SETTING OUT THE snitches had thrown me off track. Rather than give me the chance to listen, it had made me deaf. An explosion of noise that had caused an intense ringing in my ears that covered up everything else. I had opened up an infinity of roads that led me away from what was concrete. The only concrete thing I had at the moment was the paper envelope with Stephen’s DNA sample.
I opened the browser and typed into Google: Paternity test Massachusetts. There were 780,000 results in .48 seconds. Once again, I clicked on the first one that wasn’t sponsored. They promised various sorts of kits for a price of around $400. After taking a look, I saw one of the sidebars: “Solutions for Deceased or Missing Persons.” I clicked on the link. Another tab showed the different options for finding out if two people had some degree of blood relation, giving the different locations of labs that did analysis. Find the one that’s closest to you.
Though there was a DNA lab in Hyannis, I decided as a precaution to choose one farther away, in Mashpee, which was also close to the psychologist’s office, so that I could go over while Oli was in therapy.
It was very discreet. A sign read: “Clinical Analysis Laboratory.” Nothing obvious that might scare away clients looking for privacy. Even so, before I entered, I felt jittery, as if inside the lab I’d face the FBI, a SWAT team and social services ready to take away my daughters. But no, there was only a very kind nurse, who must have seen the distress on my face and sensed that I wanted to get it all over with as soon as possible.
After filling out the form, I turned in the two samples I had with me: Stephen’s and Chris’s. I had been digging around in his boxes of clothes, looking for a hair, not just any hair, because it was essential that the root was still attached—so I had read. Chris’s hair was short and blond, impossible to mistake, and I looked desperately with a magnifying glass through all the hats and sports clothing of his that I still had. Nothing. Until I found a piece of gum stuck to one of his pairs of tennis shorts. The bitter taste of defeat, Chris used to say. But it’s not a manner of speaking; it’s the damn truth. When I’m losing, I start to taste something stale in my mouth. I hate it. Once, during a game, I was down one set and I was losing the second. There was a kid chewing gum in the audience, so I asked him for a piece, and he gave me a stick of hot cinnamon gum. I hated that flavor, but I would have drunk gasoline before going on with that nasty taste in my mouth. And what happened? I ended up flipping the scoreboard, and, since then, I’ve been addicted to hot cinnamon gum. Obviously, it doesn’t always work; otherwise, I would have been number one in the world. But it’s gotten me out of a bind more than once. And now that chewed-up, dry gum was on top of the counter in the laboratory, in a self-sealing bag. The receptionist looked at it unsettled.
“Let me get this straight, you want to know if the swab is the father of the gum.” She laughed. “Sorry, I can’t help it.”
I couldn’t help laughing either.
“It requires a special treatment. We have to send it to CSI, but in Las Vegas; they’re much better than the ones in Miami and New York, which I don’t trust,” she added, smiling.
Then she told me there wouldn’t be a problem with the saliva sample, but that the gum was another story. Much more expensive and the accuracy percentages much less trustworthy.
“Because, look, I understand that if you’ve brought me the gum, it’s because there’s no possible way to get something more solid for the test. But”—she paused—“if you want to know if the gum is the child, there’s something much easier. Does the gum have sons or daughters? Because you can always do a paternity test between a grandparent and grandchild. And if it comes out positive, that’s an obvious tie between the gum and the saliva sample. So the question is, without being nosy”—she paused—“does the gum have a son or daughter we can get a saliva sample from?”
Ruby laughed. I didn’t. I was about to say no, that the gum didn’t have daughters—and certainly not one that was in my baby carrier—to sidestep the humiliation. But no, I succumbed to the evidence and she took a saliva sample from Ruby. One more anecdote she could tell another customer.
The results would take between three and four weeks, and would arrive confidentially by messenger.
We’d been living on Robin Island almost four months, and I had more or less kept my mother at bay, trying to make her understand that they couldn’t come to visit every weekend. At least, not at first. That I needed to have the feeling of starting from scratch. Independence. Of course, none of that even entered my mother’s mind. So when we got to Providence on Christmas Eve and I set foot in the front yard, which she’d decorated spectacularly with a Santa Claus in his sleigh weighed down with presents and pulled by reindeer climbing up the façade, I had to endure the outburst of reproaches while Olivia counted the reindeer three times (Yes, Oli, it’s nine, same as always).
“It’s just, honey, I don’t understand,” my mother told me later. “Well, not just me, not anybody.” She raised her voice. “George, you don’t understand either, do you?! Out there, alone in the middle of nowhere . . . What have we done to you? I feel terrible, as if the tragedy were my fault. As if we were bothering you . . . I don’t know, you running off like that . . . I didn’t say anything at the time or at Thanksgiving because I respect your loss and your pain. But it’s been forever since you left. And you’re still all closed in on yourself, and I’m getting more and more worried. I can’t even sleep at night.” She raised her voice again. “I can’t even sleep, can I, George?! We’ve suffered from the loss as well. He was like a son to us. Wasn’t he, George?! We’ve cried since we lost him, we still do, and we pray for him and even more for you, of course. Because I don’t want to lose you, too, honey. In moments like this, you have to lean on your loved ones. Now are we or aren’t we? Your loved ones, I mean. Because sometimes you make me doubt it. And what is this about you taking back your maiden name?”
“It’s not my maiden name, Mother, it’s our family name.”
“I don’t understand why. It’s going to look like you’re rejecting your dead husband’s last name.”
“To whom?”
“To people, the family, Chris’s family, all the people who are coming here for dinner tonight.”
“And you, is it going to look like that to you, Mother?”
“Well, a little, yes, honey. What’s the point in lying to you? A little, yes.” I looked at my father, who was setting up a second table where the children would sit. She looked at him: “And you’re not going to say anything? I’m tired of always playing the bad guy. Both of us agreed to try and convince her this was madness and she needed to come back home. And you just stand there like a nitwit . . .”
My father stopped what he was doing and gave her a serious look. Nothing aggressive, simply formal, reverent, like a literature professor before starting to talk about Shakespeare.
“Marie.”
“Yes, that’s my name. I thought you had forgotten it because you never talk to me.”
He walked over to her.
“I love you, Marie. I really do.”
He kissed her on the forehead, then turned around and went back to his work. My mother got flustered and was taken completely off guard.
“See? That’s why I forgive everything. That’s why I’ve been in love with him for almost fifty years now. You scoundrel, you dirty scoundrel.”
“So that’s all it takes to disarm you?”
I walked over to my mother, imitating my father. I kissed her on the cheek.
“Mom, I love you a lot too.”
“No, it’s not going to work for you . . .” but before she finished the phrase, tears were streaming down her cheeks. “OK, fine, it’s working. You see how little it takes? Scoundrels, that’s what the two of you are.”
I went out for a run to clear my head after my mother’s harangue and change the memory card in the Bushnell Trophy Cam I had camouflaged in the cemetery. There were 9,792 new photos in a little over four months. I had something to occupy me while I was there.
I thought I’d gotten over my aversion to receiving sincere and deeply felt condolences from my family. But when I saw a van arrive from my bedroom window with my grandmother Brigitte, my uncle and aunt, my three cousins and their four children, I realized that no, I wasn’t yet ready to receive their effusive gestures of affection and worry. Christmas and being in Providence made the absence of Chris even more ominous.
Before going down for dinner, I stilled my urge to go back to Robin Island by poring through the first of the photos from the camera in the cemetery—without obtaining any results—while I listened, for the fourth time, to the conversation Mark and Julia had had earlier in the day, at noon. I knew it almost by heart.
JULIA: What are you doing?! What are you doing?!
Julia slams the laptop closed in one violent go.
MARK: I was curious. You say you’re not writing, but I hear you typing every night.
JULIA: Typing isn’t writing. Typing is something anyone can do. Writing, no. And if you’re curious, ask.
MARK: Would it have mattered?
Silence.
MARK: I only read a little bit, but I really liked what you wrote, sorry, typed.
Silence.
MARK: It was hard to read, it moved me, but that’s exactly why it’s good.
Silence.
MARK: I really liked that you called the protagonists Paul and Samantha.
JULIA: You’ve never disrespected me this way before.
MARK: Remember the thing I told you when we met, when you came to the office for an emergency? I said to you: Why are we always set on being with the wrong person?
MARK: You also told me that day you didn’t like for people to hurt you, and I told you I didn’t like to hurt people either or for them to hurt me. But now, I’m not so sure we’re not hurting one another. Maybe I’m not your Paul. And you’re not my Samantha.
Silence.
MARK: It’s shocking how you’ve turned the tables. It makes me the responsible one for this goddamn situation . . . You want me to leave? You want us to separate? Tell me what you want to do. Anything but this, because it’s unbearable. It has been going on too long . . .
Silence.
MARK: At least put on a different face. Just for tonight. Until your parents leave, so they don’t pelt you with questions. We’ll just pretend we’re a normal, stable couple. One night. OK?
Silence.
JULIA: OK.
The argument sounded far away. It had taken place in Julia’s office, and the snitch had picked it up from the bedroom. A snitch that I thought didn’t work because it never captured any voices, only occasional noises. Until I realized that they didn’t share a bedroom. Julia slept every night on the sofa in her office, after typing for two or three hours with barely a rest. More than writing, it seemed she was running away. That was what Mark had told me.
Going to Providence a few days after sleeping with Mark helped deactivate the possibility of another encounter, convincing me it had been a one-time thing that would never happen again. The physical distance would make us realize how dangerous and improper it had been. I didn’t want to be a married man’s lover. Well, I could tolerate that, so long as I told myself it was a sacrifice for the cause. But what was inconceivable to me was falling in love with a married man. I wasn’t going to allow it. Still, however much I tried to cover it up, it was impossible for me to get him out of my mind.
Olivia came into my bedroom looking pallid and upset, holding on to Big Smelly Bear.
“Mommy . . .”
Pony crawled under the bed, begging forgiveness for existing.
“What is it, Oli?”
“I feel really dizzy. Is the earth moving?”
I crouched down, set her on my lap, and put my cheek on her forehead. She was quite hot.
“The earth is always moving, honey.”
“Yeah, but more.”
“No, it always moves the same.”
“No, it moves more here than on the island.”
I laid her down on my bed and stretched out beside her. I could have stayed there that way all night.
“Did you say hi to your cousins?”
“Yeah. There’s four of them.”
“Why do you like to count everything?”
“Because numbers never get lost.”
“What do you mean, they don’t get lost? What are you talking about?”
“I give things numbers so they don’t go away.”
“Where would they go?”
“I don’t know, somewhere else. If you put a number on them, they stay.”
“You count people, too?”
“Sure. Everyone’s got a number.”
“And me? What number am I?”
“You?” Say I’m one, honey, please, I’m begging you. “You’re number four, Mommy.”
“What do you mean, four?!”
“Yeah, because when I was born, I saw the doctor first, then the two nurses, then Daddy, then you.”
“You started counting as soon as you were born?”
“No, silly, you showed me the video of the birth a little while ago, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right . . . But then I should be number five. Doctor, two nurses, Daddy, and me. I’m the fifth.”
“No, because Daddy’s not here anymore. I didn’t count him in time, and he ended up without a number.”
When I was about to try and explain to her the importance of giving her father a number and say that his number should probably be one, she vomited in the bed. I took her to the bathroom so she could get the rest out, and while I held her head, my hand on her forehead, I thought I was doing the same thing as her. I had counted almost everything from the day Chris died, but I hadn’t given him a number either. In my list of suspects, he should have been number one.
Before going down for dinner, after I finally got Olivia to sleep in the bed, after changing the comforter, I thought that I was wrong, that it wasn’t a question of giving Chris a number—not for her and not for me—it was a question of no longer numbering things.
There were bunk beds in my childhood bedroom, for when some friend came to spend the night, though I always thought they were for my little brother, who never came. I longed for a little brother with all my might, and I wanted a brother, if possible, instead of a sister. That was something that played a key part in Ruby’s conception. I had always missed not having someone else in my home. Someone to teach—maybe that’s why I ended up being a teacher—to share secrets with, toys, fights and small everyday adventures. I never understood why, with my mother being a traditional housewife, we weren’t a big brood like in The Sound of Music. When I was a girl, and I asked constantly why I didn’t have a little brother, my mother would smile at me and tell me it was because I had come out so perfect that there was no reason to keep trying. As an adult, I figured it had something to do with premature menopause, because when my period came when I was eleven, my mother didn’t have any pads in the house. It didn’t seem strange to me at the time, but it did as the months and years passed and I went on being the only one who used pads or tampons.
That You came out perfect got stuck, or better said, nailed, in my mind. I suppose that all my life I’ve been trying to be at the top, to be doubly good. To be worth two children. Now that girl with the impossible task of touching perfection twice over was committing a crime while lying in her bed surrounded by her daughters and her dog, all of them asleep. She was listening on her phone, with the headphones on, to another conversation between Mark and Julia.
JULIA: Here. Read.
Noise of paper shuffling. Pause.
MARK: Are you sure?
JULIA: No.
MARK: I’m really sorry about what I did.
JULIA: I’m not. The mere fact that you took the time to figure out the password to my laptop makes me happy now.
MARK: Your birthday. July 9, 1979. Too easy. You should change it to something a little more elaborate. Less obvious. For example, instead of 7979, you could put the year first: 7979.
Laughter.
JULIA: Where have you been?
MARK: What about you?
JULIA: You really liked what you read?
MARK: A lot.
Pause.
JULIA: Can we go on faking a little longer?
MARK: What?
JULIA: That we’re a reasonably happy and stable couple.
MARK: Now that everyone’s gone, there’s no need to.
JULIA: Yeah, there is a need.
Pause. Kissing.
Bodies falling into bed.
Moaning and panting.
I felt something between pride and disgust. Pride at being partly responsible for that truce. Disgust for having done what I had done, and for being jealous. In that instant, I decided I would never sleep with Mark again. That was the first of many times I made that promise.
I knew I was going to find my father in the living room, in his easy chair, sitting next to the drink cart in silence, alone, holding a thick glass with two fingers of whiskey neat. It was his time. Silence was probably one of the things he enjoyed the most. Sometimes when I was a girl and I would wake up from a nightmare, I would get out of bed, go downstairs, see my father sitting there beneath the tenuous light of the old floor lamp, his back to me, observing the darkness through the window without moving, and that was enough to calm me down and make me feel that everything was in its place, and I could go back to bed without exchanging a word with him. But that night, I needed a little more.
I sat on the sofa, curled up and covered myself with a patchwork wool blanket my mother had crocheted.
“Here.” My father passed me the glass of whiskey, like a doctor prescribing a medication, and you don’t ask what it is, you just take it, no questions asked. “I haven’t drunk from it yet.”
My father liked to feel he was in control, that he wasn’t giving in to anxiety or necessity. That he could have something as irresistible as that eighteen-year malt whiskey in front of him and be able to resist it. He was the most patient person I’d ever known. If not, he probably wouldn’t have been able to put up with my mother, who was a powder keg. Or for that reason precisely, in order to tolerate her, he needed to become a Zen master.
I waited for him to serve himself another glass. Then I toasted the air and I drank.
“You’re really distant, honey.”
“I’m not distant; I’m reserved. Like you.”
“That’s what I usually say so they’ll leave me alone when in reality I’m being distant. Like you . . . Remember when Jack the dog died?”
“Not too well, I was really small. How old was I, four?”
“That’s right. You were sad for many days. You didn’t even want to play with Jill because you were scared the same thing would happen to her.”
“Yeah, that rings a bell.”
“You know how you got over it?”
I shook my head.
“Painting. I gave you your first set of watercolors. You learned to use them without us really even telling you anything. You know what the first thing you painted was?”
“A portrait of Jack,” I remembered immediately. I started laughing. “Just a second, Dad: Are you comparing Chris to a dog? Are you asking me to give Olivia some watercolors so she can paint a portrait of her father?”
I said it without any malevolence, but my father didn’t seem to like me making light of the situation. In part because he always chose meticulously when to intervene in my issues.
“I’m not comparing Chris to Jack. I’m not saying Olivia needs watercolors. All I’m trying to tell you is that I think Olivia needs something that inspires her as much as painting did you. And that probably it’s something simple, something within arm’s reach. Give it to her, the way I gave you the watercolors.”
Then he took his first sip of whiskey and smiled at me, noticing my silent tears.