The Best Kind of People (22 page)

The paragraph her boss had informed her about was towards the end. It read:

Woodbury, 52, is head of nursing at St. Joseph Medical Center in Avalon Hills. Following the arrest of her husband, she was described in a statement from her workplace as a “kind and compassionate individual” and a “long-serving, greatly admired and universally liked member of our team.”

The statement had choked her up. She’d bit her lip, blown her nose into a scratchy hotel bar napkin.

Then Joan had checked her email. There was one from Andrew with a list of names and numbers of therapists in the city. One from Clara’s BlackBerry saying sorry. She pictured her standing in the middle of the dinner party typing in the hurried response.

She called the first therapist on the list and set up an appointment.

Joan had then checked the home voice mail, and was relieved to hear that there were no threats or obscene messages. They’d tapered off over the last couple of weeks but still she anticipated them. Perhaps there was a new scandal the hordes were paying attention to now.

She had then sent Andrew and Sadie a joint email requesting they all have dinner. She wanted to see them. She needed to see them. “There are things we need to discuss,” she wrote. It sounded official. But all she wanted to discuss was their lives, how they were getting along, how they were managing to cope. She had recently been experiencing an odd sort of nostalgia for when they were younger and required constant supervision. At the time she’d often felt as though she couldn’t wait for Sadie to become independent, to have some time to herself, but now she longed for her seven-year-old daughter — watching her skate on the lake in the winter, her insistent voice calling out, “Are you watching, Mom?” or trying to get just a few more minutes’ sleep before hearing “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” while a small hand tugged at the duvet.

As she’d clicked off the computer, she felt as though she’d accomplished a mountain of tasks and was now heading back to work. She was filled with purpose. For a short moment the pain and desperation that had become so commonplace lifted, and she remembered her real self again.

“Anyway, so I’m going back to work, and I’m thankful for that,” she said now to the support group.

Dr. Forrestor looked at her, and she wondered if she’d been speaking for too long. He thanked her for sharing and moved on to the woman on her left, and Joan felt better, briefly, and less burdened.

NINETEEN

KEVIN BRUSHED HIS
teeth in the ensuite bathroom, watching Elaine in the medicine cabinet mirror. She sat up in bed reading the
Economist
. He tapped the side of his toothbrush twice on the side of the sink and put it away. The bathroom light was interrogative, its purpose to highlight the ageing process. He couldn’t put off telling her any longer. He’d been writing the book based on the Woodbury scandal in secret for a couple of months, and it was weighing on him. The news would hit the papers the next day that the pitch had gone to auction and a number of publishers had been fighting over it. He’d finally inked a deal. He didn’t want to feel like a coward for one minute longer. He splashed his face with cold water, dried it on the hand towel.

“My new novel is based on a true story,” he began, climbing into bed, “and tomorrow my agent is going to announce the advance I got to write it, and it’s bigger than anything I’ve received before.”

Elaine took off her reading glasses and looked at him, the magazine falling to the floor. “Oh my goodness! This is terrific news!” He hadn’t seen her this excited about anything in so long, he felt sick at having to elaborate. She reached out and caressed his cheek. “Wait — did you change the whole book? What true story?”

“Well, it’s about the Woodbury case, actually, set at Avalon prep. The narrator is, uh, his daughter. But it’s fictionalized.”

“Kevin …” She paused, and he could almost see the joy draining from her face. “That is tricky territory. You can’t do that.”

“Well, it’s done. It’s a novel. You can’t penalize me for that. It’s an incredible story, don’t you think? It happened right in front of me. It wasn’t possible to resist.” He knew Elaine was too smart for that response, but it was all he had.

“It’s not ethical,” she said. “Sadie is not a character, she is a human being this family cares a great deal about. And I can penalize you for that. Why else would you have kept it a secret from me, if you didn’t feel some kind of guilt about it?”

From there it took a turn to a deeper kind of conflict, with Elaine insisting it was a parasitic move because he was desperate to be relevant again, and that his masculinity was preventing him from learning from humility and truly working hard to improve, that he was too entitled and his early success had stilted him. That she was exhausted by him, and that this was the last straw, that he hadn’t cleaned the bathtub even once in five years. They fought for hours, about his rights as a writer and Elaine’s right to protect her kid. They never agreed. And she shut him out of her room, and he retreated to the couch, too angry to talk.

She was unsupportive and patronizing and didn’t understand what it was to be a writer. That’s what Kevin wrote in an email to the girl from Twitter he’d been flirting with, confiding in, for the last few months. That it was easy to be a moralist from your tenured tower. That she used her age in these moments to wield power. That she couldn’t insist on being a control freak who wanted to make sure everything in the house was “done right” and then get upset when people were afraid to clean the bathroom wrong. For the first time he felt truly checked out of their relationship, as though he was getting ready to leave. A deep sadness enveloped him, and then more anger. The announcement in the paper the next day was supposed to be a highlight of his career, one he wanted to share with people he loved. How dare she be so selfish?

He curled up on the couch, and woke up several times. The final time, he found Sadie sitting on the coffee table, legs crossed, staring at him. She had the bong in her hands, and exhaled a long stream of smoke. He noticed she was wearing one of those linked rings like bruisers used to wear as weapons in his day, but her ring was made of tiny green flowers. He would write that detail down. She smelled of strawberry oil, and he noticed for the first time how her waist-to-hip proportions were perfect; the last time he’d really looked at her, she’d been straight and angular.

“I hope you don’t mind.” She smiled. Her nails matched the green flowers.

He did mind, as he didn’t want to have to call his dealer any more than he had to, and his advance cheque hadn’t come in yet, so he was still broke. But he didn’t say anything. At least he knew now that he wasn’t losing his mind and forgetting how much pot he’d been smoking; this was where it had been going.

“How are things?” he asked, as though the situation was totally normal. He tried to memorize her face, the way it had lost its youthful sheen in the previous month, how her cheekbones seemed to actually be hardening, like a doll’s.

“Same,” she said, shrugging, giving him a weird smile.

He nodded back, wondering how to keep asking her questions without seeming to be interviewing her.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Nope.” She shrugged again.

She continued to stare, until he began to feel a bit uncomfortable. “I should go to bed,” he said, as though he had fallen asleep on the couch by accident.

He wanted to tell her he was heading to see her dad in the morning. He wanted to see her reaction, but Elaine’s voice in his head stopped him. He’d go see George and then he would head to the hospital to try to interview some nurses who worked with Joan. He was having a hard time nailing her character.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Kevin drove to the prison, stopping twice for large coffees along the way. The adrenalin and excitement he’d felt after he pitched the book had disappeared one morning as he stared at the blank page on his screen and felt a familiar thrum of potential failure behind his eyes. Now he really had to write the book. He watched Sadie and Jimmy sitting at breakfast, both on their phones, eating cereal, feet touching under the table, and thought,
How can I make this situation active?
George was in jail. His family was trying to keep on keeping on in his absence, dodging reporters and going to work and school. “To be clear, this is fiction,” he wrote to his editor. His editor replied: “No alternate universes, no huge plot divestments though? Use all the usual storytelling elements, and make it as interesting as possible, but don’t stray too far from the original.”

HE DIDN’T KNOW
what to expect when he saw George. He’d already written several chapters of conjecture based on his memory of who George was. But he had no idea how to reconcile the fact that people knew an entire other George, and he had never met the sinister side. Sure, he could be a Jekyll/Hyde character, but that wasn’t going to be easy to portray. It wouldn’t seem convincing. It did seem closest to the truth, though.

He’d met George before, at one of his backyard barbecues, and he’d seen him around town. George would lift his hand half off the steering wheel as he drove by Kevin when he was biking around the lake on weekends — the customary small-town thing to do. They’d exchange pleasantries at the Coffee Hut or drugstore, especially if their kids were in tow. George always struck Kevin as a bit of an intimidating figure, who was nonetheless approachable and jovial. He used to joke about him with Elaine, that he didn’t seem real. He’d seemed too perfect, too good a husband, not enough darkness. When you don’t seem real, there is generally something off about you, he thought. That’s what he’d realized while examining character, figuring out the motivations of everyone he invented. He, of course, was the epitome of the other side of the story. Too real, all flaws. Kevin knew he would never win any charm contests. His propensity to stare off was disconcerting to some, but he didn’t worry much about it. Elaine was similar, though in a muted way because she had to be so responsible all the time. But that was okay by him.

One of the only real conversations he’d had with George was at one of those barbecues, as Kevin was requesting another bourbon from the bar staff by the pool. The servers were wearing all white with ice-blue accents. It was like a scene from a 1970s movie come to life, and Kevin thought it was both pretentious and lovely.

“When are you going to start your own family, Kev? You can’t stay twenty-five forever,” he’d said. They turned to watch a group of kids running in circles around a patch of sunflowers. Even the toddlers wore designer clothes.

“I like the life I have,” he’d said, thinking that would be the end of it. Usually it was. Most married men envied him, and the conversation that followed would be full of joking about the chains of monogamy.

“Sure, sure. You don’t have to do much you don’t want to do. But responsibility is what shapes a man,” he’d said, draining the last bit of bourbon from a rock glass and swirling the remaining ice around. “There is a freedom in responsibility, you know, in confinement. Too much freedom can be dangerous.”

It was only later that Kevin realized how richly ironic that comment was, as they were standing in the backyard of George’s parents’ estate, a house he hadn’t had to scrimp and save for, buoyed by a trust fund.

Since he had decided to write the book he’d been watching and listening to the way Sadie spoke about her father. She mostly avoided speaking of him at all, even though she used to talk about him all the time. When she did mention him, she tried to do it in a way that made it seem as though she didn’t resent him.

It had taken him a while to ask George for a meeting. First, Kevin wanted to write some sketches of the Woodburys’ lives before the arrest, and then do some legal research. It took him a month to feel organized enough to approach George’s lawyer, try to get an interview with George himself. He heard back less than forty-five minutes after he’d put in the request, which was unusual. George probably wanted to set the record straight.

When Kevin got in line at the prison, leather-bound notebook open and pen poised, he took notes of how the people were standing in line, resigned and weary. He tried to keep calm and focused on the task at hand. When George walked into the room where Kevin was sitting at a long table waiting for him, he looked like he had been physically deflated, as though someone had pumped the air out of his ample chest, and altered that handsome but nerdy face of his, so that he had the withered look of any man, sort of like Kevin’s father actually, after thirty years at the mill, that whiskey face. The change in his appearance was startling.

“Hello, Kevin.” George’s hand felt smaller, weaker, but his handshake was the same. In charge.

“Hi, George. Thanks for helping me with the book.”

“No problem, no problem. You know, I’m writing my own book in here,” he said, placing his hands behind his head in what Kevin remembered as a favourite position of teachers when they expect respect or compliments.

“Is that so?” Hearing non-writers talk about their books-in-progress was one of his pet peeves. It happened all the time, especially with people who then claimed to never
read
books. Although George had once been a promising intellectual, an avid reader. He could probably do it, Kevin reasoned.

“It’s a memoir of sorts, about the penal system. It’s a dreadfully mismanaged place — archaic systems of social order, everything is about race. It’s very
Lord of the Flies
around here. Fascinating to observe and document — in moments, of course, when it’s not a living hell.”

Kevin wrote
writing his own book. Lord of the Flies.

“How is Sadie? Is she still staying with you?”

“Yes, she is.”

George grimaced slightly, looking down at his hands.

Repentant?

“Is she healthy? Going to school?”

“Yes, very healthy. All things considered, anyhow.”

“I broke her heart.”

It seemed like the kind of comment that was looking for sympathy, not absolution or relief. It was obvious that both his wife and kids would be heartbroken. He wrote down,
sympathy seeking?