The bank officer and Dominique nod. Yes, of course. Pro forma.
The deep stack of paperwork is signed. My signature part of it, part of the record, proof of criminality for some future prosecution. (Or evidence of ignorance, which I would continue to have to feign.) I’m on the hook. While the Stewartsons remain hidden behind their shuffle of identities.
“And last thing, I just need each of you”—the bank officer gesturing to Amanda and me—“to enter your Social Security number and a new account pin on this computer keypad.” He shifts the keyboard and screen around a little to face us. “Do you happen to know your Social Security number, honey?”
Yes, Amanda nods.
And here technology intersects with the human. Interfaces with the human, to make mistakes, to be fallible.
Because I always hit “Send” with my last finger. Instinct, unthinking, habit.
And focused on what I am doing, forgetting for a moment the necessity to hide it, feeling a moment of finality, of completion, of dropped guard, and joining a million previous keystrokes out of sheer habit, thinking of a hundred ever-changing codes in my online life, I type in a new code number, hit “Send”—unfolding my missing fingertip in the process.
I sense, out of the corner of my eye, that Sandi Stewartson has seen it.
I glance up at her. She is looking at me.
I am ready for all hell to break loose. Ready, fully expecting, to see her eyes widen in question and alarm, then narrow in realization of my lie, of where my loyalties lie. Ready for her to curtly, furiously, definitively stop the proceedings. After all this, all this careful effort, in my return to the familiar keyboard, my one true home, I have fucked up.
Has she seen it? How could she not?
Everyone’s had the experience of hitting “Send,” and wishing they could call it back.
Add me to that list.
My own unique version of it.
The tip sliced off that was a tip-off.
The tip of the iceberg.
But if Sandi did see it, she says nothing. Indicates nothing. Returns my look evenly, with no affect, nothing revealed behind her eyes.
Is she assuming—betting—that despite my deceit, the money, the deal, may still be going through? Is that a risk she’s willing to take? Maybe so.
I can’t really know what she’s seen. Or hasn’t.
I can’t really know what she’ll say to Dave, or keep to herself.
I can’t really know what her silence means.
We wait silently in the conference room—Sandi, Dominique, Amanda, and I—sipping coffee, nervously breaking off pieces of blueberry muffins and edges of flaky croissants, while the bank VP and Dave check on the transfer of funds.
They return in a few minutes, and I catch Dave nodding curtly to Sandi. All of us thank the bank VP and the attractive trust officer, and we all exit the bank into the Las Vegas sun, nothing changed, everything changed.
Send—where technology becomes action, doesn’t it? Where the cerebral becomes the tactile and consequential. Where the theoretical becomes the actual. Where there is no going back.
Outside in the sun-soaked parking lot, Dominique gestures to Amanda—a quick, authoritative little flick of her palm—to come with her to her sedan. I notice it is not her blue Camaro. The little bit of personality I saw in her driveway. Driving something more invisible for the occasion. And slowly, too slowly, I start to ask myself: Why? Amanda silently follows the well-dressed, official-looking woman her parents have sent to retrieve her.
Dave and Sandi Stewartson stand silently, observing them—watching until the trust officer’s sedan pulls sedately out of the lot—before heading to their own car (a silver Nissan, rented for safety’s sake at a discount facility last night), an energetic spring in their steps, car doors closing with a slap of exuberance, tinny little engine revving eagerly, backing the utterly forgettable sheet metal out and putting it into drive and aiming it toward a new life.
Not a glance my way from any of them.
There in the sunny parking lot, I don’t exist for any of them.
A purposeful avoidance from all of them. A silence that speaks loudly.
Dominique’s silence, her resolute looking away, because she doesn’t know my role, where I stand, what my loyalties are or aren’t, and her employer has no way to know either, and her best and only choice therefore is to cut me off. Why risk any interaction?
The Stewartsons’ silence, to signal they are done with me. That there is no partnership. Never was. (They had brought me, their partner, in their rental car with Amanda. Amanda now returned. Partnership now dissolved.)
And Amanda’s studiously averted eyes? Because she doesn’t know where to look. Because what I’ve revealed, what she’s experienced, what she’s observed, is all too much for a fifteen-year-old to absorb, so all she can manage in the moment is to keep her eyes down and do what she is told.
I’m cast off. Instantly returned to the shadowy half existence that has constituted my adult life. Abandoned without a word in the sunbaked parking lot.
A purposeful message. That I don’t exist. That I have never existed. A pedestrian left in a strip mall parking lot with no means of transportation. Not someone who’s being handed five million. I can’t even get a ride from them.
I can still see the Stewartsons’ taillights. Heading quickly back to Big Eddie’s? To dispose of Archer Wallace, in some way as efficient as it is unimaginable? Or leaving him chained to the bathroom fixtures, or the living room radiator, his body to be found by one of Eddie’s henchmen weeks or months from now? Getting a head start, a quick jump, on their new life?
And I am left alone in the lot.
The late-morning sun beating down on the black macadam. The heat dancing up from the paved surface, malevolent and merciless. The birdless, natureless, eerie strip-mall silence.
Until Dominique pulls back into the lot.
Having circled around, I realize, to be sure the Stewartsons are gone.
She waves me over insistently.
“Get in.”
I look once more down the road to be sure the Stewartsons are gone.
“Get in. Now.”
And as I do, Dominique gestures to me to be silent in Amanda’s presence, as she puts the big featureless sedan in gear.
She pulls out of the bank lot. I’m in the passenger seat; Amanda is in the back. Dominique looks at my hand. To Amanda in the backseat, “You can take off your bandage.”
Amanda looks inquisitively at me. I nod that it’s okay.
Amanda begins to work on the bandage. Eager. Relieved.
“I hacked into the database of the police lab, so I saw the DNA test results before anyone,” she says. Smart, I’m thinking. And if I had not had the Stewartsons hovering around me, I could have done the same. Her voice gets lower, so Amanda, unwrapping her bandage in the back, can’t hear. “I realized what you’d done for her, and I was furious.”
I was confused. “Furious? But I . . . I saved her . . .”
“Not at you. At him. At Wallace. Because your sacrifice—it told me what you felt for her. How connected. So I knew he had somehow done to you what he did to me. Took the same advantage of your loyalty. Treated you just as badly. He used us. Used us both . . .”
“Wait. What are you saying?”
She pauses. Looks straight ahead, making sure not to look anywhere else, not to see or gauge my reaction, not to let it burrow into her. “I’m talking about my role.”
“Your role?”
She looks back in the mirror at Amanda, and says, very quietly, “Not just a bedmate.”
Realization climbs up through me slowly. Like bile. Like poison.
And I see the perfect order of it. The perfect mirror of it. The perfect orderly mirror that I should have guessed at.
Her parallel l
ife to mine—that has existed for years—is suddenly more parallel.
The parallel slavery. The parallel loyalty. The parallel enforcement of that loyalty.
And the Amazing Wallace’s MO, while perverted, is at least apparently consistent.
That just as I contributed the sperm, Dominique contributed the womb.
EIGHTEEN
I am instantly returned, tossed back to the moment—the vision—of Sasha being rushed to the hospital near the end of her pregnancy. I hadn’t seen her enter or emerge from the hospital, of course, couldn’t be there or risk being seen or even coming near, and afterward she was spirited away and holed up in Shangri-la as always, off-limits, and on the security cameras I caught only a glimpse of her leaving or arriving with her loose-fitting caftans and draped, layered clothing. Now I could fill in the blanks. Either her pregnancy had ended there at the hospital, the child stillborn, her fragile incompetent womb that had required so much care and attention beforehand (the female equivalent, the perfect match, to Wallace’s own low-motility sperm and poor reproductive prospects). Or—those same loose-fitting caftans serving an opposite purpose—she had never been carrying a child at all, could not carry a child to term, and they had arranged beforehand for Dominique to be their surrogate. Either way, Wallace the Amazing had worked his magic. Because here was the baby they wanted, taking center stage exactly as needed, conveniently presenting itself at the right time, an identical product of my own sperm (with Sasha’s own egg? or with Dominique’s? I couldn’t yet say which), the baby Sasha wanted and was ready for either way. A baby ready to step onstage from the wings, Sasha’s husband saving the day, controlling the moment, anticipating the contingencies—just like his redundancy of me and Dominique, isn’t it? Using us as redundancy one more time, so the stage act of their charmed lives can continue uninterrupted, the show can go on, and he is Amazing once more.
I am processing it, trying to see it, but with Amanda in the backseat, Dominique can’t yet say more. And she is already moving on to a more urgent explanation, and I have to pay attention:
“Once Wallace decided to pay the ransom, and the Stewartsons decided to have the transfer done electronically, it put that money in play, made it suddenly digitally accessible, which you know as well as I do.” She glances over at me, just for a moment, a look filled with emotion, but she is afraid of it, and I am afraid of it as she can see, and she looks back at the road. “The Stewartsons, or whoever they actually are, are going to head into a bank, and transfer the money to a new account, to keep it away from you and Wallace and everyone else.” She looks at me once more. Did you really think differently? Did you really think they’d cut you in? “But when they try, there won’t be any there. It’s already transferring to another account at another bank. My bank. My name. The transfer took place a few minutes after they checked it. It’ll take them at least fifteen minutes to figure out what happened. Which gives us a fifteen-minute head start.”
Us. It’s the word I hear clearest. The word I catch most, linger on.
Us, I am thinking, looking back at Amanda.
“We made him, we made Wallace the Amazing, and look at how he treated us, look what he did to us.”
We made him, yes, but look what else we made in the process. A girl. A daughter.
We are taking our daughter, and leaving. Starting over.
She doesn’t say it, she can’t say it aloud with Amanda behind us, who is pulling her knees up in the backseat, curling herself in to comfort, to still her anxiety, squinting into the desert sun streaming in the window, but that is what is happening. I can feel that that is what Dominique is doing, where she is going, that that is why I am suddenly in the passenger seat: Get in. Get in now. Us.
And the startling possibility now occurs to me: Does Wallace even know Dominique is here? Has she launched all this without his knowledge, staying one step ahead of him, rearranged meeting times and locations? He probably doesn’t even know this is happening. Was this bank meeting all hers to begin with?
Either way, now everyone will be after us. The Amazing, the Stewartsons, the Las Vegas police. And because it is a kidnapping, probably even the FBI. Everyone.
Yet amid this knowledge, this coursing current of anxiety, I can’t suppress the thought:
We are a family. Parents in the front seat, our girl behind us.
A family with the open road ahead of us? A new start, a new life? Reclaiming our past? Creating our future?
We are a family.
A family for only a minute or so.
The briefest family ever.
“So what did you think when you saw the DNA results?” I ask Dominique. “I guess Wallace wanted to act before it became public.” And not wait for all the questions, the swirl of motive and confusion, that those test results would cause. Unless, as I guessed, it was Dominique who was acting so quickly—and I hope her answer, or its evasiveness, will provide me a clue about that.
Dominique looks at me. “What do you mean?”
“The DNA results from the lab. Showing that I’m the father.”
Her brow wrinkles. “What are you talking about?”
So she hasn’t yet guessed. The DNA results she is talking about must only concern the fact, the reassuring fact, that the fingertip is not Amanda’s. But I’m a little confused, thrown off—wouldn’t a lab’s processed DNA results note the partial match, no matter what? If Dominique had intercepted the results, wouldn’t she at least have been wondering about that?
“It was my sperm,” I tell her—unconcerned right now about how much Amanda, in the backseat, hears or understands or believes. “Wallace asked, and I said yes. I’m the donor.” It feels strange . . . my first admission to the world, my first assertion aloud, of my fatherhood.
Her wrinkled brow seems to suddenly smooth into understanding. She smiles sadly, wistfully. Shakes her head slowly—somehow mournful. And says it slowly, as if to a child, as if knowing the resistance, the incomprehension, it will be met with: “The DNA testing showed exactly what the world expected it to.”
“What the world expected?”
“That Wallace the Amazing is the father.”
“But how could it show that?”
A pause. A beat. “Because he is.”
I am about to ask, want to ask, But how could YOU know that?
But I don’t have to. Dominique looks at me. Smiling sadly.
And I realize that she knows it in the clearest, most fundamental way she could.
For the most obvious reason.
Because she is Amanda’s mother.
Not merely a womb. Not just a surrogate.
The simplest possible explanation—usually the best.
And sometimes also the worst.
And my depositing semen for him? Watching Amanda grow? Seeing myself in her? Was that all my imagination? My faith? My delusion? The deposit of semen. The container. The sterile process. A kind of religious ceremony. Creating a holy moment and memory for myself. Enforcing my loyalty. My commitment. Including saving her finger. Protecting her.
But she looks like me. Our eyes. Our noses. Our hands. Our fingertips to momentarily fool the Stewartsons.
Had I only deluded myself?
Was it only the story I was telling myself? That Wallace the Amazing, the shaman, was helping me tell myself?
I’m the king of data. But here the data was interpretive. I am the one saying she looks like me. Was it just my interpretation of our looks? Could they be interpreted any other way? I needed data, and didn’t have it. I was suddenly like any audience member—willing to be led by my own delusions.
I stared in the rearview mirror again. Drank in Amanda’s features. Tried to examine them coldly, analytically, observe them without the rush of connection that I had always felt whenever I had a fleeting chance to see them. We identify one another differently, after all. H
alf a family swears that a girl is the spitting image of her mother, the other family members swear she’s the very image of her father, others think they are seeing the reincarnation of a grandmother or a great aunt. Proof of how differently we can see one another. How differently we can see the world. Was it simply a delusion?
I thought again about the past. Further back than my mother’s funeral. To my father’s car crash. A father I didn’t remember. Knew only through the small handful of prominently displayed photos, which my mother never discussed. His near-complete, pre-Internet absence. My missing, fractured history.
Dominique was watching me, silently, because she realized, a few moments ahead of me, what I was about to know.
Did Amanda seem to look like me, only because I so thoroughly deluded myself?
Or did Amanda look like me, because she was my sister?
And if she was my sister, then I knew—you know—who was my father.
I looked down at my missing fingertip. My sleight of hand.
Sleight of hand—primitive, elementary, a childlike skill, compared to Wallace’s sleight of mind. His sleight of memory. Practiced on me, as if I were a silent stage assistant sawed in half. Folded into a box to disappear and never be seen again. Sleight of mind, sleight of memory, in which I was apparently an early practice subject. An early experiment—and an early, and encouraging, success.
His first success. His greatest success.
As soon as I can get to a computer, I will be back online, looking once again for news of my father’s funeral, but there will be nothing. Because it was too early for the Internet? That was always the assumption I made when I had looked before. And yet with everything else, in my ability to search, to dig down digitally, to make connections, I have always found something, some wispy string of evidence, of a thing’s existence, yet even in local newspapers of the time, there had been literally nothing, my research skills had hit a brick wall, and now I see: the only thing more shocking than what you can discover on the Internet is what you don’t find there. The truly shocking thing can be absence. No story at all—that can be the biggest story of all.
Two for the Show Page 20