Accelerated (39 page)

Suddenly, all Sean wanted to do was hop in the Ford and watch the city recede in the rearview mirror.

Manny emerged from the lobby waving a stack of mail. “Last mail before the post office forwards to the new place.” He presented the mail to Sean with a solemnity appropriate to the final transaction as doorman and tenant.

Sean nodded in gratitude and flipped through the pile. He shoved the Time Warner bill into his pocket and handed the catalogs to Ellie. Then he noticed an envelope made of heavy paper the color of vanilla ice cream. He stared at the return address on the back before tearing it open.

Dear Sean
,

Again I am so very sorry for the way things were left between us. I can imagine how angry you were when I pulled you from the show. Understand I had no choice in the matter
.

I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of sending images of your work to a friend of mine who owns the Kennedy-Tufts gallery in Boston. Like me, he fell in love with them. If you have no objections, I’d like to send the work to Jacques. He’d like to talk to you about setting up a show. He’s curating something at the Met he thinks you will be perfect for. I’m enclosing his card so you can be in touch with him directly
.

I wish you all the best in your career, Sean. I will be following it with great interest
.

Sincerely
,

Camille Burdot

Camille had come through. Even after the shitty things he’d said to her. After throwing the stepladder. Over the past year, he’d amassed incontrovertible proof that people did horrible things. Camille’s act of kindness leveled him. He wished he could apologize, thank her for this.

He watched Ellie pick up Toby and hug him tight, trying to keep it together. “Love you sweetie.”

“Promise you’ll be here when I get back,” Toby said, bursting into tears. In all the excitement, he’d forgotten to be terrified he was going to lose her again.

She squeezed him. “Swear to God,” she said. Then they were all crying. “I’m going to drive up to see you in your new house on Saturday, okay?”

Toby wiped his tears and nodded. Sean flicked away his own as inconspicuously as possible.

Nicole got out of the car, sidled up to Sean, and whacked him with a rolled-up paper.

“What was that for?” Sean said, slipping Jacques’ business card into his wallet.

“It’s for you.” She held out the
Times
. “Your new best friend, Ben Shapiro, has been busy.”

Ben Shapiro had broken the Bradley story for the
Times
. After Melanie and Jess talked to Nina Goldsmith about Calvin and the forged signature, it had all happened quickly. Bruce Daniels was fired the next afternoon, escorted from the school by policemen. Also canned immediately were the school nurse and Bev Shineman. With Garvey’s help, Ben Shapiro dug up a half dozen other cases, one of which involved a former classmate of Toby’s, a kid named Patrick who’d been hospitalized last year. The members of the Board of Trustees were under investigation and Walt was being looked at for brokering the Drake bribe. There was talk of a class action suit.

Today’s story was broader. It led with Bradley, but delved deep into the trend across the country. Manhattan wasn’t the only city with a Ritalin problem. Kids all over the country were being dosed for school. Ben Shapiro had even dug up statistics that showed how the different states fared: Nevada reported only 5.6 percent of its children had been diagnosed with ADHD while North Carolina came in with a high of 15.6 percent. Dr. Altherra told the paper that the practice of diagnosing children based on teacher evaluations needed to be re-evaluated. Experts from prestigious institutions debated which behaviors needed to be medicated and which were normal on the spectrum of childhood development. The article even went on to suggest there was evidence that a handful of the country’s elite schools were in bed with the drug companies. In his wildest dreams, Sean hadn’t imagined this kind of attention.

“You kicked their ass,” Nicole said. “I’m proud of you.”

She didn’t say it often and when she did, it was powerful. “If a five hundred-word story in a trashy celebrity rag set off this kind of wildfire,” Sean countered, “it must have been smoldering for a long time. All I did was give it some oxygen.”

“You rule, baby brother. Don’t you dare play that down.”

He wasn’t sure what to do with all this blatant praise from his sister. “At least the lawsuits are being dropped,” he said. When the
Times
stories started to run, proving that everything he’d written had been true, Bradley was forced to drop the libel suit against
Buzz
. And when
Buzz
was hailed in every media outlet around the world for breaking the story, Crandall dropped the lawsuit against Sean. It was all falling into place, which was the last thing he’d expected a few weeks earlier. Much of that was due to Ben Shapiro and Nina Goldsmith, who had done serious damage. But it was impossible to know what kind of lasting effect any of it would have.

“And my task force was approved this morning.” Nicole smiled smugly.

“Task force?”

“To look into the practice of prescribing ADD medication for children in New York City public schools.”

“So you got a promotion?”

“And a raise,” she said in the same way she used to come home to report an A+ on a paper. A rush of warmth for his sister caught him off guard. Luckily he didn’t have to say goodbye. He would see her every couple of weeks while Toby was in the city with Ellie.

“Let’s hit the road,” Toby said. He’d pushed through the tears and was now revved for the journey.

Sean flashed an open-handed salute to Nicole and then to Ellie. “See you soon.”

They pulled away from the curb and headed up Broadway to Jess’s old apartment on 123rd Street where she’d retrieved the last of her things. She waved when she saw them coming, and hoisted her bags into the back seat.

“Hey guys,” she said, letting in a blast of cold air.

“How was it?” He hated thinking of her in there with the old boyfriend, even if it had only been for a few hours.

“Fabulous,” she said, meaning the opposite. She turned to face Toby in the back seat. “Ready for a road trip?”

“Road trip, road trip,” Toby chanted.

Jess squinted at the
Times
sitting on the seat between them, picked it up, and started reading. It took a moment to register, then she let out a loud whooping sound. “A national trend story? Ben Shapiro is a
god.”

“Then you’re a goddess. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t come forward.”

“We are a carful of deities,” she proclaimed. “Let’s hit the highway.”

Sean smiled and pulled the car away from the curb. “Okay everyone, say goodbye to New York. For a while anyway.”

“Um, Dad?”

Sean knew that tone. “Tobe, you should’ve gone before we left.”

“No, it’s just …” Toby hesitated. “Can I say goodbye to my school before we go?”

“Really?” The idea of seeing it again made Sean’s stomach turn.

Toby nodded. “Really.”

Sean made a right turn onto 125th. “Of course we can.” They were chatty as they drove down Fifth Avenue, but when the car pulled up in front of Bradley, they were silent.

“If it’s so bad,” Toby said, not taking his eyes off it, “what about my friends? Why don’t their parents make them go someplace else, too?”

“Bradley’s not bad,” Jess said, carefully. “There were some bad people there who did some bad things. But they’re gone now.”

“They are?”

Jess nodded. “Your friends will be okay.”

Toby looked at Bradley wistfully. There was no denying it was a beautiful building—as long as you didn’t look too closely.

“Okay,” Toby said.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Speeding north on the FDR, Sean felt the anxiety Bradley had created in his life drain away.

“What’s a road trip without snacks?” Jess said, reaching into her duffel and producing a box of donuts.

“I call chocolate,” Toby said. “Do they have good donuts in Westerly?” he asked, as soon as his mouth was full.

“Good
donuts?” Jess said, handing him a napkin. “They’re the best. There’s a place called Donut Heaven and if you get there early enough you can watch them make the donuts. They’ve got a Boston Cream that might be the best thing I’ve ever had.”

“Let’s go there tomorrow,” Toby said. “I want to see how they make donuts.”

“Me too,” Sean said, thinking about tomorrow and what it would be like for the three of them to wake up together in Westerly. It had all happened so fast—getting their jobs, the place, deciding to live together. From a distance it seemed impulsive, crazy. But he didn’t have any doubt in his mind. In fact, he’d never been so sure of anything.

“Can I be in your class at my new school?” Toby asked Jess.

She smiled at him. It was bright, almost blinding. “I’ll be teaching sixth grade this year,” she said. “You’re going to have Miss Moore.” Toby looked skeptical. “I hear she uses candy to teach math.”

Toby’s eyes widened. “She does sound good.”

“And I’m going to teach you art,” Sean said.

“I know, Dad. You told me.”

Jess stifled a laugh. “Maybe your dad will use candy, too.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Sean said. “Much stranger.”

Rhode Island seemed as good a place as any for a fresh start, plus it would be easy for Ellie to visit Toby. Easy to bring Toby into the city. Toby would have two cities, two apartments, two parents. That was the most important thing.

“Will our apartment have two bedrooms?”

“We’re going to have a whole house. Remember?”

“With a basement?” Toby asked. “And an attic?”

“And a room for making art.” He loved the sound of it. “For both of us.”

“Cool,” Toby said. “And I can get a Formica bunk bed in my room? For when my friends come to visit?”

“Formica?”

“Yeah, you said we were going to get our new furniture in Formica.”

Sean and Jess looked at each other, baffled. Jess figured it out first. “From Ikea.”

“Right. That’s what I said.”

“From Ikea,” he repeated, and smiled to himself. “Yes. You can absolutely get a bunk bed from Ikea. We’ll go together—all three of us—and pick out furniture for our new house.”

“But not all at once,” Jess said.

“That’s right, we’re going to take our time, pick things we really like.”

They’d decided the night before not to rush any of it, to let it unfold on its own. Their home, their relationship, their careers would evolve and they’d take life as it came. And he knew it would all work out because everything that mattered was within arm’s reach.

He eased off the accelerator and settled in for the ride. He had plenty of time to get where he was going.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special thanks to those who helped this book see the light of day. I owe you big time:

To my earliest readers, Dean Hicks and Karen Palmer, thank you for not mentioning how crappy the first draft was, and for just telling me to keep going. Jennifer Belle, Michael Sears, Desiree Rhine, Jon Reiss and Juliann Garey, your brutal honesty and kind encouragement helped me stay the course through a long re-write (and a half). Thanks especially to Juris Jurjevics for his inability to sugarcoat and for helping me find the heart of this book (a moment of silence please, for the bloody scraps left on the cutting room floor).

I might never have started this book if it hadn’t been for Nicole Bokat’s class and an assignment to write the entire outline for the second session. That seemed insane, but it got me started. Phil Neal, Kara Unterberg, Jim Delisle, Jon Spurney, Mick Herron, Abby Wasserman, Nancy Jaffe, and Steve Kettmann, thank you for your intelligent insights that simply made the book better. Thanks also to Jeff Gordinier for being my personal cheering section as well as a sobering source of inspiration.

To my brothers, Andrew and Matthew, and their exceptional wives, Rebecca and Flossie, and to Graham, for believing in me and in this book and for helping with the kids on so many days, to give me time to get a few more words down.

Thanks to The Vermont Studio Center for the residencies that allowed me to spend time in your beautiful space and write and write and write, and to “Colt” Barrows for his support through all of this, even though he hasn’t read a novel in years.

But most of all, thanks to my wonderful agent, Stéphanie Abou and to my amazing editor Jessica Case and publisher Claiborne Hancock, who saw the potential and gave this book a life. I am forever indebted to you (and also to Juliet Grames, who pointed me in Stéphanie’s direction in the first place.)

Of course, none of this would have happened without the love and support and creative spirit of my parents. I will be forever grateful to my immensely talented father, Alan Hruska, who encouraged me every step of the way, and to my mother, Laura Hruska, my first, last, and perennial editor. I miss her every day.

And finally, thanks to Will and Nick, to whom this book is dedicated. You’ve been there through the ups and downs and the never-ending revisions. You are not only the inspiration for this book, you gave me the time I needed to finish. You are, without question, the best kids, ever. I love you with everything I’ve got.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.