Chapter 5

Don’t go. Not yet.
I have to.
Please. Just five minutes.
Mom, I have to go.
When will I see you again?
I don’t know.

The dream had several variations. Sometimes Luke was a little boy in the dream. Other times a gawky teenager with suddenly elongated limbs and a pimply face, while still other times he was college-aged with a growth of beard on his chin and a sullen look in his eyes. But in every version Elizabeth seemed to wake up and there he was sitting in the corner of her bedroom. Just sitting there. Each dream seemed so real, so life-like, Elizabeth felt if she could only reach out and touch her son, her fingers would contact solid, living flesh. Not a dream. Not a phantasm of longing. In some of the versions, Elizabeth found herself pleading with her son to stay a little longer. Five minutes. Just five. In the dream she always had the unmistakable sense that the leave-taking was both imminent and irrevocable. Not death so much as an action unalterable, a final act, and that this was the last time she’d ever see him. She usually woke with a clawing pain in her throat.

“Elizabeth.” An arm nudged her. “Elizabeth.”

Opening one eye, she saw Zack standing in the doorway, already dressed for work. She opened the other eye and followed his gaze toward the half empty bottle of scotch on the nightstand. Glancing around, she was disoriented for a moment. Where was she? Then it came to her: Luke’s room. She was in her son’s room. Vaguely, she recalled shuffling into his room and curling up on his bed the previous night. She didn’t remember much beyond that.

“What time is it?” she asked, swallowing something dry, a lump of sawdust.

“Almost eight,” replied her husband, holding up his watch as if for proof.

“Damn it.”

She was going to be late for work—again. And this morning she had that divorce meeting at nine, with a client she’d already had problems with and this would only make things worse. Swinging her legs off the bed, she stood too quickly, so that her head swirled with a dizzying lightness. Bright flares went off in her brain, forcing her to sit back down on the bed. Her stomach churned, and she felt on the verge of being sick.

“What are you doing?” Zack asked.

“I overslept.”

“No, I mean this,” he said, pointing toward the bottle. Then, holding both hands out in an expansive gesture that took in the entire room, he added, “Coming in here. Sleeping in his bed. For God’s sake, Elizabeth.”

Sometimes in the morning when she woke here, she’d have this intense, if fleeting sensation that she was a young mother again, waking in her son’s room after a night when he couldn’t sleep. Luke often had bad dreams, of monsters and wolves, of things lurking under the bed. In the moment before the painful realization hit her, she could almost feel the warmth of Luke’s body against hers, the sweetish scent of his hair and breath, the vague urine odor.

“This isn’t healthy, Elizabeth,” Zack said.

“Just stop. Please.”

“You have a problem, Elizabeth.”

“I’m not in the mood for a lecture right now. I don’t feel so hot.”

“Is it any wonder?” he said, his gaze landing on the bottle again. “You have a problem.”

“My problem is I’m late,” she explained, rising unsteadily and making for the door. However, Zack, all six-four, two-hundred pounds of him, stood there blocking her way.

“Zack, please,” she said. “Don’t do this. I’m already late.”

“You need to see somebody.”

“We’ve been over this already.”

“But you don’t do anything about it.”

“There’s nothing to do.”

“Of course, there is. You could go and talk to somebody.”

Zack had made it perfectly clear he felt she needed professional help. That her grief was eating her up, that she was probably suffering from depression—the drinking, her coming into Luke’s room and falling asleep. Several times he’d suggested they make an appointment to go see a therapist together. He’d even found the names of a couple of shrinks and jotted them down on a Post-it note he placed at eye-level on the fridge. But Elizabeth didn’t see the point. As if talking to someone for an hour a week and downing some Paxils would make her feel any better. As if it would bring Luke back.

“Honey,” he said to her, reaching out and placing his hand tenderly against her cheek. “I know you miss him. I miss him, too. Not a day goes by that I don’t. But we have to think about us.”

“Us?”

“Yes. Me and you. This isn’t . . .”

“What? Normal?” she said, suddenly angry.

“Yes.”

Staring up into his eyes, she said bitterly, “So why don’t you tell me what’s normal, Zachary. Because I really don’t have a fucking clue. This is all virgin territory to me.”

“Stop it.”

“No. Maybe you can act as if nothing happened, but I can’t.” She could see the immediate effect her words had on him. He couldn’t have been any more startled if she’d slapped him. He gazed down at her, wounded into silence, then removed the hand from her cheek and brought it to the bridge of his nose. She noticed his tie was askew and she reached out and straightened it, an act of past intimacy.

“I’m sorry, Zack.”

“We need to talk.”

“Tonight, okay?”

“I can’t tonight. I have my group meeting.” He paused, then offered tentatively, “You could come with me.”

“That’s your thing, Zack.”

“Why’s it my thing?”

“Talking to a bunch of other depressed people isn’t my idea of help.”

He leaned back and she used the occasion to slip by him into the hall and hurry toward the bathroom.

“Then when?” he called after her.

Instead of replying she slipped into the bathroom, shut the door, and got into the shower. As the Water Pik punished her throbbing head, she thought about how Zack wanted to move on, to go forward with their lives. Once he’d even mentioned the possibility of their having another child.

“Are you crazy?” she’d cried. “I’m fifty-one, for heaven’s sake.”

“We could adopt. Not now. I’m talking down the road.”

“There is no ‘down the road,’ Zack. Besides, I don’t want another child. I just want the one we had back.”

“He’s gone, Elizabeth. And he’s not coming back.”

She thought of the dream again: Don’t go. Not yet . . .

* * *

By the time Elizabeth got to work, she was a half hour late. She rushed past the office of her colleague Joan Lanzetti and down the hall and into her own. She shut the door and tried to compose herself. Her hair was still wet, and she’d hastily applied her makeup on the twenty-minute car ride to work. Her head continued to pound, her stomach churning, filled with something like battery acid.

“Where the fuck is the Healey file?” she muttered to herself as she rifled through the mess on her desk.

Knuckles sounded on the door; before she could respond the door opened and Joan poked her head in.

“Where’ve you been? They’ve been waiting for you in the conference room.”

“I got hung up,” Elizabeth replied.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, everything’s just great.”

“That Healey woman is fuming,” said Joan.

A contemptuous little laugh slipped from Elizabeth’s mouth. “Let her fume. That’s what she does, fume.”

“You know she’s going to bitch to Warren about this.” Warren Fuller was the senior partner of the law firm. A crotchety old man who wore rumpled suits and who sometimes snored through meetings, he still ran the firm with an iron hand, as if it was a small third-world country of which he’d been made dictator for life. Warren and Daphne Healey’s father were old golf pals. It was Warren who’d given Elizabeth the case, with the caveat that the woman might need some TLC. That was an understatement.

“If she wasn’t so goddamned unreasonable, we’d have settled this already,” Elizabeth said.

“By the way, you look like crap,” Joan offered.

“Thanks.”

Joan paused in the doorway for a moment.

Elizabeth looked at her and raised one hand, palm up, as if to say, “What?”

“Are you all right, kiddo?”

“I’m fine. I’m just playing catch up here,” Elizabeth said.

“All right, we’ll talk later.”

Fuller and Fuller was a small law firm housed in a restored Victorian that looked out onto the Garth Point village green, a town along the eastern Connecticut shore. Elizabeth, a junior partner, had worked here for nearly ten years. She liked Joan and her other colleagues, and for the most part, tolerated Warren. When she’d first moved to Garth’s Point, after having spent a dozen years working in a large firm in New York, she enjoyed the slower, small-town pace. She’d wanted to have a normal life—which meant a family, time to travel, to pursue her other interests, her pro bono work. But in the past few years, she’d gradually become disillusioned by her job in the firm, by the fact that her work here didn’t seem all that meaningful to her any longer.

Finally, she found the file she was looking for and hurried into the conference room.

“Sorry, I’m late,” Elizabeth offered to everyone seated there.

Staring at her were Josh Healey, the husband of Elizabeth’s client, and his attorney Adam Goldstein, a local lawyer Elizabeth knew and didn’t particularly like. Across from them was her own client Daphne Healey, who stared at Elizabeth with the cold, venomous eyes of a cobra.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Daphne offered sarcastically.

“Can I have a moment with my client?” Elizabeth said to Goldstein.

“I’m already running late for court as it is, counselor,” Goldstein said to her.

“Just five minutes. Please.”

The words from the dream echoed in her mind.

Elizabeth led Mrs. Healey into her office. Before she had a chance to say a word, the woman launched into one of her usual tirades. “That son of a bitch wants Kate every other weekend.”

Daphne Healey was about forty, anorexic-thin, with dark eyes and a frizzy blonde perm, a severe-looking woman whose body had been tortured by numerous plastic surgeries and Botox injections and a Barbie-doll boob job. Her maiden name had been Abernathy, one of the Abernathys, a clan that could trace its roots back to the original settlers of Garth’s Point.

“Mrs. Healey, no court is going to grant you sole custody based on your husband’s extramarital affair,” Elizabeth explained. “What you’re asking for isn’t reasonable.”

“Don’t tell me what’s reasonable. I love my daughter.”

“I don’t doubt that you do, but what about your husband?”

“What about that prick?”

Elizabeth thought how different it was to deal with someone like Fabiana, someone humble and polite, who had nothing and yet who was willing to forgive a man who had beaten her up. And here was this woman who’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and still it wasn’t enough.

“I’m sure your husband loves her, too,” Elizabeth lectured. “And he has parental rights.”

“Screw his rights,” she cried, pounding Elizabeth’s desk with her bony, heavily bejeweled fist. “It’s your job to get me full custody.”

“No, it’s my job to explain the law to you and then do the best I can.”

“Then do your best. That’s what I’m paying you for.”

Elizabeth’s head throbbed, and her stomach suddenly felt even more queasy, as if she were on a small boat in the sound on a day when the water was choppy. She took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to calm her belly.

“It’s obvious you have your daughter’s welfare utmost in mind, Mrs. Healey.” The woman didn’t seem to catch Elizabeth’s thinly disguised sarcasm. “But as a mother, you have to understand that she’s going to need a father too.”

“You don’t understand,” said the woman, pointing an accusatory finger at Elizabeth. “I’m the aggrieved party here. That son of bitch was screwing his bimbo of a hygienist.”

“But right now we’re focusing on what’s best for your daughter.”

“I’m what’s best for my daughter. Kate needs me.”

“I’m sure she does, Mrs. Healey.” Elizabeth thought then of her own father. She was in her thirties when he died yet it still seemed as if the rug had been pulled out from under her, as if she were suddenly orphaned. “But she’s also going to need her father, too.”

“I don’t need a lecture on parenting,” the woman exclaimed.

“I’m just pointing out the legal parameters.”

“Do you have children, Mrs. Gerlacher?”

The question set Elizabeth back on her heels. She usually tried to avoid getting into her private life with clients. It was better to keep them at a distance. Still, Garth’s Point was a small town. News got around. For a moment she thought the woman was toying with her, playing some sort of perverse mind game. Surely, she would have heard about Elizabeth’s son. It was in the local paper, the scuttlebutt around town. In any case, Elizabeth wasn’t quite sure how to respond to the woman’s question: Do you have children? Since her son’s death, she’d been asked this once or twice. The first time was only a couple of months after Luke died. She was on the train to New York for a meeting in the city, when a young mother with an infant in a Snugli sat down across from her. They struck up a conversation, Elizabeth asking the usual questions about the baby—her name, age, was she sleeping through the night. At some point, the young woman asked Elizabeth if she had children. Though she later realized she should have seen it coming, the question nonetheless took her a little by surprise. Beyond the fact that she didn’t want to throw a pall over an otherwise pleasant conversation, she wasn’t sure what the answer was. How does a parent whose only child has died reply to such a thing? Should she say she didn’t have a child? Simple math: one minus one equals zero? Or does having a child imply that you always have one, that no matter what happened you were always a parent and therefore you always had a child?

“No,” Elizabeth replied to Mrs. Healey.

“I didn’t think so.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“You don’t look the type.”

“What type would that be?” Elizabeth threw back at her, her annoyance barely restrained.

“The maternal type. That’s why you can’t possibly imagine what you’re asking me to do.”

“I can certainly empathize with your position.”

“No, I don’t think you can, Mrs. Gerlacher,” the woman said.

Elizabeth felt her head swoon with a dizzying rush of anger and outrage. She actually saw spots floating before her eyes. She’d gotten annoyed with clients before but she’d never experienced this visceral urge to lean across her desk and slap the woman’s face.

“It seems to me, Mrs. Healey, if you cared half as much about your daughter’s welfare as you do for your own revenge, we’d have settled this already.”

“How dare you!” She paused, then muttered something under her breath, something that sounded suspiciously like “Bitch.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” the woman replied.

“To tell you the truth, Mrs. Healey, I can’t blame your husband for running off.”

Elizabeth would have smiled at this retort, except for the fact that the sour feeling in the pit of her stomach lurched up into the back of her throat right at that moment. She had to put her hand to her mouth, as she tasted something vile as warm vinegar. She had all she could do not to retch then and there.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” she managed to get out, as she stood and hurried around the desk and past her client into the hall.

“Jesus, where are you going now? I want to talk to Warren,” she heard Daphne Healey call after her. “Do you hear me?”

Elizabeth barely had time to close the bathroom door behind her before she bent over the toilet bowl and vomited violently. Not once but again and again, as if she were trying to eject something foul and toxic from her stomach, as if the poison of the past year was something she could expel and rid herself of. As she paused, her head over the bowl, waiting, she heard her son’s voice, the words she’d heard playing in her head a thousand, ten thousand times before: There’s something I really needed to talk to you about, Mom.

* * *

A little after noon, Elizabeth was in her office working. Her stomach had settled down a little but her hangover throbbed dully behind her eyes. She looked forward to going out to the car and having a little nip. That always helped settle things.

Her door opened suddenly, and Joan entered. “You want to grab some lunch?”

“My stomach’s not feeling so hot.”

“Then take a walk with me. Some fresh air will do you good.”

The afternoon was sunny, with an autumnal crispness in the air as they walked down the street toward The Coffee Clutch, a little café on the green. The downtown of Garth’s Point resembled a setting for a 1940s Frank Capra movie about small-town America. The town green was surrounded by no less than four churches, each facing the other and seeming to represent one point of the town’s moral compass. One of the churches was St. Catherine’s, where Zack met his grief support group. On the green, people walked their dogs and read on the benches; in summer there was Shakespeare in the Park and a huge craft show, while in winter there was the Christmas tree lighting.

In The Coffee Clutch, Joan ordered a Cobb salad and a mocha latte to satisfy, as she put it, her afternoon chocolate craving. Elizabeth got only a bottle of water. They sat at a table near the window, which looked diagonally across the street at an up-scale women’s boutique called Greta’s Garb. It had its “Summer Clearance” items on a rack out on the sidewalk, hoping to catch the eye of the last of the summer tourists.

Short and curvy, Joan had red hair which fell in a wild, bushy perm and large espresso-colored eyes that always seemed on the verge of breaking into laughter. She was feisty and outspoken, and shared with Elizabeth the most intimate details of her and her husband Ray’s sex life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, never divulged anything about her and Zack in that way. She was way too private a person. Though Joan was her oldest and closest friend, Elizabeth had never told her about the affair. She thought Joan would look down on her for it.

“Brianna decide on a major yet?” Elizabeth asked.

Joan looked surprised. Funny, but lately she never talked about her kids to Elizabeth. It was almost as if, since Luke’s death, it had become an unspoken rule not to bring up the subject of kids, as if the general topic of children was taboo.

“She’s doing gender studies,” Joan replied with a roll of her eyes. “I mean, what does one do with a gender studies major? I could see if she were a lesbian or something.”

Both women chuckled at that, a nervous laughter that seemed mostly intended to dissipate the tension over talking about their kids.

“Same with Luke going into theology,” Elizabeth offered.

“Theology? I thought he’d been pre-law,” Joan said.

“He was. But since I was the one who suggested pre-law, of course he wanted nothing to do with it.”

“Isn’t that always the way? If we say up, they say down.”

Joan had two daughters; the older one, Allison, had been in Luke’s grade, while Brianna was two years behind. When their kids were little, Joan and Elizabeth used to get them together for play dates. The three kids would play house, with Luke and Allison as the stern parents to poor little Brianna, who always got stuck as the baby even when she was five. In fact, Luke and Allison had been quite close until high school when the changing social currents had swept them into separate groups. Elizabeth and Zack used to get together often with Joan and Ray socially, and when the kids were little on several occasions the two families had rented a summer place out on Wellfleet. Even before the accident, though, the four had started to drift apart. They blamed it on their hectic schedules, their kids’ routines, spouses’ work, life. But especially in the past year, her friendship with Joan had ceased to be as close. Though unspoken, Luke’s death had made things uncomfortable for both of them.

Joan fell silent, eating her salad and not making eye contact. Elizabeth had a feeling something was on her mind.

“So what’s up?” Elizabeth finally asked. “Why did you want to talk?”

Joan raised her eyebrows. “What on earth were you trying to do with Daphne Healey today?”

“What was I trying to do with her?” Elizabeth scoffed.

“She told Warren you said her husband was right to run off with his girlfriend.”

“She called me a bitch.”

“I know she can be difficult.”

“Difficult? The woman’s a royal pain in the ass,” Elizabeth cried.

“Agreed. But she’s our client. You can’t speak to her like that.”

“You know what else she said to me? That I wasn’t the maternal type.”

Joan reached across and patted Elizabeth’s hand. “She had no right to say that. But she’s still our client.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “All she wants to do is make her husband pay for cheating on her. She doesn’t give a damn about her kid’s welfare.”

“I don’t doubt that’s true but it’s not our business.”

“But it is my business to lay out what’s legally possible. There’s no way in hell she’s getting full custody. You know that as well as I do.”

“I know. But it’s the way you deal with her,” cautioned Joan.

“So I’m supposed to handle her with kid gloves just because her father’s a big muckety-muck in town? And he’s pals with Warren? The hell with her.”

“You can’t take that attitude with her.”

“Really?”

“Unless you want to make trouble for yourself. Listen, I could care less about that woman,” Joan said. “It’s you I’m worried about. You can’t behave like that. It’s not professional. And besides, you were late again.”

“Don’t—” she began but Joan held up a hand to stop her.

“Warren called me into his office. He told me he smelled booze on your breath one day last week.”

“What?”

“He said you’d been drinking.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, it is!”

Joan glanced out the window, then back at Elizabeth. “I’ve noticed it, too.”

“You’ve noticed what?”

“When it looks like you’ve been drinking.”

“Like when?” Elizabeth challenged.

“Like this morning.”

“I told you, I wasn’t feeling well. I have this stomach thing.”

“Come on, it’s me, kiddo. It’s getting pretty obvious. You go out to your car and when you come in your eyes are all screwed up.”

“They are not.”

“Besides that, Warren thinks you’ve been spending too much time doing your pro bono work.”

“What I do on my own time is my own damn business,” Elizabeth snapped.

“But not when it’s affecting your work here. You’ve fallen behind on several cases. And there’ve been other complaints. On the Lavigne closing, you had the figures all screwed up.”

“So I mess up one time and everybody’s on my case.”

“It’s not just one time,” Joan said. She paused and took a sip of her coffee. “Zack told me what’s going on at home.”

“What do you mean, ‘what’s going on at home’?”

“He said you haven’t been sleeping well. That you’ve been, well, drinking too much.”

“That’s bullshit. I mean, I have a drink or two in the evening. To relax and unwind. But I don’t have a problem,” she said.

“He’s concerned about you. We all are.”

Elizabeth could just picture the two of them—Zack and Joan—talking about her behind her back, arranging an intervention strategy. Planning ways to get her to go to a therapist, join Zack’s support group, confess to having issues.

“Well, I’m glad everyone is so damn concerned about me.”

“Elizabeth, come on. Don’t take it that way.”

“How am I supposed to take it? The two of you going behind my back.”

“We’re not going behind your back. We love you. We’re trying to help.”

“It doesn’t sound like help.”

Elizabeth felt her face growing hot.

“How bad is it? The drinking.”

“I told you. I have one or two. To relax.”

“Zack said you go into Luke’s room at night and pass out.”

“I don’t pass out,” said Elizabeth, shaking her head. “Jesus. You guys are unbelievable.”

“He’s just worried about you.”

“Maybe I went into Luke’s room once or twice. So what? It’s nobody’s goddamned business but my own.”

Elizabeth had raised her voice, so that several customers looked over at them.

“Easy,” Joan said, trying to calm her. “Do you think it’s a good idea though? Sleeping in his room.”

“If it helps me to get through this, what’s so bad about it?”

“But are you getting through this?” Joan asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you feel you’re getting any better, kiddo?”

“You tell me what ‘better’ means,” said Elizabeth. “I get up, I go to work. I put one foot in front of the other. That’s all I can do right now.”

“Have you thought about taking some time off?”

“Geez Louise. We’ve been over this before.”

“You could go away. Just the two of you. Have some fun.”

Fun, Elizabeth thought. What was that? Several times Joan had suggested she take some time off, go away on a vacation. Get her head straight. Yet the thought of having nothing to do, nothing to structure her days scared the hell out of her. Just this gaping expanse of time to fill up, like being stuck in a doctor’s waiting room without a magazine in sight. What would she and Zack do, just the two of them? What would they talk about? How could they possibly pretend to be enjoying themselves when Luke was gone from the world?

“Trust me, a vacation is the last thing I need. I need to keep busy,” Elizabeth retorted.

“But you came back two days after the funeral,” Joan said, holding up a pair of accusatory fingers.

“So?”

“You didn’t give yourself a chance to grieve properly.”

Elizabeth let out a fluttery laugh of exasperation. “I didn’t know there was a proper way to grieve. You sound like Zack now.”

“Come on, Elizabeth. You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Since when did you become a shrink?”

Joan sucked on a piece of lettuce caught in her teeth. “Maybe you ought to see one.”

“Did Zack tell you that, too?”

“I’m just trying to be your friend.”

“Then be my friend. Stay out of my damn business,” she said harshly. “You don’t know what it’s like. Every day I get up, I think it’s all just a bad dream. It’s like I’m waiting for him. Waiting for him to come slouching down to breakfast with that sour puss of his. Or when I set the table at night, I’ll hesitate for just a moment, wondering if I should set it for three as if I expect him to come home. It’s been a whole year and I still can’t really believe he’s gone.”

They stared at each other from across the table. But it might as well have been from across opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. For what divided the two was the great chasm that separated one parent whose children were alive from another whose child was dead. They both sensed it, too, and knew nothing could bridge that divide, not friendship or love or empathy, not even the bond that mothers shared.

“Listen, kiddo,” Joan said, reaching across and taking her hand. “You’re right. I don’t know. But as your friend, I have to tell you that you need to get a hold of things. You can’t keep coming in late, and you gotta cut out the booze. If you keep on like this you’re going to endanger your position with the firm.”

“What’s Warren going to do? Fire me? I’m a partner. He can’t fire me.”

“I wouldn’t push that, Elizabeth. If things don’t change, Warren’s ready to call a meeting of the board and have you suspended.”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“Yes. He would. Trust me. You don’t want to force his hand, Elizabeth.”

She suddenly felt defensive, alone, attacked from all sides. Even her best friend was turning on her.

“Listen, kiddo,” Joan said. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go home and get some sleep? And think about taking some time off. A few days. A week. It might do you good.”