IF YOU NEEDED ME by Scott Nadelson
1.
One Saturday morning in early March, when Amanda Horenstein was eleven, and her brother Donald nine, their grandfather drove his Cadillac straight into the side of their house. If the car made a noise on its way toward them, the children didn’t hear it. They were watching cartoons, Amanda on the couch, Donald on his belly only inches from the TV. Amanda’s feet were bare and cold, and she was waiting for a commercial to get up and put on socks. In the meantime she had them tucked under the dog, Harvey, a fawn-colored collie-mix with the first signs of old age in the gray hairs of his muzzle. Sometimes Donald lifted his head, his fluffy brown curls blocking part of the screen, and Amanda said, “Duck, Dorko,” to which he replied, “I’m not a duck, I’m a goose,” and made a farting noise with his lips.
There was no blare of a horn, no screech of brakes, because the old man touched neither. He was visiting for the weekend, on the way from his home in Queens to a gathering of Navy friends in Atlantic City, and had gone out to pick up the paper and a quart of milk for his cereal – whole milk, since all his daughter kept in the house was skim. The errand took less than twenty minutes. He’d left the children in front of the same Bugs Bunny cartoons he and his own children had watched on the big screen thirty years ago, preparing the way for the Jerry Lewis pictures that had made them laugh so hard they couldn’t breathe.
He hadn’t worried about leaving the kids alone – they spent most weekday afternoons that way, finishing school hours before their mother came home from work. Latchkey kids, they were called. He didn’t approve of letting kids run free, but neither did he approve of a woman with young children working full-time, sometimes as many as fifty hours a week. He also knew he was old-fashioned and out-of-date, and had long ago determined to keep his opinions to himself. His own wife – his Sylvia, God bless – had worked only part-time, in a secretary pool, for two years during the war. And when she was dying she’d thanked him for the life he’d given her. “For everything,” she whispered brokenly, each syllable spoken only after a new breath, all she could manage with lungs destroyed by emphysema. He couldn’t have stopped her from smoking if he’d wanted to, he thought, though if he’d known what was coming maybe he would have tried harder. “For everything,” she said again. He gave a dismissive wave and said, as he had when she’d first told him she knew she wouldn’t survive, when she’d first told him she’d never remarry if he didn’t make it back from the South Pacific, when she’d first told him she loved him, “What’s this crazy you’re talking?” Before she closed her eyes for the last time he planted a dry kiss on the dry skin of her forehead.
Later, the old man would explain that his foot had slipped only momentarily from the brake to the gas pedal, that the car jolted forward and wouldn’t respond to his attempt to turn it, that the steering wheel had locked. But from the expressions on the faces of the policemen who came to the scene, on the face of his son-in-law who was called out of surgery, of his daughter when she came home from shul, it was obvious that no one believed him. They saw confusion, the onset of senility. The truth was, the driveway had always been tricky for him, the entrance cut at an awkward angle, the slope too steep, pitched in a way that often made him nervous. It was necessary to accelerate over the hump at the curb and then turn sharply left to aim toward the garage. Too many steps – gas, turn, brake – and he got stuck on the first.
Maybe he’d been thinking of Sylvia still, though he knew he tended to blame her, poor woman, for too many things. Because of her illness and early death, he hadn’t traveled as much as he’d intended; he’d gone on working out of loneliness and to pay off medical bills; he’d cut himself off from old friends to avoid painful memories. But he’d also blamed her in life, and the kids, too, for making him work so hard, for never allowing him to think about himself. He’d never wanted to be a pharmacist. Given a choice, he might have tried his hand at politics. His own mother used to joke, when he was a boy, that he’d be the first Jewish mayor of New York. That was when she still didn’t speak a word of English.
He saw it all coming: the azalea bushes, the bay window, the recently finished stucco on which his daughter had spent a fortune, replacing the weathered wooden siding he’d found more attractive. He saw it the way he’d seen Sylvia’s death, something that couldn’t be stopped or even slowed, and he was overcome with self-pity. He was staring at his hands at the moment of impact, veiny and arthritic, the nails he used to have manicured when it was still fashionable for men to do so, the small scar on his thumb from a shipboard knife trick gone awry, these hands that since the war had done little other than pour powders and liquids and pills from one vial into another. Useless, he thought, as glass shattered, as stucco and wood splintered around him, one beam falling onto the Cadillac’s hood, inches short of where it might have killed him. Useless, these hands that gripped the wheel, trembling, even after the car had stopped and dust settled around him, along with the first terrible dawning that his grandchildren were nowhere to be seen.
He held those same hands up to show the policemen, to show his son-in-law the surgeon, to show his daughter. “They’re no good anymore,” he said. “No good for anything.” He kept saying it, for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week, and only much later did his daughter imitate his dismissive wave, the phrase he’d spoken so often, her accent sounding more like Bugs Bunny’s, he thought, than his own: “What’s this crazy you’re talking?”
But by then it didn’t matter what she said. He knew.
Useless.
2.
Barbara Horenstein, the children’s mother, was far from devout, but when she turned the corner onto Crescent Ridge and saw an ambulance in her driveway, police cars in the street, her husband in blood-stained scrubs running to her across the lawn, she let out the beginning of a prayer, “Please, God,” and then stopped herself. She could have asked for her children’s safety, for her father’s health – or, if it was his time to go, for a painless death – but to ask for such things seemed to invite disaster. She didn’t trust prayer or piety, though she knew she should have, being surrounded by it all week, having just come from services. But she went to services only as part of her job, alternating between Friday night and Saturday morning, this week deciding on Saturday because her father’s visit was brief. Last night she’d made him a special dinner for his seventy-seventh birthday, which had passed nearly a month ago. At the time she’d been too busy to get away from work, and during the weeks since had been plagued by a relentless, needling guilt.
For six years now she’d been development director for Temple Emek Shalom in Chatwin, New Jersey, an old, established Reform congregation just over the ridge from Union Knoll, where she and her family lived. During that time she’d led a capital campaign to refurbish the synagogue’s ballroom and gym, to tear out asbestos ceilings in the Hebrew school classrooms, to purchase a modern heating system that replaced the turn-of-the-century boiler. She’d also increased the endowments by fifty-percent and helped raise the annual operating budget by half a million dollars. She was good at her job, though being good, she told colleagues at fundraising colloquia, was mostly a matter of persistence, stubbornness, a willingness to give up Friday nights and Saturday mornings, to drive all over the county, to sit in plush living rooms and listen to the complaints of people far wealthier than she, who was herself wealthier than she’d ever dreamed of being.
She’d fallen into the job accidentally, or at least without much forethought. After college, she’d committed herself to volunteer work, partly out of a sense of responsibility, partly out of frustration. That was the late sixties, when so many of her friends spent their time protesting, against the war, against poverty, against the mistreatment of women and minorities; but the war went on, as did poverty and mistreatment. She was against the war, too – but it was so big and so far away that to think about it too much brought on feelings of futility and despair that often ended as migraines. Instead she tried to look closer to home, helping in a women’s shelter in Boston, where Jerry had begun medical school. At first she made beds and set tables for dinner, but later she organized bake sales, auctions, a charity sack race. She found herself talking to donors with a passion that surprised her, describing the lives of women who’d been beaten by husbands and boyfriends and fathers, women who’d spent months sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, women who’d sold their bodies for food, for drugs. She managed to bring herself to the edge of tears and then hold back, though many of the people she spoke to couldn’t. They wrote larger checks than they’d intended and thanked her for her work. The shelter’s director put her on his payroll at the end of the year.
After that she found jobs easily, with a food bank, with a children’s hospital, with an organization that provided jobs for the mentally disabled. When Amanda was born and they moved to Jersey – less than twenty miles from where Jerry had grown up – she worked part-time for a theater company in Morristown. The productions were amateurish and sparsely attended, and for years the company had been in the red. The manager talked often of bankruptcy. Barbara enjoyed theater, but not in any crucial way, and not the plays this company produced. But she needed to get out of the house for a few hours a week, and a few hours was all the company could afford to pay her for. She felt no passion as she spoke to potential donors, only the challenge of her fundraising goals, the impossibility of her bottom line. But by then she no longer needed passion in order to raise money, and in two years the theater was thriving, or at least stable, its productions as poorly directed as ever, though its sets were now designed by professionals, its programs printed in two colors rather than photocopied.
When the kids started school she went on the market and got nearly a dozen offers almost immediately. Some were with organizations whose mission truly moved her – one that promoted harmony between the races, one that fought disease in Africa, another homeless shelter. But the first had a ramshackle office, no cubicles even, just an open cluttered space jammed with desks and people shouting into phones; the second couldn’t offer any benefits, not even paid vacation; and the shelter would have meant a forty-five minute commute. Emek Shalom was only ten minutes away. The job came with a private office and a month off in summer. “How can I work for a synagogue?” she asked Jerry. “I don’t even believe in God.” Except for the bar mitzvahs of nieces and nephews, she hadn’t been to services since she was a girl. She and Jerry had been married by a rabbi, but only to appease their parents. But Jerry shrugged and said, “You didn’t believe in bad theater, either. And God pays better.”
And now she was a pro. She researched her prospects and knew exactly how to speak to each of them, whether to focus on education, or social activities, or spiritual matters. She could quote from the Torah when necessary, and had memorized a few lines of Talmud, of Maimonides, of Woody Allen when she needed a joke. She gave talks to the Men’s Club, to the Temple Sisterhood, about the importance of tradition and the history of the Reform movement. She had two assistants working for her, setting up meetings, processing gifts, organizing events. She’d perfected her pitch, knowing exactly when to speak a number – always a larger one than expected – and then fall silent, letting the request hang heavily in the air. The rabbi, the synagogue’s president, the board of directors all praised her and called her a Godsend.
And still she didn’t believe in God. Or didn’t think she did. But her reasons for not believing, coming mostly from her reading during college, her brief membership in the Socialist Party, seemed less logical than they once had – or else logic itself seemed less essential than it once had. And it was true, at times, that she felt something like spiritual comfort during services. Her real work didn’t come until afterward, at the Kiddush, when she would seek out members who hadn’t yet made their annual pledge, or thank those who had. During the rabbi’s sermons, which always made predictable parallels between the mistakes of the Reagan administration and those of Biblical rulers who’d come to ruin, she often went over shopping lists in her mind, or thought about ongoing house projects. But then there were certain prayers, sung by the whole congregation, led by the young cantor’s rich alto, that struck a chord in her, made her glad to escape momentarily from the concerns of job and family, to wonder at the possibility of divine purpose and benevolence. It was an idle wondering, without any real conviction behind it, or even a desire for conviction, but it gave her genuine pleasure, and she didn’t fight it.
But now she’d crossed a line, done what she’d never allowed herself to do before: “Please, God.” She’d said it as if she did believe, and maybe in that moment she did. She couldn’t finish the prayer because there was too much to ask for.
Please, God, let everything be okay, always.
And as she pulled to the curb and got out of her car, she felt she’d asked too much already. Disaster. Her father’s Caddy in her den. A gaping hole in the side of her house. Her children nowhere in sight. She’d unleashed something terrible on her family, divine injustice and malice. She was crying by the time Jerry reached her, the calm face she’d always relied on looking frightened and haggard, his heavy brow creased, his eyes wide, his trimmed hair mussed, and what he said made no sense. “Everything’s okay. Everyone’s fine.” These words, too, sounded like prayer, and she wanted him to stop talking. His mustache prickled her ear. She cried harder. “Your daughter’s a hero,” he said. “She saved Donny’s life.”
Even when she saw her father, taking his slow, rickety steps beside a policeman, when she saw Donald come running out the front door with nothing but a bandage over his left eye, when she saw Amanda carried by a paramedic, her feet wrapped in gauze, her arm in a sling, she couldn’t stop crying. The flashing light of the ambulance refracted through her tears, the entire world gone red. Plaster dust lifted in a sudden breeze. She’d been blessed with so much more than those women in the shelter where she’d once made beds and set tables. Did she deserve this, too? She didn’t know if her prayer had been answered, or if she’d been spared in spite of it. She’d never know, could never know, whether it had done any good or not.
3.
Only on the way back from the hospital did Donny remember the dog. By then it was a relief not to have to think anymore about the way his sister had grabbed him around the waist this morning, yanking him off the floor before he could begin to struggle, tossing him toward the open door to the basement, where he’d slid head-first down the stairs. In that brief, confusing moment he’d thought she was angry at him for blocking the TV – she had a temper, which he often tried to provoke by making her tell him at least three times to stop doing whatever it was that drove her crazy. Sometimes she threw a pillow at him, and once, when he wouldn’t pass the ketchup at dinner, pretending not to hear her repeated requests, a butter knife. But he’d never expected real violence, and as he bumped down the stairs he shouted out apologies and begged, silently, for mercy. Then came the blunt smack of his forehead against the railing and with it a terrible noise, a crash, a screech, a groan of metal, a squawk of rubber and wood, all the result of Mandy’s rage, he believed, the rage for which he was responsible.
The sounds seemed to have lodged somewhere deep in his ear and kept replaying one after another even now as he rode in the back of his mother’s car. He wished he could turn them off. Mandy was beside him, but he didn’t dare look at her for fear – though he knew it couldn’t be true – that the sounds were coming from her. He hadn’t looked at her once since coming out of the basement and finding the hood of his grandfather’s car where the TV had been. Not when he heard her voice coming from the kitchen, saying the word “emergency” so calmly that he forgot for a moment what the word meant. Not when she dabbed at the cut on his forehead with a cottonball and covered it with a bandage, doing both with one hand, the other hanging limply at her side. Not now, when she pushed his fingers away from his new stitches, her cast scraping his arm, and whispered, “Don’t mess with it, Dorko. You’ll make it worse.”
Instead he put his head between the two front seats and said, “What happened to Harv? Who’s taking care of him?”
From the way his parents hesitated, he knew they’d forgotten the dog, too. His father scratched his mustache and said, “I’m sure he’s fine, pal. He’s a tough old guy.”
“He might have got out.”
“He knows his way back.”
His mother didn’t say anything. Usually she drove with only her left hand on the wheel, the other on the armrest, but now both hands steered carefully, her body stiff, eyes forward. A tremor passed through her jaws every few minutes, making Donny want to reach out and touch her, but at the same time making him too nervous to move. They’d left his grandfather behind at the hospital, just for the night, just to make sure everything was okay, and Donny felt a twinge of envy that he didn’t get to do the same. He was envious of Mandy’s cast, too, which would last longer than his stitches. His father had sewn up the cut himself, and the nurse in the room told him Dr. Horenstein was the best, that he’d hardly have a scar. But he wanted a scar, wanted something to mark the day. He imagined people asking him years later where it had come from, and he’d say casually, gauging the awe and pity in his listeners’ expressions, “My sister threw me down the stairs when I was nine.” It was easier to picture an act of cruelty than an act of love, though either way he had to be amazed all over again at the way he’d flopped in Mandy’s arms and flown through the air. Her arms were twigs, hardly thicker than his own, one of them entirely swallowed by white plaster now, the fingers swollen and red when he let himself peek at them. Her feet, too, were red, still bare except for the paper booties she’d gotten at the hospital, stitched on their soles because she’d stepped on glass. He started to lift his eyes toward her face, but then his mother let out a gasp and said, “My God.”
He looked up in time to see the tremor pass through her jaw again, but this time his father put a hand on her shoulder. Through the windshield he saw the tow truck pulling his grandfather’s Cadillac out of the hole in the house, bits of stucco and wood falling in its wake, and again he wished he could have stayed behind at the hospital with his grandfather. “It’s just a wall,” his father said, in the same way he said, “It’s just money,” whenever he bought a new car or a piece of furniture or a Persian rug.
“We need a new TV,” Mandy said.
“First things first,” his father said.
He waited for Harvey to come bounding out of the hole, with a two-by-four between his jaws. Whenever they took him for a walk in the woods, the dog always found the biggest stick he could carry, so big it made him lean to one side, and when he tried to run he tripped everyone in his path. Harvey was older than Donny by a year and two months, his hips creaky whenever he stood from a long nap, but he still came running when Donny and Mandy came home from school, still barked when the doorbell rang, still chased rabbits in the backyard.
But now the hole stayed empty, even when they slammed the car doors. “He got out,” Donny said, but no one answered. His mother was talking to the tow truck driver, a kid in a denim jacket, with hair longer than Mandy’s, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head in what seemed like a sympathetic way. His father carried Mandy so she didn’t have to walk on her stitches. Tomorrow they’d have a wheelchair for her, and after a few days, crutches. The wind blew one of the paper booties off her feet, and before Donny could catch it, it skittered across the driveway, across the lawn, into the street. “Forget it,” Mandy said, when he started to chase it. “I don’t need it anymore.”
“Stay out of the den, okay, pal?” his father said.
He touched the stitches again, four of them, a sticky ridge with little canyons on either side. The pain was mostly gone, unless he pressed down hard, which he did now, feeling something ooze onto his fingertips. “Harv!” he called, again expecting the dog to come running from a neighbor’s yard, carrying the carcass of a chicken found in the trash, his breath ripe and steaming. “Harvey!”
He searched the yard, and when he got cold, searched inside, the kitchen, the bedrooms, his father’s office, the basement. At the bottom of the stairs he saw the railing where he’d hit his head, a bit of blood dried on the varnished wood, and he decided not to tell anyone about it, to leave it for as long as he could. He whispered now, “Harv,” not willing to disturb the strange silence in the house, the quiet tension he still associated with the coming sounds of the crash. He checked behind the furnace, behind the water heater, but no dog. Above him he heard his father’s voice, no more than a rumble, and then Mandy’s, clearer than he expected, “I don’t know. I just did.” He recalled her arms around his waist, recalled the rush of air, the bump of stairs, and tried to believe her throwing him was done out of love, as it must have been, though in his memory he could feel only the terrible force of anger, which he was sure must have canceled out any love.
Water flushed through a pipe overhead. He moved boxes and old clothes and toys, releasing a musty smell. He didn’t call for the dog now, because he knew Harvey wasn’t here. But he didn’t want to go to the one place he guessed the dog might be, afraid of what he’d find. He waited as long as he could, sifting through shirts he’d worn as a baby, through Mandy’s abandoned dolls, and only when he heard his father rummaging in the garage did he go upstairs.
His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, with her head in both hands, and she didn’t look up when he passed. Mandy called to him from the living room, where his father had laid her out on the sofa, but he didn’t answer. Everything in the den was covered in white dust, the couch, the coffee table, the bookshelves, the rug that used to be blue. Where the TV had been was a jagged view of grass and asphalt, his grandfather’s car and the tow truck gone now, and Donny had an urge to take up his old spot on the floor and watch the hole as he’d watched the morning cartoons. But that spot was where the hutch had landed, where the TV had smashed. He tried to imagine himself underneath the rubble but couldn’t. He didn’t know what time it was now but knew his mother would have come home from services hours ago and told them to turn off the boob tube before their eyes went square.
His parents had tried to prepare him for Harvey’s death, telling him most dogs didn’t live much past twelve or thirteen. It was easier to picture the dog’s crushed body than his own, a relief, in fact, one that made him dizzy. “Poor Harv,” he said, thinking of the way kids at school would say, “Poor Donny,” when they saw his stitches and heard about his dog.
But in answer came a muffled whimper, and he was only momentarily disappointed to have his vision of pity shaken, and then ashamed of his disappointment. Harvey wasn’t under the rubble. He’d squeezed into the space between the couch and the wall. He whimpered again when Donny slapped his palms against his knees and whispered, “Come on out, dummy.” Harvey’s graying muzzle was flat on the floor. His tail didn’t wag. “Poor Harv,” Donny said again, and meant it this time, seeing fear in the dog’s eyes, a trembling in his flank that didn’t seem so different than the one in his mother’s jaw. “It’s all over now,” he said, and reached a hand in to scratch the dog behind the ear. But instead of whimpering, this time Harvey growled. “It’s me,” he said. “It’s Donny.”
Harvey’s yellow teeth were bared, the fur on his neck bristling, making him look nothing like Harvey, and Donny wondered if he, too, looked nothing like himself, now that he was someone who’d almost died. I almost got killed, he’d tell kids at school, inspiring awe, which was even better than pity. I almost got killed, he thought, and now he did picture himself under the rubble, an arm sticking out from beneath the smashed TV, a leg twitching and then stopping. “I almost got killed,” he told Harvey, and reached out a hand again, but Harvey’s growl grew louder, and his jaws snapped, just missing Donny’s fingers.
“Move over.” Mandy’s cast was beside him, the white plaster that would soon be covered in signatures and well-wishes and funny pictures. She’d crawled on her knees and one hand, making a trail in the dust from the hallway to the couch.
“Something’s wrong with Harv,” he said.
“He’s scared.”
“He tried to bite me.”
Now he did want to see her face, to know if it, too, had changed, as Harvey’s had, but it was screened by her hair. She made a clicking noise with her tongue, and the dog’s growl turned back into a whimper. Another click of the tongue, and then came the thump of Harvey’s tail. “I found him,” Donny said.
“Big deal.”
He wouldn’t have been able to lift her from the ground if he’d wanted to. He wouldn’t have been able to throw her into the basement. He couldn’t even make Harvey come out from behind the couch. “I almost got killed,” he said.
“I know, Dorko. Get out of the way.” She snapped the fingers of her good hand, and Harvey’s muzzle appeared, then his eyes, ears, front paws. He slipped past them, head low, and ran up the stairs. “Get out of here before Dad sees you,” she said, and finally he did catch her look, no different than ordinary, her sleepy, half-lidded eyes, her freckled cheeks, her droopy lips that kids in school made fun of, all of it normal, no extra anger, no extra love. She crawled away, shuffling to keep from putting pressure on her cast. The soles of her feet were both bandaged, so he couldn’t count her stitches, though he knew there were far more than four. Outside, his father was shaking out an old black tarp to cover the hole, and Donny imagined it draped over a mangled body.
He whispered this time, only now hearing what the words meant, the sounds of them so much uglier than the sounds of the crash they made his chest ache. “I almost got killed.”
4.
The patient Dr. Horenstein had run out on the morning of the accident was Jolene Carson, a pretty sophomore at Drew, with a gumball-sized cyst on her jaw. A biopsy had come up negative, so by the time she came to see him, Jolene was concerned above all about her face and how the scar would look. Young girls and attractive women were often referred to Jerry, who was known for the delicacy of his incisions. He scorned cosmetic surgeons, people who tried to create beauty where there’d been none before, or at least not for years – but he had no qualms with preserving beauty when threatened by an unfortunate mutation of cells. He knew how to cut with the skin’s natural creases, often going out of his way to avoid unsightly marks. He felt good about his work, even though the surgery he performed wasn’t technically difficult, mostly dealing with growths just under the skin or in surface tissue. He didn’t have the pressure that some of his colleagues had, the immediacy of life and death, though he often prolonged lives that might have been cut short and was thanked in letters, and occasionally with gifts. Of course there was always the possibility of something going wrong, of unexpected reactions to anesthesia, of shock, but he’d never yet lost a patient, had never faced even the threat of malpractice. The thought of cutting into hearts, into brains, made his hands – ordinarily so steady, admired by his colleagues for their competence and grace – tremble and sweat.
Jolene had first come to see him a month ago, accompanied by her mother, who’d breezed into his office in a fitted sweatsuit and flirted with him shamelessly, tugging the rings on her slender fingers, gazing at him through severe black bangs, saying, “She has such a lovely jaw. Whatever you can do to keep it that way.”
He was scheduling six months out at that point but agreed to fit Jolene in on a Saturday morning, as he did sometimes for pretty girls who needn’t walk around for half a year with an unnecessary blemish. Jolene looked stricken and nauseous, her whole head unbalanced by the gumball bulging below her cheek. Her hair was lighter than her mother’s, all one length, pulled back and twisted into a knot at the base of her neck. She had a small nose, full lips, round hazel eyes, and Jerry felt a shameful pang, knowing his own daughter wouldn’t grow up to have such unambiguous good looks. People would say Amanda had an interesting face, that she had exotic qualities, but really they would be expressing what a shame it was that she’d turned out to be homely.
Jolene hadn’t declared a major yet, her mother said, but she was thinking about international relations. She might want to be a diplomat. She’d need to be able to make a good impression. “I wish I had a jaw like that,” her mother said. “I did once. A long time ago.”
He’d make the incision just under the jawline, he told them, and come up around the side of the bone. It would take a bit longer to heal that way, but in the end the line would be almost invisible, impossible to see from more than a few inches away.
“Only by dashing young men coming in for a kiss,” Jolene’s mother said, giving her head a shake that ruffled her bangs.
Jolene spoke for the first time then, her voice deeper than he’d expected, husky and exasperated. “Keep it in your pants, will you?” Her mother blinked and bit her lip and didn’t look at Jerry for the rest of the consultation.
But now, a week after Jolene’s surgery, her mother’s eyes were locked on his, all trace of flirtation gone. She had on a black suit, the collar open at the neck to reveal grizzled skin, wrecked by too much sun, her lipstick dark and unsexy, hair pinned tightly in back. “We’re not happy about this at all,” she said.
“I understand.”
“Not one bit.”
“If I could change it I would,” Jerry said. “Believe me, this isn’t a situation I would have chosen.”
Jolene was silent again, sitting with her legs crossed beneath the silky fabric of a long skirt, her feet in sandals though it was still brisk outside, another week until the start of spring. She had two slim braids framing her face, the rest of her hair loose and thick to her shoulder blades. A hippie girl, that was the look she was going for, a look she’d never fully achieve – even now her toes were too clean, their nails closely clipped. It was a look his own wife had been toying with the year they’d met, when Jerry himself was working on a patchy beard and talking about his dreams of healing people in a remote African village. That was before medical school, before he’d understood what it meant to be in debt, before he’d known how many different ways there were for a person to die. Barbara’s toenails had been just as neatly filed as Jolene’s, though the soles of her feet were nearly black, having gone almost two weeks without shoes of any kind. But the look hadn’t suited Barbara any better than it did Jolene, nor any better than a beard had suited him – though unlike Jolene, he hated to admit, Barbara hadn’t had the advantage of prettiness to make up for the ugly clothes and dirty feet.
Today Jolene was as pretty as ever, the swelling in her jaw gone, only a bandage covering the wound. He’d made the incision before the duty nurse came into the operating room and told him he was needed at home. It had been a good cut, as clean as anyone might have asked for, and the rest he left in the hands of an intern, Kelly Edwards, a competent young surgeon, who one day might be as sought after as Jerry himself. But Dr. Edwards was more concerned with accuracy than aesthetics, and to get to the cyst from the awkward angle Jerry had provided she’d had to stretch the incision, and hadn’t stitched it as finely as Jerry would have. It was a functional job, impressive for an intern put on the spot, but now Jolene would be left with the scar Jerry had promised she wouldn’t have, seen by more than those young men who’d bend close to kiss her. The scar wouldn’t affect her beauty in the least; it wouldn’t cause anyone to hesitate in his pursuit of her. If anything, he thought, it would add to her appeal, roughening up the perfection of her look, giving her character.
But her mother wasn’t interested in his thoughts on beauty and character. She was here with an agenda. She wanted him to re-cut, to re-stitch, to do what he’d promised to do. Cosmetic surgery. She insisted that he schedule it as soon as possible. She wouldn’t pay another dime. She’d already talked to a lawyer. “We paid for your hands,” she said. “Not for some orderly’s.”
“It was an emergency,” he said. “I wouldn’t have chosen it.”
The eyes that had previously observed him coyly through bangs now conveyed nothing but anger and indifference. The lips that had smiled at him, that he’d briefly, against his will, imagined touching with his own, were set and unfriendly, lipstick bleeding into the creases at the seams of her mouth. “Your emergency doesn’t concern me. My daughter’s face does.”
He explained what the procedure would involve. A skin graft. General anesthesia. A painful recovery, several more weeks of healing. “I’ll be glad to do it,” he said, turning to Jolene, who seemed to be studying him, her tongue working behind her lower lip, prodding the spot where the cyst had once been. No matter how many scars she had on her neck, she’d always be more beautiful than his wife, his daughter, and he suddenly wished he could have given Amanda a better chance in life, providing her a more attractive combination of genes. “But I need to be sure this is something you really want.”
“Of course it is,” her mother said.
“Is your daughter okay?” Jolene asked in her husky voice, flinging one of the braids out of her face. “I saw her on the news.”
“Just broke her arm,” he said, surprised to find himself choking on the words, his nose suddenly clogged.
He was on call until eleven that night – occasionally he was asked to oversee an emergency procedure, never to participate – and then drove home in the rain, thinking about Jolene and her mother, who’d gone back to smiling by the time she left the office, saying she was glad she’d be seeing him again. She apologized for being so hard on him, she’d just do anything for her daughter, she was sure he understood. He despised her then but couldn’t stop himself from imagining unbuttoning her blouse the rest of the way, taking off that ugly suit, seeing the whole of her tanned, wrecked skin, and now tried to shake away the image and the disgust it brought. He remembered the way Jolene’s shapely legs had shifted beneath her skirt, her toes flexing in the nylon sandals, her husky voice answering slowly when he asked again if she wanted the extra surgery, “I guess I can handle it.” If he’d been stronger, more determined, he might have tried to talk her out of it, but with her mother glaring at him, he’d only shrugged and said, “Okay. A week from Saturday.”
The black tarp flapped in the wind, its edges beating against the house, rain seeping in. He spent twenty minutes pinning it down further with industrial tacks, making more holes in the stucco, his wool coat, warm enough but useless against the heavy drizzle, quickly soaking through. The contractors had postponed once already but were supposed to begin working next week. During the day he worried about burglars, and last weekend he’d put a sign on the garage, another in the lawn, “Beware of Dog.” A burglar would have something to worry about with Harvey, no question – the dog had grown jumpy, growling around anyone but Amanda, something in his mind snapped by the accident. He wondered about the mind of a dog, if it would suddenly believe the world was falling apart when a car crashed into a house. If so Harvey was like Barbara, who seemed to expect more walls to come crumbling down at any moment. A harried look had settled into her face over the past week, and she’d stopped laughing in her usual way about people at work, the rich donors out of whose pockets she wheedled enormous checks. She’d stopped going to services on Friday night or Saturday morning, sending her assistant instead, saying she already worked hard enough during the week. In the last two days she’d begun talking about going back on the job market.
She was in bed now, and so were both the kids. Only the lights in the kitchen were on, where Jerry’s father-in-law, Ivan Zacheim, sat drinking coffee at the counter, the newspaper folded beside him. Twice now Ivan had said he was ready to go back to Queens, where he couldn’t cause any more trouble, and twice Barbara had talked him into staying longer. Jerry was ready for the house to return to normal, for the wall to be fixed, for the old man to leave. The two things seemed bound together, and sometimes Jerry wondered if Ivan couldn’t go until the evidence of what he’d done was gone as well. The old man spent a good bit of his time staring at the wall, or at the kids, imagining, maybe, what might have happened if Amanda hadn’t acted as she had. Jerry imagined it, too, at unexpected times, the thought of burying his children making all the spit dry up in his mouth, pains shooting through his legs and arms. It happened once during surgery, requiring all his effort to keep his hands steady, the one part of him he’d almost always been able to control, unlike his thoughts.
Ivan didn’t glance up when he came into the room, just lifted the cup to his lips, no steam rising, nearly as much milk in it as coffee. The cup shuddered on its way back down, sloshing brown liquid into the saucer. The old man’s hair was oiled, still thick where it hadn’t receded, and he wore a sport coat and tie, as he did everywhere except in bed. Outside he wore a fedora, too, refusing the believe that hats had gone out of style. Jerry had always admired the dignified way he carried himself, his erect posture, his careful enunciation, his slow stride that managed to hide stiffness and pain behind a façade of unhurried thoughtfulness. His confidence made up for his sagging face, a worn version of Barbara’s, whose own face was a weathered version of Amanda’s, all three sharing the shapeless mouth, the wide nostrils, the small, deep-set eyes that kept them on the verge of ugliness.
“It’s late,” Jerry said, because he was tired of silence and could think of nothing else worth saying.
“Sleep is a luxury I seem to have given up,” Ivan said, flexing the fingers on his right hand, his arthritis worse since the accident.
“The coffee isn’t going to help.”
“There comes a time when it’s better not to fight anymore.”
“Look,” Jerry said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, an irritation he didn’t entirely understand. “It’s just a wall. No real harm done.”
“I’m not much good to anybody these days. Not for a long time.”
“Donny’s stitches come out tomorrow. Mandy has the cast for a month, and then she’ll be back to normal.”
“I could have been mayor of New York,” the old man said.
There was no sense trying to reason with him, but Jerry couldn’t stop himself. “The contractors come next week. Why does everyone have to act like it’s the end of the world?” From the living room came a slapping sound, the tarp loose again, his tacks useless against a sudden wind gust. “Why can’t everyone just relax?”
The old man ignored him, taking another sip of coffee. Why couldn’t he go back to feeling normal himself? Why was he so uneasy walking through his own house, coming from the job he’d had for long enough now that even a difficult meeting with Jolene Carson and her mother should have felt routine? He didn’t expect cars to come plunging through walls at any moment, for his roof to crumble without warning. He knew that what had happened was an aberration, not to be repeated. It wasn’t the accident that had surprised him so much as how it had played out, his daughter, often difficult and whiny, complaining whenever she was given a chore, sulky when she didn’t get a gift she was hoping for, now shocking everyone with her selflessness, her simple courage and the stoic way she carried it afterward. He’d never expected much from Amanda, he was ashamed to admit – her grades were average, her behavior in school often eliciting ambivalent remarks from teachers. And now he was even more ashamed to realize he wanted her to return to the way she’d been, to go back to being difficult and predictable, something he didn’t have to wonder about, though now wonder was all he did. How could she have risked her life to save her brother? Where did she find the strength, when her own father passed up on performing any surgery with the slightest hint of urgency?
He left Ivan in the kitchen, climbed the stairs, walked past the closed door of his own bedroom, past the kids’ bathroom, past Donny’s door. Rain splattered the skylight above him, a hollow sound, and he knew he should re-tack the tarp before any more water leaked into the ruined den. But instead he stood outside Amanda’s door, as he had every night for the past week. He tried to make out the sound of her breathing but couldn’t over the drumming of the rain. He wanted to open the door and stand over her bed as he had when she was an infant, watching her sleep, amazed at what he and Barbara had produced. He was amazed again, but amazement was something he thought he’d given up years ago, an emotion too worrisome to indulge in middle age, one he had no time for. His hand was on the knob, as it had been every night for a week, the minty smell of toothpaste coming from the bathroom, Donny never remembering to rinse it from the basin when he finished brushing.
The rain came harder. He couldn’t let go of the image of Jolene Carson probing the inside of her mouth with her tongue, flinging her braid out of her face. He couldn’t stop imagining her mother unbuttoning her blouse. For years he’d been undressing women with his eyes, twice with his hands, but until now he’d always been able to push their faces out of his mind when he came home from work, to go through the motions of his family life without lingering on the regret he felt, having married a woman he’d never been more than mildly attracted to, and now not at all.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open. One bark, and Harvey’s paws were against his chest, jaws snapping at his face. Over the dog’s head he saw his own reflection in Amanda’s mirror, his trimmed mustache, his salt and pepper hair, his distinguished jawline, a face that was unquestionably handsome, more so than it had ever been as a young man’s face. He’d settled for a near-homely woman, had loved her genuinely, but only, he’d always known, because at the time he believed he couldn’t have done any better.
The dog’s breath was sour and fishy as Jerry struggled to keep his teeth away. Not the face, he thought, hearing the words in Jolene Carson’s mother’s voice, not the face. “Dad?” Amanda asked groggily, sitting up in bed, her matted hair silhouetted against the window, her own features in shadow. “Harv?”
The dog lunged again, and Jerry put a hand in front of his chin, a hand that should have been saved for surgery, that was his life, his purpose. Before he could take it away, the dog’s jaws closed over it, teeth crunching through bone.
5.
Whenever Amanda watched the news clip in the months and years following the accident, she was always shocked to recognize the strange expression on her face, a look of pity and understanding that seemed beyond the grasp of her eleven years, her wide mouth sorrowful and dignified on the shaky recording, the tape’s poor quality making her skin look sallow. She tried not to watch very often, but sometimes, without understanding why, she was drawn to it, playing it only when no one else was in the house.
The clip had been recorded by a neighbor, the one other family on the block with a VCR – the only one after the Horensteins’ had been shattered by the Cadillac’s grill. The local anchor, a boyish, wavy-haired heartthrob from the station in Chatwin, locked eyes with the camera and said, “And now we have a special story this evening, the story of an eleven-year-old girl’s incredible courage.” A graphic, “Young Heroine,” flashed across the screen, before the camera cut away to a pan of Crescent Ridge, of the house with its gaping hole, the tarp taken away for the sake of the news story.
The interview was shot the day after the accident, while Amanda’s mother was picking her grandfather up from the hospital. The reporter asked silly questions: “Do you love your brother?” and “How do the kids at school feel about having a bona fide hero in their class?” The Amanda on screen answered sincerely, ignoring the emaciated woman’s patronizing tone, while the one who watched thought, Give me a break. The Amanda on screen said, “I feel bad for my grandpa. He didn’t mean it.” She sat in a wheelchair in front of the hole, her posture upright despite the sling around her neck. “I hope my dog didn’t get too scared.”
This wasn’t Mandy, the undersized girl who was a loudmouth at school, pushy with other kids, always talking back to teachers, the one who didn’t do her homework, who once slapped another girl on the playground, bloodying her nose, because she wouldn’t give up her turn at jump rope. The Amanda who watched herself on screen couldn’t fit the two images together, and neither could her schoolmates, nor her teacher, Mrs. Travers, who up till now would have ignored any attempts she’d made at reforming. They spoke to her hesitantly, with a hint of reverence, while she wheeled around the hallways, and then hobbled on crutches. Her class gave her a standing ovation her first day back in school. Kids who’d never before had a kind word for her asked if they could sign her cast. Mrs. Travers’ way of talking to her changed from one of defeat and derision to a wary, uncertain respect.
The face of the girl on TV somehow overshadowed that of the girl who’d been loudmouthed and belligerent, even for Amanda – afterward she couldn’t go back to being Mandy, giving the nickname up at the beginning of the following school year. She’d never dreamed of being able to start over, of becoming a different person, but given the chance, she was happy to find herself quieter and milder mannered, easier on herself and others. This person had been inside her all along, she guessed later, held back from the surface by distrust or fear or doubt or any number of things she didn’t understand or whose source she didn’t remember. The new Amanda turned in most of her homework, not always on time and not always carefully done, but regularly and proficiently enough to keep her from standing out. She talked back to teachers only when they were being unreasonable, and even then in a softer, sterner voice, a voice of authority. At recess she watched games of jump rope and kickball from the sidelines, and even after her cast was off, her arm and feet healed, she declined to join in, sitting instead with the more demure fifth grade girls, the ones who wore make-up and skirts and leg warmers, the ones for whom playing sports and getting sweaty was something remembered only vaguely from the distant, childish days of third or fourth grade. To her surprise, no one told her she belonged elsewhere.
Even her parents treated her differently, as if she’d aged a dozen years overnight. Or maybe it was they who’d changed so abruptly, becoming younger in those hours after the accident, less sure of themselves, less interested in being parental. They no longer sent her out of the room when they discussed finances or problems at work, no longer lowered their voices when they had a disagreement. “I’m not arguing,” her father said, a few weeks later, his hand bandaged where Harvey had bitten him. “I just want you to really think this through, that’s all.”
“That is arguing, Jer,” her mother said. “And who says I haven’t thought it through?”
“I just don’t think you should be impulsive about it. I think you should take more time. This has been such a crazy month.”
“Another week isn’t going to make any difference.”
“You can’t make rash decisions in the heat of the moment.”
“You can’t,” her mother said. “I can.”
Later, when her father went up to bed, and Amanda was trying to read about the ratification of the Constitution and answer questions on Mrs. Travers’ worksheet, her mother made a racket loading the dishwasher and then said, out of the blue, “He’s never liked it that I’m independent. That I can think for myself. All his talk about women’s rights in the seventies. Bullshit. What he really wants is a nice traditional wife. Someone to do all the housework and keep her mouth shut.” She slammed the dishwasher closed and shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s probably not true at all.” She let out a heavy breath and examined a few hairs for split ends. “I don’t know what he wants. I never have.”
Amanda watched the tape that night, in the dark of her bedroom, on the TV and VCR her parents had given her as a surprise the day Harvey was put to sleep. She’d watched it that day as well, and watched it again eight months later, on the day of her grandfather’s funeral. She watched it when her parents announced their separation, and after coming home from her first disastrous date in high school. She watched it when Donny wrecked their mother’s Jeep, out joyriding with a friend before he’d even gotten his learner’s permit.
She watched it once more her first year in college, but this time she wasn’t alone. Beside her was a broad-shouldered boy with perfect teeth who, along with the rest of his lacrosse teammates, shaved his head and wore a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, to show off muscles and a fresh tattoo, a Chinese character symbolizing something to do with honor or bravery or enduring pain. She’d asked him about the tattoo at a party, but his answer had been drowned out by booming bass and drums. Instead of asking again she stayed close to his muscles, close to the tattoo, drinking cups of punch he offered, topped with chunks of fruit marinated in vodka, and when the party wound down she brought him back to her dorm room, empty for the weekend, her roommate gone home to visit a high school boyfriend.
He was her second lover since she’d started school, but despite his muscles he wasn’t any better than the first had been, a tall boy with impressive stubble, who claimed she’d broken his heart when she stopped returning his calls, who now looked the other way whenever they crossed paths on campus. The lacrosse player, Bennett, rolled off her, yanked off his condom, and said, “I’ll be able to go again in a minute. I got more stamina the second time.”
The vodka-soaked fruit had begun to wear off by then. Her head hurt, and she wanted to sleep. But Bennett sat up at the end of the bed, back against the wall, feet hanging off the mattress, hand on his crotch, waiting. She traced the tattoo on his arm with a bare toe. He ignored her for a moment, then grabbed her foot, and ran a finger down the scar. She pulled it away. “That tickles.”
“How’d it happen?”
“I’ll show you.”
She said it without thinking, and without thinking she walked across the room to her closet and began digging through piles of clothes, through shoe boxes full of old photographs and journals, until she found the tape. She was aware of her skin lit by a streetlamp through the window’s flimsy shade, of the hips that had taken on weight over the first three months of college, as everyone had warned her they would.
If she had a reason for showing Bennett the tape, it was at least partly out of spite, for his being such a bad lover, for thinking he had courage just because he wrote it on his arm in a language he didn’t understand, because he threw a ball around with a stick and hurled himself against other boys with his helmet and shoulder pads. His erection was coming back by the time she returned to bed, and she was relieved to be able to press play on the remote control, to see the heartthrob news anchor’s sincere look into the camera, to hear his confident voice speak her name. And there she was, an awkward, stoic-looking girl in a wheelchair, saying of course she loved her brother, saying she felt sorry for her grandfather, saying she was worried about her dog.
Was she any less awkward now? Her teeth were straighter, her hair darker and styled. She had breasts now, and thighs shaped by running on a treadmill, shoulders strengthened by swimming. Her lips still drooped, her eyes were still deep-set and prone to getting bags beneath them, her chin weak, but none of that stopped muscled lacrosse players from wanting to come home with her and push themselves between her legs. Seven years later she still carried that pose of dignity she’d discovered during the TV interview, her head held up despite the sling, shoulders squared, eyes steady. It was the same pose she’d held at the party a few hours earlier, when she’d gone straight up to Bennett and asked what his tattoo meant. She’d seen how impressed he was, breaking off from talking to another girl, quickly claiming her for the night. And now she watched him watching her, the Amanda who’d been a hero, who’d saved her brother’s life. She was glad to see he’d stopped rubbing himself, that his erection had gone away. His eyebrows lifted, the only hair on his entire head. “Damn,” he said. “Bad ass.”
“There was glass everywhere,” she said, and wedged her feet under his leg. “That’s how I got the scars.”
“How’d you do it?”
How. That was the one question the emaciated reporter never asked, the one question Amanda had never been able to answer herself. One minute she was watching cartoons, annoyed with Donny for blocking the TV; the next she had him in her arms, tossing him toward the basement door. She guessed now that Harvey had heard the car even if she hadn’t, that the dog had jumped from the couch and startled her, that somehow she’d realized what was coming. The feeling she recalled wasn’t fear or anger or panic, but only purpose and power. In that moment and in the few hours following, she’d felt herself capable of anything that might be asked of her, that she could bear whatever came her way. The pain of her broken arm, of the glass in her feet, was nothing next to Donny’s safety, her parents’ alarm, her grandfather’s sorrow. It was recalling that feeling that allowed her to pose for the camera the next morning, that allowed her to approach a muscled lacrosse player while he was talking to another girl – though she’d never felt it again directly, not once, since that day.
And sometimes she wished she’d never felt it at all. After her grandfather’s funeral, she’d even considered getting rid of the tape. Until then it had been sitting on the shelf above her desk, with the two halves of the cast she’d worn, every inch of plaster covered in signatures. They came home from the cemetery on Long Island to find the contractors at work again in the den, the sound of saws and drills and filing. The first contractors had done a shoddy job, leaving stucco that cracked and a window that leaked.
The front door was open, but they didn’t have to worry about Harvey getting out anymore. Her mother had driven the whole way, with that new careful posture, her hands tight on the wheel, eyes never leaving the road, and now she went straight to her bedroom and closed the door. She still hadn’t found a new job since quitting the synagogue eight months earlier, saying she couldn’t raise money for something she didn’t believe in. Her father hadn’t driven because his hand was still bandaged. His doctors had set the bone without realizing there was an infection, and now, after several surgeries, he could close his fingers only halfway. He was in physical therapy twice a week and didn’t know if he’d ever make it back to the operating room.
Donny had cried through the whole service, wailing when Amanda hugged him and whispered, “What’s this crazy you’re talking?” He was still crying now, following her upstairs to her bedroom, throwing himself face down on the bed. “I want Grandpa,” he said. “I want Harv.”
What she wanted was to get her dress off and her itchy tights, to put on sweats and slippers. To have the contractors gone so she could watch TV without the noise of power tools and hammers. To have her father healed, her mother back to work, Donny out of her room. She listened to his whimpering and recalled Harvey’s from the nights he’d spent beside her bed, the dog calming down only when she clicked her tongue. She saw her grandfather’s stunned face, her mother’s bewildered, her father’s in pain, Donny’s streaked with tears. They all wanted her to be strong, to make things better, to ease their distress, but she’d already done everything she could. What power she’d had that Saturday in March was long gone. Instead she was left with the fear she hadn’t felt that day, and the sadness, and an anger she didn’t understand as she watched Donny’s curls bounce on her pillow in rhythm with his sobs. “I want my dog,” he said.
“I don’t care what you want, Dorko. Okay? Enough already. I don’t care.”
He didn’t look at her. He didn’t say another word as he left the room. She took off her dress and tights, put on sweats and slippers, grabbed the tape and cast from the shelf and held them above the trash can beside her desk. She’d go back to being Mandy, back to being the loudmouthed girl who’d made up for being ugly and teased with backtalk to teachers, with cruel gossip and pushiness. She wondered if now she, too, might be able to cry for her grandfather, to cry for Harvey, for her mother’s and father’s careers, for the hole in the house.
But no tears came. Downstairs her father was arguing with the contractors. A table saw whined through wood. Donny passed her door and made a farting noise, a sound she hadn’t heard since last March. Water was running in her parents’ bathroom, her mother filling the tub. Through her window she saw a black sports car take the sharp turn onto Crescent Ridge, kicking up fallen leaves, and speed off down the street. Her breath was as shallow as it had been for months, her muscles as tightly clenched. She set the tape and cast on the desk, thinking she’d throw them away tomorrow, maybe, or the next day.
Now she crossed the dorm room, popped the tape out of her roommate’s VCR, and tossed it back into the closet, not watching to see where it landed. She could feel Bennett’s eyes following her bare body, the breasts she was proud of, that she knew how to make prominent by pulling her shoulders back.
“Bad ass,” he said again, and whistled. He’d gone back to rubbing his crotch, his erection returned to full strength.
“I’m tired,” Amanda said. She climbed into bed and turned her back to him. She felt his breath on her neck, his warm skin, his surprisingly soft hands, but she closed her eyes and braced herself against his desire, his ache, giving not the slightest sign that she was moved by it. She kept in mind the image of the girl on TV, this person who was her and not her, who she’d been once and would never be again.
“Come on,” Bennett whispered, his hands making their way over her hips. She pressed her knees together with a strength that dwindled with each passing year, that now seemed to waver with each hot breath against her neck. It would have been so much easier, she knew, to let him flop around on top of her a second time, and not have to do a thing.
Scott Nadelson is the author of the short story collections The Cantor’s Daughter and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, both from Hawthorne Books. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, and South Dakota Review.