“I don’t understand,” I say. “You’ve met her? Where is she?” I whip my head around, like she’s going to magically appear in the living room. My hands are shaking and a pulse throbs in my neck.
“I think she lives in Brooklyn with her parents. She was here, oh maybe three or four years ago? She knows about you. I told her, but she had already known. Her adoptive parents . . .” Caroline splays her hands outward and lets me fill in the missing information. Evelyn didn’t know everything. Why?
She takes a deep breath and stands up. “Her name is Joan, but hold on, I’ll get you all her information.” She scuttles out of the room on the balls of her feet, nervous. She’s had control of the conversation up to this point, and now she’s anxious. Impatient. She returns not more than a minute later holding an index card. She pauses in front of me, running her fingernail over the words, before she hands it over. “We didn’t keep in touch. It’s all the information I have.”
Her eyes are huge against her pale face. She’s beautiful, my mother. I look like her but in small ways. In person, our differences are obvious. I’m a cartoonish version of her, I’m drawn with a Magic Marker, deep confident lines. She’s sketched with an artist’s touch: feathery strokes and skittish shadows.
“She’s like me, nervous. I take medication, do you? Is that genetic? It was interesting, her mannerisms are so much like mine. You . . . not as much.” She studies me and I duck my head, studying the index card, the words sliding around as my vision blurs.
My sister’s name and address in Brooklyn are scribbled with disjointed handwriting, slanting one way then the other. Joan Bascio. I look up at Caroline questioningly.
“You can keep that. I copied it.” She looks over at the chair, like she can’t decide if she should sit or if the conversation is over, and she ends up half-hovering over me, stooped and nervous, like a Bryant Park pigeon.
“If Evelyn had known, she would have taken us both,” I say confidently. “Why didn’t she know?” Evelyn was the most maternal person I’d ever met. Her need to nurture was a constant presence in my childhood, every twisted ankle tended to as though she were a wartime nurse. Every cut and scrape thoroughly scoured with alcohol. Despite being woefully unprepared and hopelessly scattered, she’d make up for her lack of preparedness in fret time alone. Her concern was never limited to me. Any lone wolf, lost child, homeless puppy. She was a natural adopter of all misplaced things.
When I was sixteen, I broke my wrist, just a hairline fracture. I’d been helping her clean the faculty office buildings at Berkeley after school, one of her many patchwork jobs. We’d take the train down from Richmond to the UC campus, moving in and out of the administration building, quiet as mice. I’d stood on a chair, trying to dust a light fixture hanging from a conference room ceiling. When I fell, she screamed louder than I did.
In the emergency room, I alternated between reading and daydreaming, trying to distract myself from the pain. Evelyn was quiet, mostly concerned with the bill, her mind running constant stream of co-pays and deductibles against account balances and paychecks. She processed numbers like a ticker tape. A young girl, about my age, paced along the far wall. Hours later, with my arm set and casted in a thick, white plaster, I emerged through the big double doors back into the lobby and the girl was still there. She sat on the floor, her back pushed up against the wall, mascara streaks down her face. Evelyn squared her jaw, marched right over to her, and after a short, whispered conversation, brought the girl over. This is Rachel and she’s coming home with us for dinner. She said it so matter-of-factly, neither Rachel nor I dared argue, despite the fact Evelyn and I had eaten hot dogs and baked beans three nights running. Eat what? I didn’t have the gall to ask. We ate whatever meat Evelyn could find, white and mysterious in the freezer, chopped up with canned vegetables, and then she drove Rachel home. When she returned, her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but she never explained why. When I pressed her, she just hugged me and called us lucky. This, mystery meat surprise and all. We’re lucky.
The idea that Evelyn could know about another baby and reject her? Impossible.
“She had no idea there were two babies. She wouldn’t have taken you. She couldn’t afford both of you, there was no way. If she would have known, she would have backed out.” She runs her palm along her forehead, as though massaging a headache. “It sounds awful now, I know. At the time, it was just . . . survival. The whole thing was a mess, but I was in too bad a place to care. Mother found someone else interested in adoption and she took your sister. It was all done privately, through an agency.” She finally sits on the edge of the chair, crossing her legs, all knobby knees and pencil calves. “Mother kept tabs on both of you for a long time. Then Joan came to see me.”
The implication is obvious: Caroline did not keep tabs on us.
“So everyone knew I had a sister but Evelyn and me? She knows. You knew. We’re the only ones who didn’t know?” I set my water down on the glass-top end table with force.
“Well, you can’t understand unless you’re in the situation. Then later, I just think Joan wanted to find you in her own time. Or maybe she tried and couldn’t?”
Yes, that made sense. Hilary Lawlor became Zoe Swanson, then Whittaker. An amateur sleuth might lose that link.
“But you didn’t try? To help her, I mean?”
“She didn’t ask. I gave her what I knew, which wasn’t much.” She presses the pad of her thumb along the arm of the chair, avoiding my gaze.
I say nothing.
“Zoe, there’s something you should know.” She reaches around me, parting the window curtain and for a second I can smell her shampoo, her shower soap. She’s so close I could lean over and kiss her cheek. “I shouldn’t tell you this but someone called me.” Her voice is low. “I think it was a man, it was hard to tell. But someone is watching me, or maybe you.” She touched me then, her hand cold on my shoulder. “He threatened me. He said to leave you alone.”
“Who was it? Who called you?” I’m so confused.
She holds her hands out, palms up, and shakes her head. I don’t know. “I have a child. He’s six. I’m forty-six. He wasn’t supposed to be able to be born. I tried for years, to no avail, and honestly believed I was being punished for what I did. To you. To your sister. For my abandonment, my selfishness.”
I become fixated on her words: I have a child. My mind snaps back at her, sarcastically. No, you have three children. But then again, I don’t think of her as my mother, so why would she think of me as her child? Because, because, shouldn’t you always remember your children? I never had the luxury of forgetting a woman I’ve never met, a vague figure of a mother, mostly invented or derived from old, yellowed Polaroids of Evelyn’s old friends that I found in her closet. I flipped through them like I was shuffling cards, greedily pawing, until the women’s faces were smudged with tiny fingerprints. I always wondered if one of them was my real mother. I could never bring myself to ask.
Caroline had easily forgotten us. The evidence is right here: I have a child.
I realize then, her darting eyes, her fidgeting, her reluctance to talk to me. She was afraid. But also maybe, just maybe, relieved. The decision was made for her, who can blame her now?
I stand up. “But you did. You did talk to me. Why?” I swallow. Out of nowhere, I want to cry, I feel the bite in the back of my throat.
“I owe you. I owe . . . Evelyn, I guess? Joan? I’m sorry, whether you believe that or not.” She rocks back on her heels.
“I have to go.” I think of Cash in the car. The faceless, nameless man who threatened Caroline. Later, the way she’d surely be watching out her curtains all night. I hitch my purse high on my shoulder and it swings back, knocking over the half-full water glass. Water edges down the sides of the table, and on the floor, creeping toward the rich, leathery sofa. I suppress the urge to apologize. Caroline’s eyes dart from me, to the puddle, and back, and I know she is struggling over which is a larger disaster.
She stands woodenly in the living room, eyes closed. “Zoe,” she says softly.
I stand there expectantly, stupidly still hoping for something, a hug, an apology, a gesture of kindness. Friendship.
“Don’t ever come back.”
I climb into the passenger side and slam the door. Cash had reclined his seat and is startled awake. He shakes the sleep from his eyes.
“Already? What happened?” He adjusts the backrest upright.
“She was threatened.” I blurt. He cocks his head, confused. I take the card with Joan’s information and flash it in front of his face. “Also, I have a sister.”
If he’s shocked, it doesn’t register on his face. He just nods.
“Did you know?” I demand.
He shakes his head. “No, Zoe. I swear. I had no idea.” He turns the key in the ignition and backs slowly out of the driveway. He keeps his eyes forward, trained on the road. “What happened with Caroline?”
“She’s a bitch.” I say it forcefully, partly because I’m tugging on the seat belt and it finally breaks loose, but the curse slips out easily and it feels good. Even as I say it, I know it’s not completely true. It occurs to me then—even without the threatening phone call, would the outcome have been any different? She didn’t stay in touch with Joan. “She has a new life. I don’t fit in—you were right. Is that what you want to hear?” I huff and sit back, crossing my ankles.
“No. Zoe, I’d hoped I was wrong. You know that, right? What did she say?” He shifts uncomfortably as he puts the car in drive.
“Cash, she got a phone call. Someone threatened her if she talked to me.” We’re stopped at an intersection and he turns to look at me, his mouth hanging open.
“What? Who called her?”
“I have no idea.” I shrug. “Here’s the weird part. My sister, Joan? She knows I exist. She found my mother, our mother, three years ago! Evelyn had no idea that Joan even existed. The whole thing is fucked up.”
“I’ll admit that’s odd.” He rubs his chin. “Will you look for her? Joan?”
“I don’t have to look for her. Carolyn gave me her address.” I wave the card in front of him again, blocking his view of the road. He swats it away.
“So what do you want to do now?”
I think about it for a minute. “Honestly? I want to find Joan. I want to meet her.”
“Right now?” He gives me a sideways smile. My anger is like an ocean swell, forceful and overwhelming one minute, receding to calm the next. I watch as we turn the corner, off Caroline’s street, and her house fades from view. I feel a small prick of fear: Who called her? Then a crazy idea; could she be lying?
“Yeah. Would that be awful? To just show up?” I wonder out loud.
“Maybe. I think you should call first.”
I let that sit, thinking about what I care more about. My sister’s comfort level or my increasingly desperate need to see her. We drive in silence, merge onto I-84 W, and just like that—my mother is gone. Whatever tether I’ve had is dissolved and I poke at this feeling, repeat the words in my mind. I explore it, the way your tongue finds a hole in your mouth where a tooth once was. I can’t decide if I care. A small part of me worries for her, that whispered threat, for her and her little boy and her accountant husband.
“Thanks for coming with me. This has to be so boring for you.” I avoid his gaze by staring at the trees that whiz past the passenger side window.
“Are you kidding? I’ve said this before, but what I cover daily? It’s nothing that gets your blood pumping. This is interesting, Zoe. Reminds me of my Texas days.” He taps the steering wheel. “Who called Caroline? Why would anyone threaten her?”
I think of the break-in. The careening car. The overwhelming feeling that I’m on some kind of runaway train. That my whole life—the penthouse apartment, the perfect marriage, the money and security—is about to come crashing down around me. I’ve been too complacent, which never goes unpunished. It’s all been too lucky, too happenstance. Something is going on, buzzing just under the surface, and I can’t figure it out.
“Do you wonder why she hasn’t called you?” he asks, evenly.
“Who, Joan? She must have her reasons,” I say a tad snappily, trying to figure out what those reasons might be. “Maybe she has a family, or a crappy relationship, or in general, a busy life. Maybe she’s an ad executive, or she works nights trying to make ends meet. Who knows? There could be a thousand reasons. People typically believe they have all the time in the world to accomplish things. There are a lot of theoretical ‘somedays.’”
“That’s true.” He raises his eyebrow in my direction.
“You don’t believe it,” I say, but he just shrugs.
“Who called Caroline?” He comes back to that. My head pounds; I’m so tired. Joan and Caroline and some whispered threatening phone call. It’s all too much.
I study his profile—his long, straight nose, his clear intelligent green eyes with a compassionate twinkle, his skin, rough and uneven, presumably from too many days in the hot Texas sun investigating the newest political scandal.
“I know nothing about you,” I say, realizing that it’s true.
“You’ve never asked,” Cash says with a sideways smile and a quick flicker of a glance. I feel my cheeks flush. He’s right; I haven’t.
“Our friendship started because you were writing a story on me. It’s not really conducive to a two-way conversation.” I’m justifying myself. Our friendship, if you can call it that, has been shamefully focused on me.
He laughs. “Touché. So, ask away. I’ll answer.”
“How did you end up back on the East Coast?”
He shifts in his seat and cocks his head. “Go right for the hard stuff, eh?”
“Is it? I thought that was a softball.” I smile.
“Yeah, well, ah, you didn’t know. So I was engaged. Her name was Mary. We met at an Astros game, actually Game Five of the NLCS in 2005.” He coughs and shifts in the driver’s seat. “I was sitting behind her, and we were all standing and jumping around because Berkman had just hit a home run. And some jerk knocked into me, spilling my beer all down her back. She turned around and took one look at me, holding an empty beer cup, and threw her daiquiri in my face. Who drinks a daiquiri at a baseball game? I think I said that. I bought her another one as a peace offering.” As he tells the story, he gets a funny, faraway look and I think of all the ways Cash has held himself at arm’s length. Although I’m married, I feel certain it wouldn’t be different if I wasn’t.
“I’ve never been to a baseball game.”
“Never? You’ve lived in New York for how long and you’ve never gone to a Mets or Yankees game? That’s, like, un-American.”
“I know. I guess, just it wasn’t Lydia’s thing, and it’s certainly not Henry’s thing. I think his firm has had events at Yankee Stadium, but we haven’t gone.” I flick my fingertips in his direction. “I didn’t mean to hijack the conversation. Keep going. This Mary, she liked your daiquiri, then?”
“Oh, sure. Who wouldn’t?” He winks at me, and I laugh. “So, I got to plead my case, that it wasn’t my fault, ruffians and all that. She believed me, I guess. I saw her later at a bar outside the stadium and bought her another daiquiri. We met for dinner the following Saturday. She was . . .”
I give Cash his reverent moment. Beautiful? Amazing? Luminous?
“Bat-shit crazy. That’s what she was. She was a lawyer, an attack dog in the courtroom. She got an offer from a New York law firm after killing them in an insurance case. She drove a hard bargain and walked away a partner and a rich woman. I followed her here. I was a journalist. There had to be a ton of work in New York, right? I was working freelance but she didn’t think I had a lot of ambition and suggested the Post as a way to be more structured with my life. A real job, she called it.”
“Huh,” is all I can think to say.
“Yeah. Huh. But I did. And we had a spacious high-rise on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. She worked long hours, so I started working long hours. I proposed to her, to fix it, which is just about the dumbest thing a person can do. She said yes, because, well, I don’t know why. I surprised her at work one night to find her screwing one of the partners in her office. Wouldn’t you lock the door?” He offers a quick glance over. “I’d lock the door. I mean, c’mon.”
“Ouch.”
He sighed. “So I moved out and haven’t spoken to her since. Oh!” He snaps his fingers like he just remembered something. “That’s a lie. I covered a wedding a few years ago, and she was there as a guest. With him. She married that guy. She was all tucked and lifted, her face was a thick cake of makeup. She was like an ice sculpture of Mary. When I said I still worked at the Post, she laughed.”
“What did you say?” I ask, incredulous.
“I asked her if she still fucked her husband in her office. He was standing right there and by the look on his face, I could tell that answer was no.”
I laughed. “So you’re not still hung up on her?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “No, not hung up on her. She was the only woman I was ever engaged to, so sometimes I wonder. Plus, she was such a loose cannon. I find myself sabotaging relationships with other women, that’s all. They’re all so normal. Am I self-destructive? My mother thinks so.”
“Maybe a little bit.” It feels so nice to swing the camera around and focus on someone else’s problems.
“Well, self-destruction seems to be something we have in common.” He turns the radio on, but to a low volume. Something classical. More surprises. “How did you end up on the East Coast?”
The question is tangled up in the things I cannot say. I think of how to be honest, truthful, and not give away all my secrets. For me, the basest act is also the most admissible. Evelyn.
“I was in college. I was in a bad place.” I trace swirl patterns with my fingertip on the cold windowpane. “My adoptive mother, Evelyn . . . she died. I was depressed and too poor to take care of her so I . . . ran away.”
“She was sick?”
“She had cancer.” I try to avoid saying it, that big looming pit of blackness in the corner of my mind. The one that I skirt around with euphemisms and niceties like common burial and state-funded, when I really mean abandoned. Unloved. “So New York was an escape for me. I saw an opening at La Fleur d’Elise and started working there as a glorified custodian. I worked on design at night. Then . . . I met Henry.” My voice drops on the Henry. “The thing is, I left my mother.” I square my shoulders and stare at Cash’s profile, willing him to pass judgment. I see nothing, not a flicker of understanding, even. “In the morgue. I couldn’t afford to bury her. I left her.”
I see comprehension dawning in his eyes. He reaches out, touches my hand. “Are you that same person?”
“No. I was a mess then, running from myself. From other people. I’m only a slightly more put together mess now.” I pat my running nose with a napkin I find in the glovebox.
“Have you tried to go back? Find out . . . what the county did? I can do that for you. You could have a memorial. Have closure.”
“No. I can’t.” I shake my head vehemently. “They did a state-funded burial. That’s what they give to people who are abandoned. The only people who are abandoned in death are those who die unloved. I . . .” I can’t finish my sentence. I can’t even finish the thought, except I push. My brain pushes past the whooshing in my ears and the whir of the tires on the road and the awareness of my body and I think the thought I’ve avoided since I left San Francisco five years ago. “The last thing I ever did to Evelyn was tell her that she was unloved.”
The words themselves don’t feel so terrible out there, clunked out on the console between us. Cash covers my hand with his, and his eyes are so filled with compassion that I think I might break, right there in that shitty car on I-84. I gaze out onto the interstate in front of us, a large, flat expanse of nothingness with no cars and no people. It’s all so lonely.
I depress the window button and feel the warm air hit my face. I take some deep breaths. I’ve said the worst things about myself to someone who seems to care about me and I’m still here. My hands are trembling and I shove them under my thighs, my diamond digging into my skin.
Cash reaches over, taps my shoulder. “Okay?”
I nod awkwardly. I feel like someone who has impulsively confessed something horrible on a crashing plane that ends up righting itself only minutes later. I cough. “Yeah. I want to find out information on Joan. How can I do that?”
“Do you have a computer?” he asks. I give him a duh look and he laughs. “If you give me fifteen minutes and decent Wi-Fi, I can find out pretty much anything.”
I shrug. “Okay, let’s go. But I’m taking advantage of Henry being gone and ordering Chinese for dinner. He generally considers all takeout to be the lowest form of food, barely edible.”
“Well, that’s a real shame. I happen to love chicken and broccoli.”
• • •
We order takeout and sit on a blanket on the living room floor, surrounded by foil and cardboard containers, the sauce oozing out of the corners. I eat until I could burst and we chat about the city, being transplants, and what things were hardest to get used to.
“The speed of everything,” Cash said without thinking. “Everyone walks fast, the subways are fast, the taxis are fast. And yet, it can still take an hour to cross a one-mile island. Why? It used to be frustrating. About eighteen months here, I stopped trying to figure it out.”
“Yes! For me, the hardest part was the massive amounts of people. I come from a city but San Francisco has nothing on New York in terms of sheer number of bodies. But no one looks at each other. In California, people are nice.” I pour us both a glass of wine in the supplied paper cups. “I met Lydia and it got easier. I had a ready-made band of misfits.”
“Well, it was easier for me at first, then lonely later. I have friends now, guys at the paper or from the gym.”
“What about girlfriends now?” I blurt.
He shrugs and leans back against the easy chair behind him. “I do okay.” He rubs his hand across his jaw and gives me a sideways grin. I briefly think of Henry—he would die if he saw us eating in here. The rug cost $5,000. To cover the silence, I reach into the greasy bag and pull out a fortune cookie. I crack it open, the crumbs dusting down to my legs, on to the blanket. I pull out the little folded rectangle of paper. “‘In case of fire, keep calm, pay bill, and run,’” I read. “What does that even mean?”
“I like how they tell you to pay the bill first, though.” He stretches his legs out and grabs a cookie. “Here’s one. ‘It never pays to kick a skunk.’ Honestly, these are the weirdest fortune cookies I’ve ever seen.”
“Kick a skunk? Oh my God, that’s ridiculous. Okay, here’s one.” I unfold another little paper and drop it. We both reach for it and his hand accidentally grabs mine. I pull it away. “‘The greatest risk is not taking one.’”
We both ponder that one. Cash smiles. “I guess we should get a move on our search for Joan, then?”
I laugh as he pulls the last cookie from the bag, cracks it open, and unfolds the fortune. His smile falters.
“What? Read it.”
“Ah, Zoe. ‘You are extraordinarily beautiful.’”
“What?” The flush creeps up my neck and my cheeks grow warm. I clutch the collar of my shirt.
“That’s what it says, look.” He hands it to me. He’s right. You are extraordinarily beautiful. My pulse thumps under my thumb. I feel it then, his crush on me. We don’t know each other enough for it to be any more than that but I’ve been abusing his friendship, pretending the undercurrent wasn’t there. Why else does a man go to such lengths for a woman, driving her a hundred miles in one day?
“Cash, I—”
“Did you hear that?” Cash whispers. He holds up his hand, and then I do hear it. A single bang coming from the kitchen fire exit. All penthouses in New York must have a secondary exit—it’s part of the fire code. The door back there is locked with a key, not a card the way the front door is, and it’s rarely used. The only key that I know of is in the kitchen drawer.
I stand up, all wine-fueled courage, and tiptoe toward the kitchen. The room is dark and light filters in from underneath the emergency door. The light in that hallway is bluish fluorescent and gives the kitchen an eerie glow. I scoot along the cabinets, my back against the countertop. Underneath the door, I can make out the shadow of two feet. I can’t breathe, my heart pounds. We have got to get out of here.
I’m staring at the door, my feet rooted to the marble floor in terror, when the door handle jiggles.
I back up and crash into one of the metal kitchen stools. The door handle stops moving.
“Henry. Is that you?” I yell at the door, my words dribble out much weaker than I intended. Cash grabs my arm. I hadn’t even heard him come into the kitchen.
“Zoe, we should get out of here.” He’s pulling me out through the front door and into the elevator. The service stairs are on the opposite end of the floor. Whoever was back there could cross the building and surprise us on another floor. Difficult and unlikely, but possible. The elevator door closes and we start to move down.
“Why would he come in the back? Does he do that?”
I bend over at the waist, trying to catch my breath. My legs feel like Jell-O from the adrenaline. “He never has before. It’s not Henry. Henry’s in Japan by now.”
I stand upright and dial Henry’s number. He picks up after one ring.
“Zoe? What’s the matter?”
I inhale, not expecting him to answer. I sag against the back wall of the elevator as the numbers light up: ten, nine, eight . . . “Henry? Someone is in our apartment. I don’t know who.” My voice comes out like a squeak.
Four . . . three . . . two . . . L . . . “Zoe? Are you okay? I’m in L.A. Should I come home?”
I don’t know what to say. He shouts into the phone, “Can you hear me? I’m coming home, okay?” I can barely hear him over the blood rushing in my ears.
The elevator doors slide open.