A Fatal Debt by John Gapper

Square, and when I returned, laden with paper bags, I was halted in the lobby by Bob Lorenzo, the head doorman of my apartment building. Bob had a neatly trimmed beard, bloodhound eyes, and an air of fortitude under pressure. We got on fine, though I tried to avoid discussing the Mets or the co-op board, both of which were painful topics.
    “Dr. Kaufman came by, Dr. Cowper,” he said, holding up an envelope with “Ben” written on it in Rebecca’s round script and then underlined. “You just missed her. She asked me to give you this.”
    “Thanks, Bob,” I said. I had once tried to persuade him to call me by my first name, but it had not stuck. The envelope was weighed down at the bottom by something, and I felt the shape inside: her keyto my apartment. Bob regarded me with a look of disapproval, as if he knew what the package signified.
    “She said she wouldn’t be here so much anymore. I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “I’m sorry, too,” I said. I felt a surge of irritation at his silent judgment, compounding my guilt.
What was wrong with these people?
First my father and Jane, and now I couldn’t walk into my apartment building without being made to feel ashamed. That probably would have been my mother’s reaction, too.
Are you quite sure, Ben?
she’d have said with an undertone of reproach.
    Back in my apartment, I lay on the bed, took a breath, and tore open Rebecca’s envelope with my thumb. Inside was a sheet of paper folded over upon itself, with her key attached with Scotch tape.
    Ben
,
    I’m sorry I had to go. I miss you already but I think it’s for the best. I expect I’ll see you at work. I’ll be the one who looks like she’s been crying
.
    R
.
    I wanted to weep, but nothing came—my emotional tank was empty. It would have been easier if she’d been angry with me. Her affection and sad dignity were a kick in the stomach. If I hadn’t known her so well, I’d have thought that she’d calculated it to cause me pain, but she wasn’t like that.
    I got up and paced around the room for a while, but the desolate feeling wouldn’t pass. I felt weary, but I didn’t want to stay at home, feeling bad about my ill treatment of Rebecca and entanglement with Harry, and worrying about my father’s heart. I needed something to distract me. I laid her note on the bed, walked into the living room, and called a friend from the hospital. He was a party animal who’d known in our first week of residency which bar to drink at and where to go afterward. Sure enough, he was heading out to a gathering later on.
    “A guy Emma knows invited us to his apartment in TriBeCa. His parties are great, they say. He works on Wall Street,” he said.
    “I don’t know, Steve. I don’t think I want to spend my Saturday night with a bunch of bankers.”
    After my week with Harry and his entourage, it didn’t feel like relaxation to be plunged back into his world.
    “Right. You’ve got so many other choices, don’t you? That’s why you’re calling me at six o’clock. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
    When the sun had set and the lights had gone on in Union Square, casting a glow over the rooftops, I went into the bathroom. I opened a medicine cabinet above a jar of seashells that Rebecca had collected on a vacation we’d had in Cape Cod. I poked among the lotions and deodorants, behind the Ambien that she’d sometimes taken to help her sleep. I found a bottle full of orange ovals—30-milligram tablets of Adderall. Doctors shouldn’t self-medicate, especially not with amphetamines meant to treat attention deficit disorder, but Steve did and sometimes I did, too. At that moment, I craved anything that would blank out the thoughts in my head.
    By the time I’d hailed a taxi downtown, my skin was prickling and a sheen of sweat had broken out on the backs of my hands as the amphetamine salts filtered into my blood, tampering with the norepinephrine and dopamine inside my brain. My mouth was dry and I felt the worry of