On Saturday, I’m up at six, brewing coffee in a stainless steel percolator, standing at the gas stove, watching coffee gurgle and spit into the glass top. I can’t sleep. In our penthouse apartment, we hear very little street noise, so I can’t figure out the difference. But I had lain in bed, my leg jittering, shifting one way, then the other, before I finally snuck out and downstairs.
Arms snake around my middle and I jump. “You scared me.” I smile, my head tipped down, and Henry plants a feather kiss on the back of my neck.
“Ah, sorry,” he whispers in the dark kitchen. “Don’t be mad, but I have to drive back for a few hours.”
“Today?” I step forward, putting distance between us.
“I’m sorry. It’s going to be overcast, but not rainy. You could hike out back, there are trails. They’re not all ours, but no one cares. Just don’t get killed by a hunter.”
“What season is it?” I wonder.
He rubs his jaw. “Spring turkey maybe? I’m not sure. I generally hunt in the fall. Spring is too busy with work.”
I don’t understand Henry’s work or his hunting. It’s completely possible, likely even, that I don’t understand Henry. I pour us two cups of coffee in pottery mugs, but as I turn to retrieve the cream and sugar (for mine only, Henry drinks his coffee black), Henry’s eyebrows pucker, his mouth twisting apologetically.
“You have to go now,” I say, flat as stone, and sigh. I pick up his mug and pour the coffee into the carafe. He drops a kiss on my lips and lingers there, his hand pressed between my shoulder blades.
“Don’t pout. I’ll be back right after lunch. I just have to address some unexpected . . . issues.”
“Issues with what?” I’m curious now. What are the issues on a Saturday if you work on Wall Street?
“Zoe, do you know how boring my job is?”
“No, tell me. Put me back to sleep, and I’ll sleep till you come back.”
He laughs and the sound swallows me. I love it and miss it all at once. “Okay, fine. So Japan’s market is not actually closed on Saturday, and we have a security issue with the agency bonds.”
“Okay, okay. I feel like you just made all that up. Go.” I give his arm a gentle shove and he laughs again. I think it’s possible that this house, this town, has let out a new Henry, like he’s been unzipped. I picture him stepping out of his own skin, clapping his hands together, looking around. Okay, what do we do first? Fish? Hunt? Hike?
He kisses his fingertips and touches them to the crown of my head and I hear his shoes clack on the hardwood floor and the door click shut, and just like that I’m alone. I’m not necessarily afraid, but I have a pit settled right under my breastbone. I’m at loose ends. It’s hard to have a whole day in front of you and nothing to put in it, nothing to pencil in, no phone calls to make. I have this feeling often but generally I can fill my time by going out, taking in Manhattan. In New York, you’re never bored. I look at the clock above the sink. Six-thirty.
I part the curtains. Out leads to a forest in the back and a copse of trees in the front, then a quarter mile away, a road. I take my mug and from the back of the easy chair in the living room, I grab a sweater that I assume must be Henry’s but I don’t recognize it. It’s heavy and cable knit, its sleeves are long, with big wooden buttons. I wrap it around myself tightly and open the back door.
The deck is wide and spans the back of the house, looking out to a sea of black and green. In the corner is a single rocker, made of rough-hewn logs, a deliberate attempt to look woodsy. I curl into it, bring my knees to my chest and cup my coffee. It’s cold for April, I doubt today will be a day for exploring the outdoors. It smells like wet pine.
I’m reminded of Lake Tahoe. Evelyn had nabbed a cabin once, a gift from a friend. She had a million gifts from friends. She didn’t have any money, but always said she had a lot of friends, and some of those friends had money. She’d come home with steaks that she’d gotten as a gift, or wine she “found.” All trinkets that people gave her, she claimed. She’d explain it away with a wave of her hand, and a soft tinkling laugh. You can get anything you want if you’re nice to people. People like to do things for people, it’s so easy to be kind. She dragged me to Tahoe, where the rich vacation, she’d said. We’ll be queens for a week! My seventeen-year-old heart had nearly broken at the idea of a week without television and very little phone communication. I dragged my feet, I huffed and puffed, whatever-ing my way through half the trip. Sneaking calls to friends when Evelyn wasn’t looking.
Evelyn never faltered, her grin bright, coral lipstick smudged on her two front teeth when she smiled, which was all the time. It’s easy to glorify the dead and say things like that: Oh, they glowed, they were always happy. With Evelyn, it was true. Any attitude I threw at her that week, it’s like she caught it all with Jergens-soft hands and never stumbled.
She unmoored the boat, a ramshackle rowboat that I insisted would sink (So what, she’d scoffed. We can swim, right?) and paddled us out into the middle of the lake with one oar, one side, then the other. Her cheeks had grown bright red and I thought she might pass out. I’d rolled my eyes and took the paddle from her, Don’t die, Ev. And her arms had looked so thin. It was the first time I’d realized she’d grown so incredibly tiny.
“God, Evelyn, you’re a stick. Eat a sandwich or something.” I knew I was being mean, but it would be so embarrassing to have an anorexic mother, like one of the fainting cheerleaders at school. She leaned over the side of the boat and swatted a handful of water at me. I took the oar and with a sweeping motion, drenched her. She laughed, but it sounded like it came from inside a barrel.
She looked away and when she looked back, she bared her teeth. “Do I have lipstick?” For the first time, she didn’t. We’d made it back to the cabin, where we blasted Billie Holiday and simmered vodka sauce, and she let me drink wine until the edges of the room blurred. She got me to talk about boys, or who I thought were men at the time. Don’t be afraid of sex. Be afraid of love, but not sex. Love can swallow you whole, consume you, change you, but sex? Sex is just for a night. And I had no idea what she meant.
Later, I heard her on the phone in her room. I stood in the hallway of that cabin and I swore she was crying. I pushed against her bedroom door but couldn’t hear the words.
She was sick then, and it was only after she’d died that I realized she’d known it.
A thought nags at me, one I’d asked Mick, filled with hate and anger. If she had so many friends, where were they? When she died, where’d they go? No one called. No one offered to pay for a simple cremation. I’d stayed in her apartment for weeks after her death, that foggy milky time before I ran, but never once did the phone ring unless a bill collector was on the other end. I search my memory for who Evelyn said was the cabin’s rightful owner and come up empty.
The sky has lightened to a dove gray and the rain mists all around, not falling in drops from the sky, but like it’s raining from the bottom up. My coffee cup is empty and I’m cold. I venture inside and look at the clock. It’s not even nine. I wander upstairs halfheartedly, to find my book buried under sweaters and jeans in my overnight bag. All the doors in the hall are closed and I nudge open the one next to our bedroom. The bed in the center is made simply and a hand-stitched brightly colored patchwork quilt adorns the bed. The pillows are made from old jeans pockets and the walls are adorned with red wooden stars, an upmarket Americana theme. I am sure of two things: Penny decorated this room, not Henry. And nothing has changed since Tara died. Upon closer inspection, the bureau top contains bottles of women’s perfume, turned yellow in the sun. The nightstand holds a mystery book with page 137 folded down at the corner. There are blue peep-toe bedroom slippers (Chanel makes bedroom slippers?) peeking out from under the bed. She could have been here yesterday. Then there is the dawning realization that there’s not the slightest layer of dust on anything. It’s not as though this room has been closed off, never to be entered again. Someone cleans this room. Rearranges the perfume bottles, just so. Moves the slippers to vacuum, and replaces them so that their toes line up perfectly underneath the dust ruffle.
My arms are pricked with gooseflesh. I back out of the room and close the door, my hand paused over the doorknob. I am at once anxious to leave and glued to the spot. My desire to know more about the woman Henry was married to battles some unknown restraining force. I try to pinpoint it and can’t, but suspect I fear measuring up. It’s hard enough to keep pace with an ex-wife when the relationship was permitted to slide downward on its own. But I suspect Tara was ripped from Henry’s arms at the peak of his adoration, and yet I still bumble along somewhere in the middle. It’s a hard thing to know, that you’re second.
I leave the room and turn to examine the other two rooms. The door at the end of the hall is Henry’s office. The door between what I’ve so quickly come to think of as Tara’s room and his office is padlocked. Padlocked? I halfheartedly give the doorknob a good jimmy but unsurprisingly, it doesn’t move. I do the same to Henry’s office and am startled to realize that that door doesn’t open either. It’s been locked from the inside.
My phone buzzes from inside my pocket and a text from Cash blinks. Give me a call ASAP. I sent you an email. I check my service and see that there’s no data—only one unsteady bar of network service. When I open the web browser, the loading circle spins around and around. I jam my phone back in my pocket. Stupid in-the-middle-of-nowhere-land. The house doesn’t have wireless but I vaguely remember Henry assuring me his office computer had Internet access. I jimmy the handle again for good measure. I pull my phone back out and dial Henry. It rings four times and goes to voicemail. Henry, it’s me. Where’s the key to your office door and why is it locked? I want to use the Internet. Call me back.
There’s only one reason that Cash would be calling me, and it has to do with my birth mother. I’m sure he’s found something, and my heart pounds. I clatter down the steps and dig through the kitchen drawers until I unearth a screwdriver.
Back upstairs, I stick the screwdriver through the old-fashioned keyhole and wiggle it around until I feel it catch the lock. It takes me a few minutes but after the third try, the mechanism clicks backward and the handle gives. I pause, with my hand on the door. I’ve never been in Henry’s office before, and now I’m doing this without his permission.
The office smells of the one leather chair, with a faint overtone of sawdust. Henry’s desk is a simple Quaker-style table with a single middle drawer—so unlike his offices at home and work, which boast rich mahogany and more drawers and cabinets than he could possibly fill. The house was his family’s, and I wonder if this was his father’s office. Later, I’ll ask him, when he’s properly plied with whiskey. He’s said very little about his parents and I scan the room for signs of them. Nothing.
I pull out the chair and sit, hitting the power button on the computer. The desktop is a surprisingly old Mac, nothing at all like the sleek silver laptops Henry carts around, always the newest, smallest model. I briefly wonder if the office is even his. I wonder what Tara did for a living.
I’m surprised but grateful that the computer doesn’t prompt me for a password to log on. I click the Internet icon and it takes a minute, but it chugs to my email site. I call Cash back.
“Hi, it’s me. I’m at a computer, what’s up?” I’m breathless and I realize my fingers are shaking.
“Hey, hold on.” He covers the phone and I hear voices and then scratching like he’s got the phone in his pocket. After a minute or so, he comes back. “Okay. Did you check your email?”
“Yeah, it’s open.”
“I sent you a link. Click on it.”
I do and it brings me to a genealogy-tracing website with Evelyn at the top of the page. Her picture knocks the wind out of me. Her smile is bright. She looks so young. I don’t realize I’m crying until a tear hits my forearm. I sniff.
“Are you okay?” Cash asks. I realize I’ve been quiet too long.
“I’m fine. But what is this? How do they have her picture?”
“She must have made a profile. When was this picture from?”
I study it and realize that based on her weight, she was probably already sick, maybe in her first remission. “Maybe six or seven years ago? She was already sick.”
“Okay, scroll down until you see the name Janice Reeves.” He’s clicking in the background. I do what he says. “Do you see the names under her?”
“Gail, Belinda, Caroline,” I say out loud. Then again, “Caroline.”
“It’s a hunch, not a fact yet. I wanted your feedback.” He talks quickly, the words piling out in a rush.
“But the name on the birth certificate is Carolyn. With a y. And the last name is . . . Seever.”
“Remember how I said no one makes up a truly fake name?”
I can’t breathe. “Cash . . . is this really her? Were they cousins?”
“I don’t know. There’s no picture. You have to create a profile to get a picture. But Zoe, I sent you another link.”
I click back to my email and click on the second link. I don’t prepare myself, I don’t think about it, I just click. And when the page opens, the room tilts.
“Oh my God, Cash.” It’s a Facebook page, a woman staring defiantly into the camera, with a twisted mouth, a coy smile, daring the world. Her eyes are twinkling, that pale, translucent blue that I recognize. Her hair is dark and unruly in spots, glossy in others, and I bet she has a hell of a time finding good product for it. Her nose is straight with an identifiable ridge and her left eyebrow shoots up noticeably higher than her right.
Like mine. It’s all like mine. It’s my face. Aged twenty years.
“It’s her. You’ve found her.”
• • •
For the rest of the day, I keep going back to the office and staring at the computer, at that picture. That sassy, smart-aleck face, the expression I recognize but maybe haven’t seen in a long time. I have the vague recollection of making that exact face for a picture during a night out with Lydia. In the bathroom mirror, I try to imitate it, pulling my mouth to the side, arching my already asymmetrical eyebrow. Back in the office, I download the picture and email it to myself.
I stretch and look around the room. On the far wall there are built-in bookcases, floor to ceiling with books: old, new, hardcover, paperback, thrillers, and mysteries; Ruth Rendell, Dennis Lehane, Ross Macdonald, Arthur Conan Doyle. I run my finger along the shelving and wonder if they, too, are Tara’s. The eye-level shelf holds knickknacks and picture frames, and I realize with a start that there’s a simple, black frame that holds a picture of me.
I’m sitting on a rock, overlooking a stream, wearing a violet shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. I remember that day, the hike at Breakneck Ridge. It was a strenuous hike, and I was panting by the top, hot and out of breath, out of shape. A breeze was lifting my hair while Henry snapped pictures with his Canon at the summit. I remember him finding the spot for the photo, off the main trail, to a sketchy side path, overgrown and treacherous. Claiming he wanted pictures of me for his offices, at work and in our apartment, something he could look at. I protested, pushing my bangs off my forehead, my hands on my flaming cheeks. It was September, the leaves still green, the air still humid.
I remember him helping me down from the steep rock, the way he pushed me against the closest tree without saying a word, pawing at my clothes, wanting me, his hands everywhere, his mouth hot and gasping. I remember the way the bark scratched my bare back as he thrust, only twice, before he fell against me, his body limp and panting. I remember being surprised by the need, the sharp, tangible desperation, as he whispered “I’m sorry” into my hair.
I had teased him about it later, and he growled at me, “It’s only because you’re so goddamn beautiful.” He’d pulled me against him so I could feel how he was still ready, and he softly bit my neck.
I take the picture over to the desk and hold it up next to the picture on the computer. If not for the age difference, we could be twins.