Undone (35 page)

“Worse,” Jasper said. “Trying to tell—and failing. It nearly killed her.”

They sat for some time in silence. Then Deepti made a helpless gesture. “I would not have believed it of Chloe,” she said. “Perhaps this man
forced
her?”

“Perhaps,” Jasper said.

“In any case, we must now go to the police.”

“No,” he said. He told her about Pollock’s and Dunwoody’s reactions. “We need evidence. Solid evidence. Otherwise, it sounds like an insane fantasy.”

“But what can we do?”

“I can talk to Chloe.”

Deepti shook her head. She reminded him of the restraining order. “You cannot go near her. They will send you back to jail—for many, many years.”

“There’s no choice,” he told her. “I need your help to find her. I
must
talk to her. Do you know where she is?”

Deepti turned and stared out the window at the late lunch crowds hurrying past. Just a few weeks ago, she had received a card from Chloe—quite out of the blue.
I hope you and your daughter are well
, she had written.
I think of you, Pauline and Maddy often.
Deepti had written back a short, polite note. She had not heard back. But, in her meticulous way, she had taken care to write Chloe’s return address in her diary, which sat in the purse next to her on the leather banquette.

“Deepti,” Jasper said. “You know how to get in touch with her.”

She looked at him. He was hunched, leaning forward, peering at her through his dark glasses. Suddenly, he frowned and cocked his head. A look of alarm seized his features. “What is it?” Deepti said.

“Listen!”

It was several seconds before her ears were able to pick out what his sharpened hearing had easily detected over the diner’s clash and clatter and shouted conversations: a distant, high-pitched wailing sound. A siren. It grew louder. They turned and looked out the window. To the accompaniment of a crescent-doing siren scream, one of the city’s blue-and-white squad cars streaked into view and pulled up at the curb across the street. A policeman got out of the passenger’s side and went up the hospital steps. The driver stayed in the car, talking into his police radio.

“My God,” Deepti said. “They are looking for you!” She glanced at the pad on the table in front of her. Written there, in crayon, were the words:
DR GELD ACE M.
She saw again that slyly insinuating, unsettlingly impudent face and shivered, as if a cold draft had played over her.

“My car is parked on the next side street,” she said. “I will take you to her.”

T
raffic was light on the southbound I-95. Their destination, Deepti said, was an apartment building in Washington Heights—a Dominican enclave north of Harlem. “She lives there with two other girls. She is a student. She told me nothing else.”

“Why is she living there—with roommates?” Jasper said. “She has the settlement money. Millions.”

Deepti repeated, “She told me nothing else.”

They drove in silence. In his side window, the fuzzed gray outline of Manhattan appeared out of the mists of his blindness. Striped shadows flicked stroboscopically in his vision as they rode beneath the girders of the bridge that he still knew as the Triborough but which, since his incarceration, had become the
RFK. They turned left and swept past sights of East Harlem that Jasper could no longer clearly make out but which he knew intimately from trips into the city when he still had his full vision: brown brick projects, cracked concrete basketball courts and chain-link fencing. They turned right and beat their way through stop-and-go cross-town traffic on 125th Street. Pedestrian crowds pushed past at the intersections, heedless of the lights, forcing Deepti to slow or stop altogether, yellow cabs swerving around them, horns blaring. At Broadway, Deepti turned north. Thumping hip-hop gave way, at 155th Street, to frenzied merengue and salsa. They drove through the shadow of looming Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, then turned left onto 172nd. “This is her street,” Deepti said.

They crossed Fort Washington Avenue. Deepti guided her car up a steep grade, craning her head to see the numbers on the fronts of the soot-begrimed buildings, with their imitation Greek columns framing smeared glass doors.

“There it is,” she said. “Number 710.” She found a parking spot nearby and stopped. They got out. The aroma of roasting meat floated from an apartment window. Music, all clattering pot-and-pan percussion and shrill horns, issued from another window, and from somewhere an excited voice, in Spanish, was breathlessly announcing a soccer game.

Deepti took his arm and they went up the sidewalk. They pushed through a street door into a stuffy lobby, their shoes echoing against bare stone tile. Deepti found the buzzer and pushed it. An electronic crackle came from the speaker and a youthful-sounding female voice said, “Yup?” Deepti said that
she was looking for Chloe. “Just a sec.” Then, after a short pause, Jasper heard from the speaker Chloe’s familiar, featherlight voice, sounding just as it had that first day on the phone, when he called her at the Gaitskills’.

“Yes? Who is it?”

Jasper was stunned. To know, now, the malevolence that lay behind that voice!

“It is Deepti.”

“Deepti!” she cried. “What a surprise. Come on up! Fifth floor—there’s no elevator. Sorry.”

There was a buzz. They pushed through the security door. In the weak light of the lobby, Jasper made out a row of brass mailboxes mounted to the mud-brown plaster wall. They came to a dark, narrow staircase and he could discern, through the haze, a set of white stone steps worn to a crescent shape in the middle. A cramped, collapsing tenement:
why was she living here?

They climbed to the third-floor landing. He heard, over the sound of his own labored breathing and pounding heart, the shooting of a bolt above them and then footsteps padding along a hall. Chloe’s voice called down: “Deepti! We’re all the way up on—” She abruptly fell silent. She must have been hanging over the banister and caught sight of them. Of
him.
“Who’s that with you?” she asked.

Deepti made no reply.

He listened. He did not hear feet retreating along the hall, nor the slam of the apartment door and its locking mechanism. They resumed their climb.

They reached the top, then stood for a moment, catching
their breath. Through the gray blur he could make out, over Deepti’s shoulder, a shadow shape—Chloe’s silhouette, slender, sylphlike—standing against a patch of light behind her. She made a sudden movement, a flinch of shock and surprise. “Oh my God,” he heard her say. Then she asked, on a rising note of panic: “What are you doing here? Deepti—why did you bring him here?”

Just then other shapes appeared against the brightness of the apartment’s open door.

“What’s happening, Chloe?” said a female voice unfamiliar to him—slightly raspy, with a Latin tinge in the vowels and cadences. “Is everything okay?”

Then there was another female voice, this one higher-pitched, girlish, frightened: “Yeah, who’s there?”

“Wait a sec,” he heard the Latina say, and Jasper could tell from the clarity and direction of her voice that she was looking at him. “That’s your
dad
!” she cried out. “He isn’t supposed to be here! Hey, you sick fuck, you’re not supposed to be here!”

“Call 911,” the second girl said.

Deepti told them to calm down. “Mr. Jasper simply needs to have a word with Chloe. It is important. He is not here to hurt you, Chloe.”

The Latina spoke up again. “He’s not supposed to come near her! I know for a fact. My aunt had a restraining order against my uncle and one time he came with a gun and—”

“No one has a gun,” Jasper interrupted. He placed his cane between his knees and reached into his pockets. He turned
them out, showing that he had only a few crumpled bills and a wallet. “I just need to speak to Chloe. Briefly. Alone.”

“Alone?”
said the Latina, incredulous. “Hey, listen up: you got no right to talk to nobody
alone
, you rapist fuck. C’mon, Clo, let’s call the cops.”

“It’s okay,” he heard Chloe say.

“Yeah, but—” her friend started to protest.

“I’m all right,” Chloe said. “You and Misty—why don’t you go to the coffee shop? For ten minutes.”

“And leave you
alone
with him?”

“I’ll call your cell if there’s a problem.”

“This fucker raped you! You want to be
alone
with him?”

“I’ll be fine,” Chloe said. “I mean,” she added, and Jasper thought he heard some pity in her voice, “look at him.”

He imagined that all three girls must now be staring at him, sizing up his sorry, wasted, crippled figure.

The Latina made a noncommittal grunt. Then she added, skeptically, grudgingly, “Well … okay. I’ll get my laptop. And we
will
be back in ten minutes.” She retreated down the hall. A minute later, she emerged from the apartment. “C’mon, Misty,” she said. The two shapes moved up the hall toward him. Passing Jasper, the Latina thrust her face close to his, her dark eyes, sharp angular features and café au lait skin moving into his narrow range of focus. “
Sicko
,” she hissed. She moved off. Another shadow moved past, although this girl shrank from him, sliding her body along the railing that enclosed the stairwell. The sound of their feet diminished down the stairs.

When silence returned, Chloe told him to come into the apartment. She flattened herself against the door frame. Passing within inches of her, he felt the radiating nimbus of her body warmth and was inundated by the remembered scent of ginger and vanilla. He was suddenly thankful that he could not see her, that she existed only as a shadow. Deepti stayed in the hallway.

He took a few halting paces into the apartment. He could make out little—a blurred grouping of chairs around what must be a coffee table, a bookshelf, a window overflowing with blinding white light. The air was hung with a smell of pizza and beer and cigarette smoke: the aromas of student life. He heard the door close and click behind him. He turned. He could make out her fuzzy-edged, wavery outline against the gray-white wall.

Facing him, about five feet across the bare tile floor, she was unable to believe that this was the same person she had first met in that courthouse antechamber, all those years ago: the tall, sturdily built blond man whose expression of seeming sympathy and love had stirred her to a surge of daughterly love, that misdirected devotion later dashed to dust by the words in his diary. Now, she saw a tiny, stooped figure in dark glasses, white stubble on his bowed head, cheeks hollowed—and this, coupled with her awareness of how her own actions had brought him to this state, stirred her to pity and horror. She tried to put some steel in her tone, but her voice carried a telltale tremor when she said, “Why are you here?”

“I think you know.” He spoke in a low growl utterly unlike the kindly, clear voice she remembered. “To start with: you’re not my daughter.”

She could not speak, could not draw breath. How did he
know? Was it a bluff? The rush of blood in her ears drowned out everything.

“It was Maddy’s DNA,” he said.

Would she attack him? Run and collect a knife from the kitchen? Stab him? A mistake—it had been a terrible mistake to meet with her alone! But no. She made no move toward him. Instead, she moved with dreamlike slowness. Moved sideways across the room. Her blurry arm reached for the back of what he surmised was an armchair. She stepped around it and sagged down onto its cushions. Sensing that he was in no physical danger from her, he used his cane, groped in front of him, so that he could move a step closer to her.

“Pauline,” he said. “She knew. She dictated it all to Maddy. Remember the alphabet game?”

“The alphabet game …” Chloe limply echoed. She recalled that first night in the house, when little Maddy had pulled at her arm, on the sofa, and mentioned the game. They had played it many times in the weeks that followed, Chloe saying a letter and Maddy having to write it down. Those happy weeks before the disaster. The disaster of his diary. Followed by the disaster she had visited upon him. Upon his family.

“Pauline saw everything,” he went on. “The woman you called
mother
,” he could not resist adding bitterly. “She figured out everything. Not just the DNA scam. But Dr. Geld.”

At the mention of Dez’s alter ego, her head shot up and she gaped at Jasper, stunned, terrified. He
did
know the truth. He had found out. Not only about the fraud, but about
Dez.
“Oh my God,” she said.

He tapped forward. He was standing over her. He wanted
now to see her, to see her expression. But her face remained only a blurred oval, and he was afraid to move his own face closer in case she did throw off this strange, unexpected torpor and attack him. But she had no intention of attacking him, had no wish to hurt him further.

“I know the whole sick, disgusting game,” he said. “But there are two questions I have for you. Why? I need to know why you did it. Why did you destroy my family?”

“I didn’t want to destroy your family,” she whispered.

“Then why?”

She pulled up, in memory, those rationales that Dez had drummed into her, rationales that now sounded so weak, so laughably lame. “We—to pay you back for my mother,” she said in a barely audible voice.

“Your
mother
?” he said, mystified.

She felt a surge of defensiveness, felt the old certainties flare up, a final, desperate effort to convince, not so much him, but herself. “You took advantage of her!” she wailed. “You never called her! You thought you could just, just
sleep
with her
—seduce
her—then leave and—and—and—and never talk to her again!”

He was genuinely baffled. “But it was your
mother
who initiated everything. Your mother who pursued
me
—”

Yes, Chloe thought, that would be true of her poor mother. All those men she brought home from the bars every weekend, slept with and then kicked out. Of course she had pursued Jasper the same way back then, taken her pleasure and then moved on. Back to Hughie, her boyfriend, Chloe’s father. Not
pined away, for years, in sadness for this man. Not waited by the phone for his call. Chloe had always known it, on some deeply buried level. So how could she have swallowed Dez’s version? Dez’s lies?