You Should Have Known (40 page)

“Wait,” Grace said. “I don't—”

“The
relationship
,” Sharp said testily. “Between Sachs and the family members of the patient. Specifically the aunt. Yes?”

Grace looked down into her teacup and her head swam with nausea. That she had asked for this meeting, that she had called this upon herself, amazed her. What on earth was the point of it? Had Jonathan scuttled forever Robertson Sharp-the-Turd's cherished dream of being one of
New York
magazine's Best Doctors? Was she supposed to apologize because his subordinate—her own husband—had cheated him by fucking the editor?

She took her wallet from her purse and set it on the table. She didn't think there was anything else.

“No, no,” said Sharp. “Happy to.” He looked around for the waiter. “I hope this has been helpful,” he said formally.

Afterward, on the sidewalk in front of the Silver Star, she let him shake her hand.

“I'll have to testify, of course,” he announced. “If they find him. If they get him back. It's the right thing to do.”

“All right,” Grace said.

“What part of our internal case against him becomes part of the state case, that's up to the attorneys. I don't really understand it.” He shrugged.

I don't care
, Grace thought, and she was amazed to discover, for that moment, at least, that she really didn't. They walked off in opposite directions: Sharp heading north, back to the hospital. Grace, at first, had no idea where she was going. Not to her own apartment, which she couldn't face. Not anywhere in particular, because there was nowhere in particular she wanted to go. But as she came closer and closer to the street where her car was parked, she found herself looking at her watch. Henry's movie started at three thirty, ended at six. That was a lot of time on a Saturday, with little traffic in the city and a car waiting. It was enough time to go nearly anywhere, even a place that made no sense. So, without giving herself enough of an opportunity to really examine the idea, let alone to change her mind, that's where she decided to go.

O
nly once, in all the years of their marriage, had he taken her “home,” and then it had been essentially a drive-by. They had been coming back from the Hamptons one autumn weekend, Grace pregnant, Jonathan in flight from his punishing schedule as a resident, and they were relaxed, full of sleep and clam chowder and the salty wind from the beach at Amagansett; he had not wanted to stop, but she had made him. She had been curious, always, though reluctant to dredge up the unhappiness that seemed to accompany any memory of his father, mother, or brother. She wanted to see the house where he had been raised and from which he had escaped: to Hopkins and Harvard and Grace herself, and into the new family they were making. “Come on,” she had pleaded. “Just show it to me.”

So they had left the LIE and gone off into the narrower streets of the older part of the town, where the houses came from that postwar surge of the 1950s and '60s and were compact, not like the newer exploded palaces of wings and levels. It was the prettiest part of the fall and the leaves still crowded the maple trees everywhere, and she remembered thinking, as he made his way through the obviously familiar intersections, that it wasn't as horrible as she'd imagined. She'd imagined a barren neighborhood of neglected, unsightly homes, each housing a lonely child or a punishing parent, or indeed both. She'd imagined an intense air of hopelessness, out of which her adored husband had had to catapult himself, purely alone and unsupported. Instead, she'd found herself in a pleasant neighborhood of tidy smaller houses, with beds of mums in front and jungle gyms visible behind.

But of course, none of that mattered, and terrible childhoods could take place on lovely streets and in well-kept homes. Obviously, for Jonathan, at least one had, and that afternoon he had not wanted to be told how unexpectedly pretty everything was or how well somebody seemed to have maintained the front lawn of the house on Crabtree Lane, where a station wagon was parked in the carport. He did not want to step out and see if his mother or father (or the brother, Mitchell, who lived in the basement) might be home, or show Grace the room where he had endured each awful day of the first eighteen years of his life, until he could get on the train to college and medicine and her. He drove slowly around the corner and slowly down the street in front of the house he'd grown up in, declining even to stop the car, refusing to say much of anything about it. And all the rest of the way home he was silent and grim, the freedom and peace of their Hamptons weekend utterly undermined. That was what his family had done to him. That was how they still destroyed his happiness, his sense of peace within himself. She would never suggest such a detour again.

Surprisingly, though, with only that single viewing, she found it terribly simple to find the right exit now, and the first intersection and the second, until the street sign for Crabtree itself was plainly visible overhead. It was only four thirty, and the afternoon light was already going, and it only just now occurred to her that turning up like this was in its way a hostile act, though she did not think she felt any hostility to her husband's family, or if she did, she no longer knew how much of that hostility she could trust to be real, or even appropriate. She didn't know anything. She didn't know anything anymore about the man she had fallen in love with and lived with for eighteen years and made a child with. Except that he did not exist.

At the curb, she pulled over and looked at the house, letting the engine idle. It was white with black shutters and a red door, and a narrow walkway curving past the carport, where this time two cars were parked. The lights were already on inside, and even from this far away she could feel a sense of warmth from the colors inside: green curtains and rust-colored furniture. A body moved past the kitchen window, indistinguishable, and from the single dormer window protruding from the roof there came the blue flash of a television. It was a very small house in which to raise two boys, she was thinking. That little upstairs bedroom might have been Jonathan's. Or it might have been Mitchell's. Perhaps it was Mitchell's still, she thought, not without resentment, though why she'd resent a man in his thirties still living at home she couldn't imagine.

Then a hand knocked the glass near her ear, and Grace jumped.

Her foot went to the gas even as her hand went to the window switch. It was an instant confrontation between politeness and flight.

Then she noticed that the knock had been attached to a woman much older than her and wearing a massive down coat, clutched at the throat. “Hello?” this person said. And Grace moved the window switch and the window rolled down.

“Can I help you?” the woman said.

“Oh, no, thank you. I just…”

But she could not think what she had just.

“I just was driving…”

The woman looked at her intently. She seemed to be struggling with something.

“Why don't you people go away?” She sounded not precisely angry, but exasperated. “Really, what is there to see here? It's ridiculous. I don't know what you get out of it.”

Grace frowned at her. She was still parsing this.

“Don't you have anything better to do? Do you want them to feel worse than they do already? I'm writing down your license plate.”

“No
don't
,” Grace said, horrified. “I'll leave. I'm sorry. I'm going.”

“Carol?” another voice said. A man had come out of Jonathan's house. He was tall—much taller than Jonathan. She recognized him instantly.

“I'm taking her license,” said the woman in the down coat.

But he was already coming closer.

“I'm leaving!” said Grace. “Would you just…please move your hand, okay? I need to close the window.”

“Grace?” the man said. “It's Grace, isn't it?”

“It's who?” said the woman named Carol.

“I'm sorry!” said Grace.

“No, don't leave!” It was Mitchell, Jonathan's brother. She had not seen him for years. She had not seen him since her own wedding day, or more accurately after her wedding day, in the photographs. Now he was standing beside her and talking to her as if they actually knew each other.

“It's all right,” he told the other woman. “I know her. It's okay.”

“It's certainly not okay!” the woman objected. She seemed to be taking the intrusion more personally than Mitchell. “First all those newspeople, and now the peepers. They think you're keeping him in the basement? These people haven't done anything wrong,” she said unkindly, directing this last statement to Grace.

“You're right,” said Mitchell. “But this is different. It's all right. She's invited.”

I am not
, Grace thought. She glared at him, but he was still comforting the neighbor. “No, I was just…I was out here anyway and I thought I'd come by, but I wasn't going to bother you.”

“Please,” he said warmly. “Please come. It would mean a lot to Mom.” He waited another moment. Then he said with an air of finality: “Please.”

She gave in. She turned off the engine and tried to steady herself. Then she opened the door, forcing both of them to step back. “My name is Grace,” she told the woman in the down coat. “I'm sorry I upset you.”

Carol favored her with one final look of bitter disapproval and turned away. Grace watched her retreat to her own small brick house opposite the Sachses'.

“Sorry about that,” said Mitchell. “It was very difficult here, at least until the middle of January. Lots of news vans, and cars just parked at the foot of the driveway. There hasn't been much since then, but sometimes people slow down in front of the house. Mom and Dad were in such bad shape about everything, they couldn't have a real conversation with the neighbors about what was happening. Not that they'd have chosen that one to unburden themselves to, just between us.”

Just between us? She had never exchanged a single word with him, ever, in all the years they had been nominally related. But what he had said also made perfect sense. So she said: “Yes. Of course.”

“It's a close street. I think a lot of these people just feel so bad about everything, but they can't bring it up as long as my parents don't, so it just comes out in this kind of little skirmish. Carol is trying to be helpful. Look, please come inside.”

“I didn't want to bother you,” said Grace. “Actually, I don't know what I did want. But not to bother you.”

“You're not bothering us. Look, it's too cold to stand here.”

“All right,” she said, giving in. Forgetting that she was on a residential street in Long Island, she locked her car door. Then she followed him up the walk.

“Mom?” Mitchell called, holding the door back for Grace.

Jonathan's mother was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She was a tiny woman—Jonathan had inherited his slightness, his narrowness, from her—with a thin face and indigo circles beneath her dark eyes. She looked far older than the last time Grace had seen her, in the hospital when Henry was born. She also looked far older than the age Grace knew she was—sixty-one. She looked terrified, though whether to see anyone or Grace in particular, Grace couldn't have said.

“Look who I found,” said Mitchell. She hoped he knew what he was doing.

“Well,” said a voice from across the room. Jonathan's father, David, was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Hello!” And then, when she couldn't respond even to that, he said: “Grace?”

“Yes.” She nodded, just to confirm. “I apologize for the intrusion. I was nearby.” And she stopped herself there. As if it were possible they didn't already know she was lying.

“Is Henry with you?” said Jonathan's mother. Her name was Naomi, but Grace had never had the opportunity (or, to be honest, the inclination) to be on a first-name basis with her. There was a thread of pain in her voice that was visceral, but then she recovered. Who they were, any of them, Grace didn't know, only that they had had a hand in making Jonathan. They were not good people, obviously. Or perhaps no longer so obviously.

She shook her head. “He's in the city with his…with my father. We're not…we've been living somewhere else.” She wondered if any of them were following this. She was barely following it herself. “I wasn't nearby,” she heard herself say aloud. “To be honest, I don't know why I came.”

“Well, maybe we can enlighten you!” said David, the father. And without warning he took three great steps across the floor from the foot of the stairs and embraced her, enclosing her shoulders with one long arm and her lower back with the other and pressing his rough cheek against her ear. She was so stunned that she could not even step back or aside. Unlike Vita, he had not issued a warning.

“Dad…” Mitchell laughed. “Don't smother her.”

“I'm not,” said his father into Grace's ear. “I'm making up for lost time. This is my grandson's mother.”

“Your grandson you've never seen since the day he was born,” Naomi said with palpable bitterness.

“Not for lack of trying,” said David, finally releasing her and stepping back. “The point is, Grace,” he said, addressing her directly, “whyever you came, I'm very, very glad to see you. And when Naomi recovers she'll be able to show you how glad she is also. But until that happens, you might need to give her a little space.”

“More space?” Jonathan's mother said. “More than the last eighteen years? More than my grandson's entire life?”

He shrugged. “Like I said, she might need a little time to recover. Let's have some coffee. Come on into the kitchen.” He beckoned. “Naomi, we've got Entenmann's, don't we?”

“Are we on Long Island?” Mitchell said, grinning. “This is how you know you're on Long Island, somebody offers you coffee and Entenmann's. Come on, Grace. Coffee okay?”

“Okay,” said Grace. “Thank you.”

In the kitchen, an unreconstructed 1970s Harvest Gold décor with a plain, Formica-topped table, he pulled out a chair for her and went to make coffee. His parents followed, and David sat across the table while Naomi, still brimming with potent silence, opened the refrigerator and extracted milk and the blue-and-white box. The room was very clean—extraordinarily clean, Grace thought—but it was also obviously a kitchen that saw real use. The shelf over the stove held spices in little glass jars, each with a label and a handwritten date. The pots hanging from a pothook on one of the decorative beams were heavy stainless steel and dull with use. Grace looked up at her mother-in-law as the box landed on the table. Naomi gave back nothing. Jonathan had always said how cold she was. A terrible mother. Obviously he had been telling the truth about that, at least. He hadn't mentioned anything about her cooking, though.

Mitchell took a knife and cut into the coffee cake. It was an almond ring, dribbled with white frosting. He passed her a piece without asking, and without answering she took it.

“This must have been terrible for you,” said David, accepting his own piece. “We've thought of you, many, many times. I want you to know that. And we did try to call, a couple of times, but no one answered the phone in New York. We imagined you'd gone away, very sensibly.”

She nodded. It felt so unutterably strange to be talking to them at all, let alone about this. About their own son and what he'd done! And what that had done to her, and Henry. And still, they seemed so…unresponsible. For any of it. Could they possibly ignore, even now, how they had to have caused this, some part of this, by their neglect of Jonathan, their own unexamined addictions (Naomi's alcoholism, David's prescription drug abuse), their blatant preference for Mitchell, who had never finished college or had more than a temporary, entry-level job and was still, at his age, living right here at home? Was some acknowledgment of
that
going to be part of this kaffeeklatsch, this family reunion in suburbia? Looking at the three of them, she caught for a brief moment the wake of Jonathan's own resentment and sadness about where he had come from, here at the table with a family that ought to have acted more like a family but hadn't. How harmed he had been by these people. And that had
not
been his fault.