“I know I’m being foolish,” Rachel said, struggling to maintain composure. “It’s not like he has some terrible disease, for God’s sake.”
“That’s right, and you keep telling yourself that. Test scores aren’t everything.”
Easy for you to say with your little whiz kid in there, Rachel thought sourly.
Sheila was right, of course—and were they still living in Rockville, she wouldn’t have been so aware. But this was a town of trophy houses and trophy kids—a town where the rewards for intelligence were in-your-face conspicuous. Hawthorne was an upscale middle-class community of professional people, all smart and well educated. To make matters worse, Dylan was now surrounded by high-pedigree children, bred for success by ambitious parents who knew just how clever their kids were and where they stood against the competition: which kids were the earliest readers, who got what on the SATs, who ranked where in their class, who got into the hot schools.
Suddenly Rachel missed Rockville with its aluminum-sided Capes and pitching nets, tire swings, and kids who played street hockey until they glowed. Where the only scores that mattered were how the Sox, Bruins, and Celtics did, not your verbal and math; where the pickup trucks sported Harley-Davidson logos and bumper stickers that said KISS MY BASS and SAVE THE ALES unlike all the high-end vehicles outside with stethoscopes hanging from the rearview mirrors and windows emblazoned with shields from Bloomfield Preparatory Academy, Harvard, and Draper Labs, and Nantucket residency permits.
She looked out the window onto the splendidly manicured course with its two pools and tennis courts and showplace clubhouse. She felt out of place. The Dells was one of the most exclusive country clubs in New England; and now that Martin’s company had taken off they could afford the privileged life for their son. How ironic it seemed, given their expectations and presumptions. Rachel and Martin had both graduated from college so Dylan’s limitations were as much of a surprise as they were distressing. Even worse, they made her feel that the perimeters of their lives had been irrevocably altered.
You did this to him, whispered a voice in her head.
No! NO! And she shook it away.
Outside a green Dells CC truck pulled up with two greenskeepers. The men got out. They were dressed in jeans and the green and white DCC pullovers. One of them said something that made the other man break up. As she sipped her cappuccino and watched them unload a lawnmower, Rachel could not help but think how she was glimpsing her son’s destiny—a life of pickup trucks, lawnmowers, and subsistence wages.
“I guess I just didn’t do enough,” Rachel said.
“Like what?” Sheila said.
“Like when he was a baby. I guess I didn’t give him a rich enough environment. But I tried. I read all the zero-to-three books about brain growth and early childhood development. I talked and sang to him, I read him stories when he was two months old—all that stuff.” They had bought him Jump-Start Toddlers and other computer games, Baby Bach, Baby Shakespeare and Baby Einstein toys. When he took a nap, she played classical music. From his infancy, she read him poetry because the books said how babies learn through repetition, and that repeated rhymes, like music at an early age, are supposed to increase the spatial-temporal reasoning powers. She breast-fed him because of a Newsweek story on how breast-fed babies scored higher on intelligence tests than those formula-fed—as silly as that had seemed.
Newsweek. The very thought of the magazine made her stomach grind.
No! Just a coincidence, she told herself. Not true.
Tears flooded Rachel’s eyes. “And now it’s too late. He turned six last month.”
Sheila laid her hand on Rachel’s. “Pardon my French, but those first-three-years books are bullshit. All they do is put a guilt trip on parents. I bet if you took twins at birth and played Mozart and read Shakespeare around the clock to one for three years and raised the other normally you wouldn’t see a goddamn difference when they were six. You didn’t fail, Rachel, believe me.”
Rachel wiped her eyes and smiled weakly. “Something went wrong.”
“Nothing went wrong.”
Something terribly wrong.
Rachel nodded and looked away to change the subject. They were having two different conversations. Sheila did not understand.
Through the window, Lucinda was explaining something to the girl next to her. Sheila took the hint. “By the way, Lucinda’s having a birthday party a week from Saturday. It’s going to be an all-girl thing—her idea. But, in any case, I’m getting her a kitten.”
“Oh, how sweet.”
“It’ll be her first pet. I think kids need pets—don’t you? Something to, you know, love unconditionally?”
“Yes, of course. Dylan has gerbils and he’s crazy about them.”
At a nearby table, Brendan was arranging the dinnerware. To distract herself, Rachel watched him without thought. He was putting out dinnerware, all the time muttering to himself just below audibility—his mouth moving, braces flashing, his eye twitching. He looked possessed. “The poor kid’s a basket case,” she whispered to Sheila, thinking that it could be worse. At least Dylan was a happy child.
“I guess,” Sheila said vaguely. She checked her watch. There was another hour and a half of day care, so Sheila was going to go to her office in the interim, while Rachel would sit outside with a book until Dylan was out.
As they left the building, Rachel’s cell phone chirped in her handbag. The call was from Dr. Rose’s office. The secretary said that Dylan’s MRI results were back. “He’d like to make an appointment to see you and discuss them.”
Rachel felt a shock to her chest. Discuss them? “Is everything all right?”
“I’m sure, but he can see you tomorrow at ten.”
“Can I speak with him?”
“I’m sorry, he’s out of the office on an emergency and probably won’t be back for the rest of the day. Is ten tomorrow good for you?”
“Yes, ten’s fine,” she gasped and clicked off.
Oh, my God.
2
It was only three-thirty when Martin Whitman left the office. He had canceled two meetings and let all the calls and e-mails go unanswered because he wanted to buy some flowers on the way home as a prelude to taking Rachel to dinner at the Blue Heron—a chichi restaurant perched majestically on the cliffs overhanging Magnolia Harbor. Wine-dark sea, sunset dinner, candlelight, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Just the kind of romance-shock they needed.
Because something wasn’t right. Martin couldn’t put his finger on it, but for the last few weeks Rachel had lapsed into a black funk. She was distracted much of the time—moody, as if plagued by a low-level anxiety. She would become petulant when he questioned her and lose patience with Dylan when he misspoke or had trouble doing things. Without warning, she’d tear up, then withdraw. He hadn’t seen her like this since her hysterectomy which, three years ago, had left her in a dark malaise, like a slow-acting poison.
His first thought was that something was wrong with her—that her doctor had discovered a lump in her breast. But, surely, she would have told him. Then he wondered if there was another man—that while he spent up to fourteen hours a day at the office, Rachel had found somebody else. She was attractive, witty, warm, and easy to be with. But there had never been any reason to suspect her of cheating. Not until her recent shutdown—sex, of course, being a foolproof barometer. Overnight she had lost all interest in intimacy, going to bed early and falling asleep by the time he slipped beside her. When he brought it up, she said that it was just a phase she was going through—that it would pass. But so far it hadn’t.