by Nick Lake
I know I haven’t committed a crime, I say to him.
You don’t need a lawyer, then, he says. You’re a victim.
This is stupid of him, but I don’t say so. I mean, if a diamond is stolen from an heiress, is it the diamond that’s the victim? No—the diamond is just, I don’t know, the object of the crime. It’s the heiress who’s the victim. Here, in this situation, if there’s a victim, then I guess it’s my parents, my real parents, who had me stolen from them.
And me? I’m the object. I’m the diamond.
But I don’t want to explain this with sign language.
I want a lawyer anyway, I say. A woman lawyer. I can pay. This is true. (Mom) set up a savings account for me. It has forty thousand dollars in it. (Mom) said that anything extra left over from her salary wasn’t for her, it was for me. For when she was gone and couldn’t look after me anymore.
Keep me safe.
Ha Ha Ha Ha.
Special Agent Deacon looks over at some other person in a suit, who shrugs, and then Deacon sighs. Okay, he says. He motions to someone who leaves the room. But can I ask you some questions now?
No, I say. I will ask you questions.
Deacon blinks. Right, yes, fine.
My … I mean, Shaylene Cooper. This takes a while to spell out and Deacon watches patiently as the interpreter translates. Have you found her?
No.
When you do …
He knows where I’m going with this. She’ll be tried. Kidnapping, assault, possibly child abuse charges … She could get life without parole.
No, I say.
No?
No child abuse. She was … she was good to me.
Deacon nods, makes a note of this in a little black book in front of him on the table.
My parents are in town? My real parents?
Yes. In this building, actually. They are very eager to see you. We’ve been holding them back but … there’s no legal requirement. We have no probable cause to detain you for any crime. They … You went missing when you were two years old. They’ve been waiting fifteen years. A lot of times, people told them you must be dead. They’re pretty desperate.
I have been thinking about myself, only myself, but a feeling of, I don’t know what, sadness, compassion, pity, something, crackles through me like electricity. I can’t imagine what that must be, to lose a child. I could try, but it would hurt too much, I think.
You said I was in a hospital, when she … took me?
Burns. From a deep fryer. That’s what first alerted Dr. Maklowitz when he saw the scar tissue on your legs—I mean, it was pretty big news fifteen years ago, and the burns were mentioned a lot; an identifying characteristic, you know. You don’t hear about it now, which is probably why … why you didn’t know. But he remembered.
And that’s it? That’s why we ran? That’s why you found us?
Partly, he says. I mean, the burn scars wouldn’t have been enough. But your … Shaylene gave her real name at the reception desk.
Oh, I think. Because I reminded her about her license, in her purse. But she knew it was there—she just didn’t want to show it. For a crazy second, I wish I could go back to that moment, could take all of this back, and have it just be me and (Mom), and nothing to say any different.
From there, it wasn’t difficult. There was no ID for you, so they checked her records and there was no sign of Shaylene Cooper having a daughter. And there was no Shelby Jane Cooper on file anywhere, not at your address, not in local schools … We lost you for a while, of course, but after that spectacle in the diner … Well, Luke Scheinberg has a tracker in his car. We just followed it.
Of course he does, I think.
And then we had you, he says, and you’re the biggest piece of evidence. I mean, they took blood, when you were born. Just a prick test for sickle cell anemia, PKU, you know, but it was enough. DNA.
That’s why they tested my blood, I think.
I tap my fingers on the table. She told me she was Anya Maxwell.
She … what?
After the diner. I saw us, on CCTV on the news, leaving the hospital, and she said she was Anya Maxwell. Is she?
Deacon does like a cough-laugh thing; his smooth silver hair shakes. Absolutely not, he says. Anya Maxwell would be in her sixties.
I think back: the closed captions on the TV: the police believe these pictures may show An—
Angelica Watson, I think.
They were going to say Angelica Watson. But my (mom) used it, she must have thought so FAST, to come up with that story … She’s like some kind of really smart monster, like someone I don’t know at all. Who does that? Who pretends to be a famous murderer, so their daughter doesn’t know she’s stolen?
I want to see my parents, I say.
Of course, we’ll bring them right in and—
No. You have one of those rooms, like on TV? Where the witness or whatever sits on one side of the glass and the detectives can watch without being seen? I want to see them, but I don’t want them to see me.
This is a little hard to say in sign, but I think the interpreter manages it. She’s like the people who type, when the anchors are talking on the TV news, doing the closed captions—you stop noticing her after a while, and so yeah, maybe her mousiness, her forgettableness, is like a total asset for her job.
Yes, says Deacon thoughtfully. We do.
The other guy steps forward and I realize now he’s some kind of lawyer for the FBI or the police or something because he says, this is highly irr—
But then Special Agent Deacon busts out this badass stance, like chin raised, chest puffed out, which he has obviously practiced in front of the mirror, and he says, I don’t give one goddamn what it is, and that’s the end of that.
Chapter 49
There are Things That, when they break, they keep on functioning, just in some other, lesser way. Like an elevator: it breaks, and it’s a room. An escalator: it breaks, and it’s stairs.
The heart is the same.
It breaks, and you might not even notice, because you still feel things, you still have emotions.
But there’s a dimension missing, like for the elevator; it still works as a room, but it has lost its vertical axis of motion, and it’s the same with a heart: it breaks, and yeah, you can still have feelings, you can still feel sorry for someone, or angry, or sad, but there’s something that’s lost, a motion, a dimension. It breaks, and it’s just an organ, beating.
You will never really feel happy again; you will never really, deep down, care about anyone else again.
Not ever.
This is what I’m thinking as my parents step into the room on the other side of the two-way glass, because the first thing I feel with my broken heart is an emotion I don’t even have a name for, something like love, I guess, for these two people who look so unbelievably sad and also so hopeful. Pity, maybe. But then, very quickly, it’s gone, and I just feel cold and empty.
I don’t want to be here. I want to lie in the cold clean dust of the moon and close my eyes. But I don’t. I look at them.
The father is older, maybe fifty. He has a bald patch at the back of his head, and he’s wearing clothes that look like they come from L.L. Bean, that whole hiking-in-the-hills look. He isn’t wearing sandals over socks but he is, like, one step away from it.
The mother is 139 times more attractive than him, and maybe ten years younger. She has long hair that I guess is naturally red, from her freckles, but is also obviously dyed, the same color. She is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, very little makeup, and if she wasn’t the homecoming queen then I am a fricking walrus. She must have been beautiful, and I don’t mean beautiful like people usually use it to describe any old thing, I mean beautiful like stunning.
This woman can’t be my mother, I think.
Around her neck, there’s a gold cross on a chain. She keeps touching it, unconsciously—a God-person, I realize. Still, I think. I guess she has had reasons for praying.
The mother is also crying like nothing I have ever seen, like she’s a balloon person full of water, and someone has put pinpricks in her eyes, she’s just crying and crying and crying, leaking all over her face.
Father puts his arms around her, awkwardly.
This, I think, is awful! And weird! And creepy!
But I keep watching. They turn to the glass, I guess they know I’m here, and their faces are so full of it, so full of expectation and hope that I don’t know if I can bear it.
I mean, they’re strangers to me.
Then the mother reaches into her jeans pocket and takes something out and she moves suddenly forward—I flinch back, even though there’s glass between us—and the father tries to catch her arm, to hold her back, but he’s not fast enough and she is there, pressing something against the glass.
It’s a photo.
It’s a photo, of her looking much younger and yes, just as beautiful as I thought, and she is holding this baby under the arms, she’s lying back on a couch and the baby is above her, kind of dandling its feet on her chest, and she’s laughing up at it.
This baby—me.
The expression on her face, though, man, the expression on her face.
It’s not love, it’s so far beyond that, it’s like love is the normal engines and this, whatever it is, it’s warp drive—it’s something so intense that even as the father pulls her back, her face shaking, her lips trembling, I am leaning forward to keep looking at that photo, to keep seeing that thing that I see in her face fifteen years ago.
Not love. Something bigger.
But—and this is how I know my heart is broken—I step back and I close the valves that have opened, and they turn back into strangers, people I don’t know.
I’m supposed to live with THEM? I say.
They’ve said they’ll hire an interpreter. To stay in the house, until, you know, they can learn, says Deacon.
When’s my lawyer coming? I say. I want to talk with her. This is NOT happening.
Oh, honey, says Deacon, and for the first time those ballistic eyes of his go soft. I’m sorry, but it is happening.
Chapter 50
I’m not in love with my lawyer, but, you know, she’s okay.
It’s just, she’s one of those people who feel sorry for you because you’re deaf. I want to say to her, it’s not a fricking disease. I want to say all kinds of things to her.
I mean, okay, here:
I watched this show on TV once, and the characters were talking, and their whole conversation was, like, what would be worse, being blind or being deaf? So, right there—the assumption. People think it’s terrible, being deaf, something to be frightened of.
But,
A) I have never known what it is like to not be deaf, except in the Dreaming, and that’s not real. It’s just a part of me. I don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It just is.
B) You want to know what would be the worst? What would be the worst sense to lose? Touch. That’s what SHOULD scare people.
Touch.
See, we walk around on the earth, all the time, on two feet, which is kind of a miracle of balance, and it’s only because of touch. It’s the touch of feet on ground that tells us when we hit the zero moment point in the wave of our walking, and it took like forty years for scientists to teach robots to do that, to walk on two feet—I know because (Mom) taught me.
People say a bird is free.
But a bird isn’t free, it just has different architecture. A bird is an open window onto thin air; and thick air; thermals, eddies, currents. A person is a ground floor, foundations driven deep in the earth.
A bird: what it can’t do is throw arms around its mate—some of them, even, they can’t ever land, like swifts: they can’t touch, so they can’t love. Right now, I have an idea of how that might feel—it’s like I’m disconnected, like a bird, just floating in empty space. No one to hold me.
I want to say to my lawyer: I don’t care that I can’t hear. But someone just took my (mom) away, my (mom) took me away, and I never had any friends anyway, so now I don’t have anyone to touch, and the ground is gone below my feet, and I don’t have anyone and so I’m like a swift, lost in the wide unanchored air, and I don’t have love anymore.
But I don’t say any of that. It would take way too long.
I don’t want to live with them, is what I do say, or what Melany with a y says for me. We’re in a private room that my lawyer says they’re not allowed to bug, unless they want the whole Supreme Court to climb up their asses, and that makes me smile at least.
It’ll be okay, says my lawyer. Her name is Carla Rainer and she has a faint mustache. Plain gold band on her ring finger. You’ll have regular visits from Child Protective Services, to check up on you. And the state is providing a counselor for you. They know it’s important to manage your, ah, return to, uh, your birth parents.
No, I say. It’s not that. It’s just, I don’t know them. I want to be on my own.
She sighs, but the movement of her body tells me it’s a sympathetic sigh, not an irritated one. You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid, she says. You’re a minor. If you’d been mistreated by them, there’d be a case for protective custody, but … you’re their daughter.
So we go back to, what, Alaska?
You don’t want to do that?
It’s Alaska!
She smiles. I think they’re happy to stay here as long as you need. As you can imagine, they want very much to get to know you. You know they rented a place?
Yes.
So, yeah, I think we could negotiate for a … transition period here in Arizona.
Like a diver going into a decompression tank, I say. It takes Melany some time to understand what I’m saying, and translate it. I don’t know the sign for decompression tank, so I have to kind of make it up.
But Melany gets it, I guess. The lawyer, Carla, does an eyebrows-up face, like it’s somehow surprising that I have watched documentaries and read books. Yes. Probably not long, though. I mean, they have jobs.
I had not thought of this. What do they do?
Your father—Michael—is a journalist. Your mother—Jennifer—is a teacher.
Wow, I think. Other kids?
Five, she says. Three older than you. Two younger. They are … She consults some notes. Tyler and James are in college. Victoria is six, she’s the youngest, and Richie, he’s in middle school. And Anna is in the army.
Oh, I say. I have five brothers and sisters. This information is somehow too big to fit into my head.
And in a month’s time? I ask.
Huh?
When I’m eighteen. What happens then? Can I live on my own?
She sits back. Interesting question, she says. I guess you would be free to live wherever you want. I mean, I need to make some phone calls, check some precedents. If there even are any. I think that’s what it would mean, though. But your parents have made it clear they want to support you. Pay for any education needs that you might have, I’m told that your IQ is—
I don’t need their money, I say. So, for now, I have to stay with them, right? For a month?
Yes.
Okay, I say. Fine. I am aware that I’m being a bitch, please don’t think I’m not. But you have to understand—I don’t KNOW these people. I might as well be going to live with total strangers. I AM going to live with total strangers.
I know they have missed me. I know this is a big party for them. But it’s not a win-win situation for me, to say the fricking least.
I have one more item, says my lawyer.
Yes?
Luke Scheinberg.
It takes some time for Melany to spell this out. I am blank for a moment, a piece of paper waiting for words, then I get it.
Oh, right. I dimly remember someone, the city attorney maybe, using that surname.
He wants to see you.
Really? Why?
I don’t know, she says. He won’t say. But he insists
on speaking to you personally. She puts her hands up. You don’t have to. But if you want to, I would be present. And Melany, of course.
When? I say.
He’s in the building, says the lawyer. He’s waiting. You could see him anytime. But like I say, it’s your call.
I shrug. Whatever.
So I should let him come?
Sure, I say. How much worse can things get?
If you are ever tempted to say these words, or sign them, or whatever, here is my advice: don’t. Because here is the thing: it might not be right away, it might not be immediate, but the truth is, things can always get worse.
Much, much worse.
Chapter 51
Luke is nervous, I can see it in his eyes.
Don’t worry, I say as he comes into the meeting room. I’m not going to stab you.
Melany doesn’t translate this. My lawyer is sitting in a corner, making notes, not saying anything, just showing everyone she’s there. Showing Luke she’s there, mainly, I guess.
It’s weird seeing Luke here, under the fluorescent lights of the federal building. He looks drawn, gray, like he hasn’t slept in forever. His hand hangs by his side, in its white bandage. He can’t seem to meet my eye.
Hello, Luke, I say.
Melany translates this time.
Hello, he says. How are you feeling?
I blink. Great, I say. My mom is not my real mom. I’m some other person from who I thought I was. It’s fantastic.
Melany signs quickly.
I’m sorry, says Luke.
Don’t be, I say. Look at your hand. At least I stopped you getting killed with a rock. And it’s a good thing you don’t drink—otherwise you’d have had a massive overdose of codeine.
Melany lowers her eyebrows at me, like, what? I shake my head—forget it.
How’s the hand? I say, and Melany puts it onto the air as vibrations, and into Luke’s ears.
Not too bad, says Luke. Missed the artery. Some nerve damage, but could be worse.
I nod. I’m glad.
