Under the Skin (30 page)

I wanted to hug him, seeing not the handsome man he’d become but instead the lonely defensive little boy who had so often spent his summers at the farm while Gloria vacationed with the husband or boyfriend of the moment. But Ben, in this mood, didn’t appear to want hugs. So I just tried to answer him honestly.

“At this moment, there’s no proof at all—just some odd coincidences—”

His faraway, closed look told me that he wasn’t really listening to me and that he wasn’t done with his anger. “I never even knew my dad wasn’t her first husband. You never bothered to let me in on
that
little piece of information either.”

Without warning, he hurled the spray bottle to the ground. The plastic top flew off and the contents splashed out. And at once, the tension on his face and in his voice was gone and he looked at me with a rueful smile.

“Sorry, Aunt E. Mom
told
me she made you promise not to tell. She said since the marriage was annulled, it didn’t count, which meant that legally my dad
was
her first husband—”

Thank you, Gloria, for that
. I hurried to clarify my position. “And I never knew there’d been a child, not until a few days ago—you need to understand that, Ben.”

He squatted down to pick up the pieces of the broken sprayer. I had the impression that he was near tears and
I went back to my transplanting to give him time to recover his equanimity.

“It’s just …” His voice choked and he cleared his throat before going on. “This guy doesn’t look anything like me or Mom. And he acts like …” Ben was still down on the floor, fiddling with the hopelessly cracked sprayer. “Is she going to take his word for
everything
? ‘Welcome, Joss. Here, Ben, this is your brother.’ Is that all?”

I was feeling near tears myself as I tried to reassure him that it was just a matter of time; that there would be DNA tests, and a search of birth records …

“All that takes a while and it’ll have to be done. But right now—Ben, you have to understand that your mother’s carried a huge load of guilt all these years, blaming herself for the supposed death of her child—as if it had died because she didn’t want it. And now … there’s this miracle. Don’t you see? She’s not ready to put it to a test, not yet. Give her a little time.”

Ben did just that. He made himself scarce in the following days, citing a big job he had to help Amanda with—a job that had them leaving the farm early and returning late. Apart from an exquisitely uncomfortable and unavoidable family dinner Monday night, Ben’s contact with Joss had been minimal.

At first Gloria seemed oblivious to Ben’s deep unhappiness with the new situation. Her absorption in Joss was total—the two spent long hours just sitting and talking. She had gotten me to unearth my old photo albums and was bent on introducing Joss to all the members of the family, living or long gone.

And when they weren’t building family memories for Joss, she was making up for lost time by spending money on him. Now that the Eyebrow was out of the picture—safely checked into Florida’s penal system, according
to Phillip—Gloria had no hesitation in whirling Joss into Asheville to outfit him in the kind of clothing she could never persuade Ben to wear. Furthermore, she had convinced Joss to quit his job waiting tables so that they could spend more time together while making plans for the future.

“Isn’t he the handsomest thing?” she whispered to me one morning as we sat on the front porch. Joss was coming up the road, looking like the picture of health, except for a lingering limp that caused him to shuffle slightly as he walked. That limp was the reason for his therapeutic daily walk down to the mailbox and back—a good little hike. Now that the bandage on his head had been removed and only a faint scar remained, I had to admit that he was, indeed, darkly handsome. A pale olive skin, deep brown curly hair, soft dark eyes, and eyelashes that didn’t seem quite right on a guy.

“Handsome, for sure,” I agreed. “I guess he looks a lot like Arturo.”
He about has to
, I thought;
he sure doesn’t favor you
.

“Oh, yes, I think so—though you know, Lizzy, it sounds awful but it was so long ago that I hardly remember what Turo looked like—and when he never tried to get back in touch after the annulment, I burned all my pictures of him. But he had the same dark skin and curly hair, I do remember that much. And his eyes were gray—really striking-looking against his dark skin.”

“Gloria, have you been in touch with Arturo recently?

Phillip said—”

Gloria glanced down at Joss, who had paused on the road to throw a stick for James. James, as was his wont, had immediately attached himself to the latest arrival and now accompanied Joss faithfully on his daily mailbox excursions.

“Don’t mention that to Joss, Lizzy, not yet.” She was
almost whispering though we both knew that Joss was well out of earshot. “Yes, when I decided to try to contact my baby”—she laughed—“my baby girl Dana who turned out to be my grown-up son Joss, I got the strongest feeling that I should try to get in touch with Turo. I guess I was hoping to get closure on all outstanding business.” Her eyes didn’t leave Joss.

“
Any
hoo, it was ridiculously easy. I remembered that Turo’s family had lived in Cartagena, Colombia, for generations. I mean, forever—since they first came over from Spain in the Dark Ages or whenever it was. Still in the same house, he told me. And I remembered that the house was called the house of the lion—Casa de Leon.”

She giggled reminiscently. “I used to tease Turo and call him Lee-on.”

“Glory, do you want to—”

“All
right
, Lizzy, it was when I was in Asheville, the day I got my hair done. I just borrowed Nigel’s phone book, looked in the Yellow Pages, and found a private investigator. Her office was in a building nearby and when I called, she was able to see me right away.”

She darted a look to where Joss was stretched out on the grass, with James on his chest. “She was a most attractive black woman—or African American, if that’s what you’re supposed to say now. Very well spoken—over the phone I had no idea—but I told her what I wanted and gave her my information and she just laughed. She asked if I didn’t maybe have a teenager who could do this for me, it was so easy with a computer. And when I told her that it was a private matter, she just grinned and started tapping away on that computer and, I swear, Glory, it was less than five minutes and she handed me a phone number and an address: Arturo Rodriquez, Casa de Leon, Fernandez de Madrid Plaza. Do you know, she even showed me pictures on the computer of the front of his house? And when I
asked what I owed her, she said I should make out a check to Big Sisters of Asheville for whatever I felt the information had been worth. So I wrote her a nice check and—”

“And you called the number …”

Gloria blushed. “Eventually. I had to wait till nighttime so he’d be home. And of course, I wasn’t sure if I’d get Turo or his father, who
might
still be alive, or Turo’s son, if he had one—”

“But eventually you got the right Arturo.”

Joss was on his feet now and I wanted to finish this conversation without hearing a play by play that included maids and difficulties with Spanish and a possible wife—there, now she had me doing it.

“Yes, I did. And it was … well, it was amazing. We’ve talked several times since then, kind of reconnecting.”

“And have you told him—”

I stopped myself just in time as James bounded up the steps, followed more slowly by Joss. He shuffled to the rocker by Gloria and plopped down.

“Whew! That’s some walk, even with resting along the way. But, like they say, no pain, no gain.”

He leaned back and shut his eyes. “Don’t let me interrupt you two. Go on, Aunt E, has my mother told me what?”

“Phillip, there was something about the way Joss said that—well, it didn’t exactly make my blood run cold but there was a definite edge to his voice that kind of creeped me out.”

Phillip threw a handful of fish food into the pond and we watched the huge catfish appear, first rolling lazily to the surface then sweeping up the pellets with eager efficiency.

Since Joss had been staying with us, Phillip and I had
formed the habit, on the days he was home in time, of taking a stroll after dinner: into the woods, down to the pond and its little pavilion with two comfortable Adirondack chairs—anywhere for a little space.

He tossed out a second helping for the catfish and for the smaller bream that were beginning to appear at the edge of the feeding frenzy. Dropping into the chair by mine, he asked, “And did she tell him that she was in touch with his father?”

“No, and she actually sounded a little annoyed with Joss—told him rather pointedly that she wasn’t talking about him. And she didn’t go on. Later I was able to get her alone for a few minutes—sometimes I think Joss would follow her into the bathroom if she’d let him, just like a two-year-old not wanting his mother out of his sight. I remember when Laurel went through that stage—hollering
Ma! Whar you?
and pounding on the door while I tried to have a relaxing bath and—”

I caught myself as I saw Phillip trying to stifle a grin. “I’m running on, aren’t I? Almost as bad as Glory or, Heaven forfend, Aunt Dodie. And yes, I wanted to call Aunt Dodie and ask about her baby—had Dodie been covering up the truth all these years? But Gloria insisted that
she
should be the one to do it, and she wasn’t ready—yet. Okay, where was I?”

He reached over and took my hand then leaned back in his chair, his eyes on the bird’s nest in the rafters above where a nervous little phoebe was doing her best to pretend we didn’t exist.

“You were telling me whether Gloria had told Arturo about Joss.”

“Oh, right. Well—and this was fairly unexpected—she said that she wasn’t going to say anything to Joss or Arturo till she’d gotten proof. And she went on, in the most offhanded way, to say that she had that same private investigator—the one who’d gotten Arturo’s phone
number for her—on the case. I swear, Phillip, the girl has a lot more sense than I’d given her credit for. Do you know what she did?”

Really, my sister amazed me. Just as calmly as if she was a seasoned investigator herself, she told me how she’d managed to clip a bit of Joss’s hair to send in for comparison with the hair in her locket—the hair a nurse who’d attended the birth had slipped to her, as a remembrance of the lost baby.

“Glory said that on the day after the birth, she hadn’t been able to stop crying. And that was when the nurse gave her the little bit of hair, saying she’d clipped it before they took the baby away. The nurse told Glory she didn’t agree with the way things had been handled—but that was all she’d say. So whether this nurse was talking about Gloria not being allowed to see a dead baby or not being allowed to see the baby she was giving up isn’t clear—”

“But at least your sister’s admitting a possibility here; that’s good. The only trouble with the hair samples …”

He ran his free hand over his head in that characteristic worried gesture that I knew he’d tried to quit after I’d teased him about it. Catching my glance, he went on.

“Thing is, I don’t know how useful those two samples will be. For DNA, you got to have the follicles and I’m assuming neither Gloria nor the nurse back then yanked the hair out by the roots. It’s possible that the two samples could come up as a match but even a match isn’t a hundred percent proof—and if they didn’t match, it still wouldn’t prove anything. I mean, the nurse might have felt like this would help Gloria stop crying and she could have gone to the nursery and gotten a little bit of hair from any baby. Or—”

“Glory said the P.I. warned her that it might not be definitive. Evidently the investigator’s doing some more checking—birth and adoption records, that sort of
thing. She’s also going to have a chat with Joss’s adoptive parents.”

“How about a birth certificate? Or that driver’s license Joss claims his doctor is holding on to?”

The sun had been behind the mountain for some time now and in the growing dusk, tiny bats had come out to dart above the pond, doing their part to keep the insect population under control. Occasionally one would swoop down and skim the water’s still surface, whether feeding or drinking or both, I couldn’t say.

“Supposedly Joss has sent for the birth certificate.” I wondered if I should tell Phillip about the other thing Gloria had asked the P.I. to look into.
Later
, I decided and went on with the rest of my troubling news. “Joss got his driver’s license back when he and Glory went into town yesterday. I’ve seen it.”

“And …?”

It was almost completely dark now, too dark to see the bats anymore. And in the darkness, all the night sounds seemed louder: the whirring and chittering of katydids, the distant calls of owls, the muted strains of
ranchero
music from Julio’s house. I stood to start back up the road.

“And …?” Phillip repeated as he pulled himself to his feet.

“And the dates match.”