Goodnight Beautiful Page 21

  Albert cocks his head, stumped. “Not sure I remember.” He licks a finger and flips backward in the notebook. “Here it is. ‘Mother, cause of death.’ Oh.” He frowns. “You left that blank.”

  “Did I?” Sam says. “Let me see.” He opens the drawer of the table next to him and removes the notebook, impressed by the steadiness of his hand. “Place of birth, Chicago,” Sam murmurs, reading from his notes. “Oh—” He points at something on the page and makes a show of surprise. “I got it wrong. This patient’s mother didn’t die in childbirth.”

  “She didn’t?” Albert asks.

  “No. She lived until she was sixty-seven. Rather, she was forced to give him up for adoption when he was six days old, to a couple in Wayne, Indiana. Her name was Agatha Lawrence, and she was your biological mother.” Sam closes his notebook and looks Albert in the eye. “The patient we’re talking about is you, Albert. Or should I call you Beautiful?”

  Chapter 49

  I reel back. “How did you—”

  “You wanted me to know,” Dr. Statler explains, leaning back in his chair.

  “No, I—”

  “Come on, Albert.” He laughs. “It’s psych 101 stuff. You put me in a closet with your birth story. It was your unconscious mind at work, seeking my help.”

  “No it wasn’t.” I stand up. “I have to go.”

  “Sit down, Albert. We’re going to talk.”

  I hesitate, and then take my seat again, hands clenched.

  “If it’s okay, I’d like to ask you some questions.” Dr. Statler flips to a clean page and clicks his pen. “When and how did you learn Agatha Lawrence was your biological mother?”

  I hesitate, count to ten. Do it: tell him. “Last year,” I say. “When I received a letter from an attorney in New York.” I’m sitting at my kitchen table, eating sparerib tips and white rice from a Styrofoam container. I’m sorting the mail and waiting for Jeopardy! to begin when I come across the silky linen stationery with the attorney’s logo at the top. “‘Dear Mr. Bitterman,’” I say out loud to Sam, reciting the letter. “‘Our firm has been retained to locate you, regarding a critical family matter.’ They invited me to their office in Manhattan to discuss it in person. Offered to pay my way.” He’s watching me, intent. “First class on Amtrak.”

  “What did you think when you read this letter?”

  “I thought it was a scam,” I say. “One of those Nigerian princes out to get my last thousand dollars. The only family I had left was my father, assuming he’s still alive, and if he wanted to contact me, all he had to do was respond to the Christmas card I send him every year.” The phone is heavy in my hands, the TV on mute, the faint scent of fried food from Happy Chinese downstairs as I dial the phone number printed on the letterhead. “A woman lawyer answered the phone when I called,” I tell Dr. Statler. “I asked her if this was some sort of joke, and she said she’d prefer we speak in person. She sounded serious.”

  “Did anyone accompany you to New York?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, right. Like who? The only friend I had was Linda, and even if her son hadn’t applied for that restraining order, the agency would never have given me permission to take her to New York.” In Penn Station I made my way through a throng of grouchy people to the top floor, where a man in a wrinkled suit who smelled like cigarettes was holding a sign with my name on it. He led me to a black car, two warm bottles of Poland Spring water stuck into the seat pocket in front of me.

  “Their offices were on Park Avenue, and a pretty young woman led me to a conference room.” There was a tray of bagels and raw fish, strawberries with their stems already removed. Someone knocked, and then four people in suits marched in, sat in a U shape around me, and showed me photographs of a woman with wild red curls and eyeglasses with bright blue frames. “They told me she had given birth to me fifty-one years ago at a hospital outside Chicago, Illinois.”

  “I read her account of the pregnancy and birth,” Dr. Statler says. “Quite traumatic.” My father was some boy she met on a family vacation to the Dominican Republic, whose last name she never asked for. She was seventeen and the top of her class, and her father would not allow it. Arrangements and announcements were made. “Boarding school,” they called it. There were five other girls when she arrived. The oldest girl was twenty-two, the youngest fourteen, all equally well connected. She labored alone for nearly ten hours and was allowed to see me a few times a day for the next six days, before the nice couple from Indiana could make preparations to come for me.

  “It devastated her,” Dr. Statler says. “Having to give you away. But she had no say in the matter.” He places the notebook on his lap and folds his hands. “What was it like for you, learning all of this?”

  “It finally made sense,” I say. “When my father said I wasn’t his. I wasn’t either of theirs. But I was mostly excited to meet her. Fifty-one years old and a chance to be part of a family.”

  “And?”

  “They told me she’d died.” I remember the shock when the woman said this, the way I pinched my palm to stop the tears. “She’d been looking for me her whole life, but she had to die to find me. That’s how the attorney explained it to me, at least. It was only after she died that the court would agree to unseal the adoption papers. They had to, in order to let me know that she’d named me the sole heir of the Lawrence family estate.”

  “Ninety-two million dollars, it says here.”

  “And the family home in Chestnut Hill, New York,” I say. “I’d been out of work for a few months. I didn’t know what else to do, and so I moved here, into her house.” I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering opening the front door and walking into the house for the first time, everything as she had left it, dust on the furniture and accumulating in the corners.

  “She wrote you letters.” Dr. Statler pulls something from between the pages of his notebook: one of her pale-yellow envelopes, a letter inside, written in handwriting I’ve come to adore.

  “Two hundred and three of them,” I say. “She was determined that I’d know her someday, as well as the family I came from. They were complicated people.” I keep my eyes on the ground. “So was she.”

  An alarm beeps twice. Dr. Statler shifts in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time.”

  “We are?” I ask.

  “Yes, it’s time for me to get some sleep.”

  As he reaches to silence the alarm, I see the time. It’s nearly one in the morning. “I’m sorry,” I say, mortified that I’ve kept him up this late. “I lost track of time.” I stand and hurry to the door.

  “Come back tomorrow morning, Albert,” Dr. Statler says as I open the door. “Ten a.m. We’ll pick up where we left off. Would you like me to write that down?”

  “No,” I say. “Ten a.m. I’ll remember.” I step into the hall. “Good night, Dr. Statler.”

  He smiles at me, the warmest smile I think I’ve ever seen. “Good night, beautiful.”

  Chapter 50

  Franklin Sheehy sighs dramatically on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not convinced that volunteering at an old folks’ home qualifies as suspicious, Annie. And if it is, well, you’ll have to excuse me, as I need to get down to Catholic Charities to arrest my seventy-nine-year-old mother.”

  Annie closes her eyes, envisioning pinning him to the wall by his neck. “I’m not suggesting that volunteering, as a concept, is suspicious, Franklin,” she says, measured. “But it’s not just that.”

  “What else is it?” he asks.

  “The office space,” she says. “It was awfully generous, what he did for Sam. Like, to a fault.”

  “Generous to a fault?” Sheehy says. “You’ve been in the city too long, Ms. Potter. You’ve forgotten that people are nice.”

  That’s the same thing Sam said, when she first expressed her skepticism about Albert Bitterman and his “generous” offer. Annie was up most of the night, digging out the lease again and combing through her texts with Sam, trying
to piece together what she knew about him. Albert Bitterman Jr., new owner of the historic Lawrence House.

  Quirky. That’s the word Sam used to describe him, guilting Sam into staying for a drink every once in a while, asking him to help with tasks around the property—taking out the garbage and sweeping the path. Sam felt indebted, couldn’t get over his good luck.

  “He let Sam design the space himself,” Annie says to Franklin. “Sam being Sam, this meant everything cost a fortune. That’s quite a few steps up from small-town ‘nice.’ And now I find out that he’s also been visiting Sam’s mother?”

  Annie got the girl at the desk to show her his file. Albert Bitterman, fifty-one years old, started volunteering at Rushing Waters last month. Assignment: bingo night, every Wednesday and Friday. She asked around. Nobody knew him other than as the volunteer who left a lot of comments in the suggestion box. She googled his name when she got home, finding the author of a children’s book and a professor of urban planning, neither of which she guessed was a match.

  “What are you suggesting, Annie?” Franklin says. “That your husband’s landlord . . . what? Killed him and disposed of his car? Let me guess. You listen to those true-crime podcasts.”

  She sighs wearily.

  “Ms. Potter—” Franklin heaves a sigh of his own. “I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell you this, but your husband wasn’t the man you thought he was. He hid a hundred grand in debt from you. He wasn’t visiting his mother, or paying her bills. And, oh yeah, he got power of attorney over her finances two weeks before he disappeared.” Annie’s breath catches. “Yeah, that’s right. We poked around, talked to people down at Rushing Waters, and we know that part too. You may like to paint us as the bumbling cops who can’t tie their own shoes, but we know what we’re doing. Bottom line, Annie: he’s a pathological liar, and you’re the wife, left behind, grasping at straws.” She can hear his chair squeaking. “And remember, Annie. You’re an attractive woman with a lot of good years ahead of you. Like I tell my daughters, don’t waste your time on the wrong guy.”

  “Thank you, Franklin. That’s a good reminder.” She hangs up, holds her breath for a long moment, and then the rage rises, too much for her to contain. She screams as loud as she can and throws her phone across the room. It bounces off the sofa cushions and lands on the floor with a crack. She’s afraid to look, but she does; the bottom half of her screen is shattered. She drops to the couch, rests her head in her hands, and laughs. “Well, this is a very bad day,” she whispers.

  Franklin Sheehy is not wrong, you know. It’s Sam’s voice, from the opposite couch.

  “Go fuck yourself,” she whispers.

  Okay, but it’s true that you’re grasping at straws.

  “You think?” she snaps. “You think that was grasping at straws, Sam? Well, wait until you see this.” She takes the phone from the floor and squints through the broken glass, searching Google for a directory of phone numbers at the Daily Freeman.

  “Harriet Eager,” she says, answering on the first ring.

  “It’s Annie Potter. I need to ask you a question.”

  “Okay,” Harriet says.

  “The other day, you said that you’d received a few tips claiming that Sam was having an affair with a patient. Can you tell me who sent them?” Something about hearing this—she hasn’t been able to shake it.

  “Annie, don’t worry about that,” Harriet says. “It was some lunatic with nothing else—”

  Annie cuts her off. “Do you still have the email?”

  “No, sorry. I delete that stuff.”

  “Okay, thanks,” she manages before hanging up. She presses her eyes with the heels of her hands. That’s it. That’s all I can do.

  Her phone beeps with a message.

  Can’t wait. In car yet?

  It’s Maddie. Annie checks the time. It’ll be here in a half hour.

  She hits send and stands up. In the kitchen, she finds her passport and ticket on the counter and puts them in her purse.

  When her phone rings a moment later, she can’t make out the name under the broken glass. She assumes it’s Maddie, but it’s not. It’s Harriet Eager, calling back.

  “You got a second?”

  “Yes,” Annie says, taking a seat at the kitchen table.

  “A colleague of mine overhead our conversation,” Harriet says. “Turns out she did follow-up on the tip about the alleged patient your husband ran off with. I figured you’d want to know.”

  “And?”

  “And it was definitely false,” Harriet says.

  “How do you know that?”

  “The reporter asked at the university, where this fantasy patient was supposedly a student, and there wasn’t anyone who matched her description.”

  “A student at the university?” Annie feels a twinge of dread. “What was the description?”

  “What does it matter?” Harriet says. “It was a bum tip.”

  “Please, what was the description?”

  “Hang on,” Harriet sighs. “Let me ask.”

  Chapter 51

  I tug down my sweatshirt and smooth back my hair. With a deep breath, I open the door.

  “Good morning, Albert,” Dr. Statler says from his chair, hands folded on his lap.

  “Good morning.” I cross the room and take a seat on the bed. Dr. Statler observes me in silence. “You’re even better than I thought,” I say finally.

  “Oh?” he asks. “How’s that?”

  “Leading me to these realizations of myself.” I shake my head. “I didn’t see myself in those notes, but it makes sense. Insecure attachment, due to losing my mother at birth and being raised by a man like my dad.” My palms are clammy.

  “What you’re going through is a lot to process.”

  I nod. “Can you imagine what my life could have been like if they’d allowed her to be my mother?” I let myself imagine it last night, lying in the bed she used to sleep in, just as she’d left it. “I wonder if she would have taken me along on her trips. She traveled everywhere.” In the letters she wrote me, she described the food, the art, the apartments she rented. The affairs. I hope your parents are kind and your life is full, my beautiful boy. “She was the most fascinating woman I’ve ever met. Or never met, I should say.”

  “But you did meet her,” Dr. Statler says. “You were together for six days.”

  “Yes, but I don’t remember those days.”

  “Not consciously, but that experience is still there, inside you. Six days in your mother’s arms.” Dr. Statler shifts slightly in his chair and then clears his throat. “I want to try something with you. As you may know, Freud believed there was a way patients could get in touch with repressed memories.”

  “You want me to lie down?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I think it would be useful. Please, give it a try.”

  I look at Dr. Statler’s bed. “Should I take off my shoes?”

  “If you’d like.”

  I nervously slip off my loafers, set them side by side, and swing my legs onto the bed.

  “No, the other way,” Dr. Statler corrects me. “So you’re facing away from me. The idea is to keep the analyst out of sight, to allow greater freedom of thought.” I pivot in the other direction, my head at the foot of the bed, my feet toward the wall. “How do you feel?” he asks.

  “Scared,” I admit.

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Statler says. “We’re doing this together. You’re safe. Now close your eyes.” I do as he says. “Without thinking, tell me what you feel.”

  “My body feels heavy,” I say. “Like I have a stack of bricks on top of me.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  I touch my chest. “Right here.”

  “Okay, I want you to stay with that feeling,” Dr. Statler gently instructs. “Now, begin to pick up the bricks. Slowly, one by one. Set them aside.” I try to do what he says, imagining myself getting closer to my heart. “When you get to the last brick, I want you to lift slowly. Ca
n you tell me what you see underneath?”

  “A hospital room?” I whisper. I can make it true if I try. I’m with her, my mother, my chest against hers, my body hardly any bigger than her two hands. Her hair is pulled back off her face. They were right—she’s a child still. Far too young to be a mother. And yet it feels natural here, our hearts beating together, a lullaby on her lips.

  “Why did she have to leave me?” I whisper.

  “She wasn’t given a choice.”

  “Was it me?”

  Dr. Statler hesitates. “Was what you?”

  “Was it because there’s something wrong with me?” The tears sting my eyes. “She could feel it inside me,” I say. “The darkness. My anger. That’s why she gave me away. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to cry.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold on to her image in my mind, but my father pushes her aside, a look of disgust on his face at seeing me in tears again. “He wouldn’t leave me alone,” I say. “He wouldn’t let me be who I was. I couldn’t feel things.”

  “But you did feel things, didn’t you Albert? Like sadness.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when that wasn’t allowed?”

  A sob escapes. “Rage.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Rage. And you still feel it sometimes, don’t you? When you’re wronged, the rage comes back easily.”

  “Yes, Dr. Statler.” My voice sounds like a child’s.

  “Like the night of the storm, and your decision to attack me.”

  I open my eyes. Dr. Statler has pushed his chair next to the bed. Just inches away, he has a chilling look on his face, and a steak knife in his hand. “No, Dr. Statler. You had an accident—”

  “You were the accident, Albert.” The knife blade glints in his hand as he raises it. “I know what you did. I know you’re the reason I haven’t seen my wife in thirteen days.” Dr. Statler traces the knife along my cheek, catching a tear. “I know you’re the person who broke both my legs.”

  “No,” I say. “That’s not true—”