BRENNAN RUBBED HER EYES AS HER STOMACH GROWLED. She’d barely eaten anything since “brunch” with her mother and brother. She was two and three-quarters inches through her review of a threeinch binder of documents, the paper embodiment of about one hundred fifty emails and attachments relating to an asset-purchase agreement that her client allegedly breached by failing to make a contingent payment. A team of junior associates had culled about twenty-five thousand emails down to these one hundred fifty. The good news was that the contingency that required the payment had not been met. The bad news was that the emails indicated that her client may have massaged its reported earnings to ensure that it would not meet the contingency.
She picked her highlighter back up and marked some troubling text. The clock on her computer screen told her that it was 8:30 p.m. She was in her ninth hour of work on a Sunday. Her desk phone rang with a quiet, electronic beep. The caller’s name appeared on the display. Although she would usually hit the speaker button, particularly on a Sunday in the office, she picked up the receiver.
“How’d you know I was in?” she asked.
“It’s you,” he said. “When’s the last time you weren’t here crushing it on a Sunday night?”
Even Brennan didn’t know the answer to that question.
“What do you need?”
“Do you have time to swing by my office?”
“Just wrapping something up. Will you be around in twenty minutes?”
“See you then.” He hung up the phone.
Brennan sped through the last quarter inch of documents in about ten minutes and made a note to reread them in the morning. She stood up, her hamstrings tight from sitting so long, and yawned. She scanned her office, stacking papers she would need the next day and tossing the remainder into two different stacks: shredding and regular trash. By the time she was done, her desk was almost clear except for her to-do list, the three-inch binder, and a small stack of assorted papers. She made it a point not to leave the office cluttered. As far as offices went, it was an ascetic’s cell. She hung no pictures on the wall; no personal books or clippings or much of anything decorated the space. There was a drawer with an extra pair of shoes and stockings, as well as various toiletries. A spare suit and sweater hung from a hook on the back of her door.
She stopped in the restroom on the way to Sean’s office on the thirty—third floor, which was two floors above hers. She had seen some people around the office earlier—silent apparitions down a hallway or moving past her door—but the place was empty now. She wore leggings and an old sweater. Comfortable, but shabby. Fine enough for Sean. She gave a quick knock on his open door as she walked in.
He stood behind his desk with his back to the door, arranging a set of files on the credenza in front of his window. Past Sean’s reflection in the window, Manhattan stretched out to the north, draped in lights underneath a cloudy, purple night. He wore expensive jeans and a zip-up hoodie that probably cost five hundred dollars in an effort to look like it cost ten. Brennan couldn’t see his feet but knew that he was wearing three-hundred-dollar sneakers. He was forty-four but could pass for thirty-five. He took his daily personal training sessions and nightly moisturizing very seriously.
Sean glanced at her reflection in the window and without turning said, “Take a seat. Gimme one sec to finish this.”
Brennan leaned against one of the two leather chairs facing his desk but didn’t sit. The office was unchanged since her last visit. A sleek, modern desk—picked by a decorator—paired with an ergonomic designer chair dominated the space. A leather couch sat against the right-hand wall. Four photos of Sean’s wife and daughters hung in a two-by-two block over the couch. Sean’s smile dazzled like a searchlight, sweeping across the room as he turned to her.
“Aren’t you going to take a seat?”
“How long is this going to take? I was planning on heading home,” she said.
“Oh.” The smile switched off, replaced by his serious face, equally handsome but like a warm, dark barroom—full of shadows, significance, and comfort. “First, what do you think about donating to McCarthy’s campaign?”
Tim McCarthy was a former assistant district attorney running for the big job—Manhattan DA—on a law-and-order platform.
“Isn’t there a firm policy on hitting employees up for donations?”
Sean rolled his eyes and smiled again. “Come on, Bren. You and me are past those formalities. You’re basically already a partner.”
“I’ll think about it.” She knew she wouldn’t donate. McCarthy was a self-righteous blowhard. “What was the second thing?”
“I just got a new matter. I could use someone like you on it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Why not?” His eyes flickered from her face to the open door behind her.
“Do you want me to get the door?”
Sean shrugged, but then nodded twice. Brennan closed the door and turned back to Sean. “You know why this is a bad idea.”
“You’re overreacting. We make a great team.” Sean had brought Brennan onto the Reliant Tires case because of her trial experience. She accepted the assignment—she was up for partner—even though she hated the case and the client. “We kicked ass in that trial.”
“We got lucky. You don’t think it’s odd that nobody told the CEO they were going to redesign those tires in a way that decreased costs by five percent but increased the chance of failure by two hundred percent?”
“It was a routine design refinement, and you’re talking about a failure rate that was already well below one percent.”
“But it still put more people at risk.”
“Which may have factored into Reliant’s decision if anyone had known about it, particularly the CEO. Which is what the jury believed, because we’re a great team.”
He spoke with absolute conviction, but Brennan didn’t think he believed anything he was saying. Or maybe it was her own doubts she was projecting onto him.
“We’re not a good team. First,” Brennan said, “I don’t do mass torts.
Not interested in them. And it’s the only thing you do.”
“It’s not the only thing I do.”
“What’s your case about?”
“We represent Shingen Autos. Apparently, there may have been control issues with the manufacturing of their hybrid-engine batteries.”
“What issues?” she asked.
“Under certain conditions, the battery—which is actually a bank of smaller batteries—can overheat, causing battery acid leakage and fires.”
“What conditions does it take for this to happen?”
“In the affected units? The car has to be running. You know, like turned on.”
“Oh, is that all?” The question was rhetorical, but her follow-up wasn’t. “How many affected units?”
“Roughly three hundred thousand. It’s a great-selling car.”
“This is going to be a shit show.”
“That’s why I need your help.”
“No way. It’s a mass-tort case.”
“You sounded interested.” Sean hit her with his smile again, and she caught herself beginning to smile back.
“I’m not.” She crossed her arms, but not before brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Even if I was, we can’t work together.”
“Yes, we can. We get along great.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know that’s not the issue. I gotta get up to speed on that other case for Thomas Rabinowitz.”
“Okay. Fair enough. I just thought that it would be fun to keep working together.”
“No,” she said, gently.
He sighed and nodded.
“Anyway, I should get going,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “You heading home?”
“Yeah. I’m exhausted. Tough morning.”
Neither of them moved.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Brennan knew she should go but waited for him to come around his desk anyway. Before he got halfway, she walked over and embraced him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he said and kissed the top of her head. “I don’t know what you’re apologizing for.”
She craned her neck to look at him with his arms still wrapped around her. He wore his serious face. He leaned down and kissed her. He started to press himself against her but then pulled away.
“Unless you’re planning to take me with you,” he said, “we should stop. I’m getting excited.”
“Not tonight, Sean.”
Sean cocked an eyebrow and walked back behind his desk to look out the window again. She could see his face in the reflection. For a moment, and only in reflection, he was completely open, bare, searching for something. Or maybe she was imagining things.
“Well, don’t let me keep you,” he said.
Brennan walked out without looking back. Before she reached the elevator, she felt her phone vibrating in her purse. She expected it to be Sean calling to try to convince her to meet him somewhere, but it was Hunter.
“Everything okay?” she said, answering the call.
“Yeah. Mom called me and asked me to come over. She didn’t sound too hot.”
“Can you make it?”
“Yeah, I’m on my way there now. Don’t get pissy with me.”
She reflexively apologized, then thought better of it. “While you’ve been gone, I’ve had to deal with her—”
“I understand,” he said. “That’s not why I called.”
Fuck him for cutting her off. He didn’t understand the pressure she’d been under and the sacrifices she’d made while he disappeared halfway across the world. But she waited for him to get to the point. She was practiced in dealing with people who aggravated her.
“It’s about our father. She called me because she said she wanted to talk about him.”
“She hasn’t…I mean, she doesn’t talk about him.”
“I know.”
“I’ll meet—
#
—you there,” Brennan said before Hunter’s phone went dead.
He shoved it back into his pocket and walked into his mother’s building. The doorman remembered him and waved him through. At his mother’s door, he knocked. When she didn’t answer, he tried the knob. It was unlocked.
The heat hit him as soon as he was through the door, and he quickly shed his coat. A lamp in the living room cast the only light in the apartment.
“Mom?” he called out. He didn’t want to wake her if she was sleeping, but it was better than scaring her to death, which was a legitimate fear considering her condition. No answer, so he called out again. A deep seed of worry began to form well beneath his stomach—like his stomach was hanging out of his body and halfway to the floor. His heart pounded as he remembered the clinic in a sunbaked hamlet on the other side of the world and the smell of blood and bodies and good God, if he found his mother’s body—
“In the bedroom,” he heard, her low voice muffled further by her closed door.
He pushed the door open, chest heaving as he brought his breathing under control. His mother sat propped up in her bed underneath a thick comforter. Pill bottles, empty glasses, some medical gear, and a can of diet root beer covered the nightstand. Half buried under all the junk, a do-not-resuscitate order was taped to it. An episode of Seinfeld played on the small TV on top of a dresser. An empty chair for the home nurse who came for a few hours each day sat next to the bed.
The bedroom was warmer than the rest of the apartment. Sweat dampened his shirt.
“How’s it going, Mom?”
“Fine,” she said.
“You said on the phone you weren’t feeling well.”
“I’m not. But when someone asks, ‘How’s it going, Mom?’ I answer, ‘Fine.’ Don’t you?”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m sorry I fell asleep on you earlier.”
Hunter shook his head at the abrupt conciliation. She had always been like this, constantly switching moods, tacking heedlessly. The thought enraged him, but he swallowed the resentment like thick mucus and said, “You’re sick. I understand.”
She muted the TV with a remote, then sighed and sank into her pillows.
“I’m worried that the time is short, Hunter.”
“You’re going to beat this, Mom.”
“I meant lucidity, tonight, you ass. I took a pretty heavy painkiller while I was waiting for you. As soon as it kicks in, I’m going night night.” She looked down at herself, nearly lost in the bedding, then back at Hunter. Nothing about her illness diminished her eyes, alive with calculation, yet unreachable—like a party seen through a window. Hunter would have more luck reaching through the television screen and touching the face of Julia Louis-Dreyfus than comprehending whatever occurred behind his mother’s eyes.
“I’ve realized some things, lying here all day. Nothing but books and television shows I keep falling asleep to. I can’t finish anything. I just catch snippets of conversations, these little fragments of things. They’re in and out of my head. It’s like trying to catch a particular spot in the ocean, where the light is, and hold it in place.”
“I thought you said that you were lucid.”
“I’m trying to describe to you the feeling. So you understand what I’m telling you, where it comes from, and why it’s important. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”
Hunter sat in the small chair.
“I feel like I missed something. Something important. About your father,” she added after a pause. “Whether he did that thing they accused him of.”
She looked at him, same as she always had. Full of certainty.
“You and I both know that he did.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“He never denied it,” Hunter said, gripping the arms of the chair. “You told me that.”
“Yes, I told you he never denied it. That’s true.” Even in her state, Hunter marveled at her lawyer’s ability to parse her words. “But I don’t know.”
“Mom, it was thirty years ago.”
She shook her head like she was trying to shake some strands of hair from her face. He touched her forehead. It was hot and dry, like a shirt fresh from a dryer. He had a film of sweat on his forehead.
“Let me take your temperature.”
She grabbed his hand as he reached for the thermometer. “Stop it. When I’m done talking, you can do what you want. I’m coming to you. With this.”
Hunter pulled his hand back and nodded.
“When I think back to that time,” she said, “I feel like there’s so many things I barely remember. I don’t know if it’s the drugs or time or what. But so much is hazy or gone, like imprints in the carpet from furniture that’s been moved. Something was there, but I don’t remember what.”
The heat and his concern for his mother made it difficult to follow what she was trying to say.
“I think I remember your dad worked at a restaurant?”
“Yeah. When he was a kid.”
“No. I know that,” she said, impatiently. “But I feel like later, too.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t even know if I remember that.”
“But that’s not even important. It doesn’t change what he did.”
“I don’t know what’s important, though. I feel like maybe I told myself a story to make sense of everything that happened, or so that I could live with myself, with you two.”
“Mom, what are you saying? Are you saying you lied to us?” He wanted to believe it was the heat of the room searing his lungs, but his sweat turned cold. His heart hammered against his constricting chest.
“No! I would have never lied to you. Not about that.” She reached for his hand and missed. Hunter left her hand hanging from the side of the bed. “I let you and your sister make up your own minds. Maybe it’s the drugs, maybe it’s just coming to the end of things, but now I feel like I should have done something different. I don’t know what. Because I didn’t know. Because there was no way to know one way or the other. But I think I did a disservice to you both by letting you be so certain. I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t think straight enough to work it out.”
Hunter placed her hand back on her bed and gave it a squeeze. He couldn’t help but think of a corpse’s hand and couldn’t help but love it anyway.
“Mom,” he said. “You need to rest.”
She nodded and turned away. The reflected light from the television flickered in her eyes as she stared at the curtained window. Hunter waited until she fell asleep, then turned the television off.