Happy Family Part 18

"Mission accomplished," she says, taking a drink.

"I worked with guys straight out of Compton; I can imagine it must have been pretty hard core in the projects in the eighties. And as a woman? Was p.i.s.sing off your parents worth it?"

"Okay, maybe that wasn't the only reason," Cheri says. "I did have some ideas about making a difference."

"So tell me about the guy out there with the same tat. You were in love with him?" She'd been married for ten years and yet when she thinks of being in love, she goes back to Eddie Norris.

Whether it was the rain or the hangover or being properly f.u.c.ked for the first time in ages, Cheri found herself telling him things that, in all the years of marriage to Michael, she had never revealed. She started with her first months on the job. Told him about the hara.s.sment; opening her locker to find b.l.o.o.d.y Tampax or, once, some rotting fish. Cops calling her Kike d.y.k.e and Bagel b.i.t.c.h. How she had the highest scores in her police academy cla.s.s but wasn't put in rotation; couldn't get in a car or foot patrol because females were girls first, cops second. Until Eddie Norris. "He came from a SEU narcotics division up on One Hundred and Twelfth Street; he made twenty collars a month. A hundred hours of overtime-he barely slept he worked so much. He was a solution looking for a problem; everyone wanted to be his friend. Most guys in that position were walking egos. But not him. He got along with everyone. And he wasn't afraid he'd look like less of a man because he was letting a rookie female actually do the job. A lot of cops wanted to be in Alphabet City then; dope deals took place on nearly every corner, out of cinder-block holes in the walls of abandoned buildings. The projects were an urban blight, drug dens built into broken-down tenements. It was a hotbed, you always felt like something was about to explode, and usually it did. I know, you think adrenaline rush, power trip..."

"I think you said you lived there. The good-cop part," Sonny says. Cheri thinks of Yure's grandson in the wheelchair. She and Eddie had found the g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger who did that and put him away.

"There was that. I wouldn't have gotten on that beat if it wasn't for Eddie. He was comfortable in his skin at a time when I wanted to jump out of mine. He didn't give a s.h.i.+t what people thought. People were always busting his b.a.l.l.s about his car-this p.i.s.s-yellow Mazda-but he didn't care. He loved it."

"And he loved you. Not that I'm equating you with a p.i.s.s-yellow Mazda."

"Yeah, we had something...a real connection."

"So what was it? I'm not going to go for the easy, cop-on-cop s.e.x. You said f.u.c.k you to your parents and joined the police force and here was a guy who I'm a.s.suming was the total opposite of anyone you'd grown up with..."

"No. Well, no and yes." She might have been running away, but she was also running toward something. "I guess you could say Eddie Norris caught me. He stopped me, allowed me to let down and just be myself. He accepted me." She looks around in search of what is just now sinking in as being the heart of what went so right and then so terribly wrong in their relations.h.i.+p. "I felt safe," she admits. Sonny gives her a knowing nod.

"So why did it end?"

"The truth?"

"No," he says, "I want a lie. Your choice, given there's no way I'm going to know the difference."

Should she tell about that night? What sent her running back to Eighty-first Street to barricade herself in her room in a tailspin of shock and heartbreak? She had never spoken about it to anyone. Eddie Norris banging on her apartment door. Insistent. The last time he'd done that, he'd taken her and f.u.c.ked her from behind over the bathtub. The clear plastic shower curtain pressing against her face, like Saran Wrap, like silk. That was a fantasy. They'd done some role-playing but part of their cop-on-cop s.e.x was they'd seen enough darkness to never let it go too far. She'd thought maybe he was going for a repeat.

"He was dressed all in black like he was going to a bridge-and-tunnel club. He said, 'Get dressed,' and I knew it was something serious. He followed me into the bathroom. I was wearing a white tank top, stretched out to the tips of my knees, brus.h.i.+ng my teeth. My mouth was full of toothpaste and I didn't even have time to spit," she says.

"It's always the little things that stick in your memory," Sonny says. The little things, the cards Eddie laid on the table: coiled wire, a yard of heavy chain link, a switchblade, twelve-inch hunting knife, a.s.sault rifle, nightstick, stun gun.

"He pulled them out of his boot, from underneath his coat. There were no questions asked or answered. We'd all heard that a cop was killed during a buy-and-bust; the perp shot him in the head. The cop was an old friend of Eddie's, guy named Tobin. We'd hung out with him and his girlfriend, a nurse, a few times. It was a different world back then, before Rodney King, before Louima and the plunger. Crack was new to the city and hit the projects like a Mack truck. We were in the middle of a war zone. The mentality was good guys versus bad guys. We were the good guys and were going to win. There was always collateral damage," she says and looks at Sonny. "Sounds like you've seen some of that."

"Indeed I have," he says.

"Someone's kid, an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if a cop was killed? One of us? That was personal. We handled that on our own. The sergeant let us off in s.h.i.+fts, fixed things so the people who needed to be out looking could do it quietly."

Sonny listened. He smoked three, maybe four cigarettes all the way down to the filter, each time waiting until she paused before he lit up the next one.

Eddie Norris invited her to cross the threshold that night, to become part of the pack, the tribe of men. The others were waiting for them in the street below her apartment.

"It was two or three a.m. The four of them had been at it for twenty-four hours without sleep; they were hopped up on caffeine, maybe a little blow off the back of a hand. Johnson was the youngest, not too far out of high school. He was s.h.i.+fting from foot to foot trying not to let on that he was nervous. McTieg and Rayner were veterans; they weren't expecting me and weren't happy about it, but they couldn't say anything because of Eddie. They all had a mantra: Someone's going to pay for this, that sc.u.mbag who did it is going to pay." Stalking Alphabet City like hungry wolves, going to crack houses, drug corners, wh.o.r.es and jacked-up cars and a boom box thumping. It was an indigo night, that quality of darkness that's more blue than black lit occasionally by the street lamps in the projects blinking on and off; broken gla.s.s, bullet holes in the windows. They'd done walkabouts like this a thousand times, moving from outside refuse to inside refuse. The reek of p.i.s.s in the hallways, vomit and spilled malt liquor, needles and vials crunching underfoot. "We went to a couple of places, looking for our usual informants, following a lead Eddie had. The shooter was a twenty-one-year-old Puerto Rican male, spider tattoo on his neck, wearing a red hoodie-we were going off a witness ID. Nothing was turning up." Frustration spread through their systems; they strode through the derelict tent city of Tompkins Square Park with tight mouths and loud fists. McTieg slammed his foot into a cardboard tent, causing it to collapse and sending c.o.c.kroaches that could use a leash skittling out. "What you doing, man," and then deep moans from underneath the debris while he kept kicking. "f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k you, motherf.u.c.ker."

"The tension ratcheted to a point where n.o.body said anything. Underneath the anger there was a deep sense of helplessness; if we couldn't get a cop killer, what was the point of the job? Any one of us could have been Tobin. We got a tip that Red Hood's girlfriend was in a crack den by the river. Crack spots weren't hard to find-people lined up outside of them like they were handing out welfare cheese. Anyway, she turned up in the first one. Rayner grabs her by the throat, saying, 'I'm going to choke the life out of you if you don't tell me where he is.' She didn't have to because he was stupid enough to show up there. Someone spotted him as he was pus.h.i.+ng his way through junkies. But he started running in the other direction as soon as he saw us.

"We chase after him. He ducks into the vacant lots by Tenth Street. It was this maze of junkyards with half-demolished buildings, rotting-out appliances-it looked like a bomb had gone off; streetlights had been shot or burned out. It was dark, lots of places to hide, so we split into pairs. I'm with Rayner, Eddie's with Johnson, McTieg's on his own. We've got our flashlights out and guns drawn when Eddie's voice comes over the walkie-talkie; they've sighted him and are close behind.

"When Rayner and I get there, Red Hood's climbing a chain-link fence. Eddie grabs his leg hard, pulls his shoe off. They get him down. He's saying he didn't do nothing, 'I don't know about shooting no cop, man.'" Was it then that McTieg smashed him in the face with his bully stick so hard he split him open like a Marlboro box, or had it taken a few minutes? She can't remember time, only images: the topography of hate on Rayner's face, his mouth as he shouted, "f.u.c.king spic, eat s.h.i.+t, you PR motherf.u.c.ker." Saying it for all the times people had called him n.i.g.g.e.r, paying it forward to the next minority in line.

"The perp was bleeding from his mouth and nose, but his eyes were blank. He was spitting blood but kept saying, 'You got it all wrong, it wasn't me.' They all say that. You can catch them red-handed and like children they say, 'It wasn't me.' Eddie Norris was taunting him. 'You feel like a big man, killing a cop,' he screamed, spit flying out of his mouth, 'you feel like a big man now?' McTieg put his gun to Red Hood's head and said no more bulls.h.i.+t. Eddie told me to cuff him, which I did, and then search him. He wasn't armed and just as I found a joint, a dipper-meaning it was laced with PCP-Red Hood surged to his feet with the kind of crazy adrenaline you get from PCP and charged like a linebacker right at McTieg. He was cuffed. I don't know where he thought he was going to go. He was like a bull. And that was it." They were on him; fists and chains, grunts and curses.

"It was primal, like animals in a pack smelling blood. They fed off one another's anger and righteousness. I felt the adrenaline, that rush of being on high alert and in fight mode. I was right there with them as they jostled and pushed to get at him, have their turn to kick the s.h.i.+t out of him. But then McTieg moved over and blocked me out. And in that moment I thought: What are we doing? The collective rage had everyone blind. They were in a circle. I was outside, watching, realizing just how f.u.c.ked up it was." Even now, she can smell the sweat of men in violent release, hear them wheezing and groaning in anger. She remembers McTieg putting his cigarette out on Red Hood's arm, saying, "That's for Tobin."

Cheri glances at the fire in the fireplace; it's burned down. The rain drums on the roof. Sonny hasn't looked away from her the whole time. His elbows are on the table; he leans toward her and asks what she knew was coming.

"So what did you do?"

"Nothing," she says heavily. "I did nothing." She can see Red Hood's fingers twitching. Then falling open, motionless.

"And he-" Sonny starts, but she cuts him off.

"Yes. He did."

Sonny is still staring at her. His expression is unreadable.

"Afterward, everyone was shaking from the high. Johnson was high-fiving, but Eddie Norris took charge. We had to tell the same story and everyone had to calm down. He laid the whole thing out. The perp was high on PCP and resisted arrest, attacked officers with deadly intent. As long as you could explain it on paper, you could pretty much do anything you wanted.

"I had to do the report because I had the lowest rank. And something was bothering me. Eddie was all, Just get this done, quick and easy. But I went back and checked Red Hood's mug shot. His tattoo was on the right side of his neck. The witnesses all said the shooter had a tattoo on the left side. The closer I looked, the more I could tell we'd got the wrong guy. Red Hood was a criminal and a sc.u.mbag, but he wasn't the guy who killed Tobin."

"And you told Eddie."

"I showed him. It was really clear. And he said, 'Forget you saw this. We got the shooter, end of story.' He took the file. I'm sure he destroyed it. And for him, that was the end of that. He went on like nothing had happened, started talking about where we'd go for a beer after work."

"He rationalized it and you didn't..."

"It was more than that. The thing is, I saw something in Eddie that night. I knew, deep down, that it was over then. I just didn't want to admit it." She hasn't been able to admit what she saw that night, she realizes, until right now. "He was exactly like the rest of them, but in a way, he was worse. They were in the fog of rage, like what happens in war-all you care about is getting the enemy and you forget the enemy is a living, breathing person. You don't know what someone is capable of in an extreme situation. We were trained to understand that. I couldn't know how I'd react until I was there. But I saw something in his eyes that night. After I left the circle, Eddie looked back at me. And for a split second, I saw a glint of recognition. Like he saw what I saw. I'd like to think he was going to stop it. But when he looked at me again, his eyes were empty. The man I knew wasn't in there. And then he turned around and hit Red Hood in the ribs with his nightstick." Her throat constricts for a moment; she looks down. Sonny waits for her to continue. "I'd grown up convincing myself that I could be one of the guys. If I just proved myself, worked hard enough. Being a cop, I thought I'd found my people, my tribe. But that night showed me that I could never be one of them. And it made me question if I even wanted to be. I wasn't built like that. I loved that job. But my ideas of justice-all of the right reasons I became a cop-were capsized. So I quit."

"Without saying anything? Didn't you give a reason why? Did you explain it to Eddie?"

"I just turned in my gun and badge and that was it. I wasn't one for explaining myself."

"He didn't come looking for you?"

"I went to a place I thought he'd never find me: my parents' apartment on the Upper East Side. Eddie Norris didn't know who my parents were; n.o.body at the NYPD did. I probably hoped he would find me and say he couldn't live without me. I guess I was still in love with him. I was also on a small speed binge and not thinking at all rationally."

It's dark outside. The rain picks up again, and the house rattles a bit from the wind. The last time she saw Eddie Norris was in a downpour.

"I saw him one last time. I met him at this coffee shop we used to go to, and he slid into the booth next to me, ordered coffee, and when the waiter was gone he said: 'You f.u.c.king disappear and don't say a word to me, it looks bad, very f.u.c.king bad.' He said people were worried. People who didn't know me like he knew me. 'Do I still know you?' he asked.

"I knew what he was intimating. I told him he wasted his favors finding me. If I was going to talk, why would I have quit? I wouldn't do that to him. Frankly, I didn't think about the repercussions of quitting. I just ran. But if Eddie Norris needed to hear the words, I'd give him the words. I told him I wouldn't say anything about that night or what I'd found out to anyone. And I kept my promise. Until now. But my word wasn't enough at that point. He needed to go back with insurance. He said, 'This is what you're going to do: you're going to write a statement that you quit because you have drug problems, you've been struggling with addiction.' He knew about my fondness for uppers. n.o.body else did, and I never used on the job. Not once.

"He also said that if I didn't make this bogus statement, they'd do it for me. Plant drugs in my old locker and discredit me so if I ever did come forward, I'd never be able to get a job as a police officer anywhere again. Needless to say, I didn't write it. I wasn't going to add a lie about myself to all the other ones." Cheri flashes on the other statement, the one she didn't sign for Richards. She shakes her head at the irony, the pattern in the disparate mesh of her life, where she is the common thread.

"That's quite a story." Sonny's voice is a shared exhale. When she looks up she sees the damaged priest, the wounded healer. The rain tip-tip-tips. She goes to stack the plates and Sonny reaches over and touches her fingers with his. "You know the intimacy-of-strangers code? Your secret's safe with me. Thank you."

"For what?" she asks.

"For being real. It may be easier with someone you don't know, but it's not easy." Was she too real? She named names. She hadn't even known how heavy this burden was until she dropped it.

"Talking to you is pretty easy," she says. "I wish everything could be that way."

"It can be."

She believes him. For that moment, for an hour, maybe for the rest of the night. They wake up and have morning s.e.x. He falls back asleep with his hand on her belly. She feels his breath come and go like the tide. They sleep like teenagers as the rain stops and the room lights up momentarily, then fades to gray. When they're up and in need of nicotine, they huddle beneath the deck awning, pa.s.sing a cigarette back and forth. He says, "It's f.u.c.king cold and wet out here."

"Californians are p.u.s.s.ies. Try Chicago in the winter."

"Actually, I'm going to try Seattle. Warmer but rainier."

It takes her a moment to ask: "What's in Seattle?"

"Guess I'll find that out," he says. "I'm moving there, which is why I've got all the boxes in my trunk. A friend of mine has a recording studio there, and a guesthouse. And we'll see. I'm leaving day after tomorrow." Cheri nods and looks out at the ocean. It's hard to tell the demarcation between water and air, it's tone-on-tone of gray, still, blending upward into near white. When she turns back, the acoustics have changed and they both know it. Sonny goes to take a shower.

"So..." Sonny says when they're at the door.

"Let's just leave it at this. If we're being honest, let's stay honest."

She hands him the cat carrier and does the obligatory embrace. "You take care," he says and kisses her forehead. She's quick to close the door behind him and listens as he starts up his truck. She feels very small and younger than she can remember; something is surging and she's taken by its tide. The outside world has come alive again in hyper-sound; the traffic on the PCH hurts her ears-it's so loud, it bleeds through the door. I'm bleeding, she thinks. That's what it feels like; f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k. The sobs come in soundless shudder steps. She sinks to the floor. There's no container that can hold the sadness anymore. It leaks out of her eyes, her nose, an onslaught.

Like drought-dry land after rainfall, she is unable to absorb, cannot understand why she tears up when she sees an elderly man at Ralphs struggling to get his wallet out of his pants, then forgetting why he's at the register. All music lyrics, happy or sad, remind her of Michael. Just the whiff from the fish joint at PCH brings up the Rockaways, the Eddie Norris traffic accident of her heart. A good cry is a pretty thing, and Cheri hasn't been able to cry for so long. Tear-streaked and luminous in low light, something she might be able to do in public instead of the red-eyed meltdowns she's been having. But if she is the sum of her secrets, then Sonny's releasing her to talk about Red Hood changed the equation. She'd already quit something she loved because of a man, and she'd been running from that cowardice for a long, long time. Her current career might be in shambles, but she doesn't have to rinse and repeat. She hears Michael's voice: No conflict, no suffering. There are pieces to pick up. She has no idea how she will a.s.semble them or what they will form. But one thing is for certain: she will do it differently.

Meanwhile the rain has stopped, and almost instantly, Malibu is back to being 78 degrees and sunny. She has a longing for sweater weather and an escape from joggers. She sits on the deck beneath an umbrella, sungla.s.ses, layers. A girl in cutoffs and a T-s.h.i.+rt runs toward her. She's pale, with short, dark hair. The girl jogs by and tilts her head, giving her a snaggletoothed smirk. She could be a younger, California version of herself. Go home, she seems to say. Go home and finish it.

Your Own Backyard.

Don't get me wrong, it's got great bones. We just have to get rid of all this...stuff," the real estate agent says to Cheri, pointing to the jumbled a.s.sortment of books, CDs, Michael's African masks, and other eclectic totems burdening the living room of her house. The agent hands her a thick folder of comps and a list of repairs that need to be made before they put the house on the market. It's long. "You might consider staging it. Really helps get the price up. Leave it to me, I can fluff like n.o.body else." Cheri says thanks, shows her to the door, and promptly trashes the folder. She's grown to love this old house. The angles were quirky, the floors sloped; it was freezing in the winter and hot in the summer. Even new plumbing sighed and gurgled. She and Michael would complain, but over time, the house's eccentricities had become part of them. She thinks about Sonny, his truck full of the few belongings he had left, driving to whatever awaits him. Michael saying that the ultimate freedom lies in letting go. Although it never came up, she thinks he would have wanted her to sell the house.

She had started packing her office. Taya was right; she could write without being university-sanctioned. Yet she feels her chest clutch when she thinks about not having the t.i.tle Professor before her name, that stamp of approval. She'd always been part of a big inst.i.tution, and had equated work not only with a paycheck, but with the feeling of shared mission and purpose. She may never fully understand Sol's reasons for leaving her his patents, but money, she realizes, is only what you project onto it. As a teenager, she had refused Sol's money as a way to show her disdain for him. She'd never stopped running for long enough or admitted to any uncertainty. Money gave her freedom to say, "I don't know yet." But whatever she does next isn't going to be done out of fear. The rest, she tells herself, will follow. She called her publisher and said that she was ready to start working on a book, was going to investigate some new subjects and get back to them with ideas. It might not be in these files and boxes, but she'll find her subject. Or, and this was a novel concept, she'll allow the subject to find her.

Standing in her bedroom, she's amazed at what two self-professed nonmaterialistic people could ama.s.s. The tenor of this purge is markedly different from the one Cici helped her with; discarding her own worn-down soles and torn sheets elicits far less emotion. She feels a surprising rush of tenderness thinking of her mother folding Michael's clothes. What would people find out about her if they went through her things after she died? Not much would shock. If anyone else had to get her house ready for sale, it would simply be a testament to her bad housekeeping.

Cheri pulls a box of photographs from the top shelf of her closet. Cheri was always a terrible subject. As a child, she'd claimed that she was part American Indian and fearful of having her spirit stolen to try to get out of school-picture day with the faux backgrounds and gap-toothed smiles.

She spills the photographs on her bed. It's a dystopian trip to random periods of her life: the pallid Girl Scout standing at the top of her driveway in Montclair; flat-chested prep.u.b.escent sandwiched between her well-endowed cousins in Varese; a Polaroid of her spiked blue hair and long-gone partying friends; grad-school-era shots of her looking tired, mouth tight, don't get too close. She can also see her under-chin developing; "Beware the under-chin," Michael would say, "you'll turn into your mother." Shots of Michael. Younger Michael, handsome and robust, his eyes crinkling as he smiled. Black-and-white snaps from their trip to city hall where they were married. In the picture, she sits on a faded wooden bench waiting to go in to say their vows. Expectant. Nervous. Michael had said, "Look at me like you do when I know you're seeing me. When we're alone." Her eyes broadcast the message I love you. More than I can say. Michael had a copy of this photograph in a frame in his office, but it's been years since she's really looked at it or let herself remember the day it was taken. In other photographs, their poses reveal their decline. Leaning slightly away from him at Taya's wedding; arms folded tightly against her chest at a film festival-it is clear how she'd been so afraid of human connection, of trust. And yet she was able to lay it all down with a stranger over a rainy weekend. If she'd said those same things to Michael, maybe it would have changed what he'd written in his journal.

There are photos of her parents. Scallop-edged photos from another era, Cici posed with Sol like they're in an ad for scotch. Cici with her barely legal curves holding up a c.o.c.ktail; Sol with his rakish hair, cigarette in hand. There's a snap of Sol showing off his legs in tennis shorts, posing like a cancan dancer. Those young people are her parents? Or just two young people in love. How strange. This photograph was taken the night before Sol died. She remembers Cici showing it to her, moaning, "How, how?" The waiter must have taken their picture; it's a little out of focus. After years of struggle with his weight and phlebitis, Sol looks pretty fit for someone in his late sixties. He always carried himself with the bearing of a man who knows the measure of his wealth, but she detects he might have come to know something more. They do look happy.

But amid all the detritus of her life with Michael, Cheri knows there's one object in the house she's been avoiding. It sits, day after day, in the bottom left drawer of her desk, beneath a stack of condolence cards and correspondence she hasn't opened since returning from California. The envelope Michael had handed to her, saying, "Wait for the right time to open it." One pill makes you smaller; the other makes you tall; she's Alice minus the hallucinogens. But there was never a "right time" for anything. You just made a decision, and lived with the fallout. Cheri opens the drawer, shuffles through the piles of paper until she sees the manila envelope. She tears it open and pulls out a file with a handwritten note on Michael's stationery clipped to the front.

Cheri, Forgive me for doing this without your knowledge. If I'd asked, I think you and I both know you wouldn't have agreed. I wanted to leave you with something meaningful, and I'm glad I could accomplish it. The closet is open, kiddo. Now make the skeleton dance.

Love, M.

She knows what the file contains before she even opens it and sees the business card for Ellen Jameson, PI. Michael had been on Cheri for years to find her birth parents, and she'd staunchly refused. The investigator's card is attached to the report and records with a paper clip. But Ellen Jameson has been thorough. She's with an agency that specializes in finding the biological parents of adopted children, and Cheri sees the record of a live birth and her birth certificate, doc.u.ments from the New Jersey child welfare services, paperwork from the family who fostered her. Jameson reports her findings in a matter-of-fact style Cheri is familiar with from her years in the NYPD. It's hard to compute that the child in this file is her. The report states that her biological mother left the Trenton Family Clinic shortly after giving birth. Cheri had witnessed a crack wh.o.r.e leave her baby in a trash can so she could go get high, had found a homeless kid hiding in a rusted discarded refrigerator in the rubble near East First Street. Child abusers weren't only male; she'd seen firsthand how neglect killed more kids in the projects than crime did.

Miriam. That's not a crack-wh.o.r.e name. That's it-a first name and nothing more. The PI was unable to find any leads on Cheri's birth mother. But Ellen Jameson did find her birth father. The state apparently had his name misspelled. There's a DNA test that shows a 99.99 percent probability that she is one Gerald Dempsey's biological child. Back in 1962, the state had briefly looked for a Jerry Dempsey. Misspelled names are the first thing a detective checks for, but leave it to government workers to let that slide. She looks again at the doc.u.ments. His background check shows nothing, not even an outstanding parking ticket. The photocopy of his driver's license is bad; it's hard to make out his features, as blotches of black ink further blur the typical DMV mug shot. He's looking a little sideways, like he wasn't quite ready for the photo. It's hard to believe this is real. It took the PI a year to locate this man and verify her findings, so Michael had started this long before his diagnosis.

Gerald Dempsey, age sixty-nine, living in Queens, New York. She's got his date of birth, background check, and former addresses-all in Queens; the guy stayed put. Gerry or Jerry. Something as simple as one letter on hospital records meant the difference between her being raised by Gerald Dempsey or Sol. All the time she was growing up in Montclair and then living in the city, her birth father was just an hour away. Practically in her own backyard. She could have pa.s.sed him on the street or in the subway. Maybe she did. It's too much to take in.

While Michael was looking for answers about his impending death all across America, wending his way to letting go, he'd also been searching to give Cheri directions to find her beginnings. And he did all this without her knowledge. Did he get her DNA from a toothbrush, a comb? She'd be p.i.s.sed off if she weren't so moved. Had this search for Cheri's full story been part of his longing for an intimacy she couldn't provide? She was indeed a stubborn f.u.c.k. If she wants to know more, she's going to have to find out herself. And that's exactly the bait Michael knew would lure her. She stares at the end of the report, where it says that Gerald "Gerry" Dempsey had consented to a DNA test. The last line of the report lists his phone number and address and states he's "open to contact."

She carries his phone number around with her for days. She thinks about what she would say to him, how she would introduce herself, but everything she says in her head comes off as absurd. She'd always been determined not to look backward; investigating her birth parents was a return to the original wound. As a child, after she found out she was adopted, she'd idealized her birth parents as the opposite of Sol and Cici: open, accepting, unpretentious. But in the end, even her fantasies led back to the harsh truth-they had given her up. The fault was in her. And them. n.o.body abandons their child because of "good" circ.u.mstances, and even before she'd seen the worst in humanity, it wasn't hard to paint that picture. Michael might have been prescient or maybe he'd given her more credit than she gave herself, but she can't help laughing. Make the skeleton dance. Face your past. He would have appreciated the irony of her doing this now, as she's divesting herself of what was their life in Chicago to plunge forward into the total unknown.

Cheri stands at the top of the stairs to Michael's office holding the box with his ashes. It's a cold Chicago winter day; the sky is gray-streaked and if she squints she can just see a peek of sun far in the distance. She looks out on the frost-covered yard, thinking of all the times she saw Michael standing in the middle of it, of the day she'd watched him do yoga and glimpsed how we are all infinitely interconnected. She'd been looking for the perfect place, a place that said, This is what Michael would have wanted. He had loved living and creating his art here. It was where he chose to die. But it isn't about the place. Michael knew that. This, she realizes, was about her good-bye. "Okay," she says, holding up the box and tipping the plastic bag. What comes out is dense and dark and blows back in her direction, making little plinking sounds against the railing. c.r.a.p. She waits for the breeze to die down and tries again, scattering one handful at a time. She watches Michael's ashes cascade through her fingers, making a white-gray cloud that slowly dissolves into mist.

Truth Is.

Gerry Dempsey's neighborhood in Howard Beach is lower middle cla.s.s but tidy, with rows of multifamily red-brick houses decorated with blinking Christmas lights. Cheri watches two kids in braids hand-clap while singing "Miss Mary Mack" on the little patch of asphalt they call a backyard. "You're sure you're going to be okay getting here?" he asked at the end of their stilted conversation yesterday, after she'd worked up the nerve to dial his number. "I can come to you if you want." He told her to call when she reached his address and he would come down to meet her. She doesn't have to call because he's outside waiting, waving a gloved hand at her just in case she doesn't know who he is. She would have known. He looks older than his driver's license picture and taller. He's got her under-chin and a boxer's stance. She extends her hand as she approaches, but he goes in for the hug. He steps back and looks at her, holding her shoulders. Then, as if he worries he's overstepped the bounds, he drops his arms. He awkwardly points to the front door of his building. "Cold out here," he says, drawing out his vowels in a cla.s.sic New York accent. "Let's go upstairs, huh?

"Gerry," he says opening the door to his apartment, "call me Gerry," although Cheri hasn't called him anything yet. She hasn't even thought about what to call him-certainly not Dad. Now that she's inside, it strikes her just how weird it is to be forty-one years old and meeting the man who sp.a.w.ned her. "You're very pretty, like your mother that way." She doesn't even begin to know what to do with that comment; she can tell he's nervous. She tries her nicest smile.

"Where are my manners-you want a beer? Coffee?" She says she'll have a beer; now she's nervous. He goes to fetch it. He has flowers in a little green vase on his kitchen table, the kind you get as a mixed bunch in the supermarket. As he hands her a cold bottle of Bud, she notices he's wearing a St. Christopher's medal. His eyes were probably once clear blue, but they've grown milky with age. He must have been blond because his eyebrows are barely visible now. His hair is white and thinning. The cleft on his chin is scarred over from-what, a bar fight? And he's got the ruddy cheeks of a drinker. They go to the living room and sit.

Is she seeing this right? He takes a pull on his beer and purses his lips around the bottle then keeps them pursed for a moment afterward, just like she does. They both take another drink. He does it again. He makes a comment about how people say Bud is p.i.s.s water but he likes it. She cracks wise about no limes or imports for her, which makes Gerald laugh, just a bit too loudly. Cheri tries to take in as much of the place, and him, as she can. He leans forward and starts: "I told everything to that lady you hired. Some surprise that call was, let me tell you! All I know is this: I'd have wanted to know about you back then. But what could I do, I didn't know?" Cheri nods-nothing he could have done. She's taken aback by his admission, and not entirely sure if she should believe him. He clears his throat and continues. "I thought you'd want to know about your mother." Cheri thinks about Cici, the only mother she's known.

"Let's call her Miriam," Cheri says. "Do you know her last name?"

"Never did. I met her in Trenton. Nice girl. Looked a little on the young side, though she told me she was twenty. Pretty, with dark hair and weird eyes like yours-no offense. Had a feeling she was far from home and not going back."

"Do you know anything about her family? Sisters, brother? Where she came from?"

"All she said was that her mother was foreign. Can't for the life of me remember where. Somewhere exotic, but not too exotic. Could have been from one of those crazy countries like Russia or Iraq, for all I know. Miriam didn't stick around long. Not that I would have kicked her out of bed for eating crackers. I told her she could stay with me as long as she liked. I'd help her get a job."

"And that was it? She just left and you didn't know where?"

"She took off without a word. No note even. I went out to get cigarettes and, boom, she was gone. Never heard from her again. Certainly not about being knocked up."

"I guess the clinic couldn't find you. Did the PI tell you that it was because of a spelling mistake with your name?"

"Yeah, can you believe? Avoid hospitals at all costs. Guy I know went in for his appendix, got his gallbladder taken out." She spies some Hustlers poking out from under a stack of old TV Guides on the coffee table between them. Gerry phumphers and laughs before quickly shuffling them farther under the stack. She asks a few more questions about Miriam: Did she mention going to high school, talk about a job she had or wanted to have? He doesn't know or can't remember. "Oh, but she liked chocolate, and those wafers, what do you call them?" He snaps his fingers. "Neccos." Cheri notices a few dusty photographs in frames on the rickety bookshelf next to a few paperback crime books. "Mind if I take a look?" she asks as she gets to her feet.

"Sure, kid. Look at anything you want." Her eye is drawn to a picture of cops in dress uniforms, lined up. A younger Gerry is receiving a medal.

"Is this you?" she asks, pulse quickening.