You Lost Me There (15 page)

“Sure,” I said, “sounds fine.”

“First Connie wanted you to text her. I explained, Uncle Victor doesn’t text.”

“Well, I’ll call you Saturday.”

“Hey, Vic,” Russell said before hanging up, “so how are things with tiny dancer working out?”

 

 

 

After my seventieth PowerPoint slide, I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Outside, the fog was moving in, starting to shroud cars, a plaque turning each car gray and shapeless, indistinguishable from the rest.

I thought of Sara’s first card, about our swapping confidences the night we met.

I wondered if by that night I’d been waiting for the right person to confide in, to confess to. Perhaps that’s what love was, when finally a secret found its rest. But didn’t that imply it could have been anyone, that Sara was simply in the right place at the right time?

The afternoon Ben Lemery showed me his father’s gun was about a week before he died. We’d just come in from the pool, a Saturday afternoon in September. Both of us were dripping wet and freezing cold, our teeth were chattering, but we didn’t know where to stand. The newness of the house set the protocol. The fruit in a bowl on the counter, apples and oranges, was made of wax. It was warm to the touch. The Lemerys’ house was a sparkling white set piece built to spec, flanked by empty homes, the first to be purchased in a new development near the interstate. It had taken me fifteen minutes to walk over from my parents’ house, through what I’d always considered the bad part of town: run-down, the lawns wild.

Rumor was, when Ben’s parents divorced, his mother gassed herself in the garage, back where they’d lived, outside Philadelphia. But no one knew. We’d only seen Ben’s father, a big quiet fat man who wore granny glasses, who never said a word. Passing by one day running errands, weeks before the incident, my mother let me know she found the Lemerys’ house unseemly: designed for people too blind to know their position or decent taste. I’d rolled up the window and decided to gradually lose Ben as a friend. That Saturday was the last straw. Above the garage, Ben was holding the gun in his lap, explaining his plan in boastful tones, as though I’d be impressed. He dared me to say he wouldn’t do it. I made up an excuse and walked home a few minutes later.

Ben became my charge the day he arrived at Roosevelt High School. A teacher asked me to mentor him, to help Ben adjust, and I invited him to sit at lunch at the table for the overachieving and underappreciated. Quickly, though, none of us liked him. It seemed a great insult to be saddled with Ben Lemery, as though in the Roosevelt social world, as we watched him drop from one social pool to the next, falling closer to ours, we had to admit when he reached us there’d be nowhere lower he could go. But he wasn’t one of us. He broke into the school at night and stole things from teachers’ desks. Once in the parking lot, he picked up dog shit with his bare hands on a dare. But he’d latched on to me. He smirked if we passed in the hallway, would whisper conspiratorially at lunch about schemes he’d engineered to prank the faculty. A week after the gun episode, I convinced myself he was joking. Ben Lemery couldn’t be that crazy. Then he called. I was watching
Men into Space
. Would I come over to help him with his math homework? Ben was the best student in trigonometry. I said no to a fifteen-minute walk in the dark, no to the vibrato in his voice that scared and embarrassed me into staying put. I hung up first. In the kitchen, my mother was listening to opera, preparing dinner, frying green peppers in butter.

We’d never had anyone in our school kill himself, and no one knew the drill the next morning in homeroom when the intercom clicked and the principal asked for a moment of silence. He said, “Ben Lemery was a boy we will always remember in a special place in our hearts,” and someone snickered. A girl in flared trousers started crying and I was on the verge. A refrain sank in, one that would reaffirm itself for years afterward, that I could have done something
.

“This is becoming ridiculous,” Lucy said, striding in. Her laptop was in her arms, along with a coffee mug the size of a thermos, a rock climber’s carabiner clipped to its handle. “I keep discovering another section, there’s a technology part, a biomarkers clinical kind of thing—and exactly how am I supposed to manage people who won’t admit to making mistakes?”

She put her laptop down on my desk. “I’m sorry, but I cannot troubleshoot problems downstream that I’m given two weeks late, when the crucial intervention moment was at least ten days ago.”

“Lucy, breathe,” I said.

Lucy stared at the wall behind my head.

“I was the one who messed up those reports,” she said. “This is my fault.”

“It would be no one’s fault but mine. Do I look upset?”

“You’re asking me that.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Are you even listening?”

Sometimes, I noticed, Lucy’s age showed through her face: trembling where the skin stretched over her cheekbones. But she did look more wrung out than normal. Probably she’d been suggesting as much to me for weeks. Sara always said it was a hindrance of mine, that I expected people to tell me what they needed.

Lucy picked up her laptop.

“I just don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

“Who says we’re on the right track, and not the guys at GSK? Why
not
the guys at GSK? Don’t you ever think this could be a multimillion-dollar mistake?”

I laughed but regretted it. “Lucy, you’ll get your drug. Most likely, the mice will turn out smarter afterward.”

“I’m telling you, I just don’t know anymore.”

“Know what?”

Lucy twirled a hand around her head, indicting me, the lab, the air particles. “I am trying to explain that I am very, very tired.” She was daring me to break away. She leaned forward and lowered her voice, “Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Take a nerve cell.”

“A nerve cell.”

“Take the membrane, the ion channels. Potassium goes out, sodium flows in. A little negative on the inside, a little positive on the outside.”

“Right.”

“So the potential remains reliable. Lively in public, a cynic on the interior, but pretty stable on the whole.”

“Lucy, I get it—”

“Now, apply a charge in just the right place. Give a jolt. What happens?”

“The gates open.”

“The gates
fly
open. All kinds of things get through. The balance goes out of whack.”

I waited for part two.

“Remember park ranger Terry? Do you know what he said when he broke up with me this week?”

“I thought you weren’t going to see him again.”

“That part of me is missing. However I’m built, I lack something that everyone else has.”

As if a film previously applied to her face had slipped off.

“Lucy, you can’t listen to that. This creep doesn’t know the first thing about you.”

She stared at me for a moment. “I really need some girlfriends. I mean, forty-one.
Forty-one
. Where are my children? My mother asked me that on the phone last night, like I’d lost them recently.”

We both laughed. I reached out my hand but she managed in getting up to duck her shoulder. Lucy left the door open on her way out and I watched her go: her shoulders flattening, her knobby hiking sneakers treading silently down the hall.

I sat very still for a moment, staring out the window. Fog was in the treetops. Two dead roaches lay on top of the radiator. Sitting on top of a stack of laboratory equipment catalogs was my lost address book. I weighed it in my hands like a fish.

I dialed Sara’s only sibling, her sister, Miriam, in Kansas City. She picked up on the second ring. We exchanged pleasantries. After a few minutes I snuck in my question with a lie that Betsy was having memory lapses. We were bringing her in for some cognition tests and needed to confirm that we had the correct versions for some of her stories. How did Miriam remember the night Sara and their mother fought, the night Sara almost ran away?

Miriam backed up Betsy’s account. It was the night of Sara’s play at the high school, her starring role. Probably because she was nervous for Sara, their mother had drunk more than usual before going to the auditorium. During a quiet moment in the second act, she’d vomited in the front row. Back home, the fight was terrible. “Singed the wallpaper off, from what I remember.” At the high point, Sara punched her mother in the mouth and ran out in tears, vowing never to return. She bought a bus ticket for California, in fact.

I asked if Miriam was sure. Hundred percent, she said. “Look at any family portrait afterward. Mother never smiled with her mouth open again. She needed two front teeth replaced.”

We made conversation a few more minutes, because yes it had been too long, particularly for family. And didn’t I remember those nice vacations we’d taken together, the one that winter to Baja. And didn’t I remember what fun we’d had. And didn’t I remember. And perhaps if ever I was near Kansas City, I always had somewhere I could rest my feet.

Yes, I said, of course, of course I remembered.

Neurologically, though, it made perfect sense. Combining the degree of my knowledge of Sara’s early life with, in this case, a lack of specific recollection (I hadn’t been there, after all) made for a plausible case of misattribution. I could have told Miriam as much off the bat.

I’d learned early on with Sara that marriage wasn’t science. Both evolved, both went through cycles. Science grew through fine-tuning, one scientist turning up with an idea about nature, then a little later someone else saying in fact it’s like this, here’s my data, and down through the line, fully documented in the literature. But a marriage had no literature. There was no microfiche for arguments. There was only he said, she said. A picture postcard of what happened.

My father gave me one piece of advice on my wedding day: to remember the wife’s always right. I recalled telling Sara about it later in the beige hotel room, and how we laughed, both of us so happy, secure knowing that our marriage wouldn’t be the norm, wouldn’t be anything like the families we’d come from.

 

 

 

I drove back to Somesville just after midnight, packed my bag, and set the alarm clock for five a.m. My mind was dull and clouded when I fell asleep, nervous and clear when I woke. By morning, rainstorms had swept over the island and shoved the fog out to sea. Gulls cawed with the sunrise. I stopped for coffee in Seal Harbor, where the crowd at the gas station was mostly contractors, about a half-dozen guys with sunburned necks. The other neuroscientists probably purchased their soy chai lattes elsewhere, I figured.

There was an island legend people told about that gas station and a certain celebrity neighbor. Martha Stewart comes down one day to get gas, the story goes, and she asks the station clerk, can I use the phone? The clerk politely informs her there’s a pay phone outside, that the house phone is for employees only. Stewart lives up the hill in the old Ford estate, to get home it’s only a minute to her driveway, but Martha’s not going anywhere. Martha says she’s got no change and she really needs to make a call. The clerk tells her again about the difference between the house phone and the pay phone, that it’s been store policy for more than thirty years. By now the line is backing up. Martha’s upset. She’s Martha Stewart. She’s never been treated like this before. She says to the clerk: Do you know who I am? Do you realize who you’re talking to?

At which point, an elderly gentleman steps out of line, taps Martha on the shoulder, and says, “Excuse me, but I’m David Rockefeller. And I use the pay phone, too.”

And he hands her a quarter.

At seven in the morning, campus was empty, the lab deserted. I sat at my desk and did nothing. My thoughts were tied to others further back, and those bound to ones even deeper, stored under wraps in unused rooms. The sun filled my office with soft yellow light. I scowled at the parking lot. I closed the blinds and booted up my computer. The newest message in my in-box said it had been sent at four a.m.:

When Lucy got in, I asked her to inform everyone I wasn’t to be disturbed. For lunch, I grabbed two Diet Cokes and a bag of Fritos, and in a spree of work I conducted several conference calls, edited an article for Lucy, reviewed some résumés, and answered enough e-mail so that I’d be caught up when I returned from New York. At five-thirty, I left for the airport.

I was saying good-bye, hearing wishes of good luck, when I dashed back to my computer. I stared at the screen.