“You don’t have enough information to find this guy.”
“That’s why I’m hiring you.”
He shifted in his chair. “I did a little digging since our first meeting. Nothing big, nothing I’ll charge you for—”
“I’ll pay.”
“—but enough. If he was named Trevor or even, heck, Zachary, we might have a chance of tracking down a guy who taught at one of over two dozen institutions of higher learning in Massachusetts or Connecticut twenty years ago. But, Miss Childs, I ran a quick computer analysis for you and in the last twenty years, at the twenty-seven schools I identified as possibles, there have been seventy-three”—he nodded at her shocked reaction—“adjunct, fill-in, assistant, associate, and full professors named James. Some have lasted a semester, some less, and some have gone the other way and attained tenure.”
“Can you get employment records, pictures in the files?”
“I’m sure for some, maybe half. But if he’s not in that half—and how would you even identify him?—then we’d have to track down the other thirty-five Jameses who, if demographic trends in this country are an indicator, are flung across all fifty states, and find a way to get their pictures from twenty years ago. Then I wouldn’t be charging you for forty hours’ work. I’d be charging for four hundred. And still no guarantee we’d find this guy.”
She worked through her reactions—anxiety, rage, helplessness, which produced more rage, and finally stubborn anger at this prick for not wanting to do his job. Fine, she’d find someone who would.
He read that in her eyes and the way she gathered her purse to herself.
“If you go to someone else and they see you, a young woman who recently came into some money, they will milk you for that money and still come up empty. And that larceny, which is what it will be in my opinion, will be perfectly legal. Then you’ll be poor and fatherless.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Where were you born?”
She tilted her head toward the south-facing window. “Springfield.”
“Is there a hospital record?”
She nodded. “Father is listed as UNK.”
“But they were together then, Elizabeth and James.”
Another nod. “Once when she’d had a few drinks, she told me that the night she went into labor they were fighting and he was out of town. She had me and, because he wasn’t there, she refused to list him on the record out of spite.”
They sat in silence until she said, “So you won’t take my case?”
Brian Delacroix shook his head. “Let him go.”
She stood, her forearms quaking, and thanked him for his time.
She found photographs stashed all around the house—the nightstand in her mother’s bedroom, a box in the attic, filling a drawer in her mother’s office. A good eighty-five percent of them were of the two of them. Rachel was struck by how clearly love for her shone in her mother’s pale eyes, though, true to form, even in pictures, her mother’s love looked complicated, as if she were in the process of reconsidering it. The other fifteen percent of the pictures were of friends and colleagues in academia and publishing, most taken at holiday cocktail parties and early summer cookouts, two at a bar with people Rachel didn’t recognize but who were clearly academics.
None contained a man with dark wavy hair and an uncertain smile.
She found her mother’s journals when she sold the house. She’d graduated from Emerson by that point and was leaving Massachusetts for graduate school in New York City. The old Victorian in South Hadley where she and her mother had lived since Rachel was in third grade contained few good memories and had always felt haunted. (“But they’re faculty ghosts,” her mother would say when the unexplained creak snaked out from the far end of a hallway or something thumped in the attic. “Probably up there reading Chaucer and sipping herbal tea.”)
The journals weren’t in the attic. They were in a trunk in the basement underneath carelessly packed foreign editions of The Staircase. They filled lined composition notebooks, the entries as haphazard as her mother had been ordered in her daily life. Half were undated, and her mother could go months, once even a year, without writing. She wrote most often about fear. Prior to The Staircase, the fear was financial—she’d never make enough as a professor of psychology to pay back her student loans, let alone send her daughter to a decent private high school and on to a decent college. After her book landed on the national bestseller lists, she feared she’d never write a worthwhile follow-up. She feared too that she would be called out for wearing the emperor’s new clothes, for perpetrating a con job that would be discerned when she published again. It turned out to be a prophetic fear.
But mostly she feared for Rachel. Rachel watched herself grow in the pages from a rambunctious, joyful, occasionally irritating source of pride (“She has his appetite for play . . . Her heart’s so lovely and generous that I’m terrified what the world will do to it . . .”) to a despairing and self-destructive malcontent (“The cutting troubles me a bit less than the promiscuity; she’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake . . . She leaps into dark waters and then complains about the depth but blames me for the leaping”).
Fifteen pages later, she came upon “I have to face the shame of it—I’ve been a subpar mother. I never had any patience for the underdeveloped frontal lobe. I snap too much, cut to the chase when I should model patience. She grew up with a brusque reductionist, I’m afraid. And no father. And it put a hole at the center of her.”
A few pages later, her mother returned to the theme. “I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things, soul-baubles, new age therapies, self-medication. She thinks she’s rebellious and resilient, but she’s only one of those things. She needs so much.”
A few pages later, in an undated entry, Elizabeth Childs wrote, “She is laid up right now, sick in a strange bed, and even needier than usual. The persistent question returns: Who is he, Mother? She looks so frail—brittle and mawkish and frail. She is a lot of wonderful things, my dearest Rachel, but she is not strong. If I tell her who James is, she’ll search him out. He’ll shatter her heart. And why should I give him that power? After all this time, why should he be allowed to hurt her again? To fuck with that beautiful, battered heart of hers? I saw him today.”
Rachel, sitting on the second-to-last step of the basement staircase, held her breath. She squeezed the edges of the journal and her vision shimmied.
I saw him today.
“He never saw me. I parked up the street. He was on the lawn of the house he found after he abandoned us. And they were with him—the replacement wife, the replacement children. He’s lost a lot of his hair and grown spongy above the belt line and below the chin. Small comfort. He’s happy. God help me. He’s happy. And isn’t that the worst of all possible outcomes? I don’t even believe in happiness—not as an ideal or as an authentic state of being; it’s a child’s goal—and yet, he is happy. He’d feel that happiness threatened by this daughter he never wanted and wanted even less once she was born. Because she reminded him of me. Of how much he grew to loathe me. And he would hurt her. I was the one person in his life who refused to adore him and he’d never forgive Rachel for that. He’d assume I told her unflattering things about him, and James, as we all know, could never abide criticism of his precious, earnest self.”
Rachel had been bedridden only once in her life—freshman year of high school. She’d contracted mononucleosis just as she was heading into Christmas break. The timing turned out to be fortuitous. It took her thirteen days to get out of bed and five more to regain the strength to return to school. In the end, she missed only three days of classes.
But that would have been the window when her mother saw James. Which was also when her mother was a visiting professor at Wesleyan. She’d rented a house in Middletown, Connecticut, that year and that was the “strange bed” Rachel had been confined to. Her mother, she recalled now with a disconcerted pride, had never left her during th
e illness except one time, to get groceries and wine. Rachel had just started watching Pretty Woman on VHS and was still watching it when her mother returned. Her mother checked her temperature and opined that she found Julia Roberts’s toothy grin “cosmically grating,” before she brought the grocery bags into the kitchen to unload them.
When she returned to the bedroom, glass of wine in one hand, warm, wet facecloth in the other, she gave Rachel a lonesome, hopeful look and said, “We did okay, didn’t we?”
Rachel looked up at her as she laid the facecloth across her forehead. “Of course we did,” she said because, in that moment, it felt like they had.
Her mother patted her cheek, looked at the TV. It was the end of the movie. Prince Charming, Richard Gere, showed up with flowers to rescue his Hooker Princess, Julia. He thrust the flowers forward, Julia laughed and teared up, the music boomed in the background.
Her mother said, “I mean, enough with the smiling already.”
That put the entry of the diary at December 1992. Or early January 1993. Eight years later, sitting on the basement steps, Rachel realized her father had been living somewhere within a thirty-mile radius of Middletown. Couldn’t be any more. Her mother had visited the street where he lived, observed him with his family, and then picked up groceries and stopped off at the liquor store for wine in under two hours. That meant James was teaching somewhere nearby, most likely at the University of Hartford.
“If he was still teaching by that point,” Brian Delacroix said when she called him.
“True.”
But Brian agreed that there was enough to go on now so that he could take her case and her money and still look himself in the mirror in the morning. So in the late summer of 2001, Brian Delacroix and Berkshire Security Associates launched an investigation into the identity of her father.
And came up with nothing.
No one by the name of James taught in higher education in northern Connecticut that year who wasn’t already well accounted for. One had blond hair, one was African American, and the third was twenty-seven years old.
Once again, Rachel was told to let it go.
“I’m leaving,” Brian said.
“Chicopee?”
“The business. So, yeah, Chicopee too, but I just don’t want to be a private investigator. It’s too grim, you know? All I seem to do is disappoint people, even when I deliver what they paid me to find. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Rachel.”
It hollowed out something in her. Another departure. Another person in her life, however minor of impact, who would leave whether she wanted it to happen or not. She had no say.
“What’re you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m gonna go back to Canada, I think.” His voice sounded strong, as if he’d arrived someplace he’d been meaning to arrive his whole life.
“You’re Canadian?”
He chuckled softly. “Sure am.”
“What’s back there?”
“Family lumber business. How’s things with you?”
“Grad school is great. New York right now,” she said, “less so.”
It was late September 2001, less than three weeks after the towers fell.
“Of course,” he said gravely. “Of course. I hope things look up for you. I wish you good things, Rachel.”
She was surprised how intimate her name sounded when it fell from his tongue. She pictured his eyes, the tenderness there, and was mildly annoyed to realize she’d been attracted to him and had failed to acknowledge it when it could have mattered.
“Canada,” she said, “eh?”
That soft chuckle of his. “Canada.”
They said their good-byes.
In her basement apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, easy walking distance to most of her classes at NYU, she sat in the soot and ash of lower Manhattan in the month after 9/11. The day of the attack, a thick dust grew woolen on her windowsills, the dust of hair and pieces of bone and cells piling up like a light snow. The air smelled burnt. In the afternoon, she wandered, ended up walking past St. Vincent’s ER, where gurneys were lined up for patients who never arrived. In the days that followed, pictures began to appear on the walls and fences of the hospital, most often with a simple message—“Have You Seen This Person?”
No, she hadn’t. They were gone.
She was surrounded by loss so much greater than any she’d experienced in her own life. Everywhere she turned she saw grief and unanswered prayers and a bedrock chaos that took so many forms—sexual, emotional, psychological, moral—that it quickly became the thread and thrum that united them all.
We are all lost, Rachel realized, and resolved to bandage her own wound as best she could and never pick at the scab again.
That autumn, she came across two sentences in one of her mother’s journals that she repeated to herself as a mantra every night for weeks before going to bed.
James, her mother wrote, was never meant for us.
And we were never meant for him.
2
LIGHTNING
She suffered her first panic attack in the fall of 2001, just after Thanksgiving. She was walking along Christopher Street and passed a woman her own age who sat on a black iron stoop under the arched entrance to an apartment co-op. The woman was weeping into her hands, a not uncommon occurrence back then in New York City. People wept in parks and bathrooms and on the A train, some silently, some with vigor and volume. It was everywhere. But you still had to ask, you still had to check.
“Are you okay?” Rachel reached out to touch the woman.
The woman recoiled. “What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.” The woman’s face was dry. She smoked a cigarette that Rachel hadn’t noticed before. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” Rachel said. “I was just—”
The woman was handing her several tissues. “It’s all right. Let it out.”
The woman’s face was dry. Her eyes weren’t red. She hadn’t been covering her face. She’d been smoking a cigarette.
Rachel took the tissues. She dabbed her face, felt the stream there, felt the tears welling under her nose, dripping off the sides of her jaw and the point of her chin.
“It’s all right,” the woman repeated.
She looked at Rachel like it wasn’t all right, it wasn’t all right at all. She looked at Rachel and then past Rachel, as if hoping to be rescued.
Rachel mumbled several thank-yous and stumbled off. She reached the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. A red van idled at the light. The driver stared at Rachel with pale eyes. Smiled at her with teeth yellowed by nicotine. It wasn’t just tears streaming out of her now, it was sweat. Her throat closed. She knew she was choking even though she hadn’t eaten that morning. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t fucking breathe. Her throat would not open. Neither would her mouth. She needed to open her mouth.
The driver got out of the van. He approached her with his pale eyes and pale hawkish face and ginger hair cut tight to his scalp and when he reached her . . .
He was black. And a bit rotund. His teeth weren’t yellow. They were copy-paper white. He knelt by her (how had she ended up sitting on the sidewalk?), his brown eyes large and fearful. “You okay? You need me to call someone, miss? Can you stand? Here, here. Take my hand.”
She took his hand and he pulled her to her feet on the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. And it was no longer morning. The sun was dipping. The Hudson had turned a light amber.
The round kind man hugged her to him and she wept into his shoulder. She wept and made him promise to stay with her, to never leave her.
“Tell me your name,” she said. “Tell me your name.”
His name was Kenneth Waterman, and of course she never saw him again. He drove her back to her apartment in his red van, which wasn’t the big panel van that smelled of axle grease and soiled undergarments she’d imagined but was, instead, a minivan with child seats in the
middle row and Cheerio crumbs on the floor mats. Kenneth Waterman had a wife and three children and lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens. He was a cabinetmaker. He dropped her home and offered to call someone on her behalf, but she assured him she was okay now, she was fine, it was just this city sometimes, you know?
He gave her a long, worried look, but cars were stacking up behind them and dusk was gathering. A horn blared. Then another. He handed her a business card—Kenny’s Cabinets—and told her to call him anytime. She thanked him and got out of the minivan. As he drove away, she realized the van wasn’t even red. It was bronze.
She deferred her next semester at NYU. Rarely left the apartment except to walk to her shrink in Tribeca. His name was Constantine Propkop and the only personal information he ever divulged was that his family and friends insisted on calling him Connie. Connie tried to convince her that the national tragedy she was using to shame herself out of recognizing the depths of her own trauma was doing her serious harm.
“There’s nothing tragic about my life,” Rachel said. “Was it sad sometimes? Sure. Whose wasn’t? But I was well cared for and well fed and grew up in a nice house. I mean, boohoo, right?”
Connie looked across the small office at her. “Your mother withheld one of your most basic rights—your paternity—from you. She subjected you to emotional tyranny in order to keep you close.”
“She was protecting me.”
“From what?”
“Okay,” Rachel corrected herself, “she believed she was protecting me from myself, from what I might do with the knowledge.”
“Is that really why?”
“Why else?” Rachel suddenly wanted to dive out the window behind Connie.
“If someone has something you not only want but truly need, what will you never do to that person?”
“Don’t say hate them because I hated her plenty.”
“Leave them,” he said. “You’ll never leave that person.”
“My mother was the most independent person I’ve ever met.”
“As long as she had you clinging to her, she could appear to be. What happened once you were gone, though? Once she could feel you pulling away?”