Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  Could be she’s not all that interesting under the highlights and lip gloss. Who knows if she believes in luck. She’s never been rude to me, but she’s not particularly warm, either. Could be she’s just a Mrs. Potatohead: fully accessorized, hollow inside. One thing’s for certain. Somewhere along the line, someone told her she was special. Someone drove it home and made her believe it, so now she feels obligated to wear diamonds and those jeans that make her ass look amazing. Someone told her she was the only person who could fill an Elizabeth-shaped hole in the world. Said it until she believed it.

  The kicker is, that person made it true. Even if I do spend more hours of the day with Mrs. Hart’s husband than she does, and even if I am the one who keeps his life on track, she’s the one who helps him tidy their beautiful home after a party, and I’m the one who probably only got invited so I’d stay on his good side. I’ll go home to an overdone one-bedroom apartment all alone, still thinking of him and what he thinks of me. That’s not the kind of woman I am. Usually am. This shouldn’t be me.

  I stare at my glove box. Inside is the blood vial I found in Dr. Hart’s coat pocket last week when I took it to be laundered. The questionnaire, dated and signed by Nick Carpenter, is in there too. I wasn’t being nosy. I always empty the pockets before I drop off his lab coats, dumping out Tic Tacs or pen caps or paper scraps, whatever. Never found a blood sample before, though. Not before this. Grossed me out to keep it in the cup holder, so I threw it in the glove box. I didn’t exactly forget about it, but I didn’t have a plan for it either. Lately, though, it’s been on my mind. Gina is good at reminding me. I have no clue what that kid was doing there, what his blood was doing in Dr. Hart’s pocket and what it’s doing in my car now. All I know is that the blood was from that dead kid’s body, and Dr. Hart intended to hide it, so it feels like a powerful thing to have on hand. Just in case. And powerful feels good.

  31.

  All in all, the party wasn’t bad. It had its moments. I smiled and even laughed when nonverbal cues indicated the appropriate times to smile or laugh, and tried to make eye contact when people spoke, and made the most of elastic good-byes, but my mind was on Raymond and whether he’d back off, and also on Elizabeth, what she was saying and to whom. She traded wine for water shortly after giving her toast, but her unpredictability was distracting nonetheless. So many unpredictable people. I kept an eye on Jonah, too, as he gave polite answers to the same questions asked over and over, and I drew comfort from his capacity to resist doing further structural damage to his hand or my house. Most of our guests left at a reasonable hour. A few stragglers forced aggressive kindness upon us, insisting upon filling our fridge with Tupperware and throwing away every last crumpled cocktail napkin. Having bonded—perhaps over their shared fascination with Luna’s social ineptitude disguised as social savvy—Elizabeth and Bess exchanged phone numbers and made tentative plans to catch an upcoming opening at Guild Hall. The whole evening was what one might consider a success, as these sorts of things go. We raised a few thousand bucks for a suicide prevention program serving our community, someplace Elizabeth tracked down, or Bonnie maybe.

  All in all, it was pleasant, and at times, I felt the shackles loosen. After our generous friends left, I slept hard and woke up believing my secret might press itself into the past, smoothing out my bold decision—my brave decision—to fight like hell for my family. I woke up loving people and trusting my secret to blend into what’s behind me.

  But my peace hinges on so many conditions: if the detective just takes me at my word; if he resists fact-checking with Jonah; if Jonah forgets all about that pregnancy lie; if Elizabeth reins in her appetite for self-destruction; if my computer hasn’t hoarded an invisible archive of searches so hackers can’t poke holes in my story; if Ray backs off long enough to let me slip out of his life, and if he stays out of mine for a very long time, which will break my heart but serve the greater good; if Simone fears Ray enough to keep her mouth shut, but not so much that she risks tattling; if my nurses forget about the butterfly needles so there’s no trace of Nick at work; and if Nick told no one, absolutely no one, about the diagnosis, then it never happened. I can close this chapter of my life. If Elizabeth only did what she did out of boredom or spite and not out of love, or worse yet, falling out of love, then we can fix this. We can be the couple who survived this episode. We’ll be our own heroes.

  For an hour or two last night, for a minute or ten this morning, these circumstances felt possible. I was unburdened, but it was fleeting. The first disruption came from Jonah, who left a message while I was with a patient. “The medical examiner’s office called,” he told me in a voice mail. “He wants me to swing by the office at my earliest convenience. What should I do?”

  He called again an hour later, saying, “Call me, Dad,” and nothing else.

  He is leaning on me because I asked him to, so now I’m stuck having to advise. Do I ask my son to lie for me? Do I dare tell him the truth?

  The third call came shortly thereafter. This time, it was Buchanan for me. In his voice mail, he omits the little detail about contacting my son. I’m to swing by the department at my earliest convenience to answer a few questions. Again. Seams in my carefully compartmentalized system begin to blur, and I’ll be damned if my hands aren’t shaking when I ask my first patient of the day, “What hurts?”

  I’m shoving food into my mouth between appointments—a meal replacement bar that tastes like candied rubber (we sell these things?)—when I get a call from an unknown number. Local. I ignore it, but a minute later, the same number calls again. Ben Walters from our homeowners’ association wants to extend his sympathies, which, of course, means wanting to gossip.

  He says, “You know, I got a tip that kid had troubles. Right when he got here, actually. Some neighbors—won’t say which, but you can guess—weren’t feeling his wake-and-bake vibe. Got complaints about the smell of pot. I told them I’d issue a warning, but after you pointed it out at Bella Torta, it seemed excessive. You said you were on the ball, so . . .”

  He’d been fond of Nick back when everyone thought he was perfect. Now that everyone thinks Nick was troubled, however—and now that Nick’s dead, moreover—Ben is quick to take credit for seeing the signs first.

  When I attempt to get off the phone, Ben gets to the real reason he called. Acknowledging the sensitive timing and that it’s not an explicit area of HOA oversight, he needs to discuss my plans for the roof walk.

  “This story has caused a lot of conversation,” he says. “I’ve been thinking, there might be something positive that can come out of it. If you went ahead and secured the structure now, it would demonstrate commitment to the security of this community, you know? We have to stay up to code, but it’s good optics when people set examples, too. If you lead, people will follow, and hopefully we can avoid accidents like these in the future.”

  Accidents like these, he says, as though this is a common variety of accident that should stop happening all the time. He probably prepared and rehearsed that pitch with his wife. One minute he’s a fan. The next, he’s a critic. One year, my roof is getting front-page press. Now it’s earning warnings and hosting horror and facilitating gossip. I tell Ben what he wants to hear, which is that I’ll absolutely start looking into it. When he presses for hows or whys and time lines, I tell him my waiting room is starting to pile up, but that I’ll get on it as soon as possible, and “thank you so much for being proactive and supportive during this difficult time.”

  Ending the call brings small relief, since Ben Walters has thrown me off schedule. My waiting room is gridlocked, and although my patients have granted me a grace period because they’ve all heard the chatter, relayed the chatter, (gotten high off the chatter), their good graces won’t last forever.

  The proper order of things has collapsed. I can’t even escape the building at the end of the day—fresh air ten steps away—without being sucked back toward sick breath, hot germs, and antiseptic. Simone’s the par
asite this time, saying, “Dr. Hart, wait. We need to talk.”

  Ten steps from freedom, I spin around and say too loudly, “What do you want?”

  She is unfazed. “To finish the conversation we started.”

  “We didn’t start it. You started it. You blindsided me.”

  She lets my desperation fade before saying, “I want a raise.”

  I tell her the truth: that life is volcanic at the moment, but when things settle, we’ll talk.

  “That won’t work for me.” She hands me a pair of documents printed on bond paper. The first is a spreadsheet listing her responsibilities, and in corresponding columns, the distribution of time per task in a given week, the dollar values for each per hour, skill sets required, continuing education courses she wants me to fund. The other sheet is her resume. Up to date, well designed. She says, “I had a hunch you might be too busy to talk, so I made it easy for you. That’s what I do. Everything is there. Go home, read it over, let me know if you have questions. I’ll expect an answer by next Monday.”

  “Come on, Simone. A week from today? You know how difficult things are right now. Life’s been—”

  “Crazy,” she interrupts. “I know.” Off she goes, saying, “It’s always crazy.”

  She walks like a drum majorette back to the desk where she manages my life. All of these years, so steady. She sure picked a shitty time to have a growth spurt.

  I escape through the back door, but the outside is no better. Damp air and petrichor zap my nerves: a hotwire of nausea, crushed hydrangeas, decay, denial, soggy mulch. Even in death, Nick is still spoiling things.

  Locked in my car, I flip the visor mirror to check—and, yes, my jawbone is flushed, my neck covered in welts. I broke out in hives in college, had panic attacks, too. Couldn’t get it under control, even in medical school, where Step exams were so excruciating that I categorically eliminated considering a career in academic medicine, or any specialization requiring a fellowship, for that matter. I built a life around quality of life. Hives weren’t part of the plan.

  Green light after green light all the way home. I’m trying hard to remember what my next move is supposed to be, but I’m so tired. We’re all tired. We need sound, dreamless sleep. I inhale this ozone-bright rain smell and get hung up on memories of bliss in those days after Nick’s death, when none of us knew he was dead. I just thought I was free. Silly me.

  Maybe the air is to blame, but when I grab these papers on my way out of the car, holding this document Simone forced upon me—her sales pitch, her overwrought effort to frame extortion as business—I’m overcome by sensory recall, remembering how it felt to snatch articles and ads from the guesthouse after finding Nick’s body. I’d folded them and tucked them into my back pocket with every intention of destroying them, and even though I can visualize myself visualizing myself going through with my intent, I can’t for the life of me remember if I really did it. This isn’t like me—or maybe it is. Maybe this is my new normal.

  My hand is shaking when I open the door to my house. I try willing my heart back to tempo, willing those printouts destroyed. Surely I shredded them, and even if I didn’t, there’s still hope those jeans are at the bottom of my hamper, untouched. I should hurry. I should run to my closet to whack-a-mole my next risk, but my body protests. I’m just so damn tired.

  No one is home. I stand alone in a giant room, listening as, one by one, the Ifs detonate inside my head. Jonah is being questioned. I am being challenged. Simone is growing bolder. Down come the pillars of my sanctuary. My job is suffering. My reputation is suffering. I’m supposed to set an example through the structural integrity of my house. My house. I’m supposed to set an example by giving away money, by giving nice speeches, by giving all my strength and support to the woman and child in my care, and I failed at this most basic level.

  Down comes my sanctuary. This is the house I strengthened and molded to be good enough for Jonah, to let me be the father who makes him proud. I trudge up the stairs and turn left instead of right, and I knock on Jonah’s door, just in case he beat me home, and I fake a willingness to face our respective voice mails from the county medical examiner’s office. It’s come to this. When Jonah doesn’t answer, I let myself into his room, a bedroom once decorated with Transformers posters and Star Wars sheets. Now the walls are blank. One family photo in a silver frame is propped atop his dresser: me and Vanessa and Jonah, age three. This was back at the old place, the starter house Jonah can’t possibly remember. In the photo, he’s holding tight to his mother’s back, and she’s holding tight to mine, and I’m bending down in a field of fallen leaves. We are stacked like a cairn marking Long Island autumn, and we are happy.

  I did not kill anyone. All I did was make a choice, a choice to have a conversation—and at the time, it was the best choice, the right one given the situation. Circumstances have changed, though. Drastically. A government employee is going to ask my son whether or not he rode with me down to my office a few weeks back to print papers for some made-up exam. If Jonah tells the truth, I will be deemed a person of interest. Maybe it’ll be announced on the news. If Jonah lies, he’ll do it for me, and consequently, his image of me will shatter. Down will come his father, the hero figure, and he still needs me. So the question becomes: What’s the new right choice if protecting my family is still the bottom line?

  I lie down on Jonah’s bed atop a predictable Ralph Lauren comforter: faded plaid in primary colors. This is where my son lays his head at night. This is his view at the end of the day. It is dim and stark and lonely here. What does it feel like to fall asleep in this room, knowing that life split long ago into two separate tracks, both of which are true, neither of which is pure? This is my great unknown: the distance between his life here and his life there. How does it feel to be him? He was a child here, and then he was gone, and then he came back to me as a stranger. Can I ask him to lie for me now?

  Every choice I’ve ever made was to shield him from the losses prepared for me as a child. I rose up so he wouldn’t have to. Could it be that everything I’ve ever done—the hard work and the love, the steps forward, the backlash, all of the bitter ends and bright ideas—has been wasted? I fell for the fallacy that serenity is a meritocracy, but there is no credit earned or redeemed. I strained for this. I bent my trajectory and changed my tongue for this, and traded up for this, but nothing rolls over. Every day begins anew underwater. Every day I work my way to the surface, and every night I sink all over again. I’ve turned amphibian. I’m the Leviathan caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

  That’s fatherhood for you, he said. Turns the best of us into monsters.

  The answer is no. No, I cannot ask him to lie for me. I cannot ask him to soil his respect for me. I will fall on the sword for him, and I will tell the investigator everything. I’ll come clean, the ink will dry on Nick’s death certificate, and we’ll find a way to get on with our lives.

  I roll onto my side, slipping my hands beneath a pillow, tucking into the fetal position—the shared pose of each raw human, bound and protected by our mothers’ fluid and flesh, oblivious to more: we were all this, once—but I’m ripped from the moment by the unremarkable discovery of evidence that my kid is a slob. He’s the sort of slob who leaves trash in his bed. My fingers guess before my mind does: a candy wrapper, an Alka-Seltzer package.

  But no. It’s a condom wrapper. My son left an empty condom wrapper under the pillow on which he sleeps. He hasn’t changed his sheets in weeks.

  I blink. I blink to change the channel in my head and blink again, progressing pictures in a carousel slide show rotating in my mind. Images and possibilities exchange for the next and the next and the next as I scan back through the progression of their friendship. The desire to please. The need to include Nick in our lives. I think of the silent messages they exchanged on the boat, threading hooks. They sensed each other the way only lovers can and do, and all this time, I missed the signs because I was fixated on a red herring.

&
nbsp; Elizabeth wasn’t sleeping with Nick. Jonah was.

  Downstairs, the garage door motor grinds open, bangs closed. There’s plenty of time for me to flee, but I’m so damn tired. Eyes fixed on the landing at the top of the stairs, I lay here clutching an empty Trojan wrapper in one hand and a worn pillowcase in the other. Footsteps approach and ascend slowly, falling into the same rhythm that brought me here. I’m resting like a child in my own child’s bed, fully clothed in the dark, counting the beats of a weary march as it grows closer.

  32.

  Jonah doesn’t see me stretched out in his bed until he is standing a few feet away. “Shit.” He stumbles backward. “Jesus, Dad. You scared the shit out of me.”

  Sensation returns to my arms and legs. Still gripping Jonah’s trash in my fist, I lift my head, then my body, to sit on the edge of his bed.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  Leaning my elbows against my knees, unsure of my position or plan, I take in the person before me, a boy I’ve misread all this time. He silenced himself. He felt the need to disappear.

  “Dad?”

  He suffered and hid. He hid from his own father. I find my voice. “Got your message.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, do you want to hear the update?” He’s frantic, fried at the ends.

  I nod.

  “That investigator called again a little bit ago.”

  “Did you answer?”

  “No. I told you I wouldn’t. I did what you asked, but he’s freaking me out.” Jonah wraps and unwraps his headphone cords around his wrist. “Can he keep calling like this? It’s harassment, isn’t it?”

  Now is the time to ask about his relationship with Nick. Now. I open my mouth to extend support, but no sounds come. The details still won’t compute.

  “I’m losing my mind, Dad. I’m seriously going crazy. Do you have any idea what he wants to talk to me about?”