There were more e-mails from Amy’s father to his mother, back and forth. Matt Connor had made a file of them. They helped pass the time late at night, when the baby was asleep. It was a perverse pleasure. Normal people had sex and money, love and companionship. He had a child that was not his own. The son of the man and woman he hated
more than anything on the planet. Yet, after only a month, he cared for Jimmy with a depth of affection he found inexplicable. He had not disposed of the child in some third-world country as he had planned.
That said something. But what?
His deepest fears and hopes had not materialized. His revenge had brought no final peace, but it had not hurt, either. On a hypothetical scale of joy and sorrow, he was happier now than before he had wounded Amy. The righteous were mistaken—if revenge was not sweet, it at least had flavor.
However, when he thought of Amy crying at night because of her lost child, he wept with her. He could feel the walls closing in on her as the days passed. She would think the worst; her baby dead and buried. She could not imagine that the shadow she had cast over Matt Connor’s life had returned as an avenging angel.
Yet, sometimes, late at night, when he stood over Jimmy, he felt like he would give his life to protect the child. He imagined he was a much better father than David.
The e-mails were interesting. While Jimmy slept peacefully not four feet from his desk, Matt flipped through his favorites. It was thirty-three days since he had taken the child.
Dear Nancy,
Thank you for staying on the phone with me so long the other night. I’m sorry I broke down and wept like a fool, somehow I couldn’t help myself. The nights are the worst. Often, I swear, I hear my grandson crying outside my door. Several times I have gotten up from bed to check-the sound is so real. But, alas, Jimmy is never there.
Amy has been destroyed. Nothing I say can console her. She has this idea in her head that God is punishing her for what she did to Matt. I tell her that is nonsense, that this tragedy would have been the last thing Matt would have wished upon her. But she’s in a dark place and there’s no reaching her.
Her husband is no help. The looks he gives her–I think he believes she took Jimmy and buried him somewhere. David is a sick man. I wish he’d get out of our lives.
Nancy, how can we live? You lost a son and I lost a grandson. Such a cruel world, this one we are cursed to live in. It is only the love of people like you—and the memory of men like Matt–that make it bearable. My prayers are with you, and I hope yours remain with me.
Yours, John
The next one had come the previous week.
Dear Nancy,
Hope fades. It sounds as if the FBI no longer believes we’ll be contacted by the kidnappers. Amy and David spoke to them yesterday and the woman in charge of the investigation, Agent Bane, said it was unlikely to receive a ransom demand after such a long lapse of time. I think the FBI has known this for a while, but to have it confirmed is devastating. Amy has turned into a wraith. You know, she used to weigh only a hundred and five pounds. Well, she has lost fifteen of that If this keeps up she’ll have to be put in a hospital.
What can I say? I miss my grandson. I miss my daughter. I miss Matt. I cannot be free of the idea that if your son had not died, all this pain would have been avoided. I think of myself as a religious man, but I catch myself cursing God. There is no justice in this world. David should have gone in that water. Matt should be with us now.
Sorry, Nancy, I rave. I better go.
Yours, John
Matt found it interesting how Amy’s father made a connection between his death and the kidnapping. The man had always been sensitive. It was as if Amy’s dad had a psychic antenna for the good and evil in people. Matt felt
awful about the pain the man was going through. The guilt was not erased by the agony Amy was experiencing. However, there was only so much guilt he could allow himself to feel and stay sane.
There was good news. Cindy had a new boyfriend. His ex-girlfriend had written his mother yesterday about the guy. He was a handsome lawyer from a rich Southern family. Matt honestly wished her the best. He had not missed her as much as he imagined he would. In fact, he had not missed her at all. That was the problem with obsession. It lumped every small good in life into one indistinguishable mass of nothing.
There was a knock on his trailer door. Matt looked up and saw Lupe Chavez outside the window, Jimmy’s eighteen-year-old nanny. He had found her in a coffee shop with a girlfriend two days after he had taken Jimmy. Both girls were from Guatemala, and desperate for jobs. When it came to finding employment, Lupe had distinct advantages over her friend. Her English was excellent and she projected a competence beyond her years. He occasionally worried about her sharp mind. A simple girl from a remote village would have been a better choice to care for a kidnapped child. But he liked Lupe, and he worried about leaving Jimmy in the hands of a simpleton.
“You’re early,” Matt said as he opened the door. There was no mistaking Lupe’s resemblance to Amy, another fact that made him wonder about his state of mind. They were about the same size, five foot tall and slim. Lupe had the same large Latin eyes he seemed unable to get enough of. Her face was more alert than Amy’s; however, she was not nearly as pretty. It occurred to him then how easy it had been for Amy to hide her real intentions. She showed so little of her internal state that one was constantly filling in the blanks.
“I went shopping for the baby and finished faster than I expected,” she said as she held up a bag of diapers and formula. Matt remembered the day he had swiped the child. A hundred miles north of L.A., in the middle of nowhere,
Jimmy had awakened hungry and upset. He had wanted his mother’s breast, and his frantic efforts with a formula bottle had not been appreciated. Naturally, Matt had considered beforehand how difficult it might be to feed Jimmy. In his telescope, he had seen Amy occasionally giving her son a bottle, and he had hoped for the best. But he had never imagined Jimmy’s crying could shake him so deeply. For two hours he had seriously considered the impossible—dropping the whole scheme and returning the child to Amy.
But then Jimmy had fallen asleep and the next time he awoke he had taken the bottle happily. The kid must have been starving. His huge eyes had stared up at him with such trust that it had touched him deeply. Matt had been surprised that the routine tasks of caring for the boy did not bother him. Even changing Jimmy’s diapers when Lupe was gone was no hassle.
“Great, come in,” Matt said, opening the door wider. “I’ve errands I have to get done anyway. The sooner I start on them the better.” It was a Saturday, he did not have to work. He had not planned to work as long as he had the child, anyway. But now that Jimmy had become a permanent member of his household, that was impractical.
Matt needed to get out in either case.
Playing father was fun but not twenty-four hours a day.
Besides, he had a new girlfriend, twenty-five-year-old Debra Marsh. That was his supposed chore, to go over and have lunch and sex with her. She was good for him in a lot of ways. She talked a lot and didn’t mind if he listened. He had met her at a bar. In Modesto, drinking was as obligatory as wiping the dust from one’s eyes. She worked in an office somewhere downtown. There was only one problem with the relationship. He could not come during sex unless he pretended she was Amy. It was not as disgusting as it sounded. He suspected the technique kept a lot of couples together.
But he did not love Debra any more than he had loved Cindy.
Yet he liked her; there was a lot to be said for just liking someone.
“What are you reading?” Lupe asked as she checked on sleeping Jimmy. Matt hastily put away the copies of the e-mails. He was a fool to keep them. Lupe could read them when he was out and put two and two together. He reassured himself she was not a snoop, but the truth was, everyone was.
“Just some old letters from online friends,” he said.
“Girlfriends?” Lupe only appeared conservative—one of those staunch Roman Catholics who carried a condom in her purse. She had come on to him several times, but he knew it would be a mistake to mix business with pleasure. Jimmy was used to her. It was odd, but in this matter, he had no trouble putting Jimmy first. Lupe added, “You need to get out more.”
“You don’t like Debra?” he asked.
“I like her. I like watermelons too. But it doesn’t mean I would sleep with one.”
“She’s not that stupid.”
“She’s not smart.” Lupe moved closer to Jimmy. She loved him as if he was her own. He had told her that Jimmy’s mother had died in a car accident not long after giving birth. He had said it with such feeling, they had both ended up crying. Lupe gently poked Jimmy. “I think he’s waking up.”
Jimmy had one eye open, and was yawning. He looked unbearably cute. How could anyone think of the long term in the face of such innocence? Yet, Matt knew that one day he would have to decide what he was going to do with the child. Only, it would be tomorrow, always tomorrow.
“He only took a little formula before his nap,” Matt said. “He’s probably still hungry.”
Lupe brushed aside a wisp of Jimmy’s hair. “He looks more and more like you each day.”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Lupe shook her head. “He has your eyes, exactly, and
the same shape of face. Get some of your own baby pictures and compare them. You’ll be stunned.”
Matt stared down at Jimmy and a sensation both hot and ice-cold swept over him. The baby had opened both his eyes and was smiling up at him.
“I’ll do that,” he muttered.
THERE WAS an obvious detail that did not have to be considered because it was … well, so obvious, besides being indisputable. Jimmy couldn’t be his kid because he had never had sex with Amy. Yet, once out of the trailer and on the road toward Debra’s house, Matt did consider the idea.
He was in a unique position to evaluate impossibilities. After all, as far as the cops knew, he could not have been the one who had kidnapped Jimmy because he was dead. And look how well that logic worked for the authorities.
He had not had actual intercourse with Amy, but they had fooled around mightily. One of her favorite tricks when they were hot and heavy and naked in bed together was to grab his dick and rub it against her clitoris. She really got off on it, and he had to admit he had almost come at such times.
The key here was, he had almost come.
Matt knew enough about physiology and pleasant tingling sensations to realize he could have had a significant amount of sperm at the tip of his penis when she had stroked him close to climaxing. He also knew that sperm trained for the hundred-meter butterfly from the moment they were born. And it wasn’t a far swim from the surface of her vagina up to her tubes. Indeed, he had actually read about such cases.
He might have impregnated her and not known it.
But had she known it? A disturbing question, to be sure, but then everything about Amy was disturbing. If she had indeed gotten pregnant with his baby and had still chosen David over him then that made her out to be worse than a whore.
An interesting idea … to no longer be dead. His prefabricated nonexistence was liberating and stifling at the same
time. He missed his mom. He missed Los Angeles. He still missed Amy … No, it was better not to go there. No fucking way should he go there. Yet if Jimmy was his child and she did not know it, and he was able to prove it, then how long would David hang around?
“I’m not going back to her!” Matt screamed inside his car.
Even he was not that crazy. She wouldn’t come back anyway. She was a slut and he didn’t have any money. That was all she had wanted. Besides, babies looked like a lot of people when they were Jimmy’s age.
Still, the possibilities were interesting.
Matt did not go to Debra’s house. He swung by the library instead, found a book on DNA testing and paternity cases. He didn’t have to read long to learn what he needed. It took only a week to determine who the father of a child was. In the back of the book was a list of laboratories that performed the test. Matt used the library pay phone to call a lab in San Francisco. The woman who answered was informative. All they needed was a cheek swab of the child and the suspected father—plus five hundred dollars. Matt had feared it would cost a lot more.
“Do these tests hold up in court?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” the woman said.
Matt reached for a pen. “Tell me exactly how I should send the swabs.”