Death by Inferior Design (12 page)

“Nobody ever does. I’ve been a real joy to have around at parties and social gatherings, let me tell you.”

“Well, maybe you’re not exactly Santa Claus or one of his merry elves, but—”

He snorted and grumbled, “I’m not even one of his reindeer.”

“But on the other hand, you probably make everyone else feel better about their own lives in comparison. I know
I
feel better.”

“Good.” He grinned, rose from the table, and gave me a slight bow. “Then my work here is done, milady.”

To my near mortification, I actually blushed and giggled like a schoolgirl as I got to my feet, too. Well, then, as my mom would say, live and learn. That’s what came of my imbibing alcohol in the aftermath of someone collapsing in a client’s home.

Maybe Steve Sullivan wasn’t quite as bad a skunk as I’d come to believe. Then again, everyone who’d ever met the man, myself included, knew how charming Sullivan could be whenever he wanted to be. And a skunk’s fur is beautiful. So what?

chapter 7

Audrey’s parlor remained in the same state as it had been in last night, the contents shoved with abject indifference against the walls. In times of stress, I’m drawn to certain pieces of furniture— regardless of their setting—the way some people are drawn to certain types of food. The parlor’s sage sofa—its plush velvet impossibly soft to the touch—was a haven for me. I curled up against its arm, the cordless phone in my hand, and gathered my courage.

Just as I felt resolved and ready to act, Hildi sprang onto the far end of the sofa and began to navigate a nonchalant course over the plush cushions toward me. Too nervous about my impending phone conversation to have my cat on my lap, I rose. Hildi promptly hopped back onto the antique-pine floor. Her indignation at having been treated so ignobly was evident in her every movement. She flicked the white tip of her tail at me as she strode past me toward the kitchen, in a feline gesture that I chose not to interpret at the moment.

I dialed my father’s number, half hoping there would be no answer. I waited through the first three rings, my stomach in an unpleasant flutter. My father picked up. At least it wasn’t Angie, his wife, or their twelve-year-old daugher, Jessie. Forcing a measure of gaiety into my voice, I said, “Hi. It’s Erin.”

“Well, hi there. I was just thinking of you.”

The greeting would have been flattering, except that was what he always said, and yet he contacted me so seldom that it was impossible for me to believe.

“The strangest thing happened yesterday, and I need your input. I was removing the paneling from a wall in a house in north Crestview and discovered a hiding spot in the wall. A copy of that baby picture of me that Mom kept on the piano was inside.”

There was a long pause. “Did you ask the owners about it?” His voice was utterly unemotional.

“No. Mom made me promise never to look for my birth parents. But do
you
know who they are? If so, you don’t have to tell me their names, but . . .” I faltered. Staring unseeingly at the floor, I asked, “Do you have any idea why my
not
finding them was so important to her?”

“Erin, as you know, when I met your mother, she’d already adopted you.”

I chewed on my lower lip. He could sometimes take a hundred words to give a simple yes or no.

“I didn’t even know for the longest time that you weren’t really hers—that she hadn’t given birth to you herself. All I ever knew about the circumstances was that she adopted you from a friend when she was living in Colorado. It was a sore subject with her, and I chose to never upset her by prying into it.”

I frowned, frustrated. That she’d adopted me from a friend and that, even though I’d been eighteen months old at the time of my adoption, she’d known and loved me from when I was just six weeks old was all she would ever tell me as well. She never explained why six weeks or why this friend had given me up, aside from the gentle, pat answer: “She knew I would take better care of you than she could.”

“You never asked? Was the adoption even legal?”

“I’m sure it was all legal and aboveboard.”

I completed a full circle of the parlor. Even while this phone conversation was so critical as to make me hang on my father’s every word, I still managed to silently admire the painstaking stitch-work that was evident on the back of Audrey’s rolled-up hand-knotted oriental rug. “But . . . how
could
it have been? She was just twenty-one and single. I was already eighteen months old. That’s not your standard, legal adoption. Is it?”

No reply.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I’ve always told you the truth, Erin.”

“You say that, Dad, yet it’s so hard to believe that, once you found out I wasn’t her biological child, you simply let the subject drop. Who would
do
that? How could you be so complacent about your own family?”

“You know what they say about curiosity and cats.”

Though impatience and anger had already crept into my father’s voice, I had to ask the question that had haunted me for the last two decades—ever since my mother first admitted I was adopted. I’d dragged that much out of her when she’d been unable to produce any pictures of me as a newborn, which my second-grade teacher wanted for a which-child-is-which-baby guessing game. From that day on, her meager answers had only brought me more questions and doubts. None of the circumstances surrounding my adoption had been typical. Neither of my parents was ever willing to explain them fully. My mother’s dying wish had been for me never to look into my past.

“Erin? Are you still there?”

I slid a wing chair toward me to reach over its back and reposition Audrey’s divine coral harlequin table lamp so that its ivory shade was no longer being crushed. I took a deep breath. “Dad, is it possible . . . that I was an abduction?”

“Absolutely not,” he fired back, suddenly furious. “How could you even think such a thing of your mother? Or do you mean that you think
I’ve
been lying all these years, and that I snatched you from your real parents?”

My emotions fluctuated between rage and despair. The retort that I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud blasted through my brain
—Do you honestly think I’m trying to hurt you, Dad? Can’t you see this from my side for
once—what it’s been like for me? Not to know such basic
truths as who I am and where I came from? To always have
my most soul-baring and painful questions met with an
angry barrage?

I leaned against the entrance to the kitchen, the only spot on the wall that wasn’t blocked by Audrey’s repositioned furniture. Over the lump in my throat, I persisted. “Look at this from my perspective, Dad. Certain things about my adoption never made a whole lot of sense to me, but that didn’t ever really matter till now. I had a good, happy childhood.” More or less.

“Yes, you did. You did indeed. And you went to the school that you wanted, and you got the career that you wanted.”

I clenched my teeth. He’d neglected to mention that my going to the school that I wanted had come to me thanks to a generous scholarship and my part-time job, so neither he nor my mother had been forced to pay for my education.

He went on in a simmering tone. “And yet, even so, out of all the places to live in the entire country, you chose to move to Crestview, where your mother went to college. Why? Did you secretly want to find your biological parents, despite your mother’s explicit request?”

“No!” This was so unfair of him. He was playing what I’d just now told him against my wounded emotions at the loss of my mother. Or was I in the wrong here? This was why I hated talking to my father about anything of a serious nature; I instantly felt trapped into being the same heartbroken twelve-year-old that I’d been when he’d moved out. It was impossible to see the forest for the trees when the branches kept jabbing me in the eye. I heard myself yammer, “Mom always talked about how pretty Crestview was. After she died, I just . . . wanted to see the place, and I wound up staying and starting up my business here. That’s all.”

He sighed heavily in my ear. “Erin, if you’re asking my opinion, just do what your mother asked.
Stay away
from these people! Perhaps your mother had more than her fair share of secrets, but everything she did was in your best interest. Always.”

“That’s the one thing I’m sure of,” I replied, feeling a little better from the reminder of that one cornerstone from my past.

“Erin, I . . . This isn’t a good time for me to talk.” That was a frequent response from my father. I doubted that we’d had a single phone call in which he hadn’t uttered it at least once, including those rare occasions in which he had been the one to place the call. In a bad case of overkill, this time he added, “You caught me on my way out the door. I’ve got to go. Just . . . let someone else finish this . . . this room you’re working on, and stay away from those people.”

“I can’t quit work three-quarters of the way through a project.”

“Erin,” he said firmly, “the one and
only
thing I know about your birth parents is that one time your mother told me that they were dangerous.”

“But you said she got me from a friend. How could she consider a
friend
of hers to be dangerous?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to go. Just . . . be careful. And good talking to you, Erin. Thanks for calling.”

He hung up before I could reply. Good talking to me? That was what he says about a conversation like
that
?
Hey, Erin. Your mysterious birth parent might want to
hurt you. And it sure is shitty of you to worry that you may
have been kidnapped at eighteen months. But it was good
talking to you. I’ve got to get back to my real daughter
now.

I slammed the handset into its cradle on the mahogany console, currently wedged behind the chesterfield sofa. My cheeks felt red-hot. It was immeasurably painful not to believe my own father. His studious avoidance of this subject matter was, I was certain, the mortar of the brick wall he’d built between us. If only there were some other relatives—aunts or uncles—I could tap for information . . . But my mother had been an only child, and her parents passed away about twenty years ago.

My father hadn’t asked for the name of the homeowners for my design project. Surely that meant he didn’t know my biological parents’ last name. That was an infinitely kinder possibility than its alternative—that he knew the name and just didn’t care.

If only I could remake my own personal interiors as easily as I could a dwelling space, could keep only the useful or the lovely or the fondly sentimental. That simply wasn’t possible.
Yes, Mom, we do indeed need to look
forward and not behind us. But how can we understand
where we are without ever understanding where we’ve
been?
I’d never thought to ask her that question when she was alive.

With no one answering the phone at either the Axelrods’
or the Hendersons’ houses, around six o’clock that evening, I drove to the hospital. A sense of foreboding overwhelmed any cheer that I might normally have gleaned from the decorative lighting on the houses and trees I passed. I was now certain that Randy Axelrod was my biological father.

Having run the phone conversation with my father through my head so many times that my brain was getting wear marks, one possibility could tie everything together: Randy was something of a bully. My biological mother and my adoptive mother had been friends, perhaps at CU. According to my father, I had been given away to protect me from a dangerous parent. Perhaps Randy had been abusive, and Myra and my mother had conspired to get me halfway across the country to keep me safe. Maybe my mother’s last wish was
also
geared toward keeping me safe. Perhaps she simply never wanted me to find out that my father was a despicable human being.

If the Axelrods
did
turn out to be my biological parents, at least Myra seemed to be a nice enough woman. She had to be scared out of her wits right now. A quick visit to let her know someone was thinking about her and her ailing husband was just the natural, human thing to do.

I walked through the main doors and did my best to stifle the torrent of memories that the antiseptic-laced air brought me. A shiny blue garland rimmed the receptionist’s desk. Below the garland, a slightly faded cardboard Santa had been captured in a permanent “Ho, Ho, Ho.” On the credenza, a two-foot-high artificial tree was laden with red, blue, silver, and gold balls on its forest-green scouring-brush branches. I asked the receptionist for Randy Axelrod’s room number.

She glanced at her computer screen and asked, “Are you a family member?”

I hesitated, thinking that the truthful answer—I don’t know—would not go over well. “No. If that’s a problem, is there any way I could get a message to—”

Just then I caught sight of Myra. Her chin was held high as she entered the lobby, and her lips were so tightly pursed that they were white. She did a double take and then came over. “Erin, hello. It’s so good of you to come. You must have heard the news.”

Confused, I studied her face. She had a drugged-out glaze to her gray eyes that might have been shock. “I . . . was there when your husband collapsed.”

She shook her head. “Randy passed away. Two hours ago. Heart attack.” Her voice was emotionless.

Frustrated, I balled my fists. With him had died my only chance to get to know the man who might be my biological father. What little I did know of Randy Axelrod, I hadn’t liked, and now that was all that would remain of him in my memory banks. My own concerns and emotions were meaningless, however, when face-to-face with his new widow. “I’m so sorry,” I told her, staring into her eyes and hoping that she could sense my sincerity within such a well-worn response.

“Thank you.”

We stood there in the hospital lobby in silence. Myra wrapped her tan cardigan tight around her shoulders, clutching the garment with both hands as if it were a security blanket.