“So the reason you didn’t cheat again was because you were afraid of another phone call like that?” she asked, the anger building again.
“I had a vasectomy,” he whispered. “Right after I found out. I was so ashamed, Rebecca. I didn’t deserve another child with your mother.”
So much for God and biology.
“Please don’t hate me, Rebecca. I couldn’t—”
A large, squishy lump made its way from her stomach to her throat. “I couldn’t hate you.”
She was about to ask if he’d loved the woman, this Pia Jayhawk, but then realized she didn’t want to know.
“Rebecca, come close,” he said, and she hesitated, but sat down on the edge of bed. “In my desk drawer at home, in a red leather case, there’s a key to a safety-deposit box at the Citibank on Lex near my office. There’s more in there about all this. It’ll explain better than I can now. Go there now, Becs.”
No. No, no, no. She didn’t want more. And she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone with this crazy story. As long as she was in this room with her father, the man she’d always known, always loved and adored, things were as they always were. He was still the same man, the same father. There was no lie. No baby named Joy. No more.
But the moment Rebecca walked out of room 8-401, cold, gripping reality would knock into her knees.
There was a baby.
Is a baby.
“I want to stay with you, Dad.”
He shook his head. “Please, sweetheart. I want you to get what’s in the safety-deposit box. I want to know, be sure, that you’re going to the bank. Please, Rebecca.” A wheeze came from his throat, and her heart clenched.
“What’s in the box, Dad?”
“I’m so tired, honey. So, so tired. Just promise me you’ll go today. I know you always keep your promises.”
“I promise,” she assured him. Suddenly, she could imagine leaving, could imagine walking out of this room, could imagine going to the bank with the key—as long as she didn’t open the box. “But, Dad, what do I do with what’s in the box? Do you want me to bring it back here?”
“No,” he said. “Not here. I know you’ll know what to do.”
He closed his eyes and she sat there in the wedding gown, afraid to move.
“A half sister?” Michael repeated. Rebecca had flung out the story in a rush of words and wasn’t sure she’d made any sense. “What?”
Michael Whitman wasn’t easy to surprise. As a divorce lawyer, a specialist in mediation, he’d been there, done that, and heard it all. From affairs to hidden assets to secret children. Last year, he’d had a case involving a man who juggled two families at the same time, a wife and two kids, and a mistress and a daughter, but the mistress hadn’t known about the wife either. She’d believed him to be an international businessman when he really lived less than thirty miles away half the week. Still, Michael had managed to work his mediation magic on the couple—the married one—and they’d avoided a long and nasty divorce battle.
An unacknowledged baby? A secret safety-deposit box containing who knew what? Business as usual around the law and mediation offices of Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman.
Michael shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”
Rebecca nodded. “Me either. I have a half sister. I’ve known about this for almost an hour and it’s still not sinking in.”
They stood at the windows in Michael’s office. If Rebecca looked left, she could make out the cluster of buildings that the hospital comprised. She’d almost gotten off the bus when she saw her father’s Citibank branch on the corner, but she hadn’t been able to move, lift her herself up. She’d stared after the Citibank logo as if bypassing it would make this all go away, temporarily anyway. She would go to the bank after work. She would find out what was in the safety-deposit box, then be able to go home. Michael would make her his famous Irish chai latte and she could try to think.
There was a tap at Michael’s door, and Marcie Feldman, the senior paralegal who reported to Michael, poked in her shellacked blond bob. She sneered at Rebecca. “I was looking for you. The Frittauers are here.” She made a show of glancing at her watch.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Rebecca said. From her father’s bedside to this. To smug Marcie and Rebecca’s interminable case files of divorcing couples. For the past several months, walking through the front doors of Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman had required three strong cups of coffee. Because Michael was there? Or because her job had become so unbearable?
Or both?
“And as an FYI,” Marcie added, “per HR, if you’re going to be out of the office past allotted lunch hours between noon and two, you need to clear it with me first.”
If my father dies at 2:01, I’ll be sure and call you first to ask if I can stay by his side, she felt like shouting. Talk about not sucking up to the boss’s girlfriend. Rebecca almost had to give Marcie credit for that.
“She cleared it with me,” Michael said. He was always way too kind to the superefficient automaton that was Marcie Feldman. Granted, the office would fall to pot if it weren’t for Marcie, but still. “I was so busy I forgot to mention it to you.”
Marcie smiled her tight smile at Michael, then looked at her watch again before the shellacked blond bob withdrew from the doorway.
“Forget the Frittauers,” Michael said. “I’ll have Marcie cover it.”
“She’ll just hate me more. I can do it. And I like the Frittauers. They’ll distract me from thinking about my dad and I’ll be able to focus on them. I think I can keep them on track.” Unlike the Bergerons or the McDonough-Pages, the last two sets of clients who’d had to be physically pulled apart—and not because they were hugging or had rediscovered their love at the eleventh hour. Marian Bergeron had flipped out over something Rebecca had said (seemingly in favor of her husband) and had pushed Rebecca so hard against a credenza that Rebecca had gotten a whopper of a black-and-blue mark on her thigh. And Jeffrey Page had thrown the contents of a water pitcher at his wife—and the pitcher at Rebecca. At least it hadn’t been a glass pitcher.
And Rebecca was just a paralegal—she wasn’t even the mediator.
She’d once actually thought she’d enjoy working in divorce mediation. Boy, had she been wrong. The result was always the same: a divorce. Divorce with dignity (the firm’s tagline) or not.
“No one could hate you, Rebecca Strand,” Michael whispered, and then pulled her into a hug. For a moment she actually felt that she could do it, sit down with the feuding Frittauers and go over the few remaining unresolved issues in their case. A hug from Michael had that power. Another addition to the pro column.
She and Michael had been a couple from her third day at the firm. On that third day, Rebecca had entered conference room 1 to attend to new clients, Mr. and Mrs. Plotowsky, and the moment she sat down she smelled Chanel N° 19, her mother’s signature scent. Her mother had been gone for years then, but it was the first time she’d smelled that scent since she’d put her mother’s clothes in storage, unable to give them away or put them in her own closet. Chanel N° 19 wasn’t popular like Chanel N° 5. And so she’d smiled at Mrs. Plotowsky and said, “Your perfume reminds me of my mother. It was her favorite.”
And Mr. Plotowsky, who’d sat staring at the cherrywood table until that moment, jumped up and yelled, “No fair! No fair! Disqualified!” He’d run screaming into the hallway, yelling that Rebecca had sided with his wife and couldn’t be impartial.
Mr. Goldberg had sent the senior paralegal (the smug Marcie) to “write Rebecca up” and go over protocol, which included no personal comments. Ever. That afternoon, Michael Whitman, the young partner at the firm (the elder Whitman and Goldberg were in their sixties), asked Rebecca to lunch, and she’d assumed it was to fire her.
“Actually,” he’d said at their little table in a crowded Chinese restaurant around the corner from the office, “I asked you to lunch because I think you’re beautiful and smart and kind and I wanted to know if
I had a chance.”
A chance. Michael Whitman, six feet two, eyes of blue, a smart, compassionate, if uptight, thirty-two-year-old attorney-mediator in a three-piece suit and an expensive briefcase, thought she was beautiful and smart and kind, even though he himself had had to spend over an hour calming down Doug Plotowsky. She’d recently had her heart bruised, if not broken, by an effortless liar, and Michael Whitman’s romantic intensity, especially given her mistake with the Plotowskys, had done something magical to her spirit. She’d explained how she thought her years of experience as a paralegal, her psychology degree and interest in counseling might serve her well in the field of divorce mediation, and Michael had been so encouraging. Her entire life she’d been the go-to girl for friends with problems, which was why she’d chosen to study psychology in the first place.
People had been telling her of their tragedies and triumphs since preschool. With pinky promises and crossed hearts and swearing on various boyfriends’ lives not to tell (and Rebecca never did; she was a supreme keeper of secrets), she would hear stories of parents divorcing, of older sisters getting pregnant, of letting a boy unhook a bra. When she’d started working, she’d spent her lunch hours listening to all sorts of family dysfunction, of boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands who wanted this or didn’t want that. But then her mother had died and Rebecca had lost her way and trailed along in her dad’s career as a real-estate attorney—for too long. She’d started at Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman with such high hopes, and as she’d realized very quickly that she hated the job, she’d fallen for one of the partners, which had made coming to work a lot more enticing. For a long while, anyway. Michael had told her often in the beginning that she had a gift for paying supreme attention without judging or validating, which allowed the other person to unload and reach his own conclusions without even realizing it. He sad it was why divorcing couples responded so positively to her style.
“Sweetheart,” Michael said, “if you really think you’re up to dealing with the Frittauers, go ahead, but if you need to just let all this new information percolate, I understand.”
What he really meant was: Don’t screw things up with the very prominent clients. Like you’ve done several times in the past few months. If she weren’t Michael’s girlfriend, she would have been on probation and fired by now.
New information. Rebecca hated when Michael spoke to her as though she were a client. But the words lit up a lightbulb over her head. “Michael, I just realized I’d better find this Joy Jayhawk fast. Before my dad—” She burst into tears and covered her face with her hands.
Michael leaned his head down on hers. “Becs, listen, honey. One thing at a time. Just focus on your dad right now.”
“But there’s no time left,” she said, wiping her eyes. “If I track her down and let her know, she might want to come. At least meet him before—”
Michael tipped up her chin and shook his head. “Rebecca, I strongly advise against that. Keep in mind that you are operating under an informational deficit. This woman, whoever she is, is not your sister. She is a total stranger who will feel entitled to half of your father’s estate.”
Depending on the circumstances, Michael was sometimes more attorney, sometimes more mediator. Right now, behind closed doors in his office, the corner office he’d worked eighty hours a week to get (the elder Whitman did not believe in nepotism and grudgingly made Michael a partner only when he had to concede the old adage about the chip and the block), he was both of these things, when what Rebecca wanted, needed was more boyfriend.
“Straight talk here, Rebecca. Your dad is worth over a million dollars. You want to see half disappear into the hands of someone you know nothing about? She could be mentally unbalanced. Or a junkie. Or just a greedy bitch. You wouldn’t be wrong to excise her from your mind. Like your father did.”
Rebecca could not seem to do that, not that she was trying. She already had a picture formed in her mind of the half sister. Despite her own brown hair and her father’s, she saw blond hair. Yet brown eyes, like hers and her father’s. A sweetness in the face. A need for an older sister.
Rebecca, the classic lonely-only, hadn’t stopped asking for a sister. Every birthday, every Christmas, every Hanukkah, until she was old enough to understand about God and biology and luck, she asked. She’d received pets instead. A betta fish, a guinea pig, a white rabbit, the sad-faced beagle named Bingo. All that time, all these years, she did have a sister. A sister walking and talking and breathing the air.
“Take the rest of the day off,” he said, hugging her. “Go be with your dad. He needs you more than the Frittauers right now.”
Leave the Frittauers in the hands of Marcie Feldman? No. They were hers. They were the one couple in the past several months who seemed to truly calm down in Rebecca’s presence. At the tail end of the mediation process, the Frittauers had been married for six years and separated two months ago over Edward Frittauer’s admitted and ongoing affair with an administrative assistant at his firm. An administrative assistant who was now pregnant with his child. Gwendolyn had been willing to overlook the affair until Edward mentioned he now had an extra mouth to feed and that perhaps little Angelina could attend a summer camp for less than ten thousand next year. When Edward Frittauer came to pick up their five-year-old daughter for scheduled “Daddy time,” the fighting and screaming and accusations between Mommy and Daddy in the doorway of their co-op led little Angelina Frittauer to hyperventilate. She was rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctor, a former client of Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman, handed the Frittauers Harold Goldberg’s card.
Rebecca had done much of the preliminary work with the couple, sitting across from them at the large square table in conference room 1, gathering information to see where they stood on the major issues: division of property, child support, and visitation. During the first five minutes of their first meeting, both Frittauers said that nothing mattered more than their daughter and her well-being; they wanted to divorce as calmly and as amicably as possible. That sentiment lasted for another minute, until Michael Whitman walked into the room with his briefcase. Suddenly, Edward wanted to sell the co-op, which Gwendolyn Frittauer wanted to keep. Suddenly, Gwendolyn wanted every-other-week visitation for Edward, and Edward to split the week. Suddenly, they were screaming again.
Until Michael left Rebecca to “redirect the tension.” She’d so appreciated his trust, his faith in her, when everyone else in the office had started expecting very little. In less than ten minutes, she had the couple quiet and verbally agreeing that Gwendolyn would live in the co-op and Edward would have weekends with their daughter. Something about Rebecca, something in her looks or her manner, seemed to appeal to Gwendolyn Frittauer. Apparently, she reminded Gwendolyn of her favorite cousin, who’d moved to California years ago. And when Gwendolyn was calm, Edward was calm.
Because of the Frittauers, Rebecca had gotten back some of her standing in the office. She wasn’t the “screwup” anymore.
The Frittauers would have been Rebecca’s parents had her mother known about the affair. Norah Strand had been such a proud person. She wouldn’t have stood by her man. She would have kicked him out. Rebecca was sure of it. It was clearly why her father had protected his secret.
The Frittauers were here for their final meeting to draw up the separation agreement. Rebecca would lead them through it before Harold Goldberg came in to finalize everything. Then she would go find that red leather case containing a key to a safety-deposit box she wasn’t sure she wanted to open.
two
Gwendolyn Frittauer reminded Rebecca of a younger version of Glenda Whitman. She was forty, yet had past-bra-strap-length bouncy blond hair. She wore heavy makeup, including iridescent lipstick and bronzer. Her eyes were remarkably close together, giving her the look of a ferret, yet there was a sweetness in her face and a sadness Rebecca had picked up on right away. Gwendolyn sat across the square table from her husband, who alternated between staring out the window and glancing a
t his watch.
“Afraid you’ll miss an ultrasound appointment?” Gwendolyn snapped at him. “Oh, wait a minute—that’s right. You don’t go to those things.”
Okay. This was going to be a long session. Rebecca sat down at the head of the table and opened her case file, the one that had accompanied her on the subway to Junior’s last night for her father’s cheesecake. But instead of making a quick review of what was already in her head, she envisioned Pia Jayhawk, vampish-looking, a man stealer, a home wrecker, lying on the obstetrician’s table, no one waiting with her to see the heartbeat, the tiny growing form of a baby. Focus, Rebecca, she reminded herself. Stop thinking about Dad.
Mr. Frittauer was examining his nails. “You won’t bait me, Gwendolyn. So don’t waste your bad breath.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Rebecca rushed to say. Redirect the tension. “I recall you both liked the French roast.”
Gwendolyn snorted. “Bad breath. Is that the best you can come up with, Edward? Sad.”
“I’m dying for a cup of coffee,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t I have our receptionist bring in a carafe and a tray of pastries, and we’ll get started on the last few items.” She picked up the phone to buzz Jane.
“Fine, whatever,” Edward said to Rebecca, then turned his attention to his wife. “I repeat: You won’t bait me, Gwen. I’ve been attending Buddhist meditation classes.” Edward did look less … buttoned up. He usually wore wire-rimmed glasses and precisely combed hair; today, the glasses were gone, the red hair showed signs of gel, and the Rockports had been replaced by Italian black leather.
The Secret of Joy Page 2
