The Search Angel

by Tish Cohen

  “There’s no going back from something like that,” Isabelle mumbles.

  “Hmm?”

  “I once rented a little house in Vermont. There was a bathtub out front that the owners had left sitting there, having replaced it with a Home Depot special. My sister suggested I plant in it.” She shakes her head, deep in thought. “But I said no. Once you plant nasturtiums in an abandoned bathroom fixture, there’s no going back. There’s no undoing who you’ve become.”

  His rump on the seat and front feet on the floor, Angus pushes his great head between the two seats and starts to pant.

  “My adoptive mother planted in a rain barrel. And her garden won awards every year.”

  “That doesn’t make it right, darling.” Isabelle applies plum lipstick and winces at the malodorous puff cloud that is Angus’s breath. “All right. Let’s find you a less-foul-smelling family member than this creature.”

  They pick their way along a cracked cement path and onto the porch while Angus woofs his discontent from the backseat of the car. It’s hard not to peer through the living room window before they knock. There, in a tweedy recliner, wearing gym shorts and a stretched-out T-shirt with stains on the belly, is an overweight man with the chubby, hairless legs of a toddler. Light from the TV flickers across his face as he eats from a bag of Cheetos.

  Eleanor’s concern must show because Isabelle winks. “We don’t know he’s your father. It’s just a place to start.” She pulls a bottle of merlot from her bag. “Always best to arrive on a stranger’s stoop with a gift in your hand.” Eleanor raps once on the screen door. The Cheetos disappear behind the chair and the man who may or may not be her father gets up.

  The screen door squeaks open to a chin stubbled with white and pale blue eyes spidered with red veins. Right away the eyes shift hopefully to the bottle. “Yeah?”

  “Are you Daniel Leland?” Isabelle’s voice is all business.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Isabelle Santos. I’m looking for a woman named Ruth Woolsey. You went to high sch—”

  “What the hell you need Ruth for?”

  “Do you know anything about her?”

  “Can’t be trusted is what I know.”

  Isabelle puts her hand on Eleanor’s arm as if to say, It’s all right. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Senior year. Back when she told me she was pregnant with my best friend’s baby. Bitch is still with him. Married now, over somewhere in Upstate New York. Albany area, I think.”

  He’s not my father. Eleanor is both saddened and relieved.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Ricky Pantera.”

  He holds out his palm. Isabelle fills it with the bottle.

  “Ricky Pantera, Richard Pantera, Rick Pantera …” Back in the car, Isabelle pulls out her iPhone.

  Eleanor waits, barely daring to breathe, while the phone searches the New York State Yellow Pages.

  The screen fills up and there it is.

  “Richard S. Pantera. 701 N. Broadland Street, Hampton Manor, NY 12144.”

  Isabelle watches Eleanor, holds up her phone to show the number. “We could call her right now. Up to you.”

  Eleanor turns to watch as a wasp zigzags toward her open window, slips inside to inspect her shoulder. She waves it away. Somewhere nearby, the sound of a leaf blower drones. “Not here. I think I’d rather be home.”

  “All right. I’ll be there tomorrow night at eight. Just have ready a couple of lemons and a zester.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Isabelle starts the engine. “Rule number one. Never question the search angel.”

  Chapter 30

  Ruth Woolsey’s existence, her address, her husband’s name (maybe that of Eleanor’s father?), it doesn’t have the impact on her she’d thought. She feels no joy the next morning. More like terror. Eleanor hasn’t eaten since before they visited Daniel Leland’s house yesterday. What if Ruth doesn’t want to be found? What if she gave up her baby and walked away determined to live her life as if it never happened? It could easily be the case. Eleanor doesn’t know if she would survive that pain.

  Besides these possibilities, there’s also the possibility that Isabelle is wrong. That they call this Ruth Woolsey and she says they’ve got the wrong person. Or that she’s no longer alive.

  Eleanor adjusts the front window display—a black crib with the side rail lowered to allow for a rumpled gray linen duvet to spill out in an artful imitation of real life—and adjusts the sun and moon mobile hanging overhead. Angus, mercifully, is asleep in the window after spending the afternoon yelping at Faith, Death by Vinyl’s sleepless upstairs neighbor, as she moved out of her apartment.

  The only customer in the store is an elderly woman in pressed navy pants and cardigan. She glances up at Eleanor and raises a crooked finger. The older ones often get confused. Taking care of baby used to be so simple. A bassinet and a glass bottle. A rattle. Pacifier. A few nice outfits for when the neighbors came to call. It’s these customers Eleanor takes special care of. She imagines them going home, wrapping their gift (chosen with painstaking deliberation), writing out the card in wavering script, then waiting for the baby shower, where they will be guided to a chair at the edge of the room, just on the outside of the excitement that comes from young women who believe they’re the first ones in history ever to have given birth.

  Eleanor doesn’t want these senior relatives—most often women—to show up with an unwanted gift that provokes a false exclamation of joy, followed by the item being tucked away in the back of the hall closet.

  “Do you carry Dr. Spock?”

  Spock. His methods, in Eleanor’s opinion, spawned the baby boomers’ reactive and overly permissive attitude and, eventually, the resultant pamperedness of today’s teens. Parenting through love, she understands. Parenting through indulgence—or neglect—is nothing short of dangerous.

  “We’re all out, but there are a few great ones here, one by Dr. David Austin. This one by K.C. Bowery—it’s a good one for strengthening the bond between infant and child. Research has proven that a mother’s reactions to baby’s—”

  “It’s all so overwhelming these days, isn’t it? I don’t know how you young women do it. So much to think about now.”

  “There’s also this one about baby sign language written by—”

  “Sign language … for babies?” The lines in the woman’s chin deepen. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “They think it eliminates tantrums. Babies can be taught simple signs for, say, eat, more, cookie, bottle, hug. That kind of thing. They say speech lags behind cognitive development, but hand–eye coordination doesn’t. So baby learns a few signs and suddenly she can tell you what’s wrong. Can you imagine how much less frustrating that would be for new mothers? To know why their baby is crying?”

  The woman wiggles gnarled fingers by her ears. “Signing? Like for the deaf?”

  “That’s right.”

  The creases in her face grow complicated. “I really don’t know …” She glances at her watch, then toward the door.

  Eleanor looks around, determined to keep this woman in the store. She needs the sale. She doesn’t want to walk her past the exit, make it too easy to leave. “Have you thought about music? Researchers say listening to classical music builds an infant’s brain.” When her customer appears confused again, Eleanor adds, “And calms the mother during times she’s all alone. Sometimes I suggest as a gift something useful like an infant gym, then we slip a nice CD by Bach into the box with a ribbon. Makes for a wonderfully layered presentation.”

  Music. Now this makes sense to the woman. She moves over to the CD section and lets her fingers worry through the Genius Baby collection, stopping to examine this one or that. So much rides on her choice.

  Close to the dividing wall that separates her store from Noel’s, Eleanor notices a trickle of water coming from ceiling tiles that appear to be soaked. The water starts to drip on the floor,
slow, steady, then pour out in one thin stream, then another. And another. Eleanor excuses herself and races to the storage closet for a roll of paper towels to mop up the floor. Another trickle, this one fatter than the rest, sprouts from the front of the store. And another. Four, five, six leaks now.

  “Ginny!” With this, Angus wakes up and lopes down the aisle, woofing at the ceiling and slipping on the wet floor. Ginny pokes her head out of the break room. “What the …?”

  “Just grab pots, bowls, teacups. Anything!”

  Ginny vanishes into the back closet and reappears with an armload of plastic bathtubs and empty diaper pails, which she arranges beneath the closest dribbles and streams. She might as well not have bothered, as the water now buckets down in too many places to control and ceiling tiles are dropping in soggy clumps onto a rack of Italian sleepers. Angus is energized by the action, and takes a sopping pillow between his teeth to shake the life out of it. Or maybe into it. Ginny and Eleanor rush to push strollers, Baby Bjorns, and fabric bouncy chairs out of the way as more of the sky falls. The three pails are no longer enough; the entire rear right corner of the store is under deluge.

  The customer, who’d been bent down examining a Baby Bach CD, stands tall now and looks around, astonished, then reaches into her purse and pulls out a collapsible umbrella. She gives it a shake and, once it has bloomed in full, holds it over her head and marches out of the store.

  Eleanor is now soaked. She pulls off blazer and silk scarf, the blouse, vest, and boots, until she’s down to camisole and khakis, which she rolls up to her knees.

  She marches past Ginny, who has bits of wet pink insulation dotting her head and shoulders. “I’m going to check upstairs and next door.”

  Her apartment was dry and quiet, but it’s as if a tsunami has hit Death by Vinyl. A few of Noel’s shelves are knocked over, likely from the huge metal fan that has fallen from the ceiling. Records and magazines and T-shirts lie in a chunky swamp on the floor. Noel sloshes through the water, which is still pouring from above, his pants soaked to the ankles, his boots blackened with wet. Beside him, face down in the lake: Sasquatch. His go away sign has drifted away.

  “Oh no,” she says, surveying the devastation.

  “Bohemian Rhapsody” plays on but the sound has gone drunken and squishy. All that painstaking work on speakers that are now waterlogged.

  His countertops are dripping with pooled water and Eleanor rushes to lift files and flyers and masses of mail, reaching down to retrieve what’s fallen into the pond. As she sorts it in her arms, she notices piles of unopened envelopes. Three notices from Boston Water and Sewer, countless letters from TD North and a credit bureau. Four, maybe five, from Chickadee Investments—the company Birdie owned with her husband, now run by their grown children. They owned nearly the entire block, including Eleanor’s building. One of the envelopes is marked in red “Third Notice.”

  It doesn’t look as if he’s paid a single bill.

  She looks up to catch him staring at her shoulders. Suddenly she feels naked. He lunges down to her feet and picks up a dripping-wet picture frame. He stares down at it, immobilized. A jagged crack criss-crosses his wife’s face.

  Eleanor takes it out of his hands and unlatches the back of the frame to remove the photo. “This will dry.” She looks around for a safe place and leans it up high on a shelf behind the cash. “It’ll be fine if you don’t touch it.”

  He nods, his face completely devoid of expression.

  “Should we get to work? See what we can save around here?”

  Noel points at red and blue plastic milk crates running the length of the store on a long wooden shelving unit. They’re still dry. “Start with these?”

  “Sure. Just set everything on higher ground.”

  Lift.

  Stack.

  Splash.

  Repeat.

  Water continues to gush from above and Eleanor helps him move dry crates from the epicenter of the storm. They stack them at the store’s perimeter, alongside a mound of concert T-shirts, record players, and DVDs. At the back of the store, the old floorboards are higher, creating a safe zone for a rolling rack of posters, the milk crate full of Britney and Posh Spice.

  “Must be one of the apartments above you. It’s not nearly as bad in my place.”

  He stops. “Wait. You’re flooded too?”

  “Why do you think I arrived half naked and soaked?” Without waiting for an answer, she asks, “Any access to the second floor from here?”

  He motions toward a poster-covered partial wall at the rear. “Birdie had a staircase built.”

  The black iron circular staircase wraps tightly around a center pole and Eleanor, being wet, holds onto it for dear life as she climbs in bare feet to the second floor. At the top, she pushes open a flimsy door and scans the hall, which smells like water.

  There’s no answer when she knocks at the back unit. No answer at the front either, but Eleanor hears splashing from inside. She turns the knob and the door swings open.

  The apartment is empty, all dingy white walls speckled with nail holes and dark-stained floors faded where furniture used to be. Orange batik fabric hangs from the living room, giving the room a weird, coppery glow. With the painted flowers on one wall, the vibe is distinctly hippie-ish. And the floor is covered in water.

  Water gurgles out from the galley kitchen, where the tap is on full and the sink is overflowing. She splashes across the room to turn off the tap, then races to the bathroom to do the same for sink and bathtub. All the drains are stoppered.

  Which means Auntie Faith followed Ginny’s advice. She went drastic. And then some.

  Chapter 31

  She’s read the message some five or ten times, each time a different way.

  Hey. El. Any chance we can chat or meet?

  It’s everything she’s been hoping for. Forget rocking horses and drunken sex, this time he wants to talk. He’s finally come to his senses and wants her back. He came home, got in her—their—bed and said he missed her. He slept with her. So he took a few days to think—so what? Now he’s back for real. He’s realized the greatest reward can only come from risk, from holding your breath and jumping in.

  She could float, she feels so light.

  It couldn’t be that he would just walk away. Getting Sylvie was way too joyous a life event. A child is what they both want. He couldn’t be willing to give that up. And it isn’t as if adoption is some crazy, untried life choice. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. It happened to her!

  The e-mail came in at the end of the workday, just as Eleanor climbed the stairs to change out of her sodden clothes. Come to think of it, the ping sounded different than usual. Louder. Or more clear. She knew before looking that it was from him.

  Upstairs, she pads into the bedroom and strips. She’ll see him. No question she’ll see him.

  Hey. El. Any chance we can chat or meet?

  Of course, it could be something bad he wants to tell her. He’s met someone else and wants a divorce. Worse—he’s met someone else and she’s pregnant.

  Eleanor turns on the shower and waits for the water to heat up, then steps into the tub and lets the steaming hot spray pelt her back.

  She answered him too quickly. Not ten minutes later, she said, with as much nonchalance as she could fake: Hi. Sure, I guess we could meet or whatever. Sometime. (She wasn’t going to say “chat.” He might suggest a phone call.) How about tonight?

  Tonight is the night she and Isabelle are planning to call Ruth. Eleanor has waited thirty-five years to hear her birth mother’s voice. She can wait one more day. More important is Sylvie and rebuilding her family. Ruth comes into Eleanor’s life and maybe it fixes some things. Jonathan comes back, it fixes everything.

  Nothing—nothing—will stop Eleanor from seeing Jonathan tonight. If he agrees.

  Her phone pings from atop the toilet. She dries her hands on the shower curtain and grabs it.

  Jonathan: Sounds good. Piatto V
ecchio at eight?

  Piatto Vecchio was their place. Charming, and she could arrive a few minutes late and walk all sexy across the room while he watches from the table. He’d remember what they had, their connection. He’d see her as his wife, his lover, and not just as the soon-to-be mother of a baby that scared him out of her life.

  Baby. That was a good point. Piatto Vecchio might remind him of the night she told him about Sylvie. The beginning of the end that, with any luck, was not the end. In fact, probably best to avoid Italian food altogether. Seafood might be better.

  She texts back, Blue Water Grill?

  He replies, Great, see u in an hour.

  She plunges her face into the shower jet and screams for joy.

  Once she’s dried off and doused herself in a scent he once said he adores, she scans her closet for an outfit. Not so many layers tonight. Tonight she’ll show a bit of skin if it kills her. She pulls out a light blue Calvin Klein with a structured sixties feel. Fitted bodice and an A-line skirt. It’ll set off her eyes and make her waist look tiny. The perfect vibe to get her husband back. With a pair of nice pumps, her calves would look shapely, toned. Jonathan always loved her calves.

  She slips the dress on and stares in the mirror.

  What if the note doesn’t mean he wants her back? What if it means nothing of the sort. Maybe the guy simply wants to make things official. Talk lawyers and separation agreements and moving trucks.

  She could throw up from not knowing.

  In the meantime, there is Isabelle. She texts her:

  Something came up tonight. May be good. Rain check—tomorrow?

  “Ma’am?” Cal, the only available contractor Noel could find online, stares at her with a chisel in one hand. He waves it toward the wall, which he has already opened up to expose the brick underneath. The ceilings on both sides saved him time, as Noel’s was already exposed and Eleanor’s exposed itself. “You got a sec to see something?”