Melancholy Baby

59

The place felt empty when I woke up the next morning. Rosie was with Richie. I felt a ripple of excitement when I thought of Richie. It’s never over until it’s over. I couldn’t quite remember who Yogi Berra was. Some kind of sports person. But I knew the phrase by heart. I went for a run by myself, and came home and showered, and was drinking coffee in my bathrobe when the phone rang and I picked it up and Sarah’s voice said, “Sunny, you have to come here.”

“To your school?”

“Yes. My room. You remember where it is?”

“Yes. Are you in trouble?”

“No. There was a bunch of mail piled up while I was with you. I just looked at it this morning. There’s a big manila envelope. It’s from my father.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t dare open it. I need you to come and open it with me.”

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

And I was. We sat in her single dorm room on either side of her small wooden desk in the small window alcove that gave her a view of the library steps. The envelope was on the desk between us.

“Where’s Rosie?” Sarah said.

“With my ex-husband,” I said. “We share custody.”

Sarah nodded. We were both looking at the envelope.

“Would you like to open it?” I said.

“No,” Sarah said. “You.”

I nodded and picked it up. I was postmarked Andover, the day before he’d been shot. I took a nail file from my purse and used it to slit open the top. It had been through the mail system, and there were very few clues likely to be still clinging to it, but I tried to be careful anyway. In the envelope were four photographs and a letter. I put the photographs on the desk, faceup, so that Sarah could see them. They were full-frontal nude pictures of an attractive young woman looking coquettish. In one picture was a cute, slender young man with a camera who must have been taking the picture of them together in a full-length mirror. They appeared to have been taken in someone’s living room. You could tell by the grain that they had been enlarged from snapshots. Sarah stared at the pictures without comment.

“Do you want me to read the letter to you?” I said.

She nodded, looking at the nude pictures.

“ ‘Sarah Dear,’ ” I read. “ ‘I have always thought you were my biological child, though I was not married to your biological mother. Recent DNA test results tell me I’m not. But in my heart, in my love, in my every fiber, I am your father and I love you as I always have. I don’t know who your biological father is. Your biological mother is Lolly Drake. I’ve enclosed pictures, which I took of her, and one of her with me when we were intimate, to authenticate my case. I thought I had made her pregnant with you, and when she offered, I took you to raise as my own. I’m ashamed to say she paid us to do that. I don’t know more than this yet, but I’m determined to find out. If things work out, you and I can talk about this letter and these pictures. The pictures are embarrassing; I was married. But it is all the evidence I have, and if anything happens, I want you to know the truth as far as I can tell it.

“ ‘I love you, honey, Dad.

“ ‘PS: I’ll always be your Dad, whatever the DNA says.’ ”

I put the letter down in front of her. She didn’t look at it. She was staring at the photographs.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Daddy.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And that’s my mother?”

“Yes.”

“Who did he say she was?”

“Her name is Lolly Drake.”

“Not the same one?”

“Yes. The queen of the airwaves,” I said.

“Lolly Drake is my mother?”

“It appears so.”

“Did you know?”

“There was a lot of reason to think so,” I said. “Now we have proof.”

“What should we do.”

“First thing,” I said. “I think you ought to meet her.”

“You’ll be there?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.