“Man, you better talk about this in group,” Chris said. “You look like shit.”
Jasper was back at 10 Cherry Tree Lane. He saw himself ushering into the house the man with the ACE cap. A slim man, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. Hollow cheeks. The man followed Jasper with a silent tread through the living room, down the hall to the kitchen, where Jasper showed him the back stairs leading down to the furnace. Had Jasper let him out of his sight? Yes—the man had gone down the stairs. And he had stayed down there. Maybe ten minutes later, Jasper heard him ascending from the basement. Jasper had gotten up from the sofa to escort the man out. He couldn’t have stolen anything, let alone Maddy’s DNA.
Then he remembered. The bathroom. The man asked to use the bathroom.
“Oh my God,” he said.
“Damn,” said Chris, who had moved off. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, taking off his shoes and socks. “You look bad. You want me to get Dunwoody?”
Jasper didn’t answer. He was thinking about how the ACE man had spent several minutes, supposedly, in the bathroom. More than enough time for him actually to have tiptoed into Maddy’s room. To bend over the sleeping child, to swab the inside of her cheeks. Had he not imagined precisely this scenario for his abortive Bannister novel? Yes. He had even written a detailed draft of the scene, as the basis for a story about a diabolical imposture, a fraud … It was beyond belief. It could not be. He had imagined this very crime. In just this way. It had been in front of his eyes all along. All the clues. He had seen it. Yet he had not seen it. Nor would he ever have seen it—if not for these words on the page.
“It’s not possible,” he whispered.
But of course, it was possible. After the man left, Jasper had gone to Maddy’s bedroom to wake the child and fetch Pauline. And she had stared at him in horror. In distress. Trying to warn him.
Pauline had seen it all.
The words in Maddy’s tablet were dictated not by Chloe or Deepti. They were dictated by Pauline. Somehow, in her horror and distress, she had managed to overcome that cognitive deficit that had, up until then, forbidden her from blinking out messages, letter by letter, with the help of an assistant who recited the alphabet. These were warnings, for him, painstakingly blinked out to Maddy, who had dutifully chanted the alphabet to Pauline, day after day. Maddy could have had no idea of the messages’ meanings; she would have simply viewed the exercise as a game, a way to show off her prowess at recognizing, and writing, letters. The unwitting amanuensis. Jasper himself might have elicited these same messages from Pauline, thus averting the disaster, had he not, in his state of crazed lust, fallen off from the habit of trying to train Pauline in precisely this form of dictation, had he not retreated every evening to his office to pour out, into his computer, his stream of filthy fantasies.
Now he saw Maddy sitting with Pauline, singing the alphabet song, always incomplete, always breaking off, then returning to the beginning, only to sing it again—stopping at seemingly random points, then resuming from the start. Pauline staring raptly as the child sang and scribbled with her crayon. He had, on that last day, in his terrible blindness, asked Maddy why she kept singing the song. She had said something about “the butterfly man.” He had not understood, had been too bound up in his obsession with Chloe even to try to understand. He understood now. The butterfly man was Jean-Dominique Bauby, a locked-in patient who dictated a memoir to an assistant, letter by letter, by blinking at the appropriate time as the assistant recited the alphabet—blinking twice to indicate the space between words. A superhuman effort that had produced a book both beautiful and heartbreaking. Jasper had read it repeatedly in the days and weeks after Pauline’s stroke. He later watched Julian Schnabel’s masterful movie adaptation on DVD—Maddy sitting on the floor in front of the television, scribbling with her crayons. She had asked him what was going on in the movie. He had explained it to her. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
“The butterfly man,” he said aloud.
“What’s that?” Chris said.
There were no phones in the inmates’ rooms. All calls had to be placed within earshot of the desk sergeant, on a pay phone in the reception area downstairs.
“Chris,” Jasper said, struggling to rise from the bed. “Help me downstairs. I’ve got to make a phone call.”
Chris looked up from the issue of Popular Science he had been paging through. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “You don’t look so good. Maybe you should just lie down.”
“Now!” Jasper yelled.
Chris tossed aside the magazine and sprang off his bed. He took Jasper’s arm and led him downstairs. In the lobby, Chris brought Jasper over to the pay phone on the wall above the seating area, then retreated upstairs. Jasper felt frantically in his pockets. He had no change.
He tapped over to the desk, took a twenty from his pocket and asked Dunwoody for change. Dunwoody counted it out slowly: three fives, four ones and four quarters. Jasper made his way back across the lobby to the phone. He fed a quarter into the maddeningly narrow slot and punched in a number from memory. After two rings, a crisp female voice rapped out: “Pollock, Munson and Kline.” He croaked out his request and was put through to an assistant, who said that Mr. Pollock was in a meeting.
“No!” Jasper shouted. He said that he was a client, he was calling from a pay phone at a halfway house, that it was an emergency, and that he needed to speak to Mr. Pollock right away. The assistant told him to hold on. Almost a minute went by, then he heard a click and Pollock’s voice said, on a note of wary surprise, “Mr. Ulrickson?” It was obvious from his tone that Pollock had never expected to hear from Jasper again, and was not overjoyed to do so now.
Jasper explained his discovery. It all spilled out: the words dictated by Pauline and transcribed by Maddy, the messages saying that Chloe was not his biological daughter, that it had all been a trick, a hoax to defraud him of his money, to destroy him, professionally and personally. “You—you even suspected such a thing, at first, when I called you up,” Jasper reminded him. “You mentioned the scammers and con men who make false paternity claims! But I’m sure you’ve never encountered something this diabolical.” To expose the scheme, Jasper said, Pollock need only dispatch someone to his sister’s house in San Francisco, take a DNA swab from Maddy and check that sample against the one submitted under Chloe’s name. “They would still have Chloe’s DNA sequence on file at DDS, right?” he added excitedly. “Well, it won’t be hers! It will be Maddy’s!”
Pollock greeted this news with a long silence. Then he said, in a low, quiet voice, “Where are you calling from?”
“A halfway house,” Jasper said. “I mean, a residential rehabilitation center, they call them now. I was released six months ago. Sorry—I should have said that right at the start.”
“Yes, I did hear about your release,” Pollock said. “Tell me, are you attending psychiatric sessions? Therapy? To help you readjust to society?”
Jasper was puzzled by Pollock’s desire to discuss this triviality, given the stunning news he had just relayed of the fraud. But he answered, “Yes—we have group therapy every evening. But about Maddy’s DNA. Can we get that started right away? I don’t want to lose any time. I think Pauline’s health, even her survival, could depend on her hearing that the culprit or culprits have been—”
“Mr. Ulrickson,” Pollock interrupted sharply.
“Yes?” Jasper said, startled by the other man’s abrupt tone.
“I’m having a very busy day, and I need to get back to work. But let me just say that I understand how difficult it must be to reintegrate into society after long incarceration. The best advice I can give you is to continue your group sessions, but also to inquire into personal, one-on-one therapy, where you can address any problems you’re having dealing with any lingering guilt about your daughter and—”
“No!” Jasper cried. “I’m not crazy. I have evidence. Maddy’s drawing pad. She wrote the messages—in crayon. Pauline dictated them to her
. I can show you. If you send a messenger—”
“Mr. Ulrickson,” Pollock said. “I really must get back to work. I was very sorry to hear of your troubles. I hope you can make a successful reintegration and become a useful member of society.” He hung up.
Jasper stood in mute astonishment, the phone at his ear. He hung up.
He had been a fool—gibbering incoherently about Maddy’s drawing pad and secret messages in crayon. Unless he could physically show someone the evidence, they would never believe it.
He tapped his way back to the desk. “Officer Dunwoody,” Jasper said. “I need your help.” He held up the drawing tablet.
“Yeah,” Dunwoody said. “I heard every word.” Jasper could not see Dunwoody’s expression—the desk sergeant was a murky pink and purple outline against the dull flicker of small TV screens—but he could hear the sarcasm in his voice.
“Please,” Jasper said, “let me show you.” He put the pad on the counter and began to open the cover. Dunwoody slapped it closed.
“Don’t fuck with me,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny. But I’m not laughing.”
“It’s my daughter’s printing,” Jasper persisted. “She was four at the time. How could she be writing messages about stolen DNA? It had to be my wife!”
“Okay,” Dunwoody said, “get the fuck out of here.” There was true threat in his tone now.
“Please—” Jasper started to say, but the man cut him off.
“You’re due at work in thirty minutes,” Dunwoody said. “If you’re late, you lose outside privileges—for a month.”
Jasper stood there, lost. He was still filled with exultation over his discovery, his mind racing, his heart drumming hard. But he was thwarted, blocked. Then he had a thought—a crucial realization. “Yes—okay,” he said, snatching the drawing pad off the desk. “I’m going. I—I was only joking about the messages.”
“No shit,” Dunwoody said. He pushed the button to release the front door lock. “Now, get to work.”
Jasper tapped across the lobby, pushed open the door and went out.
Cool air hit his face and body. It was mid-March, the keen cold of lingering winter stirred to tepid warmth by a brightening sun. He had not brought a coat, but it was too late to go back for it. Dragging his uncooperative leg behind him, feeling his way with his cane, he moved as quickly as he could up the street to the bus stop. But instead of joining his usual group waiting for the bus westbound to go to work, he proceeded to the curb, looked both ways, up and down Venice Street. He could hear the eastbound bus approaching some way off—perhaps a block away, the distinctive grind of its engine. There was no time to limp down to the lights at the intersection. Through the watery blur, he could not see any cars coming. Trusting to fate, he set out across the avenue, tapping, heaving his lame leg along with a jerking motion of his hips.
He got to the opposite side. Fifty yards up the sidewalk was the eastbound stop for people going downtown—toward the hospital. He made it just as the bus pulled up. The doors opened with a sharp hydraulic hiss and he climbed aboard. As usual, he took a seat near the front.
“Fulton?” asked the driver, whose voice Jasper recognized.
“Yes, thank you,” he said.
“Not your usual time,” the driver said.
“No,” Jasper said with finality.
Panting, heart hammering, he collapsed back against the seat and closed his eyes. He had suddenly known, in the lobby with Dunwoody, that more important even than alerting the authorities was the urgency of telling Pauline of his discovery. Whether she could hear him or not, whether she could process his words—whether anyone else ever believed him—he must tell her that her Herculean efforts to warn him about the fraud had not been in vain. Carlucci had said that Pauline’s condition was not dissimilar to that of people suffering posttraumatic stress, her brain and body shut down in defense. Was it not possible that Pauline’s state derived from the unimaginable frustration of having tried—and failed—to alert him to the hoax? He would not be able to forgive himself if she died before he had the chance to tell her that her messages had been heard; that she had reached him.
He asked the driver how close they were—surely they were almost there? The driver named a street ten long blocks from the hospital. Panicked, Jasper touched the face of his glassless watch. Noon. He should, right now, be stepping through the door at his workplace. How long before his boss called Dunwoody to alert him that he was AWOL? How long before Dunwoody put out a bulletin to have Jasper apprehended?
The bus moved with aching slowness through the clogged traffic, edging up, tentatively, to each stop to let people in and out. Sluggish passengers disembarked, and sluggish passengers climbed laboriously in. Then the driver sat for a seeming eternity before pulling the handle that caused the doors to shut with a wan sigh. Often he was obliged to open the doors again, to allow a passenger to yank his bag or elbow or coattail from between the doors’ rubber gusset, before once again closing them. Then he would nudge the bus into gear and slowly pull away from the curb, only to lurch immediately to a stop in the unmoving traffic.
Jasper was seized suddenly with horror. Perhaps Pollock was right—perhaps he had imagined everything. He was overwrought. He had gone mad. He ripped the drawing tablet from under his arm, opened it and brought the page close to his face. Yes—yes, there they were, those words. Chloe not yours. Maddy’s DNA. He had not imagined it. He was not insane. He paged ahead. Saw the ACE man message. Then he turned to the tablet’s last page, where there was another set of shakily drawn letters and words—a message he had not yet seen:
DR GELD ACE M
The message was incomplete—but he knew its meaning, and even recalled when it must have been written. He was sitting beside Pauline and Maddy on the sofa, on that last day they were ever together as a family. Chloe was in her session with Dr. Geld. Maddy was softly singing the alphabet song as Pauline stared at her hypnotically. He had snapped irritably at Maddy, interrupting her in mid-song, interrupting Pauline (he now realized) in mid-message. But he knew now what Pauline was trying to tell him: Dr. Geld is the ACE man. Had he known it, on some level, all along? Those pale eyes? That mocking smile and aura of amused insolence? A chill shivered his marrow.
“Here’s Fulton,” said the driver.
He stuck the tablet under his arm, struggled to his feet and then climbed down from the bus onto the sidewalk. He peered around helplessly through his dark glasses, suddenly disoriented in his excitement. A deep-voiced man said, “Can I help you?” Jasper felt a hand gently take his upper arm and he was enveloped in a comforting aroma of pipe smoke and leather. “On the way to the hospital?” the man asked in a kindly voice. Jasper said he was. “So am I,” the man said. “I’ll take you.”
They crossed the busy avenue and together negotiated the stairs up to the hospital entrance. In the lobby, the man said that he had to see someone on the first floor. “You’ll be okay?” he asked. Jasper said he was fine, thanked his invisible angel, and headed for the elevator bank. The whole time, he expected to hear a voice cry out, “There he is!” and to hear the hard-soled shoes of the hospital’s security personnel scuff rapidly up to him over the polished marble floors. But the lobby remained a placid, sunlit aquarium where soft shapes swirled and swam like fish. He joined a large, vague crowd waiting for the elevator. He heard the musical ping followed by the oily swish of the doors. Carried forward like a cork on a wave, he stepped inside.
The nurses expressed surprise when he limped, tapping, out of the elevator and up to the reception desk. “We usually see you at the end of the day,” one of them sang out cheerfully.
“I have a little time off,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “I thought I’d say a quick hello to Pauline.”
“Be our guest!”
He moved down the hallway, expecting at any moment to hear a phone come to life in the nursing station behind him, then one of the nurses calling out, on a note of hysteria and su
rprise, “Mr. Ulrickson!” That did not happen. He made it to Pauline’s room and stepped inside. He approached the bed. She lay, as usual, utterly still, eyes closed, face pointed toward the ceiling, inert. He felt for and took her hand. He brought his face close. “Pauline,” he whispered.
Her closed eyelids remained still.
“Listen to me, honey,” he said. “Deepti brought me Maddy’s drawing tablet. I saw the messages. I read the warnings. I know the truth. I know that Chloe is not my daughter. I know it was a trick—a hoax.”
He paused. He squinted at her face. He thought he saw Pauline’s eyeballs stir beneath the thin flesh of the lids. But he could not be sure.
“I know about the man in the ACE cap,” he continued. “I know he went to Maddy’s bedroom when she was napping. He swabbed her. You saw it all. Honey, I got your messages.”
Her closed eyelids compressed, once. This could not be a random reflex, Jasper felt sure.
“I know about Geld,” he whispered. You managed to tell me everything, my love.”
Her eyelids trembled. Then, tentatively, quiveringly, they cracked open. He glimpsed through the slits the moist brown of her irises.
“My God,” Jasper said. “Oh my God.” He filled his lungs to bellow for the nurses. But he quashed the impulse. He had something to ask her. Something of grave importance. “Honey,” he said, “are you listening?”
Her eyelids fluttered. Opened wider. She was looking at the ceiling, her irises moving wildly, restlessly. Then, with her head rigidly immobile on the pillow, she turned her gaze in Jasper’s direction. She stared into his face. He saw her pupils contract, as she focused on him. He snatched off his dark glasses so that she might better recognize him. Was she registering the changes in him? The weight loss, the empty eye socket, the silvered hair? He watched with disbelief as her eyes began to take on a glint of life, to fill with recognition, animation, that spark of vitality and awareness that had always brimmed within them, that had convinced Jasper of her fierce determination to live.
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