You Should Have Known (14 page)

“Mrs. Sachs?” O'Rourke said.

“Look,” she said, “I want to help, of course. But I don't see what I can add that might possibly be relevant. I don't know the first thing about this woman. I only spoke to her once, and not about anything important. It's awful what happened to her, whatever happened. I don't even know what happened!” she said, her voice rising. “But whatever it is, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the school. And I know it has nothing to do with me.”

They looked at her with an odd satisfaction, as if they had been waiting for her to display some evidence of resentment, and now she had obliged them and made them right about her. Already, she regretted even this mild outburst. But she wanted them to go away. Now—before Henry arrived and saw them. And they were still here.

“Mrs. Sachs,” O'Rourke said at last, “we're sorry to have troubled you. I don't want to keep you any longer. I do want to speak to your husband, though, if you don't mind. Is he upstairs?”

She stared at them. Again, without warning, her thoughts flashed to some 1950s universe in which these men—these
men
—had to obtain some Y-chromosome-attached endorsement before leaving her alone, which merely made her crazy. But all she could manage to say was: “Why?”

“Is it a problem?” said the other one.

“Well, it is because he's not here. He's at a medical conference. But even if he weren't, he wouldn't have any idea who you were talking about. He didn't even know this woman.”

“Is that right?” said the first one, the Irish one. “Not through the school, like you?”

“No. I take my son to school and pick him up.”

They were frowning at her, both of them.

Mendoza said: “Every day? Your husband never takes him?”

She nearly laughed. She was thinking, bizarrely, of a couple she'd once treated, in which the husband and wife had a business they'd created and run together, with great harmony and success. Still, when it came to their home and the care of their two children, the woman found herself entirely on her own, making sure the tuition was paid and the toilet paper didn't run out, keeping track of vaccinations and taxes and up-to-date passports, coming home to make dinner and set up appointments for the kids and wipe down the counters as he decompressed from a hard day at work. The wife's frustration was set to a perpetual simmer. In therapy, the two of them had circled and circled this maddening state of affairs, gently addressing the husband's family-of-origin issues that had given rise to his idea of what married life was supposed to look like, and the wife's traumatic early loss of her father. There had been carefully proposed charts and lists to redress the imbalance of responsibilities. There had been visualization of the family life each wanted for themselves and their children. And then one day, as the wife was explaining to her husband
why
it was not all right to schedule “boys' night” on Back to School Night, he suddenly experienced one of those rare but usually fulfilling jolts of inner illumination for which therapy is so justly lauded. With a rush of the purest outrage, the man sat up on the couch and turned to his wife, business partner, the mother of his children, the only woman he—in his own words—had ever loved, and said: “You're not going to be happy till I do half!”

So maybe she was the tiniest bit of a hypocrite. Or maybe it was just the way she wanted it, walking her son to Rearden, waiting for him, taking him to his violin lesson, not sharing this precious bit of Henry-time with Jonathan, who for the record had never asked to share it. Anyway, what business was it of theirs? And why on earth did it matter?

“Well,” she said with a small laugh that sounded forced even to her, “it might be modern times and all that, but I doubt it's any different at your kids' schools. Are the parent-teacher committees and booster clubs full of dads?”

They exchanged a brief look. Then the one who'd said he had two kids gave a shrug. “I don't know. My wife does all that.”

Exactly
, she thought.

“But still, they might have met, right? Your husband and this lady. Mrs. Alves?”

And then Henry arrived. He slouched into the lobby, wearing his violin on his back, his heavy leather book bag slapping at his hip with every step; then the unfamiliarity of actual people on those chairs made him look up. Grace's heart sank, though she couldn't have said exactly why.

He had been a beautiful boy and was on his way to being a beautiful man, though at the moment he was delayed on an isthmus of preadolescence, the faintest darkening of incipient hair on his upper lip. Like Jonathan, he had curly black hair. Like Grace, he had fine bones and a long neck. Like both of them, he thought more than he spoke.

“Mom?” said Henry.

“Hi, honey,” she said automatically.

Henry stood, fingering the key he had taken from his school bag.
Latchkey
, she thought, though he wasn't a latchkey kid, not really. Probably, he had thought she was already upstairs, waiting for him, and if he'd found himself alone would have assumed she was on her way, which she certainly would have been—had been, in fact—before these irritating men had blocked her path. Henry was still waiting.

“Go on up,” she said. “I'll be there in a minute.”

With another pause, just long enough to convey the message that an explanation would now be required, he turned and left, his violin swinging a little at his back. The two men said nothing until the elevator closed behind him.

“How old's your boy?” one of them said.

“Henry is twelve.”

“Fun age. That's when they go into their rooms and don't come out for about a decade.”

This comment served as some sort of cue for the two of them. They both chuckled theatrically, and one, O'Rourke, shook his head with a downward gaze, as if recalling his own repellent activities as a twelve-year-old. Grace was torn between wanting to defend her son, who had indeed begun to shut himself in his room a few months before (usually to read or practice his violin) or just walk away from them. She did neither, of course.

“Your son know the Alves kid?” said Mendoza, offhand.

Grace looked at him.

“What's his name?” Mendoza asked O'Rourke.

“Miguel.”

“Miguel,” he reported to Grace, as if she weren't three feet away.

“No, of course not.”

“Why ‘of course'?” he asked, frowning at her. “It's a small school, right? I mean, that's what I read on the website. That's why tuition costs the big bucks. All that individual attention? What's it cost, that school?” he asked his partner.

Was she allowed to leave? Grace wondered. Was it ever allowed? Or was it like talking to royalty, where the conversation ended only when they said so?

“Thirty-eight thousand, he said.”

Grace thought:
He?

“Yowza!” said Mendoza.

“Well,” O'Rourke said, “you saw that place. Looked like a mansion.”

That place, she thought crossly, had been founded in the 1880s to educate the children of laborers and immigrants. That place had also been the first private school in New York to admit black and Hispanic students.

“How do you think she afforded it?” he asked her, serious again. “You got any idea?”

“Do I…” Grace frowned. “You mean, Mrs. Alves? We barely knew each other, as I said. She would hardly have confided in me about financial matters.”

“But I mean, she wasn't a rich lady. The husband…what's he do?” This was directed at O'Rourke.

“Printer,” said O'Rourke. “Runs a big print shop downtown. Like, Wall Street area.”

Despite herself, Grace was surprised, then ashamed of her own surprise. What had she imagined? That Malaga Alves's husband was handing out postcards on Fifth Avenue announcing a going-out-of-business sale at a “famous brand” showroom? Just because their son was on scholarship, did that have to mean that the father was destitute? Wasn't the Alves family entitled to its American Dream?

“I suppose it's possible,” she said tactfully, “that Miguel was on scholarship. Our school has a long-standing scholarship program. In fact, I think I'm right in saying this, I believe that Rearden has a higher percentage of scholarship students than any other independent school in Manhattan.”

Christ
, she thought.
I hope that's true.
Where had she read it? The
New York Times
, probably, but when? Maybe Dalton or Trinity had slipped past them in the meantime. “Anyway, what I meant about my son not knowing Mrs. Alves' son is that a seventh grader probably doesn't have much to do with the fourth grade—not in any school. He might have passed this little boy in the hall or something, but he wouldn't have known him. I'll tell you what,” she added, and got to her feet, hoping even this wasn't a transgression, “let me ask him. If I'm wrong, I'll call you and tell you. Do you have a card or something?” She held out her hand.

O'Rourke stared, but Mendoza stood up and removed his wallet. He withdrew a slightly grubby business card and then took a pen and crossed out something on it. “Old cards,” he said, handing it to her. “The city of New York has declined to order me new ones. This is my cell,” he added, pointing with his blue ballpoint.

“Well, thank you,” she said automatically, and extended her hand, also automatically. She was thrilled to be getting away from them, but he held on to her.

“Hey,” he said. “I know you want to protect him.”

He tipped his head, chin up, eyes flicking to the lobby ceiling. Grace, instinctively, looked up, too, and she understood: He was talking about Henry. But of course she wanted to protect him!

“I know you want to,” he said, his expression bizarrely affable. “But don't. It'll only make it worse.”

Grace stared at him. He still had her hand in his, in his big hand, and she couldn't leave without it. She thought:
Can I yank it away?
She thought:
What the fuck are you talking about?

S
he was so angry. She was so angry that it took every second of the six-floor elevator ride just to calm herself, at least enough to recognize that she was not having some kind of actual, physical, multisystem shutdown requiring actual, physical, medical attention, but was merely very, very angry. The elevator had a mirror in which she declined to look, for fear of seeing this white-hot version of herself, so she focused instead on the faux finished wood of the ceiling, working her jaw as if she were chewing hard on something that refused to be broken down.

Still, it bloomed around her, filling the available, enclosed space.
How dare they?
she thought more than once as the elevator rose. But: How dare they…
what
, exactly? She had not been accused of anything more nefarious than being, perhaps, a less than welcoming fellow parent and fellow committee member to a new, clearly less affluent arrival at her son's school, who would happen, in due course, and in a truly unforeseeable turn of events, to get herself murdered. But why single Grace out for that? Why not go for the fourth-grade parents in general or just parade the class mom down the center of Park Avenue and clap her in the stocks if they wanted to set an example?
What is their problem?

The worst of it, she thought, rattling her key into the lock of her own front door, was that she had no obvious outlet for all of this fury. She preferred, as infuriating circumstances went, the kind that offered clear avenues of redress. A booted or towed car, for example, might be profoundly annoying, but at least you knew where to go and whom to yell at. Odious parents of odious children at Henry's school could be cold-shouldered, meaning that she no longer had to pretend to like them or mix with them at school events. Rude shopkeepers and inadequate restaurants could be passed over in future—in New York, nobody had a monopoly on anything, which was useful; even the can't-get-into spot of the moment would be replaced, in a week or two, with some other can't-get-into spot. (The only exception to this rule she'd ever encountered was private school admissions, but Henry had been safely ensconced in Rearden's Class of 2019 since the age of three, the Manhattan equivalent of being Set for Life, at least educationally speaking.) This was different—because she, of course, supported the police as any law-abiding citizen ought, more than ever since 9/11, when they and the others had literally gone down in flames. It was maddening.

And even if she somehow identified an appropriate outlet for complaint, what exactly was she supposed to be carping about? That two police detectives, never less than outwardly polite, and trying to comprehend a terrible, dreadfully sad murder that had left two children without a mother, and bring the man responsible (of course it was a man) to justice, had come to her home and asked her some questions? It was nothing she hadn't seen on
Law & Order
. It was nothing.

She wondered, setting down her bag on the hall table and noting the smack of the refrigerator door from the kitchen (Henry, procuring his customary post-school gallon of OJ), whether she ought to be calling Jonathan. It was safe to complain to Jonathan, of course, but perhaps too self-indulgent to interrupt his conference for that purpose. Besides, in his world, the world of dying children, how much sympathy could she expect to extract for a murdered stranger, let alone for herself, the barely inconvenienced acquaintance of a murdered stranger? He would, she knew, be a little annoyed by the thought that two detectives had apparently instructed her not to protect their twelve-year-old son. No—more than annoyed.

Protect him from what?
he would say, and she imagined the tracking of his mood on an EKG ticker tape, starting to prick and roil.

Protect him from…the news of the death of the mother of a fourth grader Henry had never set eyes on, or at least would not have known by name?
I know you want to protect him.
It would have been laughable if not for the fact that he—the Irish one or the other one—had actually said it.

Maybe she should call Robert Conover and yell at him, but she wasn't really sure what he'd done, apart from send out such an asinine e-mail.
That
was pretty bad. Still, he'd had to do something, say something; it would have been wrong not to try to get ahead of events. And most people were lousy writers, even heads of schools, as likely to say something unhelpful (or idiotic) as what they'd actually set out to say. Or maybe she should be yelling at Sally, because she—as head of the benefit committee—had obviously supplied the police with Grace's name, or just because she was generally objectionable. Maybe she should yell at her father.

In general, Grace did not even yell around, let alone to, her father, who had long ago made clear that he would not engage with any but her most sedate, cerebral self, a self he had reared and paid to educate and whose acerbic and intelligent commentary on most things was more than welcome. She was not flighty or emotional by nature, which was just as well, but even she had had to navigate adolescence as a female, which made necessary certain episodes of hormonal extravagance, certain scenes in restaurants and in view of the old friends of parents. These incidents had had, Grace knew well, an indelible impact on her father's sensibilities. It was just as well she'd been an only child.

Still, he had never wavered in his own brand of paternal devotion. Even after her mother's death (which took place after Grace had—technically—left home), even after his remarriage, he never let slip that garment of paternal authority he had taken on when he became a father, in that far-from-the-delivery-room way that men had once become fathers. They had, she supposed, a good relationship, if that meant they saw each other frequently, and he let her know when she was looking well, and that he approved her choice of husband and the child she had produced, and perhaps was even proud of what she had accomplished professionally. And neither of them was given to heartfelt declarations, so that was all right. And there were certain rituals they both counted on, like the weekly dinners at the apartment he shared with his new wife—the wife of nearly eighteen years Grace still (maliciously?) thought of as “new.” (These dinners had at first taken place on Friday nights, in deference to Eva's superior Jewishness, and later on other nights, in deference to Grace and Jonathan's inability to get with the program of the aforementioned Jewishness, and the fact that Eva's daughter and son could no longer manage a baseline courtesy in the face of that inability.)

Now that Grace had thought of her father, she felt an actual need to call him. She had to call him, or call Eva at any rate, to confirm the following night. But she hadn't done it because she hadn't yet heard whether Jonathan would be back in time from Cleveland.

Henry came, bearing a granola bar, the kind marketed as healthy but as fully loaded with sugar as anything in the candy aisle. “Hey, you,” said Grace.

Henry nodded. He glanced toward his own bedroom door, and it occurred to Grace that she seemed to be actually blocking his way.

“Walk home okay?” she said.

“Who were those guys?” said Henry, cutting to the chase.

“They were from the police department. It wasn't anything.”

He stood, holding his granola bar with a stiff, extended arm, the way the eagle on the American seal holds his olive branch and arrows. He frowned at her from under his too-long hair.

“What do you mean, not anything?”

“You heard about the little boy at your school? Whose mother died?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “But why were they asking you about it?”

Grace shrugged. She hoped she was conveying some distance. She wanted to convey distance. “The mother was on the benefit committee with me, for the fund-raiser last weekend. But I barely knew her. I think we just spoke once, at a meeting. I didn't have anything to help them.”

“Who did it?” said Henry, surprising her. Then it occurred to her:
He must think whatever happened to Malaga Alves could happen to his own mother
. He had always been a bit fearful. He'd suffered terrors after scary images, even cartoon images, he'd seen as a little boy. At summer camp, the counselors reported, he waited till other boys were heading to the toilets, out behind the cabin back in the woods, and then went along with them rather than go by himself. And even now he wanted to know where she was. She knew it would change eventually, but it just seemed to be the way he was wired.

“Honey,” she told him, “they're going to figure it out. It's awful, what happened, but they'll figure it out. You don't have to worry.”

I know you want to protect him
, she thought.

Well, of course she did. That was her job.
And
her inclination, thank you very much. Then she pushed back at the thought of those two. Those probing, appalling men.

Henry nodded. He looked thin—thin in his face, Grace thought, or perhaps it was his face that looked, just, different. The head changes shape as the child grows, jaw and cheekbone and eye socket moving into and out of position. Henry's cheekbones seemed to have tipped forward just slightly, making the briefest contact with skin, making shadows on either side. He was going to be handsome, like his father, while actually looking very little like him. He was going to look, she was suddenly aware, like her own father.

“Where's Dad?” Henry said.

“In Cleveland. I'm pretty sure he's coming back tomorrow. Did he tell you when he's coming back?”

Then it struck her as noteworthy that she had even asked her son when her husband was returning. But it was too late to take it back.

“No. He didn't say. I mean, he didn't tell me where he was going.”

“I hope he's back in time for Grandpa and Eva's.”

Henry said nothing. He liked Eva, who—unless some massive transformation took place in the life and psyche of Jonathan's mother—was all the grandmother he was ever, properly, going to have.

Both of Jonathan's parents had spent decades buried in their unacknowledged addictions (Naomi was an alcoholic, Jonathan said; David had not spent a day without Valium since the 1970s) and in their indulgence of Jonathan's younger brother, a committed ne'er-do-well who had never finished college or held a job and who lived in his parents' basement, monopolizing their attention and financial resources. Jonathan's ambitions for himself had been baffling to them, clearly, and his wish to participate in the lives of other people, especially people in dire, challenging circumstances, plainly appalled them. They still lived in Roslyn, but they might as well have lived on the moon. Henry hadn't seen either of them since infancy.

Grace herself had spent very little time with Jonathan's family. There had been the formal introduction, an uncomfortable outing in the city with an awkward meal at a Chinese restaurant, followed by what felt like a forced march around Rockefeller Center to look at the Christmas tree, and only the most careful conversation. Neither parent had attended their wedding. (Only the brother had turned up, standing somewhere to the rear of the small group on the sloping back lawn of the lake house in Connecticut and leaving without actually taking leave sometime during the reception.) After that, she had seen the parents only a handful of times, including during a tense visit to Lenox Hill Hospital the day after Henry's birth, where they arrived—she had never forgotten this detail—bearing an old comforter, obviously handmade, but not within the current or even previous decade. It might have had some meaning to them, she supposed, but the obtuseness of it appalled her. No, she was not going to cover her adored and long-awaited infant with a worn, faintly malodorous blanket they might have found in a jumble sale or thrift store. With Jonathan's permission, she had left it in the garbage pail of her hospital room.

Not one of the three of them—father, mother, or younger brother—had ever shown any real curiosity about Grace herself (which, at the end of the day, wasn't really a problem) or about Henry when he'd come along. She now understood that Jonathan, who had been a very smart and self-motivated kid, had made himself into a person of his own design, and from a very early age, and this Grace found thoroughly heroic. It was more than she had done. Her own parents might not have been overly demonstrative, but they had always made her feel welcome and valued, and they had been utterly clear in communicating the notion that she needed to move in the world, be educated, live in curiosity about other people, and make her mark. Jonathan had had to figure those things out on his own: unguided, unsupported, even unobserved. She didn't feel sad for him because he didn't feel sad for himself, but she felt sad for Henry, who deserved at least one real grandmother.

“How's the homework?” she asked Henry.

“Not bad. I did some in study hall. I have a test, though.”

“Want me to help?”

“Maybe later. I have to study first. Can we get Pig Heaven for dinner?”

Pig Heaven was their go-to takeout for nights on their own. Jonathan was of course not religious, but he didn't care for Chinese. They did not tell her father and Eva about Pig Heaven.

“Nope. I got lamb chops.”

“Oh. Good.”

She went to the kitchen to start dinner. He went into his bedroom, presumably to study. She banished the last of her hostility toward the two men in the lobby with half a glass of Chardonnay from the fridge and dug out the steamer basket for the cauliflower. Once the pot was on the stove and the lamb chops were seasoned and half a head of Boston lettuce was soaking in the salad spinner, she had recovered sufficiently to try Jonathan again, but again his cell went straight to voice mail. She left a brief message asking him to call, then phoned her father's number, which rang in that drawn-out, old-fashioned way you knew could lead only to the pre-digital species of answering machine, complete with blurry recorded message and extended beep.