Picture This (13 page)

“It's not beautiful in the cellar, but the good news is that back here in the center of the island you've got some elevation, so water might not collect. It would be easy enough to pour a cement floor if you wanted one,” Isaiah commented. “We'll ask Russell about that. I mean, you'll ask him. I'm here as the official island greeter.” He had just run into a cobweb, and it stuck to his dark face, snagging on his stubble.

She understood that in the animal kingdom two male elk “greet” each other by pawing the ground, sniffing, tossing back their heads, bellowing, and then somehow conveying their agreement that they come from the same herd and no harm is intended. In humans the encounter is similar: two men say hello, shake hands, slap each other on the upper arms, and lower the register of their voices ever so slightly.

As Rocky and Isaiah climbed the narrow stairs from the earthen cellar, she heard the crunch of tires along the driveway and was suddenly gripped with anxiety. Here was a guy who could help the house or create havoc. What if the house didn't like him? What if she paid him and he never did the work? A truck door slammed before she was able to spiral out further with what-if thoughts. She'd establish her place with Russell later.

Isaiah cleared his throat as he walked across the driveway to greet the carpenter.

“Russell,” he said, nodding his head as if he balanced powerful antlers. His voice had lowered a notch.

The carpenter stepped down from his black diesel truck and closed the door with a solid clunk. He approached the older man, arm outstretched, they shook hands and then solidly clapped each other on the upper arms. Rocky was sure that she heard the primal sound of antlers rubbing against each other in agreement.

Chapter 21

The House

T
he house was built the same year soldiers came home from a war, in 1918. Some people mailed away for house kits from Sears, a sturdy enough product, but the house in the center of Peaks Island had been built by a shipbuilder. The beams were thick and solid, and the molding around the doorways was abundant but not lavish; unlike the large homes on the hillside of Portland, this house was not showy but was graced with just enough carved wood to announce its longevity as a place where people could stay for generations.

The widow's walk on the third story was a folly among the island people. Even on the third story of this house, one couldn't really see the ships coming in for all the trees, but the shipbuilder said it was bad luck to build a house without one. Although no woman would ever worry the widow's walk with her pacing, children would be drawn to it, and the house would brighten with their hours of play, snug in the small space.

By midcentury, the shipbuilder, his wife, his children, and his grandchildren had all died or moved on; the next family stayed a decade or so until life on the mainland drew them away, taking four children and a wife whose heart broke when she closed the front door for the last time. The last family was a fisherman and his wife, lured into the house by all the embedded whispers of the sea, the shipbuilder's stories that had lingered in the floorboards and the horsehair plaster of the walls. Late at night the new family sometimes heard the creaking of wooden ships, the wind grabbing hold of the sails, impossible as it all seemed by daylight. Over the course of their decades-long tenure, the couple had had a total of two children, one who was killed in the final days of the war in Vietnam and one who moved to Buenos Aires as soon as she got the chance, four dogs (two Airedales, one dachshund, and a mixed breed called Buckeye), and a steady supply of cats who kept the house free of rodents.

The house soaked up the habits of the people who inhabited it: the way they slept, snored, and exhaled, the way they ate breakfast with the radio on and an aluminum pot of coffee percolating on the stove. The wood, plaster, glass, wiring, and old copper pipes that brought in fresh water and took away the soiled water did not add up to a whole that was in itself a sustainable building. The insides, the guts of the house, had to be pumped up by the trials, agonies, and delicate moments of joy coiling through the lives of its inhabitants. The house was a balloon that stayed firm and inflated by the ruckus of the people who lived there.

The house had been without inhabitants for three years, and now, for the first time ever, it was under renovation. The woman with the dog arrived and tore out wallboard and gasped at the lack of insulation. She was dreaming of a family as she brought in carpenters who assessed the house with appreciative eyes, who knew a good strong banister when they touched one.

The house longed to be filled, to be adorned with fresh paint, to have screens replaced and floors sanded, to start anew, to wrap its arms around a bustling conglomerate of people who would want nothing more in the world than to come home to it each night.

Chapter 22

“H
ow does paternity testing work?” said Rocky. After pacing the fifteen feet between her bedroom and kitchen for an hour, she had finally dialed the 800 number for the DNA Diagnostic Center.

“If you're pregnant and have had more than one partner, getting a paternity test is the wise thing to do,” said a practiced female voice.

“Back up,” said Rocky. “I'm not pregnant. And this isn't about a baby. My husband died more than a year ago. A girl just contacted me and said she's his biological daughter. Can we still test for paternity?”

“If the alleged father is deceased, then DNA from another family member can be used.”

“His parents are dead, and he didn't have siblings. He had one uncle.”

“They are generally not considered a close enough genetic link for something as important as paternity issues. If this is a paternity case, it may not hold up in court. There are other sources . . .” The woman paused. “We can use hair follicles. And any material left from the coroner's office that can be used as well.”

Bob had died at a hospital; Rocky had never heard anything about a coroner's office. His body had been taken directly to the funeral home before being sent to the crematorium.

“I can check with the hospital, but if you can determine paternity from a hair follicle, I might be able to come up with that.” She had kept one sweater and two shirts, but when Bob had died it was late spring and they had just been cleaned; no telltale strands of hair clung to them.

“And we would need a cheek swab from the girl.”

“Yes, of course. How long would it take to find out the results?”

“Under normal circumstances, five to seven days.”

“And how much does this cost?”

“Seven hundred dollars, roughly. The price has dropped considerably over the last few years.”

“I know this is a ridiculous question, but is there any chance the test might be covered by insurance?”

“Not unless you have the same insurance as the senators from your state. I shouldn't have said that. I've just had a request denied for my son's second appeal for his bone marrow transplant. But in answer to your question, there is not a chance in hell that insurance will pay for this.”

“I'm sorry. You just put this into perspective for me. You're right, no one is sick here, just lost and searching.”

Rocky would put out the $700 for the test. There was no question about not doing the test. She couldn't wait to tell Natalie.

W
hat did she have left from Bob that could be used for paternity testing? He'd been cremated. She had finally washed the pillowcase that had held his scent for months; by then it was so badly yellowed that Rocky tossed bleach into the washing load in hopes of saving it. The result was disaster for the pillowcase: it emerged from its bleaching with a lacework of holes. Rocky had thrown it away.

DNA testing for paternity was more complicated with a dead father. A sibling of Bob's would be the next best thing, if he'd had a sibling. His parents had died before Rocky appeared on the scene. But there was a paternal uncle in Eugene, Oregon, a man who had never attended a wedding or birthday celebration and had never appeared in any family photo that Rocky had seen. When she and Bob had married, Bob said that his uncle was not the kind of man he wanted at his wedding. “Just believe me on this one,” he had said to Rocky. In fact, she wasn't sure the uncle still lived in Eugene. She had tried to call him when Bob died, but there had been no response to the call she made to the number she found in the white pages online.

In the TV dramas, DNA testing is the magic elixir, like a test for mono or strep throat. Men are cleared of false accusations and sprung from their death row prison cells, all because of DNA testing. That was how Rocky wished this could go. If they couldn't locate the strangely elusive uncle, then something of Bob himself would have to be located: a hair follicle, an old razor, a toothbrush. Everything like that had gone symbolically into the trash on day 365 after his death. Still, there must be something. Perhaps someone else had kept something of Bob's.

R
ocky was generally straightforward with people. Friends and family had sometimes made the erroneous assumption that because she was a therapist she would act like a therapist all the time and be thoughtful and introspective in every situation. “Do you think a podiatrist wants to examine feet at a party? Or that an accountant is just dying to balance your checkbook?” offered Rocky, time after time. When she was working as a therapist, she brought all of her skills to the task and served her clients in the best way she knew how. But when she was off duty, she felt free to be a fully flawed human. She saw few advantages in soft-pedaling information. But she was oddly cautious with Natalie. She was afraid that if she said the wrong thing the skittish girl would disappear.

The sliding glass door was open, and the prolific smells of animals, birds, and plants mingled with the ocean air drifting into the cottage. She waited until Natalie was finished with her pizza to give her the DNA news. They had eaten with their chairs facing out, as if the vista of tangled bittersweet was a large-screen TV. It was Thursday night, the one night Hannigan's Grocery Store offered pizza. Theirs had been basic pepperoni with not one vegetable in sight. Between the two of them, they had polished off the best part of a liter of Coke. Rocky had finally found someone who shared her food tastes, even if it was an eighteen-year-old girl. They each used a section of paper towel to wipe their mouths.

“I found out some information about paternity testing today,” said Rocky, balling up a used paper towel.

Natalie's eyes widened. She looked down and folded the paper towel in half, then again, and again, until it was the size of a credit card. Her cuticles were newly darkened with blood on both hands, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

“What do I have to do?” asked the girl. She clutched the wad of paper in one palm as if she was trying to compress it into an even smaller size.

Rocky stood up and took both plates to the sink. Then she threw her wadded-up paper towel into the cardboard pizza box. She pointed to Natalie's hand for her to toss hers in also.

“Oh. I didn't know I still had it.”

Rocky closed the pizza box and tossed it into the plastic recycling tub.

“It's not so much what you have to do. You're the easy part. One cheek swab from you is all we need. But it's finding something from Bob that has me baffled. I need to find something of his for testing.”

“Do you have anything yet?”

“Not yet.”

Natalie rubbed her cheek with the back of her fist, the way a toddler might wipe away tears. But she was only pushing wisps of hair from her face.

“It's only a matter of time before we find something of Bob's that we can use. He had an elusive uncle, and I'm trying to track him down. Eventually, we'll have a clear answer about who your father is, or who your father is not. We should talk about what this will all mean. What will it mean if we find out that Bob was your father?” asked Rocky. She turned her chair slightly to face Natalie and then sat down.

Natalie slid to the floor and sat cross-legged, looking oddly younger. “I want to know where I came from, how I started. I want to know if I have any family. What if I have kids of my own someday and I need to know medical history?” Her fingers twitched; she brought one hand halfway to her mouth and then, catching herself, placed it with a controlled steadiness under her thigh. Rocky wanted to ask,
What will it mean about me?
But she did not.

“I get the need to know if you have family. And what if you find out that Bob isn't your father? What then?”

Natalie's mouth drew tighter, pulled in a way that Rocky hadn't seen before.

“You don't want to believe me, do you?” said Natalie, with a wounded gash in her voice. “Why is his name on my birth certificate? Isn't that enough?”

“The big question is, why wasn't his name on the first birth certificate? Why didn't your mother leave some information about him, or any indication of his identity? We need to be sure—100 percent sure—for your sake,” said Rocky, keeping her voice soft.

“You mean we've got to be 100 percent sure for your sake. You don't want me to complicate your life. Like part of him is still around in me. That's too weird for you, isn't it?”

Cooper stood up and moved to Rocky's chair. He planted his considerable back end on her foot. He faced out, looking at the girl. Rocky automatically reached down and stroked him from head to body, ending in a resounding thump on his side.

“It would change a lot of things. I don't want you to get your hopes up and then get hurt. I think you've been hurt too much by things outside your control. Let's get as much information as we can.” Rocky paused, stumbling over words that wanted to come out as she tried to utter only the words that she would allow out. “It's been nice to have you here. So don't worry about staying too long. I could use some help around here. It's going to be crazy while the other house gets remodeled.”

Natalie had on her shortest shorts, and detritus from the floor stuck to her thighs when she suddenly stood up. “Do you want to know how many times I heard that?
It's been nice to have you here.
That's what people say right before they get rid of me.”

Natalie didn't wait for an answer. She leapt up, pushed open the door, and marched down the driveway.

Cooper stood up but did not indicate that he wanted to go out with the girl. “Is this what parenting is like? What did I say wrong?” said Rocky.

The enormity of the girl's injury snaked into Rocky. This was not the way it would have been with her clients. Rocky always urged her clients to develop resilience, expand their support systems, and work on new responses to hardships, but Natalie had gaping wounds that seeped into Rocky as if she was the cause. Parental guilt was new to Rocky, and the weight of it pressed hard fingers into her skull.