Others of My Kind Page 3

  Jack waved from behind the Buick’s windshield as I emerged, then hurried out and around to open the passenger door for me.

  “Rough day?”

  “Good one, really. You?”

  “So-so. Though I guess, in my line of work, so-so’s a good day.”

  He pulled into the parking lot of a bar ten or twelve blocks away, in a long-decayed portion of the city beginning to show signs of afterlife. Windows and a small plaque over the door read FOUNDATION. “This okay with you?” he asked. When I said it was, we went in. Well-appointed floor plan, good tables with plenty of room between them, and clean, but not much of anyone around save those at the bar, day-long drinkers, regulars. I asked for white wine, Jack ordered a beer and shot. The wine was sickly sweet.

  “Thanks again for touching base with Cheryl.”

  “I only hope that eventually it may do some good.”

  “What we all hope. You never know.” He threw back his shot of well bourbon, sipped a couple ounces of draft. Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played over a sophisticated sound system. Someone was losing big money here.

  “Have to tell you this one thing,” Jack said.

  “Okay …”

  “I have an ex-wife—not really ex, I guess, since all we are is separated. Divorce’s been in the works awhile. We have a daughter.”

  I waited.

  “Just wondered how you felt about it,” he said, “that’s all.”

  Background music shifted to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s ukulele-and-solo-voice rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Deanna.”

  “You love her?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “See her often?”

  “I used to, when she was young. Had her for weekends, half the summer. As she grew up, I saw her less and less.”

  “Just how long has this divorce been in the works?”

  “Little over ten years.”

  “You check with Ripley, see if that’s some kind of record?”

  “Think I should?”

  “Probably.”

  His eyes were bright with good humor.

  “We all have to decide what’s important to us and fight for it, Jack. Sometimes the best way to fight is to do nothing.”

  “Friends I have left say I’m living in the past, trying to hold on to something that’s no longer there.”

  “The past is what we are, even as we’re constantly leaving it.”

  “You know what? I have no idea what that means.”

  “Neither do I,” I said, laughing. “But it sounded good.”

  “Let’s get some food. There’s a mom-and-pop place around the corner. Best Italian in town, everything handmade, even the pasta.”

  “That sounds good, too.”

  “What’s important to you?” Jack asked as we walked out. Night was settling in, last tatters of daylight become pink banners riding low in the sky. When he took my arm to gently guide me left, our eyes met.

  “Everything,” I told him.

  Man, this frail biped, moves onto African plains dominated by large animals, hopelessly overpowered. But he has in his hands tools never before seen in the world—clubs, sharpened rocks; later, spears—and in his heart a fierceness those other animals will never embrace, never understand.

  I woke from a too-familiar dream, in which I’d been chased by some unknown animal into a blind alley and there among trash bins, naked, had turned to face it with my hatchet of chipped flint bound with vines onto split bamboo, to learn via morning radio that the president has returned to residence in the White House. First Lady Fiona and daughter Fina remain tucked away somewhere in the country’s folds. Vice President Courtney-Phillips also hovers out of sight. Further threats have been made, the White House press secretary states. Our intelligence gives these threats credence. We will keep you informed.

  Of course they will. Just as they rushed to inform us of actual body counts in Vietnam, U.S.-engineered assassinations in Chile, the systematic closing down of power plants before the energy crisis of 2002, the cost of the Iraq War, or how deregulation might lead to financial collapse.

  Firmly seated at the front of the bus, so utterly accustomed to privilege that its presence has become invisible to them, our horde of senators, congressmen, secretaries-of, advisers, attorneys, and lobbyists goes on deciding what is best for us. Little wonder that we feel helpless—ridden. The bureaucracy protects itself; that becomes its purpose. The machine has no off switch. As Bishop used to say: We’re set on SPIN, forever.

  Last night’s meal had been wondrous. Mr. Bevelaque (“Everyone calls me Papa”) hummed what sounded like “Santa Lucia” as ceremonially he wiped the waxcloth of our table, dealt setups of silverware wrapped in napkins, brought a bottle of Chianti and tall glasses of water.

  “Go for the special,” Jack said. “Most places, with specials they’re just trying to offload overorders or dodgy product. Here, it’s what’s best.”

  So we had two specials, salmon and asparagus in cream sauce over penne pasta, preceded by bruschetti of sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. The Chianti was good, fruity, with just enough of a bite to it.

  Jack had dropped me off around ten. I’d fallen almost immediately to sleep. Then woke fleeing some unknown beast.

  I lay still, the neighborhood so quiet that I heard power lines swinging on their posts in the wind, or thought I could. A subtle music. Then suddenly, prompted by that, came a rare memory. It’s late night, Saturday, a storm winding down outside. Power has been out. The radio is on in the kitchen, and my mother is alone in there. I hear her, consistently half a step off, singing along.

  Chapter 3

  Two years ago, I went looking for my parents on the Internet. I’m still not sure why.

  Since I had no identity and few early memories, my official life having in effect begun at age almost-twelve, it proved a difficult task.

  I assumed, first, that I had been abducted not too far from my home. The car trip to Westwood Mall when Danny and I traveled there to celebrate our anniversary had lasted no more than thirty, forty minutes. Westwood Mall being just outside Harpers Ferry, I focused my search on Harpers Ferry and the cluster of smaller towns surrounding it.

  Birth certificates and the like are matters of public record. Counting back, given that even my age was an assumption and allowing for a couple years’ slippage either side, I began with a list of close to eight hundred names.

  Other records—newspaper archives, school enrollment, church membership—aren’t always easy to access, but with persistence you can flush them out.

  Hospital records, missing-persons reports filed with police—here the real problems start. But if calling from a TV station where you’re in preproduction on a documentary about, say, preteen disappearances, or the legend of Mall Girl, or a human-interest piece on grandparents seeking long-lost grandchildren, sometimes you find doors easing open.

  As somber autumn gave way to bright winter and that in turn to chattering spring, the list shrank to just over six hundred, then to five and a half, four hundred, two hundred plus. I’d get home from the studio to burn away the rest of my evening on Internet and phone. Week by week, I slogged away and pared it down. I’d look out my window and see leaves gone crimson, cinnamon, purple and orange. Next time I glanced up, birds were alighting with straw, bits of fabric and fast-food wrappers in their beaks, building nests among green leaves.

  The local NPR station launched a weekend marathon, forty-eight hours of continuous Irish music, about an eighth of which I managed to tape.

  On one of the commercial radio stations, curiously, advertisements for new fall TV shows began appearing.

  Another started late-night broadcasting of radio dramas from the forties and fifties.

  Sweaters and scarves came out of drawers and went back in.

  Women’s shoes got uglier.

  The first of many gi
fts Danny gave me was something called a Magic 8-Ball. His father had given him one just like it when he was my age, he said, and after all these years he’d had the devil of a time finding one. “You ask a question,” he explained, “then turn it over,” demonstrating. A triangular piece like a tiny pyramid floated to the surface within. It read Better not tell you now.

  In my box beneath the bed I held hard on to that Magic 8-Ball. I couldn’t see it there, or lift my arm to manipulate it, but it gave me comfort, it was solid, it knew things.

  For years afterward I didn’t think about the 8-Ball, didn’t remember it. Then one day as I worked on a documentary about natural structures in architecture I was watching a clip put together by one of the computer geeks, basically animated sketches of geometric shapes. Lines appeared onscreen, came together slowly turning—and there it was. An icosahedron, I later learned: a polyhedron with twenty faces. The tiny pyramid within the 8-Ball. And with that, it all came back. Signs point to yes. Reply hazy, try again. Outlook good. Don’t count on it.

  For a long time that’s how my days were, like that icosahedron floating up out of the surround bearing inscrutable texts. Everything became a blur. I worked, stopped off for takeout on the way home, settled into following up the latest leads or scrambling after new ones, dribbled plum sauce and bits of kung pao vegetables on my keyboard.

  “You’re obsessing,” my friend Kimmie told me.

  She had called to get together for lunch and, despite my repeated demurrals, kept calling until I agreed.

  Kimmie was Vietnamese. We’d met years back in my first computer class, at the time I was first getting dragged, heels scraping, into the modern world. Kimmie was there because on her own she owned real estate and, with her family, a number of convenience stores and a restaurant, and kept books for all. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have made it through that class. She was one of the few who knew my history.

  “Why do you want this?” she asked. “What are you thinking will happen?”

  Embarrassed to have no appropriate response, I shrugged. I was the eminently practical person who met every challenge headlong, snuffling out problem spots large and small, patching them up or over. And I passed my workdays making sense of the world for others, taking up fragments of sensation and information and piecing them together, stitching quilts from leftovers and rag-ends of the world’s fabric.

  “The Internet’s a godsend to you,” Kimmie said, “it’s where you feel most comfortable. There, you’re able to convince yourself you’re connected to the world, when in fact you’re protected from it, isolated, alone and safe.”

  “Still in my box, you mean.”

  She took my hand on the table.

  “Friends can say these things.”

  We spooned up dumplings, punctured them with chopsticks, and sucked out the broth while all around us there at the mall streamed people whose worlds would never include dinners of insect-riddled, half-rotten rice, helicopters struggling to heave whole families up, up and away out of a ravaged city, or young women living in boxes beneath beds.

  Four days after that meal with Kimmie, bells rang.

  Mr. and Mrs. Horace Smith. Smith—can you believe it? I suppose that in some unswept corner of my mind I still thought of myself as exceptional, so how could I have come from an ordinary two-bedroom block-construction house on Second Street?

  Mr. Smith had recently retired from the factory at which he’d worked all his adult life, sending thousands upon thousands of toasters, coffeemakers, electric can openers, and knife sharpeners down the belt into boxes. Wife Edith was a stay-at-home but did volunteer work for the church. The Smiths’ only child, a daughter, had disappeared a quarter century ago.

  Casa Smith sat halfway down, on the east side, of a block of others just like it. It was white now, but older coats of blue showed beneath. The yard had been recently cut; hedges remained un-trimmed and runners of weed extended up onto sidewalk and driveway. Clean windows were not a priority. A white cat sat in one of them watching as I came up the walk, its eyes as cloudy as the window. Do cats, I wondered, have cataracts?

  I’d just stepped onto the porch when the mailman swung by. Without comment or question, seeing me there, he handed me the mail.

  I rang, and heard the bell go off inside.

  Did I see anything of myself in the woman who moments later swung the door open?

  She took the mail from my hand.

  “You’re not Eddie,” she said.

  “Eddie?”

  “Our regular postman.”

  The door was already closing.

  “Mrs. Smith?”

  “Yes?”

  She glanced back into the house. Hundreds of things in there that needed attending to, no doubt.

  “I called, earlier?”

  “Oh. From the television station.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And you brought my mail. Well then, come right on in.”

  The front door opened directly into a living room of pale green stucco walls. A sectional sofa too large by half for the room sat against the right wall, an equally outsize entertainment center against the wall opposite, leaving room for little else but a couple of brittle-looking chairs and gimpy end tables. Beige carpet wall to wall, a veldt. All was spotless, ordered. Above the sofa, at the juncture of ceiling and wall, strands of cobweb swayed. Looking from these to her glasses and the watery eyes behind, I understood that the cobwebs were there only because Mrs. Smith could not see them.

  “May I offer you coffee?” she asked, smile brightening. “We’ve just put on a fresh pot. Most people have coffee after the meal, but my husband always likes his before.” She smiled and added (pointedly?) “We eat at seven.”

  “Coffee would be wonderful.”

  Gone perhaps five minutes, she returned with a tray bearing a coffee carafe, cups and saucers, and reservoirs of sugar and milk, bearing in her wake, as well, Mr. Smith.

  “When we spoke on the phone,” she said, once Mr. Smith had been deposited in what was obviously his accustomed chair and the coffee distributed, “I couldn’t quite understand what it was you wanted. Just what is it we can do for you, dear?”

  “You had a daughter, Emily.”

  “We did, yes.”

  “In April of 1984 she was abducted.”

  “So we’ve always assumed.”

  “Went missing, anyway,” Mr. Smith said. “That’s how the police put it. ‘She went missing.’ ”

  Mr. Smith glanced longingly at the TV. Dark now—as they say of theaters on off days—but filled with promise. Everything came together there, everything made sense.

  Mrs. Smith poured more coffee for us both.

  “You had no further children.”

  No.

  “And there were no clues or leads. You never knew what happened to Emily.”

  This time she didn’t respond straightaway.

  “We all have our hardships to bear in this life, you know.”

  Mr. Smith: “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. Not a day. ‘She went missing.’ ”

  “But we have to move on with our lives, don’t we?” his wife said.

  “I think we do, absolutely.” I stood. “Thank you for your time, ma’am, and for the coffee.”

  She and I walked to the door. There, I looked back at Mr. Smith. He sat unmoving, eyes still on the blank TV screen, cup in hand. The collar of his polyester shirt was badly pilled and worn half through. Hair sprouted from his ears.

  We are all, I suppose, waiting for something.

  What difference could finding my parents possibly make? I’d always made light of adoptees who, coming to adulthood, insisted upon doing so. So many years have passed. Whatever congruencies and connections once may have obtained are long gone. One might as well seek out Cro-Magnon ancestors.

  Mrs. Smith and I stood by the door. The final hold of day, splashes of bright orange and pink on the horizon, let go as dark seeped up from the ground. Three kids of twel
ve or so went by on motorized scooters. The scooters sounded like huge mosquitoes.

  “On the phone you said you were doing a feature about missing children.”

  “That’s one of the projects we’re researching, yes.”

  “Well, I hope we haven’t wasted your time, dear.”

  “Not at all.”

  She looked toward them as the kids on their scooters came back up the street. They rode abreast down the center of it. A Chevy van lugged slowly, patiently behind. Streetlights were coming on, one by one.

  “We do just have to get on with our lives, don’t we?”

  The door was closing even as she said it.

  That night as I lay in bed with the radio on, Vice President Courtney-Phillips held a press conference to announce her divorce. We have decided it is in the best interests of.

  Her son, now sixteen, will be going to live with his father in Silver Spring. Daughter Amy, fourteen, will remain with her in their DC apartment. A reporter asks about rumors that she will be making a bid for president in the upcoming election.

  Absolutely not, she said. A woman? A black woman? And divorced in the bargain? Who would vote for someone like that?

  Me.

  Chapter 4

  The phone’s ringing dredged me from sleep.

  Two thirteen A.M. Slats of moonlight fall obliquely against the wall opposite. I hear, momentarily, the call of an owl before traffic sounds come back up to obscure it. The shadow of my hand as I reach for the phone is immense, frightening.

  “Miss Rowan? Jenny Rowan? I’m sorry to bother you this time of night.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Lisa Boudreaux. I’m a doctor at Washington Hospital Center, chief resident in surgery. I have your number from Detective Collins. You know a young woman named Cheryl, I believe?”

  “I do.”

  “We have her here in ER. She’s been assaulted and badly beaten. Detective Collins thought you would want to know.”