The Smart One (27 page)

I looked at Clare, whose eyes beseeched me to rise above my hurt, be the bigger person, understand that our baby sister had finally emerged from her self-destruction and it was a glorious and beautiful moment.

Joey stared at me, her eyes the same clear shade of blue they’d been as a child. The stupid haze of drugs was gone, as was the cynicism. All I saw there was my innocent little sister wanting my approval. She ran her fingers through her shiny curls, which bounced right back into shape.

“You’re proud of her, aren’t you?” Clare said.

They waited for a response, but I had nothing to say. I opened the door to leave.

“She doesn’t want to admit it,” I heard Clare say to Joey, “but Bev loves you.”

They both looked at me as if certain I would soften, but I shook my head and stepped outside, letting the door shut behind me.

On Friday, I sat across from Clare at a local diner. I had asked her to lunch because I wanted to tell her—face-to-face—that I was leaving New York.

She put her cell phone on the table and opened the diner’s gigantic menu. I was pacing myself, waiting for the right moment to spring the news on her. She picked up her phone again and looked at it.

“Are you expecting a call?” I asked.

“Kind of.”

“How cryptic,” I said. Why couldn’t she just tell me who she was waiting to hear from? I opened my menu to scan the massive array of selections.

Clare stuck her fork into the coleslaw the waitress had left on the table and shoveled some onto her bread plate. “Look, don’t be mad, but…I asked Joey to join us.”

I closed my menu. “Clare, you
know
I don’t want to talk to her.”

“Calm down. She wasn’t home. I left a message.”

“If you’re thinking about orchestrating a reconciliation, forget it.”

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to. She’s been missing since she told us her news.”

I opened my menu again and flipped the pages. “I wonder if the chicken salad wrap is any good.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Heard. Don’t care.”

“Four whole days. I left like six messages.”

“Boo-hoo.”

“Bev…”

“If she was dead the police would have sent a squad car to one of our houses by now. Relax.”

“You aren’t worried?”

“The part of me that worried about Joey simply doesn’t exist anymore. Can we move on? Finish what you were saying about Marc. You were going to tell me what he said when you asked about the woman in the hotel room.”

After the party, Clare had decided that the best way to help Dylan was to first come clean with Marc and tell him everything. Then they approached Dylan together to explain that sometimes grown-ups make mistakes, and Mommy had made a big one. But she would never kiss another man but Daddy again. And while Dylan seemed to be edging toward acceptance, Marc was another story.

Clare put her menu down and stared at me, as if she was trying to decide whether to push the whole Joey issue or just go ahead and answer my question. She sighed, resigned. “He told me it must have been a wrong number.”

“Do you believe him?”

“What choice do I have? If I want to keep this marriage on track, I
have
to believe him.”

I got that, I really did. Sometimes trust is nothing more than a leap of faith. A man in dusty coveralls passed our table,
staring so hard at Clare that he nearly walked into a wall. She didn’t seem to notice.

“And what about him? Did he forgive
you
?”

“He said he’s trying but…I don’t know if we’re going to recover from this, Bev.” She put her head down and tears fell.

I reached out and took her hand. “Of course you will.”

“He left for Chicago on Wednesday—another sales meeting. Told me he wouldn’t call me while he was away. Said he needed this time to think.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. He’s supposed to come home tonight. I hope he does.”

“You don’t think he’d leave you, do you? Marc loves you. And it was just a kiss.”

“I really love him,” she said. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Stop.”

“He doesn’t know if he can ever trust me again. And it’s all my fault.”

The waitress came over to take our orders and relieve us of the tome-sized menus. A bus boy slapped a basket of bread onto the table. I pushed the coleslaw closer to Clare and moved the bread closer to me. I’d miss these New York diners when I was gone. There was a lot I’d miss.

After lunch, I agreed to go with Clare to some new shoe store she’d heard about. I still hadn’t told her my news. It was just too hard to dump on her when she was feeling so miserable and needy. Shopping, I thought, would be just the thing to pick her up.

The store looked a little too upscale for my budget, so I headed to the back, where sandals were on sale. The ones I had on were pretty beat-up and I thought it would be good to
have a brand-new pair for my brand-new home, which could still wind up being in one of two states, North Carolina or Nevada. I found a strappy black shoe that I thought was kind of cute, and asked the saleswoman to bring it out in my size. Meanwhile, Clare examined a two-toned pump with an oddly shaped heel.

“What do you think?” I asked Clare, after I slipped on the shoes and walked to a mirror.

“I think we should take a drive to Joey’s house to make sure everything is okay.”

“I mean what do you think of these sandals?”

“They look like something from the back of your closet.” Clare picked up a red open-toed pump and showed it to me. “This would look
hot
with that shirt,” she said.

I was wearing a ruby-colored V-neck top that matched the shiny snakeskin shoe Clare held, and I knew she was probably right. I took it from her and examined it.

“I’ve never owned red shoes,” I said.

“Then it’s time.”

I turned it over and looked at the price.
“Ack!”
I put it down on the nearest shelf but Clare snatched it right up.

“My treat,” she said, waving it at the saleswoman.

I sighed. “Are you trying to bribe me?”

“It’s a going-away gift,” she insisted.

That stopped me cold. “You know I’m leaving?” I said.

“Of course.”

“How?”

“The way you reacted to Joey. I don’t think you would have done that if you were staying. It’s almost as if…as if you
want
to be furious so you’ll feel better about leaving. Part of you just doesn’t want to walk out on the people you love.”

I tsked, dismissing her observation. “That makes no sense. Wouldn’t I be mad at you too?”

“You probably would be if I wasn’t such a wreck. Your heart is too soft to pick a fight with me now.”

I had to admit that she might have had a point. I remembered how furious I was with my parents right before I left for college. In particular, I recalled an utterly pointless fight over bath mats.

Clare’s cell phone rang and she pulled it from her purse to answer it, but the call dropped. “I don’t know this number,” she said, looking at the caller-ID window. She called back to see who it was, and when the person on the other end answered, Clare looked alarmed.

“Someone called me from this number,” she said into the phone. “I see. Okay, thank you.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

“North Shore University Hospital, but the number sent me to the main switchboard, and they couldn’t tell me who called. Do you think it could have been someone phoning about Joey?”

I swallowed against a lump as a familiar fear rose up. “If it was, they’ll call back.”

Sure enough, Clare’s purse starting singing again as she paid for the shoes. I peered over her shoulder as she opened the phone, but it was a different number, and I recognized it. It was Alicia Goodwin’s cell phone.

Clare had a brief and cryptic conversation, but her eyes told the story. Alicia had conveyed some kind of terrible news. Clare looked stricken.

“What is it?” I said.

“Alicia and Teddy just drove by the Waxmans’ and there was a police car parked out front.”

“In front of the Waxmans’?”

“No.” Clare’s hand went to her heart. “In front of ours.”
When we screeched to a halt by the curb, Clare and I saw a squad car parked in front of my house…
our
house, the house someone looking for Joey’s next of kin would wind up at. A uniformed police officer stood chatting with Detective Miller. We rushed over to them, and the officer opened his mouth to speak, but Miller held up his hand to silence him.

“It’s Joey,” he said to us, his face grim.

“No!” Clare said.

Clare screamed and I reached out for her, but I was the one who was falling.

Detective Miller sped Clare and me straight to the hospital. Along the way, he explained that Joey was still alive, but that it didn’t look good. Apparently she had smoked a large amount of crack cocaine, causing her blood pressure to skyrocket. This created such a buildup in her brain that a blood vessel burst. She was going in for emergency neurosurgery and the doctors had said to prepare the family for the worst.

I don’t remember much about the trip after that, except that I kept apologizing to Miller and Clare.

My sister clenched her teeth. “Stop saying you’re sorry.”

“But it’s my fault.”

“It’s not.”

“She was clean. Everything was going so well. God, I may have killed her.”

“She’s not dead!” Clare cried. “Stop saying that.”

When we reached the hospital, Miller escorted us upstairs, but we didn’t get to see Joey. She was still in surgery, and we were shown to a waiting room and told a doctor would come out soon to talk to us.

The wait felt interminable. Clare and I got into a stupid fight over calling our parents. I wanted to wait until we had
more news. She wanted to call them right away so they could make arrangements to come home.

“Do whatever you want,” I finally snapped, and got up to pace the room, picking up magazines and slapping them down again, while Clare sniffled softly into her cell phone. My armpits were wet from nervous sweat and I was pretty sure I stunk.

Finally, a doctor in surgical scrubs came into the room, his mask resting below his chin. He was just a bit younger than my father, and had that stern look I had learned to associate with neurologists, the most somber of specialists. A diagonal line of blood marked his shoulder. Joey’s blood. I tried to read his expression before he spoke, but he was inscrutable.

“Your sister is still in surgery,” the doctor began.

“Will she make it?” Clare asked.

He took a breath, as if he had to regroup and start from the beginning. “It’s not uncommon for a recovering addict to miscalculate and overdose. They tend to take the same quantity they were using when they quit, but their bodies no longer have a tolerance for the drug. In Joey’s case, the cocaine increased her blood pressure so significantly it caused an intracranial hemorrhage. We’re evacuating that now.” He paused and pursed his lips. “There’s no way to predict the outcome. We just have to wait and hope there’s no further bleeding or swelling.”

“If she lives…,” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if Joey’s brain would be permanently damaged.

“I don’t want to give you false hope,” the surgeon said, anticipating my question. “The swelling caused by the hemorrhage is considerable. But let’s focus on first things first. If she pulls through the next twenty-four hours, her chances of survival increase.”

I turned to Clare. “She might not even live a day!”

The doctor told us they were doing everything they could for her, and we thanked him. As he reached the door, he stopped and turned back to us. “I know your father,” he said. “A good man.”

I nodded, but turned to ashes inside thinking about my parents. They didn’t deserve to lose a daughter like this.

When I was in my twenties and announced my engagement to Jonathan, my family responded with guarded enthusiasm. I guess they had good reasons to doubt the prospects for our marriage, but I was crestfallen. Only Joey seemed genuinely pleased for me. Then, when she offered to throw me a bridal shower in her new Tribeca loft, I was swept away with gratitude. I wanted so badly to believe it would all work out that I managed to overlook the fact that her drug habit had escalated to the point where she was often barely functional. I gave her a guest list, and she took over from there, sending out the invitations, choosing a theme, hiring a caterer, ordering decorations, etc., and paying for it all with the royalties she was still reaping from “Tiger Attack.” At one point Clare even complained to me that she wanted to help but that Joey insisted on doing everything herself.

When the big day finally came, I took a subway downtown to Joey’s building, a warehouse that had been converted to massive apartments for a unique class of affluent New Yorkers—bohemians with cash. I had arrived fashionably late, figuring I would give my guests time to get there before me. Even though it wasn’t a surprise party, I figured it would feel more like a shower if I arrived last. But when I got off the elevator on Joey’s floor, my heart sank. There, standing in the hallway outside apartment 4E, was a group of about twenty women, including my grandmother, my mom, my sister, as
sorted female relatives of varying ages, and several of my closest friends, not to mention Jonathan’s stern mother, two sisters, and his elderly Aunt Annabel with her oxygen tank and aluminum walker.

“I’m sure she’ll be here any minute,” Clare said when she saw my face, but it was too late. I had already burst into tears.

We stood in the hall for another half an hour before we began discussing alternatives. Finally it was decided to move the whole party to Jonathan’s mother’s apartment uptown, but only about half the guests agreed to make the trip. The others left me with their gifts and went on their way.

Joey later gave an excuse about getting tied up at a business meeting and said we should have just asked the super to let us in, as if the screwup wasn’t her fault but ours. I knew it was the drugs, of course. We all did. And I was utterly furious. Looking back now, though, the most vivid part of the memory was Joey’s earnestness about the planning, and how hard she was working to make me happy. I’m not taking her off the hook for the decision she made—then or now—but I understand that addiction is an insatiable beast. Rehab may have taught her to cage it, but it never goes away. A recovering addict has to master that part of herself that’s always fingering the key, waiting for an excuse to open the gate. Stupid of me to assume Joey had managed that. Stupider, still, to be the catalyst.

Joey survived the surgery, but emerged in a coma. No one could tell us when she might wake up, if ever.

Lying in that bed, machines monitoring her vital signs, Joey looked like a shell, like someone who merely bore some physical resemblance to my little sister. The large white bandage on her head made her look small and waiflike. But the skin
around her eyes was dark and papery, and her cheeks were hollower than I’d ever seen them. Clare collapsed into me.

“They have a tube in her throat!” she said.

I patted her back. “To help her breathe.”

“But her voice! When my friend Sondra’s mother had surgery on her shoulder, the breathing tube damaged her vocal chords. You have to tell them to take it out!”

Clare was hysterical and I didn’t think it was the right time to mention that Joey’s singing voice was the last thing we needed to worry about right now. So I just told her to go home and be with her family, and promised I’d sit vigil all night.

“I’ll call if there’s any change,” I said.

“Will you talk to her? Will you try to get her to wake up?”

“Of course.”

After Clare left, I scraped the side chair over to Joey’s bed. I couldn’t hold her hand because there was a monitor on her fingertip, so I stroked her cheek and spoke to her.

“Joey? It’s Bev. I’m here. You have to wake up.” I watched carefully, but there was no movement. I gently squeezed her arm. She didn’t respond. I leaned in and started to whisper.

“You have to wake up so I can tell you I’m sorry.”

I heard voices and looked up to see a doctor and nurse come into the room. They introduced themselves and explained that they would be checking on Joey throughout the night. They consulted her chart and the monitors. The doctor took a penlight from his pocket to check Joey’s pupils.

“She’d been clean a whole year,” I said, desperate for them to know she wasn’t some drug addict living on the street. “She’s studying to be a cantor.”

The doctor nodded, and I wondered if he understood I was begging him to save her.

On my request, the nurse turned off the lights on her way
out. Sitting there in the dark, listening to the ventilator and watching Joey’s chest rise and fall, I felt crushed with loneliness. I touched her shoulder.

“Joey?”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture her awake, propped up on pillows. I imaged her clear blue eyes, her smirk, the tiny vertical scar under her left eye that looked like a wrinkle when she smiled.

I opened my eyes again and touched the tape around her mouth that held the breathing tube in place, wondering if her subconscious could sense pain.

“I’m supposed to keep talking,” I said, “but I feel like an idiot when you don’t respond. Can you move your pinky or something?”

I poked at her small finger.

“I don’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry’ sounds so anemic when you’re watching your sister…” I stopped myself. Did I really think she was going to die? “You’re going to be fine,” I said, knowing it was important to sound positive. “You’re going to wake up and be a cantor and have a great life. It’ll be just like before. But you have to wake up and open your eyes. You’re the only one who can do it.” I rose and went to the other side of the bed so I could hold her hand. There was no chair on that side so I knelt.

“I know you don’t want to die, Joey,” I whispered. “That’s why you called Miller before you passed out. But you’re going to have to fight for it. And who does that better than you?”

I suddenly felt so tired. I went back to the chair and reclined, staring at the acoustic tiles in the ceiling as I listened to the hypnotic rhythm of the ventilator and heart monitor.

“I know you wanted to hear me say I was proud of you. And I was. Of course I was. I should have said I love you. I was being mean and stupid. I just…you know, I was angry
about Kenny.” I stopped and pulled a tissue from the box by the side of her bed and blew my nose.

“But that’s over. If you wake up and want to spend the rest of your life with Kenny, it’s fine with me. Who cares? I mean, maybe I’ll still be a brat about it, but so what. We only just got you back. Don’t leave us now…
please
.”

I went on and on like that all night, saying anything that popped into my head. I talked about what it was like when she was born and Mom and Dad brought her home from the hospital. I didn’t remember, of course, but my parents had told stories of how Clare and I fought over her. And then, of course, how we fought with each other just to get our mother’s attention when she was busy with the baby. I told her how much she annoyed me with her singing when I was trying to do my homework. I asked her if she remembered how she made me promise not to tell our parents that the janitor from Dad’s office exposed himself to her. I confessed that I broke my promise on that, because I was so worried. I told her I was the one who broke her sparkly green belt that summer. I told her I never liked her friend Fran who always thought everything was so funny, and that Phil Janks, who she had such a terrible crush on in seventh grade, had told me he thought she was cute. I shouldn’t have kept that from her. It was jealous and petty. I told her that I used to brag and brag to my friends about how talented she was, and how I was so proud of her that I cried the first time I heard her song on the radio. I told her how terrifying it was when her drug habit got so bad she cut herself off from the family. I told her we had family meetings about her, and that Mom was so upset she thought the worry would kill her.

“I was so mad at you for hurting her like that. I thought you were so selfish. I guess…I don’t know. We all took it so personally, as if we thought you were
trying
to hurt us.”

By the morning I was so talked out I had no voice left. After
the sun came up, more hospital staff members had paraded in and out of the room, doing the same tests over and over. Elena, one of the night nurses, brought me a cup of coffee before her shift ended. She told me to go home and get some sleep, but I wasn’t ready to leave.

A short time later a team of people came in to take Joey for another CT scan. I stayed behind, too exhausted to move, too confused to figure out what to do next. When I heard my parents come in, their travel clothes creased from the flight, I was groggy and nearly asleep. They hugged me and said I should go home and get some rest. I didn’t want to leave, but my mother insisted.

“Take a nice bubble bath and get some sleep,” she said.

“I must smell like a sewer,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She stroked my hair. “Don’t apologize.”

I opened my mouth to tell that I had a lot to apologize for, but couldn’t find the words. So I blew my nose one last time and went home.

On my way inside I grabbed the mail. Mixed in with the usual stack of bills, catalogs, and junk mail was a single white envelope bearing a yellow forwarding sticker. It was addressed to me, of course. I stared, blinking, at the Las Vegas, Nevada, return address, waiting for the significance of the letter to have some kind of emotional impact on me. At last, I took it upstairs, dropped it into a dresser drawer unopened, and got into bed.

I thought exhaustion would overtake me quickly, but the thought of being woken by a terrible phone call from the hospital was giving me a most unwelcome adrenaline rush. Finally, after tossing and flailing about the bed for over an hour, I took the phone off the hook and drifted into a fitful sleep. One disturbing dream after another plagued my rest, locking
me in a sleep cycle so close to the surface of consciousness that a lucid thread followed me from room to troubled room. At last, two of my dream selves discussed the situation right in my bedroom. The me that was asleep in bed said it was guilt that caused the nightmare anxiety, while the other, who was hovering by my bedside, insisted it was death itself. Sleeping Bev said that sounded too much like the Hollywood version of death, where the hooded Grim Reaper appears in the person’s bedroom, holding a scythe. Then, in a horrifying moment, the sleeping me realized that the other presence in the room
was
the Grim Reaper. I understood too, that if I looked deep into the blackness of the empty hood, the face of the person being called would appear. I covered my eyes, believing that if I didn’t see Joey’s face she wouldn’t be dead.