“Okay, that was lame,” I said, but I started to laugh.
We were both laughing and laughing, and it was around that time that the room began to spin.
At some point Martin must have paid and bundled me up the Tombs’ steep stairs, out onto Thirty-Sixth Street, and then home and into my own bed. Brothers are good for things like that.
Eight
* * *
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2013
If you have ever been run down and flattened by a bus, then you have some idea how I felt the next morning. I doubt I would have crawled out of bed at all if the phone hadn’t rung.
“Did I wake you?” asked Will Zartman.
“No, no, I was just . . . Actually, yes. What time is it?”
“Coming up to eleven o’clock.”
“Christ. Right. I had—I guess I had a big night last night.”
“Oh. Out at a party?”
“Just a bar.” I groaned. “I think I drank half my body weight in rye.”
“Very trendy.”
“So I’m told. I’d rather never see the stuff again.”
“Hair of the dog,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Go fix yourself a Bloody Mary. You’ll feel better. Only hangover cure I’ve ever tried that works. Mind you, that’s just me talking. As your doctor, I suggest you make a pot of coffee and go back to bed. And of course never, ever, consume more than four units of alcohol in a single session again.”
“Right.”
“So who were you out with?” he asked casually. “Some girlfriends?”
Was I imagining it, or was something more than purely medical solicitousness in his voice?
“My brother.”
“Oh. Fun.” He must also have sensed he’d crossed a line, because he cleared his throat and adopted a more clinical tone. “Anyway, sorry to have disturbed you on a Sunday morning. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I got your results from the lab this morning. Nothing we need to be majorly alarmed about at this point, but your blood lead level is quite high.”
“How high?”
“Twenty-nine. That’s micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. For adults, anything over twenty-five is considered elevated. That’s when people start showing symptoms. Headache, irritability, delayed reaction time, that type thing.”
“Great,” I said miserably. “I needed something else to worry about.”
“Of course, it could be completely unrelated. Where do you live?”
“Georgetown.”
“Ah. Old house?”
“Eighteen fifty-nine.” Georgetown is a historic district; almost all the houses are a hundred years old or more.
“Well, there you go. You could have lead paint on the walls. Or lead pipes. Do you drink DC tap water?”
“Every day.”
“Ghastly stuff. Swimming with critters you don’t even want to imagine. And of course, for years it was contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. But listen, put this out of your mind for now. We’ll cross that bridge when we have to. It’s just one more factor in the mix.”
“In what mix?”
“In the mix as we make a decision. On whether to schedule surgery to try to get that bullet out.”
? ? ?
A GOOGLE SEARCH turned up little.
I had finally dragged myself out of bed and brewed a pot of tea. Then I settled myself with my laptop on the living-room sofa and tried to ferret out any information I could find about Sadie Rawson and Boone Smith.
It was strange. These days even the dullest person would generate a dozen search hits, if only from friends tagging him in photos. But my birth parents had died fifteen years before the Internet became widespread. You couldn’t google them.
The main newspaper in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution, must have reported on the murders. Crime was worse back then in big American cities, but surely a double homicide and the near-fatal wounding of a child would have drawn media attention. But the Journal-Constitution’s online archives were only digitized back to 1990. Everything older was presumably on microfiche, gathering dust somewhere.
The only hit I got was for a class of 1974 “In Memoriam List,” on the website for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It had been updated this past spring, in advance of a fortieth-reunion gathering planned for next year. The list was titled “In memory of those classmates who have passed away since graduation” and included dozens of names. Both Boone and Sadie Rawson were on it. There was no other information, not even the date of their deaths.
That was it. No wedding announcement, no work-related press releases, no photographs.
I pulled out the birth certificate that my mother, Frannie, had fetched from the upstairs files for me. It stated that I had been delivered at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. The home address it gave for Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith was Eulalia Road, in the northeast of the city.
I plugged that into Google Maps and selected the street-view option. A minute later I was staring at their old house. Eulalia Road appeared to be a short, quiet, residential street. My first home had been in the middle of the block, a one-story brick house with a separate, detached garage farther up the driveway. The grass lawn in front had a big tree, which blocked my view of the front door itself. But you could see that the house was well kept, the brick and shutters freshly painted.
I had no way of knowing if this was the house in which my birth mother and father died. They were murdered three years after they had brought me home from the hospital. They might have moved. Still, I couldn’t stop staring. The zoom function was frustratingly blurry; the picture wasn’t sharp enough to let me see in the windows. Yes, I knew the interior would have been redecorated. The owners might have changed many times since 1979. No trace of me or of my first family would remain in that pretty, little house.
But all day long I kept wandering back to my laptop, hitting refresh on the image, and imagining a small girl, turning somersaults on that lawn.