Raj took a deep breath and spoke much more slowly than usual. “I got a call this morning from your counselor friend. From the records office.”
“Irene? Why was she calling you?”
“You used me as a reference, remember, in your application for Joey’s adoption certificates. Foster stuff. Whatever it was.”
“But you already knew that.”
“Yeah. I’m your Primary Reference, right?” he said, without any flirtation or humor this time. “And she told me your application had been rejected.”
“She left me a message saying as much this morning,” Lydia said. “But she shouldn’t be involving you in it. I mean, why would I need a reference if my application was rejected?”
“That’s not it,” Raj said. “She asked me to come by her office this afternoon. She told me that your application had been rejected but that it had nothing to do with you using me as a reference. That my record was clear. That I shouldn’t worry about applying for jobs or anything like that. That my record was pristine. Her word.”
“She asked you to come into the office to tell you that? That makes no sense.”
“None at all,” Raj said. “She was trying to cover her ass in case— In case I got upset.”
“Upset about what?”
Raj looked out over the traffic-clogged edges of downtown.
“Obviously I was confused,” he said, “until Irene told me that I could always try to apply for Joey’s adoption documents. That just because you’d been rejected didn’t mean that I would be. But only if I wanted to, she was careful to point out. It’s like she was dancing around something, but I was intrigued, and I thought it might help you out. So I went in.”
“You actually went to her office?”
“I did,” Raj said, “and she closed the door and asked me, point-blank, if I wanted to apply for Joey’s adoption paperwork. But I had no interest in filling out an application, paying all the fees—I just wanted to know what she was up to. It’s really not hard, she told me, then she handed me the application to show me how easy it was to fill out, and she flipped it to the second page and there’s this list of checkboxes where I would state my ‘relationship to the adoptee.’ Only one of the boxes already had a checkmark next to it. And Irene was touching it with the end of her pen, tapping it, and looking at the door to make sure no one was coming, and looking at me, and tapping the page. Tap-tap-tap. She’d already checked the box for me. This is what I’m getting at—”
“What box did she check?”
“She was trying to tell me, Lydia, without actually telling me.”
“What box, Raj?”
“Sibling,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Raj hunched forward on the stone steps. Lydia rubbed his back.
“We don’t know what any of this means, okay, Raj? This is a mistake. Irene was probably just trying to help me out, to work the system somehow.”
She could feel Raj breathing deeply, pulling himself together. “Was Joey my brother?” he said. “Does that make any sense at all, Lydia?”
“I don’t think so, Raj.”
For a while they sat in silence. She could hear a couple of panhandlers fighting near the obelisk in the park and the clack of skateboards shredding the lip of the Civic Center fountain.
“Irene called him Joseph Patel,” Raj said, pressing his temples with his fingers. “She said he got the Molina surname when his foster parents adopted him.”
“Have you talked to anyone else about this, Raj?”
“What,” he said, “like my parents?”
“It’s got to be a mistake,” she said. “Don’t talk to them just yet. Or anyone, for that matter. Let me think.”
“Irene said she recognized my name while she was reviewing your request.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Raj Patel. Isn’t that like the most common name in the Indian world? You’re like the John Smith of whatever region that is.”
“Gujarat. You know, the place my mom went to visit for nine months when I was a kid. Okay, not quite nine, but you get the idea.”
“Oh shit,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a mistake, Raj. Has to be.”
“Lydia,” he said, smiling with incredulity, “Irene encouraged me to take some time to think about whether I really wanted this, but when I said I wanted to know, she approved the application while I was sitting there. She even helped me to write up an affidavit in her office, then brought me down the hall to have it notarized.”
“For what?”
“To request a sealed adoption record,” he said. “Under ‘Reason for Request’ she told me to write adoptee deceased and sibling is requesting. Something like that. That was all. Then she checked some registry or calendar and said she could get me before a judge tomorrow. She does this stuff for a living, Lydia.”
“Not like this she doesn’t,” she said. “She’d be out of a job.”
Raj snickered. “The judge will still have to approve it before I’m able to see any original records, but Irene said she would help me if I was sure this was what I wanted.”
“And are you, Raj?”
“Yeah. Totally. I mean, if—yeah. I’d want to know. This is just so fucking weird.”
“I just can’t believe she called you like that. Why would she—?”
“She thinks we’re together,” Raj said quickly. “That you and I are—together.”
Lydia looked toward Raj, but Raj was looking away, toward the shiny plastic fortress of the art museum. On the walkway below the steps, a few sparrows fought over the corner of a hot dog bun.
“What was he like?” Raj said quietly.
“Joey?” she said. She thought for a minute. “Brilliant. Cool. Cute.”
“But messed up,” Raj said, “obviously.”
“You could say that.”
She could hear Raj sniff next to her and then exhale a long gust, the kind intended to clear cobwebs from the soul, to pry out its nails. Lydia didn’t say anything more.
“You realize he brought us together,” he said. “Not intentionally, but still, I saw your photo in the newspaper because he hanged himself at the bookstore.”
“I know,” she said.
“I could have helped him.”
Lydia’s hand shot out of her lap and clasped Raj’s shoulder. She shook him gently.
“Hey. Let’s not overdo this. We’ll figure it out, okay? I’ll talk to Irene first thing—”
“I’ve already talked to Irene,” he said, “and she’s told me all she’s ever going to.”
“But I’ll talk to her, Raj, and—”
“You need to ask someone who might actually know something, Lydia. You need to ask your dad. He was around back then. And he’s the only person connected to everyone involved. Including Joey.”
Lydia felt the mile of height between this step and the earth’s sea level begin to give way to space. She felt herself plummet. She felt herself fall. She felt air—
“That’s why I thought you should drive here,” Raj added, “so you could go straight from here to see him. So you could go to the mountains and ask your dad what he knows.”
“I can’t do that, Raj.”
“You can.”
Between gaps in the skyline Lydia could see the dark form of the distant mountains where Raj was trying to steer her. From this vantage the Rockies appeared as a spiky black wall, majestic and fearful, a remnant of an ancient time. She felt she understood those early roaming Denverites who’d hit that wall and couldn’t take another step, so they stabbed some buildings into the prairie, rolled out some railroad tracks, and began their century of sprawl. It was so much easier to stay put.
“What I really want to do is go straight to the doughnut shop,” Raj said, “and hear what my parents have to say about all of this. But I should wait until it’s all verified, right? Besides which, if I go over there now—”
“You should not go over there now,” she said, l
ooking at how tensely he was clenching his fists. “I don’t want to have to bail you out of jail.”
“Please go see your dad, Lydia. If you don’t want to go alone, I could go with you.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Or I can go see him by myself,” Raj said.
“Just slow down, Raj. All of this has got to be a mistake. There’s no point in me—”
“Stop saying it’s a mistake,” he said, with an edge in his voice that surprised her. He stood and looked at the sky and began to drop down the capitol’s stone steps, one at a time. “I think you’re forgetting something, Lydia: you weren’t the only one in Joey’s photo. I was in there, too. Me. Right at your side, as always. It’s not a mistake.”
Lydia watched Raj walk between the barren trees and across the walkways in the direction of downtown. Once he was out of sight she wandered back toward Plath’s car. Traffic inched brightly down Broadway, and she knew he was right: Lydia may have been blowing out birthday candles in the center of the photo that Joey had died with, but the ten-year-old Raj was at her side, as loyal as always. With small embarrassment, she recognized that Joey would have been more likely to die holding a photo of his big brother than a photo of the woman who sold him books. And Raj had been right about something else, as well: her dad—the source of Joey’s photo—was the only person she knew who might just have the answers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After leaving the capitol Lydia made a quick stop at her apartment to grab the birthday party photo and throw some crackers into her satchel. David was in the shower when she came in, and though part of her was tempted to disappear in there with him, she knew if she did, this journey would screech to a comforting halt. Besides, she was still hurt by the fact that he’d known about the Hammerman for years, yet had kept his knowledge secret from her. She knew that her reaction didn’t make sense—it wasn’t David’s fault that he’d figured out her past, and she’d been just as secretive—but the betrayal she felt was real.
She could hear him humming to himself in the shower as she scrawled him a note on the back of a student loan envelope:
Going to see Dad in Rio Vista (if I don’t chicken out). Be home tomorrow, latest. I’ll call.
Wish me luck.
L
As she read the note she was surprised to notice the absence of a single word: love. She didn’t want to think too much about why she’d omitted it, but it was an easy fix:
Wish me luck.
Love,
L
There.
The night was cold and windy as Lydia drove. Stars crowded the windshield, and ovals of ice glowed on the road like pools of oil. The drive was long, the mountains desolate. And then came Rio Vista.
Lydia hunkered low in the Volvo as she rolled onto Main Street. A lot had changed since she’d left town at seventeen—Elmo’s Drugs was now a bistro pub, Hot Dog Heaven a massage therapist’s office—and passing through the empty streets she felt little more than a maudlin familiarity. As she reached the long snowy driveway north of town that led to her father’s cabin, she didn’t see any tire tracks or footprints, which meant he hadn’t left his property in a while. She parked and began to walk up the crusty slope, weaving a trail between pine trees and brush.
Up the stretch of hillside, twenty yards down from his A-frame cabin, she could see the light box of his workshop shining between the pines. The shop had been built with weathered lumber salvaged from a fallen barn, and from here it looked warm and inviting, the only glow on the entire frozen mountainside. Soon she was standing in a pile of snow and peering into one of its windows. The glass was so drizzled with dirt that it looked as if the shop had some sort of striped paneling covering its inner walls. She scratched an ice clod against the pane to see better and realized that the walls of the shop, all the walls, were lined with books. Thousands of them.
Her hand pressed the splintery siding. She felt a glint of hope.
As she soft-stepped into a slightly open door, the warmth of a woodstove poured through her and into the cold. Her father was standing at a long workbench with his back to her. He was wearing an oversized flannel shirt over a black hoodie, and the back of his hood was bisected by the elastic straps of a white work mask. His hands were covered by purple latex gloves and he was slathering some kind of stain over a row of wooden planks.
“I was wondering when,” he said, pausing his brush but not turning around. His voice was deeper and hoarser than it had been on the phone, maybe because of the mask. “I guess I was wondering if more than when. But I’m glad you came.”
She couldn’t speak.
“I’ve been waiting for you forever,” he added.
He still hadn’t turned around. Maybe because she couldn’t read his expression, she focused on reading the space around him. The shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, twenty feet high and equally wide, and they covered every inch of wall space except where they framed the windows and doors. It was as if his books had replaced the structure entirely.
“Are you making more bookshelves?” she said, mouth dry, fighting vertigo.
He set the brush in a black jar of spirits and ungloved his hands, keeping his back to her. She’d assumed he would be happy to see her but his posture expressed only reticence. Maybe he just couldn’t face her.
“Almost out of space,” he said, “for real this time.” He gestured toward the planks he’d been staining. “Let’s see, these are the new shelves for the bathroom in the cabin. Above the toilet. You think this is a lot, wait till you see inside.”
“You have books in the cabin too?”
“Let’s just say it got a little tight in there.”
Lydia hadn’t expected her father to be so fixated, so delusional. The thought of this man reaching deep into his memory to help her decipher the past seemed suddenly ludicrous. She shifted her satchel and unbuttoned her coat and cardigan.
“Are you ever going to turn around? You haven’t even looked at me.”
Without a pause he unsnapped his mask and faced her.
In Lydia’s mind her father was the man she’d last seen well over a decade ago, snoring in his bed on the morning of her high school graduation, when she’d snuck out of the cabin with a map and a backpack and hitched a ride to the bus station in Leadville. Ever since then, his increasing age had always been abstract, something she associated with Over the Hill! birthday cards and Metamucil ads. Now it was perfectly concrete. He was into his sixties but he appeared at least a decade older. His face was spotty and dry and white whiskers furred his cheeks and neck. He was back to wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, but gauging from the scratched filth of his lenses he’d pulled them from a memento drawer. But most noticeable was how frail he’d become. The waist of his jeans was cinched by rope and his elbows dangled limply against his ribs. The man was rank, encrusted, but worst of all malnourished. The reality of this sent her screaming at herself: if she was going to cut him out of her life, she should’ve at least made sure he was healthy.
“Are you eating?” she said, nearly choking on the words.
“I’d be dead if not.”
“How often?”
He leaned forward and squinted. “You doing okay? You look kind of worn out.” He reached out a hand but stopped it midair.
“What are you eating?” she said.
“Back to that,” he said impatiently, and shuffled head-down toward a large storage bin on the far side of the workshop, set like an island a few feet from the wall. Lydia followed. The bin held canned soup, beans, chili, pears. On the floor alongside it, at the base of a ticking woodstove, was a gray sleeping bag looking larval atop a mattress.
“Sometimes I live out here,” he said, playfully swiveling a can opener. “Especially lately.”
The sight of his tumbled canned goods added to the sadness she was feeling, so she walked along the bookshelves and tried to find her footing. He trailed behind her.
“You’re getting a lot of reading do
ne, anyway,” she said.
“Actually not. I don’t really have the energy, to be honest. Plus I’m long overdue for new glasses.”
“Then why books?” she said, running her hand along the edge of a shelf.
“I guess I didn’t know what to do with myself after you left. Then I started doing it and this is what it became.”
“But where’d they all come from? You couldn’t’ve bought all these.”
“Courtesy of the Rio Vista State Penitentiary. Donations. Books come in from thrift stores, estate sales, libraries—a lot of books no one wants end up being sent to the prison, and those that the prison doesn’t want end up here. This is the dreck that doesn’t make it to those carts you see on sidewalks in front of bookshops. A lot are missing pages or covers or are moldy or torn. Sometimes they arrive on pallets. I think word got out that we’d take anything.”
“ ‘We’? I thought you quit.”
“I did. But I still go over about once a month and pick up whatever they discard. Which is most of them.”
“To the prison?”
“I go at night. They think I’m nuts. But they’re happy not to have to deal with them.”
“It’s quite a library, anyway,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.
“I’ve begun to think of it as more graveyard than library. End of the line, you know. Where book-of-the-month club comes to die.”
As they spoke, Lydia had been walking along the shelves, sliding out the occasional title. For all of their tatter and wear the books did have an overall tidy appearance. She noticed a few wooden rulers hanging from nails and realized that each book had been placed exactly one inch from the lip of its shelf. Staring toward the raftered ceiling, following the compulsive plumb lines of all those spines, Lydia felt a stitch in her neck. No wonder he had no energy for reading.
“I need to know something,” she said, turning to face him, surprised at the boldness of her voice.
“Is it about what I think it’s about? Let me see it.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about, and when she did she turned slightly away, as if to guard the satchel hanging on her shoulder. “You mean Joey’s photo?”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 20