The Bullet (4 page)

Seven

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013

I
t was Saturday morning when the bullet began to throb.

Not a steady ache, like my wrist. This felt more ragged, more demanding. The pain came and went, but when it was there it was hot. I imagined the bullet pulsing, like an organ.

Back when I was a girl, the whole country was caught up in the frenzy for the
Star Wars
movies. I was a baby when the first one came out, but I do remember weeping on the morning that
Return of the Jedi
hit the theaters. I must have been six or seven by then. Tony and Martin were allowed to go see it; I was deemed too young and ordered to stay home. It seemed an unbearable injustice. Afterward, my brothers annoyed me for weeks by conversing in garbled Yoda syntax (“Told you I did, the potatoes please pass”). They also joked about sensing a Disturbance in the Force. It sounds hokey, but thirty years later, this is the phrase that now came to mind. I did sense something like a Disturbance. As though the bullet wielded some force that was disturbing the normal rhythms of my body.

I thought about the veins and muscles in my neck. How for years they must have grown and pushed and curved around the lead, like the roots of a tree when they meet resistance from a stone.

I had been three years old when I was shot.

Three.

That meant the bullet had been inside my body for longer than my teeth.

•   •   •

I CALLED MY
doctor late that afternoon.

Was it possible? I asked him. That an ancient wound could start hurting, just like that?

“Unlikely,” he replied. “But describe the pain?”

I thought about it. “Hot. Like it's radiating heat or something.”

“Well, it's definitely not doing that. Unless it's gotten infected, but I didn't see any sign of that when I examined you this week.”

“Okay, but it really is . . . throbbing. I can feel the metal. The physical weight of it. Like it's jabbing me.”

“I suspect that might be psychosomatic.”

“I am not imagining this, Dr. Zartman.”

“Call me Will. And I'm not suggesting you are. It would be an entirely normal reaction. Now that you know it's there, you're going to feel it. I suppose it's also possible that the bullet has shifted. Perhaps it's pressing on a nerve that it wasn't before.”

“Why would it shift?”

“That I don't know.”

“And would that be why my wrist started aching?”

A long pause. “I don't know that either. Half the patients I see seem to be suffering from mild cases of carpal tunnel. It's almost always because they spend too much time in front of their keyboards. So that was my natural assumption in your case. But if—if that bullet is pressing on a nerve—then, sure. Symptoms might be presenting in your wrist.”

“And maybe I really am feeling pain in my neck, too.”

He ignored this. “I'll call and hassle the lab again. Try to hurry them up on your blood work. I'd like to see your blood lead level. They work seven days a week over there. Maybe they'll have something by tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“And I should hear back on Monday from Marshall Gellert. The neurosurgeon. I couldn't track him down yesterday, but he's the best in town. I'll ask him to see you right away.”

“And then what?”

“We'll have to see what he says. Meanwhile, what did you find out from your parents? Can they help with figuring out how it got there?”

I made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a bark. “You were right. They knew.”

“And?”

I laugh-barked again. “How much time have you got?”

He listened for nearly an hour. After we hung up, I stepped out my front door and went for a long walk through the streets of Georgetown. No collapses this time. Just the steady beat of my boots hitting brick. And in my neck the dark mass of the bullet, throbbing, pulsing, keeping time.

•   •   •

THE TOMBS is
a Georgetown institution. A big, dark, brick cellar one block from campus. There's a bar on one end and a noisy restaurant packed with undergrads on the other. It is the kind of place where students meet their roommates for happy-hour pitchers and buffalo wings on a Saturday night, then return hungover the next morning, to meet their parents for an eggs-Benedict brunch. It's tradition to come to the door at midnight on your twenty-first birthday. They stamp you on the head and pour your first legal beer on the house.

I did think twice about turning up on Saturday night. I might bump into someone I knew from the university, and I wasn't in the mood for chitchat. But the thought of staying home was too depressing. Plus the Tombs is right around the corner from me, and I couldn't be bothered dressing up and heading anywhere swanky. So I called Martin and told him to meet me.

We settled ourselves in a leather booth in the back corner and sat
staring at each other. Martin knows me too well to bother with small talk. Instead he flagged down a waiter, ordered the artichoke dip and a beer for himself, and a glass of white wine for me.

It is not quite true what I said earlier, about not liking whisky. I like rye whiskey fine. I can't stand Scotch, but a few years back I was seeing a man from Kentucky. He liked to drink Sazeracs, mixed with rye from a distillery near where he grew up. Rye tastes like bourbon but better. More peppery and less sweet. I acquired the taste and still drink it on the rare occasion when I am drinking to get drunk. Martin knows this. He raised an eyebrow when I canceled the wine and requested instead a double Bulleit, neat.

All he said, though, was “Make it two.”

We sipped in silence for a bit. Then he said, “Irritating, isn't it? How it's become all fashionable lately?”

“What?”

“Rye.”

“It's fashionable?”

“Don't you ever go out? It's the hip thing. Laura and I actually got invited to a rye tasting the other night. All these fortysomethings who never drink anything but seventy-five-dollar-a-bottle Bordeaux, sipping and pretending to detect notes of green apple and tobacco.”

“I just like the taste.”

“See, that's the fashionable thing to say. Very authentic of you.” He took another sip, then looked into my eyes. “You used to have nightmares, when you first came. You would crawl into my bed and curl up against me, hot and all wet with tears. When I woke up in the morning, you were always gone. Do you remember?”

“God, I'm getting sick of people asking me that.”

He looked hurt.

“I'm sorry. Martin? I'm sorry. But you know, you're one of the worst parts of all this.” I pointed at him. “You and me. Finding out that—that you're not really my brother.”

“I am really your brother.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean we aren't related by blood.”

I nodded.

“I thought about that, too.” He glanced around, then picked up a steak knife lying on the table. He held out his finger and drew the serrated blade across it. Drops of blood sprang out.

He reached across the table. “Your turn.”

I must have looked aghast.

“Come on, trust me. Give me your hand.”

I did as he said. The blade hurt more than you would think as it sank into my flesh.

He set down the knife and pressed his finger against mine. “Now I am. Your blood brother.”

For the first time since this all began, I started to cry. I knew it was only a gesture, but at that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. We sat there, hands clasped, tears running down my face. He wrapped a napkin around our fingers and held it tight.

“Martin, I didn't mean—”

“Shush. You don't have to say anything.”

He caught our waiter's eye and mouthed,
Two more
.

The waiter looked at me with misgiving, no doubt thinking I was enough of a mess as it was. But he trotted off. The drinks went down easy. We were on our third round when suddenly I grinned.

“What?” asked Martin.

“We're drinking Bulleit.”

“So?”

“Pronounced
bull-it
. And I've got a bullet in my neck!”

“Not funny.”

“Oh, come on, it's hilarious.” I clinked my glass against his.

Slowly he smiled. “Technically, you know, we're drinking shots of Bulleit. Get it? Bullet shots?”

“Okay,
that
was lame,” I said, but I started to laugh.

We were both laughing and laughing, and it was around that time that the room began to spin.

At some point Martin must have paid and bundled me up the Tombs' steep stairs, out onto Thirty-Sixth Street, and then home and into my own bed. Brothers are good for things like that.

Eight

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2013

I
f you have ever been run down and flattened by a bus, then you have some idea how I felt the next morning. I doubt I would have crawled out of bed at all if the phone hadn't rung.

“Did I wake you?” asked Will Zartman.

“No, no, I was just . . . Actually, yes. What time is it?”

“Coming up to eleven o'clock.”

“Christ. Right. I had—I guess I had a big night last night.”

“Oh. Out at a party?”

“Just a bar.” I groaned. “I think I drank half my body weight in rye.”

“Very trendy.”

“So I'm told. I'd rather never see the stuff again.”

“Hair of the dog,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Go fix yourself a Bloody Mary. You'll feel better. Only hangover cure I've ever tried that works. Mind you, that's just me talking. As your doctor, I suggest you make a pot of coffee and go back to bed. And of course never, ever, consume more than four units of alcohol in a single session again.”

“Right.”

“So who were you out with?” he asked casually. “Some girlfriends?”

Was I imagining it, or was something more than purely medical solicitousness in his voice?

“My brother.”

“Oh. Fun.” He must also have sensed he'd crossed a line, because he cleared his throat and adopted a more clinical tone. “Anyway, sorry to have disturbed you on a Sunday morning. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I got your results from the lab this morning. Nothing we need to be majorly alarmed about at this point, but your blood lead level is quite high.”

“How high?”

“Twenty-nine. That's micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. For adults, anything over twenty-five is considered elevated. That's when people start showing symptoms. Headache, irritability, delayed reaction time, that type thing.”

“Great,” I said miserably. “I needed something else to worry about.”

“Of course, it could be completely unrelated. Where do you live?”

“Georgetown.”

“Ah. Old house?”

“Eighteen fifty-nine.” Georgetown is a historic district; almost all the houses are a hundred years old or more.

“Well, there you go. You could have lead paint on the walls. Or lead pipes. Do you drink DC tap water?”

“Every day.”

“Ghastly stuff. Swimming with critters you don't even want to imagine. And of course, for years it was contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. But listen, put this out of your mind for now. We'll cross that bridge when we have to. It's just one more factor in the mix.”

“In what mix?”

“In the mix as we make a decision. On whether to schedule surgery to try to get that bullet out.”

•   •   •

A GOOGLE SEARCH
turned up little.

I had finally dragged myself out of bed and brewed a pot of tea. Then I settled myself with my laptop on the living-room sofa and tried to ferret out any information I could find about Sadie Rawson and Boone Smith.

It was strange. These days even the dullest person would generate a dozen search hits, if only from friends tagging him in photos. But my birth parents had died fifteen years before the Internet became widespread. You couldn't google them.

The main newspaper in Atlanta, the
Journal-Constitution
, must have reported on the murders. Crime was worse back then in big American cities, but surely a double homicide and the near-fatal wounding of a child would have drawn media attention. But the
Journal-Constitution
's online archives were only digitized back to 1990. Everything older was presumably on microfiche, gathering dust somewhere.

The only hit I got was for a class of 1974 “In Memoriam List,” on the website for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It had been updated this past spring, in advance of a fortieth-reunion gathering planned for next year. The list was titled “In memory of those classmates who have passed away since graduation” and included dozens of names. Both Boone and Sadie Rawson were on it. There was no other information, not even the date of their deaths.

That was it. No wedding announcement, no work-related press releases, no photographs.

I pulled out the birth certificate that my mother, Frannie, had fetched from the upstairs files for me. It stated that I had been delivered at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. The home address it gave for Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith was Eulalia Road, in the northeast of the city.

I plugged that into Google Maps and selected the street-view option. A minute later I was staring at their old house. Eulalia Road appeared to be a short, quiet, residential street. My first home had been in the middle of the block, a one-story brick house with a separate,
detached garage farther up the driveway. The grass lawn in front had a big tree, which blocked my view of the front door itself. But you could see that the house was well kept, the brick and shutters freshly painted.

I had no way of knowing if this was the house in which my birth mother and father died. They were murdered three years after they had brought me home from the hospital. They might have moved. Still, I couldn't stop staring. The zoom function was frustratingly blurry; the picture wasn't sharp enough to let me see in the windows. Yes, I knew the interior would have been redecorated. The owners might have changed many times since 1979. No trace of me or of my first family would remain in that pretty, little house.

But all day long I kept wandering back to my laptop, hitting refresh on the image, and imagining a small girl, turning somersaults on that lawn.

•   •   •

I AM NOT
known for rash decisions. I tend to drive my friends crazy, thinking and rethinking choices for weeks before finally staking out a course of action. It's the way I'm hardwired, the way I move physically as well: slowly, methodically, like a dancer moving through deep water. I think this is why, in my work, I'm drawn to the literature of centuries past. I
like
that Marcel Proust spends thirty pages describing how his character tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep. And that's the action-packed part of his masterpiece,
In Search of Lost Time
. Proust meanders for a further six volumes before wrapping things up. It's a gorgeous book. By comparison, contemporary literature feels too frenetic.

Suffice to say, I am not a taker of spur-of-the-moment trips. But that evening, my thoughts kept circling back to the house in Atlanta. I wondered what color the shutters had been painted when my birth parents lived there. I wondered how tall the tree out front had stood, what kind of car they had parked in the garage. I wanted to see it. I
wanted to go there, see the house, and find whatever remained of my first life.

It felt urgent. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that I would be too distracted to go through the motions of my normal routine tomorrow. I never miss work; I couldn't remember taking a sick day in all the years I'd worked at the university. But surely this counted as a personal emergency? And I actually was unwell, I thought, touching my neck. It would be tricky: Fall semester was in full swing. I had four lectures to teach in the week ahead. But the next break in the academic calendar wasn't until Thanksgiving. The end of next month. I would go crazy if I waited that long.

I thought for a while, rubbing circles up and down my wrist. Then I checked the clock—9:00 p.m., not yet too late to call—and looked up the phone number for Madame Aubuchon.

Hélène Aubuchon is the formidable head of Georgetown's French Department. She is in her seventies, but her posture (not to mention her legs) puts students four decades younger to shame. The French use an acronym, CPCH, to describe a certain type of aristocratic woman. It stands for
Collier de Perles, Carré Hermès
—meaning, a lady too well bred to leave the house without her pearl necklace and Hermès scarf. Hélène must have perfected the look in Paris back in the 1960s, and she'd remained immaculately pulled together ever since. I respected her, and I was also a little afraid of her.

She answered on the fourth ring.
“Allô?”

“Bonsoir, Madame Aubuchon? Je suis désolée de vous déranger . . 
.
”
We had worked together for years now, but I still addressed her with the formal
vous
. Hélène Aubuchon, in my experience, was not prone to informality.

“I'm so sorry to bother you at home,” I continued in rapid French. “But I've had a bit of a family emergency. I'm going to need to take a few days off.”

“Ah. When were you thinking?”

“Well, ideally, starting tomorrow.”

“Non. Tout à fait impossible,”
she said sternly. “But you know this. Not in the middle of the term.”

“I've just found out I was adopted. When I was very young. I never knew.”

“
Oh là là. Ma chère.
That must have been a shock. However, I need you to run the study-abroad session on Wednesday evening. And you are needed in the classroom, that sophomore tutorial
surtout
—”

“The reason I was adopted is that my mother and father were murdered.”

Silence.

“And may I tell you how I learned all this? It's because doctors discovered a bullet in my neck. Right up against my spine. It was fired there by whoever murdered my parents. They shot me, too.”

More silence. Then:
“Mais je ne comprends pas.”
I don't understand. “A bullet?”

“Yes. In my neck.”

“But—you don't—you don't mean it's still there?”

“It is. I can send you the X-ray if you like. The bullet glows bright white.”

“And your parents were—you said they were
murdered
?”

“My birth parents, yes.”

She let out a little poof of air.
“Oh là là là là là là.”
I imagined her loosening the Hermès and fanning herself. “
Je m'excuse
. Take as much time as you need.”

•   •   •

A QUICK CHECK
online revealed that flights departed Reagan National Airport for Atlanta nearly every hour tomorrow. They weren't prohibitively expensive, either. I picked a midmorning departure, Delta flight 1139.

Then I opened a small suitcase and began tossing in sweaters, leggings, a caramel-colored suede skirt. What did one pack for such a trip? What passed for an appropriate wardrobe for an outing to lay
flowers on the graves of a mother and a father you had never known? When I had booked my plane ticket, the computer asked whether I was traveling for business or pleasure. Umm, neither. Not even remotely.

I jotted down a list of everyone I should remember to tell that I was leaving town. My family, obviously. A student for whom I'd agreed to serve as thesis adviser. Also, Will Zartman. His name gave me pause. I was supposed to go see his neurosurgeon colleague next week. I reached up and touched my neck. The pain was less intense today. Will was probably right: I was only imagining I could feel something. The neurosurgery consult could wait. That bullet had been in my neck for thirty-four years; another few days wouldn't hurt.

It occurred to me that there must be knock-on effects from this week's surreal developments that hadn't even dawned on me yet. Yesterday, for example, after hanging up with Will, I reflected that all my life I had blithely filled in medical forms claiming no family history of diabetes or heart disease. Whereas, for all I knew, all four of my biological grandparents had dropped dead from massive coronaries. I had no clue what my family medical history was.

I felt a stab of fury toward my parents. My
adoptive
parents, if that was the right term. By what right had they kept so much from me? How could they have thought I would not want to know? What made it worse was that I was closer to my parents than to anyone else in the world. They could both read me like a book. I had assumed the reverse was true as well.

Now I felt a shift. A fracturing. The decoupling of souls.

You think you know people when you grow up with them. When you believe they've been beside you your whole life. You know their voices, the curves of their hands, what makes them laugh. You know their hearts.

But it turns out you don't know their thoughts. Not truly, not in full. All people have their secrets, and not just things they keep from you, but secrets
about
you. Things they hope you'll never learn. You
can share your home with someone, share all the silly, little details of life, share the soap, the sugar bowl, shoes—and you would never guess.

You think you know someone.

Then, at the age of thirty-seven, you grow up.