“No I’m not,” Michael snapped.
“‘No sunglasses,’” Rosa Figueroa read from the instructions, “‘no earphones, no headgear’—so cap off, please, Michael.”
The boy took it off and sat on the stool. His brown hair (nearer to Amber’s shade than Victor’s) was buzzed short in a way that reminded Noah of convicts in old movies.
“Better not smile,” he said in the boy’s direction as he was paying the photographer.
“Why not?”
“It’s whatchacallit, biometrics. The distance between the edges of your mouth and your eyes, that kind of thing, the proportions get distorted by a smile. You’ll look less like yourself—I mean your usual self.”
“What if I usually smile?”
In Noah’s two-minute experience of this child, he didn’t.
Michael was glued to his phone again.
“Eyes up, please,” the seen-it-all photographer called.
“Do a neutral face,” Noah suggested.
“What do you mean, neutral?” the boy asked.
“Not smiling, not frowning, just as if you’re calm.”
“Like dead?” Now he played possum, jaw hanging, eyes staring, torso lolling off the stool.
Rosa Figueroa spoke up. “Michael, can we please get this done before we miss our turn at the passport desk?”
“‘An unaffected smile is permitted,’” he called out, pointing to a sign on the wall. He stumbled over unaffected, but there was nothing wrong with his reading.
Noah hid his irritation. “I guess they must have changed the rule. But unaffected, that means nothing goofy or over the top.”
Michael pulled a sinister grin with his fingers hooked in the corners of his mouth.
Noah might end up losing two thousand dollars to the airline because this kid wouldn’t stop monkeying around.
“Sit up straight, please.” The photographer suppressed a yawn.
“Phone away,” Rosa Figueroa told Michael.
He only tightened his grip on it.
“That’s OK, it’s just a head shot,” the photographer said.
Once released from the stool, Michael put his cap back on and pulled it all the way down.
They had the envelope of warm prints in about a minute. (The electronic sign over the glass booths still said D450, so they hadn’t missed their slot.) In the pictures Michael looked older, Noah thought; harder. But really, eleven—that was barely formed.
He sat down on the plastic seat beside the boy. He noticed a tiny hole in Michael’s coat, a bit of fluff sticking out.
Go on, Joan said, make more sparkling conversation.
“I’m sorry about your grandma.”
Rosa Figueroa caught that. “Sounds like she was a wonderful lady, she’ll be missed. I bet she’s looking down, watching you right now.”
The boy’s small face showed nothing at all.
The sign jumped from D450 to C927, then straight to D452, and Rosa Figueroa leaped up as if she’d been electrocuted: “That’s us.”
Out in the bone-rattling wind, afterward, Noah tingled in anticipation of the large coffee he was going to enjoy, by himself this time, in a not-too-trendy café, before he went home to gather his forces. “How should we get Michael back to school?” he asked Rosa Figueroa in the most responsible voice he could put on.
She frowned at her watch. “Hardly worth it. I have to be in Downtown Brooklyn for a hearing by twelve thirty, and before that I need to make a couple of calls…but maybe we could fit in the home visit now?”
She wasn’t really asking, Noah gathered, and the home in question was his apartment. “Ah. OK. I haven’t had a chance to tidy up, but…” That was the whole idea, he realized; it wouldn’t be an accurate spotcheck otherwise.
Michael was playing with some ball-shaped electronic game, oblivious to the cold.
Rosa Figueroa fretted over her laminated bus map.
“Let’s treat ourselves to a cab.” Noah said it lightly, like a line from a Noël Coward play. Would she guess that he was so worn out he thought he might drop down in the street?
She made only a token protest.
To fill the silence in the taxi, Noah said, “I used to work in Brooklyn, as it happens. I taught for more than forty years at a university.” Though the engineering and applied-sciences campus had been five miles from Ella Davis’s notorious neighborhood.
He won’t be interested in your career, Joan pointed out.
Snagged in traffic. Noah watched the ticker mount. Would the boy think Noah was a billionaire? It was all relative, he supposed. Rich enough to take a yellow cab, but not a limo with a peaked-cap driver; what did you call that?
“What’s up with that hat?” Michael didn’t look up from his beeping globe.
Rosa Figueroa wasn’t wearing one, so the boy must mean Noah’s. His hand flew up to adjust the sit of his old fedora. “What’s up with it?”
“Why are you wearing it?”
“Why do you wear yours?”
Michael shrugged.
Noah tried again. “What’s that game you’re playing?”
Several seconds passed.
“Can you answer the question, Michael?” the social worker murmured. “Mr. Selvaggio just wants the two of you to get to know each other.”
Enough of a further pause to be insolent before Michael said, “MindReader.”
“Is that right?” Noah asked. “It reads your mind?”
A scornful sound in the boy’s throat.
“So…you think of something? And then?”
“It does a question about the thing, you say yes or no—”
“Oh, that’s an ancient game,” he said with relief. “A TV show, and it was on the radio before that. People have been playing Twenty Questions for centuries.”
“Nobody’s even had electricity for centuries,” the boy muttered.
Rosa Figueroa roused herself. “So, you know where your uncle’s going to take you tomorrow, Michael? France! If your passport comes through.” Faltering.
“He’s not my uncle. Cody’s my uncle.”
Hang on, who was Cody? “Is he your aunt’s husband?” Noah asked.
“Mom’s brother. He lives with us.”
Noah looked at Rosa Figueroa.
“Cody Davis has been staying at their mother’s on and off this past year,” she admitted.
“Then why can’t—” Noah stopped himself. “Didn’t you say on the phone that I was Michael’s only relative in New York?”
“After we ruled out Mr. Davis. He’s on disability—in chronic pain. You’re the only one in a position to be able to offer care.”
And how could Rosa Figueroa possibly have known whether Noah would have it in him to offer care? “What’s wrong with him?”
“He uses a wheelchair, I believe from an injury he suffered, years ago. That right, Michael?”
The boy nodded over his electronic ball.
“You must be missing him, too, as well as your grandma.”
“Is this Cody still at the apartment?” Perhaps with some kind of hired support… If Noah could throw money at this situation, he’d do it in a minute.
“Landlord kicked us out already.” Michael’s voice was bitter.
“I think your uncle’s with friends in Queens for now,” Rosa Figueroa told him, “but I’m sure you’ll see him soon.”
So this Cody was motherless and homeless too. It was all such a disaster.
“And Mr. Selvaggio is your great-uncle, which is another kind of uncle.”
“What’s so great about him?” Michael wanted to know.
Whether that was ignorance or wit, it did make Noah smile.
II
Twenty Questions
Noah surveyed his neighborhood out the cab window with new, uneasy eyes. The Upper West Side really wasn’t that tony—less so than the Upper East Side. He and Joan had bought this apartment before prices had skyrocketed in the ’80s. Still, as the cab pulled up to his building he found
himself self-conscious about the scalloped canopy over the entrance, the uniformed doorman. It must all look pretty snooty to Michael.
The elevator clanked on the way up to the ninth floor. See, Noah wanted to say, absurdly, the place could do with some refurbishing, I’m no Daddy Warbucks.
At his door, he found himself struggling to turn the key. Rosa Figueroa was right behind him, no doubt assessing everything from his fine motor skills to the prints in his narrow hall. (Was the Egon Schiele drawing borderline pornographic?) As the invaders filed past him, Noah tried to see his apartment through their eyes—fine-boned chairs, thin Persian rugs on the walls, unbroken shelves of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Organic Letters. He just hoped the child wouldn’t break anything.
“Michael, want to take your coat off?”
The boy ignored Rosa Figueroa.
What was she scanning for: sketchy roommates? Whips? Mysterious white powders? Or dangers that Noah wasn’t even aware of? No, more like absences of crucial things that kids needed.
Noah didn’t even have to be the best of a bad bunch, he told himself, because there was no bunch from which he’d been selected. If the social worker judged him not up to the mark, so be it: she could tear up that Designation of Person in Parental Relationship and take Michael away with her to the group home. The sad fact was, for her to do that, there’d probably have to be a serial-killer collage on Noah’s bedroom wall.
“Where’s your dog?” Michael wanted to know.
“Ah, dead, sorry,” Noah said. He never registered the heated sleeping pad in the corner anymore, or the mangled chew toy. Unhygienic; he should get rid of them.
Michael didn’t even glance at the rippled surfaces of books, the CDs, the vinyl (mostly jazz). Still wearing his backpack, he parked himself on the curved end of the black leather chaise longue. That’s a genuine 1969 LC4, designed by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret in 1928, Noah wanted to tell him. A marriage of geometric purity and ergonomic perfection.
“Could I see Michael’s room?” the social worker asked.
The spare room looked perfectly all right—patchwork quilt draped over the footboard, reading lamp, empty dresser and closet. Just nothing like an eleven-year-old’s room.
When they returned, Michael didn’t appear to have moved from the chaise longue. Head down, studying his beeping ball.
“Anyone hungry?” Just for something to say. But what on earth could he offer them? He always had stuffed olives in his cupboard. Marcona almonds dusted with rosemary. Maybe a can of Campbell’s Thick Creamy Mushroom.
“Nothing for me, thanks.” Rosa Figueroa spoke in the self-denying tone of someone who would really rather say yes. “Michael?”
“What’s your wife?”
That your wife, was that what the child meant? Or, what was she, career-wise? Noah crossed to the large photograph in the cluster over the chaise longue. “Joan was a scientist. There she is receiving an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Michael turned around to glance at the picture.
Noah had let it be known that the AACC shouldn’t shilly-shally, because of the tumor. And there was Joan again, that same year, at a Women in Chemistry fundraiser, nodding and smiling and speechifying till she trembled. In those final months, she’d squeezed herself out like a lemon. “See who’s shaking hands with her?”
Rosa Figueroa let out a respectful gasp. “That’s Hillary Clinton, who was nearly president,” she told the boy.
“So what’s your Wi-Fi?” Michael asked.
Not wife; Noah heard correctly this time. Discomfited, he said, “The password? I’ll have to look it up.”
Michael got up, still strapped into his backpack, turtle-humped. He roamed the room, picking up books and papers like some burglar, putting them down in the wrong places. Noah’s hands itched to stop him.
“Smoke detectors?” Rosa Figueroa seemed to be running down a mental list.
“One in the kitchen,” Noah said with a gesture, “another in the bedroom.”
Michael located the black plastic modem, flipped it over, and started copying the long code into his phone.
“Oh, and your principal wants you to keep a journal, Michael. Maybe Mr. Selvaggio will help you do a family tree? Or just describe whatever from your trip. When I was your age my folks took me to Niagara Falls, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
Michael looked to Noah like he’d rather forget all of this.
Eyes on Noah, Rosa Figueroa jerked her head toward the kitchen.
He led the way. “You might as well call me Noah,” he said over his shoulder.
“OK, sure, if you’ll say Rosa.” Her tone went from soft to crisp. “I notice your medicine cabinet isn’t locked.”
“Sorry, there is a key, I just…” Need to find it. “I’ll lock it.”
“Great.”
Didn’t she realize Noah had no competencies in the parenting field at all? The last—the only—minor who’d ever stayed the night here was Victor. (Who would almost definitely have raided their meds, Noah realized now.)
“His school information is at the top of the file. Listen, these placements don’t always work out, and it’s nobody’s fault.”
So she’d decided he was going to fail at this. Noah felt (could it be?) oddly stung.
“If you’re not coping—or if Michael’s freaking out—get in touch earlier rather than later, all right?”
He nodded, unable to speak.
Rosa checked her watch. “At this age kids say, ‘Leave me alone,’ but they need you not to. Just keep trying, listening. The goal is to make him feel safe.”
Noah nodded.
“You might have better luck once I’m out of your hair.”
“He doesn’t have any.” Michael, in the kitchen doorway.
Noah let out a nervous chuckle and rubbed his crown. He wondered if baldness seemed creepy to a child; like a mutation.
Rosa was zipping up her thin down coat.
He registered that she was leaving the boy with him now.
“Is everything clear, Noah?” She sounded as if she thought he might be losing it.
“More or less. Except—won’t we need to collect the rest of his things at some point?”
“Got them.” Michael’s shrug made his backpack jerk.
Could that really be the sum total of the child’s possessions? Like a gypsy, or a refugee.
“What if the passport…” Noah’s voice came out faint. “If I haven’t heard from them by the end of tomorrow.” Will you come and take him back? Better not to ask, especially in front of Michael; it would be hurtful, as well as showing weakness. Noah had signed the form, after all. He was saddled with this child, for an unspecified number of weeks. “Well. I’m sure it’ll turn up in time.”
Rosa nodded, her smile tight, and put a card into the boy’s hand. “Keep this somewhere you won’t lose it, Michael, and message me if anything’s bothering you at all, OK?”
“’Kay.”
Anything fixable, she must mean; anything small. Not grief. Or fury at his fate.
“Or ask your uncle for his phone. Any hour of the day or night.”
“Great-uncle.” The sound was deep in the boy’s throat.
When Noah came back from seeing Rosa to the elevator, the boy was in the kitchen (still in his coat and cap), staring up at the saucepan rack. No, to the left of it.
“Can I see the bird?”
Noah hadn’t noticed the clockwork toy in years. He lifted it down and blew off the dust. The tiny automaton was upright, with beady metal eyes and a worn velvet body in orange, gold, and black. “This was my grandpa’s. He was a famous photographer. My mom and I lived with him in France, during the war, and that’s why I’m going there tomorrow, really.” He corrected himself: “Why we’re going.”
“Which?”
“Which what?”
“Which war?”
“The Second. World War Two,” Noah added for clarity.
The bird’s beak hung a little loose and askew, he saw now. “My grandpa got this Pick-Pick Bird from a commercial photographer who was retiring. Used it when he was shooting kids.” They’d been a craze in the ’20s—millions of them sold, pneumatic versions, even water-powered ones. Where were they all now?
The kid didn’t look as if he were following.
“It’s what photographers said, to get you to look into the lens: ‘Le petit oiseau va sortir.’” He fumbled for the American equivalent. “‘Watch the birdie.’ Anyway, this one, you wound it up and it walked around in circles, pecking at the ground.”
“Wound it up like how?”
Noah puzzled over the bird. There was a bald spot over the left hip, with a tiny hole; he put his finger to it. “I suppose the key was detachable, and it’s been lost.” By Margot, or Père Sonne, or the man he got it from, even; sometime in the last century, somewhere between Nice and New York.
“Design flaw.” For a moment Michael sounded much older.
“Indeed.” Noah supposed he could possibly track down a replacement key online, if he took the trouble. But then what if it didn’t work? On the whole, he’d rather not know that the mechanism was rusted up; would rather think of this Pick-Pick Bird as potentially full of movement and music. It reminded him of the old story about the emperor who chose a bejeweled wind-up nightingale over the dull brown one who used to sing to him so sweetly.
“This is him,” Noah went on, crossing to the photos on the wall, “your famous…great-great-grandfather.” Was that right?
“Why does it go ‘father,’ ‘grandfather,’ ‘great-grandfather,’ but Cody’s my ‘uncle’ and you’re my ‘great-uncle’?” Michael wanted to know. “Shouldn’t it be ‘grand’ before it jumps to ‘great’?”
Noah furrowed his brow. “No idea, sorry. That’s me there in my mother’s lap—Margot, she was called, your great-grandmother—with Père Sonne. That was his nom d’artiste. Like a nom de plume for a writer—a pseudonym? Or alias?” It was exhausting having to translate almost every word into vocabulary he imagined an eleven-year-old would know. “His real name was Pierre Personnet. You must know singers with ludicrous stage names? Like, ah, 50 Cents.”
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