The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  “—died. I’m not offended by the term.”

  “Of course! What physician would be? Died. There! Let’s both be grown-ups.”

  It’s only a successful shot in the dark—to guess a single parenthood, no names, no specific circumstances—but Lily has to remind herself of it. He’s on a fishing expedition and nothing else. Just like the psychic who chances on the dead loved one whose name starts with a vowel (“Uncle Ed!”) and is credited with uncanny accuracy, this man is feeling around until she helps him find a nugget of particularity. Something she’s not about to do. First, because it’s her job to turn this interview around. Second, she doesn’t like the idea that he possesses even a piece of faked knowledge of her past.

  “There are a number of problems with your proposition,” Lily states calmly.

  “Yes?”

  “For one, it would appear that we’re about the same age. Which means if I was a child when you knew my mother, you were a child too. Even if you had met her—which I don’t believe—you wouldn’t have remembered it, given how young you would have been.”

  “You said a number of problems. Could you cite another?”

  “You haven’t given my mother a name, or stated where you knew her from.”

  There’s a clock on the wall and the man glances up at it, rightly calculating that these interviews have fixed time limits. His shackles clank together under the table as he weighs what approach he should take.

  “I have many things I’d like to say that you will find unbelievable at first. Specifics are where that doubt of yours puts me at a disadvantage, especially here, where I can’t show you things, only speak them,” he says. “Yet I look forward to our future discussions, Doctor. They will require some time. That’s where the showing will be of assistance.”

  “I can observe more than you think from right here,” Lily says, placing her elbows on the table. “And my hearing is fine. It’s my job to listen.”

  “Then hear this. I am not like anyone who has ever passed through this place before. I am a singular case.”

  “Were you trying to prove your singularity when you injured that man the way you did?”

  He takes a deep breath. “Let’s stop talking about him.”

  “Isn’t he the reason we’re together right now?”

  “No. He means nothing.”

  “The pain you caused him. Are you saying—”

  “No!”

  The man stands. Kicks at the leg shackles with such force the table, the floor itself shakes. His hands clenched in fists he stops himself from swinging down. Lily flinches, but almost instantly sits straight again.

  “I’m not here to explain a petty crime! I’m not a case study! I thought you—”

  He stops once he realizes he’s shouting. He sits. His eyes dart to the door to see if an officer will appear. Lily half expects it herself. But whether the guard on the other side of the glass is too busy dunking his donut or whether he’s waiting for a signal she has yet to give, the door remains closed.

  “I’m here to give you a gift,” the man says, his voice no more than a whisper.

  Lily closes the file. “I should go.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “These interviews—they can’t happen if—”

  “I promise I won’t do that again. I will be patient. And it’s really the most extraordinary gift. Please, Lily.”

  The way he says her name. It sounds to her, with that accent of his, closer to its true articulation than when she says it herself. She lingers, partly to confirm her diagnosis by learning what he wants to present her with, partly to hear him say her name again.

  “What gift?” she asks.

  “Something I’ve never wholly shared with anyone before.”

  “A secret.”

  “If it’s a secret, it’s been sitting right under mankind’s nose for a very long time.”

  “It’s special knowledge, then.”

  “Only the truth, Doctor.”

  Lily puts her pen down. Gestures for him to continue.

  “It’s true by appearance we would seem to belong to the same generation,” he begins. “Which would mean I was a child at the same time you were. But the fact is I was never a child.”

  “Metaphorically, I take it.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I came into the world in this adult form, and have remained this way all my life. A life that’s over two hundred years old, Dr. Dominick.”

  Lily nods as casually as she can and picks up her pen. Makes another note in the file.

  Irrational age claim. Constancy = appearance. Supernatural attributes.

  It’s almost disappointing. Even this one, so interesting, so seemingly different, is falling into place, into a category.

  Delusions of immortality consistent with schizophrenia => indication of Cotard’s Syndrome?

  He was going in this direction all along, she recognizes now. It was his intensity—his seasick-making attractiveness—that put her off course at first. But now he’s coming into diagnostic focus just like all the others. Which makes this day just like all the ones that came before. It makes her feel old. Two hundred years old.

  “The longest recorded life span of a human being is one hundred and twenty years,” she says. “You’re aware of this?”

  “One hundred and twenty-two years and one hundred and sixty-four days. Yes, I’m aware of it.”

  “So you see yourself as an exception?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “In the simplest terms? I’m not a human being.”

  Ah, here we go, Lily thinks. Which will it be? Alien or angel? It’s usually one of those two. Though she’s prepared to give this one the credit of coming up with something a little more original.

  “You beg the question, 46874-A,” Lily says, reading the number on the stickered ID of his file. “If not human, what are you?”

  He smiles. But it’s not like his earlier ones. There’s sadness in his face now that transfers to her, an instant, swelling despair in her chest.

  “I think the answer to that is why I’m here,” he says.

  “You’ve said that already. To have someone give you a name.”

  “No, Lily.” His face drifts closer to hers over the table, a distance greater than she would have guessed his leg shackles would allow. “To have you know what I am.”

  It comes to her all at once. The fear.

  He’d made her alert from the moment she’d entered the room. But she hadn’t felt truly frightened until now.

  To have you know what I am.

  The layers of unwanted discovery he implies with this sentence alone, a darkness that goes deeper than any psychiatric condition—it enters her like a bullet of ice to the chest.

  “I have another appointment,” she mumbles as she sweeps the file up and stands. “We’ll have to arrange—”

  She knocks her chair back without meaning to and it clatters to the floor. This seems to get the guard’s attention, because she hears the buzzer that opens the door. Only ten feet away but looking three times that distance now. She doesn’t stop to right the chair. She doesn’t look back at him.

  “Alison,” the shackled man says.

  “What did you say?”

  “She went by other names at different times in her life, but that’s most likely what you knew her as.”

  Lily can’t find words. Or air. She makes it to the door but goes still once she gets there, her hand riveted to the handle.

  “Your mother,” he says. “I knew her, Lily. In ways you didn’t. Still don’t.”

  “How did you—”

  “Your mother was not who she presented herself as. Not at all.”

  “That’s not—”

  “She told you a story. And as you grew up in other people’s homes, you passed it along until you could construct your own story. But I have come here to tell you that what you know of your origins contains only t
he smallest fragment of truth.”

  It takes all her will to do it, but Lily turns to face him. “Why don’t you tell me. Tell me the truth.”

  “Your father wasn’t a man named Jonathan. Those few photos of him that you possess are pictures of a stranger that your mother gave you so that it would appear you were the product of a brief coupling, that they had gone their separate ways.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “While the woman you know as Alison was your mother—”

  “Shut up!”

  “While Alison was your mother, the man in those photos—Jonathan—played no part in your conception.”

  “You’re wrong,” she says. “Jonathan Dominick was my father.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I am.”

  5

  * * *

  Lily staggers from the interview room with her hands held out at her sides, partly to brace herself, partly to fend off any attack. The latter concerns her more than the dizziness that feels like a nest of birds trapped in her head, beating their wings against the inside of her skull. Defend herself? From what? The client was being taken to his cell by way of a separate, secured hallway. He is no threat now. But it doesn’t stop her from feeling threatened. The half-smile and swallowing eyes of the man in chains. She told you a story. Her mother’s body. The thing standing over it.

  She can feel the nameless client inside the building. Somewhere in the concrete vastness of the Kirby’s long halls he radiates a heat that makes her look behind her more than once over the course of the day to check if he’s standing there. Each time there’s a second of real surprise when he isn’t.

  Lily knows this is only her returning to what he said, over and over. Odd in itself. Clients said bizarre things to her all the time and, for the most part, none of it echoed in her head once she’d shut the interview room door. She tries to tell herself it’s because what the man said was so personal. But then again, clients had tried to get under her skin before, tried to make it about her. None of them could back it up with obscure facts the way the man from this morning had. Is that why his voice lingers? The psych studies say it’s the same way with ghosts. The dead appear most vividly to those already looking for them, so that those suffering grief see the one grieved for just as those playing with a Ouija board unknowingly move the planchette with their own fingers. A series of links of her own making: she’s thinking of him, and this gives her the sensation of his presence, so that it seems he’s reaching out to her just as she is to him.

  Hold on to your doubt, Doctor.

  He needn’t have bothered telling Lily that. Doubt is the one part of herself she doesn’t have to worry about losing. Her clients’ talk is little more than a patchwork of scenarios, guesses, denials, delusions. She mistrusts people for a living. It’s also why she worked so hard at school, now that she thinks of it. Those glowing report cards, the scholarships, the letter of acceptance from the Kirby—she’d been suspicious of all of them. She knows where talk therapy would ultimately lead her on this issue. Her mother. The way she died. A child who believed it was a monster who knocked at the cabin door. A white Pegasus flying through the forest with her on its back.

  No, she had never had a problem with doubt.

  She can pull apart the things he said to her all too easily—her parents’ names would have required a little digging, but any obsessive with a computer and time on his hands could’ve gotten that far. The rest of it even more easily dismissed. Over two hundred years old. Never aging in appearance. The claim about being her father. You didn’t need an advanced psychiatric degree to write all of it off as batshit crazy.

  So why are you looking over your shoulder every five minutes?

  He’s different.

  She’d felt it from the moment she’d seen him. Even before that, on her walk to work that morning, seeing a woman with her mother’s face run by. And before that too. The dream of the monster.

  There is no link between these moments and dreams and yet her mind travels between them with the fluency of coherence. Her mother, the man in the interview room, the thing in the cabin. Back to her mother again.

  Lily remembers her in detail in some respects, and not at all in others. It was like viewing a landscape from five thousand feet. Sometimes the clouds cover everything in gray, and sometimes they pull away to show the smoke rising from a chimney, the swing set in the yard, a figure clipping laundry to a line.

  One of the details that reveals itself now is how, before the lullabies that sent her off to sleep, there were often bedtime stories too. Lily suspects they must have been made up on the spot, as none of the plots correspond to any children’s classics she’s aware of, no Dr. Seuss rhymes or talking animals or books with charming pictures in them. In fact, they didn’t seem like stories you’d ever tell a kid her age. They were too frightening, for one thing. A man who went into a forbidden room and was almost devoured by women who turned into fiends. A boy who stayed out too late at night who was kicked and kicked by a stranger in the street until his head broke open. A doctor who discovered a way of putting a ghost into a graveyard corpse. The grown-up Lily had always considered them homemade variations on the Brothers Grimm, their intent to caution and instruct. But now she sees her mother’s tales as worse than that, sicker than that. They were horror stories.

  Lily flips through the catalogue of her memory to find a warmer, more wholesome clip, so that when her mother’s hair comes to mind she holds on to it. A kind of dark that was almost liquid in the way it bent light into stripes down its length. Lily would snuggle against her mother’s back and shroud her face with hair, peering through it like a waterfall. Now the scent of it returns to her. A vanilla that had nothing to do with any shampoo or conditioner but came from her mother’s skin, the essence of her that clung to the soft black strands.

  Lily’s hair would be just like it if she didn’t cut it to her jawline. She always assumed this was to assert a no-nonsense, professional demeanor but realizes now it may have as much to do with avoiding the pain of seeing her mother in the mirror every time she looked if she allowed it to grow.

  Now a new question: If she felt her mother so keenly through the distance of the past, why did her father—his image, his name—return nothing specific to her? The man in the room was right in this at least: Jonathan Dominick had only ever registered to her as the photo of a stranger. Which is not to say the idea of a father was without life for her. She felt his absence acutely, as acutely as the revulsion at her mother’s murder, a space like an insatiable gnawing in her heart.

  You want your daddy, her voice says. It’s so like you to feel the most for the thing that was never there.

  Then another voice. His.

  Until your old life ends and your new one begins.

  Despite all her doubt, it seems to Lily it already has.

  A new life. More vivid than the one before today, the whole of her body prickly and alive. She couldn’t say she’s happier (measuring happiness has never been easy for her, like looking down into a dark lake and guessing the distance to its muddy bottom), yet there’s a skin that’s been peeled away from her today all the same. It’s left her weightless. Going through the tasks of her agenda—the lunch meeting with a colleague that boiled down to complaints about inadequate air-conditioning in his office, the returning of inconsequential e-mails. It took more than a little self-control to not tell her colleague to buy his own damn air conditioner if he didn’t like the “incessant rattling” from the one the hospital gave him. Even replying to a request for advice on a file from Dr. Edmundston, the kindly man who hired her and whom she adored, felt like a chore.

  Whatever shape this new life ended up taking, it’s clear to Lily that her inappropriate voice was going to have a bigger say in things.

  * * *

  SHE’S SO DISTRACTED BY THE morning’s interview that Lily almost forgets she has a date tonight.

  “So,�
�� her assistant says, tapping a pen against her lower lip. “What are you going to wear?”

  “Wear?”

  Denise drops the pen. Snaps her fingers. “Calling Dr. Dominick. Hel-lo?”

  “Sorry. I’m a little lost today.”

  “I’m asking how you’re going to look for your man.”

  Your man.

  For a second, Lily thinks Denise is talking about her client from this morning.

  That’s when she remembers the guy from the dating website. A name and photo and profile that accepted her name and photo and profile and now these two avatars are going to meet at a restaurant. It was Denise who’d talked her into it. She explained to Lily how people didn’t meet anymore, didn’t date, they hooked up.

  “You don’t want to be alone forever, do you?” she’d asked.

  At the time, the part that made Lily feel even older than being coached at romance by a woman only three years younger than herself was that maybe the answer was yes, she did want to be alone forever.

  She recalls how she found the man she’s to meet for dinner nice-looking when she’d accepted his invitation. Hot. Denise’s word. Now hers.

  Lily checks her watch. Three forty-two. She tallies what work remains before her for the day: two more client interviews and a stack of notes to be dictated, then an important Scheduling Committee meeting, Dr. Edmundston sitting as Chair.

  “Cancel the rest of my day,” Lily says, grabbing her coat.

  “What? What’ll I say?”

  “Say I’m sick.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “Shopping.”

  * * *

  LILY’S CLOTHES ARE EXPENSIVE. THE only aspect of herself she splurges on. Tailored blouses and jackets and pants, a Midtown uniform of top-tier feminine professionalism. But there is little in her wardrobe that would qualify as sexy. The simple fact is she doesn’t really think about sex anymore, let alone have much of it. How long has it been? She’s startled to realize it’s a stretch measurable in years, not months. She had a ready-made loop of excuses for the increasingly rare occasions when she worried it might indicate a larger problem: the difficulty of finding a decent guy in New York, the demands of work, the preference of a glass of wine and Netflix at the end of the day over conversation. Honesty would require her to add another reason. She’s lost touch with desire.