You Should Have Known (31 page)

That didn't last long, that defiance.

Sometimes, at night, after Henry had fallen asleep, she put on her parka and went outside with a packet of cigarettes she had found in one of the kitchen drawers. She had no idea whose they were or how they had come to be there, but she took them down the slope to the lakefront and lay down on the icy dock and lit one, and the pure bad pleasure of it came tearing back, wafting deep into the moist caverns of the lungs and shooting away through the bloodstream. She watched the white cloud rise up into the night, visible proof that, at least for this moment, she was still here, still sentient and more or less functional. This itself, it occurred to her, was the drug, just that bald proof of existence. It was intoxicating. It was a necessary, brutal, reassurance.

She had not smoked for eighteen years, since the night she met a future oncologist in the basement of the Harvard Medical School, and she could not recall the act of smoking as ever feeling so freighted with meaning. Now, inhaling and then watching the white smoke rise, she felt as if some great Pause button had been depressed when Jonathan stepped into her life, and only this instant had the finger come away and released her forward motion, and suddenly she was back at precisely that earlier moment, a college student again, with most of the big decisions and the big events still before her. Though this time she had been issued with a child and a nominal profession.

And a book about to be published. Or so it had been when she'd left the city. She saw all of their names, constantly, on her phone: Sarabeth and Maude and J. Colton the publicist. She had not returned even one of their calls. She had not even listened to the messages. Almost idly, she wondered what they must have considered was worth trying to say. The article in
Vogue
would never run. The
Today Show
must no longer wish to interview her, except perhaps in connection with the death of Malaga Alves. And the book itself…
Who
(and she made herself, deliberately, complete this thought)
would knowingly be counseled by an expert on marriage whose husband had become involved with another woman? Or had a child with that woman? Or, in fact, murdered that woman? Or had stolen, lied, abandoned his wife in a scorched earth of incalculable…

Well, not pain, exactly. Whatever Grace was feeling right now, right at this moment, flat on her back, numb with cold, blowing smoke up into the brutal night, was not pain. But that did not mean the pain wasn't somewhere nearby. It was very close, very close. It was just on the other side of the wall, and nobody knew how long the wall was going to hold.

She took another lungful and breathed it out, watching it rise. She had once loved smoking, not that she had ever been in doubt of its lethal reach, not that she had wanted to die, ever. She wasn't ignorant and she wasn't a masochist. On the night of the medical school party, she had simply gone back to the apartment she and Vita shared near Central Square and finished off her final pack on the fire escape, thinking about Jonathan and what he meant to do with his life. She had never even told him she smoked. It had been, simply, not relevant to the only thing that really mattered to her after that night, because everything important had only begun that night. Did that make her a liar, too?

How many roads had there been, diverged in that endless dormitory basement, and why had it been such a simple matter to choose the one she had chosen, and did it make a difference whether that road was less traveled or more? Probably not, she thought now. Probably none of those points mattered now. What mattered was that she had made a mistake and somehow trundled along blindly for far too long, and now she was here on a winter night at the end of her own dock, terrorized, paralyzed, and behaving like a teenager, with her own newly fatherless almost-teenager huddled for warmth in an unheated house, ripped away from his own life and in great need of some serious guidance, not to mention a good deal of clarification.

I'll get right on that
, Grace thought, exhaling.

The smoke went up to the hard sky, ink-dark, brilliant with stars. They and the moon made the only light except for a single lamp left on in her own living room, and the porch light, an old lantern with three bulbs, one functional. None of the other houses were occupied except for one, a stone cottage down at the lake's pointy end, which had a thin stream of smoke coming from the chimney. It was very quiet here. Very, very quiet. Except sometimes she could hear these sorts of wisps of music that seemed to come with the wind, from somewhere. It was unusual music. She thought there might be some kind of violin making it, but not the kind of violin Vitaly Rosenbaum would recognize, or at least credit. The sounds made her think of mountains in the South, people sitting on porches together, looking out into the trees. Some nights she had heard only the one instrument, and sometimes there were more: a second violin and maybe a guitar. Once she thought she heard human voices, human laughter, and when that happened she made herself concentrate on the sound of it, as if she could barely remember what the sound of that was like.

But mostly there was nothing to listen to except the crackling of her own fire or the sound of one of them turning a page.

And then it was nearly Christmas, a day that she had given no thought to at all, and she woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve in the classic state of an unprepared husband. For the first time, she left Henry alone in the house and drove north to Great Barrington to find something she could give him; but when she finally got to the shopping mall she saw that some of the stores were already closing, and she raced around, staring hopelessly at all the useless, illogical, irrelevant, and undesirable objects. Finally, in the bookstore, she found herself wandering the usual aisles, looking for something to interest him, but within the narrow confines of those subjects she herself sanctioned there wasn't anything—it was plain, now—that he truly cared about. There was nothing here for Henry, nothing he would do more than thank her for, as he had been raised to thank anyone who meant to do something polite. That wasn't going to be enough for him, she told herself. Not this year.

So she went to the sports section and forced herself to lift book after book. A history of the Yankees. All right. A book on the Negro League—at least it was history. And something about the NFL she chose because when she opened the book to a random page she read a fairly decent sentence. And another book, about basketball, she picked without opening at all, because she already felt awful about being such a snob. And then a DVD set of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's
Baseball
series, which perhaps they could even watch together. She had everything wrapped right there at the counter.

The way back to the door took her past the books about marriage and family, and Grace felt herself slow her pace, and she made herself look. It was in an aisle like this one, a few years earlier, on the Upper West Side, that she had stopped to look at what was available to her patients and everyone else. Books about getting the man you wanted to want you back. Getting him to ask you out, commit to you, marry you. Accepting those impediments you yourself had created for the life you deserved. So much delusion. So much concession. Where was the cold clarity you might bring to, say, the search for a bra that really fit or the right breed of dog for your lifestyle? Wasn't finding a life partner at least as important as that? Didn't it deserve at least as much discernment and toughness? Why shouldn't a young woman read a sign for its actual meaning, not just its interpretive rainbow?

Over and over again, the readers of these books about getting and keeping had come into her practice and confessed their own failings, often amid the ruin of their lives. They thought they had failed to properly get or properly keep. A husband's flirtations with other women must be because of her weight gain. A man's coldness to his baby (and his in-laws and every one of his wife's friends and also, incidentally, his wife herself) was because she got off the fast track at work and was probably not going to make partner if they had a second child. The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms.

And the worst of it, she had thought, standing in the Relationships aisle of the Broadway Barnes & Noble, was that they actually
were
guilty, just not of any of those things, and they actually
had
failed, but not at what they thought. They hadn't
gotten
wrong and they hadn't
kept
wrong. They had chosen wrong. That was all of it. And where was the book that said that?

She had started tentatively enough, one afternoon when a client had failed to arrive and she found herself with an unanticipated hour alone. The couple who had just left were both enraged, and the whole room still thrummed with the stress of that and the uselessness of that. In the hour she suddenly possessed, she sat at her desk and wrote a kind of manifesto about the state of her profession, lamenting the fact that therapists seemed unwilling to state what was obvious to them, or ought to be obvious to them. How many times had they listened to a husband's or a wife's litany of latter-day complaints and thought:
But you already knew that.
You knew that when you met him or dated him. At least by the time you got engaged. You knew he was in debt: You're the one who paid off his Visa bill! You knew that when he went out at night he came back plastered. You knew he thought you weren't up to his level intellectually, because he went to Yale and you went to U Mass. And if you didn't know, you should have known, because it could not have been clearer, even back then at the very start.

For her patients, for any of their patients, it was almost certainly too late; the relationships on display in their consulting rooms could now only be accepted or unraveled. But for her readers—already, by the end of that first hour, she thought of them as her readers—there was time for a caution: You can know these things from the very beginning, if you're paying attention, if your eyes and your ears and your mind are open, as they should be open. You can know and then, critically, hold on to that knowledge, even if he loves you (or seems to), even if he chooses you (or seems to), even if he promises to make you happy (which no one, not one person on the planet, can possibly do).

And part of her, a big part of her, had obviously wanted to be the one who told them this.

Because I am such a competent and knowing person
, she berated herself.

Like every one of her fellow authors, each so willing and ready to climb above the crowd of mere mortals and declaim their ideas to a grateful populace.
Hurrah for us!
Hurrah for me
, thought Grace.

Well, that was over.

Driving home with a bag of marginally festive groceries and another of gifts for Henry, she gripped the wheel so hard that her back began to throb. The temperature had dropped yet again, and she made herself be vigilant against the lethal black ice. There was a patch of it just after the turn onto Childe Ridge, the road that connected most of the houses on the lakefront, and after navigating around it at a snail's pace, she looked up to see a man at a mailbox. This was the stone cottage, most likely the only other lake house currently occupied, and even her wish to be entirely alone could not stand up to a practical imperative: To be on neighborly terms with the only other human in the vicinity, in the dead of winter, and deep in the countryside, was probably not a bad idea.

He held up his arm, and she carefully slowed and stopped.

“Hello!” he called. “I thought that was you.”

Grace rolled down the passenger window. “Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded unnaturally bright. “I'm Grace.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. He was wearing a down jacket, quite worn, spouting feathers in a few places. He looked about her own age, maybe a bit older, with very short gray hair. He was holding his mail: newspapers, flyers, actual letters. “Leo? Holland? We used to drive your mom crazy.”

Grace laughed, surprising herself completely. “Oh, my God, you absolutely did. I'm so sorry.”

And just like that, she was apologizing for her mother, decades after the fact. Marjorie Reinhart had never forgotten the summers when her own parents' little house was the only house on the lake. The boys from down at the other end, with their motorboat and water skis, had so unnerved and irritated her that she regularly dropped off notes pleading for quiet. In this very mailbox, Grace thought.

“Please,” he said genially. “Water under the bridge. Water down the lake!”

“Okay.” She nodded. “Are you living here full-time?”

“No, not really.” He shifted the mail to his other arm and put his exposed hand into his coat pocket. “I'm on sabbatical. I was home, trying to finish a book, and they just kept calling me. Department meeting, thesis review. Even disciplinary stuff. So I thought I'd run away for the rest of my leave. You're not winterized, are you? Sorry, is that a personal question?”

He was smiling. He had a crooked smile.

“Not winterized. Are you?”

“More or less. It's never exactly warm, but I can take my down jacket off. But how are you getting along, then?”

“Oh”—she shrugged—“you know. Space heaters. Lots of blankets. We're all right.”

Leo Holland frowned. “We?”

“My son. He's twelve. I should go, actually, I've left him alone there for the first time.”

“Well, if he's there now, he's not alone,” said Leo. “There's a car parked on the road. I just walked past.”

Grace tried to breathe. She was calculating how many hours she had been away—not more than two. Or three. She was terrified.

One state away wasn't so far after all. Or maybe she wasn't—the story wasn't—so unimportant as she'd tried to believe.