Spinning (31 page)

“You’re right, you suck at pep talks.”

Jim smiled. “I know you didn’t need a test, D-Man. But you got one anyway. The key here is to pass the test. Now get the hell out of here and go study.”

He escorted me to the door. “Get her back, Dylan. If you need me for anything, just let me know. ”He slapped me on the ass and sent me back into the game.

I had one day until the hearing and had planned to stay in my office with the door closed preparing. In my leather folder, I carried the information Amanda had requested: all the papers I had on Diane and Spring. It didn’t amount to much. There was no documentation I could pull together to refute the fact that I had absolutely no legal right to keep the little girl. There was no interdimensional memo from Diane stating that she wanted me to be the legal guardian for her daughter; no notarized letter from Spring’s father saying he couldn’t care less about her.

Getting off the elevator, I waved at our receptionist and headed for my office. From my angle, I saw Billie standing in the hall watching. I knew I was going to have to deal with everything that had happened between us, but this would have to come at some other time after I’d adjusted to living alone again, whenever that might be.

I moved quickly through the hall. I didn’t need anything to distract me right now. Unfortunately, when I tried to close my office door, Billie slid in behind me.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” I tried to indicate through my body language that this wasn’t a good time, but the message wasn’t getting through.

“Do you have a minute?”

“A minute, but I’m expecting someone.”

“This will really only take a minute.” She closed the door behind her.

She stood leaning against the door, her head tipped and her dark red curls fell to her shoulder. I liked it when she didn’t straighten her hair or tie it behind her head. She had a very un-Billie-like expression on her face and she looked like she had been up late.

“Dylan,” she started then stopped and moved closer to my desk. “What’s this?”

She picked up the picture of the happy Volvo family with Spring and one-legged Santa taped to their side.

“Nothing,” I said. “I like that car. It’s the new Volvo.”

“Don’t you think you should tape a wheelchair in for Santa there? I mean, it could be the difference between naughty and nice this year.”

“Billie, really, this isn’t a good time. There’s stuff going on.” I had wondered if Amanda had called her after getting off the phone with me, but now I realized that this hadn’t been the case. I wanted to tell her about Spring. Subconsciously, I’d been wanting to talk to her from the second that Family Services left my apartment. But given the way I had left things between us, I didn’t know how she would respond or how I would respond.

“Listen, Dylan, about…”

“Don’t say anything. I’m sorry. I never meant to…”

“Dylan, no. I’m the one…”

A voice came through my speakerphone. “Dylan, your appointment is here.”

Billie and I stared at each other in silence.

The speakerphone sounded again. “Dylan? Are you in there?”

“You have to go,” she said.

“Yeah, I have to go.”

“This won’t take long.”

Once more, the speakerphone called out,. “Dylan?”

I hit the intercom button, my eyes never leaving Billie. I couldn’t keep Amanda waiting. “Send her back. Thanks.” I wanted to say something, but my chest started to tighten and I could feel my breathing becoming shallow.

Billie looked very concerned. “Dylan, are you all right?”

There were so many things I wanted to say to her at that point. But I couldn’t say any of them. I felt sick.

“Dylan?”

I took a deep breath. “Family Services came and took Spring last night. The City of New York was following up on Spring’s nonexistent paperwork. There’s a hearing tomorrow.”

“Oh my God…”

“Billie, I’m a grown man playing house.” I held up the picture of the happy Volvo family. “I’m no different than the pictures on my desk.”

“That’s not true, Dylan. You might have been pretending, but you’re a better dad than I ever had. You’re the best dad Spring ever had you might as well be her dad. What am I saying? You
are
her dad.”

She touched my arm. I desperately wanted her to hold me. I desperately wanted her to want me. I had been relying on her so much for so long. I needed her to go through this with me, but I couldn’t ask her not with the way we had left things and not with me needing to focus all of my energies over the next day on Spring.

There was a knock at the door.

“My appointment’s here,” I said.

“What can I do?”

“I might need you to drag me out of a gutter tomorrow afternoon.”

She smiled and squeezed my arm. “There won’t be any gutters.”

I took her hand to escort her to the door. I promised myself that after the court date regardless of the outcome I was going to tell her everything that I wanted to say, lay myself completely out before her and take my chances.

There was another knock and the door opened slowly. “Dylan?”

“Amanda?” Billie said.

Attorney Amanda Vandenberg, of Vandenberg and Peterson, entered my office. She waved over her shoulder to Billie, as she headed directly for a chair in front of my desk.

She started right in. “Let’s get to work. Did you bring everything?”

“I brought everything I had,” I said. I looked for Billie and caught the heel of her boot sliding out the door.

I opened my folder with the address booklet and removed the aluminum skeleton key from an envelope. I showed Amanda the correlation between the number on the key and the address book. Amanda agreed with the
safety deposit box theory, took the key and left me with the book only after she had reviewed each page in it.

The picture of the happy Volvo family stared up from my desk. As I ran my finger over Spring’s little face, I noticed a pink message slip on my desk. Waverly had called
.
Yet another thing to think about some other time.

“Is everything all right, Dylan?”

“It’s fine. Definitely can wait. How can I get Spring back?”

At first, I thought I saw a look cross her face that appeared familiar. It was a hesitant look like the one that says,
Of course I’ll call you
, then doubts it, then after a kiss, reaffirms it.

“Dylan, I’ve been doing some work on this and the law is very unclear.”

“Shit.”

“No, that’s good.”

“How can that be good?”

“The Board or the Judge will look at this on a caseby-case basis.”

“That’s good.”

“No, that’s bad.”

“Why?”

“No precedents. I researched the topic. The State of New York has legal custody of Spring. They, meaning the Department of Social Services, through the Department of Child Protection Services, will want to place Spring with a relative.” Amanda looked up from her papers. “Does Spring have any relatives?”

“All dead,” I said. “Except…”

“Except…?”

“Except, I don’t know anything about Spring’s natural father.”

He was a man I disliked for no other reason than that he was out there somewhere. He had played no active role in Spring’s life, and yet we were in direct competition for the four-year-old daughter he had no idea existed. I hated the man because he wasn’t sensitive to Diane’s needs — as if I was really paying attention to that when we first got together in Chicago. It took more than a week to get to know a woman, a lover, a mother for your child. I had no idea how much time he had put in, but I was guessing that he hadn’t spent nearly enough to find out about Diane, to learn her favorite color or her mother’s maiden name. He would almost certainly consider his paternity to be a huge burden to him, and yet he still had more rights to Spring than I did.

“You have no idea where this guy is?”

“None at all.” My arms were feeling heavy. “I tried to find him… sort of. I did some stuff. I called Diane’s old employer, that sort of thing. I came up with nothing.”

“What’s on the birth certificate?”

“I haven’t seen the birth certificate. I’m guessing that’s one of the things in the safe deposit box that our magic key opens somewhere in the United States.”

She shook her head. This wasn’t going well.

“They’re going to want to find him. The court can, of course, get another copy of the birth certificate. It would behoove us to get it before they do. If we can, we can maybe contact the father and take his temperature on the whole thing. If necessary, maybe we can discredit him.”

“Discredit him? You mean prove that this guy, who doesn’t even know he’s a father, is unfit to be one?”

Amanda stared at me. “We don’t have a lot to go on, Dylan. This might turn into a nasty fight. You up for that?”

I knew what Amanda was thinking. She was thinking that the guy in the bar flitting from table to table, downing shots of tequila, and chatting up waitresses was too much of a lightweight to do what needed to be done. She had no reason to think otherwise; no way to know that I didn’t define myself that way anymore.

“I’m ready for whatever it takes,” I said, with as much conviction as I could muster.

She nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer. Hopefully, it won’t come down to that because that would suck for Spring.”

I thought about what Spring might be doing at that very moment. She probably hadn’t eaten much, since wherever she was they wouldn’t make things the way she liked them. And she didn’t have Mr. Jimmy because I’d hastily left him on the floor when she was being taken away. And she didn’t have the picture of me with her mother. She was probably confused and hungry and feeling incredibly insecure.

Amanda continued. “If we can’t provide information about the father, Family Services will try to track him down. In the meantime, we can file a petition for custody. The judge will decide based on Spring’s best interests. You know, who she’s used to, who takes care of her now, where she’s been living, how she’s treated…”

“That’s gotta work in my favor, doesn’t it?”

Amanda ran her fingers through her hair. “It should. That’s the big thing I’m counting on. I wish there was more on the books for this kind of case. There’s precedent regarding same-sex marriage or partnership, but it’s unlikely that the judge will allow that to be part of the decision.”

I felt completely off balance.

“We’ll be trying to show that you’ve been acting as the psychological and de facto parent. That’s the entire premise of our case. But even if we succeed, if they locate the father or if he ever shows up in her life before she turns 18, you could still lose her.”

At least if we were dealing with that scenario, it would mean I had Spring. “One battle at a time,” I said.

Amanda nodded. “One battle at a time.” She closed her briefcase after putting in the key and the few leads I had given her. “I need to get started. Anything else?”

I searched my mind for anything that would help. “I think that’s it.” I held out my hand to shake. “Amanda, I can’t thank you enough for the way you’ve just jumped into the fray here.”

“The next couple of dozen rounds are on you,” she said, smiling for the first time since she entered the office. She took my hand and then leaned across and kissed my cheek.

“And listen, about Jim…”

“Dylan, whatever he said to you is a lie. So, I called him once after having a few too many. That was it.”

I left the office a short time after Amanda did. It was pointless for me to be there. I was surprised that Amanda hadn’t given me any assignments in preparation for the court appearance until I realized that she realized that I would almost certainly be useless at them under the circumstances. This was a time for precision and efficiency, and using me for these tasks would be a little like letting someone operate heavy machinery on a double-dose of Nyquil.

There were messages on both my cell phone and my home answering machine from Billie, Jim, and Hank. I didn’t respond to any of them. I returned Waverly’s call because I felt it was necessary to get that done. The only other person I spoke with the rest of the day was Amanda the few times she called for information. I just couldn’t see anyone else. I didn’t want to be cheered up or given a pep talk. I didn’t want to drink my troubles away. I definitely didn’t want to address my increasingly uncertain future with Billie. I also didn’t want to wallow, though that’s probably an accurate definition for what I spent most of my time doing.

It must have been close to 8:00 when I realized I was hungry. Not wanting to run into Jim in the hallway I was fairly certain that the knock on the door about an hour before was his I decided to have something delivered. Spring loved it when we ordered food on the phone, never tiring of making a call and having someone show up a half hour later with exactly what we wanted to eat. As I flipped through my various takeout menus, I passed the deli that made the sweet potatoes Spring loved and the rotisserie chicken place that delivered in yellow boxes that she found unusually entertaining. I got to the menu for a Thai place that I’d only called once since I’d known Spring. Her introduction to red curry had not gone well. As I placed my order, I realized that there was a very real chance that from this point on I would be free to order Thai or Indian or Ethiopian or anything else I wanted whenever I wanted it. The thought nearly made me lose my appetite.