We looked at one another.
“It’s the explanation that makes the most sense,” I said.
The idea sat there, on the table in the middle of us, sitting on top of the messy plates, crumpled napkins, and pizza crusts.
I had no feeling about the idea of my father cheating on my mother, I discovered. No betrayal or outrage, not even sadness. No feeling at all.
“They hated each other.” Dodie’s voice was almost a whisper. She dropped her napkin to the table. “I don’t know why they even got married. It wasn’t because they were in love.”
For the first time, I thought about my parents as people younger than me. I tried to picture my father proposing, my mother saying yes. Had it been hopeful at one time? Had either of them thought it would work?
Both of them were good-looking, so maybe there had been an attraction and nothing else. Mom’s family had money. Dad’s family, from what I could tell, were California dreamers with no money at all. Somehow, Dad had twigged on to Mom’s healthy bank account and used his looks to do the rest. I didn’t even know how they met, and now I would never know.
I was conceived so close to the wedding that they’d probably fudged the dates. Dad had impregnated his meal ticket, thinking he’d won the lottery. That sounded like Dad. That he’d gotten careless years into a miserable marriage was not only possible, it was almost probable.
“Mom never said anything about it,” I said. “And she loved Ben.”
But the theory still fit. Mom never talked aboutanythingunpleasant. And Ben was an innocent baby, easy to love. Maybe by then Mom hadn’t cared who Dad slept with. Maybe she had someone else, too. Maybe she’d hated all of it, but the baby—that particular baby—had made it better. Not loving Ben wasn’t possible.
“We’re never going to know,” Dodie said. “They left us with this mess, with all of these questions, and we can’t ask themanything.And even if we could, they wouldn’t answer. They were so good at that, weren’t they?” She lifted her chin. For a second, I wondered if she was going to spiral, but her gaze was hard and focused instead of wild. “What gets me is that none of it matters.” She lifted her hands. “You live your whole life, and you feel all these things, you experience all these things. You learn things. And if you don’t tell anyone about it, it all just dies when you die. What you know, your life, your experience, it dies when you do. It’s all just—what? Electric impulses in your brain. Your memory of your whole life from beginning to end is just vibrating brain cells, and when the brain cells stop vibrating, then it never happened. Don’t you ever think about that? I do.”
In the back of Petey’s, a phone rang. The teenager behind the counter picked it up reluctantly and took an order, reaching for a pen and writing with it, his expression annoyed.
“It’s like the photos of Pompeii,” Dodie continued. “Skeletons in ash. When I see those pictures, I think of how those people knew things, felt things, thought things. They had memories and important information. Every secret thing they knew disappeared forever when the volcano erupted, and those are just the people we knowabout. Most people vanish so completely they don’t even leave bones.”
“If you’re asking whether I wonder what the point of life is,” Vail said, “I think about it all the time.”
“So do I,” I said. “But not everything disappears forever. Not for everyone. Not every time.”
We exchanged a look. The things I saw—had always seen—were remnants of lives, for better or worse. The last traces of Dodie’s electric brain impulses, maybe. Or maybe they were something else.
“You should have called one of us,” Dodie said. “When they locked you up in that hospital. You should have called Vail or me. We would have come to get you out.”
I swallowed hard, remembering sitting in that room, thinking stupidly that it was the key to getting my daughter back. I hadn’t called my siblings. Neither of them had known about the hospital until long after it was over and I was already out. “They didn’t give me very many phone privileges,” I said. “And they wouldn’t have released me. You wouldn’t have had the right paperwork.”
Vail scowled. “Paperwork? You think I couldn’t havemadethe right paperwork and made it look real?”
“Easy peasy,” Dodie said.
I choked out a laugh that was supposed to be disbelieving, but when I thought about it, I didn’t disbelieve it at all. My siblings would think nothing of forging whatever paperwork they needed, by any means necessary. It would be a top-shelf forgery, too. Sometimes it was useful to have next to no morals.
But I hadn’t called them. For a while, when I realized what was really happening, I’d believed I belonged there, in the hospital. I’d believed I shouldn’t be free. It had even been tempting to be relieved at having no choices anymore, at not having to pretend to be normal. It had taken time for anger to replace the shame and despair.
“I’ll call you next time it happens, then,” I said.
“See that you do,” Dodie chided me. “But let’s get back to this problem. Maybe Dad was Ben’s father. Who was his mother?”
“Someone local?” Vail asked.
“Maybe,” I said, “but Dad traveled a lot.”Businesswas always the explanation we were given.He’s away on business.Dad had no business we could discern aside from marrying Mom’s money and making all of us miserable, but children don’t question their parents. When you’re a child, no one wants to know what you’re wondering about. You shut your mouth and wonder in silence, because you don’t know anything yet and no one wants to hear it. I felt a quick, hot burst of angry pride that my own daughter was a mouthy bitch.
“So she could be anyone, from anywhere,” Vail said, deadpan. “That narrows it down.”
“Gus Pine is looking into it,” I said. “If someone’s baby was stolen, they would have reported it to the police. It’s a start.”
“If she was local, there would have been gossip,” Dodie added. “A single woman in the sixties, having a baby alone. Unless she was married.” She sighed and rubbed her fingertips on her forehead. “Ugh, this ishard.I detest thinking. I talked to the neighbors, but they haven’t lived there long and didn’t know a thing.”
“What neighbors?” I asked.
