Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "Absolutely!" Brian Davies had told me, in the too-hearty voice that people use when dealing with the recently injured or mentally ill. "Sure, you can stay. House'd just be sitting there empty, anyhow! Stay as long as you need to! Stay as long as you'd like!"

  So, the morning after Sukie's suicide, I had signed myself out of the hospital, kissed my husband goodbye, and loaded the kids, plus Janie and my mother, into the minivan. We went shopping for basics: overalls and sweatshirts, pajamas and underwear, toothbrushes and hairbrushes. Reina sat in the food court with an untouched cup of hot water in front of her and her telephone in her hand staring at the people passing by like she'd just landed on our planet and had never seen a mall before. Occasionally we'd pass her and I'd catch a phrase or two in French or Italian. Emergencia and famille seemed to be figuring prominently. I bought her the kind of tea she liked, a dehumidifier, and the first pair of non-high-heeled shoes I'd bet she'd worn in years, and she took the kids to Tower Records. "They like polka?" she demanded, loudly enough to turn heads two stores over. "Kate, that's obscene."

  Before we left town I dropped Janie off back at Sukie's house. One of the cops had pulled her Porsche up to the curb, locked the door, and brought Janie's keys to the hospital. The car sat in front of the empty house, looking somehow forlorn, with snow covering its windows and a bit of yellow police tape caught on its antenna.

  "I can come up next weekend," she said, hugging me goodbye.

  "I could never thank you enough for..." Helping me, I wanted to say. Believing in me. "Being my friend."

  She hugged me hard and kissed my cheek. She got in her car, I got in the van and I drove my children and my mother east, with the sun setting at our backs, a hundred and eighty miles back to the ocean.

  The first weeks went by in fits and starts. We bought two cords of wood and built fires every morning and gathered around them at night, toasting marshmallows and watching movies, bundled up in blankets as the wind whipped off the sea and made the walls shudder and moan. We shopped for groceries at the Super Stop 'n Shop in Orleans. We signed the kids up for music class in Eastham, and drove them to storytime at the libraries in Truro and Provincetown and Wellfleet, then took them out for chowder for lunch.

  In the afternoons while the kids napped and Reina talked on the telephone, I'd bundle up and head to the deck overlooking the bay, feeling the rough wind in my hair as I sat on a chaise longue, thinking that I should have figured it out faster. In retrospect, it was all so clear how Sukie had been leading everyone down the wrong path. She'd been the one to tell me about Kitty's ghostwriting, and I'd bet anything that she'd been Tara Singh's anonymous tipster too. She'd given me the sitter's phone number, she'd told me about Kitty and Ted Fitch, knowing that every wrong step I made took me further away from her.

  I would stare at the waves and consider Kitty Cavanaugh. What would she have said to me if she'd lived long enough for our lunch date? Would she have enlisted me in the search for her father? Did she want a friend? A witness? Would she have envied me my two parents, the same way I'd once envied her beauty, her slim figure, her shiny hair, the ease with which she seemed to manage all the things that left me confounded? And would I have told her that her focus on the past was jeopardizing her present, and that there's always a price to pay for looking back?

  Only the national edition of the New York Times was available on the Cape in the wintertime, and I had to drive all the way to Provincetown to get it, but between those flimsy editions and a cranky dial-up Internet connection, I managed to spend those first few weeks in Truro following the fallout, the ever-widening ripples that Kitty Cavanaugh's murder had set into motion.

  Sukie Sutherland had been buried on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where her parents had retired, not in Upchurch, where she'd spent her whole life. Her husband put their house on the market the week following the funeral, then took the kids off to parts unknown.

  Lexi Hagen-Holdt remained a missing person. The police had called in a diving team from New York City, and they were dredging the Connecticut River, where Sukie had planned on taking me, for her body. The Times had no word on what had happened to Denny and Brierly and Hadley. I couldn't bring myself to think about them for very long.

  Philip Cavanaugh had been questioned by the police to determine what he knew and when he knew it. What emerged wasn't enough to get him anything more than a stern talking-to. Yes, he'd been carrying on with Sukie, and with Lexi, and, for a while, with Lisa the sitter and Luz the personal trainer and--God help me--he'd even made a play for Mrs. Dietl, the not-so-prim-and-proper grandmother who ran the Red Wheel Barrow. Yes, he'd had what the Times termed "general conversations" with Sukie about his wife's work as a ghostwriter and what life might be like without Kitty, but he'd never encouraged her to do anything about it or known that she was planning on it.

  As for Delphine Dolan, she'd started calling herself Debbie again and had sold her story to the tabloids. "Housewife Hooker Tells All!" blared the headline on one of the magazines Janie brought me. There was a shot of Delphine, lovely in a low-cut blue dress, and another photograph in which she was looking coyly over her shoulder, wearing nothing more than bikini bottoms and a smile.

  "Her husband's standing by her," Janie read between sips of the Pedialyte and vodka she'd requested. We were bundled up on the deck, wrapped in down comforters, mittens, and hats, with the hard wind whipping off the water, reddening our cheeks and turning our fingers numb. " 'I love my wife,' blah blah blah...Ooh, look, they're developing a sitcom based on her life!"

  I nodded. "Good for Delphine."

  Janie smiled shyly and handed me another magazine. I saw a copy of Content, with Kitty Cavanaugh's face on its front cover. It was the shot I'd recognized from her mantel. A wedding picture. Kitty was all shining dark hair and big blue eyes, a white lace veil and a white satin gown and a smile that made it seem as if the whole world was hers for the taking. "Kitty Cavanaugh: A Life," read the headline. Janie's byline was five times the size it normally was. "My first piece of legitimate journalism," she said proudly. "Sy's going to have it bronzed!"

  The article was five pages long and utterly engrossing. Janie had tracked down all of the players and gotten many of them to give her quotes on the record. The one they'd used in eighteen-point type came from Dorie Stevenson. "She was the best person I knew."

  It was all there: the story of Kitty's mother Judith Medeiros's life in New York and overdose death and Kitty's de facto adoption. Then came Hanfield, where Joel Asch had been her professor--"not her father, but a father figure. I wanted to help her. I hope that I did." Then, the roster of men Judy Medeiros had known, both in the biblical and nonbiblical sense. There was a prominent lobbyist and a network executive, the poetry professor and the ophthalmologist. "New York Attorney General Ted Fitch voluntarily took a paternity test in the days following Suzanne Sutherland's suicide," Janie had written. "The results were negative. The question of Kitty Cavanaugh's paternity and Judith Medeiros's death remains a mystery--one that the New York Police Department's detectives have recently reopened. If Cavanaugh herself found the answer before she died, she took it to her grave."

  Our days fell into a comforting rhythm. We'd have breakfast, then take a trip to the library or the supermarket or the pirate museum in Provincetown. Lunch, then nap, crafts and coloring, a video when it rained. After dinner, we'd build a fire, and Reina would sing--sometimes opera, sometimes polka. After I'd tucked the kids in, I would lie alone in the bed beside the big windows, listening to the ocean, looking at the lights of Provincetown twinkling across the water, the stars that filled the sky. I planted bulbs in the blank spaces laid out to be a garden--tulips and daffodils and, when the weather got warmer, seeds for daisies and impatiens, petunias and pansies. On Wednesday and Friday mornings I'd drive the kids to the dock in Provincetown and we'd take the ferry into Boston, where we'd visit the offices of Dr. Birnbaum, a child psychologist. She'd usher the kids into her comfortably cluttered office, complete
with dollhouse, easel, and every kind of toy, and close the door with a click. I'd sit in one of the hardwood chairs, trying not to press my ear to the door, trying to believe that Sophie, Sam, and Jack knew they were loved and that, in spite of what had happened, they were safe and would eventually be all right.

  Ben came every weekend. He played with the children, went out to dinner with us, popped popcorn, sang polka, dressed and undressed Uglydoll, and watched every movie Disney ever made. At night, he would sleep in the bed beside me without reaching for me. "When you're ready to talk about this...," he said late one night. I shook my head no. He'd sold our house and rented a condo in Cos Cob for himself, for the time being. He'd hired another partner, promised he'd cut back his hours, promised he'd be home more, promised we could move wherever we wanted to--another town in Connecticut, New Jersey, even New York City again, the same neighborhood, the same apartment building, if he could swing it. He wanted us to be a family again. It didn't matter where. "It'll be better," he whispered, running one finger tentatively along my cheek. "It'll be like it was before."

  I kept my eyes shut and pretended to be sleeping, until I heard him sigh and felt the bed shift as he rolled back to his side.

  Evan continued to call every few days. "Can I see you?" he'd ask. "We've already wasted so much time, Kate. We should be together." I put him off too. I stared at the ocean and thought about Kitty Cavanaugh's father. Was he dead or alive? Had he been following the story? Was he guilty of more than fathering an out-of-wedlock daughter?

  February turned into March. "I wish I could stay," my mother told me. "But I signed a contract."

  I nodded. "It's okay. You were here"--I swallowed hard--"when I needed you."

  "I'll always be here when you need me," she said. She drew my hair back from my forehead and kissed me. "Remember that, Kate."

  The breeze off the ocean became warmer, scented with salt and beach plums. On the weekends, Janie or Ben would watch the kids, and I would walk on the beach for hours, feeling the cool sand on the soles of my feet as I made my way past concentric circles of seaweed, piles of driftwood, the occasional decomposing fish. Some days I'd see seals cavorting fifty feet out or sunning themselves on rocks at low tide. The rocks were the most comforting thing of all. Every day, the tide would go out, and they'd reappear, the way they would all summer, the way they'd been doing for centuries before I had ever seen this beach and would continue to do after all of us were gone.

  Just before Memorial Day, I reached under the front seat of the minivan to retrieve Sophie's candy necklace, and found the advance reader's copy of The Good Mother that Laura Lynn Baird had given me. I flipped past the blank pages at the front of the book advising that the dedication was to come, and read

  Mommy & Me

  by Katherine Cavanaugh

  Foreword

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess, with long black hair and rose-red lips who went off to an enchanted kingdom and came back with a baby, a little girl all her own.

  When the princess died and the little girl grew up, the girl went looking for her mother, trying to understand who she was, whom she'd loved, and what each of them had become.

  There are women who grow up with good mothers, women who endure indifferent mothers, and women who survive toxic parenting, absent mothers, abandoning mothers, mothers by biology only.

  The woman who raised me, my aunt Bonnie, fell into the first category, as loving and supportive a mother as any child could wish.

  My real mother--my biological mother, the woman who gave birth to me in a hospital in Hyannis in 1969 and moved back to New York City by herself six months later--was a mystery: a glamorous presence, a beauty, a sorceress. I spent the first years of my life trying to charm her, waiting for her to return to me the way, I'd find out much later, she was waiting for the man who'd gotten her pregnant to come back to her.

  "Mommy!" Sophie held her out hand for her necklace. I tucked the book in my purse and handed it over. That night, I read more.

  The man who may or may not be my father sits across from me in a midtown restaurant. His suit is black, beautifully cut, or gray, or navy blue. His gray hair is combed straight back from his forehead, or it's curly salt and pepper, thinning on top, too long in the back, or it's gone entirely, leaving the top of his head naked and vulnerable as an egg. His fingertips are blunt, the nails clipped close and coated with clear gloss. When I slide my mother's photograph across the linen-draped table, he barely glances at it before using those fingertips to slide it back. "Never saw her in my life." A dozen years, a dozen men. The Internet helps--a few keystrokes and I can download biographies from corporate Web sites or magazine profiles. I can find out where this possibility, this shadow-daddy, grew up, where he spent his summers, where he went to college, where he got married, how many children he claims. I work in a cubicle in my small town's library. I sift through reels of microfiche, yellowed newspaper clippings, laminated programs, black-and-white photographs. And I return again to the city to sit in restaurants where coffee costs six dollars a cup, and ask the only question that matters. Mine? I wonder, staring at him over my cup as my voice launches into the speech I've given so many times before. Are you mine? And what do you know about how my mother died?

  On the first day the temperature topped seventy-five degrees, I wiggled the children into their bathing suits and slathered their pale bodies with sunblock. Janie had come to visit again. We worked together, gathering pails and shovels, towels and folding chairs and a rainbow-striped umbrella to stick in the sand. Then we descended the stairs to the beach. The boys dashed right into the little waves that lapped the sand. Sophie hung back, clutching my hand. "Come on, sweetheart," I coaxed. She shook her head but didn't resist when I scooped her into my arms. The water was shockingly cold as it flowed over my toes and ankles, but I forced myself to keep going, wading in until it was foaming past my knees...then my hips.

  "One...two...three!" I said, and bent forward until Sophie's toes brushed the top of a wave. She squirmed in my arms, giggling, as I tossed her lightly into the air. She screamed with laughter, then collected herself and let me carry her back to shore to build a sandcastle with her brothers. I eased myself into the water until it was up to my shoulders, then took a deep breath and dunked my head. When I brushed the salt water out of my eyes and looked back to shore, the kids and Janie were applauding. I waved, then flipped onto my back and floated in the pale green ocean water, looking up at the sky. Come home to me, said Ben. Come back to me, said Evan. I closed my eyes, listening for my answer. My hair trembled in the water. My body rose and fell. The waves rolled in and out, saying nothing at all.

  On Memorial Day, the telephone rang.

  "Turn on your TV," said Janie.

  "Which channel?"

  "Doesn't matter."

  I flicked on the set and saw a familiar vista--the White House, atop an emerald green lawn, underneath a sparkling blue summer sky. A podium had been set up in the Rose Garden, and the president stood behind it.

  "We go live now to this unprecedented speech," said the news anchor.

  The president gripped the podium. I saw his throat working as he swallowed once, twice, and then began to speak. "After careful consideration, I have decided not to seek my party's nomination for a second term as president," he said. "I have made this decision after lengthy and prayerful personal reflection, and a desire to do what is right, not only for this country, but for..." His throat worked again. "For my family. I have caused them pain--my wife, my children, the people who have seen me at my lowest and loved me nevertheless." He looked down at his notes, then looked up again, clenching his jaw. "I ask the media and the public to respect our privacy during this difficult time. Godspeed, and God bless America."

  It was a moment before the anchor's voice came on again, and in that moment, I stared at the face on the screen as the camera lingered. I considered the high cheekbones, the cleft chin, the blue eyes that gleamed as he bowed his head over t
he podium. Eyes, a poet might have said, the blue of pansies...or of cornflowers.

  "Well," the anchor spluttered, clearly off balance. "Well, Peter, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Have we heard any news about a possible medical condition?"

  "He wishes," Janie said in my ear. "Cops found the dealer last night."

  "The president's dealer?"

  "No, President Stuart was already a congressman then. He knew better than to buy his own junk. He had his little brother get it for him--you know, the one who spent the entire last decade in and out of rehab. Thirty years ago. Two hundred dollars of uncut China white and bye-bye, inconvenient woman and illegitimate kid."

  I stared blankly at the empty podium on the television screen, picturing the note I'd found in Kitty's dresser drawer. Stuart 1968.

  "Mommy?" Sophie tugged my hand.

  "I should go." I told Janie.

  "Stay tuned," she said, sounding almost giddy. "Breaking news. Developing fast. I've got to go get my hair blown out. CNN just called."

  I told her goodbye, hung up the telephone, and flicked the television into silence. Bonnie's voice echoed in my head. She told me that she was getting to the end of it...and Joel Asch's voice joined hers. Writing for us gave Kitty access, he'd told me. You can interview senators. Even presidents.