The Paternity Test (35 page)

The air above the sun-baked driveway warped with heat mirages. The asphalt’s smell was tarry and inflammable.

Danny set his bags of laundry down inside the hatch. A ball of socks came tumbling out and rolled off, disappearing. “Anyway, I’m sure you know you missed her by now,” he said. “You win, okay? So leave me alone, why don’t you.”

Stu said, “Missed her? What do you mean we missed her?”

“Seriously?” Danny said. “I figured she’d have told you. Or at least”—he whipped around to bark at me—“told
you
.”

Stu gave me a questioning look, full of trepidation—preparing himself, it seemed, for more betrayal. I shook my head.

“She really didn’t?” said Danny.

“I’m in the dark,” I said.

Now the storm within his eyes was stalled. He stepped back and leaned his full weight on the Explorer, trembling like the heat above the asphalt. “She left,” he said. “She’s gone. She went back to Brazil.”

My spine crackled. “Brazil? But how?” I asked. “Today?”

Stu, searching wildly, said, “Where’s Paula?”

Danny winced. “Her, too. Took her with.” He shut the hatch, whose window’s rubber stripping had come loose. With thick thumbs he tried to tuck it back. “They packed up and took off after I’d gone to work,” he said. “Debora called from Logan, switching planes.”

“But wait,” I said. “How long? How long will she be gone?” The number
ten
was in my head.
Ten weeks at the least
. Somehow I still thought that was important.

“She doesn’t know,” said Danny. “Or, no, that isn’t what she said. ‘I
can’t
know.’ That’s what she kept saying.”

At frst I thought to cheer. She’d saved herself ! The baby, too! But just as fast, I felt myself flling up with jiltedness. Saved the baby for whom? Without having told us? I stared at Danny. I wanted to shout:
How could you let her go?

“What are you going to do?” asked Stu. He looked around, calculating, as if to find an instrument panel to captain, a control stick. “Won’t you go? Won’t you go down after them?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “She warned me not to. Maybe.” He poked an end of stripping in; the other end popped out. “For now, I’m headed up to Brockton. A couple days,” he said. “Comforts of home.” He pointed at the bags of dirty laundry.

He looked like a little boy whose kite the wind has robbed, feeling the chafe of string yanked through his hands. Why was he not raging, not rushing for the airport? Coldcocked by the loss, I guessed, or trying to hide his torment. I didn’t know how much longer I could mask my own.

“You’ll tell us when you hear from her?” I asked. “When you know more?”

Danny grimaced. “I’m heading off, okay?” he said. “Excuse me.”

He walked around and climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key. He backed out without checking his mirrors.

Stu and I were left alone, there on the burning blacktop. I still had the envelope from K.C. in my hands: its flap sealed, its folded edges sharp.

The next days passed in a furor of mixed feelings. Proud of Debora, pissed at her. Relieved, apprehensive. Altogether sick with incompletion.

Stu and I, in crisis mode, made a decent team, assessing our options, propping up each other’s frames of mind. About the central issues, we agreed: we had to get in touch with Debora, to see what she was planning, to work out ways we’d help her with the pregnancy, the birth. Now that she was safely away from Danny, we’d take charge. We would give her everything she needed.

But e-mails to Brazucamama at Hotmail all bounced back:
This address has permanent, fatal errors
.

I kept thinking every day would be the one she’d call. Of course she’d call; I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t. But doubt was a dislodged clot, floating through my bloodstream, ready to make my flimsy heart seize up.

Stu, at frst, was also swinging wildly among emotions: overwrought one moment, technocratic the next, plotting steps to solve the situation. Maybe now the legal system would work for us, he said. Or, if not for us, then for Danny: he would have a strong case for seeking Paula’s custody, since Debora, strictly speaking, was guilty of kidnapping. Couldn’t we, then, ask K.C. to get involved again, and find Debora by helping Danny file a suit against her?

But no, I couldn’t stomach helping Danny to track her down, I said. Not when she had f nally fled his grasp.

“It’s not Debora I’m worried about,” said Stu. “It’s the baby.”

In any case, we knew this line of thought was likely moot: Danny wanted nothing to do with us.

“Forget Danny,” I said. “If he won’t chase her,
we
should. Fly down there and find her in Brazil.”

Debora’s descriptions of where she had grown up had been so vivid, I felt sure I’d recognize her town, her family’s farm: the field where her brother had lost his way, seeking butterflies; the mango tree under which she’d frst been touched by boys; the house where she’d grown her lucky orchid. But now it struck me: she had never told me the town’s name.

The shock of Debora’s disappearance had ripped us from our moorings. In the immediate breakneck flail, it helped for us to cling together, keeping each other’s heads above water. Eventually, though, the rapids of our panic petered out, and we emerged, alone and sore, to tend to our own bruises.

I was hurt that Debora had not trusted me to aid her, ashamed that she was arguably wise not to. I waited for an e-mail from an unfamiliar name, thinking she might start a new account. Any time we came back to the house from doing errands, I could not disguise my hopeful rush to check the phone machine. Breathlessly, I’d stab its buttons, hungry for her voice.

“Please, Pat,” said Stu, one night after grocery shopping, when I had left the frozen foods melting on the counter, had gone straight to check for a new message. “Please,” he said, “can’t you try to pretend you’re not obsessing?”

“But why?” I said. “Aren’t you, too? I mean, shouldn’t we both be?”

“Depends,” he said, “on what you’re obsessing over.”

I focused on the baby, imagining its development: bigger than the proverbial period now but not by much, a C-shaped curl of cells with little buds where limbs would grow. My image of it should have been a purely joyous thing, but now, of course, now that Debora had stolen off, it couldn’t be: what if the image was all I’d ever have? I found myself blaming the baby as much as I blamed her, angry that something barely formed—a concept more than a being, still—could wring me with such handicapping force.

I attempted to talk to Stu about my misplaced anger, about the way a parent’s hard emotions toward a child could gather, long before the child was ever born. I brought this up on a Sunday, part of the way through August, when Stu had just finished a flight from Denver. He’d removed his epauletted shirt and donned an apron, to help me do the dishes after dinner.

“Maybe we could talk of something different tonight,” he said. “Can’t we do that? Remember how to do that?”

“But Stu,” I said, envisioning the baby’s budding limbs. “Somewhere Debora’s sitting there, a baby growing inside her. A baby that, the chances are, you made—that has you in it.”

“Or maybe,” he said, “
you
made it. You and Debora together.” He went back to scrubbing out a saucepan.

Stu started taking as many duty days as possible, signing on for longer flights, sleeping in hotels. Two years back, I would have suspected he was up to something, but these days it was clear to me he wanted no one’s company, wanted only to be away, alone, to rinse his thoughts.

It was now high season, and everywhere I went—the Old Village Store, the Lobster Mart, the beach—I was thrust into the midst of seemingly carefree families, the patter of their flip-flops like the sound of self-applause. More and more I stayed at home, but the cottage gave no comfort, swollen with new silences, its endless view a taunt. I sought, as I hadn’t done in years, the balm of poetry, but found myself with shards of Auden catching in my throat:
Blow the cobwebs from the mirror / See yourself at last
.

Stu had warned me—ordered me—not to contact Danny, at least not without his okay: “Trust me: all you’ll do is make things worse.” But on the one-month anniversary of Debora having left, when Stu was in . . . I’d forgotten, the cities blurred together . . . I could bear to be cut off no longer. I called Danny, to learn if he had gotten any word from her, and also to attempt to ask forgiveness. Maybe, I thought, I had to do a little karmic cleansing, to earn a forward step for me and Stu.

“If I had,” said Danny, when I asked if he’d heard from her. “If I had, do you think I would tell you?”

“But Danny,” I said. “Listen. We’ve got a common interest here. Don’t you think it might make sense if—”

“No,” he said, “
you
listen. Keep the fuck away from me. Don’t call; don’t come over. Swear to God, I’ll get a restraining order.”

I didn’t plan to mention this miscarried call to Stu, but then one day, when we were fighting, it came slipping out.

We were on our way to see a movie at the mall. Sometimes it was simpler for us to sit in the dark with strangers than to stay alone together at the cottage. It was Labor Day weekend; the roads were crushed with traffic. A hurricane supposedly was creeping up the coast, somewhere off Long Island’s tip by now, but here you wouldn’t have known it yet: the sky was bland and passive, the blue of a newborn’s blind eyes.

Between our car and the Honda ahead, Stu kept a civil gap, as though this were a funeral procession. Balloons tied to its bumper (a honeymoon? a birthday?) had swollen in the heat; most had popped.

Stu had cranked the AC up to high; I was shivering. “Cold,” I said, and showed him all my goose bumps. “Kill the air?”

“I want it cold,” he said. “Just roll your window down.”

Our convoy of the disconnected stuttered, stopped, resumed. Someone cut in front of us, an SUV like Danny’s: the same model but slightly lighter blue.

“Wonder what he’s up to now,” said Stu. No need to name him. “Wonder if he’s crawled down there and begged to win her back. What an asshole. Got what he had coming.”

“Well, not to defend,” I said. “But he’s a lot less black-and-white, maybe, than you think.”

“Oh?” said Stu. “Oh, really? Somehow I’m not seeing the gray areas.”

I had never expected to be making excuses for Danny, but now I told Stu the story Debora had divulged: Danny’s attempt at college, his dream of public defending, and then the pregnant co-ed, the baby when he was just nineteen, all the years of paying child support . . .

“People, you know, have histories,” I said. “People’s histories matter.”

Stu upped the AC even higher: a scolding hiss.

“I called him,” I said. I blurted it out, without having meant to.

“Oh, and let me guess,” said Stu. “He was just as sweet as he could be?”

“He threatened he would get a restraining order.”

Stu slammed the steering wheel. “Jesus, what did I tell you? Fuck you, Pat. Don’t you
ever
listen?”

I hated the way he looked at me. Hated the thought of how I looked to him.

“Why?” he said. “Why can’t you just keep your big mouth shut?”

“
My
big mouth? Mine?” I said. “Stu, without what
you
said, none of all this fuck-up would have happened.”

Stu’s jaw hung open. He huffed disbelievingly.

“I mean,” I said, “if you had never snitched on us to Danny. Yes, I messed up—fine. But if you’d maybe thought for just a single goddamn second before deciding to mouth off the way you did . . .” I hadn’t known till the words came out that they’d been building in me. I hadn’t let the truth of them—what felt like truth—arise.

Stu said, “Fine. But let’s just try a different ‘if and then.’” His voice was square, tidy, algebraic. “If you’d never slept with her,
that’s
what would have stopped this.
You
, Pat. If you were more the saint you claim to be.” He stared ahead. The spastic traffic lurched. “Every bad thing that happens to us, you pin on me,” he said. “Just because of things I used to do. How long will you think that, Pat? Tell me how long. Forever?”

Smog was seeping in through the AC vents, the window. I could taste its blackness on my tongue.

“You think people’s histories matter? Sorry,” said Stu, “but no. How they get
beyond
their histories—that’s what really matters. Not what people did but what they do. What they do next.”

What we did, for the moment, was park at the mall and walk inside, heading for the movie that we needed all the more now, to let us spend two hours together safely.

The mall was more crowded than I’d ever remembered seeing it: showboat teens, retirees in casual, untucked shirts, parents toting babies strapped in Scandinavian slings. Maybe they were stocking up ahead of the looming storm, or maybe they were blissfully oblivious of its approach.

We barged through the throng together, close but saying nothing, our argument still smoking from its coals. I was so intent on pushing forth through all the shoppers that I didn’t notice the booth we’d neared till someone beside me brayed, “Write your name on a piece of rice. Five dollars!”

I tried to shrink away but the crowd had hemmed me in, and here came Mrs. Rita, waving a pink-nailed hand. Her smile was so big it crowded out her other features. “Get over here. That’s right, you two. Come on.”

Dread came crashing down on me: she knew us; she remembered. “The newlyweds,” she’d say. “More than a year later, and still glowing!” She would ask if we had kept our matching grains: Till Death.

I looked at Stu. I couldn’t tell if he knew what was happening. How embarrassing to have to grin and nod, to lie for both of us, but what choice would I have? I got ready.

“Good to see you,” said Mrs. Rita, her voice, like shaken soda, over-fizzed. “Now, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” She looked us up and down. “That’s my expertise, you know: guessing who people are to each other. You two, hmm, I’d say . . . definitely some kind of family. But not too closely related, right? Not brothers. Maybe brothers-in-law? Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’ll guess: you’re in-laws.”