CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE ARCH OF CAMILLE BURDOT’S EYEBROWS RAISED AND LOWERED as she made a slow tour of his work. Each of his new pieces was clamped to its own easel along one wall of the gallery. As the damp patches under his arms spread, he concentrated on breathing. It was a bad day to forget deodorant.

He tried to see his work with an objective eye, which was hard, given everything he’d put into it since Toby’d been away. Since his night with Jess. Camille emitted occasional noises of what he hoped were approval but could just as easily have been disappointment. The pieces were interesting, at least he thought so. But if Camille didn’t, he’d wasted his time—and a lot of energy.

His mind wandered to Christmas morning, the heat banging against the radiator, the absence of Toby drowning out even that. Looking at the old Christmas albums had been masochistic. No matter how many more Christmases they’d have, he’d never get this one back. He’d been gloomy, self-indulgent, as he snipped up the worst Christmas photos—and the ones of Ellie—and used them in the piece Camille was now looking at.

“Very nice,” Camille announced, finally. “I will take all,” she said. Her smile was a twisted pout. “You will frame them.”

“You want all of them?” Maybe he’d misunderstood, with the accent and English being her second language. “All twenty?”

“So modest,” she said, with a wink that only a French woman could get away with. “Now go away. Back to work!”

When he hit the sidewalk, he ran west toward Chelsea Piers, not quite believing what was happening. He wasn’t used to feeling elated.

He dialed Ellie’s number and thankfully Toby answered.

“You’re just who I wanted to talk to. Guess what? The gallery lady liked all my work. She’s taking it all.”

“You rule, Dad,” Toby said. “Hey, Mommy and me are painting snow later. But I’m not going to use white.”

Ellie had given him a set of acrylic paints and an easel. “That’s a great idea, Tobe.”

Sean had decided that telling Toby about Calvin would wreck Christmas. He didn’t need to do that. He’d wait until Toby was home, where Sean could keep an eye on him and help him understand. It could take days, weeks, months for something like this to sink in.

“I just got to the basketball courts,” he told Toby. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in a few days.” He felt good as he strutted onto the court.

“Sean!” Walt and his buddies were warming up. “Get out here. We need your height.”

The other players didn’t look too intimidating. They were all a good ten or fifteen years older, most had guts, and fewer than half had full heads of hair.

“Meet the guys,” Walt said, and introduced Sean to an elite splinter group from Who’s Who that included the chief counsel for the New York Times, the minister of The First Presbyterian Church, the head of Orthopedics at the Hospital for Special Surgery, a bigwig at the ACLU, and a couple of hedge-fund guys.

The aging, overweight group wasn’t as pathetic as it looked. What they lacked in stamina and basic cardiovascular health, they made up in ball handling, fakes, and excellent use of all that extra body weight. Sean’s team squeaked out a victory, but he was going to be sore for days. At least he’d avoided injuries. The others hadn’t been so lucky. Bobby, the orthopedic surgeon, sat out with a bloody nose for the last twenty minutes, compliments of Gunther, one of the hedge-fund guys. Gunther was wiry and feral and his elbows flew around like Samurai swords. It was a miracle there’d been so few casualties.

“Who’s up for a drink?” Walt was sweaty, cheerful. “There’s a place just up the block.”

The others begged off with excuses ranging from board meetings to wives to a conference call with Japan.

“I’m in,” Sean said. Drinking afterwards was the best part of playing sports, as far as he was concerned.

The bar was designed to look like a roadside joint, but was packed with ambitious twenty-five-year-olds all trying to catch each others’ attention with a studied and animated avoidance. If this was the singles scene, Sean wanted no part of it.

He followed Walt into a booth and ordered an Anchor Steam. With twenty pieces in the Burdot show, Anchor Steam was now in his budget. Or would be soon. From now on, only the good stuff.

“Good game,” Sean said. “Those guys know what they’re doing.”

“In just about every way,” Walt said with a wink.

“Kind of a successful group,” he agreed.

“Compliments of Bradley.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He tried to imagine Kayla, Dylan, even Toby, as the future decision-makers of the country, the world, but that was still a ways away.

“When I got to Bradley in sixth grade, it freaked me out.” Walt took a sip of his beer. The happy hour white noise surrounding them was deafening. “All that money and power. I constituted the school’s token middle-class child.”

“Yeah right.”

“I didn’t say I was poor. But my family didn’t own islands and run corporations.”

Walt was getting more interesting by the minute. They had some things in common after all.

“In high school I finally figured out it was all about attitude. If you acted like you belonged, you did.” He raised his glass. “Good life lesson, actually.”

“Yeah, well I don’t know if Toby’ll be at Bradley for high school.” He hadn’t meant to drop that bomb.

Walt screwed his face into a question mark. “Of course he will be.”

Sean shrugged so it didn’t seem like such a big deal. “I don’t know if Bradley’s the right place for Toby. He’s a great kid and all they’re doing is giving him a hard time. I’m sick of every little thing being a major crisis.”

Walt was nodding. “You know they do that on purpose, right? It’s part of their thing.”

Sean shook his head. “Bradley has a thing?”

“It’s maddening,” Walt went on. “But I guess I understand why they do it.”

“Why they do what?”

“Okay, so people pay ridiculous sums of money to send their kids there, right?” He was hunched forward intently. “Why do they do that?”

“The education. Obviously.”

Walt was shaking his head. “So their kids don’t fall through the cracks. That’s the whole thing. People can send their kids to P.S. Bumfuck down the street for free. Will they get a decent education? Maybe. It’s hard to know. What we do know is that at Bumfuck, their child is simply one of the pack. There’s no way to keep track of who stinks at math, who can’t really read, who’s dyslexic. For thirty-five grand a year—no, thirty-eight this year—Bradley watches so closely they’re bound to find a problem. From what I’ve heard, parents get nervous if the school doesn’t find something.”

Yeah, he thought, they’re watching so hard they let a kid die.

“Personally, I think they’re just trying to get a feel for which parents are committed to making their kids the best they can be.” Walt allowed a self-conscious smile. “I guess that’s the cheerleader in me talking.”

“You really think I’m overreacting?” Had he misread the messages? Was Bradley’s crisis-mode bullshit just their thing? He went over the most annoying conversations with Shineman. Did every parent go through some version of the same thing? And if so, why the hell didn’t he know that before? Maybe Walt was wrong. But if he was right …

“When Mikey was in third grade,” Walt said, “we had him evaluated. The teachers recommended it.”

“No shit.” Hearing that it was par for the course helped. A little. “Same thing happened to Toby.”

“I think third grade is the sweet spot for catching whatever’s going on with kids. That’s what they told us, anyway.”

“So … what happened? With Mikey?”

“I love my son, but there’s no other way to say it: Mikey was a space cadet. The doctor suggested we try Ritalin. Said it helped kids like Mikey do better in school.”

“Did you do it?”

Walt’s expression said it for him: duh. “Mikey went from a severely average student to Dean’s list practically overnight. He was on Ritalin until he graduated last year. I’m convinced he never would have gotten into Harvard without it. Honest to God.”

“So he had ADD?”

Walt shrugged. “Whatever he had or didn’t have, the medication helped him.”

“But—”

“I know that look. You thinking about it, too? For Toby.”

“It’s a hard one.”

“Welcome to parenthood,” Walt said. “You need to decide for yourself what to do. All I know is that for Mikey it worked. Turned him into an A student, which affected the entire trajectory of his life. It’s a powerful little pill.”

Walt downed the rest of his beer and opened his wallet. “I should head back. I’ve got a brief to write tonight.”

“Here, let me.” Sean reached for his back pocket.

Walt shooed it away. “My treat. You’ll get me next time.”

ON THE SUBWAY RIDE UPTOWN, HE WONDERED IF WHAT WALT had said was true. Jess would be interested to hear his theory. Soon, though, all he could think about was Jess’s legs wrapped around his waist and the way her body responded to his. And then, ultimately, he had to think about Jess walking out the door near tears. He hated the fact that he couldn’t even email her. Then he realized that was ridiculous. Of course he could email her.

As soon as Sean got home, he sat down at the computer. All he had was her school account. It would have to do. Dear Jess. Dear was too formal. Jess, he wrote. Then he stared at the computer. What did he want to say? That he couldn’t stop thinking about her? That he needed to see her? Way too desperate.

Jess, he wrote. Hope you’re having a great break. Looking forward to seeing you. I’ve been having a craving for Oreos and Scotch, but it wouldn’t be the same without you. Any interest? Sean.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. He pressed send and as soon as he did he started waiting for a response.

Lucky for him, there was prep work to do for Toby’s arrival. He’d gotten way too used to the quiet, to forgetting to turn on the lights, to never having milk in the fridge. He went to the market and stocked up on frozen waffles, apple juice, and other staples. He even splurged for the chocolate chip granola bars.

Toby had sounded good when he called every night—if not like Ellie’s personal flack. “Mom started running again,” he said, when he called the first night. “Mom baked a cake,” he reported the next. It sounded like Ellie had pulled herself together, which was both a relief and also a little annoying.

That night he couldn’t sleep. Partly because he was excited to see Toby, partly because he was dreading having to break the news about Calvin.

The next day Toby was back and the apartment was happy chaos again.

“I had fun, Dad,” Toby said. He was smiling, relaxed. He was as close to the old Toby as he’d been in a while. “But it wasn’t like being home.” As long as Toby knew where home was, everything was okay.

Toby put on the Rolling Stones and as he rocked out to “Shattered,” his hair caught air then flopped back down again in true rocker form. Maybe it was time for a haircut. He wondered if Ellie had indulged Toby’s air guitar habit. As he tried to imagine her doing Chrissy Hynde, the miraculous happened. Toby stopped mid-guitar solo to volunteer information.

“So there was this girl named Delia,” he said, looking Sean in the eye with an older-than-eight expression. “She can grind.”

He pictured the kids on a dance floor in some seedy club, this girl rubbing her pelvis against Toby’s ass. There had to be something he was missing. “Huh?”

“On her skateboard.”

This visual was so much better.

“Plus she can do a half-pipe. She was really cool.”

So they both had crushes. He wondered if Toby’s had turned out better than his. “So what’s Delia like?”

“I don’t know. She’s nice.”

“Yeah? Great. So … what does she look like?”

“I don’t know. She’s pretty,” he said with a shrug, to show he didn’t care too much. “She has long hair, kinda brown, and her eyes were happy. Oh yeah, and she wore tie-dyed T-shirts and stuff.”

“So, is she … did you … are you just friends?” What was he asking?

“I have her email address. And I sort of, well, I kind of kissed her good-bye,” Toby said, twisting his mouth to cover up a smile.

“Wow.” Wasn’t Toby a little young for kissing girls? “So you must really like her.”

Toby squirmed a bit. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. She told me she had a boyfriend already. But I think she liked me back.”

Atta boy, he thought. Confidence. “Who wouldn’t, Tobe? You’re the best.” He elbowed Toby in the ribs. “I missed you like crazy.”

“I missed you, too, Dad.”

Sean knew he had to tell Toby about Calvin, but did he have to do it instantly? Toby took a shower, and Sean heated up a frozen pizza. While they ate, Toby told him about Ellie’s cottage and how they’d made fires in the fireplace at night and walked on the beach in the snow. He was almost jealous.

He nodded at the right places as Toby recounted Ellie stories, but his mind was on Calvin. He couldn’t send Toby back to school without enough time to process it all. When Toby was brushing his teeth, Sean re-read the mass email he’d received from Bev Shineman:

To the Bradley Community:

It is with great sadness that I’m writing to you today. Calvin Drake passed away last night at Mount Sinai Hospital, a result of complications from a peanut allergy.

Parents, you should discuss this sad loss with your children. I’ve enclosed a helpful article about talking to children about death. And of course, please contact me if you have any questions or need to discuss your feelings. When school resumes we’ll have discussion groups in homeroom and grief counselors will be available for the children and anyone else who would like to speak with them.

We are newly committed to our efforts to keep Bradley a nut-free zone. This terrible occurrence was an unfortunate result of a snack that was brought in from the outside. With all of us working together, we can make sure nothing like this happens again.

Sincerely,

Dr. Bev Shineman

School Psychologist

He’d practiced a million times, but now nothing seemed right. How to start? One of the “helpful” articles he’d read stressed that there was never a good time to break the news.

Toby stood in the doorway of Sean’s bedroom, traces of toothpaste foam still in the corners of his mouth.

“What is it, Dad?” He seemed grown-up despite the superheroes that crawled all over his pajamas. “You look funny.”

“Let’s sit.” He patted his bed slowly. The motion was as much to regulate his own heart rate as it was to summon Toby.

He hopped onto the bed. “You’re freaking me out, Dad.”

“There was an email from school.” He laid his hand on Toby’s back. Maybe he should have read some more articles before having this conversation. He felt entirely unprepared. “Tobe, Calvin died.”

Toby looked at him like he hadn’t heard right.

“Do you understand? Calvin is dead. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, but …”

Sean bit his tongue and waited for the rest of the question. He wasn’t supposed to tell him more than he wanted to hear.

A dark cloud passed over Toby’s face. Then a flicker of hope. “In the SpongeBob video game you get three lives. In Ratchet & Clank, too.”

“Tobe, those are just games. In real life you only get one.”

Toby’s eyes started to fill. “He should get more lives.”

“I know,” he said. “This is so sad. I’m so sad, too.” He reached around Toby and gave him a hug. Toby buried his head in Sean’s shoulder.

“It’s not fair.” Toby was sobbing now, his breathing was ragged and his body shook.

Kids cried all the time because you wouldn’t let them watch Scooby Doo or have seconds on dessert or because they fell in the park and tore the skin off of their knee. But watching your child cry because he was filled with profound sadness was worse than awful.

Toby looked up with sad eyes. “You’re supposed to be old when you die,” he said. “Calvin wasn’t old.”

“I know.” Sean wiped his face with his sleeve. “I know.”

“Am I going to die?” Toby’s brain was in overdrive now. Sean could see the questions percolating.

“No, Tobe. Calvin was allergic to peanuts and somehow he ate something with peanuts in it. Most kids don’t die. Almost none.” He could finesse the facts slightly, couldn’t he?

“Are you going to die?”

He was ready for this one, thanks to Jess.

“No, Tobe,” he said. “Not for a long time. I’m not going anywhere.” He swallowed. “Neither is your mom.”

“Is Calvin in heaven?”

He hadn’t thought about that one. He was hoping Toby wouldn’t even know to bring it up. “I don’t know.”

“If he’s not in heaven where is he?”

Toby wanted answers, and Sean wanted to give him some. Don’t lie. It kept running through his head. Exactly how far was he supposed to take this not lying thing? Because while he was at it, he might as well throw in that there was no tooth fairy or Santa Claus. “Lots of people believe in heaven, Tobe. If you believe in heaven, then Calvin is definitely there.”

“Is that where your mom and dad are?”

He thought about his parents. About how loud and abrasive they’d been when they were alive and about how empty everything seemed without them. Toby had never even known them. “I don’t know. Nobody really knows what happens when you die.”

“Mom says people are reincarcerated.”

“Reincarnated.”

“Yeah,” Toby said. “They come back as grasshoppers and butterflies.”

“She said that?” Was Ellie out of her fucking mind telling this stuff to Toby? Not that he was faring much better here, but still. “I mean, it could be true. But … I don’t … probably not.”

Toby was quiet for a few minutes. “So where is Calvin?”

“Like I said, nobody really knows.”

“No, Dad. I mean where is he? Right now.”

He was pretty sure Toby was asking about Calvin’s earthly remains, but if he was wrong he didn’t want to be volunteering information like that. “Calvin will always be here because we’ll remember him.” It sounded like a lame Hallmark greeting card and he wished he could take it back as soon as he said it.

Toby was getting annoyed now. “Dad, where’s his body?”

“It’s probably in a cemetery.”

“Under ground? Buried?”

He nodded. It wasn’t necessary to go into specifics about cremation. That fell into a gray area somewhere between the don’t lie and don’t give too much information instructions outlined in the article.

“But when he wakes up how will he get out?” Toby looked panicked. “He’ll be trapped.”

This was obviously going to take some time to sink in. “He’s not going to wake up, remember?”

“Oh, right,” Toby said and got quiet. “So I never get to see Calvin again?”

Sean shook his head slowly. “You can remember him, though, and see him in your mind.”

“It’s not fair,” Toby said. He was crying again. “He didn’t get to see my comics. It’s not fair.”

“I know.” He pulled him in, hugged him and rocked him until they both fell asleep. When he woke up at six a.m. with a stiff neck, they were still huddled together.

He tried to sit up without waking Toby, but the pain in his neck made him groan.

“Dad?” Toby said, groggily. “Will you make pancakes?”

As he was mixing and pouring, Sean realized he hadn’t cooked a thing while Toby was away. The routine was comforting. Maybe Toby would feel the same way.

Toby padded into the kitchen. “Can I help?”

“Absolutely.”

Toby dragged a cast iron skillet from the cupboard to the stovetop and gave a serious look. “Stand back,” he said, before turning the dial. A ring of fire leapt up to the pan. Toby had always been good in the kitchen. Responsible, careful. How could he have ADD? Then he thought about what Walt had said. They were watching him all day, much more closely than Sean could. Maybe all he needed was to get the new semester off to a good solid start and they’d lay off him, let him relax. It was worth giving the drugs a shot if it gave Toby some breathing room. Toby deserved that.

“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Toby said. “I’m still sad about Calvin.”

“Yeah, it’s okay to be sad about it for a long time.” Like probably forever. “Remembering him is good, though, and you can do that anytime you want.”

Toby didn’t bring him up again for the rest of the day. As they moved into their second hour of an endless Monopoly game at the kitchen table, Sean noticed that Toby seemed to have filed the whole thing away. He was sure it would come up again, but for now a break was a happy relief, for both of them.

It seemed like as good a time as any to bring up the other huge topic that had been on his mind all vacation. “I talked to Dr. Altherra the other day.”

“Who?” No name recognition whatsoever.

“You know, the lady—the psychiatrist—we went to. She asked you about school?”

“Yeah?”

“She thinks it might help you pay attention in school if you take some medicine in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“You have to tell me if it makes you feel at all funny—like funny bad.”

Toby shrugged. “Okay.”

And that was that. Sean had been sure there would be more questions, concerns, apprehension. But that had all been Sean’s to deal with. Toby didn’t have to think about the risks or question the decision. If his father told him to take medicine, he needed medicine. It was all so blissfully simple.

The next morning, his hand shook as he tried to cut the pill in half with a dull knife. Toby was so calm right now, so completely himself, so completely non-ADD, it seemed crazy to be doing this. But what did he know about inattentive ADD? He was no psychiatrist. The knife split the pill too quickly and half of it flew across the kitchen. He saved one half, though, and handed it to Toby. “Here you go, try this,” he said, going for a nonchalance he did not feel.

Toby looked at Sean like he’d asked him to eat a sharp piece of glass. “What is that?”

Then he realized. Toby had never taken a pill. All medicine—Tylenol, Motrin, even the antibiotics from the pharmacy—always came in liquid form. He explained how to put the pill on the back of his tongue and wash it down with water. Toby looked skeptical.

“Want to give it a try?”

Toby shrugged and took the pill between his fingers. He gagged a few times trying. Finally, he took a big swallow of water and smiled. “Hey, I’m pretty good at that.”

For the next four hours, Sean asked Toby if he was feeling racy, tired, more focused. No, was all he said.

“I wouldn’t expect half a pill to have any therapeutic effect at all,” Dr. Altherra said on the phone. The half pill was a test to make sure Toby didn’t have any bad reactions. She told Sean to give Toby a whole pill the next day, and to give him some reading or math problems to see if his focus was any sharper.

The next day Sean gave Toby a whole pill, which he swallowed on the first try. “Yes!” Toby said when it went down. Again, no bad reactions. No change at all. When Sean presented him with math problems, Toby flat-out refused. Asking a kid to do schoolwork on his last day of Christmas break amounted to cruel and inhuman punishment. To make matters worse, he couldn’t tell if Toby’s attention was any better, because at home, for the most part, Toby was fine focusing on his homework. He decided he was going to have to send another email to Jess, even though he was still waiting to hear back from the last one, to let her know what was going on. If Toby’s problems were happening at school, then the school was going to have to tell him if things were improving.

He composed an email to Jess that night. Hi Jess—Could you give me a call when you get this? It’s about Toby. Look forward to seeing you at school, Sean.

But she didn’t respond to that email either.

The next morning, the first day of the new semester, he handed Toby the lavender pill with a glass of water and watched him swallow it. “I’m going to bring some of these to the nurse. You need to go down after lunch and she’ll give you another one, okay?”

“Whatever,” he said, spooning more Cheerios into his mouth.

If Toby had a fever, Sean would give him Tylenol. For strep, he’d give him Zithromax. But this was different. He blamed the Ringling Brothers.

Back when Toby was five, he and Ellie had taken Toby to the circus. Outside Madison Square Garden, animal rights people had set up a massive campaign with poster-size photos of drugged elephants and doped-out tigers to show how barbaric the circus really was. The animals were kept nicely stoned at all times, the protestors said, robbing the fierce animals of their fierceness, making them docile, easier to train. Every time an elephant balanced on a ball or a tiger jumped through a flaming hoop, Sean had gotten a sick, sinking feeling. It was kind of like the feeling he had now as he drugged Toby for school so he could learn loftier circus tricks like advanced math and reading.

“What?” Toby was looking at him strangely.

“Nothing,” he said. “We don’t want to be late the first day back. Hey, how do you …”

“Dad, if you ask me how I feel one more time, I’m going to have to do something drastic.”

Sean pressed his lips together dramatically to show there would be no further questions. He opened the front door and gestured for Toby to walk through. Toby smiled, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and obliged.