Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (12 page)

There was a long moment before Lori spoke. She sighed, started to say something, then stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was falsely bright. “Sure, I’d love to get together with you, Claire. How about ten a.m. tomorrow at Custer Park?”

Weighed down by guilt, Claire slowly hung up the phone. If she hadn’t gotten confused at the last moment, she would have been able to give Lori the answer she needed now. Claire remembered the way Vi had looked at her with narrowed eyes as she cleaned up the mess. She was sure the nurse had suspected something. More than likely, even if Claire did use her pick kit to break in to the Bradford Clinic, she would find that the ledger books had vanished. Had she ruined her only chance to find Lori’s baby?

She sighed, then joined Charlie in looking at the map the older woman had spread over the dining room table. They began to search the grid for streets the size of threads, the names printed in tiny agate type. As they did, Claire ran through the stretching exercises Dr. Gregory had recommended. Her ankle was no longer swollen, and the bruises had faded to ugly shades of yellow and green, but it was still painful to put her full weight on it.

Charlie spotted the first address in Southwest Portland, close to the downtown area, and only a few miles from where they lived. The second was in Irvington, a district of Portland filled with stately homes built a hundred years before by timber barons and department store tycoons. The third was harder to find. The street wasn’t listed on Charlie’s five-year-old map. In the Yellow Pages, they found the zipcode and used that to roughly figure out where the house must be. It was located in an area that on Charlie’s map was just an expanse of white space bisected by the Tualatin river. And the fourth...

“Do you know them?” Charlie pointed at the name and raised an eyebrow. “Kevin and Cindy Sanchez?”

“Why would I know them?”
Charlie tapped a manicured fingernail two lines lower, on the words “Minor, Oregon.” In her obsession with numbers, Claire hadn’t paid much attention to the names or addresses. When Claire was five, Jean had moved them from Portland to Minor, a rural town twenty miles to the west. Minor had been founded by a miner who had been both unable to spell or to find the gold he was convinced must lie just under the ground. When Claire had lived there, Minor had been a small town surrounded by fields. Now it had become a bedroom community for Portlanders still seeking a bit of acreage.

“Sanchez doesn’t sound familiar. But I haven’t lived in Minor for nearly twenty years. Fir Terrace doesn’t ring a bell either. I’ll bet it’s one of those new subdivisions where they name the streets after all the natural beauty that used to be there before they put up the houses. Pine Drive, Cedar Lane, Fir Terrace, and there aren’t any trees left standing at all.” Claire thought of something. “They might be a good possibility, though, especially if the clinic does try to match kids to adoptive parents. Someone with the last name of Sanchez would probably be a good fit for someone whose biological father is named Estrada.”

1DRING

Chapter Twelve

After Charlie left for skating practice the next morning, Claire made one phone call and didn’t answer another. The phone call was to Dr. Gregory, to ask him if he’d heard from Ginny. He hadn’t, but he held Claire to her promise, wanting to know all the details of Claire’s visit to the clinic as well as Ginny’s possible disappearance. He persuaded her to meet him at Village Coffee after she met with Lori.

Almost as soon as Claire had set the phone down, it rang again. The Caller I.D. box showed that the call was from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dante. Claire’s hand hovered over the phone for a long moment, before she let it drop to her side. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up.

“Claire - it’s me, Dante. What’s up? Hanging the new Impressionists show has been keeping me so busy that I’m practically living here, but I finally realized last night that I haven’t talked to you for over a week - and that’s way too long. Give me a call and let me know what’s happening with you. And tell me how things are with Lori and Zach. I miss you, and,” he lowered his voice, “I love you. So please give me a call as soon as you get in. If you get my voice mail, just press zero-pound to opt out and ask the secretary to track me down.”

He sounded sincere. But Claire could not shake the memory of sara’s voice in her ear, sweetly explaining that Dante was in the shower. Claire and Dante were separated by more than just three-thousand miles. They were different in every way, from their family backgrounds to their educations. Was it so unthinkable that he might have turned, even for a moment, to someone more like him?

IMAUMBN

URNNML

###

The clouds clustered on the horizon were the color of steel wool, but it wasn’t raining. Yet. There were fewer than a dozen kids in Custer Park. A toddler clambered through a green-plastic tunnel in the infant’s play structure. Three boys about Max’s age ran back and forth between the swings and the battered merry-go-round, engrossed in some private game. Two pre-teen girls balanced on adjacent teeter-totters, arms outspread. A couple of moms sat at a picnic table, one drinking coffee from a paper cup bearing the ubiquitous Starbucks logo, and the other nursing a bundled-up baby under the drape of a pastel afghan. In the grassy bowl that earlier in the year had held soccer players and soon would hold softball games, a young girl and her dad took turns throwing a Frisbee to a black Labrador.

As Claire walked up the muddy grass, she saw Lori sitting on a park bench, Zach on her lap. There was a faint growth of dark fuzz on his head, reminding Claire of a baby bird. She took a seat beside Lori on the wooden bench scarred with generations of initials. Max was walking up a blue plastic curlicue slide, his feet slipping on the wet plastic with every step. Claire worried he would fall and knock out his teeth, but Lori didn’t seem concerned. Her restless hands kept touching her younger son. She plucked invisible lint off his blue Polartec jacket, stroked the dark down sprouting on his scalp, reached down to straighten his white socks.

Zach squirmed under her attentions, finally sliding down to the ground. His head swiveled back and forth as he watched Max, who had joined the three other boys as they tore through the park. Each had picked up a fallen twig, which quickly became swords, guns or baseball bats, whatever the moment called for. Zach turned to Lori, his dark eyes depthless in his still jaundiced face. Claire’s chest ached to see him. Despite his remission, he still looked very ill to her.

“Can I go play, Mama?”

Lori hesitated. Earlier she had told Claire how hard it was to let him do anything for fear that he would be bruised or cut, and not stop bleeding. “All right - if you’re careful. I don’t want you to fall or bump into anything, so no running.”

Zach gave a put-upon sigh. “O
kay
, Mama.”

Lori raised her voice. “Max! I need you to look after your brother.” Max didn’t turn around, although by the way his shoulders stiffened it was clear that he had heard her.
 
“Max!” Lori shouted. He threw his stick on the ground and began walking back toward Zach, dragging his feet at each step.

A smile rising on his face, Zach limped off to meet him. Even Max couldn’t resist that smile, and he allowed the corners of his mouth to twitch upward before putting back on his blank, put-upon expression.

“The chemotherapy has done something to Zach’s coordination,” Lori said. “They call it peripheral nerve toxicity. All they can say is that they hope it’s not permanent. Sometimes I think it’s like that saying - which is worse, the cure or the disease?” Claire noticed that her friend’s skin look oddly naked. She had drawn a thick line of gray eyeliner around each eye, but the rest of her skin was bare. Had she stopped for a moment and forgotten to continue her normal routine? Or had she hoped that people would register the eyeliner and believe it represented the rest of the makeup she usually wore - foundation and blush and eyeshadow and mascara and lipstick?

“But at least he’s in remission, Lori. They got him that far.” Claire looked around at the budding trees, the new blades of grass. Even though the calendar said February, icy weather always left Portland well before March. “And it’s almost spring.” Spring always made Claire feel hopeful, but she found the idea would not leave her mouth.

“Sometimes it’s so hard not to think that this could be the last spring, the last Easter, the last birthday, the last Christmas, the last Arbor Day, for Godsakes!” The words burst out of Lori. “I’m tired of thinking like that. I’m tired of being a lesson to people that they should enjoy what they have or it might all turn to shit.”

Claire didn’t have a response for Lori. She handed her the stolen photocopy. Then she explained what had happened at the Bradford Clinic and what she and Charlie were planning. “There’s no chance that you remember the number the clinic gave you, is there?”

Lori shook her head, her mouth twisting. She traced her fingers lightly down the list of names, the way a mother might stroke a newborn’s tiny starfish hand. Claire had to look away. With a stiff, old man’s gait, Zach was climbing the three stairs that led to the infant’s play structure. The other child playing on it, a boy about half his age, watched him with a puzzled expression. Max stood off to the side with his arms crossed, his gaze following the boys his own age.

“Did you bring pictures of you and Havi when you were around ten?” Claire asked, still watching Zach cautiously climb up the play structure. When she turned to Lori, she found her friend crying silently, the tears dripping off the end of her chin as she looked at the list of names. Something about the set of Lori’s face told her that she wanted no hugs, no reassurances. “I don’t even know how old ten looks anymore,” Claire continued. “How old is that girl?” She gestured to the girl playing with her dog. “Is she ten?

With a long, shuddering sigh, Lori wiped her eyes on her sleeve, then turned her head to look. She shook her head. “I’d say more like eight. Look at her chest. It’s completely flat. Most girls have two little bumps by the time they’re ten. Do you remember that? I remember begging my mom for a training bra when I was ten or eleven. A training bra! Like you could teach your breasts to do tricks. I remember how all the boys would walk by and run their fingers down your back, hoping to snag your bra strap and snap it. If their finger didn’t catch, then they knew you were still wearing an undershirt and you were so humiliated because you knew that
they
knew.” Lori was still staring in the direction of the girl and her dog, but her eyes had lost their focus. “Sometimes when I bring the kids to the park I look for her. It’s not too hard to figure out what she might look like. I remember a little bit from biology about how genes work. Or all I need to do is look at the boys. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Because dark is dominant.”

Claire was looking in the other direction, so she saw how Zach was now limping after the three older, taller boys, who clearly wanted nothing to do with him. He had a stick in one hand and was waving it in their direction, but they looked at each other and then ran to the far edge of the park where there was a small pond surrounded by boulders. The boys began to climb them, crowing to each other about who was higher.
 
Max took Zach by the hand and led him back to the infant’s play structure. Claire had to concentrate on her breathing so she wouldn’t cry.

Lost in thought, Lori continued, “For some reason in Oregon there are a lot of blue eyes. I used to sit in meetings at work and look around the room. And mostly I saw light eyes looking back at me. I guess maybe I don’t understand genetics. It seems like three-fourths should be brown, but it’s always less than half. Maybe all you pale-skinned Scandinavian types were attracted to Oregon because of the rain. You don’t have to worry about getting sunburned.”

“Oregonians don’t tan, they rust,” Claire said, repeating a joke that had been big when she was in grade school. “We’ll take pictures of any likely girl. Do you think you would know your daughter if you saw her?”

Lori didn’t hesitate.
 
“If I could look her square in the face, I would know. You know your own flesh and blood.” Then she leaned down to rummage in her purse. She handed Claire an unsealed envelope.

Inside were two twenty-year-old photographs.
 
One was a black and white, now yellowed and dog-eared. In it, Havi’s solemn eyes were framed by uneven bangs and slightly protuberant ears. The other was a school portrait of Lori, her hair held back by a white knitted headband, her eyes hidden by thick octagonal glasses set in tortoiseshell frames.

“Hey, now I know what color your hair really is,” Claire exclaimed. “It’s brown.” She looked closer at the photo. It was hard to be exact about color when you were looking at a faded black and white photo. “Or maybe blond?” she ventured.

Lori gave Claire a lop-sided smile and didn’t answer. “If you ever show that to anyone, I’ll kill you.” Then she reached into her wallet and handed Claire a third photo, this one in color. In it, Zach wore a red waffle-weave shirt, a pair of well-worn Osh-Gosh overalls and a smile that lit up his whole face. Claire looked from the photo to the real thing, from the boy with a sharp-edged face to one whose features had been blurred by prednisone, from a smiling child to one whose face seemed burdened and aged.

Lori saw what Claire was doing. “That photo was only taken last October,” she said. “Five months ago. He was sick then, too, only we didn’t know it.”

“Did you give this to me so that I could compare it with the girls we find?”

Lori shook her head. “So you’ll remember why this is important.” Claire wondered if this was Lori’s way of rebuking her for not finding the right record.

Walking back to her car, Claire tucked her hands in her coat pockets and discovered a fistful of change. Her fingers picked out at least three quarters, plus a half-dozen smaller coins. Rather than putting change in her wallet, she liked to slip it into the pocket of whatever jacket or coat she was wearing, a little surprise for her future self. Fingering the coins, she remembered the other task she needed to accomplish before she met Dr. Gregory at Village Coffee. She would use the pay phone on the corner to call the Bradford Clinic. In case the clinic had Caller I.D., as Lori thought they did, she didn’t want to risk calling from her house. As Lucy, Claire planned to leave a message that she had changed her mind about giving up her baby.

###

Claire was waiting for her latte (or, as the guy behind the counter termed it, “a tall skinny,” which was how she had felt about herself for most of her life) when Dr. Gregory walked in.

“Hey, Dr. G.”

“What’s with this Dr. G stuff? Can’t you just call me Michael?”

Claire avoided answering directly. She wanted to stay on Dr. Gregory’s good side without promising anything. “You should look at Dr. G as a step up, halfway between formality and informality.”

He gave a mock sigh and shook his head. “If I need to wait, I will. How’s your ankle holding up?”

For an answer, Claire held up her hand and tipped it from side to side. “The swelling’s mostly gone. But this morning I went for what I thought would be a half-walk, half-run that ended up being all walk. It just didn’t feel right.”

“Come over to my office and I’ll take a look-see. Just let me feed my habit first.” He gave a nod to the kid behind the counter. “The usual, Bodie.”

Claire didn’t know if she wanted to be alone with Dr. Gregory in his office, his cool fingers tracing the bones of her ankle. “No, that’s okay, I’m sure it’s fine. You’re already been so helpful, what with my ankle and all and then taking me out to dinner and answering my questions. I don’t want to impose on you any further. I’ve never even gotten a bill for your house call.” She focused on the words from the magnetic poetry set that was stuck on the back of the espresso machine. A previous customer had pushed a string of words together to read, “scream stop crash blood smear never could drive.”