You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

“Tomorrow,” she told him, “we’ll get a couple of heaters. And some firewood.” She stopped. She had been about to say that this was like an adventure, like a brave experiment, but just in the past few hours Henry had stopped being a boy who might have believed that. He was now a boy who climbed without comment into the backseat of a rental car, which was full of their belongings, inelegantly packed, and lit out for some unexpected territory. He was a fugitive from other people’s crimes. They both were, actually. “Henry?”

  “Yeah?” He had not moved. He stood with his hands crushed into the pockets of his down jacket, blowing experimental steam in little puffs.

  “I’m going to take care of this,” she told him. She was surprised to hear herself sound so confident. She had not thought much beyond the getting away from, and not at all about the next morning or the following week. There were seven more days of Rearden classes before the holiday break. There were patients. There was a rental car she couldn’t keep forever. There was a book supposedly about to be published. There was the very real possibility that her own name—God, her own face—was even at this moment on a local news broadcast or website, available to any colleague, any patient, any Rearden parent, anyone who had known her husband better than she had herself. But even those terrible things seemed, at this precise moment, far too abstract to waste her small reserves of sanity and will upon. Her world was now very tiny and very sparsely populated. It extended only a breath in any direction. “We’re going to be all right,” she told him, and then, in the frail hope that he, at least, believed it, she said the exact same thing again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Suspension of Disbelief

  Afterward, what would astonish her was how easy it had been to disassemble her life. A life—she had to remind herself—of such continuity and such stability that not even her address, despite a few digressions, had changed since birth. The pediatric practice in which first she and then her son had been patients, the comforting promenade down Madison, in which only the names of the stores and the styles of the immensely expensive goods ever changed, the coffee shops, the bus stops, the nannies from every corner of the earth pushing their charges to the playground at 85th Street…all of it would float away over the next few days, lost in the critical pursuit of warmth and sustenance and in her own dogged suspension of disbelief.

  The next day, she drove the car across the border to Pittsfield, where—with astonishingly little preamble—she purchased one of the rental agency’s used vehicles, a perfectly unremarkable Honda. Then she and Henry went to an outlet mall near Great Barrington and purchased duvets, warm boots, and the kind of long underwear she assumed people who skied wore. At a Home Depot, she found a space heater the salesman swore up and down was safe and a caulk gun she wasn’t sure she’d be able to figure out how to use and which she was sure wouldn’t do much good in any case. Then they hit the supermarket. On the way back, she followed a sign up a long driveway to an A-frame on a wooded lot and arranged for a bemused man in a filthy parka to deliver a cord of cut firewood. She was used to buying wood in little bundles, wrapped in plastic, from Food Emporium and wasn’t sure how much a cord actually was, but he promised to get it to her in the morning, so that was something. Henry, who wasn’t acquisitive as a rule, made only one request all day (apart from the Heath Bar Crunch at the Price Chopper), and that—bizarrely—was an anthology of sportswriting he found in the supermarket. She bought it without a second thought.

  Back at the house, they flung the duvets on the master bed and crawled beneath, Henry with the sports book he had already begun on the ride back, Grace with the legal pad on which she was attempting to reconstitute her client list, prioritizing those she was due to meet in the upcoming days. Everyone would have to be e-mailed, at the very least. Most, then, would have to be called. She wasn’t going to think about that part now. The room, which was not the room in which she had slept during her childhood summers but the room she still thought of as her parents’, took on an alien dullness in the watery winter light. The old knotty pine of the walls seemed drained, as if it lacked something available only in the warm weather and was merely on hold until it could be replenished. The old paintings—some from her grandparents’ time, some from her own trips to the Elephant’s Trunk on Route 7—had a sort of caul thrown over them, their colors dulled accordingly. It struck her now, looking around first idly and then with the recognition of yet another form of loss, that there was not one object that signified a real tie to a real idea of her own life. Not one. Instead, the catechism to which she had subjected every belonging in the New York apartment came flooding back to her, and she found herself interrogating the things she saw, demanding they account for themselves and justify their inclusion in what she now laughingly considered reality. The old photographs, her family’s four generations of nominal possessions attested to, seemed meaningless; the ones of herself and Jonathan in particular were an assault. Childhood artworks (her own and Henry’s), curious objects picked up in the woods or along the lakeshore, books she had brought from the city to read and, having read, left behind on the shelves, ripped-out articles from the New Yorker, past issues of the three or four scholarly journals she followed—what did any of it have to do with her now, here, huddled beneath a brand-new duvet in her parents’ bed with her twelve-year-old son, for how long? Until the end of the night? Or the news cycle? Or the year?

  Until the nuclear winter ended and somebody (who?) gave the all clear?

  The weight of it all was imponderable, so she declined to ponder it, powering through the to-do list of massive life alterations as if they were another busy mom’s hit list for a Monday morning and laboring over the message to her patients: “Because of significant and unforeseen events, it is necessary that I take a leave of absence from my practice. I cannot adequately convey to you my sincerest regret at having to suspend our work together, and I wish I could tell you how long I will need to be away. I am of course available to help you find interim care with another therapist, so if you need a reference or would like to discuss your options, please feel free to contact me by e-mail…”

  Which was not, precisely, an empty offer, though she did not, precisely, have e-mail, at least at the moment. The summer before, she had paid a local company to set up a Wi-Fi system, and they had, and it had worked, albeit slowly, but neither she nor—more meaningfully—Henry had been able to make it work now. So she began—tentatively, by necessity, and with utter terror—to make her way to the David M. Hunt Library in the village, a Queen Anne pile so baldly impressive that it felt thoroughly suited to the heavy purpose at hand, and there, in half-hour increments on the sign-up sheet, she let down the guillotine between herself and all the men and women who had paid her for her good counsel. They would not want it now, she told herself, clicking Send again and again, severing whatever trust in her they might so unwisely have placed, negating any benefit she might once have brought them. (And every time she did it, every time she composed and delivered one of these identical messages—because she made herself do it fresh each time, because she declined to obliterate her entire career in a mass e-mail—it was like another blow upon the same bruise: the maximum suffering allotted.) And then she sat back, looking at the inert computer screen on its little ledge in the hushed, carpeted library, and noted how it had all been accomplished so quietly. Or not, precisely, quietly. It felt like a whisper made into the absolute stillness of a cave, which somehow comes back deafening and then disappears altogether. In reality, very little came back, and there was silence, at least from most of them. One woman, who had a habit of coming in only when she was acutely in crisis, e-mailed to ask for a reference. Lisa, the abandoned wife whose husband was now living with a Rothko and a man in Chelsea, sent a kind and beautifully written message to say that she hoped “everything” would work out for Grace. (Grace could not bear to think how much of “everything” Lisa knew by now.) And Steven, the perpetually enraged screenwriter, took a moment out of his busy life to w
rite and call her “a sorry-ass cunt.”

  It nearly made her smile. It nearly did.

  Oddly, the only person to actually protest her departure was not one of her patients, and not her son’s headmaster (Robert had responded to her notice of withdrawal with a brief note saying that Henry would be welcome back at any time—Grace could only hope that was accurate), and not even her father (who was relieved to hear from her, but so full of appalled questions that she pretended to have lost the cell phone signal and hung up the phone). It was Vitaly Rosenbaum, who wanted her to know how greatly he was going to be inconvenienced by the sudden nonattendance of his student and how damaging any lacuna in Henry’s musical education would certainly be. Grace read his e-mails with a kind of cherished nostalgia for the myopia of others. As a rule, the violin teacher was a stranger in the strange cosmology of e-mail. He had given in only when one of his students brought him an old desktop and set up a system for him, carefully explaining (and printing out) precise instructions for composing, sending, and receiving, and he used it only when deprived of more comfortable forms of communication. Still, he managed to convey (in no fewer than three terse and imprecisely worded messages) the fullness of his displeasure at Henry’s absence and even made so bold as to suggest that Grace was being delinquent in her duties as a mother because of whatever selfish thing was keeping her son away.

  Vitaly Rosenbaum, at least, was apparently not a consumer of news. Not a reader of the New York Post, or the Times, or New York magazine. Not a watcher of the six o’clock news. Not a follower of NY1.com. He was fastened so tightly into his own unhappy enclosure that he simply had no idea what Henry Sachs’s absence might signify.

  How she wished the world in general were like him.

  Each time, as she finished her allotted minutes on the computer terminal and prepared, once again, to let go of some balloon—some person, some arrangement, some filament of normal—still bobbing tenuously overhead, she had to fight the roar of so much waiting information, so nearby, only a movement of the fingertips between herself and the gale force of it. A clicking sound—so soft, at that—holding apart the whispering of the country library in Connecticut and the deluge of what was happening a few hours south. Grace sat there in her swivel seat, hands poised over the keys, fighting herself to know and not know, inheriting the wind of her own hysteria. Each time it was an original contest: fought from the foundations and to the bitter end. Each time it was a victory for willed ignorance.

  Then she would carefully log out and rise from the terminal and go find Henry, who had finished the sportswriting anthology and was now reading a biography of Lou Gehrig, and take him home to the cold, cold house on the frozen lake for another day of not knowing, and there she would light the fire (a task at which she had become necessarily adept) and tuck blankets around her son on the couch and turn on the light for him as he read and start to cook something hot for the two of them. And then, with the chilly air of the afternoon gradually replaced by the still more brutal air of the night, she would sometimes attempt, in the most careful and least inquisitive way possible, to assess her circumstances.

  By default, she knew that Jonathan must still be—wherever he was—beyond the collective reach of Mendoza and O’Rourke and the NYPD and, for all she knew, the FBI or INTERPOL. He must be. If he were not, Mendoza would have called her cell. Mendoza actually was calling every few days, not just to find out whether she had heard from Jonathan but to ask how she and Henry were doing. (She took those calls because he had let her leave the city, or at least not made it difficult for her to leave. She owed him for that.) She never answered unless it was him or her father, but the cell had become an open tap, impossible to shut off. Her office line, listed on every Web directory of New York therapists (subspecialty: couples), forwarded to the cell, and it rang constantly until she silenced it, then it merely flashed and vibrated constantly. She wouldn’t listen to the messages, not if she could see who was calling; if she couldn’t see who they were beforehand, they might get in a greeting before she hit Delete. And then one afternoon the ancient wall phone in the kitchen started to ring, its antiquated blurt like something out of a midcentury television episode. It rang over and over again, beginning at about two in the afternoon a few days before Christmas and on into the evening. There was nothing like a caller ID, of course. Grace was pretty sure the cracked Bakelite phone could never be configured to reveal, in advance, a caller’s identity, but it probably hadn’t rung since the previous summer. She put her hand on it, still undecided.

  When she lifted it, saying nothing, there was a pause, and then a tense female voice said: “Is that Grace?”

  Grace set down the receiver, almost gently, as if she were trying not to alarm the woman on the other end. Then she reached down along the phone’s vaguely dangerous-looking cord to its woefully outdated wall jack in the floorboard and maneuvered the plug free.

  So at least one of them must know where she was, but nobody had actually turned up. That was good. That was the point of having left, wasn’t it? To run farther away than they would be inclined to follow? And obviously they did not care enough to follow her to rural Connecticut. Only one state away, but she wasn’t—which meant the story wasn’t—important enough to come after her. It made her almost hopeful, the idea of that.

  But then Grace remembered that somebody was actually dead and two children orphaned. She wasn’t hopeful after that.

  So easy to disassemble her entire life. Surely that, too, was a privilege she had not deserved, not when you thought about the “blood-strewn” apartment and what Miguel Alves had had to find in it. Grace knew (because she had spent a humiliating hour on the phone with a total stranger at Morgan Stanley) that most of the money she’d thought she possessed a few weeks earlier she still did possess, though a withdrawal of $20,000 from the cash reserves had been made on the afternoon of Monday, December 16, the day Malaga Alves had been killed.

  That and a handful of jewels could get you most places, Grace thought bitterly.

  Her own escape, and Henry’s, to a house (albeit a freezing house) where they could stay as long as they liked—because it belonged to her—eating food and burning wood she could afford to purchase, was only the most recent in a long list of unearned advantages, from preferential admissions for legacy applicants to a (big) leg up on the Manhattan real estate ladder. She did not feel, precisely…guilty about that. Not guilty. Actually, there had always been a sort of inverse pride in the fact that she didn’t care much about money or crave extravagant things. But then again, she could afford not to care much about money. She knew that, too.

  And now, stiff with cold on her parents’ bed, in a house that four generations of her family had called home (at least for the warm summer months), with her son beside her (utterly absorbed in the life of Lou Gehrig), a refrigerator of food carelessly bought with a credit card, a new (if far from luxurious) car outside, thoughtlessly bought with the same credit card, she thought fiercely: I have nothing to apologize for.

  That didn’t last long, that defiance.

  Sometimes, at night, after Henry had fallen asleep, she put on her parka and went outside with a packet of cigarettes she had found in one of the kitchen drawers. She had no idea whose they were or how they had come to be there, but she took them down the slope to the lakefront and lay down on the icy dock and lit one, and the pure bad pleasure of it came tearing back, wafting deep into the moist caverns of the lungs and shooting away through the bloodstream. She watched the white cloud rise up into the night, visible proof that, at least for this moment, she was still here, still sentient and more or less functional. This itself, it occurred to her, was the drug, just that bald proof of existence. It was intoxicating. It was a necessary, brutal, reassurance.

  She had not smoked for eighteen years, since the night she met a future oncologist in the basement of the Harvard Medical School, and she could not recall the act of smoking as ever feeling so freighted with meaning. Now, inhaling and then
watching the white smoke rise, she felt as if some great Pause button had been depressed when Jonathan stepped into her life, and only this instant had the finger come away and released her forward motion, and suddenly she was back at precisely that earlier moment, a college student again, with most of the big decisions and the big events still before her. Though this time she had been issued with a child and a nominal profession.

  And a book about to be published. Or so it had been when she’d left the city. She saw all of their names, constantly, on her phone: Sarabeth and Maude and J. Colton the publicist. She had not returned even one of their calls. She had not even listened to the messages. Almost idly, she wondered what they must have considered was worth trying to say. The article in Vogue would never run. The Today Show must no longer wish to interview her, except perhaps in connection with the death of Malaga Alves. And the book itself… Who (and she made herself, deliberately, complete this thought) would knowingly be counseled by an expert on marriage whose husband had become involved with another woman? Or had a child with that woman? Or, in fact, murdered that woman? Or had stolen, lied, abandoned his wife in a scorched earth of incalculable…

  Well, not pain, exactly. Whatever Grace was feeling right now, right at this moment, flat on her back, numb with cold, blowing smoke up into the brutal night, was not pain. But that did not mean the pain wasn’t somewhere nearby. It was very close, very close. It was just on the other side of the wall, and nobody knew how long the wall was going to hold.

  She took another lungful and breathed it out, watching it rise. She had once loved smoking, not that she had ever been in doubt of its lethal reach, not that she had wanted to die, ever. She wasn’t ignorant and she wasn’t a masochist. On the night of the medical school party, she had simply gone back to the apartment she and Vita shared near Central Square and finished off her final pack on the fire escape, thinking about Jonathan and what he meant to do with his life. She had never even told him she smoked. It had been, simply, not relevant to the only thing that really mattered to her after that night, because everything important had only begun that night. Did that make her a liar, too?