The reporter stared hard into the photo but shook his head.
“Look at their feet.”
“They’re barefoot,” the reporter said. “So what?”
The woman squinted. “Why would anyone put such a gorgeous outfit on a child and then have them run around barefoot?”
“No shoes were found in the boat?”
The woman shook her head. “Isn’t that strange? Where are the shoes? And look again,” she said, pointing to the photo. “The soles of that boy’s feet are dirty. Wouldn’t you give your kid a bath before putting him in a sailor suit?”
“Hmm,” the reporter said, squinting. “After the party, the kids were running around in the grass, where their feet got dirty. They got carried into the boat. Dirty feet hardly make them campesinos.”
The woman couldn’t resist the temptation to impress the handsome reporter with her inside knowledge, so she spilled what she knew: “Okay then, here are three more clues,” she said, as she leaned forward. She pulled down one finger. “The girls’ ears aren’t pierced.” She used her other hand to give one of her large gold hoop earrings a hard tug. “In Latin America, no self-respecting mother is going to let people mistake her girl for a boy. Newborns have their ears pierced before they ever leave the hospital. It’s practically the law.” She arched an eyebrow and tapped at the table with her long red nails.
The reporter frowned. “Maybe the parents were just smart; kids can choke on jewelry. Or maybe the parents aren’t Latino. I remember my sister wasn’t allowed to get her ears pierced until she was twelve . . . You said there are two more reasons?”
The woman leaned in a little more, looked left and right, and whispered, “How about the fact that the boys aren’t circumcised? Around here, only kids born at home are uncircumcised. That proves that they’re . . . you know . . . jíbaros.”
The reporter had leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, smiled sideways, and said, “I’m not circumcised. Do I look like a jíbaro to you?”
The woman choked a little on her cocktail. When she finally stopped coughing, and her eyes stopped watering, she cleared her throat and smiled. But she found it difficult to make eye contact with the reporter, so she held a finger up and ordered another rum cocktail. “Make it añejo this time,” she told the waiter. For the next ten minutes, she mostly addressed the small potted ficus tree to the left of the reporter’s shoulder. “Maybe the children’s parents are hippies,” she said with a nervous laugh. The reporter, who retained a smirk for the rest of the interview, prompted her for the third clue. At last the woman’s capacity for indiscretion dried up. She waved one hand around, shook her head, and said, “I’m drunk. I can’t remember. But there’s more.”
With limited information, a short deadline, and a lengthy word requirement, the reporter was forced to do a little speculating himself. He predicted, in that final update, that if the world was to learn anything new about the children and their background, it would have to be under certain conditions. First, that the children reach legal age in order to speak for themselves—their adoptive parents would understandably try to shield them from the public eye. And second, that they become curious or motivated enough to seriously investigate the question on their own.
Soon after, the reporter was assigned to interview a major-league baseball player who had initiated a reunion with his Puerto Rican birth mother in the months after a near-fatal car accident. He asked the ballplayer to comment about the mystery of the children from Mayagüez. The young man speculated that, since there were five of them, sooner or later, one of them would be compelled to search for their biological families. “I was afraid to know,” the athlete confessed from his wheelchair. “And then one day I woke up in a hospital bed, bandaged from head to toe, and decided that I just couldn’t leave this world until I knew how I got here in the first place.”
As the years passed, the Newsweek reporter thought of the five children now and then, but more so when he had children of his own. He thought of them when his wife dressed their daughter in puffy pink dresses for Easter, and when their four-year-old son wore a sailor suit to a wedding. He discovered that the spokeswoman had been absolutely right about the context of the missing shoes. People didn’t let toddlers run around barefoot on formal occasions; it probably was a significant clue. And if their story had generated so much print yet still failed to produce answers, how could the question possibly fail to stir the children’s own imaginations some day? As a parent, he hoped that their motivator would be simply curiosity, rather than, as the ballplayer had suggested, some soul-shaking misfortune.
Part I
Chapter 1
August 2007
David
I’m standing on the porch of a Victorian nested high atop a windswept island of pink granite. Griswold Island is the first in an archipelago of three hundred and sixty-five islands known as the Thimble Islands, off the coast of Connecticut. Out on Long Island Sound, colorful sailboats glide across the expanse of water that sparkles in the afternoon sunshine. The air is thick with the fragrances of summer—charcoal and suntan lotion and that fishy smell that never lets you forget you are by the sea. I’m highly entertained by the drama playing out before me. Two seagulls, fierce as gladiators, are battling over a two-pound quahog. The rocks below are a dumping ground for the birds’ trash, and they’re littered with broken oyster, clam, and mussel shells. I should be helping out inside, but I have to stay and see which bird wins the trophy clam. If Julia’s brothers and uncles were here right now, we’d be making bets.
I’ve been coming here for the last six summers with my girlfriend, Julia Griswold, who is a descendant of the man who built the house in 1886. I intend to marry her. My grandmother’s diamond engagement ring is in the right front pocket of my khakis, and I pinch the unbendable platinum between my fingers now and then. I know that the odds are slim that Julia will say yes at this point, but that’s another story. I brought the ring with me, just in case, because I can’t image a more romantic place than this.
Julia (who refers to herself these days as my “friend”) is somewhere inside the house, preparing for the arrival of our guests. The breeze sweeping though the back windows of the house carries the aroma of berries and brown sugar baking in the old stove, along with the clatter of cabinet doors and drawers being opened and shut. I know Julia well enough to know exactly what she is looking for—sterling silver iced tea spoons. Julia knows perfectly well that my brothers and sisters will push away the tea and demand to know where we keep the beer, but she’s fussing anyway. Not because of me or because of the rarity of this occasion. No, she’s doing it because the ritual of welcoming guests in this meticulous manner has been a family tradition for one hundred and twenty-one years.
There are ten branches of Griswolds who all share the cost and upkeep of this home equally, and since the summer season is so short, the family uses a strict time-share system. Amazingly, each of the ten branches of the Griswold family have cut back their allotment by one day, so that I may host the first-ever reunion of my siblings, which, needless to say, means the world to me. As far as clans go, we are polar opposites. Whereas the five of us are adoptees, the Griswolds have a family history that goes back to the Stone Age. Curiously, they’re fascinated by my lack of origins, tantalized by the very idea of not knowing anything. Around here, I’m the slightly freakish stray everyone loves. I’m a fixture at the poker games and I’ve partaken of Scotch withheld from sons. I regularly sneak in nudies for the old guys and beer for their grandsons. The aunts are fond of me too. I’m privy to secrets kept from daughters and I’m the only non–family member to have a house key.
In the butler’s pantry, Julia’s on her knees, pulling out yellowed boxes of stemware. I reach around her and pull out a tray full of tarnished silver things. “There they are!” She smiles and taps herself on the forehead. I take a handful of spoons, along with a bottle of silver polish and a flannel rag, and I wash the spoons in the long e
namel farm sink in the kitchen and lay them out on a checkered kitchen cloth, while she gets to work on the bouquet of flowers from the garden. I squeeze polishing cream onto the chamois and rub up and down until the metal is warm to the touch. I lay them across the counter and they gleam, shiny and fierce as a set of surgeon’s tools. When she spots them, her eyes light up. She kisses me on the cheek and gathers them up in the cloth. She heads out to the porch, muttering something about how her great-great-grandmother would be proud of the table setting. Besides the spoons, her dead relatives’ contribution to the welcoming ceremony include a hodgepodge of pitchers, glasses, linens, and dessert plates. My favorite is a ceramic sugar bowl and creamer set in the shape of a pair of bikinied lady frogs with huge, drooping boobs. It’s a cautionary tale—they belonged to an aunt who left the fold and went to Vegas, and in the end, they’re all she had left. But her contribution to the table setting is held in equal esteem as that of the ancestors who passed on the fancy crystal, china, and silver. In this house it’s the essence of the family as a whole that counts, and the more kooky or off-beat their personalities, the more vividly they are remembered. The Griswolds are anchored by the meticulous indulgence in each other’s idiosyncrasies, tastes, and habits. After a while, you half expect these people to pop up at any time; and this is what is motivating Julia to work so hard in the kitchen, obeying relatives she’s never even met. “I imagine my aunts with their hands on their hips, barking out orders,” she once told me. “So I do what they say.”
Ever since I got sick, I’ve developed a deep respect for the spirit behind this crazy tradition. It occurred to me one day that people in this family don’t really die. Griswolds just sort of become invisible. Their funerals are a blast. There’s champagne popping, laughter, dancing. Liquor. Lots of liquor. In fact, I had more fun at Julia’s dad’s funeral than at either of my sisters’ weddings. And yet, seven months ago, I was dismissive of what I thought were silly, wasteful, and time-consuming rituals. In fact, the first time I came, six years ago, I thought the ceremony was for me; I presumed that Julia was showing off her future-wife potential. Wanting to dash once and for all any illusions of marriage, I said, “If you’re trying to impress me with your domestic skills, don’t bother.” Back then I sported a goatee, which I tugged as I said with a shrug, “I’ve got to warn you that I’m not the marrying type.”
Her response had been one of visible relief. “That’s totally fine. You’re not my type anyway,” she said. As it turns out, we were both wrong. I intend to right that wrong.
My siblings should be pulling into the small village of Stony Creek by now. I fetch old Uncle Oz’s spyglass from a ledge between the eaves of the lower roofline. Oz, who left this world the same year as Woodrow Wilson, kept his instrument on the ledge where he could access it in “emergencies” (defined as the chance to ogle girls in swimsuits). I shut one eye and peer through the tube. It works, but the view is cloudy and there’s a crack in the lens. It kind of antiques the world. It’s like I’m in one of those films from the roaring twenties. I swear I can almost hear the big band music every time I use it. Through the spyglass, I see that my sibs are boarding the water taxi that will bring them across the mere two hundred yards of water that separate us. Even though we have a motorboat, Julia arranged for this initial taxi pickup because it can handle more cargo and luggage than our small boat can, and this way we can get everyone’s belongings over in one trip. I’ve been Griswold “house-trained,” so I diligently replace Uncle Oz’s spyglass on the ledge (if you forgot, he’d reputedly smack you silly with a fly-swatter). I look around for something a bit more contemporary, and find a pair of marine binoculars on a coffee table. I raise them to my face. I adjust the focus wheel and the image comes in clear, sharp, and steady. I yell through the screen door to let Julia know that they’re getting close.
There is a scale measure to the far left corner of the objective lens of the binoculars. I know I shouldn’t do this, but it has become a compulsion to constantly test my brain. I try to figure out the distance, represented by their position on the scale, in meters. I wait for the answer to just come to me. But nothing happens. I simply can’t figure it out. An all too familiar anger rises inside me. I grunt a little as I give in to my compulsion to hurl the binoculars over the rail and into the yard. One of the seagulls takes flight as the binoculars sail over the lawn toward a pile of rocks, then land soundlessly in the spongy heart of a hydrangea bush, unharmed and suspended by their strap. I take a deep breath. For a moment, I notice only the smell of the sea, the cawing of birds, and the clusters of sea grass that are hissing and waving in the warm summer breeze.
A screen door slams behind me. I turn around. Julia’s got her hands on her hips. She shakes her head as she passes me on her way to retrieve the binoculars. She is elegant and reedlike, with shoulder-length blonde hair. I see that she’s been shopping in the attic again: she’s wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses that actually belonged to an aviator, a tooled leather belt that went to Woodstock, and a conical bamboo hat that hails from the Vietnam War.
“I aimed for the plant,” I say.
“You have to control your impulses, David,” she says as she holds up the binoculars, “or you can take your little party back to your mom and dad’s house.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Do I get credit for throwing the binoculars, not the spyglass?” I ask with a sheepish shrug of the shoulders.
She shakes her head, and the frames of her glasses gleam in the sunlight. “Where’s your stress ball?”
“Upstairs.”
“Doesn’t do you any good up there.”
“Squeezing a ball when I’m pissed off only makes me more pissed off at how stupid I feel squeezing a ball.” I pull my baseball cap down lower over my eyes. Julia’s face softens and she lets out a deep breath. Slowly, she takes off her Vietnam hat and opens her arms, which I dive into like a child. When she finally pries herself out from my clutch she says, “Hey, you haven’t shown a hint of aphasia all morning. Did you notice that? Not a skip.” She turns and points to the water. “Did everyone make it? Can you see?” she asks, and I know what she’s doing—it’s one of her teacher tricks. She’s leading me down a mental exit ramp, taking the focus off the frustration of my diminishing faculties. That, and the fact that I have the mental acumen of a six-year-old means it works. I find myself looking out over the water and squinting.
“Can I even count anymore?” I harrumph and begin to do the math. “One, two, three, four. Yup, they’re all here. One more sibling and I’d need a calculator.” I peek out of the corner of my eye . . . yes. I made her smile.
We turn our attention to the approaching water taxi. I’ve seen both my sister Taina and my brother Adrian in the last few weeks, but we haven’t been all together, all five of us, since 1979. Our first full reunion should have happened at both Holly’s and Taina’s weddings, but someone backed out last minute, both times. And so it turns out that being diagnosed with cancer has a silver lining after all. The zillions of obstacles to a reunion miraculously lift and flutter away, and all of a sudden here they come.
My brothers and sisters disembark along with the smell of diesel fuel and the noise of an idling engine. Ray steps off the boat first. He still has crazy, curly hair down to his shoulders and his wide body blocks the sun for a moment. We slap each other on the arm and he says, “I’m gonna fatten you up, man!”
I pat my belly. “I’ve gained twenty-eight pounds, man. I’m skinny by reputation only.” Over his shoulder, I glimpse boxes of bulky and absurd things: a piñata, a snow-cone machine, a Slip ’n Slide, a karaoke machine. Stuff that should be steak, wine, noodles, paper towels, but that’s Ray. And then there’s Taina, who has brought more trunks than a Vanderbilt. You never know who she’ll be—artiste, hippie chick, urban hip-hop, country-club prep, motorcycle momma, salsa dancer. She’s taller than normal today. “Did you grow?”
She twists one platformed foot out to account for her stature. She’s weari
ng a white-and-green palm frond pattern sundress reminiscent of fifties Hollywood, with a neckline that shows off her glassy, golden brown skin, with underlying collarbones that point upward like wings. “Hey! It’s the Chiquita Banana girl,” I say. Tai squints and then slowly raises a red-tipped middle finger at me.
“Baby boy!” Holly shouts, and she grabs my face and plants kisses on my cheeks and forehead like an overbearing aunt.
“Ew,” I say, and wipe them off with the back of my hand. Holly’s barely five feet tall and is believed to be the youngest of the five of us, and yet, she is, without a doubt, the big sister. This may have to do with the fact that she’s the only one of us that has kids, and is therefore more parentlike, or that she teaches kickboxing, or that she’s naturally bossy. And now that she finally broke down and got our clan’s signature starfish tattoo, watch out. She holds out her newly inked hand for me to see: a mama starfish with three tiny starfish in tow, representing her three boys. I suddenly understand her long-held reluctance to get it—it’s garishly at odds with the Ring-Pop-sized sparkler on her finger. “I finally did it!” she says, beaming and pointing to the tattoo with her other hand.
Stay with Me Page 2