“It is missing from before,” she said.
She must have mistaken me for someone else because she was looking at me intently, squinting her eyes a little as if she were trying to place a particular detail of my face. I looked away, and without meaning to I started counting to myself, one-one-thousand two. It was a habit I’d gotten into during my trouble with the school board, when for most of my last semester teaching I stopped meeting the eyes of the girls in my classes and looked instead at the parts of their hair, counting to myself, one-one-thousand two, then shifting my gaze, careful that no one would think a glance had lingered too long. The girl had a high, even hairline, plain brown at the roots. One-one-thousand two, I thought, and directed my eyes down at our two suitcases, one-one-thousand two, then at a rose in a cheap plastic cone that the girl was carrying. Along with the rose I noticed that she had a shoebox under her arm.
“Let me get the door for you,” I said. When she looked at me blankly I nodded to the shoe repair shop. “Are you going in?” I asked.
“No,” the girl said. Seeing that I was looking at the shoebox she was carrying, she said, “Ah, no, not this. It isn’t shoes.”
“Oh,” I said, and to myself, one-one-thousand two.
It was only then it occurred to me that there was something half-familiar about her too. I looked again, trying to place the curve of her chin or the tilt of her head.
“Do you know what street is for the station Montparnasse?” the girl asked.
“No idea,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know Paris.”
One-one-thousand two, I thought, and when I looked at the girl again I realized what it was I recognized. It wasn’t that I’d seen her face before—at least not exactly. But I’d just been looking at the cover of Bristol’s book, where the photograph of Inga Beart captures the uncommon lightness of her eyes. The girl with the suitcase didn’t look like my mother except that her eyes were also very pale, and they gave her face the same distant expression—she was looking at me, but her eyes might have been tracking dust motes, or they might have been focused on something very far away.
The girl said something again in her own language. She was still looking at me; I could see the minuscule adjustments of her pupils, spreading like drops of ink in still water. I remembered too late to shift my attention to the girl’s forehead. Then, not knowing what else to do, I looked back in at the window of the shop.
There’s something they say about my mother: For all she saw in people, she never once looked at me. At the moment of my birth, according to the biographers, Inga Beart turned her head away. One of the biographies quotes a nurse who claimed she was present at my delivery, saying that she remembered it out of the thousands because even the girls who got their babies in the professional way would try to get a peek before the sisters carried them off. But Inga Beart shut her eyes, as the nurse remembered it, and wouldn’t open them again until I had been weighed and footprinted and bundled off into the care of the state, and they told her it was time to sign the papers.
It took some time for the hospital staff to sort out where my relatives were, and a while more before Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt could arrange to come and get me. It was no easy thing for them, taking on another baby with Pearl still in diapers and Eddie barely six months old, and I spent my first weeks of life in an orphanage.
Of course, when my own son was born I was determined that for him everything would be different. He lay in his hospital bassinet and gripped my finger with fierce newborn strength, too new to the world to do anything by half measures, and I told him that so long as I had anything to do with it, he was never going to feel alone. I was lucky enough not to know back then the thousand ways a promise like that would be impossible to keep, and I stayed all through the night at the window of the nursery. I wanted to be sure my son had his father there, a face to see through the glass when he opened his eyes.
But if my mother ever worried that I was lonely or afraid, there’s no record of it. In fact, in all her novels and stories, her volumes of correspondence and the hours of interviews she gave over the years, my mother never once mentioned me. All the scholars have noted this, and even the more restrained of her biographers can’t help but put it rather painfully. As one of them said, “For Beart, who refused to believe in anybody until she had them written down, her own child simply did not exist.”
Perhaps. I am willing to admit that it is possible that Inga Beart and I never came face to face—that on the day she came back to the ranch to see us I stayed hidden under my Aunt Cat’s kitchen table. But she did come back. However much she might have tried, my mother did not leave me behind entirely. It’s the one thing I’ve been sure of all these years. Because when I close my eyes I see a double stitch just below her anklebone, then three stitches more and the straps begin, crossing left over right on the right foot and right over left on the other. They buckle on the outside and cinch at the fourth hole, but there is a crease just below the third, a little light wearing to show that she must have worn her red shoes a little looser for a while. It’s a detail I never thought about when I was young. But later when I heard a pregnant woman tell her friend her feet were swollen, I started wondering if those little creases in the leather hadn’t been my addition to my mother’s life, my mark on her.
I was surprised to find that the girl with the suitcase was still standing there on the sidewalk. I had the sense that she was waiting for me to say something, though I couldn’t remember exactly what we’d been talking about.
Most of the other stores on the street weren’t open yet, but at the back of the shoe repair shop I could see the shopkeeper already at work, threading an old hiking boot with new laces. Beside him a pair of red shoes had been polished and tagged for pick-up. They had an old-fashioned look to them, but the color was too bright and the straps were wrong.
The girl was still studying me, as if she wasn’t entirely satisfied that we were strangers to each other. She was about the same age as my son. I kept looking in the window of the shop, trying to think of something to say.
On a ledge above the sewing machine was a collection of figurines, clever little things all done out of pieces of shoes. The owner of the shop had clearly made them himself as a way to show his skill with a bit of leather and thread. Crusaders carried lances tipped with cobblers’ tacks, and a child’s insole had been fashioned into a tiny boat, with shoelaces for rigging and a buffing cloth for a sail.
I turned to the girl. “Aren’t these something?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Here,” I pointed to them. “These figurines in the window. See how they have the little suits of armor? My son would get a kick out of that.”
“Kick?” she said.