Leave Me
A NOVEL
Gayle Forman
ALGONQUIN BOOKS
OF CHAPEL HILL
2016
For Willa and Denbele
Contents
New York City
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Pittsburgh
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Algonquin
New York City
1
Maribeth Klein was working late, waiting to sign off on the final page proofs of the December issue, when she had a heart attack.
Those first twinges in her chest, however, were more a heaviness than a pain, and she did not immediately think heart. She thought indigestion, brought on by the plate of greasy Chinese food she’d eaten at her desk the hour before. She thought anxiety, brought on by the length of tomorrow’s to-do list. She thought irritation, brought on by the conversation with her husband, Jason, who when she’d called earlier was having a dance party with Oscar and Liv, even though their downstairs neighbor Earl Jablonski would complain and even though keeping the twins up past eight upped the odds that one of them would wake in the night (and wake her up, too).
But not her heart. She was forty-four years old. Overtaxed and overtired, but show her a working mother who wasn’t. Besides, Maribeth Klein was the sort of woman who when she heard hoof beats did not think horses, let alone zebras. She thought someone had left the TV on too loud.
So when her heart began seizing, Maribeth merely excavated a bottle of Tums from her desk and sucked on them while willing Elizabeth’s office door to open. But the door remained shut while Elizabeth and Jacqueline, Frap’s creative director, debated whether or not to tweak the cover now that sex tapes of the famous young actress gracing it had emerged on the Internet.
An hour later, the decision was made and the last of the proofs were signed off on and shipped to the printer. Before leaving, Maribeth stopped by Elizabeth’s office to say good-bye, which she immediately regretted. Not just because Elizabeth, noting the hour, remarked how tired Maribeth looked and offered her a car-service voucher home—a kindness that embarrassed Maribeth, though not enough to decline it—but because Elizabeth and Jacqueline had been deep in conversation about dinner plans and had stopped talking as soon as Maribeth entered the room, as if they’d been postgaming a party to which she hadn’t been invited.
At home, she fell into a fitful sleep, waking up with Oscar sprawled on the bed next to her and Jason already gone. And even though she felt worse than she had the night before—exhausted and nauseous, from the poor night’s sleep and the Chinese food, she assumed, but with her jaw aching, too, for reasons she did not understand, though she would later learn that these were all actually signs of her ongoing heart attack—she dragged herself out of bed and somehow got Liv and Oscar dressed and walked the ten blocks to BrightStart Preschool, where she maneuvered the gauntlet of the other mothers, who regarded her with a cool condescension because, she suspected, she only did drop-offs on Fridays. Jason handled the other mornings (something the BrightStart mothers positively lionized him for) so that Maribeth could get to her desk early enough to leave by four-thirty.
“A short workday,” Elizabeth had promised. “Fridays off.” This was two years ago, after Elizabeth had been anointed editor-in-chief of Frap, a new (and well-funded) celebrity lifestyle magazine, and those were the bright, shiny apples she’d used to lure Maribeth back to full-time work. Well, those and the ample salary, which she and Jason needed to pay for the twins’ upcoming preschool, the cost of which, Jason had joked, was “exorbitant squared.” At the time, Maribeth was freelancing from home but not earning anything like a full-time salary. As for Jason’s job at a nonprofit music archive, well, the tuition would’ve eaten half of his annual take. There was an inheritance from Maribeth’s father, but generous as it had been, it would’ve covered only one year, and what if they didn’t get a spot at the public pre-K (the odds of which, people claimed, were worse than getting into Harvard)? They really needed the money.
Though the truth was, even if preschool had been free, like it was in France, apparently, Maribeth suspected she would’ve taken the job just for the chance to finally work side by side with Elizabeth.
The short work day turned out to be eight hours, and much longer during the closes. Those Fridays off turned out to be her busiest day of the week. As for working side by side with Elizabeth, well, that hadn’t quite worked out as expected either. Nothing had, really, except perhaps for preschool. That was just as expensive as they’d anticipated.
At circle time, Maribeth opened the book Liv had carefully selected for today’s reading, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, and blinked as the words danced across the page. Earlier that morning, after she’d retched bile into the toilet, she had suggested to her daughter that perhaps she should postpone the reading until the following Friday, prompting Liv to throw a fit: “But you never come to school,” her daughter had wailed. “You can’t break a promise!”
She managed to get through the whole book, though she could tell by Liv’s scowl that her performance was lackluster. After circle time, she said good-bye to the twins and took a bus the ten blocks back home, where, instead of going to bed, as she so desperately wanted, she checked her e-mail. At the top of the queue was a message, sent to her personal and work accounts, from Elizabeth’s assistant, Finoula, asking if Maribeth could do a crash edit on the attached article. Next up in her inbox was the to-do list she had e-mailed herself from work last night. It contained twelve items, thirteen if you included the article Finoula had just sent. Though she generally avoided putting anything off—when she did, her lists only metastasized—she mentally shuffled the day, prioritizing what could not be delayed (ob-gyn, CPA, meet Andrea), what could be (call with Oscar’s speech therapist, dry cleaners, post office, car inspection), and what might be passed off to Jason, whom she called at work.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “Do you think you can figure out dinner tonight?”
“If you don’t feel like cooking, let’s order in.”
“We can’t. It’s the twins parenting potluck. We’re hosting,” she reminded him. Because even though it was on the calendar, and even though she’d told him about it earlier in the week, and even though the potlucks had been happening every other month for more than four years now, they still caught him by surprise. “And I’m not feeling great,
” she added.
“So cancel,” he said.
She knew he’d say that. Jason was very fond of the easy way out. But the only time anyone had canceled a potluck was two years ago, right after Hurricane Sandy. And, yes, she knew this wasn’t Jason’s thing. But she’d joined this group when the twins were six weeks old and she’d been body-bruised from the exhaustion of it all and so unbelievably lonely from being home all day with just them. And, yes, maybe some of the parents were annoying (like Adrienne, with her changing dietary demands for Clementine and Mo based on whichever nutritional study she’d just read about in the Times—no dairy, no gluten, now it was paleo). But these had been her first parenting friends. Even if she didn’t exactly like them all, they were her comrades in arms.
“I’m just worn out,” she told Jason. “And it’s too late to cancel.”
“It’s just I’ve got a crazy day,” Jason said. “We have tens of thousands of files to migrate before the database upgrade.”
Maribeth imagined a world in which a crazy day excused her from having to deal with dinner. Excused her from anything. She would like to live in such a world. “Can’t you just cook something? Please.” Don’t tell me to order pizza, Maribeth thought, her chest clenching, though not from stress, as she thought, but from the blood bottlenecking through her narrowed coronary artery. Please don’t tell me to order pizza.
Jason sighed. “Fine. I’ll make the chicken with olives. Everyone likes that.”
“Thank you.” She felt almost tearfully grateful to be off the hook, and residually angry because she was always on the hook.
It took her fifteen minutes to walk the three blocks to the café where she’d arranged to meet Andrea Davis, a former colleague of hers from the Rule. She would’ve liked to cancel that appointment, but Andrea, who was divorced and had two teenage children, was out of a job now that the shopping magazine where she’d been working had folded. Just like the Rule had folded. Just like so many of the magazines they’d worked at had folded.
“You’re so lucky to be at Frap, with Elizabeth,” Andrea told her over coffee, the smell of which was making Maribeth want to gag. “It’s brutal out there.”
Yes, Maribeth knew this. It was brutal. She was lucky.
“We’re a long way from the Rule,” Andrea said. “Remember after 9/11 when we tore up the entire issue and remade it from scratch? Those late nights, all of us working together, the smell of burning plastic in the air. Sometimes I think those were the best days of my life. Isn’t that sick?”
Maribeth wanted to say that sometimes she felt that way, too, but at the moment she’d grown so breathless she could hardly speak.
“Are you okay?” Andrea asked.
“I’m feeling off,” Maribeth admitted. She didn’t know Andrea all that well, which made it easier to tell the truth. “Strange symptoms. Like pains. In my chest. I’m worried it might be my . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“Your heart?” Andrea asked.
Maribeth nodded, as the implicated organ clenched again.
“I go to the ER at least once a year, convinced I’m having a heart attack. I get the pain in my arm and everything.” Andrea shook her head. “Anyhow, it’s nothing. Okay, not nothing, it’s reflux. With me anyhow.”
“Reflux?”
Andrea nodded. “Acid reflux. A by-product of this thing called stress. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Of course, stress. That made more sense. But Frap had just done a profile on a twenty-seven-year-old sitcom star who’d been diagnosed with MS. “You just never know,” the actress had said in the article. And then two weeks ago Maribeth’s mother had called and mentioned that her friend Ellen Berman’s thirty-six-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. Although Maribeth had never met Ellen Berman or her daughter, she felt terrible for her and freaked out enough to schedule an ob-gyn appointment (and she really did need to schedule a mammogram, too; she’d only had one since the twins were born.) Because that actress was right: You never knew.
And in fact, Maribeth did not know that at that point, her heart tissue had begun to die from lack of oxygen. So she carried on with her day. Promised Andrea she’d ask Elizabeth about any openings or leads and then took a cab to the CPA’s office to drop off the year’s receipts so their tax returns—already on extension since April—could be prepared in time for the deadline next week. Then she hailed a cab uptown to Dr. Cray’s office because even though she was dizzy now and wanted nothing more than to go home and crash, she was already six months late for her annual ob-gyn exam and she didn’t want to wind up like Ellen Berman’s daughter.
And because she did not know that the exhaustion she was feeling was a result of the decreased oxygenated blood now flowing through her, she told Dr. Cray’s nurse she was feeling fine, even as the nurse took her vitals and noted that her blood pressure seemed abnormally low and asked her if she might be dehydrated. Maybe she was. Maybe that was it. So she accepted a cup of water.
She did not think heart. And perhaps she never would have, had it not been for Dr. Cray asking Maribeth if she was okay.
The question itself was pro forma. But Dr. Cray—who had delivered Oscar and Liv and had seen Maribeth through so much—happened to ask it right as she was doing the breast exam, right as her fingers were gently probing the flesh of Maribeth’s left breast, just above her heart, which no longer hurt, but felt tight, drumlike, a sensation that called to mind her pregnant belly, leaving Maribeth no choice but to reply, “Well, actually . . .”
2
Two hours later, Maribeth was starting to panic.
After reassuring her that it was probably nothing, Dr. Cray had put Maribeth in a car service to the nearest ER and called ahead to let them know she was coming. “Just to get checked out, just to be on the safe side,” she’d said. Upon arrival, Maribeth had been tagged with a wristband, taped up with monitors, and shunted into a cardiac observation unit, where she’d been observed, primarily by an unending series of doctors, none of whom looked old enough to legally drink, let alone practice medicine.
In the car over to the hospital, she’d called Jason at work and gotten his voicemail. Remembering that he said he would be offsite for part of the day, she’d called his cell and had gotten voicemail again. Typical. He was allergic to talking on the phone. She hadn’t bothered leaving a message. After all, she was in a car service, similar to the one that had ferried her home from work last night. It hadn’t seemed unreasonable that this would all be over in an hour or two.
Instead, she’d texted Robbie, who had started babysitting the twins when they were a year old and Maribeth had started getting enough freelance work to justify hiring someone. Back then, Robbie had been a sweet, creative NYU theater major. Now she was a graduate, a bonafide actress with an erratic schedule. So Maribeth wasn’t entirely surprised when she’d texted back: Can’t. Got a call back!!!!!!! with a series of emoticons to underscore her excitement. And then she added a Sorry, with a few sad-face emojis to telegraph her regret.
Now it was getting close to two-thirty and the twins would be getting out of school soon with no one to pick them up. She tried Jason again. And got voicemail again. This time, there really was no point leaving a message. He wouldn’t be able to get to BrightStart in time. And Jason had unretrieved messages on his cell phone dating back to the last presidential election.
She called the school. The receptionist, a model-pretty but grossly incompetent young woman who regularly lost forms and checks, answered. Maribeth asked if it might be okay for Oscar and Liv to stay a little late that afternoon.
“I’m sorry but we don’t offer aftercare,” the receptionist said, as if Maribeth were some random stranger inquiring, not a parent who’d been with the school for more than a year now.
“I know that but I’m in, well . . . I’ve been unavoidably detained.”
“BrightStart’s policy clearly states pickup is no later than three-thirty,” she said, the connection hissing. Th
e reception in here was terrible.
“I’m aware of the policy but this is an . . .” She hesitated. Emergency? It was looking less like her heart than like a colossal waste of time. “An unavoidable situation. I won’t be able to get there by three-thirty, nor will my husband or babysitter. I know the teachers stay later. Can’t Oscar and Liv just play in a corner? I can’t imagine I’m the only parent this has ever happened to.” Though, who knew? Maybe she was. The Tribeca neighborhood where the school was, and where Maribeth had lived in a rent-stabilized loft for more than two decades, had become one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Sometimes it seemed as if even the nannies had nannies.
The receptionist made an unpleasant sound and put Maribeth on hold. A few minutes later she returned, saying that one of the other parents had offered to take the twins.
“Oh, okay. Who?”
“Niff Spenser.”
Niff Spenser wasn’t technically a BrightStart parent. She had two BrightStart graduates, both now ensconced in a K-12 prep school, and a third child who would be starting next year. She volunteered in the “gap year,” as she called it, to “stay in the loop,” as if preschool had a steep learning curve you couldn’t afford to loosen your grip on. Maribeth couldn’t stand her.
But Jason wasn’t answering and Robbie was busy. For a flash, she thought of Elizabeth, but it felt inappropriate, less like calling a friend than a boss.
She got Niff’s number from the receptionist and texted her Jason’s information, promising he’d collect the twins before dinner. She texted Niff’s info to Jason and told him that she’d been held up and to coordinate a pickup with Niff. Please confirm you have received the text, she wrote.
Got it, he texted back.
And just like that, a decision seemed to have made itself. She would not tell Jason why she’d been held up until it was all over. And if it turned out to be nothing, maybe she wouldn’t tell him at all. Odds were, he wouldn’t ask.
Maribeth examined the monitor on her finger. A pulse ox. She recalled her father wearing one after his stroke. The monitors taped to her chest itched; she suspected it would take a good scrubbing tonight to get the glue off. “Excuse me,” she called to one of the ER residents, a stylish young woman who wore expensive shoes and spoke with a Valley Girl lilt. “Do you know when I might get out of here?”