“It can’t be her. But if it is her, I don’t have any actual reason to talk to her.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Madly. But it’s nothing to do with me.”
“You should probably tell the aunts. Then they can follow up if they want to.”
“True. I’ll do that right away. I’ll send them the picture.”
I thought that over as I got Nelia settled for her nap. When I returned, Sam was asleep on a recliner, so I waited alone, pacing the pool deck with my big water bottle, for my parents to return and tell me the rest of what transpired over lunch. Sam was spent, crushed by his own work and parenthood but also trying to help my dad with a particularly gruesome stage of remodeling the vintage Spanish-style place we’d purchased while trying to ignore Patrick’s muttering about romance versus common sense. My father had a point. We were swayed by the charm of the house before we realized that previous residents had included many generations of rodents and marsupials, not to mention the odd alligator strolling the neighborhood. When I found out about that, I wanted to leave. (How had I not realized this? Well, I was a Midwesterner! And who actually expects... alligators?) Sam pointed out that we would have to go to Missouri to entirely avoid them, so we installed a very tall vinyl picket fence with secure locks on the inside and the outside of the gate.
During that indefinite interval, we lived with my parents, who had four bedrooms and were gallant. Their place wasn’t far from our base in Vero Beach and boasted perks including but not limited to that pristine and heated pool. I was sure that we would have a pool as well, by the time we started collecting social security. At my folks’ house, I could be both mother and child. I got up at five, literally threw my toddler at my mother, sometimes worked from their house, sometimes drove an hour to work in the kind of traffic that made me wonder if all my fellow commuters had bathrooms in their cars, worked until six, by then so hungry that I actually relished whatever half-baked comestible Miranda provided, then fell into bed with Nelia tucked against my spine. We didn’t even try to put her in a crib; she was too spoiled and we were too worn-out.
By the time my parents returned from their brunch, I had done too much thinking to keep up the pretense of nonchalance. I was ready to go out right then to search for Ruth, but Miranda and Patrick were adamant. Patrick, particularly, insisted that Ruth wasn’t going anywhere, and although I didn’t really believe that—for what if Ruth had seen my parents at the same moment they saw her?—I was too bulkily burdened to dispute them. Mom told me they’d asked the server if she knew the woman in the booth across and one back.
“She said, of course, that was Mrs. Copeland,” Miranda told me. “I asked how she knew her and the server, who was just a kid, said she was a substitute teacher at the middle school and all the kids liked her. She came in a few times a week, always had the Cobb salad, always took half of it home in a poly clamshell for dinner. Then she said, ‘She brings her little girl sometimes.’ I said, ‘Ruth’s daughter is grown-up,’ and, before you ask, I didn’t say she’s incarcerated. The server seemed confused. She said, ‘You must be thinking of someone different. Mrs. Copeland, the science teacher?’ I said, ‘Right, I must be thinking of someone else.’”
“It can’t be her then.”
“It is her. You saw her yourself. Maybe she babysits for somebody. Maybe she had a baby.”
“Ruth’s sister said she wouldn’t have any more children because she has a heart condition. That was one of the reasons the marriage broke up. But maybe she did.”
I thought I would never have the patience to wait. I really did want to be able to deliver Ruth back to her sad sisters, now mourning not only her but Felicity as well. But a few days later, I learned anew how arresting it could be to give birth to nearly full-term twins, after twenty-three hours of labor, during which I couldn’t feel pain because of an epidural, but I could feel a sensation like my midsection being dug up with a backhoe. I learned how awkward it could be to fall asleep nursing one baby with a book propped open in the crook of my unoccupied elbow and a two-year-old sprawled across my lap. As I sat up during the night, I remembered watching soap operas with my great-aunt Bridget, and how puzzled I was that these shows were just like real life: All people did was bicker, drink coffee, and go to restaurants. I wished they were still on.
I had not imagined that I would be a mother of three before my thirtieth birthday; if I had imagined it at all, I thought I would be freezing my eggs on the threshold of forty. Nelia was a Damiano in every feature, but Danny and Joey were both fair-haired but otherwise so unalike in appearance that they would grow up to tell people that they were just good friends. Unlike Nelia, the babies were good and learned how to sleep at night. The only aspect of being a new mother again that I didn’t like was not enough presents. I still felt that Nelia’s unplanned conception had robbed me of my life’s allotment of crystal wineglasses and candlesticks. Danny and Joey’s double-header debut cheated me out of a baby shower. They would be wearing pink and yellow hand-me-downs until they could walk.
When the boys were eight weeks old, and Sam commenced his part of the parental leave, I finally called Fay and Claire. I did this against Sam’s wishes. He was fearful that I might somehow step into some weird trap, although he could not imagine what that might be.
When I texted them the photo, they were elated and they were frightened. They arrived two days later, on the first flight they could book. Though they knew that their parents might never forgive them, they decided to hold off on telling two already brokenhearted very old people that their lost daughter might still be alive. For who knew what might happen?
My mother and Claire were happily reunited. Claire had brought along Yuri, one of her sons, who was recovering from a small but tricky dental surgery, and he got a kick out of seeing how he and his brother must have looked when they were baby twins. This big kid who could dive into pools was a source of fascination for Nelia, who followed him around like a puppy, sweetly offering him her Duplo blocks and her Beyoncé Barbie.
On the second day, my parents and Sam kept all the children so I could take Claire and Fay to Space Alley. It was massive and lustrous and noisy. There must have been twenty servers. We ate our Fusion Falafel and Sputnik Sweet Potato Fries. I could tell how impatient they were. Fay finally asked, “Which waitress was it?”
“I don’t know,” I told them. “I wasn’t here.”
“How are we going to find her then?”
All the young women looked the same, ponytailed milk-pale blondes, in the sunniest place in America.
“They’re like carhops,” Fay said. “Remember that fifties place Dad took us to when we were kids, where you ate in your car and the carhops were girls on roller skates? How did they carry big trays of burgers and shakes on roller skates?”
Claire said, “That was right around here.”
Finally, I asked for the manager. When the woman approached, I said in a rush, “We’re looking for someone who comes in here a lot, an old friend, she’s a teacher at the middle school, Ruth Wild?I mean, Ruth Copeland?”Some old friend, I thought. “We haven’t seen her since she moved here and we wanted to surprise her.”
“I know exactly who you mean,” the manager told us. “But I don’t know where she lives. Maybe you should ask at the middle school.”
Claire and Fay stared at me, and I thought,Yep, just good investigative reporting!
“Is that far?” I asked. There had to be more than one middle school.
“About four blocks that way,” the manager said.
On the way, we detoured to drive past the house where all of them grew up.
Fay said, “That was our room at the front on the second floor. It was a huge room, that went across the whole front of the house, with all these windows. Three beds, three closets, and our own bathroom. I have enough space to give my boys their own rooms, but I want them to share because it’s better, you know? It makes you grow up closer to the only person who’ll know you all your life.”
