A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  It was a miracle. My children were actually giving me a period of uninterrupted peace.

  I went back to my desk and sat for a minute, tapping my finger against the keys. The police had confiscated the contents of Bobby’s filing cabinet, so there was no way for me to see if he’d ever gotten a reply from his birth mother. However, I could check to see if he’d gotten an E-mail. I’d already noticed that Bobby kept careful track of his paper files and the documents on his computer. It stood to reason that he would do the same with his E-mail records.

  He didn’t disappoint me. His E-mail program had a carefully organized archiving system. Unfortunately, because I didn’t know his mother’s name or E-mail address, it was going to be a challenge sifting through the hundreds of messages in the “Personal Correspondence” archive to find which one might have come from her. Using the program’s Find command, I started searching by E-mail subject heading. “Birth Mother” came up with nothing, as did “Mother.” “Mom,” however, led me to a series of E-mails from Bobby’s sister, Michelle, complaining about how their mother had criticized Michelle’s new living room furniture. Apparently, Michelle had bought it at IKEA, and Dr. Katz felt constrained to point out that in Sweden, where the chain had begun, and which the good doctor had recently visited to deliver a paper on “Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization,” IKEA was considered about as classy as Wal-Mart. Michelle had written to Bobby seeking reassurance 1. That IKEA was a reasonable place to buy a couch, and 2. That their mother was a bitch. I searched through Bobby’s “Sent Mail” file and found that he had responded to both in the affirmative.

  Subject headings “Adoption,” “Adopt,” and “Adopted” led nowhere. Finally, I decided I had to find a more efficient way to search. I launched Bobby’s Internet browser and looked up his favorite sites. The California Reunion Registry was listed, but I already knew that Bobby hadn’t found his mother through that site. Nothing else in the favorite sites list looked promising, so I clicked down the Go button, hoping he had given his browser a large cache. He had. The browser allowed me to track the last two hundred web sites he’d visited immediately before he died.

  Bobby had searched a medical site for a cure for athlete’s foot (I made a mental note not to shower at the gym) and bought a Palm Pilot on-line. He’d posted a review of the new John Grisham on Amazon.com (he liked it okay but wasn’t thrilled) and bid on a set of golf clubs on eBay. None of these activities, I thought, was that of a man about to kill himself. As of a day or two before his death, Bobby had planned to be around long enough to monitor a five-day on-line auction and receive a package that would take three to seven days to arrive. If he had committed suicide, it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. I wondered if the police had come across this information.

  Bobby had also, I noticed, checked his I-Groups home page over and over again. I-Groups is one of the many sites on the web that allows people with similar interests to join up in E-mail circles. The site has hundreds of different groups, some open to the public, some open only to those approved by the members of the group. Being part of an Email circle through a service like I-Groups lets members send messages to the group as a whole, instead of having to cc each individual member. I was part of a couple of these circles myself. Friends from college and I had been E-mailing for quite some time. When I was pregnant with Ruby, I’d joined a list for mothers due in the same month and spent a very self-indulgent and satisfying nine months comparing stretch marks and hemorrhoids. For a while, I’d participated in an I-Group for “recovering attorneys” but found the “support” I got a bit over the top. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d weaned myself off heroin; all I’d done was quit my job.

  I held my breath as I selected the I-Groups link in Bobby’s Go menu. If he hadn’t saved his password as a cookie to be entered automatically when the page came up, there would be no way for me to check his I-Groups home page and access the archives of posted messages.

  I was lucky. Like me, Bobby was not particularly security conscious. His home page showed just one I-Group. It was called Parentfinder@I-Groups.com. I clicked over to the archive and began sifting through the messages. Bobby had joined the group almost three months before. His initial message informed the other members that he was an adoptee looking for his birth parents, who were not registered with the California Reunion Registry. He asked for advice about alternative ways to find them. And boy did he get it.

  As I scrolled down through the many replies to Bobby’s initial posting, I was interrupted by the scourge of the work-at-home parent: her children. Ruby and Isaac wandered into the room. Isaac was naked from the waist down.

  “Isaac! Where are your pants?” We’d only recently convinced Isaac to lose his diapers. It had taken about forty pounds of M&M’s doled out one by one as a reward for each successful bathroom excursion.

  “They’re in the toilet,” Ruby said as if I were an idiot for even asking.

  “Oh, no. Did you go to the bathroom, Isaac?” He nodded happily, sucking on the two middle fingers of his left hand. I stifled my gag reflex and hustled him back to the bathroom. I fished his pants out of the toilet and briefly considered throwing them directly in the trash. They were from Baby Gap, however, and not even a toilet full of poop justified tossing out a thirty-dollar pair of toddler jeans. Instead, I dumped them into the washing machine. As I scrubbed my disgusting yet adorable boy from tush to fingertips, I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d still be wiping the kid’s behind when he was in graduate school. Probably not. Probably by the time he had his bar mitzvah, he’d be able to handle his own potty needs.

  I’d clearly ignored the kids for long enough. I gazed longingly at the TV, but guilt won out over my desire to keep reading Bobby’s E-mail. Instead, I spilled a load of blocks and miniature cars on the carpet. I groaned softly as I sat down. I know there are some mothers who love nothing more than spending hours finger painting and making Play-Doh castles. I’m not one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my kids. I love them with a combination of ferocity and obsession that can be overwhelming both to them and to me. But playing with them can be skull-crushingly tedious.

  Ruby and I played with the blocks while Isaac zoomed his Hot Wheels around us. I did my best to convince her not to bellow in protest when he dared approach our construction site. I was less successful at getting him to stop talking about how his cars were going to shoot and kill each other. We compromised by agreeing that the red Formula One could beat up the other cars, as long as he gave their booboos kisses afterward.

  After half an hour or so, my garage built out of blocks was teetering dangerously, and I wasn’t sure if I had the energy to rebuild. Luckily, Peter showed up just as I was beginning to lose focus. As soon as he’d gotten down on his hands and knees and begun renovating my structurally unsound building, I slipped back to my computer.

  Within an hour, I’d made a long list of potential means of finding a birth parent who didn’t want to be found. Bobby’s E-mail pals had provided him with names and numbers of private investigators, on-line search services, and a few organizations dedicated to furthering an individual’s access to his or her biological and familial history. According to his E-mails to the group, Bobby had contacted the organizations first, so that’s what I did. I checked out their web sites. By and large, they seemed fairly innocuous, mostly providing the same kind of support that Bobby had gotten from his I-Group.

  One was a little more intense. This site, called www.righttoknow.net, was dedicated to assisting people whose birth parents were not just unknown but were actively keeping their identities secret. The site offered more arcane investigative services, including instructions on performing skip traces and credit card searches. It offered the names of investigators who specialized in “fugitive parents.” At the bottom of the home page was an E-mail address. I copied it and then clicked over to Bobby’s E-mail program. I searched his archives for any message from that address. Pay dirt.

  Over the past couple of months,
Bobby had been E-mailing with someone named Louise, the founder of Right to Know. From her E-mails, I pieced together that Bobby had contacted her through the web site and asked for help with finding his birth mother. Early on in their correspondence, she told him that she, too, lived in Los Angeles, and that she had sources for finding parents in the area. Louise sent Bobby E-mails almost daily. I read through a pile of them before I found one that sounded promising. In it, Louise told Bobby that she had “good news” and “information.” She asked him to meet her where she worked, at the Starbucks across the street from the Westside Pavilion, a mall in West L.A.

  I copied all the important information onto my computer. It had taken me all of an afternoon to get within one step of Bobby’s birth parents. The Internet seems to have been designed to allow people to spy on one another. It certainly has made the private detective’s job significantly easier. I found this somewhat troubling, although I was less concerned with the death of privacy than with the possibility that Al would find a significant portion of his new business usurped by a web site’s offering to find anything about anybody at bargain basement rates.

  Six

  THE next morning, after I’d dropped Ruby off at preschool, Isaac and I headed out to the Westside Pavilion. I guess it probably says something about my approach to detective work that before I went to question Louise, I did a little shopping. I had never actually bought new clothes for Isaac. He’d spent the first two and a half years of his life wearing Ruby’s hand-me-downs. Suddenly, however, as if in concert with his burgeoning interest in firearms, he’d begun to refuse to allow me to dress him in her old pink overalls, flowered T-shirts, and pastel leggings, although for some reason he was still perfectly happy to sleep in her Little Mermaid nightgown.

  Isaac and I stocked up on navy blue shirts, royal blue pants, and indigo sweatshirts from the sale racks in the various baby stores. I hung my purchases over the handle of his stroller, and we rolled out of the mall onto Pico Boulevard at the corner of Westwood Boulevard. There, directly across Pico from us, was a Starbucks. Across Westwood, and at the other end of the block, was another Starbucks. Now, granted, Westwood is a busy street, and they were at either end of a fairly long block, but still—was there really enough latte business for two identical coffeehouses?

  “Shall we flip a coin, buddy?” I asked Isaac.

  He looked up at me quizzically. “Okay,” he said.

  “Heads we go to the one down the block, tails we go to the one on the other side of the street.”

  It came up tails. Isaac was fascinated. “Do it again,” he said.

  “Okay.” It came up heads.

  “Third one breaks the tie, buddy.” Tails.

  I waited for a pause in the traffic and then, shopping bags flapping in our wake, jaywalked as fast as I could across the street. Isaac shrieked delightedly at both the speed of our run and the fact that we were very clearly breaking the “cross at the corner” rule I’d so carefully drilled into his head.

  I walked up to the counter and ordered a tall, fat, skinny, wide something or other and asked the pierced young thing behind the bar if Louise worked at the store. A dark-haired woman with bad skin, who was studying the foaming action she was getting from her steam-valve machine, lifted her head at the sound of my voice. I smiled at her, sure that I’d found my Louise.

  The boy with the studded eyebrow to whom I’d asked my question said, “No, I don’t know any Louise.”

  “Are you sure? I know there’s a Louise working either here or at the Starbucks down the block. Is your manager around? Maybe I could ask him or her?”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders and jerked his head toward the woman. The thick ring in his nose jiggled with the action, and he reached up a hand to steady it. God help me if my children decide to have themselves pierced. Peter swears that the fad will be over by the time Ruby is a teenager, but I am convinced that will only be because they will have come up with something worse, like voluntary amputation, or recreational trepanning.

  The dark-haired woman came over to me, her face blank. Her cheeks were pitted and scarred, and a few angry pimples covered her chin and nestled in the corners of her mouth. “I’m the supervisor. Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for someone named Louise. Does she work here?”

  “We don’t have anybody by that name,” she said.

  “Oh. Well, maybe it’s the Starbucks at the end of the block. I’ll try there.”

  “Don’t forget your latte,” the pierced boy called. I went back for the cup and balanced it on the handle of the stroller as I tried to open the door. I couldn’t manage to hold the coffee, open the door, and push the stroller through at the same time, and neither employee seemed particularly interested in helping me. Finally, I tossed the latte in the trash and, holding the door open with one hand, pushed Isaac and his stroller out with the other. I’d get a coffee at the next Starbucks.

  Isaac and I reenacted our dangerous and illegal asphalt traverse and headed to café number two. The next Starbucks was a slightly larger version of the first, with a few extra tasteful banquettes and little round tables. This time, the person with the nose ring who took my order was female. She shook her head immediately at my question about Louise and handed me my extra-foamy mocha with a smile that seemed much too sweet for her severe haircut and jewelry. I pulled Isaac out of his stroller, handed him a madeleine, and fed him the foam from my coffee.

  I turned to ask the coffee girl if she was sure that there was no Louise when Isaac’s bellow of rage made me spin around in my chair.

  “What happened?” I asked, checking him over for broken bones.

  “My cookie!” he wailed.

  “What about your cookie?”

  “It got in your coffee!”

  “How did it get in my coffee?”

  “I tried to scoop the foam, but it melted my cookie!”

  I tried to comfort him, but finally just got him another cookie. His face broke into a grin to rival that of the Cheshire Cat. It had been an elaborate ploy to weasel another madeleine out of me.

  “Okay, cookie boy, let’s go.”

  We wandered back down the street toward the mall and our car. As we got closer to the other Starbucks, I kept thinking of the supervisor with the bad skin. I was sure that when I’d first said the name Louise, she’d raised her head in recognition. I mentally kicked myself in the pants for being so dense. A pseudonym. It was entirely possible that the name Louise was merely an alias. Given the fact that some of the “suggestions” on the web site seemed a bit on the gray side of legality, it was reasonable that “Louise” might not want to be directly associated with it. She would want to avoid liability, not to mention the wrath of parents whose identities she’d given away over their objections.

  Once more I hauled Isaac back across the street. I walked into the store and up to the front of the counter, without waiting in line.

  “Hey! There’s a line here, you know,” a voice snarled at me. I ignored the muscle-bound man in the shiny suit who’d yelled at me and caught the dark-haired woman’s eye.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She flushed and shook her head. “Sorry, we’re busy.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said and leaned against the counter. Isaac started kicking the glass pastry case. Helpful child.

  She glared at me and then, finally, shrugged her shoulders and motioned for another young employee to step into her spot at the register. She ducked out from behind the counter and led me to a table in the far corner of the café.

  I pulled a few board books out of the basket of the stroller and settled Isaac on a bench not too far from where the woman had sat down. Between the books and the sugar packets on the table, he was set for a few minutes at least.

  “Hi, Candace,” I said, reading the name tag pinned to her chest.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I think we have a friend in common.”

  “Yeah? Who?” She so
unded like she didn’t think it was very likely.

  “Bobby Katz.”

  Her face flushed again, and she looked down at her fingernails. They were bitten red and raw.

  “You know Bobby?” she murmured, the harshness gone from her voice.

  I realized at that moment that she hadn’t heard. I dreaded being the one to tell her. I reached out my hand and grasped hers.

  “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” I began.

  She jerked her hand out of mine. “What?” Her voice was a hollow croak.

  “Bobby died ten days ago. I’m so sorry.”

  Her skin seemed to gray before my eyes. The acne and scars stood out crimson against the ashen pallor. “What? How?”

  I took a breath before launching into the ugly details. I also lowered my voice so that Isaac wouldn’t hear. “It’s not real clear. What we know for now is that he was found dead in his car along the PCH, just south of Santa Monica Canyon. He was holding a gun, and it looks like it was probably a suicide.”

  “No!” The people standing in line for coffee looked our way at the explosive sound of her voice.

  Isaac whined softly, “Mama?”

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said. I walked over and gave him a hug. He was making neat stacks of sugar, Equal and Sweet’N Low, alternating the white, blue, and pink packets. “You keep playing, okay?”

  He nodded, and I went back to Candace. Her face was buried in her hands, and she was worrying the pimples on her forehead with her fingers.

  “I couldn’t figure out why he hasn’t been answering my E-mail. I’ve been writing like ten times a day for over a week,” she said.

  I realized then that I’d been so busy reviewing his archives that I hadn’t thought of checking Bobby’s E-mail account for new messages that had come in since his death. I made a mental note to log on from his laptop once I got home and download all his pending messages.