A Small Indiscretion (36 page)

“Cathal,” I said.

“No, not Cathal. It was an
M
. Maurice. Morann. Something like that.”

“Manus.”

“Yes. After I left the berth that night, didn’t you two—”

“No!” I said. “Nothing happened. I didn’t let him touch me. I never lied to you about that. You have to believe me.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know it was Malcolm? How do you know it wasn’t Patrick?”

“I know it’s not Patrick.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just am.”

“You didn’t use protection with Malcolm?”

“He said … He said it was all right. I thought that meant … I don’t know. I don’t remember. I trusted him, I guess.”

“Well, maybe he was in love with you.”

“I don’t know,” I said, though I did know Malcolm had been in love with me.

“Maybe he wanted to father a son.”

“Stop. Just stop. Please.”

“All right. I’ll stop. The important thing is we need to reach Robbie. We need to tell him the truth. You need to tell him. From the beginning.”

“All right,” I said. “I will.”

But five days later, when we tried to reach you at the institute in Japan, we discovered you were no longer there.

T
HE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT RULED OUT
Jonathan as your biological father. History implicated Malcolm. But history is a human creation, and so is memory, and so is the science of medicine. And humans are only human. We wanted absolute certainty. We wanted hard evidence. So the day after your father and I confessed to each other at Gold Hill, we went to work. We had everything we needed to know about your DNA from the tests conducted after your accident. We had everything we needed to know about Emme’s, too, it turned out, since her blood had been drawn and added to her medical record at the hospital in Santa Cruz. We ought not to have had access to that record, but we had connections in high places. Mitch made some phone calls, then summoned your father into his office. He left a particular patient’s record on his desk, where your father could see it, then he stepped out of his office to attend to the important matters of life and death.

W
E SENT YOU
an email on February 20—the day after we reviewed the results of the sibling DNA tests, six days after I read the letter from Louise’s uncle—asking you to call us. We received, right
away, an out-of-office reply from your Gmail account. The subject line was a Zen proverb: “When you seek it, you cannot find it.”

We called the administrative office of the institute and were told you had withdrawn for the semester. We spoke to the director, who told us in excellent English that he was terribly sorry, he had assumed we had been fully aware of your withdrawal from the program. We grilled him about the circumstances of your leaving and were told it had been cordial and deliberate, and that you had withdrawn for reasons of “health and well-being.”

We retraced our steps. We walked through the summer, and the accident, and the coma, and the double-coma, as we thought of it, and your recovery. Then Christmas at home, and sending you off to Japan, and the few cryptic emails we’d received from you there, the first telling us you’d arrived safely, the second that you were settled into your living quarters, the third that the coursework was unfortunately more conventional than you’d anticipated. We second-guessed every decision. We walked back along the thread, trying to find the beginning, but we came up short.

We were tortured by the question of why and where you had gone, and also by the deplorable but seemingly inescapable corollary: Who was to blame?

We did not blame you, of course, after all you’d been through. I did not blame your father, either; in my mind, he was a victim, too. I would have blamed myself, except that the thing that would have alienated you from me—the secret I’d kept from you, unwittingly, all your life—was not yet known to you. So I was inclined to blame a temporary insanity brought on by a return of the coma dreams.

Your father was hell-bent on holding the professor at Berkeley, whom you’d been studying under, responsible. The physics God, Dr. Ivan Karinsky, who also happened to be a Zen master and interested in the intersection between science and enlightenment. Your
father was told by the physics department that Dr. Karinsky was on sabbatical in India. Your father would not relent until he was given contact information—in, of all places, Varanasi. We spoke briefly with Dr. Karinsky over the phone, but all we learned was that he did not know your whereabouts, and that even if he did, he would not be at liberty to disclose them, given that you were legally an adult. He added that it was your prerogative to seek healing wherever you thought you could find it, and that if indeed you had embarked on a spiritual journey, our trying to find you would only drive you further away. His response infuriated us both. It was all I could do not to tell him that clearly he was a person who had never raised a child.

I contacted Arthur Greatrex in Paris to see if he knew anything, but he assured me he did not. He wouldn’t allow me to speak to Emme directly. I went so far as to ask him to put his hand over his heart and promise me that if he learned anything at all, he would contact me immediately. Like the gentleman he was, he gave me his word.

I went to speak to Michael Moss at the Green Underthing. A long shot, I knew, but I sensed he had in some way been in competition for Emme’s affections. What did I think? That he’d slain you in a transcontinental duel and hidden your body? Or that he’d locked you away so he could win the fair lady’s hand? He looked at me like I’d lost my mind and told me he’d never even heard of you, and he hadn’t heard from Emme since before she flooded the store. He softened, it’s true, when I told him you were my only son, and that you and Emme had been involved in some way, and that now you’d disappeared.

Mitch came to see us, but he could offer nothing more than a reassurance that there was no reason to expect your health would fail. You did not need dialysis. Your kidney had astonished us all by healing completely, as had your concussion and your lung and your
ribs and your knee, though you would probably continue to walk with a slight limp for the rest of your life. We assured him we were not concerned about the limp, and he assured us he knew that; he was only attempting to give us the fullest possible information.

We grilled the administrators at the institute in Japan again and again. We contacted the research center in Oxfordshire. We scoured the Internet. We checked with all the hospitals; we enlisted the support of the U.S. Embassy; we worked with the travel authority to establish that you had not left Japan, at least not on a plane or a ship using your own passport. We contacted all of your friends, and all of your ex-girlfriends, and all of your professors and mentors. We started a Facebook page to publicize our search. Your father flew to Japan. After ten days he returned, having exhausted all leads. He’d seen the dormitory room in which you’d slept before you disappeared, but the room had already been stripped clean and assigned to someone else.

So, again, we lie in wait. In our separate houses. In our separate beds. We go through the motions of daily living. We parent your sisters as best we can. Your father keeps his business running. I open the door of the Salvaged Light now and then and try to make order out of the wreckage.

T
O LAY
. To lie. A lay. A lie. It’s a versatile but tricky word, isn’t it? To get the lay of the land. To lay down the law. To lay blame. To lie low. To lie down on the job. To let it lie. To lie down and …

Not once, in all the time you were in the hospital, not even when you moved from the first coma into the second, did I imagine your death. Oh, I considered it often enough when you were growing up, as every mother does. When you were a baby, and you slept too long, I imagined that the fumes from the chemicals required by law
to make your mattress flameproof had entered your lungs and killed you. Every time you rode your bike, I imagined a neighbor backing his car out of his driveway and running you over. Like all mothers, I lived in a land of imagined disaster in defense against a real one. I worried, I predicted, I prevented—except the time I didn’t. And now I can’t, because I don’t know where you are. I try not to think of you drowned, shot, lost, crushed beneath a train—but sometimes my imagination runs wild.

Y
ESTERDAY
. The second to last day of April. It poured rain. The power went out. I found some flashlights and candles and waited for your father to deliver your sisters back home from a weekend at Gold Hill.

“April showers bring May flowers,” Polly shouted as she and Clara rushed into the house.

Jonathan stood in the doorway.

“Come in out of the rain,” I said to him. “The power’s out.”

“I think there’s a lantern in the garage,” he said. He disappeared and returned after a long while with the lantern in hand, already lit.

“Have the girls eaten?” I said. “Have you? Do you want something?”

I opened the refrigerator, forgetting that I would not be able to see what was inside. Your father brought the lantern over and I grabbed what I could. I cut up apples and cheese and found some peanut butter. I set out crackers. I found a bottle of wine, and your father let me pour him a glass. I opened a bottle of Pellegrino for myself.

The wind howled. Your father made no motion to leave. He built a fire and we sat around the fireplace. The girls showed us routines they were learning in their hip-hop dance class after school, though without music, since there was no way to amplify it.

When it was bedtime, we put Polly in with Clara so she wouldn’t be scared. Jonathan read to them by candlelight. When they were asleep, he and I sat down again by the fire.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I went to see Mitch.”

“Oh?”

“I wanted to find out if he knew anything about Robbie.”

“But he doesn’t. He said so. More than once.”

“I know. But.”

“But what?”

“Something wasn’t adding up. I don’t know. Christmas Eve.”

“What about Christmas Eve?”

“We had words.”

“You and Mitch?”

“About Robbie. About what he should or should not be told, and when. We argued, but we didn’t resolve anything. What I didn’t know was that sometime that night, after our argument, Mitch took Robbie aside and told him what he knew.”

“What he knew about what?”

“What he knew about the tissue testing.”

“Oh, my God. Are you joking? He told Robbie you weren’t his father? Why would he do that? He had no right. He had no jurisdiction.”

Your father raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness, but his face was pinched with held-in fury.

“He says he’s sorry. He says to tell you it was an awful mistake. He says he had way too much to drink that night. Apparently, he’s retained a private detective, on his own, to try to find Robbie. He feels responsible for Robbie’s disappearance.”

“He is responsible for Robbie’s disappearance!”

I was on my feet, now, pacing the room. “Remember he told us he was giving us the ‘fullest possible information’? Remember he said that? Weren’t those his exact words? He went on and on about the limp. The limp, for Christ’s sake! So that’s why Robbie disappeared. That’s why he was acting so strangely when we put him on the plane to Japan. That’s why he was so remote.”

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes, remembering. “What I don’t understand is why Robbie didn’t tell us he knew. If he’d only come out with it, we could have put a stop to all this.”

“He must have been asking himself the very same question,” your father replied. “Why hadn’t we told him? Why would we send him off for a year, still in the dark? He must have been asking himself right up until he boarded the plane for Japan. He must have thought that at any moment, we would come clean. And we didn’t. You didn’t, because you didn’t know. I didn’t, because I just couldn’t bring myself to. I withheld the truth, which was the same as lying. I undid a whole lifetime of trust.”