Happy Family (33 page)

“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; fuck, fuck, fuck. 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 assemble 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, sunglasses, layers. A girl in cutoffs and a T-shirt 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.

D
on'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 assortment 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 nobody 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 title Professor before her name, that stamp of approval. She'd always been part of a big institution, 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 amass. 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 prepubescent 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 cocktail; 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.

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, documents 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 whore 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-whore 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 documents. 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 passed 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 pissed 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 fuck. 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. Nobody abandons their child because of “good” circumstances, 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. Crap. 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.