by John Searles
Maybe he doesn’t want to, I thought, sipping my coffee. And that’s okay with me.
“So let me ask you a few questions,” Joshua said. He took a tape recorder out of his tan bag and set it on the table.
I braced myself for whatever he was going to ask me, then thought that it would be smarter if I got my dirt up front. “How about I ask you some questions first?”
“Sounds fair,” he said, holding a finger in the air over the red “record” button, not yet pressing it. “What do you want to know?”
No more wasting time. “The Burdan trial. What is it?”
I watched his bushy eyebrows cinch together. That purple patch crinkle like the skin on a rotten eggplant. “Let me get this straight. You don’t know anything about your mother’s first son?”
“Just that she was married to a man named Peter and that they had a kid named Truman. My brother.”
“Okay, then. Here goes.” He stopped and seemed to be mulling something over. Maybe he was wondering whether or not it was right to spill my mother’s secrets just to get his interview. I tried to fix my face so that it looked like I could take or leave both him and his information. Finally he breathed in and said, “Your mother’s first husband was Peter Tierney. When she was pregnant with their child, he died in an accident. She had the baby five months later.”
I leaned forward for more but decided I didn’t want to seem too anxious, so I leaned back again.
“Peter Tierney didn’t have any money to leave her. No insurance. So she took a job as a waitress to try to support your brother. But she was young herself, and it was never enough to make ends meet. And she still couldn’t quite pull herself together after Peter’s death.”
I stopped him there. “How do you know any of this?”
Joshua reached into his bag and pulled out a manila folder, handed it to me. The thing was stuffed with pages of clipped newspaper and magazine stories. I scanned the headlines. BIOLOGICAL MOM WANTS BABY BACK. BURDAN FAMILY CHALLENGES CASE IN COURT. EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TERRY TIERNEY.
I was about to dig into the articles—not for the words right away but for the pictures of my mother and brother that must have been there—but Joshua started talking again. “Your mother’s doctor kept pressuring her to give up the baby in a private adoption. He said he knew a family who could give him a better life than a single mother with no money could. Finally she decided to go through with it.”
So that was the secret. My brother had been given up for adoption. But why did my mother claim to be visiting Truman when she came to New York?
“According to what she said in those interviews, when your mother’s grieving for her husband let up, it was like coming out of a fog. She couldn’t believe what she had done. She missed her child and wanted him back. At the same time your uncle had come into some money. He helped her get a lawyer who built a case that claimed Terry had made the adoption decision under duress. During the grieving period after her husband’s death. They went after that doctor first, and it turned out he had made a big chunk of change finding that baby for another family. The courts ordered that the adoption records be unsealed.”
My curiosity gave way, and I started flipping through the articles, looking for a picture of Truman. I didn’t find one of him but I came across a few of a stuffy-looking couple. Bald guy in a business suit. Woman with straight shoulders and pearls, glasses on a chain. Mr. and Mrs. Burdan. “So the Burdans are my brother’s adoptive parents?”
“Yes,” he said. “And they’re a wealthy family. Your biological brother is one rich young man. Also, you should know that his name isn’t Truman anymore. It’s Randolph.”
I gripped the articles in my hands and tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. My brother was rich. But he wasn’t my brother at all. He was someone named Randolph Burdan. My mind flashed on one of my afternoons spent wandering the city. Last week I’d been on the Upper East Side when I passed a school where a flock of boys in blue blazers were streaming out the front door. Something about their neatly parted hair and unblemished faces had made them appear flawless, extraordinary to me. A bunch of rich kids who seemed incapable of being harmed. As I sat there listening to Joshua, my mind put Truman in that picture, made him one of those flawless kids.
“Your mother didn’t stand a chance in hell against their family lawyers,” Joshua was saying. “Courts ruled that the adoption was final. But by then the story had made national news. I covered the case for the paper I worked for back then. And the Burdans weren’t happy with the publicity. When your mother’s lawyers tried to get her visiting rights, they shot that down, too.”
“End of story?” I said.
“Not quite. A year after the ruling Randolph Burdan was missing.”
So that headline in my uncle’s Bible was about Truman. . . Randolph. “Did anyone find him?”
“He turned up on the playground five days later. He was all by himself, pushing an empty swing on a Sunday morning. Of course, the family suspected that your mother had taken him. But she had an alibi, so no one could prove a thing.”
I tried to picture my mother as a kidnapper but came up only with the image of her in that black wool coat, her lips chapped and peeling, plunging our clogged toilet and crying. She wouldn’t have taken my brother only to abandon him at the playground. “So where is he today? I mean, he must be eighteen by now.”
“Twenty, actually. A sophomore at Columbia. And he goes by the name Rand, not Randolph.”
The waitress appeared, pad in hand. “What can I get you?”
I had zip for an appetite and told her that coffee was all I wanted. Joshua said the same, so she refilled us both.
“My mother used to come to the city and tell me that she was visiting him,” I said when the waitress was gone. “Was she? I mean, were they in touch? Because he didn’t come to her funeral.”
“I highly doubt your mother was visiting him. The family shunned her, and so did Rand. He didn’t want anything to do with her. They thought she was just after money.”
I flipped through the articles again. No pictures of my brother. But I saw a bunch of my mother being interviewed by reporters. She looked shaky and nervous with those microphones in front of her face. I bet she hated all that attention. I thought of the way she used to talk about him, calling him Truman even though that was no longer his name. Why couldn’t she just let go?
“So now that I’ve brought you up to date,” Joshua said, taking out a notepad and carefully pressing that red button, “I want to ask you a few questions. The story I’m doing is about the way your mother’s life exemplifies the choices women face with unwanted pregnancies. She tried both paths—adoption and an illegal abortion—and neither was a solution. I thought I’d begin by writing about her attempt to start a new life and why it all went wrong in January.”
Question: Why did it all go wrong?
Answer: Edie and me.
My mother had been cheated out of her first child and her last. The one in the middle had cheated her out of her life. Meanwhile, I was a runaway. And Edie was living happily ever after in a run-down apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Something was happening in my head.
I felt the electric hum of a railroad track when you put your hand to it, telling you the train is around the bend. I saw that blank white space at the bottom of the list of things I wanted from Edie. It grew bigger and whiter as that electric hum grew stronger. Louder. Those three white words were finally turning blue, then black. They weren’t just three words; they were a name:
Sophie Dominick Kramer.
That’s what I wanted from Edie. The sibling I never had. The one who was given to another family before my birth. The one whose life had been stopped in that motel. I couldn’t get my mother back, and my brother was someone else now. But if that baby was my sister, then I wanted her. I was going to save her from whatever life on the edge Edie had in store. And I was going to take something from Edie in the process, the way she had
taken something from me.
Joshua Fuller was still talking. “I have an interview set up next week with your mother’s best friend as well. A Marnie Garboni.”
I stood up from the table, clutching the folder with all those stories about my mother’s life. Her bad decisions. “Marnie will tell you everything you need to know. I have to leave.”
“But we had a deal,” he said, jerking his head up from his notepad. His face looked tough suddenly. The Ballantine’s scotch man losing his cool. “You can’t go.”
I ignored him, walked toward the door of the diner.
“We had a deal!” he called.
I stepped out onto the street and started across town. My plan was to make a pit stop at my uncle’s place, gather up what money I had left, then find a way to get that baby. I passed a long line of people on the street waiting to see a movie I’d never heard of called The Go-Between. I passed a ratty-haired woman hanging out of a phone booth with one hand down the front of her cranberry-colored pants. A prostitute. A drug addict. Maybe both. “I got to get some sleep,” she was saying into the black mouth of the phone. “I just got to get some sleep, man.” Something about her tangled hair and drawn eyes made me think of Edie. I imagined that she was a vision of the woman Edie would become. And I refused to let her drag my sister along for the ride.
When I reached the apartment building, there was a dark sedan parked out front. The driver was removing a suitcase from the trunk, and my uncle was digging in his pockets for his keys.
Welcome the fuck home.
“I’ll let you in,” I told him, knowing he’d be shocked to see me.
“Dominick,” he said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“I left Holedo and stayed at your place for a while. But don’t worry, I’m just grabbing something, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“Does your father know where you are?”
“I don’t think he gives a shit,” I said and stepped forward, unlocking the door for both of us.
My uncle dillydallied with the driver, signing a receipt, then tipping him, before coming inside. I marched up the stairs ahead of him, and he trailed behind, clunking his suitcase the whole way and spitting out half sentences. “But you—I thought—How did you—”
I let him keep babbling until we were in the apartment. After he took off his coat and collapsed into the armchair by the TV, I told him that I knew about the Burdan trial, my brother, all of it. Figured I might as well get his end of the story before leaving.
“So now you know,” he said, calmer than I suspected. His voice was tinged with something. Maybe sadness; definitely confusion. And in that moment I saw him for the first time as a person separate from my uncle, maybe the way the rest of the world saw him, too. A lonely man who buried himself in his work. Something told me that the sadness of his sister’s life left his heart feeling saddled, because he had wanted to help her over the years but didn’t know what to do. All those checks he had sent her were Band-Aids to cover up her Truman wound. “Your mother never told you the truth because she was trying to make a fresh start,” he said. “She wanted you to know you had a brother in case somehow things worked out with him. But she didn’t want you to know about all that business of the past. If you ask me, Dominick, I think she wanted to believe he was living here with me. It was like some kind of fantasy of hers. The only thing she had left of her first son.”
I had so many questions, but what came out was this: “Who were those presents for?” My childhood jealousy bubbling up one final time. Those presents I always wished were for me.
“What presents?” Donald said.
“The ones she brought with her on the bus here when I was a kid.”
“Oh. She used to leave stuff with the doorman at the Burdans’ building at first. Little letters to them, pleading. But when the doorman stopped taking them, those gifts just piled up around here.”
“Didn’t you try to talk some sense into her?”
“Yes. I used to tell her she had to let him go. To just be happy knowing he was taken care of. That he had opportunities she could never give him. And she did let it go for a while. She met your father. She had you, which made her incredibly happy. But I guess she always felt like something was missing.”
“Tell me one more thing,” I asked, reaching into the drawer where I had stashed my cash. “Did she take him? Was she the reason he was missing for those five days?”
My uncle sighed. “I have never told anyone this. But yes. She took him.”
“Why did she give him back?”
“Your mother used to watch his nanny and him in the park. It was her only way to see him. One morning, as your mother sat there watching, and probably weeping, she just strolled over and picked the kid out of the sandbox while the nanny was busy gabbing. She walked right out of the park and called me a day later from New Mexico.”
As my uncle went on, my mind painted details into the story he told, letting the whole scene take shape before me. My mother was desperate and beautiful, a woman who had done the unthinkable. On the plane to Albuquerque she kept Truman at her side, playing peekaboo with him like any other mother and child. Right away she found out the words he knew and kept asking him to say them. “What goes woof-woof?” she asked. “Doggy go woof,” he answered proudly. “What goes meow?” “Kitty go meow,” he said and giggled. He also said “Dada,” and it broke her heart, because Peter was gone. But her son never said “Mama.” She thought that meant he knew the truth. That somewhere in his toddler heart he sensed that the rich woman who had paid a doctor to get him was not his mama after all. And as the plane soared through the clouds, across the country, to somewhere safe, Terry tried to get him to call her Mama. “Can you say it?” she kept asking. “Mama. Can you say it?” By the time they landed, he still hadn’t said it to her. But that was okay, she told herself, because someday soon he would.
“I flew out there as soon as I could to meet her,” my uncle was saying. “She had checked into a little hotel in Santa Fe with Truman. I mean, Rand. I told her right off the bat that she couldn’t go through with it. She had to give the baby back.”
The more he spoke, the more the story unfurled in my mind, vivid and clear, as if I had been there, too. The moment my mother saw her brother step off the plane, she regretted her decision to let him in on what she had done. “You can’t keep him,” he told her when they got into a rented car and drove under the open, blue sky of New Mexico. His words were like a heavy weight pressing on her shoulders. She told him that the child belonged to her. That she had been tricked by that doctor and the Burdan family. That she wasn’t going to let them keep her baby and ruin her life simply because they had more money and a fancy lawyer. But Donald didn’t let up. He wanted to know what kind of life she hoped to lead, hiding out like a fugitive. He wanted to know how she was going to feel if they found her and sent her to jail. “And then where will either of you be?” he kept asking. “Truman will have a good life in New York. That’s what you told yourself when you gave him up. That’s what you have to tell yourself again.”
“It wasn’t easy. But eventually I convinced her,” my uncle said to me. “We made a plan. Truman and I would fly to New York. I would bring him back to the playground first thing in the morning before anyone was there. Make a call informing the police as to where he was. The whole while I would watch from a distance to make sure they found him. Your mother agreed, but she asked me for one thing first.”
“What was that?” I said.
“She wanted one last day with her child. So I agreed. The next day we woke up before sunrise. Drove south to a little town called Estancia and had breakfast there. We spent the day at—”
“Laguna del Perro,” I said.
My uncle looked at me, momentarily puzzled, then went on. “Yes. We walked through the trails. Swam in the water. Truman was only about three years old at the time.”
I thought back to all those stories about New Mexico that my mother used to te
ll me. Now I pictured Donald by her side, walking through the dry, open landscape as she carried Truman. My mother memorizing every detail of that day so she could take it with her for the rest of her life.
“I have a picture of Truman and me by the lake somewhere around here,” my uncle told me.
I’ve seen it, I thought. “And at the end of that day?”
“I took the child back to New York. The next morning I did everything just as we planned. I bought him a balloon and an ice cream, then took him to the park. Your mother spent one more day in Santa Fe. Out in the open, so she had an alibi in case anyone tried to prove she’d taken him. And it worked, because no one ever could.”
“So my mother never lived in New Mexico?”
“No,” he said, then told me that she kept saying how she wished she could. Instead my mother had her perfect day with her son, and the Burdans got their baby back. It had been one canyon walk, one breakfast, one single day that she stretched into a lifetime with Truman. That was all she had of him.
I didn’t want to hear any more. The only thing I could think about was getting the hell out of here and finding Sophie. My maybe sister. A baby with my middle name. I felt the way my mother must have just before she picked what was rightfully hers out of the sandbox.
“Where are you going?” Donald said when I walked toward the door.
“I have to run an errand.”
“Now?” he said. “What could you possibly have to do?”
I didn’t answer him. Just walked out the door and down the stairs. I knew what I had to do. And I had to do it for my mother.
When a cab drove by, I flagged it down and told the driver to take me to the corner of Forty-seventh and Ninth. Five minutes later I was standing in front of Edie’s building. I slid through the alley, passed the gutted and left-for-dead Oldsmobile. I kept as quiet as that tuxedo cat, barely making a sound as I pawed through the tear in the fence. The bodega fan was blowing, and I could smell the greasy residue from other people’s breakfasts. Eggs and bacon. Sausage links. A rat scurried beneath my legs—right between them—like I was something inanimate and non-threatening to scurry beneath on its way to find food. Or green poison pellets that would leave it foaming at the mouth. Or a sturdy wooden trap that would snap its neck just as it was about to eat. I didn’t even flinch. Just watched its gray body move under the Olds and toward the bodega.