She had travel Kleenex in her hand already; the job was clean and then it was done. She expected to be in Cincinnati by the end of the day.
But Jim had other ideas. He picked up a glass cigar rest from the table and brought it down on her head. When it was clear she was still breathing, he dragged her to the bathroom and locked her in.
IV. In which fathers do what they think is best. Betrayal, betrayal. In which: My darling little girl
05:50:21:03: MY DARLING LITTLE GIRL. My beloved Ida. This tape might be the last you see of your dad. I’m sorry about some of the other stuff on here. Maybe you’ll understand when you’re older. I’m sorry, too, if I can’t finish the rest in time. But that’s okay. I have some time now.
I want you to know that I started to chase your mother the second she fled my apartment and that I’ve never really stopped. I called every hotel in the area. I spoke to the people who had moved into her parents’ house. Any clue where they went? No. Any forwarding address? No. In ’94, the Internet was hardly the resource it is today, but still, I made use of what I could. I put ads in local papers across the country. The response was overwhelming, and at first, I tracked down every lead. Bus, train, hitch, hobo. I went to every state in the continental U.S. and probably through at least half its small towns.
Eventually I got word she was living in New Paltz, in New York State. At the time, I was in Miami, but decided I could be in New Paltz in two days if I hitched nonstop. I remember the ride into town. A college kid picked me up, then asked me to drive while he toked on air freshener. Butane high.
There wasn’t a working stereo in the car, so this kid listened to his CD player. Sometimes, he’d slap the dash with his hands or sing along. But mostly he stared out the passenger window. I had driven long stretches of road before. I was accustomed to the populace of cars. The freeways. The solitude expressed by so many people en route together. But that day’s ride seemed especially grim. I was going to find Esme, and yet I was grim. Probably this should have set off alarm bells, but who has that kind of foresight in the moment? I felt alone, even more alone than usual, so that I began to tremble all over, with tremors you could actually see ten feet away. A paroxysm of loss for missing Esme but also, maybe, because of the loss we’re born into.
“I’m going to New Paltz to meet my girlfriend,” I said. I said it once, then louder, and finally I punched the kid in the leg. “She’s incredible.” Because, really, this shudder from within was too much. Sometimes hurt just likes a stage.
The kid took off his headphones just long enough to say, “That’s cool.”
“She was my first, you know. You always keep them close.”
“Look, I’m not much for talk,” he said, and he turned up the volume on his CD player.
We made it into town. A town cloned from other college towns. Head shops, bookstore, deli. The kid said this was as far as he went. He gave me his number, and after I wandered around New Paltz for an hour, as if I’d run into Esme just for being there, I called him up.
There was a line outside his dorm room. Students with liquor and chips; one with a dog on a leash. I tried to get by. I tripped over a glass bong the length of my arm, but no one was letting me past.
The kid, whose name was Reese, poked his head out the door. He reached for me and clapped me on the back. “You get in free, my friend.”
“Why’s that?”
“I made some calls.”
I’d been to a lot of campuses by now, and Reese had probably heard about some poorly attended events in which I insisted that a repeal of solitude was not only sufficient but ample grounds for a movement with only one requirement to join: a desire to join.
For half an hour, I wallflowered while a couple made out next to me. After that, a girl with a pink Mohawk took their place.
“Nice spot,” she said. “One thing about me, I like to watch people. A place like this, you can really watch. All this space.” She outstretched her arms.
“These your friends?”
“No”—and she sank to the floor.
“Come on,” I said. “It can’t be that bad,” though I suspected it was. And I was right. She touched her belly. “Freshman with a bun in the oven. It is that bad.”
“I’m sorry.”
She returned to her feet. “Second wind, baby. Want to dance?”
I said no. I could not keep time. Even my heart beat erratically.
“Is it that you don’t want to dance with me?” she said. Her eyes had tears.
“Oh, God, no. It’s not that at all.”
“You think I didn’t want to be pretty? This isn’t by choice,” she said, pointing to her face. “How do you think I got knocked up, anyway? A girl like me, you get passed around.”
It was nearly eleven. I dropped my beer. Three hours of sleep in two days. The dog lapped up the suds before they were lost to the carpet. I decided to make for the bathroom, where I planned to fold up in the tub.
“You know, I haven’t told anyone about the bun,” she said. “Weird that I just told you, right?”
I nodded and smiled because this was the Helix, right here. She asked if I wanted to have sex. I said no, but that I’d be happy to stimulate her clitoris if she thought it would do her any good. She said this was not the most enticing proposal, but sure, why not.
She took my arm. Only, when we got to the bathroom, I really did collapse in the tub. I was just so tired. She said there was a Korean doctor in town who was an OB but also a healer of some kind and maybe, from the look of things, what I needed was some healing. She had been to see him about the baby and in the waiting room she’d met another pregnant woman who told her about the healing. In fact, the other pregnant woman had recently come to town precisely to see this Korean doctor, who was, she swore, the best.
I almost passed out, though not from fatigue. What did the woman look like? She was lovely. How pregnant? Six months. A blanched star of skin on her earlobe? Could be, yeah.
I raced down the hall and turned on the lights. I was looking for Reese; I needed his car. A boy getting oral sex on the couch said, “Ignore it! Keep going!” Reese said, “Sure, man, but when you get back, we want to hear about the Helix.”
The OB’s name was Choi Soon Yul. I found his office in the phone book and sifted through a dumpster out back until I found an electric bill with what I took to be his home address. Two hours later, I was banging on Yul’s screen door, smelling very much like the garbage I’d just been through. Porch lights went on, a dog went nuts, and I was sure someone would call the police, which would at least have given me a place to sleep. It was nearing 3 a.m. Instead, Yul came to the porch in slippers. Yes, yes, please would I come in and stop making that racket.
He was oddly self-possessed. He made us tea. I drank two cups and asked about Esme. He made a pretense of doctor-patient confidentiality but gave it up when it became clear I was not to be deterred and could, in fact, spend the rest of the night wailing on his doorstep. Finally he said yes, he had a patient who fit the description, but so what? Her file was in his office. I said we had to get it. He asked if I was threatening him. I was not. Only, was she okay, the patient? Was the baby okay? At last he seemed taken aback. And I was confused. Should I have been asking something else?
We agreed to visit his office the next day. In the meantime, he gave me a blanket.
I slept late into the afternoon and awoke to a flashlight pointed at my face and someone squirting me with water from a spray bottle. The room was dark; the shades were pulled. I felt massively hungover. I shaded my eyes and headed to the bathroom. My urine was a russet color I had never seen in nature. I was still feeling parched and groggy, so I went back to sleep on the couch. Next I knew, there was a voice saying, “Lift up your shirt,” and a hand feeling for the softest part of my stomach and something sharp breaking the skin.