Undone (5 page)

“You can tell us about that later,” he said. “Right now, I want you to go to the kitchen and be with Deepti—I just heard her come back in. I have to talk with Mommy about grown-up things.”

“What grown-up things?”

“They wouldn’t
be
grown-up if I told you,” Jasper said. “We’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

Maddy climbed from the bed and ran off.

Jasper then smoothed Maddy’s covers and sat on the end of the bed, facing Pauline. He took her warm, motionless hands in his own. He inhaled a steadying breath and then asked if Pauline recalled the name Holly Dwight. Her eyes kindled—and Jasper knew she remembered. Years ago, when they first began dating, he had, in a bid to remove ghosts of former loves, insisted on
trading with Pauline a list of their past romantic partners. His had not been particularly extensive—he had always been somewhat timid in affairs of the heart—and included only a rather low-key and passionless romance with a fellow English major that dragged on through his undergraduate years; a short-lived adventure with an older woman, a divorced professor, during his postgraduate studies; and an ill-advised affair with a manic-depressive magazine fact-checker during that period of six months when Jasper tried out the louche life of a would-be poet in the East Village, before his parents’ deaths, which soon brought him back home to Connecticut (where, temperamentally, he had always really belonged). He had not omitted from the list of past romances Holly, despite the brevity, and seeming inconsequence, of their liaison.

“Well,” he went on, “I’ve just opened a letter saying that Holly has died.”

Pauline’s eyes widened.

“She left a teenaged daughter. An orphan.”

The expression in Pauline’s eyes melted into one of sympathy for the girl left all alone after her mother’s death.

“But this letter—from child welfare in Vermont—well, it suggests that she might
not
be an orphan.” He looked at Pauline meaningfully and, after a moment, saw a stirring in her dark pupils, a looming surmise. “Yes,” he said at length. “Seventeen years old. Turns eighteen at the end of the month. The dates work out perfectly.”

He was relieved to see none of the emotions he had feared he might read in her eyes: recrimination, anger, retroactive
jealousy. Instead, Pauline’s gaze continued to register piteous concern for an abandoned, grieving child, with a clear admixture of concern about
him
, about how he was coping with the news.

“I’m fine,” he said. “A little shaken up, of course. But fine. Are you?”

She blinked once, firmly. Then a new look came into her eyes, a quizzical look that asked him how they should proceed.

“Of course, we have to be sure,” he said. “I’ve already called a lawyer to arrange for a DNA test. There’s a chance—a slim one, but a chance—that she isn’t mine. But if she is—well, I don’t see any option but to have her come and live with us.” He spoke this last utterance as a statement, but the slight upward inflection at the end of the sentence betrayed that he was, indeed, asking a question, seeking Pauline’s blessing for the plan.

Without hesitation, she blinked in the affirmative.

“Oh God, honey,” he said. “Thanks for being so understanding.” He rose from the bed, leaned forward and embraced her.

But then, he thought, he should not be surprised at her ready agreement to take the child in. Pauline, who had faced the possibility of living out her days in a chronic care ward, would know better than anyone the horrors of being abandoned to the care of paid strangers. Was it any wonder that she was unwilling to consign the child to such a fate, in foster care? In that respect, he thought, Pauline and his possible—what had the lawyer called her?—his
reputed
daughter—were not so different.

P
ollock called at noon the next day. He had spoken with Stubbs at Vermont Child Services and had learned the details concerning the paternity test. “They use DDS Diagnostics in Ohio—excellent place,” he told Jasper. “They’ve got licensed donation sites everywhere. Couple right near you. They offered some times when you might go in and give a sample.”

Jasper chose the first available option: three o’clock that afternoon, at Clay Cross Pediatrics, half a mile from his house.

“Very good,” said Pollock. “Ask for Cochrane.”

At two-thirty, Jasper set out, on foot, for the clinic. It was a bright spring afternoon and, on Cherry Tree Lane (where he lived at number ten), explosions of yellow forsythia glowed
here and there among flowerbeds thick with tulips and drooping peonies. In the rustling green canopy overhead, birds set up a mellifluous chatter. Jasper had grown up here, knew every crack in the sidewalks, every gnarled root and paving stone, but now, with the consciousness of his possible fatherhood—a fatherhood which, if real, had run parallel to his life for the last seventeen years without his knowledge—he felt as if he were seeing everything for the first time. That he could be the father of a child he had never known—Holly’s child—meant that, on some fundamental level, he had never fully known
himself.
The sensation was, to his surprise, not altogether unwelcome, and he was furthermore conscious of a stirring, within, of an unexpected paternal pride, and even excitement, at the prospect of getting to know this daughter (should she prove, truly, to be his); of taking her in and raising her. With that came an acknowledgment of the slight weariness that had settled over him lately, in the routine of caring for two such helpless dependents as a small child and an invalided wife, a regimen interrupted only by bouts at the computer, where even his Bannister mysteries had begun to seem a little overfamiliar. On some level, he realized (with a queer inward shock), he had been longing for some kind of change in his routine—a longing so deeply buried he had not even been aware of it until now.

The Clay Cross clinic was housed in a former blacksmithing shop on a lane off the town’s main street. Cochrane, a smiling African-American man in a medical smock and jeans, invited Jasper back into an examining room, where he quickly disabused Jasper of the impression that he was a doctor (“I’m a
mere phlebotomist—which means I’m trained to take blood and swab cheeks”). He asked for a government-issued ID (Jasper handed over his driver’s license) and he wrote Jasper’s address and phone number on a business-sized envelope with a preprinted case number. Then he took out an inkpad of the type Jasper had seen at the local police precinct when researching an early Bannister, blackened Jasper’s thumb and rolled the print onto the collection envelope. He then donned rubber gloves and said, “Okay, let’s take some DNA.” Brandishing what appeared to be a Q-tip, but with a longer stem and only one end terminating in white matter, he scraped several times on the inside of Jasper’s left cheek, placed the swab into the envelope, then took a fresh one and repeated the procedure. He did this four times in all, swabbing both the right and left cheeks twice. He sealed the swabs in the envelope, then asked Jasper to sign his name along the tamperproof tape.

“Now, I need you to hold the envelope up, with the case number and thumbprint facing me,” Cochrane said. Wielding a disposable camera, he snapped two pictures, then put the camera and the envelope containing the swabs into a paper pouch and sealed it with a fresh piece of tape, which he also had Jasper sign.

“Wow, that’s quite a rigmarole,” Jasper said. He had done extensive research into DNA testing of crime-scene blood for several Bannisters over the years, but had never had occasion to look into the procedure for paternity testing.

“That’s how we maintain chain of custody of the sample,” Cochrane said. “Otherwise, the results are no good in court.” He put the pouch into a FedEx box addressed to DDS Diagnostics,
then buzzed the front desk and asked the receptionist to call for a pickup.

Jasper asked how long he would have to wait for the results.

“Varies,” Cochrane said. “Three, four weeks. Sometimes six or seven.”

“
That
long?” Jasper cried. “I don’t know if I can stand the suspense!” He realized, to his surprise, that, if asked, he would not in that moment have been able to say which outcome he was hoping for: a positive result or a negative one.

But Cochrane did not ask. Instead, he said in a kindly tone: “We always tell our clients to forget about it. Try to relax. Lose yourself in your work.”

I
n the days that followed, Jasper stuck to his usual routine, rising each morning at seven-thirty, showering, helping Deepti to dress and feed Pauline, serving breakfast to Maddy, then standing on the front stoop and waving as Deepti drove them off to physiotherapy and preschool respectively. He then repaired to his office to work on his Bannister. Still in search of a fresh crime on which to hang the tale, he sifted old notebooks, visited news Web sites, checked police blotters. To no avail. With the paternity test preying on his mind, he found it impossible to focus. That is, until the morning when he stopped trying to force his thoughts away from the test results. Instead,
he surrendered to obsessing about the outcome—and it was only then that he had his creative breakthrough: why not
write
about these uncertainties? Why not address, head-on, what was uppermost in his mind?

He opened a fresh Word file and began to tap out a scene that showed a family—some half dozen adults and a scattering of children—all of them dressed in black and standing by the graveside of a beloved patriarch. Jasper described balled Kleenexes raised to red, raw noses, downcast, tearful eyes and the priest murmuring the familiar psalm (“he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake …”). He described the creak of the winch as the casket was lowered into the ground. Then he began a new paragraph, describing a stranger, a gaunt, hollow-cheeked young man, also dressed in black, standing some way in the distance, beneath a rain-dripping willow. The young man came forward and, to the family’s shock and surprise, identified himself as the illegitimate son of the dearly departed—a child, he claimed, born out of wedlock to a now-deceased chambermaid at a hotel where the father had once stayed, twenty years earlier; and thus an heir to the old man’s fortune.

“He is, of course, an impostor,” Jasper typed, in a note to himself. “A psychopath bent upon removing his rival ‘siblings’ one by one, and appropriating the full fortune for himself—a scheme in which he will be foiled only by the timely intervention of Detective Bannister, an old friend of the family. B’s suspicions are aroused by a certain false note in the young man’s voice—and a tendency on the part of Smokey to growl in his presence.”

Typing fast, he began to sketch in the villain’s background, tracing his motivations to a childhood of deprivation and cruelty in an orphanage; he started to write notes on the grieving family, conceiving of them as a wealthy clan with deep New England roots. Freed from the agonizing writer’s block that had stalled him for weeks, Jasper wrote rapturously, without pause, stopping only when he heard the ringing of the doorbell.

Fingers poised above the keyboard, he waited for Deepti to answer it. But he heard no footsteps hurrying out to the foyer, and after a moment the bell sounded again. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes past three. He realized that he had been working, without pause, for more than five hours! Maddy and Pauline must have arrived home, with Deepti, and be napping; Deepti must be in the guesthouse talking on the phone to her daughter. He furthermore realized why he had been able to keep writing, undisturbed: Pauline, hearing the fusillade of typing from his office, must have known that he had conquered his writer’s block; she must have forbidden anyone from interrupting him. Still his invaluable collaborator!

He jumped to his feet and hurried to the front foyer, where he paused and looked through the peephole. On the stoop was a man in white coveralls carrying a toolbox and wearing a white painter’s cap with the logo “ACE” above the brim. “Can I help you?” said Jasper, upon opening the door.

The man, his eyes obscured by a pair of mirrored aviators, said, “Furnace inspection.”

“Furnace?” Jasper said. “There’s nothing wrong with my furnace.”

“Let’s hope not,” the man said. “Governor has mandated that every furnace in the state be checked for carbon monoxide leaks. Letter went out last week.”

Jasper had seen no such letter. He must have overlooked it in the mountains of correspondence that arrived every day from fans of his memoir. “How long will this take?” he asked.

“Tops, ten minutes.”

Jasper ushered him in and led him to the back of the house, where he opened a door off the boot room and flicked a light switch, illuminating a descending staircase. “It’s down there,” he said. The man touched the beak of his ACE cap and set off down the stairs.

There was no hope of Jasper’s continuing to write with a stranger in the house. He retreated to the living room, dropped onto the sofa and picked up a magazine from the coffee table. He paged through it impatiently. Perhaps five minutes later, he heard footsteps coming up from the basement. He threw the magazine aside and went out to the kitchen. “Looks fine,” the man said, ascending the final stairs. “But hey, mind if I use your bathroom?”

Inwardly cursing at the prolonging of this interruption, Jasper led him out to the hallway, pointed at the bathroom and then repaired again to the living room. Less than two minutes later, he heard the toilet flush. He went out to the hall. The man emerged from the bathroom and Jasper escorted him to the foyer.

“Hey,” the man said, pausing at the open front door. “Aren’t you that writer?”

Jasper debated with himself whether to admit it. “Yes,” he
said finally, and with some reluctance. The last thing he wanted to do right now was discuss
Lessons from My Daughter.

“Yeah, I love those Bannisters,” the man said. “I’ve read ‘em all.”

“Oh,” Jasper said, surprised. “Thank you.”

“Read some two, three times.”

“Well,” Jasper said, “I’m delighted.” He rarely met a Bannister fan face to face and had lately begun to despair that the success of his memoir would eclipse his work as a novelist. “I’ve actually just started a new one,” he offered.