You Should Have Known (27 page)

She nodded back. If there was a script for this, neither of them seemed to know it. But though he said nothing, his foot had moved, barely perceptively, into her path. Grace stared at it, then at him.

“Can I go up to the classroom?” she asked, appalled.

He seemed to consider this, and she watched him, mystified. She could not seem to get her brain around it.

“I'm wondering…,” he began.

“Mom?” Henry asked, turning. He was already halfway up the first flight.

“Wait, I'm coming,” she told him.

“It's just,” Robert said again, “I think, under the circumstances, Henry ought to go up alone.”

“Mom, it's fine,” Henry said. He seemed confused and irritated, in equal parts. “I'm fine.”

“Robert,” Grace said, “what the fuck are you doing?”

He took an extended, very careful breath. “I'm trying to get us through a crisis. I'm trying to get all of us through this.” She felt as if she were gazing at him through some kind of film, like glass or Perspex smeared with grime. She could just barely make out the shape of him. “Grace…,” he said, and suddenly he was a different Robert. “Grace, I don't think you want to be here.”

She looked down. He had taken hold of her. He had placed a hand on her arm, between wrist and elbow. It was not possessive, exactly. It was—it was trying to be—comforting.

And then she understood—finally, finally. Robert knew. Of course, he knew. He knew because they had told him, Mendoza and O'Rourke. He had known even before she—Grace—had known, about Jonathan and Malaga Alves. Jonathan, her husband, and Malaga Alves, the dead woman. He knew at least some of the things she knew herself. Perhaps less. Perhaps, it came to her very horribly, even more. How much more? She had given up counting the things she didn't know.

Grace made herself look him in the eye. “What did they tell you?” she asked him bluntly. Then she remembered Henry and glanced up at where he'd been standing, on the stairs, but he had already gone on. He had left her behind.

Robert shook his head. She wanted to hit him.

“I want you to know,” he told her quietly, “that this is a safe place for Henry. If he needs to spend time in my office, he can come see me, anytime he likes. Recess and after school, for example. And if anyone says anything to him, he should come see me right away. The teachers will be looking out for him as well. I've spoken to everyone.”

I've spoken to everyone.
She stared at him.

“He's a Rearden student. I take that very seriously,” Robert said, flagging a little, as if he knew he was losing her. “But…just not to make it worse. I've seen this kind of thing before. Not…of course not on this scale. But issues, within a school community. They can't be stopped once they've started. They need to…well, be given their heads, if you know what I mean.”

She nearly laughed. She had precious little idea what he meant, except that it was very, very bad and it had somehow become about her.

“So I wouldn't hang around. And…if you want to come a little later for him this afternoon, miss the regular pickup crowd, he can wait in my office. It's no trouble.”

Grace said nothing. She was torn between basic manners—she knew he was attempting to do something nice for her—and awful humiliation. Humiliation made people act in ways severely detrimental to themselves. She knew that; she had seen it so many times. She made herself breathe. There were other parents, she now saw, crowding behind her into the stairwell.

“Okay.” She nodded. “That would be…it's a good idea.”

“I'll go get him at the end of period eight and take him to the office. Why don't you give me a call when you're on your way? I'll be here until six, at least.”

“Okay,” she said again, but she still could not bring herself to actually thank him.

She turned and worked her way back through the mothers and the kids and through the doorway into the back alley, where there were more mothers and kids. Most parted amiably enough, and no one seemed to take special notice of her. But when one body seemed to freeze in place, forcing her to move to one side of her or the other, Grace looked up to find Amanda Emery, flanked by her twin daughters.

“Oh,” said Grace. “Amanda. Hi.”

Amanda merely stared at her.

“Hi, girls,” Grace said, though she didn't really know the Emery girls. They were stocky, with round faces and what Grace assumed was their mother's natural hair color: light brown. Before her eyes, Amanda grabbed her daughters' shoulders, matching claws on either one. Grace nearly took a step back. She still said nothing at all, though one of the girls looked up resentfully and said: “Ow. Mom!” It was Celia. The one with the overbite.

Grace saw the backlog. It extended all the way down to the alley's corner and then went on out of sight. It filled her with the most intense dread.

“Bye,” she told Amanda Emery, stupidly, as if they had just exchanged the most banal of social pleasantries. She had to turn sideways and squeeze, in places, and mainly she was ignored, but not always. There were other Amandas, some she knew, some she had never noticed before. But in her wake, as she moved, came little expulsions of sound and also something she didn't identify right away, that turned out to be the opposite of an expulsion of sound, but in its way was just as loud, and that was the silence that came after sound. And it was that silence that followed her, like a building wave.

When she squeezed past Jennifer Hartman and out onto the street, she found that the reporters now formed a rough semicircle around the entrance to the alleyway. She ducked her head and made for the edge of the building, but they seemed disinclined to let her go easily. They made a kind of herd, it seemed to her, with a herd understanding of whose job it was to shout and whose to listen, who got to push forward with microphones and who had to stay back, checking sound levels on their equipment or preparing to write things on the most ordinary of pads. But they communicated as one animal, and what the animal wanted from her was nothing she could part with, not without losing her senses: right here on the sidewalk, right now at eight twenty in the morning of such a very, very long and very terrible day ahead.

“Excuse me,” she told them roughly, and, “Let me through.” And to her own amazement, they did, because by some miracle they had not yet realized that she was any different from the next mother who emerged from the alley's entrance, whom they also crowded and shouted to.

Not much longer, she knew. Maybe not even one time more. But for now they seemed willing to let her go.

Then someone called:
Grace
.

Grace put her head down and started to walk, away from them and up the street.

“Grace, wait.”

A small woman rushed up beside her and took her elbow. It was Sylvia, and she seemed determined to stay alongside.

“I have to—,” she tried to say.

“Come on,” said Sylvia. “There's a cab.”

It had stopped for a light at the corner of Park, but with the peripheral vision that increased survival for New York cabbies from all four corners of the world, he saw the two women walking swiftly in his direction and immediately put on his right directional, to the predictable dismay of the cabdriver directly behind him. By the time Sylvia had the door open, the second driver had already honked twice.

“I can't,” Grace said again once she had actually climbed inside. “I'm sorry.”

“No, don't be,” Sylvia said simply. Then she asked the driver to take them to Madison and 83rd. Grace, through the fog of her irritation and the vastness of her distress, tried to figure out what was at Madison and 83rd, but she could picture only the coffee shop on the corner. She couldn't remember its name, but it was the one Meryl Streep had watched her son from in
Kramer vs. Kramer
. At least, there used to be a framed photo of the scene, on the wall behind where the cashier sat. To her mild surprise, this was exactly where Sylvia asked the driver to stop.

Sylvia had refrained from speaking during the five minutes it had taken to drive, and Grace—who had brought her narrow reserves to bear on the challenge of not falling apart while riding in the backseat of a cab with a person she was not exactly on intimate terms with, to an uncertain destination, for an unknown purpose—had not said anything either. Now, watching Sylvia pay the driver, she wondered if she was supposed to know what was happening.

“Come on,” Sylvia said. “I think coffee for us both. Unless you need a drink.”

To her own surprise, Grace laughed out loud.

“Well, thank God for that,” said Sylvia.

They took a booth near the back, just under the Heimlich maneuver poster, and Sylvia practically barked at the waiter—
“Coffee, please”
—who performed the classic New York grunt of understanding with great economy. Grace had nothing to say and nowhere to look. She was baffled by the mere fact of being here with Sylvia Steinmetz. Why her? Only because she had made the effort?

But then it occurred to her that this—that Sylvia Steinmetz—was now what passed for a friend in her life. It seemed impossible, but it wasn't. She could not comprehend how she had allowed this to happen.

Sylvia said something Grace did not quite make out, so she asked her to say it again.

“I said: I had no idea this was happening to you, until this morning. Sally e-mailed me this morning.”

“Fuck Sally,” said Grace. Then she laughed again, even less appropriately.

“Right. But irrelevant. Those reporters weren't there because Sally told them.”

“But—” She stopped as the waiter brought two white mugs of black coffee, sloshing a little over the edge. “But I don't think they knew me. They didn't seem any more interested in me than in anyone else.”

Sylvia nodded. “That won't last much longer. You have a few hours, I think. I wouldn't count on more.”

And then Grace understood that she had been much too accustomed to thinking of her life in exactly the wrong way—in sort of a spatial way, which was no longer viable. It mattered very little, for example, that she had long seen herself as part of a little family, ringed in by parents and colleagues, then by acquaintances, and then by the city that had always been her home. Whether or not this topography was still accurate didn't matter at all, because the question wasn't relevant; what mattered now, as of this morning, was the temporal reality, not the topographical one. What mattered was the fact that her life, the one she had cherished, was rushing to its end. Rushing, rushing, as into a brick wall, and she knew there wasn't a thing she could do to stop it.

“I'm sorry,” Sylvia said. “I went through this with a client once. We had a little more time.”

Grace's head was still spinning. Ordinarily, she might have wanted first to satisfy her own curiosity. Sylvia represented workers who'd been unfairly terminated or who brought harassment suits of various hues. Which client? What had she done, or what had been done to her? Was she someone Grace might have read about—in the
Times
or
New York
magazine? She used to devour stories like this. They were so interesting. People were so interesting, the messes they made of their lives.

But she couldn't afford the distraction.

“What did you do?” she asked instead.

Sylvia frowned. “Well, we got her into a new home. We moved her bank accounts—they were joint accounts with her business partner, but he'd absconded with a lot. We also hired a crisis manager for her.” She looked up at Grace. “But she had a public profile already. That was different.”

Grace looked at her. She had never heard Sylvia speak about her work, at least beyond generalities. It was a different Sylvia, sitting across from her in the booth, stirring thin milk from a metal pitcher into her coffee till it threatened to overflow the rim.

“How did it turn out?” Grace asked.

“It was a long haul,” said Sylvia shortly. “But it's better not to focus on that. It's better to think about what you can do now.”

A shudder went through Grace. She felt the way she had for a brief time in college, when she'd let herself be persuaded to serve as coxswain for the women's crew. She'd been good at the actual manipulation of the shell, the management of the personalities, and even the strategizing of the race itself, but she couldn't bear the hour before the meet. An hour of purest fear, purest dread, an absolute conviction that she—and never the eight tall, powerful women facing her in the narrow shell—was about to ruin everything.

She bent forward over her coffee, and possibly it was the coffee, the heat of the coffee, that flew up into her eyes and cheeks and made her wonder if she was either about to cry or indeed already crying.

“Okay,” she managed. Then she took a breath to steady herself and straightened up. Sylvia seemed to be waiting. “Just…first,” she finally managed, “before I can do anything, I have to ask you. What do you know?”

Sylvia shook her head firmly. “I don't
know
anything at all. I want to be clear about that. I haven't accepted as fact anything I might have been told. My standard of proof is way too high for that.”

“Okay,” Grace said. Then, because it seemed appropriate, she said: “Thanks.”

“But what I've been told was that Jonathan had some kind of involvement with Malaga, and that the police want to talk to him, but he's missing. And also that you know where he is and aren't telling them. Which I can't believe at all.”

“Good,” Grace said shortly, as if this were some kind of relief.

“Which part of it is
good
?” Sylvia asked, tearing a packet of Sweet'N Low and fluttering the contents into her cup.

“The part about not believing I know where he is and I'm hiding him. I'm not brave enough to do that. Or crazy enough. I don't know where he is. I just…This just…” But she gave up.