You Should Have Known (32 page)

“Do you need help?” Leo Holland asked. He suddenly looked very sober.

“No, I…just have to go.”

“Of course. But come for dinner. Both of you. Maybe after New Year's?”

She might have nodded. She wasn't sure. She was driving down the road, through the thick woods, the iced-over lake just glittering through the trees on her right, passing the second house and the third, the fourth and fifth very close together. All she could think of was that Henry might be—
was
—alone with someone, anyone. A reporter. An infamy junkie—one of the legion of interested and highly informed bystanders, minted by
People
magazine and Court TV, who felt entitled to intrude on somebody else's nightmare. She thought, and tried not to think, and failed, and thought again, of somebody in the cold little house with her son, sitting on the sofa, asking questions about something that had nothing to do with them, upsetting Henry or perhaps—and then she realized how much of her outrage came from this bit of it—telling him things about his father that he was not (that she herself was not) ready to hear.

But most of all—and this was an idea that came so quickly, it had obviously been there all along—she was terrified that it was Jonathan. Surely it could not be Jonathan. He wouldn't come back. He wouldn't do that to them, or at least, she thought fiercely, be careless enough to do that to them.

The road bent to the right, and then, looking frantically ahead into the darkness, she was able to see the house and the car parked before it. Her surprise was nearly as strong as her relief. There, in the patch left vacant by her own departure only two (or at most three) hours earlier, sat a late-model German sedan of a make no sentient Jew should ever drive, but Eva—who controlled the car option—was not one to burden herself with excessive sentimentality. Grace's father, unexpectedly and against all logic, appeared to have arrived for Christmas.

I
nside, the two of them were sitting together on the lumpy green sofa near the fire, feet up on an old trunk, big mugs of tea steaming up into their faces. It was actually, she noted, not freezing in the house, and she wondered if there might be some basic thing that she had not understood about the boiler or the heat distribution system. But it was just the fire, after all. He had it going really well. He had always—strangely for a city man—been very good at making fires.

“Well, hello!” said her father heartily enough.

Henry, she saw, was holding an unfamiliar item: a portable DVD player, on which the two of them had been watching something she didn't immediately identify. For the briefest moment, she felt an intense wave of irritation.

“Dad,” Grace heard herself say, “when did you get here?”

He looked at Henry. Henry, one eye already back on the little screen, gave a shrug. “Maybe an hour ago? I got the fire going.”

“I see. And is this an early Christmas present?”

He looked over at the object in his grandson's hands. Then he frowned. “Well, no, no. It's mine, actually. I just thought Henry might like to use it while he's here.” He turned back to her. “Is it all right?”

“Oh.” Grace nodded. “Yes, of course. Thank you,” she added grudgingly. “Henry,” she asked him, not very nicely (as if he had been the ungracious one), “did you say thank you?”

“He certainly did,” her father said. “This child has excellent manners.”

“It's
2001
,” Henry added. “They just found the domino thing on the moon.”

She frowned at him, momentarily distracted from her own irritability. “Domino?”

“Monolith,” Frederich Reinhart corrected. He turned back to Grace. “I just grabbed what I had. One of the kids gave me this collection. Greatest science-fiction movies of all time.”

One of the kids. One of Eva's kids, in other words.

You only have one kid
, she nearly said.

“Like, ten of them,” Henry chirped. He seemed delighted.

If there was anything—
one single thing
—she disliked more than sports-obsessed boys, it was science fiction–obsessed boys. Now her cultured, sensitive, violin-playing son was reading books about baseball and watching videos about spaceships. And he hadn't been near his violin since they'd arrived. And—what was even less comprehensible—she hadn't said word one to him about that.

“Well,” Grace heard herself say, “that's very kind.”

“Missed this one,” her father said. He had hooked his arm around Henry's neck and pulled him closer. He was wearing one of his ribbed turtlenecks, soft and gray. Her mother had once bought them for him. Now Eva bought them. “Both of you,” he added. “I wanted to come and make sure you were both all right.”

Grace turned and went into the kitchen. Once she had recognized the car, once the awful, liquid fear had left her, she had taken her time gathering up everything from the trunk, because it was too cold outside to make an unnecessary trip. Now she started unloading, slapping each individual can onto the wooden countertop like an isolated element of percussion.

Missed you…

Sure!

Both of you…

Right!

The Berkshire Co-Op had been closed by the time she got to it, so it had all come from Price Chopper, and it did not a Martha Stewart feast suggest. There were two cans of cranberry jelly, the kind you squiggled out whole and cut with a knife. There was a can of fried onions, another of cream of mushroom soup. Obviously, she was going retro this Christmas. The entire holiday had been nearly an afterthought. She hoped her father wasn't expecting to be entertained.

“Grace?” she heard him. He had stopped in the doorway.

The turkey was at the bottom of the grocery bag, under the frozen string beans, and she was reaching in for it. It was only part of the turkey, actually. Just the breasts. And already roasted.

“What?” she said unkindly.

“I should have asked you first. I am sorry.”

“Yes,” Grace confirmed. “Someone up the road told me there was a car here. I was frightened. You should have called.”

“Oh. Well, that part…I did call. I tried to call. There,” he said, pointing to the kitchen phone. “I might have missed you.”

She sighed. She hadn't the wherewithal to tell him about unplugging the phone. “No. I'm sorry. We've been living like recluses. Luddite recluses. But on purpose.”

“So you don't know what's going on,” he said, and not as a question. And there was just the tiniest edge of disapproval when he said it. Possibly he was thinking:
And hasn't that been a great part of the problem?
Or possibly she imagined that.

“In detail? No, I don't know. I've got the gist, though. I think it's better we're here.”

He nodded. He looked haggard, she thought. The skin beneath his eyes was papery, and she could see, even across the room, the tracery of red blood vessels. Ten years older, just in a few weeks.
Thanks for that, too, Jonathan
, she thought.

“I'd like to help,” said Frederich Reinhart. “I came to see if there was some way I could.”

Grace shuddered. It was an unfamiliar place in which they found themselves. Two solitary travelers on a narrow mountain pass. The question was not which one of them would give way, but which one of them would accept the deference of the other. An absurd problem to have, Grace thought.

To cover her discomfort, she took the turkey to the refrigerator, but when she opened it she found that the shelves inside were crammed with orange-and-white bags. Before she could think, she was elated.

“I went to Zabar's,” her father said unnecessarily. “I thought I'd bring a bit of home.”

Grace nodded, still holding the fridge door open. She wasn't at all surprised to note that she was in real danger of crying. “Thank you,” she told him.

“Henry likes the chopped liver,” he said. “I brought extra to freeze. The strudel should freeze well, too.”

“When did you become a domestic god?” Grace laughed, but he seemed to take the question seriously.

“Eva is very capable as a cook, and she does not see the point of places like Zabar's. I realized a good long while ago that if I wanted cucumber salad and lox to remain a part of my life, I was going to have to get them in myself. I remembered those cookies you used to like.” He pointed. They had moist stripes of green and orange and white cake and were encased in chocolate. They had been her favorite treat, no contest. Now just looking at them made her a tiny bit happier. “I got a bit of everything, I think,” her father added. “I even got matzo ball soup.”

“We'll have a very Jewish Christmas Eve,” Grace said, smiling.

“I suppose,” he agreed, making room on one of the shelves for her supermarket turkey.

“Christmas in the shtetl.”

“O little star of Bukowsko.” Her father laughed. Bukowsko had been his grandfather's shtetl in Galicia.

“Ouch.”

“My grandmother wouldn't mind. Her sister, she was the one who gave me pork to eat for the first time. An absolutely delicious sausage, I remember.”

“And here we are,” Grace said helpfully. “In hell.”

“No. It only feels that way right now.” He stepped back from the fridge and held open the door for her. “You'll come out of this, Grace. You're tough.”

“Right.”

“And Henry's tough. It's a huge blow, I'm not belittling it. But he's been a very loved child, one way or another, and he's smart. If we can all be honest with him, he'll be okay.”

She was about to say something highly defensive (and probably unkind) when it occurred to her that she hadn't at all been honest with Henry. In the guise of “protection,” she had told him very little of what had happened—what was happening—to his family. But every time she imagined that conversation, just now included, she fell completely apart. And “together” was the principle of her life right now. “Together” was the mantra.

“We will be honest,” she told her father. “Just not right at this moment. There's too much I don't understand myself. I have to get us settled here. I have to make some parameters for us.”

“Parameters are important,” he agreed tentatively. “Stability, security for him, absolutely. I take it you're staying?”

She shrugged.

“What about your practice?”

“I've suspended it,” she said. It felt unreal, saying it aloud. “I had to.”

“And Henry's school?”

“There are schools in Connecticut.”

“There's no Rearden in Connecticut.”

“Absolutely right,” she snapped. “Will Hotchkiss do?”

He closed the refrigerator and turned around. “You really are thinking ahead.”

“Yes. I really am.” Though she hadn't been, not till this moment. That Hotchkiss thing, it had come out of nowhere.

“Your friends?”

Grace went to the drawer, the same drawer where she kept her now half pack of cigarettes, and got a corkscrew. Then she went for one of the bottles of red wine on the top shelf.

What was she supposed to say? That not one friend or acquaintance from what she now laughingly thought of as her “past” had troubled themselves to come after her? She knew this was true. When she scrolled through the call list on her muted cell, she saw that they just weren't there. Amid the media gnats and the detectives and the relentless calls from Sarabeth and Maud, which she was also trying to ignore, they just weren't there.

The idea of it—the power of that—was just breathtaking.

“I seem to have misplaced them all,” is what she finally told him.

He nodded sadly, and Grace, watching him, thought that her father must assume they had all deserted her in the scandal. But they hadn't been there in the first place, that was her point. That was what she knew now.

“Well, Vita called,” he said a bit nonchalantly, as if what he was saying were not utterly stunning. “I told her you were up here. She's living in the Berkshires somewhere, I think she might have said where, but I'm not certain. Hasn't she been in touch?”

Grace, short of breath, turned her head to the old wall phone. How many times had it rung before she'd unplugged it? And when she'd picked up the receiver that one time. That woman's voice, the reporter's voice…had it actually been a reporter? Her hand shook a little as she dug the end of the corkscrew into the rubbery cork.

“Let me,” said her father, and she handed it over. “You never heard from her?”

She shrugged. She still couldn't believe it.

“I said how good it was to hear her voice. I think she is very worried about you.”

Well, she can join the club
, Grace thought, eyeing the wine her father was pouring. But again, she remembered that there was no club. There weren't enough people worrying about her to form one. Besides, it was horrible of Vita to have gone away and left her, but even more horrible to come back now.

“Fine, fine,” she said, taking the glass. It was a little bitter, but instantly effective.

“She's doing something for…well, she called it a rehabilitation center. I didn't ask for details. Isn't she a therapist, too?”

I wouldn't know
, Grace thought, but she said: “She was training to be one. That was a long time ago. I really have no idea.”

“Well, maybe you'll manage to reconnect. It happens that way sometimes. When your mother died, I heard from people I hadn't thought of in years. Lawrence Davidoff. Remember him?”

Grace nodded. She took another swallow of her wine and was rewarded with a sensation of fuzziness and warmth in the pit of her stomach.

“And Donald Newman. We were in Korea together. We'd lived five blocks apart for years, never ran into each other. He introduced me to Eva, you know.”

She looked at him. “Really?”

“His wife was a real estate agent. Eva and Lester bought the apartment on Seventy-Third from her. So after Mom died he decided to fix us up.”

Grace wanted to ask:
How long after?
It was a point of detail she had never been very clear on.

“I don't need any old friends fixing me up, thanks.”

“I doubt that was on her mind. As I said, she seemed very concerned. And if you ever…became aware…of something like this, in her life, I'm sure you'd want to be in touch with her as well.”

Grace, who wasn't sure at all, said nothing. She went to the cupboard and started taking down plates. She got the silverware and the napkins. Then she went back to the fridge and tried to figure out what was for dinner.

Her father really had brought a bit of everything. There were spreads and cheeses and plastic containers from up and down Zabar's long prepared-food display, a skinny baguette and a bag full of bagels and a loaf of sliced rye. Also, on the countertop next to the fridge, a stack of those gourmet chocolate bars they had piled up in the checkout lanes. “Wow,” she said, unwrapping the two-inch-thick wedge of salmon, cut in thin, shimmery slices, folded between translucent sheets. “This is wonderful. I really appreciate this.”

“Not at all,” he said. He had put his hand on her shoulder and was standing behind her, looking into the fridge. “Is it enough?”

“To feed the entire population of the lake? Yes, I think so. Actually, it's just us at the moment. And someone in the stone house.”

“Down at the end?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “The boys who water-skied? That house?”

“Yeah. One of them grew up to be a college professor. He said he was on sabbatical, writing a book.”

“Are they winterized?” Her father frowned.

“No, I don't think so. He asked me the same thing. But it won't last forever. If I can get us through January, that'll be the worst of it, I'm sure. And if it gets too bad, I'll check us into a motel.”