6

The room was packed. And as massive as Ben’s office was, getting a place like that packed required a veritable shitload-full of people packing it to get the packing done.

Ben had arranged it all the night before; meaning that he’d made a few preliminary calls and let the folks who did the leg work arrange the rest. His first call was to the lawyers. Not that Ben put much stock in lawyers as a rule, but you had use their services to button up the details, to legalese the contracts, to make agreements safe and equitable for all concerned. Gerald Kellerman was the Main Man of the firm that represented Atherton, a guy not all that used to getting after-hours calls. And thus his voice was hoarse and his diction halting when he clicked on his phone after seven rings:

“Hullo?” Lucky for him it wasn’t some evil-tempered justice on the line who liked to hold folks in contempt.

“Gerry?”

“Yes?—Uh, umm—Ben? Is this Ben?” Kellerman was doubtlessly in the middle of a dream. From his tone, it was a nice dream he wasn’t all that happy to be wakened from. “What is it, Ben? What’s wrong?—Uh, what time is it?”

“I don’t know—midnight, I think, maybe a little after. Look, Gerry—I’m gonna need you guys tomorrow at the office—my office. And before that….”

“Before? How before?”

“Like now, like right away. I’m gonna need some papers drawn up now—or before eight in the morning, anyway, so you guys are gonna have to saddle up your horses pretty quick. It’ll be the standard Atherton acquisition contract, so since we’re gonna need it early, best thing would be to call your team right now, if you don’t mind doing it, and get things started ASAP.”

“Yeah, but…. You mean…. You don’t actually mean you want it started now, do you? Like right now? Tonight?” It was that comfortable dream, Ben thought, something Gerry wanted to slip back into in the worst of all possible ways.

“Yep, that’s what I mean. That’s why I pay you guys the big bucks, isn’t it? The papers’ll need to be on my desk by eight in the morning at the latest so our house staff can go through them before everybody signs. If you don’t mind then, Gerry, call whoever you need to call and get it done. Which means now would seem to be the most auspicious time, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but … but….”

“I’ll email the details on the entity we’re buying into—Just use the standard Atherton agreement, same as always, 80-20—you know the drill. And listen to me, Gerry—be very careful to protect the interests of the kids involved. Treat them like family, you hear? I made this one nice Gujerati kid an oral promise, and I want the two of them—him and his majority-holding buddy—I want them treated like our own.”

“OK, Ben, fine—but … kids, did you say?”

“Yeah, it’s all in the email; I’ll send it right away. Make sure you spell the names the way I write them. See you tomorrow, Gerry. And make sure everything gets to my office by eight on the nose and the contract reads just the way I want it to—you got that all down?”

Sure, he mumbled. And Ben thought: Hell, old Gerry should be sure, considering what his law firm raked in each and every year from Atherton for the minimum of legal work their team turned in. The forms, the agreements, the duplicates and triplicates that needed to be signed—they’d be there on time, all right, ready and waiting—

And they were, of course. Everything meticulously stacked on Ben’s big desk waiting for completion when the two boy-geniuses arrived. Carole was sitting there too. Every day, just like clockwork, Ben’s hyper-protective wife would show up at the Red Bank office to bring him lunch or snacks or just to say hello; then, having left, she’d phone him two or three times more before he made it home—just to make sure he was OK. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he’d take the call, and take the time to answer her at length.

“How are things going, sweetie?” she’d ask, or something equivalent to that.

“Great, hon, and how about you?” was what he’d habitually answer.

“OK. Just out with the girls, you know. At the club. Charlotte’s here too. She says to say hello to Ed.”

She’d bring him in a piece of cheesecake, then pester him next morning to get his sugar checked. Always pestering like that, but in a caring way. If he got a headache, she’d make him an appointment with the premier neurosurgeon in the state. He wouldn’t go, of course. Secretary Cindy would call and cancel: Cancel a date with the cardiologist, once, when he got an episode of heartburn after dinner at the Thai place out on Highway 36; cancel with a leading pulmonologist, another time, when he caught a little cold.

It was Carole’s way, but it was understandable, considering what she’d been through in her developmental years. Dramatic loss does that to a sweet young kid in her teens, and she was just a college freshman when Lizzie’s death occurred. Just eighteen, never touched by loss, when she went downstairs that awful night for milk and cookies, and found her darling older sister lying in her life’s blood on the kitchen floor, crumpled double like a broken doll. And then to see that kid, that sad, demented sicko with a dagger in his hand, to watch him walk out through the door as calm as some delivery boy who’d pocketed a nice big tip, leaving a handprint of Lizzie’s blood smeared on the knob, blank-faced, emotionless, as casual and matter-of-fact as if he’d done this unoffending family an act of good—What does that do to a girl as gentle and naïve as Carole was back then? She’d lost her dearly beloved sister and best-of-friends—and in so horrible a way. So Carole’s being overly protective was understandable, alright. And who in the world needed overprotecting more than poor despondent Ben?

Maybe not now anymore so much, but back then, he sure needed all the help he could get from everyone around. And Carole had given it in spades. As horrid as that hellish scene had been, as much as she’d been traumatized, poor Carole had been the steady one that night. She’d summoned the strength—from God knows where—to call the medics and the cops, to hold her dying sister’s head while the last few drops of blood were draining out, to drag her folks from bed, soothe their hysteria—And then, the hardest thing of all, she later said, to make that dreadful call to Ben.

She was sobbing on the line, so much so that it was hard for him to understand: “Ben—Bennie, we need you here. It’s Carole, Bennie. Please come. Please come right away.”

So he’d thrown on whatever clothes were lying near at hand and run. He ran out to the car, ran it full throttle the sixteen blocks between his house and Lizzie’s, not knowing what he was running toward, not thinking, just moving fast; fast. There were police cars there—two, maybe three; he couldn’t remember anything but the lights flashing blue and red. So he’d left the car in the middle of the street still running and run breathless into the house. First thing he saw was Carole, drenched in blood, and he thought—he feared—that it was Carole who’d been hurt, because he liked Carole—liked her quite a lot, in fact … until he saw the ash-gray face lying in her lap. He couldn’t remember much of anything after that.

So he’d kept on running till he’d run clear away. He couldn’t help but run away, bumming his way around the world on a couple thousand bucks in cash, doing his best to die, what with the case of typhoid in Turkey, the bouts of malaria in Burma and Nepal, the hepatitis in Kenya that nearly did his liver in. After six months, he came around a little bit; the fevers went away. Death wouldn’t take him yet, however hard he tried. So once his head was clear, he made a call, collect, for he was freshly out of funds. He called his parents first to say he was OK, that he’d survived every mortal ailment a person could contract. And then he called Carole. Sure she would accept the charge. Turned out, she was the only one he really had to talk to in the end.

When he got back home they bonded. Who knows why? Maybe the things he’d loved in Lizzie were genetically similar to the things he found in her little sister’s kindly soul. Maybe it was just their mutual loss, their mutual grief, their mutual commiseration that linked them so firmly—Who can say? And as for her, as for Carole, maybe what she came to love in Ben was what her precious sister Liz had loved. Maybe shared genetics give rise to shared attractions. Whatever, however, the marriage had worked out well enough for both. Ben had suffered a grievous wound that couldn’t ever heal, but Carole had made herself into a bandage. And the bandage, so far, thank God, had held.

“You want something special for dinner?” she asked from the chair facing his desk, as he sat fingering the contracts the lawyers had obediently brought in.

“No, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve got in the house is fine.”

“OK, I’ve got some fresh fish in the fridge; I’ll have Betty make something good with that—So how about lunch? You want me to bring you something in?”

“No, no, Cindy can order me something if I’m hungry later on, or maybe Eddie and I might run out for a bite—maybe take our two computer geniuses across the street for some Italian if they’re so inclined. Don’t worry, Carole. Jesus—you worry too much about me, you know? Relax, OK? Chill, my darling girl—Hey, once we button up this deal, maybe you and I and Charlotte and Eddie can take a couple days and fly over to Bermuda for a little fun—How does that sound?”

OK, she said, and shrugged, and left, giving her much beloved husband a parting kiss on the cheek, and getting to the elevator just as Eddie and the wonder-kids were stepping out. The first one to pass her was a slender, pleasant-looking youth with olive skin and exotic features—this must be the Indian kid Ben said he talked to on the phone last night. He smiled at her, and she reflexively smiled back. And once he moved on toward the door to Ben’s office, nattily dressed and personable toward the three or four people in the corridor standing there to greet him—she turned her head and got a gander at the other one. And when she got that one transitory look, that quick, fleeting first impression of this eerie, awkward ‘other one’, well that was it: Whatever remnant of a smile persisted on her face evaporated instantly, and her habitually sanguine heart just dropped.

Memories poured forth that she had for ages managed to suppress—that blank face, those hollow eyes, the stumbling gate. That boy! That night! That blood! Intolerable enough memories—God! Such things as made your stomach turn.

But it wasn’t her memories that gave her pause there, standing at the elevator on her way down to the limo. No, it wasn’t hers, but rather Ben’s memories that got her worries up. He’d see that face too, just as she had, and have those same dark recollections she was having, and they’d stay with him for weeks.

He’d be a wreck when he got home that night, no less than she would. They wouldn’t talk about it—It was too painful to talk about. But one look in each other’s eyes, and they would both understand what they had witnessed that day.

It would take a month or more for both of them to get back to their old blissfully forgetful selves.