Accelerated (5 page)

The long haul hadn’t turned out to be all that long. “I’ll have another,” Sean said to the bartender.

After his second drink, he looked at his watch. He had five minutes to get back to Bradley. He slapped money on the bar and walked into blinding daylight. The new father carried a Styrofoam box of scampi. Sean didn’t have the heart to tell him that if a woman who’s just given birth asks for shrimp cocktail and you bring her shrimp covered in garlic and oil, there most certainly will be hell to pay. The kid would find out soon enough.

The vodka only kept him warm for the first block and a half, and as he ran past the Mount Sinai buildings, he thought of Calvin in the ER, Melanie sobbing over his lifeless body. Whatever buzz he’d had was gone now and he felt heavy, slow, sick.

He dragged himself into Bradley just in time to see the kids following their teachers, single file, down the sweeping staircase and across the lobby. A few girls in bellbottoms and sparkly Tshirts giggled. A tousled-looking boy tripped over his feet, but then recovered. Sean winced, remembering how he’d tripped over his own feet all through school.

He watched Toby search the room, find him, and shoot him a toothy grin. He seemed fine. All the kids did. Maybe Jess hadn’t told them about Calvin. Sean tried to read their faces, but you couldn’t tell with kids. Sometimes information like that took a while to sink in.

Jess had pulled herself together and was talking to the kids like she’d known them forever instead of just eight hours. From a distance it was easier to size her up. She’d said she played lacrosse in college, and now he saw it. She had a great body. Athletic, not sucked-out and bony like so many New York women. Her expression hovered somewhere between authoritarian and conspiratorial and was as intriguing as anything he’d seen in a long time—especially here.

He watched Toby laugh at a joke Zack was telling. Calvin should have been laughing right along with him. The other parents in the room still had no idea how lucky they were to be here picking up their kids while the Drakes prayed to see Calvin’s eyes open.

He took a minute to catch his breath, to steady himself before pushing through the wall of mothers.

“You’re Sean Benning,” a soothing male voice said. A hand descended on his back in a fatherly way. “Walt Renard.”

He shook the hand that was extended toward him. “Hi.” Walt Renard looked tanned, well-rested, like he’d just stepped off a tropical island.

“I hear you took Calvin to the ER.”

Walt was one of the parents who knew everyone, even though he didn’t fit The Bradley School’s parent profile. In all the years he’d seen Walt at dropoff and pickup, Walt had never once worn a suit and tie. Today he wore blue jeans, a button-down shirt, and expensive shoes.

“Word spreads fast,” Sean said, keeping Toby in his peripheral vision. “Does everyone know—about Calvin?”

“Not yet. Not most people.”

“I have no idea what happened, why it happened.”

“There’s nothing more terrifying than being a parent.” Walt removed his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his untucked shirt. “We do everything we can to protect them. And then something like this happens.”

Toby was looking for Sean across the room. “I ought to …”

“Yeah, you ought to get your son,” Walt said. “You did a good thing today.” He clasped Sean’s hand again. “Karma points,” he said, and gave a wave.

When Toby saw Sean, he stuck his hand in Jess’s direction for his formal dismissal handshake. As soon as they’d unclasped hands, Sean scooped Toby into a fierce hug. He hadn’t meant to, but there was no fighting it.

“Dad,” Toby said, embarrassed.

He hated letting go, but forced himself. “Don’t know what came over me,” he said. “Sorry.”

Jess handed him his jacket. “You might need this.”

He thanked her and put it on. She seemed so together. “How are you?”

“Fine,” she said, as though they hadn’t just saved a kid’s life together. Or probably saved it. “Thanks for the art project.” Apparently, he
and
Toby had been dismissed.

Toby said nothing as they walked to the bus stop.

“So,” he said, when he realized Toby was going to need some prodding. “How was the rest of your day?”

Toby shrugged. “Calvin went to the hospital.”

Sean nodded. Wait for it.

“Kayla said Calvin’s eclectic,” Toby said.

He tried to imagine ways in which Calvin could be eclectic but failed. “He’s what?”

“Eclectic,” Toby said. “Kayla saw a show on PBS. They get all weird and shaky when there’s a lot of bright light.”

He should really write this stuff down. “Epileptic?”

“Yeah,” Toby said.

Sean was pretty sure Calvin wasn’t epileptic. If he was, the doctors would have identified it fairly quickly. The blank looks on their faces had made the whole thing that much more terrifying.

“Drew said it could be a peanut allergy,” Toby went on. “Even though Chef Antoine doesn’t use peanuts.”

“Calvin doesn’t have allergies, Tobe.” Sean wondered if Toby would ask how he knew this, but he didn’t. It was a given that parents knew everything about everything.

“Isaac said school was going to have to pay lots of money if it was their fault.”

Perfect. Isaac was working the litigious angle. “So are you worried about Calvin?”

“Remember Patrick?”

Patrick, Patrick. “Uh …”

“Remember, he did the Empire State Building set for the second-grade play?”

Sean remembered some kid’s parents paying two hundred bucks to have a professional set designer come in and build the set.

“Patrick had a peanut allergy and had to go to the hospital, too. He came back.” Toby shrugged. “But then he left school after the summer.”

“Calvin doesn’t have any allergies.” He put his arm around Toby and they walked a while without speaking.

“I hope Calvin comes back.”

“Me too,” Sean said. “Me too.”

“W
HERE
’
S THE SEX
?!” R
ICK
H
OLLINGSWORTH BELLOWED
accusatorily through the office. It never failed to make the young
Buzz
staffers tremble in their Vans. But Sean liked Rick—sort of.

“I want flesh on these pages,” Rick shouted. The skin under his chin wobbled when he moved his head. Sean routinely photo-shopped the same turkey flap out of Harrison Ford’s profile. Rick had endured a few too many late-night closes, and the endless supply of pizza and beer had settled into a fifteen-pound tire around his middle. His lids drooped, giving him a heavy, tired look.

“Find me swimsuit shots for Christ’s sake,” he said. His waddle continued to wobble even after his head came to a complete stop. “Where are the Big Five? Someone’s got to be on a beach this month!” He stormed into his office and slammed the door.

The sad fact of the matter was that Rick was a brainy guy. Should have been at
Time
or
Newsweek
. But seven years ago he’d lost his shit and heaved his computer out the window of his eighteenth-story office at
The Economist
. It was a miracle it hadn’t hit anyone. Any real career Rick might have had in journalism had flown out the window along with the computer. Now, even though antidepressants had more or less fixed the bugs in his brain chemistry, he was stuck here at this sorry excuse for a tabloid. A lifer. Rick’s morose presence served as a constant reminder to Sean to get out while he still could.

The job was supposed to be temporary, a stop-gap after Toby was born while Ellie took time off from the network. He’d given up the freelance work and his painting studio for a steady paycheck and health insurance. But three years had turned into five, then eight. He’d get out somehow, but for the meantime, Sean needed the job. He dialed Gino.

“I’m away from my phone right now,” Gino’s voice announced. “Leave your number and when I get out of the hot tub I’ll ring you back.”

Gino never picked up his phone. Sean knew the drill. “Code Blue,” he said, and hung up. The sick thing was, Gino might actually
be
in a hot tub. He imagined Gino, flanked by topless Bunnies, their steamy ears askew. His fearlessness, coupled with a total lack of humility, made him one of the best paparazzi in the business. In the middle of Jen and Brad’s divorce, he’d left a paper bag full of steaming dog shit on Jen’s front step. When she bent down to open it, he caught the whole thing with his foot-long zoom from the mansion next door. The photo—a close-up of Jen’s devastated expression—ran on the cover with the caption “Jen on the Verge.” Inside, a fabricated story from “sources” revealed she would be checking into a Malibu facility for “treatment.”

The phone rang at Sean’s desk less than sixty seconds after he placed the call. He picked it up on the first ring. “We need T&A,” he said. “ASAP.”

“Nice to hear from you, too,” Gino said, with a post hot-tub calm. “Tell me.”

“Flesh deficit. Big Five only,” he said. They’d had the same conversation dozens of times. “So what do you know?”

“Julia is in Aruba with the twins, Brangelina is in Thailand, Britney is in Baja. Any of those work?”

Gino always knew. In a sick way, that impressed Sean. “Just get me the shots by day after tomorrow. I don’t care where you have to go.”

“Code Blue rules. Code Blue pay, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Go.” Code Blue, the magazine’s screw-the-pay scale emergency mode, had made Gino one of the richest slime bags in his slimy business.

If Gino made good on one or two Code Blues a year—and he almost always scored more than that—he was in the black. For the Aniston dog-poop shot alone, the magazine paid him a hundred grand. First class airfare, four star hotels. It was worth it. He was newsstand gold.

Sean, on the other hand, was making seventy thousand dollars a year at the magazine, putting him just barely above the poverty line in New York City. Hand to mouth was pretty accurate. There was never anything left over for a splurge, a vacation, savings. If his in-laws weren’t paying, The Bradley School would never have been an option.

He dialed Rick. “Got it covered,” he announced. “Gino’s on it.”

He could hear the sigh of relief through the phone.

But Sean knew even Gino couldn’t deliver 100 percent of the time. Just to be safe, he opened his emergency folder. There was a “Separated at Birth” thing he’d put together that played off celebs who looked vaguely similar: Matthew McConnaughey and a young Paul Newman, Kiera Knightley and Wynona Ryder. He also had a “Then and Now” story ready to go that compared high school yearbook photos with current shots of the stars. Then there was the evergreen “Who Wore it Best” story that humiliated two actresses for having generic taste, then went ahead and mortified one of them for not wearing it well enough.

Stories fell out constantly at
Buzz
. Celebrity couples broke up, reconciled, and broke up again so fast, you never knew which story to run with. He knew how to drop in a new story on a dime.

The phone rang again. There were always two or three calls from Gino getting approval to hire assistants, drivers, escorts. The guy had balls. Sean approved it all.

He picked up the phone. “What?”

“Sean Benning?”
Beneeng
. The woman’s voice was French and throaty. It brought to mind black underwear.

“Uh, yeah?” How articulate.

“It is Camille Burdot, Burdot Gallery. You dropped off your portfolio last month?”

He’d pushed it out of his mind because nothing would ever come of it. “Right.” His voice came out sounding too high. He coughed and lowered it. “Should I come down and pick it up?”

“I think your work is quite interesting,” she said. “I would like you to come in for a meeting.”

Sean opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“Mr. Benning? Did I lose you?”

Deed I lose you?

“No. I mean, I’m glad you like my work. When should I …”

“Tomorrow. How’s three o’clock?”

Three was not good. He and Toby were supposed to be baking an apple pie for Thanksgiving. “Three’s great.”

“See you then,” she said, and hung up.

As the shock wore off, a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. Next came the victory dance that involved pelvic thrusts and pumping fists.

No way he could do a “Who Wore it Best” story after a conversation with Camille Burdot. It would be just his luck if she were one of those French women with greasy hair, fuzzy armpits, and a two-pack-a-day habit with teeth to match. He shook his head to dislodge the image and tried to get back to the black underwear.

Luckily, it was two forty-five. Time to pack up. No matter how much he hated his job, Sean was well aware that no other boss would let him get away with leaving this early on a regular basis.

“Women are the devil,” Rick had told him when Ellie left three months ago. He’d closed the door to his office and poured them each a glass of Johnny Walker Black from a bottle he kept tucked between hanging folders in his filing cabinet. It was 11 a.m. “Maddie dumped me six years ago. Ruined my fucking life,” he said. “I see my kids every other weekend.” Color rose in his grayish cheeks. He loosened his collar, then took a drink. “You get the work done, you can leave whenever you need to. Don’t let her wreck the kid’s life, too.”

Now, on his way out, Sean stuck his head around the glass door to Rick’s office. Rick was slashing copy with a red pencil. Maybe it was the residual effect of the
Economist
episode, but he used the red pencil instead of the computer whenever possible.

“We should have images day after tomorrow.” Sean wondered if he was still smiling.

“That’s why you earn the big bucks, buddy,” Rick said. The gruff act had already passed. “Say hi to your little genius for me.”

Sean hightailed it to Grand Central and was on the Lexington subway six-and-a-half minutes later. If he got on the train before two fifty-five, he could make it to school on time. If he missed the train by as little as forty-five seconds, he’d hit a gap in service and he’d suffer the consequences of
tardiness
. Every parent knew that being late to pick up your child from school was mortifying on numerous levels. Not only would your kid glare at you sullenly when you walked into the empty lobby, but the teacher, who’d invariably be checking her watch, would be pissed you were now using her for babysitting.