Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  The gate swung open with only a tiny creak.

  Noah lingered on the path, pretending to smell the trees; he dreaded going into the building, even though this was what he’d come here to do. He wondered if Michael sometimes felt this way about his visits to Amber in prison.

  After he rang the buzzer on the front door, it took a few minutes for a tiny woman in uniform to come and unlock it.

  It was the smell that made Noah stiffen, as much as the locks on all the doors. Nothing rancid, only institutional; disinfectant? (Please, please let Noah drop down dead crossing Broadway before it came to this.) He signed them in and asked—casually, as if they were frequent visitors—where Madame thought they might find Monsieur Demetz?

  They could try his room. The care worker pointed upward.

  Noah took the carpeted stairs. When he turned on the landing Michael was still at the bottom, sitting on the stairlift.

  “Where’s the On button?”

  “Get off,” Noah hissed, beckoning.

  Michael loped up the stairs three at a time, one hand on the rail.

  They read the names on the doors until they finally got to DEMETZ LUCIEN. It struck Noah that the French habit of putting the surname first could give situations an almost military tinge. Davis, he remembered the guard calling Amber. Inmate Davis! But really he supposed it was a matter of whether you saw yourself primarily as a member of a clan or as an individual. Family Over Everything, as Michael’s tattoo said?

  Noah tapped softly on the thin wood. “Monsieur Demetz?”

  Nothing.

  The man could be napping, or reading, or anything. Noah had no right to barge in. But he’d come all this way…

  He opened the door an inch, then another. A small bedroom, nobody in it. Some kind of safety rail around the bed. How a life could shrink to a handful of square feet, toward the end.

  Noah led Michael downstairs again. Through a square of glass he spotted dozens of people sitting around the edge of a big room as if having a silent meeting; a TV on in a corner. Old people: definitely decrepitus rather than senectus. He steeled himself to go in, but it was locked.

  “This place creeps me out,” Michael whispered.

  “Me too.”

  “Can we go?”

  “It’s worse for me,” Noah told him. “One fall and I’ll end up here, in diapers.”

  That made the boy giggle.

  Noah waited for the next nursing assistant to come through and appealed to him.

  Ah yes, Monsieur Demetz was in the sunroom, at the other end of the building, and he’d be glad to see some old friends.

  Noah was feeling bad about his cover story. What if the Frenchman took one look at these Americans and said he’d never seen them in his life?

  In the conservatory there were perhaps a dozen figures, two of them men—as far as Noah could tell from a quick scan, because age made everyone more androgynous. One man in a hat at the piano, hands motionless on the keys; another between some potted plants, staring out the window. Noah hesitated, then touched the aide’s sleeve as the young man turned to go. “I can’t—Pardonnez-moi,” but it had been some time and he couldn’t quite recall…

  The aide led him over to the plants. “Lucien,” he said gently, rousing the starer.

  Lucien Demetz had a full head of hair, much of it still black. Physically he looked younger than Noah. Something about the gaze, though; not vacant, but misty. Damn it: Noah could tell they’d come several years too late.

  But he did his best, introducing himself and Michael as visiteurs des États-Unis and hurrying on to say that he thought Monsieur Demetz had known—had once met—Noah’s mother? Noah had reason to believe that she’d taken Monsieur Demetz’s picture when he was a little boy. “Pour Monsieur Abadi—Moussa Abadi?” he added in a low voice, awkward about raising painful history in a public space. (But none of the other residents paid any attention. Do they all have dementia, he wondered?)

  Not a spark in those brown eyes.

  If this was indeed Monsieur Demetz in this photo? Noah produced it from his envelope.

  The man’s face lit up at the sight of the small boy.

  But that proved nothing; he might think it was a grandson of his. Noah would bet the residents were constantly being shown old photos. And who didn’t like the sight of a smiling child? “C’est bien vous, Monsieur?”

  “Oui, oui, bien sûr.”

  “Does he say it’s him?” Michael asked.

  “Mm, but I think he’s, you know, gone in the head.” Noah turned the photo over and pointed to the initials on the back: “R.J., c’était bien votre faux nom pendant la guerre, René Jacques?” Was it true that had been Monsieur’s false name in the war?

  Lucien Demetz kept nodding.

  Noah’s mother, Madame Selvaggio, had taken that photograph, a friend of Moussa Abadi’s.

  The face was uncertain now.

  Did the name Margot Selvaggio mean anything to Monsieur? Or—Noah corrected himself—Marie Zabel? He should have thought to bring a picture of his mother from New York. All he could do was flick to a marked page in the biography and point to a photo captioned Margot on her wedding day. This was her, Marie Zabel.

  Lucien Demetz’s eyes wandered across the page.

  Noah tapped just below Margot’s glowing face. Marie Zabel, a lady with a camera?

  “Et un oiseau.”

  “And a bird.” Had Noah heard the man right?

  “Le petit oiseau va sortir.” Eyes veering to the window again, Lucien Demetz barely breathed it.

  “The little bird’s coming out,” Noah translated under his breath.

  Michael nodded excitedly. “Watch the birdie.”

  But it wasn’t just Margot who’d said that; anyone photographing a child would have used the phrase. “Probably just because I mentioned a camera,” Noah whispered. Word association, the last game of a failing mind; language falling from prose to bare, enigmatic poetry.

  “Show him the actual bird,” Michael suggested.

  A little sheepish, Noah took the Pick-Pick Bird out of his pocket and unwrapped it from its sheet of bubbles. He stood it on his palm.

  Lucien Demetz beamed. “C’est l’oiseau!”

  “It’s the bird!” But perhaps he just meant it was a bird; any colorful toy might have elicited the same response. Even if this was the very model of plush bird the woman had shown Lucien Demetz when she’d been taking his picture—there were millions of Pick-Pick Birds out there. It must have been a nightmarish day when the Demetzes told little Lucien he had to go away and pretend to be a Christian boy; why would he have paid any attention to the photographer?

  Lucien Demetz reached out and Noah let him take the bird. The man touched the velvet, especially the bald patches, as if soothing the creature.

  How could Noah possibly extract from Lucien Demetz’s soupy brain the information he needed? But he tried again. So did Monsieur remember her, the lady with the bird who’d taken this photo of him when he was three years old?

  Lucien Demetz nodded again, but this struck Noah as just a tic, a way to keep the conversational ball in the air. The man’s eyes stayed on the bird. His mouth was doing something curious. His tongue was out, not in a lax or dribbling way.

  “Trying to touch his freaking nose!” Michael squealed it.

  “Hang on.” Noah watched Lucien Demetz, wary. His mottled gray-pink tongue was reaching upward, urgent, as if to catch the last drip of something delicious.

  “Ask him! Ask him if she did that.”

  Noah put his own tongue out and curled it, aiming vainly upward. By any chance, could the lady touch her own tongue to her nose?

  “Oui! Oui! Elle l’a léchée!” Lucien Demetz burst out laughing.

  “She licked it,” Noah told the boy.

  “That’s got to be your mom, then.”

  “Ten percent of the population have Gorlin sign.”

  “Yeah, but come on, dude! You said she did it like a party trick.”

/>   Though maybe every mother who could do a thing like that, did. Wouldn’t you use all the tricks in your bag to distract children, especially in bleak situations? Still, Noah reckoned the odds. Drew a Venn diagram of overlapping traits. A woman taking identity shots of kids in Nice for the Marcel Network, in 1943; a woman who wound up a velvety orange, black, and gold Pick-Pick Bird, and licked her nose to make her subjects smile.

  “It’s her,” Michael crowed.

  Lucien Demetz’s tongue was back in his mouth now, his lips still, his hands stroking the bird.

  Watching him, Noah thought of the emperor whose gorgeous clockwork bird had seized up in the end; on his deathbed he’d called for the dark-feathered nightingale, knowing he never should have chosen a shiny substitute, because nothing but her real song could save him now. Was there any music that would bring back memories once they were lost in the fog? What were we, once our stories had drifted off like smoke?

  He thanked Lucien Demetz.

  Who paid no attention, but caressed the Pick-Pick Bird as if it had flown back to him after a lifetime.

  Had the man made a new family, as Vivienne had, in place of all he’d lost? Did his descendants come to see him every Sunday afternoon? Noah could have asked one of the staff, but he realized he couldn’t bear it if the answer was no. Besides, it wasn’t as if there was anything Noah could do about it; he was just passing through.

  He jerked his head at Michael to mean they should go now.

  “The bird.”

  “I’m going to leave it with him.”

  “But it’s yours.”

  Noah waved that off. How much longer do you think I’ll get to hold on to my things before I have to give them all away anyway?

  But he did put the photo of little R.J. back in the envelope, to keep the whole set together.

  Getting off the bus, Noah said there was something he wanted to do at Place Masséna, where they’d watched the Carnival Corso last night.

  “Can we ride the Ferris wheel?”

  “All right, but my thing first.”

  “Let’s take the tram.”

  “Oh, Michael, it’s just two stops down the street.”

  “Faster, though, and we have to use up our ten-ride card, don’t we?”

  “Your logic is irresistible.”

  The carriage was crammed, and just as the high-pitched ping announced that the tram was about to move off, a man hauled the doors back open and a horde of schoolkids came squirreling in. Young ones—seven or eight years old, maybe. The teacher held the doors and asked everyone to move up because more children were still on the platform waiting to get in.

  Could the teacher not have broken up the group, Noah wondered, or waited for the next tram? This one seemed dangerously overcrowded. Children pushing, shoving, leaning against poles and one another… A cluster fell over as the tram braked to let a car cross the intersection. Noah was afraid an adult would trip over them. They were snorting with glee, and one girl wiped her nose on her sleeve as she hopped up, then scratched her calf with the other shoe. When the tram stopped suddenly at Jean Médecin she toppled again, right through the wave of bodies. Noah leaped up, pointing. “Attention!”

  People stared at him.

  Michael looked away, shaking his head in embarrassment.

  But the little girl had sprung up already, her bobble head wobbling on its spindly neck. She sang out: “Quelqu’un a pété!”

  And it was true, someone had farted: that warm agricultural smell. Gales of laughter went up; even their teacher’s hard face cracked.

  As the tram moved off and gained velocity, Noah’s irritation surged. This pack of brats was lurching back and forward again, trying to cause an accident…

  Then he found his eyes jellied with tears. The sheer merriment of these children; maybe this was the funniest moment they’d ever know in their lives. (Noah remembered bursting out laughing in Mass, one time; his mother’s urgent eyes on him, the hoots and snorts exploding out of his body.) It was well and good, all in all, that these particular kids had no reason to be afraid, today; they still had time to be childish. If one of them leaned too far and slipped, well, people would pull back, make space, and pick up the fallen. No need to fight for scraps or air. This was enough for Margot and all of them to have fought for, Noah saw now: the freedom of these kids to mock and fart, to break and remake; even to forget.

  For a moment he saw his mother in that bath at the Excelsior, like some martyr of old, singing through her pain.

  At Place Masséna, workers in oddly smart, futuristic uniforms were dismantling the stands and trucking the pieces away. It all looked so different in the light of day. Noah couldn’t be sure which garbage can he was looking for, so he peered squeamishly into three or four.

  “You’re wishing you hadn’t thrown away Nodaddy Ding’s old hat.”

  “Well, if I can spot it…”

  “It’s not in any of those cans,” Michael told him.

  “Where is it, then?”

  The boy loped in a different direction over the black-and-white paving squares, right across the square.

  “Are you sure? Careful!” Because the kid was dipping into a trash can. “Watch for broken glass—or needles—”

  Michael emerged with a gigantic cone dripping with melted ice cream.

  “Don’t eat that!”

  “What do you think I am, a raccoon?” He tossed it aside and dug in farther.

  “Just leave it.” If Rosa could see them now… “It’s not worth it. It’s just a hat.”

  “It’s my great-great-grandpa’s fucking hat.” With a final grunt, Michael hauled it out. The once-beautiful—so-long beautiful—fedora.

  Noah hurried up to examine it. Crushed, gluey with Silly String and other disgusting substances. “Well done.” Doing his best to sound appreciative. He held it stiffly by his side, away from his pants, as he led the way toward the gigantic Ferris wheel.

  The views of Nice were magnificent, but Michael—although excited to be up so high—soon tired of them. It was Noah who noted each slate spire and brightly tiled dome, each little terra-cotta roof; he who watched (probably for the last time) the ancient city spread its arms to embrace the sea.

  It took a while to unload the cars one by one. Michael’s head dipped to his phone. “What are you playing?” Noah asked as their car dangled and wobbled.

  “Just the dinosaur game. There’s no Wi-Fi.”

  “What’s the dinosaur game?”

  “You don’t know it?” Michael showed Noah his screen—There is no internet connection, with a roughly pixelated T. rex.

  “How is that a game?”

  “Hit the space bar, he starts running, has to jump over cactuses…”

  “Cacti.”

  Michael squinted at him. “Are you correcting me again?”

  “Live with it.”

  The boy held out the cracked phone. “Try it if you want.”

  Noah did his best, tapping the bar to make the dinosaur leap. “You know in reality T. rex and cacti never shared the earth?” A whisker too slow, he crashed at the fifth cactus: GAME OVER.

  “Pathetic, dude.” Michael pointing to Noah’s score of 68. “One time I got past four thousand. Sometimes there’s birds… The colors invert, too, when it’s night for the dinosaur.” He got to work again, utterly focused. “I guess this is what we’re all going to be playing, in the end.”

  Noah didn’t follow. “What end?”

  “After the crash.”

  Noah’s eyes stayed on the racing, jumping T. rex; it was oddly mesmerizing. “After you crash into the cactus?”

  “The crash, dumb-ass. When the sea rises and the internet’s down and all. This is going to be the only game left.”

  Noah looked out for each cactus on the boy’s behalf, stomach tight in sympathetic tension, cringing in case the dinosaur wasn’t quick enough to leap, or too quick…

  GAME OVER.

  He and this boy were quite alien to each other, he
decided. Yet, in an odd way, akin.

  Michael put away his phone. “We’re up.” Their car finally dipped to the platform, and he shoved at the restraining bar.

  Back at the hotel, while the boy was taking a long shower, Noah thought to check that their plane was on time.

  At the bottom of his phone’s screen, he noticed the +1 on the voicemail icon.

  “Mr. Selvaggio, Noah, it’s Rosa, on Monday, 8 a.m. New York time.”

  She’d left the message while they were on the Ferris wheel, he realized; he hadn’t heard the ringtone through the noise. Her voice was oddly muted.

  “I wanted to speak with you in person. I have to tell you, I managed to contact Amber’s sister, Grace Drew, in Cincinnati—”

  A sinking feeling; a disappointment that this story was coming to an end already. But how irrational for Noah to feel flattened.

  Really, Joan asked, what else could you have been hoping for?

  “Unfortunately, her current circumstances don’t allow… She and her daughters have just moved in with a new partner, and the situation’s not the most stable. She says to give Michael her love, but she’s in no position to take him on, to take him in, at the moment.”

  Noah let out a long, ragged breath. So that’s why Rosa sounded regretful—not because she was taking Michael away from him, but because she couldn’t.

  Behind the wall, he heard the boy flush the toilet.

  “We can meet up again on your return to New York, talk it through. Maybe another visit with Amber. But as of now, if you aren’t able or willing to keep Michael for the foreseeable… I don’t see any alternative but to take him into our agency’s custody.”

  Noah gritted his teeth. Hell no, motherfucker!

  “So let me know. Talk to you soon, I hope.”

  He took a breath.

  Joan spoke sharply in his head. Call back and say you’re not equipped for this.