Within minutes of borrowing Plath’s Volvo, Lydia had driven through downtown and parked on Broadway. As she walked toward the capitol, she could see traces of some earlier snowstorm in small curdled mounds along walkways and under trees, but much of it had melted, leaving soggy grass and slushy gutters and enormous puddles underfoot. The capitol’s golden dome glimmered against the sky.
Raj, as promised, was standing on its western steps, beneath the trio of porticos. His hands were buried in his jeans pockets and he was wearing a light suede jacket that smelled like a goat when she hugged him. The light was dusky with dark clouds blocking the sunset, but she could still see prunelike swells under his eyes and she wondered if he’d been crying.
“You okay?” she said.
“Just great. Thanks for coming.”
They sat down on the engraved step marked One Mile Above Sea Level. Raj touched the words with the tips of his fingers. “Remember coming here for a field trip when we were kids?”
“I guess so,” Lydia said. “What’s wrong, Raj? What did you call me up here for?”
Raj took a deep breath and spoke much more slowly than usual. “I got a call this morning from your counselor friend. From the records office.”
“Irene? Why was she calling you?”
“You used me as a reference, remember, in your application for Joey’s adoption certificates. Foster stuff. Whatever it was.”
“But you already knew that.”
“Yeah. I’m your Primary Reference, right?” he said, without any flirtation or humor this time. “And she told me your application had been rejected.”
“She left me a message saying as much this morning,” Lydia said. “But she shouldn’t be involving you in it. I mean, why would I need a reference if my application was rejected?”
“That’s not it,” Raj said. “She asked me to come by her office this afternoon. She told me that your application had been rejected but that it had nothing to do with you using me as a reference. That my record was clear. That I shouldn’t worry about applying for jobs or anything like that. That my record was pristine. Her word.”
“She asked you to come into the office to tell you that? That makes no sense.”
“None at all,” Raj said. “She was trying to cover her ass in case— In case I got upset.”
“Upset about what?”
Raj looked out over the traffic-clogged edges of downtown.
“Obviously I was confused,” he said, “until Irene told me that I could always try to apply for Joey’s adoption documents. That just because you’d been rejected didn’t mean that I would be. But only if I wanted to, she was careful to point out. It’s like she was dancing around something, but I was intrigued, and I thought it might help you out. So I went in.”
“You actually went to her office?”
“I did,” Raj said, “and she closed the door and asked me, point-blank, if I wanted to apply for Joey’s adoption paperwork. But I had no interest in filling out an application, paying all the fees—I just wanted to know what she was up to. It’s really not hard, she told me, then she handed me the application to show me how easy it was to fill out, and she flipped it to the second page and there’s this list of checkboxes where I would state my ‘relationship to the adoptee.’ Only one of the boxes already had a checkmark next to it. And Irene was touching it with the end of her pen, tapping it, and looking at the door to make sure no one was coming, and looking at me, and tapping the page. Tap-tap-tap. She’d already checked the box for me. This is what I’m getting at—”
“What box did she check?”
“She was trying to tell me, Lydia, without actually telling me.”
“What box, Raj?”
“Sibling,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Raj hunched forward on the stone steps. Lydia rubbed his back.
“We don’t know what any of this means, okay, Raj? This is a mistake. Irene was probably just trying to help me out, to work the system somehow.”
She could feel Raj breathing deeply, pulling himself together. “Was Joey my brother?” he said. “Does that make any sense at all, Lydia?”
“I don’t think so, Raj.”
For a while they sat in silence. She could hear a couple of panhandlers fighting near the obelisk in the park and the clack of skateboards shredding the lip of the Civic Center fountain.
“Irene called him Joseph Patel,” Raj said, pressing his temples with his fingers. “She said he got the Molina surname when his foster parents adopted him.”
“Have you talked to anyone else about this, Raj?”
“What,” he said, “like my parents?”
“It’s got to be a mistake,” she said. “Don’t talk to them just yet. Or anyone, for that matter. Let me think.”
“Irene said she recognized my name while she was reviewing your request.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Raj Patel. Isn’t that like the most common name in the Indian world? You’re like the John Smith of whatever region that is.”
“Gujarat. You know, the place my mom went to visit for nine months when I was a kid. Okay, not quite nine, but you get the idea.”
“Oh shit,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a mistake, Raj. Has to be.”
“Lydia,” he said, smiling with incredulity, “Irene encouraged me to take some time to think about whether I really wanted this, but when I said I wanted to know, she approved the application while I was sitting there. She even helped me to write up an affidavit in her office, then brought me down the hall to have it notarized.”
“For what?”
“To request a sealed adoption record,” he said. “Under ‘Reason for Request’ she told me to write adoptee deceased and sibling is requesting. Something like that. That was all. Then she checked some registry or calendar and said she could get me before a judge tomorrow. She does this stuff for a living, Lydia.”
“Not like this she doesn’t,” she said. “She’d be out of a job.”
Raj snickered. “The judge will still have to approve it before I’m able to see any original records, but Irene said she would help me if I was sure this was what I wanted.”
“And are you, Raj?”
“Yeah. Totally. I mean, if—yeah. I’d want to know. This is just so fucking weird.”
“I just can’t believe she called you like that. Why would she—?”
“She thinks we’re together,” Raj said quickly. “That you and I are—together.”
Lydia looked toward Raj, but Raj was looking away, toward the shiny plastic fortress of the art museum. On the walkway below the steps, a few sparrows fought over the corner of a hot dog bun.
“What was he like?” Raj said quietly.
“Joey?” she said. She thought for a minute. “Brilliant. Cool. Cute.”
“But messed up,” Raj said, “obviously.”
“You could say that.”
She could hear Raj sniff next to her and then exhale a long gust, the kind intended to clear cobwebs from the soul, to pry out its nails. Lydia didn’t say anything more.
“You realize he brought us together,” he said. “Not intentionally, but still, I saw your photo in the newspaper because he hanged himself at the bookstore.”