Undone (33 page)

“Huh,” he said aloud.

What could this sentence have been part of? What could she have been trying to write? Or, rather, what could Chloe or Deepti, who must have dictated it, been trying to tell her? He puzzled over this for almost a minute but could make no sense of it—even as a sentence fragment, an incomplete thought. Perhaps he would bring the drawing pad with him to the hospital on Sunday and see if Deepti could recall what this was. It
bothered him, obscurely, to think that the import of the phrase could be lost forever.

He turned the page and was surprised to discover still
more
words, again in that blocky, childish, ill-spaced hand, with the
P
s and
E
s backward, and the words running almost diagonally down the page:
ACE
; and a little lower, CAP; and below that, the almost-illegible word
TOOK
; and then near the bottom, as if it were an afterthought—it was in a different color of crayon, orange this time—the mysterious word fragment
ONA
again.

“What on earth …?” he mumbled.

Chris came into the room. He stopped and stared at Jasper, who was squinting hard at the page. He held the pad so close to his face that his nose almost touched the paper. “Dude,” Chris said, “what’s up? Looks like you’re
eating
that thing.”

“I’m trying to read something,” Jasper said. “But I can’t see it properly. Tell me. What does this say?” He held the book out. “Just here,” Jasper said, pointing at the words at the top of the page.

Chris bent over and looked. “It says, uh, ‘ace … cap … took.’” He straightened up. “What’s it mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Jasper said. “What’s this last bit? Does that say ‘ona’?”

Chris bent over again. He nodded. “Yup, that’s it. ‘Ona.’ No, wait,” he said. “No, sorry, that’s a
D.
It’s—well, it’s not a word. Just letters.
D-N-A.
Hey, is that like
DNA
?”

Jasper stared at Chris’s blurry, indistinct outline. Then he pulled the book under his eyes. He brought his face close to the paper. “Yes,” he said. “DNA.”

The page was shaking now in his hands and it took him a
moment to steady himself. He reread all the words on that page, saying them aloud to himself in a whisper: “‘Ace … cap … took … DNA.’”

“Dude,” Chris said, “you okay?”

Jasper flipped back to the first page. His heart was hammering hard in his chest. “Help me here,” he said. “What does this word say?” He held the first page up to Chris.

“Chloe,” Chris said.

Jasper turned the page. “And this?”

Chris squinted. “Not,” he read.

“And here at the bottom?”

“Yours,” Chris read.

Jasper turned another page. “And what does
this
say?”

“‘Maddy, uh, maddys ONA’—I mean, DNA,” Chris said. “What the hell is this?”

Jasper spoke the words aloud, running them together and supplying what he gleaned must be the missing punctuation: “Chloe not yours. Maddy’s DNA.”

“Dude,” Chris said admonishingly, “isn’t Chloe your daughter? I mean, didn’t Dr. Jax say you aren’t supposed to talk about her out of group?”

Jasper lowered the tablet onto his knees. He could not breathe and his heart was convulsing wildly. He stared ahead of him into the indefinite gray, trying to calm himself.

“Man, you better talk about this in group,” Chris said. “You look like
shit.
”

Jasper was back at 10 Cherry Tree Lane. He saw himself ushering into the house the man with the ACE cap. A slim
man, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. Hollow cheeks. The man followed Jasper with a silent tread through the living room, down the hall to the kitchen, where Jasper showed him the back stairs leading down to the furnace. Had Jasper let him out of his sight? Yes—the man had gone down the stairs. And he had
stayed
down there. Maybe ten minutes later, Jasper heard him ascending from the basement. Jasper had gotten up from the sofa to escort the man out. He couldn’t have stolen
anything
, let alone Maddy’s DNA.

Then he remembered. The bathroom. The man asked to use the bathroom.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“Damn,” said Chris, who had moved off. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, taking off his shoes and socks. “You look bad. You want me to get Dunwoody?”

Jasper didn’t answer. He was thinking about how the ACE man had spent several minutes, supposedly, in the bathroom. More than enough time for him actually to have tiptoed into Maddy’s room. To bend over the sleeping child, to swab the inside of her cheeks. Had he not imagined precisely this scenario for his abortive Bannister novel? Yes. He had even written a detailed draft of the scene, as the basis for a story about a diabolical imposture, a fraud … It was beyond belief. It could not be. He had imagined this very crime. In just this way. It had been in front of his eyes all along. All the clues. He had
seen
it. Yet he had not seen it. Nor would he ever have seen it—if not for these words on the page.

“It’s not possible,” he whispered.

But of course, it
was
possible. After the man left, Jasper had gone to Maddy’s bedroom to wake the child and fetch Pauline. And she had stared at him in horror. In distress. Trying to warn him.

Pauline had seen it all.

The words in Maddy’s tablet were dictated not by Chloe or Deepti. They were dictated by
Pauline.
Somehow, in her horror and distress, she had managed to overcome that cognitive deficit that had, up until then, forbidden her from blinking out messages, letter by letter, with the help of an assistant who recited the alphabet. These were warnings, for him, painstakingly blinked out to Maddy, who had dutifully chanted the alphabet to Pauline, day after day. Maddy could have had no idea of the messages’ meanings; she would have simply viewed the exercise as a game, a way to show off her prowess at recognizing, and writing, letters. The unwitting amanuensis. Jasper himself might have elicited these same messages from Pauline, thus averting the disaster, had he not, in his state of crazed lust, fallen off from the habit of trying to train Pauline in precisely this form of dictation, had he not retreated every evening to his office to pour out, into his computer, his stream of filthy fantasies.

Now he saw Maddy sitting with Pauline, singing the alphabet song, always incomplete, always breaking off, then returning to the beginning, only to sing it again—stopping at seemingly random points, then resuming from the start. Pauline staring raptly as the child sang and scribbled with her crayon. He had, on that last day, in his terrible blindness, asked Maddy
why
she
kept singing the song. She had said something about “the butterfly man.” He had not understood, had been too bound up in his obsession with Chloe even to try to understand. He understood now. The butterfly man was Jean-Dominique Bauby, a locked-in patient who dictated a memoir to an assistant, letter by letter, by blinking at the appropriate time as the assistant recited the alphabet—blinking twice to indicate the space between words. A superhuman effort that had produced a book both beautiful and heartbreaking. Jasper had read it repeatedly in the days and weeks after Pauline’s stroke. He later watched Julian Schnabel’s masterful movie adaptation on DVD—Maddy sitting on the floor in front of the television, scribbling with her crayons. She had asked him what was going on in the movie. He had explained it to her.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

“The butterfly man,” he said aloud.

“What’s that?” Chris said.

There were no phones in the inmates’ rooms. All calls had to be placed within earshot of the desk sergeant, on a pay phone in the reception area downstairs.

“Chris,” Jasper said, struggling to rise from the bed. “Help me downstairs. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

Chris looked up from the issue of
Popular Science
he had been paging through. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “You don’t look so good. Maybe you should just lie down.”

“
Now!
” Jasper yelled.

Chris tossed aside the magazine and sprang off his bed. He took Jasper’s arm and led him downstairs. In the lobby, Chris brought Jasper over to the pay phone on the wall above the
seating area, then retreated upstairs. Jasper felt frantically in his pockets. He had no change.

He tapped over to the desk, took a twenty from his pocket and asked Dunwoody for change. Dunwoody counted it out slowly: three fives, four ones and four quarters. Jasper made his way back across the lobby to the phone. He fed a quarter into the maddeningly narrow slot and punched in a number from memory. After two rings, a crisp female voice rapped out: “Pollock, Munson and Kline.” He croaked out his request and was put through to an assistant, who said that Mr. Pollock was in a meeting.

“No!” Jasper shouted. He said that he was a client, he was calling from a pay phone at a halfway house, that it was an emergency, and that he needed to speak to Mr. Pollock right away. The assistant told him to hold on. Almost a minute went by, then he heard a click and Pollock’s voice said, on a note of wary surprise, “Mr. Ulrickson?” It was obvious from his tone that Pollock had never expected to hear from Jasper again, and was not overjoyed to do so now.

Jasper explained his discovery. It all spilled out: the words dictated by Pauline and transcribed by Maddy, the messages saying that Chloe was
not
his biological daughter, that it had all been a trick, a hoax to defraud him of his money, to destroy him, professionally and personally. “You—you even suspected such a thing, at first, when I called you up,” Jasper reminded him. “You mentioned the scammers and con men who make false paternity claims! But I’m sure you’ve never encountered something this diabolical.” To expose the scheme, Jasper said, Pollock need only dispatch someone to his sister’s house in San Francisco,
take a DNA swab from Maddy and check that sample against the one submitted under Chloe’s name. “They would still have Chloe’s DNA sequence on file at DDS, right?” he added excitedly. “Well, it won’t be hers! It will be Maddy’s!”

Pollock greeted this news with a long silence. Then he said, in a low, quiet voice, “Where are you calling from?”

“A halfway house,” Jasper said. “I mean, a residential rehabilitation center, they call them now. I was released six months ago. Sorry—I should have said that right at the start.”

“Yes, I did hear about your release,” Pollock said. “Tell me, are you attending psychiatric sessions? Therapy? To help you readjust to society?”

Jasper was puzzled by Pollock’s desire to discuss this triviality, given the stunning news he had just relayed of the fraud. But he answered, “Yes—we have group therapy every evening. But about Maddy’s DNA. Can we get that started right away? I don’t want to lose any time. I think Pauline’s health, even her survival, could depend on her hearing that the culprit or culprits have been—”

“Mr. Ulrickson,” Pollock interrupted sharply.

“Yes?” Jasper said, startled by the other man’s abrupt tone.

“I’m having a very busy day, and I need to get back to work. But let me just say that I understand how difficult it must be to reintegrate into society after long incarceration. The best advice I can give you is to continue your group sessions, but also to inquire into personal, one-on-one therapy, where you can address any problems you’re having dealing with any lingering guilt about your daughter and—”

“No!” Jasper cried. “I’m not crazy. I have evidence. Maddy’s drawing pad. She wrote the messages—in crayon. Pauline dictated them to her. I can show you. If you send a messenger—”

“Mr. Ulrickson,” Pollock said. “I really must get back to work. I was very sorry to hear of your troubles. I hope you can make a successful reintegration and become a useful member of society.” He hung up.

Jasper stood in mute astonishment, the phone at his ear. He hung up.

He had been a fool—gibbering incoherently about Maddy’s drawing pad and secret messages in crayon. Unless he could physically
show
someone the evidence, they would never believe it.

He tapped his way back to the desk. “Officer Dunwoody,” Jasper said. “I need your help.” He held up the drawing tablet.

“Yeah,” Dunwoody said. “I heard every word.” Jasper could not see Dunwoody’s expression—the desk sergeant was a murky pink and purple outline against the dull flicker of small TV screens—but he could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

“Please,” Jasper said, “let me show you.” He put the pad on the counter and began to open the cover. Dunwoody slapped it closed.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny. But I’m not laughing.”

“It’s my daughter’s printing,” Jasper persisted. “She was four at the time. How could she be writing messages about stolen DNA? It had to be my wife!”

“Okay,” Dunwoody said, “get the fuck out of here.” There was true threat in his tone now.

“Please—” Jasper started to say, but the man cut him off.

“You’re due at work in thirty minutes,” Dunwoody said. “If you’re late, you lose outside privileges—for a
month.
”

Jasper stood there, lost. He was still filled with exultation over his discovery, his mind racing, his heart drumming hard. But he was thwarted, blocked. Then he had a thought—a crucial realization. “Yes—okay,” he said, snatching the drawing pad off the desk. “I’m going. I—I was only joking about the messages.”

“No shit,” Dunwoody said. He pushed the button to release the front door lock. “Now, get to work.”

Jasper tapped across the lobby, pushed open the door and went out.

Cool air hit his face and body. It was mid-March, the keen cold of lingering winter stirred to tepid warmth by a brightening sun. He had not brought a coat, but it was too late to go back for it. Dragging his uncooperative leg behind him, feeling his way with his cane, he moved as quickly as he could up the street to the bus stop. But instead of joining his usual group waiting for the bus westbound to go to work, he proceeded to the curb, looked both ways, up and down Venice Street. He could hear the eastbound bus approaching some way off—perhaps a block away, the distinctive grind of its engine. There was no time to limp down to the lights at the intersection. Through the watery blur, he could not see any cars coming. Trusting to fate, he set out across the avenue, tapping, heaving his lame leg along with a jerking motion of his hips.