You Should Have Known (12 page)

But he wasn't here. And she did not feel authorized to deliver his lines.

“It's very difficult,” she said to Robert.

“Oh, my God. I mean, I could not even stay functional around that.” He turned to greet, in a hearty but nonspecific way, a man who slung a heavy arm onto his shoulder as he passed by toward the elevator. Then he turned back. “I'd be no use to anyone. I'd just bawl constantly. I mean, I even lose it when the kids get rejected by their first-choice colleges.”

“Well,” Grace said dryly, “that is tragedy on a cosmic scale.”

“No, seriously,” he said. Apparently, he wanted a serious response.

“It's a very hard job, but he gets to help people, so it's worth it.”

Robert nodded, though he did not seem satisfied. Grace, belatedly, wondered why this sort of thing didn't fall within the spectrum of rudeness. Would you say to the guy who pumps out the septic tank,
How you can do that?
But she tried to give Robert the benefit of her considerable doubt. She did like Robert.

“I have some excellent news about your little scholar. He's doing very, very well, you know.”

Grace smiled awkwardly. It was not a surprise that Henry was excelling, of course. He was so smart—that was not a virtue, just an accident of DNA—but he worked hard enough that you didn't begrudge his winning of the cerebral lottery. He wasn't one of those kids who coasted or, worse, submarined their own potential because they resented it, or resented that it was important to the people around them. Still, it was odd to be discussing this now, as if they were at some big, social parent-teacher conference where people got dressed in their finery to find out how their kids were doing in school.

“He loves his math teacher this year,” Grace said truthfully.

At that moment, Sally Morrison-Golden bounded up and gripped Robert around the shoulders, possibly as much to steady herself as to express affection. She was, Grace saw, more than just a mite drunk. She teetered a bit on her very high heels and sported a faint half-moon of pink lipstick on her left cheekbone. Sometime after the evening's take had been tallied—or even just estimated—she must have cut loose. She was now exceptionally loose.

“What a wonderful night,” Robert told her.

“Oh, rah,” she slurred sarcastically. “Nice of our hosts to show up, wasn't it?”

Still?
thought Grace. “Doesn't matter,” she told Sally. “We've had a great time and we did really well. Can you believe this apartment, Robert?” she said.

“If I lived here, I'd be home now,” Robert said affably. “And I'd own that Francis Bacon over the couch. Which would be nice.” He kissed them both on the cheek and left them. Grace was not sorry to see him go.

“Did Malaga find you?” Sally said. “She was looking for you before.”

“Find me?” Grace frowned. “What for?”

“God, can you believe all those men she had drooling on her? They were like Pavlov's dogs. Amanda and I were like, ‘I'll have what she's having.' Jilly Friedberg just about lost it. She literally went and dragged her husband away.”

Grace, who was a bit sorry to have missed this moment, gave a noncommittal smile. “She did look very pretty,” she said.

Sally seemed to wobble a bit. She moved her feet as if she were
en pointe
, which, given the height of her heels, she very nearly was. Then she, too, lurched off in the direction of the dining room. Grace, who really wanted to leave, went to find Sylvia.

“Can we leave?” she asked her. “Do you think it's all right?”

“I think it's more than all right. I think it's required,” Sylvia said. “Did you see the way those guards are looking at us? They want us o-u-t.”

“Okay, then,” Grace said, relieved. She had been sure the staff would not want them to linger, but she'd also worried that Sally would want to remain as long as possible, perhaps even calling a postmortem beneath the Jackson Pollocks. “I'm going. I'm really beat.”

“Where's Jonathan?” asked Sylvia. “I thought I saw him before.”

“Yes, he was here,” said Grace. “But he got a call about a patient in the hospital. He had to go back.”

“To Sloan-Kettering?” asked Sylvia, as if Jonathan had ever worked anywhere else.

She wondered if she was about to face another round of “How does he do it?” but mercifully Sylvia seemed to contain herself. She said nothing, and Grace managed to get away before anyone else could stop her. She wanted to be home when Jonathan arrived, to be waiting for him in case he needed her. And if experience was her guide, he might very well need her. He had just helped bury an eight-year-old in Brooklyn, and now he had another patient in crisis in the hospital. He was going to be in terrible shape, whenever he made it home. He felt these things so deeply.

T
he end came not with a bang and not with a whimper, but with the silent blink of the envelope icon on her cell phone. The icon had been programmed, once upon a time, to flash once for a single message, twice for a second message, and so on, until it hit some sort of inner, critical mass of messages, at which point it just blinked in perpetuity, like a fluttering wing of iridescent green at the corner of her cell phone. Later she would remember that blink, so ordinary that she had ignored it through the first patients of the morning (a couple fighting a doomed fight to remain married), and her second appointment (with a long-term patient on the threshold of a manic episode), and even through a lunch break she'd devoted to a pre-interview with a producer from
Today
.

Four days had passed since the fund-raiser, A Night for Rearden.

The
Today
appearance would not take place until after the new year, but with the holiday coming up, the producer explained, they were trying to get ahead of things. “And they gave you the breaking news speech already?”

Grace said no. They hadn't, but wasn't it obvious?

“Yeah, this kind of story can get tossed around a little, if something comes up.”

The interviewer's name was Cindy Elder. Grace had jotted the name on a pad, an old habit from years of speaking to potential clients. Ironically, Cindy Elder sounded young, practically collegiate. “What would you say are the most important things you should try to find out about someone you're interested in?”

“I would say,” said Grace, “that it's more a question of listening to what someone is trying to tell you than asking questions about specific background information, or the so-called big issues or deal breakers people sometimes concentrate on when they're dating someone, such as money or religion. Those things are important, of course, but I would argue that it's even more important to hear what a person's behavior, or tone, is already communicating when they speak about ideas and people.”

Grace could hear the clack of Cindy Elder's keyboard in the background and her encouraging, intermittent, “Mm-hm…”

She had done enough interviews already to see the way the wind was going to blow. Like it or not,
You Should Have Known
was going to be presented to the world as a dating guide, shelved—quite possibly—cheek by jowl with the odious
The Rules
and
Relationships for Dummies
. It couldn't be helped, she supposed, or at least not if she wanted her book to be a bestseller.

“What are some things you might hear in a man's behavior or tone?”

“You might hear disdain for ex-partners, or co-workers, or parents and siblings. We all have negative feelings about some people in our lives, but hostility as a pattern is problematic. And in men, hostility toward women in general is an enormous red flag.”

“Good,” said Cindy Elder, clacking. “What else?”

“A lack of interest in others. Talking about people as if they only exist in relation to him and not as separate individuals. That's something that may never change, not with marriage or even children. You have to remember, this is a person who's reached adulthood with his attitudes intact, and he is comfortable enough with them to have them on display with a person he doesn't know very well and is theoretically trying to impress.”

“Right,” she heard Cindy say.

“So our responsibility, particularly as women, is to really pay attention. We tend to get tunnel vision sometimes, especially with a man we're physically attracted to. If the chemistry of attraction is strong, it can drown out some of our other receptors.”

The typing stopped. “You make this sound very clinical. Is that your intention?”

“Well,” she said, “yes and no. I think it's possible to be a romantic and still keep your wits about you. Not every attraction has to lead to a long-term partnership. The trouble comes when we're so attracted to a potential partner that we stop hearing what he's actually telling us.”

“Such as…”

“Such as…I'm not really that interested in you as a partner. Or I'm not interested in anyone as a partner. Or how about, any
woman
as a partner? That one comes up more often than you'd think. Or, Sure, I'm interested in you as a partner, but only on my terms, and those terms are going to make your life miserable.”

“Okay!” said Cindy. “I think I've got enough.”

“Fine,” Grace said. They thanked each other and Grace hung up. Then she looked at her cell phone again. Earlier, waiting for the office line to ring for her scheduled interview, she had scrolled through the senders and decided to ignore the messages. The first appeared as “M-G,” her own abbreviation for Sally Morrison-Golden, whose post-fund-raiser information assault was scarcely lighter than its pre-fund-raiser counterpart. The second sender was Henry's school, but not an actual human at Henry's school, who might be trying to reach her because Henry was ill or some academic or behavioral crisis warranted a meeting with a teacher. It was the generic Do-not-reply automaton at Rearden that sent mass e-mails to the effect that Crazy Hat Day would take place tomorrow, or an early dismissal for teacher training was scheduled for the following Monday, or a case of head lice had been confirmed in the kindergarten. Grace sometimes woke to this same nonperson on winter mornings, announcing snow days or late openings, and in fact it had actually snowed this morning, a little, early for winter but not bizarrely so, and hardly enough to require a response. She scrolled on down. Sylvia Steinmetz. M-G. M-G. M-G.

Ladies, please
, she thought irritably.

It would be the last moment of the life she would afterward think of as “before.”

Then she retrieved them.

First, from Sally: “Hi, everyone. Still hearing from people how great it was, and a few late donations came in. We do have some stuff to go over, not too much—I think we can get to it all in an hour, ninety minutes tops. Amanda has kindly offered her home. Next Thursday at 9 AM work for all of us? 1195 Park, apartment 10B. Let me know ASAP.”

Then the school: “With sadness, we need to inform parents that one of our fourth graders has suffered a family tragedy. Counselors will be visiting all three fourth-grade classrooms tomorrow to talk with the students. We would like to request that everyone in our school community be mindful that sensitivity is required from all of us. Thank you. Robert Conover, Head of School.”

Which meant, thought Grace, exactly what? The statement—or e-mail, or announcement, whatever it was—had obviously been so worked over that what emerged was nonsensical. Clearly somebody was dead, but the somebody wasn't the fourth-grade student. That, she thought, would not have been described as “a family tragedy.” And “family tragedies” had certainly happened before, at Rearden as anywhere else. Last year alone, two fathers in the middle school had passed away, one from cancer and the other in a private plane crash in Colorado; neither death had given rise to an e-mail like this.
It has to be a suicide
, Grace thought. A parent's suicide, or possibly a sibling's death, but not a sibling who went to Rearden—that, too, would have been phrased differently. The whole thing was, actually, highly frustrating. Why bother sending such an e-mail, which would only ignite speculation and endanger the very sensitivity being requested? If you're not going to communicate anything, why send a communiqué?

Annoyed, she deleted the message.

From Sylvia: “Yes, I can do Thursday. Might be a few minutes late, must drop lovely urine sample at Daisy's doctor that morning.”

From Sally: “Re: 4th grade family tragedy. Does anyone know anything?”

And she's off
, thought Grace, deleting.

From Sally again: “Grace, call me ASAP.”

From Sally again: “Grace, it's Malaga Alves. Did you hear?”

This one, she did not delete. Instead, she read it again, and then again, as if it might change or at least make sense. Malaga Alves was “it”? What was “it”?

When the phone in her hand actually rang, she flinched and gripped it tighter, then held it up with an unsteady hand. Sylvia. She hesitated, but only for a moment.

“Hi, Sylvia.”

“Jesus, did you hear about Malaga?”

Grace took a breath. It seemed too much effort to detail what she knew and did not know. “What happened?” she said.

“She's dead. I can't believe it. We all just saw her on Saturday.”

Grace nodded. She was aware, briefly, of wanting to say all of the usual things and then just move on. She really didn't want to know more, or care, or be wounded by the thought of the little boy in fourth grade or the baby who had nursed so extravagantly at the planning meeting a few days earlier. “What do you know?”

“The son…what's his name?”

“Miguel,” Grace said quickly, surprising herself.

“Miguel went home by himself on Monday, after his mother didn't show up. He found her in the apartment, with the baby. It's so awful.”

“Wait—” She was still trying to sort these pieces and still wanting not to know. “Is…was the baby all right?”

Sylvia seemed to give this serious thought. “You know, I don't know about that. I suppose so. I think we'd have heard, otherwise.”

Ah,
Grace thought. So now she was part of an interested party called “we.”

“You got the school's alert?” Sylvia said.

“Yes. I couldn't really understand it. I knew it was something pretty bad, of course.”

“Well,” Sylvia said with heavy sarcasm, “it did use the word
tragedy
.”

“Yes, but…I don't know. It sort of made a fire and then threw fuel on it. Why did they do it? I mean, this is incredibly sad, of course, but why didn't they just come out and say that a fourth-grade parent had passed away? That's what they did last year after Mark Stern died. I don't think they brought in grief counselors.”

“That was different,” Sylvia said tersely.

“Was it a heart attack? Or an aneurysm? It must have been something sudden. She certainly looked very healthy the other night.”

“Grace…,” Sylvia said. She seemed to be waiting for something. Later, Grace would decide that she had been indulging her own pleasure at bearing such bad news. “You don't understand. She was murdered.”

“She was…” Grace couldn't quite get her brain around this word. It came from paperback mysteries and the
New York Post
—neither of which, naturally, she read. People she knew, even as slightly as she knew Malaga Alves, did not get murdered. Long ago, the son of her family's housekeeper, a Jamaican woman named Louise, had fallen in with a gang and murdered someone else. He'd been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison upstate, destroying his mother's health and shortening her life. “That's…” But she couldn't say what
that
was. It was… “Oh, my God, that poor little boy. He found her?”

“The police were in school today, in Robert's office. It was his decision to get the counselors in. I don't know, do you think it's the right thing?”

“Well, I certainly hope they're not going to explain to the fourth grade that their classmate's mother was murdered.” She took a moment to imagine this horrific prospect. “And I certainly hope the parents won't be telling their kids.”

“Maybe not directly,” said Sylvia. “But you know they'll hear about it.”

Grace, for her part, wanted very badly to stop hearing about it, but she could think of no way to bring this about.

“How are you going to tell Daisy?” she asked instead, as if Sylvia were the expert in human behavior and she were the one calling for advice, instead of the other way around.

“Daisy told me,” she said bluntly. “Rebecca Weiss told her. Rebecca heard from her mother, who heard from our friend Sally Morrison-Golden.”

“Crap,” Grace said automatically.

“So that's the entire herd of cats out of the bag, basically.”

“You'd think…,” Grace began, but there was no point in finishing.

“Well, I wouldn't think. I expect very little of Sally, really. But it's beside the point. Sally may have the emotional maturity of a middle schooler, and she may be a bitch, but she didn't murder anyone. This would be devastating no matter who says what to whom. And it's going to be a mess for all of us. Not just the kids. I'm thinking about the press—there's going to be the whole ‘Private School Mom Murdered' thing. Even though she wasn't really a ‘private school mom,' you know?”

Grace frowned. “You mean…Wait, what do you mean?”

She could hear Sylvia exhale in sharp frustration. “
You
know, Grace. Full-tuition-paying private school mom. A mom who is paying full tuition to Rearden at the price tag of thirty-eight thousand dollars per year. And yes, I know how bad that sounds, but it's true. They'll come gunning for the school, and then in the last paragraph they'll write that her kid was low-income and on scholarship, but we still get to be the school where one of our parents was murdered.”

Grace noted that her irritation—with Sylvia for her selfishness, Robert for his histrionics, and Sally for the clear and unsettling fact that she was baldly disseminating the news—had now apparently elbowed aside her shock. This meant distance, and the relief that came with it.

“I don't think that's going to happen,” she told Sylvia. “Whatever caused this, it has nothing to do with Rearden. Really, I think we should wait until there's actual information. We should be focusing on just being available to the kids, if they need us. Not that either of our kids is going to be affected. But the fourth graders…” This was going to be a really profound thing for them, Grace thought, having the parent of a classmate die suddenly, let alone violently, and the effect of that would certainly ripple upward to the older kids, if not downward, where the younger ones would be (presumably, hopefully) shielded from the news. She thought for a moment of Henry, who had not experienced anything like this (Grace's mother had died before he was born, and Jonathan's parents were, while thoroughly absent from his life, at least alive). How to best handle things when he came home from school, today or tomorrow or next week, and said, “Did you hear this kid in fourth grade, his mom got murdered?”