A Friend of the Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt the urge to go back to school herself. A few calls to former professors landed her an adjunct spot at Bergen State, where she was assigned the perpetually unpopular
Beowulf-to-Chaucer
survey. It was a position for which she would be criminally underpaid, but she threw herself into the course with gusto, and eventually the chair agreed to give her a per-course raise of five hundred dollars, which fanned her usually unfannable ego. Sometimes, in bed, we’d play variations of games wherein she was the sexy professor and I was the naughty student. I think she liked these assignations more than she would have initially guessed.
    And so this was how I galloped across my steppe, healthy and oblivious, even though people dear to me were strapped into their own hellish roller coasters and couldn’t find the escape latch. Or, to be less preposterous about it, almost fifteen years ago, my best friend, Joe Stern, had a problem with his daughter Laura, a terrifying problem — the kind of thing impossible to imagine when parenthood is new, the baby is six months old and drooling into her rice cereal, and your wife looks like the Madonna, long hair and clear skin, spooning Gerbers into the kid’s peachy face.
    The year Laura turned seventeen, there was a rash of neonaticides across New Jersey. Cheerleaders delivering at their proms, abandoningtheir babies in Dumpsters, that kind of thing. Iris said to Laura one morning, as the girl was heading out for school, Honey, can you even imagine? and Laura shook her head. Later that same afternoon she was admitted to Round Hill with major blood loss, and her baby, at twenty-five weeks’ gestation, was found dead in a trash can not too far from the Round Hill Municipal Library. Laura had delivered in the second-floor bathroom. The baby’s skull was crushed in like an egg.
    Was the baby alive when Laura smashed its skull? That was the crux of the legal battle, and also, secondarily, whether or not Laura had been in her right mind. Joe and Iris, who’d been thinking of moving to the School District, immediately took their house off the market, probably with some relief. Iris was friendly with a wonderful big-firm litigator, and together they found Laura the very best representation to face off against the State of New Jersey, which was battling in the name of Baby Girl Stern. Joe took care of the psychiatric angle, and forget about Round Hill, they went to Columbia, the chief of adolescent psychiatry. Four days a week. Joe and Iris both began seeing therapists themselves and in their spare time tried to fend off the press.
    Where was I during that time? Looking back, all those years ago, it’s hard to remember exactly. Absorbed in my work, I guess, making money, worrying over some stocks and daydreaming about renovating the kitchen. I was captain of the JCC men’s basketball league, thirty-five-and-older division. So maybe that—and then of course there was parenthood, and work, and my own marriage, which was suffering from predictable twelfth-anniversary doldrums (Elaine wanted to try for more children; I refused to even talk about it). But I suppose, in the end, my absence was due to what it was for all of us: discomfort, the general impossibility of knowing what to say, a vague disgust at what Joe’s daughter had done, and the self-satisfaction of not having had it happen to us.
    But one morning, just after six, I was at the JCC shooting the ball around; Elaine’s snoring had woken me up. And who should walk in but Joe, whose calls I hadn’t answered in the past week and a half.
    “Jesus, Joe,” I said. He was gaunt; he’d lost at least ten pounds while I wasn’t paying attention. His Eagles T-shirt hung loose over his shoulders, and his shorts sagged.
    “Pete.” He nodded and threw his ball at me. “Twenty-one?”
    “Twenty-one,” I agreed, dropping my own basketball. Six in the morning was still early at the JCC, and we had the court to ourselves. I thought to myself, The