“Here I am blabbing. So? What’s the word?”
Raj explained that he’d just come in from bouncing around a bunch of different state agencies downtown. “I met Irene at the courthouse this morning. She gave me a Danish, and twenty minutes later we were standing in a meeting room with a judge and a stenographer. She talked to the judge briefly, going over the files she’d sent him, and then he asked me one question: ‘Why do you wish to unseal Joseph Molina’s adoption file?’ And I replied, ‘I’m his brother.’ Three words. I thought I was going to have to elaborate, but then the judge said he’d been provided with a death certificate for the adoptee, Joseph Molina, and the Vital Records office had validated our familial relationship, and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t unseal the records for a living sibling. That was it.”
“Thank you, Irene,” Lydia said. “Are you sure about this, Raj?”
“I’m definitely sure,” he said, as if it were a proclamation. “Part of me still thinks that maybe it’s all a mistake, but it’s getting harder to believe that, you know? What were my parents thinking? I mean, what the hell? I barely slept last night I was so pissed. This is not the kind of thing you hide from your child.”
“But you didn’t—”
“I haven’t said anything to them,” he said reassuringly, “and I’m avoiding them to make sure I don’t, but at some point they’re going to look me in the eye and explain.”
“Avoidance is probably a good plan. For now, anyway.”
“Are you around later today?” Raj said, sounding frail. “Irene is hoping to have the files couriered to me late this afternoon. Speaking of, I might need to borrow some money. I’m sorry, I just had to have it rushed, and there were all these fees, and I can’t ask my folks—”
“We’ll figure out the money,” she said. “Or maybe you’ll have to get a real job.”
“Not all of us can be booksellers,” he said.
“Truer words have never been spoken.”
Raj laughed. Lydia’s hands were cold, and a bad taste stained her mouth, but hearing his laugh made her feel better. Out the gas station window, a pickup truck with a happy hound in its bed parked by the pumps. She knew she should hang up and get back on the highway, but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts, so she was glad that Raj kept talking.
“Lydia? I know you need to go, but you don’t have a picture of him, do you? Of Joey?”
“I don’t, Raj. I could ask around the store, maybe Lyle or Plath, but I kind of doubt anyone would. He wasn’t really the spotlight type. Why?”
“I still don’t even know what he looked like. Did he look like me?”
With his green eyes and tawny skin, his black hair and lanky frame, Lydia had always been ready to assume, with little to no consciousness, that Joey was Latino. And learning his last name, Molina, probably only shored up this assumption. But in retrospect, he could just as easily have been almost any flavor of American, a kid whose portrait—dressed in black, standing on a Denver street with the Rockies in the background and bits of leaf in his hair—might have found a home in a National Geographic coffee table book, something called A Day in the West or The Americans. He could’ve been anyone, from anywhere.
“He looked like Joey,” Lydia said. “That’s just how I think of him. I know that’s not helpful.”
“I guess I’ve just been feeling bad,” Raj said. “I mean, if Joey had been living here in Cowtown all these years, I probably walked right past him on the street a dozen times, and I guarantee you that I didn’t offer to buy him lunch or dump some change into his palm. The kid was my brother, you know?”
“You probably never even saw him, Raj. He was born to disappear.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
Lydia could hear Raj drawing air on the far end of the phone, and she realized he was more upset than he was letting on.
“Irene asked me if I wanted a photo of him from his police record,” he said, “so that will be in the files she sends. But you know, I just keep thinking how awful it is that I only learned about him after he killed himself, and that my only photos of him will be of his body bag or his mug shot. What’s wrong with the world if those are the only images we have of this kid? Where’s his baby book, you know? I could’ve been his big brother, Lydia, for real. Instead of this.”
Lydia didn’t know what to say, so she sighed in agreement.
“I’m just glad he met you,” Raj continued. “That before he died he had a chance to know you the way I know you. That helps some, Lydia, just knowing that you were there for him. You were, weren’t you?”
“I think so.”
“That helps, Lydia. See, I just . . .”
Raj trailed off, and she wondered if he was crying. She wished she was there next to him, but in a way she was glad that she wasn’t.
“Raj?”
“I’m fine,” he said after a bit. “Just come see me when you get back to town. I won’t do anything until you get here. My fucking parents, man.”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
Lydia let the pay phone receiver crash into its cradle. She stood there for a minute, eyes wandering over the gas station’s rock candy and elk jerky, its belt buckles and butterfly knives. Before heading out, she retrieved her father’s wad of brown paper towel from her satchel and rested it quietly atop the pay phone. The woman behind the register looked up and yawned, then returned to reading her romance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After her shift at the bookstore, Lydia called Raj and agreed to meet him on the sidewalk in front of the Terminal Bar & Cafe, a slouching brick dive a few blocks north, where he rented a tiny apartment above the bar. On her walk over, she was thunked by a fat, cold raindrop, and soon more drops spotted the cobblestones and concrete. When she arrived, Raj wasn’t out front, but she soon found him sitting on a trashed vinyl bar booth in the alley, ignoring the rain. He was watching a pair of damp workmen carry an etched mirror out of the bar and slide it into the back of their truck. One of them gave Lydia a quick once-over as she approached, but otherwise the mood was funereal.
“Another one down,” Raj said, but he didn’t take his eyes off the workmen gutting the bar beneath his home.
Lydia understood. The Terminal was an epic dive with an epic history—Cassady, Kerouac, Waits—and the rumor among her comrades was that it would soon ditch the Coors taps and wonky pool table and be reborn as a sleek seafood bistro. A massive dumpster was parked against the curb out front, and it overflowed with the Terminal’s discarded bar stools and vinyl booths, its kitchen mats and condiment dispensers—all of the artifacts the new owners didn’t want.
“It won’t be long before we’re all evicted, anyway,” Raj said. “Used to be no one wanted to live down here, now everyone does. How are you?”
“Wiped. Still no courier?”
“He must be running late,” Raj said. He explained that the courier was supposed to deliver the package of files from Irene by five o’clock, but he hadn’t called or shown up yet. “Do you mind waiting out here with me? I just don’t want to miss him.”
The orange vinyl wheezed when she plopped down next to him.
A faint ribbon of tangerine light glowed above Union Station, but otherwise the dusk was dark and cloudy. Soon the air had chilled enough to change the rain into a wet snow. Lydia and Raj scooched the booth closer to the alley’s brick wall. The workmen took one look at the sky and called it a day.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Raj said, “if Joey’s files verify that he’s my brother. I don’t know how I’m going to face my parents. How could they not tell me?”
“Let’s just wait and see, Raj.”
Raj closed his eyes and leaned back into the booth. He was wearing black jeans and a gray coat and he didn’t seem to notice the snow.
After last night’s visit to her father’s workshop Lydia thought she might feel stronger in her core—more in command of her feelings and her history—but no
w she felt as she always did, only worse. Nibbled by dread and in dire need of a toothbrush. There was no way around the fact that her father had tampered with the crime scene at the O’Tooles’ and may have obstructed the investigation, but she couldn’t fathom the possibility of his facing charges or a jury or even reporters. She couldn’t risk that, no matter how wrong he’d been. And she especially couldn’t send him out of her life right at the moment he’d reentered it. She really didn’t know what to do.
Raj stood and began rocking on the balls of his feet. His boots ended in a smeary reflection of city lights.
“I don’t know how I’d do all of this alone,” he said with an unexpected formality.
“Don’t worry about it, Raj. Have a seat.”
He remained standing, squinting through the snowy drizzle at the dark frame of his apartment window above the bar. Below it a row of empty kegs were stacked against the building like bullet casings.
“I just keep thinking,” he said, “about how cool it is that my brother and your father managed to find each other in that prison.”
“I know what you mean.”
“And in a similar way, you know, just tracing things out, how if Joey was alive I wouldn’t be here with you. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, but that’s kind of a road to nowhere, Raj.”
“I mean it, Lydia. More than anything I wish Joey was sitting here with us, enjoying this crappy snow—of course I do. But it was his death, his body bag in the newspaper, that caused me to find you again, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m pointing this out because I want to make sure I don’t squander Joey’s value on this planet, you know? I feel like he led me into something rare here, whether he meant to or not, and I can’t let that go to waste just because I’m too embarrassed to share my feelings.”
“Raj,” she said, “it’s a lot to process, and there’s a lot we don’t—”
“Okay,” he said, interrupting her. “I’m just going to say it: you and I, Lydia, we need to be together. We need to see what’s right in front of us. This is no accident, Lydia. Our whole lives have been adding up to this: me and you, here and now. Just listen to it.”
Lydia felt something stir inside her, and she did listen: to the traffic splashing in the distance, to a train clacking along its tracks, to drips plinking on the fire escape and in the gutters. For a second, she considered giving herself over to Raj’s words, but doing so felt overly complicated and, in light of David’s constancy, unnecessarily cruel.
“I can’t think about this right now, Raj.”
He turned away from her and stared at the row of empty brick storefronts across the street.
“Because of David?” he said. “At least tell me it’s because of David and not because I’m chubby or gross or something.”
“Raj, you’re a total catch, trust me.”
“The loneliest catch in the world,” he said, but he sounded only half-serious.
A pickup truck splashed past and its driver tossed a cigarette out the window.
“We’ve always been close, Raj, even when we weren’t together. And we’ll keep being close. So let’s just lead our lives and see what happens, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, and though she could tell he was disappointed, she also knew she was right: this was not the time.
Lydia’s hands were wet and a pool of slush had gathered beneath her feet.
“You can wait in my apartment if you want,” he said.
“I’m happy right here.”
When the courier finally pulled up in front of the Terminal, driving a little eighties Metro or Yugo, Raj ran to the curb to meet him. The courier stepped out of his little car and into the snow casually, sporting an anemone of dreads and wearing a ripped striped sweater.
“You’re kind of late,” Raj said.
“Traffic, man. Speer Boulevard. I mean, what’s the point of even driving, you know? Move me to the mountains, give me a horse.”
The man’s car was double-parked, its hazards flashing. Lydia felt a swallow of anxiety as Raj took the package of files from the man and bobbed it dreamily in his hands. It was bound in some kind of waterproof sleeve and sealed with a string-and-button clasp. Lydia imagined Joey burning a similar package in his trash can on the day he’d hanged himself.
“I need a signature for that,” the guy said, handing him a clipboard and hunching over it to block some snowfall.
Raj snapped out of it. “Sorry.”
“I’m used to it, man. I deliver results for medical tests, divorce papers, all kinds of heavy shit. I bear news, man.” He took the clipboard from Raj and shined a little flashlight on his name. “May your news be fruitful, Raj Patel. May your news bring peace. Later.”
Lydia and Raj watched the courier’s taillights disappear, then both walked toward the side entrance in the alley. Raj stopped beneath a light fixture bolted to the bricks and began ripping into the package. A Post-it note with a scrawled message from Irene was on the outside, but he didn’t even bother to read it before opening the file.
“I can’t see anything,” he said, lifting the pages close to his face and blinking. “It’s like everything is underwater.”
“Here,” Lydia said, and took the file from him, and leaned in close enough to read.
“What’s it say? Were we right?”
She nodded, mouth dry. She could hear little persistent ticks and realized Raj was clicking his fingernails together.
“Raj. Are you seeing this?”
“What?”
“This,” she said, holding a fresh photocopy that said Certificate of Adoption across the top, inside a border of scrolls, above the seal of the state of Colorado. The first thing she noticed was the way all the information was arranged in a grid of small rectangles, little windows, each holding different data, and she couldn’t help but consider the resemblance they bore to Joey’s messages. This was a copy of the certificate that was filed when baby Joey was adopted into the Molina family, soon after his birth, so a lot of the information recorded the details of Mr. and Mrs. Molina, as Lydia had expected, while the rest of the information focused on Joey’s birth and birth parents. Those boxes also offered the details she’d expected—Child’s Name, Child’s Gender, Place of Birth, Date of Birth, Time of Birth, Birth Mother’s Name, Birth Mother’s Maiden Name—until she came upon the information about Joey’s birth father.
“See that?” Lydia said, and her wet finger tapped the box that recorded the birth father’s name.
“I don’t understand,” Raj said. He pulled the certificate from her hands and held it closer to the light.
Birth Father’s Name: Bartholomew Edward O’Toole.
Lydia felt her shoulders tighten. She could hear the snap of drips hitting paper.
“Does that say Mr. O’Toole?” Raj said. “Under ‘Birth Father’?”
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“This isn’t right,” he said, huffing. “Irene sent me the wrong file.”
“It’s the right one, Raj.”
“It can’t be, Lydia. It can’t be. Unless—”
“Yeah.”
“Does this mean—?”
“I think so,” she said.
Lydia felt snowflakes melting on her face. The file in Raj’s hand fell to his side and draped against his thigh.
“Maybe Mr. O’Toole was just a witness or something,” he said, “and they put his name in the wrong box.” He looked at the sky. “They wouldn’t do that, would they?”
“They wouldn’t,” Lydia said. “It says, ‘Birth Father,’ Raj. That means—”
“That means Joey wasn’t my dad’s baby,” he said. “That means my mom—my mom and Mr. O’Toole?”
“That’s exactly what that means.”
“My mom?”
“I know.”
“So she didn’t go to India?” he said, incredulous, as he squinted at the l
etterhead on another sheet in the file. “She went to Colorado Springs instead, some place called the Sacred Heart Maternity Home. I’m surprised it doesn’t say ‘For Girls in Trouble.’ My mom and Mr. O’Toole, for real?”
Lydia’s blood felt thick as it squeezed through her heart. She sensed a thought forming that wouldn’t quite emerge, as if it were trapped in a net just below her consciousness, trying to break the surface. How sad—maybe that was it—that Joey’s dad was dead, probably before the kid was even born. Had he even known about Joey, and had Joey even known about him? How sad, either way.
Raj took a deep sniff and studied the paper, aiming for control. As his neurons scrambled to redefine everything he’d ever known about his parents, Lydia couldn’t help but see him as the childhood friend who’d always shared the candy crammed in his jumpsuit pockets, who’d read endless books at her side, who’d always looked so worried when he walked up the porch steps to his own home. She ached all over.
“It’ll be okay, Raj.”
“Just give me a second,” he said faintly.
Lydia was going to turn and wander away to give him some space, but when she took a step she felt a tug and realized that they were holding hands. She had no idea how long they’d been doing so, and he himself didn’t seem to notice, but his grip fit within hers so naturally that she had to shake his wrist a little before he let up. As soon as his hand was free she regretted letting go. Her fingers felt colder now, unpleasantly damp and pruned, and the rest of her felt colder as well.
“I’ll take you to breakfast tomorrow,” she said.
Raj looked up from the file and seemed surprised to see Lydia still standing there, her hair soaked and flat. A small pop escaped his jaw. “Breakfast? Okay.”
“Maybe hold off for a day or two before you talk to them.”
“To my parents?” he said, brow raised. “My brother is dead, Lydia. And my mom was screwing Mr. O’Toole. I don’t know that I’ll ever talk to them again.”
He returned to the cone of dripping light and didn’t look up, even as Lydia walked out of the alley, past the cluttered dumpster, and off in the direction of Colfax.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 23