Barefoot Beach (13 page)

An alarm buzzed in my brain and kicked me into my default, which was to deflect. “I don't think the others will go for that. They're regulars at the Turquoise Café. Morty has high cholesterol and Marsha doesn't let him get near ice cream.”

Margo would have my head on a platter for that response. I could hear her script. “I mean, really, darling, how could you squander such a fabulous
straight line?” But that was Margo. She went for the laugh, the big payoff, and my style was lower key. “Yes, so low that only dogs can hear it,” as she would say. “Which is why you haven't gotten laid since that slimy stock-broker nailed you after plying you with drink at your twenty-fifth high school reunion. But this is different, Nora. This is Scott. He's as far from slime as you can get. Pay attention to the man.”

Yes, Margo.

He was saying, “I was talking about us, not everyone. Keep it in mind, anyway. And if not ice cream, a glass of wine?”

“Sounds interesting,” I said, going for noncommittal until I could ponder the question, and plumb it for every bit of meaning and non-meaning.

I clicked the remote to unlock my car, but he opened the door for me and, before closing it, said offhandedly, “I meant to ask you, all I have for contact data is the Hot Bods phone number and the email listed on the We Got Rhythm website. In case of emergency, if I'm running late like tonight, I'd like to have some better way of reaching you.”

So, sitting there behind the wheel, one foot swinging symbolically between the accelerator and the brake, I sent him an email with my cell phone number. Just in case of emergency.

Lon and I had wanted a sibling for Jack.

“You don't want Jack to be a lonely only,” he'd urged.

Easy for him to say. He had a younger sister living in Bangkok with her diplomat husband and her three overachieving, excruciatingly polite kids. Lon saw Kate only once a year, but they shared memories of a blissful childhood spent camping with their parents in the Sierra Madres and fishing on the San Gabriel River. Even separated by half a world, they stayed in touch, emailing weekly. Kate was a great gal.

On the other hand, my brother, Mick, had been the bogey boy who popped out of closets and snapped rubber bands under my chin. He'd grown into a full-fledged wiseass of whom Lon had said, “Mick knows the name of the unknown soldier.”

So I might not have been as enthusiastic about the value of the sibling bond as Lon had been, but I'd loved being pregnant and even more being a mom, and I'd watched
The Waltons
Christmas special enough times to buy into the fantasy. Jack was such a great kid I figured we'd hit the jackpot in the genetic gamble the first time, so why not try to double our luck?

When our son was three, we went back to the Baltimore Fertility Bank to get another shot of #1659. But we were told our DD had done a single run of six months—the minimum—and gone inactive. “Unavailable,” was what they told us, and that, “From a legal standpoint, frozen
semen remains the property of the donor and its use for insemination can be withdrawn by said donor at any time.” The cupboard was empty. And Lon hadn't been keen on pressing our luck with a different donor.

Still hoping Jack might have a half brother or sister somewhere out there, I checked a national donor sibling registry online, punched in the name of the cryobank and #1659, and came up empty. There might have been other kids conceived with DD's donor material, but they weren't signed on. Over the years, I'd checked occasionally, but I never found any sibs.

And then there were two.

It was now officially summer and it felt like the height of it, searingly hot. The thermometer on the widow's walk read ninety-four degrees and the radio threatened record-breaking heat for the day. I wriggled into a year-old bathing suit. It still fit, which brightened my mood. I grabbed a hat, sunscreen, and a beach towel and followed the gulls cawing their siren song. At Mooncussers Rock, I tossed my stuff and ran for the ocean the way a lover runs to a lover, anticipating bliss.

Up to my shoulders in water that looked like velvet but felt like satin—cool and luxurious as it wrapped around me—I glided in. Fully submerged, I felt the shock of its June chill and surfaced to gasp. After a moment, though, my happiness at being where I was, exactly where I wanted to be, warmed me, and I swam easy strokes, feeling half human, half fish, tasting salt, thinking I hadn't had a margarita in almost a year and remembering every other delicious thing I hadn't done for ten months that waited for me on the horizon.

Jack, on his iPhone, caught me smiling as I emerged. He smiled back from his perch on Mooncussers Rock and, as I approached, tossed me a towel.

“Water warm?”

“Let's say refreshing.” Goose bumps rising from the breeze against my
skin, I toweled off. “What's up?” I asked. From my son's expanding grin, I knew something was.

“More news from Dirk,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Well, not really new news. He mentioned it in our call yesterday.”

Yesterday? I felt my mood plummet. I'd overheard a conversation between them two days before and caught Jack's easy, intimate tone and intermittent laughter. Were they phoning back and forth every day now in addition to the emails? My stomach clenched, a cramp of fear, a spasm of envy. During the school year, Jack and I connected once a week, and it was almost always a call from me to him. Occasionally, I'd forward a joke or a link to a newspaper article. Once in a blue moon, we'd Skype. He was so busy with classes and lacrosse and Tiffanie, whose name, by the way, hadn't come up much since DD got into the picture. Okay, I'd add that to the Dude's plus column.

“Just FYI, Dirk's pretty careful about feeding me stuff slowly. He told me there's a lot I'll want to know but we'll take it a little bit at a time so I'll have a chance to process it.”

Very sensitive, I thought with a twinge. What next? The Dude's criminal record?

Jack handed over the iPhone, displaying a square of color photo. “My half sisters,” he murmured, as soft as a prayer, and for a few seconds the screen dissolved to a blur.

Dirk was right. The brain can absorb only so much at a time. “What?” I said stupidly, so that Jack repeated it louder and more distinctly, as if he were talking to someone without hearing, or to a foreigner. I did feel, had felt since Jack first told me he'd started his search, as if I'd wandered into an alien country. Not France, Italy, or Spain, where if you knew one romance language you could get by. More like Hungary or Finland, where everything is unintelligible. In Helsinki, Lon and I had walked backstreets, gripping hands for balance, strangers in a strange land.

“I . . . have . . . two . . . biological half sisters. From Dirk and his ex-wife,” my son pronounced.

I bobbed my head to let him know it was filtering through. I held the iPhone up and blinked until the picture cleared.

“I'll send the file on to you so you can open it on your laptop. But wait a sec.” He magnified the iPhone image and peered at it over my shoulder.

Two girls were posed with their arms around each other's shoulders. Their smiles were wide and orthodontically perfect. Not a lot of makeup on either, but more on the younger one. Both wore sweaters and jeans. Behind them, flames licked a stone fireplace.

“Sara's fourteen. Jen—Jennifer—is seventeen. Sara's in middle school. A social butterfly, Dirk says. Jen's really smart, like a math whiz.” Math was Jack's strong suit. “She jumped a year in high school and she's starting Berkeley in the fall.”

He gave me a moment to exhale. “The picture was taken at the Tahoe house. They have a second home on the lake.”

Oh God.

“Everyone likes to ski.”

Jack's favorite sport. Lon's too, I reminded myself.

“So what do you think?”

Thankfully, I could get away with a shallow response. Deep down, I was churning. We hadn't given our son a sib. But Sixteen, converted to Donor Dad, now Dude, had done that times two.

Jack's brow knitted as he waited for my answer. What did I
think
? I made myself not think. Just stared at the girls' photos and ached, even as I was happy for my son.

Sara was elfin, with close-cropped brown hair, huge dark eyes, and small, sharp features, except for the nose, which she'd grow into. I predicted an exotic beauty in five years.

“She must resemble her mom,” I said carefully.

The older girl was California blond, tall, with a springiness about her, an energy that two dimensions could barely contain. Her shoulder-length hair was carelessly streaked with sun and shadow and she carried the golden-eyed gene. I said, “Jennifer looks like her dad, who looks like you, so . . .”

“He was here first, Mom. I look like him.”

“Of course. I got it backward.”

My son regarded me thoughtfully. “If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be here. Try to remember that, okay?”

“Yes, I'll try to keep that in mind.” I tuned my voice to slightly sarcastic. He needed to hear the old me. The one who had spirit, who wasn't going to fold in the face of all these goodies from Dirk DeHaven Donor Dad. The sisters. Lake house. Skiing. Father figure.

Jack picked up the tone and a spiral nautilus shell at his feet. He pitched the shell toward the ocean. It was a hard pitch. When he turned back to me, his eyes had darkened to a tarnished brass. “Mom, listen. I'm getting the feeling you're going off the deep end here. Dirk's made it really clear. He knows he's not my father. And I know it. Maybe he can be a mentor, maybe a friend. But whatever he is, he's in my life to stay.”

“Are you so sure, Jack? Because he may not . . .”

“Yeah, I
am
sure. So chill, please, will you? I'm not a kid anymore; I can handle this, however it turns out.”

Maybe,
I thought,
but I'm not so sure I can.

My son hadn't put his arm around me since we'd walked back together from the fringe of the ocean after salting it from Lon's cremation urn, but now he gave me a side hug. “Dad would be good with this.”

What had Lon said about #1659? “If our child is interested in meeting him, I'll invite the guy over for a beer.”

“Really, he would, Mom.”

All I could manage was a series of nods, like the birdbrained seagulls strutting the shore.

That night, alone in the house, I entered what Margo had christened “the shrine.”

Against the far wall was the sacred desk, Great-grandfather Farrell's, which we'd inherited. Legend had it, and Lon had absolutely believed, that Jack London had written “The Law of Life” at that desk. A guest of the Farrells, he'd drunk too much at dinner and Dr. Farrell had insisted he stay overnight. The next morning, struggling through a hangover and smoking through a pack of Lucky Strikes, London had knocked out the short story in four hours.

My husband had written his first and second books at that desk. The third,
Wild Mountain
, had been written in the Baltimore house on an IKEA table, a lapse that accounted for its failure, he'd been sure.

On the left, in front of the built-in bookshelves, stood two ancient wooden file cabinets I'd first seen in his New York apartment. There was also a round glass-topped table on which he'd arranged framed photographs of his departed family and friends. The Circle of Death, he'd called it. The only picture that breached the Circle of Death had been the one that showed him at eight, along with his father and grandfather, all three lined up on horseback at the Glen Ellen ranch. Remarkably straight backed, standing next to the boy's horse and holding its reins, was the iconic ninety-year-old great-grandfather, the doctor who'd treated and befriended Jack London.

Lon, you're one of them, a link in the circle.
For the first time in eight years, I slipped into the chair behind the desk. When I'd been there last, a week after the memorial service, it was to search for the file folder in which my husband had kept records of household bills paid. I found it and never opened a drawer again.

Now I did.

Lon had never allowed anyone—not his agent, not his editor, not me—to read one of his books in progress. And I'd never been tempted. Not even when, after Lon's death, his agent suggested I send him the unfinished manuscript. Nate Greenberg and Lon had worked together for years. He wasn't Lon's agent when the blazing comet of
Canyon of Time
burst upon the scene, but he was already something of a phenomenon himself when he took on
Banshee River
. A combination adviser, negotiator, therapist, and cheerleader, he never lost faith, not in Lon's talent or his prospects for a triumphant comeback. He was overjoyed that Lon was writing again after a long dry spell.