A Father's Quest (8 page)

“What do you mean? It’s in pretty good shape considering it’s, like, twenty years old.”

He lugged the cardboard file box he took with him everywhere to his mother’s big oak desk in the far corner of the room. He hadn’t had time to do any sort of modernization or updates to the place, but he’d thought about this house a lot while he was in Iraq. With a little TLC and seed money, he could make it a viable property. Either to sell or move into. Once he had Birdie back and his life on track again, he’d revisit those plans.

“Mom really let the place go the past couple of years. She was such a fanatic about keeping things neat and dirt-free when I was a kid, I was half-afraid to invite friends over. At least we had a big yard to play in.”

“Funny. I came here once when I was a kid to drop off something for my mom. I remember standing in this very spot, thinking how great it must be to live in such a clean and pretty place. Our house was like Grand Central Station at rush hour. And I don’t think Mama knew what a dust rag was.” She nudged the carpet with her toe. “I had dreams about this carpet for weeks afterward.”

Dreams.
The word brought back the reason she was here. Not that the urgency of his quest was ever far from his thoughts, but he knew from his military experience that a soldier, while always on duty, had to distance himself from the intensity of his mission every so often simply to stay sane.

Lunch had been good. He needed sustenance. And talking about Cheryl had been good, too. Remy required some understanding of his ex-wife’s unpredictable and convoluted, entirely self-absorbed thought process so she wouldn’t try to think like a normal person where Cheryl was concerned.

“Look around if you like while I put this in the kitchen,” he said, grabbing the bag with the dessert from the top of the box. “The bathroom is down the hall on the right if you want to freshen up. I’ll show you Birdie’s room after you watch a couple of videos.” He paused before adding, “There’s a lot to see. Probably more than you can take in at a single sitting. Anytime it gets to be too much, say so.”

“Okay. I will. Thanks,” she said, walking toward a brass-and-glass étagère his mother used to display two or three dozen framed photographs. Mostly of him and the important highlights of his life: graduation, new job, commission in the Guard, wedding, Birdie’s birth. The newer shots were more about Birdie, and he was okay with that. He was gratified that his mother was proud to be a grandma.

He returned a few moments later to find Remy holding the shot of him when he received his commission.

“You look very stern and serious in your military uniform.”

He hated that photo. He’d been hours away from proposing to Cheryl. Whenever he looked at his expression in that picture, he decided his subconscious must have known something he chose not to hear.

“Oh, my word!” Remy exclaimed a second later. “What a beautiful baby! Look at that red hair. Where did that come from?”

Of course, if I’d listened to that inner voice, I wouldn’t have had Birdie.
“My dad,” he said, the standard answer that he’d given a thousand times to the same question. Only this time, the person asking had a different connection to the answer. He noticed her hand trembled a tiny bit as she set down the frame.

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Mom used to claim that Dad had flame-red hair when he was a young man. There are only a couple of photographs of him from his childhood—all black and whites. His parents were dirt-poor farmers in Mississippi. No money for fancy things like cameras and cars. Could explain why Dad was so absorbed by anything with wheels and a decent body.”

“Or, in some cases, a decent body was enough,” she said, her tone rich with irony. Marlene had been a shapely woman. All of his pals on the wrestling team had voted Marlene Bouchard as the mom they’d most like to wrestle…naked.

He cleared his throat. “Right. Dad was definitely a ladies’ man.”

She turned slightly, this time an image of his mother in her hand. “Do you think your mother knew it? Before they got a divorce, I mean?”

“I don’t know. She might have turned a blind eye to his extracurricular activities because he kept a roof over her head and a thick white carpet underfoot.”

“You sound bitter.”

He was. But his family history wasn’t relevant beyond where it intersected with his daughter and this present moment. “I’ll get my laptop set up so you can meet Birdie.”

He appreciated the fact that she didn’t press. In fact, she followed orders quite well for a civilian. She walked into the big, open living room, running her hand across one of the plump, persimmon cushions of the sofa his mother had ordered off the internet.

The bright color and modern style matched absolutely nothing in the room. “It jumped off the internet and simply arrived at my door one day for only $9.99, shipping and handling,” she’d told him.

That had been his first confirmation of his growing suspicion that his mother wasn’t quite herself anymore. He’d canceled her credit cards, pulled the plug on her internet service and made sure the rest of her assets were protected.

“From the pictures I’ve seen so far,” Remy told him once she was seated on the couch, “I can tell I’m going to like her. She’s always smiling. You seem to have been able to make up for your wife’s, um, problems very well.”

He grabbed his leather computer bag and walked to the big-screen TV. He was pretty sure he had the right cables stuffed behind the credenza.

“Kids learn fast to adapt. And Cheryl wasn’t always out of it. When Birdie was a baby, there was a period when every night I’d come home to gourmet meals. I’d give Birdie her bath and get her ready for bed while Cheryl cleaned up the kitchen. It was TV-land perfect. And when Birdie got a little older, Cheryl used to act out Mother Goose tales for her. Birdie loved that.”

But, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there was the night he came home and found a stranger poking around in the refrigerator. “A friend of Cherry’s,” the man said.
Cherry?
Jonas had nearly broken his neck racing down the hall to check on his daughter. Luckily, Birdie was safe in her crib, although she’d soaked the sheets and blankets because she was wearing the same diaper Jonas had put on her that morning before he left for work.
Cherry
didn’t come home for a week.

“So about the cult,” Remy said. “Is Cheryl extremely religious?”

He plugged the USB connection into his laptop and walked to the coffee table, remote control in hand. “Sometimes, depending on her mood. God, Buddha and Jesus have all dropped by on occasion.”

“Some people’s idea of the Dream Team.”

He gave a caustic hoot. He liked that she didn’t try to minimize his experiences or offer some lame platitude. He’d heard them all from coworkers at the insurance company and superior officers in the field.

“Before my deployment, I petitioned the state to have Cheryl hospitalized—for her own well-being and for Birdie’s sake. A woman I used to work with—she trained me for my first job with the company—was taking an early retirement to care for her grandchildren. She said she would be willing to take in Birdie—for a fee, of course—while I was away.

“I would have paid anything at that point, simply for the peace of mind of knowing my daughter was in a safe, consistent family setting. I knew these people. They were good Christians who raised three great kids, but Cheryl said she could see into their souls. She called them pawns of Satan. She was able to convince the state she was sane and fit.”

“At least you tried.”

He hit the power button. “Unfortunately, Cheryl decided that I was the enemy out to destroy her for some nebulous reasons I won’t repeat. Even after our divorce, we could usually talk about what was best for Birdie, but this deliberate act of betrayal in her book made her paranoid and supersecretive. She even told Birdie I couldn’t be trusted anymore.”

“Oh, no. Do you think she brainwashed your daughter into believing you’re the enemy?”

No. Yes. He couldn’t go there. Instead of answering, he opened the laptop and clicked on a random file. Most were labeled by dates. One said: Birthday. It had said “Last birthday” meaning the last one he’d filmed, but the label had taken on an ominous meaning, so he’d changed it. “This was the October she turned six. Obviously, I missed her seventh.”

He hit Play.

“We held it at a Chuck E. Cheese’s because the weather was as unpredictable as her mother. Cheryl was managing to keep it together at the time. I brought my mom for the weekend. Mom and Birdie both stayed with me.” For one tiny window in time, he’d had the family he’d long ago imagined—with only one key element missing. A wife. A wife was the glue that held the ship together when the seas got rough and the wind started to blow. He believed in that ideal because he believed the person who preached the philosophy—Remy.

“Do you remember what you told me about the roles of a husband and wife in marriage?”

She looked up from the slide show. “Don’t tell me you actually listened to that drivel. I was a cockeyed optimist who bookmarked three hundred quotes from
Chicken Soup for the Soul
. I knew less about life than a poodle knows about opening a can of dog food.”

“I thought you were pretty smart.”

“Because both of our home lives were so mixed up. Look at me. No known father of record. A mother with a reputation for hooking up with married men…including your father. And three older sisters, who I’m sure qualified as serial daters.” She shook her head. “So, tell me about Birdie’s nickname. Why do you call her that?”

“Well,” he began, happy to recall one of his favorite memories, “when she was born, the first thing I saw was this long-legged, scrawny, birdlike creature with a shock of bright red hair plastered to her head.” He snorted softly. “God, she was beautiful.”

Remy smiled broadly as if she could picture exactly what he described.

“Her mother had already made me promise that if we had a girl, we’d name her Brigitte Leann. Brigitte for—” He winced. “
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. The movie. Cheryl changed the spelling because she insisted the movie got it wrong.”

He could tell Remy was trying hard not to smile.

“Leann was for her mother. They’d had a turbulent, love-hate relationship. I used to wonder if there was a connection between Cheryl’s subsequent meltdown and her mother’s dying, but Cheryl refused to talk about her childhood. To me, at least. She must have told her court-appointed psychiatrists something, but I don’t know.”

Remy watched the birthday-party slide show without comment for a good five minutes. When the show ended, she looked at him and said, “Why does Cheryl look vaguely familiar? Is she from around here?”

He pushed to his feet and walked to the étagère. He opened the door of a lower compartment and took out a porcelain frame adorned with roses. The bride and groom smiling at each other in the staged pose looked like strangers. Happy, beautiful strangers.

He passed it to her.

“Oh.”

Oh, indeed. Cheryl was the same height, had the same curvy body and the same color of blond hair as Remy. Were their facial features similar? Not exactly, but there had been moments when Jonas first met his future bride that he could swear he caught a glimpse of Remy in her laugh, her coy wink.

Cheryl had nearly lost what slim hold she had on reality when she stumbled across a yearbook photo of him and Remy. Cheryl had instantly recognized the obvious doppelganger aspect between her and his ex-girlfriend.

“You sick bastard,” she’d screamed. “You married me under false pretenses. Do you close your eyes when you kiss me so you can pretend you’re with her?”

Nothing he said could sway her. Finally, after hours of weeping, tearing of hair and threats of jumping off the nearest bridge, he calmed her with a promise that he would never have anything to do with Remy Bouchard ever again.

“And if I ever find out that you’ve slept with that bitch, I will kill myself,” she’d told him with such stone-cold truth he had no choice but to believe her.

She might be mentally unstable but she was smart and she instinctively knew where to find his weakest point. As the child of a suicide victim, Jonas would do whatever it took—no matter what—to keep his own child from having to experience that pain and spend the balance of her life wondering if she was to blame.

Remy stared at the photograph for a good minute, finally handing it back with a sigh. “Life is strange, isn’t it?” She attempted to smile but there was no sparkle of humor in her eyes. “I dated a couple of boys who reminded me of you at the beginning, but they could never quite match the image I’d built up of you in my mind. Eventually, I was able to let that go. But it took a while.”

He wanted to ask about those boys.
How many? Who was the first? Did you love him?
The warble of a cell phone saved him from making a complete fool of himself.

Remy bounced off the sofa, producing a phone from her purse. “Hello? Jess? Oh, my gosh, I forgot all about you. I’m so sorry. Jonas took me to Catfish Haven. What’s up? Are you ready to leave?”

She stepped away—not out of earshot, but across the room to the wide picture window that overlooked a lawn that needed mowing. The neighbor boy he’d hired had been on vacation with his family this week. If nothing broke with the case, Jonas would have time to do it himself.