“I’m fine. I was splashing water on my face. I needed to know I wasn’t dreaming.”
I made Mr. Vargas a pot of coffee and went to check on Frank. He was out cold. The cavity was open with the lights still on. I was surprised to see I’d left it open. I guess I wasn’t the careful person I’d always imagined myself to be. I was someone who forgot her phone on the kitchen counter on the way to pick up a patient from the psych ward. One who left Roman candles where kids could find them and trapdoors open for anybody to tumble into. Maybe I wasn’t the one people should be calling Jeopardy, but I might be imperfect enough for somebody to love me someday.
Somebody aside from Frank, or Mr. Vargas, or my mother, I mean.
Before I shut the hatch I knelt for one last look into the abyss.
Frank did give me carte blanche.
I hopped down into what I’d started to think of as the Dream Bunker. I wandered its miniature aisle, examining the bounty of little hats and shoes that Frank must have outgrown ages ago. The clothes I’d purged from his closet, stuffed under my bed and forgotten, were now folded neatly. The plastic machete was there, Frank’s skateboard, the paper bag top hat he had made at the playground. The pink plaid ice pack and the burgundy Hermès scarf that had once belonged to Banning. The three chocolate hearts he’d bought the day his mother disappeared. A beagle pull toy with a big smile and sad eyes and a tail made out of a spring finished with a green bead that looked like it had been made about the time that guy in The Graduate put his arm around Dustin Hoffman’s shoulder and murmured to him, “Plastics.”
The beagle’s flat plastic ears were screwed to its head so they could swing when it moved and its plastic wheels were uneven on purpose so the thing would wobble from side to side, swinging those ears as it dogged a toddler’s footsteps. I picked it up and turned it over. On its belly someone had written “Mimi” in marker in a girly hand definitely not Mimi’s. Banning’s maybe? It was hard to imagine Mimi stuffing the beagle into her suitcase along with Julian’s typewriter when she ran away to New York and literary fame and misfortune. But here it was.
There were envelopes of drugstore-developed photos spilling over with snapshots and negatives. A frame made of Popsicle sticks with a photo of a much younger Frank inside it, just as dressed up then as now and as unsmiling as a Civil War soldier setting out for the front. The big, heavy photo album Frank had shown me way back when. I sat down on the stool and flipped through its pages again. The photographs looked very different now that I knew more about the cast of players. Especially the ones of Julian. With his long hair cut off in a golden halo I couldn’t help noticing that he looked an awful lot like a young Xander, the Mr. Fix-it I hadn’t met when I saw those pictures the first time around. No wonder Mimi had stood at the glass staring at the crew building her wall. When Xander rapped on the glass she looked like she’d just seen a ghost because she kind of had.
I put the album back where I’d found it alongside Ziplocs of newspaper articles, big bundles of typing paper tied up with string, bulging manila envelopes and file folders neatly lined up in a rack. I ran a fingertip along Mimi’s file-folder labels and froze on one that read DONORS.
AS HARD AS it is to imagine picking a person with whom you’d like to spend an evening based on some stats and personal essays, now I know it has to be lots harder to choose a man to sire the child who will be with you forever.
There were four packets, three with résumés of guys who seemed virtually identical. Those three were over six feet tall and noted in staff interviews to be “devastatingly handsome,” “a real James Bond type,” and “easygoing, with charm and movie-star good looks.” All claimed high IQs and were either college students or graduates or graduate students. Who’d written essays that said things like “I love animals and sports and building cool stuff with my hands.” “I would like to travel to some European countries or other foreign places because that is where you can find lots of history and culture and other things like that.” “With each new day I derive joy from the knowledge that everything I do makes the world a better place for myself.”
Then there was Guy Four. What got to me was his answer to the essay question, “Why do you want to be a sperm donor?”
First, let me say that I don’t need the money. I am an aerospace engineer—what wags might call a “rocket scientist—”