Small Blessings (32 page)

*   *   *

Rose could not stop herself. Out it came. Everything she'd never told anyone before she'd told Agnes.

Rose kept her eyes on Henry as she explained how her own situation in regard to fathers had been a bit—and she did have to struggle to find the right word to use with a six-year-old—
unusual.
“So you see, Henry, I haven't the slightest idea who my father is,” she finished, as though this would somehow make it easier for this child, who wore trouble as comfortably as old clothes, to deal with everything he had to deal with.

They were seated—where else?—at the kitchen table, Henry and Rose quite close together, Tom somewhat removed, as though he wanted to be supportive and present but not intrusive. But then, since he wasn't deaf, Tom Putnam would now also know about her unconventional inception. Could that really be why she'd told Henry?

The boy regarded her solemnly. “What did you tell other kids?”

Ah yes! Other kids. Those pint-sized iterations of judgment and convention. Rose grinned at him. “The truth. But only when they really backed me into it. I got to be quite an expert at not answering that particular question.”

Henry was still thinking. “Was it hard on you to be a kid who didn't have normal parents?”

With anyone else, Rose might have launched into a discussion of what was meant by “normal parents.” But since it was Henry, she answered the question. “Sometimes it was very hard. But still, I wouldn't swap childhoods with anyone.”

“You wouldn't?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

Now it was Rose's turn to think. “Because then I would have been living someone else's life and not my own?” She heard what she'd meant as a statement come out as a question. Had she meant to ask a six-year-old's opinion about this? Was this the one babe whose mouth really did spout wisdom?

Henry's face scrunched with thought. “It's sort of like we each get our own adventure, isn't it?”

Exactly!
“That's it!” Rose said, finally daring—yes, she
had
been chicken before now—to look at Tom. When she did and found him smiling at her as though they were together in this business of Henry, it felt as natural as breathing to smile back.

A phrase from some long-ago history class floated between them, a phrase she'd always loved for its vivid representation of the unknown.

Here be dragons …

*   *   *

That evening, after supper, after Harry Potter, after Henry was asleep, Tom grabbed his briefcase from his usual drop-off spot just inside the front door, climbed the stairs to his office, and settled in to grade the latest batch of RemWrite assignments. He had just finished unloading the stack of papers—seventeen attempts at a five-hundred-word autobiography—when he heard the hall door open and Agnes's step on the stairs. “Is Henry all right?” he called out, as any parent would.

Agnes's head appeared. “Henry's fine. He's sleeping.” She glared around her. “I need to sit for a moment. Where am I supposed to do that in this rubble pile?”

Tom got up and removed a stack of books from the room's chair and gave it a quick dust with his sleeve. “How about here.” He resisted the urge to give Agnes a quick peck on the cheek as she stalked past him and sat down.

Agnes, having read his mind, rolled her eyes at him. “You. Sit. This might take a while.”

He sat and watched her pull some papers from her reticule.

“I've been in touch with an old contact in New Orleans. A colleague of a friend from law school.”

Tom sat up. “Yes?”

Agnes eyed him in the dim glow of his desk lamp. “This colleague of the friend is a private investigator who evidently knows some pretty spiffy hackers. Anyway, there's no such thing as privacy anymore—if you're willing to throw enough money around.”

“How much money?” Tom felt he should pay whatever had to be paid to disinter Henry's past.

“None of your business. Do you want to know what he found out or what?”

“About Henry?”

“And his mother. There was quite a lot to find out about the late Serafine Despré.”

“Are you sure the Serafine Despré you had those people research is Henry's mother?”

“I'm sure.” Agnes held out the papers. “You wanna read this stuff for yourself or you want me to give you the CliffsNotes?”

“Let's start with the CliffsNotes.” Tom realized he was gripping the arms of his desk chair, quite literally bracing himself for whatever was to come.

“Okay.” Agnes fished reading glasses from her reticule and perched them on her nose. “Serafine Despré, the only child of Drs. Honoré and Prudence Despré, was born on May 14, 1973. Both parents were forty. He was Creole; she was white. Serafine was their only child.

“Honoré and Prudence met and married during their respective residencies at Tulane Medical School, where both trained as internists. Mrs. Dr. Despré came from lots of old money—rice plantations with a little fishing thrown in. The couple eschewed the high life, however, and settled in Picayune, Mississippi, where they proceeded to use a chunk of Prudence Despré's family money to set up a series of clinics serving surrounding rural areas that had no other reliable access to medical care. Evidently they both worked their asses off in these clinics. No one has a bad word to say about them; they were always together, always working, never out for personal gain. In other words, Henry's grandparents were saints.”

“Hmmm,” Tom said, feeling he should say something.

“Hmmm, indeed.” Agnes kept her eyes fixed on her papers. “Not so Henry's mother. Serafine appears to have been a bit like Marjory, in that she was semi-okay until puberty, then, after puberty, anything but okay. Serafine has a sealed juvenile record, but the public record of her numerous arrests begins six weeks after her seventeenth birthday. It's all for drugs and drug-related offenses—mainly possession, possession with intent, and, when her parents cut off all direct financial support after Henry was born, for prostitution. She was
not,
I'm happy to say for Henry's sake, HIV-positive when she died.”

“Good Lord.”

“Or not so good.” Agnes scowled at her papers. “Poor woman.”

“What do you think happened to her?” Tom couldn't stop himself from trying to fathom how the child of such decent people could zoom so far off the rails.

“Life happened to her.” Agnes looked up at Tom, the bleakness of a Siberian winter in her eyes. “It's not for everyone, you know.”

“I do know,” Tom said gently. “I'm sorry.”

“Nonsense.” Agnes fished a tissue out of her reticule, blew her nose loudly, balled the tissue up, and threw it at the distant trash can. It didn't make it, but so what? Tom knew it had done her good to throw something.

“Well then,” she said. “You ready for me to go on?”

“I am.”

Agnes adjusted her glasses. “Honoré and Prudence sent their daughter away for her first rehab stint to a posh and very expensive place called the Manor, when she was fourteen. Alcohol appears to have been her drug of choice at that time, obtained while her parents were off being saints. According to the Manor's records—”

Tom was astonished. “You mean your person got a look at a private hospital's records?”

Agnes eyed him over her glasses. “I suggest we save bemoaning the sorry state of privacy these days until we finish sorting this out.”

“Sure. It's just that I'm shocked.”

Agnes was unable
not
to enjoy jerking her son-in-law's infinitely jerkable chain. “Well, if a little well-intentioned peeping shocks you, get ready to be
fried
by what's coming. Serafine appears to have been a raging alcoholic by the age of fourteen. There are also mentions of coke, weed, and a snort or two of heroin in her doctor's notes from the Manor”—Agnes held up a hand to forestall another interruption from Tom—“but alcohol was her most pressing problem. Serafine stayed in treatment for three months. Honoré and Prudence were very involved, visiting an average of four times a week and attending twice-weekly family therapy sessions. The doctor gives them high marks as parents but also notes his general worry about Serafine's inability to resist relapsing once she returns home. Which is just what happened. Serafine was back at the Manor a couple of weeks after discharge, this time for nine months. During her second stint, at the doctor's suggestion, there was much less parental involvement.” Agnes stopped reading to look up at Tom. “Not sure what
that's
about. Maybe they
hovered,
” she said, the pot acknowledging the kettle when it came to that particular parental failing.

“Maybe they did. I'm beginning to grasp how easily paved a parent's road to hell is.”

Agnes snorted. “Amen to that. But we digress again. This time, Serafine was discharged into a boarding school called Mount Olive, which appears to have been run on a combination of tough love and Outward Bound. She did well there, staying put long enough to get her high school diploma at the age of seventeen. Her parents, overcome by optimism, allowed Serafine to attend Tulane, and stupidly—there's really no other way to say it—gave her a generous monthly allowance and a new Mazda Miata.” Agnes eyed him angrily across the gloom of his office and waved her hand dismissively. The Després' parental flounderings struck too close to home for her to tolerate without judgment. “What were they thinking, Tom? They were
doctors,
for God's sake, dealing with addicts every day. How could they
not
know they were inviting their daughter to party her way into oblivion?”

“They probably just wanted to believe she was all right,” Tom said mildly. “I guess parents don't always think straight when it comes to wounded children.”

Agnes bit her lip.

Tom thought it best to move on. “So I take it nothing good happens to Serafine after that?”

“Wrong!” Agnes triumphantly smacked her papers. “Henry happened.”

Of course! Henry! Serafine's chance of redemption, and, perhaps, his own. Children at least made you
try
to be your best self.

Agnes was off again. “It appears Serafine got pregnant during yet another stay at a New Orleans rehab center, although it may have been just after, because Henry was born a bit prematurely. By this time, her parents had cut off all direct financial support of their daughter, as any money they gave her went for drugs, but they were still paying for her rehab stints and any health care she needed. It looks as though Serafine got serious about sobriety as soon as she discovered she was pregnant and went home to Mom and Dad. Society articles in the local paper, the
Picayune Item,
document that the Drs. Despré were showing up at community events around this time with their long-lost daughter in tow. And from the one picture of the three of them, it's obvious that Serafine is pregnant.”

“You've got a picture of them?” A picture offered a chance to catch firmer hold of Henry's past.

“It's faxed newsprint, so it's not very good.”

“May I look? Please?” Tom held his hand out. Agnes fished one of her papers out of the pile and handed it to him. He turned and held the paper directly under the desk lamp.

It was a photograph of three people at some kind of garden party. Two of them were kindly-looking people in their early sixties, made lusterless by newsprint and fax. Not so the ethereal sprite who stood between them, looking off at some distant spot over the photographer's shoulder. Here, indeed, was Cleopatra in the flesh; a woman whose infinite variety could neither be withered by age nor staled by custom.

Serafine Despré was dark and cloud-haired, with enormous, haunted eyes. Slender as a reed except for her basketball of a tummy, she seemed too insubstantial to survive the knock-around life endured by mere mortals. She was not so much beautiful as magical. But Tom had absolutely no doubt that she was Henry's mother. She was a dark-eyed Henry, made female.

“My goodness,” he said.

“Or not,” Agnes said.

“Or not,” Tom echoed.

They sat in silence for a moment, Tom staring at the photograph, trying to grasp that this lovely, delicate creature had hanged herself in a parish jail. Marjory visited again, young and beautiful and differently doomed. Tom knew that no matter how long he thought, such waste and cruelty would never make anything approaching sense. The thing to do was to grieve for the lost and then get on with doing what you could for those within reach. Like Henry. And Agnes. And, even, himself.

“When the going gets tough, the tough suck it up,” Agnes said. “The rest get run over.”

He looked up to find her watching him. “You think?”

“I know. There's all kinds of ways to die, and most of them don't involve actual death, just the handing over of the soul to fear and anger and greed. Or despair. Very few people have the guts to deal with life on life's terms.”

Tom immediately thought of Rose Callahan. Agnes, of course, read his mind. “Yes, we're lucky to have met Rose. She's just what we both need in our lives at the moment. And, perhaps, for a great many more moments in the future.”

“You think?” Tom heard the hope in his voice. My God, could he truly be in love with the woman? Or was he just in love with the possibilities of his new life?

“Shall we go on?” Agnes asked.

“Yes.” Tom handed the picture back to her without looking at it again. One stare at a grainy picture, and Serafine Despré was forever lodged in his heart.

“Okay, where were we?” Agnes made a show of rattling pages, finding her place. “Henry was, as I said, born a bit prematurely. Serafine was admitted to Tulane Medical Center as soon as she went into labor, as the Drs. Despré were concerned that both baby and mother might need more sophisticated medical care than their local hospital could provide because of Serafine's history of drug abuse. Henry's birth, however, appears to have been uncomplicated. Serafine was sent home the next day, Henry in two weeks. Both baby and mother were discharged to the Despré family home in Picayune. Serafine's next arrest was in Slidell, Louisiana, six months later. This was her first arrest for prostitution.”