Melancholy Baby

12

I talked with Bobby O’Brien for another half hour but didn’t learn anything more. Over the next few days, I talked with the other classmates she had mentioned, and a few she hadn’t. Several of them agreed with Bobby, that she had changed when she was thirteen. No one had any theories why. No one could give me any information about her parentage. No one had ever heard her question it.

I met Sarah for coffee at Taft. Sarah took hers black.

“What happened to you,” I said, “when you were thirteen?”

“Huh?”

“When you were thirteen, in the seventh grade, something happened.”

“What?”

“I was hoping you’d know,” I said.

Sarah lit a cigarette and took in a lot of smoke and let it out, slowly looking at it as it floated between us.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You find anything out yet about my parents?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Well, whyn’t you do that and stop nosing around about me in the seventh grade?”

“Something happen that made you start to wonder about your parents?”

“In the seventh grade?”

“Yes.”

“No,” she said. “I always knew they weren’t my parents.”

I nodded. Sarah drank some black coffee. I sipped some of mine. Even with milk and two sugars, it was harsh and unpleasant. Drunk black, it must have been appalling.

“You just knew,” I said.

“Yes. I told you that. I always knew. You think I wouldn’t know. You know things like that.”

I looked at my coffee. I didn’t drink it.

“Sarah?” I said.

“Sarah what?” she said, and dropped her cigarette butt forcefully into her coffee. “Why don’t you stop bugging me like I did something bad. I didn’t do anything wrong. Whyn’t you find out what you’re supposed to find out?”

“We’re not supposed to be adversaries,” I said.

“Well, then, stop snooping on me,” Sarah said.

She lit another cigarette.

“Stop snooping on me,” she said.

I nodded. Tears began to well up in Sarah’s eyes. She started to cry in little soft gasps. I put a hand out and patted her arm. She yanked the arm away and hugged herself. I tried to feel bad for her, and couldn’t. There was nothing in our conversation that constituted a reasonable basis for crying. She was always on the verge of hysteria.

“I won’t snoop on you,” I said.

It didn’t slow her much. She cried and smoked and didn’t say anything. I sat and waited and didn’t say anything, either.

Everything about Sarah and her parents seemed fraudulent. And more than that, insubstantial, like something that had been built on the cheap, with shoddy materials and no craft, to conceal something unhealthy and mean.

It’s not like my life is going really swell, either, honey.

I shook my head. Stop it. There was nothing in that direction that would do anyone any good. After a while she stopped crying, and even let me pat her forearm a couple times. She lit another cigarette, and then stood up quite suddenly.

“I have to go now,” she said, and turned and walked away.

Which is probably what I should have done.