A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  “You might feel better if you got out.”

  “I’ll feel better when I get out of New Zealand.”

  But he softened the cynicism by winking at his son.

  The beautiful little girl with the scar was at the park again that day. Jean watched the child and her own son-the two outsiders-tentatively greet each other and then happily play together.

  “I’m Zachary David Williams.”

  “I’m Angela Susan Jones.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “How come you talk so funny?”

  “I’m a United States for American!”

  “Race you to the slide, Zachary!”

  Several times Jean tried to catch the eye of the woman who accompanied Angie, but she never succeeded in doing it. The woman, short, stouter, older, and more solemn-looking than the other mothers, kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on her charge. After a while Jean gave up the effort of making a friend for herself and pulled her book on the history of New Zealand out of her purse. Skipping the chapter on Maori art, in which she wasn’t particularly interested, she turned quickly past pictures of wood carvings that looked like Alaskan totems and thumbed to the chapters about modern-day New Zealand.

  “… Greek and Italian restaurants are enormously popular. …”

  She was happy that Zachary had found a pal. It was still an effort not to stare at Angie’s face, but Jean noticed that the other people in the park rarely did, as if they were used to seeing the child there. Soon, lost in photographs of spectacular scenery, lulled by the music of her own child’s screams and giggles, Jean nearly forgot about it herself.

  “Mom,”

  She looked up into Zach’s face.

  “I’m cold, Mommy.”

  “Well, no wonder, look at the time! I’ve been lost in my book. Where’d your little friend go?”

  “Angie went home.”

  Jean smiled tenderly to see the expression of loss in his eyes. “You have really made a good friend, all this long way from our own home, haven’t you?”

  “Come back tomorrow, Mommy?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  And they did return to the park every day they remained in Wellington, until it was time to leave for the fjords and glaciers of the south island.

  But when they had to say good-bye to Angela for the last time, Zachary and his little friend couldn’t seem to grasp that they would never see each other again. Jean knelt down on the ground beside them and explained over and over that Zachary and his mom and dad had to leave, and they wouldn’t be able to come back to the park.

  But Zach said, “We come tomorrow, Angie!”

  “No, darling, we won’t be able to do that.”

  “Yes!” He shouted at his mother. “Park! Yes!”

  “Shh, Zachy, here’s what we’ll do.” Jean grabbed her purse and took out a scrap of paper and a pen. “I’ll write down our name and address and give it to Angie, so maybe someday she can write to you, okay?”

  “We come to park,” Zach said stubbornly.

  Jean gave the scrap of paper to Angela, who grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket of her little skirt. “Good-bye, Angie.” Jean ached to kiss the child’s scarred cheek; instead, she touched her fingers gently to the curly blond hair and then to the other, perfect, cheek. When Angie smiled, her wide, pretty mouth and her haunting almond eyes turned up sweetly at the corners.

  “Angie!”

  From her park bench, the woman called.

  Angie hugged her friend, and then ran off, waving and shouting, “See you! See you tomorrow, Zach!”

  Zach argued with his mother about anything and everything all the way down the path to the hotel. Finally his fury turned to tears. Then he cried so inconsolably, and for so long, that Jean began to worry and to feel grateful they were leaving so the separation of the two little friends wouldn’t be any harder than it already was.

  “Honestly, Lyle,” Jean whispered to her husband that night in bed. Zach was asleep, and breathing noisily through his tear-clogged nose, in the single bed across the room from their double. “You’d think this was that Maori legend I read about, the one where Rangi and Papa were separated by Tane.”

  “Do I know these people?” Lyle whispered back.

  “Rangi was sky father, Papa was earth mother, and Tane was their son, and they were all together in the primordial darkness. But Tane was also the god of the forests, and so he had to push his parents away from him in order to create night and day so that his forests could grow. The story was that Rangi the sky father was so grief stricken at being separated from Papa the earth mother that his tears filled her with oceans and lakes.”

  “So it’s old Rangi’s fault that we couldn’t drive down here from Chicago?”

  “I feel so sorry for Zach! I’ll swear, trying to explain why he won’t ever see Angie again is like trying to explain death to a four-year-old. He doesn’t understand that it’s permanent, and that she’s gone forever from his life.”

  “I need that Tane fellow,” Lyle muttered into his pillow, “to separate me permanently from New Zealand before this hotel separates me permanently from my money.” “Oh, good night, you!”

  But Jean was wrong-the separation wasn’t permanent.

  When Zachary was ten, he received a postcard from Angela Susan Jones in Wellington, New Zealand. The front of the card had a photograph of the playground in the Botanic Gardens, and she’d circled the tallest slide with a red, indelible marker.

  “Do you remember?” it said on the back. “I put your address in a secret place and saved it all these years. Will you please, please, please write back to me?”

  She had signed it, “I still love you. Angle,” and printed her address.

  Zachary wrote back.

  When Zachary was twenty-four and in the second year of medical school at the University of Chicago, he announced to his parents the specialty he intended to pursue.

  “I’ll be a plastic surgeon,” he said.

  “Good, maybe you can take a few tucks in my wallet,” his father joked. “It’s feeling loose and flabby after putting you through med school.”

  But Jean, who had never before heard her son mention any special interest in plastic surgery, was surprised and a little puzzled by his decision.

  During the last year of Zachary’s medical residency, he told Lyle and Jean that “the little girl from Wellington” was coming to Chicago to stay with him for a visit.

  “Do you remember her, Mom?”

  “You’ve written to Angie all these years, honey?”

  “Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”

  “No, but I should have guessed.”

  A day later, she called her son back.

  “Zach, are you hoping to fix Angie’s scar? Is that why she’s coming? Is that why you decided to be a plastic surgeon?”

  “Sure,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion. “I’m going to take a look at it, and see what I can do.”

  “Does Angie know this?”

  “Of course, Mom, we planned this together a long time ago. We’ve always known she’d come up here, and I’d become a doctor, and we’d fix her face.”

  “Zach, what caused that scar?”

  “I don’t know,” he said matter-of-factly, “because Angie doesn’t know. Her mother told her it happened when she was a baby, before she was adopted. She doesn’t have any memory of it.”

  “Angie’s adopted?”

  An image flitted through Jean’s mind, a memory of a silent woman of about Jean’s age, sitting alone on a park bench, her hands folded in her lap, watching the little girl.

  “You don’t care, do you, Mom?”

  “Of course not, honey.”

  But as Jean hung up the phone from talking to her son, she felt chilled and frightened by something she couldn’t identify at first. And then she realized that it was this … obsession … there was no other word for it … this obsession of his that unnerved her, this fixation
on a little girl he’d met twenty-five years earlier. No, she corrected herself, this obsession of theirs, Zach’s and Angie’s, too.

  “Since they were four years old!” she exclaimed to Lyle.

  “So? It’s romantic” he said. “I think it’s nice.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. At least it’s one good thing to come out of that awful trip to New Zealand. Relax.”

  * * *

  But in spite of all of his newly acquired skill and the help of more experienced surgeons, Zachary was not able entirely to erase Angle’s scar, and so at their wedding the guests whispered to one another about the faint disfiguring mark on her left cheek,

  “She’s beautiful anyway,” most of them agreed, and she was. Angie was lovely, and so was the baby boy that was born to her several years later.

  When Justin Jones-Williams was six months old, Angie called Jean and Lyle to say, “We’re going home! Zach’s taking time off! We want to go back to Wellington to see my family and show off Justin! Will you come, too?”

  “Us? Go, too?” At seventy-five and seventy-four, Lyle and Jean were still quite healthy and active, but Jean was startled and a little frightened by this invitation. Could they possibly manage such a trip? “Oh,” she said, stalling as she smiled into the phone, “you just want us to come along as babysitters.”

  “Of course we do!” Angie’s laugh was so light and happy that it flooded Jean with memories of the first time she’d ever heard it making music with her own son’s laughter. “Please, Jean?”

  And so she went along, too, but without Lyle this time.

  “I hated New Zealand,” he said at the airport.

  “No kidding,” Jean murmured, and kissed him good-bye.

  Through the endless flights, from Chicago to San Francisco, from Honolulu to Auckland, and then on down to Wellington, Jean took turns holding Justin, feeding him, playing with him, walking him in the aisles, cuddling him when he slept. And all the while she was filled with a terrible terror: What if Angie longed to remain with her family, what if Zachary decided to look for a medical post in New Zealand, what if the other grandparents wanted their share of the baby, what if she had to go home without them? Once, having those awful thoughts somewhere in the air between Honolulu and Auckland, when she was half-nutty with fatigue, Jean felt hysterical giggles bubble in her throat! And wouldn’t that just confirm Lyle’s worst opinions of New Zealand. She buried her lips in the baby’s neck to hide her trembling mouth.

  The house where Angie grew up and where her parents still lived was only a front yard away from the taxi stop where Jean and little Zach had been dropped off at the Botanic Gardens.

  Well, of course, Jean thought, when she saw that. It was fate, it was always fate.

  Rather than amusing her, however, the thought tired her. After two days on airplanes, Jean felt as if fate was wearing her out.

  The Joneses’ home was a two-story cottage built on a precipitous slope. It had a garage at street level but required walking a long flight of stairs down to reach the front door. The woman who answered their knock was the same short, stout, dark-haired woman of Jean’s age who had accompanied Angie to the playground all those years ago. She turned out to be Miriam Jones, Angie’s adoptive mother; her father was Malcolm Jones, a tall, blond, bandy-legged man who was a retired government worker. Jean was weary enough to be nonplussed at the sight of the lines around Miriam’s mouth and the age freckles on Miriam’s hands; it was one of those moments when Jean was caught off guard by the shock of the passing of her own years.

  “What a lovely boy,” Miriam and Malcolm said of their grandson. But neither of them took him-or Angie-into their arms to welcome them home. At her first glimpse of her daughter’s mended cheek, Miriam Jones murmured, “Well, I see they didn’t get it all, did they?” And Malcolm looked at his son-in-law and then said to his wife, “Thought she was fine as she was, didn’t we?”

  Tears sprang to Jean’s eyes in defense of her son and out of hurt for Angie, but she also felt a rush of joy of which she was mightily ashamed. These were not warm, affectionate parents to whom a daughter might long to return.

  Fools, Jean thought, and smiled happily at them.

  That evening after Miriam served lamb stew, cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes, she offered coffee to the Americans, along with a meringue and fruit dessert called a pavlova. Jean accepted a glass of sweet sherry, instead, and proceeded nearly to drop off to sleep in a rocking chair, cradling Justin. She could barely hold her jet-lagged eyes open; it was all she could do to pick up snatches of the conversation, and even they seemed only dialogue in a funny kind of surrealistic dream …

  “… While I’m here, don’t want to hurt you or Father … find my birth parents …”

  “… Can’t imagine why you …”

  “… Never knew, did we, Malcolm? Except what the social welfare people said …”

  “… What’s the good, really …”

  “In the U.S., you’d write to the …”

  “Now that we have Justin, I think we ought to know …”

  “… Not always good to know …”

  “Why? Why not?”

  Jean’s eyes flew open at the uncharacteristically sharp sound of her daughter-in-law’s voice. She was disturbed to see that Angie’s face was flushed, making her scar more pinkly visible. Jean tried to shift a bit, to ease her stiffness without waking the baby, but when the rocking chair creaked loudly, drawing the others’ attention, she settled back quietly, if uncomfortably. What was going on here? What had she missed by dozing off? Why was Zachary looking at Angie with such a worried expression?

  “Tell me what you remember,” Angie half pleaded, half demanded of her parents. “If you don’t, I shall have to make inquiries that will take such time and trouble, and …”

  “All right!” Miriam Jones raised both of her hands in an exasperated gesture of surrender. “But there’s so little we can tell you! The names of your biological parents were kept secret, but I do think the social worker told us you were born in Te Kapura,”

  Angie touched her cheek. “Did they tell you about this?”

  “No.” The mother looked straightforwardly at her daughter. “Except to say that you had not received any medical care at the time it happened, so it had never even been stitched by a doctor. When we got you, the wound was still raw, but healing.” Jean wondered if she only imagined that Miriam’s glance slid away from her daughter for a moment as she added, “They didn’t tell us anything else about you. And we didn’t ask. We were older than most adoptive parents, and you were hard to place.” Jean flinched inwardly, for Angie’s sake. But then her heart warmed to Miriam when the other woman looked up at her adopted daughter and said with a formal but moving simplicity, “We wanted you so. We have never regretted our decision to take you. We hope you don’t regret it either.”

  “Mother.” Angie looked as if she longed to rush to Miriam’s side, but her mother’s reserve kept the daughter pinned to her chair. “Of course I don’t. I’m so grateful.” Angie, who was so easily and openly demonstrative with her American family, cleared her throat and said awkwardly, “I love you both.”

  Malcolm shifted his weight on the sofa.

  “Well, now you’d best forget all about it,” he advised.

  “Yes, it’s done now, isn’t it?” his wife agreed.

  But if they thought they would deflect their daughter and son-in-law with a taste of the truth, they misjudged the young couple. Jean thought they should have known better than to underestimate Angle’s and Zach’s tenacity when those two became obsessed about something!

  “What town did you say?” Angie asked.

  Her mother sighed. “Te Kapura.”

  “Do you want to go tomorrow?” Zach asked Angie.

  “Yes.” She turned to her mother-in-law. “You, too, Jean?”

  “No,” Jean said, feeling they needed time alone. “I’ll stay here and baby-sit with Justin.” Jean smiled at her son. �
��Maybe I’ll take him to the playground, and he’ll meet his future wife.”

  “I think we ought to take him with us,” Zach said.

  “Yes, let’s,” his wife said.

  Jean saw Miriam and Malcolm exchange glances. They noticed her observing them and for a moment all three grandparents were united in a strange bond that felt to Jean like complicity. Was she voicing a shared fear, Jean wondered, when she said, attempting a light tone:

  “Well, do bring our baby back.”

  But Jean did go, because Justin-who was spoiled by the airline flights where the adults gave him anything he wanted just to keep him happy-wailed at being dragged from her arms after she gave him his bottle the next morning.

  “You’d better come, Mom,” Zach said.

  “Please,” Angie pleaded. “I don’t think I can cope with this day and with him, too.”

  Jean pretended to give in gracefully, as if she were sacrificing a perfectly lovely day on her own in Wellington, but she’d go with them if they insisted.

  “Well, all right,” she said happily.

  Although she said nothing about it to anyone, she felt a sense of relief at going along with them that wasn’t altogether connected to her joy at spending the day with her grandson.

  * * *

  Te Kapura, they learned from a map, was twenty-five miles inland, north of Wellington along winding country roads. Angie drove, as she was the only one of them who was accustomed to the British way, while Jean sat in the front narrating the trip from the same old paperback history book that she’d brought to New Zealand the first time, and Zach played with Justin in the back. Jean finally gave up the reading, however, when it became impossible to make herself heard over the squeals and giggles.

  “Angie,” she said to her daughter-in-law. “How are you going to go about this search?”

  “Well,” Angie said, “I suppose we’ll just knock on doors, won’t we?” Only twenty-four hours back in New Zealand and Angie’s accent was already stronger, Jean noticed; she had also retrieved the British habit of turning statements into interrogatories. “If the town’s as tiny as most of these villages are, they’ll surely remember a baby with this, won’t they?” She twitched her own scarred cheek.