Everybody's Son Read online

  “Oh, really? And what exactly are my qualifications? Hell, I didn’t even run for class president in high school. You’re the one who should run.”

  “And if I had your good looks and family name, I would.” Connor shifted in his chair and fixed his gaze on David. “Any race you enter, you’ll be in the top tier based on name recognition alone. That means something, David.”

  David felt the faint but familiar stirring of anger. “Yeah, what it means is that I would be elected for all the wrong reasons.” He pointed toward the laughing boys in the pool. “You’re wrong, Connor. What our country needs is not people like you and me running shit for another hundred years. What it needs is a meritocracy—and that means people like Anton, who come from nothing but become something.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Anton’s twelve years old. A little too young to run for political office. So you may have to serve as a placeholder while we wait for him.”

  “Touché.” David grinned appreciatively as he pushed himself off the chair. “I’m hungry,” he announced. “You coming in, or are you gonna sit here all afternoon hatching Machiavellian plots about my future?”

  They went into the kitchen to where Jan and Delores were baking appetizers and assembling a fruit salad. “There you are,” Jan said. “Can you guys grill some hot dogs for the kids?”

  David popped a mini quiche into his mouth. “What about the rest of us?” he asked. “Why do we have to eat cucumber sandwiches while the kids eat real food?”

  Delores smacked his hand. “Because you’re watching your cholesterol, remember? Now go get the grill going.”

  The men carried the platter of hot dogs to the deck. “These will be done in no time,” Connor muttered as he lit the grill. He stepped onto the lawn and yelled, “Food’s almost ready. Time to get out of the pool.”

  Like wet puppies, Bradley and his friends spilled out of the pool and headed for the deck. “Hey, hey,” Connor shouted. “Use those towels to dry yourselves off.”

  “Why?” Anton said, his eyes flashing gold as he looked up at Connor with an impish grin. “We’re only going to get wet again.”

  Connor held up the spatula with mock menace. “Because I said so,” he said, lunging to grab Anton by the waist.

  “Okay, okay,” the boy squealed, trying to escape Connor’s grip.

  Watching Anton and Connor horse around, David felt a stab of happiness so sharp that it registered as pain. He loved that Anton was comfortable around Connor’s family; it mitigated the fact that after two years, Anton persisted in calling him David. Always he pretended not to notice, even while wondering who else did.

  The children went off to dry themselves, and it was from this feeling of pleasure-pain that David spoke. “Man, if I were his mother, I’d give him up. If I saw the change in him, what progress he’s made, I’d never block his way. Only a selfish woman would do otherwise.”

  “What are you saying?” Connor asked.

  “Nothing.” David shook his head sharply to dismiss the thought forming there. “Forget it.”

  There was a long, awkward silence. Then Connor said, “You want me to see if I can talk to her?” His face was red from the heat and the beers.

  David looked up with a start. “No. I mean, how can you?”

  Connor shrugged. “I don’t know. But anything’s possible.”

  Hope, thin as a thread, sharp as a fishing line, cut into David’s heart. “But what could you say? And why would she? I mean, she obviously didn’t care enough about him to . . .”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Connor said slowly. “She was pretty distraught about losing her kid. I think she loves him very much.”

  Did David imagine the chastisement he heard in Connor’s words? He wasn’t sure. He suddenly felt flushed, mildly nauseated, the heat of the afternoon, the smell of meat sizzling on the grill, the stale taste of beer in his mouth, all making him feel a little out of sorts. “Well, there you go,” he said. “She’d never give him up. Why would she?”

  Connor shrugged and went back to tending to the grill. After a few moments, David wandered indoors. He was upset at himself for doing exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do two years ago. Then he’d sworn that he’d live in the moment and enjoy every bit of his life with Delores and Anton without letting the knowledge of its finiteness cloud his joy. He still had five months left with Anton. That would have to do.

  After lunch, he went out in the heat to watch Anton do a series of backflips into the pool. Well, she can’t take that away from him, he thought. For the rest of his life, he’ll know how to dive. And watching him knife through the blue water, Or that. He’ll know how to swim, forever. And a few hours later, when Anton told a joke whose sophistication David knew would’ve eluded him just a few years earlier, he thought, He’ll always have this great sense of humor. Even though she won’t understand it. He felt a sneering contempt for the woman, and a kind of triumph, for his would be the invisible hand that had shaped her son.

  It wasn’t until they had been home for a few hours and he was pouring himself a drink in his library that David recognized that his resolve to accept the situation with Zenlike equanimity was insincere. Biology is destiny? Bullshit. To believe this would be to condemn Anton to the Dark Ages. The true crime, the true bigotry, was to condemn this bright, effervescent boy to the darkness of his mother’s home. David remembered how the boy had stayed alone in the apartment with the power cut off, and it suddenly seemed like an apt metaphor for the opaqueness of his former life. There had been nothing valuable or graceful about that life. A broken woman had been raising a broken child. How long before he, too, would’ve fallen prey to the vice of her addiction? How long before he would’ve picked up a pipe or a needle? How long before she would’ve traded her son, with his luminous beauty, to a drug pusher in exchange for a hit?

  The brandy tumbler shook in David’s hand, and he set it down with a bang on the walnut side table that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Absently, he stroked its dark polish. He could trace his family back at least six generations. Not everyone could, he understood that. But Anton didn’t even know the name of his own father. The boy’s grandmother had been unwilling to take him in. And he was supposed to believe in the sanctity of the biological family unit? The social workers, the family courts, the whole system was wrong, their assumptions faulty.

  He sat up in the plush armchair, his body jolted by a sudden thought: Perhaps, just perhaps, he had another birthday gift to give Anton. And it would be the best one yet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  David sat alone in the conference room with the lights turned low. Smithie was out in the reception area, waiting for the van to pull up. David had arrived twenty minutes ago and Smithie had let him into the nondescript single-story building, which housed one of his satellite offices. He had escorted David to the conference room, with its one long table, and then gone again to the foyer to await the van.

  Now, as he sat at the head of the empty table, his elbows on the armrest of his chair, his fingertips joining to form a triangle, an image flashed before his eyes—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. That’s who he felt like, restless, agitated, packed with an explosive energy. God, that was a good movie. When James was in high school, he and David had watched the original and the two sequels over the course of a weekend, a male rite of passage. He had been so thrilled that James had loved the movies as much as he did.

  His mind began to wander. Who would his son have turned out to be? What would he be doing if he were still alive? He yanked it back. He needed to focus his full attention on the task ahead. He heaved his briefcase up on the table. This well-worn leather briefcase, a gift from his father on his thirtieth birthday, had held so many things over the years—legal briefs, files, his checkbook. But never had it held something that had the power to change the course of all their lives.

  SHE LOOKED DIFFERENT than he had anticipated. Seeing her diminutive form in the chair, looking into the big
round eyes that held no hostility, just fear, he felt a pang of remorse. For over two years he had demonized this woman in his head. In his imagination he had bulked her up, made her loud, brash, vulgar, and trashy. He realized now what he’d been doing—he’d tried to make her an opponent worthy of his contempt and disgust. But the woman sitting across from him was tiny, even girlish. She had a birdlike face whose most salient feature was those big light-brown eyes. A pigtail hung from either side of that face. Her eyes were clear as water, with none of the jerky shiftiness that he associated with drug users. She was apparently clean, drug-free.

  And yet for all of its mystery, the face looked deeply familiar. David stared at her, trying to make sense of this, and the realization jolted him. Of course. She looked like Anton. Or rather, the other way around. But whereas Anton had a beauty that dazzled, the woman did not arrest your attention. What she had was—David groped here for a way to categorize—a kind of country charm. Yes, that was it. Despite her hard living, Juanita looked like the southern country girl she once was. There was nothing brutal or hard about this face. In fact, he found himself liking her.

  Maybe this was a sign that he ought not to go ahead with what he had come here to do. Maybe another way was possible—David closed his eyes for a brief second as he laid out a different scenario: Perhaps he and Delores could help this woman when she got out less than three months from now. If they could get her a job, if they made sure she attended a recovery program, if they paid for Anton’s education at a private school, they could ensure that the boy had a good future. This woman was not a hardened criminal or a lost cause—he had enough judicial experience to trust his instincts about this. He could help her, which was the same as helping Anton.

  He opened his eyes to see the woman watching him closely, and something about the intensity of her gaze, the fact that she had caught him in a moment of weakness, annoyed him. How soon before the woman had an unsavory boyfriend? How soon before she quit a job and went missing? He reminded himself what the recidivism rates were for crack cocaine addicts. The path to hell was paved with good intentions. He would not risk Anton’s future for a moment of sentimentality.

  He pulled himself up to his full height and looked at her gravely. “Do you know why you’re here? Do you know who I am?”

  “No, sir.”

  He swallowed. He had no idea how Connor had made this happen, what strings had been pulled, which warden had been involved, in bringing the woman here late in the evening in an unmarked van. They had approached Smithie only a week ago for his help with a meeting place, knowing he could keep a confidence, and true to form, he had agreed without asking too many questions. Connor had wanted to use a proxy to get a message to Juanita Vesper. But David had refused, knowing that nobody else could make his case for him. He was taking an awful risk, he knew, with this clandestine meeting. But he also knew that the very recklessness of such an encounter, its sheer improbability, would protect him. Now, as he eyed the woman sitting beside him, he felt his face soften. How terrifying it must be for her, being whisked out of prison without explanation and brought to an empty office building where she had been greeted by an unknown white man and was now sitting across from another. Did she think she was being kidnapped? He could see the tremor in her lower lip, how frightened she was and how she was fighting to keep her composure. This was apparently another trait Anton had inherited from his mother.

  “I’m David Coleman,” he said, his voice gentle. “I’m Anton’s foster dad.”

  The woman’s face brightened, as if it had been flooded with light. “Anton,” she said. “Lord have mercy. How is he?”

  Her response was so genuine and spontaneous, it warmed his heart, destroying the last of his defenses. Delores had been right. This was mother love that he was witnessing. The pleasure that she derived from hearing Anton’s name made the encounter feel egalitarian, both of them united by their love and concern for the boy.

  “He’s fine,” he said. “Actually, he’s more than fine. He’s thriving.”

  Juanita nodded matter-of-factly. “He’s very smart,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “Takes after his dad, I guess.”

  He looked at her, surprised. He hadn’t expected her to know who Anton’s father was. “You know him?” he blurted out, and then blushed as she fixed him a look. “I mean, who is he?”

  She tightened her lips in a way that reminded him of Delores. “He was a doctor,” she said shortly. “But he’s crossed over.”

  “Crossed over?” he said stupidly.

  “He’s passed.”

  He wanted to ask more questions but held himself in check. Juanita’s eyes had gone opaque and her face was shuttered. And really, what did it matter? Far more important to get to the business at hand.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she got there first. “Is he here?” she asked, looking out into the dark hallway. “Anton? He’s come to see me?”

  “What? Oh. God, no. No, he’s not here.” And then, for a reason he never understood, he added, “He didn’t want to come.”

  Juanita’s eyes flickered as she absorbed the blow. She swallowed once and then said, “He’s still angry at me?”

  David shrugged. “He’s upset,” he said vaguely.

  “That’s why he’s never come to see me in jail? Or write to me?”

  “He wrote a few times, didn’t he?” David remembered that Delores had made Anton write a few letters in the early days, so that he could stay in touch and also practice his spelling. But the letters that came back from prison, David had intercepted, over Delores’s vociferous objections. As time went by, he had managed to convince her that it was in the boy’s best interest to keep the letters from him.

  “A few times. But when I wrote back, there was no answer.”

  What was it that he was hearing in Juanita’s voice? Suspicion? Hurt? Doubt? Whatever it was, he had to move her away from this line of questioning. Nip it in the bud.

  He cleared his throat as if preparing to render a judgment in court. “Ms. Vesper,” he said, “you can’t really blame the boy for being angry, can you?”

  “No, sir.” She shook her head vigorously. “Can’t blame him at all.” Her voice grew plaintive. “But I says I was sorry so many times. He still never wrote back.”

  Anxious to change the subject, he reached for his briefcase and pulled out a folder. “On a happier note, here are some pictures of Anton today.” He had deliberately chosen photos that showed Anton in places and activities that would be alien to the woman sitting next to him—Anton at the helm of Pappy’s sailboat at the Cape last summer; Anton in his red ski jacket, staring directly at the camera; Anton posing with Brad and three of their friends, all of them dressed in chinos and polo shirts.

  He heard her gasp as she flipped through the pictures. “That’s my baby boy? He looks so grown.” She looked up at him. “You’ve done gone and kidnapped my son.” But she smiled as she said it. “Sweet Jesus. He looks like a . . . a—” She cut herself off.

  But David heard what she hadn’t said: He looks like a young prince. A handsome young prince.

  He sat back in his chair and surveyed her, the last of his hesitation gone. “Yes, we’ve been fortunate. We—my wife and I—have been able to give young Anton a very good life. Frankly, it’s a life that other children, well, other children can only dream of.” He looked at her with slight hostility, as if defying her to contradict him.

  Juanita folded her hands in a gesture of humility. “Thank you. I will always be grateful. I worry day and night about my son. You know, when you’re in prison, every thought you have is an ugly one. So much evil in this world.”

  David bit down on his tongue to keep from saying the obvious: You weren’t so worried when you left your son home alone during a heat wave. He was surprised to find that his earlier liking of this woman was dissipating. How curious, he thought, but then he realized why. Juanita and he could never be friends. They were natural rivals. Whether the woman was aware o
f it or not, they were competing for the same prize.

  He gathered the photographs from her, shuffling them as if they were playing cards. Just as he was about to place them back in the file folder, she asked shyly, “Can I have one?”

  He hesitated, not wanting to leave a paper trail from this illicit meeting, but then he looked at her again, small and pitiful in the office chair, and he thought, Who will ever know? Who will ever believe her? And so he smiled and pushed the photographs back toward her. She chose the one of Anton on the ski slopes. “Baby boy,” she murmured, still clenching the picture. “I’m counting the days before I see you again.”

  It stuck in David’s craw how effortlessly, how dumbly, this woman assumed that she would reclaim her son even after seeing visual proof of how Anton had bloomed under David and Delores’s care. Did she really think that love would conquer all?

  As if she had read his mind, she said, “You’ve done a lot for my son, Mr. David. I’m not gonna let you down.” She looked at him earnestly. “I’ve been clean for two years. I’ve started a Bible study group. Prison’s been good for me. I lost my boy once, and praise be to God, he ended up with someone nice like you. But I swear, I’ll never risk losing Anton again. Never again.”

  He’d heard some variation of the same speech in court too many times to be particularly impressed by her words. Juanita was obviously sincere, but good intentions meant squat when faced with the temptation of a highly addictive drug. She’d be lucky if she stayed clean for six months once she was out of prison.

  He shifted restlessly in his chair as he glanced at the wall clock above the woman’s head. She still had the long drive back to the prison. It was time to cut to the chase. “Ms. Vesper,” he said, leaning forward. “Let’s talk candidly, shall we?” He paused, taking in her puzzled look. “It’s about Anton, of course.”

  David lay in bed, careful not to express his mental agitation in the movement of his body, for fear of waking Delores. It had gone well. About as well as he could’ve expected. He had won. At least he thought he had. He had gone through too much, had risked too much, for any other outcome to be possible. Pulling an inmate out of prison to meet with her surreptitiously? If word got out, he would lose his legal license. And needless to say, the ensuing scandal would destroy any political aspirations he might have. The worst of it was he would take Smithie and Connor down with him. He had taken the biggest gamble of his life, and he’d done it because the payoff was so enormous. So it had to work. Had to.