The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  When she got back, the waiter had removed both their plates. Grace slid back into the booth and sipped her now chilly tea. His phone was now on the tabletop. He had perhaps done a bit of business while he was waiting.

  “Dr. Sharp,” said Grace, “I know Jonathan had a disciplinary hearing in 2013. I’d like to know more about that.”

  “He had a few disciplinary hearings,” Sharp said a little gruffly. It was rather late in the day for him to start getting gruff with her, thought Grace. “One for accepting a monetary gift from a patient’s father. Allegedly accepting,” he modified. “The father declined to speak to the hospital attorney. It had to be dropped. Then we had another one about the incident with Waycaster. In the stairwell.”

  Where he had tripped, in other words. He had tripped in the stairwell, chipping his tooth, which had had to be repaired and was still, wherever it was at this very moment, a slightly different color from the teeth on either side. She assumed. Except that he had not tripped, she knew that now.

  “Waycaster,” she said.

  “Ross Waycaster. He was Sachs’ supervisor at the beginning. I thought they got on okay. I never heard anything from either one of them about a conflict. But he confronted Sachs directly, about the situation with the Alves mother. It turned into a real scene. Four or five people saw it, and Waycaster had to have stitches afterwards. Even then I had to insist he file a complaint. There was a hearing about that, I can assure you. And then a separate one about the relationship itself.”

  And here, finally, he stopped. He looked up at her, as if he were truly noticing her for the first time.

  “I assume you know about that relationship.”

  “I do,” Grace said solemnly, but she was marveling at him. That he had even asked! After the bludgeoning death of the woman in question, the disappearance of the man in question, and the assigned moniker (courtesy of the New York Post) that had emerged from the tabloid foam in the wake of that disappearance, it would be stretching credulity indeed to imagine she did not. The moniker was “Murder Doc,” and it had finally wormed its way through to Grace’s awareness the previous week, via an AP story in the Berkshire Record (which was printed right next to an innocent local feature on lowering your heating bill). It was in this story that she also read, for the first time, that she—Dr. Grace Sachs, sic—had been eliminated as a suspect in the murder of Malaga Alves. It ought to have given her some comfort, but the concurrent revelation that she had once been under suspicion—no matter how briefly—quashed her relief. “The police haven’t shared many details with me,” she told him.

  He shrugged. He had no knowledge of what the police had or hadn’t done.

  “So if there’s anything you’d like to share with me, I’d be glad to hear it,” she said, spelling it out for him.

  Sharp pursed his lips. It made little difference to him, obviously.

  “The patient was an eight-year-old boy with Wilms’ tumor. Dr. Sachs was the primary doctor. The mother was here every day. One of the nursing staff came to me. She had concerns.”

  After a moment, Grace prodded him. “Concerns.”

  “They weren’t discreet. They were not even trying. The RNs were extremely upset about it. Particularly after the warning he’d got. So I called him in again. I said this is going to stop or I’m going to file a complaint, and it’s going to a full disciplinary hearing. This is back last fall sometime. Fall of 2012. Maybe … November? And he promised it was already over. He said—I think he said he was going through a difficult time. He was dealing with some things in therapy, and acting out. Acting out,” Sharp said with distaste. “I wonder where he pulled that out.”

  Grace, for her part, did not wonder.

  “But whatever he said he was going to do, it didn’t happen. The next thing I was aware of, he and Waycaster got into it in the stairwell. But there were witnesses. As I said,” he assured her.

  “Yes,” Grace said mildly. “You did.”

  “And injuries. There were injuries.”

  She nodded. She didn’t think it was worth reassuring him anymore.

  “So. Two separate incidents. Two separate hearings. But it was the latter one that was grounds for termination. And even then, I want you to know, I offered him an option. I said, ‘Look, you could go into a treatment program. Residential program. You couldn’t get away with outpatient for a situation like this.’ I thought I might be able to persuade the committee to accept a medical leave. I know we could have found a way it wouldn’t read as termination. Not that I thought he was somehow going to get cured,” Sharp said. “I mean, they say it’s not curable, don’t they? Don’t you?” he corrected himself. He was deferring to her professionally, she supposed.

  “You did your job,” she said. It was as far as she was willing to go.

  “As I said, it wasn’t a question of his skill as a physician. He was a talented guy. He had all the nuts and bolts to be a great doctor. He made his own position here impossible.”

  And then she felt her cell phone vibrate inside her jacket pocket. It was her father, or at least his home phone. “Hello?” Grace said, grateful for the interruption.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Can we go to a movie? We can go at three thirty. The one I want’s playing on Seventy-Second and Third.”

  “Oh. Okay. Grandpa’s taking you?”

  “Grandpa and Nana. Is it okay?”

  “Of course,” she said. “What time’s it out?”

  It was out at six. They were going to stay at her father’s tonight. It was the first time they had been back to the city since that day in December.

  When she set it back down, she noticed Sharp actually looking at her. Maybe it had taken her own distraction to make him notice her presence.

  “Your daughter?”

  “My son. Henry.”

  Who doesn’t have a brain tumor, she nearly added.

  “He’s going to the movies with his grandparents.”

  “Jonathan didn’t talk about his parents,” Sharp said. His gaze had wandered off again. “I didn’t find out till last year he grew up a town away from me on Long Island. He was from Roslyn. I grew up in Old Westbury,” he said with meaning, though whatever he meant by it was entirely wasted on Grace. To a Manhattanite, Long Island existed as a single entity of Long Island–ness: Gradations of any kind were simply not processed.

  “You know,” Sharp said, “that Best Doctors thing, they usually come through the hospital. They ask the press office to suggest a few people. They poll the physicians all over the city, of course, but they always work through the press office. Not this time. First time the hospital heard anything about it was when the copy arrived in the office. They were furious, I can tell you. I get a call asking, Did I know about this? Of course I didn’t know. Why would New York magazine call Jonathan Sachs one of the best doctors? I mean, usually there’s some national or international achievement, yeah? So I’m baffled like everybody else. And then one of the attendings comes in and shuts the door, and she tells me there’s a connection. Somebody at the magazine is the aunt of a girl whose doctor is Jonathan Sachs. And she tells me for a long time she’s been struggling, whether or not to say something. But she thinks now somebody should know about it, and the relationship is over the line, she says.”

  “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 anythi
ng 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE CABOOSE

  Only 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.”