Boy Still Missing (20 page)

To each question the priest’s refrain was “It’s God’s will.”

It’s not that I didn’t believe in God, because I did, but I couldn’t help thinking that he needed to come up with a better argument. I mean, if that was the case, then why didn’t we simply let sick people die without trying to help them? Or throw up our hands when people broke their
legs or arms, let their limbs heal bent and wobbly without casts? The more the priest spoke, the more I pictured God as a big silvery eye in the sky among puffs of white clouds, looking down on the women who suffered from His will and refusing to stop it.

I listened for a while longer, until their discussion looped back in on itself, clearly going nowhere. They both believed what they wanted, and neither of them was budging. Finally I turned off the TV and sprawled on the couch. The streetlight outside cast stretches of square black shadows on the wall. I stared up at those shadows and counted the hours until my meeting with Joshua Fuller the next day. As tired as I felt from all the emotion of the day, sleep never came to me completely. I dozed on and off on the couch for hours. Woke to think of Edie holding her new baby and whispering those words. Woke again to imagine that I was her baby and she was whispering to me.

You are my life,
she cooed in her shaky voice again and again.
You are my life.

When the faint light of dawn made the shadows disappear, I got up and showered. Dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt I had worn the day before. I waited by the window, watching the street until eight-thirty rolled around. Then I put on my coat and headed out to meet Joshua Fuller.

The diner he suggested was not really a diner at all, or at least not like the one in Holedo. This place had wood-paneled walls and tables instead of booths. No mini-jukeboxes to play. The waitress who seated me wore jeans instead of a drab uniform. She flipped over the upside-down cup on my table and asked if I wanted coffee. I don’t know why I kept drinking the stuff lately, even though I didn’t like the taste, but I pushed my mother’s gum to the back of my mouth and gave her the green light to pour. The menu was a mix of regular diner food—burgers, omelets, turkey clubs—and weird Polish dishes, too—pierogi, borscht soup, beet salad. They also had some Chinese and Italian stuff. I scanned all that food as I waited for Joshua Fuller to show. On the phone he had described himself as six feet tall with curly brown hair and glasses. Each
time the door opened, I looked up expecting to see someone who fit that description. At exactly nine o’clock he walked through the door. He had described himself accurately enough, minus the fact that his hair was more gray than brown and there was a purple birthmark above his eye. It looked like an eye patch he had lifted to his forehead so he could peek out for a moment. His turtleneck and black blazer made him seem slick and smart to me. Like one of the guys from a Ballantine’s scotch ad, swirling his drink and looking nonchalant.

This is him, I thought. The man who is going to deliver me to my brother.

“Dominick?” he said when he got to the table. He carried a smooth leather bag, stuffed and heavy on his lanky arm. “It’s you, right?”

“It’s me.” I shook his hand when he put it forward, which made me feel older than I was. A scotch-drinking sophisticate, too.

“Nice to meet you,” he told me, sitting down.

The waitress came by with the coffeepot. She flipped his cup, poured, refilled mine while she was at it. After she left, we fell into a moment of awkward silence.

“You know,” he said, breaking it, “I realized after we hung up that I could get in serious trouble for not letting anyone know where you are. I mean, you’re fifteen. A minor.”

“Are you going back on our deal?” I asked, thinking I’d bolt for the door if that were the case.

“No,” he told me. “I decided that you’re not really missing if you’re staying at your uncle’s place. All your father has to do is pick up the phone like I did.”

Maybe he doesn’t want to, I thought, sipping my coffee. And that’s okay with me.

“So let me ask you a few questions,” Joshua said. He took a tape recorder out of his tan bag and set it on the table.

I braced myself for whatever he was going to ask me, then thought that it would be smarter if I got my dirt up front. “How about I ask you some questions first?”

“Sounds fair,” he said, holding a finger in the air over the red “record” button, not yet pressing it. “What do you want to know?”

No more wasting time. “The Burdan trial. What is it?”

I watched his bushy eyebrows cinch together. That purple patch crinkle like the skin on a rotten eggplant. “Let me get this straight. You don’t know anything about your mother’s first son?”

“Just that she was married to a man named Peter and that they had a kid named Truman. My brother.”

“Okay, then. Here goes.” He stopped and seemed to be mulling something over. Maybe he was wondering whether or not it was right to spill my mother’s secrets just to get his interview. I tried to fix my face so that it looked like I could take or leave both him and his information. Finally he breathed in and said, “Your mother’s first husband was Peter Tierney. When she was pregnant with their child, he died in an accident. She had the baby five months later.”

I leaned forward for more but decided I didn’t want to seem too anxious, so I leaned back again.

“Peter Tierney didn’t have any money to leave her. No insurance. So she took a job as a waitress to try to support your brother. But she was young herself, and it was never enough to make ends meet. And she still couldn’t quite pull herself together after Peter’s death.”

I stopped him there. “How do you know any of this?”

Joshua reached into his bag and pulled out a manila folder, handed it to me. The thing was stuffed with pages of clipped newspaper and magazine stories. I scanned the headlines.
BIOLOGICAL MOM WANTS BABY BACK. BURDAN FAMILY CHALLENGES CASE IN COURT. EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TERRY TIERNEY
.

I was about to dig into the articles—not for the words right away but for the pictures of my mother and brother that must have been there—but Joshua started talking again. “Your mother’s doctor kept pressuring her to give up the baby in a private adoption. He said he knew a family who could give him a better life than a single mother with no money could. Finally she decided to go through with it.”

So that was the secret. My brother had been given up for adoption. But why did my mother claim to be visiting Truman when she came to New York?

“According to what she said in those interviews, when your mother’s grieving for her husband let up, it was like coming out of a fog. She couldn’t believe what she had done. She missed her child and wanted him back. At the same time your uncle had come into some money. He helped her get a lawyer who built a case that claimed Terry had made the adoption decision under duress. During the grieving period after her husband’s death. They went after that doctor first, and it turned out he had made a big chunk of change finding that baby for another family. The courts ordered that the adoption records be unsealed.”

My curiosity gave way, and I started flipping through the articles, looking for a picture of Truman. I didn’t find one of him but I came across a few of a stuffy-looking couple. Bald guy in a business suit. Woman with straight shoulders and pearls, glasses on a chain. Mr. and Mrs. Burdan. “So the Burdans are my brother’s adoptive parents?”

“Yes,” he said. “And they’re a wealthy family. Your biological brother is one rich young man. Also, you should know that his name isn’t Truman anymore. It’s Randolph.”

I gripped the articles in my hands and tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. My brother was rich. But he wasn’t my brother at all. He was someone named Randolph Burdan. My mind flashed on one of my afternoons spent wandering the city. Last week I’d been on the Upper East Side when I passed a school where a flock of boys in blue blazers were streaming out the front door. Something about their neatly parted hair and unblemished faces had made them appear flawless, extraordinary to me. A bunch of rich kids who seemed incapable of being harmed. As I sat there listening to Joshua, my mind put Truman in that picture, made him one of those flawless kids.

“Your mother didn’t stand a chance in hell against their family lawyers,” Joshua was saying. “Courts ruled that the adoption was final. But by then the story had made national news. I covered the case for the
paper I worked for back then. And the Burdans weren’t happy with the publicity. When your mother’s lawyers tried to get her visiting rights, they shot that down, too.”

“End of story?” I said.

“Not quite. A year after the ruling Randolph Burdan was missing.”

So that headline in my uncle’s Bible was about Truman…Randolph. “Did anyone find him?”

“He turned up on the playground five days later. He was all by himself, pushing an empty swing on a Sunday morning. Of course, the family suspected that your mother had taken him. But she had an alibi, so no one could prove a thing.”

I tried to picture my mother as a kidnapper but came up only with the image of her in that black wool coat, her lips chapped and peeling, plunging our clogged toilet and crying. She wouldn’t have taken my brother only to abandon him at the playground. “So where is he today? I mean, he must be eighteen by now.”

“Twenty, actually. A sophomore at Columbia. And he goes by the name Rand, not Randolph.”

The waitress appeared, pad in hand. “What can I get you?”

I had zip for an appetite and told her that coffee was all I wanted. Joshua said the same, so she refilled us both.

“My mother used to come to the city and tell me that she was visiting him,” I said when the waitress was gone. “Was she? I mean, were they in touch? Because he didn’t come to her funeral.”

“I highly doubt your mother was visiting him. The family shunned her, and so did Rand. He didn’t want anything to do with her. They thought she was just after money.”

I flipped through the articles again. No pictures of my brother. But I saw a bunch of my mother being interviewed by reporters. She looked shaky and nervous with those microphones in front of her face. I bet she hated all that attention. I thought of the way she used to talk about him, calling him Truman even though that was no longer his name. Why couldn’t she just let go?

“So now that I’ve brought you up to date,” Joshua said, taking out a notepad and carefully pressing that red button, “I want to ask you a few questions. The story I’m doing is about the way your mother’s life exemplifies the choices women face with unwanted pregnancies. She tried both paths—adoption and an illegal abortion—and neither was a solution. I thought I’d begin by writing about her attempt to start a new life and why it all went wrong in January.”

Question: Why did it all go wrong?

Answer: Edie and me.

My mother had been cheated out of her first child and her last. The one in the middle had cheated her out of her life. Meanwhile, I was a runaway. And Edie was living happily ever after in a run-down apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Something was happening in my head.

I felt the electric hum of a railroad track when you put your hand to it, telling you the train is around the bend. I saw that blank white space at the bottom of the list of things I wanted from Edie. It grew bigger and whiter as that electric hum grew stronger. Louder. Those three white words were finally turning blue, then black. They weren’t just three words; they were a name:

Sophie Dominick Kramer.

That’s what I wanted from Edie. The sibling I never had. The one who was given to another family before my birth. The one whose life had been stopped in that motel. I couldn’t get my mother back, and my brother was someone else now. But if that baby was my sister, then I wanted her. I was going to save her from whatever life on the edge Edie had in store. And I was going to take something from Edie in the process, the way she had taken something from me.

Joshua Fuller was still talking. “I have an interview set up next week with your mother’s best friend as well. A Marnie Garboni.”

I stood up from the table, clutching the folder with all those stories about my mother’s life. Her bad decisions. “Marnie will tell you everything you need to know. I have to leave.”

“But we had a deal,” he said, jerking his head up from his notepad. His face looked tough suddenly. The Ballantine’s scotch man losing his cool. “You can’t go.”

I ignored him, walked toward the door of the diner.

“We had a deal!” he called.

I stepped out onto the street and started across town. My plan was to make a pit stop at my uncle’s place, gather up what money I had left, then find a way to get that baby. I passed a long line of people on the street waiting to see a movie I’d never heard of called
The Go-Between.
I passed a ratty-haired woman hanging out of a phone booth with one hand down the front of her cranberry-colored pants. A prostitute. A drug addict. Maybe both. “I got to get some sleep,” she was saying into the black mouth of the phone. “I just got to get some sleep, man.” Something about her tangled hair and drawn eyes made me think of Edie. I imagined that she was a vision of the woman Edie would become. And I refused to let her drag my sister along for the ride.

When I reached the apartment building, there was a dark sedan parked out front. The driver was removing a suitcase from the trunk, and my uncle was digging in his pockets for his keys.

Welcome the fuck home.

“I’ll let you in,” I told him, knowing he’d be shocked to see me.

“Dominick,” he said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“I left Holedo and stayed at your place for a while. But don’t worry, I’m just grabbing something, and then I’ll be on my way.”

“Does your father know where you are?”

“I don’t think he gives a shit,” I said and stepped forward, unlocking the door for both of us.

My uncle dillydallied with the driver, signing a receipt, then tipping him, before coming inside. I marched up the stairs ahead of him, and he trailed behind, clunking his suitcase the whole way and spitting out half sentences. “But you—I thought—How did you—”