The Song Reader (33 page)

The first night was rough. The baby was fine, but the nineteen month-old boy, Theo, became hysterical when he had to face bedtime without his parents. Patrick walked him back and forth for fifteen minutes, which felt like hours, but the little kid was still letting out an earsplitting wail. When it was Lila’s turn to take over, Patrick had never been more relieved to get into bed and close his eyes. He knew he couldn’t sleep with that sound, but he was bone tired from all the activities of toddler care: the playing and talking and laughing and distracting he and Lila had been doing all day. At one point he told her, “Why can’t they stay babies forever?” The three-month-old girl had lain in her cradle or sat placidly in her bouncy chair most of the time, only needing to be fed and changed. Patrick enjoyed her big toothless grins and the odd motion she made with her legs, as if she were riding a bicycle only she could see.

He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and when he woke up and the clock by Jason and Doreen’s bed said 3:41, he was both surprised
and a little worried. Lila had never joined him. Had she driven off into the night with Theo, hoping to calm him down with the motion of the car that had worked so well for his nap? Or had she snapped and thrown the squalling kid out the window, as Patrick had joked about doing hours ago?

He found her on the couch, with Theo lying on her, snoring softly. Lila herself was awake and stroking his cheeks lightly with her fingers. She also kissed the top of Theo’s head before she noticed Patrick standing in the hallway, watching her.

“He didn’t want to sleep alone,” she whispered. “I didn’t mind. It’s been kind of nice, holding him next to me.” She paused and inhaled. “He smells so good. Have you ever noticed that about babies?”

Somehow they managed to get Theo into his crib without waking him. It was no small feat, and Patrick would have been thrilled if he wasn’t so tired.

It wasn’t until the next day that he realized something had changed. At the first sound of Theo coming awake, Lila was out of bed and at the little boy’s side—and there she remained for the next few days, almost all of the time, surprising Patrick’s father, who called Lila a natural at mothering, and, of course, surprising Patrick himself. When a grateful Jason and Doreen returned, looking decidedly younger after a short time away from parenting, and asked how everything had gone, Lila said, “Perfectly. Theo is wonderful.” She sounded oddly shy. After a pause, she added, “Both your children are.”

It was the last thing Patrick expected: his wife had apparently become smitten with a toddler. Though Patrick himself had found parenting a lot more difficult than he’d anticipated, he still felt relieved. He wanted a family and now he felt confident Lila would, too.

He decided to wait a few days to discuss it with her. He wanted
to be careful how he brought it up; he suspected she might have been embarrassed that she’d burst into tears when they’d left the little boy. Maybe he was hoping she’d bring it up herself? He wasn’t sure anymore; in any case, they never had the discussion. They went back to Philadelphia and back to work, since spring break was over. And then, only three days later, her brother committed suicide.

Watching Lila’s grief was so terrible that in some ways, he was glad whenever she started another rant about Ashley, though these rants also made him uncomfortable. He wanted to believe that Lila was right, and he agreed with his wife that if Ashley had no basis to accuse Billy of child abuse, then Ashley herself was the abusive one for keeping the children from their father. The operative word, though, was “if.” If the charges against Billy—which, after all, had been supported by the court, though the one time he reminded Lila of this, he instantly regretted it, as she went back to bed and stayed there for hours, sobbing like her heart would break—but if those charges were really baseless, then Ashley was an abuser and yes, as Lila kept saying, an unfit mother. Someone who should not be caring for Billy’s beautiful children.

Even so, he was stunned when Lila said she’d contacted a lawyer because she planned to raise those kids herself. “With your help, of course,” she added slowly. Her eyes were swollen; her lovely hair was a tangled mess. “I couldn’t do it without you.”

He said he would help, because it was the only answer he could think of. But he did talk her into waiting a while, giving the kids time to grieve for their father before their young lives were turned upside down again. He knew if his wife still wanted custody of Billy’s kids later on, they’d have to deal with it, but for now, his only focus was getting through the memorial service and the next few days.

The night before the funeral at a little after three a.m., he woke
with the feeling that something was wrong. He looked over at Lila, but she was sound asleep. The room seemed cold; he got up and turned the heat up, and then he sat on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his feet on the floor, still alert, still listening for something: an intruder, a dog barking in the apartment next door, whatever it was that had woken him up. But there was no sound except Lila’s breathing and the usual traffic sounds in the street below.

Patrick had never understood or respected the kind of people who claimed to believe in psychic premonitions. To him it was irrational, even ludicrous, that whenever something bad happened, apparently sane people would insist that they’d known it was going to, that they’d dreamed it a month before or seen it in a vision or read it in their horoscope. Lila used to insist that what they were really expressing was their despair at human helplessness—that deep wish within us all that if only we could have known, we could have done something to stop it, or at least had time to prepare ourselves.

In Patrick’s case, though, even if he’d known what was about to happen to Lila, he wouldn’t have known how to stop it or how to prepare for it. This was what kept him up that night, back in bed but lying still so he wouldn’t wake her: the suspicion that he was inadequate in some essential way to what his wife needed from him now, and his fear that he might lose her for good if he couldn’t figure out how to change.

A big-hearted novel about the way we live now: the choices we make, the decisions we let life make for us, and what it means in the twenty-first century to do the right thing.

Matthew and Amelia were once in love, but a decade later, they have become professional enemies. To Amelia, who has dedicated her life to medical ethics, Matthew’s job as a high-powered pharmaceutical executive has turned him into a heartless person who doesn’t care about anything but money. Now they’re kept in balance only by Matthew’s best and oldest friend, Ben—who also happens to be Amelia’s new boyfriend. But that balance begins to crumble one night when Matthew finds himself on a desolate bridge face-to-face with a boy screaming for help. Homeless for most of his life, ten-year-old Danny is as streetwise as he is world-weary, and his desperation to save his three-year-old sister means he will do whatever it takes to enlist Matthew’s aid. What follows is an escalating game of one-upmanship between Matthew, Amelia, and Danny, as all three struggle to defend what is most important to them—and are ultimately forced to reconsider what it is they truly want.

Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s

The Cure for Modern Life

Currently available from Atria Books

W
as Matthew Connelly a bad man? He’d never once asked himself that question. Make of it what you will. Of course it would have surprised him to know that, as he walked toward the bridge that night, a little boy was asking the question for him. Because Matthew didn’t notice people like this boy, he never wondered what they were thinking about, or if they thought at all. They were as invisible as the ants he’d crushed under his feet as he walked through the streets of Grand Cayman the weekend before, with Amelia and Ben, the happy couple, deliriously grateful to have found each other, all demons of the past behind them—and all thanks to him. His matchmaking was a good deed from their point of view, pure and simple. To Matthew it was something else entirely, something he didn’t dwell on but accepted as another delicate operation in an extremely complex job.

The boy watching Matthew, who gave his name as Timmy or Jacob or Danny, depending on the situation, was only ten years old, but his mother said he was closer to forty in his harsh judgments of other people, by which she usually meant his harsh judgments of herself. And it was true; the boy took an almost instant dislike to Matthew Connelly. It wasn’t just that the guy looked too young to be so filthy rich, with a fancy topcoat that had to cost more than it had cost to feed Isabelle for her entire life, or even that he was obviously in a hurry, striding up Walnut Street like he had somewhere important to be, though it was way past midnight. It wasn’t even the loud, idiotic singing the man was indulging in as he walked, as though no one could possibly be outside on that frigid November night in Philadelphia except Connelly himself, who no doubt considered the journey a reason to pat himself on the back that he was always up for a little exercise. No, the real thing that condemned him, from the boy’s perspective, was the position of his hands, which were jammed so far into his pockets that all you could see were the tops of what surely were the most luxurious leather gloves sold on the planet. So he wasn’t cold, which meant there was only one reason his hands were like that. He was a selfish person, the kind who wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone else. The kind of person his mother called a “natural-born Republican bastard,” even though she didn’t believe in her son’s hands theory, preferring instead the simpler principle that all rich people were bastards.

Still, the boy, who ended up naming himself Danny that night, had no choice; he had to try. He grabbed three-year-old Isabelle in his arms, groaning under her weight, and ran up the concrete stairs as fast as his scrawny ten-year-old legs would carry him. He had to be standing on the bridge when the man got there, blocking his path. As the guy came closer, Danny proceeded to yell and scream and cry: “Help! Please, mister! My baby sister! Help!”

The tears weren’t real because he never cried, but the fear made his frozen hands shake harder. Isabelle had been throwing up all day and his mother had told him a million times that if you throw up for too long, you can die. Protecting Isabelle was his sacred duty and he would do it no matter what, even if he had to die himself. It was part of the code of honor he’d adopted a few months after his sister was born, when he’d sworn himself in as a knight. This was after he’d read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which his mother had stolen for him from the library, but he wasn’t playing some stupid pretend game. Even the book said that knights weren’t only in the past, and anyone could be one. True, the boy had never met another knight, but that wasn’t surprising since knights had to sacrifice everything to uphold the code, and that was hard, even for him. But whenever he wanted to renounce his knighthood and go back to being a regular kid, he remembered his honor and how no one could take it away from him—not his mother, not the cops, and certainly not this selfish asshole who wasn’t going to stop, Danny knew, no matter how much he begged.

That Danny turned out to be wrong had nothing to do with his ability to judge men like Matthew Connelly. On that particular night, there was something about Matthew that even a very wise, very hardened ten-year-old boy/knight couldn’t guess from the man’s appearance. The rest, Danny had gotten right, uncannily so. It was true that Matthew was what most anybody would call rich, given his upper-six-figure salary; his stock options at Astor-Denning, the pharmaceutical company where he was a VP; the top-of-the-line Porsche 911 he’d bought with last year’s bonus; his property investments across the city—though he was leasing the loft where he’d lived for the last two years, an upscale but not intimidating place, perfect for his friendships with scientists. It was also true that he was walking quickly, not because he had a flight to Tokyo in the morning, which he’d put out of his mind, but because it felt good to move; not as wonderful as it had on the dance floor, but still good. The idiotic humming was a carry-away from the club he’d just left, a way of remembering the woman he might have taken home with him if this were a normal night, yet it had been anything but.

At seven-thirty he’d gone out to dinner with a nationally known med school professor who’d agreed to testify before the FDA on behalf of Astor-Denning’s new diabetes drug. Matthew’s goal was to make this guy happy, to give him the right food, the right wine, the right conversation, even, if necessary, the right women. But the only thing the good doctor really wanted was to try MDMA: ecstasy. He was recently divorced; he thought he needed a drug that would “release” his emotions about his ex-wife. Matthew agreed to make a few phone calls, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to listen to the guy’s emotions as they were released. When the doc insisted that they try the drug together, Matthew’s first reaction was to smile and nod and decide he wouldn’t swallow it. The illegal part didn’t bother him, but he didn’t want to lose control of the meeting. But then the doc said they’d know they were “tripping” when their pupils dilated, and Matthew realized it might not be easy to fool this doc, even if the guy was high. Whatever happened, he could not let this important contact decide he was a liar. What the hell. The E was pure, according to his source, and he had a brilliant medical professor at his side. What could go wrong?

The fiftysomething, fat, balding doc had had the time of his life, running around the club, groping one woman after another, telling each of them, “I know I’m on X, but the way I feel about you is so intense, it has to be real.” Matthew was much more subdued, but he enjoyed the experience, too. And he felt proud that he’d forced himself to leave the club alone—after the doc left with some blonde—even though the pill was still working, knowing it would give him a cheerful walk home, which, damn, he needed for a change. The trip to the Caymans last weekend, meetings and conference calls and putting out fires all day, wining and dining research partners five nights out of seven: all of this was making him feel unusually tired, though he was determined to prove that nothing had changed, despite the fact that he’d just turned forty. He was in great shape. He could always
party like it’s 1999
, even if that particular phrase was one he kept to himself, fearing it would date him with the hot twentysomethings he invariably found himself attracted to rather than women his own age.