“Claudia. Breathe. You have to breathe. Breathe and shut up. Let me talk.”
She sank back in her chair and tried to hear what her brother had to say. It wasn’t much. The kid, as Benji called him, had a name. Max Davis. Max Davis who was a musician, who grew up in Rochester, who’d started looking for her when he was seventeen but who realized his desire was only half the equation, who acknowledged maybe Claudia would rather eat glass than meet him, which would suck but which he realized was a possibility before he began his search.
“I don’t want to be somebody’s mother.”
“He has a mother.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“How about you start with ‘hello’? One step at a time.”
“Where are you? Is he there with you?”
“He’s been sitting outside the house for three days, building up the courage.”
“But where is he?”
“On the porch, with Cat.”
“He’s with you now? Has Mom seen him?”
“She’s inside. Probably painting.”
“You have to get him out of there before she sees.”
“Like put him in the trunk and drive away?”
“Do you think this is funny? I’m serious. I can’t handle her hysterics.”
“Her hysterics?”
“I swear, Benji. I’ll kill you if you make this worse.”
She remembered waking in the hospital, twenty-two years old, the bright lights and crisp sheets and a pack of ice slowly melting between her legs, Benji asleep in a chair in the corner while the woman in the bed next to her, breasts mapped with arresting blue veins, tried stuffing her nipple into her wailing baby’s mouth. The relief Claudia felt at that moment. The freedom. She had a train of visitors — nurses, her caseworker from the adoption agency, even a priest who didn’t mind shepherding non-Catholic sheep — and registered in their piteous looks what each of them expected her to feel. They believed they would find her crushed, a girl so young, bathed in regretful, Madonna-like tears, perhaps even ready to pull out of the deal and demand that the baby — her baby — be delivered into her arms. But that wasn’t what Claudia felt. If any regret coursed through her blood, it was regret that she didn’t feel these things that she was supposedly supposed to feel.
“I want you to talk to him.” She heard Benji on the move, a slight susurration of wind, other voices reaching her ears.
“Absolutely not,” Claudia whispered fiercely.
This, Benji ignored. The voices grew louder, and before she could say more, a strange, unexpectedly deep “hello?” stopped her racing mind in its tracks.
He sounded like he’d stuck his head in a darkened room, uncertain if anyone would answer, while she felt stuck in a child’s game, tagged It before she even had the chance to hide. She froze.
“Hello?” the voice repeated.
“Hello,” Claudia echoed.
“Hi. Wow. Claudia?” Silence. “This is so weird.”
“It is.” More silence. “Weird.”
“I’m Max. I guess Benji told you that already.”
“He did.”
“And you’re Claudia.”
The easy relief she’d felt in the weeks after the hospital had long ago hardened into a sense of the rightness of her decision. She lived, protected, in its shell. But sometimes, not often, but sometimes a feeling of dread crept in. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he smart or skinny or perpetually scared? Was he loved? Very occasionally, she walked the city streets fearful that a child on the sidewalk would tug her coat sleeve and call her Mommy. Once, three years after the fact, she bought a birthday card with a baby giraffe on the front, but having no place to send it, fed it to the paper shredder with a stack of canceled checks.
“I’d love the chance to talk to you,” Max said.
“Yes. Yes.”
“In person? Do you think we could meet in person?”
“Mm-hmm. I was about to say.”
“Cool.” A short, satisfied laugh came at her like a siren. He asked her a few other questions, as if trying to make chat at a cocktail party with a committed mute, then said, “When do you think?”
“Soon. I have a few things here,” she said, standing and returning to her sketches. A shaking hand smoothed the paper as if to display the enormity of her task, the real and blameless unlikelihood of making time. “But soon.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” came Benji’s voice. She could have reached through the phone and snuffed him out like a candle, in good conscience.
“Tomorrow?” Claudia repeated, transformed, it seemed, into the most hapless of parrots.
“Cool,” he said smilingly. “Great.”
“Can I talk to Benji?” Claudia asked, applying a steady pressure to her voice to keep the murderousness from seeping into it.
“Sure.”
She heard Max calling him, heard the phone being passed into her brother’s hands, and then the sound of the line going dead.
The call touched a match to Claudia’s fuse. She didn’t know this yet, not fully. In the front office of her mind, her business was simply getting to the boy, but in the back, in the windowless dark, she sat watching a spark dance up to a powder keg, uncertain exactly what part of her life was about to go up in smoke, but too fascinated to pinch it out.
After hanging up, she collapsed on the couch on the eastern side of the apartment and watched what was left of the morning sun spool across the room in a gauzy strip. Fiery, golden, imperative, the light rolled out like a carpet that led to the bedroom, where her suitcase awaited packing. When Oliver got home from his workout, freshly showered but still sulking, she pushed him onto the bed and, tearing his clothes from him, fucked him without fully removing hers. When it was over, she rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and doubled up her pillow.
“I got a phone call,” she said.
He rested his chin on her shoulder as she spoke, listened without interruption, which was Oliver’s virtue as much as his downfall. She couldn’t help wondering if it mattered whether she chose to discuss the child who turned up out of nowhere or the review of the newest restaurant on the block. If he registered the difference.
“Max Davis?” The first words out of his mouth.
“That’s his name.”
“Max Davis, the cellist Max Davis?”
Claudia turned. “Benji said he’s a musician.”
“You know Max Davis.”
“I do not know Max Davis. Did you hear anything I just said?”
He did, he assured her. He did. He pulled her onto her back so she was looking up at him. “The Bach cello suites? The recording I gave you last Christmas? That’s Max Davis! How cool is that?”
“Cool?” Claudia asked.
“I missed seeing him the last time he was in town.”
She kicked herself off the bed and went to the closet to retrieve her bag.
“What? Are you mad?”
“Am I mad?” She posed the question calmly, like a Buddhist sending a quest for insight out into the universe, not expecting an answer.
“I’m so many things at this moment, Oliver. It’s hard to pick just one.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I tell you what I just told you and you’re — what? — jonesing for comp tickets to the philharmonic.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Thinking? No, you weren’t.”
“But this isn’t a total shock, is it? I mean, we knew this day might come. It was always a possibility, right?”
“It’s a pretty big fucking shock to me.” She flipped open the top of her weekender and said, “Grab me my gray sweater?”
“Take the big bag,” Oliver said. “I’m coming with you.”