“Isn’t he perfect?” Caroline had said, and Renee could only nod. She had leaned over her nephew’s small body and observed his beauty and newness, but she could not bring herself to touch him.
Renee left the NICU without touching Baby Girl Dustin. She texted Fiona: be there soon.
Outside, the dusk smelled like frost and chestnuts, and Renee breathed to clear the chemical stench of the hospital from her lungs. With her arm outstretched, she walked one block, two, but no cabs stopped. It was that busy early-evening hour when people had plans, places to be. Renee was considering how long it would take to walk all the way to Kyle’s apartment when her phone buzzed. She was expecting Fiona again, but the number was unknown. Renee answered; it was Jonathan Frank, her patient with the cut hand.
Renee explained that she was late, she couldn’t talk. She’d already overstayed her shift and would be late for her brother’s engagement party, and now she couldn’t find a cab and would probably have to walk or wait for a crosstown bus, which would take nearly as long.
“Why didn’t you leave earlier?” Jonathan asked. “I thought I was your last patient.”
“I had to check on someone in the NICU,” Renee answered. “A new baby.”
“What happened?”
Renee paused. What had happened? Why had she visited a baby who was not her patient, whom she had not treated, to whom she had no connection whatsoever? Renee told Jonathan about the parents’ entrance to the ER, the failed home birth, the preventability of certain situations. Why were people so stupid? she asked him. Why did they put themselves and the people they loved at risk? She was talking about the home birth, but more than that she was talking about Joe. She never mentioned his name, of course, and this man Jonathan Frank didn’t know anything about her, didn’t know about her father’s death, didn’t know she had a younger brother whom she felt sometimes she’d done more to raise than their mother had. That her kid brother had grown into a man who appeared in all material respects successful and happy and blessed and yet who carried around within himself a sense of absence and loss, and for whatever reasons—he refused therapy, he didn’t talk about it with friends, he liked to preserve the illusion of strength—this emptiness had become his core. Renee remembered Joe’s fury with the fireplace poker on the day of their father’s funeral. Part of Joe was still that boy, still raging through the yellow house, still destroying the image of the family that would never exist again.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “About the baby.”
“Thank you,” Renee replied.
She wondered who he thought she was. The kind of woman who swooned over babies? Maybe she should tell him a story: Once, Renee had gone fishing with her father on the Long Island Sound. He’d rented a cruiser, a big boat, but he’d taken only Renee with him. Just you and me kid, she remembered him saying in a funny, scratchy voice that seemed an imitation of someone, though she didn’t know who. The voice had momentarily confused Renee, made her wonder if perhaps her father expected a certain kind of response. She didn’t want to disappoint him, not on such a momentous day, and so she’d bounded aboard and with concentration began to thread worms onto the hook. She sat in the sun with her father, who had packed salami sandwiches, her favorite, and cans of Coke, and she held that fishing pole until her arms ached, and she’d wished the day would never end. She was nine years old then, maybe ten.
“When will they know about the baby?” Jonathan asked. “I mean, the long-term effects?”
“Well, it could be tomorrow,” answered Renee. “Or it could be years. This kind of early trauma, we don’t know when or how it might show up.”
She thought about her father and that day of fishing, the bloody worms on the hook, the cans of sweet Coke, and about her brother Joe. I can stop, Renee. Don’t worry, he’d said to her. Why didn’t people understand the responsibility that came with being the subject of someone’s love? It made her so angry. How easy it would have been for that man and woman to keep their baby safe. How easy it would be for Joe to stop what he was doing. He wasn’t an addict, not the strung-out, desperate kind. Maybe he was addicted now, but it was pure laziness. Pure stupid indulgence and privilege. He could get high when and how he wanted, and so he did. It felt good, Joe had told her, like excitement, like sex, almost like falling in love.
“You’re a fast walker,” Jonathan said then. “I can barely keep up.”
Renee stopped. “What did you say?”
“You walk very fast.”
“How do you—” Renee looked around her. Directly across the street stood Jonathan Frank, holding his phone to his ear. He waved at her with his good hand.
There was some traffic on the street, and at that moment a white van rolled past, obscuring Jonathan, but then it passed and there he stood, smiling at her. Still waving. Renee waited for the light to change, and then she crossed the street.
Chapter 7
Kyle Morgan lived in one of those mammoth gray stone buildings on Central Park West that evoked scenes of women in dresses nipped at the waist and men wearing spats. A timeless building that would outlast us all. I’d been here before—Kyle and Joe had been friends since college—but the gravity of the place still stunned me every time.
The doorman wore a long black coat and gave a slight bow before leading me through a dim marble reception to the old-fashioned elevator with its brass buttons and clanking, accordion-style door. Up, up, up we went, the tinkling sound of music and conversation growing louder as we ascended. At the top the door opened directly onto Kyle’s apartment.
Inside was an expanse of richly polished wood floor and rugs patterned with giant yellow roses and blue, heady hydrangeas. Paintings hung on every wall, each lit by a brass oblong light. A young woman wearing a tuxedo handed me a champagne flute. Waiters circulated with trays of pink and white and green food: mini lobster rolls, salmon sashimi, shrimp on bamboo spears. Somewhere, someone played a piano. I saw no one I knew, just men in suit jackets and jeans, women in tight complicated dresses, all of them buffed and polished to a high shine. Along the far wall stretched a wide bank of windows filled with the greenery of Central Park.
I was nervous. Standing on the edge of Joe’s party, I worried about the poem I had written. Was it too sentimental or not sentimental enough? Too edgy, too sexual? Caroline had clapped her hands at the end, but I didn’t know what Joe would think, or Sandrine.
I scanned the crowd looking for Noni and Renee. And where was Joe? In the week since helping Caroline in Hamden, I’d wondered often about my brother. He hadn’t returned any of my calls or e-mails. I wanted to believe that Renee was overreacting, that Joe was fine, but small incidents kept creeping to mind: Joe late for a lunch, Joe distracted, Joe and Sandrine talking in urgent whispers. His bloodshot eyes, uneasy smile, and always the same explanation: I’m tired, that’s all. Just tired.
Finally I spotted my brother. He stood behind an ornately carved and painted screen pushed close to the wall. The screen created a small shadowed space, inside of which Joe was talking to a woman. I saw them only because of my position beside the elevator; from all other points in the room, the screen would have shielded them from view. I did not appreciate this at the time. Only later.