“You couldn’t wait?”
“You still sleep like a hedgehog, like you’re trying to disappear into your own belly. I didn’t want to wake you.”
She crawled from the sleeping bag and pulled her satchel protectively into her lap. Her first thought was to catalog its contents to see what else her father had unearthed, and she wondered about the sunflower notebook that held Joey’s messages, and whether he’d—
“I didn’t look at anything else,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She set her satchel down. Her father squinted at the image, pale faced.
“This is definitely the photo. God, I remember helping you pick out your birthday outfit and decorating the cake and everything. Ten years old. We had no idea what was coming.”
His eyes crinkled and he coughed into his chapped fist. Lydia tried to swallow but couldn’t.
“Is Joey really dead?” he said.
“He is.”
“And Joey really had this on him when he died?”
“He did.”
“He was one of the few, you know? In all my time walking those corridors, Joey was one of the few.” And then he went on to explain to her the way he’d met the juvenile Joey in that isolated cell on that isolated block of the isolated level three, and how Joey must have cribbed the photograph from his desk on that quiet Christmas Eve.
“He was so promising,” her father continued, “and then to finally finish his prison sentence and instead of getting his life together he goes after you? I just don’t get it. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Lydia resisted her desire to point at Joey’s maybe-brother Raj admiring her in the photo. She wasn’t ready to get into all of that, not with her father.
“The only explanation I can come up with,” he said, “is that after all those nights of me and him talking, maybe Joey felt like he knew you. And he knew that you’d treat him right, which I’m sure you did.”
“You talked a lot about me?”
“You could say that,” he said, clearly understating the point. “I even told him that once he got out he could look me up, that I might be able to give him shelter until he got on his feet, but he said he was going straight back to Denver. He seemed happy to be getting out, I have to say, more hopeful than I’d ever seen him, so I felt okay about him heading into the world all alone.” He tapped the photo against the back of his knuckles. “Can I keep this?”
“All yours.”
“I’ll take good care of it,” he said. Then he stood and dug around for a roll of tape on his bench and taped the photo to the edge of a shelf. “What the hell happened to Billy Pilgrim?” he said contemplatively, under his voice, like a person who’d had a lot of practice talking to himself. “What the hell happened to Billy Pilgrim?”
For the first time since she’d arrived in Rio Vista, Lydia felt herself smile. He almost sounded like her dad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For nearly an hour Lydia had been driving away from Rio Vista, grateful for the isolation of Plath’s car. The highway near Fairplay rolled between mountains, over a snowy basin peppered with pines. She found herself so enervated by the visit to her father that more than once the car drifted over the center line until she snapped alert. She wanted to focus on the connection she and her father had finally made, yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Dottie O’Toole and the ring he’d tugged from her finger. The act was impulsive and had taken only seconds, yet it had rippled through the decades like a shock wave.
Lydia was scheduled to work at noon, so when she caught a glimpse of a gas station she pulled over to call Bright Ideas and let them know she was running late. As soon as she hung up she realized she should probably also call David to let him know she was safe.
No one answered at home, and when David’s extension at work went straight to voice mail she set the receiver down without leaving him a message. Of course she loved him and knew that for years he’d been doing all he possibly could to create a home with her, yet she also felt that this—being here, in this desolate mountain gas station, after spending the night on the floor of her father’s shop—felt separate from David, different from the life they shared. Instead of calling back she found herself retrieving Raj’s number from her little notebook and dialing it.
“So how was it, seeing your dad?” Raj asked as soon as he answered. “You two are okay?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“He had a thing for Mrs. O’Toole, apparently.”
“Every dad had a thing for Mrs. O’Toole.”
“Where was I during all of this?”
“Being ten,” Raj said matter-of-factly.
Lydia looked around the gas station. For the first time she noticed the woman working at the register, wearing a down parka, chewing on a meat stick, reading a romance novel on a stool.
“Did you learn anything else?” he said.
“He didn’t have much to say about your parents, Raj. No gossip about a love child. Sorry.”
“Worth a shot, anyway.”
“Yeah.” She could hear his breathing begin to slow, his hope deflating. Her attention drifted back to the woman at the register. She was perched in front of a wall of colorful cigarette packs and for a second Lydia imagined the packs were books, wordless and deadly, and she imagined herself standing before them, working a rural roadside job, as if this would be the trade-off were she to disappear into the mountains and leave all of this messy personal history behind. She couldn’t help but think about the years of nights her father had spent roaming the halls of the prison—empty nights, it seemed, except perhaps for his time with Joey—and the price he’d paid for escape.
“What about you, Raj?” she said. “Anything happen on your end?”
“Quite a lot, actually,” he said. “More than quite a lot.”
“Here I am blabbing. So? What’s the word?”
Raj explained that he’d just come in from bouncing around a bunch of different state agencies downtown. “I met Irene at the courthouse this morning. She gave me a Danish, and twenty minutes later we were standing in a meeting room with a judge and a stenographer. She talked to the judge briefly, going over the files she’d sent him, and then he asked me one question: ‘Why do you wish to unseal Joseph Molina’s adoption file?’ And I replied, ‘I’m his brother.’ Three words. I thought I was going to have to elaborate, but then the judge said he’d been provided with a death certificate for the adoptee, Joseph Molina, and the Vital Records office had validated our familial relationship, and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t unseal the records for a living sibling. That was it.”
“Thank you, Irene,” Lydia said. “Are you sure about this, Raj?”
“I’m definitely sure,” he said, as if it were a proclamation. “Part of me still thinks that maybe it’s all a mistake, but it’s getting harder to believe that, you know? What were my parents thinking? I mean, what the hell? I barely slept last night I was so pissed. This is not the kind of thing you hide from your child.”