“Isn’t that the point?” Jess said.
Garvey sighed. “Listen carefully. I’m only going to do this once.” He settled into the leather chair and continued the lecture. “When the original Metattent hit the market in 1980, sales never even came close to Ritalin’s. The public had no reason to choose it over Ritalin, since it was—for all intents and purposes—the same drug. Plus, don’t forget, Ritalin had the name recognition and the decades of quote-unquote evidence of its safety. Klovis, the company that made Metattent, they knew they had to get a gimmick, and fast. They got the gimmick, all right. But it wasn’t fast. It took twenty years to get Metattent Junior approved. And by 2004, when it hit the market, there were more children taking ADD medication than ever. Parents were now on the Internet reading all sorts of horror stories about Ritalin, talking to each other online about it. And voilà. Suddenly, their doctors present them with a new drug specifically designed to put all those fears to rest. Supply and demand. It’s basic economics. And with roughly two million children a month taking drugs for ADD in this country, there was plenty of demand. The first year Metattent Junior was on the market, it outsold Ritalin for the pre-teen set two to one. The second year, it made $980 million, three times what it cost to develop the drug.”
“Jesus,” Jess said.
“Jesus is right. The number of kids taking these drugs is growing every year. It was up to 5.1 percent of all children—all children—in 2008.” Garvey formed a prayer with his fingers, which poked into his lips as he thought. “Okay, look. I had a patient a few years back. Like your son, he was also a Bradley student who had been pressured into getting a psychiatric evaluation. The child is diagnosed with ADD. Of course he is. The school knows exactly what to put on those forms to get back the diagnosis. Hard for parents to argue with an inattentive-type ADD diagnosis when the symptoms only surface at school. Brilliant, right?”
A wave of shame passed through Sean. He fidgeted in his seat.
“My patient’s parents were uncomfortable with the idea of medication. They didn’t believe the ten-minute session with the therapist could possibly have led to such a serious diagnosis. Especially since their son had behaved beautifully with the shrink. Ultimately, they were willing to accept the diagnosis, but not the medication. They’d done their research and decided they wanted to try a more holistic approach, adding more iron and fish oil to his diet. They wanted to try behavior modification and biofeedback. But Bradley refused to forgo the meds. The child could have all the fish oil he wanted, they said, but he’d already fallen too far behind and the holistic treatment would take too long. They gave this family an ultimatum: drugs or another school.”
Sean was afraid to ask. “What’d they choose?”
“The child is still at Bradley is all I’ll say. Great kid, too. Smart.”
“I should talk to them,” he said, reaching for a pen on the desk. “What’s their name?”
Garvey slammed his palm on a stack of papers, causing them to slide to the ground. “Can’t do it. Wish I could. Doctor-patient stuff.”
He swiveled his chair and plucked a report from a pile. It was bound in a plastic cover, like a school report. He handed it to Sean. “My book.” It was titled ADHD: Focus on the Lie.
Sean thumbed through it.
“It’s eighteen dollars.”
He laughed, but it turned out Garvey was dead serious. He dug into his pockets and held out a twenty.
Garvey snatched it, opened his wallet, and handed him back two dollars. “I’ve seen half-a-dozen kids from Bradley,” he said. “All pretty much the same story. I’m determined to nail that godforsaken school. I brought three lawsuits against them. Lack of evidence,” he spat out. “And then they made sure I’d never be able to speak up again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster. Signed the contract and everything. Then all of a sudden they pulled out. Seems they got a mysterious phone call from a VIP who didn’t like what the book implied.”
“How do you know it was Bradley?”
“Because I mentioned them in chapter two,” he said. “And they made it clear they weren’t happy about it. No other house will touch me. I’ve been bound and gagged. Silenced.”
“I guess you can do that when you have a hundred million dollar endowment,” Jess said.
“And alumni who run the world,” Sean added.
“Exactly.” Garvey sighed. “Look what they did to that nice Bradley teacher who wrote an Op-Ed about boys in the classroom and the use of medication. The Op-Ed never ran, and now she’s blacklisted.”
“What?” Jess asked.
“She wasn’t really a sexual offender, you know,” Garvey said. “But if a school accuses a teacher of being a sexual offender, well, it’ll appear on every background check that’s done on her. That would just about ruin a career, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sexual offender?” he asked. “Who?”
“Debbie Martin. Nice lady. Excellent teacher.” Garvey shook his head sadly. “She tried to fight them, but that only made it worse. Her life is in the toilet right now. She’s living under an assumed name somewhere outside of Baltimore, I believe. Copyediting electronics manuals.”
“Debbie Martin was Toby’s teacher.” He looked at Jess. “The one you replaced.”
“Well be careful, young lady. The last thing you want is to have a Bradley bull’s-eye on your forehead. Trust me.”
He watched Jess chew the inside of her lip. She looked paler than when they’d walked in, and he knew it was time to get her out of there. He stood and held out his hand to Garvey. “Thanks for your time,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
“For your own sake I wouldn’t recommend it.” Garvey followed them down the stairs and opened the front door. “Sean,” he said, as they turned to walk down the snowy path. “I don’t know what your plans are for your son, but I would get him out of that school as soon as humanly possible.”
They drove in silence. He pictured all the ways Bradley could ruin Toby’s life if Sean tried to press charges against the school. How they could take it out on Jess.
“That was … not what I was expecting.” She eyed the Blue Moon Diner coming up on their left. Checked curtains hung in the windows and it had a breakfast-all-day look.
“Hungry?”
“Starving.”
He pulled the car into the parking lot.
“Grilled cheese with bacon may be the only thing that will get me through the rest of this day,” she said.
His stomach growled thinking about bacon. He wondered if Ellie would smell it on his breath. He turned off the car, but neither made a move to get out. She stared out the window at the chipped lettering on the front of the Blue Moon motel that joined the diner.
“That teacher,” she said, staring at her hands. “Debbie Martin. Do you think the school really did that to her?”
“He was pretty convincing.”
“He was, wasn’t he?” Her chest rose and fell.
“Did you tell anyone about coming here?”
She shook her head.
“Good.” He rested his hand on hers. She grabbed it and held on. He slid his free hand up her arm and pulled her toward him, wrapping both his arms around her. “They won’t find out.” Her hair smelled faintly of apricots.
He felt her breath change, felt her hands in his hair. All he could think about was her naked body, how it would look, how it would feel. The car was way too cramped for what needed to happen next. “Screw the bacon,” he said, catching his breath. “Let’s get a room.”
Inside, the front desk was abandoned. A sign directed them to ring the buzzer. While he waited for the ancient man to shuffle out from the back, he thought about what kind of men checked into cheap motel rooms with women who weren’t their wives. It sounded awful when he thought of it that way. He wasn’t some cheating husband and this wasn’t some woman who wasn’t his wife.
“We’d like a room.”
“Cash or credit?” the man asked.
He hadn’t thought this through. “Cash,” he said, guiltily. He handed the man five twenties he’d taken out of the bank the night before for gas and emergencies. Jess shook her head subtly, like she couldn’t believe they were doing this.
The man handed him a single key that dangled from a gouged rectangle of blue plastic. “Number 14.”
Jess squeezed his hand as they walked down the narrow hallway in silence. He jiggled the lock until it unlatched. The room was small and the stain on the carpet looked like Texas.
“You take me to the nicest places,” she said, examining a plastic cup sealed in plastic wrap.
“I wouldn’t touch anything if I were you.”
She folded her arms around him. “Nothing?”
“Let me rephrase that.” He kissed her. “Don’t touch anything but me.” Soon he didn’t even notice the cheesy posters of the beach at sunset or the weird chemical smell. It was just him and Jess in the queen-size bed, the polyester comforter thrown across the room and the sheets tangled around their feet.
The room was no longer cold. The windows were fogged over and he couldn’t tell whose sweat was whose. When Jess caught her breath she spoke, but not directly to him. “Why doesn’t this feel wrong? You’re married. I seem to keep forgetting that fact.”
“It sounds so lurid when you say it that way.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” He kissed her. “Not to me.”
She rolled onto her side to face him. “We could be biased.” He traced the curve from her shoulder down to the valley of her waist and up again. The line was smooth and sloping. Perfect.
She opened her eyes and looked into his. “I keep hearing my mother’s voice,” she said, “saying not to get involved with a married man.”
He nodded. It was good advice. “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but I think you should know that Ellie and I,” he winced—it was awful saying Ellie’s name while he was in bed with Jess. “We haven’t been together, like this, since before she left. Way before.”
She nodded, thinking.
“Too much information?”
“I’m trying to decide whether that fact makes this more or less lurid.”
“Can we pick a different word?”
“Sleazy?”
He rested his hand on her thigh. It was warm and smooth. “If your mother knew how I felt about you, she might be okay with it.”
She allowed a half smile. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
His palm tingled where it came in contact with her skin. “When I touch you everything makes sense. I don’t want to be with anyone else. Just you.”
“But … you’re living with your wife.”
There was no arguing with this fact, even though it was a fact he desperately wanted to change. “Yeah.”
“It’s not good.”
“I guess you need to hear about what’s going on, or not going on, between me and … Toby’s mom.”
“Talk.”
“I don’t even like thinking about her when I’m with you, much less talking …”
She laid her hand on his cheek, which had the effect of making him want to tell her anything, everything. “Talk.”
“When I go home now and Ellie’s there I can’t breathe. Everything about it is wrong. I told you this before, and it’s still true. The arrangement is all about Toby.” He thought about how much the divorce was going to hurt Toby, about how hard it was going to be to tear their family apart. It would be painful and expensive and worth every cent when his life was his again.
“Maybe you should try to work it out. For Toby.”
“You’d be more convincing if you were wearing clothes.”
“True,” she shrugged. “Still …”
“I don’t want to try.” He wanted to put the Ellie chapter far behind him. “She’s not who I want.” As he said it, he wanted Jess again.
She reached for him, like she knew. “So what’s the plan? What’s going to make my mother stop nagging me from the Other Side?”
“Tell her Ellie is my roommate. That it won’t be this way for much longer.”
“Hmm,” she said. “The old ‘I’ll leave my wife for you’ line. This is exactly the kind of thing my mother’s voice is talking about.”
“Tell her I’ve never been as happy as I am right now. With you. Never.”
The smile stayed on her lips as they found his. She scooted her body closer until their skin was touching. “I bet you say that to all the women you take to sleazy motel rooms in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Actually, that’s true.”
When he thought about it later, he couldn’t remember how they started making love again or when they fell asleep. When they woke up to Sean’s phone, the room had gone dark. By the time he found the phone, Ellie’s call had gone to voice mail. He didn’t need to listen to it, and there was no way he was going to call back from here.
Jess rolled toward him, curling her front along the length of his back. “Shower time,” she said. He turned to watch her silhouette walk away from him.
He could have slept another hour at least, but he followed her, the idea of a steamy shower leading him on. Inside the bright green bathroom, those thoughts evaporated. Jess watched water trickle from the showerhead that was clogged with rust and gook. A permanent brown ring tattooed the tub.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she said.
“There’s nothing wrong with Plan B,” she said, turning so he could get her back. When she had been thoroughly wiped down, she took the cloth from him and immersed it in the hot water. “Your turn.” She covered his face with it, swept it around his shoulders and down his stomach. She circled around and swept up his back with her face inches from his.
“Plan B.” He kissed her, since her mouth was right there. “Works for me.”
Later, he watched her pull on her panties, then step into her jeans and button them. He helped her fasten her bra and ran his hands along her back and down her hips. It was impossible not to touch her. For a moment, he forgot about his real life, where Ellie would be waiting for him.
He usually hated traffic, but not tonight. Tonight it meant more time with Jess. It wasn’t guilt exactly, that he was feeling. Or maybe it was. Lying was never good. He wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t good at it, for one thing. In his head, he played out scenarios where he told Ellie she had to leave. Would she be surprised or did she already know? And how would they tell Toby? He predicted crying. Lots of it. From all of them.
Three hours later, he stood in front of his apartment door trying to force his pulse to slow down. He couldn’t help feeling like a cheating husband coming home to his wife. But he wasn’t cheating, he reminded himself. He was in love. Ellie had left him and this marriage was all just pretend. At least he hadn’t picked up flowers. According to every movie he’d seen, cheating husbands brought home flowers. She would have known instantly where he’d been and what he’d been doing.
Inside, Ellie was scurrying around clearing surfaces. Anger usually accompanied her manic cleaning episodes and he felt it radiating off her now. He thought he might vomit. If he did, maybe he could claim illness and go to bed.
“Hi,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “What’s going on?”
“Did you get my message?” Ellie’s tone was clipped, tight. Like it got when her parents came over. Then he remembered: her parents were coming over. They’d invited themselves for dinner, complaining they’d only seen Toby once since he’d been released from the hospital. They required “quality time with the family.” Which meant he wouldn’t have to confront Ellie. At least not right away. He relaxed a little.
“I … bad reception.”
“You’re so late,�
�� she said, continuing to straighten.
“Minor disaster at the office,” he said, feeling the lie catch in his throat. “We lost a story and I had to pull something together quickly.”
She looked at him and frowned. “Where are the flowers?”
“What?”
“The flowers. For the table.”
He couldn’t win. “I can get some now.”
“No, never mind,” she said. He could tell she was trying not to be annoyed. “It doesn’t matter. Why don’t you put out some cheese and crackers?”
He emptied some Triscuits and cheddar onto a plate and examined two decent bottles of wine Ellie had left on the counter. Through the open kitchen wall he watched her like he had for years. He recognized the dress, which she must have dug out of the closet. It was cut lower than he remembered and it actually showed a lot of cleavage. The pile of magazines she’d just made slid off the table and she let out a frustrated groan. She sunk onto the couch, defeated. “I am so not in the mood for this.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Tell me about it. Let’s keep it short.”
She was nodding. “They just want to see that Toby’s okay. That we’re okay.”
He swallowed. Should he remind her they were not okay? That this was all for show?
“After they spend some time with Toby, we can say we’re meeting friends for dinner.”
“We’re not meeting friends for dinner,” Toby said, walking into the living room.
“Just don’t mention that, okay?” he said, scooping up Toby. “I missed you today.”
“Where were you?”
“I had lots of work to do.” He felt lightheaded from all the lying. How did people live this way?
When the doorbell rang, Toby hopped up, opened the door, and gave Maureen and Dick a genuine smile. “Hi Grandma. Hi Grandpa.”
Their faces melted. “Oh my lovely boy,” Maureen exclaimed. “You look wonderful. Healthy.” She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him gently, like she was afraid he might break.