by Dan Chaon
Then, everything was quiet. He kept his eyes closed, hearing the approach of a car, and then footsteps running, and finally a voice that called to him through the cracked windshield. It doesn’t sound like my father, he thought. It could be anyone.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?
O’Neil had come at last to the town where she lived. The bus rose up over the crest of a hill, and Bedlow, South Dakota, appeared below him in a blur of falling snow. One of those houses, he thought: She was inside it.
But as the bus pulled into Bedlow he just sat there, as if he might not move. They stopped in front of the bus depot, which was part of a truck stop on the edge of town. Heavy flakes of snow were falling onto the cars in the parking lot, and O’Neil was reminded of the furniture in a house that has been closed up, all draped with sheets. Everyone was silent. A few people in seats near him shifted fitfully, perhaps troubled by a dream. “Bedlow,” the driver called impatiently. When the driver called again, O’Neil realized that he was the only one getting off. “Are you Bedlow?” the driver asked as he teetered to the front, and O’Neil nodded. He knew he was doing the wrong thing.
She didn’t know he was coming; that was the worst part. As he stood alone in the parking lot under the high, brightly humming Shell sign in his trench coat, he imagined that he must look like an assassin in an old movie, someone who would make the music turn ominous and dissonant. He didn’t like to think of it that way, to picture her unaware of the trouble that was bearing down on her—innocently going about her business, fixing her dinner or balancing her checkbook at her kitchen table or snug in an easy chair, placidly reading a book.
He had always tried to think of it like this: he’d come across a doe in the clearing of a forest, and it was still, its hide shivering, its ears pricked up; any sudden movement would cause it to bolt. Only the most subtle, graceful approach would allow him to step closer, to put out a hand. And then? He didn’t know. It wasn’t, he thought, a very accurate metaphor.
From a strategic standpoint, and from a moral one, all the books warned against surprising them. They were very pious about honesty, these books, with their talk of the evils of secrecy and closed records, with their stirring passages about the “right to know.” But the truth was, the only way to get information—birth certificates, court documents, et cetera—was to lie and connive, to fake everything. For a year now, O’Neil had pretended to be the father of a dying child, in urgent need of medical information. He forged letters from an invented pediatrician on stolen hospital stationery. He wept into the phone, into the embarrassed silence of some clerk or another, and after he got what he wanted he almost laughed with the exhilaration of fooling them, even while his eyes were still blurry with real tears.
He had her address for a long time before he did anything about it. Three months before, on his birthday, he sent her a rose. There was a card attached, with his name and phone number.
There was no response. He waited a month, and then he sent another note. “Did you receive my rose?” it said. He enclosed an envelope for her reply. The answer came at last, two weeks later. It was a little white card with the words “Thank You” in gold script on the front. Inside she’d printed, in careful block letters: SORRY. She underlined this three times.
Perhaps she really thought that this would be the end of it, but O’Neil had to believe that she knew better. She had to have doubts of her own, and deep down she was expecting him, he thought. For weeks now, every time her phone rang, every time she locked her door at night, a shadow of dread, anxiety, even vague eagerness would pass over her. Or so he imagined. It might even be a relief for her to have it over with.
In the phone booth outside the truck stop café—EAT GAS WELCOME—he dialed information. His plan was simple: He would take a taxicab directly to her house and ring the bell. There would be no way for his uncertainty to get the best of him if he was standing there at the edge of her yard, and he found it practically unimaginable that she would close the door on him after she’d opened it and he began to speak.
But there was no taxi service in Bedlow. He knew he should have guessed as much, since it was a small place, but he had let himself become too pleased with the directness of his plan. Beyond the interstate, the town itself—the dazzles of streetlights that were beginning to glow in the dusk, among the dark treetops—looked to be several miles away. By nightfall, it would be below zero. Walking seemed out of the question.
He pressed his hand to the glass of the phone booth, watching the snow fall onto the barren lot. Once, in Chicago, he’d answered a randomly ringing pay phone and a husky male voice had said, “I can see you, mister. I’m watching you right now.” He’d looked up: rows of windows, dotting upward like endless ellipsis points, almost into infinity. The rest of that day, he’d found it hard to shake the sense that someone was out there, watching.
Remembering this made him edgy. Something inside his stomach shrank a bit, and he couldn’t help but think again that he was making a mistake. He stepped out of the phone booth, walked around it once, trying to consider his course. Then, feigning nonchalance, he turned and went inside the café.
For a moment he’d let himself imagine that he might meet someone there, maybe hitch a ride into town. But it wasn’t that type of place, he realized. It seemed to him that everyone looked up when he crossed the threshold, and he felt as if silence fell over the room and everyone was staring as he lurched into the unfriendly, greasy-smelling brightness. The cowboys and truck drivers threw a glance at his trench coat, the red-and-gold scarf tucked carefully into his collar, and he put a hand through his hair, combing out the snow with his fingers.
There was a little area by the cash register where trinkets and novelties were on display, and he walked over and looked at them, folding his hands in front of him as if he were self-possessed and untroubled, a man with a bit of free time to kill. Tiered within the glass case, jewelry and belt buckles made of Black Hills gold and turquoise were lined up; below them, metal figurines of ’49ers, cowpokes with lariats, Elvis, an Indian on a horse, his arms open wide, with the inscription
Great Spirit Teach me to criticize another man not Until I have walked a mile In his moccasins!
Staring at this, he half considered just staying, sitting down and drinking coffee until the bus back to Chicago showed up. He lingered over a revolving rack of postcards, trying to sort out his thoughts, flipping through the pictures of Mt. Rushmore and Reptile Gardens and Wind Cave. He couldn’t help but imagine himself and this woman, his mother, visiting these places, seeing the sights of the world she lived in. He pictured them slowly beginning to tell their stories, to become friends. It wasn’t so improbable.
O’Neil had always felt sure that it wouldn’t work over the phone: it was too unreal, too easy for her to simply hang up. But why not call her, he thought now, just to hear the voice, the brief, hesitant “Hello . . . hello . . . Is someone there?” Then hang up, go home.
Or say something, he thought: “You don’t know me, but . . .”; or “Mother, this is your son”; or “You can’t hide from me anymore”; or even “I love you.” O’Neil whispered all of them under his breath, testing the feel of each on his tongue. None of them worked. None of them got past a few lines before he imagined a click, a dial tone.
When he looked up, he could see an elderly man staring at him from a table near the window. The old man’s mouth was turned up in a tiny crescent smile, and O’Neil shrugged his shoulders at him, as if to say, “Well, we all talk to ourselves once in a while, don’t we?” But rather than turning away, the old man began to nod his head, still smiling and watching, and O’Neil could feel the friendly expression on his face tighten into a mask.
No one in the world knew where he was. He’d managed to keep it secret, though sometimes he felt as if he could hold it back no longer. At work, poised over the blinking cursor on his computer, O’Neil would catch the girl in the next cubicle glancing at him, and he’d feel a quivering inside his stomach.
For a moment, O’Neil imagined he was going to tell. And when he called his parents, his adoptive parents, he could sense it, moving beneath the talk of health and weather like a fish below ice. He spoke into the hiss of long distance, imagining that his words disintegrated to travel through the wire and then came together at the other end, but not in the same pattern. Who knew what they would hear him say?
So he told them nothing. He didn’t want to hurt them. He didn’t want his mother to ask, after a long pause, “What can she give you that we haven’t?” or even “Why?”
O’Neil couldn’t answer that. For years, he hadn’t even thought about it. His parents had told him at an early age that he was adopted, and he’d grown up taking it for granted. He was his parents’ son, he told those who asked, an O’Neil 100 percent. The nameless lady who had given birth to him didn’t matter.
But slowly, it had crept up on him. Sometimes, it was just little things—a face seen closing a door, a certain smell of wood, a woman’s laugh heard from across a restaurant. Sometimes, on a busy Chicago street, all the bodies passing around him would suddenly have histories—pasts, futures, secrets. It was a mundane realization, he knew, except that he was aware that any of them—a woman stumbling down his street at midnight, singing in a high clear voice; a lady vanishing into the doorway of an elevated train; a businessman in silver sunglasses, cruising slowly past in his convertible—any of them could belong to him. He sensed mothers, fathers, siblings in the faces that passed. Once, at a bar, O’Neil had been drawn to talk to a man who looked like him. A little drunk, O’Neil found himself pushing the conversation, asking the man about his family. “What’s your mother like?” O’Neil had said, leaning forward as the man shifted uncomfortably.
And O’Neil wondered what had happened to her. Did she look at him, after he was born? Did she cry? He couldn’t picture her face, though sometimes if he concentrated he could almost catch a glimpse of some aspect—the set of the eyes, the shape of a finger. Occassionally, he would indulge himself, pretending she might be someone famous. He’d even clipped out photos that had caught his eye in newspapers and magazines, actresses or experts of some sort, society page ladies. He liked to imagine her as someone with quick things to say, a party giver. Perhaps she was known for her moods. He tried not to construct a rape, the natural father pulling her onto the dirty ground, the heel of his hand against her mouth. He tried not to imagine her smiling as she left the hospital, free of an annoying burden and nothing else. He’d read a book about a home for unwed mothers, and this was where O’Neil most often saw her. For months, the pregnant girls lived separate from the rest of the world. Once, when the nuns took them to town for ice cream, they were given wedding bands to wear. There were white corridors, crisp pages of forms she had to sign, the movement of O’Neil’s unformed limbs inside her.
He didn’t know whether this would make sense to his adopted parents; probably, it wouldn’t. He could see his father shaking his head, frowning, looking down at his hands. And late at night, when he was alone in the guest room, his old bedroom, his adoptive mother would come to him. Or so he imagined. She’d sit down on the edge of his bed, he imagined, and look at him sadly. “You’re lonely,” she’d say. “That’s what it is, you know. You live in that big city by yourself, and you’re having a hard time finding a direction.” She’d touch his hair, push it gently back from his brow. For a long time, they’d stay like that, in the dark, in silence.
“Whatever’s missing in your life,” she’d say at last, “whatever that is, you’re not going to get it from her.”
O’Neil wasn’t sure that she would say this, of course. It was possible that his parents would be encouraging. Maybe, if he’d tried to explain his reasons to them, they would have nodded sympathetically. “Do you know what I mean?” O’Neil would ask them, and they would say, “Yes, we understand, we support you.” But even then, the other conversation, the negative one he’d imagined, would be right there beneath the surface. After all, the questions he put in their mouths were the same ones he’d been asking himself all along.
He walked back out to the phone booth. None of those imaginary conversations mattered, O’Neil told himself. He was here now; there was no turning back. He was going to talk to her, see her, and after that, maybe all the answers would fall into place.
He felt light-headed. Out in the distance, semis and cars nudged toward the exit, the interstate underlined the flat stretch of horizon. For a long while he just stood there in the glass box, his hand on the phone. As he watched, the lines of wheel tracks, the dots of footprints casually disappeared in the accumulating snow. His hands felt disembodied when he dialed the number.
O’Neil had imagined that this moment would be dizzying, that the air would hum with electricity. But the phone seemed to ring and ring, and the air seemed suddenly thin, and his stomach tightened as if he’d been running a long ways. At last he heard the receiver being lifted. And then her voice, tired, somewhat impatient, said, “Hello?”
“Hello,” O’Neil murmured. “It’s me. I’m calling to find out if you received the rose I sent you.” His voice sounded as he imagined hers would, soft and sensual.
There was a long pause. All O’Neil could hear was an echoing hallway of static through the wire, muffled voices and computer sounds mumbling as if from behind shut doors. He gripped the telephone tightly, could feel his body straining forward as if he could somehow catch hold of her words and pull them to himself. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes. I received it.”
“Did you like it?” he whispered. His heart was pounding. In his mind he was already rushing through the conversation, exchanging life histories and breathless, emotional phrases. He thought of her hands, shaking right now as his were.
“It was nice,” she said. She cleared her throat at the same time O’Neil did, and he laughed a little, because they thought alike; they really were alike.
“Really?” O’Neil breathed. “I thought you’d like it. I knew you would.” He was unrehearsed, speaking quickly, and he sensed himself picking up momentum. But before he could continue, she sighed heavily.
“Listen,” she said, as if O’Neil were an eager salesman and she wished he’d come to the point. “What do you want? Why are you calling me?” She spoke stiffly, and the half-swoon he’d been in dropped away. He was intruding.
“I want to meet you,” O’Neil said at last, and she nearly cut him off.
“But I don’t want to meet you,” she said. “I don’t want to correspond with you, I don’t want to know about you.” Her voice sharpened and grew more deliberate as she spoke. “I’m sure you’re a very fine person, very smart, very nice, very handsome. I’d be proud of you. But I don’t want to know you.”
O’Neil opened his mouth. “Please,” he said, and his throat tightened, “I’m here. I came here to meet you.” Outside, things were beginning to distort and double and he wiped his hand across his eyes. “What if we just met once? Then I’ll be gone away and I won’t bother you. I won’t call you anymore. I just want to see you—we don’t even have to talk.”
“What good would that do?” she said flatly. It was what O’Neil always thought his other parents would say, and he felt the question sink heavily inside him. He sighed into the phone, the sound amplified, huge against the mouthpiece.
“I don’t know,” he said. He paused, but she made no sound. He thought he could hear her breathing. “I want to just because you’re my mother.”
“I’m not, though,” she said. “I’m just someone who made a mistake a long time ago. And I’ve been punished enough for it, I think.”
O’Neil didn’t say anything—he couldn’t speak. And after a long silence she said, “I’m going to hang up now. I’m really very sorry.”
“Wait!” O’Neil blurted out. “I’ve come a long way. I’m here now. Couldn’t I just see you from a distance? Couldn’t I maybe stand outside your house, or across the street, and then you could step outside for a minute. A minute.”
“Don’t come near my house,” she said sharply. “You’re not listening to me. No.”
“Please,” he said, and he could hear himself repeating, softly, anything to keep her on the line, “Please please please. I don’t want to cause problems. You understand, don’t you? What could it hurt?”
There was no sound coming from the phone, and for a moment O’Neil thought she’d hung up. Then he heard her sigh. “Look,” he said. “What about this. I’m at the bus station now. I’ll stay here, I won’t come to your house if you’ll promise me. If you could just walk by—walk by here and give me some sign so I know it’s you. You wouldn’t have to see me at all. You wouldn’t even have to look at me.”
“Why are you doing this?” she said tiredly.
“What can it matter to you?” he said; his voice had hardened. “Just to walk by? It would mean everything to me.” She was silent. “Is that really too much to ask? In the next hour or so. I’ll be in the window of the café. Walk by and just wave, so I know. Then I wouldn’t have any reason to go to your house.”
