Little Black Lies (18 page)

“I don't know,” I say. “It's something you might want to work on.”

At this, Jean Luc drops his head in his hands and bursts into laughter, his hair falling into his eyes. This is not at all the response I expected, but then, he is getting a bit pink-faced and drunk. “I'll be right back,” he says, standing up to walk to the bathroom. I turn my head to follow him and notice my vision swimming, which makes me regret ordering my last drink.

A group of men at the next table shout out laughing, their faces flushed from heat, beer, and wings. The waitress brings by our new frosty beer mugs just as Jean Luc returns to the table, drying his hands on his jeans. There is a hole at his knee, pale skin peeking through. “I like these. What do you call them, ‘wings'?” His bowl is a mess of chicken bones.

“You want to try one of mine?”

“Sure,” he says, reaching over.

“They're hot, be careful.”

Jean Luc takes a bite and in seconds starts coughing, his eyes filling with tears. “What is wrong with this?” he asks, grabbing for his beer.

“I warned you they were hot.”

“That is not hot,” he argues, sticking out his tongue and fanning it, which doesn't help. I know; I've tried. “This is more like unbearable.”

“Unbearable is their Armageddon sauce. I had that on my wings once. Almost needed CPR.”

“Zoe,” he says, hoarsely, grabbing my hand. His eyes are still watering.

“Don't worry. I'll get medium next time. You just have to get used to it.”

“No, no, it is not the sauce.” He looks down at the table, then back up at me. “Listen, I should never have gotten involved with Melanie. She was all wrong for me, and it was a bad thing to do to Robbie. And to
you
, obviously,” he adds, his emotional intelligence catching up with him. “You know me. I am not usually like that.”

I nod, finishing off my last wing. “I don't disagree with you.”

“I wanted to say I'm sorry. But I'm also not sorry, because it helped me see something very important. Something I hadn't seen clearly before, and perhaps I needed that variable to demonstrate it.”

“Okay?” I say. I'm not sure what he's getting at, but I think he is comparing me to a chemistry experiment.

“It is this: I love you.”

There is a pause, the music blaring around us, as I realize he never has said this in English before, though I always assumed he meant the same thing in French. Maybe he didn't, though.

“
Je t'aime
, too,” I answer, and he gives me a bleary smile.

We walk back to the apartment, which is harder than it sounds on crutches in the snow. The snow is postcard perfect. The streetlights shine through the snow in a winsome blur, his hand steady on my elbow, until we finally get to the sidewalk that Scotty must have shoveled. The heavy oak door opens to the quiet apartment, and we head up to my bedroom and sit on my bed. We stare at each other in the dark. The room is silent except for our breathing, and I grab the rough fabric of his shirt and kiss him hard, with something more than desire, something like desperation. As if I want to kiss every inch of skin on his body and mark him as mine.

T
he morning dawns gray and cloudy, with my head pounding and my stomach queasy. The bed is empty. “Jean Luc?”

“
C'est moi
,” he answers, and seconds later he walks in with two steaming mugs of coffee. I forgot he was a morning person.

“One sugar and one creamer. Am I right?”

“You are right,” I say. “And
trés
thoughtful.” I take a long draught of coffee, which Jean Luc has made ultrastrong as usual, but which calms the thrumming in my temples now beating in time with my foot.
“How did you sleep?” I ask, my voice husky from last night's beer and hot sauce.

“Not so good,” he answers with a shrug. “Too much to drink. You?”

“Same,” I answer.

He is sitting at my desk, drinking his coffee and reading through the
Sunday Times
. An image of him whispering into his cell phone in my desk chair from last night pops into my mind. The visual is grainy, like a hallucinatory dream, mixed with a night of alcohol-laced anxiety dreams.

“Were you on the phone last night or somethin
g
?” I ask.

“No.” He shakes the newspaper straight. “Perhaps you dreamed it.”

“Maybe.”

“So what should we do today?” Jean Luc asks, flipping a page of the newspaper, the corner wilting over.

“I don't know. You're leaving tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, in the morning, to avoid the traffic.” He moves the paper so I see half of his face.

“Okay.” I mentally peruse things to do in Buffalo when a crazy idea strikes. “How about a trip to Cleveland?”

Jean Luc raises an eyebrow. “Cleveland? I don't know,” he hedges. “It seems like a long drive for the rock-and-roll things.”

“No.” I laugh. “To see my birth mother. Well, I don't know if she's my birth mother. My maybe–birth mother.”

His eyebrows furrow with unease. “How does this follow again?”

“You remember the facial recognition I was telling you about?”

“Right,” he says slowly, dipping back into the conversation from last night's debauchery.

“It's the last one from the program. Sylvia Nealon.”

Jean Luc's jaw clenches, and he flips another page.

“Or what the hell,” I say. “We don't have to. It's a stupid idea. We could go to Niagara Falls if you want.”

He lowers the paper, staring out the window. “No, let's do it. Let's go to Cleveland.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Zoe. If I can help you, then I should help you. Let's go find your mother.”

His face contorts with dismay. “She doesn't know we are coming?” Jean Luc has always been an open book. A psychiatrist's dream.

“Sort of,” I lie. “Well, I left quite a few messages, but she never exactly answered.”

“Oh,” he answers doubtfully, as Karin reminds him to turn left in three-quarters of a mile.

I wipe the powdered sugar off my lips from our Tim Hortons doughnut run. Jean Luc takes dainty bites of a croissant and leaves the other half in the bag. His car is pristine, unlike mine, which looks like a mixture of my office and a locker, and somewhere a homeless person might live. I had wanted to pack some goodies and magazines but he said, “Why would we do this? There are stores on the way, no? If we are hungry?” Completely missing the point of a road trip, even a three-hour one.

We listen to NPR while I rearrange my cast in a million uncomfortable ways and try to ignore the burbling in my stomach, which may be a consequence of my hangover or a response to the impending reunion with my maybe–birth mother. When I see the sign for Cleveland, I want to puke. We pass by stately brick homes with stately brown trees, then by scaled-down suburban new builds for scaled-down American dreams, and finally to rows of cramped, beat-up houses with dirt-streaked vinyl siding, for those who have just about given up on the American dream.

Karin states that we have arrived, and the nerves squeeze in my chest. Jean Luc pulls to a stop on the opposite side of the street, and we both stare at the house as if we're on a stakeout. I stretch my legs and take a deep breath.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Jean Luc asks, though I can tell the thought makes him nervous.

“No, she probably won't even be home. You stay. I'll be right back.” I hobble out the door and across the slushy street. Another doorstop, another mother. I stare at the door a moment, at the peeling, pale lavender paint. The stoop is covered with fungus-ridden Astroturf, like all the other stoops in the row. Breathing in deeply, I am about to ring the bell when the door swings open and a woman steps out.

At first glance, I know this is my mother. I know it in my bones. She is the picture, aged twenty years, standing before me. Her frizzy hair is a head full of black curls now, veined with wiry grays. The sun is bright, shining behind her, framing her head like a halo. I stand there staring slack-jawed at my mother, who obviously did not die in a fire or otherwise, and incidentally does not recognize me.

“Hello?” she says. It is not a nice hello. It is an annoyed, “What are you doing on my doorstep staring at me?” hello.

“I'm Zoe Goldman.”

“Okay. I'm Sylvia Nealon. Can I help you with something?” She has a thick New York accent.

“Um. I did leave a few messages, but I never heard back so…”

“Oh,” she says, looking at me anew. “
You're
the one leaving those freaky messages on the machine?”

“Yes, well, I saw your picture on the Internet, and you look just like my mother, and I'm looking for my mother, and I thought maybe you were her.” I could not sound more imbecilic. I thrust the picture out toward her, the one of me and my frizzy-haired mom, almost toppling off my crutches to do so.

“How did you get this picture?” she asks, suspicious now.

I'm too shocked to answer.

“I repeat: How did you get this picture?”

“From my adoptive parents,” I say as calmly as possible to calm her down, too. The picture sways in the breeze as she grips it. “It's the only picture I have of my birth mother before she died. She was killed in a fire, at least that's what I was told, and so that's me, right there, five days old. The baby. That's from—”

“Wait,” she says, cutting me off. “Break here. Hold on a second. That is my picture, and that is a baby, but that is not you, baby doll. I don't know who you are, or what you are trying to pull over on me here, but that is my daughter, Robyn.”

Here we gaze at each other in silence, miles of bewildered confusion between us. As if the earth tilted off its axis, and we are in parallel worlds.

“My parents gave me the picture,” I repeat, like a robot.

Sylvia turns over the photo. “And who in the hell wrote on the back?”

I swallow. “My adoptive mom.”

“And who's your adoptive mom?”

“My mom is Sarah Goldman, used to be Meyers. And my dad died. But his name was Terry Goldman.”

She pauses. “Terry Goldman? From GIK Finance?”

That was the name of Dad's consulting group, for Goldman, Irwin, and Kennedy. “Yes, yes, that's right.”

“He was my boss,” Sylvia says.

“I don't…I don't understand.”

“Join the club, honey. I spent two years as a secretary at that office when I lived in Syracuse. Terry was my boss. I had the baby around that time, and he must have got ahold of the picture somehow.”

“Oh,” I say, confused. So my father
stole
her picture and pretended she was my mother? Why in God's name would he do that?

“I quit soon after anyway.”

“How did you end up in Cleveland then?”

“It's been twenty years, honey,” she says. “I relocated for my husband. Who went and took off with his secretary. Asshole,” she mutters, leaning her arm on the spindly, black iron railing. “Not that it's any of your business.”

“No, I suppose not,” I say in a daze.

“Your father wasn't so bad, though. He was a nice-enough guy. I'm sorry to hear that he died.”

I nod slowly, as if there is gauze around my head. “Car accident,” I mumble.

A sports car with red spoilers speeds by us on the street, as if it's on the autobahn and not a broken-down, outer-ring suburb of Cleveland. I get a glimpse in Sylvia's doorway of white walls, shiny black furniture. It smells like cigarettes. “I still don't understand how you thought I was your mother, though,” she says.

I adjust my crutches, taking some weight off my armpits. “I don't know either. It's just what I was told.”

“That's pretty screwed up,” she says.

And for the first time in the visit, I fully agree with her. “Can I keep the picture?” I ask as an afterthought.

Sylvia pauses, considering, and hands it to me. “Why not?” she says. “I have enough pictures of Robyn. This one reminds me of the asshole anyway.” She steps back in the door, and as I pivot on my crutches on the Astroturf to leave, she calls out, “Hey, good luck finding your mother.”

“Thanks,” I say and turn to hobble off her step, grateful, at least, that it wasn't her. When I get in the car, Jean Luc is saying good-bye quickly in French and powering off his phone.

“How did it go?” he asks.

Jean Luc is in my bedroom finishing up a few e-mails before dinner when I hear his footsteps shuffle down the stairs. I'm thumbing through
Archives of General Psychiatry
, where I have just learned that in a questionnaire study of a hundred patients with insomnia, 92 percent claim to be tired during the day. Staggering. I wonder how much government funding the researchers absconded with for that study.

“Zoe, we need to talk,” Jean Luc says, dropping his packed-up duffel bag on the floor. The thud hits me like a sucker punch.

“What about?” My psychiatry journal flaps shut on my lap.

He shoves his hands in his jeans pockets, jangling his car keys. His light-blue spring coat is half-zipped. “This isn't working.”

I stare at him, stunned. “What do you mean?”

Jean Luc pauses, looking down at his brown leather shoes, which have dark stains from the snow. “I'm sorry, Zoe. I don't know what to say. Today just felt…” He searches for the word in English. “Not right. You could feel it, too, couldn't you? Like we just could not connect to each other?”

“Today wasn't the most spectacular, I'll admit,” I say. “But I mean, consider the circumstances.”

“Yes, maybe.” He sounds resigned.

I sigh. “I should never have dragged you there, Jean Luc. It's my fault. Next time we'll go to Niagara Falls. How about this, let's do steak tonight, okay? No sushi.”

He looks at me in a sad silence.

“Why, were you planning on leaving right now?”

“I think it would be best.”

I stare into the blue gas flames, trying to piece together what exactly happened here, where things fell apart. The ride home was quiet, but not uncomfortably so, and I wasn't exactly in a chatty mood. Just now I figured we were relaxing before dinner. And…

“Who was on the phone, Jean Luc?”

He doesn't answer, bending down to straighten out the twisted luggage tag.

“In the car, after I saw Sylvia Nealon. Who was that?”

“Oh, no one,” he says, color flooding into his cheeks. Again, the proverbial open book.

“Let me guess,” I say. “Three syllables, starts with an M.”

He looks up at me. “It is not what you think.”

“Yeah, right,” I say. “It's exactly what I think. She calls, and you come running.”

“I was leaving tomorrow anyway,” he argues.

“Obviously you can't stand to be here another second.”

Jean Luc doesn't say any more, just stands in the middle of the room, his shadow a beastly profile on the wall.

“It was her on the phone last night,” I say. “Wasn't it?”

Jean Luc doesn't say anything but at least has the decency to look guilty.

“So what was last night then at the restaurant? What was the ‘Now I see how much I love you' all about?”

Still he is silent.

“Was that part of the experiment? You introduced a variable and got the wrong result?” I slap the journal onto the coffee table, standing up from the couch with some difficulty. “I bet I wasn't even the variable at all…I was probably the fucking control group!”

He swallows. “Zoe, I'm not sure I understand the protocol—”

“You know what? Don't call me. Don't text. Don't ask me to Skype. When she dumps you for Mr. Washington again, I don't want to hear about it. It is over. Not maybe it's over, maybe it's not. Maybe I love you, maybe I don't. It's over.
C'est fini.
I was doing just fine before you decided to swoop in and fuck up my life.”

Jean Luc stares at me, and the grandfather clock gongs out five long tones. “I am sorry, Zoe,” he says, waiting for an answer, but I have none to give. He loops the duffel over his shoulder, zips his jacket, and walks out the door. I hear the trunk slam shut, the engine start, and then he is gone.