She needed to talk to someone, but John wasn’t answering the phone and the truth was he was more screwed up than she. There was one other option. She thought about it.
Yes, perhaps. She’d go back home and see how she felt.
She drove home sedately and by the time she pulled into her drive she’d decided she would make the call. She stood in the kitchen and dialed. It rang and rang, but he didn’t answer.
She left a message, feeling like just another voice on just another machine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BACK OF MRS. CAMPBELL’S HOUSE LOOKED out over a small patch of yard that said everything the front of her house tried not to. I stood in her kitchen, waiting as patiently as I could while she clattered about. I remembered my mother once telling me that the day you refused a hot beverage from an old person was the day they learned their company was not worth the wait. I know shit about plants, however, and the view was not interesting me in the slightest. It took everything I had not to go through and grab the old lady by the throat.
“Muriel was adopted herself,” she said, when she eventually led me through into the sitting room. “Did she tell you that?”
“No,” I said, stepping quickly forward to take the tray from her. I don’t know what the protocol on that is, but the way I saw it, I had about ten seconds before it wound up on the floor and I just wasn’t waiting for her to make a new batch. “She told me she couldn’t help me, and that was pretty much that.”
“She can be that way. I knew her when she first started working there. She had some bad years at the start. First husband left her, cleaned out the house when he went. Beat up on her some too. But come what may, she turned up on time and she did what she was supposed to do and she helped a lot of people out. Lot of the public go into a place like that big old department on Adams and forget the staff are human too, and got their own lives.”
“I understand it can be a difficult job,” I said. “People can be hard to deal with.”
“Damn straight. Course, some of the folks work there are assholes too.”
I laughed. She nodded approvingly. “You should smile more,” she said. “You look better that way. Most people do, but you especially. You don’t smile, your face looks like you mean people harm.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“So you say.”
“Mrs. Campbell, I got the sense that . . .”
“Okay, I’m coming to it. You’re looking for a brother, that right? Muriel said you thought it would have been 1967. That would be correct. In fact, as I remember it was October. Though truth be told my memory really isn’t what it was. I’m okay on things. Just not so good on pure facts.”
I just nodded. My chest felt tight.
“A Chinese storekeeper found him on the street. A toddler. Don’t know how long he’d been there, but he’d been crying a good while.”
“My parents had their reasons,” I said, feeling an absurd need to defend a decision that had not been my own, and which I barely understood. “The background was complicated.”
“I’m sure. And they didn’t dump him in the Tenderloin or the Mission District, at least, which is something. Anyway, we knew he was called Paul because he had his name stitched right there on his sweater. ’Course a lot of times back then families would choose a new name anyhow, but Paul’s name stuck. We did the usual checks but we had no way of tracing where he might have come from, and so he went into care here in the city. Stayed there a few years too. Usually finding a home for one that’s little and cute isn’t so hard. But with this one, it seemed like they wouldn’t take.”
I wanted to know what she meant, but didn’t want to interrupt her flow.
“I lost track of him for a while. There are a lot of kids. There’s always a new one needs something doing about. Next time I heard about him was when it was becoming a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“He’d be with a foster family for a few months, and then he’d be back, well ahead of schedule. At first I didn’t pay much attention. It happens. But it started to become a thing. Hey, Paul’s back. The temporary family couldn’t . . . well, I was going to say ‘couldn’t cope,’ but it never seemed to be that. Not exactly. It was just, here he is, back again. And you need to bear in mind these were families who’d looked after a lot of kids, who were good at taking children in and making them feel alright. We’d have him placed and mentally wave him good-bye, then five weeks later I’d go into the home and there he’d be, sitting on a windowsill, looking out. I’d ask him what had happened and Paul would say the same thing the families did: it just didn’t work out.”
She took a sip of her coffee, as if considering long-ago mistakes. We all have them, our hallowed icons of guilt. “Anyway, so finally it’s decided that we need to step up the search for an adoptive family, some longer-term solution. So I talked to Paul, and told him that’s what we were going to try to do. He nodded—he’s about six, seven years old at this stage, bear in mind—and something tells me he’s not agreeing with the idea, just recognizing it was what was going to happen and his role was just to let it roll on. So I asked him, didn’t he want to find a permanent family? And he looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘I had one. It’s gone. When everything is in place, I’ll get it back.’ ”
I felt cold across the back of my neck. “He remembered us?”
“Not necessarily. But he knew that once there’d been something else. You don’t have to be the brightest firework in the box to realize his position wasn’t natural, and he was a very smart kid. You could tell. That’s all it was. Kids often get it, this feeling they’ve been abandoned, taken away from where they ought to be. Even the ones who haven’t been adopted get it. The ‘I should be a fairy princess’ syndrome, or ‘I am rightfully a king and when I cry the earth cries with me.’ That’s what I thought it was.”
I’d watched the abandonment part of the video many times, without really confronting what it must have been like for the child who was left behind. In the last three months I hadn’t really cared what he’d felt. I tried hard to do so now.
“Look,” I said, “do you mind if I have a cigarette?”
“Go ahead.” She smiled. “My husband used to smoke. I like the smell. You do know it will kill you, though?”
“Not going to happen,” I reassured her. “Just a rumor put around by the gym addicts and health nuts.”
She nodded, no longer smiling. “Yes, that’s what he thought too.”
Something about the way she said it meant that though I smoked the cigarette down, I didn’t enjoy it very much. “So what happened when you looked for a permanent family?”
“I’ll tell you.” She was quiet for a moment, before continuing. “You know, I did that kind of thing for a long time, and I thought about it a lot. Most of me believes that where we’re born seeps up into us like water from the soil, that we have leaves like trees do; and where the seed that becomes us first lands, that’s who we are and that will determine the color of our leaves—even if some bird picks us up that same afternoon and moves us fifty, a hundred miles away. Another bit of me thinks, well, but we’re all God’s children, aren’t we? We’re all just human. Isn’t that what the Bible says? So what does it matter if a child is brought up by someone who isn’t its kin, or in some other part of the country? Give them a good home and it could be nothing ever happened. I’ve seen it work hundreds and hundreds of times. It isn’t always easy, but it works, and it’s one of the things makes me think we humans aren’t such a bad lot after all.”
She shook her head. “Finding an adopter for Paul just wasn’t that simple. He was placed with three families after that. First lasted a year, another foster arrangement. They had an older daughter of their own already. I was dealing with my own things at that time, my husband got sick. I got into work one Monday morning with stuff on my mind and I was told that Paul was in a room on another floor. When people had turned up that day, he was sitting on the step outside.
He hadn’t run away. His family had put him there. After that, he was back and forth for a few months, then we found him someone else. That one lasted two whole years, by which time he was coming up to nine. Then one day there’s a knock on my office door, and the mother was standing there. She told me, politely, that they’d had enough. That it wasn’t Paul, not at all, but she had a little baby girl of her own now and they’d just decided fostering wasn’t for them anymore. I was mad at her, I can tell you. I nearly chewed her head off. That’s not the way it works. But . . . you can’t leave a child with people who don’t want them anymore.”
She picked up her cup, found it was cold, and put it back down. “Do you . . .”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Please go on.”
“I saw Paul again at the home, soon after that. I was feeling sorry for the kid. I told him I thought he’d had a raw deal. He just shrugged. ‘I already have a family,’ he said, again. I was concerned to hear that he was still thinking that way, and I tried to point out that wasn’t the case, not really, and he had to help us in finding him a new set of people to be with. He’d once had a birth mother and father, and that would always be true. But now he had to be with someone new. ‘Not them,’ he said. ‘They weren’t real. But I had a brother. He was real. He was just like me.’ He put a big stress on the ‘just’: just like me, was what he said.”
She smiled faintly. “I didn’t believe him, of course. Thought he was just conjuring; there was something about him by then that was a little . . . I don’t know. But when you turned up at the door tonight, I saw he was right after all. He did have a brother, just like him.”
I nodded, because I had to, but I was thinking that she was wrong and he was wrong too. I resembled him physically, that was all. I was surprised she could see the resemblance, anyway, if Paul had been a child when she last saw him.
“Then finally we found one that took. We got him placed with a family here in the city, and he was there a year before they moved out of state and he went with them. Whatever had been wrong, it got right. This time it worked. That’s it.”
I looked at her.
“What?” she said.
I just kept looking at her.
She looked down at her hands. Her voice was quiet. “What has he done?”
“Mrs. Campbell,” I said. “Tell me what you haven’t yet said. I really have to know.”
She looked back up at me and when she spoke, she spoke fast and her eyes were flat. “Few years later I ran into the husband from the couple who had been responsible for leaving him on the steps of the building. Hadn’t seen anything of them since that day—you treat a child like that, you’re off our books and going to court. Matter of fact, they nearly were, but the wife got sick, and so . . . it was let slide. I saw this guy across the street and deliberately looked away, but next thing I knew he was running toward me through the traffic. He came right up and stood in my way, and he just started talking. He told me that his wife had a dog, back when Paul was with them. Said that most of the time the boy was good, very good, almost as if he had decided this was the way things were and he’d better make the most of it. Got along okay with their daughter most of the time. But this dog, Paul didn’t get on with it and he hated it when it barked, and he said it looked at him strangely. This dog was pretty old, the man’s wife had had it since she was in college, and she loved it more than anything else in the world. Even more than him, her husband said, but that was okay: he liked the creature too. Big old dozy hound didn’t do much, just slept in the backyard and thumped his tail on the ground every now and then.”
She stopped, took a deep breath. “Then one day Paul came running in the house and said the dog had had an accident. They went running out back. The dog is lying half in the yard and half in the narrow road at the end. Its head is all messed up, like it got caught in a car’s wheels. Paul’s crying and stuff so the dog’s quickly buried and it was only later that night, when they were sitting in bed, that the man’s wife said something. She didn’t look at her husband and she talked quietly, as if speaking to the wall. She said that in all the years they’d lived in that house, the dog had never gone anywhere near the back road. She said how it would be odd for someone to be driving along it too quickly to stop. She said, too, how it was strange that it was only the head that had been so badly injured, strange that both eyes, and the mouth, should be so damaged.
“Her husband thought about this. Nothing more was said that night. They went to sleep, eventually. That was a week before they brought Paul back. The husband admitted that they didn’t know how they knew, that they had no proof. It could still just have been an accident. But that week was enough. His wife couldn’t have him there anymore.”
Mrs. Campbell held a finger up to stop me from saying anything. “Now listen, you. This is just something a man said. I thought it could just be some kind of overblown lie to make up for what they’d done, and that was probably there to read in my face. The guy just shook his head, and said that if I’d had to look in his wife’s eyes all the years since, I’d know what was the truth and what was not. Then he walked away, and I never saw him again.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Right.” She nodded. “And the last thing is just me, and I’m going to tell you it, and then you’re going to go. Six, seven years after that, not long before I retired, there was a fire. Muriel said she’d told you. A lot of paperwork got lost.”
“Yes,” I said. “She mentioned it.”
“Something she doesn’t know about is this. I was late getting to work that morning—tram got fouled up, I had to walk the last six blocks. Time I got there, building was already up in smoke, people standing out on the street, everyone running back and forth. Could have been a very bad day. As it was, four people got killed and a lot more got burned. Fire went up when the building was full. And as I was standing there, trying to take it all in, I got a strange feeling in the back of my neck. I turned, and . . .”
Her throat clicked, dry as old bone. “There he was. On the other side of the street, watching. Grown up a little now, a young man. Looked just like you do now, only thinner. I saw him just a second, and then he was gone. Or maybe I didn’t see him at all. Sometimes I think I saw that face and recognized it. Most of the time, I think it was just in my own head, which is why I never mentioned it to no one. Not even Muriel, and she was like a daughter to me. Still is, when she’s got the time.”
“It was him,” I said quietly. “It was Paul.”
She gripped me by the arm, her fingers strong and sharp. “What you must not think is this was anything to do with him being in care, with the people who fostered him, who tried so hard to give him a life. It was not. Those people helped bring up Muriel and thousands more like her.”
“I know,” I said. “My parents weren’t my real parents either, and they gave me more love than I ever deserved.”
She was surprised, but gathered herself. She stood, and I understood my time was over.
At the door, as I stood on the porch, she put her hand on my arm again and said one final thing.
“I’ve spent all my life with young people, and on the whole I’ve enjoyed it a lot. But one thing about my view of the world changed in that time, and changed for good.”
“What was that?”
“I still believe we’re all human,” she said, stepping back and closing the screen door, “but I don’t believe we’re all God’s children. No, I don’t believe that at all.”
I WENT BACK TO THE HOTEL BECAUSE I WASN’T SURE what else to do. I ran out of steam when I hit the lobby and ended up sitting in the bar, staring out at the street through tinted glass. Everyone has their typical experiences, as discussed. This is one of mine.
I was spaced out and ticked off. San Francisco was a dead end. Mrs. Campbell didn’t remember the name of the family that had taken Paul in for good. In any event, they’d moved, and she didn’t know where to. Her colleagues from that time were either dead or scattered. The trail ha
d been severed, not least by the fire. I believed Paul had come back and set that fire, and I knew Mrs. Campbell did too—just as I believed she understood that the young boy who had been found on the street alone had merely tolerated being moved from pillar to post until he was old enough to leave and make his own way in the world: when he would become the person to put things “in place.”
When I reached for my wallet to pay for the first beer, I remembered I’d turned off my cell. I had a missed call. I didn’t recognize the number but it could only be one of two people, so I called it back.
She answered quickly. “John?”
“No,” I said. “It’s Ward. Your phone tells you who’s calling, Nina. Just look at the display.”
“Right,” she said. “Silly me. Where are you?”
“San Francisco,” I said.
“Oh. Why?”
“I left my heart here. Came to pick it up.”
“Good move. How’s it looking?”
“Barely used,” I said, and she laughed briefly. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Well, not true, things are going crazy. We had a double murder this morning; someone left a Jane Doe in a nasty motel and then whacked a cop to underline his point. He left a hard disk in the woman.”
“Charming,” I said.
“Not very. It’s LAPD’s business, of course, but Monroe is all over it and thus so am I. Wondered if you would take a look at this disk. I had a copy done, unofficially. I know you used to do that kind of thing on a professional basis.”
“Sure,” I said. “Though Bobby would have been a better bet for you. And even a byte-for-byte copy isn’t going to be exactly the same as the original. But I’ll take a look.”
“They’ve already found a note and a piece of music on it. This one has a real sense of theater.”
“What’s the music?”
The Upright Man Page 9
