Raj closed his eyes and leaned back into the booth. He was wearing black jeans and a gray coat and he didn’t seem to notice the snow.
After last night’s visit to her father’s workshop Lydia thought she might feel stronger in her core—more in command of her feelings and her history—but now she felt as she always did, only worse. Nibbled by dread and in dire need of a toothbrush. There was no way around the fact that her father had tampered with the crime scene at the O’Tooles’ and may have obstructed the investigation, but she couldn’t fathom the possibility of his facing charges or a jury or even reporters. She couldn’t risk that, no matter how wrong he’d been. And she especially couldn’t send him out of her life right at the moment he’d reentered it. She really didn’t know what to do.
Raj stood and began rocking on the balls of his feet. His boots ended in a smeary reflection of city lights.
“I don’t know how I’d do all of this alone,” he said with an unexpected formality.
“Don’t worry about it, Raj. Have a seat.”
He remained standing, squinting through the snowy drizzle at the dark frame of his apartment window above the bar. Below it a row of empty kegs were stacked against the building like bullet casings.
“I just keep thinking,” he said, “about how cool it is that my brother and your father managed to find each other in that prison.”
“I know what you mean.”
“And in a similar way, you know, just tracing things out, how if Joey was alive I wouldn’t be here with you. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, but that’s kind of a road to nowhere, Raj.”
“I mean it, Lydia. More than anything I wish Joey was sitting here with us, enjoying this crappy snow—of course I do. But it was his death, his body bag in the newspaper, that caused me to find you again, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m pointing this out because I want to make sure I don’t squander Joey’s value on this planet, you know? I feel like he led me into something rare here, whether he meant to or not, and I can’t let that go to waste just because I’m too embarrassed to share my feelings.”
“Raj,” she said, “it’s a lot to process, and there’s a lot we don’t—”
“Okay,” he said, interrupting her. “I’m just going to say it: you and I, Lydia, we need to be together. We need to see what’s right in front of us. This is no accident, Lydia. Our whole lives have been adding up to this: me and you, here and now. Just listen to it.”
Lydia felt something stir inside her, and she did listen: to the traffic splashing in the distance, to a train clacking along its tracks, to drips plinking on the fire escape and in the gutters. For a second, she considered giving herself over to Raj’s words, but doing so felt overly complicated and, in light of David’s constancy, unnecessarily cruel.
“I can’t think about this right now, Raj.”
He turned away from her and stared at the row of empty brick storefronts across the street.
“Because of David?” he said. “At least tell me it’s because of David and not because I’m chubby or gross or something.”
“Raj, you’re a total catch, trust me.”
“The loneliest catch in the world,” he said, but he sounded only half-serious.
A pickup truck splashed past and its driver tossed a cigarette out the window.
“We’ve always been close, Raj, even when we weren’t together. And we’ll keep being close. So let’s just lead our lives and see what happens, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, and though she could tell he was disappointed, she also knew she was right: this was not the time.
Lydia’s hands were wet and a pool of slush had gathered beneath her feet.
“You can wait in my apartment if you want,” he said.
“I’m happy right here.”
When the courier finally pulled up in front of the Terminal, driving a little eighties Metro or Yugo, Raj ran to the curb to meet him. The courier stepped out of his little car and into the snow casually, sporting an anemone of dreads and wearing a ripped striped sweater.
“You’re kind of late,” Raj said.
“Traffic, man. Speer Boulevard. I mean, what’s the point of even driving, you know? Move me to the mountains, give me a horse.”
The man’s car was double-parked, its hazards flashing. Lydia felt a swallow of anxiety as Raj took the package of files from the man and bobbed it dreamily in his hands. It was bound in some kind of waterproof sleeve and sealed with a string-and-button clasp. Lydia imagined Joey burning a similar package in his trash can on the day he’d hanged himself.
“I need a signature for that,” the guy said, handing him a clipboard and hunching over it to block some snowfall.
Raj snapped out of it. “Sorry.”
“I’m used to it, man. I deliver results for medical tests, divorce papers, all kinds of heavy shit. I bear news, man.” He took the clipboard from Raj and shined a little flashlight on his name. “May your news be fruitful, Raj Patel. May your news bring peace. Later.”
Lydia and Raj watched the courier’s taillights disappear, then both walked toward the side entrance in the alley. Raj stopped beneath a light fixture bolted to the bricks and began ripping into the package. A Post-it note with a scrawled message from Irene was on the outside, but he didn’t even bother to read it before opening the file.
“I can’t see anything,” he said, lifting the pages close to his face and blinking. “It’s like everything is underwater.”
“Here,” Lydia said, and took the file from him, and leaned in close enough to read.
“What’s it say? Were we right?”
She nodded, mouth dry. She could hear little persistent ticks and realized Raj was clicking his fingernails together.
“Raj. Are you seeing this?”
“What?”
“This,” she said, holding a fresh photocopy that said Certificate of Adoption across the top, inside a border of scrolls, above the seal of the state of Colorado. The first thing she noticed was the way all the information was arranged in a grid of small rectangles, little windows, each holding different data, and she couldn’t help but consider the resemblance they bore to Joey’s messages. This was a copy of the certificate that was filed when baby Joey was adopted into the Molina family, soon after his birth, so a lot of the information recorded the details of Mr. and Mrs. Molina, as Lydia had expected, while the rest of the information focused on Joey’s birth and birth parents. Those boxes also offered the details she’d expected—Child’s Name, Child’s Gender, Place of Birth, Date of Birth, Time of Birth, Birth Mother’s Name, Birth Mother’s Maiden Name—until she came upon the information about Joey’s birth father.
“See that?” Lydia said, and her wet finger tapped the box that recorded the birth father’s name.
“I don’t understand,” Raj said. He pulled the certificate from her hands and held it closer to the light.
Birth Father’s Name: Bartholomew Edward O’Toole.
Lydia felt her shoulders tighten. She could hear the snap of drips hitting paper.
“Does that say Mr. O’Toole?” Raj said. “Under ‘Birth Father’?”
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”