Undone

by John Colapinto

  “In a minute, I’ll tell the nurses you’re awake,” he whispered. “Everything is going to change. They’ll start the physio again. You’re going to improve. And I’m going to be with you. Forever. But first—I’ve got to ask you something. Something very important.” He cocked his head, listening, to hear if anyone was coming who might interrupt them. The corridor outside was silent. He turned back to her. “Did Chloe know?” he asked. “Was she part of this?”

  Pauline saw, in her mind’s eye, the way Chloe had clutched at the man’s arm—then let go when aware that the touch had been witnessed. She blinked once.

  “Good Lord,” he said.

  There had existed the possibility, however remote, that Chloe too had been the victim of his unknown adversary; she too might have been tricked into believing she was his biological daughter. He had, he realized, been clinging to this hope. But no. She knew. She was part of the conspiracy. Part of the plan to destroy him. Her every smile and batted eyelash a stratagem. That transparent pink nightie, and carefully prepared glass of Scotch, part of a coldly calculated trap. The revelation was nightmarish, unthinkable. The depth of her evil so much more chilling for being hidden behind that seeming innocence. But now, at least, he had a place to start, a thread to pull. He did not have long. By now, Dunwoody would know that Jasper had not arrived at work. That he had fled.

  “I’ve got to go,” he whispered to Pauline. “They’re going to be looking for me. But please don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right. I promise. You were not too late.” He kissed her cheek. “You were not too late.”

  He stabbed his glasses back onto his face and tapped his way out the door.

  Approaching the nursing station he tensed, preparing to try to run, even with his damaged hip, if they tried to accost him. But, miraculously, he heard the nurse at the desk call out, “See you soon!”

  Jasper limped up to her. “My wife is conscious,” he said, addressing the indistinct shape. “She’s blinking in response to questions. Get the doctor—hurry!”

  He heard a rattle as the nurse snatched up the phone.

  “Hurry!” he cried. “She is awake. She is aware!”

  He heard the nurse slam down the phone. The sound of her shoes hurried off down the hall.

  He went to the elevator and pushed the Down button. Behind him, one of the phones in the now-abandoned nursing station exploded to life, letting out ring after ring. He heard the nurse’s shoes moving rapidly back up the corridor toward the phone. The elevator doors slid open. He stepped inside. He heard the plastic rattle of a receiver being lifted, then the nurse saying, “Hello?”

  The doors closed.

  The elevator swooshed downward. He felt the floor push up against the soles of his shoes, forcing his knees to flex. The doors slid open and two people surged at him out of the gray mist. But they were not the police—only a woman in a white lab coat and a doctor in green surgical scrubs. Jasper tapped out into the lobby. He made his way, heart pounding, to one end of the welcome desk, where there was a free public telephone—he had used it on his previous visits to notify Dunwoody that he was on his way back to the center. He took out his wallet, extracted a slip of paper, brought it to his face, squinted at the digits written upon it, then punched them into the phone. He turned his back on the brightness from the revolving doors at the entrance, hiding his face. He heard two rings, then a female voice said, “Hello?”

  “Deepti,” he said. “It’s Mr. Ulrickson. I need your help.” He told her to meet him at the diner across the street from the hospital. “Right away,” he added. “And don’t tell anyone.”

  5

  Jasper arrived first and was shown to a booth near the back. His hypersensitive ears were assaulted by the din of crashing cutlery, waitresses calling out orders, frozen hamburgers clacked onto hissing grills and the roar of frozen french fries plunged into hot oil. A shadow fell over him. He waved away the menu and ordered a ham sandwich. He was not hungry but feared he would be asked to go if he tried to occupy a prime table without eating during the lunch rush.

  He glanced up hopefully every time he heard the jingle of the bell over the door. In the wavering dimness, he could make out only the blurred silhouettes of people against the midday glare. He had been there for almost ten minutes and had seen scores of people come and go before a figure entered the restaurant, hesitated, then rapidly approached.

  “What is going on, Mr. Jasper?” Deepti said as she settled into the seat opposite him. “I was leaving to come here when that Officer Dunwoody phoned. He asked if you were with me. Or if I knew where you were.” Jasper, unable to respond, waited. “I told him no.”

  His breathing and heartbeat resumed. “Thank you, Deepti,” he said. He glanced out the window beside him, toward the gray monolith of the hospital. Any minute now, he thought, a cruiser would pull up.

  The waitress appeared, placed Jasper’s sandwich and coffee in front of him and offered Deepti a menu. “Just a coffee for me, please,” she said. The waitress dissolved into the noisy blur.

  “Look at this,” he said, pushing his food aside and placing the drawing pad on the table between them. He opened the cover. “These are messages. From Pauline. Transcribed by Maddy. The alphabet game.” He explained about the day when the man in the ACE cap came to the house, ostensibly to inspect the furnace. “You were in the guesthouse, phoning your daughter, so you didn’t see him. But he went into Maddy’s room and swabbed her cheeks. He used Maddy’s DNA to establish that Chloe was my child. Pauline saw it all, and tried to warn me.”

  Deepti seemed to be struggling with doubts. Then he showed her the final message, the one about Dr. Geld being the man in the ACE cap. “He was an impostor,” Jasper said. “He was no doctor.”

  The memory of Dr. Geld’s insolent face flashed in Deepti’s mind. “I did not trust that man,” she said. “There was something about him.” She recalled those final moments, after Pauline had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, and she had been alone with that man on the front path. He had said something impossibly rude in reply to her questions. A few minutes later, she had seen him, through the sliding glass doors of the living room; he had shown a disturbing overfamiliarity with Chloe. Recalling this, a sickening suspicion arose in Deepti’s mind. “Could Chloe have been part of this?” she asked.

  Jasper nodded. He explained that he had confirmed this with Pauline.

  “Pauline?” she said, incredulous.

  He described how she had awakened from her coma when he told her that he had deciphered her warnings.

  “Poor Miss Pauline!” Deepti said, when the full implications of this had sunk in. “Knowing the truth, and not being able to tell anyone!”

  “Worse,” Jasper said. “Trying to tell—and failing. It nearly killed her.”

  They sat for some time in silence. Then Deepti made a helpless gesture. “I would not have believed it of Chloe,” she said. “Perhaps this man forced her?”

  “Perhaps,” Jasper said.

  “In any case, we must now go to the police.”

  “No,” he said. He told her about Pollock’s and Dunwoody’s reactions. “We need evidence. Solid evidence. Otherwise, it sounds like an insane fantasy.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “I can talk to Chloe.”

  Deepti shook her head. She reminded him of the restraining order. “You cannot go near her. They will send you back to jail—for many, many years.”

  “There’s no choice,” he told her. “I need your help to find her. I must talk to her. Do you know where she is?”

  Deepti turned and stared out the window at the late lunch crowds hurrying past. Just a few weeks ago, she had received a card from Chloe—quite out of the blue. I hope you and your daughter are well, she had written. I think of you, Pauline and Maddy often. Deepti had written back a short, polite note. She had not heard back. But, in her meticulous way, she had taken care to write Chloe’s return address in her diary, which sat in the purse next to
her on the leather banquette.

  “Deepti,” Jasper said. “You know how to get in touch with her.”

  She looked at him. He was hunched, leaning forward, peering at her through his dark glasses. Suddenly, he frowned and cocked his head. A look of alarm seized his features. “What is it?” Deepti said.

  “Listen!”

  It was several seconds before her ears were able to pick out what his sharpened hearing had easily detected over the diner’s clash and clatter and shouted conversations: a distant, high-pitched wailing sound. A siren. It grew louder. They turned and looked out the window. To the accompaniment of a crescent-doing siren scream, one of the city’s blue-and-white squad cars streaked into view and pulled up at the curb across the street. A policeman got out of the passenger’s side and went up the hospital steps. The driver stayed in the car, talking into his police radio.

  “My God,” Deepti said. “They are looking for you!” She glanced at the pad on the table in front of her. Written there, in crayon, were the words: DR GELD ACE M. She saw again that slyly insinuating, unsettlingly impudent face and shivered, as if a cold draft had played over her.

  “My car is parked on the next side street,” she said. “I will take you to her.”

  6

  Traffic was light on the southbound I-95. Their destination, Deepti said, was an apartment building in Washington Heights—a Dominican enclave north of Harlem. “She lives there with two other girls. She is a student. She told me nothing else.”

  “Why is she living there—with roommates?” Jasper said. “She has the settlement money. Millions.”

  Deepti repeated, “She told me nothing else.”

  They drove in silence. In his side window, the fuzzed gray outline of Manhattan appeared out of the mists of his blindness. Striped shadows flicked stroboscopically in his vision as they rode beneath the girders of the bridge that he still knew as the Triborough but which, since his incarceration, had become the RFK. They turned left and swept past sights of East Harlem that Jasper could no longer clearly make out but which he knew intimately from trips into the city when he still had his full vision: brown brick projects, cracked concrete basketball courts and chain-link fencing. They turned right and beat their way through stop-and-go cross-town traffic on 125th Street. Pedestrian crowds pushed past at the intersections, heedless of the lights, forcing Deepti to slow or stop altogether, yellow cabs swerving around them, horns blaring. At Broadway, Deepti turned north. Thumping hip-hop gave way, at 155th Street, to frenzied merengue and salsa. They drove through the shadow of looming Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, then turned left onto 172nd. “This is her street,” Deepti said.

  They crossed Fort Washington Avenue. Deepti guided her car up a steep grade, craning her head to see the numbers on the fronts of the soot-begrimed buildings, with their imitation Greek columns framing smeared glass doors.

  “There it is,” she said. “Number 710.” She found a parking spot nearby and stopped. They got out. The aroma of roasting meat floated from an apartment window. Music, all clattering pot-and-pan percussion and shrill horns, issued from another window, and from somewhere an excited voice, in Spanish, was breathlessly announcing a soccer game.

  Deepti took his arm and they went up the sidewalk. They pushed through a street door into a stuffy lobby, their shoes echoing against bare stone tile. Deepti found the buzzer and pushed it. An electronic crackle came from the speaker and a youthful-sounding female voice said, “Yup?” Deepti said that she was looking for Chloe. “Just a sec.” Then, after a short pause, Jasper heard from the speaker Chloe’s familiar, featherlight voice, sounding just as it had that first day on the phone, when he called her at the Gaitskills’.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  Jasper was stunned. To know, now, the malevolence that lay behind that voice!

  “It is Deepti.”

  “Deepti!” she cried. “What a surprise. Come on up! Fifth floor—there’s no elevator. Sorry.”

  There was a buzz. They pushed through the security door. In the weak light of the lobby, Jasper made out a row of brass mailboxes mounted to the mud-brown plaster wall. They came to a dark, narrow staircase and he could discern, through the haze, a set of white stone steps worn to a crescent shape in the middle. A cramped, collapsing tenement: why was she living here?

  They climbed to the third-floor landing. He heard, over the sound of his own labored breathing and pounding heart, the shooting of a bolt above them and then footsteps padding along a hall. Chloe’s voice called down: “Deepti! We’re all the way up on—” She abruptly fell silent. She must have been hanging over the banister and caught sight of them. Of him. “Who’s that with you?” she asked.

  Deepti made no reply.

  He listened. He did not hear feet retreating along the hall, nor the slam of the apartment door and its locking mechanism. They resumed their climb.

  They reached the top, then stood for a moment, catching their breath. Through the gray blur he could make out, over Deepti’s shoulder, a shadow shape—Chloe’s silhouette, slender, sylphlike—standing against a patch of light behind her. She made a sudden movement, a flinch of shock and surprise. “Oh my God,” he heard her say. Then she asked, on a rising note of panic: “What are you doing here? Deepti—why did you bring him here?”

  Just then other shapes appeared against the brightness of the apartment’s open door.

  “What’s happening, Chloe?” said a female voice unfamiliar to him—slightly raspy, with a Latin tinge in the vowels and cadences. “Is everything okay?”

  Then there was another female voice, this one higher-pitched, girlish, frightened: “Yeah, who’s there?”

  “Wait a sec,” he heard the Latina say, and Jasper could tell from the clarity and direction of her voice that she was looking at him. “That’s your dad!” she cried out. “He isn’t supposed to be here! Hey, you sick fuck, you’re not supposed to be here!”

  “Call 911,” the second girl said.

  Deepti told them to calm down. “Mr. Jasper simply needs to have a word with Chloe. It is important. He is not here to hurt you, Chloe.”

  The Latina spoke up again. “He’s not supposed to come near her! I know for a fact. My aunt had a restraining order against my uncle and one time he came with a gun and—”

  “No one has a gun,” Jasper interrupted. He placed his cane between his knees and reached into his pockets. He turned them out, showing that he had only a few crumpled bills and a wallet. “I just need to speak to Chloe. Briefly. Alone.”

  “Alone?” said the Latina, incredulous. “Hey, listen up: you got no right to talk to nobody alone, you rapist fuck. C’mon, Clo, let’s call the cops.”

  “It’s okay,” he heard Chloe say.

  “Yeah, but—” her friend started to protest.

  “I’m all right,” Chloe said. “You and Misty—why don’t you go to the coffee shop? For ten minutes.”

  “And leave you alone with him?”

  “I’ll call your cell if there’s a problem.”

  “This fucker raped you! You want to be alone with him?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Chloe said. “I mean,” she added, and Jasper thought he heard some pity in her voice, “look at him.”

  He imagined that all three girls must now be staring at him, sizing up his sorry, wasted, crippled figure.

  The Latina made a noncommittal grunt. Then she added, skeptically, grudgingly, “Well … okay. I’ll get my laptop. And we will be back in ten minutes.” She retreated down the hall. A minute later, she emerged from the apartment. “C’mon, Misty,” she said. The two shapes moved up the hall toward him. Passing Jasper, the Latina thrust her face close to his, her dark eyes, sharp angular features and café au lait skin moving into his narrow range of focus. “Sicko,” she hissed. She moved off. Another shadow moved past, although this girl shrank from him, sliding her body along the railing that enclosed the stairwell. The sound of their feet diminished down the stairs.

  When silence returne
d, Chloe told him to come into the apartment. She flattened herself against the door frame. Passing within inches of her, he felt the radiating nimbus of her body warmth and was inundated by the remembered scent of ginger and vanilla. He was suddenly thankful that he could not see her, that she existed only as a shadow. Deepti stayed in the hallway.

  He took a few halting paces into the apartment. He could make out little—a blurred grouping of chairs around what must be a coffee table, a bookshelf, a window overflowing with blinding white light. The air was hung with a smell of pizza and beer and cigarette smoke: the aromas of student life. He heard the door close and click behind him. He turned. He could make out her fuzzy-edged, wavery outline against the gray-white wall.

  Facing him, about five feet across the bare tile floor, she was unable to believe that this was the same person she had first met in that courthouse antechamber, all those years ago: the tall, sturdily built blond man whose expression of seeming sympathy and love had stirred her to a surge of daughterly love, that misdirected devotion later dashed to dust by the words in his diary. Now, she saw a tiny, stooped figure in dark glasses, white stubble on his bowed head, cheeks hollowed—and this, coupled with her awareness of how her own actions had brought him to this state, stirred her to pity and horror. She tried to put some steel in her tone, but her voice carried a telltale tremor when she said, “Why are you here?”

  “I think you know.” He spoke in a low growl utterly unlike the kindly, clear voice she remembered. “To start with: you’re not my daughter.”

  She could not speak, could not draw breath. How did he know? Was it a bluff? The rush of blood in her ears drowned out everything.

  “It was Maddy’s DNA,” he said.

  Would she attack him? Run and collect a knife from the kitchen? Stab him? A mistake—it had been a terrible mistake to meet with her alone! But no. She made no move toward him. Instead, she moved with dreamlike slowness. Moved sideways across the room. Her blurry arm reached for the back of what he surmised was an armchair. She stepped around it and sagged down onto its cushions. Sensing that he was in no physical danger from her, he used his cane, groped in front of him, so that he could move a step closer to her.