“Here’s what I want. I want him not to do anything that could hurt our son. I read about a case where a birth parent was able to undo an adoption.”
“You’re thinking of the Clausen case from Michigan. It made all the papers. Different jurisdiction, and a completely different situation. That child was much younger; her adoptive parents basically kidnapped her. Your son — Burt? — is ten. His adoptive parents came by their rights legitimately. They’re the only family your son has ever known. Unless they’ve been bad parents, no sane judge would uproot the child now, even if the father did challenge the adoption. Which in my opinion is extremely unlikely.”
“It is?”
“Yes. Any lawyer is going to tell him the same thing I’m telling you. He can’t win. He’d just be throwing away money — a lot of money — and possibly disrupting the life of his child.”
Addie pictures the lawyer in her red power suit, her wall of diplomas and plaques — was there a trophy on her credenza? But no family pictures anywhere. A family lawyer with no family.
“What about me?” Addie asks her. “Can he do anything to me?”
“You mean sue you?” The lawyer laughs. Her laugh, like everything else about her, is quick and sharp. “Only if by not telling him earlier, you somehow damaged him. If he’s like most men, you probably did more damage by telling him the truth.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know, I know.” The lawyer softens. “Ms. Lockwood, there are a thousand possible reasons you haven’t heard from your child’s father, most of them innocent. Maybe he just doesn’t know what to say. The important thing is, you did what you needed to. Did you send the letter certified?”
“I couldn’t. That’s not the kind of relationship we have.”
“So you don’t know for sure that he got it.”
“No.”
“Can you at least call him? Ask if he got your letter. Ask what he’s thinking. Make notes.”
“I’m worried,” Addie says.
“I’m telling you: don’t be.”
“If he did want to sue me, how long would he have?”
“Three years. Three years from when he first learned about the child.”
“Three years is a long time.”
“Not so long,” the lawyer says. “You’ve waited a lot longer than that to tell him.”
Words
Dusty’s suit is too small. It makes him itch. His collar pinches his neck. In his right hand he’s clutching a fistful of ashes, not soft ashes like from a cigarette, but gritty. They cut like sand. When his father nudges him, he holds up his hand and lets go and a gust of wind comes along and blows most of the ashes away. A few stick in the sweaty creases of his palm.
His mother. The last of her.
She had pale yellow hair and partly chewed-off pink fingernail polish and a tiny blue ladybird tattoo on her neck. She fell asleep in her car. Now she is ashes in the desert.
He and his family are standing in a big scrubby field next to a road that has no traffic. He has been on this road before, when his parents took him fishing at the lake. The road where his mother’s parents died. The sun is a giant white ball.
“Don’t stare,” his father says. “You’ll go blind.”
His mother had swimmy eyes. Sometimes she sang.
His grandmother from North Carolina pulls him aside. She is tall and old and thin and her nose looks like a beak. He has always been afraid of her. She squeezes his hand so hard he can feel his finger bones rubbing together. “I want you to remember something,” she says, bending down so that her face is close to his. “What happened was not your fault.”
Which is when it first occurs to him that it might have been.
He remembers the day his mother left their groceries in the store. How she marched him out to the parking lot, holding his hand as hard as his grandmother is holding it now, and talked to him in a low, scared voice. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “You hear me? Especially not your father.”
He wonders if he was supposed to tell anyway. Sometimes grownups mean the opposite of what they say.
Things can happen so fucking fast. In an afternoon. You can come home from work and turn on the TV and fix your kid a snack because your wife hasn’t made dinner yet. You go looking for her. She isn’t in bed like she sometimes is. She isn’t in the shower. She isn’t in the yard. She isn’t anywhere. It occurs to you — who knows why? — to check the garage. And that’s where you find her, along with the mail, in the front seat of her car, which has run itself out of gas.
Dear Roland, you have another son and you owe money everywhere.
She didn’t leave a note. Just the letter in her lap and the bills in her purse. Her face was tilted to one side. Her cheeks were red; she looked sunburned. His first thought was to lean in and touch her, but he was afraid of hurting her somehow. Even though she was already dead.
He kept Addie’s letter to himself. No reason Elle’s aunt and uncle should know about it.
Pet decides not to place an obituary in the local paper. This is one small thing she can do to protect her grandson. If anyone asks, she will say Dusty’s mother died in a car accident.
She calls Roland every night and tries to talk him into moving back to Carswell. “A good place to raise Dusty,” she tells him. “It would be good for you, too. You need your family.”
“We’re with family,” Roland says. He and Dusty have moved in with Elle’s aunt and uncle. People with, as far as Pet can tell, no background.
“At least get out of Reno,” she insists. “Try someplace new.”
“I’m tired of new places,” Roland says. “Besides, Dusty likes it here, and I’m letting him call the shots.”
“He’s nine.”
“Yeah, well. He can’t fuck up any worse than I have.”
“Roland. Language, please.”
It’s late. Roland is lying on the bed with his clothes on so that he can get up whenever he feels like checking on Dusty, two doors down. Dusty has stopped talking again. He sleeps curled up in a ball.
Across the hall, Elle’s aunt and uncle are watching TV. This is how they spend their nights, propped in front of the tube with the sound turned up. Roland can hear thick, dull laughter from some late-night show.
He leans back on his pillow, arms crossed behind his head, and stares at the wallpaper. This is Elle’s old room, her bed, her slippery chenille spread. He thinks maybe he will feel closer to close to her here.
“Write me a song,” she used to ask him.
“I’m no good at rhymes,” he would say.
“The words don’t have to rhyme.”
“I’m no good at words.”
After a while she stopped asking.
Now he has words — rhymes, even — but no guitar and no money to unpawn it.
Little flowers on the wall
Dusty sleeping down the hall
In the night I heard him call
I never knew you at all
He imagines a backbeat. A low, breaking, Waylon-like voice.
“Country?” Elle would say. She wouldn’t believe it. Him, the bluesman, writing her a country song.
The words in Dusty’s head are so loud he’s afraid to say them, he’s afraid his voice will explode. He writes in his memo pad instead: I’m sorry.
Some things they will never know about Elle:
As a child she was slow to talk. She learned by watching the Patty Duke show. She called her father Pop-o, like Patty, and said bah-ee for bye like Patty’s British cousin.