Cold Feet

by Amy FitzHenry

  Caro hired the moving company Starving Student Movers. They seemed like okay guys when they got there, but I had my first clue that they might be less than reputable when I asked the one taking apart my bedroom furniture where he went to school and he looked at me blankly before hustling my scratched wooden desk chair down the stairs. Starving Students, my ass. When Caro realized at the end of the day that one large box was missing from our belongings, and started tearing through the rest of the boxes, I abandoned my job of unpacking the pots and pans.

  “It’s fine, Mom, it wasn’t that much stuff,” I said, following her around as she deftly sliced through boxes like a seasoned surgeon. “It was only the old wooden jewelry box with barely anything in it, some pictures you don’t even like, and the video camera.”

  The fact that Caro was so upset about the theft frightened me even more than the missing box itself. It gave credence to the seriousness of the situation, made the nonstudent movers seem more like dangerous villains than the harmless stoners they probably were. I wanted the whole thing forgotten, labeled an innocent mistake. After all, I’d gotten them lunch at Wendy’s. Who, except the truly evil, would steal from someone who brought them a Frosty?

  “Get in the car,” she said, ignoring my attempts to calm her down and grabbing the keys off the top of an unopened box. “We’re getting that video camera.”

  The video camera in question was, at the time, my one and only prized possession. When I was younger, I spent long summer days writing, directing, and videotaping one-woman versions of various productions. At age fourteen, I still loved the camera and was randomly inspired by certain things that I thought were artistic but were mostly nauseatingly trite. Like when I set up the camera to record the day the cherry blossoms bloomed in D.C.’s Tidal Basin. I figured I’d fast-forward the footage later and it would be a kind of nature flipbook. It turned out to be the most boring eight hours of tape ever recorded, which I quit screening after approximately fourteen minutes.

  As uncomfortable as the whole situation made me, I headed to the passenger seat without a word. I hugged tight to the knowledge that my mom knew how important the camera was to me.

  We spent the next three hours driving from one pawnshop to the next, making efficient stops at places called Fistful of Pesos and Hock-o Bell. It was at the simply put Cash ’n Hand where we found our stolen items. By the time we got to Cash ’n Hand, I knew the drill. I headed straight to the electronics section, ignoring the muddy-complexioned teens staring longingly at the guitars and the indiscernibly aged men with streaky-gray ponytails leaning against the glass case.

  “This is it!” I shouted when I found our camera in the corner, hastily propped on a tripod. I mentally congratulated myself on having dragged my book bag on the ground for several blocks the previous summer before realizing the camera was inside, giving it a distinctive metallic scratch.

  My mom didn’t seem to hear me, though; she was standing frozen at the jewelry counter. She pointed to the rings and the man behind the counter dug through the lowest shelf, his face locked in a grimace, before pulling out a pearl ring I’d never seen before. The man handed it to her, after shooting her an accusatory glance and rubbing his arm dramatically. My mom ignored him and slid on the ring, which appeared to fit perfectly.

  I grabbed the camera and approached the counter, triumphantly announcing that I’d found it and it was definitely ours. The man, still holding his elbow as if he’d been injured at war, looked skeptical, and with an unfriendly glint in his squinty brown eyes, asked how the hell I could tell.

  “Open it up,” I suggested, gambling that the thieves hadn’t thought to remove the evidence. “If the tape inside is me describing the life cycle of the cherry blossom, it’s ours.”

  In the end, that was how we proved it. When the tape inside featured my pseudo-artsy voice explaining that the trees bloom a mere week a year, there wasn’t much they could do but call the cops and let us point out our belongings.

  I always thought that story was the most important thing to remember about moving day, that unexpectedly bizarre day in our lives. But what if it was something else as well? What if that was the day we moved into the house my father bought for us?

  After Liv figured out that my father’s name could likely be found on the deed to the house, we quickly connected the dots. We could use Westlaw, the legal search engine, to track the deed transfers over time and figure out who owned it when Caro and I lived there. The search tool was typically used to identify easements or the identities of bona fide purchasers in foreclosure cases, but it would work for our purposes as well. We would simply type in the address and search for the relevant year. First, however, we would need a law library.

  Which was how we found ourselves standing in front of a heavy wooden door on the Berkeley campus, having traversed San Francisco, crossed the Bay Bridge, and weaved through the East Bay to get there.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said anemically, a question we both knew was a formality. We’d come this far. We weren’t about to turn back now.

  “No, but it’s the best one we’ve got,” Liv answered. I couldn’t believe what we were about to do, but she was right. In order to access Westlaw, and the all-powerful legal database of home listings, we’d need a user name and password. Ever since Tom Cruise showed the world how easy it was to take down corrupt lawyers in The Firm, law firms had become notoriously paranoid about privacy and now required their lawyers to use matter numbers, which could be billed back to specific cases and clients, to get any information off Westlaw. Although we of course had user names, neither Liv nor I was willing to get disbarred for this mission, so we couldn’t use an active case number to log on. We did, however, know one person who could use his Westlaw account for anything he damn well pleased. We knew a law professor.

  When STB swung open the door I was intimidated by his handsome, shit-eating grin. He looked like he was trying out for the role of sexy, disheveled professor in a cheesy network sitcom, with his blazer with the patches on the sleeves and his white collared shirt. I smugly noted the overly shiny loafers he wore, which any decent costume designer probably would have replaced with Vans so he wouldn’t look like he was trying quite so hard.

  I don’t have anything to prove to this guy, I reminded myself. It was he who had everything to prove to me. Well, to Liv, but to me by extension. This awareness gave me the burst of confidence I needed to plunge forward with my plan and explain the situation.

  “Really, we don’t need much from you, besides your Westlaw log-in. I swear we’re not stalking anyone or doing any illegal searches—we need to check out some relatively harmless information, which we think will lead us to my dad, but without a client to bill the matter to, we can’t use our work passwords.”

  I wrapped up my brief explanation from the same awkward position I’d been in since we entered the office, sitting precariously close to the edge of a leather wing chair he’d offered me, while he comfortably swiveled back and forth at his desk and Liv sat with her legs tucked under her on the tan love seat in the corner. She looked far too comfortable in STB’s presence for my taste. But what could I say? It was my fault we were there in the first place.

  Tony agreed to my request almost at once, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was because of the ancient dirt I had on him. I searched for clues that he was still with Professor Gray, while also examining the way he communicated with Liv. It wasn’t that I was worried about her getting involved with him again, but that wouldn’t stop the creep from trying.

  We followed Tony into a small professors-only research lab down the hall that had sleek MacBook Pros and comfortable chairs. Tony offered us a fancy coffee from the Nespresso, but I declined, ready to get started.

  As soon as he logged on, he moved out of the way and let me take his place at the keyboard. As I scrolled and found the proper database, I heard him and Liv wander away, their c
hatting voices quickly fading away. No doubt they were headed back to his office, presumably to give me some privacy. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d been talking directly into my ear; I wouldn’t have heard them. It was as if my brain could only take so much stimulation and the task at hand was currently occupying one hundred percent of my senses.

  I stared at the search screen, unsure of whether I was ready to take the final step in my journey. After this, we were officially out of ideas. Maybe I was better off not looking, and then the possibility of discovery could always be out there. Or maybe it was better not knowing at all. I hesitated.

  Then, out of the blue, a memory popped into my head: the one time I told Val about my birth father. We’d been drinking Sancerre on a Sunday afternoon in my front yard and the buzz I felt gave me the freedom to share this piece of information, which I normally wouldn’t have divulged. She responded by remarking that it kind of sucked not to know who he was, but wouldn’t it be rad if he was some random famous guy? She went on an amusing rant about my dad as a potential rock star, whose concert we might have attended without even knowing it. She urged me to find him so we could get backstage passes for whatever awesome band he was opening for. I guess even in our fantasy hypothetical we were willing to accept that at his age, he wouldn’t be headlining. I remember looking at her in disbelief and thinking how amazing it would be to be her, to automatically jump to the positive, unrealistic scenario in your head, before even considering any of the soul-crushing ones.

  It was the memory of that afternoon, and Val’s perspective on life, that made me find the right search box for house deeds and tentatively type in my home address. Val Baby did exactly what she wanted and assumed everything would turn out fabulously. As a result, it usually did. I wanted to think like her, just for a second. I wanted to be falsely optimistic, to go for what I wanted, consequences be damned. WWVBD? There was no question in my mind that she’d run the search without hesitation. I pressed enter.

  That Wednesday evening, as I stared at the computer screen and read the name of the mortgagor for the house on Redwood Lane during my years of high school, my first thought was that Dr. Majdi was right. The wave had arrived.

  For a moment, I thought it was a mistake. I scanned the screen for a frenzied few seconds, looking for the name in the proper time period. When I found it, I felt the oddest sense of relief. I must have typed in the wrong address, I thought. I retyped the address, double-checked the screen, and realized with a stomach-crunching certainty that I had typed it correctly the first time. It wasn’t the wrong address. It was mine all right. And it happened to be three doors down from the mortgagor’s other house, also on Redwood Lane.

  Mike Madigan, neighbor, father of three, defense contractor, and old movie fan, was my father.

  The man who had always been so nice to me, always offered to fix things around the house, and always laughed at my jokes, even the really unfunny ones. The same man my mother had avoided like the plague.

  Mike Madigan had purchased our home the month before we moved in, and he’d sold it weeks after I left for college. He was the purchaser, but he put my mother’s name on the deed as well. This wasn’t an investment property. He was my dad.

  I left the screen up and stumbled in the general direction of STB’s office. I had to ask for directions from a student I passed in the hall, as dazed and disoriented as I was. There was something else, something hugely important in the back of my brain that demanded my attention, but my survival mechanism told me to find Liv before turning to face it. The wave Dr. Majdi had warned me about was hovering above my head, gathering steam. I needed to find Liv, before I focused too hard on the implications of this discovery and determined exactly what my memory was trying to grasp.

  Finally, minutes away from using the emergency phone I saw in the hall to call security and ask them to help me locate a missing person, I found the right wooden door. Without thinking, I pushed open the door, eager to find Liv and retain some sense of equilibrium. Was it true? Was Mike Madigan my father? Could there be any other explanation?

  Then, at the exact moment I opened the door to Tony’s office, the awful nagging thought, the one that had been jumping up and down for attention at the edge of my consciousness since the moment I’d seen Mike Madigan’s name on the computer screen, took shape. The wave crashed. And I was flattened.

  “What are you doing?”

  Liv and Tony jumped apart as if experiencing an electric shock, probably because they assumed the person yelling at them was someone with slightly more clout than me, like his wife or the dean. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Liv had sworn against this moment so many times, and with absolute blind faith, I’d believed her. Sexy Tony Brown, evil professor and cheating scumbag, was sitting comfortably at his desk chair, while Liv perched in his lap, talking quietly. This wasn’t some split second where they were overcome by desire and he kissed her, arguably against her will. This seemed ordinary. Regular. Normal.

  “What is going on?”

  “Em.” Liv looked at Tony for support and he sighed audibly. I realized this must be something they’d talked about dozens of times, her judgmental best friend and how she would react if she ever found out about their secret . . . what? Affair? Relationship? Both options sucked. All at once, I understood why Liv, the most desired girl I knew, absolutely never had a boyfriend. Because she always had one.

  “I knew you would be upset. I knew it always made you uncomfortable. I didn’t think you’d understand—”

  “I do understand. I understand that there is absolutely no one in the world that I can trust. My fiancé kept a secret from me for years, my mother is a pathological liar, and my father had a goddamn secret family. You’re just like all of them, Liv. I can’t trust you. I don’t even know you,” I shouted, near tears. Liv, meanwhile, looked like she was in shock. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized it wasn’t Liv I was yelling at. It was Caro, Sam, maybe even Mike.

  “Does that mean you found your dad?” Tony asked, looking genuinely interested. “You said something about a secret family. Does that mean you know who he is? Can you contact him?”

  I took a short, hard breath.

  “No, Tony, I can’t contact him. No one can. Because he’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 23

  One of the few times Caro called me after I moved to California was two years prior, to tell me that our neighbor, the friendly but relatively inconsequential Mike Madigan, had died suddenly of an aneurysm. At the time, I was puzzled as to why this was even headline news, prompting one of her rare moments of deliberate contact. Since my mother had moved out of Arlington and back to Georgetown as soon as I escaped to college, I assumed she hadn’t looked back.

  “Do you still keep in contact with everyone from Redwood Lane?” I asked, trying to pay attention to my mother on the Bluetooth while simultaneously looking for parking. It was a Sunday morning and I was meeting a friend from my book club for brunch at Huckleberry on Wilshire, which happened to have the best fried-egg sandwich in Los Angeles. I was already ten minutes late, but I knew the slightest indication of distraction would annoy my mother, so I was trying not to use my “talking on the phone in the car” voice, which Sam said made me sound like I’d had some kind of stroke.

  “Who told you about his . . . accident?” I couldn’t figure out how to refer to the tragedy. All I knew about brain aneurysms was that there was no way to prevent or predict them, and they killed you in about fifteen minutes. Even just talking about them felt like bad luck.

  “He was only sixty-two,” she said sadly, neglecting to answer my question. Caro hadn’t sounded so depressed since the verdict from Bush v. Gore. Something else was going on, but I couldn’t figure out what. I figured the call had to be context for something else. Perhaps she was coming to terms with her own mortality and decided it was time to connect with her flesh and blood. I’d never heard her express such a r
emorseful thought.

  “That’s really sad. I remember when he used to shovel our front walk in the winter. And didn’t he have a bunch of kids? How’s his wife doing?” I found some street parking and pulled in. I shut off the engine, but didn’t get out of the car. All of a sudden, the creamy latte and blueberry cornmeal muffin I’d been looking forward to all morning didn’t seem all that tempting. I felt surprisingly bereft. For someone I’d known only marginally, Mr. Madigan had seemed like a genuinely good guy who didn’t deserve to be randomly kidnapped from the world. As I sat in the quiet car, my energy rapidly drained out of me. The lightness I’d been experiencing moments before at the thought of a Sunday brunch and gossip session was replaced by a tight sadness in my stomach.

  I listened to my mother’s blank reply as she listed where Mr. Madigan’s boys went to college. As my car’s interior quickly started to overheat with the air-conditioning off, frustration started to build on top of my sadness. Why was she calling me now, of all times? Was this kind of impersonal information, the births and deaths of our neighbors, really all that my mother and I had to say to each other? The last I’d heard from Caro was ten months prior, when my student loan bills were mistakenly being sent to her. Now, sitting in my black Prius, with the sun baking down on me—opening the door seemed way too hard at that moment, even though it would have solved the problem of the pool of sweat settling on the back of my neck—I started to feel more and more agitated, a common reaction to Caro popping up out of the blue.

  “Is this the only reason you’re calling?” I interrupted sharply. My tone instantly altered the direction of the conversation.

  “What?” she responded. Slowly and in a steely voice, Caro repeated, “I called you to tell you about Mr. Madigan. The poor man woke up with a headache one day, went to his company picnic, and collapsed halfway through the pie-eating contest.”