The Bone Parade (44 page)

I want to thank Elizabeth Mead, a sculptor who gave so willingly of her time and expertise. She sat for numerous interviews and opened her classroom and studio to me. She’s a fabulous artist and a remarkable woman.

Thanks also to Tim Burton, a sculptor and old friend whose tales of travel in Nepal sparked some of my earliest thoughts for this book (and whose work,
Garden Spirit
, presides over our seedlings).

If there are errors in my account of the arts, they are mine alone, and would have been more numerous but for Elizabeth; Tim; and Steve Comba, a superb artist whose work graces my walls.

Thanks as well to Laura Makepeace, DVM.

I have been fortunate in having a long-standing circle of readers whose encouragement and criticisms have helped me immensely over the years. I want to begin with a great thanks to Ed Stackler, who read my earliest ideas for
The Bone Parade
, a sampling of chapters along the way, and the novel in its entirety. He always provided the most incisive of comments.

My other readers have all offered keen thoughts and assistance, and if I could I would embrace them all every day: Dale Dauten, Tina Castaàares, Lars Topelmann, Catherine Zangar, Christopher Van Tilburg, and Steve Comba.

My deepest thanks to my agent, Luke Janklow, for his instincts, passion, and humor. What a pleasure it is to work with him.

And special thanks to my editor, Leigh Haber. It’s also been a joy to work with her. She’s possessed of a sure hand and a light touch.

All the characters and events in this book are a product of my admittedly twisted imagination. I do want to take a moment to note that the fictions extend to the restaurant and pub offerings of Moab, Utah, where I have, in fact, eaten some very fine meals, and where I understand the local brew is excellent. Forgive me my fun, foodies. Forgiveness, too, for the liberties I’ve taken in my description of the geological features of southeastern Utah.

P
AUL
S
IMON’S SONG
is in my head. The one about the mother and child reunion. Nothing new in that. I could probably sing it in my sleep. In fact, I probably have.

It’s a beautiful day. They were calling for rain, but there’s not a cloud in the sky. There’ll be plenty of rain soon enough. It’s already October. I tracked Katie down in August, but it took me a while to work all this out. When I first came up here, the lawns and trees were green. Now I’m looking at leaves as big as my hands all over the sidewalk.

She lives on a pretty street. It could have come straight out of a Frank Capra film. There’s actually a white picket fence on my left. Not hers, but it’s nice anyway, and I can’t help running my hand over it.

In some ways I feel I already know Katie Wilkins. I’ve seen her from a distance, and even photographed her with a telephoto lens. I’m good at the sneaky shot. And she’s a great subject, really cute. Everything about her is cute: her hair, figure, clothes. She’s cute like Katie Couric’s cute. The same kind of look. It’s easy to see why this Katie got in “trouble” in her teens. Why she could still get in trouble.

I’ve done my homework on her. She’s single, no kids, lives alone. It’s better this way, for her and for me. There’s not going to be some husband standing there all bug-eyed, or kids asking a bunch of stupid questions.

When I spot the house, the one I’ve driven past nine times, it’s all I can do to keep from running up and pounding on the door. That’s what anticipation does to you. It builds and builds and builds until it’s ready to explode.

But I’m not going to make a spectacle of myself. The neighborhood’s too quiet. I’ve walked three blocks from my car and hardly seen anyone. Not a single kid. She sure hasn’t surrounded herself with what she never wanted.

I can’t help wondering if she’s going to see herself when she sees me. The same nose, maybe? Or mouth, eyes? Her own reflection in my features? It’s not unusual for birth mothers to notice this stuff right away.

Three steps up and I’m on the porch. The doorbell sounds unfriendly, shrill, as if it can’t decide if it’s a bell or a buzzer.

She opens the door. This is the moment, the one I’ve been waiting for.

“Hi, Mom.” I let those two words linger as her brow knits a thousand questions. Then, with her lips quivering and threatening to slice the silence, I say, “I’m your son.”

“I don’t have a son.”

Her immediate denial makes her look ugly. A better man, a less bitter one, might feel devastated; but I’ve searched and planned and rehearsed this over and over, and I’m not going to be denied.

I force a smile, and my words come more easily than I might have imagined.

“Yes, you do. You had me thirty-two years ago at St. Vincent’s in Cincinnati.”

She all but doubles over, her hands gripping her gut. It’s as if the memory of labor is ripping her apart. She knows she’s not lying her way out of this one. I’ve got the details. She may have lied to lovers, to the husband she had for three years, but she can’t lie to me.

“Look, I know it’s a shock, but I had to see you. I had to. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I haven’t told anyone anything about you. If you want, I’ll go away and never come back. You’ll never have to see me again.”

She shakes her head, a little less uncertain.

“No, come in. Come in.”

She closes the door behind me and raises a hand as fluttery as the notes of a flute. It takes me a second to see that she’s gesturing to a sofa where she wants me to sit. But I don’t want to sit down. She’s the one who sits, flattening her pants with her palms as if she’s straightening the memory of a skirt.

“I knew this would happen one day. How did you find me?”

“I followed my heart,” I tell her, “and it led me here.”

She starts to cry. I hear the word
sorry
, then “I’m so sorry.” She says something else, too, but I can’t make it out.

I use the breakdown to put my arms around her and raise her to her feet. She reaches up to be hugged, comforted. I indulge her for a few seconds before I begin to lead her to the back of the house.

We take only three short steps before she freezes.

“What are you doing?” That look is back, the one she gave me when she tried to deny her own motherhood.

“I’m taking you back there so you can lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down.” Her eyes narrow and dart to the front door, and I wonder if she’s going to try to run.

“Sure you do. It’s okay. Relax a little.”

I reach into my jacket and show her the knife. I let her see it up close. I tell her not to say a word, not even to think about screaming. Or running. The blade speaks, too. Volumes. It has the shape of a wiggling snake. It’s like a dagger out of
The Arabian Nights
. Form does follow function, especially in matters of the flesh.

I nick one of her belt loops. Just that quick it’s in two, the ends sprouting loose threads. I nick another one. Her eyes are plenty wide now. She backs against the wall. Here comes the best part. I bring the blade down the front of her blouse, popping buttons off like grapes. They clatter on the tile. They sound loud to me, but I bet they sound even louder to her.

She’s trembling. “Who are you?”

I shake my head. “You tried to deny me once before, Mom. Don’t do it again. That hurts.”

I point my blade down the hall. She backs along the wall, afraid to look away. That’s okay, I like the eye contact when I remind her of the details: “St. Vincent’s, the fifteenth of May. Ten-twenty in the morning. Eight and a half hours of labor.”

She begins to sob. She’s a slave to memory. Aren’t we all?

The first door opens to her bedroom. I herd her inside and tell her to take off her clothes. When she starts to say no, I slice open the front of her pants. I can see her white underpants, white like her skin, the secret skin that hides her womb. Then I see a little button of blood. I’ve nicked her. Didn’t mean to, but the effect, if nothing else, is undeniable. She disrobes, defeated. She discards her clothes as if they no longer belong to her.

I take mine off, too, but fold them carefully and lay them on a dressing table. You could look at her clothes and mine, and they’d tell you the whole story. They’d even tell you the ending.

She weeps and shakes and tries to pull her hand away, but I’m very persuasive, and I’ve had lots of practice. Lots of mothers. I adopt a new one whenever I feel the urge. And I’m feeling it right now. I’ve felt it for months, ever since I saw Katie’s name on the registry of birth mothers. Katie Wilkins: Does a name get any more American than that? Then I saw her picture, and I knew she’d like nothing more than to meet me. They always want to meet their son.

A
BED OF NETTLES
, this business of telling secrets, and Suzanne found herself tossing and turning on it as they began their approach to Chicago. The landing gear lowered, and she realized the shudder that radiated from the wings to her window seat could just as easily have arisen from her body: She was on the verge of making the most painful confession of her life to the biggest and most important audience she was ever likely to face.

She spotted the blue-capped, blank-faced chauffeur with the “Suzanne Trayle” sign standing just outside the security checkpoint and had to fight an impulse to walk right past him to the nearest ticket counter for a return flight home to Oregon. She’d come to Chi-town to give the keynote address to the annual conference of the American Adoption Congress, but after reviewing her speech for the umpteenth time on the plane, she felt as keyed up as a long-suffering understudy about to take the stage for her first real performance.

The convention organizer had told her that they wanted her to speak about opening adoption records. Suzanne had been so flattered—and had agreed so quickly—that the personal implications hadn’t been immediately apparent: How can you talk about opening adoption records if you’re not willing to be open yourself?

So she’d resolved to come out of adoption’s darkest closet, a decision that had been much easier to reach when she was still about two thousand miles from the podium. As she wound down the Chicago lakefront, peering through the smoky windows of a limousine at the whitecaps surging to the shore, her uneasiness prompted assurances that by nine o’clock it would all be over; but then she recalled how many times she’d used this tired—and ineffective—gambit to try to weasel her way through a pending crisis.

And it’s not going to be
over
. Don’t kid yourself. It’ll just be starting.

Red, white, and blue pennants snapped in the breeze as they pulled up to the City Center Complex, an unimaginative name for an uninspired-looking convention hall and hotel.

The driver hustled around the stretch to get her door, and she managed a smile as she remembered a famous photographer saying that the outdoors was what you had to pass through to get from your cab to your hotel. But these were tonier times for Suzanne, and the cab had turned into a limo.

Before she made it to the reception desk, a short man with freckles all over his bald head intercepted her.

“I’m Douglas Jenks, and I’m
so
glad to see you.” His smile burned as bright as those spots on his polished pate.

“It’s good to meet you, too.”

The convention organizer. She shook his hand, as cool and limp as raw salmon—and so at odds with his animated face—and thanked him for the invitation.

“No, don’t thank me. Do
not
thank us for one second. We want to thank
you
for coming. This is so great having you here. And the timing with that story in
People
? It couldn’t have been better. Like you planned it. The—”

“I didn’t, really.”

He went on undeterred. “—ballroom is absolutely packed. We’re sold out,
and
we’ve had to clear out some chairs in the back so we can make room for the overflow. Lots of TV, too,” he added with even more delight.

Suzanne barely had time to consider the gratifying—and intimidating—size of the audience before he was reminding her of his invitation to join him for dinner.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I have to beg off. I really need some time to get ready.” The truth? She didn’t think she could hold down dinner.

“Okay,” he said slowly, drawing out both syllables skeptically. “Well, we do want you at your best. You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?” He frowned, and in an instant fleshy cornrows traveled up his brow and the front half of his spotted scalp.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Suzanne touched his arm reassuringly. “I just need to get settled from the plane ride.”

She edged toward the reception desk and handed a credit card to the young man waiting to check her in. The Congress was hosting her, but there were always incidentals to pay for.

“All right. Come down when you’re ready. We’ll be waiting. Ciao-ciao.”

As he turned away she had to stifle a laugh because with that silly good-bye, and his orange spots, he suddenly reminded her of Morris the cat in those old commercials.

She just managed to bite her lip—pain the moment’s preferred antidote—when he executed a spirited and surprisingly graceful spin to wheel back around.

“Sorry, almost forgot.” He dug through a three-ring binder and pulled out a note. “A distinguished-looking man with silver hair gave me this earlier and asked me to give it to you.”

One glimpse at the crisp penmanship confirmed that it was, indeed, from Burton. But distinguished looking? Silver hair? She’d always thought of it as gray. He’d made her husband sound like a Supreme Court Justice, which he definitely wasn’t. Not yet anyway. Try administrative law judge for the Oregon Construction Contractors Board. He’d applied for a circuit court judge pro tem position, but was still waiting for the governor to promote him to the bench. Despite his steroidal ambition with the gavel—or maybe, now that she thought of it,
because
of it—His Honor had suffered a serious lapse in judgment in following her here. Hardly the first such lapse, and far from the worst, but can’t an estranged husband stay estranged? At least for a while?