A Good Marriage

by Kimberly McCreight

  Oh yes, Sarah had told her about that and Amanda had deliberately pushed it straight out of her mind. Zach would lose it, too, if he found out about some hacking situation. He was obsessive about their privacy. If their information got into the wrong hands, he would definitely hold it against the school, which he had picked specifically because of its attention to every last detail. He might even want Case pulled out and that could not happen. Despite its demanding academics, Brooklyn Country Day was the only bright spot for Case in an otherwise rough transition.

  Amanda had hoped to wait until the end of the school year to move ten-year-old Case east, but in the end that hadn’t been possible. At least Case made friends easily. It helped that he fit in many different places socially. On the one hand, Case was an outgoing, athletic baseball fanatic, and on the other he was an introspective artist who could happily sit alone, sketching his favorite animal—jaguars—for hours. But a new school with only a few months left in fifth grade was a lot to ask of any child, even a flexible one.

  There had been tears and some nightmares. Once Case had even wet the bed. Having often been plagued by terrifying dreams herself, Amanda had always taken her son’s sound sleep as a sign she was doing something right. Now even that was gone. At least Case had perked up once Amanda agreed to sleepaway camp: eight weeks all the way back in California with his best Palo Alto friend, Ashe. But what if her son’s sadness returned after camp ended and he came back to Park Slope? Amanda didn’t want to think about it. She’d always made whatever compromises necessary for Zach’s career, but never at Case’s expense. Her most important job was to protect her son, but in balancing Zach and Case, there were no easy answers.

  “Oh, now don’t you get all freaked out, too,” Sarah said. “I see that look on your face.”

  “I’m not freaked out,” Amanda lied.

  “Anyway, the school is pulling out all the stops to investigate,” Sarah said, but she sounded a little like she was trying to convince herself. “Hired some fancy cybersecurity firm. You know Brooklyn Country Day. They take no prisoners.”

  “I just—I had no idea,” Amanda said.

  “That’s because the administration is being too close-lipped. I keep telling them that,” Sarah said. “It makes it look like they’re hiding something. So you’ll come to the meeting then?”

  Amanda had been to one Brooklyn Country Day PTA meeting thus far and had found it extremely intimidating.

  “Oh, I don’t know if I can—”

  “Sure you can. Anyway, I need your moral support. These parents are looking for someone to turn on,” Sarah said, as though she wasn’t far more likely to cut them all down to size. “Eight p.m. My place. I won’t take no for an answer.”

  Sarah didn’t need Amanda there, but she wanted her to be. And that was enough.

  “I’ll be there,” Amanda said to her friend. “Of course I will.”

  Lizzie

  JULY 6, MONDAY

  Rikers looked worse than I remembered, even in the dark.

  The larger prison buildings seemed deliberately designed to clash, and the smaller buildings and assorted trailers—administrative offices, maybe, or guard barracks or weapons storage—were unlabeled and sagging. A massive concrete prison barge floated impossibly on the water, housing another few hundred inmates who—I’d read—had recently managed to cut the barge loose and almost escape by slowly floating away.

  Barbed-wire fencing loomed everywhere. Tilted and flecked with rust, it ran in straight lines and formed squares and bent in circles, giving you the uneasy sense of being simultaneously locked in and locked out. But what I dreaded most from the last time I’d been at Rikers—years before, to interview a witness—was the acrid smell of sewage and the rats. Unlike ordinary nocturnal skittering vermin, the Rikers rats walked around boldly in daylight, aggressively standing their ground. One more reason to be glad for the dark.

  Once inside Bantum, the building where Zach was being housed, it took another fifteen minutes of clearing security before I was finally sitting in a little box that smelled of urine and onions and sour breath, staring at a cloudy plexiglass divider as I waited for him to be brought up.

  On the drive out, my friendship with Zach had come back to me in fits and starts. It had been ages, but we had spent quite a lot of time together for the better part of first year—studying, meals, movies. My forgetting the extent of our friendship wasn’t necessarily a reflection on Zach either. I had a very selective memory. But I did now remember this so clearly: I’d liked Zach because he’d felt familiar—in good ways, and bad. It had been especially evident the day our beloved contracts professor had spontaneously given us an impassioned “career counseling” lecture in class.

  When Zach and I met for dinner later that night at Mahoney’s, the pub on Rittenhouse Square, he was already all worked up.

  “Can you believe that bullshit with Professor Schmitt?” Zach had said, squirting ketchup on his burger as a rowdy group of Penn football fans tumbled in.

  “You mean the bit about soulless corporate law firms?”

  Zach nodded, eyes locked on his burger, probably so he didn’t have to make eye contact with any of the very large, very drunk football fans closing in around us. “It’s too bad. I really liked that guy. But now he can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

  “So you think corporate firms are soulful?” I teased, turning to watch the giant next to me, who was swaying ominously.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You’re the biggest gunner I know.” Zach’s leg had started to bounce the way it did whenever he got nervous, which was often. “People around here like to pretend that being ambitious makes you a monster. But I refuse to lose, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

  He didn’t mean anything by it, but sometimes Zach did sound like the bad part of my dad, the part the customers and employees and neighbors who loved him knew nothing about. To them my dad was all jokes and warm, silly charm. And he was those things. But he was also obsessed with status and achievement for achievement’s sake, to the exclusion of things that mattered, like people. Like my mom and me and what we wanted. He wouldn’t even let my mom teach me Greek like she wanted and he avoided the few Greek friends she’d made. The real him was always unsatisfied with who we were. What my parents had managed to build for themselves—the restaurant, our “cozy” two-bedroom on tree-lined West Twenty-Sixth Street that was always filled with my mother’s homemade diples, her amazing stories about Kefalonia, where she’d grown up, and all her endless affection—was pretty amazing. Idyllic, as far as I was concerned. But it had never been enough for my dad, even before we lost it all.

  “Are you suggesting that the students at Penn Law aren’t competitive enough?” I’d laughed. “Isn’t that like saying the problem with a pack of lions is that they’re too into vegetables?”

  “But they like to pretend they aren’t competing. It’s hypocritical.” Zach’s eyes flashed up at me pointedly. That was Zach: too much eye contact or not enough. He did not excel at moderation. But then, neither did I. And Zach at least didn’t try to hide behind some jovial persona like my dad. Zach was honest about who he was and I respected that. “My mother was a waitress and a house cleaner and my father worked in a steel plant. Blue-collar and not educated, but, man, did they work their asses off. Look at your parents, as hardworking as mine and defrauded into the grave.” He pointed a finger at me. “Success is an abstraction only to rich people.”

  I shrugged. “I’m going the public interest route.”

  Zach raised an eyebrow. “Public interest? That’s noble and everything, but people like you and me don’t have those options.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I snapped back. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to work at the US attorney’s office. And I don’t give a shit about money.”

  I also didn’t like being underestimated. I was going to devote my life to protecting people like my parents, hardworking immigrants who’d been convince
d by a kindly-seeming regular into borrowing $100,000 against their bustling diner in Chelsea and investing it in a “secret” Hudson Yards project. Really, it was just my dad who’d been convinced. He’d invested without consulting my mother. Then, poof: the money had vanished, and so had the regular. With whiplash speed, the bank foreclosed on the restaurant. Millie, a customer turned family friend and sergeant in the Tenth Precinct, had jumped into action, breathing down the FBI’s neck to find the guy. In the end, Millie’s pressure wasn’t the reason he was found. But found he was—in the worst possible way. It didn’t change anything. Everything my parents worked for had already been destroyed. And so had my family. I was sixteen at the time; they’d both be gone before I turned seventeen.

  I stumbled through the rest of high school, shattered, living with my mother’s sister, who was counting the minutes until she could return to Greece. My world had turned so suddenly hostile and incomprehensibly dark. For months I was dangerously depressed. Throwing myself into my studies had eventually brought me partway back to life.

  The compulsive studying also earned me a free ride to Cornell and by senior year there, I’d started thinking about law school and an eventual job as a federal fraud prosecutor. The idea of a future career protecting people who’d been taken advantage of like my parents was a lifeline tossed out to me. Not talking about the rest of what had happened? That had given me the strength to pull myself to shore.

  “Hey, no offense.” Zach was staring down at his burger as he held up his hands. “You’ll make a great prosecutor. I’m just saying, you work ten times harder and are more driven than anyone else in this damn school, even me. Maybe you should reap the rewards.”

  “Don’t worry. I will. They’ll just be the rewards I want.”

  “You know, I believe that.” Zach had smiled. “Actually, I have absolutely no doubt.”

  But no matter how close Zach and I may have been for a time, nothing he said would change my mind about representing him now. I would listen, make him feel heard, and then—as promised—find him that truly excellent lawyer who was not me. And that was all I was going to do.

  There was finally a buzz on the other side of the airhole-dotted plexiglass. When the door opposite opened, there, after all this time: Zach. Or his right eye. Because that was all I saw at first. Swollen closed, it had a deep cut above it. The whole side of his face was a spectacular purple-crimson. It was painful to look at.

  “Oh my God, Zach,” I breathed. “Are you okay?”

  He smiled weakly, nodding as he sat. “I was standing in somebody else’s line spot. There are a lot of rules in here. Learning them is a process. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  Even injured, Zach’s face was better-looking than I recalled, the angles more defined, stronger after all these years.

  “I’m sorry that happened,” I said. “It looks painful.”

  “Definitely not your fault,” he said, eyes darting down in that familiar way of his. “Thank you for coming at all. It’s been a long time.” He was quiet for a moment. “Luckily, I don’t make a living as a model. But ideally, I would like to get out of here so that I can keep the rest of my face.”

  “A reminder: they’re not supposed to record these conversations, but …”

  “Who knows, right?” Zach said. “I’ve got nothing to hide, but I hear you. All due care. I was listening, I promise.”

  His eyes shot up to meet mine as his body started to vibrate slightly—that leg of his doing its thing out of sight. Poor Zach. He was in real trouble in there. He smiled then, sad and eager. I felt a queasy sinking in my gut.

  “I’m here to help, Zach, in any way that I can,” I began. “But as I said before, I’m not going to be able to represent you myself.”

  Zach peered at me through his one good eye, made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Okay. I mean, that’s not what I want to hear, but you can only do what you can do. I guess.”

  My chest unclenched a little. I’d been more afraid than I’d realized that Zach would get angry. Not that I’d ever actually seen Zach angry. Did that mean he was incapable of murdering his wife? Of course not. Besides, eleven years was eleven years. I knew nothing about Zach’s life now apart from what I’d read in that New York Times profile that I’d discovered during one of my what-happened-to-every-guy-I-knew-before-Sam retaliatory googling sessions.

  “Honestly, it’s my new job,” I said, this very real, very legitimate, and much better excuse having occurred to me on the long ride to Rikers. “I’m a senior associate at Young & Crane. Only partners take on cases. I have to defer to their procedures.”

  “How did that firm thing happen anyway?” Zach asked. “All you ever wanted was to be a US attorney. No judgment, but I was surprised when I saw that you’d left.”

  “Saw?” I asked.

  Then I remembered: the Penn Law Annual class notes. Victoria had an incongruous sorority streak that compelled her to attend every reunion and submit an update to each and every alumni quarterly. I had no doubt she’d been trying to be supportive—a senior associate position at Young & Crane was a prestigious and extremely lucrative job; the complex cases, the sterling reputation, the salary to match. I was even on partner track, albeit a slightly delayed one. But the change in my original plan—to devote my professional life to good work and low pay as a prosecutor at the US attorney’s office—had not been voluntary.

  “I would have been less surprised to see that you’d left law altogether than to see that you’d switched to corporate defense.”

  I winced, but tried to cover it with a smile. “Life. Things don’t always turn out the way you expect.”

  “What does that mean?” Zach asked. “There’s no way you got fired. You’re way too good for that.”

  “It didn’t make sense for us to have me stay there.”

  That was true, though far from the whole truth: that my husband had driven our life into a ditch that my job at Young & Crane was supposed to dig us out of.

  About a year before, Sam had gotten so drunk at a work lunch that he told his editor at Men’s Health to fuck off, then fell asleep on the bathroom floor. Facedown, under a urinal. Men’s Health had already been the last of many stops on a steep slide for a career that had started at the New York Times. The jobs had all been lost in one way or another because of Sam’s drinking—factual errors, missed deadlines. Belligerence.

  Fortunately, when Sam was finally fired from Men’s Health, he had a contract for a book based on his popular advice column. Unfortunately, we’d long since spent the modest advance, and he was nowhere near finished with the book. These days, Sam wasn’t writing much at all. Despite all that, we might have been able to squeak by okay on my paltry government salary were it not for the accident.

  The weekend after Sam got fired from Men’s Health, we took the jitney out to a friend’s place in Montauk, trying to get our minds off the whole thing with a good meal and a glass of wine. Apparently, sometime after I went to bed, Sam decided he was “totally fine to drive” and “borrowed” our friend’s restored antique convertible to run out and get some more beers. He ended up smashing the car into the Anglers, a historic pub downtown, completely destroying both it and the vehicle. The accident had, remarkably and thankfully, left Sam completely unscathed, but to compensate for the destruction of some priceless family heirlooms we’d been sued personally by the owner of the Anglers for intentional conduct not covered by insurance—in other words, Sam being drunk. The settlement required us to pay $200,000 out of our own pocket over the next two years.

  This was a fact I’d intentionally left off my Young & Crane financial disclosure form. The lawsuit was against Sam personally, and hence in a gray area in terms of my own credit history. I did know better, of course. Law firms didn’t want associates in debt because it might make them vulnerable to undue influence, and our sizable debt was a joint obligation. Even with my Young & Crane salary, paying it off would not be easy either. But it could be done over time an
d without claiming bankruptcy, provided we dispensed with “nonessentials” like the IVF the fertility specialist had recommended as our next step. But then, that did simplify things. The last thing Sam and I could handle was a baby.

  Was I angry about all of this? Of course. Sometimes I was positively enraged, but never so much that hope didn’t win the day. After all, if I stopped believing that everything would work out, if I stopped trusting in Sam’s golden-hued worldview, I’d be left only with the reality of the way things were. And that was totally untenable.

  “It didn’t make ‘sense’ for you to stay at the US attorney’s office?” Zach pressed. “What does that mean?”

  There was that directness I’d always liked.

  “We’ve run into some unexpected financial challenges. It’s a long, complicated story. Anyway, working at the US attorney’s office isn’t exactly the best way to earn extra cash.”

  “Marriage,” Zach said, then shook his head ruefully.

  “It’s obviously not the end of the world,” I said. “I’m working at one of the best law firms in the country, not a salt mine.”

  Zach’s one eye looked sad. “Still,” he said. “I know how much that job meant to you. I’m sorry.”

  A burn blazed up my throat. I looked away.

  “That’s the hardest part about marriage, isn’t it?” Zach went on. “Somebody else’s problems become your own. It doesn’t always feel fair.”

  “It doesn’t,” I said. Zach saying the exact right thing was nicer than I wanted it to be.

  “So your husband. Richard, is it?”

  “Richard?” I felt a guilty pang when I remembered where Zach was getting that name. “No, not Richard. His name is Sam.”

  “I’m guessing he’s not a lawyer …”