Undone (12 page)

“Okay,” Chloe said. “I love you, Dad,” she added before he could hang up.

“I love you too,” he said and, in saying it, felt the strangeness of it: professing love—no,
feeling
love—for someone he had never met, never seen. How wonderful that the bond between parent and child could be felt, over a phone line, after less than five minutes’ acquaintance! Could anything speak more eloquently of the mystical connections of family? He surrendered to a fresh storm of sobs—then hurriedly mopped his face and blew his nose. He stood, and brought his breathing under control. Then he went down the hall to face the difficult task of breaking the news to Pauline.

S
he was staring at the carpet when Jasper returned to the living room. As he approached, she raised her gaze to his. He saw in her eyes a light of hope, which instantly died when she read his expression.

Maddy was sitting on the sofa, coloring. “Please be a good girl,” he told her, “and go see Deepti in the kitchen. Mommy and I have to talk about grown-up things.”

“Again?”
Maddy said. But she picked up her pad and crayons and trooped off.

He pulled up a footrest, placed it in front of Pauline and sat. He took her hands in his own. She would not look at him, her eyes cast down.

“Honey,” he said softly. “You have to face this.
We
have to face this. We can’t—I don’t know
—wish
it away. The good news is that I just spoke with her. She sounds like a wonderful child. Not angry or sullen or blaming. She sounds very sweet, and she very much wants to come and live with us and be a part of this family.”

At this, Pauline looked up, and stared meaningfully at him.

“Yes,” he said, misreading that look, “I know that having her here will be disruptive of our routine. At least, at first. But we’ll get used to it, and there will be benefits to having her here. I’m sure of it. She can help with Maddy. She can lend a hand to Deepti. I can give her chores—Xeroxing, opening mail, buying printer ink—any number of things. Having her here will actually free up
more
time for us. Do you see what I mean? Do you see the positive side?”

She blinked twice.
No.

He felt a flare of exasperation but tried not to show it. “Darling,” he said calmly, soothingly, “she’s my
daughter.
Surely you’re not saying, ‘Don’t take her in’?”

She blinked once.

“Oh, honey,” he said, risking a smile. “You don’t expect me to believe that? That you think I should leave my own flesh and blood to be raised by strangers? By a foster family?”

Yes.

“So you’re saying a father shouldn’t take responsibility for his own child?”

No.

“Yet I should abandon Chloe?”

Yes.

“Well, that makes no
sense
, honey,” he said. “You’ve just flatly contradicted yourself. The point is, I could no sooner leave Chloe to foster care than I could have left
you
in the chronic care ward.” This struck Jasper as an emotional equivalency that Pauline could not fail to acknowledge with an affirmative blink. But she only dropped her eyes, in a gesture of helpless surrender, and stared at the carpet.

He understood about retroactive sexual jealousy. If the roles were reversed, Jasper, who suffered acutely when he thought of Pauline’s old boyfriends, would have had a mighty struggle to accept into their home a child she had engendered with an ex-lover. But he would have done it, because he trusted her, trusted in her love. He knew that, deep down, she trusted him the same way. She just needed some reassurance. How to reassure her? He told her that Holly was a long, long time in the past, that he had never thought of her in the intervening years, and that he loved Pauline and Pauline only. “Isn’t that obvious?” he asked.

She considered him with a woeful gaze. A tear squeezed up from the lower lid of her right eye, trembled there for a moment, expanding, then ran in a rapid rill down her cheek. He reached up and, with his index finger, wiped it away.

“It’s going to be okay, honey,” he said. “I promise.”

Deeply unsettled by this exchange, he wondered if he was, after all, wrong in thinking that he must bring Chloe to live with them. Perhaps a family with their challenges could not reasonably be expected to take on the disruptions a teenager would inevitably bring. But when he discussed this later that evening
with Deepti, she assured him that he was doing the right thing, the only thing, by taking Chloe in. “She is your flesh and blood,” Deepti said. “She is family.”

Jasper’s sister, Laura, two years his junior and married to a successful software developer in San Francisco, gave him similar advice when he called her that evening. “Of
course
Pauline is going to feel strange about
any
change in the household,” Laura told him. “Think of how vulnerable she feels. How powerless. But when she meets the girl—and you’re saying she sounds like a terrific kid—everything will change. Honestly, Jaz, it’s going to be fine. And you really don’t have a choice. She’s your daughter. Trust me, Pauline will come round.”

Laura’s words became a mantra to him; he repeated them to himself whenever he felt his doubts rise again.
She’ll come round. She’ll come round. She’ll come round.

Because, of course, she had to.

I
nterstate 91, the six-lane superhighway that runs on a nearperfect vertical from New Haven, Connecticut, to the town of Derby Line, Vermont, on the American-Canadian border, cuts past lush, cow-dotted pastures, rounded mountains fleeced in green forests, and twinkling New England towns nestled in valleys where white church steeples, pointing skyward, make explicit the implied connection between the paradisiacal surroundings and the supernatural being who seems their only possible creator. But on the afternoon in early August when Jasper steered his car off Exit 48, at Stamford, onto I-91 to begin the long haul through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, he was not conscious of scenery. He was thinking only about his impending meeting with Chloe.

He had spent the previous weeks being investigated by government accountants who pawed through his tax returns and royalty statements; by social workers who quizzed his family, friends and neighbors; by psychologists who delved into his attitudes to family, adoption and teenaged girls. He was questioned by an FBI agent who checked his fingerprints against international crime databases. Chloe, meanwhile, had undergone a similar vetting in Vermont, with special emphasis on her psychosocial and emotional functioning. On a morning at the end of July, Murray Pollock called Jasper to say that the family court judge in Newport had read the dossiers on both parties and had ruled that Jasper would be awarded custody. Formal transfer would occur at a hearing in Judge Gerald Howard’s courtroom at noon on August 3—tomorrow.

He had considered flying (there was a direct from JFK to Burlington) but decided to drive. It was a five-and-a-half-hour trip each way. He thought that the return journey would offer an ideal opportunity for him and Chloe to get to know each other—to
bond
—before she met the rest of the family.

They had spoken several more times on the phone but had not progressed much beyond cooed avowals about how much they looked forward to seeing each other. He had, however, had a series of mandatory telephone “sessions” with Chloe’s transitioning social worker, Dr. Doreen Edwards, whose job it was (as she put it) “to smooth out any little wrinkles in Chloe’s adjustment from one life to another”—and from whom he had been able to glean some much-wanted background on the girl he believed to be his daughter.

Edwards had made a point of reminding Jasper that Chloe had recently lost her mother—”the only parent or parental-figure the child has ever known”—and that for all Chloe’s superficial cheerfulness, she
was
grieving and might be harboring “several unresolved issues.” Thus, he should not be surprised if she became rebellious, argumentative, limit-testing. She might bear subconscious resentments toward Jasper, whom she could perceive as having “abandoned” her and her mother—”even if such ideas do not fit the facts.” Chloe was, furthermore, a child of addiction (Holly had, Edwards said, “suffered from the disease of alcoholism”), and this might bring forth, in Chloe, “an array of negative behaviors”—anything from shoplifting to lying and fighting, to sexual promiscuity, exhibitionism and “inappropriate relationships.” And although Chloe had yet to display any such self-destructive tendencies, everyone in a position to guide her must stay alert to their possible appearance.

He had spoken, too, with Chloe’s school guidance counselor, a Miss Shelley, who said that IQ testing in elementary school had suggested a child of slightly
above
average intelligence, but who demonstrated a marked lack of intellectual curiosity—although this might result from the home environment where the mother was often absent and the child was given few opportunities to develop interests outside of television. She demonstrated a “pacific, even passive, temperament,” and tended to cling to those she perceived as vital to her welfare. No disciplinary problems had been reported in school—and indeed the only incident ever to have raised any alarms dated to mid-March of this year, when a teacher was observed to initiate inappropriate physical contact
with Chloe (a kiss on her neck). It was determined that she had done nothing to provoke or encourage the act—”apart from being a singularly attractive child,” Miss Shelley added, “for which she can hardly be blamed!” Chloe’s mother had declined to press charges, the offending teacher left the school, and the child had demonstrated no ill effects from the incident. All told, she was well behaved, given somewhat to daydreaming and fantasy, athletic though not much driven to compete, well groomed, punctual and with a stated interest in acting and modeling, although she had not participated in any of the school’s extracurricular activities geared to those pursuits.

Thinking of all this now, Jasper (as he flicked on his headlights against the gathering dusk over northern Massachusetts) found much to be heartened by. Certainly, there were some problem areas to be conscious of (passivity; possible latent hostility), but things were far from as bad as they
might
have been, surely. No drug use, abortions, arrests, juvenile detention. Clearly, she was working below her academic potential, but Jasper believed that would change once she was in his family’s supportive and nurturing environment.

He stopped at a diner near Brattleboro, ate a hamburger and then carried on north. At Exit 27, he followed the off-ramp onto a two-lane highway that cut through monotonous corn and wheat fields. Eventually, out his right passenger window, appeared the brooding profile of Mount Orford, over the Vermont border, in Quebec. He knew its shape from the summer he had spent in New Halcyon, all those years ago. He was getting close.

He reached Newport at midnight and drove along Main Street, turned left at School Street then right onto Prospect, where, a few doors down, he found the Little Gnesta, the Swiss chalet–styled bed-and-breakfast at which he had made a one-night reservation. He parked behind the building and then climbed, stiffly, out of his car.

He was almost overcome by the remembered aroma of honeysuckle and ragweed, mountain flowers and nearby Lake Memphremagog—a perfume that carried him back to that summer almost twenty years ago. Before moving toward the porch, where a flurry of moths swarmed the lit bulb over the door, he paused and marveled at the strangeness of his situation: that single moment of unguarded passion on a beach not ten miles away, a single moment from his youth that might have vanished like so many other lost instants, but which, owing to the vagaries of human reproduction, had reverberated down the years, to this moment, his return, and his standing on the brink of a momentous meeting. He turned his face up to the night sky, to the vast, heart-quaking star field so much larger and clearer here than back home, where light pollution from nearby New York City erased the evidence of the heavens. Facing that twinkling black expanse, he pondered the mystery of how a single sperm cell of the hundreds of millions he had produced found its way to the egg nestled in Holly’s womb, there to set in motion a new life, a cosmos of thought and feeling. The randomness—the sheer statistical unlikelihood of that occurrence—seemed objectively reflected in the gasping array of stars and galaxies overhead, an infinity of cosmic accidents that had produced this beautiful
Earth. A rationalist (he had abandoned his parents’ formal religion at age eighteen), Jasper nevertheless did, privately, retain the belief that there was a force for good shaping everyone’s ends, that no occurrence, regardless of how dire, was without meaning in some larger plan—a faith that had survived even the calamities of his parents’ deaths, and of Pauline’s stroke, and which now buoyed him with the conviction that the advent of Chloe in their lives could only be a harbinger of good and joyful things.

He shouldered his overnight bag and went inside.

In the pine-paneled lobby, a crookbacked old woman behind the desk handed him his door key, and he shuffled down the hall to his room. Exhausted, he did not even bother to shower, and instead only hastily washed his face and brushed his teeth before falling into bed.

H
e was up with the alarm at eight the next morning. He took special care shaving (he did not want his daughter’s first impression of him to include a bloody scab where he had nicked himself), got dressed in the light-colored summer-weight suit he had packed in his overnight bag, then went down the hall past the dining room, where a lively breakfast among strangers was in progress. He eschewed this—he was feeling far too nervous to sit and make small talk with people he did not know—and walked up to Main Street, where he found a health-food diner. He ordered, but was unable to eat, a bowl of granola. At eleven-thirty, with a half hour to spare, he paid the waitress and then set out.