Undone

by John Colapinto

  He was, at first, mystified by this abrupt reversal. But upon reflection, he understood its origins. Pauline’s opposition must derive from the retroactive sexual jealousy she felt about his long-ago liaison with Holly—a jealousy that could only be heartbreakingly magnified by Pauline’s physical incapacity, which made it impossible for her to assert her sexual “ownership” of Jasper, through intercourse—to stake her claim against what she clearly suspected were his reawakened memories of Holly, of that moment on the beach. Having arrived at this insight, he inwardly cursed himself for the lack of empathy, the blindness, that had prevented him from realizing it earlier. For days, he had blundered on, trying to force Pauline to engage on the subject of the girl, to acknowledge the very real possibility that the child would be coming to live with them. Having finally seen his error, he had ceased trying to talk about the situation. But, obviously, the subject could not be avoided forever—as the ringing phone now attested.

  Pauline’s stare sharpened. She had obviously divined that it was Pollock calling.

  He lifted the phone to his ear and said a cautious hello.

  “Results are in,” the lawyer said without preamble.

  “Hold on,” Jasper said. He put his hand over the receiver. “Pollock,” he confirmed to Pauline. He shot a glance at Maddy, who knew nothing, as yet, about her prospective half-sister. “I’d better take this in my office,” he added, simultaneously feeling a stab of guilt at using their child as an excuse to quit the room; for Jasper’s true motivation was to escape the searing heat of Pauline’s gaze, which awoke in him a vague and inexplicable feeling of guilt. “I’ll be right back,” he added, getting to his feet. He carried the cordless phone down the hall to his office, shut the door behind him and sat at his desk. “Okay,” he told Pollock. “I’m ready.”

  “She’s your daughter.”

  Scalding blood bounded into his face. His heart began to tom-tom. He had tried to acclimate himself to this result in advance, to internalize it, make it real for himself, so as to blunt the shock when it came. Those efforts had been in vain. He was reeling. “My daughter,” he repeated tonelessly.

  “That’s correct,” said Pollock. “Which means that I can now, legally, divulge to you her name. She is Chloe. Chloe Dwight.”

  “Chloe,” he said softly. His daughter. Chloe. Of all the many C-names he had imagined, this lovely one had never come to him. Had Holly known the derivation? From the Greek: “to bloom, to blossom.” Is that why she had chosen it, or had she merely liked the sound? In any case, she was Holly’s bloom—and, of course, his own. He felt a surge of that paternal pride, that excitement, that had surprised him during his walk to the clinic to donate his DNA sample a few weeks ago. He immediately thought of Pauline, and a terrible apprehension overcame him.

  “Mr. Ulrickson?” Pollock said. “You still there?”

  “I am,” he said. “I’m just trying to absorb it.”

  “I’m sure it’ll take a while. And you’ll have some time.” He explained that Jasper should not expect immediately to bring Chloe down from Vermont to live with him. “She is currently a ward of the state,” he said. “So you’ve got to make a formal petition for custody—same as if you were adopting. Government’s got to be satisfied you can support and educate the child; that you’ve got a stable home, that you’re not crazy, that you don’t have a criminal record. So there will be some background checks, interviews, that kind of thing. She’ll undergo something similar in Vermont, social workers and shrinks making sure she’s strong enough, emotionally, to leave her friends and school and start living with a father she never knew. They never actually deny custody—not unless she’s a basket case or you’re a raving drug addict or living on the streets or a convicted sex offender. Still, it takes time.”

  “How much time?” Jasper asked. To his surprise, he was disappointed to hear of the delay.

  “It’s the judicial system, so don’t expect things to happen overnight. But if I light a fire under them, we might have this done in—what is it now? End of May? Say, two months. Early August. If you’re lucky. Now,” he added in a lighter tone, “I’m sure you’d like to have a word about all this with your daughter.”

  “Maddy?” Jasper said. “I don’t see what—” Then he realized his mistake.

  “I’ve got the number for her at her foster parents’ place,” Pollock went on. “She’s waiting for your call. Got a pen?” He recited the number and Jasper wrote it down. “Okay,” Pollock said, “we’ll talk. And congratulations.” He rang off.

  Jasper sat there, trying to imagine what to say to the girl. To Chloe. His daughter. There seemed, at once, far too much to say (how do you catch someone up on seventeen years of life in a phone call?) and not nearly enough (apart from the little he had been able to glean of her life from the affidavit, he knew almost nothing about her). But there was no point in trying to prepare speeches, to script a conversation. He would trust to emotion, let his heart speak. Wasn’t that always the best way?

  With a shaking index finger, he punched the number into the phone. It had scarcely begun to ring when he heard a click, then came an elderly-sounding woman’s voice. She said, with a certain coy expectancy, “Gaitskill residence …?”

  He cleared his throat—a hot, hard obstruction had taken up sudden residence there. “I’m calling for Chloe—” His voice hung for a moment. Did he need to supply a surname? And if so, which one? Dwight? Ulrickson? “From Connecticut,” he offered instead.

  “Just a moment.” Through a muffling palm, he heard the woman say urgently, “It’s for you. Connecticut.” There followed a rustling sound. Then he heard, through the thrumming cataract of blood in his ears, a featherlight voice: tentative, shy, hopeful.

  “… Dad?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Jasper said, on a gust of breath that burst from him like a sob. Then he was sobbing. Something about that soft, vulnerable, childlike voice—his daughter’s voice—coming through the phone line, from so far away, the girl he never knew, his girl, living among strangers, until now an orphan, or believing herself to be, and thus all alone in the world. He struggled to master himself.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he managed to say, gulping down the sobs that convulsed his throat and lungs. “Yes, it’s—it’s your dad.” And then he was doing what he had told himself he must not do, since it might sound like an indictment of Holly for failing to tell him of Chloe’s existence: he was apologizing—apologizing for not having been in her life, not having raised her, not having been there for her at the important moments, birthdays, graduations, her mother’s death. “But I didn’t know about you, honey,” he said, “otherwise everything would have been different—everything.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” came that soft, light voice, sweetly melodic. “It’s okay. I don’t blame you. I know Mom didn’t tell you about me. I know it’s not your fault.”

  Her readiness to forgive also made him cry, and he was some time getting control of himself. “Well, the main thing is, we’ve found each other,” he said at length, mopping at his eyes and cheeks and nose with a Kleenex he had snatched from a box in his desk. “That’s what’s important now. We have the future.”

  “That’s what I’m excited about,” Chloe said, her voice brightening, quickening. “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Well, I was hoping that you would come and live with us,” he said. “Do you want to do that? I know it would mean leaving all your friends and the places you know—”

  “I can’t wait!” she cried. “That’s my biggest dream! But I guess it’s going to take a long time. I’ve got to talk to psychiatrists and everything.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I have to talk to all sorts of official people too. But we’ll both come through with flying colors, and then you’ll be here. I would come to see you right away, but I’ve got a small daughter—your half-sister, Maddy; and my wife, your stepmother, Pauline, is an invalid. It’s very difficult for me to get away.”

  “Oh, I under
stand,” Chloe said. “I’ve still got school too. But can you tell me about Connecticut? I want to be able to picture it.”

  Jasper described Clay Cross, its location near the Sound, and told her about the house, the spreading maple out front, the patio out back with the view, over the lawn, of the water and the distant twinkling skyscrapers of New York visible like a mirage on clear days. He told her the layout of the rooms, and was about to explain where Chloe would be sleeping when his office door flew open and Maddy ran in.

  “Mommy wants you,” she announced. “I can tell.” She turned and ran out.

  Pauline! He had left her waiting all this time to hear the results of the DNA test! How could he have forgotten her? It had never happened before. “I’m sorry, Chloe,” he said, “but I’ve got to get off the phone. It’s my wife—Pauline. Your stepmom. She needs me. But we’ll talk again soon. And I’ll see you soon.”

  “Okay,” Chloe said. “I love you, Dad,” she added before he could hang up.

  “I love you too,” he said and, in saying it, felt the strangeness of it: professing love—no, feeling love—for someone he had never met, never seen. How wonderful that the bond between parent and child could be felt, over a phone line, after less than five minutes’ acquaintance! Could anything speak more eloquently of the mystical connections of family? He surrendered to a fresh storm of sobs—then hurriedly mopped his face and blew his nose. He stood, and brought his breathing under control. Then he went down the hall to face the difficult task of breaking the news to Pauline.

  11

  She was staring at the carpet when Jasper returned to the living room. As he approached, she raised her gaze to his. He saw in her eyes a light of hope, which instantly died when she read his expression.

  Maddy was sitting on the sofa, coloring. “Please be a good girl,” he told her, “and go see Deepti in the kitchen. Mommy and I have to talk about grown-up things.”

  “Again?” Maddy said. But she picked up her pad and crayons and trooped off.

  He pulled up a footrest, placed it in front of Pauline and sat. He took her hands in his own. She would not look at him, her eyes cast down.

  “Honey,” he said softly. “You have to face this. We have to face this. We can’t—I don’t know—wish it away. The good news is that I just spoke with her. She sounds like a wonderful child. Not angry or sullen or blaming. She sounds very sweet, and she very much wants to come and live with us and be a part of this family.”

  At this, Pauline looked up, and stared meaningfully at him.

  “Yes,” he said, misreading that look, “I know that having her here will be disruptive of our routine. At least, at first. But we’ll get used to it, and there will be benefits to having her here. I’m sure of it. She can help with Maddy. She can lend a hand to Deepti. I can give her chores—Xeroxing, opening mail, buying printer ink—any number of things. Having her here will actually free up more time for us. Do you see what I mean? Do you see the positive side?”

  She blinked twice. No.

  He felt a flare of exasperation but tried not to show it. “Darling,” he said calmly, soothingly, “she’s my daughter. Surely you’re not saying, ‘Don’t take her in’?”

  She blinked once.

  “Oh, honey,” he said, risking a smile. “You don’t expect me to believe that? That you think I should leave my own flesh and blood to be raised by strangers? By a foster family?”

  Yes.

  “So you’re saying a father shouldn’t take responsibility for his own child?”

  No.

  “Yet I should abandon Chloe?”

  Yes.

  “Well, that makes no sense, honey,” he said. “You’ve just flatly contradicted yourself. The point is, I could no sooner leave Chloe to foster care than I could have left you in the chronic care ward.” This struck Jasper as an emotional equivalency that Pauline could not fail to acknowledge with an affirmative blink. But she only dropped her eyes, in a gesture of helpless surrender, and stared at the carpet.

  He understood about retroactive sexual jealousy. If the roles were reversed, Jasper, who suffered acutely when he thought of Pauline’s old boyfriends, would have had a mighty struggle to accept into their home a child she had engendered with an ex-lover. But he would have done it, because he trusted her, trusted in her love. He knew that, deep down, she trusted him the same way. She just needed some reassurance. How to reassure her? He told her that Holly was a long, long time in the past, that he had never thought of her in the intervening years, and that he loved Pauline and Pauline only. “Isn’t that obvious?” he asked.

  She considered him with a woeful gaze. A tear squeezed up from the lower lid of her right eye, trembled there for a moment, expanding, then ran in a rapid rill down her cheek. He reached up and, with his index finger, wiped it away.

  “It’s going to be okay, honey,” he said. “I promise.”

  Deeply unsettled by this exchange, he wondered if he was, after all, wrong in thinking that he must bring Chloe to live with them. Perhaps a family with their challenges could not reasonably be expected to take on the disruptions a teenager would inevitably bring. But when he discussed this later that evening with Deepti, she assured him that he was doing the right thing, the only thing, by taking Chloe in. “She is your flesh and blood,” Deepti said. “She is family.”

  Jasper’s sister, Laura, two years his junior and married to a successful software developer in San Francisco, gave him similar advice when he called her that evening. “Of course Pauline is going to feel strange about any change in the household,” Laura told him. “Think of how vulnerable she feels. How powerless. But when she meets the girl—and you’re saying she sounds like a terrific kid—everything will change. Honestly, Jaz, it’s going to be fine. And you really don’t have a choice. She’s your daughter. Trust me, Pauline will come round.”

  Laura’s words became a mantra to him; he repeated them to himself whenever he felt his doubts rise again. She’ll come round. She’ll come round. She’ll come round.

  Because, of course, she had to.

  PART THREE

  1

  Interstate 91, the six-lane superhighway that runs on a nearperfect vertical from New Haven, Connecticut, to the town of Derby Line, Vermont, on the American-Canadian border, cuts past lush, cow-dotted pastures, rounded mountains fleeced in green forests, and twinkling New England towns nestled in valleys where white church steeples, pointing skyward, make explicit the implied connection between the paradisiacal surroundings and the supernatural being who seems their only possible creator. But on the afternoon in early August when Jasper steered his car off Exit 48, at Stamford, onto I-91 to begin the long haul through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, he was not conscious of scenery. He was thinking only about his impending meeting with Chloe.

  He had spent the previous weeks being investigated by government accountants who pawed through his tax returns and royalty statements; by social workers who quizzed his family, friends and neighbors; by psychologists who delved into his attitudes to family, adoption and teenaged girls. He was questioned by an FBI agent who checked his fingerprints against international crime databases. Chloe, meanwhile, had undergone a similar vetting in Vermont, with special emphasis on her psychosocial and emotional functioning. On a morning at the end of July, Murray Pollock called Jasper to say that the family court judge in Newport had read the dossiers on both parties and had ruled that Jasper would be awarded custody. Formal transfer would occur at a hearing in Judge Gerald Howard’s courtroom at noon on August 3—tomorrow.

  He had considered flying (there was a direct from JFK to Burlington) but decided to drive. It was a five-and-a-half-hour trip each way. He thought that the return journey would offer an ideal opportunity for him and Chloe to get to know each other—to bond—before she met the rest of the family.

  They had spoken several more times on the phone but had not progressed much beyond cooed avowals about how much they looked forward to seeing each other. He
had, however, had a series of mandatory telephone “sessions” with Chloe’s transitioning social worker, Dr. Doreen Edwards, whose job it was (as she put it) “to smooth out any little wrinkles in Chloe’s adjustment from one life to another”—and from whom he had been able to glean some much-wanted background on the girl he believed to be his daughter.

  Edwards had made a point of reminding Jasper that Chloe had recently lost her mother—”the only parent or parental-figure the child has ever known”—and that for all Chloe’s superficial cheerfulness, she was grieving and might be harboring “several unresolved issues.” Thus, he should not be surprised if she became rebellious, argumentative, limit-testing. She might bear subconscious resentments toward Jasper, whom she could perceive as having “abandoned” her and her mother—”even if such ideas do not fit the facts.” Chloe was, furthermore, a child of addiction (Holly had, Edwards said, “suffered from the disease of alcoholism”), and this might bring forth, in Chloe, “an array of negative behaviors”—anything from shoplifting to lying and fighting, to sexual promiscuity, exhibitionism and “inappropriate relationships.” And although Chloe had yet to display any such self-destructive tendencies, everyone in a position to guide her must stay alert to their possible appearance.

  He had spoken, too, with Chloe’s school guidance counselor, a Miss Shelley, who said that IQ testing in elementary school had suggested a child of slightly above average intelligence, but who demonstrated a marked lack of intellectual curiosity—although this might result from the home environment where the mother was often absent and the child was given few opportunities to develop interests outside of television. She demonstrated a “pacific, even passive, temperament,” and tended to cling to those she perceived as vital to her welfare. No disciplinary problems had been reported in school—and indeed the only incident ever to have raised any alarms dated to mid-March of this year, when a teacher was observed to initiate inappropriate physical contact with Chloe (a kiss on her neck). It was determined that she had done nothing to provoke or encourage the act—”apart from being a singularly attractive child,” Miss Shelley added, “for which she can hardly be blamed!” Chloe’s mother had declined to press charges, the offending teacher left the school, and the child had demonstrated no ill effects from the incident. All told, she was well behaved, given somewhat to daydreaming and fantasy, athletic though not much driven to compete, well groomed, punctual and with a stated interest in acting and modeling, although she had not participated in any of the school’s extracurricular activities geared to those pursuits.