The air between us was humming, but I kept my distance. "I'm sorry," I said. "No one told me."
Jake looked at the car, which was dusty from its long drive. "How much do you want?" he said, lifting the nozzle from its cradle.
I stared at him blankly. He unscrewed the cap. "Oh, the car," I said. "Fill it."
Jake nodded and started the pump. He leaned against the hot metal door, and I watched his hands, restrained in their strength. Grease had settled into the creases in his palms, the way it used to. "What are you doing now?" he asked. "Still drawing?"
I smiled at the ground. "I'm an escape artist," I said. "Like Houdini?"
"Yeah," I said, "but the knots and cuffs are stronger."
Jake didn't look at me when the pump switched off. He held out his hand, and I gave him my credit card.
I had expected the familiar physical jolt that had always flared between us when our fingers touched. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. I wasn't looking for passion, and I knew I wasn't in love with Jake. I was married to Nicholas. I was where I was supposed to be. But somehow I expected there to be a little something left from before. I looked into Jake's face, and his aqua eyes were cool and reserved. Yes, he seemed to be saying, between us, it is over.
When he came back a minute later, he asked if I'd come into the office for a moment. My heart caught; maybe he was going to say something to me or let down his guard. But he took me to the machine that validated credit cards. My American Express card had been rejected. "That's impossible," I murmured, and I handed him a Visa. "Try this."
The same thing happened. Without asking Jake's permission, I picked up the telephone and dialed the emergency 800 number on the back of my credit card. The operator informed me that Nicholas Prescott had voided his old Visa card and that a new one, with a new number, was being sent to his address. I put the receiver down on the counter and shook my head. "My husband," I said. "He just cut me off."
I mentally ran through the amount of cash I had left, the chances of my checks being accepted out-of-state. What if I didn't have enough to find my mother? What if I could find her but then was too broke to get to her? Suddenly Jake's arm was around my shoulders. He led me to a worn orange plastic window seat. "I'm gonna move your car," he said. "I'll be right back." I closed my eyes and slipped into the familiar feeling. This time, I told myself, Jake would be able to rescue me.
When he came back he sat beside me. There was gray in his hair now, just at the temples, and it still hung over his eyes and curled at the edges of his ears. He lifted my chin, and in his touch I felt that easy camaraderie I had felt when I was his favorite little sister. "So, Paige O'Toole," he said, "what brings you back to Chicago?"
As he drew the outline I filled in with chiseled images and stories the past eight years of my life. I had just told him about Max falling off the couch and getting a nosebleed, when the glass door jingled and a young woman came in. She had dark, exotic skin and eyes that tilted up. She was wearing a tie-died cotton jumper, and she carried a big bag of Fritos in her left hand. "Dinner!" she sang, and then she saw Jake sitting with me. "Oh." She smiled. "I can wait out back."
Jake stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. He put his arm around the woman's shoulders. "Paige," he said, "this is my wife, Ellen."
Ellen's dark eyes opened wider at the sound of my name. I waited a second, expecting a flare of jealousy to streak her smile. But she just took a step forward and held out her hand. "After all these years of hearing about you, it's nice to finally meet you," she said, and I could see it in her gaze--she was being honest. She slipped her arm around Jake's waist and squeezed lightly, hooking her thumb into the belt loop of his jeans. "How about I leave the Fritos," she said. "I'll catch up with you at home." And as easily as she'd interrupted, she disappeared.
When she left the small glass business office, taking with her the halo of energy that hovered around her, the air seemed to be sucked away as well. "Ellen and I have been married for five years," Jake said, staring after her. "She knows about everything. We can't--" His voice tripped, and then he started again. "We haven't been able to have any kids yet." I turned away; I did not trust myself to meet his eyes. "I love her," he said softly, watching her drive onto Franklin.
"I know."
Jake squatted down on the floor in front of me. He picked up my left hand and rubbed his thumb over my wedding band, leaving a stripe of grease that he did not try to erase. "Tell me why he cut off your charge cards," he said.
I tilted back my head and thought about the days when Jake
would be getting ready for a date with another girl; all the nights I had eaten with his family and pretended that I really belonged and spun such complicated tales about my mother's death that I sometimes wrote them down just to keep track. I remembered Terence Flanagan's buckled grin as he pinched his wife's backside while she served the potatoes. I remembered Jake coming to me after midnight, to dance in the moonlit kitchen. I thought of Jake's arms around me as he carried me to my bedroom, still bleeding from the loss of a life. I thought of his face coming in and out of my pain; of the impossible ties he cut to say goodbye. "I've run away," I whispered to Jake, "again."
chapter 22
Nicholas
This is the deal," Nicholas said, juggling Max on his hip and the diaper bag on his shoulder. "I'll pay you whatever you ask. I'll do everything in my power to get you off the next two graveyard shifts. But you've got to watch my kid."
LaMyrna Ratchet, the nurse on duty in orthopedics, twisted a strawberry-blond curl around her finger. "I don't know, Dr. Prescott," she said. "I could get in a shitload of trouble for this."
Nicholas gave her his most winning smile. He was watching the heavy clock above her head, which said that even if he left right now he'd be fifteen minutes late to surgery. "I'm trusting you with my son, LaMyrna," he said. "I've got to go. I've got a patient waiting. I'll bet you can figure something out."
LaMyrna chewed on a fingernail and finally reached out for Max, who grabbed at her Coke-bottle glasses and her stringy hair. "He
doesn't cry, does he?" she called after Nicholas, who was running down the hall.
"Oh, no," Nicholas yelled over his shoulder. "Not a bit."
Nicholas had arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, a half hour earlier than usual. He'd actually had the pleasure of waking up his son, who had awakened him three times during the night to drink and to be changed. Max, still half asleep, had fussed the whole time Nicholas tried to jam him into a fuzzy yellow playsuit. "Yeah, well," he'd said, "how do you like it?"
Nicholas had expected to put Max in whatever sort of staff day care the hospital had, but there was no damn program on site. If Nicholas wanted to use Mass General's child care facility, he'd have to drive to fucking Charlestown, and--as if that weren't inconvenient enough--it didn't open until 6:30 a.m., when Nicholas would already be scrubbing for surgery. He'd asked the OR nurses to watch Max, but they had looked at him as though he had two heads. They couldn't, they said, not when at least six times a day there was no one behind the desk because of short staffing. They suggested the general patient floors, but the only nurses on the early shift were bleary from being up all night, and Nicholas didn't quite trust them. So he'd headed up to the orthopedics floor, and he'd found LaMyrna, a homely girl with a good heart whom he remembered from his internship.
"Dr. Prescott," he heard, and he whipped around. He'd missed the door to the operating suite, that's how exhausted he was. The nurse held the swinging door for him. He turned on the steaming water in the industrial sinks, scouring under his fingernails until the pads of his fingers were pink and raw. When he pushed his way backward into the operating suite, he saw that everyone else had been waiting.
Fogerty leaned closer to the unconscious patient. "Mr. Brennan," he said, "it seems Dr. Prescott has decided to grace us with his presence after all." He turned toward Nicholas and then toward the door. "What," he said, "no stroller? No Porta-Crib?"
Nicholas pushed him out of the way. "Just when did you develop a sense of humor, Alistair?" he said. He turned to the head OR nurse. "Prep him."
He was tired and sweating and badly needed a shower, but the only thing in his mind when he finished surgery was Max. He knew he needed to round his patients; he hadn't a clue about his schedule for tomorrow. He rode up five flights in the cool green elevator. Maybe he'd go home today, and Paige would be there, and this would have been a lousy nightmare.
LaMyrna Ratchet was nowhere to be found. Nicholas stuck his head into the back room at the nurses' station, but no one seemed to know whether she was still on duty. Nicholas began to peer into different patient rooms. He poked through a bouquet of balloons because he thought he saw a short white skirt, but LaMyrna was not in the room. The patient, a woman of about fifty, clung to Nicholas's arm. "No more blood," she cried. "Don't let them take no more blood."
LaMyrna was not in any of the patient rooms. Nicholas even checked the women's staff bathroom, startling a couple of nurses and a female resident, but LaMyrna was not at the sink. He ducked down, peering at the shoes in the stalls. He called her name.
Finally, he went back to the nurses' station in the center of the orthopedic floor. "Look," he said, "this nurse has disappeared, and she's taken my baby."
An unfamiliar nurse handed him a pink telephone message note that had been folded like a Chinese football. "Why didn't you say so?" the woman said.
Dr. Prescott, the note read, 7" had to leave because my shift was over and they told me you were still in OR so I left Mike with the people in the volunteer lounge. LaMyrna.
Mike?
Nicholas couldn't even remember where the volunteer lounge was. They had built it sometime during his residency; it was a general meeting area with lockers and a sign-in sheet for the candy stripers and older hospital volunteers. He asked for directions at the hospital's front desk. "I can take you," a girl said. "I'm on my way there."
She was no older than sixteen and wore a jeans jacket with an airbrushed rendering of Nirvana on the back. She carried a small Eddie Bauer refrigerated cold-pack, and her peppermint-stick uniform protruded from a plain white tote bag. She saw Nicholas staring at the bag. "I wouldn't be caught dead leaving school in it," she said, and she cracked a gum bubble, loud.
There was no one in the volunteer lounge. Nicholas ran his fingers over the page of signed-in volunteers, but found nothing to indicate that one of them was watching a baby. Then, propped in the corner, he saw his diaper bag.
Nicholas sagged against the wall, flooded with relief. "How do I find out what candy stripers are on what rotations?" The girl looked at him blankly. "Where do you all work?"
The girl shrugged. "Check the front of the book," she said, flipping to the sign-in page. He saw a list of volunteers, organized by the day they worked and their staff assignments. There were at least thirty volunteers in the hospital at that moment. Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not do this. He just could not do this.
He left the volunteer lounge with the diaper bag on his shoulder and for the first time noticed a secretary sitting at the makeshift desk outside. "Dr. Prescott," she said, smiling up at him.
He did not question how she knew his name; many people at the hospital had heard about the wunderkind of cardiac surgery. "Have you seen a baby?" he said.
The woman pointed down the hall. "Dawn had him, last I saw. She took him to the cafeteria. They didn't need her so badly in ambulatory care today."
Nicholas heard Max's laughter before he saw him. Beyond the thick line of residents and nurses and sullen hospital visitors waiting to be served, he spotted his son's spiky black hair through hazy red cubes of jello. When he reached the table where a candy striper was bouncing Max on her knee, he dropped the diaper bag. The girl was feeding his three-month-old son an ice cream bar.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he yelled, grabbing his son away. Max reached his hand toward the ice cream, but then realized his father had returned and burrowed his sticky face into the neck of Nicholas's scrubs.
"You must be Dr. Prescott," the girl said, unruffled. "I'm Dawn. I've been with Max since noon." She opened the diaper bag and held up the one bottle Nicholas had brought to the hospital, now bone dry. "He finished this at ten this morning, you know," she chided. "I had to take him to the milk bank."
Nicholas had a fleeting image of Holsteins, wearing pearls and cat's-eye glasses, acting as tellers and counting out cash. "The milk bank," he repeated, and then he remembered. In the preemie pediatric ward, new mothers pumped their own milk for strangers' babies born too early.
He assessed the girl again. She was smart enough to find food for Max; hell, she had even known he was hungry, which he couldn't tell for sure. He sat down across from her at the table, and she folded the remains of the ice cream sandwich into a napkin. "He liked it," she said defensively. "A little bit can't hurt him, not once he's hit three months."
Nicholas stared at her. "How do you know these things?" he asked. Dawn looked at him as if he were crazy. Nicholas leaned forward conspiratorially. "How much do you make for candy striping?"
"Money? We don't make money. That's why we're called volunteers."
Nicholas grabbed her hand. "If you come back tomorrow, I'll pay you. Four bucks an hour, if you'll watch Max."
"I don't candy-stripe on Thursdays. Only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have band on Thursdays."
"Surely," Nicholas said, "you have friends."
Dawn stood up and shied away from the two of them. Nicholas held his hand out in the air as if that might stop her. He wondered what he looked like through her eyes: a weary, mussed surgeon,
sweaty and wild-eyed, who probably wasn't even holding his baby the right way. He wondered what was the right way.
For a second, Nicholas thought he was going to lose control. He saw
himself breaking down, his face in his hands, sobbing. He saw Max rolling to the floor and striking his head on the beveled edge of the chair. He saw his career destroyed, all his colleagues turning their heads away in embarrassment. His only salvation was the girl in front of him, an angel half his age. "Please," he murmured to
Dawn. "You don't understand what it's like."
Dawn held her arms out for Max and tugged the diaper bag onto her thin shoulder. She put her hand on the back of Nicholas's neck. The hand was gloriously cool, like a waterfall, and gentle as a breath. "Five bucks," she said, "and I'll see what I can do."
chapter 23
Paige
If Jake hadn't been with me, I would have run from Eddie Savoy's without ever going inside. His office was thirty miles outside Chicago, in the heartland of the country. The building was little more than a brown weathered shack attached to a chicken farm. The stench of droppings was overpowering, and there were feathers stuck to the wheels of my car when I got out. "Are you sure?" I asked Jake. "You know this guy?"
Eddie Savoy burst out of the door at that point, knocking it off its hinges. "Flan-man!" he yelled, wrapping Jake in a bear hug. They broke away and did some funny handshake that looked like two birds mating.
Jake introduced me to Eddie Savoy. "Paige," he said, "me and Eddie were in the war together." "The war," I repeated.
"The Gulf War," Eddie said proudly. His voice was as rough as a grindstone.
I turned to Jake. The Gulf War? He had been in the army? The sun slanted off his cheekbones and lightened his eyes so that they appeared transparent. I wondered how much more about Jake Flanagan I had missed.
When I told Jake about leaving Nicholas and Max, and then about wanting to find my mother, I'd expected him to be surprised --maybe even angry, since I'd been telling him all those years that my mother had died. But Jake just smiled at me. "Well," he said, "it's about time." I could tell by the brush of his hands that he had known all along. He told me he had a friend who might be able to help, and then he asked one of his mechanics to watch the station.
Eddie Savoy was a p
rivate investigator. He'd been getting started in the business, working as a lackey for another detective, and then he'd joined the army when the war broke out in the Persian Gulf. When he came back he felt he'd had enough of taking orders; he started his own agency.
He led us into a small room that looked as if it had been a meat storage refrigerator in a different life. We sat on the floor on tasseled Indian cushions, and Eddie sat across from us, behind a low parsons bench. "Hate chairs," he explained. "They do things to my back."
He was not much older than Jake, but his hair was completely white. It had been shaved in a crew cut and stood away from his scalp as if each individual piece was very frightened. He had no mustache but the beginnings of a beard, which also seemed to stick straight out from his chin. He reminded me of a tennis ball. "So you haven't seen your ma for twenty years," he said, tugging the old wedding photo from my hand.
"No," I said, "and I've never tried to find her before." I leaned closer. "Do I have a chance?"
Eddie leaned back and pulled a cigarette out of his sleeve. He struck a match against his low desk and drew in deeply. When he spoke, his words came out in smoke. "Your mother," he said to me, "did not disappear off the face of the earth."
Eddie told me it was all in the numbers. You couldn't escape your numbers, not for that long a time. Social Security, Registry of Motor Vehicles, school records, work records. Even if people intentionally changed their identity, eventually they'd collect a pension or welfare, or file taxes, and the numbers would lead you to them. Eddie told me how the previous week he'd found in half a day the kid a mother gave up for adoption.
"What if she's changed her Social Security number?" I said. "What if her name isn't May anymore?"
Eddie smirked. "If you change your Social Security number, it's recorded as being changed. And the address and age of the person changing the number is listed too. You can't just walk in and get someone else's, either. So if your mother is using someone else's number--say her own mom's--we'll still be able to find her."