She shook her head impatiently. “No. I told you. He told me I could keep it. I wanted to keep all the pictures he showed me of you. One of them was you on a sailboat, I remember. I had to choose between that one or this, quick. Before they took me back to the facility.”
He listened dumbly as she kept talking, telling him about the mysterious ride to the deserted office building and the tall, distinguished-looking man she met there. The stories David had told her about her baby boy, how well he was doing in school, how happy he was with his new life. And then the proof, the pictures of her own Anton, a little older now, the baby fat burned away, the clothes stylish and tailored to fit him, not the hand-me-downs she used to get at the Goodwill store. Her Anton, already a stranger, on ski slopes and on a sailboat and playing a sport whose name she didn’t know. What mother worth her salt would deny her only child such a life? She waited for him to answer, but he stared mutely at her, not wanting to believe her, believing her. “Why would he?” he said at last, his voice hoarse. “Why would he come to you? And how could he have gotten you out of prison?” Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. And so he closed his eyes and sat back in the rocker, savoring that last minute of an intact world, his last brush with innocence, before he asked the next question. “The judge who sentenced you . . . who locked you away, do you remember his name?” As he asked, he was ashamed of the fact that he had never bothered to find out for himself. He had truly acted as if he had been hatched into the Coleman family as pristine as a chick from an eggshell, with no past and no curiosity about that past.
Juanita gave the barest of smiles. “I sure do. Judge Bob Campbell. I know that name sure as I do the devil’s own. He gave me three times the sentence we plea-bargained for. My court-appointed lawyer said I got railroaded.” She was quiet for a moment and then she laughed. “I like Georgia,” she said. “Down here, you know exactly where you stand. White man is king here, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But up north, they talk sweet to your face. And then cut your throat when you ain’t looking.”
He wished she would shut up so he could think. Find the flaw in the yarn she was spinning. But she kept on talking, and now she was pulling out something else, a piece of paper, no, a check, and pushing it at him. He took hold of it reluctantly, holding it between his thumb and index finger. He stared at the familiar address—their old Arborville address—and then at Delores Coleman’s signature. He saw the date, saw that it said “Cash” on the payee line, and saw that it was made out for the sum of five thousand dollars.
“He sent me this,” she was saying. “After I was released. The man who delivered it said it was for me to start a new life. Your mam—his wife—sent a real nice note with it, thanking me for giving you up. She promised to provide a good life for you. And she hoped that I stay clean and have a great life. That’s what she said—‘I hope you have a great life.’”
He stood up. “Excuse me,” he said. “The bathroom?”
He bent over the toilet and retched a few times, though since he had not eaten anything but a few peanuts and a bite of the sandwich, there was nothing much to bring up. He stood up and splashed cold water on his face and then leaned against the door, trying to steady his breathing, wrestling with the weakness in his limbs, the queasiness in his gut. He forced himself to remember that day when David had taken him for ice cream and told him gravely that his birth mom wanted to surrender custody to David and Delores. “Try to understand, son,” David had said. “It’s not her fault. She’s just really sick and can’t care for you the way she knows we can.” Anton remembered again what he had felt in that moment, that orphaned, cut-off feeling, knowing that he had permanently lost not just his mom but his old apartment, his neighborhood, his old pals, his entire way of life. That he had been traded like a baseball card. And that he now belonged to this tall, handsome man who looked at him with such hope and longing that it terrified him, even though he admired him and wanted more and more to be like him. Anton had skipped school a week later and taken two buses to go back to his old apartment, hoping to find his mam and convince her that she was making a mistake, only to return home to the Colemans that evening, exhausted and defeated. As time went by, David and Delores had become his real family, and his real mother had become a phantom, a cautionary tale, an embarrassment.
He sank to his knees, the green bathroom tile cool against his body. He was everybody’s son, but he belonged to no one. The three parents in his life had each betrayed him in his or her own way, and he had no idea how to weigh one betrayal against the other. Who had the better claim on him? Did he belong to any of these damaged people? He had no idea. Who would he be when he opened this cheap wooden door and walked back out into that small living room? He knew he had to come out of the bathroom at some point and face her, but he didn’t know how. His face flushed as he remembered how he had mocked her a short while ago, the contempt with which he had looked at her. And of course, his lawyer’s mind told him, there was always the possibility that he was misreading the situation, believing her too easily, not comprehending some fiction in what she was telling him. His father had been a judge, for God’s sake, at the time of her imprisonment. David would know better than to defraud an inmate, would think a million times before setting up a clandestine meeting in a deserted office building. Wasn’t he afraid that someone—a guard, a fellow inmate—would squeal? If Mam’s story was true, David had risked his legal license, his profession, his family name, for the sake of—for the sake of what? Him? A young, ignorant boy who, more often than not, was moody, sullen, withdrawn?
It was all too confusing, the dimly remembered past closing in on him like a hand at his throat. With an effort, he struggled to his feet, bracing himself with a hand on the sink. He turned on the faucet again, splashed more water across his face, and glanced at the distraught, wild-eyed stranger looking back at him in the mirror. Who was this man? How long had he been here? He looked at his watch and blinked. How the hell had it gotten to be three o’clock?
He walked back into the living room to find her sitting where she had been when he’d disappeared into the bathroom. “You okay?” she asked, but her voice was distant, with none of the maternal concern she had exhibited earlier. He nodded and sat down heavily on the rocker. “The check,” he began, as if resuming a conversation. “How come you didn’t cash it?”
She smiled a wan smile. “Couldn’t. Dangerous to give that much money to a junkie. I was only a couple years sober, remember? So I mailed it to my mom. For safekeeping. She said she would hold it for me until I moved back down here. Which I did, a few months later.” She made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “This is your nana’s house, you know. You lived here until you were one. But you’re too young to remember.”
“Is she dead?”