by Jan Ellison
Which brings me to the point of this communication. Some months after Louise died, Daisy returned to Paris to consider the future of her mother’s possessions. At that time, she found a wooden box that held her mother’s lifetime correspondence, as well as various keepsakes. It did not amount to much, I’m afraid, as Louise was not a sentimentalist, but for our purposes here, there were a few relevant items. There was a roll of film, which Daisy developed in a darkroom here in Paris (she is quite a capable photographer), and a letter from a person who shares your name and, I presume, your identity, dated 30th December 1989, bearing a postmark from Dublin, Ireland. You may or may not recall the nature of that letter, and it is of no account now, since Daisy destroyed it after she read it, except that it caused Daisy considerable upheaval, particularly, it seems, the use, in the letter, of the word “ecstasy.” The discovery of that letter, along with the roll of film, sent Daisy into what the doctors suspect was a “hypomanic episode,” which, in turn, at some point last summer, escalated to full-blown mania.
Suffice it to say that when she arrived in San Francisco last spring, and mailed you a letter, her mental health had been compromised. As the summer progressed, it continued to deteriorate.
I understand that Daisy presented herself at your place of business, where you generously offered her living quarters and employment, and that your son, Robert, became her close acquaintance. I also understand there was an unfortunate flooding of your store, an incident for which Daisy takes full responsibility, and the memory of which, I assure you, is cause for deep regret on her part. She tells me there was also a horrific accident in a car of Daisy’s possession that occurred while Daisy was driver and your son her passenger. I have been informed by Daisy that your son was very seriously injured, and for that the both of us send our most profound regrets. She wishes for me to reassure you that she had no intention of injuring your son. In fact, she seems to have been deeply attached to him, though she has not offered any details to me as to the particular nature of their involvement. This was Daisy’s third serious automobile accident, and we have agreed there is no need for her to operate a vehicle again in the foreseeable future. It is my hope that your son has recovered fully, and if this is not the case, I offer my gravest sympathies.
Daisy’s behavior the night of the accident, along with her disappearance, must have seemed from your vantage point unforgivable. I hope my letter will serve as a starting point for a reassessment of that sentiment. She came straight from San Francisco to me, in Paris, and I assure you she is currently receiving the best possible psychiatric care.
In short, I hope you will forgive Daisy for the damage to the business of which you are proprietor, and most important, the injuries, both emotional and physical, your son suffered at her hand. I assure you she has forgiven you for what she perceived as your role in her father’s death. I do not mean to suggest her perception is reality, but perception is often loath to give up its stranglehold on the mind when it comes to the strange bedfellows of love and death.
Yours, faithfully,
Arthur Greatrex, Esquire
Forty-two
DAISY. An Anglo-Saxon word that means “Day’s eye.” The flower so named because of the way it opens at dawn. Also a translation of the French Marguerite, and used as a pet form of Margaret. The name Malcolm and Louise used for their daughter when they were alive, but not the name she chose when she left Europe and reinvented herself—and not the name you will hear when she visits you in your dreams.
Emme. One syllable. Like the letter.
Grief. One syllable. Like a great black wave.
I sat at the table on Valentine’s Day with the letter in my lap and it came at me—grief—catching me in its curve and twisting me inside its history. Then, a day later, when I showed the letter to your father, and he in turn presented evidence of his own, that wave of grief shoved me under and took my breath away.
Grief for your father, for his predicament.
Grief for Malcolm, more than twenty years after the fact. And for Louise.
Grief for you, on many fronts. Because the woman you fell in love with last summer was not who you thought she was, and your father was not who you thought he was, which makes you not who you thought you were—and me a stranger, and an enemy, for making all of that true.
And finally, grief for Daisy, whose own grief over the loss of her parents I’d opened anew. What would I have written in that letter? What would I have apologized for or explained? What burden did I transfer to Louise—and then Daisy—only because at that moment, I did not have the strength to carry it myself? Every idea I have is a reconstruction. After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision. I don’t know what I wrote in that letter beyond the single clue I’ve been given—the word ecstasy.
I reread Arthur Greatrex’s letter many times. I tried to imagine her—Emme, Emme-and-Emme, Daisy, Margaret, Marguerite Greatrex Church—that final night, after she’d screamed at me and left our house and you’d walked her back and taken her keys. Before you climbed into her car. I tried to claw my way inside her brain as she put the plug in the drain and stuffed a towel in the clean-out and turned the faucet on full blast. As she descended the stairs, the lights from the geometric cutouts casting blue triangles on her red fur boots. Was it madness—or was it plain, bald want? She wanted her parents back, and because she could not have them, what she’d wanted instead was some small revenge. The mania had given her a reckless invincibility, as drinking used to give me, a reckless certainty that she could, and should, get what she wanted at any cost.
And maybe the next thing she’d wanted, after flooding the store, was her car. Or maybe that was only a ruse. Maybe what she really wanted was you.
I picture her storming the twelve blocks of sidewalk in her red fur boots and her gold-leaf dress and her goose-feather choker. I see her standing in the gloom outside our house, texting you upstairs in Polly’s room. I hear the sound of your phone next to your ear. I watch you rise, and read, and text her back, and drop your phone, inadvertently, on Polly’s bed. What happened next? Did you find her inside the house, snatching the keys, and know you had to follow her? Did you step outside to save her and somehow sacrifice yourself?
I believe Arthur Greatrex, Esquire. I believe she never intended to hurt you. I believe that what she felt for you was not a sinister emotion but a tender one—drawn from the bucket of love.
I WENT TO see your father in Gold Hill the day after I received Arthur Greatrex’s letter. I brought the letter and the photo taken in front of the White Cliffs that I’d received in June. The photo Daisy herself had printed twice in a darkroom in Paris, then reexposed one print to achieve the desired effect, then reexposed the other for a different effect. One copy went to Patrick. The other to me.
Jonathan put on his glasses and read Arthur Greatrex’s letter. When he finished, he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes and handed it back to me.
“ ‘Ecstasy’?” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Horrible. I have no memory of it. I don’t know what possessed me. I’m just thankful she destroyed it. If I had to read it, I might die of shame.”
He looked at me steadily. “I think it’s time you told me the whole story.”
So I did. I told him everything I’d left out.
The morning on the satin sheets with Malcolm at the penthouse. The ongoing affair with Patrick in London. Montmartre, when Malcolm had felt dizzy climbing the stairs. How we’d met Mary McShane at the top. How I hadn’t returned to the penthouse with Malcolm. How I hadn’t known it was to be the last full day of his life.
I ended with the letter I’d written in the pub in Dublin while Jonathan slept at the bed-and-breakfast, the letter that included the word ecstasy. I slid the photograph of Malcolm and Louise and Patrick and me at the White Cliffs toward him. He stared at the photo intensely, saying nothing. He stood and picked up a photo of you off his mantel, from one of yo
ur high school swim meets—an action shot, right at the start of your dive. He laid the two photos side by side on the table. He leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling, as if the words that needed to be set down between us were written on the exposed beams.
“Well,” he said. “That explains some things. But not quite everything.”
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath. He went to his desk in the corner and pulled out a folder and slid it across the table toward me. The document on top, which I had never seen before, was titled “Information for Families: Tissue Typing for Kidney Donation.” It explained tissue typing in lay terms, describing how a child inherits three antigens from each parent, but cannot inherit a number that neither parent has, and how a parent might not necessarily have a blood group compatible with his or her child. There was a final paragraph titled “A Special Note on Paternity Testing”: “It is important for a male relative to understand that tissue typing is similar to what is sometimes called ‘paternity testing.’ We ask that you consider this carefully, and before you agree to the test, we would want you, as a family, to decide who should be told if the results are unexpected.”
I read that paragraph, and finally, after all this time, I understood.
He’d known. All through your ordeal, and your release, and Christmas at home, and your departure. He’d been taking that folder out and studying it at night, I imagine, the way I’d been studying the contents of the hatbox. No wonder he hadn’t been able to forgive me. No wonder he’d moved out.
“There are only two cases in the medical literature,” your father said. He formed quote marks with his fingers. “Two cases of ‘unexpected discovery of misattributed paternity in kidney donor pairs.’ ” He gave me a meager smile. “At least Robbie and I are not entirely alone in our predicament.”
I sat in a stunned silence. Was that silence an acknowledgment that I had always known?
I don’t know. I know that I had not been engaged in a cover-up, as your father must have suspected. But perhaps I had experienced a “distortion in thinking,” to use a phrase borrowed from the clinical literature of addiction. I had not lied, but I had not seen.
I closed my eyes. I sat alone at my end of the table, remembering. The flash of lightning. The roll of thunder and the hammering rain. The bout of undeserved pleasure on white satin sheets.
“It was Malcolm,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“That means Daisy is—”
“Robbie’s half sister.”
This time it was your father who closed his eyes.
“We don’t know what went on between them,” I said, when he opened them. “It might have been nothing.”
“It might have not been nothing, too.”
“Mitch told you? When you met about the tissue tests after the accident?”
“Yes.”
“But you chose not to tell me until now.”
“Yes.”
“Does Robbie know?”
“No. I didn’t tell Robbie. Though I wish I had. At first I thought it could wait until he was better. And then I thought it could wait until he came home from overseas. I didn’t want to spoil his year. After everything that’s happened. After how hard he’s worked, first to win the grant, then to recover. And anyway, it was your story to tell, not mine. I didn’t even know what was what or who was who. And I was too angry, and too disgusted, to tell you what I knew. What I thought I knew.”
“What did you think you knew?”
He balanced his chair back and stared at the ceiling again, avoiding my eyes as he spoke. “All these months I thought it was that kid from the ferry. That skinny redheaded kid with the fiddle. I thought he was Robbie’s father. What was his name? He was from Wexford.”
“Cathal,” I said.
“No, not Cathal. It was an M. Maurice. Morann. Something like that.”
“Manus.”
“Yes. After I left the berth that night, didn’t you two—”
“No!” I said. “Nothing happened. I didn’t let him touch me. I never lied to you about that. You have to believe me.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know it was Malcolm? How do you know it wasn’t Patrick?”
“I know it’s not Patrick.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just am.”
“You didn’t use protection with Malcolm?”
“He said … He said it was all right. I thought that meant … I don’t know. I don’t remember. I trusted him, I guess.”
“Well, maybe he was in love with you.”
“I don’t know,” I said, though I did know Malcolm had been in love with me.
“Maybe he wanted to father a son.”
“Stop. Just stop. Please.”
“All right. I’ll stop. The important thing is we need to reach Robbie. We need to tell him the truth. You need to tell him. From the beginning.”
“All right,” I said. “I will.”
But five days later, when we tried to reach you at the institute in Japan, we discovered you were no longer there.
Forty-three
THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT RULED OUT Jonathan as your biological father. History implicated Malcolm. But history is a human creation, and so is memory, and so is the science of medicine. And humans are only human. We wanted absolute certainty. We wanted hard evidence. So the day after your father and I confessed to each other at Gold Hill, we went to work. We had everything we needed to know about your DNA from the tests conducted after your accident. We had everything we needed to know about Emme’s, too, it turned out, since her blood had been drawn and added to her medical record at the hospital in Santa Cruz. We ought not to have had access to that record, but we had connections in high places. Mitch made some phone calls, then summoned your father into his office. He left a particular patient’s record on his desk, where your father could see it, then he stepped out of his office to attend to the important matters of life and death.
WE SENT YOU an email on February 20—the day after we reviewed the results of the sibling DNA tests, six days after I read the letter from Louise’s uncle—asking you to call us. We received, right away, an out-of-office reply from your Gmail account. The subject line was a Zen proverb: “When you seek it, you cannot find it.”
We called the administrative office of the institute and were told you had withdrawn for the semester. We spoke to the director, who told us in excellent English that he was terribly sorry, he had assumed we had been fully aware of your withdrawal from the program. We grilled him about the circumstances of your leaving and were told it had been cordial and deliberate, and that you had withdrawn for reasons of “health and well-being.”
We retraced our steps. We walked through the summer, and the accident, and the coma, and the double-coma, as we thought of it, and your recovery. Then Christmas at home, and sending you off to Japan, and the few cryptic emails we’d received from you there, the first telling us you’d arrived safely, the second that you were settled into your living quarters, the third that the coursework was unfortunately more conventional than you’d anticipated. We second-guessed every decision. We walked back along the thread, trying to find the beginning, but we came up short.
We were tortured by the question of why and where you had gone, and also by the deplorable but seemingly inescapable corollary: Who was to blame?
We did not blame you, of course, after all you’d been through. I did not blame your father, either; in my mind, he was a victim, too. I would have blamed myself, except that the thing that would have alienated you from me—the secret I’d kept from you, unwittingly, all your life—was not yet known to you. So I was inclined to blame a temporary insanity brought on by a return of the coma dreams.
Your father was hell-bent on holding the professor at Berkeley, whom you’d been
studying under, responsible. The physics God, Dr. Ivan Karinsky, who also happened to be a Zen master and interested in the intersection between science and enlightenment. Your father was told by the physics department that Dr. Karinsky was on sabbatical in India. Your father would not relent until he was given contact information—in, of all places, Varanasi. We spoke briefly with Dr. Karinsky over the phone, but all we learned was that he did not know your whereabouts, and that even if he did, he would not be at liberty to disclose them, given that you were legally an adult. He added that it was your prerogative to seek healing wherever you thought you could find it, and that if indeed you had embarked on a spiritual journey, our trying to find you would only drive you further away. His response infuriated us both. It was all I could do not to tell him that clearly he was a person who had never raised a child.
I contacted Arthur Greatrex in Paris to see if he knew anything, but he assured me he did not. He wouldn’t allow me to speak to Emme directly. I went so far as to ask him to put his hand over his heart and promise me that if he learned anything at all, he would contact me immediately. Like the gentleman he was, he gave me his word.
I went to speak to Michael Moss at the Green Underthing. A long shot, I knew, but I sensed he had in some way been in competition for Emme’s affections. What did I think? That he’d slain you in a transcontinental duel and hidden your body? Or that he’d locked you away so he could win the fair lady’s hand? He looked at me like I’d lost my mind and told me he’d never even heard of you, and he hadn’t heard from Emme since before she flooded the store. He softened, it’s true, when I told him you were my only son, and that you and Emme had been involved in some way, and that now you’d disappeared.
Mitch came to see us, but he could offer nothing more than a reassurance that there was no reason to expect your health would fail. You did not need dialysis. Your kidney had astonished us all by healing completely, as had your concussion and your lung and your ribs and your knee, though you would probably continue to walk with a slight limp for the rest of your life. We assured him we were not concerned about the limp, and he assured us he knew that; he was only attempting to give us the fullest possible information.