“It sounds too crazy. Why haven’t I heard about it before?”
“No one knew about this before we were tissue matching. Most would look completely normal.”
Charlotte said, “Are you saying Jake is the product of two fathers? You and . . . ?”
“Cleet. Raney’s first husband. The man she married a month after I made love to her.” He waited for some sign from Charlotte—excitement or astonishment or utter disbelief. “We need to get different tissue from him. We have to test Jake’s blood.”
—
It took two days to find Jake. Louise didn’t answer her phone or return Charlotte’s message—she should have been there if Jake was still living with her, Charlotte thought. She began to wonder if he’d been sent back to his stepfather’s. She was ready to call Blake Simpson when Eric called from her house. “Louise telephoned here. She wants to talk to you. She doesn’t have Jake anymore.”
“Did she say where he is?” Charlotte asked.
“She won’t tell me. She can’t tell me. ‘Confidentiality police,’ as she put it. But since you’re Raney’s doctor she can tell you—I think she’s using that as an excuse to tell either of us anything.”
Charlotte could almost see Louise’s broad face as soon as she heard her voice on the phone. Louise began with a deep, plaintive sigh in which Charlotte heard the trials of Jake and all the hundreds of children who’d come before him. “A lot of children spend a few days with me and feel ready to look at their homes and their folks with fresh consideration,” Louise told Charlotte. “They shake off all the angry words that made ’em run. You know how it is, that age. Kids keep the last argument spinnin’ around and around—mouse on a wheel. But after some time they start to miss things—their room, friends, Mom’s food, Dad’s jokes. Eventually, usually, even Mom and Dad. I’m talking about kids like Jake, now. Not the ones with the real horror stories.
“I met Mr. Boughton. Read all the records from the social worker. There’s nothin’ there that would excuse us for taking Jake out of that household.”
Charlotte was holding the phone with two hands like a strong grip might change what she heard. “But Jake told me he didn’t want to go back to his stepdad,” she said. “He was clear about that. Did anyone—the social worker, I guess—do a thorough investigation? I mean, not all abuse is physical.”
Louise let out a sympathetic laugh. It could have felt belittling except that Louise sounded almost grateful for Charlotte’s naïveté—a reminder, perhaps, that not everyone had seen so many ruined lives. “David Boughton isn’t the best man, but he isn’t necessarily a bad man. The mother’s accident has been a trauma to both of them—him and Jake. The main reason Jake ran away was to get to her. Boughton could be a decent father in the long run.” She paused. “You would tell me otherwise, if you had any facts?”
“I think Jake has scoliosis—maybe something even more serious. He said his mother wanted him to see a doctor.”
“Boughton says Jake has seen at least three doctors in the last few months,” Louise said, pausing as if she hoped Charlotte had something more.
“If Jake doesn’t want to live with him . . .” Charlotte said.
“I asked if you had any facts.”
Charlotte bit her lip. What facts did she know about David? “So does Jake have to go back to him? There’s no option?”
“Actually, there is one option. Our twelve-year-old boy, who sometimes has trouble stringing a dozen words together, has filed dependency proceedings. With some help from DCF—Department of Children and Family Services. He’s asking to be permanently removed from David Boughton’s care.”
“A child can do that? A minor?”
“Yes. And there’s a chance the judge will listen to him. Jake doesn’t seem to be budging and Boughton isn’t begging to get him back.” Louise drew her words out cautiously, which made it sound less like the victory Charlotte was starting to hope for.
“Well, wouldn’t that be better for him if he doesn’t like his stepfather?” she asked.
Louise took a long time to answer. “May I ask, is there any chance, from what you can tell, that Jake’s mother will make it home?”
Suddenly Charlotte felt like she was back in the conference room again, crying not with thankfulness that Raney had survived when they turned off the ventilator, but with regret. “In my opinion? No.”
“Do you know if she, or Jake’s father, Flores, has any living relatives? Outside of the Philippines?”
Charlotte began to understand where Louise was going. “No. Not that I know about.”
“Dr. Reese, have you known many children who grew up in foster care?” It was clearly a rhetorical question. “There are many fine people helping kids like Jake. But you might read up on the statistics before you assure yourself that he’s better there than with Mr. Boughton. Placing an adolescent boy is not easy. Sometimes the best choice is not a perfect choice.”
“Is there any chance Jake could stay with you?” Charlotte asked.
Louise’s reply was preceded by another heavy sigh. “I’m sixty-eight now. My home is for urgent intervention. Short term.” She paused. “Boys like Jake make that my own hard choice.”
“Right. I understand.”
“Do you think Jake should see his mother? Even if they can’t talk?” Louise asked.
Charlotte saw Raney in her mind, immobile, unresponsive, her muscles wasted—as if demonic magical creatures had stolen the real mother away and replaced her with a false image. How would he react to that? Was it better to see her in the process of letting go? Or to remember what she’d been? “I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe no one does.”
Louise said she would try to let Charlotte and Eric know how Jake was faring, but she herself was unlikely to be involved much longer. They were about to hang up when Charlotte asked, “Louise? What if . . . What if someone related to Jake turned up? What then?”
“Well, the judge always prefers to place a child with a relative.”
“What if they don’t even know each other?”
“Even then. Blood over water.” Louise was quiet on the other end of the line. “What kind of relative are you referring to?”
Charlotte took a full breath and held it a moment. “What if Jake’s biological father was another man. Not Flores. Someone Jake had never met.”
“Someone Jake had never met,” Louise repeated in a solemn and carefully objective voice, and Charlotte saw Eric and Jake sitting side by side at Louise’s dinner table, their faces so strikingly similar. “Well, like I said,” Louise continued, “the court always prefers blood. Jake will be assigned a GAL—guardian ad litem—for the dependency proceedings. They’ll know.”
“Ah,” said Charlotte quietly.
“They could be sure any paternity claim was handled right. Legal proof and all.” She gave Charlotte a minute to say something, then sounded like she’d resolved any question in her own mind. “I’ll get that name for you. Should know in a few days. I’ll make sure you’re in contact.”
—
Over dinner Charlotte told Eric about Jake’s dependency hearing and the disappointing news that he could not stay with Louise. But she didn’t share the conversation about paternity. She wanted to talk to the guardian ad litem first. She wanted to be sure. They talked a lot, however, about whether Jake should be brought to Seattle to see his mother. The entire conversation left them both depressed, realizing they were attached to a child legally beyond their reach. The only good outcome of foster care, they agreed, was that someone other than David would handle Jake’s medical problems. If Jake’s plea for foster care was approved. If the foster home took him to the right doctor.
Eric pushed his half-eaten meal away. “Did you ask Louise if it’s possible to get a blood sample from Jake?”
She hesitated before she said, “No.” Which was the truth, if not
all of it.
“I don’t guess that would be an easy request to explain, would it?”
The next day, though, Charlotte got a second phone call about Jake. This one from Katherine Hemling, Jake’s court-assigned guardian. Louise had asked her to call. Jake’s dependency hearing would be coming up next week.
“Do you know where he would live if the judge lets him leave his stepfather’s?” Charlotte asked her.
“Not yet. We’ll wait for the order before we start that hunt. We have a shortage of foster parents in Jefferson County—as you might guess.”
“Ms. Hemling, Jake has been having problems with his back. When I saw him—it wasn’t a formal exam, of course—but I think he has scoliosis. Maybe something worse. He needs to see a specialist as soon as possible. Will someone, whoever he lives with, be able to get medical care for him?”
“Oh, the state would pay for care.” She said it with a mix of both assurance and pessimism. “They do their best, Dr. Reese. But even at their best it’s a cumbersome responsibility for most homes.”
Now, thought Charlotte. Now, before she hangs up. “I have another question. What if Jake had a blood relative?”
“We’ve already looked. Believe me—we would always prefer that to foster care.”
“What if someone could prove he was Jake’s biological father?”
Katherine was quiet for a moment. “Well, can he? If so, if a DNA test proved it, he could file a paternity claim requesting custody. Or are you just asking to ask?”
Charlotte told her, then, about Eric and Raney, the timing of their romance with Jake’s birth, the physical similarities. The relatively rare genetically inherited disorder they both likely shared. And when Katherine suggested a simple buccal swab, Charlotte told her why it would not be that simple. She told her about chimeras. After she had explained it all—down to the cats—Charlotte asked if the court might order a blood sample from Jake. Possibly other tissue if that was not definitive.
“Frankly,” Katherine answered in a politely curt voice, “that sounds pretty close to crazy. But yes. If you could give reasonable cause, I suspect the judge would approve it. But the biological father would have to file a paternity claim first. And he should do it before the hearing.”
—
That night Eric made love to Charlotte with an intensity that portended an acceptance of finality, or so she imagined. She didn’t tell him about her conversation with Katherine—she didn’t know how.
When Charlotte went to work the next morning and discovered Raney’s bed empty, she rushed to the nursing station in a near panic. But it was nothing unexpected—a spot had opened up at the chronic care facility across the street, so Beacon had moved her. They needed the ICU bed. Within the hour Charlotte was busy taking care of the new occupant, a ninety-four-year-old man in congestive heart failure. Eric surprised her with grilled steak that night—a food she loved and he considered just shy of poison—putting it out on her favorite china with silver cutlery and a good Cabernet. It was funny how often he seemed to predict she might need a boost, had some uniquely personal pleasure waiting even before he’d seen her face or heard her voice.
“What is it?” he asked when she gave up on the fillet halfway through. She told him about Raney’s transfer, hoping that would be enough, but he knew her too well. “Something else is bothering you. Is it about Jake?”
It should be an easy thing to tell him, Charlotte thought. A simple rule of law, which he could take or leave. It was his decision. His right. She had to let it go. “I need to know something,” she said. “I want you to think about it before you answer. How does it change things if you know you’re genetically related to Jake?”
He looked puzzled. “He’s more likely to get the medical care he obviously needs. We have more leverage if I can prove he’s mine, whether he’s in a foster home or with Boughton. We’ve been over all this.”
“Agreed—we might have more leverage. But that’s a different question. I’m asking, How will it matter to you?”
“Oh, Charlotte,” he said, sounding sad and resigned and almost—it broke her heart to hear—pitying. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that until it happens. Maybe just what you said in the motel that night. It’s the moral thing to do, isn’t it? If he has NF, he got it from me. I’m responsible for it.”
Charlotte tried to keep her voice steady. How could it be so hard to say something to someone you knew so well? “I talked to the guardian ad litem helping with Jake’s court case. We can get a blood sample. The court can order one. But you would have to file a paternity claim before the judge would order the test.”
“A paternity claim? What, stating that I think I could be his biological father?”
“No. A paternity claim means you intend to act as Jake’s father. A real father. That you intend to raise him.”
Eric stood up and walked to the kitchen door with his back to her. She could hear him breathing slowly, like he was counting breaths to calm himself. “Raise him. That’s a lot more than we’ve been talking about.”
The resigned tone of his voice ripped through her. She knew she couldn’t let it go—not again. “Have we talked about it? Have we even admitted what we should really be talking about? This is more than Jake. This is years old, and we keep pretending we have forever to decide. Or I do. This is about us, Eric.”
“What?” He turned to face her. “I haven’t stood by you in this?”
“You stand by me always. You stand by me, but we’re standing still. In the same place. Where are we going? What are we together?”
They both felt it, the chill slipping into the air, slipping between them. Charlotte was ready to turn away, say, Forget this. I’m just tired—worn out. I meant nothing. Without any effort she had been doing that for years—moving from one day to the next, loving him from one day to the next, knowing that all human plans are subject to the whim of the universe. What was there, in the end, to hold on to? Why count on anything more than now—this one infinitesimal point in time? So they had lived and loved as if one day could forever turn into any other. How had she forgotten the first rule of biology? That survival depends on continuous change. Stand immobile in one place and you will starve, freeze, or burn; oxygen will not enter or exit, cell division will cease. Because time will go forward with or without you, implacable and unceasing, glacially grinding down anything that won’t move at its pace.
Her voice broke. “You may have a son, Eric. The child you could never decide, never commit, to have with me.”
“How is it fair of me to have a child? Even Jake? Do you know what it’s like to wonder how long you’ll be here?”
“How long will anyone be here? Would Raney have given up having him if she’d known what was going to happen to her? Okay, you have a disease. You might die at fifty. Or tomorrow. Does that mean you and I don’t matter? That a child we make is a mistake? If you die before me or get sick again, will it hurt any less because you wouldn’t commit to me?”
He looked at her and she saw the wound she had made. Saw it and felt cruel and more wounded herself. “Please, Eric. I can’t keep choosing between you and the rest of my life. Stop protecting me from losing you. Oh, God, I’ve probably lost you already.”
He seemed paralyzed for a moment and Charlotte wanted to leave, run from the room and the house and the memory of it all. Then he moved close enough to touch her, ran his hands across her tear-streaked face and around her arms to pull her close. She resisted him at first, then slowly let him hold her until they both calmed. “And what do we do if the test says I’m his father?” he asked.
“Then you’ll be his father. We’ll raise your son. We will raise him together.”
• 21 •
raney
David refused to go to the orthopedic surgeon in Aberdeen with Raney and Jake. As a man who worked hard for his own living, he couldn’t excuse ta
king up a doctor’s time when there was no way to pay him. “There was a boy in my school in Oklahoma who had curvature. Doctor made him wear this metal brace for years. He hated it—finally just threw it away. Ended up doing fine without it,” he told Jake. Raney put dinner on the table without a word, using the last of her self-control to keep Jake from witnessing the bitterness two married adults were capable of. Later, in bed, David put his arms around her and whispered, “I know it’s hard. If you can just wait until I get a job with benefits. If he isn’t getting better in a few months I’ll go along with it.”
The next morning she slid out of bed, dressed in the dark, and carried David’s trousers into the kitchen before she fished through the pocket for the car keys. She shook Jake awake, quieting his mouth with one calm hand. “Breakfast on the road today, Buddy.”
—
After they left Dr. Lawrence’s office, Raney drove straight to the Dairy Queen for Yukon Cruncher Blizzards. Neither of them had said much since leaving the exam room—Jake, she figured, because he was pondering how many needles or shots lay ahead. Raney, though, was turning the surgeon’s words inside out, hunting for any certainty in the possiblys, probablys, and remotelys he had used. She tried to discount the scariest medical terms—tumor, cancer, steel rods, transfusion—against the friendlier ones—benign, good prognosis, recovery—but she couldn’t clearly remember what he’d said about the actual likelihood of any of them. For all that, she had liked the surgeon. He let Raney know that he had all the time in the world for their questions, even though she could hear ten screaming children through the walls.
“So what did you think of him?” she asked Jake.
“I liked the candy.” In this last year of too many doctor’s visits, Jake and Raney had both bemoaned the apparent collusion between dentists and doctors who rewarded children with only Batman or My Little Pony stickers after a needle stick.
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