Since We Fell

1 Seventy-Three Jameses

Rachel was born in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. It was known as the Region of the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts — and it employed two thousand faculty to teach twenty-five thousand students. She grew up in a world of coffee shops, B&Bs, wide town commons, and clapboard houses with wraparound porches and musky attics. In autumn, leaves fell by the tubful and choked the streets, spilled onto sidewalks, and clogged fence holes. Some winters, snow encased the valley in silence so dense it became its own sound. In July and August, the mail carrier rode a bicycle with a bell on the handlebar, and the tourists arrived for summer stock theater and antiquing.

Her father’s name was James. She knew little else about him. She recollected that his hair had been dark and wavy and his smile sudden and unsure. At least twice he’d taken her to a playground with a dark green slide where the Berkshire clouds hung so low he’d needed to wipe the swing free of condensation before he could place her on it. On one of those trips he’d made her laugh but she couldn’t recall how.

James had been an instructor at one of the colleges. She had no idea which one or if he’d been an adjunct, an assistant professor, or an associate on tenure track. She didn’t even know if he taught at one of the Five Colleges. He could have been at Berkshire or Springfield Technical, Greenfield CC or Westfield State, or any of a dozen other colleges and junior colleges in the region.

Her mother was teaching at Mount Holyoke when James left them. Rachel was just short of three and could never say with certainty if she’d borne witness to the day her father walked out of the house or if she’d just imagined it to suture the wound his absence left behind. She heard her mother’s voice coming through the wall of the small house they’d rented that year on Westbrook Road. Do you hear me? If you go out that door, I will expunge you. Shortly thereafter, the bump of a heavy suitcase on the stairs out back followed by the snap of a trunk closing. The rasp and whistle of a cold engine clamoring to life in a small car, then tires crunching winter leaves and frozen dirt followed by... silence.

Maybe her mother hadn’t believed he’d actually leave. Maybe once he had, she’d assured herself he’d return. When he didn’t, her dismay turned to hate and her hate grew depthless.

“He’s gone,” she said when Rachel was about five and had begun asking persistent questions about his whereabouts. “He wants nothing to do with us. And that’s okay, sweetie, because we don’t need him to define us.” She got down on her knees in front of Rachel and tucked an errant hair behind her ear. “Now we won’t speak of him again. Okay?”

But of course Rachel spoke of him and asked about him. At first it exasperated her mother; a wild panic would find her eyes and flare her nostrils. But eventually the panic was replaced with a strange, tiny smile. So tiny it was barely a smile at all, just a slight uptick of the right side of her mouth that managed to be smug, bitter, and victorious all at the same time.

It would be years before Rachel would see the onset of that smile as her mother’s decision (whether conscious or unconscious, she’d never know) to make her father’s identity the central battleground in a war that colored Rachel’s entire youth.

Her mother promised to tell her James’s last name on her sixteenth birthday, provided Rachel showed a level of maturity that would suggest she could handle it. But that summer, just before she turned sixteen, Rachel was arrested in a stolen car with Jarod Marshall, whom she’d promised her mother she was no longer seeing. The next target date was her high school graduation, but after an Ecstasy-related debacle at the semiformal that year, she was lucky to graduate at all. If she went to college then, a community college first to get her grades up, then a “real” one, her mother said, maybe then.

They fought continuously over it. Rachel would scream and break things and her mother’s smile would grow colder and smaller. She would repeatedly ask Rachel, “Why?”

Why do you need to know? Why do you need to meet a stranger who’s never been a part of your life or your financial security? Shouldn’t you first take stock of the parts of you that are bringing you such unhappiness before you journey out into the world to find a man who can offer no answers and bring you no peace?

“Because he’s my father!” Rachel screamed more than once.

“He’s not your father,” her mother said with an air of unctuous sympathy. “He’s my sperm donor.”

She said that at the tail end of one of their worst fights, the Chernobyl of mother-daughter spats. Rachel slid down the wall of the living room in defeat and whispered, “You’re killing me.”

“I’m protecting you,” her mother said.

Rachel looked up and saw, to her horror, that her mother believed that. Far worse, she defined herself by that belief.

Rachel’s junior year in college, while she was in Boston, sitting in Introduction to British Literary Studies Since 1550, her mother blew a red light in Northampton, and her Saab was T-boned by a fuel truck driving the speed limit. At first there was concern that the shell of the fuel truck had been pierced in the accident, but it turned out not to be the case. This was a relief for the fire and rescue crews who came from as far away as Pittsfield: The fuel truck had just topped off and the intersection was in a dense area by both a senior citizens home and a basement-level preschool.

The driver of the fuel truck suffered mild whiplash and tore a ligament in his right knee. Elizabeth Childs, once-famous author, died upon impact. If her national fame had long since subsided, however, her local celebrity still burned bright. Both the Berkshire Eagle and the Daily Hampshire Gazette ran her obituary on the front page, below the fold, and her funeral was well attended, though the gathering back at the house afterward was less so. Rachel would end up donating most of the food to a local homeless shelter. She spoke to several of her mother’s friends, mostly women, and one man, Giles Ellison, who taught poli-sci at Amherst and who, Rachel had long suspected, had been her mother’s occasional lover. She could tell her assumption was correct by the way the women paid special attention to him and by how little Giles spoke. A normally gregarious man, he kept parting his lips as if he wished to speak but then changed his mind. He looked around the house like he was drinking it in, as if its contents were familiar and had once brought him comfort. As if they were all he had left of Elizabeth and he was taking stock of the fact he’d never see them, or her, again. He was framed by the parlor window that looked down Old Mill Lane on a drizzly April day and Rachel felt a tremendous pity rise up in her for Giles Ellison, rapidly aging toward retirement and obsolescence. He’d expected to go through that rite of passage with an acerbic lioness by his side, but now he’d go through it alone. It was unlikely he’d find another partner as radiant with intelligence and rage as Elizabeth Childs.

And she had been radiant in her own officious, acerbic way. She didn’t enter rooms, she swept into them. She didn’t engage friends and colleagues, she gathered them to her. She never napped, rarely seemed tired, and no one could ever remember her falling ill. When Elizabeth Childs left a room, you felt it, even if you’d arrived after she’d gone. When Elizabeth Childs left the world, it felt the same way.

It surprised Rachel to realize just how little she was prepared for the loss of her mother. She had been a lot of things, most of them not positive in her daughter’s opinion, but she had always been so utterly there. And now she was so utterly — and so violently — gone.

But still the old question persisted. And Rachel’s clear access to the answer had died with her mother. Elizabeth may have been unwilling to provide that answer, but she had unquestionably been in possession of it. Now, possibly no one was.

However well Giles and her friends and agent and publisher and editor had known Elizabeth Childs — and they all seemed to know a version of her that differed slightly but crucially from the woman Rachel had known — none of them had known her longer than Rachel’s lifespan.

“I wish I knew anything about James,” Ann Marie McCarron, Elizabeth’s oldest friend in the area, told Rachel once they were sufficiently lubricated for Rachel to broach the subject of her father, “but the first time I ever went out with your mother was months after they broke up. I remember he taught in Connecticut.”

“Connecticut?” They sat on the three-season porch at the back of the house, just twenty-two miles due north of the Connecticut border, and somehow it had never occurred to Rachel that her father could just as easily have taught not at one of the Five Colleges or the fifteen other colleges on the Massachusetts side of the Berkshires but just half an hour south in Connecticut.

“University of Hartford?” she asked Ann Marie.

Ann Marie pooched her lips and nose at the same time. “I don’t know. Could be.” Ann Marie put her arm around her. “I wish I could help. And I wish you’d let it go too.”

“Why?” Rachel said (the eternal why, as she’d come to think of it). “Was he that bad?”

“I never heard he was bad,” Ann Marie said with a minor slur and a sad grimace. She looked out through the screen at the stone-colored mist in the gray hills and spoke with a firm finality. “Honey, I only heard that he’d moved on.”

Her mother left everything to her in her will. It was less than Rachel would have imagined but more than she needed at twenty-one. If she lived frugally and invested wisely, she could conceivably live off her inheritance for ten years.

She found her mother’s two yearbooks in a locked drawer in her office — North Adams High School and Smith College. She’d received her master’s and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins (at twenty-nine, Rachel realized, Jesus), but the only record of that was the framed diplomas on the wall by the fireplace. She went through the yearbooks three times, forcing a snail’s pace upon herself each time. She found, in total, four pictures of her mother, two formal, two as part of a group. In the Smith yearbook she found no students named James because it was an all-girls school, but she did find two faculty members, neither of whom was the right age or had black hair. In the North Adams High School yearbook, she found six boys named James, two of whom could have been him — James McGuire and James Quinlan. It took her half an hour at the South Hadley Library computer to ascertain that James McGuire of North Adams had been paralyzed in a whitewater rafting accident while still in college; James Quinlan had majored in business administration at Wake Forest University and rarely left North Carolina, where he’d built a successful chain of teak furniture stores.

The summer before she sold the house, she visited Berkshire Security Associates and met with Brian Delacroix, a private investigator. He was only a few years older than she was and carried himself with the rangy ease of a jogger. They met in his second-story office suite in an industrial park in Chicopee. It was a shoebox of an office, just Brian and a desk, two computers, and a row of file cabinets. When she asked where the “associates” in the firm name were, Brian explained that he was that associate. The main offices were in Worcester. His Chicopee satellite was a franchise opportunity and he was just starting out. He offered to refer her to a more seasoned operative, but she really didn’t feel like climbing back in her car and schlepping all the way to Worcester, so she rolled the dice and told him why she’d come. Brian asked a few questions and wrote on a yellow legal pad and met her eyes often enough for her to feel a simple tenderness in his that seemed older than his years. He struck her as earnest and new enough at the business to still be honest, an opinion he validated two days later when he advised her not to hire him or anyone else for that matter. Brian told her he could take her case and probably bill her for at least forty hours of work before he came back with the same opinion he was offering now.

“You don’t have enough information to find this guy.”

“That’s why I’m hiring you.”

He shifted in his chair. “I did a little digging since our first meeting. Nothing big, nothing I’ll charge you for—”

“I’ll pay.”

“—but enough. If he was named Trevor or even, heck, Zachary, we might have a chance of tracking down a guy who taught at one of over two dozen institutions of higher learning in Massachusetts or Connecticut twenty years ago. But, Miss Childs, I ran a quick computer analysis for you and in the last twenty years, at the twenty-seven schools I identified as possibles, there have been seventy-three” — he nodded at her shocked reaction — “adjunct, fill-in, assistant, associate, and full professors named James. Some have lasted a semester, some less, and some have gone the other way and attained tenure.”

“Can you get employment records, pictures in the files?”

“I’m sure for some, maybe half. But if he’s not in that half — and how would you even identify him? — then we’d have to track down the other thirty-five Jameses who, if demographic trends in this country are an indicator, are flung across all fifty states, and find a way to get their pictures from twenty years ago. Then I wouldn’t be charging you for forty hours’ work. I’d be charging for four hundred. And still no guarantee we’d find this guy.”

She worked through her reactions — anxiety, rage, helplessness, which produced more rage, and finally stubborn anger at this prick for not wanting to do his job. Fine, she’d find someone who would.

He read that in her eyes and the way she gathered her purse to herself.

“If you go to someone else and they see you, a young woman who recently came into some money, they will milk you for that money and still come up empty. And that larceny, which is what it will be in my opinion, will be perfectly legal. Then you’ll be poor and fatherless.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Where were you born?”

She tilted her head toward the south-facing window. “Springfield.”

“Is there a hospital record?”

She nodded. “Father is listed as UNK.”

“But they were together then, Elizabeth and James.”

Another nod. “Once when she’d had a few drinks, she told me that the night she went into labor they were fighting and he was out of town. She had me and, because he wasn’t there, she refused to list him on the record out of spite.”

They sat in silence until she said, “So you won’t take my case?”

Brian Delacroix shook his head. “Let him go.”

She stood, her forearms quaking, and thanked him for his time.

She found photographs stashed all around the house — the nightstand in her mother’s bedroom, a box in the attic, filling a drawer in her mother’s office. A good eighty-five percent of them were of the two of them. Rachel was struck by how clearly love for her shone in her mother’s pale eyes, though, true to form, even in pictures, her mother’s love looked complicated, as if she were in the process of reconsidering it. The other fifteen percent of the pictures were of friends and colleagues in academia and publishing, most taken at holiday cocktail parties and early summer cookouts, two at a bar with people Rachel didn’t recognize but who were clearly academics.

None contained a man with dark wavy hair and an uncertain smile.

She found her mother’s journals when she sold the house. She’d graduated from Emerson by that point and was leaving Massachusetts for graduate school in New York City. The old Victorian in South Hadley where she and her mother had lived since Rachel was in third grade contained few good memories and had always felt haunted. (“But they’re faculty ghosts,” her mother would say when the unexplained creak snaked out from the far end of a hallway or something thumped in the attic. “Probably up there reading Chaucer and sipping herbal tea.”)

The journals weren’t in the attic. They were in a trunk in the basement underneath carelessly packed foreign editions of The Staircase. They filled lined composition notebooks, the entries as haphazard as her mother had been ordered in her daily life. Half were undated, and her mother could go months, once even a year, without writing. She wrote most often about fear. Prior to The Staircase, the fear was financial — she’d never make enough as a professor of psychology to pay back her student loans, let alone send her daughter to a decent private high school and on to a decent college. After her book landed on the national bestseller lists, she feared she’d never write a worthwhile follow-up. She feared too that she would be called out for wearing the emperor’s new clothes, for perpetrating a con job that would be discerned when she published again. It turned out to be a prophetic fear.

But mostly she feared for Rachel. Rachel watched herself grow in the pages from a rambunctious, joyful, occasionally irritating source of pride (“She has his appetite for play... Her heart’s so lovely and generous that I’m terrified what the world will do to it...”) to a despairing and self-destructive malcontent (“The cutting troubles me a bit less than the promiscuity; she’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake... She leaps into dark waters and then complains about the depth but blames me for the leaping”).

Fifteen pages later, she came upon “I have to face the shame of it — I’ve been a subpar mother. I never had any patience for the underdeveloped frontal lobe. I snap too much, cut to the chase when I should model patience. She grew up with a brusque reductionist, I’m afraid. And no father. And it put a hole at the center of her.”

A few pages later, her mother returned to the theme. “I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things, soul-baubles, new age therapies, self-medication. She thinks she’s rebellious and resilient, but she’s only one of those things. She needs so much.”

A few pages later, in an undated entry, Elizabeth Childs wrote, “She is laid up right now, sick in a strange bed, and even needier than usual. The persistent question returns: Who is he, Mother? She looks so frail — brittle and mawkish and frail. She is a lot of wonderful things, my dearest Rachel, but she is not strong. If I tell her who James is, she’ll search him out. He’ll shatter her heart. And why should I give him that power? After all this time, why should he be allowed to hurt her again? To fuck with that beautiful, battered heart of hers? I saw him today.”

Rachel, sitting on the second-to-last step of the basement staircase, held her breath. She squeezed the edges of the journal and her vision shimmied.

I saw him today.

“He never saw me. I parked up the street. He was on the lawn of the house he found after he abandoned us. And they were with him — the replacement wife, the replacement children. He’s lost a lot of his hair and grown spongy above the belt line and below the chin. Small comfort. He’s happy. God help me. He’s happy. And isn’t that the worst of all possible outcomes? I don’t even believe in happiness — not as an ideal or as an authentic state of being; it’s a child’s goal — and yet, he is happy. He’d feel that happiness threatened by this daughter he never wanted and wanted even less once she was born. Because she reminded him of me. Of how much he grew to loathe me. And he would hurt her. I was the one person in his life who refused to adore him and he’d never forgive Rachel for that. He’d assume I told her unflattering things about him, and James, as we all know, could never abide criticism of his precious, earnest self.”

Rachel had been bedridden only once in her life — freshman year of high school. She’d contracted mononucleosis just as she was heading into Christmas break. The timing turned out to be fortuitous. It took her thirteen days to get out of bed and five more to regain the strength to return to school. In the end, she missed only three days of classes.

But that would have been the window when her mother saw James. Which was also when her mother was a visiting professor at Wesleyan. She’d rented a house in Middletown, Connecticut, that year and that was the “strange bed” Rachel had been confined to. Her mother, she recalled now with a disconcerted pride, had never left her during the illness except one time, to get groceries and wine. Rachel had just started watching Pretty Woman on VHS and was still watching it when her mother returned. Her mother checked her temperature and opined that she found Julia Roberts’s toothy grin “cosmically grating,” before she brought the grocery bags into the kitchen to unload them.

When she returned to the bedroom, glass of wine in one hand, warm, wet facecloth in the other, she gave Rachel a lonesome, hopeful look and said, “We did okay, didn’t we?”

Rachel looked up at her as she laid the facecloth across her forehead. “Of course we did,” she said because, in that moment, it felt like they had.

Her mother patted her cheek, looked at the TV. It was the end of the movie. Prince Charming, Richard Gere, showed up with flowers to rescue his Hooker Princess, Julia. He thrust the flowers forward, Julia laughed and teared up, the music boomed in the background.

Her mother said, “I mean, enough with the smiling already.”

That put the entry of the diary at December 1992. Or early January 1993. Eight years later, sitting on the basement steps, Rachel realized her father had been living somewhere within a thirty-mile radius of Middletown. Couldn’t be any more. Her mother had visited the street where he lived, observed him with his family, and then picked up groceries and stopped off at the liquor store for wine in under two hours. That meant James was teaching somewhere nearby, most likely at the University of Hartford.

“If he was still teaching by that point,” Brian Delacroix said when she called him.

“True.”

But Brian agreed that there was enough to go on now so that he could take her case and her money and still look himself in the mirror in the morning. So in the late summer of 2001, Brian Delacroix and Berkshire Security Associates launched an investigation into the identity of her father.

And came up with nothing.

No one by the name of James taught in higher education in northern Connecticut that year who wasn’t already well accounted for. One had blond hair, one was African American, and the third was twenty-seven years old.

Once again, Rachel was told to let it go.

“I’m leaving,” Brian said.

“Chicopee?”

“The business. So, yeah, Chicopee too, but I just don’t want to be a private investigator. It’s too grim, you know? All I seem to do is disappoint people, even when I deliver what they paid me to find. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Rachel.”

It hollowed out something in her. Another departure. Another person in her life, however minor of impact, who would leave whether she wanted it to happen or not. She had no say.

“What’re you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m gonna go back to Canada, I think.” His voice sounded strong, as if he’d arrived someplace he’d been meaning to arrive his whole life.

“You’re Canadian?”

He chuckled softly. “Sure am.”

“What’s back there?”

“Family lumber business. How’s things with you?”

“Grad school is great. New York right now,” she said, “less so.”

It was late September 2001, less than three weeks after the towers fell.

“Of course,” he said gravely. “Of course. I hope things look up for you. I wish you good things, Rachel.”

She was surprised how intimate her name sounded when it fell from his tongue. She pictured his eyes, the tenderness there, and was mildly annoyed to realize she’d been attracted to him and had failed to acknowledge it when it could have mattered.

“Canada,” she said, “eh?”

That soft chuckle of his. “Canada.”

They said their good-byes.

In her basement apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, easy walking distance to most of her classes at NYU, she sat in the soot and ash of lower Manhattan in the month after 9/11. The day of the attack, a thick dust grew woolen on her windowsills, the dust of hair and pieces of bone and cells piling up like a light snow. The air smelled burnt. In the afternoon, she wandered, ended up walking past St. Vincent’s ER, where gurneys were lined up for patients who never arrived. In the days that followed, pictures began to appear on the walls and fences of the hospital, most often with a simple message — “Have You Seen This Person?”

No, she hadn’t. They were gone.

She was surrounded by loss so much greater than any she’d experienced in her own life. Everywhere she turned she saw grief and unanswered prayers and a bedrock chaos that took so many forms — sexual, emotional, psychological, moral — that it quickly became the thread and thrum that united them all.

We are all lost, Rachel realized, and resolved to bandage her own wound as best she could and never pick at the scab again.

That autumn, she came across two sentences in one of her mother’s journals that she repeated to herself as a mantra every night for weeks before going to bed.

James, her mother wrote, was never meant for us.

And we were never meant for him.

2 Lightning

She suffered her first panic attack in the fall of 2001, just after Thanksgiving. She was walking along Christopher Street and passed a woman her own age who sat on a black iron stoop under the arched entrance to an apartment co-op. The woman was weeping into her hands, a not uncommon occurrence back then in New York City. People wept in parks and bathrooms and on the A train, some silently, some with vigor and volume. It was everywhere. But you still had to ask, you still had to check.

“Are you okay?” Rachel reached out to touch the woman.

The woman recoiled. “What are you doing?”

“I’m seeing if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.” The woman’s face was dry. She smoked a cigarette that Rachel hadn’t noticed before. “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” Rachel said. “I was just—”

The woman was handing her several tissues. “It’s all right. Let it out.”

The woman’s face was dry. Her eyes weren’t red. She hadn’t been covering her face. She’d been smoking a cigarette.

Rachel took the tissues. She dabbed her face, felt the stream there, felt the tears welling under her nose, dripping off the sides of her jaw and the point of her chin.

“It’s all right,” the woman repeated.

She looked at Rachel like it wasn’t all right, it wasn’t all right at all. She looked at Rachel and then past Rachel, as if hoping to be rescued.

Rachel mumbled several thank-yous and stumbled off. She reached the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. A red van idled at the light. The driver stared at Rachel with pale eyes. Smiled at her with teeth yellowed by nicotine. It wasn’t just tears streaming out of her now, it was sweat. Her throat closed. She knew she was choking even though she hadn’t eaten that morning. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t fucking breathe. Her throat would not open. Neither would her mouth. She needed to open her mouth.

The driver got out of the van. He approached her with his pale eyes and pale hawkish face and ginger hair cut tight to his scalp and when he reached her...

He was black. And a bit rotund. His teeth weren’t yellow. They were copy-paper white. He knelt by her (how had she ended up sitting on the sidewalk?), his brown eyes large and fearful. “You okay? You need me to call someone, miss? Can you stand? Here, here. Take my hand.”

She took his hand and he pulled her to her feet on the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. And it was no longer morning. The sun was dipping. The Hudson had turned a light amber.

The round kind man hugged her to him and she wept into his shoulder. She wept and made him promise to stay with her, to never leave her.

“Tell me your name,” she said. “Tell me your name.”

His name was Kenneth Waterman, and of course she never saw him again. He drove her back to her apartment in his red van, which wasn’t the big panel van that smelled of axle grease and soiled undergarments she’d imagined but was, instead, a minivan with child seats in the middle row and Cheerio crumbs on the floor mats. Kenneth Waterman had a wife and three children and lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens. He was a cabinetmaker. He dropped her home and offered to call someone on her behalf, but she assured him she was okay now, she was fine, it was just this city sometimes, you know?

He gave her a long, worried look, but cars were stacking up behind them and dusk was gathering. A horn blared. Then another. He handed her a business card — Kenny’s Cabinets — and told her to call him anytime. She thanked him and got out of the minivan. As he drove away, she realized the van wasn’t even red. It was bronze.

She deferred her next semester at NYU. Rarely left the apartment except to walk to her shrink in Tribeca. His name was Constantine Propkop and the only personal information he ever divulged was that his family and friends insisted on calling him Connie. Connie tried to convince her that the national tragedy she was using to shame herself out of recognizing the depths of her own trauma was doing her serious harm.

“There’s nothing tragic about my life,” Rachel said. “Was it sad sometimes? Sure. Whose wasn’t? But I was well cared for and well fed and grew up in a nice house. I mean, boohoo, right?”

Connie looked across the small office at her. “Your mother withheld one of your most basic rights — your paternity — from you. She subjected you to emotional tyranny in order to keep you close.”

“She was protecting me.”

“From what?”

“Okay,” Rachel corrected herself, “she believed she was protecting me from myself, from what I might do with the knowledge.”

“Is that really why?”

“Why else?” Rachel suddenly wanted to dive out the window behind Connie.

“If someone has something you not only want but truly need, what will you never do to that person?”

“Don’t say hate them because I hated her plenty.”

“Leave them,” he said. “You’ll never leave that person.”

“My mother was the most independent person I’ve ever met.”

“As long as she had you clinging to her, she could appear to be. What happened once you were gone, though? Once she could feel you pulling away?”

She knew what he was driving at. She was the daughter of a psychologist, after all. “Fuck you, Connie. Don’t go there.”

“Go where?”

“It was an accident.”

“A woman you’ve described as hyperalert, hyperaware, uber-competent? Who had no drugs or alcohol in her system the day of her death? That woman drives through a stop sign on a dry road in broad daylight?”

“So now I killed my mother.”

“That’s the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting.”

Rachel gathered her coat and bag. “The reason my mother never practiced was because she didn’t want to be associated with half-assed quacks like you.” She shot the degrees on his wall a look. “Rutgers,” she scoffed and walked out.

Her next shrink, Tess Porter, had a softer touch, and the commute to her office was much shorter. She told Rachel they’d get to the truths of her relationship with her mother on Rachel’s schedule, not her doctor’s. Rachel felt safe with Tess. With Connie, she’d always felt he was poised to strike. So she, in turn, always felt poised to parry.

“What would you say to him, you think, if you found him?” Tess asked one afternoon.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Of him?”

“What? No.” She thought about it. “No. Not of him. Just of the situation. I mean, where do you start? ‘Hey, Dad. Fuck you’ve been for my whole life?’”

Tess chuckled but then said, “There was some hesitation there. When I asked if you were afraid of him.”

“Really?” Rachel gazed at the ceiling for a bit. “It’s, like, she could contradict herself about him sometimes.”

“How?”

“Most times, she described him in effeminate terms. ‘Poor sweet James,’ she’d say. Or ‘Dear sensitive James.’ Lots of eye rolls. She was too outwardly progressive to admit he wasn’t masculine enough for her. I remember a couple of times she said, ‘You’ve got your father’s mean streak, Rachel.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got my mother’s mean streak, bitch.’” She gazed up at the ceiling again. “‘Look for yourself in his eyes.’”

“What’s that?” Tess leaned forward in her chair.

“It’s something she said to me a couple times. ‘Look for yourself in his eyes. Tell me what you find.’”

“What was the context?”

“Alcohol.”

Tess gave that a thin smile. “But what do you think she meant?”

“Both times she was pissed at me. I remember that much. I always took it to mean he... If he ever saw me, he’d...” She shook her head.

“What?” Tess’s voice was soft. “If he ever saw you, he’d what?”

It took her a minute to compose herself. “He’d be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

Rachel held her gaze for a bit. “Repulsed.”

Outside, the streets grew enshrouded, as if something huge and otherworldly blotted out the sun and cast its shadow across the breadth of the city. The rain fell suddenly. The thunder sounded like the tire slaps of heavy trucks crossing an old bridge. The lightning was a distant crack.

“Why are you smiling?” Tess asked.

“Was I?”

She nodded.

“Something else my mother would say, particularly on days like today.” Rachel tucked her legs under her. “She’d say she missed his smell. The first time I ever asked her what she meant, what he’d smelled like, she closed her eyes, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Lightning.’”

Tess’s eyes widened slightly. “Is that what you remember him smelling like?”

Rachel shook her head. “He smelled like coffee.” Her gaze followed the splash of the raindrops out the window. “Coffee and corduroy.”

She rebounded from that first bout of panic and low-grade agoraphobia in the late spring of 2002. She ran into a boy who’d been in her Advanced Research Techniques class the previous semester. His name was Patrick Mannion, and he was unfailingly considerate. He was kind of doughy and had the unfortunate habit of squinting when he couldn’t hear properly, which was often because he’d lost fifty percent of the hearing in his right ear in a childhood sledding accident.

Pat Mannion couldn’t believe Rachel kept talking to him after they’d exhausted the limits of discussing the one class they’d taken together. He couldn’t believe she suggested they get a drink. And the look on his face when, back at his apartment a few hours later, she reached for his belt buckle was the look of a man who’d glanced up at the sky to check for clouds and witnessed angels passing overhead. It was a look that remained on his face, more or less, throughout their relationship, which lasted two years.

When she did eventually break up with him — ever so gently, almost to the point of convincing him that it was a mutual decision — he stared back at her with a strange, brutalized dignity and said, “I never used to understand why you were with me. I mean, you’re gorgeous and I’m so... not.”

“You’re—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “Then one day, about six months ago, it hit me — love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. And I knew sooner or later you’d dump me before I’d dump you because — and this is the important part, Rach — I would never dump you.” He gave her a beautiful, broken smile. “And that’s been my purpose all along.”

After grad school, she spent a year in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the Times Leader and then returned to Massachusetts and quickly moved up to the features department at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, where a story she wrote on racial profiling by the Hingham Police Department garnered some acclaim and enough attention that she received an e-mail from Brian Delacroix, of all people. He’d been traveling for business and had come across a copy of the Ledger in the waiting room of a lumber distributor in Brockton. He wanted to know if she was the same Rachel Childs and if she had ever found her father.

She wrote back that she was the same Rachel Childs and that, no, she hadn’t found her father. Would he care to take another stab at the job?

Can’t. Slammed at work. Traveling traveling traveling. Take care, Rachel. You won’t be at the Ledger long. Big things await. Love the way you write.

He was right — a year after that, she made it to the majors and the Boston Globe.

Which is where Dr. Felix Browner, her mother’s OB/GYN, found her. The subject line of his e-mail was “Old Friend of Your Mom’s,” but once she responded to it, it became clear he was less a friend than someone Elizabeth Childs had utilized for medical purposes. Dr. Browner was also not the gynecologist her mother had been using by the time Rachel had knowledge of such things. When Rachel reached adolescence, Elizabeth had introduced her to Dr. Veena Rao, whom most of the women and young girls Rachel knew also used. She’d never heard of Felix Browner. But he assured her he had been her mother’s doctor when Elizabeth first came to western Massachusetts and had, in fact, introduced Rachel herself to her first taste of oxygen. You were a squirmy one, he wrote.

In a subsequent e-mail he wrote that he possessed important information he’d like to share regarding her mother but he only felt comfortable sharing it face-to-face. They agreed to meet halfway between Boston and Springfield, where he lived, and settled on a diner in Millbury.

Before the meeting, she researched Dr. Browner and the picture was, as her instincts had been telling her since his first e-mail, not a flattering one. The year before, in 2006, he’d been barred from practicing medicine due to multiple allegations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct by female patients, the earliest dating back to 1976, when the good doctor was only a week out of med school.

Dr. Browner brought two rolling file cases to the diner with him. At sixty-two or so, he wore his thick silver hair in the almost mullet, almost shag style of someone who drove a sports car and patronized Jimmy Buffett concerts. He wore light blue jeans, penny loafers without socks, and a Hawaiian shirt under a black linen blazer. He carried an extra thirty pounds around his middle like a statement of success and had an easy way with the waitress and the busboys. He struck her as the kind of man who is well liked by strangers but baffled if someone doesn’t laugh at his jokes.

After he’d expressed his sympathies for the death of Rachel’s mother, he reminded her what a squirmy little newborn she’d been — “Like you were dipped in Palmolive.” He then somewhat breathlessly revealed that his first accuser — “We’ll call her Lianne and not just because it sounds like Lyin’, okay?” — knew several of the other accusers. He ticked off their names and Rachel immediately wondered if he was using aliases or if he was violating the women’s right to privacy with cavalier indifference: Tonya, Marie, Ursula, Jane, and Patty, he said, all knew one another.

“Well, it’s a small region,” Rachel said. “People know each other.”

“Do they?” He shook a sugar packet before opening it and shot her a cold smile. “Do they?” He drizzled the sugar into his coffee, then reached into one of his file cases. “Lyin’ Lianne, I’ve discovered, has had numerous lovers. She’s been divorced twice and—”

“Doctor—”

He held up a hand to silence her. “And was named as the ‘other woman’ in a divorce. Patty drinks alone. Marie and Ursula have substance abuse issues, and Tonya — woo-hoo-hoo — Tonya sued another doctor for sexual assault.” He bulged his eyeballs in mock outrage. “Apparently there’s an epidemic of predatory doctors in the Berkshires. Heavens!”

Rachel had known a Tonya in the Berkshires. Tonya Fletcher. Managed the Minute Man Inn. Always seemed distracted and a bit perturbed.

Dr. Browner dropped a stack of paper the size of a cinder block on the table between them. Arched a triumphant eyebrow at her.

“What,” Rachel said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

He didn’t acknowledge that. “I have the goods on all of them, you see. You see?”

“I see,” Rachel said. “And what would you like me to do with that?”

“Help me,” he said, as if it were the only answer in the world.

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I’m innocent. Because I didn’t do a single wrong thing.” He turned his palms over and extended them across the table. “These hands bring life into the world. They brought you into the world, Rachel. These hands were the first that ever held you. These hands.” He stared at them like they were his two great loves. “Those women took my name.” He folded his hands together and looked down at them. “I lost my family over all the stress and discord. I lost my practice.” Tears glistened in his lower eyelids. “And I didn’t deserve it. I did not.”

Rachel gave him what she hoped would be a sympathetic smile but suspected looked merely sickly. “I’m not sure what you’re asking of me.”

He leaned back from the table. “Write about these women. Show that they had an agenda, that they chose me to advance that agenda. That they set out to destroy me and now they have. They need to atone. They need to recant. They need to be exposed. Now they’re suing me in civil court. Do you know, young lady, that the average civil case costs a quarter million to defend. Just to defend. Win or lose, you’re out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Did you know that?”

Rachel was still stuck on “young lady,” but she nodded.

“So, so, so, this coven has raped me. What other word could apply? They have wrecked my good name and destroyed my relationships with my family and my friends. But that’s not enough, is it? No. Now they want to pick my bones. They want what little money I have left. So I can spend my remaining years destitute. So I can die on a cot in a shelter somewhere, a friendless nothing.” He splayed his fingers over the stack of paper. “In these pages are all the dirty facts about these dirty women. Write about them. Show the world who they are. I’m handing you your Pulitzer, Rachel.”

“I’m not here for a Pulitzer,” Rachel said.

His eyes grew small. “Then why are you here?”

“You said you had information regarding my mother.”

He nodded. “After.”

“After what?”

“After you do the story.”

“That’s not how I work,” Rachel said. “If you have information about my mother, just tell me and we’ll see—”

“It’s not about your mother. It’s about your father.” His eyes flashed. “As you yourself said, it’s a small region. People talk. And the story about you, my dear, was that Elizabeth refused to tell you who your father was. We pitied you, you know, all the good townspeople. We wanted to tell you but none of us could. Well, I could have. I knew your father quite well. But doctor-patient confidentiality laws being what they are, I couldn’t reveal his identity against your mother’s wishes. But now she’s dead. And I’m no longer allowed to practice.” He sipped his coffee. “So, Rachel, would you like to know who your daddy is?”

It took Rachel a moment to find her voice. “Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“Yes.”

He acknowledged that with a downward flick of his eyelids. “Then write the fucking story, sweetheart.”

3 JJ

The more Rachel dug — into the court records and the very files Browner provided — the worse it got. If Dr. Felix Browner was not a serial rapist he was giving the best impression of one Rachel had seen in some time. The only reason he wasn’t in prison was because the one woman who had pressed charges within the statute of limitations, Lianne Fennigan, had overdosed on Oxycontin the final week of his trial, just before she was set to testify. Lianne survived the overdose but was in rehab the day she was supposed to deliver her testimony, and the DA accepted a plea that included revocation of the doctor’s license, six years’ probation, six months’ time already served, and a gag order, but no prison time.

Rachel wrote up her story. She brought it with her to the diner in Millbury, pulled it out of her bag as she sat across from Dr. Felix Browner. He gazed at the small sheaf of pages but remained still.

“What,” he said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

She gave that a tight smile of acknowledgment. “You look happy.”

He did. He’d shit-canned the Jimmy Buffett look for a crisp white shirt under a dark brown suit. His hair was slicked back and heavily gelled. His caterpillar eyebrows were trimmed. His face had color and his eyes gleamed with possibility.

“I feel happy, Rachel. You look stupendous yourself.”

“Thank you.”

“That blouse brings out the green of your eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“Is your hair always so silky?”

“I just had a blowout.”

“It becomes you.”

She beamed her own bright smile his way. His eyes pulsed when it landed and he laughed a small private laugh. “Well, Lordy,” he said.

She said nothing, just nodded in a knowing way and held his gaze.

“I think you can smell that Pulitzer.”

“Well,” she said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She handed the pages to him.

He settled into his chair. “We should order drinks,” he said absently as he began to read. As he turned the first page, he looked across at her, and she smiled with encouragement. He read on and his brow knitted as anticipation transmogrified into consternation, then despair, and finally outrage.

“This,” he said, waving off the waitress’s approach, “says I’m a rapist.”

“Kinda does, doesn’t it?”

“This says the women’s chemical dependency and alcohol abuse and sexual piggery are due to me.”

“Because they are.”

“This says I tried to extort you into wrecking these women’s lives a second time.”

“Because you did.” She nodded pleasantly. “And you slandered them in my presence. And I bet if I did even a little digging at your local watering holes, I’d find evidence you slandered them to half the male population in western Mass. Which would be a violation of the terms of your probation. And that means, Felix, that when the Globe runs that story you are going straight to fucking D block.”

She sat back, watched him go speechless. When he finally met her eyes, his swam with martyrdom and disbelief.

“These hands” — he raised them — “brought you into the world.”

“Fuck your hands,” she said. “We have a new deal. Okay? I won’t file that story.”

“Bless you.” He sat up straight. “I knew the moment I—”

“Give me my father’s name.”

“I’ll be happy to, but let’s order a drink and discuss that idea.”

She took the pages from his hand. “Give me my father’s name right now or I file this story” — she pointed at the bar — “from that phone.”

He slumped in the chair, considered the ceiling fan that rotated slowly above him with a rusty squeak. “She called him JJ.”

Rachel placed the article back in her bag to hide the tremors that ran from her hands to her elbows. “Why JJ?”

He turned his hands up on the table, a beleaguered supplicant to fate. “What will I do now? How will I live?”

“Why did she call him JJ?” Her teeth, she realized, were gritted.

“You’re all the same,” he whispered. “You bleed men dry. Good men. You’re a pestilence.”

She stood.

“Sit.” He said it loud enough that two diners looked their way. “Please. No, no. Just sit. I’ll be good. I’ll be a good boy.”

She sat.

Dr. Felix Browner removed a single piece of paper from his suit jacket. It was old and folded in four. He opened it and handed it across the table to her. Her hand shook even worse as she took it, but she didn’t care.

At the top of the page was the name of his clinic: Browner Women’s Health Clinic. Below that: “Father’s Medical History.”

“He only came to my office twice. I got the impression they fought a lot. Pregnancies scare some men. Settle around them like a noose.”

Under “Last Name,” in neat block letters and blue ink, he’d printed “JAMES.”

That’s why they’d never found him. James was his surname.

His first name was Jeremy.

4 Type B

Jeremy James had been teaching full-time at Connecticut College, a small liberal-arts institution in New London, Connecticut, since September 1982. That same year, he bought a house in Durham, a town of seven thousand, sixty miles straight down I-91 from where Rachel grew up in South Hadley, and about a ten-minute drive from the house her mother had rented in Middletown, the year Rachel came down with mono.

He married Maureen Widerman in July 1983. Their first child, Theo, was born in September 1984. Their second, Charlotte, a Christmas baby, arrived at the end of 1986. I have half siblings, Rachel thought, blood relations. And she felt, for the first time since her mother had died, as if she were tethered somewhere in the universe.

With his full name in her possession, Rachel had Jeremy James’s entire life laid out before her in under an hour, or at least the portion that was a matter of public record. He became an associate professor of art history in 1990 and a full professor with tenure in 1995. By the time Rachel tracked him down in the fall of 2007, he’d been teaching at Connecticut College for a quarter century and now chaired the department. His wife, Maureen Widerman-James, was the curator of European art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Rachel found several pictures of her online and liked her eyes enough to decide she was the way in. She’d looked up Jeremy James online and found his pictures as well. He was bald now and heavily bearded, and in all the photos he looked erudite and imposing.

When she introduced herself over the phone to Maureen Widerman-James, there was only the slightest of pauses before Maureen said, “For twenty-five years I’ve been wondering when you’d call. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally hear your voice, Rachel.”

When Rachel hung up, she stared out the window and tried not to cry. She bit her lip so hard it bled.

She drove out to Durham on a Saturday in early October. For most of its history, Durham had been a farming community, and the thin country roads she drove along were pocked by great old trees, faded red barns, and the occasional goat. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a nearby apple orchard.

Maureen Widerman-James answered the door to the modest house on Gorham Lane. She was a handsome woman with large round glasses that accentuated the calm but penetrating air of curiosity in her light brown eyes. Her chestnut hair was red at the roots and gray along the strands closest to her temples and forehead, and she had it in a messy ponytail. She wore a red-and-black work shirt untucked over black leggings and no shoes, and when she smiled, the smile took over her face in a flood of light.

“Rachel,” she said with the same mixture of relief and familiarity she’d used on the phone. It cemented the unsettling realization that she’d said Rachel’s name more than a few times over the decades. “Come in.”

She stepped aside and Rachel entered a home that looked like the home of two academics — bookcases in the foyer, consuming the walls in the living room, under a window in the kitchen; walls painted in vibrant colors, the paint chipped in places and never touched up; figurines and masks from Third World countries in various states of display; Haitian art on the walls. Rachel had been in scores of homes like this during her mother’s career. She knew what LPs would be on the built-in shelf in the living room, what magazines would dominate the basket in the bathroom, that the radio in the kitchen was tuned to NPR. She immediately felt at home here.

Maureen led her to a pair of pocket doors in the back of the house. She put her hands to the seam between them and looked over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“Who could be ready for this?” Rachel admitted with a desperate chuckle.

“You’ll be fine,” Maureen said warmly, but Rachel caught a sadness in her eyes as well. As much as they may have come to the beginning of one thing, they’d also reached the end of something else. Rachel wasn’t sure if that’s where the sadness stemmed from but she suspected it. Nothing would ever be the same in any of their lives.

He stood in the center of the room and turned as the doors opened. He was dressed not dissimilarly to his wife, though instead of leggings he wore gray jeans. His work shirt was also plaid and untucked, but his was blue and black, and worn unbuttoned over a white T-shirt. A few bohemian touches to him — a small silver loop in his left earlobe, three dark rope bracelets around his left wrist, a chunky watch with a fat black leather band on the other wrist. His bald head gleamed. His beard was trimmer than it was in the pictures she’d found online and he looked older, his eyes sunk a little farther back in their sockets, his face hanging a little lower. He was taller than she’d expected, but his shoulders were stooped at the points. He smiled as she reached him and it was the smile she remembered, the thing about him she’d remember not only to her grave but long after she was buried in it. That sudden, uncertain smile of a man who had, at some point in his life, been conditioned to ask for permission before he expressed joy.

He took her hands, his gaze searching her, drinking her, darting all over. “God,” he said, “look at you. Just look at you,” he whispered.

He pulled her to him with fumbling ferocity. Rachel returned the hug in kind. He was a heavy man now, around the middle and in the arms and back, but she hugged him so tight she could feel her bones make contact with his. She closed her eyes and heard the beat of his heart like a wave in the dark.

He still smells like coffee, she thought. No longer of corduroy. But coffee still. Coffee still.

“Daddy,” she whispered.

And he pushed her, ever so gently, away from his chest.

“Sit.” He waved Rachel vaguely toward a couch.

She shook her head, steeling herself for the latest shit sandwich. “I’ll stand.”

“Then we’ll drink.” He went to a bar cart and started fixing all three of them drinks. “She died when we were overseas, your mother. I did a sabbatical in France that year and didn’t learn of her death for years. It wasn’t as if we had any shared friends to tell me of her passing. I’m truly sorry for your loss.”

He looked directly at her and the depth of his compassion hit her like a fist.

For some reason, the only thing she could think to ask was “How did you meet?”

He’d met her mother, he explained, on the train back from Baltimore, where he’d gone for his own mother’s funeral in the spring of ’79. Elizabeth was heading east with her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins to her first teaching post at Mount Holyoke. Jeremy was in his third year as a part-time assistant professor at Buckley College, fifteen miles north. They were dating within a week, living together within a month.

He brought Rachel and Maureen a scotch and raised his own. They drank.

“It was your mother’s first year on the job in an extremely liberal region of a liberal state at the end of a liberal decade, so cohabitation without marriage was acceptable. Pregnancy without marriage might have even been more so; some looked on it as admirable, spitting in the face of the dominant paradigm and all that. However, if she’d simply been knocked up by a person unknown? That would have made her seem tawdry and pathetic, a foolish victim unable to rise above her class. At least that’s what she feared.”

Rachel noticed Maureen watching her carefully, half her scotch already gone.

Jeremy started rushing through his sentences, his words spilling and stumbling. “But it was one thing to, to, to sell the idea to the general populace, the people she worked with, et cetera. It was quite another thing to try to sell it at home. I mean, I’m not a math professor but I can still do math. And your mother’s was off by two months.”

Here it is. He just said it, Rachel thought, and took a big pull on her scotch, but I’m not hearing it somehow. I know what he’s saying but I don’t. I can’t. I just can’t.

“I would have been willing, even happy, to be part of selling the fiction, but I wasn’t willing to keep up the lie in our kitchen, in our bedroom, in the day to day of our lives. It was insidious.”

Rachel could feel her lips moving ever so slightly but no words left her mouth. The air in the room was thin, the walls contracted.

“I took a blood test,” Jeremy said.

“A blood test,” Rachel repeated slowly.

He nodded. “The most basic kind. It would never conclusively prove paternity but it would conclusively disprove it. You’re type B, yes?”

A numbness spread through her like she’d mainlined Novocain into her spinal cavity. She nodded.

“Elizabeth’s was A.” He drained his scotch. Put the glass down on the edge of the desk. “Mine is also A.”

Maureen placed a chair behind Rachel. Rachel sat in it.

Jeremy was still talking. “You understand? If your mother was A and I’m A but you’re B? Then—”

Rachel waved at the room. “Then there’s no way you can be my father.” She finished her scotch. “I understand.”

For the first time she noticed the pictures on his desk and scattered on the bookshelves and side tables in the office, all of the same two people — his and Maureen’s children, Theo and Charlotte, through the years. As toddlers, at the beach, birthday parties, graduations. Landmark moments and others that could have been forgotten were it not for the camera. But full lives lived, from birth to college. For the past seventy-two hours, give or take, she’d thought they were her half siblings. Now they were just someone’s kids. And she was back to being an only child.

She caught Maureen’s eye and shot her a broken smile. “I guess this isn’t something you could have told me over the phone, huh? No. I get it, I do.”

She stood and Maureen came out of her own chair and Jeremy took two quick steps toward her. She realized they thought she might faint.

“I’m okay.” She found herself looking at the ceiling, noting that it was copper, of all things. “I’m just really...” She searched for the right word. “Sad?” She answered her own question with a nod. “That’s it. Sad. Tired too. You know? Been a long hunt. I’m going to go.”

“No,” Jeremy said. “No.”

“Please,” Maureen said. “Don’t go. We made up the guest room. Be our guest tonight. Take a nap. Stay. Rachel, please.”

She slept. She never would have thought it possible with all the shame. Shame in knowing how much they pitied her. That they’d avoided this conversation for as long as they had because they hadn’t wanted to reduce her to what she was now: an orphan. She could hear a distant tractor as she closed her eyes and the sound chugged through dreams she couldn’t remember. When she opened her eyes ninety minutes later she felt, if anything, even more exhausted. She went to the window and parted the heavy curtains and looked out on the Jameses’ backyard and the backyard that abutted it, that one strewn with children’s toys, a short slide of hard plastic, a pink-and-black buggy. Beyond the yard sat a small Cape with a pale slate roof, and beyond that farmland. The tractor she’d heard sat idle in a field.

She’d thought she’d known what it was to feel alone but she hadn’t. She’d had an illusion to keep her company, a belief in a false god. A mythical father. When she saw him again, she’d been telling herself in one way or another since she was three years old, she’d feel whole, if nothing else. But now she had seen him again, and he was no more connected to her than the tractor.

She came down the stairs and they were waiting for her in the small parlor at the bottom. Rachel stopped in the doorway and noted the pity in their eyes again. She felt like an emotional beggar, going from door to door her whole life, asking perfect strangers to feed her. Fill her. Fill her again.

I’m a bottomless vessel. Fill me up.

She met Jeremy’s gaze and it occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t pity she saw there but his own shame.

“I get that we weren’t blood,” she said.

“Rachel,” Maureen said, “come in.”

“But that made it okay for you to leave me?”

“I didn’t want to leave you.” He held out his hands. “Not you. Not my Rachel.”

She entered the room. She stood behind the chair they’d placed across from the sofa where they both sat.

He lowered his hands. “But once she’d decided I was the enemy — and she decided that the first day I showed any doubt about going along with her fantasy of who impregnated her — there was no quarter.”

She took the seat.

“You know your mother better than anyone, Rachel. So I’m sure you were well acquainted with her rage. Once it found a target to focus on or a cause in which to channel itself? There was no stopping it. Certainly no speaking truth to it. And once I got a blood test, I transformed from an enemy to a cancer in the body of that house. And she went after me with single-minded” — he searched for the word — “madness. She was either going to bring me fully to heel or she was going to expel me.”

“Expunge you.”

He blinked. “What did you say?”

“She screamed it at you that last night — I will expunge you.”

Jeremy and Maureen exchanged startled looks.

“You remember that?”

Rachel nodded. She poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the coffee table between them. “And that’s what she did. If she’d expelled you, Jeremy, that would have worked out okay for both of us, I think. But when she expunged you, you were erased. The dead have names and grave markers. The expunged never existed.”

She sipped her water and looked around the parlor at its books and pictures and the record player and LPs just where she’d predicted they would be. She noted the hand-knitted throws and the place where the love seat buckled on the ridgeline and the various scrapes in the hardwood floor and the scuff marks in the wainscoting and the slightly cluttered nature of it all. She thought how nice it must have been to grow up here, to have been the children of Jeremy and Maureen. She lowered her head and closed her eyes and in the darkness she saw her mother and the playground with the low clouds and the wet swings where Jeremy had taken her as a small child. She saw the house on Westbrook Road with its piles of sodden leaves the morning after he’d left. Then she saw an alt-life in which he hadn’t left and Jeremy James was her father in all but blood and he raised her and counseled her and coached her middle-school soccer team. And in that alt-life, her mother wasn’t a woman consumed by a thirst to bend all the people in her life to fit her own fucked-up narrative of that life but was instead the person she was in her writing and her teaching — objective, rational, self-deprecating, capable of a love that was simple and direct and mature.

But that’s not what she and Jeremy got. They got a conflicted, aggressive, toxic mess of outsize intelligence, outsize anxiety, and outsize rage. And all of it bound up in an outwardly competent, cool, and calm Nordic exterior.

“I will expunge you.”

You expunged him, Mother. And in the process you expunged me and yourself out of the family we could have been, we so easily and joyfully could have been. If you’d just gotten out of your own fucking way, you horrible demon bitch.

She raised her head and pushed the hair out of her eyes. Maureen was there with a box of tissues as Rachel had somehow known she would be. What was that kind of attentiveness called? Oh, right. Mothering. So that’s what it looked like.

Jeremy had moved to the floor in front of her, sat looking up with his hands clasped around his knees and his face lit with kindness and regret.

“Maureen,” he said, “could I speak to Rachel alone for a minute?”

“Of course, of course.” Maureen returned the box of tissues to a credenza, then changed her mind, brought it back and placed it on the coffee table. She refilled Rachel’s glass of water. She fussed with the corner of a throw rug. Then she gave them both a smile that was supposed to be comforting but curdled into something terrified. She left the room.

“When you were two,” Jeremy said, “your mother and I fought pretty much every minute we were in each other’s presence. Do you know what it’s like to fight with someone every day? Someone who claims to dislike conflict but who in fact lives for it?”

Rachel cocked her head at him. “You’re really asking me this?”

He smiled. And then the smile went away. “It scours the soul, damages the heart. You can feel yourself dying. Living with your mother — from the time she’d decided I was the enemy onward, anyway — was to live in a state of perpetual war. I was walking up the driveway after work once, and I threw up. Just puked into the snow covering our lawn. And there was nothing specifically wrong at that particularly moment, but I knew that the second I walked into the house, she’d come at me about something. Could be anything — my tone of voice, the tie I chose that day, something I’d said three weeks earlier, something someone else had said about me, a feeling she had, an intuition she’d received as if by divine providence that something was not right about me, a dream that suggested the same...” He shook his head and let out a small gasp, as if surprised how fresh the memories could be even now, almost thirty years later.

“So why did you hang in there as long as you did?”

He knelt before her. He took her hands and pressed them to his upper lip and breathed in the smell of them. “You,” he said. “I would have stayed because of you and puked in the driveway every night and gotten an ulcer and early heart disease and every other possible malady if it meant I could have raised you.”

He let go of her hands and sat on the coffee table in front of her.

“But,” she managed.

“But,” he said, “your mother knew that. She knew I had no legal footing but she knew I’d stay in your life, whether she liked it or not. So one night, the last night we ever made love, I remember that well, I woke up and she was gone. I ran to your room and you were there, sleeping away. I walked around the house. There was no note, no Elizabeth. No cell phones back then and we hadn’t made any friends I could call.”

“You’d been there two years by that point. You had no friends?”

He nodded. “Two and a half.” He leaned forward on the edge of the coffee table. “Your mother torpedoed any attempts at a social life. I couldn’t see it at the time — we were so overwhelmed with work and having a baby and then a newborn and all the labor-intensive stages of, well, having a child. So I’m not even sure I noticed how cut off we were until that night. I taught in Worcester back then, at Holy Cross. My commute was a bear, and your mother sure wasn’t going to socialize in Worcester. But when I’d suggest going out with her coworkers, fellow faculty and such, she’d say, ‘So-and-so secretly hates women,’ or ‘So-and-so is just so pretentious,’ or, the nuclear option, ‘So-and-so looks at Rachel funny.’”

“Me?”

He nodded. “How was I going to respond to that?”

“She used to do the same thing with my friends,” Rachel said. “All these backhanded slights, you know? ‘Jennifer seems nice... for someone with her insecurities.’ Or ‘Chloe could be so pretty but why does she dress that way? Does she know the message she’s sending?’” Rachel rolled her eyes at it now, but she could feel the stab of it just below her rib cage to realize how many friendships her mother had shamed her out of.

Jeremy said, “Sometimes she’d actually make plans with another couple or a group of coworkers and we’d be all set to go. And then, right at the last minute, it would fall through. The sitter’s car broke down, Elizabeth felt ill, you looked like you were coming down with something — ‘Doesn’t she feel hot, JJ?’ — the other couple called to cancel, even though I couldn’t recall hearing the phone ring. The excuses always seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment. It was only over time, in the rearview, that I saw how they piled up. Either way, we had no friends.”

“So this night she disappeared?”

“She came back at dawn,” he said. “She’d been beaten.” He looked at the floor. “And worse. All the visible injuries were to her body, not her face. But she’d been raped and battered.”

“By who?”

He met her eyes. “There’s the question. She’d been to the police, though. Had pictures taken. She consented to a rape kit.” He sucked a wet breath to the back of his throat. “She told the police she wouldn’t identify her attacker. Not then anyway. But once she came home and told me, she assured me that if I didn’t come to my senses and admit the truth, she—”

“Wait a minute,” Rachel said, “what truth?”

“That I’d impregnated her.”

“But you hadn’t.”

“Right.”

“So...”

“So she insisted I say I had. She said the only way we could be together was if I was wholly honest with her and stopped lying about fathering you. I said, ‘Elizabeth, I’ll tell the world I’m Rachel’s father. I’ll sign all documents to that effect. If we divorce, I’ll pay child support until she’s eighteen. But what I won’t do, what I can’t do, what it is categorically insane to ask me to do is to claim to you, her mother, that I planted the seed. That’s too much to ask of anyone.’”

“And what did she say to that?” Rachel asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.

“She asked me why I insisted on lying. She asked me what sickness was in me that I would try to make her seem as if she were being unreasonable about something so crucial. She asked me to admit that I was trying to make her look as if she were insane.” He pressed his palms together, as if in prayer, and his voice grew very soft, almost a whisper. “The game, as I understood it, was that she could never believe I loved her unless I agreed to abide by an unreasonable contract. The unreasonable aspect of the demand was the point. That was her deal breaker — meet me there in the cave of my own insanity or meet me nowhere.”

“And you chose nowhere.”

“I chose the truth.” He leaned back on the table. “And my sanity.”

Rachel felt a bitter smile tug the corners of her mouth. “She didn’t like that, did she?”

“She told me if I was determined to live a life of cowardice and lies, then I could never see you again. If I left that house, I was leaving your life forever.”

“And you left.”

“And I left.”

“And never attempted contact?”

He shook his head. “That was her checkmate, in the end.” He leaned forward. Placed his palms softly on her kneecaps. “If I ever tried to make contact, your mother told me, she’d tell the police that I was the man who’d raped her.”

Rachel tried to get her head around it. Would her mother have gone to those lengths to drive Jeremy James — or anyone for that matter — from her life? That would be beyond the pale even for Elizabeth, wouldn’t it? But then Rachel recalled the fates of others who’d run afoul of Elizabeth Childs during her childhood. There’d been a dean whom Elizabeth had ever so gradually poisoned the faculty against; a fellow psych professor whose contract was not renewed; a janitor who was fired; an employee at the town bakery who was let go. All these people and a couple more had crossed Elizabeth Childs — or she believed they had — and her retaliation was heartless and calculated. Her mother, she knew all too well, had thought at all times in tactical terms.

“Do you think she was raped?” she asked Jeremy.

He shook his head. “I think she had sex with me and then she either paid or coerced someone into beating her up. I’ve had years to think about it and that’s the scenario I find likeliest.”

“Because you wouldn’t live a lie within your own home?”

He nodded. “And because I’d seen the depths of her own insanity. And that she could never forgive.”

Rachel kept twirling it in her head, over and over. Eventually she admitted to the man who should have been her father, “When I think of her — and I think of her too much — I sometimes wonder if she was evil.”

Jeremy shook his head. “No. She wasn’t. She was just the most profoundly damaged human being I’ve ever met. And she was relentlessly hostile if crossed, I’ll give you that. But there was great love in her heart.”

Rachel laughed. “For who?”

He gave her a look of dark befuddlement. “For you, Rachel. For you.”

5 On Luminism

After she met the man she’d mistakenly believed to be her father, a surprising thing happened — she and Jeremy James became friends. There wasn’t much tentative about it; they dove in, more like long-lost siblings than a sixty-three-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who turned out not to be related.

When Elizabeth Childs died, Jeremy and his family had been in Normandy, where Jeremy had used his sabbatical to research a subject that had long fascinated him — the possible link between luminism and expressionism. Now, as his academic career was winding down and retirement loomed, Jeremy was trying to write his book on luminism, an American style of landscape painting often confused with impressionism. As Jeremy explained it to Rachel, who knew less than zero about art, luminism grew out of the Hudson River School. It was Jeremy’s belief that the two schools shared a link, even if prevailing theory — dogma actually, Jeremy would scoff — held that the two schools had developed independently of each other in the late 1800s on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

A man named Colum Jasper Whitstone, Jeremy told her, had worked as an apprentice to two of the most famous luminists — George Caleb Bingham and Albert Bierstadt — but vanished in 1863 along with a large sum of money from the Western Union office where he was employed. Neither the money nor Colum Jasper Whitstone was ever heard of again in the Americas. But the diary of Madame de Fontaine, a wealthy widow and arts patron in Normandy, twice made mention of a Callum Whitestone in the summer of 1865, referring to him as a gentleman from America with good manners, refined tastes, and a cloudy heritage. When Jeremy first told Rachel this his eyes were lit like a birthday child’s and his baritone voice grew several octaves lighter. “Monet and Boudin painted the Normandy coast the same year. They would set up every day, just down the street from Madame de Fontaine’s summer cottage.”

Jeremy believed these two giants of impressionism had crossed paths with Colum Jasper Whitstone, that Whitstone was, in fact, the missing link between American luminism and French impressionism. All he had to do was prove it. Rachel pitched in with research, aware of the irony that she and her not-father were searching for a man who’d vanished into the dust and void of a hundred and fifty years when together they couldn’t identify the man who’d fathered Rachel a little over thirty years before.

Jeremy often visited her apartment during research trips to the MFA, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Public Library. She’d departed the Globe for TV by then and had moved in with Sebastian, a producer at Channel 6. Sometimes Sebastian was there and would join them for dinner or drinks, but mostly he was working or on his boat.

“You’re such an attractive couple,” Jeremy said one night at her apartment, and the word attractive left his mouth sounding unattractive. He had developed an ability to say all the right things about Sebastian — taking note of his intelligence, his dry wit, his good looks, his air of competency — without sounding like he meant any of them.

He examined a picture of the two of them on Sebastian’s beloved boat. He placed it back on the mantel and gave Rachel a pleasant, distracted smile, as if he were trying to come up with one more positive thing to say about the two of them but had drawn a blank. “He sure works a lot.”

“He does,” she agreed.

“He wants to run the whole station one day, I bet.”

“He wants to run the network,” she said.

He chuckled and carried his glass of wine to the bookshelves, where he zeroed in on a photograph of Rachel and her mother that Rachel had almost forgotten was there. Sebastian, not a fan of the photo or its frame, had crammed it at the end of a row of books, backed into a shadow cast by a copy of History of America in 101 Objects. Jeremy removed it gently and tilted the book so it remained standing. She watched his face turn both dreamy and desolate.

“How old were you in this?”

“Seven,” she said.

“Hence the missing teeth.”

“Mmm-hmm. Sebastian thinks I look like a hobbit in that picture.”

“He said that?”

“He was joking.”

“That’s what we’re calling it?” He carried the photograph back to the couch and sat beside her.

Seven-year-old Rachel, missing both upper front teeth and one lower, had stopped smiling for cameras at the time. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Elizabeth found a set of rubber fangs somewhere and used a Sharpie to black out one of the upper teeth and two of the lower. She’d had Ann Marie take a series of pictures of her and Rachel vamping for the camera one drizzly afternoon at the house in South Hadley. In this, the only photograph to survive from that day, Rachel was wrapped in her mother’s arms, both of them beaming their hideous smiles as broadly as possible.

“I’d forgotten just how pretty she was too. My goodness.” Jeremy gave Rachel an ironic smile. “She looks like your boyfriend.”

“Shut up,” Rachel said, but it was unfortunately true. How had she never noticed before? Both Sebastian and her mother looked like Aryan ideals — hair several shades whiter than vanilla, cheekbones as sharp as their jawlines, Arctic eyes, and lips so small and thin they couldn’t help but appear secretive.

“I know men marry their mothers,” Jeremy said, “but this is—”

She nudged an elbow into his paunch. “Enough.”

He laughed and kissed her head and put the photograph back where it belonged. “Do you have more?”

“Pictures?”

He nodded. “I never got to see you grow up.”

She found the shoebox of them in her closet. She dumped them out onto the small kitchen table so that her life took the shape of a messy collage, which seemed all too fitting. Her fifth birthday party; a day at the beach when she was a teenager; semiformal during junior year of high school; in her soccer uniform sometime during middle school; hanging in the basement with Caroline Ford, which would have been when she was eleven because Caroline Ford’s father had been visiting faculty for that one year only; Elizabeth and Ann Marie and Don Klay at a cocktail party by the looks of it; Rachel and Elizabeth the day Rachel graduated from middle school; Elizabeth, Ann Marie, Ann Marie’s first husband, Richard, and Giles Ellison at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and again at a cookout, everyone’s hair a little thinner and a little grayer in the latter; Rachel, the day her braces were removed; two of Elizabeth and half a dozen unidentified friends at a bar. Her mother was quite young, possibly still in her twenties, and Rachel didn’t recognize any of the other people or the bar where they were gathered.

“Who are those people?” she asked Jeremy.

He glanced at it. “No idea.”

“They look like academics.” She picked up the photograph and the one below it, which appeared to have been taken within a minute of the first. “She looks so young, I figured it was taken when she first got to the Berkshires.”

He considered the photo in her right hand, the one in which her mother was caught unaware, her eyes on the bottles behind the bar. “No, I don’t know any of those people. I don’t even know that bar. That’s not in the Berkshires. At least not any place I’ve ever been.” He adjusted his glasses and leaned in. “The Colts.”

“Huh?”

“Look.”

She followed his finger. In the corner of the frame of both photographs, just past the bar, at the entrance to the kind of paneled hallway that usually leads to restrooms, a pennant hung on the wall. Only half of it had made it into the frame, the half with the team logo: a white helmet with a dark blue horseshoe in the center. The Indianapolis Colts logo.

“What was she doing in Indianapolis?” Rachel said.

“The Colts didn’t move to Indy until 1984. Before that, they were in Baltimore. This would have been taken when she was at Johns Hopkins, before you were born.”

She laid the picture in which her mother wasn’t looking at the camera back down on top of the collage and they both peered at the one where the principals looked into the lens.

“Why are we staring at this?” Rachel eventually asked.

“You ever know your mother to be sentimental or nostalgic?”

“No.”

“So why did she keep these two pictures?”

“Good point.”

There were three men and three women, including her mother, in the center of the frame. They’d gathered at one corner of the bar and pulled their stools close together. Big smiles and glassy eyes. The oldest of them was a heavyset man farthest to the left. He looked to be about forty, with muttonchop sideburns, a plaid sport coat, bright blue shirt, and wide knit tie loosened below an unbuttoned collar. Beside him was a woman in a purple turtleneck with her dark hair pulled back in a bun, a nose so small you had to look for it, and barely any chin. Next to her was a thin black woman with a Jheri-curl perm; she wore a white blazer with the collar turned up over a black halter top, a long white cigarette held up by her ear but not yet lit. Her left hand rested on the arm of a trim black man in a tan three-piece suit with thick square glasses and an earnest, forthright gaze. Beside him was a man wearing a white shirt and black tie under a velour zip-front pullover. His brown hair was parted in the middle, blown dry, and feathered along the temples. His green eyes were playful, maybe a bit lascivious. He had his arm around Rachel’s mother, but they all had their arms around each other, huddling close together. Elizabeth Childs sat on the end; she wore a billowy pinstriped blouse with the top three buttons undone, publicly revealing more cleavage than she ever had in Rachel’s lifetime. Her hair, which had always been cut short during her years in the Berkshires, fell almost to her shoulders and was, true to the times, feathered on the sides. But even with the fashion fails common to the era, her mother’s sheer force of self pulled one to her. She stared back from a remove of more than three decades as if she’d known as the picture was being taken that circumstances would one day put her daughter and a man she’d almost married in the exact position where they now found themselves — searching her face, yet again, for clues to her soul. But in pictures, as in life, those clues were opaque and fruitless. Her smile was both the most brilliant of the six and the only one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She was smiling because it was expected of her, not because she felt it, an impression underscored in the other photo, which looked to have been taken seconds before or seconds after the posed shot.

Seconds after, Rachel realized, because the tip of the black woman’s cigarette glowed a fresh red in the second photo. Her mother’s smile was gone and she was turning back to the bar, her eyes on the bottles to the right of the cash register. Whiskey bottles, Rachel was mildly surprised to note, not the vodka bottles she would have expected her mother to show an interest in. Her mother was no longer smiling but she looked happier because of it. Her face bore an intensity that Rachel would have characterized as erotically charged had its focus been anything but the bottles of whiskey. It appeared as if her mother had been caught in a reverie, in anticipation of an encounter with whomever she was leaving that bar with or meeting up with afterward.

Or she was just glancing at whiskey bottles and wondering what she’d have for breakfast tomorrow. Rachel realized with no small amount of shame that she was projecting at a nearly unforgivable level because she wanted to find value in photos that had none.

“This is silly.” She went to get the bottle of wine they’d left on the counter.

“What about it is silly?” Jeremy placed both photos side by side.

“I feel like we’re looking for him here.”

“We are looking for him here.”

“It’s two photographs from a night at a bar when she was in grad school.” She refilled their glasses and left the bottle on the table between them. “Nothing more.”

“I lived with your mother for three years. Except for pictures of you, there were no pictures. Not one. I now discover the existence of these two, tucked away somewhere the whole time I lived with her but never to be shared with me. Why? What’s in these pictures on this night that matters? I say it’s your father.”

“Could just be a night she was fond of.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Could just be two pictures she forgot she had.”

The eyebrow stayed up.

“Fine,” she said. “Make your pitch.”

He pointed at the man closest to her mother, Velour Man with the feathered brown hair. “He has the same color eyes as you.”

Fair enough. Like Rachel, he did have green eyes, though his were a much brighter shade; hers were so light they were almost gray. And like Rachel, he did have brown hair. The shape of his head wasn’t far off from Rachel’s own; the size of the nose was about right. His chin was quite pointed, whereas Rachel’s was more squared off, but then her mother’s had been squared off too, so one could argue she’d simply gotten her mother’s chin but her father’s eyes and hair. He was a handsome man, porn ’stache notwithstanding, but there was something lightweight about him. And her mother did not have a known affinity for the lightweight. Jeremy and Giles might not have been the most overtly masculine men Rachel had ever come across but there was steel at the core of both of them and their intelligence was prodigious and immediately identifiable. Velour Man, on the other hand, looked like he was on his way to emcee a Junior Miss pageant.

“Does he seem like her type?” Rachel said.

“Did I?” Jeremy asked.

“You have gravitas,” Rachel said. “My mother dug gravitas.”

“Well, it’s not this guy.” Jeremy put his finger on the heavyset guy with the eyesore of a sport coat. “And it’s not this guy.” He put his finger on the black guy. “Maybe the cameraman?”

“Camerawoman.” Rachel showed him the reflection in the bar mirror of a woman with a mane of brown hair spilling from underneath a multicolored knit cap, the camera held in two hands.

“Ah.”

She looked at the other people who’d been inadvertently captured on film. Two old men and a middle-aged couple sat midway down the bar. The bartender made change at the cash register. And a youngish guy in a black leather jacket was frozen in midstride after coming through the front doors.

“What about him?” she asked.

Jeremy adjusted his glasses and hunched in close to the photo. “Can’t get a good enough look. Wait, wait, wait.” He got up and went to the canvas backpack he took everywhere on his research trips. He removed a magnifying glass paperweight and brought it to the table. He held it over the face of the guy in the leather jacket. The guy had the surprised look of a man who’d almost stepped into a photographer’s shot and ruined it. He was also darker skinned than he’d appeared from a remove. Latin American or Native American possibly. But not in line with Rachel’s own ethnic makeup, in either case.

Jeremy moved the magnifying glass back over to Velour Man. He definitely had the same color eyes as Rachel. What had her mother said? Look for yourself in his eyes. Rachel stared at Velour Man’s magnified eyes until they blurred. She looked away to readjust her vision and then back again.

“Are those my eyes?” she asked Jeremy.

“They’re your color,” he said. “Different shape, but you got your bone structure from Elizabeth anyway. Do you want me to make a couple calls?”

“To whom?”

He placed the paperweight down on the table. “Let’s take another leap and consider that these were her fellow students in the Ph.D. program at JHU that year. If that presumption is correct, everyone in this picture is probably identifiable. If it’s incorrect, I’m only out a few phone calls to friends who work there.”

“Okay.”

He took pictures of both photographs with his phone, checked the images to make sure they were captured correctly, and put the phone in his pocket.

At her door, he turned back and said, “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Why?”

“You seem kinda hollowed out suddenly.”

It took her a minute to find the words. “You’re not my father.”

“No.”

“But I wish you were. Then this would be over. And I’d have a cool guy like you for a dad.”

He adjusted his glasses, something she learned he did whenever he felt uncomfortable. “I’ve never in my life been called a cool guy.”

“That’s why you’re cool,” she said and kissed his cheek.

She received her first e-mail from Brian Delacroix in two years. It was brief — three lines — and complimented her on a series of stories she’d done two weeks before on allegations of kickbacks and patronage in the Massachusetts probation department. The head of the department, Douglas “Dougie” O’Halloran, had run the department like his personal fiefdom, but now, based on work done by Rachel and some of her old colleagues at the Globe, the DA was prepping indictments.

When Dougie saw you coming toward him, Brian wrote, he looked fit to shit a collie.

She caught herself beaming.

You too, she considered writing back.

But then she saw his PS:

She immediately Googled him, something she’d consciously refrained from doing until now. There was only one picture of him in Google Images, slightly grainy, which had first appeared in the Toronto Sun coverage of a charity gala in 2000. But there he was, in an incongruous tux, head turned to the side, identified in the caption as “Lumber scion Brian Delacroix III.” In the accompanying article, he was described as “low-key” and “notoriously private,” a graduate of Brown with an MBA from Wharton. Who’d then taken those degrees and become...

A private investigator in Chicopee, Massachusetts, for a year?

She smiled to remember him in that shoebox office, a golden boy trying to reject the path his family had laid out for him but clearly conflicted about this choice he’d made. So earnest, so honest. If she’d walked through any other door, handed any other private investigator her case, he or she would have done exactly what Brian had warned her they would — bled her dry.

Brian, on the other hand, had refused to do so.

She stared at his photograph and imagined him living a neighborhood or two over. Or maybe a block or two over.

“I am with Sebastian,” she said aloud.

“I love Sebastian.”

She closed her laptop.

She told herself she’d respond to Brian’s e-mail tomorrow, but she never got around to it.

Two weeks later, Jeremy James called and asked if she was sitting down. She wasn’t but she leaned against a wall and told him she was.

“I’ve identified pretty much everyone. The black couple are still together and both work in private practice in St. Louis. The other woman died in 1990. The big guy was faculty; he passed too a few years back. And the guy in the velour pullover is Charles Osaris, a clinical psychologist who practices on Oahu.”

“Hawaii,” she said.

“If he turns out to be your dad,” Jeremy said, “you’ll have a great place to visit. I’ll expect an invitation.”

“But of course.”

It took her three days to call Charles Osaris. It wasn’t a case of nerves or trepidation of any kind. It was rooted instead in despair. She knew he wasn’t her father, knew it in the pit of her stomach and in every electromagnetic strand of her lizard brain.

Yet some part of her hoped for the opposite.

Charles Osaris confirmed that he had been in the Johns Hopkins Ph.D. program in clinical psychology with Elizabeth Childs. He could recall several nights when they went to a bar called Milo’s in East Baltimore, where, indeed, a Baltimore Colts pennant had hung on the wall to the right of the bar. He was sorry to hear Elizabeth had passed away; he’d found her an intriguing woman.

“I was told you two dated,” Rachel said.

“Who on earth would tell you something like that?” Charles Osaris let out a sound that was half bark, half laugh. “I’ve been out of the closet since the seventies, Miss Childs. I never had any illusions about my sexuality, either — confusion, yes, but illusions, no. Never dated a woman, never even kissed one.”

“Clearly I was misinformed,” Rachel said.

“Clearly. Why would you ask if I dated your mother?”

Rachel came clean, told him she was looking for her father.

“She never told you who he was?”

“No.”

“Why?”

And Rachel responded with the explanation that, with every passing year, seemed more ludicrous. “For some reason she thought she was protecting me. She confused keeping something secret with keeping me safe.”

“The Elizabeth I knew was never confused about anything in her life.”

“Why else keep something so big a secret?” Rachel asked.

When he responded, his voice was newly tinged with sadness. “I knew your mother for two years. I was the only man within a ten-mile radius who wasn’t trying to separate her from her clothing, so I probably knew her as well as anyone. She felt safe with me. And, Miss Childs, I didn’t know her at all. She didn’t let people in. She liked having a secret life because she liked secrets. Secrets were power. Secrets were better than sex. Secrets, I firmly believe, were your mother’s drug of choice.”

After her conversation with Charles Osaris, Rachel had three panic attacks in one week. She had one in the employee bathroom at Channel 6, another on a bench along the Charles River during what was supposed to be her morning jog, and the third in the shower one night after Sebastian fell asleep. She hid them all from Sebastian and her coworkers. As much as one could feel in control during a panic attack, she felt in control of herself; she was able to continually remind herself that she wasn’t having a heart attack, that her throat wasn’t permanently constricting, that she could in fact breathe.

Her desire to remain indoors intensified. For a few weeks, only conscious effort and internal howls of defiance pushed her out the door every morning. Weekends, she stayed in completely. For the first three weekends, Sebastian assumed it was part of the nesting instinct. By the fourth, he’d grown irritable. Back then, they were on the guest list to just about every party in the city — any gala, any charity function, any see-or-be-seen excuse to imbibe. They’d become a power couple, fixtures of gossip items in the Inside Track and Names & Faces. Rachel, try as she might, couldn’t deny how much she enjoyed the position. If she had no parents, she’d realize in retrospect, at least the city welcomed her into the tribal fold.

So she got back out there. She shook hands and kissed cheeks and drank in the attention of the mayor, the governor, judges, billionaires, comedians, writers, senators, bankers, Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, and Celtics players and coaches, and college presidents. At Channel 6, she rocketed through the ranks, racing from freelance to the education beat to crime to general assignment in sixteen months flat. They put her face on a billboard with Shelby and Grant, the evening anchors, and prominently featured her in a commercial to introduce their revamped logo. When she and Sebastian decided to marry, it felt like they’d elected themselves homecoming king and queen, and the city applauded the decision and gave its full blessing.

It was a week after the invitations went out that she ran into Brian Delacroix. She’d just interviewed two reps at the statehouse over a projected budget shortfall. Her crew went to the van but she decided to walk back to the station. She’d just crossed to the other side of Beacon when Brian walked out of the Athenaeum accompanied by a shorter, older man with ginger hair and a matching beard. She experienced that electric bolt of confusion and recognition that usually only occurred when she passed someone famous in the street. It was a feeling of I know you. But I really don’t. Both men were ten or twelve feet from Rachel when Brian’s eyes found hers. A flash of recognition was followed immediately by a flash of something she couldn’t identify — was it annoyance? fear? neither? — and then that flash vanished and was replaced with what, in retrospect, she could only describe as manic joy.

“Rachel Childs!” He crossed the distance to her in one long stride. “What’s it been — nine years?”

His handshake was firmer than she expected, too firm.

“Eight,” she said. “When did you—?”

“This is Jack,” Brian said. He stepped aside so the smaller man could step into the space he’d made and now they were a threesome standing on the sidewalk at the peak of Beacon Hill as lunchtime crowds streamed around them.

“Jack Ahern.” The man shook her hand. His handshake was much lighter.

There was a strong whiff of Old World to Jack Ahern. His shirt had French cuffs with silver cuff links that peeked out from under the sleeves of his bespoke suit. He wore a bow tie and his beard was precisely trimmed. His hand was dry and uncallused. She imagined he owned a pipe and knew more than most about classical music and cognac.

He said, “Are you old friends with—?”

Brian cut in. “Friends would be a bit strong. We knew each other a decade ago, Jack. Rachel’s a reporter on Channel 6 here. She’s excellent.”

Jack gave her a polite nod approximating respect. “Do you like the work?”

“Most days,” she said. “What kind of work are you in?”

“Jack’s in antiquities,” Brian said in a rush. “He’s up here from Manhattan.”

Jack Ahern smiled. “By way of Geneva.”

“I’m not sure what that means,” Rachel said.

“Well, I live in Manhattan and Geneva, but I consider Geneva home.”

“Isn’t that something?” Brian said, even though it wasn’t. He glanced at his watch. “Gotta go, Jack. Reservations for twelve-fifteen. Rachel, a pleasure.” He leaned in and kissed the air to the side of her cheek. “I heard you’re getting married. Very happy for you.”

“Congratulations.” Jack Ahern took her hand again with a courtly bow. “I hope you and the groom will be very happy.”

“Take care of yourself, Rachel.” Brian was already moving away with a distant smile and too-bright eyes. “Great seeing you.”

They walked down to Park Street and took a left and passed from view.

She stood on the sidewalk and took stock of the encounter. Brian Delacroix had filled out some since 2001. It became him. The Brian she had met had been too skinny, his neck too slim for his head. His cheekbones and chin had been a little too soft. Now his features were clearly defined. He’d reached the age — thirty-five, she was guessing — where he’d probably begun to resemble his father and had stopped looking like someone’s son. He dressed far better and was easily twice as handsome as he’d been in 2001, and he’d been plenty handsome then. So in regards to personal appearance, all changes to the good.

But the energy that had come off him, cloaked in pleasantries though it may have been, struck her as mildly unhinged and anxious. It was the energy of someone trying to sell you a timeshare. She knew from her research that he ran International Sales and Acquisition for Delacroix Lumber, and it saddened her to think that nearly a decade in sales had turned him into a glad-handing, air-kissing showman.

She pictured Sebastian, working away at 6 right now, probably leaning back in a chair, chewing a pencil as he cut tape, Sebastian the king of the crisp edit. Actually, everything about Sebastian was crisp. Crisp and clean and squared away. She could no more picture him in sales than she could picture him tilling the land. Sebastian was attractive to her, she realized in that moment, because there was nothing desperate or needy in his DNA.

Brian Delacroix, she thought. Such a shame life turned you into just another salesman.

Jeremy walked her down the aisle at the Church of the Covenant, and his eyes were wet when he lifted her veil. Jeremy, Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte all came to the reception at the Four Seasons. She only saw them a couple of times, but it was as comfortable with Jeremy and as awkward with Maureen and the children as it had always been.

After their first meeting, when Maureen had seemed genuinely pleased Rachel had found them, she grew more distant with each subsequent encounter, as if she’d only been welcoming of Rachel because she’d never expected her to hang around. She wasn’t rude by any means, or cold; she was simply not present in any substantive way. She smiled at Rachel and complimented her looks or clothing choice, asked about her job and Sebastian, and never failed to mention how happy Jeremy was to have her back in his life. But her eyes refused to lock onto Rachel’s and her voice carried a tone of strained brightness, like an actress trying so hard to remember her lines she forgot their meaning.

Theo and Charlotte, the almost half siblings she never had, treated Rachel with a mixture of deference and furtive panic. They hurried through all conversations, bobbing their heads at the floor, and never once asked her a question about herself, as if to do so would confer upon her the stature of the factual. Instead, it seemed imperative for them to continue to see her as something out of the mythic mist, inexorably moving toward their front door, but never actually arriving.

When Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte said their good-byes, about an hour into the reception, the relief at standing five steps from the exit door was so total it infused their limbs. Only Jeremy was shocked by the abruptness of their departure (both Maureen and Charlotte feared they were coming down with summer colds, and the drive back was long). Jeremy took Rachel’s hands in his and told her not to forget about the luminists or Colum Jasper Whitstone on her honeymoon; there’d be work to do when she returned.

“Of course I’ll forget,” she said, and he laughed.

The rest of the family drifted out to the valet stand to wait for the car.

Jeremy adjusted his glasses. He fiddled with his shirt where it bunched up around his belly, always self-conscious around her about his excess weight. He shot her his uncertain smile. “I know you would’ve wanted your real father to walk you down the aisle, but—”

She gripped his shoulders. “No, no. I was honored.”

“—but, but...” He shot his wavering smile at the wall behind her but then looked at her again. His voice grew deeper, stronger. “It meant the whole wide world to me to be able to do it.”

“Me too,” she whispered.

She placed her forehead on his shoulder. He placed his palm on the back of her neck. And in that moment, she felt as close to whole as she imagined she ever would.

After the honeymoon, she and Jeremy found it difficult to get together. Maureen wasn’t feeling well, nothing serious, just age, he supposed. But she needed him around, not gallivanting off to Boston to while away the summer in the reading rooms of the BPL or the Athenaeum. They managed to squeeze in lunch once in New London, and he looked weary, the flesh on his face too gray and tight to the bone. Maureen, he confided, was not well. She’d survived breast cancer two years ago. She had endured a double mastectomy, but her latest scans had come back inconclusive.

“Meaning?” She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.

“Meaning,” he said, “her cancer could have recurred. They’re going to run more tests next week.” He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, then looked over them at her with a smile that said he was changing the subject. “How are the newlyweds?”

“Buying a house,” she said brightly.

“In the city?”

She shook her head, still coming to terms with it. “About thirty miles south, give or take. It needs updates and renovations so we won’t move in right away, but it’s a good town, good school system if we have kids. It’s not far from where Sebastian grew up. It’s also where he keeps his boat.”

“He loves that boat.”

“Hey, he loves me too.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Jeremy shot her a wry smile. “I just said he loves that boat.”

Four days later, Jeremy suffered a stroke in his office at the college. He suspected it was a stroke but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, so he drove himself to the nearest hospital. He drove his car halfway up onto a curb and staggered to the entrance. He made it to the ER on his own two feet but promptly suffered a second stroke in the waiting room. The first orderly to reach him was surprised by the strength in Jeremy’s soft professor’s hands when he grabbed the lapels of the orderly’s lab coat.

The last words Jeremy would speak for some time made little sense to the orderly or to anyone else, for that matter. He yanked the orderly’s face down to his own and his eyes bulged in their sockets.

“Rachel,” he slurred, “is in the mirror.”

6 Detachments

Maureen shared the orderly’s claim with Rachel during Jeremy’s third night in the hospital.

“‘Rachel is in the mirror’?” Rachel repeated.

“That’s what Amir said.” Maureen nodded. “You look tired. You should get your rest.”

Rachel had to be back at work in an hour. She’d be late. Again. “I’m fine.”

In the bed, Jeremy stared up at the ceiling, his mouth agape, his eyes wiped clean of awareness.

“The drive must be terrible,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not bad.” Rachel sat on the windowsill because there were only three chairs in the room and they were all occupied by family.

“The doctors said he could be like this for months,” Theo said. “Or longer.”

Both Charlotte and Maureen began weeping. Theo went to them. The three of them huddled in their grief. For a few minutes all Rachel could see of them was their heaving backs.

A week later Jeremy was moved to a neuro-treatment facility and gradually recovered some motor ability and the most rudimentary kernels of speech — yes, no, bathroom. He looked at his wife as if she were his mother, at his son and daughter as if they were his grandparents, at Rachel as if he were trying to place her. They tried reading to him, scrolled through his favorite paintings on an iPad, played his beloved Schubert. And none of it connected. He wanted food, he wanted comfort, he wanted relief from the pains in his head and body. He engaged the world with the terrified narcissism of an infant.

The family made it clear to Rachel that she could visit as much as she wanted — they were far too polite to say otherwise — but they failed to include her in most conversations and were always visibly relieved when she had to go.

At home, Sebastian grew resentful. She’d barely known the man, he’d argue. She was sentimentalizing an attachment that didn’t really exist.

“You need to let it go,” he said.

“No,” she replied, “you do.”

He held up an apologetic hand and closed his eyes for a moment to let her know he had no interest in a big fight. He opened his eyes and his voice was softer and conciliatory. “You know they’re considering you for Big Six?”

Big Six was what they called the national network in New York.

“I didn’t know that.” She tried to keep the excitement from her voice.

“You’re being groomed. Now isn’t the time to ease up on the throttle.”

“I’m not.”

“Because they’ll test you on something big. Something national-scale.”

“Such as?”

“A hurricane, a mass murder, I dunno, a celebrity death.”

“How will we soldier on,” she wondered aloud, “after Whoopi has passed?”

“It’ll be hard,” he agreed, “but she would have wanted us to show courage.”

She chuckled and he nestled into her on the couch.

Sebastian kissed the side of her neck. “This is us, babe, me and you. Joined at the hip. Where I go, you go. Where you go, I go.”

“I know. I do.”

“I think it’d be cool to live in Manhattan.”

“Which neighborhood?” she asked.

“Upper West Side,” he said.

“Harlem,” she said at the same time.

They both laughed it off because it felt like what one did when crucial differences in a marriage revealed themselves in strictly theoretical terms.

Jeremy James improved significantly through the fall. He remembered who Rachel was, though not what he’d said to the orderly, and he seemed to tolerate her presence more than rely on it. He had retained most of his knowledge of the luminist movement and of Colum Jasper Whitstone, but it was disjointed, his general sense of chronology off, so that Whitstone’s vanishing in 1863 was placed on a timeline just prior to Jeremy’s first trip to Normandy in 1977, when he was a graduate fellow. He thought Rachel was younger than Charlotte and couldn’t understand some days why Theo could take so much time off from high school to visit him.

“He doesn’t apply himself in the first place,” he told Rachel. “I don’t want him using my sickness to apply himself even less.”

He moved back into the house on Gorham Lane in November and was attended to by a hospice nurse. He grew physically stronger. His speech grew clear. But his mind remained elusive to him. “I can’t quite grasp it,” he said once. Both Maureen and Rachel were in the room and he gave them his hesitant smile. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.”

In late December of 2009, Rachel twice caught him checking his watch in the first ten minutes of her visit. She couldn’t blame him. Without their shared detective stories to discuss — he to find evidence of Colum Jasper Whitstone crossing paths with Claude Monet, she to find her father, and the both of them to understand Elizabeth Childs — they had little to talk about. No shared ambition, no shared history.

She promised to stay in touch.

Leaving his house, she walked down the flagstone path to her car, and she felt the loss of him anew. Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus far experienced it, was a series of detachments. Characters crossed the stage, and some hung around longer than others, but all ultimately exited.

She looked back at his house as she reached her car. You were my friend, she thought. You were my friend.

Two weeks later, on January 12, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti at five o’clock in the afternoon.

As Sebastian had predicted, Rachel was assigned to cover it for Big Six. She spent her first few days in Port-au-Prince. She and her crew covered the airdrops of food and supplies, which most days ended in riots. They covered the corpses stacked up in the parking lot of General Hospital. They covered the makeshift crematoriums that sprang up on street corners all over the city, the bodies burning like sacrificial appeasements, gray sulfur roiling amid the oily black smoke, the body within already an abstraction, the smoke as unremarkable as all the other smoke — from the buildings that continued to smolder, from the gas lines that had yet to burn out. She reported from tent cities and medical relief posts. Down in what had once been the shopping district, she and her camera operator, Greta Kilborne, shot footage of the police firing on looters, of a young man with protruding teeth and ribs, lying in ash and rubble with his foot blown off at the ankle, a few cans of the food he’d been stealing lying just out of his reach.

In the days after the earthquake, the only thing that teemed in Port-au-Prince more than disease and hunger was the press corps. Soon she and Greta decided to follow the story to the epicenter of the quake, in the coastal town of Léogâne. Léogâne was only forty kilometers south of Port-au-Prince, but the journey took them two days. They could smell the dead three hours before they arrived. There was no infrastructure left, no aid, no government relief, no police to shoot looters because there were no police.

When Rachel compared it to Hell, Greta disagreed.

“In Hell,” she said, “someone’s in charge.”

Their second night, at a squatters camp cobbled together from sheets — sheets for roofs and sheets for walls — she, Greta, one ex-nun, and one almost-nurse moved four young girls from tent to tent. The six wannabe rapists who moved through the camp looking for the girls were armed with knives and serpettes, the machetes with hooked blades common among farmers. Before the earthquake, half these men, Rachel was assured, had held good jobs. Their leader, Josué Dacelus, had come from the countryside just east of the quake zone. Ninth in line for a small sorghum farm in Croix-des-Bouquets, he soured on the world when it sank in that he would never inherit the farm. Josué Dacelus looked like a movie star and moved like a rock star. He usually wore a green-and-white soccer polo over tan cargo pants with the cuffs rolled up. On his left hip he wore a Desert Eagle.45 automatic, and on his right, he wore a serpette in a battered leather scabbard. He assured everyone that the serpette was for his protection. The.45, he said with a wink, was for theirs. Lot of bad men around, lot of horror, lot of evildoers. He’d bless himself and raise his eyes to the heavens.

Eighty percent of Léogâne had been cratered by the quake. Leveled. Law and order was a memory. There were rumors that British and Icelandic search-and-rescue teams had been sighted in the area. Rachel had confirmed earlier in the day that the Canadians had docked a destroyer in the harbor, and Japanese and Argentinian doctors were trickling into what remained of downtown. But so far, no one had reached them.

That morning and afternoon had been spent helping Ronald Revolus, the man who’d been on his way to becoming a nurse before the quake. They’d transported the three mortally wounded members of the camp to a med tent run by Sri Lankan peacekeepers three miles east. It was there she’d spoken to a translator who’d assured her they’d get help to them as soon as they were capable. Hopefully by the following night, two days at the most.

Rachel and Greta returned to the camp and the four girls had arrived. The itchy, hungry men in Josué’s gang noticed them immediately, and their awful intentions spread from the mind of one to the mind of all in the time it took to get the girls water and check them for injury.

Rachel and Greta, who failed as reporters that night by getting involved in a story they should have covered if anyone would have put it on the air, worked with the ex-nun and Ronald Revolus to move the girls all over the camp, rarely staying in one hiding spot for more than an hour.

The light of day wouldn’t stop the men — rape was nothing to be ashamed of in their minds or the minds of most of their peers. Death, so the norm in recent days, was only to be lamented for natives and even then, only if they were close family. They’d continued drinking through the night’s search and into the dawn, and the hope was they’d have to sleep at some point. In the end, two of the four girls were saved when a UN truck trundled into the camp that morning accompanied by a bulldozer to pick up the corpses in the ruined church at the bottom of the hill.

The other two girls, however, were never seen again. They’d arrived in camp just hours before, both freshly orphaned and freshly homeless. Esther wore a faded red T-shirt and jean shorts. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widelene, but everyone called her Widdy. It made sense that Esther was sullen, nearly mute, and rarely met one’s eyes. What made no sense was that Widdy was sunny and had the kind of smile that blew canyons through the chests of its recipients. Rachel knew the girls only for that one night, but she’d spent most of it with Widdy. Widdy and her yellow dress and her boundless heart and her habit of humming songs no one could recognize.

It was remarkable how completely they disappeared. Not just their bodies and the clothes they’d been wearing but their very existence. An hour after sunup, their two companions went mute when asked about them. Within three hours, no one in the camp besides Rachel, Greta, the ex-nun Veronique, and Ronald Revolus claimed to have seen them. By nightfall of the second day, Veronique had changed her story and Ronald was questioning his memory.

At nine that night, Rachel accidentally caught the eye of one of the rapists, Paul, a high school science teacher, who was always unceasingly polite. Paul sat outside his tent and clipped his nails with rusty nail clippers. By that point, rumors had spread that if the girls ever had been in the camp — and they hadn’t, that was crazy talk — three of the six men who had roamed the camp drinking heavily that night had gone to sleep by the time the girls who never existed may or may not have disappeared. So if those girls had been raped (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul was involved. But if they’d been murdered (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul had been sleeping by that point. Just a rapist, Teacher Paul, just a rapist. If the fates of the girls haunted him in any way, however, he hid it well. He looked in Rachel’s eyes. He used his thumb and index finger to make a gun. He pointed it at her crotch and then slipped the finger into his mouth and sucked on it. He laughed without making a sound.

Then he rose to his feet and crossed to Rachel. He stood in front of her and searched her eyes.

Very politely, almost obsequiously, he asked her to leave the camp.

“You lie,” he explained gently, “and it makes people anxious. They do not tell you this because we are a polite people. But your lies make everyone very upset. Tonight” — he held up one finger — “no one will show how upset they are. Tonight” — again with the finger — “no harm will likely come to you and your friend.”

She and Greta left the camp twenty minutes later, hitching the only ride out with the Sri Lankans. At their relief center, she pleaded with them and the Canadian peacekeepers who’d worked their way inland from their ship.

No one got her sense of urgency. No one got within a zip code of it. A couple of girls disappeared? Here? There were thousands of disappeared at last count and the number would only grow.

“They’re not disappeared,” one of the Canadians said to her. “They’re dead. You know that. I’m sorry but so it is. And no one’s got the time or resources to search for the bodies.” He looked around the tent at his companions and a few of the Sri Lankans. Everyone nodded in agreement. “None of us anyway.”

The next day Rachel and Greta moved on to Jacmel. Three weeks later they were back in Port-au-Prince. By this point, Rachel was starting her day with four black-market Ativans and a shot of rum. Greta, she suspected, had relapsed into the predilection for heroin chipping she’d told Rachel about their first night in Léogâne.

Eventually, they received word that it was time to head home. When Rachel protested, her assignment editor confided via Skype that her stories had grown too strident, too monotonous, and had taken on an unfortunate air of despair.

“Our viewers need hope,” the assignment editor said.

“Haitians need water,” Rachel said.

“There she goes again,” the editor said to someone offscreen.

“Give us a few more weeks.”

“Rachel,” he said, “Rachel. You look like shit. And I’m not just talking about your hair. You’re skeletal. We’re pulling the plug.”

“No one cares,” Rachel said.

“We cared,” the assignment editor said sharply. “The United States is sending over a billion and a half fucking dollars to that island. And this network covered the shit out of it. What more do you want?”

And Rachel, in her Ativan-addled brain, thought, God.

I want the capital-G God the televangelists claim moves tornadoes out of their paths. The one who cures cancer and arthritis in the faithful, the God professional athletes thank for taking an interest in the outcome of the Super Bowl or the World Cup or a home run hit in the eighty-seventh game of the hundred sixty-two played by the Red Sox this year. She wanted the active God who inserted Himself in human affairs to reach down from Heaven and cleanse the Haitian water supply and cure the Haitian sick and uncrumble the crumbled schools and hospitals and homes.

“The fuck are you babbling about?” The assignment editor peered into the screen at her.

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken.

“Get on a plane while we’re still paying for it,” the assignment editor said, “and get back to your little station.”

And that’s how she learned any ambitions she’d had to make the national network scene were dead. No New York for her. No career track to Big Six and beyond.

Back to Boston.

Back to Little Six.

Back to Sebastian.

She weaned herself off Ativan. (It took four attempts but she got there.) She cut her drinking back to pre-Haiti levels (or in the neighborhood anyway). But the bosses at Little Six never gave her a lead story again. A new girl, Jenny Gonzalez, had arrived during the time she’d been gone.

Sebastian said, “She’s smart, accessible, and she doesn’t look at the camera sometimes like she might head-butt it.”

The ugly truth was that Sebastian was right. Rachel would have loved to hate Jenny Gonzalez (Lord knows she tried), to believe her looks and sex appeal had gotten her where she was. And while those things certainly didn’t hurt, Jenny had an MA in journalism from Columbia, could improv on the fly, always hit her marks fully prepared, and treated everyone from the receptionist to the GM with the same respect.

Jenny Gonzalez didn’t replace Rachel because she was younger, prettier, and more well endowed (though she was all those things, goddammit) — she replaced Rachel because she was better at her job, had a more easygoing nature, and people loved talking to her.

There had still been a chance for Rachel, though. If, through clean living, she reversed the aging process she’d accelerated in Haiti, if she removed the chip on her shoulder that had first appeared and then kept growing there, if she kissed ass and played ball and transformed herself back into that slightly sexy, slightly tomboyish, slightly nerdy (they gave her red horn-rimmed glasses in place of her contacts), wholly knowledgeable ace reporter they’d hired away from the Globe for big bucks in the first place... then she still had a home at Little Six.

She tried. She covered a cat that barked like a dog and the annual “breaking of the ice” by the L Street Brownies, a group of mostly naked men who were the first to brave the waters of Boston Harbor every year. She reported on the baby koala born at Franklin Park Zoo and the running of the brides at Filene’s Basement.

She and Sebastian rehabbed the house they’d bought south of the city. Their schedules were such that when he was at the house, she was at work, and vice versa. To rarely see each other was such a pleasant arrangement that she would, in hindsight, come to believe it added a year to their marriage.

She received a couple of e-mails from Brian Delacroix. And even though one of them — You did magnificent work in Haiti. People in this city care now because you cared — carried her through an otherwise shitty day, she reminded herself that Brian Delacroix was a salesman, one with a weird energy that probably stemmed from his soul being at odds with the career decisions he’d made. She couldn’t trust there was a real Brian left anymore, so her responses to his e-mails were limited and polite: Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. Take care.

She told herself she was happy. She told herself she was trying to get back to the reporter and wife and person she’d been before. But she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t stop watching the feeds from Haiti, following the country as it scrabbled for rebirth but mostly just continued to die. Cholera broke out along the Artibonite River. This was followed by rumors that UN soldiers were the source of it. She begged Klay Bohn, her assignment editor, to let her go back for a week. Even at her own expense. He didn’t even dignify the request with a response, just told her she was expected in the parking lot behind the station, where she’d hop a van to cover a six-year-old in Lawrence who claimed God had given him the numbers his mother used to win the lottery.

When cameras secretly filmed UN soldiers removing a leaking pipe from the ground along the banks of the Artibonite and the footage went viral, Rachel was interviewing a hundred-year-old Red Sox fan attending his first game at Fenway.

As the cholera continued to spread, Rachel covered back-to-back house fires, a hot-dog-eating contest, a weekend of gang-related shootings in Dorchester, two elderly sisters who created end tables out of bottle caps, a BC party that got out of control in Cleveland Circle, and a former Wall Street broker who turned his back on high finance to do outreach work with the homeless on the North Shore.

The stories weren’t all tripe, they weren’t all inconsequential. Rachel had almost convinced herself that she occasionally performed a valid public service when Hurricane Tomas hit Haiti. Only a few people died, but the shelters were wiped out, sewers and septic tanks overflowed, and the cholera outbreak metastasized across the island.

She’d been up all night, following the available footage and reading the reports as they came across the wires, when Brian Delacroix’s name popped up in her in-box. She opened his e-mail and all it said was:

It was as if someone had placed a warm hand to the side of her neck and tilted her face to his shoulder and let her close her eyes. Maybe, since that off-kilter encounter outside the Athenaeum, she’d been judging Brian too harshly. Maybe she’d just caught him on a bad day, as he was trying to close a deal with Jack Ahern, an antiquities dealer from Geneva. Rachel had no idea where lumber and antiquities could cross paths, but she didn’t really understand finance — maybe Jack Ahern was an investor of some kind. In either case, so Brian had acted a little odd, a little nervous. What was wrong with being a little odd and a little nervous?

He understood. Somehow from a remove of years and through the scantest of cyber-contact, he grasped that it was crucial she get back there.

And as if she’d ordered it up like a pizza, half an hour later Sebastian came home and said, “They’re sending you back.”

“Back where?”

He pulled a plastic bottle of water from the fridge and placed it to the side of his head. He closed his eyes. “You have the contacts, you know the customs, I guess.”

“Haiti. They’re sending me back to Haiti?”

He opened his eyes as he continued to massage his temple with the bottle. “Haiti, yeah.” Though he’d never spoken the words, Rachel knew he blamed Haiti for her career decline. And he blamed her career decline for his own career stagnation. So when he said “Haiti,” it sounded like an obscenity.

“When?” Her blood was tingling. She’d been up all night but now she was wide awake.

“Klay said no later than tomorrow. Do I have to remind you that you can’t fuck this up?”

She felt her face drop. “That’s your pep talk?”

“It is what it is,” he said wearily.

She could think of a lot of things to say, but they all would have led to a fight and she didn’t want to fight right now. So she tried, “I’ll miss you.”

She couldn’t wait to get on the plane.

“Miss you too,” he said as he stared into the refrigerator.

7 Have You Seen Me?

Back in Haiti, the same heat and crumpled buildings and exhausted despair. The same bewildered looks on most of the faces. Where there was no bewilderment, there was rage. Where there wasn’t rage, there was hunger and fear. But mostly bewilderment: After all this suffering, the faces seemed to ask, are we to accept that suffering is the point?

On her way to do her first story, meeting the crew out in front of Choscal Hospital in the dense slum of Cité Soleil, Rachel walked streets so poor a newcomer would have been unable to discern the difference in the neighborhood before the quake and after it. Photos were pasted to broken lamp poles and impotent power-line poles and the low walls that lined the streets — pictures, in some cases, of the dead, but primarily of the missing. Under most of the photos a question or plea was written:

Èske ou te wè m?

Have you seen me?

She hadn’t. Or maybe she had. Maybe the face of the middle-aged man she passed as she turned a corner was one of the bodies she’d seen in the collapsed church or the hospital parking lot. In either case, he was gone. And not coming back, she was fairly sure.

Rachel crested a small hill and the breadth of the ghetto spread out before her, a spillage of steel and cinder-block shacks sun-blasted to monochrome. A boy rode past her on a muddy bicycle. The boy looked to be about eleven, twelve at most, and had an automatic rifle strapped to his back. As he looked over his shoulder at her, Rachel reminded herself that this was gang territory. Mini war gods ran the show and fought for turf from one end to the other. Food didn’t flow into here, but guns sure as shit did. She shouldn’t have been walking around there alone. She shouldn’t have been walking around there without a tank and air support.

But she didn’t feel fear. She just felt numb. She felt overwhelmed with numbness.

At least she thought that’s what it was.

Have you seen me?

No, I haven’t. No one has. No one did. No one will. Even if you’d lived a full life. Didn’t matter — you vanished the moment you were born.

That was the mood she carried into the little plaza in front of the hospital. The sole good news about what followed was that it only went live to the local market, in this case, Boston. Big Six was going to decide later if they’d use it. Little Six, though, believed a live feed would stoke a sense of urgency in a story everyone suspected was losing viewer interest because of tragedy fatigue.

So she went live standing in front of Choscal Hospital. The sun slipped out from a black brick of clouds directly above her head and set itself to sear. Grant, the anchor at Little Six, somehow managed to sound twice as stupid coming through an international feed.

Rachel rattled off the statistics — thirty-two confirmed cholera cases lay bedridden in the hospital behind her; post-hurricane flooding was contributing to the spread on a national scale and complicating relief efforts; the situation was expected to grow more dire by the day. Behind the camera crew, Cité Soleil spread out like a sacrifice to the sun god, and Rachel could feel something sever within her. It was a spiritual piece and untouched by this world up until this moment, a sliver of soul perhaps, and the heat and loss hunted it down as soon as it detached and ate it. In its place, a sparrow flapped its wings in the center of her chest. No warning, no buildup. It suddenly hovered in the center of her chest, flapping as hard as it could.

“And excuse me, Rachel,” Grant was saying in her ear, “but Rachel...”

Why did he keep saying her name?

“Yes, Grant?”

“Rachel?”

She consciously avoided gritting her teeth. “Yes?”

“Do you have any estimates on how many people have contracted this deadly disease? How many people are sick?”

The question struck her as absurd.

How many people are sick?

“We’re all sick.”

“I’m sorry?” Grant said.

“We’re all sick,” Rachel said. Was it her imagination, or did the words come out a tad slurry?

“Rachel, are you saying that you and other members of our Channel Six crew have contracted cholera?”

“What? No.”

Danny Marotta removed his eye from the lens and gave her a “You okay?” look. Widdy walked behind him with a graceful stride that didn’t fit with her youth or the blood on her dress, or the second smile carved into her throat.

“Rachel,” Grant was saying. “Rachel? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

And Rachel, sweating profusely by this point, shaking so hard the mic jumped in her hand, replied, “I said we’re all sick. We’re all, we’re all, what, I mean, we’re just sick. You know?” The words sluiced out of her like blood from a puncture wound. “We’re lost and sick and we all pretend otherwise, but then we all go away. We all just fucking go away.”

By the time the sun went down footage of Rachel repeating “We’re all sick” to a baffled anchorman as her hands and shoulders shook and her eyelids batted at the sweat that drizzled from her forehead had gone viral.

It was the consensus of upper management during a postmortem meeting that while it was commendable that the feed was cut four seconds before Rachel said “fucking,” it should have been cut ten seconds earlier. As soon as it became clear that Rachel was unhinged — and most agreed that moment occurred the very first time she said “We’re all sick” — they should have cut to commercial.

Rachel was fired over cell phone, as she walked across the tarmac at Toussaint Louverture Airport toward the plane home.

Her first night back, she went to a bar in Marshfield, a few blocks away from their house. Sebastian was working through the night and had made it clear he had no desire to see her right now. He said he’d stay on his boat until he could “process what she’d done to them.”

She couldn’t blame him really. It would be a few weeks before the reality of what had become of her career would sink in, but when she caught her reflection in the bar mirror as she drained her vodka, she was startled by how frightened she looked. She didn’t feel frightened, she felt numb. Yet she stared over the scotch and whiskey bottles to the right of the cash register at a woman who looked a bit like her mother, a bit like herself, and every bit terrified.

The bartender clearly hadn’t seen the video of her meltdown. He treated her the way bored bartenders the world over treated customers they couldn’t give a shit about. It was a slow night, so he wasn’t making his nut in tips no matter how hard he shucked and smiled. So he did neither. He read a newspaper at the other end of the bar and texted with someone on his phone. She checked her own texts but she didn’t have any — everyone she knew was ducking and hiding until the gods decided how fiercely they wanted to continue their assault or whether they could relent and spit her back out. She did have one e-mail, though, and even before she tapped the mail icon, she knew who it was from and smiled when she saw Brian Delacroix’s name.

Who are you? she thought. You strange man with (mostly) perfect timing? One of these days, Brian Delacroix, I would like to...

What?

I would like to give you a chance to explain that weird encounter outside the Athenaeum. Because I can’t connect that guy with the guy who just sent me this note.

The bartender brought her another vodka, and she decided she’d head back to her apartment, maybe compose an e-mail to Brian Delacroix that articulated some of the thoughts that had just passed through her head. She handed the bartender her credit card and told him he could cash her out. As he rang up the sale, she felt beset by déjà vu stronger than any she could remember. No, it wasn’t simply déjà vu: She’d experienced this precise moment before, she was sure of it. She caught the bartender’s eyes in the mirror, and he gave her a curious look in return as if unsure why she stared so intently at him.

I don’t know you, she thought. But I know this moment. I’ve lived it.

And then she realized she hadn’t. Her mother had. It was a restaging of the photograph of her mother in roughly the same place at a similarly shaped bar, in similar lighting, thirty-one years before. Like her mother, she stared absently at the bottles. Like the bartender in the picture, the bartender tonight had his back to her as he rang up the sale. His eyes hung in the mirror. Her eyes hung in the mirror.

Look for yourself in his eyes, her mother had said.

Rachel is in the mirror, Jeremy had said.

The bartender brought her the check. She added a tip and signed it.

She left her drink unfinished on the bar and hurried back to the house. She went to her bedroom and opened the shoebox full of photos. The photographs from the bar in East Baltimore were on the top of the pile where she and Jeremy had left them two summers ago. Rachel followed her mother’s gaze over the whiskey bottles to the mirror behind them, to what Elizabeth had really been looking at, to what had put the charged look, the eroticized look, on her face.

The bartender’s face loomed above the cash register, his eyes locked on Elizabeth’s. The green in his eyes was so pale it was almost gray.

Rachel took the photograph to her bathroom mirror. She held it up beside her head. His eyes were her eyes — same color, same shape.

“Well, shit,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”

8 Granite

She’d assumed the bar was long gone, but when she Googled Milo’s East Baltimore, it popped right up on her screen, replete with pictures. It had changed some — three large windows had been hung in the brick wall facing the street, the lighting was softer, the cash register was computerized, and the stools now had backs and ornate arms — but the same mirror hung behind the bar and the bottles were placed in the same hierarchy. The Baltimore Colts pennant on the wall had been replaced with one for the Baltimore Ravens.

She called and asked for the owner.

When he got on the phone, he said, “This is Ronnie.”

She explained that she was a reporter for Channel 6. She didn’t say which Channel 6 and she didn’t say she was working on any particular story. Usually, identifying herself as a reporter immediately opened a door or immediately slammed it shut; either scenario tended to avoid time wasted on further explanations.

“Ronnie, I’m trying to track down a bartender who worked at Milo’s in 1979. And I wondered if you’d have employment records from that era you’d be willing to share.”

“Bartender back in seventy-nine?” he said. “Well, that was probably Lee, but let me check with my father.”

“Lee?” she said, but he’d put the phone down. For a few minutes she heard very little, maybe a conversation being held somewhere far away from the receiver, hard to tell, but then she heard footsteps approach the phone and the scrape of it being lifted off the bar.

“This is Milo.” A scratchy voice, followed by the huff of breath being expelled through the nostrils.

“The Milo?”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s this you need?”

“I was looking to get in touch with a man who tended bar there almost thirty-two years ago. Your son mentioned a Lee?”

“He worked for us back then.”

“And you remember him?”

“Well, yeah, he worked here at least twenty-five years. Left about eight years ago.”

“And he was the only bartender who worked there back then?”

“No, but he was the main one. I worked the bar some, my late wife, and old Harold, who was going senile right around then. That clear it up for you?”

“Do you know where I could find Lee?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking, Miss...?”

“Childs.”

“Miss Childs. Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking about Lee?”

She couldn’t think of a single reason to lie, so she told him. “It’s possible he knew my mother.”

“Lee knew a lot of women.”

She took the plunge. “It’s possible he was my father.”

There was nothing but the sound of him breathing through his nostrils for so long she almost spoke again out of sheer anxiousness.

“How old are you?” he said eventually.

“Thirty-one.”

“Well,” Milo said slowly, “he was a good-looking son of a bitch back then. Dated a few — ten — women, I seem to remember. Even a penny can shine, I guess, when it’s newly minted.” More breathing.

She thought he was going to say more but after a while realized he wouldn’t be doing so. “I’d like to reach out to him. If you’d feel okay helping me, that would—”

“He’s dead.”

Two small hands grasped the sides of her heart and pushed inward. Ice water surged up the back of her neck and flooded her skull.

“He’s dead?” It came out louder than she’d intended.

“’Bout six years now, yeah. He left us, went to work for another bar in Elkton. A couple years after that, he died.”

“How?”

“Heart attack.”

“He would’ve been young.”

“Fifty-three?” Milo said. “Maybe fifty-four. Yeah, he was young.”

“What was his full name?”

“Well, miss, I don’t know you. I don’t know if you could lodge some paternity thing against the people he left behind. I don’t know enough about such things. But again, I don’t know you, that’s the problem.”

“Would it help if you did know me?”

“Absolutely.”

She took the train to Baltimore the next morning from Back Bay station. She innocently met the eyes of a college-age girl she passed on the platform, and the girl’s eyes bulged with sudden recognition. Rachel walked to the end of the platform with her head down. She took a spot near an older gentleman in a gray suit. He flashed her a sad smile and went back to reading Bloomberg Markets. She couldn’t tell if the sadness in his smile stemmed from pity for her or if he just possessed a sad smile.

She got on the train without further incident and found a seat near the rear of a half-empty car. With every mile the train covered, she felt she escaped her newfound identity as a public basket case just a bit more; by the time she passed through Rhode Island, she felt nearly relaxed. She wondered if some of her ease stemmed from the knowledge that she was returning, if not home, at least to her genesis. She also took strange comfort that she was following in reverse part of the journey her mother and Jeremy James had taken to western Massachusetts in the spring of 1979. Now it was mid-November, more than three decades later. The cities and towns she passed were caught between late fall and early winter. Some municipal parking lots had already shored up road salt and sand. Most trees were bare, and the sky was sunless, as bare as the trees.

“This is him here.” Milo placed a framed photograph on the bar in front of her, his stubby index finger positioned beside the face of a lean man of advancing hairline and advancing age. He had a high forehead, sunken cheeks, and her eyes.

Milo was about eighty and breathed with the aid of a liquid-oxygen canister perched in a hip pack nestled at the small of his back. The clear silicone tubing ran up his back and then hooked over his ears before draping down his cheekbones to where the nasal cannulas entered his nostrils. He’d been living with emphysema since his early seventies, he told Rachel. Lately the hypoxia had been progressing but not so fast it kept him from sneaking eight or ten cigarettes a day.

“Good genes,” Milo said as he placed an unframed photo down in front of her. “I got ’em. Lee didn’t.”

The unframed shot was a bit more candid than the first, which was a staff photo in which everyone was posing. This unframed photograph was from decades back. Lee had a full head of lanky dark brown hair, and his eyes were set farther up in his face. He was smiling at something a customer had said. While several of the other patrons laughed with their heads thrown back, Lee’s was a small smile, a withholding one; it wasn’t an invitation, it was a moat. He looked to be no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and she could immediately see what her mother had been drawn to. That small smile was all coiled vitality and inflamed reticence. It promised too much and too little at the same time. Lee looked like the worst boyfriend and greatest fuck of all time.

She could see why her mother had described him as smelling like “lightning.” And she suspected that if she herself had walked into this bar in 1979 and this man had been standing behind it, she would have stayed for more than one drink. He fit the look of the profligate poet, the drug-addled painter-genius, the musician who’d die in a car crash the day after he signed his big record contract.

The tour of Lee’s life she received from Milo in photos, however, was of a journey confined mostly to the very bar where she now sat. She could feel his world and his options and his opportunities for casual sex with vibrant women decrease with every photo. Soon the world beyond the bar wasn’t something to dream of, it was something to hide from. The women who once pursued him turned into women who had to be pursued. They then became women who had to be lubricated with the proper amounts of humor and alcohol. Finally, one day, they’d be repulsed or amused to discover he thought of them sexually.

But as Lee’s sexual voltage decreased, year by year, his smiles grew wider. By the time he’d reached her middle-school years and still wore the black vest over a white shirt that Milo required of his bartenders, his skin had mottled, his face had sunk, and his smile had yellowed and picked up two gaps in the back rows. But with every photo, he looked looser, less burdened by the weight of whatever had been behind that fuck-you smile, that fuck-you sexual charisma. The soul seemed to flower as the body declined.

Milo next produced a stack of photographs from the annual Independence Day friends-’n’-family softball game and picnic. There were two women who appeared and reappeared in the photos alongside Lee. One woman was thin and brunette and possessed a face tight with strain and anxiety; the other was blowsy and blond and usually had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“That was Ellen,” Milo said of the dark-haired woman. “She was angry. No one ever knew why. Kinda woman could suck the life out of a birthday party, a wedding, a Thanksgiving — and I seen her kill all three. She left Lee around eighty-six, I want to say. Eighty-seven? No later. Other one was his second wife. That’s Maddy. Last I heard she was still alive. Living in Elkton. She and Lee had a few good years and then sort of drifted apart.”

“Did he have any kids?” Rachel asked.

“Not with these women.” Milo watched her carefully across the bar for a moment as he reached behind his back to adjust something on his oxygen dispenser. “You think you’re his, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure of it,” Rachel said.

“You got his eyes,” Milo said, “that’s for sure. Pretend I said something funny.”

“What?”

“Laugh,” he said.

“Ha ha,” she said.

“No, for real.”

She looked around the bar. It was empty. She chuckled out a version of her laugh. She was surprised how authentic it sounded.

“That’s his laugh,” Milo said.

“Then it’s settled,” she said.

He smiled. “When I was young, people said I looked like Warren Oates. You know who that is?”

She shook her head.

“Movie actor. Was in a lot of westerns. Was in The Wild Bunch.”

She gave him an embarrassed shrug.

“Anyway, I did look like Warren Oates. Now people say I look like Wilford Brimley. Know who that is?”

She nodded. “The Quaker Oats guy.”

He said, “That’s him.”

“You do look like him.”

“I do.” He held up a finger. “And yet, best of my knowledge, I’m not related to him. Or to Warren Oates.” He held his thumb and index a hairbreadth apart. “Not even a little bit.”

She acknowledged his point with a slight tip of her head. Arrayed across the bar top was a man’s life in photographs, just as her life had been arrayed before her and Jeremy James two summers back. A collage, yet again, that said everything and said nothing. A person could be photographed every day of his life, she suspected, and still hide the truth of himself — the essence — from all who came along in pursuit of it. Her mother had stood in front of her every day for twenty years and she knew her only as much as Elizabeth had deemed fit to show. And now here was her father, staring back out at her from 4 × 6s and 5 × 7s and 8 × 10s, in focus, out of focus, oversaturated, and underlit. But in all cases, he was ultimately unknowable. She could see his face, but not behind it.

“He had a couple of stepkids,” Milo told her. “Ellen had a son when he met her, Maddy had a daughter. Don’t know that he formally adopted either of them. Never got a feeling one way or the other whether he liked them or they liked him back or if it went the other way. Or somewhere in between.” He shrugged, looked down at the collage. “He knew a lot about whiskey, had a couple motorcycles over the years he was fond of, had a dog for a while that got cancer so he never got another.”

“And he worked here for twenty-five years?”

“’Bout that.”

“Did he have any ambitions beyond being a bartender?”

Milo looked off for a bit, trying to remember. “When he was really into motorcycles, he talked with another guy for a while about opening a garage together where they’d fix ’em, maybe customize ’em. When the dog died, he read up a lot on veterinary schools. But nothing ever came of any of it.” He shrugged. “If he had any other dreams, he kept ’em tucked on a high shelf.”

“Why did he stop working here?”

“Didn’t like taking orders from Ronnie, probably. Hard to take orders from a man you watched grow up. Got tired of the commute maybe too. He lived in Elkton. Traffic between here and there gets worse every year.”

He looked at her in such a way that she knew he was sizing her up, making a decision. “You wear nice clothes, look like you got a good life.”

She nodded.

“He didn’t have no money. You know that? What little he had the exes took.”

Again she nodded.

“Grayson.”

The small hands caressed her heart this time, coldly, but lighter than a whisper.

“Leeland David Grayson,” Milo said. “That was the man’s full name.”

She met his second wife, Maddy, at a small park in Elkton, Maryland, a town that felt tossed aside, its hills dotted with the shells of factories and foundries no one living could probably remember in their heyday.

Maddy Grayson was teetering between overweight and corpulent, the rowdy smile she’d worn in most of the pictures replaced with one that seemed to drain a second after it appeared.

“It was Steph, my daughter, who found him. He was on his knees in front of the couch, but his right elbow was still on the couch? Like he’d got up for a drink or a piss and that’s when it took him. He’d been there at least a day, maybe two. Steph had gone around to borrow some money because, well, Lee could be a soft touch on his drinking days. But outside of that, he wanted to be left alone. What he liked to do on his days off was drink decent whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and watch old TV shows. Never new ones. He liked stuff from the seventies and the eighties — Mannix and The A-Team. Miami Vice.” She turned on the bench slightly, excited. “Oh, he loved Miami Vice. But the early ones, you know? He always said the show went to hell when Crockett married the singer. Said it got hard to believe after that.” She fumbled in her purse and came back with a cigarette. She lit it and exhaled and followed the smoke with her gaze. “He liked those shows because things made sense back then, you know? World made sense. Those were good days, sensible days.” She looked around the empty park. “Not like now.”

Rachel was hard pressed to imagine two decades in her lifetime that made less sense to her than the seventies and the eighties or two that seemed less stable or compassionate in general. But she didn’t think there was much point in mentioning that to Maddy Grayson.

“Did he ever want anything?” she asked.

“How do you mean?” Maddy coughed into her fist.

“Like to become, I dunno, something?” Rachel regretted her choice of words as soon as they left her mouth.

“Mean like a doctor?” Maddy’s eyes grew hard fast. She looked angry and confused and angry about the confusion.

“Well, I mean” — Rachel stuttered and tried for a friendly smile — “something besides a bartender.”

“What’s wrong with being a bartender?” Maddy tossed her cigarette to the pavement in front of her and turned her knees toward Rachel. She matched Rachel’s desperate smile with an iron one. “No, I’m asking. For more’n twenty years, people went to Milo’s because they knew Lee was behind the bar. They could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge. They could come to him when their marriages went tits-up, they lost their jobs, their kids turned into assholes or druggies, fucking world went to shit all around them. But they could sit in front of Lee and he’d serve them a drink and hear them when they talked.”

Rachel said, “Sounds like an amazing guy.”

Maddy pursed her lips and reared back, as if she’d seen a cockroach climb out of her pasta bowl. “He wasn’t an amazing guy. He was an asshole a lot of days. I couldn’t live with him in the end. But he was a great bartender and a lot of people were better off for knowing him.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

“But you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maddy pushed a breath through her lips that managed to be both derisive and melancholy at the same time. “The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

The rest of us are just Americans.

Rachel recognized the grubby self-aggrandizement of the line as well as the faux modesty. She could already hear herself quoting it at cocktail parties, could hear too the laughs it would garner. But even as she heard the laughs, they shamed her. She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.

But that was the country her father had inhabited. The country of the unseen and the unheard. And, upon their deaths, the unremembered.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said to Maddy.

Maddy waved it off with a freshly lit cigarette. “Honey, your shit don’t mean shit to me.” She gave Rachel’s knee a friendly squeeze. “If Lee was your flesh and blood, then good. I hope it brings you peace. Woulda been nice for you, I guess, if you’d known him.” She tapped the ash of her cigarette. “But we don’t get what we want, just what we can handle.”

She visited his grave. It was marked by a common granite headstone, black sprinkled with specks of white. She’d seen the same granite in the kitchen countertops of at least two colleagues. They’d used a lot less granite on Lee Grayson, though. It was a small stone, no more than a foot and a half tall and twenty inches wide. Maddy had told her Lee had purchased it on layaway around the time his own folks passed away, paid it off about three years before he died.

There had to be more to it. There had to be.

But if there was, she couldn’t find it.

She’d cobbled together the thumbnail of a biography from what Milo had said about him, what Maddy had said about him, and stray bits both had recalled others had said about him.

Leeland David Grayson had been born and raised in Elkton, Maryland. He’d passed through a kindergarten, a grade school, and a high school. He’d worked for a paving company, a trucking company, a shoe store, and as a driver for a florist before finding work at Milo’s in East Baltimore. He’d spread his seed at least once (or so it seemed), married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Owned a house that he’d lost in Divorce #1. Rented a smaller place from then on. Over the course of his life, he’d owned nine cars, three motorcycles, and one dog. Died in the same town where he was born. Fifty-four years on this earth and, to the best of anyone’s recollection, he’d expected little of others and gave about the same in return. Wasn’t an angry man, though most got the sense it would be foolish to push him. Wasn’t a happy man, though he liked a good joke when he heard it.

Someday all who had reason to remember him would pass from the earth. Judging by what Rachel had seen of the ways people looked after their health in Lee’s circle of friends and acquaintances, that someday would come sooner rather than later. Then the only person who would know his name would be whoever mowed the grass near his headstone.

He didn’t live his life, her mother would have said, it lived him.

And in that moment, Rachel realized why her mother had probably never told Lee about her or her about Lee. Elizabeth had seen how his life would play out. She had known his wants were small, his imagination limited, his ambitions nebulous. Elizabeth Childs, who’d grown up in a small town and chosen to live in a small town, had despised small-town thinking.

Her mother had never told Rachel who her father was because to admit she’d given her body to him in the first place would have been to admit that some part of her had never wanted to escape where she’d come from.

So instead, Rachel thought, you robbed us of each other.

Rachel sat at his grave for the better part of an hour. She waited to hear his voice in the wind or the trees.

And it came, it actually came. But it wasn’t pretty.

You want someone to tell you why.

Yes.

Why there’s pain and loss. Why earthquakes and hunger.

But mostly:

Why no one gives a shit about you, Rachel.

“Stop,” she was pretty sure she said aloud.

You know what the answer is?

“Just stop.”

Because.

“Because what?” she said to the quiet of the cemetery.

Because nothing. Just because.

She lowered her head and didn’t weep. Didn’t make a sound. But for a very long time, she couldn’t stop shaking.

You’ve come a long way to get this answer.

And here it is. At long last. Right in front of your face.

She raised her head. Opened her eyes. Stared at it. A foot and a half tall, twenty inches wide.

It’s granite and dirt.

And there’s no more to it.

She didn’t leave the cemetery until the sun fell halfway down its black trees. It was close to four in the afternoon. She’d arrived at ten in the morning.

She never heard his voice again. Not once.

On the train back north, she looked out the window, but it was night and all she could see of the cities and towns was the blur of lights and the dark in between.

Most of the time, she couldn’t see anything at all out there. Just her own reflection. Just Rachel. Still alone.

Still on the wrong side of the mirror.