by Jodi Picoult
Eddie took down the family history that I knew. He was particularly concerned about genetic illnesses, because he had just wrapped up a missing persons case that involved diabetes. "This woman's whole family has the sugar," he says, "so I chase her for three years and I know she's in Maine, but I can't get the exact location. And then I figure she's about the age all her relatives start dying. So I call up every hospital in Maine and see what patients have the sugar. Sure enough, there she is, getting her last rites."
I swallowed, and Eddie reached across the table and took my hand. His skin felt like a snake's. "It's very difficult to disappear," he said. "It's all a matter of public records. The hardest people to find are the ones who live in tenements, because they move around a lot. But then you get them through welfare."
I had an image of my mother on welfare, living on the streets, and I winced. "What if my mother isn't my mother anymore?" I asked. "It's been twenty years. What if she's found a new identity?"
Eddie blew smoke rings that expanded and settled around my neck. "You know, Paige," he said, pronouncing my name Pej, "people just ain't creative. If they get a new identity, they do something stupid like flip their first and middle names. They use their maiden names or the last name of their favorite uncle. Or they spell their same name different or change one digit in their Social Security number. They aren't willing to completely give up what they're leaving behind." He leaned forward, almost whispering. "Of course, the really sharp ones get a whole new image. I found a guy once who'd taken a new identity by striking up a conversation at a bar with a fellow who looked like him. He got the other guy to compare IDs, just for kicks, and he memorized the number on the driver's license and then got himself a copy by saying it had been stolen. It ain't so hard to become someone else. You look in the local papers and find the name of someone who died within the past week who was about your own age. That gives you a name and an address. Then you go to the place where the death occurred, and it's on public record, and bingo, you got a date of birth. Then you go to Social Security and make up a wacko story about your wallet being filched and you get a new card with this new name--the death records are usually slow in getting over to Social Security, so nothing seems out of the ordinary. And then you pull the same shit at the RMV and you get a new driver's license. . . ."He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. "The thing is, Paige, I know all this stuff. I got connections. I'm one step ahead of your mother."
I thought about my mother's obituaries; how easy it would have been for her to find someone close to her age who had died. I thought of how connected she got to those people, how she'd visit the graves as if they were old friends. "What are you going to do first?" I asked.
"I'm gonna start with the scraps of the truth. I'm gonna take all this information you gave me and the picture, and I'm gonna walk around your neighborhood in Chicago, seeing if anyone remembers her. Then I'm gonna run a driver's license check and a Social Security check. If that don't work, I'm gonna look up twenty-year-old obit pages of the Trib. And if that don't work, I'm gonna dig in my brain and ask myself, 'Where the hell can I turn now?' I'm gonna hunt her down and get an address for you. And then if you want I'll go to her house and I'll get her garbage before the town picks it up and I'll be able to tell you anything you want to know about her: what she eats for breakfast, what she gets in the mail, if she's married or livin' with someone, if she has kids."
I thought of my mother holding another baby, a different daughter. "I don't think that will be necessary," I whispered.
Eddie stood up, letting us know the meeting was over. "Fifty bucks an hour is my fee," he said, and I paled. I couldn't possibly afford to pay him for more than three days.
Jake stepped up behind me. "That's fine," he said. He squeezed my shoulder, and his words fell softly behind my ear. "Don't worry about it."
I left Jake waiting in the car and called Nicholas from a pay phone on the way back to Chicago. It rang four times, and I was thinking about what kind of message I could leave, when Nicholas answered, hurried and breathless. "Hello?"
"Hello, Nicholas," I said. "How are you?"
There was a beat of silence. "Are you calling to apologize to me?"
I clenched my fists. "I'm in Chicago now," I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering. "I'm going to find my mother." I hesitated and then asked what was on my mind, what I couldn't get off my mind. "How's Max?" I said.
"Apparently," Nicholas said, "you don't give a damn."
"Of course I do. I don't understand you, Nicholas. Why can't you just think of this as a vacation, or a visit to my father? I haven't been back here in eight years. I told you I'd come home." I tapped my foot against the pavement. "It's just going to take a little longer than I thought."
"Let me tell you what I did today, dear," Nicholas said, his voice icy and restrained. "After getting up with Max three times during the night, I took him to the hospital this morning. I had a quadruple bypass scheduled, which I almost didn't complete because I couldn't stay on my feet. Someone could have died because of your need for a--what did you call it?--a vacation. And I left Max with a stranger because I didn't have any idea who else could baby-sit for him. And you know what? I'm doing this all again tomorrow. Aren't you jealous, Paige? Don't you wish you were me?" The static on the line grew as Nicholas fell silent. I had never thought about all that; I had just left. Nicholas's voice was so bitter that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. "Paige," he said, "I don't want to see your face again." And then he hung up.
I leaned my forehead against the side of the telephone booth and took deep breaths. Out of nowhere, that list I had written of my accomplishments just days before came to mind. I can change a diaper. I can measure formula. I can sing Max to sleep. I closed my eyes. I can find my mother.
I walked out of the phone booth, shading my eyes from the judgment of the sun. Jake grinned at me from the passenger seat of my car. "How's Nicholas?" he asked.
"He misses me," I said, forcing a smile. "He wants me to come home."
In honor of my return to Chicago, Jake took what he called a well-deserved vacation, and insisted I spend time with him while Eddie Savoy found my mother. So the next morning I drove to Jake and Ellen's apartment, which was across the street from where Jake's mother still lived. It was an unassuming little brick building, with a cast-iron fence around the tiny blotched yard. I rang the bell and was buzzed in.
Even before I reached Jake's apartment, on the first floor, I knew which one was his. The familiar smell of him--green spring leaves and honest sweat--seeped through the cracks of the old wooden door. Ellen opened it, startling me. She held a spatula in her hand and wore an apron that said across her chest, kiss my grits. "Jake says Eddie's going to find your mother," she said, not even bothering with "hello." She drew me in with her excitement. "I bet you can't wait. I can't imagine not seeing my mother for twenty years. I wonder how long it--"
"Jeez, El," Jake said, coming down the hall. "It's not even nine o'clock." He had just showered. His hair was still dripping at the ends, leaving little pockmarks on the carpet. Ellen reached over and made a part with her spatula.
The apartment was nearly bare, dotted with mismatched sofas and armchairs and an occasional plastic cube table. There weren't many knickknacks, except for a few grade-school art class ceramic candy bowls, probably made years before by Jake's siblings, and a statuette of Jesus on the Cross. But the room was warm and homey and smelled like popcorn and overripe strawberries. It looked happily wrapped and comfortably lived-in. I thought about my Barely White kitchen, my skin-colored leather couch, and I was ashamed.
Ellen had made French toast for breakfast, and fresh-squeezed orange juice and corned beef hash. I hovered at the edge of the speckled Formica table, looking at all the food. I hadn't made breakfast in years. Nicholas left at four-thirty in the morning; there wasn't time for a spread like this. "When do you have to get up to do all this?" I asked.
Jake curled his arm around
Ellen's waist. "Tell her the truth," he said, and then he looked up at me. "Breakfast is all Ellen can do. My mother had to teach her how to turn on the oven when we got married."
"Jake!" Ellen slapped his hand away, but she was smiling. She slipped a piece of French toast onto a plate for me. "I told him he's more than welcome to move back home, but then he'd have to do his own laundry again."
I was mesmerized by them. They made it look so easy. I could not remember the last time there had been a gentle touch or a relaxed conversation between Nicholas and me. I couldn't remember if Nicholas and I had ever been like this. Things had happened so quickly for us, it was as though our whole relationship had been fast-forwarded. I wondered for a moment what might have happened if I had married Jake. I pushed that thought away. I had given my life to Nicholas, and we could have been like this, I knew we could, if Nicholas had been around just a little more. Or if I had given him something to stick around for.
I watched Jake pull Ellen onto his lap and kiss her senseless, as if I weren't even there. He caught my eye. "Flea," he said, grinning, "you aren't going to watch, are you?"
"For God's sake," I said, smiling back at Jake. "What's a girl got to do to get breakfast in this house?" I stood up and opened the refrigerator, looking for the maple syrup. I watched Jake and Ellen from behind the door. I saw their tongues meet. I promise you this, Nicholas, I thought. Once I get my act together, I'm going to make it up to you. I'm going to fall in love with you all over again. I'm going to make you fall in love with me.
Ellen left for work minutes later, without eating anything she'd prepared. She worked for an advertising agency downtown, in Relocation. "When people move to different branches in the country," she had said, "I get them started all over again." She draped a long multicolored scarf over her shoulders and kissed Jake on the neck and waved to me.
Over the next two days, Jake and I went food shopping together, ate lunch together, watched the evening news. I spent all day with him, waiting to hear from Eddie Savoy. At seven o'clock, when Ellen came home, I would get up off her sofa and turn Jake over to her. I'd drive home to my father's, sometimes pulling off into a dark, rustling alley to imagine what they were doing.
The third day I was in Chicago, the temperature soared to one hundred degrees. "Get yourself to the lake," the morning radio DJ said when I was on my way over to Jake's place. When I opened his door, he was standing in the middle of the living room in his boxer shorts, packing a wicker basket. "It's a picnic kind of day," he said, and he held up an orange Tupperware bowl. "Ellen made three-bean salad," he told me, "and she left you a bathing suit to borrow."
I tried on Ellen's bathing suit, feeling very uncomfortable in the bedroom where Jake slept with his wife. There was nothing on the white walls except the old sampler that had hung over Jake's childhood bed, with the Irish blessing that he had left in my knapsack when I walked away from my life. Most of the room was taken up by an enormous four-poster bed, carved out of golden oak. Each post depicted a different scene from the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve in a gentle embrace; Eve biting into the forbidden fruit; the Fall from Grace. The serpent wound itself over the fourth post, which I was using to balance myself as I stepped into Ellen's maillot. I looked into the mirror and smoothed my hands over the places where my bust did not fill up the cups and where the material strained at my waist, thicker because of Max. I wasn't the slightest bit like Ellen.
In the corner of the mirror I saw Jake come to stand in the doorway. His eyes lingered on my hands as I traced them over my body, lost and unnatural in his wife's clothing. Then he looked up and held my reflection, as if he was trying to say something but could not find the words. I turned away to break the spell, and put my hand on the serpent's carved neck. "This is some bed," I said.
Jake laughed. "Ellen's mom gave it to us as a wedding gift. She hates me. I think this was her way of telling me to go to hell." He walked to a chipped armoire in the corner of the room and took out a T-shirt, tossing it to me. It hung to the middle of my thighs. "You all set?" he said, but he was already leaving.
Jake and I parked in the lot for a private golf club and walked beneath the highway overpass to the shores of Lake Michigan. He had pulled the wicker basket and a cooler of beer out of the trunk, and as I was about to lock it up, I pulled out my sketch pad and conte sticks on impulse.
In early July, the lake was still cold, but the humidity and the heat rolling off its surface softened the shock of wading in. My ankles throbbed and then little by little became numb. Jake splashed by me, diving in headfirst. He surfaced about six feet away and tossed his hair, spraying me with tiny iced drops that made my breath catch. "You're a wimp, Flea," he said. "You move out East and look what happens."
I thought about Memorial Day the year before, when it was unseasonably hot and I had begged Nicholas to take me to the beach in Newburyport. I'd waded into the water, ready to swim. The ocean was no more than fifty degrees, and Nicholas had laughed and said it never gets swimmable until the end of August. He'd practically carried me back up the beach, and then he held his warm hands over my ankles until my teeth stopped chattering.
Jake and I were the only ones on the beach, because it was barely nine in the morning. We had the whole lake to ourselves. Jake did the butterfly and then the backstroke, and he purposely came close so that he'd splash me. "I think you should move back here permanently," he said. "What the hell. Maybe I'll just never go back to work."
I sank into the water. "Isn't that the beauty of being the owner, though? You can delegate responsibility and walk away and still make a profit."
Jake dove under and stayed there for so long I began to get worried. "Jake," I whispered. I splashed around with my hands to clear the deep water. "Jake!"
He grabbed my foot and pulled hard, and I didn't even have a chance to take a breath before I went under.
I came to the surface, sputtering and shivering, and Jake smiled at me from several feet away. "I'm going to kill you," I said.
Jake dipped his lips to the water and then stood up and spurted a fountain. "You could," he said, "but then you'd have to get wet again." He turned and started to swim farther away from the shore. I took a deep breath and went after him. He had always been a better swimmer; I was out of breath by the time I reached him. Gasping, I grabbed at his bathing suit and then at the slippery skin of his back. Jake treaded water with one hand and held me under the armpit with the other. He was winded too. "Are you okay?" he said, running his eyes over my face and the cords of my neck.
I nodded; I couldn't really speak. Jake supported both of us until my breathing came slow and even. I looked down at his hand. His thumb was pressed so tightly against my skin that I knew it would leave a mark. The straps of Ellen's bathing suit, too long to begin with, had fallen off my shoulders, and the fabric sagged, leaving a clear line of vision down my chest. Jake pulled me closer, scissor-kicking between my own legs, and he kissed me.
It was no more than a touch of our lips, but I pushed away from Jake and began swimming as hard as I could back to the shore, terrified. It was not what he had done that scared me so; it was what was missing. There had been no fire, no brutal passion, nothing like what I remembered. There had been only the quiet beat of our pulses and the steady lap of the lake.
I was not upset that Jake was no longer in love with me; I'd known that since the day I took a bus east and started my second life. But I had always wondered What if?, even after I was married. It wasn't that I didn't love Nicholas; I just assumed a little piece of me would always love Jake. And maybe that was what had me so shaken: I knew now that there was no holding on to the past. I was tied, and always would be, to Nicholas.
I lay down on the towel Jake had brought and pretended to be asleep when he came out of the water and dripped over me. I did not move, although I wanted to sprint miles down the beach, tearing over the hot sand until I couldn't breathe. Running through my mind were the words of Eddie Savoy: I'm gonna start with the scraps of t
he truth. I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn't determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I'd done wrong.
When Jake's steady breathing told me he had fallen asleep, I sat up and opened my sketch pad to a fresh page. I picked up my conte stick and drew his high cheekbones, the flush of summer across his brow, the gold stubble above his upper lip. There were so many differences between Jake and Nicholas. Jake's features held a quiet energy; Nicholas's had power. I had waited forever for Jake; I got Nicholas in a matter of days. When I pictured Jake I saw him standing beside me, at eye level, although he really had half a head on me. Nicholas, though--well, Nicholas had always seemed to me to be twenty feet tall.
Nicholas had come into my life on a white stallion, had handed me his heart, and had offered me the palace and the ball gown and the gold ring. He had given me what every little girl wanted, what I had long given up hope of having. He could not be blamed just because no one ever mentioned that once you closed the storybook, Cinderella still had to do laundry and clean the toilet and take care of the crown prince.
An image of Max flooded the space in front of me. His eyes were wide open as he rolled from belly to back, and a smile split his face in two when he realized he was seeing the world from a whole different angle. I was beginning to understand the wonder in that, and it was better late than never. I stared at Jake, and I knew what was the greatest difference: with Jake I had taken a life; with Nicholas I had created one.
Jake opened his eyes one at a time just as I was finishing his portrait. He turned onto his side. "Paige," he said, looking down, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."
I looked squarely at him. "Yes, you should have. It's okay." Now that his eyes were open, I sketched in his pale, glowing pupils and the tiger's stripe of gold around them.
"I had to make sure," he said. "I just had to make sure." Jake tipped down the edge of my pad so that he could see. "You've gotten so much better," he said. He ran his fingers along the edge of the charcoal, too light to smudge.
