“I assume so. He goes upstairs to his room and puts on his headphones and taps away at the keyboard. Sometimes I hear him talking on the phone.”
Another long silence.
Then she said, “He hasn’t stopped vaping, has he?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t smell pot, but you wouldn’t, with a vape pen, right?”
“That’s right.”
Another pause.
“So our son is vaping to take the edge off, and lo and behold, he’s flunking math. I guess that’s taking the edge off, all right.”
Duncan rolled his eyes.
Sometimes, she thought, Duncan acted more like his son’s pal than his father. But he was a warm and loving father, and that was the most important thing. He was born and bred to it: he came from a big and loving Italian family, where (at least as she imagined it) there was always a pot of marinara bubbling on the stove. He and his brothers and sisters bickered constantly but always came through for one another.
The Espositos could not have been more different from the Brodys. Her mother practically mainlined her martinis after work every night. Her father was what today you’d call emotionally unavailable. He was an articulate man, a brilliant teacher, but he rarely spoke at home except to complain about the administration at the school where he taught. A general fug of disappointment always surrounded him. He was always working on his novel, which no one ever saw. It was never published, and as far as Juliana knew, it was never completed. All he’d say about it was that it was “literary.” He was recessive, a shrinking violet: always removed, always distracted. He was barely even there. He emerged from his shell only to grouse about something. Follow his rules and leave him alone.
Her mother only drank at home, never at work, or so she insisted. But she drank a lot at home. To the extent that dinner would usually burn in the oven. Twice she’d almost burned down the house. It got so bad that Juliana started making dinner. Then, since her mother always slept late, Juliana had to start making Calvin’s lunches every morning. She remembered putting in those little red boxes of raisins for him instead of the fun-size Kit Kat bars left over from Halloween, being the responsible mom-type figure; she also remembered Calvin’s howls of protest. There were plenty of times when she wanted to go into a sulk, to throw a fit, to act like a kid. To be a moody adolescent. But that felt like a luxury she couldn’t afford. That they couldn’t afford.
Everything in the Brody house went unsaid; everything was distant and swaddled in batting. She’d grown used to the silences.
She’d looked at her parents’ lives and thought: I want no part of that. Her dad, desperately unhappy and unloved in his job. Her mom, living in a world of pretend. And then if you rebelled against them, like Calvin, you got yourself killed.
So it was Duncan’s family-centric warmth that had really attracted her to him, even more than his brown eyes and his long lashes and his perfect butt. More than his passion, his intellectual stubbornness. In a way, it came down to how much he loved his mother.
Jake’s math teacher, Mr. Wertheim, was a clumsy, overweight man in his late twenties with thick glasses and an inability to look you in the face. Juliana had forgotten what his first name was. He was just Mr. Wertheim. He opened the door to the classroom with a surprised look that implied that he’d forgotten they were coming. The classroom was otherwise empty. They sat in chairs with tablet arm desks, facing one another. Mr. Wertheim cleared his throat and looked down at the desktop. He wore a green tartan plaid shirt. His big belly barely fit behind the desk. He traced a figure eight on the desk with his index finger and cleared his throat and said, “Um, I think Jake is a really smart kid with a lot of potential, but he’s failing math.”
“Failing?” Juliana said.
“The last three tests he’s gotten an F. And he hasn’t turned in the last six homework assignments.”
Juliana looked at Duncan, who looked rattled. “What can he do about it?” Duncan said, ever the optimist.
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. I’ve offered to stay after school to work with him, but he has yet to take me up on it. I figured he’d have time after school since he’s quit the soccer team.”
As they left the classroom, Juliana said, “He quit soccer?”
“I’m stunned. Jesus.”
“Wow. So what’s he doing after school every day?”
He was silent for a beat. “Not his math homework, clearly.” He laughed painfully.
They walked for a while in silence. Outside the building they said hi to Jake’s history teacher, Ms. Howland. Juliana wondered whether he was flunking history too. She looked at her watch. “We’re fifteen minutes early to pick him up. From whatever he’s doing. You want to wait with me?”
“I do. Thanks.”
They sat on the wooden bench outside the main entrance, where kids waited for their parents.
She said, “Our son’s flunking math, and we’re flunking parenthood.”
After a long silence, they both started talking at the same time. “You know,” Duncan said as she said, “Can I say something?” and then “Go ahead.”
Finally Duncan collected himself. “I’m not ready for you to come home yet,” he said. “We built something together — it’s not me and it’s not you, it’s something else, and maybe we have a responsibility to it. Now, I’m not the perfect husband, I know that. This isn’t all on you.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But it kinda is.”
He hesitated. “Yeah, it kinda is,” he said, and he smiled. A pause. “So we’ll talk to him?”
“Whatever good that does. He keeps telling me soccer is ‘fine,’ and he doesn’t elaborate, but that’s sort of typical of the way he is these days, with me anyway.”
A few minutes later, her phone rang. It was Martie Connolly. “I just got a heads-up,” she said. “The two police detectives are on their way. When do you think you’ll be back?”
Her stomach knotted. “Give me half an hour,” she said.
Jake showed up a while later, his heavy backpack looped over his right shoulder, his big headphones around his neck.
“How was soccer?” Juliana and Duncan said in unison, unintentionally.
Jake looked from one to the other, realizing something was up. “I didn’t go to soccer,” he admitted.
Gently, Juliana said, “What’d you do, Jake?”
“I worked in the library.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t persist, because she was fairly certain he was lying.
They were all getting much too good at that.
“We need to talk,” Juliana said.
37
She tried Lyft, but the app said there were no drivers available and she didn’t want to be late for the interview with the detectives. So she requested a Wheelz black car, and the app said the driver, whose name was Mohammed, would be arriving in seven minutes. Gradually the time counted down to one minute and then “arriving now,” and a moment later a black BMW 7 Series limousine pulled up to the curb. It glinted in the watery light of dusk. She said good-bye to her husband and son and got into the back of the car.
She greeted Mohammed. The BMW smelled new. She sat back and tried to relax, checking her e-mail on her phone. The sedan pulled into the rush-hour traffic on Beacon Street.
Jake had been understandably defensive. He said his math teacher was “overreacting” and that he promised he’d do better in math. No, he didn’t want a tutor. He apologized for “kinda lying” about going to soccer practice, but he was doing homework in the library and working on a “project” that he didn’t want to talk about.