He opened a new window on his computer and logged in to the bank account he had shared with Rachel. They’d separated their accounts after Frank told them to, with Toby transferring his direct deposit to the new account at the bank on the corner of his new apartment building. His computer still autologged in to the old account, though, and he thought maybe he could see where Rachel was and what she was doing if he could see where she was spending her money. He pulled up the page and clicked on the account login, and he was presented with a screen that said that his password or username was incorrect. He tried again. He got the same screen that said he had two more tries before the account was locked. He tried one more time, and now the screen said he had one more try. He tried one of the credit cards; same thing.
He closed his computer and indulged in a single “Fuck you, Rachel” in his head. His therapist, Carla, had been adamant that an inner monologue could be poisonous, and how an internal “Fuck you, Rachel” wouldn’t solve as many problems as it would create—problems that were all his, not hers, by the way. But fuck you anyway, Rachel, he thought. Like a cool drink of water.
* * *
—
AT NIGHT, HE continued to receive messages from Nahid, and with every nipple/lip/abdomen picture and double entendre, he thought what a crazy world this was, that he was in a deep torture-spiral of anxiety about where the hell his wife was—a spiral that he smiled through so as not to tip off his children—and he was sexting with a woman he’d never met as if everything were a-fucking-okay. He marveled for the millionth time that summer about how a person could be this miserable and bewildered, and this horny and excited, all at the same time. What a piece of work is man.
And during the days he would stare out at the beach and consider the block universe of the little stretch of land in front of the house, too. In the block universe, he is there, six summers before, the day they decided to buy this house and he took the kids to the sand while Rachel spoke to the real estate agent and then came outside and they hugged and kissed and he thought of those Syd Hoff books he used to read to the kids, the one about Sammy the Seal. Sammy the Seal leaves the zoo to go explore the world, and he goes to school and he goes to restaurants and it’s all fine, nothing great, until finally he happens upon a bathtub and he says, “Ah, here is a place!” And that was the thought Toby had that day on the beach: Ah, here is a place! She maybe felt this too in that moment, and they kissed. And then in the next frame of the block universe he’s playing Frisbee on that same beach with Hannah and he is once again thinking, Ah, here is a place! And Rachel comes out and screams at them for getting sandy after their showers and before they are supposed to go out to dinner.
Hannah was invited to a friend’s house Friday and Toby took Solly to drop her off. The girl’s mother, Roxanne Hertz, with her small mouth and her platinum hair and her indie rock seventies bangs, tried to pry from Toby how it was that Toby was in the Hamptons when according to the information they’d culled throughout the summer, Rachel had been the one to keep the house.
“I thought Rachel was supposed to be with them this week,” said Roxanne.
“She was, but she had to leave town for a bit,” Toby said.
Roxanne stood in the silence. She swayed her head, back and forth, ear to ear, like a metronome, and there was something hypnotic about the gesture that made him mirror it, too. No, he had to be strong. He lifted his head upright.
“So,” he said. “How’s the summer been for you guys?”
She smiled with half her face in wretched pity. “It just must be so hard for you all right now. Change is hard. I always say that.”
“It is.” He pursed his lips to keep them from talking. Roxanne was going to lose this particular game of chicken.
Roxanne seemed to understand that she had lost and sighed. “Well, you know how new relationships are. I’m sure you’ll get back into a routine.”
God, why wouldn’t this end? From out of the hallway, Roxanne’s third-grader, Max, emerged.
“Oh, hey, Max,” Toby said. “Solly’s in the car. Want to come say hi?”
Max looked at Roxanne. Roxanne’s eyes flashed at her son in anger. “Go say hi.” Then, to Toby, “Why don’t you bring Solly in and keep him here for a while? He and Hannah could stay for dinner. She and Brielle have a lot to catch up on!” She smiled benevolently, which pissed him off a little, for its implication that it was hard for him to have his children with him (false) or that he was suffering visibly (fine, true). Toby said he’d ask Solly, and he went outside and waited a full minute before pulling Solly out of the car and telling him that it was time for a playdate with Max.
“You can text me when you’re ready for them to come home,” Toby told her.
“She still doesn’t have a phone?” Roxanne asked. “Toby, the girl needs a phone!” She said that last thing in some kind of mockery or imitation of something, like a Groucho Marx voice. He remembered that Rachel had once said about Roxanne that she could only confront people or ask for something if she was doing a weird voice.
“She’s getting one for her birthday.” He thanked Roxanne and smiled and told her he’d return the favor next time.
“It’s no favor!” she called as he walked away. “We love having them over!”
He got into the car and stared straight ahead. Roxanne had said “new relationships.” “New relationships are hard,” something like that. He had nodded and smiled through it, since it felt like an expression of concern, and he had just wanted to get the hell out of there. But now the phrase itched in his head. New relationship? Was he receiving new information? The car was suddenly unbearably hot and he realized he hadn’t started it yet.
As he drove the twenty-five miles per hour one was allotted down Dune Road, he thought how Roxanne, who was not particularly close with Rachel, had known she’d be here this week. They had made plans for the girls to spend time together. Maybe the new relationship between Rachel, a now-single mother, and her daughter was hard? Or Rachel and Toby? Or Toby and Hannah? He twisted this scenario into a hundred poses before he allowed himself to turn and look Roxanne’s most obvious implication in the eye: that her seething cauldron of rage and ice and heartlessness had been penetrated to its molten core layer by another. That not only was Rachel gone, but she was gone with a man. That poor fucker, Toby thought.
But his arm hair stood up: Something real was happening here. That perhaps the always thin, unraveling tether she had to them had finally broken and she was adrift in space somewhere—somewhere, but where? She was no longer answering to him. She was no longer answering him at all. Panic washed through him. She was now an inner ear problem, something affecting his balance. His proprioception was off. He didn’t know how to feel about her because he didn’t know where to direct his aim anymore. He didn’t know where she was, and he no longer knew what she was capable of.
He pulled into the driveway. The house looked deadly. Inside, it was empty and quiet, and he stood still for a minute at the doorway. When he was young, he would become terrifically scared in the dark when his parents and sister were asleep. If he had to get up to get water or go to the bathroom, he moved as quickly as he could, humming to himself the whole time, so that he could never really hear the quiet. He was afraid if it was too quiet, he would hear what was beneath the quiet—ghosts moaning or whatever. He didn’t want to know. But now, standing in his ex-wife’s home, he was brave. He made himself as still as possible, thinking if it was quiet enough, she would somehow appear. He stayed that way for a good five minutes, just standing there in the quiet. Then he took his clothing off right there in the living room, and went outside and jumped naked into the sparkling water of the pool of the house into which he was technically breaking and entering.
* * *
—
SUNDAY MORNING CAME and Toby knew that the traffic would get worse and worse on a weekend like this (that must have been at least part of
the source of his mounting dread, right?), so he packed them all up, hating himself for how meticulously he left the kitchen and made the beds, and drove them home.
“Where are we going now?” Solly asked as they drove through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. “Can we have dinner at Tony’s?”
“Let’s go to EJ’s,” Toby said. EJ’s was a diner-style not-diner on Third Avenue that served twenty-dollar pancakes.
“Breakfast for dinnerrrrrrrr!” Solly hollered.
He looked at Solly in the rearview mirror and saw again how easy it was to make him happy. Hannah was scowling out the window with her arms crossed. Toby said, “But first we’re going to get your sister a phone.” He looked in the rearview once more and saw Hannah come alive with something that looked like love once again. It was cheap love, purchased with blood money, but he didn’t care. He’d take it.
Afterward, Toby thought he’d spend the night showing Hannah how to use the phone, but of course she already knew. She already had an Instagram account, and Toby would have liked to talk to somebody about whether it was a good thing for an eleven-year-old to have those things, but Rachel was never someone to ask, even when you knew where she was. Toby followed Hannah on Instagram, and her posts always screamed a deficit in confidence. They fished for compliments. They bragged in ways that were false. All this made him want to put her on his lap and rock her and sing her to sleep.
He got a new text from Nahid, asking if they were finally getting together. She was wearing a gold beaded necklace in the picture that accompanied the question. She’d never sent a picture of her face, but this one at least included her neck and a scrap of chin. The necklace hung off her neck, and was strewn down her breasts and around the lace embellishment on a white bra. Fuuuuuuck.
I still have my kids, he texted.
She texted back with a gif of Alejandra Lopez crying, a scene from Presidentrix, Alejandra’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical about Edith Wilson, who secretly ran the country after her husband, Woodrow Wilson, had a stroke. This gif had her literally, defiantly, miserably ripping up the Treaty of Versailles as she sobs over her husband’s bed.
Alejandra was a client of Rachel’s. Trigger warning, Toby wanted to write back.
He was going to cancel on Nahid again. It didn’t feel right to leave the kids just now. He was going to cancel on her. But he looked at that picture again and fuuuuuuck. The part of him that could think clearly could also think angrily and hornily. And that gif—sent almost as a reminder of how tangled Rachel still was in every move he made. No. He wasn’t having it. No matter where Rachel was, no matter what she was doing, she was no longer going to mess with his life.
He wrote back that yes, they were finally going to meet. Could she do tomorrow? She could.
HIM: Can I take you to the new French place on Third? Can I take you to the old French place on Lex?
HER: [Purple devil emoji]
HIM: Does purple devil emoji mean Third? Or Lex?
HER: How about just at your place?
And in his head, in rapid fire:
Holy shit oh my God yes
Is she going to rob me
Fuck you, Rachel
There is no such thing as sex that is this easy
That was the thought that stayed with him. There just isn’t. He’d had sex with women immediately on dates. He’d talked dirty to women and ended up having phone or FaceTime sex. But he’d never been literally and plainly invited over for sex. Maybe she was a prostitute? Maybe this was a scam? He hadn’t seen her face, he realized. What if this was a joke? What if this was one of his colleagues? It wasn’t. He calmed himself: It wasn’t. He was spiraling.
HIM: Ah, my kids will be home. I wish I could. Badly.
There was brief silence and his heart was in his throat, but then she wrote: You can come here. 9 pm. Don’t be late.
She gave him an address on Seventy-seventh Street on the West Side and he gave her a [purple devil emoji] back. You know, someone could rob you even inside their home.
HER: You’re not going to rob me, are you?
Right, okay, but that was exactly the kind of text he’d send if he planned to rob someone: He’d get in front of it. He scrolled back up to look at her pictures, then closed out of her message. He thought about texting Joanie. She’d babysat for him before; it wasn’t unreasonable for a doctor to hire a resident or a fellow to babysit (or do research, or do personal-assistant work). But Joanie seemed too familiar with him lately, the way she addressed him, whatever it was in their relationship that made her at least think of him as his first name, and he worried about that. So he texted the yoga teacher/performance artist who had babysat for the kids a couple of times.
He finally turned to face the nagging in his chest. He had no permanent babysitter. Now that they were back, he realized that he could return them to day camp, which ended at three, but honestly, this was untenable. He wanted to call Mona; he wanted to show up wherever she was right now (Queens? Staten Island?) and tell her what came over him, how sorry he was, how she was the glue holding this family together or some such. She would understand. She knew what it was like to be brought to madness by Rachel—she had to. She’d been working for them for almost twelve years.
But he couldn’t. This was Rachel’s mess to clean up. She was the reason he was so hair-trigger. And firing Mona was the right thing to do. It was, right? Hours of porn! He had an idea. He went into his bedroom and called the camp director at the sleepaway camp to see if there was room in the fourth-grade bunk, too. The director said yes, but it was too late to enroll.
“I’m having some extenuating circumstances here,” Toby said.
The director was quiet.
“My wife and I, we just had a separation, and I feel like it would really be good for the kids to have some distance from home right now.”
“I met your son on the tour. He seemed pretty adamant that he didn’t want to go to camp. We don’t want to create a situation—we have so many kids here who think they are ready for camp and aren’t. The ones who don’t even think they’re ready, well…”
“The tour was in April. Things change.”
“So he wants to come now?”
“I’d really like to give him the option.”
“Let me discuss with the division director. I’ll call you back as soon as we connect.”
He put down his phone and stared out his bedroom window for a minute before he stood up and went into the living room, which was dark, except for the glow illuminating Hannah’s face from her new phone. He entered Solly’s room to read him a chapter book they’d been reading every night about a boy who is abducted by his teachers, all of whom were secretly aliens all along.
“I bet that could happen,” Solly said.
“You never know.”
Toby shut off Solly’s lamp and started scratching his back. He took a breath and dared himself before saying, slowly, “I think you would love camp.” Solly stopped breathing in the dark. Caution, Fleishman. “It’s a shame you don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want to be away from you and Mom.”
“That’s okay. You can stay home. I’d never force you to go.” Toby began scratching Solly’s arm like he liked. “But it’s just really cool. They have movie nights. Max is going. Jonah is going. It’s just for a month. But you have to do what you feel like when you’re ready. Don’t let anyone force you into anything.”
“Right.”
“Do you know they have an archery program there?”
“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “I saw when we visited.”
“Yeah, it’s usually for the older grades, but this year they’re letting fourth-graders try it.”
“Really? Well, it’s too late anyway.”
It was wrong. It was terrible. He shouldn’t do this. But if he could just g
et Solly to go away for a bit, Rachel would come home and the kids would never have to know what was happening. And if she wasn’t home in a month, he’d deal with it. But he needed to buy some time. This was for Solly’s own good.
“Of course, the decision is yours. It just might be that everyone comes back from camp and they’re talking about stuff and you feel left out.”
Solly considered this. He looked up at Toby in the dark. “Maybe I should. Do you think I should?”
“I think you’d love it. I don’t want to make any decisions for you, but I think you’d love it.”
“And if I call you and I hate it?”
“I’ll pick you up. You don’t have to stay somewhere you don’t like. But Hannah will be there, and if you’re scared or homesick, you can always go talk to her.”
“Maybe I should,” Solly said.
Solly fell asleep but Toby kept scratching his arm.
* * *
—
BY MONDAY MORNING, Karen Cooper was number twelve on the transplant list, and still unresponsive. Toby met his fellows at the nurses’ station outside her room. They looked him hard in the face to see what today would be like for him and them, and he realized this and instantly felt bad about how angry he’d gotten at them. That was no way to teach, to scream at your students like that.
“How’s our patient?” Toby asked. They relaxed.
“No change,” Logan said. “Continued acute liver failure, normal signs of activity in the brain, but nothing upward.”
“How was your vacation, Dr. Fleishman?” Clay asked.
“It wasn’t really a vacation. More of a childcare issue.” Silence. They wanted blood, too. Well, they couldn’t have it. “It was fine.”
They entered Mrs. Cooper’s room. She was even yellower than she’d been. In the corner were two boys around Hannah’s age. Joanie introduced them as Jasper and Jacob Cooper, the patient’s twin sons, looking miserable as they played on iPads. David Cooper made them stand and shake Toby’s hand. David had spent the weekend reading WebMD and watching YouTube videos of people with Wilson’s disease and having his assistants compile dossiers about it. But he still didn’t understand that Wilson’s disease was tricky and rare, and that it was hard to diagnose, which was why so many people who had it found out about it late, and mostly when it got to this point, it was irreversible. They never heard that part, that there was damage already done. That a miracle would be her staying alive; restoring her back to who she had been was no longer on the menu of possible outcomes.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 14
