When He Fell (26 page)

And then he stops. He pushes me away from him so fast and hard that I stumble and then fall hard onto my hands and knees. Bruce stands above me, panting.

“You disgust me,” he says, and then, after doing his pants up, he turns and walks out, slamming the door behind him.

I stay on my hands and knees for a moment, rigid and yet reeling, before I collapse and curl into a fetal ball on the floor. Shock pounds through me and then tears slide silently down my cheeks and into my hair. I have been brought lower than I thought I could go, and yet I’m not even surprised. This, I think, is the natural result of my behavior, of flirting with married men, of looking to them to help me, save me, of being willing to do anything, be with anyone, rather than be alone. This is what happens, where you end up, and it’s a horrible place, a place I never wanted to be. In that moment I hate myself.

I’m not sure how long I lie there; my body is cold and aching, my face stiff with dried tears. I hear a gentle knock on the door and then Brian’s voice, soft and uncertain.

“Maddie?”

I think of ignoring him, but he probably heard the door slamming, maybe even Bruce’s shouting, and I don’t think he’ll be put off. So I uncurl myself from the floor, wipe my face as best I can, and actually attempt to plaster on a smile.

I open the door. “Hey, Brian.”

He takes one look at me and his face drains of color. “What did that jerk
do
to you?”

Too late I realize my clothes are a little messed up. Quickly I adjust them, tuck my hair behind my ears. I should not have answered the door.

“Nothing, nothing,” I say quickly. I can feel myself flush. “Just an…argument. You heard, probably…”

Now I see Brian flush. “I heard everything,” he says and mortification sweeps through me in an icy wave. “This building has very thin walls.”

I turn away because I can’t bear to look at him. “You must think I’m a complete…” I don’t even want to finish the sentence. Idiot? Skank?
Whore?
I feel it all. I feel the weight of all my decisions, all my terrible choices, press down on me, and for a second I can’t breathe.

“I don’t think anything, Maddie,” Brian says gently and I walk away from him, sinking onto the sofa as Brian follows me into the living room. “That was Bruce Decker, the husband of Juliet, who was on playground duty when Ben fell.” I speak to my lap, my head bowed, my hair falling in front of my face. “Apparently someone posted a message on MetroBaby about the insurance claim, and it’s gone viral.” Acid swirls in my stomach as realization thuds through me again. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t want any publicity.”

Brian sits next to me on the sofa, close enough so our legs brush. He moves away a little, so they’re not. “Who do you think it was, then?”

“I have no idea. The only people I told about the lawsuit were you and Lewis.”

“Lewis?”

I swallow hard, choke down a wild sob I feel rising inside me. “Josh’s father.”

“I haven’t spoken about this to anyone,” Brian says. “And Keith, of course, is under client confidentiality. So Lewis must have told someone…”

“He wouldn’t have,” I say. “We’re…friends, and it would only reflect badly on Josh. He wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe he told someone who told someone?”

I think of Joanna. But Joanna would never do this. It would be the last thing she wanted. “I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose I should look it up.” Wearily, feeling deadened inside, I reach for my laptop and click on the MetroBaby site. I’ve visited it a couple of times before, mostly to gawk in appalled fascination at the posts by the super-rich Manhattan mothers who whine about their lazy nannies and obsess about getting their three-year-olds into preschools that feed Harvard and Yale.

It doesn’t take me long to find the post; it is number one on the trending list on the sidebar. The title reads
Finally Burgdorf School is getting what it deserves! Mother suing the school for negligence and it is about time!!!!

“Shit,” Brian mutters under his breath and I click on the post, scanning the huge rant against the school and its unfair policies towards children with difficulties. I can’t take it all in; I have no idea who would post this, who would use my personal story to fuel their own hatred and anger.

I scroll down to view the comment trail, but after reading only a few posts I push the laptop away. I can’t fill my head with all the useless ranting about Burgdorf and lawsuits and discrimination against children, the judgment against me for suing, against Joanna for having a son who pushes. MetroBaby mothers love to point the finger, to judge without jury, and harshly at that.

But even without reading it all I know this is bad. Bad for the school, bad for Lewis and Joanna and Josh, and bad for me.

How long before they run stories about Ben? About Josh? The poster didn’t name the children, thankfully, but the newspapers will ferret them out. My stomach roils and I drop my head into my hands.

“I never wanted this,” I whisper. I never wanted
any
of this.

Brian puts a hand on my shoulder. “I know.”

“Do you think this will affect the settlement conference next Friday?”

Brian sighs. “Hopefully not. Hopefully the newspapers won’t pick it up.”

I think about Bruce’s comment about the
New York Daily Mail
and my stomach drops. “I think they already have.”

Brian squeezes my shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do about it now, Maddie, so try not to worry about it. And whatever you do, don’t comment on that site.” He points to my laptop. “Nothing good will come of engaging in that kind of speculation and discussion.”

I let out a hollow laugh. “Trust me, the last thing I want to do is get on that site.”

Brian drops his hand from my shoulder and I feel its loss. I’m afraid he’s going to leave and I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to go without me explaining why I acted the way I did with Bruce, even if I’m not sure I can.

“I don’t know what you must think of me,” I say in a low voice. I don’t look at him.

Brian is silent for a moment. “I think you are someone who is under an enormous amount of emotional pressure,” he finally says. His voice is careful.

“Even so…”

“I’m not going to judge you, Maddie.”

I close my eyes. The fact that he feels he has to say that is bad enough. “The thing with Bruce…” I begin, and then stop. I don’t want to admit to Brian how messed up I am. I don’t want to confess to the way I’ve flirted with married men, secure in my knowledge that it would never actually go anywhere or hurt anyone. “It wasn’t…” I try, painfully, the words squeezed out. “Before tonight…”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Brian says, a little too quickly. Of course he doesn’t want to hear all the details.

I nod, my eyes still closed. No, I won’t tell him. It’s my burden to bear, my problem, my awful weakness.

“Look,” Brian says after a moment, and he clears his throat. “I just…I just want to say that I am here for you, Maddie. That I’m your friend.” He puts a slight emphasis on the word friend, to make it clear that is all he is.

And for once I am not disappointed by such an offer. I have been looking to men, any man, to fill an emptiness inside me for a long time. It started when I was twelve, and lost my virginity to an eighth grader by the middle school’s Dumpsters. It went on from there, with me searching, never finding, giving myself in all sorts of ways to boys and men who didn’t really want me. I finally stopped when Esme straightened me out, and I managed to get through college without breaking my heart or giving away my body to someone who didn’t care about me. And then in a moment of loneliness I started it all again, and had Ben as a result. After that I kept searching for the man who would, bizarrely, be a father figure to both me
and
Ben. Who would fill all the emptiness. A man like Lewis.

But I don’t want do that any more. I don’t want to keep looking for salvation only to destroy myself, and maybe other people, in the process. I want to change.

I lift my head and give Brian a watery smile. “Thank you,” I say quietly, and I mean it. Right now the best thing anyone could offer me is friendship.

22
JOANNA

Tuesday afternoon I sit in Will Dannon’s waiting room and strain to hear what he is saying—what Josh is saying—but the door is thick and I can’t hear anything.

I jiggle my foot and flip through the upmarket magazines—better than the ones in my office—and try not to grind my teeth. Worry churns inside me, knots my insides tightly. Worry about Josh, about Lewis, about my marriage, about my parents, about the business I’ve neglected the last month. No part of my life is easy or safe.

After an hour Josh comes out of Will’s office, blank-faced, shoulders hunched, followed by Will who seems entirely too relaxed. I send a silent, frantic question with my eyes that Will blandly ignores. Damn the man and his stupid patient confidentiality. This is my
son.

As we head out into the darkening streets of Greenwich Village, the words spill out of me.

“So how was it?” I ask Josh. My voice, at least, isn’t manically cheerful.

Josh shrugs. “He just asked me stuff about school.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just what subjects I liked. We talked about Lego for a while.” His voice brightens at this, and I wonder if Will Dannon said anything of import to my son. Probably not. Most likely he was just building up Josh’s trust, trying to get to know him. I understand that, I can almost accept it, but I can’t shake the feeling that time is running out. That my family is a ticking time bomb and one day, one day
soon
, it’s going to explode.

“Did you talk about Ben?” I dare to ask as we walk towards the subway. “And—and Maddie?”

Josh’s footsteps slow and he turns to look at me. “What do you know about Maddie?” he asks and for a second it feels as if my heart has stopped beating.

“I know she’s Ben’s mother, and that she’s been close to you and to—to Dad.” I wait, willing him to tell me what he knows, for his sake as much as mine, even as I wonder if I should have started this at all.

“I’m not close to her,” he says.

“But you think Dad is, maybe,” I say, unable to keep myself from it, and Josh stops and turns towards me, searching my face. Around us people stride and surge; someone bumps my shoulder hard and curses before moving on.

“He’s not,” he says, his voice petulant, savage. “He’s
not.
”

I swallow hard. “Josh…do Dad and Maddie have something to do with why you pushed Ben? Is that what you don’t want to talk about?”

Josh stares at me for a second, one terrible, tense, silent second, and then his face crumples and he starts to cry. I’ve never seen him cry like this, tears slipping down his cheeks, his shoulders shaking, his whole body contorted by grief. He looks far too little to carry such a big burden.

I sag in both fear and relief. Finally we’re getting somewhere, even if it’s somewhere I don’t want to be. “Oh, Josh.” I pull him towards me and he clings to me, his face pressed against my chest. “Oh, Josh,” I say again, helplessly, because I have no other words. No other comfort.

After a long moment Josh pulls away from me, rubbing his sleeve across his face, and we walk into the subway station, buoyed along by all the other people. A herd of commuters get off at Forty-Second Street and Josh and I manage to find seats. He sits with his head pressed against my shoulder, his eyes closed. I put my arm around him, anchoring him to me. We don’t talk, and in my head I try to put the puzzle pieces together. First I look for the straight edges, the things I know for certain.

Josh pushed Ben. He meant to do it; he meant to hurt or punish or maybe even kill him. Josh thinks Lewis knows why he did it. It has something to do with Lewis and Maddie.

I’ve formed the frame of the puzzle of our lives, and it terrifies me. Now I have to fill it in. The obvious piece, the enormous, awful one, is that Lewis and Maddie are having an affair. Over the last year or two they’ve become close; those play dates I naively assumed Lewis was handling on his own were with Maddie, the four of them like a family.

The thought is enough to bring bile to my throat, but I swallow it down and keep on fitting the puzzle pieces together. So they’ve had an affair, and Josh found out about it. Maybe Ben found out first, and told Josh, up there on the rocks. Maybe Josh didn’t believe him, was angry, and so he pushed.

And maybe, as time went on, he realized it
was
true. He remembered seeing Lewis and Maddie together. Who knows how it happened, but I can’t forget Josh’s burning stare as he told Lewis he knew.

And of course Josh doesn’t want to tell me about any of it. He doesn’t want to hurt me. And God, am I hurting now.

As we rattle uptown I long to feel normal again. I yearn for my child, my family, my marriage, all to be normal and safe again. I want to appreciate what I have, to savor it, rather than wallow and drown in fear. I want to find a way to climb out of this horrible, deep hole, but I feel like I am standing at the bottom with no way to go up.

Back at the apartment Josh sits on the sofa with his Lego book, watching me beneath his lashes, checking up on me.

I make dinner, feeling like a zombie, like an empty shell of a person, but trying not to show it to my son. I try to hum as I cook, but my voice wobbles. My whole body aches. I want to curl up into a corner and sob. Instead I stand by the stove, frying chicken, cutting onions. When my eyes sting and run from the onions, Josh looks at me, alert, worried, a panicked question in his eyes.

I force a smile. “It’s just the onions, honey,” I say, but my voice wavers and I look down, away from Josh’s knowing gaze.

Lewis comes in at six, his cheeks reddened from the cold and gray shadows under his eyes. I don’t trust myself to speak, and so I busy myself with dinner.

Lewis glances at both of us, wary now. “Hey,” he says and Josh simply stares. I mumble something resembling a hello as I flip the chicken.

Lewis takes a beer out of the fridge. “Everything okay?” he asks, and Josh sits up straight. I can feel him watching me, wondering what I’ll say.