Baby of the Family Page 4

  “Well, I suggest you get to know him, Birdie.”

  3

  Mrs. Susan Scribner Whitby winced as she glanced in her rearview mirror. The pace at which the sun was setting was painfully slow; why wouldn’t it just get dark already? She let out another gulping sob and fixed her eyes back on the road in front of her. Her rented red Corolla sped up Route 9 to Poughkeepsie, going twenty miles over the speed limit. She was panicked. Her flight back to LAX was in less than twenty-four hours, and if she missed it, then she would miss her ex-husband’s funeral, the event she was planning for a man whom she had seen only once in the past several years. Who was she crying for? Roger? She kept picturing the gorgeous face of her son, Nick, her little boy. When he was a toddler she couldn’t walk one city block or cross through one aisle in the grocery store without someone stopping her to comment on his beauty. And Nick’s good looks had only increased with age; he’d grown into his colt-like limbs, and his shoulders had broadened to those of an athlete. A stunning man.

  Now Roger, to whom she’d devoted so many tears already, was dead and gone. She had known this day was approaching, yet it still knocked her down. Susan whisked the tears from either side of her face, then wiped a sweaty hand on her thick orange hair.

  This inheritance was a second chance for her baby. It was, perhaps, the greatest thing that Roger had done: identifying that Nick was gifted and giving him an opportunity to truly fulfill his destiny. And it had barely taken any convincing from her. Yes, she and Nick had gotten into a vicious argument two months before. She would have never imagined she was capable of saying the things she’d said to him. While sitting in an Italian bistro near Washington Square, he had announced that he was considering dropping out of college—said he didn’t want his final semester’s tuition to contribute to warmongers, or some other insane blather. How dare he. After everything she’d done for him, all she had sacrificed. She had told him that he was spoiled rotten, which had prompted him to call her a “self-absorbed psychopath.” As he’d stomped out of the restaurant—Susan having already paid for his dinner—he yelled over his shoulder, “Controlling bitch!” Now, as Susan played the scene back in her mind, more tears flowed steadily down her cheeks. She really should not be driving.

  Nick was her angel, her savior, the best thing that had ever happened to her. When he was a baby it was just the two of them, in her tiny studio in Hell’s Kitchen. She ached now for the warm, pulsing creature he had been. A scent akin to fresh baked bread rose off his perfectly smooth baby skin; she was able to put all of her body around all of his, protecting him from everything that could ever attempt to harm him. What year had he grown too large for her to surround him? Alone in the car now, she cried out the words, “My baby!”

  Two days prior, Susan Scribner Whitby had gotten on a plane in California and come to New York. Nick had turned off his cell phone, and his roommates claimed they hadn’t seen him in days. Although Nick’s name was securely inked into Roger’s will—she had gotten the changes in writing, of course—Susan knew that the Whitbys acted fast and fraudulently when money was concerned. She needed to get Nick to a lawyer as soon as possible and have his signature down on paper too. Plus she had a sinking feeling, call it a mother’s intuition, that her son was getting into trouble. He was so passionate and so utterly brilliant in every endeavor he took on, but his problem was one of judgment. His decision-making capabilities had always wavered, and these days they were swerving wildly off any reasonable track. He was too emotional, with a temper. She’d pinned down all his NYU friends she’d been aware of, but had been unable to find him anywhere. Now she was on her way to Demming College to see if one of her recently deceased husband’s daughters—Shelley, the loose one, who was probably some kind of addict by now—had any idea where her son could be. The two kids had developed a friendship for a short time period, a teenage attachment that Susan had never approved of. But Shelley was Susan’s last recourse. Though who knew. Maybe the girl had dropped out. It was clear that the only reason the snide brat was even at Demming, after she’d spent a post–high school year of sitting idly in the house that still belonged to Roger, was that the college felt obligated to take on a legacy student. After all, the Whitby Student Center and the Whitby Auditorium had not been cheap endeavors.

  The printed map on Susan’s passenger’s seat had directions to a dormitory called Senior House. She didn’t have the slightest clue if that was where Shelley lived, but she should be a senior, and Susan didn’t know where else to look. She stopped the Corolla in front of the redbrick building, No Parking sign be damned. Then she hustled herself out of the car, leaving behind the teal jacket of her pantsuit set.

  On the second floor, a tall girl traipsed over the linoleum tiles wearing an oversize bathrobe, with her hair twisted into a towel turban.

  “Hello!” Susan called. The girl didn’t seem to notice her waving, so Susan grabbed at a shoulder of the robe. She was met by a high-pitched shriek.

  “Listen.” Susan did not have time for manners. She shook the girl a little. “Do you know Shelley Whitby? I need to find her immediately.”

  The girl’s mouth dropped open, her hip cocked to the side, and she said nothing. Susan crossed her arms. Nick needed her. So what if she ended up missing the funeral. She would continue to wait for hours if she had to. That was a mother’s job.

  4

  The Sunday after his death, Roger’s youngest daughter—Michelle Whitby, or Shelley—was in Poughkeepsie Center working the end of a brunch shift. Outside, the air carried a weighty spring chill, but overnight the earth had popped bright green. Sun streamed through tree branches, marbling the grass and the sidewalks in yellow brilliance. Shelley looked out the window as she leaned on the Formica countertop of the Magic Mule Deli, famous for its pea soup and not actually a deli. The restaurant was a diner that strove toward the upscale, and the aging woman who was currently complaining to Shelley’s boss was representative of the typical clientele: a midsixties salt-and-pepper-topped, tote-bag-bearing, flamingo-like frump. Shelley had plain forgot to put in the order of this woman and her shorter, plumper brunch-mate. The women were there for an hour without food, and then when it finally went in, the order got confused: one got bacon instead of sausage, the other’s eggs scrambled instead of over easy.

  The dissatisfied customer crouched over the old-fashioned cash register where Matt the manager stood. The woman pointed at Shelley. “She was the worst waitress I have ever seen, and on top of that, it is repulsive to not make a server wear a brassiere. Indecent! Visible nipple. Enough to put anyone off their eggs.”

  Shelley smirked and glanced up at the Elvis clock that hung on the wall. Elvis in his blue dinner jacket ticked his hips from side to side, checking off the seconds. It was one in the afternoon and Shelley had been at work since eight, on a little over four hours of sleep. She’d been light-headed all morning, which was something she truly enjoyed about waitressing—she could feel suspended in time. Her overcaffeinated body moved mechanically: pouring coffee, smiling at customers, carrying heavy oval plates piled with shaved potatoes and omelet creations. Her unwashed hair hung in a messy ponytail with small loops breaking out. In her V-neck T-shirt one could see, as she leaned on her forearms, the plump curves of skin that formed the inner side of each breast. It was then, when she was leaning over, that her cell phone began to buzz and ring from inside the half apron tied around her waist.

  Matt looked at her with a softness he’d clearly come to feel for her in the two months she’d been his employee. But his look also said: I don’t blame you, but if you apologize to this pain-in-the-rear, we can all get on with our day. Shelley rolled her eyes.

  “Do not even tell me she is answering a phone call!” The frump crossed her arms.

  Shelley flipped open her black Motorola. “Hello?”

  “This is a call for Shelley Whitby,” said an uptight, middle-aged man’s voice.

  “You’re
in luck.”

  “Yes, hello. It’s Steven Armond.” There was a long pause. “The lawyer.”

  “Oh—hello.” It was a 617 number—Boston—so she should have guessed. She knew Armond. He came to Whitby family events, standing along the walls of the Christmas parties and at the farthest picnic tables at the clam bakes, silently. It was as if being employed by the family meant he was de facto related to them as well. But he might as well have been; Shelley was fairly sure his father had also been the Whitbys’ lawyer.

  “Listen, Shelley. This dispute over the estate and your father is getting heated.”

  “What?”

  Matt’s hands were on the counter in front of her now, and he mouthed the words: Off. The. Phone.

  Matt was a rail-thin hippie in his early forties who enjoyed a cold Bud Light and seemed to love his two greyhound dogs just as much as he loved his own long ponytail. He was particular in his way, but at the core of it just like everyone else: after her first week of working there, he caught Shelley in the chilled air of the walk-in, cleared his throat, and said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. Are you related?”

  The lawyer continued, “I know it’s only been a handful of days since he passed, but this is the kind of thing that has to be picked up on right away.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shelley asked. “Passed what?”

  The lawyer was silent then, but this was typical for him. Her mother once claimed Armond spoke so slowly in order to increase his billable hours. Shelley remembered now when she had heard this man speak before. Her father, Roger, had drunk too much at the end of a summer reunion dinner up at the Idlehour house, and he stood in the middle of the front lawn, unzipped his fly, and with a sheepish smile began to piss on the grass in front of everyone. It was the lawyer who had hollered, “No, Roger!” before speeding over and pulling him by the shoulders into the darkness of the south driveway.

  “Shelley, when was the last time you spoke with your mother?” Armond asked.

  It had been more than a month—perhaps six weeks—since the two had spoken. Shelley didn’t exactly know where her mother was, although she had her private suspicions. The breakdown in communication was part of the reason that she was, at the moment, standing in the Magic Mule Deli. Shelley was still a senior at Demming College, slated to graduate in less than a month if she could figure out a way to make up five incomplete grades. Her mother had been supporting her throughout college by sending her substantial checks every three weeks. But the checks stopped coming regularly toward the end of that fall, and in February, after several unanswered phone calls, Shelley had yet to receive a check at all for the spring semester. She began to have trouble buying sweaters and notebooks and big Styrofoam cups of beer. Soon enough she couldn’t even buy herself lunch, so she walked down Garden Street and into the Magic Mule and asked if they were hiring.

  “I talked to her last week,” Shelley lied to the lawyer. “I think she was on the Vineyard.”

  “Dear.” The man sighed, but it was clearly a pitying sigh, directed toward himself. “Shelley, I’m sorry.” A great pause. “Your father died of a stroke last Sunday.”

  The whir and hum of diner conversation muted in her ears. No was her first thought. She didn’t believe it. The lawyer was misinformed. Her father was going to live until he was nearly one hundred, just as his father had. She must have displayed some sort of physical reaction, because in the diner the flamingo woman stopped her warble and lowered her pointer finger. Matt dropped the hands he’d been waving in front of Shelley’s face.

  She said nothing at all, so it would have been hard for the lawyer, who stood above his desk in his leather-swathed office in Boston’s Back Bay, to read the moment. “Are you there?” Armond asked. “Did you hear what I said?”

  Something in Shelley’s chest began to quiver, threatening to split open. Instantly she missed her father in a physical way. He was so rarely there when she was small that his importance became amplified, at all times projected over her and her mother and her grandmother. When she did see him, it felt as if he were a giant. She wanted his body next to hers at that very moment, towering over her as he had when she was a child. She wanted him to be looking at her, calling her Secret Spell Shell.

  Shelley waited. “What?”

  “He was in his bed in Pasadena, and his nurse was in the other room. It was a quick affair.”

  She thought to herself: This doesn’t just happen without any warning. When her grandmother Biddy had died a handful of years earlier, Shelley had witnessed her slow decline. But this news of her father came out of nowhere. She knew then that in the depths of her mind, she had never stopped believing that Roger would one day come home to her and her mother. A sense of injustice began to fill her with anger. She had so much left to deal with, concerning him. She needed more time. It wasn’t fair that he could just be gone, like that, and never return. It simply wasn’t fair.

  An image of Roger’s hand popped into Shelley’s mind. When she was small she used to pick his bulbous fingers off the dining table, run her own hands over the edges of his square fingernails, then unfold these fingers into a flat plane and use them as a pillow. She would lay her head in her father’s hand whenever she pleased, and it was as if he didn’t even notice. He wouldn’t so much as look up from his newspaper or ongoing conversation. Now, in the diner, Shelley touched her cheek to confirm she wasn’t crying. No tears. She vibrated slightly though, in the region of her lower ribs.

  Her father, Roger Whitby Jr., had passed eighty the year before. And his Parkinson’s had gotten progressively worse, which was something Shelley had been told but hadn’t witnessed, as she hadn’t seen him in more than two years. The fact that she had never imagined him dying before was a testament to how young Shelley still was at twenty-two. But it was also a testament to her penchant for dismissing subjects that caused her anguish. This was her personal golden rule: if one stopped oneself from worrying about the effects of one’s actions, then those actions never mattered. When all her schoolmates at Spence were concerned with getting As and Bs, Shelley smirked, aware that she was in on a secret that distinguished herself from her peers. When she received a D on a math test, she closed her eyes and imagined a large cardboard box with tissue-paper stuffing. She mentally placed the test in the box, crunched down the paper and folded over the sides, then pictured kicking it away. That was the end of the stress about the math test. Now she tried to see the disembodied image of her father’s hand and place it into one of her old boxes.

  She kept the black flip phone pressed between her collarbone and cheek as her boss and the woman stared at her. “Is that it?” Shelley asked the lawyer. The vibrating had risen through her torso and her voice had joined in on the matter.

  “No!” Armond nearly hollered. “The reason I’ve called is that it seems Roger Jr. had created a trust for his children.” Another pause. “But, Shelley, last year he signed the trust over to one beneficiary. He’s left every penny to your brother. There were more pennies than we thought, and this child is going to have all of them. Every penny, every acre, and every house—including your mother’s house.” The man pronounced pennies in a Brahmin accent that was seldom still heard in this world: pahn-es.

  Shelley’s oldest half brother, Andrew, was basically an old man himself by now. He lived in Connecticut and took the train into the city every day to work on Wall Street. He had a herd of children, all of whom were much older than Shelley. Andrew was the firstborn son, the child whom the money would not make a lick of a difference to. Of course it was all left to him.

  “I’ll have my mother call Andrew,” Shelley said, ready to hang up. Her pulse had begun to speed. A darkness—or a confusion, really—was falling over her. If her father was dead, everything in her life could change.

  “No!” Such emotion from this dry cracker of a man. “It’s not Andrew. It’s the final child, Nick. Susan Scribner’s son. H
e’s going to inherit everything after the mandated grace period, at the end of the summer. And, Shelley, I can’t get in touch with him. His own mother claims she can’t find him.”

  “Nick?” She almost said, My Nick?

  He was, of course, not hers. Nick was Shelley’s younger stepbrother—no, half brother, not by blood but by adoption—and they hadn’t even known each other until their early teenage years. But she’d come to think of herself and Nick as being on the same team. All of their other half siblings were over a decade older than them, from a different generation. She and Nick were not only the youngest but also the two kids from her father’s haphazard, slapdash families. Nick always giggled when she said that; he preferred the term avant-garde families. They were compatriots in their circumstantial weirdness, and for that she loved him. She imagined Nick’s broad face and unruly hair, then remembered the screaming fight they’d had when she last saw him, after she had bought him a Starbucks coffee and he poured it out on the sidewalk in a political stand against something she wasn’t quite sure of.

  Shelley hung up with Armond and found herself leaning on the Magic Mule’s counter, feeling unhinged. Her father loved Nick more—he always had. Her constant fear, festering since her father had left when she was in the eighth grade, had been confirmed: Roger never cared enough to even notice her. She was shaking. It wasn’t sadness she was experiencing but anger. It flashed in her stomach, then through her chest. It was finally confirmed: she had been a mistake, and her father had never wanted her. Unwanted, mistake, nuisance. Then without any effort, one of her mental boxes popped into her mind, and she shoved all those thoughts into it as fast as possible. There they would stay. Plus, she wasn’t sure she’d been told all the facts. It was all invisible: first Roger’s California life, and then his death.