Did David imagine the chastisement he heard in Connor’s words? He wasn’t sure. He suddenly felt flushed, mildly nauseated, the heat of the afternoon, the smell of meat sizzling on the grill, the stale taste of beer in his mouth, all making him feel a little out of sorts. “Well, there you go,” he said. “She’d never give him up. Why would she?”
Connor shrugged and went back to tending to the grill. After a few moments, David wandered indoors. He was upset at himself for doing exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do two years ago. Then he’d sworn that he’d live in the moment and enjoy every bit of his life with Delores and Anton without letting the knowledge of its finiteness cloud his joy. He still had five months left with Anton. That would have to do.
After lunch, he went out in the heat to watch Anton do a series of backflips into the pool. Well, she can’t take that away from him, he thought. For the rest of his life, he’ll know how to dive. And watching him knife through the blue water, Or that. He’ll know how to swim, forever. And a few hours later, when Anton told a joke whose sophistication David knew would’ve eluded him just a few years earlier, he thought, He’ll always have this great sense of humor. Even though she won’t understand it. He felt a sneering contempt for the woman, and a kind of triumph, for his would be the invisible hand that had shaped her son.
It wasn’t until they had been home for a few hours and he was pouring himself a drink in his library that David recognized that his resolve to accept the situation with Zenlike equanimity was insincere. Biology is destiny? Bullshit. To believe this would be to condemn Anton to the Dark Ages. The true crime, the true bigotry, was to condemn this bright, effervescent boy to the darkness of his mother’s home. David remembered how the boy had stayed alone in the apartment with the power cut off, and it suddenly seemed like an apt metaphor for the opaqueness of his former life. There had been nothing valuable or graceful about that life. A broken woman had been raising a broken child. How long before he, too, would’ve fallen prey to the vice of her addiction? How long before he would’ve picked up a pipe or a needle? How long before she would’ve traded her son, with his luminous beauty, to a drug pusher in exchange for a hit?
The brandy tumbler shook in David’s hand, and he set it down with a bang on the walnut side table that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Absently, he stroked its dark polish. He could trace his family back at least six generations. Not everyone could, he understood that. But Anton didn’t even know the name of his own father. The boy’s grandmother had been unwilling to take him in. And he was supposed to believe in the sanctity of the biological family unit? The social workers, the family courts, the whole system was wrong, their assumptions faulty.
He sat up in the plush armchair, his body jolted by a sudden thought: Perhaps, just perhaps, he had another birthday gift to give Anton. And it would be the best one yet.
CHAPTER TEN
David sat alone in the conference room with the lights turned low. Smithie was out in the reception area, waiting for the van to pull up. David had arrived twenty minutes ago and Smithie had let him into the nondescript single-story building, which housed one of his satellite offices. He had escorted David to the conference room, with its one long table, and then gone again to the foyer to await the van.
Now, as he sat at the head of the empty table, his elbows on the armrest of his chair, his fingertips joining to form a triangle, an image flashed before his eyes—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. That’s who he felt like, restless, agitated, packed with an explosive energy. God, that was a good movie. When James was in high school, he and David had watched the original and the two sequels over the course of a weekend, a male rite of passage. He had been so thrilled that James had loved the movies as much as he did.
His mind began to wander. Who would his son have turned out to be? What would he be doing if he were still alive? He yanked it back. He needed to focus his full attention on the task ahead. He heaved his briefcase up on the table. This well-worn leather briefcase, a gift from his father on his thirtieth birthday, had held so many things over the years—legal briefs, files, his checkbook. But never had it held something that had the power to change the course of all their lives.
SHE LOOKED DIFFERENT than he had anticipated. Seeing her diminutive form in the chair, looking into the big round eyes that held no hostility, just fear, he felt a pang of remorse. For over two years he had demonized this woman in his head. In his imagination he had bulked her up, made her loud, brash, vulgar, and trashy. He realized now what he’d been doing—he’d tried to make her an opponent worthy of his contempt and disgust. But the woman sitting across from him was tiny, even girlish. She had a birdlike face whose most salient feature was those big light-brown eyes. A pigtail hung from either side of that face. Her eyes were clear as water, with none of the jerky shiftiness that he associated with drug users. She was apparently clean, drug-free.
And yet for all of its mystery, the face looked deeply familiar. David stared at her, trying to make sense of this, and the realization jolted him. Of course. She looked like Anton. Or rather, the other way around. But whereas Anton had a beauty that dazzled, the woman did not arrest your attention. What she had was—David groped here for a way to categorize—a kind of country charm. Yes, that was it. Despite her hard living, Juanita looked like the southern country girl she once was. There was nothing brutal or hard about this face. In fact, he found himself liking her.
Maybe this was a sign that he ought not to go ahead with what he had come here to do. Maybe another way was possible—David closed his eyes for a brief second as he laid out a different scenario: Perhaps he and Delores could help this woman when she got out less than three months from now. If they could get her a job, if they made sure she attended a recovery program, if they paid for Anton’s education at a private school, they could ensure that the boy had a good future. This woman was not a hardened criminal or a lost cause—he had enough judicial experience to trust his instincts about this. He could help her, which was the same as helping Anton.
He opened his eyes to see the woman watching him closely, and something about the intensity of her gaze, the fact that she had caught him in a moment of weakness, annoyed him. How soon before the woman had an unsavory boyfriend? How soon before she quit a job and went missing? He reminded himself what the recidivism rates were for crack cocaine addicts. The path to hell was paved with good intentions. He would not risk Anton’s future for a moment of sentimentality.
He pulled himself up to his full height and looked at her gravely. “Do you know why you’re here? Do you know who I am?”