Audrey’s Door (28 page)

S
ix days after Audrey Lucas discovered Jayne Young’s body hanging from a noose, Jill Sidenschwandt’s phone rang. It was two in the morning, and her Madison Avenue bedroom was liquid ebony. Tom reached across the king-sized bed and swatted the antique rotary off the Prince Edward nightstand, then draped his arm over her and squeezed.

Jill burrowed her face into her pillow. “Noooooo,” she moaned. It had to be one of the Pozzolana brothers. Not even Tom’s China clients had the balls to call this late.

“Are they kidding?” Tom asked, then flicked the Tiffany lamp. Shards of colored glass ignited like a rainbow. “You’ve got to quit. Start your own business. You paid your dues with those people.”

Half the office had shown up at the funeral three days ago. Even Mortimer had put in an appearance. But by
now, he and Randolph probably thought her mourning period was over. They wanted her back at her desk.

She flopped onto her back. The ceiling was cracked, which she’d just now noticed. Wishbone-shaped. She winced, and resisted the temptation to make the only wish that mattered.

“They’re not kidding; they’re just idiots,” she said, then remembered that the receiver was off the hook—they might hear her. “Gaaaa,” she muttered as she picked it up, then asked, “Hello?”

No one answered on the other line. But she could hear someone’s breath. The sound was distant, as if the speaker on the other end was holding the phone at arm’s length.

“I can’t sleep anyway,” Tom said as he sat up beside her. “All these flowers are killing my allergies. I wish they’d just send cards.”

Jill squeezed Tom’s thigh to silence him. He squeezed back, to be cute. “Hello?” she asked again. More breathing. It sounded further away than before.

“Julian?” she asked, still half-asleep. Next to her, Tom stiffened. It wasn’t him; she knew it wasn’t Julian. But how could she wonder, and not ask?

When he died, they’d both been at work, and the homecare nurse had been drinking coffee in the kitchen. Her last words to him that morning: a caricature of tough love. Teary-eyed and panicked, he’d asked her whether she believed in an afterlife. It had hit her then, though she should have understood as soon as the doctors gave up on the chemo: her son was going to die.

Shut up and stop worrying,
she’d told him.
You’ve got to be brave and face this fighting, or you’ll never get any better.
She’d hated him for just a moment, for having been born, and leading her to this moment of failure as a mother, for not having kept him safe.

“Julian?” she asked again, though she knew it was impossible. Still, it might be the past calling, and this
was his death rattle. She could right the wrong, and hear it now and console him, like she should have done then.

Sniffles. “Puh—” The voice said. It sounded feminine, and was followed by panting.

“Who is this?” she asked while Tom switched on the light. Their room was awash with funereal white flowers that smelled worse with each day they ripened. Rancid sugar air.

“Huh, huh, huh,” someone—it sounded like a woman—half breathed, half cried over the line.

“Who is this? Tell me who you are!” Jill said.

“Help me,” the woman begged. Then the line went dead.

Jill’s stomach turned. Something urgent. Something terrible. Her own self, perhaps, calling her from a parallel future, to warn her of what was to come. Only it was too late. Her son was dead. She got up fast and started down the hall to check on the rest of them.

She and Tom had bought the apartment with his trust fund back in the late nineties. Seven thousand square feet in a doorman building in the East Seventies. A long hall connected all the rooms. Up until yesterday, the place had been crammed with relatives. She missed their clutter and hushed voices. The way they cooked and doled out hugs that did not comfort but at least distracted. But Tom’s parents had caught a car back to Greenwich, Connecticut, last night, and for the first time since Julian’s death, her shrunken family was alone with its grief.

She went to Xavier’s room first, and sprung open the door without knocking. One hand clutched a
Hustler,
the other lay hidden beneath the covers. A freshman at New York University, he hadn’t been ready to leave the nest and live in a dorm. She’d hoped college would bring friends, or unearth a latent talent, but so far, no dice. His bare chest was hairless and pale. Something
about its softness seemed unformed. There was a vacancy behind his eyes. She liked to think he was ditzy, but she suspected it was more than that. His mind traveled to solitary, unfathomable places. No matter how many presents or hugs he got, he was always convinced that the world had done him wrong.

She’d been so busy with Julian that it had only occurred to her at the funeral, when Xavier had sat away from the family and off to himself, that there was more wrong with him than spoiled-kid syndrome. “Why isn’t Mercedes coming to clean today?” he asked after the burial, his affect flat as the oil in a level. “I needed somebody to vacuum my room.”

Now, in his own world as usual, he pumped under the covers without seeing her. Even in this, his movements were clinical. Though he held the magazine, she did not imagine he was thinking about the black woman with bright pink nipples on the cover, or even of a boy. Nothing so human as that. Just an itch to be scratched. She shut the door and moved on, hating herself as she thought it, but thinking it nonetheless:
Why Julian? Why not Xavier?

Next, Clemson’s room. She found him sleeping soundly. He’d come home from his last year at Harvard for the funeral, and would be leave again in a few days. You’d think he’d have gotten cocky with those smarts and looks, but no. Like Tom, he made a point of putting people at ease. Less like Tom, he always had to win, be it lacrosse, grades, or squiring the best-looking girl to the University Club. If she had any complaints, it was that he was too perfect. People like that, you always wonder what lies beneath. Probably, they wonder, too.

Farther down the hall. She didn’t turn on the light, and instead felt her way with her hands through the dark. Last year, when her parents had visited from Dayton during Julian’s first round of chemo, her father had asked, “What does the mortgage on this place set
you back a month? Forty grand? You know, there’s kids starving in Africa.” Then he’d looked her up and down like she wasn’t his daughter, but a stranger, and said something she still hadn’t forgiven. “There’s kids with cancer. Leukemia. You sell this place for something half the size and donate the difference to charity, you could save some lives. Maybe start going to church again and say a prayer to St. Jude, and you could save
his
life.”

“Shut your fat mouth before I shut it for you,” Jill’s mother had answered, but by then, Jill was already in tears. Not a day had gone by since, that she hadn’t remembered those words and wondered if they were true.

Finally, she checked on Markus. He’d moved into Julian’s bedroom after the diagnosis, to keep him company. They’d slept in narrow beds separated by a night table like an old married couple, and after only a few weeks, had been finishing each other’s sentences. Irish twins separated by ten months. Markus had been the most present during Julian’s illness, and perhaps the only one to understand how much that time had mattered. But the end stages had wrecked him. In sympathy with Julian, or maybe in grief, Markus, too, had lost so much weight that his ribs protruded. He’d even shaved his head. In a matter of months, both boys had shrunken inside their skins like mirror-image ghosts.

She opened the door and saw that Markus was not alone. He’d sneaked his boyfriend Charles through the service entrance. In sleep, they were pressed together like spoons in the far bed. She sighed.

She might have found Charles more palatable, were he not so limp-wristed and fey. So easy to bully, with simply a frown. The boy was a runaway that Markus had met in Times Square. His parents had disowned him at fifteen, and he would have become a street walker if Markus hadn’t helped him get a job waiting tables. He lived with a bunch of kids in a studio apartment in
the Bronx now, didn’t go to school, and dyed his hair platinum blonde. A white cotton sheet concealed their nakedness.

She cleared her throat. Dead brother or no, if she’d done something like this back in Dayton, her mother would have made her pick her own switch, then shipped her to a convent. It occurred to her that she had erred. Nurses, nannies, the house in Amagansett, private schools, then the Ivy League. The boob lift last year that’d had nothing to do with back pain. The constant diets that left the refrigerator bare: four (now three) growing boys, and not a single sandwich fixing. Her job at Vesuvius, which provided her the excuse to neglect her family, when she should instead have quit as soon as she’d gotten pregnant and raised them right.

If she’d been around more often, Xavier might not have gotten lost in the shuffle. Clemson wouldn’t be so smug. Markus might have learned affection for the fairer sex. Tom might not have cheated with his secretary, and almost lost his job after that sexual harassment suit that had cost the company millions. The things she’d traded, all for vanity.

The morning Julian died, she’d known it was coming. Had been able to smell the scent of it on his loose skin. She’d opened the window a crack even though it had been frigidly cold, just for some relief from that relentless death stink. She’d understood she ought to stay, but so often these last twenty-two years, her intuitions had proven false. The product of unfounded worries, and guilt for not having been there often enough. Just as easily, the day might be tomorrow, or next week, or fifty years from now. She could not succumb to such fretting when she had work on her desk, and a life to be lived. So she’d left her son with his nurse, and six hours later gotten the call that he was dead. It had taken her more than a day to call family and friends because she hadn’t wanted to say the thing out loud.

“Is there an afterlife?” He’d asked, and now she wished she’d swallowed her terror, and told him:
Don’t worry, my love. There is a heaven for you on the other side of the stars, and if there is not, I will make one.

Would leaving him to die alone be her greatest regret? Or would there be more, unfathomable, that would pile over the years so that when she died of old age, she would see two lives, the one she’d lived and the shadow path, full of all the things she should have done. The truth her father had implied: if she’d been a more righteous person, her favorite son would not have died.

In the old sickroom, Markus opened his eyes. Average grades, average looks. No special skills except an ability to put other people at ease, because he so rarely spoke, but always listened. He was the wild card of all her children—stronger than his frail body appeared and kinder than the rest of them, too. His eyes bulged now, and he startled. Next to him, fey Charles grunted.

“I’m sorry,” he mouthed.

She waved, to let him know she didn’t intend to make a scene. The tips of her fingers flagged up and down in unison. “Ice mother,” Julian had once called her, and to her dismay, the others had laughed. Julian was the only one who’d ever teased her, and now she wondered if the rest, even her husband, were afraid.

She leaned in the doorway. Julian’s bed was empty and stripped of sheets. On the bureau were piles of clothes that she planned to take to Goodwill. A poster of the Dubai Tower was tacked to the wall, because it scraped the sky, and had reminded Julian of Babel. He’d wanted to build bridges and skyscrapers. Plan the cities of tomorrow. She could smell him in here. Poor Markus, this room was haunted by a ghost.

Markus sat up. His eyes were wet with grief, or maybe shame, as if he believed that for this transgression with Charles, she might love him less. Still sleeping, Charles snuggled against Markus’ bare chest, and kissed it.

To her surprise, she wasn’t angry. Just grateful to Charles, for transforming this miserable room that would live forever in Markus’ memory, into something bittersweet. At least he would not have to be alone on this terrible night.

“I love you,” she whispered, because he looked so much like Julian. Because she did love him. Because there was a reason, after all, that she’d left Ohio, and made a new life for herself in New York.

She shut the door. When she got back, Tom was dressed. He’d heaped the white flowers into a black Hefty bag. She nodded her approval, then sat next to him on the bed. “What was that all about?” he asked.

“The person on the phone. She was so sad. I got worried one of the boys was hurt.” She weaved her fingers between his and squeezed. These last few days, they hadn’t been able to stop touching each other. In their way, returning to the source of their lost son. “I should have been there for him. I wasn’t a good enough mother,” she said.

He sighed, and she wasn’t sure if he agreed or was too tired to answer. “No,” he finally said. When she opened her mouth to reply, he interrupted. “No. No. No. No. No.”

Now it was her turn to sigh.

His face was clean-shaven, and his hair freshly washed. They were alike in that way: even in tragedy, they firmly believed in the rituals of living. Over the last week, not a single bill had gone unpaid, or report card unchecked, or e-mail unanswered. “When’s the last time we were on a date?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Not for at least a year. Not since he got sick. Let’s go to Monteleone’s. Have a cold Guinness.”

“Is it open?”

Tom tossed a pair of overalls in her direction, along with her twenty-five-year-old Who T-shirt. It was what
she’d been wearing when they met, and no matter how much she’d changed since then, he told her he would forever remember her that way: an innocent kid from Ohio who still wrote letters to her grandmother once a month, and loved the Pinball Wizard. The only girl he’d met back then who’d made men wait in the lobby of her building before dates instead of inviting them up. What she hadn’t told him was that she’d been working seventy-hour weeks; she hadn’t had time for dating. He was the only man who’d stuck around long enough to propose and find out what her apartment in Queens had looked like. Still, it was nice that one of them remembered her youth so fondly.