Connie had the uncanny feeling that she was seeing photos of herself in a life that she could not remember having lived.
“Where did you get these?” she asked Mickey Chan.
“From the Ladbrooks. Dennis and Lorraine Ladbrook, the couple that adopted Colleen.”
Examining the photographs again, Connie was struck by the fact that Colleen was smiling or laughing in every one of them. The few pictures that had ever been taken of Connie as a child were usually institutional group shots with a crowd of other kids. She didn’t have a single photograph of herself in which she was smiling.
“What are the Ladbrooks like?” she asked.
“They’re in business. They work together, own an office-supply store in Santa Barbara. Nice people, I think, quiet and unassuming. They weren’t able to have any children of their own, and they adored Colleen.”
Envy darkened Connie’s heart. She coveted the love and years of normality that Colleen had known. Irrational, to envy a dead sister. And shameful. But she could not help herself.
Mickey said, “The Ladbrooks haven’t gotten over her death, not even after five years. They didn’t know she was a twin. They never were given that information by the child welfare agencies.”
Connie returned the photographs to the manila envelope, unable to look at them any longer. Self-pity was an indulgence that she loathed, but that’s what her envy was swiftly becoming. A heaviness, like piled stones, pressed upon her breast. Later, in the privacy of her apartment, maybe she would feel like spending more time with her sister’s lovely smile.
The waitress arrived with moo goo gai pan and rice for Mickey.
Ignoring the chopsticks that were provided with a regular complement of flatware, Mickey picked up his fork. “Connie, the Ladbrooks would like to meet you.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, they never knew Colleen had a twin.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I can’t be Colleen for them. I’m someone different.”
“I don’t think it would be like that.”
After she drank some beer, she said, “I’ll think about it.”
Mickey dug into his moo goo gai pan as if nothing tastier had ever come out of any kitchen in the Western hemisphere.
The look and smell of the food made Connie half ill. She knew that nothing was wrong with the dinner, only with her reaction to it. She had more than one reason to be queasy. It had been a hard day.
Finally she asked the dreadful question that remained. “How did Colleen die?”
Mickey studied her for a moment before answering. “I was ready to tell you this morning.”
“I wasn’t ready to hear, I guess.”
“Childbirth.”
Connie had been prepared for any of the stupid and pointless ways that death could come suddenly to an attractive twenty-eight-year-old woman in these dark terminal years of the millennium. She had not been prepared for this, however, and it jolted her.
“She had a husband.”
Mickey shook his head. “No. Unwed mother. I don’t know the circumstances, who the father was, but it doesn’t seem to be a sore point with the Ladbrooks, nothing they consider a stain on her memory. She was a saint in their eyes.”
“What about the baby?”
“A girl.”
“She lived?”
“Yes,” Mickey said. He put down his fork, drank some water, blotted his mouth with a red napkin, watching Connie all the while. “Her name is Eleanor. Eleanor Ladbrook. They call her Elbe.”
“Ellie,” Connie said numbly.
“She looks a great deal like you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”
“You didn’t give me a chance. Hung up on me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Just about. Very brusque, you were. Tell me the rest this evening, you said.”
“Sorry. When I heard Colleen was dead, I thought it was over.”
“Now you have a family. You’re someone’s aunt.”
She accepted the reality of Elbe’s existence, but she could not yet begin to get a handle on what Ellie might mean to her own life, her future. After having been alone for so long, she was stunned to learn for certain that someone of her own flesh and blood was also alive in this vast and troubled world.
“Having family somewhere, even one, must make a difference,” Mickey said.
She suspected it would make a huge difference. Ironically, earlier in the day, she had nearly been killed before learning that she had one very important new reason to live.
Putting another manila envelope on the table, Mickey said, “The final report. The Ladbrooks’ address and phone number’s in there when you decide you need them.”
“Thank you, Mickey.”
“And the bill. It’s in there, too.”
She smiled. “Thank you anyway.”
As Connie slid out of the booth and stood, Mickey said, “Life’s funny. So many connections with other people that we don’t even know about, invisible threads linking us to some we’ve long forgotten and some we won’t meet for years — if ever.”
“Yeah. Funny.”
“One more thing, Connie.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a Chinese saying that goes… ‘Sometimes life can be as bitter as dragon tears—’”
“This more of your crap?”
“Oh, no. It’s a real saying.” Sitting there, a small man in a large booth, with his gentle face and crinkled eyes full of good humor, Mickey Chan seemed like a thin Buddha. “But that’s only part of the saying — the part you already understand. The whole thing goes… ‘Sometimes life can be as bitter as dragon tears. But whether dragon tears are bitter or sweet depends entirely on how each man perceives the taste.’”
“In other words, life is hard, even cruel — but it’s also what you make of it.”
Putting his slender hands flat together without interleaving his fingers, in the position of oriental prayer, Mickey bowed his head in her direction with mock solemnity. “Perhaps wisdom may yet enter through the thick bone of your Yankee head.”
“Anything’s possible,” she admitted.
She left with the two manila envelopes. Her sister’s captured smile. The promise of her niece.
Outside, rain was still coming down at a rate that made her wonder if a new Noah was at work somewhere in the world, even now marching pairs of animals up a boarding gangway.
The restaurant was in a new strip shopping center, and a deep overhang kept the pedestrian walkway dry. A man was standing to the left of the door. Peripheral vision gave Connie the impression that he was tall and husky, but she didn’t actually look at him until he spoke to her.
“Have mercy on a poor man, will you, please? Mercy for a poor man, lady?”
She was about to step off the curb, out from under the overhang, but his voice was arresting. Soft, gentle, even musical, it seemed radically out of sync with the size of the person she had seen from the corner of her eye.
Turning, she was surprised by the formidable ugliness of the man, and wondered how he could possibly earn even a meager living as a beggar. His unusual size, knotted hair, and unkempt beard gave him the mad aspect of Rasputin, though that crazed Russian priest had been a pretty-boy by comparison. Terrible bands of scar tissue disfigured his face, and his beak nose was dark with broken blood vessels. His lips were marked by oozing blisters. One glimpse of his diseased teeth and gums reminded her of those in a corpse she had once seen after it had been exhumed for poison tests nine years after burial. And the eyes. Cataracts. Thick, milky membranes. She could barely see the dark circles of the irises underneath. His appearance was so threatening that Connie imagined most people, upon being panhandled by him, turned and fled rather than approach to press money into his extended hand.