Risking It All Read online

She knocked and then entered. It had become clear to Danny that the adult knock on his door was an announcement rather than a request for permission to enter, so he was ready. He had been playing a game on his iPad, which he wasn’t supposed to use during the school week, and he hurriedly stashed it under his pillow. He sat on his bed, looking sheepish. Before she could ask what had happened, he apologized, at least for the way he spoke to his teacher.

  “I know you’re sorry, Danny. But it’s not enough to be sorry after. You have to learn to control yourself. Everyone has those feelings sometimes, but it’s important to know when and how you can express them.”

  He nodded. “Does Jeff know?”

  “Yes. He’s coming home early tonight. I think he wants to talk to you.”

  “Can’t you just tell him I’m sorry?”

  “No. You have to tell him.”

  “He won’t believe me.”

  “If you mean it, he’ll believe you.”

  She heard the outer door open and went out to meet Jeff.

  She was expecting a storm, but he surprised her by seeming unusually calm. He didn’t let Danny off the hook, but he didn’t, at least at first, drive it in deeper. Instead, without even stopping to see Griffin, he called Danny into the living room. The boy arrived hesitantly, with a mixture of fear and bravado. His face was set, as though ready for an explosion, and though at first his eyes were cast downward, they soon met Jeff’s with something like defiance, or maybe, Marcia thought, pride. Jeff told him what the teacher had said and that he would now have to stay after school for three weeks doing his homework and extra assignments. Danny already knew this, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have anything to say to me?” Jeff asked.

  Marcia looked at Danny pleadingly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in the tone kids use when they aren’t.

  “I hope you really are,” Jeff said sternly, clearly irritated. And then, just when she thought the worst was over, Jeff threw a verbal grenade. “You know because of this behavior and many more like it since you’ve been at the school, you won’t be allowed to continue there next year. There are consequences. It’s not enough to say you’re sorry. You have to mean it and that means changing your behavior.”

  Marcia was stunned. They had agreed to tell him together, at the right time, after they had found another school, hoping to make the new school sound exciting to try to soften the blow. Now Jeff had done the adult version of what Danny had done, she thought. Jeff was angry so he impulsively reached out to hurt him.

  Danny didn’t react visibly. His face showed no emotion. He just asked, “When?”

  “Next year. After the summer,” Marcia said quickly. “So you still have a few more months there. But then you’ll start in a new place. We’re just trying to pick the best one now. It will be more like your old school.”

  “You mean easier, right?”

  “Maybe a little. But bigger, more kids, you’ll see.”

  “Will Raul come?”

  “No, Danny. But you’ll still be his friend and you’ll still see each other.”

  “Could I go finish my homework?”

  “Sure.”

  She could barely control her anger until he left. Then she turned to Jeff, “How could you do that? We had discussed this.”

  “It just pissed me off the way he said he was sorry, like he’s said it a hundred times and never meant it. Does he think we’re idiots?”

  She couldn’t answer. She knew it would just lead to another row that circled around the same issue and was never resolved.

  “Look, I have an idea. That’s what I really wanted to talk to you about,” Jeff said. He opened his briefcase and took out some glossy brochures. She was confused. At first she was touched—she thought he was trying to arrange a vacation for them. Maybe it was a romantic place and he thought if they went together they could patch up some of the bad feeling between them. She reached out and glanced down at one of the brochures, the hint of a smile on her lips. It was from a place called the Glen. A picture of a large farmhouse surrounded by fields and the woods beyond was featured on the front page. Maybe he was thinking of a vacation for all of them. She looked at him, puzzled.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a therapeutic community for disturbed teenagers,” he said. “It’s perfect for kids like Danny. I don’t think it would be too expensive. I’m pretty sure we could get some financial aid, given his situation. He could live there and maybe they could straighten him out.”

  Her first reaction was intense disappointment: this was just another plan to get rid of Danny. She was annoyed at herself for her first reaction; she should have known better. But she picked up the brochure and scanned it. It was in Utah. The kids lived under strict rules, worked on the farm, lived in dorms, had group therapy and went to school. The text asked: Are you at your wits’ end? Has your teenager run away, taken drugs, been expelled from school, behaved violently, resisted all efforts to straighten out? Come to the Glen, where trained professionals will do the job for you.

  “This sounds like something out of Dickens,” she said. “I mean, first of all, Danny isn’t a teenager. Second, he’s not nearly this bad. He’s never run away or taken drugs.”

  “He’s run away from school.”

  “Temporarily. That’s not the same thing. He always comes home.”

  “So far.”

  “And he certainly doesn’t take drugs.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Jesus, Jeff. You want to send him to a therapeutic community for stuff he might do but hasn’t done?”

  “I want to send him because I think he needs it.”

  “He’s trying, Jeff. In spite of everything you are doing to make it harder. And he has had some success. He’s with a therapist who believes he just needs more time and more nurturing.”

  She couldn’t miss Jeff’s gesture of impatience and frustration. “Yeah. That therapist is completely disinterested, right? More time, more nurturing and more therapy sessions with him at a hundred bucks an hour.”

  “He’s a really good man, Jeff. He has plenty of patients. He doesn’t need Danny.” She paused and tried to calm things down. “Look, maybe if things are rough in two years we will need to consider something like this. But not now. And not a place that’s so far away. We couldn’t even visit him often.”

  “This may not be your decision, Marcia. I admit that this is what I want, but not just for me. It’s a famous place with a great reputation and I honestly think this is right for him, but if you refuse, we will have to come up with another solution. I can’t go on like this anymore. I’m uncomfortable in my own home.”

  “You’re hardly here anyway,” she shot back.

  “Did you ever ask yourself why that is?”

  They stopped talking as they heard Berta pass through the hallway on her way to the kitchen. She was probably getting a bottle for Griffin.

  “Listen to what I’m saying, Marcia. I mean it,” Jeff said when they heard the door to the kitchen close.

  “Oh Jesus, Jeff. Please don’t make this a choice between you and him.”

  “I think it may come down to that.” He walked to the door. “And the sad thing is I’m not sure who you’ll pick.” He put on his coat. “Think about it. I’m going to take a walk.”

  “Don’t leave,” she called after him. “Let’s try to talk this out.”

  “We talk and talk and can’t come to a conclusion. It’s no good.” He closed the door behind him.

  She watched him leave and then sank heavily into the living room couch. She glanced again at the brochure but she didn’t want to think about it. She knew she wouldn’t let Danny go there, not yet. Just today the therapist had said not to give up on him and this felt like it would be doing just that. How would he feel to be rejected, abandoned, sent to a place he’d regard as a prison? She couldn’t believe Jeff meant what he’d threatened. He was just speaking in anger and frustration, she thought. He would take
that back when he calmed down. She hoped Danny hadn’t heard anything, and she peeked into his room. It was a mess—he’d obviously thrown his things around and he was on his iPad again without permission. She allowed him to e-mail with Raul and she hoped that’s what he was doing. Maybe it would comfort him. She wondered if he ever used the Internet for browsing on unacceptable sites. She knew she had to check up on him, but didn’t have the heart to do it now.

  Marcia opened the door to Griffin’s room and walked in. Berta had come back and was sitting in the chair by the crib holding him on her lap and giving him a bottle. Marcia whispered that it was okay for Berta to leave and took over with Griffin. He looked up at her, locking eyes as he sucked, and she gazed back at him, completely absorbed in him until she had a sudden thought. What would happen if Jeff left? What would that do to Griffin? He was so young and already he would be the child of a broken marriage. She didn’t even think about how she would feel. Her feelings about Jeff were so confused. It seemed like whatever love she had for him existed more in her memory than in her life. Day to day there was only worry and anger. But did that mean she no longer loved him? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to think about it.

  Griffin finished and was sucking air, so she gently withdrew the bottle from him. He was drowsy, almost asleep, so she was able to put him into his crib, wind up his mobile, give him his pile of pacifiers and tiptoe out of the room. There was a part of her that wondered, uselessly, whether they had done the right thing from the beginning. Usually she pushed that thought away but it surfaced from time to time. Grace had asked her if she ever regretted the surrogacy. She had answered that of course she regretted what had happened, if she had known she wouldn’t have done it, but how could she ever regret Griffin? He was the one uncomplicated joy of her life.

  She had work to do and she sat at her desk, trying to distract herself with the manuscript she needed to edit, but she wasn’t doing a good job of it. Finally, she gave up and got ready for bed. She turned on the TV to pass the time bingeing on reruns of The Good Wife until Jeff returned, but when he hadn’t come back two hours later, she started to worry, seriously considering the possibility that he might have actually meant what he said. She walked back into the living room, picked up the brochures, took them back to bed with her and started reading them.

  21

  She fell asleep before he came home and was dimly aware when he slipped in beside her, but too sleepy to check the time. In that semi-awake state she reverted to behavior more reminiscent of their former closeness; she reached out to touch him, curling up closer, brushing his arm with her lips before falling into a deeper sleep. In the morning, they spoke little. She awoke early, picked Griffin up at his first cry and had already brewed the coffee, fed the baby his bottle and placed him in his high chair when she heard Jeff’s alarm go off. She put some Cheerios on Griffin’s tray and darted into Danny’s room to be sure he was up and getting ready.

  “I’m making scrambled eggs,” she said. “That okay?”

  Danny nodded, gathering his books and stuffing them into his backpack. He was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, which was not acceptable dress for school. “You know you can’t wear that,” she said, irritated. “Please change into your uniform.”

  “A lot of the kids do it,” he argued, his voice sullen.

  “I don’t believe you,” she answered. “Anyone who doesn’t wear the school uniform gets points against them and sent home.”

  “Well, Raul does it sometimes.”

  “That’s absurd, Danny. Please don’t lie to me. Raul’s mother would never let him.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway. They already threw me out,” he said defiantly.

  “They could make you leave now instead of at the end of the term,” she answered. “Then what would we do?”

  He shrugged with that casual indifference to the future so common in adolescents. “Just change your clothes right now,” she said in her firmest voice, trying to control her temper. “I don’t have the time for this.”

  She poked her head into the bathroom and shouted loud enough for Jeff to hear her over the shower. “Scrambled eggs okay?”

  “No thanks. I have a breakfast meeting,” he shouted back.

  He stopped in the kitchen to give Griffin a kiss before he left, ignoring Danny and barely looking at Marcia. She walked into the hallway with him when he stopped to get his coat. “Now it’s a breakfast meeting. Between breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings, I sometimes wonder why you bother to come home at all,” she said.

  He put on his coat and opened the door. “Sometimes I wonder the same thing,” he said as he left.

  She didn’t have time to parse that last comment and, though it upset her, tried to brush it off. Today was a workday for her too, so she hurried Danny out the door, handing him his lunch money. She put some scrambled eggs on Griffin’s tray, talking to him in as cheerful a voice as she could muster as she wolfed down some eggs herself, followed by a third mug of coffee. When Berta arrived a few minutes later, she handed Griffin over and rushed into the shower. When she emerged, she tore around her room, choosing her outfit, searching for a lost shoe, which turned out to be under the bed, collecting her papers, checking to be sure she had her wallet and MetroCard. Finally she said goodbye to Berta, kissed Griffin and went to the closet for her coat. She looked herself over quickly in the hall mirror and decided she looked as acceptable as she was going to that day. While waiting for the elevator, she fished around in her bag nervously, double-checking her essentials, looking for her reading glasses and thinking, not for the first time, that she had to stop using such big bags because she could never find anything in them. Finally, her fingers closed on her glasses case. But she soon discovered her glasses weren’t in it, so she let go the elevator, which had just arrived, and returned to the apartment to find them. They were on the floor near her bed—she must have put them there before she fell asleep last night. She noticed her phone on the dresser and gratefully grabbed that too. She had thought she’d already taken it, but this was such a chaotic morning, she must have been mistaken.

  She got to work in time for the morning meeting. Julie brought her a cup of coffee, her fourth since awakening, so she was beginning to feel a little wired. Afterward, in her office, she started to write the final page of an editorial letter she knew would not go over well with the author and paused to think of a tactful way to say he needed to restructure several of the chapters. As she was concentrating, she heard the familiar ping of a text coming in on her cell phone. She was going to ignore it, but it was followed by a second ping and she worried it might be about Griffin so she retrieved it from her bag and checked the message. Good morning, sweetheart, she read.

  Who was this? The text identifier didn’t help. Ilana. Who was Ilana? As she stared in confusion, another text popped up. My cat jumped up on the bed and woke me in the middle of the night. I reached over for you but you were gone. I think he was looking for you too. He misses you. So do I.

  She could feel her heart pounding in her ears. She turned over the phone and noted that the back cover was transparent, not solid gray like hers. This was Jeff’s phone. He must have forgotten it this morning and she’d picked it up by mistake. She just kept staring at the text. Another popped up—an emoticon of a heart. She looked up as Julie knocked and then popped her head in. “Do you have a minute?” Julie asked. “I’d like to go over some questions with you on the Fullerton manuscript.”

  “Not now,” Marcia snapped. “Julie, don’t keep walking in on me, for God’s sake. The door’s there for a reason. Knock on it.”

  Surprised, Julie was flustered. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Marcia. I knocked but I thought you didn’t hear.”

  “Well, wait for an answer next time. I’m busy right now.”

  She was sorry she’d snapped as soon as Julie backed away and closed the door, but she hadn’t been able to control herself. She looked back at the phone; no new message popped up. She pushed it away as
if it burned her fingers and closed her eyes, trying to process what she’d just learned. Then she reached for it again and answered the text.

  This is Marcia. Jeff’s wife. I’ll be sure to give him your message. She pressed SEND. She pushed it away again and picked up her landline, punching in Jeff’s office number. Her heart was still pounding but she felt resolute when Karen, Jeff’s secretary, answered.

  Trying to make her voice sound as natural as possible, she asked Karen to please tell Jeff she wanted to speak to him.

  “Hi, Marcia,” Karen said, “I’m really sorry but he’s in a meeting. I’ll tell him to call you as soon as he’s out.”

  “No. Please interrupt him. Tell him it’s me and it’s urgent and I need him right away.”

  “Okay,” Karen said, her voice unsure.

  She was gone for about five minutes. When she returned she was apologetic. “I’m really sorry,” Karen repeated nervously, “but he says he’ll call when the meeting ends.”

  Marcia replied with barely contained fury. “Just tell him that if he doesn’t come to the goddamn phone right now, I’ll come over to his office and interrupt his meeting in person.”

  Another few minutes passed. Marcia could imagine how embarrassed he was, how he would have to apologize and excuse himself. How he’d storm over to the phone. She wondered if he suspected. Did he know he’d left his phone behind? Did he worry that she’d seen it? She looked at it, lying on the desk, full of damning, hurtful information, information she both wanted and didn’t want to know. Her mouth felt dry. She heard him pick up the phone and thank Karen.

  “Marcia, what the hell is the matter with you? What is so goddamn important?”

  “I just have a message for you,” she answered as evenly as she could. “I thought it couldn’t wait. Ilana’s cat misses you. Apparently he was disappointed you were no longer in Ilana’s bed this morning.”

  There was a silence. Probably seconds, but it felt like minutes.

  “You have my phone?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. I told you we should change the cases so they weren’t so easily confused.”