Undone (11 page)

She was sitting on the living room floor, a few feet across the carpet from Jasper, at the foot of Pauline’s wheelchair, paging through a book made of felt, with Velcro-backed, removable bits of cloth that depicted various items—a violin, a lion, a cat—each item to be matched with the corresponding letter of the alphabet sewn onto each page.

Jasper was on the sofa, laptop open on his knees, working on his Bannister mystery. In the weeks since first conceiving of his plot concerning a villainous psychopath posing as the illegitimate son of a dead patriarch, Jasper had made great strides. He had honed the backstory of deprivation and abuse that had
warped his villain’s mind. He had further fleshed out in vivid scenes the wealthy, noble Gutterson family and its ancestral home in the leafy reaches of Princeton, New Jersey. All had gone with surprising smoothness.

The thorniest problem, as Jasper had foreseen, was that of the DNA test that his villain would be obliged to undergo to convince the Guttersons that he was the illegitimate son of Lemuel Gutterson. How to get around the chain-of-custody safeguards?

It seemed obvious that the only way for an impostor to pass a paternity test would be to use a sample taken from someone who was the biological offspring of the father. Jasper had, accordingly, created for these purposes a child—youngest scion of the late lamented Lemuel—from whom his antihero could steal some cheek cells. Because Jasper’s criminal was male, and would have an XY chromosome makeup, the child had to be male too, but young enough so that the sample could believably be stolen from him without his awareness. This suggested a preschooler, a kid Maddy’s age, or younger. He had duly written such a character into the story—which had required him (in the infernally difficult business of composing fiction) to backtrack and weave seamlessly into the story a second wife for the octogenarian Lemuel, a woman young enough to bear a child but not so young as to suggest that Lemuel (who was meant to be an admirable character) was a predatory old cradle robber. Jasper had created a forty-one-year-old female nurse (modeled in no small part on Deepti) who had faithfully seen Gutterson’s first wife through a long, fatal bout of cancer, and to whom Lemuel, alone and grieving, had turned for support after his wife’s death.
In an act applauded by his older children, Lemuel had married his wife’s former nurse and sired the little DNA provider so crucial to Jasper’s plot.

But now he was wrestling with the problem of how, exactly, his villain could extract a cheek sample without anyone being the wiser. He had been struggling with the conundrum for days and at the moment was asking himself if his villain might not pose as a dentist who visits the boy’s preschool to give the children a lesson about dental hygiene, thereby managing to collect a cheek sample while pretending to inspect the boy’s teeth. But even as he began, excitedly, to tap this into his laptop, he felt that the plan could never be made to seem believable; the teachers would surely notice his villain poking the swabs into the child’s mouth. Besides which, the reader would inevitably wonder why the child would not speak up, asking why the dentist was scraping away at the inside of his cheeks. Which raised the question: could the child somehow be
unconscious
? Perhaps asleep! Napping! His villain need only dream up a ruse, an imposture, to infiltrate the home—pose as a repairman or contractor? Jasper began to type this inspiration, when Maddy’s indignant voice drew him back to the here and now.

“Dad?” she said. “What does it
mean
?”

“Sorry, honey,” he said, looking up from his screen and blinking away the fictional visions that clouded his eyes. “What does what mean?”

“Ella
Menno
.”

“Ellamenno?” he said. “Not a clue. Where did you hear that word?”

“At preschool. We were singing the ABCs.”

“Oh, I see!” He chuckled. “Ellamenno. It’s not a word. It’s part of the alphabet. The letters
L-M-N-O.
It’s funny, because when
I
was a kid, I also used to think exactly the same—”

The phone, on the table beside the sofa, rang. Jasper checked the caller ID. It read: “Law Offices, Pollock.”

His heart jumped in his chest. It had been several weeks since he donated his sample. This
must
be Pollock, finally, with the results.

Deepti called from the kitchen: “Do you want me to get that?”

“No, no,” Jasper said. “I’ve got it.”

He glanced at Pauline. She was staring at him. Her eyes had a hooded, haunted look, the same look they had had for weeks—a look he had, until her recent change in mood, never seen before.

Dr. Carlucci had warned Jasper that many locked-in patients suffered “emotional lability”—marked mood swings—and at first Jasper had tried to convince himself that the sudden change in Pauline, a few weeks ago, could be chalked up to that. But the dramatic shift in Pauline’s emotions, he was finally obliged to admit to himself, was no temporary thing: it was part and parcel of a dramatic reversal on the subject of the paternity claim. From her earlier ready acceptance, Pauline had, overnight, adopted a stance of rigid opposition to, and disapproval of, anything touching on Holly and the child. She refused even to respond to Jasper’s efforts at engaging her on the subject. His attempt, the other day, to talk about what room they would put the child in, should she turn out to be his, had made Pauline shut down completely—closing her eyes to indicate her refusal even to consider the subject.

He was, at first, mystified by this abrupt reversal. But upon reflection, he understood its origins. Pauline’s opposition must derive from the retroactive sexual jealousy she felt about his long-ago liaison with Holly—a jealousy that could only be heartbreakingly magnified by Pauline’s physical incapacity, which made it impossible for her to assert her sexual “ownership” of Jasper, through intercourse—to stake her claim against what she clearly suspected were his reawakened memories of Holly, of that moment on the beach. Having arrived at this insight, he inwardly cursed himself for the lack of empathy, the blindness, that had prevented him from realizing it earlier. For days, he had blundered on, trying to force Pauline to engage on the subject of the girl, to acknowledge the very real possibility that the child would be coming to live with them. Having finally seen his error, he had ceased trying to talk about the situation. But, obviously, the subject could not be avoided forever—as the ringing phone now attested.

Pauline’s stare sharpened. She had obviously divined that it was Pollock calling.

He lifted the phone to his ear and said a cautious hello.

“Results are in,” the lawyer said without preamble.

“Hold on,” Jasper said. He put his hand over the receiver. “Pollock,” he confirmed to Pauline. He shot a glance at Maddy, who knew nothing, as yet, about her prospective half-sister. “I’d better take this in my office,” he added, simultaneously feeling a stab of guilt at using their child as an excuse to quit the room; for Jasper’s true motivation was to escape the searing heat of Pauline’s gaze, which awoke in him a vague and inexplicable
feeling of guilt. “I’ll be right back,” he added, getting to his feet. He carried the cordless phone down the hall to his office, shut the door behind him and sat at his desk. “Okay,” he told Pollock. “I’m ready.”

“She’s your daughter.”

Scalding blood bounded into his face. His heart began to tom-tom. He had tried to acclimate himself to this result in advance, to internalize it, make it real for himself, so as to blunt the shock when it came. Those efforts had been in vain. He was reeling. “My daughter,” he repeated tonelessly.

“That’s correct,” said Pollock. “Which means that I can now, legally, divulge to you her name. She is Chloe. Chloe Dwight.”

“Chloe,” he said softly. His daughter.
Chloe.
Of all the many
C
-names he had imagined, this lovely one had never come to him. Had Holly known the derivation? From the Greek: “to bloom, to blossom.” Is that why she had chosen it, or had she merely liked the sound? In any case, she
was
Holly’s bloom—and, of course, his own. He felt a surge of that paternal pride, that excitement, that had surprised him during his walk to the clinic to donate his DNA sample a few weeks ago. He immediately thought of Pauline, and a terrible apprehension overcame him.

“Mr. Ulrickson?” Pollock said. “You still there?”

“I am,” he said. “I’m just trying to absorb it.”

“I’m sure it’ll take a while. And you’ll have some time.” He explained that Jasper should not expect immediately to bring Chloe down from Vermont to live with him. “She is currently a ward of the state,” he said. “So you’ve got to make a formal petition for custody—same as if you were adopting. Government’s
got to be satisfied you can support and educate the child; that you’ve got a stable home, that you’re not crazy, that you don’t have a criminal record. So there will be some background checks, interviews, that kind of thing. She’ll undergo something similar in Vermont, social workers and shrinks making sure she’s strong enough, emotionally, to leave her friends and school and start living with a father she never knew. They never actually deny custody—not unless she’s a basket case or you’re a raving drug addict or living on the streets or a convicted sex offender. Still, it takes time.”

“How much time?” Jasper asked. To his surprise, he was disappointed to hear of the delay.

“It’s the judicial system, so don’t expect things to happen overnight. But if I light a fire under them, we might have this done in—what is it now? End of May? Say, two months. Early August. If you’re lucky. Now,” he added in a lighter tone, “I’m sure you’d like to have a word about all this with your daughter.”

“Maddy?” Jasper said. “I don’t see what—” Then he realized his mistake.

“I’ve got the number for her at her foster parents’ place,” Pollock went on. “She’s waiting for your call. Got a pen?” He recited the number and Jasper wrote it down. “Okay,” Pollock said, “we’ll talk. And congratulations.” He rang off.

Jasper sat there, trying to imagine what to say to the girl. To Chloe. His
daughter.
There seemed, at once, far too much to say (how do you catch someone up on seventeen years of life in a phone call?) and not nearly enough (apart from the little he had been able to glean of her life from the affidavit, he knew almost
nothing about her). But there was no point in trying to prepare speeches, to script a conversation. He would trust to emotion, let his heart speak. Wasn’t that always the best way?

With a shaking index finger, he punched the number into the phone. It had scarcely begun to ring when he heard a click, then came an elderly-sounding woman’s voice. She said, with a certain coy expectancy, “Gaitskill residence …?”

He cleared his throat—a hot, hard obstruction had taken up sudden residence there. “I’m calling for Chloe—” His voice hung for a moment. Did he need to supply a surname? And if so, which one? Dwight? Ulrickson? “From Connecticut,” he offered instead.

“Just a moment.” Through a muffling palm, he heard the woman say urgently, “It’s for you.
Connecticut.
” There followed a rustling sound. Then he heard, through the thrumming cataract of blood in his ears, a featherlight voice: tentative, shy, hopeful.

“… Dad?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Jasper said, on a gust of breath that burst from him like a sob. Then he
was
sobbing. Something about that soft, vulnerable, childlike voice—his
daughter’s
voice—coming through the phone line, from so far away, the girl he never knew,
his
girl, living among strangers, until now an orphan, or believing herself to be, and thus all alone in the world. He struggled to master himself.

“Sorry, sorry,” he managed to say, gulping down the sobs that convulsed his throat and lungs. “Yes, it’s—it’s your dad.” And then he was doing what he had told himself he must not do, since it might sound like an indictment of Holly for failing to tell him
of Chloe’s existence: he was apologizing—apologizing for not having been in her life, not having raised her, not having been there for her at the important moments, birthdays, graduations, her mother’s death. “But I didn’t know about you, honey,” he said, “otherwise everything would have been different—everything.”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” came that soft, light voice, sweetly melodic. “It’s okay. I don’t blame you. I know Mom didn’t tell you about me. I know it’s not your fault.”

Her readiness to forgive also made him cry, and he was some time getting control of himself. “Well, the main thing is, we’ve found each other,” he said at length, mopping at his eyes and cheeks and nose with a Kleenex he had snatched from a box in his desk. “That’s what’s important now. We have the future.”

“That’s what I’m excited about,” Chloe said, her voice brightening, quickening. “I can’t wait to see you.”

“Well, I was hoping that you would come and live with us,” he said. “Do you want to do that? I know it would mean leaving all your friends and the places you know—”

“I can’t wait!” she cried. “That’s my biggest dream! But I guess it’s going to take a long time. I’ve got to talk to psychiatrists and everything.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I have to talk to all sorts of official people too. But we’ll both come through with flying colors, and then you’ll be here. I would come to see you right away, but I’ve got a small daughter—your half-sister, Maddy; and my wife, your stepmother, Pauline, is an invalid. It’s very difficult for me to get away.”

“Oh, I understand,” Chloe said. “I’ve still got
school
too. But can you tell me about Connecticut? I want to be able to picture it.”

Jasper described Clay Cross, its location near the Sound, and told her about the house, the spreading maple out front, the patio out back with the view, over the lawn, of the water and the distant twinkling skyscrapers of New York visible like a mirage on clear days. He told her the layout of the rooms, and was about to explain where Chloe would be sleeping when his office door flew open and Maddy ran in.

“Mommy wants you,” she announced. “I can tell.” She turned and ran out.

Pauline!
He had left her waiting all this time to hear the results of the DNA test! How could he have forgotten her? It had never happened before. “I’m sorry, Chloe,” he said, “but I’ve got to get off the phone. It’s my wife—Pauline. Your stepmom. She needs me. But we’ll talk again soon. And I’ll
see
you soon.”