Henry
Henry sat in his car, watching the house. His back ached, and he was aware of the low hum of anxiety. He shouldn’t be here. This was a mistake.
The street was lined with towering oaks, the leaves swaying in the light summer breeze. Cicadas sang, their song rising and falling. Through the slightly open car window, the whole place smelled fresh. Clean. Wholesome. This was the kind of place people moved to raise families, safe, pretty. Idyllic. At least from the outside looking in.
It was one of those neighborhoods he’d always fantasized about when he was a kid. Basketball hoops in the driveways; bikes left askew on nicely tended lawns. He imagined that people who lived in neighborhoods like this decorated for Halloween with big jack-o’-lanterns and goofy, glittery skeletons hanging on doorways. At Christmastime, there’d be lit and trimmed trees in big bay windows, twinkling lights outside. In summer, kids would play in the street—kickball, and flashlight tag. They’d ride bikes to each other’s houses.
When he was living in this apartment or that with Alice, he would see neighborhoods like that on television or in the movies, wonder what it was like to have that sense of community, of home.
“Can we live someplace like that?” he’d asked one night.
He didn’t remember what they’d been watching—some made-for-television movie where every home was decorated with bright colors, and every woman was pretty and well-coiffed.
“With all the normies?” she’d answered with a scoff. “You want to go to a block party where I make small talk with housewives?”
She leaned on the word with disdain. But what was so wrong, he wondered, with taking care of a family?
But Alice’s disdain for that type of life was so palpable that he didn’t bring it up again. But it was all he had ever wanted; just one of the many things he didn’t get.
That’s the good news about life, Miss Gail liked to tell him. You get to create yourself when you’re grown. No matter what circumstances you come from, no matter what darkness, you can write a new story for yourself and the family you make.
Maybe he could give a place like this to his own kids. The thought gave him a pang of longing so severe he had to breathe his way through it.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Piper had asked him this morning. “What about always moving forward, never looking back?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “Maybe I can’t move forward without looking back.”
Piper rested a hand on her belly, gave him that look. She hadn’t even started to show yet. “Ready or not, we’re moving forward.”
They were too young to be married, too young to be having a baby. Everyone said so, especially Piper’s parents. Especially Piper’s dad, who never stopped giving Henry the side-eye.
Piper had finished her English degree at NYU, a hugely expensive education which her father complained prepared her to do absolutely nothing, especially with a baby on the way.
Henry was starting grad school in the fall, having graduated top of his class at MIT. He’d pursue a master’s in computer engineering at Columbia University nights, while working at a startup cybersecurity company during the day.
“I want him to know who he is,” Henry said, in their tiny Riverside walk-up. The windows had been open, sun streaming. The place wasn’t huge; the neighborhood wasn’t great. But it was theirs and they loved it.
“Or her.”
“Or her,” he agreed.
Piper moved over to him, took his hands and placed them on her middle. “He’ll know, or she’ll know, because of us. Because of who we are.”
She was right. Of course, she was. But when he looked back into his past, it was as vast and as mysterious as it was when he looked up into the stars. The mind boggled at infinity. The infinite possibilities of where he’d come from, from whom. Who Alice had been. Those strange, buried memories that surfaced in dreams. Piper had grandparents, aunts and uncles, stories of where people came from, how they’d made their way through the world. She could give all of that to their baby, a history, origins. Henry had nothing but questions, a dark mystery to be solved.
He started to move out of the car, prepared to walk up the driveway lined with pretty perennials, knock on the red door. He was expected. But he sank back, heart thudding.
He gave himself another moment, thinking of his last talk with Detective West.
So many years later the detective still hadn’t closed Alice’s case.
The old cop was a year from retirement now, but still at it. He was nursing a theory about some guy who might have followed Henry and Alice from Tucson. Tom Watson, the son of Faith Watson, the woman for whom Alice had worked as a caregiver.
“Based on the information you gave me, and the new information I got from your aunt, when I was in Tucson on vacation, I was able to track down the family of Alice’s old employer,” said West.
Alice it seemed had stolen money from Ms. Watson; Tom, according to his sister, had suspected that Alice might have been responsible for the old woman’s death—an error with her medication. Maybe an accident. Maybe not.
Henry had felt a twinge of guilt. West, a stranger to Alice was using his vacation time to hunt Alice’s killer, while Henry had been doing everything he could to tamp down thoughts of her—burying himself in his studies, taking the train to see Piper on Friday nights, partying with her in the West Village all weekend, working nights in the school’s bursar’s office, digitizing records. Those years were good ones; he was so busy that he rarely thought about anything but what was right in front of him.
But Detective West hadn’t forgotten.
“Faith Watson’s daughter, Corinne, said that her brother, Tom, thought Alice tweaked the dosage on the old lady’s meds, then cleared out her accounts. But Tom was a bit of shady character—some drugs, perpetually unemployed. Corinne didn’t believe him, in fact, she’d suspected that Tom and Alice were involved.”
“That sounds like a pretty big lead.”
“Did you ever see her with a man in Tucson?”
Henry searched his memory. Maybe there was someone? A bearded man, smiling and holding a bouquet of wildflowers. There had been men, here and there. No one who’d made a lasting impression.
“Tom admitted to tracking Alice down, but said he never hurt her. Just asked for the money back. Said in exchange he wouldn’t tell the police what she’d done.”
“If he thought Alice killed his mother and took her money, why wouldn’t he call the police?”
The old man cleared his throat. In the background, Henry had heard the noises of the busy police station. He glanced at his watch, a gift from Piper’s parents on graduation. He had the urge to cut the conversation short. He’d been running late for work, and honestly he hadn’t wanted to talk about Alice.
“Good question. I wondered the same. But—there wasn’t any real evidence. Just his suspicions. Honestly, it didn’t seem like Tom cared that much about his mother or how she’d died. I think all he really cared about was the money.”
“How much?”
“About five thousand.”
“Did Alice have that? Did she give it to him?”
“He says no. As far as I found, your mother didn’t have a bank account. Unless she had one under another name. She didn’t even have a credit card. Maybe she had a stash of cash somewhere.”
“There was always money for whatever,” said Henry, remembering. “But I never found anything when we cleaned out the apartment.”
“So maybe the person who killed Alice took that money.”
Henry had turned the information around in his head, trying to fit this knowledge into the fractured pieces of his memory. It did make a kind of sense. They left places in the middle of the night. Alice always seemed to be in flight, looking over her shoulder. If she’d been taking money from people then fleeing, it made sense that she’d be worried someone would come after her.
So probably it was this guy Tom Watson. He’d killed her, taken whatever money she’d had. Or what if she ripped off other people in other places? Had someone finally caught up with her, just as she’d feared?
“It was this guy Tom Watson, right? It had to be.”
Detective West made a noise that was kind of like a verbal shrug. “He didn’t have any priors. No history of sexual assault or violence against women.”
“What about the DNA evidence? You said the technology was improving all the time.”
“Since Tom Watson was never arrested, there are no fingerprints or DNA records for him in the national databases.”
Henry stayed quiet. Then, “I mean—could you ask him to give it now since you’ve found him.”
Detective West grunted. “I did. And guess what? He said no.”
“You can’t force him?”
“I’d need a warrant, someone in his area to cooperate. But I don’t have the physical evidence for that.”
“So you don’t have enough evidence to collect more evidence?”
“Something like that. I’m sorry, son.” Detective West continued on into the silence. “Anyway, after I interviewed him and his sister, Tom Watson died last week. Heart attack.”
It wasn’t funny. But Henry almost laughed. In all those made-for-television movies he’d watched with Alice, all those unsolved mystery documentaries he watched with Piper, there was always something, no matter how small, no matter how many years later, that led to the truth. But the real truth was that many crimes went unsolved; so many questions were left unanswered. People did terrible things, then died unpunished. What if he, Henry, died one day, never knowing the truth of who he was? Would that mean he’d never really lived?
“I’m still looking, Henry.”
“I know you are, Detective.”
“What about your aunt. Did you ever connect with her?”
West asked him that every time. Henry usually made up some excuse for why he hadn’t gotten in touch. The woman, Alice’s sister, had sent him a few emails which he’d never answered. They were nice. We’re here for you, she’d written. We want you to be a part of our family.
“Yeah,” he’d lied. “We’re in touch.”
“Good. That’s good,” said West sounding relieved. “It’s important to stay connected to family.”
Was it though?
Or was that just something people said. He and Piper were very connected to Piper’s family and it wasn’t always easy, or pleasant. At their small backyard wedding, Piper’s mom and dad had a big fight in the kitchen that carried out into the yard. Some distant relatives who Henry was meeting for the first time asked him pointedly: Where are you from, son? His dark skin, and mass of black curls communicated to them something suspicious about his heritage.
Racist fucks, Piper complained. Don’t worry. We don’t see them much.
Henry had a hard time understanding racism. People were just people, right? They might differ in the color of their skin, features, or cultures, but under the skin, they were all the same. He’d read that all humans shared 99 percent of the same DNA. That it was only like 1 percent that accounted for the superficial differences of appearance.
Miss Gail felt more like family than Alice ever had, and she was just some stranger who had taken him in, raised him as best she could. He loved her in a way he wasn’t sure he had loved Alice.
All these thoughts churned as he sat listening to the wind in the trees. Finally, he saw the door to the house open and a woman stepped out onto the stoop and waved.
She looked a little like Alice, but fuller bodied, prettier. She had fluffy blond hair, and wore a flowered dress, simple flats.
He waved back. He couldn’t just drive off now, which is what he had been considering doing before she came out of the door. That’s what happened—thoughts of Detective West, and Alice, and Piper’s family, and their baby, and who Henry had been or would be were like a hurricane in his head, a chaos of thoughts that spiraled until he couldn’t hear or think anything else.
She approached as he crossed the quiet road to go meet her. At the sidewalk she put both her hands to her heart, and started to cry, then took him into a warm, tight embrace. He stood stiffly, awkwardly, letting her hold on—simultaneously touched and surprised, a little scared. He wasn’t really a hugger. Finally, he closed his arms around her.
“I’m Henry,” he said, though she clearly knew who he was.
She pulled back and looked at him, put a hand to each of his cheeks.
“I see her in you,” she said, tears streaming. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m a wreck. It’s just that I’ve waited so long for any piece of her. I’m so glad you’re here, Henry. Thank you for coming. I know nothing has been easy for you.”
She took him by the hand and led him inside the house that was everything it promised from the outside—warm, filled with photos, tastefully decorated. She’d baked cookies, the scent still hanging in the air.
“I don’t mean to overwhelm you,” she said when they sat at the table. There were white tulips on the counter, dipping in a crystal vase. Everything was clean, surfaces shining.
He noticed the stack of photo albums then, other notebooks, some files. Detective West said that his aunt was an amateur genealogist, tracing the roots and branches of her family tree back into history. The idea of that, that there was all that data about her family, about his family, was as exciting as it was frightening.
“I want you to know, Henry, that we would have taken you after she passed. I would have raised you as my own. But Margaret—she didn’t want us. Her family. She just, I don’t know, always wanted to get away.”
“Margaret.”
“You knew her as Alice, that’s what Detective West said. But that wasn’t the name our parents gave her. She always loved that book—Alice in Wonderland. She went down the rabbit hole, didn’t she?”
His aunt had started crying again. He wanted to comfort her but he didn’t know how. He reached out an awkward hand and she took it.
“By the time Detective West and I connected, you were grown, heading off to college. And you didn’t answer my emails.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just—I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have.”
“It’s okay,” she said. Her smile was warm, understanding. “There’s no rule book for dealing with a mess like this one, is there? We’re all just trying to get through, aren’t we?”
She got up and came back with a cup of tea and a plate of cookies.
“Detective West says that I had the birth certificate and social security number of a dead child. Do you know anything about that?”
She sat with a long exhale, rubbed at her eyes. “Margaret...we called her Maggie...got pregnant in her senior year of high school. It was a big deal. Our parents were devastated, you know. They wanted so much for her, for us. But they planned to help her raise the baby so that she could finish school.”
She opened the first stack of photo albums, slid it between them. They flipped through the thick pages. A picture of Alice as a child—holding out the skirt of a yellow dress, smiling, coquettish. Then as an adolescent, lithe and striking, if not pretty, in the embrace of a younger girl, Henry’s aunt. There was a family portrait, everyone stiff and smiling against a gray backdrop. Alice wore a blue dress, eyes sullen. Picture after picture of the girls—Christmas morning, Hawaiian vacation, riding on horseback, playing tennis. His aunt paused at each, sharing memories. Oh, my, Maggie hated horses—everything about them. But Dad wanted us both to know how to ride. The fights!
Our parents fought every Christmas. Dad was always on Mom for spending too much.
There was a picture of Alice, her hair cut short in a pixie cut, wearing a skintight striped dress. Oh, the Pat Benatar look. My parents were furious that she cut her hair. But she did what she wanted. Always.
Then, finally, the photograph of a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Not Henry. This child had strawberry blond hair, light eyes.
“Honestly, for a kid, it was kind of exciting, to have a nephew and a baby in the house. I was four years younger than Maggie.”
She smiled at the memory, but the happy expression darkened. “But the baby, also named Henry, he died. SIDS.”
She traced a hand over the picture of the infant.
“It just blew us to pieces. Maggie took off after that. We’d get a postcard from this town or that over the years. But I never saw her again.”
She shook her head, was quiet a moment. Henry heard a clock ticking somewhere, a chime for the quarter hour. Then,
“Our parents passed—young for these times. My dad had a heart attack; all the men on his side of the family died young. My mother, well, she had a car accident. But if you ask me it was more that she’d just given up on life. She didn’t really recover after the loss of Margaret, the baby, my dad. She had been depressed and drinking heavily the night she died.”
They were just sentences. A flat recount of the decline of a family. But he could see the pain and loss in the older woman’s face.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. And he was. Sorry for her, for himself. It seemed like Alice had hurt a lot of people.
“Life,” she said. “It beats you up, doesn’t it?”
“Not everyone,” he says. Some people seemed to live charmed lives, even if they didn’t know it. Intact families, the privilege of heritage, an expectation of a certain kind of future, a safety net beneath them.
Her smile was kind. “Yes, everyone. Eventually.”
Henry pointed to the baby photograph. “That’s not me.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not.”
“Then who am I? Where did I come from? I think maybe I didn’t really want to know. But my wife and I, we’re having a baby.”
Her face lit up. “How wonderful, Henry. That’s such lovely news.”
“So I guess suddenly it feels important to know more about my history.”
His aunt nodded. Even with tiny lines, and a softness around the jaw she was still a pretty woman with shining, smiley eyes and creamy skin, delicate features, well-kept. There was the shade of Alice around the brow, something in her smile. She had none of Alice’s darkness, her edge.
“Of course it does. Of course.”
She patted the stack of albums, notebooks, and files. “I am a bit of an armchair genealogist,” she said. “As for the past, it’s all here—or a lot of it anyway. And with all the new technology, finding answers about you will be easier than ever before. If you want me to, I can help you. I can help you understand who you are. Maybe we can even find your father. Is that what you want, Henry?”
He was surprised by the rush of emotion, feelings he hadn’t let himself have, a stunning desperation to belong somewhere, to someone.
“Yes,” he managed, his voice cracking slightly. “I want that very much.”
After lunch, he followed his Aunt Gemma up the staircase to the second floor.
“Step into my office, said the spider to the fly,” she said with a chuckle as she swung open the double doors to a room filled with bookshelves, a big desk with two computer screens, a cozy couch facing a coffee table stacked with photo albums, notebooks, files.
She urged him to take a seat and he did, nearly sinking into the soft floral cushions.
“Our father started this project before Maggie and I were born. He could trace his heritage back to British landowners, though by the time his parents came to America they were tradespeople. His father was a tailor; his mother was a governess until they married.
“Our mother was descended from Russian Jews,” she said. “It’s a funny thing that the people who are privileged by history are also the beneficiaries of better record keeping. It took me years, two trips out to Utah where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the largest collection of records in the world, hours and hours online, to find the name of the town where I think my maternal grandmother was born. We had a trip planned to Russia, but then my husband passed.”
“I’m sorry.”
She paused a moment. “Thank you. He was a wonderful man and we had thirty good years together. I try to be in gratitude for that, not grief.”
“Children?”
A flush came up on her cheeks, her eyes filling. She shook her head, seeming not to trust her voice.
His hand found hers again and she looked at him gratefully.
“That’s my life’s biggest sadness,” she said. “We tried and tried. But...”
They sat a moment until she was ready to go on. And then she did. They sat talking, the sky going dim outside as she shared her research—telling him stories about distant relatives on both sides, things she’d gleaned from old letters, and news stories, birth and death certificates. She shared grainy photographs, and wrinkled copies of wedding announcements, handwritten ledgers from churches she and her husband had visited in the UK.
It was a journey into the distant past, brought alive by his aunt’s meticulous research. And something in Henry settled, something that had been an endless restless question was answered. He did have a history, a family. He wasn’t just floating in time, disconnected, a stranger even to himself. Maybe.
“I still have so many questions,” said Henry.
“Yes.”
“I mean, Miss Gail worked hard to get me my own social security number. But we never were able to track down my actual birth certificate. What if I’m not even Alice’s child? What if she abducted me or something?”
It was just one of a myriad possibilities he’d turned over in his mind. Had she stolen him? Is that why they were always on the run? Those foggy memories he had, were those from his real family?
His aunt shook her head. “No,” she said. “I see her in you, the shape of your eyes. You even have the chin cleft everyone on our father’s side has. I feel it, Henry. I do.”
He put his hand next to her arm. His skin was so much darker than hers. He gave her a meaningful look.
“That means nothing. We have to find your father to get the other pieces of your puzzle. And that’s all it is. DNA. It’s just one big puzzle, and we’re each just tiny little pieces that all fit together somehow, somewhere.”
He found himself smiling, which he didn’t do often. Piper was always on him. Lighten up, loser. His wife was the one person who could always get him to crack a grin, until he met his aunt. He liked her energy, warm, practical, loving. She was right; he felt it, too, their deep connection.
“But how do we find that piece?”
She got up and went to her desk. When she came back, she held a glossy brochure. She handed it to him.
“Lucky for us, the technology in this field is growing by leaps and bounds,” she said sitting back beside him. “A couple years ago we may never have had answers.”
It was a sell piece, featuring pictures of people smiling around dinner tables, or holding hands, cradling babies, or beaming at older people on sunny paths, for a company called Origins. The s on the end was comprised of a DNA helix.
Every family has a story, it read in bold letters. Let us help you tell yours.