37

WE’D SET THE time for mid-afternoon, so that if they didn’t feed us anything, if the woman met us at the door and whispered, “I’m going to tell him you’re my cousin’s stepson,” and we were back on the road in eleven minutes, there would still be daylight for the trip back home.

“You called her?” I asked, as we turned south at the Hanover Inn onto a state road. It wasn’t really a question.

“I told you all that.” He had both hands on the wheel, concentrating like he was driving the Indy 500, not another car in sight. He’d worn a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled, and jeans. Long-lost son clothes.

“Tell me again.” I wasn’t too calm myself.

“I called her, Lucille, after I got her email. I told her I’d been born to Lucille Freeman, and gave her my birth date, which I’d done when I wrote. She asked me, ‘What name do you go by?” ’ And I told her Maarten. ‘All right,’ she said, and asked if I had a pen so she could give me directions to their house.”

I had nerves, wanting this for him in the worst way, but scared of the reception we might get. How could people let you go, and go on about their lives as if you’d never happened? I’d worn my pale southern tee over cropped pants, and my armpits were as damp as if I was back at another puppy trial, and I guess I was, in a way.

“That was Dartmouth back there, where I didn’t go.”

I laughed. “I didn’t either.”

“I mean, you know, I thought about it—.”

Fifteen miles down the two-lane road, he turned left on a street with a large brick corner house that had a FOR SALE sign in the yard. He checked his notes. “Six blocks from here on the right, it says.” He slowed the car to a crawl, creeping through intersections. As we got closer, he rubbed the top of his head, as if to make sure it was still there. “It’s the next block,” he said. “Whoa. I don’t know anything to say but ‘Hey, I’m your kid.’ That’s going to freak them out.”

“They know that, James. Don’t they?”

“I guess, yeah. Hell, I don’t know.” He stopped the car at a yellow house, studied the page of directions one more time. “This is it.” He stared at me in panic. “Janey.”

“What?”

“If I freeze up, help me out.”

“Sure,” I promised, not having any more idea than he what to say.

The woman who opened the door, small, neat, her brown hair graying, studied us a minute, then showed us in. “So you are James,” she said, making a small smile. “Yes, I can see that.”

“This is . . .” He turned, almost bumping into me.

“I’m Janey Daniels.” I held out my hand.

“A southern voice?” she asked.

“I’m from Carolina, South Carolina.”

“All right,” she said. She seemed quite reserved, quite contained, as if she did not expect things to be easy. “Come into the kitchen. I would like to tell you some of it before Owen comes home. Will you wait for refreshments? Do you need a bathroom?”

“We’re okay,” James said, and I nodded.

She waved us onto kitchen chairs in a sunny room with windows looking out on a backyard with three bird feeders. She stood, wearing a neat shirtwaist dress, pressing her palms together. “I had a youthful marriage to an abusive man. All right? Owen and I met; we were both teachers at that time. Not here, not in this state.” She glanced at James. “You know that.”

He nodded, and swallowed.

The woman, Lucille, continued, her voice low. “I got pregnant. If my husband had found out, I could never have got free. I had to leave before it was apparent, and hide out. He was the type of man, if he’d learned I was pregnant, would have become violent. Perhaps you’ve known others like that. He’d had a vasectomy, to ensure I had no reason for birth control.”

James seemed about to ask something, half rising in his chair, but at that moment the front door opened, and we heard a man’s voice. “Lu,” he called, “you in there?”

“I’m in the kitchen, Owen.” She waited, composed, pressing her lips together. When he came into the room, a tall man, he looked familiar, as if I’d seen him before. It took me a minute, while he crossed the room to kiss his wife, to take in the combed-back dark hair, the blue eyes.

“This is James Maarten,” she said to him. “And his friend Janey Daniels, who is from South Carolina.” To us, she explained that Owen put in time at the high school on Saturday afternoons, helping with student science projects.

“Maarten?” The man reached out his hand when James rose. “Well, I certainly can tell that without needing to be told. Now you’re too young to be one of my brother Reg’s boys; I expect you must be my Cousin Andy’s boy. Stand up here and let me see, I swear.”

And the resemblance between the two of them took my breath.

“Owen,” the woman said, “he’s our boy.”

The man flung his arms around James and a low crying sound came from his throat. “It’s him?” He held James out and looked at him, his eyes wet. “It’s the answer to a prayer. You’d be twenty-eight, isn’t that so? Sure, it is. I can tell you the day in March.” He wiped his eyes. “Lu, you must’ve fainted when you saw him at the door.”

She smiled slightly. “I’m not a fainter, Owen, but I have to admit it knocked the wind clear out of me, how he favors you.”

Owen seated us all at the table, and they served us homemade, cream-cheese frosted carrot cake and filtered decaf coffee. Although they asked if we’d like something else, it was clear the cake had been prepared just for us, as the kitchen was still warm and smelled of spices.

Owen kept looking at James as if he couldn’t yet believe his eyes. “I wanted to kill that man, her husband, that John Freeman. But Lu said if we gave up the baby, she could get her divorce. She and I had been together while she was married. You might as well know that. We’d found ourselves in love and didn’t use precautions, though now I see you here, I’m glad for our carelessness.”

James put down his fork, finding it hard to eat. “I can understand that, sir.”

“Tell me now, how was it you found us?”

James explained that the woman who raised him had given him their name, at the last. He looked away, and a sigh escaped him—maybe something about all those other years or maybe no longer holding his breath. “These days,” he said, as if he’d waited for the opportunity, “you can find people on the internet, if you spend some time on it.”

I felt weak as dishwater watching them. So the woman, Lucille, hadn’t told her husband this was their son showing up, not beforehand, not before she’d laid her eyes on James. What if he’d looked like a stranger instead?—but there was no point in going down that road.

“Should we call the kids?” the man asked.

“Owen, no, not just yet.” She put a hand on his arm, as if restraining him. “I think we should ask James about his feelings on that matter. He must know we had other children. Perhaps he is angry. Are you, James? Angry at us?”

The man waved that away. “Lu, he came and found us, didn’t he? That answers that.” He turned to James. “Am I right?”

“Right,” James answered. “That was a long time ago and everything.”

Lucille ran a hand over her cheek, then pressed her temple with two fingers. “We were young,” she said. “Those were hard times.”

Owen stood, his hands shaking a little. “I want to show him the family albums; when he sees me and my brothers, back in the old days, he’s going to think he’s looking at pictures of himself.”

After her husband had wiped his mouth, got up from the table and motioned for James to follow him, Lucille said to him, in a low voice, “Tell me one thing: was she good to you? Did you have a good life?”

James rose. “Sure, she was,” he said. “Norma was a businesswoman, and she had a brother who came around a lot, teaching me stuff like how to catch a ball, you know.”

“Yes.” Lucille closed her eyes briefly and I could see the vein in her temple.

The two men sat side by side on the sofa in the living room, a stack of photo albums in front of them on the coffee table. Every single Maarten in America must have been kin to Owen and must have had his picture made throwing horseshoes, playing touch football, the older men playing cribbage and dominoes, the younger ones in driveways shooting baskets or on the slopes skiing. There were occasional holiday shots of wives and baby Maartens.

Owen said, “We told the kids, that’s Brian and Kara, we told them from the start that we lost a baby before they came along. I don’t see the problem in telling them that we found him again, the truth of the way it happened. In a nutshell, at least.” He motioned for Lucille to sit, and she took my hand and led us to a pair of arm chairs facing the sofa.

Owen went on, “We’ll get them back here—Brian’s outside Boston with his family, and Kara, she’s the one not married yet, is working on a nursing degree in Worcester. Neither one took to teaching the way we did. We’ll get them here when the time is good for everybody and have a big reunion. And next year, I promise you, we’ll do it up right. We’ll celebrate your birthday in a proper way.” And Owen Maarten gave James, his eldest son, a cuff on the shoulder, and then hooked an arm around his neck.

I considered that it might not be just me who would have certain feelings about the prodigal son’s return. I wondered how Brian, who’d been the good son all along, and who probably looked like Lucille’s side of the family and so not at all like a Maarten, would take the news of his new brother. And if Kara, the daughter, who hadn’t rushed to marry, perhaps because of the six photo albums showing grandfathers and uncles and brothers and nephews and boy cousins and grandsons, might refuse to meet another male Maarten. Mostly, I wondered how Lucille—whose control I couldn’t help but admire—felt in her heart about having her decision of twenty-eight years ago walk through her door on a Saturday in May.

James, sitting next to his dad, beaming and dazed, looked as if he’d just come downstairs on Christmas morning. As if he’d just discovered there really was a Santa Claus. I had to look away to get my mind around it. Here I’d been aching for him to have a family of his own, not realizing that once he did, he might never look back. I could have gotten in the car and headed home. He’d never have noticed.