by Bill Clegg
Her legs bend under her, the movement of the ocean still lingering. She sits down on the sand, her back against what she can now recognize is an old Kiawe tree. She notices its massive root system exposed, dangling and coiled like an underground crown ripped to the surface by insurgent forces. Safe now, she grows drowsy. She can feel all the major and minor muscles in her back and shoulders begin to loosen. Waves hit the shore, hard, again and again, the sound she hears from her own bed at night, but closer. Against the dead tree she sleeps.
Hap
He’s been standing under the Departures Board for close to an hour. After walking to Union Square from the diner near Dana’s, he rode the 4 train to Grand Central without knowing what would come next. In his right hand he holds the card she slid across the table before leaving. It’s white on one side and mint green on the other, Alice’s least favorite color. I can’t stop you from seeing these people, but you shouldn’t, Dana had advised, but in pencil she still wrote down on each side what she said she would: names, towns. After she left, Hap looked, briefly.
When he got off the subway, it occurred to him to take Metro North to Wassaic and find a taxi to drive him the rest of the way to Wells. He could find his half-sister and brother, meet their mother, hike the trail to the cabin above the lake where Dana told him he’d been conceived. He could retrace the steps that led to his existence, bear the news to those who still did not know. He could do these things—part of him feels he must—but to what end? Does he want to dislodge people he’s never met from their lives? Does he have a responsibility to? And what after? Find the woman who did not want him?
Going home seems as impossible now as it did six days ago when he rode in the ambulance with his father from the Hotel Bethlehem to the emergency room at St. Luke’s. His cell phone died yesterday, but before it did one of Leah’s many texts, which had collapsed in less than two days from fury to despair, described exactly how he felt: I don’t know who you are right now. And I did not choose to do this alone. You are ruining everything.
He flicks the edge of the card a few times and drags the pad of his thumb across its flat surface. If he takes the long journey to the place written there, he will find the woman who carried him in her body and brought him to the world. How many times did she hold him? Once? None? Had he ever felt the warmth and swarm of her? The home of her. Did that memory linger somewhere, buried under everyone and everything that came after? He’d never know.
So much discovered in so few days, yet he’s never felt so acutely aware of his ignorance. The mural had come down, but only to reveal another less complete, but more complicated one; one that would surely fall, too, and be discredited or trivialized by the one that came after. And on and on. Life appeared no more than a long, bleak unraveling, a stripping away of layers, like the skins of an onion, one by one, peeled back to expose what? The truth? Did it always end in nothing? Was there only a space the layers folded around that held no meaning beyond the years it took to arrive there?
In the briefcase, there had been papers gathered in folders he’d shuffled through quickly at first, wary of what he might see. There were the marriage and divorce papers between Alice and his father. And there were names he did not know—Lupita Angeles Lopez, Dana Isabel Goss. But as he looked more closely at what looked like adoption papers, he recognized his own, and below it, next to his parents’ signatures, the date April 15, 1970, almost three months before he was born. Another set of his papers listed his birthday as March 10. His head spun and his eyes shut and for a long time he sat on the floor of his father’s apartment and willed his mind to go completely blank.
Eventually, he’d forced himself to look through the rest of the papers. A bulging green folder with “Dana Goss” written near the top held a strange assortment: a still-glossy Sotheby’s catalog for an auction titled “Property from the Estate of George and Annabelle Goss” which featured pages of early American furniture, paintings and jewelry; and six three-by-five index cards covered with addresses, one after another—London, Santa Barbara, Paris, La Jolla, Chicago—each written in different shades of black and blue ink but all in his father’s crisp, rigorously clear handwriting. Every one was crossed out but the last one, in New York City, on West Eleventh Street. The next morning, he’d dialed the number written neatly below the zip code from a payphone at a diner on Sixth Avenue.
This makes no sense, he’d said, again and again, sitting across from the woman who had turned up less than fifteen minutes after he’d called. He watched her elegant fingers balled into fists, one upon the other, pressing into the tabletop as if she were holding a small pepper grinder. The one on the bottom moved slowly inward, toward her body, and the one on top remained fixed, applying what looked like great pressure. The papers were spread out on the table between them, the opened briefcase beside her on the booth seat. She told him to be quiet. That he needed to listen. And that once she’d finished, he needed to move on. That none of what she had to tell him could possibly matter to him now.
Hap passes the card between his fingers like a magician and looks up at the terminal ceiling. How had he not seen it when he first arrived? The enormous dome painted aqua blue and on it in gold a long cloud of stars bisected by the symbols of the zodiac. The raised club and winged horse remind him of Mo, and the tarot cards he used to read to his mother and their friends. He kept them wrapped in a gauzy red fabric in his sock drawer and would become suddenly serious when he’d ask the person he was reading for to shuffle the deck, cut it in half, and pick the cards he’d then arrange with mathematical precision on the kitchen table. Occasionally, Mo offered to read Hap’s cards, but he declined every time. When the tarot came out, Hap steered clear and scoffed at the silliness of reading the future in arbitrary symbols. He wonders now if he’d agreed, even once, what the cards might have said. Would they have told him that most of what he thought he knew was not true? That he’d been raised on lies, and that he’d live more than half his life before finding out? If he’d heard these things then, would he have believed them? Surely not.
What he did know, with biting clarity, was that not only had he lacked the attention to notice the many clues scattered before him since he was a boy, but he’d been so relentlessly uncurious and absent of imagination that it never occurred to him to ask the people around him the most basic questions. Who are you? Where do you come from? What matters to you? Some journalist he turned out to be. No wonder it had been so easy to leave the newspaper.
He searches the vast ceiling for a crab, the symbol of his birth sign, Leah told him on their second or third date. He already knew more than he wanted to about the zodiac. Mo talked about it often, read horoscopes from the paper, used the excuse of Mercury in Retrograde to explain lost bills, missing keys, and sent packages that never arrived. As well, an old girlfriend had given Hap a slim book as a gift one Christmas when he was in high school called Cancer. He’d read it, but he never told her. And he pretended to Leah that he was hearing for the first time that he was very empathetic, likely to be moody, hypersensitive, and someone who tended to isolate from others. He hadn’t identified with any of it. Why hadn’t he told her the truth, Hap wonders now. Something about Mo’s mystical side, more than a decade after his death, must have still embarrassed him, the same way his nut milks and meditations always had. But also it surprised Hap that Leah was so interested in such things. She was such a type A academic, her star at Penn clearly on the rise. Most likely he just wanted to hear a younger woman he was attracted to but hadn’t yet kissed explain why he was the way he was. It was hard to remember what it was like having such a crush on her, to be so intimidated and flattered and hopeful. But even that night, he remembers, after she told him that he was probably a big dreamer but sloppy with details, he couldn’t help but think that most of it was just a racket. Crystals, psychics, astrology—stories hung like shiny ornaments from the stars, the sun, the moon, sweeping across the sky with needy believers chasing behind who took them for truths. There is
nothing we won’t pin a story to, Hap thinks, his eyes following the gathered stars of the Milky Way to a ram, a bull, a fish. Still, he can’t help but wonder which sign of the zodiac he belongs to now.
He’d been told on a field trip once that the night sky depicted here was reversed, not the view from the earth as we see it, but the one that appears to God when he looks down on it all from above. The other side of the sky, he remembers someone saying—in his class then, or maybe later—and the words spark an image of the entire universe captured in a snow globe, swirling and observable, like a toy an arm’s length away. The idea momentarily relaxes him. All the mystery and complication in one small, held space. He tries to imagine his life this way, his forty-eight years in the palm of his hand, and as he does he can’t help but be appalled by the boy, young man and adult who carried on, solipsistic and oblivious, for so many years. He’d gotten it wrong with Mo, with Christopher, whoever he was; and he was getting it wrong right now, with Alice and Leah and his daughter. One week ago he walked into St. Luke’s to become a father only to return two days later to lose one. And he’s been stumbling ever since. To where? An enormous gold room filled with no one he knows, standing under a painted sky that only God can see.
Hap feels the card wedged between his middle and ring finger. He bends it there until its surfaces give way to a crease. With his other hand he pinches it tightly and folds it again, pressing with force each corner to keep it from opening. He pulls his wallet from his jeans and begins to tuck the folded card in the empty gap behind the place where he keeps his driver’s license, credit cards, and expired IDs. All the cards that up until now have told him who he is and was. Student, reporter, Lafayette Bank customer, Planet Fitness member, resident of Pennsylvania. Before he closes the wallet, he hesitates. Putting the card here makes the information written on it feel real, official. He pulls the card out, closes his fist around it.
At the center of the terminal, the clock with four round, bright faces shows the long hand at twelve and the short hand leaving six. Hap feels his heart accelerate. He thinks of his daughter and counts back the days that have passed since she was born. Does she still not have a name, or has Leah made the decision without him? He lets himself imagine how angry and bewildered his wife must feel and as he does the extremity of his failure pierces. He starts fumbling for the cell phone in his back pocket but remembers the dead battery. He’s not even certain she and his daughter are still where he left them, with Alice.
Alice. Had he thanked her yet for inviting him and his family to live in her house, for helping with the baby? He didn’t think so. Alice was nearly seventy-three. Mo was forty-one—seven years younger than Hap now—when he died. Alice, Mo, Christopher, Leah, his daughter, the regrets were piling higher by the second. He had messed up and missed so much.
Hap closes his wallet and shoves it in the front pocket of the jeans he’s worn since the morning Leah went into labor. He sneezes, twice, in rapid succession. And then again, violently. He braces for another but it does not come. He closes his eyes and without planning to he holds his breath, Alice’s old trick to prevent a relapse of hiccups. His nose itches and with his wrinkled sleeve he rubs harder and longer than he needs to, and behind his eyelids flash pinpricks of light. A drowsy wave crashes up and down his body and when it recedes he steadies himself against the wall. He closes his eyes again, feels the cool marble at his back and sinks to a seated position. Maybe he hadn’t been misled. Perhaps the truth, the thing he’d been so desperate to pin down since he arrived in New York, was that his life was exactly how it had appeared. He opens his eyes and scans the room. From the floor, the terminal appears larger, more hectic with strangers pushing across their jagged trajectories. He remembers the hour, the time of day when most people leave work and rush home to their families. He looks up again at the painted sky. His wife needs him. His daughter does not know him. His mother is taking care of them both, now, just as she took care of him.
Hap stands away from the wall. Beyond the clock, at the top of a long inclining corridor, he sees an exit. As he moves toward it, his shoulders and arms get bumped and knocked and when he feels the folded card slip from his fingers he does not stop. The last light of the day blasts from the doors and overwhelms the particulars of the people crowded there. He sees their shadows spill and wriggle on the marble floor and he joins them. At the door, he feels the warm sun on his face. He will follow it west to the Port Authority bus station, and in that shabby terminal find the first bus home. Nothing has ever felt so simple, so clean and good and right. His hands are empty.
Lupita
She dreams. It’s the same dream she’s started hundreds of times since she came to the island. In it, she’s alone, standing at the edge of a river, the one she grew up next to but never swam in, never toed into or explored. Dana and Jackie’s realm, where Lupita watched them linger at twilight, spinning tales of hidden treasure and wood trolls as they pulled rocks from the water and held them up to the setting sun. She steps in and feels the icy water chill her heel and toes and grab at her ankle, but before she submerges her second foot, a voice booms from the wood-line, commanding her to stop. In an instant, she’s away from the water, onto the lawn, running for what feels like her life. Here is where the dream has always ended.
But this time, when Lupita takes her first step into the river, the water is warm and there is no voice. She wades in, slowly, despite her fear. The water feels soft against her skin, soothing, and the deeper she goes, the more relaxed she becomes. A warm rain begins to fall and with it she notices the faint smell of roses and lavender.
She can see the big house—its old vines climbing the columns and walls, crossing the lifeless windows. The water begins to creep up the lawn and the rain falls harder. The river rises around her, caresses her neck and face. Lupita feels her feet leave the stony riverbed and soon she is floating. Huge swells surge from upriver and crash onto the lawn, but she is not swept away. Instead, she moves with ease in the current, treads in place as the waves become enormous. She watches them lap against the long porch, past the columns that flank the house, and rise quickly up the steps to the window ledges.
As she watches the water inch past the second floor windows and approach the roofline, she suddenly wants nothing more than to stand on top of the house before it’s swallowed. With all her strength, she swims. The current is with her, and in what feels like only a few seconds, she approaches the chimney, the one she watched smoke curl from in the winter when she was young and wondered if Santa Claus would dive down on Christmas Eve even though the Gosses were in Florida. It mattered a great deal to her that he might make two visits to one family, that Dana could actually be given two sets of presents, have two stockings filled, receive two letters from Santa telling her she’d been a good girl that year. It seemed impossibly unfair.
Lupita grabs at the chimney. The brick feels like sand in her hands, flimsy and fast vanishing. She does her best to hold on and steady her feet, but she slips and wobbles on the slate roof as the water rises above her waist. Before she’s submerged, she hoists herself up and straddles the edges of two of the six chimney pots. They are a tawny ceramic that darkens when wet and beneath her feet they look like drowning flesh. She watches the river invade and overwhelm them and she has no pity. The water rises, pulls her up and off, and soon there is no roof, no house, no trace of what was there. Around her there is nothing but raging water, foam and fury. Unafraid, she drifts.
The chop eventually calms, the rain ceases, and the water becomes crystal clear under a sky now brilliant with stars and a high, bright moon. Beneath her, Lupita sees what appears to be a vast ship taking shape and slowly rising toward the surface. When the deck meets her feet and the schooner is fully atop the water, the wind stirs, the great sails billow, and she feels the vessel begin to move. Quickly, it gains speed and explodes forward, catching air and streaking across the water like the flat stones she watched her father fling into the river when he didn’t think anyo
ne was watching. It was the only time she ever saw him do something that had no purpose but pleasure. And never for very long. Three or four rocks skipped toward the distant bank and then back to work, or home, mumbling imperceptibly as he went, pipe smoke curling behind him.
The ship moves fast toward far away, its sails are full, stretched to bursting. Below, for her, the river spills its secrets—rubies and sapphires, diamonds and emeralds—millions of them, catching the moonlight, glinting beneath the surface like underwater fireworks. Above the prow, Lupita grips the wooden railing with both hands. She has no plan, no destination; there is nothing she wants, not one thing she fears. Her body feels as light as paper.
The river widens. The ship surges forward. Soon there is only open ocean, limitless and welcoming. Waves curl and collapse on all sides, spraying her clothes, tickling her skin. She is a girl again, squinting into the wind and water, and someone is beside her.
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to my editor, Wendy Sheanin, for showing up, again and again, with patience and rigor and enthusiasm. My publisher, Jen Bergstrom, who is as fun and kind as she is brilliant. Aimee Bell and Jackie Cantor at Scout for wise editorial counsel as well as encouragement. And Carolyn Reidy, who writes the best cards, among her many other superpowers. Ongoing gratitude to the indomitable and peerless Kimberly Burns, and to Lauren Truskowski and Sally Marvin. Paula Amendolara, Gary Urda, Tracy Nelson, Colin Shields in sales, and Abby Zidle, Anne Jaconette, Bianca Salvant, and Anabel Jimenez in marketing for working their respective magics. Lisa Litwack for going the distance on the jacket. Boundless gratitude to Sara Quaranta for so effortlessly directing traffic and to John Paul Jones for accommodating every last change. Robin Robertson at Cape for key notes at several crucial stages, and for ongoing faith. Marie-Pierre Gracedieu, Luiz Schwarcz, Otavio Marques da Costa, Anna Flotaker, and Beatrice Masini for continued belief and careful stewardship. Tracy Fisher, her team at WME and Claudia Ballard for evergreen excellence. For the true blue who read at various stages (some more than once): Lisa Story, Adam McLaughlin, Susannah Meadows, Pauls Toutonghi, Marion Duvert, Karen Kosztolnyik, Emma Sweeney, Jill Bialosky, Lena Dunham, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Kassie Evashevski, and Taylor Beck. Boundless gratitude to the team at TCA (present and past): Chris Clemans, Lilly Sandberg, Griffin Irvine, David Khambu, Raeden Richardson, and especially Simon Toop for exacting but somehow always cheerful feedback, and for balancing all the many spinning plates on poles. Thanks to Diana Rico-Morales for a close read and critical insights, and to Carmen Hage-Vassallo for meticulous notes and suggestions. And to Cecilia Martinez-Cruz, much gratitude for chiming in so selflessly in the final hour. As well to Julia G. Young for being so generous with your time and expertise on mid-century immigration from Mexico into the United States, and for pointing me in the direction of invaluable resources. And in every capacity, and for the very first green light, gratitude and love to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Lastly, and most importantly, to Van Scott, my partner in all things, without whom this book would not have been written.