You Should Have Known (26 page)

So she put it back in its strange place, thinking she would simply leave it where it was, for them to find when they came to look for it. And then, because this was the first time she had imagined them in her apartment, looking into drawers and closets and cupboards the same way she had just been looking, and because the minute she imagined this, she realized that such a scene was now an inevitibility, she opened the cupboard again and took out the phone and left it on top of the cupboard, in the open, where it didn't look as bad, as…
incriminating
, as it would if he had hidden it. She had told them the phone was here, in the apartment. She had not said that it was squirreled away. Why shouldn't she do that for him, anyway?

I know you want to protect him
, one of them had said, though which one she couldn't remember now.

Grace lay back on the bed, on top of the covers, and closed her eyes. She was weary, hollow with weariness. She kept thinking about objects, the objects she had discovered—the scarf and the shirt and the condom—and how they explained nothing, how they were some sort of rune or hieroglyph she could not comprehend. That sparse little trail of things on the floor whose appearance could not be explained—the scarf and the shirt and the condom—it wasn't the right trail at all. The right trail, it came to her, was the one of objects that were no longer here.

That missing gym bag, the good leather one she had given Jonathan. It normally lived on the floor of the closet. It was not there now. Say he picked it up and moved around the room with it, placing things inside: What things would he take? Underwear. Shirts. Toiletries. Pants. The corduroy pants those detectives had seemed so fascinated by? How was she supposed to know which ones they meant? Jonathan had at least six pairs of corduroy pants. She should know, she had bought them all, and all of them were now absent from the shelf in the closet, above the closet rod. There were orphaned hangers and empty drawers and a newly vacated shelf in the bathroom where his toothbrush and his razor usually lived. No wonder it hadn't registered until now; it was
barely
registering even now. Everything looked every bit as it should for a man out of town for a couple of days—on a trip, for example, to a medical conference in Cleveland—due back before he ran out of clean underwear.

Not what is here and does not belong
, she told herself,
but what is not here and does.
It sort of made her think of that poem by James Fenton, about war—some war, she could not remember which:

Added and taken away, plus and minus: but without a prayer of canceling each other out. All of the new people in her life—police detectives and murder victims—not making up for the person unaccountably gone.
And not some other war but my own war
, she understood, squeezing shut her eyes.  
My very own.

S
omehow, she slept. By the next morning she had traveled from her own side of the bed to Jonathan's, as if over those ragged, uncompromising hours she had begun to doubt that he was gone and needed to be sure no one was there. No one was there—no head (dark curling hair, dark growing beard) making its customary dent in the soft pillow, no shoulder, rising and falling over the duvet, no presence at all. Grace woke in the same traumatized clothing she had put on twenty-four hours earlier, when she had been merely concerned, merely annoyed. How wonderful to feel merely those things now.

It was just after six and not yet very light. She dragged herself upright and did all of the necessary things, dressing herself, washing to the extent she could. The room looked disheveled, with the sheets and duvet half twisted off and her shoes on the floor. The strange shirt and the condom in red foil seemed to glow in some malevolent way from where they had been deposited in front of the closet, as if they had been outlined—like the way a dead body might be outlined—but in neon. She kicked them aside as she went to the closet, then threw down her own shed clothes on top of them, as if to hide them from herself. She put on a new sweater, a new skirt, both close in style to what she had worn the day before (because it hurt to think about clothes), and then she did a couple of things that also hurt to do, but which she had fallen asleep thinking about doing, and had woken up thinking about doing, and saw very clearly that she had to do.

So, with her laptop open on the bed before her, she canceled every one of her appointments that day, and every one of her appointments the next day, Saturday morning, which was as far as she felt able to look ahead. For explanation, she cited only a “family illness” and said she would be in touch to reschedule. Then, bracing herself against her own distaste, she called J. Colton's number and left a message saying that she would be unable to speak with the writer from
Cosmopolitan
this afternoon and to please not schedule anything for her for the next week because she was dealing with something in her family, and she would be back in touch as soon as she could be. “Thank you!” she told the dead silence of the tape recorder—though it wasn't, of course, a tape recorder. There no longer were any tape recorders.

When these two things had been accomplished, she felt as exhausted as if she had toiled, physically, for many hours.

With Henry's Puma bag she went down to the lobby and set out into the cold predawn of the morning, still exhausted but now also brutally wide awake—a very uncomfortable combination. There were eight blocks separating her apartment from her father and Eva's, and the frigid air she hauled into her lungs along the way felt awful but just possibly therapeutic, the way only a truly awful sensation could. The streets were mainly empty, though the pavement in front of the redoubtable E.A.T. was alive with delivery trucks and prep workers, and she looked longingly inside as she passed, as if the familiar pleasures of the city were already unavailable to her. Waiting for the light at 79th, she found herself staring at the nearly forgotten contours of Malaga Alves's face on the cover of a newspaper in a blue metal dispenser. The headline, whatever it was, could not be seen, and when the light changed, she walked on.

Upstairs, a terse and typically unwelcoming Eva led her to the kitchen, where she got the extra little blow of seeing Henry eating cereal out of one of her own mother's china bowls. That Eva had elected (for this occasion? Grace wondered; or—which was even worse—merely for every day?) to make use of her parents' wedding china, circa 1955, as a receptacle for Henry's cornflakes and skim milk was nothing less than a shot across the bows, and even in the present circumstances Grace had to fight herself not to rise to the challenge.

Eva had taken a shine to the china upon her marriage to Grace's father, but not so much of a shine that it was used for very fine occasions, like Passover or even Shabbos dinner. Instead, the classic Haviland Limoges Art Deco, with its delicate green edge, was trotted out for morning toast, and the Entenmann's Danish her father consumed before he went to sleep every night, and the canned soup Eva's grandchildren ate (which was particularly galling), and naturally the weekly visit of Grace's own family, at which—for years—it had tormented its rightful (in her opinion) owner. Needless to say, Eva was not hurting for dishes. She still had two enormous sets from her own first marriage, to the father of her son and daughter (an extremely wealthy banker, who had died of a ruptured appendix while on an island off the coast of Maine—a terrible story, really): one also Haviland (the less formal, actually) and one from Tiffany, used on the most special of special occasions. There was also, somewhere in her cupboards, a perfectly adequate white pottery set from Conran's, ostensibly for those everyday occasions when one would not think of using good china. And yet, in accordance with some vicious logic of her own, Eva seemed to make a point of setting out the possessions of her predecessor whenever Grace came to visit.

Of course she had wanted them. She had complained to Jonathan about the injustice of this, about how wrong it was to withhold from an only daughter (an only child!) such an important artifact, one that by tradition (Emily Post tradition, at any rate) ought to have come to her just as soon as her father and Eva joined households. And no, she was not being petty. And yes, her father had given her many things: the apartment, first and foremost, and her mother's jewelry (none of which—as of this morning—she still possessed). But that wasn't the point.

Henry looked up when she entered the kitchen. “I forgot my Latin book,” he said after swallowing.

“I've got it.” She put the Puma bag on the chair beside him. “And the math.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about math. And I need clothes.”

“Well, what a coincidence!” She smiled at him. “I brought clothes. I'm sorry about last night.”

Henry frowned. He had a crease between his dark brows when he did that. Jonathan had the same crease. “What about last night?”

She felt such gratitude for the natural narcissism of being twelve years old. Wasn't it a good thing, thinking so little behind and so little ahead and so little around that the most intense of cataclysms, the greatest ruptures in the fabric of the world, had so little immediate impact? She imagined that if the two of them were walking across limitless space, Henry would be all right as long as she could keep tossing bits of solid mass beneath his feet. How wonderful it must be not to realize that something had gone very, very wrong in the world. At least, for now.

“Did Nana let you stay up late?” she asked him.

“No. I got to watch TV with them, but only till the news.”

Well, that's a plus
, thought Grace.

“Karl slept on my bed with me.”

“Oh, goody.”

“Where's Dad?” said Henry, upending the equilibrium. It had been nice while it lasted.

“I wish I could answer that,” she said honestly enough. “But I can't.”

“Isn't he where he said he was going? To Iowa or wherever?”

“Ohio,” she corrected, before remembering that she herself had most likely supplied the Ohio. She glanced behind her, but Eva had left them alone. “I don't know. I can't reach him.”

“Why don't you just text him?” said Henry, employing the logic of the iPhone generation.

Grace looked around for coffee. The coffeemaker, mercifully, had a half-full carafe.

“I would, but unfortunately he left his cell phone at home.”

She got up to pour herself a cup, using (with very mixed feelings) one of her mother's teacups.

“I'm scared,” Henry said, behind her.

She went back to him, set her cup on the table, and hugged him. He let her gather him in, and she tried not to let him feel her own hurtling fear. She thought:
I'll take yours, too
. Grace let out a long, shuddering breath. She tried to think of something she could tell him, something that might be both helpful and true, but anything she thought of fell down in one of these attributes. True but not helpful, helpful but not true—seldom both. Actually, never both. Were they going to be okay? Would she be able to figure it out? And could she really take care of him? She wasn't at all sure she could take care of herself.

But even as she thought this, Grace understood that there was a slender, brittle layer of resistance she still seemed to be holding on to. It hadn't been there the day before, not on that street corner in Hospital Land with Stu Rosenfeld or in the small, overheated room in the 23rd Precinct house with O'Rourke and Mendoza. It certainly had not been there in the hours she had just spent, clawing through her own drawers and closets, raging and distraught at what she'd found and not found. But somehow, somewhere along the way, it had seen fit to materialize and now it was present: a certain edge of resolve, fragile enough, but tactile. It made her feel…not exactly strong. She was not strong, not at all. She was in no position to storm the barricades or face the mothers at Rearden. But she did feel, somehow, lighter now and sort of different.
Because
, she thought, squeezing the thin shoulders of her child, and pressing her cheek against his, and inhaling the vaguely, newly adolescent smell of his skin,
I have less to protect than I did before
. It made things easier somehow.

She managed to get them both out of the apartment without seeing Eva again, or her father, and they walked, mostly in silence, to Rearden. Henry seemed to have passed through whatever turbulence of need he'd experienced and now seemed as placidly contained as he did any other morning. When they turned down the street toward school, it took him only a moment longer than her to see that the media presence had intensified. Massively.

“Whoa,” she heard him say.

Whoa is me
, Grace thought.

No, she did not want to walk past the vans.

The courtyard gates were shut, which they never, ever were, and the streets were full of mothers: no nannies or babysitters again this morning. They lined the sidewalk in front of the gates, their backs to the school's marble edifice, their determinedly impassive faces turned toward the cameras. They were beautiful and fierce. They were a herd of some elegant mammal, ready for flight but actually hoping for a fight. Apparently, none of this was fun anymore.

“Look,” Grace said, pointing. “You see where Mrs. Hartman is?”

Jennifer Hartman, the mother of Henry's once best friend, Jonah, was standing halfway down the block, at the entrance to the alley that ran behind the school, holding a semi-official-looking clipboard.

So Robert had indeed activated the secondary entrance.

“Come on,” she told Henry, taking his elbow.

They arrived with two or three others, and everyone—bizarrely, given how unprecedented any of this was—seemed to know what to do. “Phillips,” said the woman in front of Grace, peering over Jennifer Hartman's shoulder. “There. Rhianna Phillips, second grade.”

“Great,” Jennifer said, making a check next to the name. “Go on back. It's kind of ad hoc, as you can imagine.”

“Logan Davidson?” said the mother in front of her, as if she weren't quite sure. “Kindergarten?”

“Okay,” said Jennifer Hartman. “Go on in.”

“Hi, Jennifer,” Grace said. “I see you've been recruited.”

Jennifer looked up, and for the briefest moment not one thing happened. And then came a draft of ice, so sudden and overpowering that it left her almost incapable of speech, her own inappropriate smile stuck (frozen) to her face. She looked automatically at Henry, but Henry was only looking up at Mrs. Hartman, the mother of his lost friend. She was a woman of middling height but extraordinary bearing, with high, sharp cheekbones and eyebrows many shades darker than her ash-blond hair. She had been in Henry's life since the boys began kindergarten together eight years earlier, when Grace's practice and Jennifer's own business (she did publicity for chefs and restaurants) had taken on the heft of real careers. Grace had always trusted her and liked her, at least until the Hartmans' marriage started to fray. She had tried to give Jennifer some distance, always offering to take Jonah for overnights or outings, but that had been around the time Jonah himself started to pull away.

Now Henry was standing a mere two feet away from her and looking into her stony face, and did he understand? Jennifer Hartman had taken him on dozens of trips to indoor playgrounds and to see countless animated films. She had gotten him through his first sleepovers, some requiring midnight calls home for reassurance. She had twice taken him to Cape Cod in August, herding him and Jonah through visits to the potato chip factory and the Plymouth Plantation. Once she had even brought him to the emergency room with a broken elbow after Henry had fallen off one of the stone perimeter walls in Central Park. And since the split—since Jennifer's divorce (which was understandable: she was a grown-up and unhappily married) and her son's denunciation of his once best friend (which was not understandable, but also not within either mother's power to prevent)—she and Grace had maintained formalized, civilized exchanges, the kind that might characterize relations between two countries that had once been allies and might someday be again. But this.

“Hi, Mrs. Hartman,” said her beautiful son, her sweet, innocent, and good-hearted son.

She barely looked at him. “Go on in,” she said stiffly. Then she looked down again.

Grace took him quickly, rushing them both away.

Down the alley, which smelled strongly of pigeon shit, she walked behind him, letting the sound of the tumult outside fade as they went. Before her, the kindergartner and her mother were stopped again, at the back door of the school, and again admitted, this time by Robert and his assistant, an intense young woman with John Lennon glasses and a French braid. “Welcome, welcome!” Grace heard him tell the kindergartner's mother. He shook her hand as if this were a normal day, perhaps a normal first day of the year, and the doorway were not the heavy iron always-shut back door but Rearden's grand front entry into its marble foyer, so impressive to prospective parents. The pair moved past him and up the dark fire escape stairwell. “Henry, hello,” he said when he saw Henry. “Grace.” He nodded.