November Sky (23 page)

“Did you hurt yourself?” Nick asked. Hugely relieved that he hadn’t taken off, I shook my head and he held out his hands.

“Come on, get up. If we stand around in this Siberian cold, we’ll be flat out in bed tomorrow with pneumonia.”

I let him pull me up. As I knocked the ice and dirt off my rear end, he still looked shocked but had the beginnings of a smile on his face.

“On a normal date, the question would arise—your place or mine? But we’re already married, and I think, given the evening’s events, no one would call this a date.” He rubbed his eyes in his exhaustion, and then looked at me beseechingly. “I know we’re separated, but would you consider coming home with me? I feel like I’ve gone through a meat grinder and need someone to talk to.”

I followed him across the parking lot, carefully placing one foot before the other, and breathed freely when I didn’t fall on my sore butt again. Although I’d rehearsed all the possibilities before this meeting, what was happening now lay beyond the power of my imagination. I was relieved that Nick calmly and happily requested and accepted my company.

After slipping and sliding over icy streets for half an hour, I was in the house I’d sworn to never enter again, wrapped in a blanket on the couch beside Nick. I’d deliberately not spoken during the car ride home so I wouldn’t distract him while he drove. After we arrived, he wordlessly fetched a blanket and asked whether I’d like something warm to drink. There were now two stout, steaming cups of tea in front of us. I warmed my hands on mine and desperately tried to find words to end the silence between us. But Nick broke the ice.

“I’ve always wondered why I didn’t look like my father. And now I get Mom’s story about my baby pictures being burned in a cellar fire in our house in Spain. I remember the editors of our high school yearbook had the bright idea of including everybody’s first baby picture as well as a current one. Everybody gave pictures of newborns. I was the only one who was a nine-month-old and everyone teased me for being a giant baby.” He took a large gulp from his cup. “It’s funny to think that I got the name Vanderstätt on paper exactly the way you did when we got married. I’m not a member of this family. I wonder who I really am.”

I delicately floated an idea that had been percolating in my head since Angela’s disclosure. “You’ll always be Nick Vanderstätt for me, and for Angela and Jürgen, too. But I believe that once you’re twenty-one, you can make inquiries about your biological parents. Child Welfare is obligated to give out the information.”

To be on the safe side, I didn’t mention the other thought that had come to me. Perhaps by finding out something about his earliest childhood, he could track down the cause of his self-destructive attacks. He’d been amazingly calm until now, but I knew how quickly his dark moods waylaid him and I stayed on my guard.

He took my hand. “I’d like you to come along if I do look for the woman who brought me into this world. If she’s still alive, I’d like to know why she didn’t want me.”

I was overcome with sympathy at hearing the pain in his voice. At the same time, many things were now becoming clear. I’d heard that if a child under a year old—during that time when babies develop basic trust—is separated from his mother or goes through some trauma, it can leave deep scars in a child’s psyche. This could be the case for Nick. At the same time, I doubted that knowing the circumstances would be enough in itself to eradicate or even ease his wounds. I suspected that a long road lay before Nick. But we finally had a starting point.

I responded to his squeeze and looked at him. “I’ll go with you. But first ask Angela and Jürgen if they have any more details.”

Chapter 22

We spent all night on the couch, talking off and on until fatigue finally overcame us. The next morning, noises from the first floor told us that his parents were awake, and we went downstairs, bleary eyed. Over breakfast, Nick asked them for more details about his adoption. Angela gave him the file folder beside her.

She sent me a glance of gratitude. “These are the adoption papers. Your date of birth and your parents’ names are in there. We were only told you were raised by your maternal grandmother because both your parents were dead. She was your last living relative, and when she died you were put in a children’s home and given up for adoption. They christened you Dominick, and we left it at that.”

Nick handled the papers with a certain reverence, glanced through them, and smiled wanly. “I actually had the exotic name of Meier? That could make an investigation difficult.”

It quickly got complicated. That same day, Nick and I went to the appropriate Child Welfare office. Angela had given us the name of the caseworker who initiated everything and handed over the child to them. A friendly lady in a soberly furnished office told us that unfortunately, the woman had retired four years earlier and had passed away since. Nick and I were bitterly disappointed, having put all our hopes in learning more about Nick’s first family from her.

The official offered to look for Nick’s adoption file. Nick signed a request to examine it, and we waited in the corridor for further information. His mood alternated between extremes. Although he didn’t want his adoptive parents to see it, he was furious at them for keeping his adoption from him for so long, and he was sad he could not meet his biological parents.

I hoped I had done the right thing by encouraging him to find out something about the first nine months of his life. Maybe that’s where the cause of all his problems lay, but would there be things he didn’t want to know?

The helpful woman came back from the archives and regretfully shook her head. “I’m terribly sorry, Herr Vanderstätt, but all I can see in the files is where you and your grandmother last resided and that she died thirty years ago. You were adopted two months after her death. There are no more details. Here is your grandmother’s last address.”

She gave us a note with a name, Luise Kalterer, and a street address in Neuperlach, a part of Munich.

Shortly afterward we were back in Nick’s car. He gave me a puzzled look.

“Well, now what, Watson? My grandmother’s been dead forever, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten.”

“Let’s go to this address so you can see where you came from.”

He shook his head impatiently. “It’s completely useless, Laura. I guarantee we won’t find anything there. It’s been more than thirty years, and I was only there with my grandmother for a short time as a baby. Child Welfare says everyone in my original family is dead. And I’m gradually adjusting to the idea that I’m not Angela and Jürgen’s biological son. I’m glad and grateful that I grew up with them. Who knows what might have become of me otherwise?”

He got a pretty good idea about that upon arriving at the address indicated and stopping in front of an ugly concrete apartment building in need of restoration in an unappealing high-rise area. Some shady figures were loitering on the unkempt grounds and gave us unfriendly looks. We hesitated as we got out, checked that the car was locked, and stared up at the building’s graffiti-smeared facade. To judge by the arcades leading to the upper floors, there were countless apartments in this uninviting building. Nick held my hand as he shuddered beside me.

He articulated exactly what I was thinking. “God, this looks dismal!”

I was only able to get him inside with much artful persuasion. The safety lock on the front door was broken, so we went right in. The dirty floor in the lobby was strewn with cigarette butts, stinking fast-food containers, half-empty plastic bottles, and more trash. We tried not to step on the chewing gum on the warped floor tiles on our way to the elevator. It was broken, but I didn’t regret not getting into that awful stinking car. We walked up four flights of stairs. I stayed close to the wall with Nick on the outside to avoid looking over the center railing. I focused on the numbers that appeared now and then on the doors. It was ridiculous, but even our little climbing game on the bridge hadn’t cured me entirely from my fear.

We reached the fifth floor and went to the inside corridor. Scratched in chalk on the sixth door was the number 46A with the tenant’s illegible name underneath. Four holes revealed that the original number plate had been ripped out of the wood. We stopped at the door, and Nick looked with disgust at the brownish swollen wood, the black-stained brass doorknob, and the two stinking garbage bags in front of it. There was a greasy window next to the door with gray rags blocking the view inside. We heard noises from the stairs. An elderly woman with long, unkempt gray hair and wearing a stained green smock appeared at the end of the corridor. She groaned as she dragged two full plastic bags behind her. The bags emitted suspicious sounds. When she saw us, she stopped and stared at us with mistrust.

“Whaddaya want in my apartment, huh? My son ain’t in, but he didn’t do nothin’. He was with me here the whole time, I can testify to that!” she announced.

Nick stepped up and looked at her reassuringly. “We’re not from the police. I lived in this apartment when I was a kid and just wanted to take a look at it.”

The old lady broke into croaking laughter. I felt like I was in a “Hansel and Gretel” parody. She was going to entice us into her apartment, lock us up, and stuff us with the contents of her bags . . .

Instead, she came so close that my stomach rebelled with nausea from the alcoholic fumes she emitted and the unbearable smell of her sweaty, unwashed body.

She stuck out her forefinger at Nick, and looked us up and down with scorn. “Don’ give me none of that shit! Dunno who sent you snot-noses or what yer doin’, but you ain’t comin’ into my apartment!”

She unlocked the door with amazing agility, disappeared inside, and slammed it in our faces with a bang.

I cursed. We were obviously too well dressed for the neighborhood.

Nick was grim-faced as he grabbed me by the arm. “Well, that was that. Let’s blow this joint.”

I reluctantly let him pull me toward the staircase, but my detective skills had been aroused. I wanted to try the surrounding apartments in case somebody still remembered Luise Kalterer and her grandson, but Nick made it clear that he wanted to get out of the revolting place as fast as he could.

I ruminated all the way home. I just couldn’t accept that we’d hit a dead end. What had happened, exactly? When and how did his biological parents die? But the more I tortured my brain, the less I came up with as to how to find the answers. All the parties were dead. It was like we were jinxed.

Nick covered up his dismay at being confronted with the site of his earliest childhood. He cracked jokes about what the old lady and her son with apparent criminal leanings had in the apartment. But I sensed that the desolate atmosphere in the building had given him a lot to think about. I instinctively put a hand on his arm when he stopped at a red light two streets away from our house.

“You know, it might have looked very different when you were living there. The building could have had completely normal, working-class tenants and has just gone downhill over the last several years.”

“Sure, and this year Easter and Christmas fall on the same day. I’m too big for fairy tales.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “Now that we’ve closed the book on that story, we ought to talk about us and our future.” His dark eyes looked plaintive and emotional. “I miss you terribly. Come back to me.”

I was back in the old bind faster than expected. I’d been pinning all my hopes for our future on following up on clues and looking for a breakthrough for Nick. Coming across a trauma in Nick’s earliest childhood could with a single stroke make his death wish understandable. Once we knew why, I could have had ammunition to get him to work on it with a specialist. And then we could try a new beginning. His eyes grew dark, and he ground his teeth when I didn’t answer immediately.

I made an effort to stay calm. “You haven’t tried to kill yourself one single time since I moved out, right?”

Now it was his turn not to answer. I’d never been that straightforward. I felt mean, but I went ahead with it: “If I come back to you now, the whole business will start up again. You’ll be nice and charming, in love, funny—until your black moods attack. Then you’ll cause a lot of shit, and I’ll come to the rescue. For some reason you want to test me and my love to the extreme. Maybe because you feel unconsciously that your real parents left you high and dry. But it only happens when I’m near you.” I took a deep breath. “And that’s exactly the reason I can’t come back.”

We’d reached our house, and I was madly determined to pack the rest of my things on the spot and drive to Chris’s, no matter how hard it would be. I knew I was dangerously skirting the abyss. The moment I was gone, he could suffer from another short circuit, but I had to take that risk. Otherwise everything I’d done would be futile.

He surprised me once again. He took out his wallet and picked out a crumpled yellow Post-it from among his credit cards. “This is the address of that hypnosis therapist that Mira tried to talk me into seeing. I called him this morning and am going tomorrow morning. I’m still very skeptical about it having any success, but I’ll give it a shot for your sake. Will you at least stay until tomorrow?”

Nick had finally given the signal I’d been hoping for. He
had
changed during my absence, grown more serious, more responsible, and he’d processed the fact of his adoption remarkably well. And he realized that if he wanted me to come back he’d have to deliver something more substantial than love notes, promises, and pleas. I called Chris to let her know that Nick and I had some things to clear up and I wouldn’t be into work that day. I’d also be spending another night away from the apartment. She wished us all the best.

“Laura, as much as I love having you sublet, I’d honestly be delighted if you and Nick got back together. That would give my faith in true love an enormous boost.”

But it was still too early for a complete reconciliation, as hard as the decision was. I was afraid that Nick would say that this therapist was unpleasant or incompetent, or find another way to quit again. I felt like a nomad when carting an overnight bag back to Grünwald. I still didn’t have the slightest inkling how things would continue with Nick and me. I didn’t know whether we had a future together at all.

That night, for the first time in three months, I slept with my husband. Nick bubbled over with joy to have me with him for a while. When I arrived back from Chris’s, Nick had gone grocery shopping, so we cooked together like in the old days. The power of the physical attraction between us was undiminished. In the narrow kitchen, we constantly had to wriggle by each other. Nick often used to seize these opportunities to give me a slap on the butt or pull me to him for a quick smooch. At first we behaved like two friends, interacting with fastidious propriety. He excused himself whenever he had to go past me to get a platter out of the cupboard, and I stepped aside to avoid any contact. And yet the air in the little room was electric with our suppressed desire. Finally, I tried to fish a bowl out of an upper cupboard but couldn’t reach it on tiptoe. Nick saw his chance. Quick as a flash, I felt his warm body right on my back, his arm reaching past me. He effortlessly took down the stack of bowls and placed the dishes in front of me. But instead of stepping back, he pressed himself so tightly against me that I could clearly feel his arousal.