Akin Read online

  “Figueroa. Rosa Figueroa,” she repeated in the too-clear enunciation middle-aged people used with those who were past middle age.

  “Could you back up for a moment?”

  “I’m exploring Michael’s kinship resources,” she told him.

  Had Noah misunderstood—was this some kind of genealogy project, then?

  “He’s been living with Ella Davis, his grandmother, but she’s just passed.”

  For a moment he thought she meant something like an exam, and then he got it. “I’m very sorry to hear that.” To fill the silence: “What was it that…”

  “Complications of diabetes. She was only sixty-three.”

  That made seventy-nine sound like the height of luck to Noah.

  “And her husband died back in the ’90s,” Rosa Figueroa added. “So now we’re looking for somewhere for Michael.”

  Noah was at a loss as to how he came into this. “Why is he not with, ah,”—Angela? Amanda?—“Amber?”

  “She’s currently incarcerated.”

  He groaned inwardly. “For what?”

  “I wonder, could we focus on the child’s immediate needs, Mr. Selvaggio?”

  Noah cleared his throat. “I’m just racking my brains as to how I can be of any assistance to you. I’ve never met any of these people, myself. My sister died soon after Victor, and her husband, ah, a long time before that.” Dan had lasted long enough to have a pretty good idea of what kind of son he’d raised—incorrigible, that was the word people used to throw around. But too early to know that Victor would soon follow him, which was a small mercy, and one not granted to Fernande.

  “Yes, sir, that’s exactly why I’m getting in touch. You appear to be the last of Michael’s kin here in New York City.”

  That old-fashioned word again. Kith and kin, kinsfolk, kindred; like something out of J. R. R. Tolkien. Did she mean legally or genetically? In what sense could you really be kin to someone you’d never met?

  “Mr. Selvaggio?”

  This social worker couldn’t be thinking of bringing the child here, to Noah’s apartment.

  No. It struck him that, like so many other seniors, he was the target of a phone scam. The woman had gotten hold of the names of relatives of his, for some equivalent of the Spanish Prisoner trick—the Nigerian fortune constantly being offered in illiterate emails.

  Put down the phone, Joan told him.

  “Sorry not to be of more use, Ms. Figueroa”—no trouble remembering the name the crook had given, now, if he took a split second to get the vowels in the correct sequence—“but I’ve got to go now.”

  “Please.”

  It wasn’t the word but Rosa Figueroa’s tone that made Noah pause, receiver halfway to the cradle. She did sound like a real person, and so weary. “It’s just that I don’t see how I can be of any practical help,” he told her. “Certainly not in the immediate…I’m off to France next week, as it happens. Maybe after I get back we could speak again.”

  “This can’t wait. I met Michael for the first time myself this morning. There’s nobody at all to look after him.”

  It wasn’t subtle, how she was playing on Noah’s sympathies. He wanted a cigarette.

  “Could you come and meet his mother with me, tomorrow morning?”

  “But—”

  “Let’s all just sit down and put our heads together, all right, to see what can be done for this child?”

  Noah sighed.

  Noah smoked as he leaned out the kitchen window—a waste of heat, yes, but these apartment buildings stayed so baking from October to April you couldn’t survive without opening a window once in a while.

  Incarcerated. Was Amber Davis just as much of a fuckup as his nephew had been? Possibly more so. Hadn’t she been a grown woman (though not quite old enough for it to have counted as statutory rape) when she’d gotten the lanky, lovely fifteen-year-old into her bed and conceived this unfortunate Michael?

  Noah was trying to get the sequence straight. Victor’s adolescence had had such a disastrous domino effect it was hard to remember the order and duration of each awful event. He was pretty sure that word of the baby had come after Victor’s truncated stay in that so-called therapeutic school upstate (which had almost bankrupted Fernande and Dan before getting shut down) and after he’d run away from their house in Brooklyn for the second time, with Fernande’s jewelry and a checkbook. She’d gotten her gold back, but it had been melted into a lump. The judge had placed Victor in a group home, then, but he’d run away from that too. Always minor-league stuff, but it added up: possession of marijuana, Ritalin, loitering, trespass, disorderly conduct…

  What Noah couldn’t remember was, had Michael been born before or after the Limited Secure Placement? Fernande and Dan had been encouraged to call that his group home too, though the fence was of razor wire this time. (Orwellian, the dialect of the justice system.) Noah had visited twice, on his own; Joan had always been busy. The place was just two subway stops from the elegant brownstone where Victor had grown up, but a world away.

  Then when he’d been let out after ten months, the boy had “crashed with friends.” Noah had never gotten the impression his nephew was actually living with the young woman and their son. Fernande—more than Dan—had badgered Victor to let them meet their grandchild, but he’d been elusive. When she’d asked if they could send baby clothes, he’d asked for money instead. And then at seventeen, for something petty—violating parole by skipping school?—Victor had been sent off to juvie, a hellhole of a residential center up near Albany. That fence had been sixteen feet high, Noah remembered from his single visit. Victor had come back with kidney damage from a beating.

  From that point on, all Noah had heard about his nephew’s doings had come via Fernande. She and Dan had managed to meet the mother and child a couple of times; she’d reported that Victor was “quite involved,” though Noah didn’t know what that meant: changing diapers? Paying support? Noah had seen a few photos and nodded dutifully. He couldn’t remember what the little boy had looked like, now, except that he hadn’t inherited Victor’s looks.

  He stood up, stubbed out his cigarette, and tugged the old window shut. He could have made more of an effort with his nephew, he supposed. But it had all felt like such a goddamn waste of breath.

  The moment that stuck in Noah’s memory like a sliver was when he’d made himself go into his and Joan’s home office, a few months after her death. (He’d have avoided their bedroom, too, if it had been practical, as well as the bathroom and kitchen and living room; even the rubber mat by the door where she left her winter boots, and the key hook on which she balanced the little roll of dog-shit bags.) Those four rectangular spaces on the office wall, like ripped-out teeth: Noah’s last Père Sonne prints. He knew at once that it must have been Victor, who’d slunk off during Joan’s funeral while everyone else was eating and taken them off the wall, then smuggled them out of the apartment.

  When Noah had called Fernande about it, she’d burst into tears, but it wasn’t shock. Victor had sold hers long ago, she admitted. The only photos by their pépère that had stayed in the family were gone now; locked away from the world in some collector’s vault. “What’s the difference?” Victor had responded. “You guys would’ve donated them to some museum sooner or later.” He was nineteen, so it would be adult prison this time. As a favor to her, Fernande begged, would Noah please, please not call the police?

  He hadn’t. But he hadn’t forgiven his nephew either.

  Noah had stopped asking Fernande for news at that point, though when Victor’s name came up she always spoke with a determined positivity. He’d chosen to assume the best, or the least worst: that his nephew had finally calmed down in his twenties, as so many wild boys did, and become more or less law-abiding. (Amber and little Michael were still in the picture, though having a child to support could be as much hindrance as help, Noah imagined, to someone like Victor.) But maybe Fernande had hidden the worst from her brother, or maybe she hadn’t
known the half of it herself.

  How could anyone bear to be a parent? Like contracting to love a werewolf.

  His sister’s retirement, which should have been a well-earned respite, must have been one long fretting and losing. First Dan—after a stroke, pointless rehab, another stroke—and then, three years later, Victor. Fernande had had to identify her son laid out on a refrigerated tray in the morgue in Queens: still exquisite in all his features, not yet twenty-seven. Farther east on Long Island, the day before, a motel chambermaid had found Victor on the carpet, veins full of heroin and fentanyl.

  Which had never made sense to Noah, because he hadn’t thought of his nephew as that kind of user. (A dope-smoker since twelve, but not what they used to call a junkie.) Drugs had their own irrational logic, he supposed, and these days everything seemed to be laced with something worse. If you weren’t quite sure what you were taking, could you be held accountable for doing it, and for leaving your son fatherless?

  If it came to that, Noah wondered now, which of our decisions were ever entirely our own?

  Never to reach twenty-seven. He’d felt hurt that Fernande hadn’t asked him to go with her to identify her son. What else was a brother for? But he supposed that on such a day, company was no consolation. And she must have known that he’d given up on Victor long before.

  Joan, in his head: Come on, surely you have things you should be doing?

  Noah stood on the pedal of the garbage can and threw away his cigarette butt.

  Next morning, he writhed in his seat at the women’s correctional facility. (The latest euphemism for prison.) Whenever he tried to straighten up, the molded plastic prodded him in the wrong part of his back. Rosa Figueroa was across the table, and the speechless notary public, Lucas Weinburg (brought along for what she called witnessing), on his left.

  Noah was still rattled from the journey. An hour and a half up the Hudson, through snow flurries, in Rosa Figueroa’s cluttered and underheated sedan, with Lucas Weinburg in the back, apparently asleep. The social worker looked about fifty; worn but not burned out, with only a little gray in her black curls, and a birthmark on her cheekbone, which Noah liked her for. Also one of those discreet hearing aids. She turned out to have a caseload of twenty-four children. When Noah had asked how she remembered who was who, she’d laughed darkly and said the system was in such crisis that she and her colleagues were just doing triage.

  After that, the two of them had made desultory conversation about bad news in the headlines till they’d reached a pretty hamlet (“full of Hollywood types,” she’d told him). Then a sharp turn through a gate in a double barbed-wire fence, into the parking lot of the prison.

  Behind Noah, a baby wailed on and on. Children, all ages; he hadn’t expected quite so many of them. It hit him now that when a mother was sent to jail, her kids were receiving just as long a sentence. He thought of the boy, Michael.

  “All right, Mr. Selvaggio?”

  “Perfectly.” He didn’t mention his back. It wasn’t advisable to admit to aches and pains after seventy, or younger people wrote you off.

  “There can be delays.”

  Noah disliked statements of the blindingly obvious, but the woman was just being civil.

  “Just as well it’s a Sunday. They don’t allow contact visitation during the week.”

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Seeing her in person,” she explained, “not just by video link. Ms. Davis is actually only entitled to visitors on Saturdays, since her name’s in the first half of the alphabet, but the sergeant agreed to make an exception for a hardship visit because of the urgency.”

  Video link would have been fine by Noah. He’d have preferred to stay at arm’s length from this whole mess.

  “Also we’re lucky New York State doesn’t insist on the full visitor-application process,” Rosa Figueroa told him. “You just need the permission of the inmate.”

  Noah’s head was aching. Nothing about this felt lucky. He’d agreed to this appointment with the inmate out of a sort of guilt by association with Victor, her onetime…partner? Also as a posthumous favor to Fernande. She’d managed to meet her grandson on only a couple of occasions, but she’d spoken of him with a wistful fondness. If he was in desperate need of a roof over his head for a week or two, Noah supposed he could manage that much, after Nice.

  Not that he believed any old guff about the dead looking down, like spy drones hovering. His baby sister was long past being herself. Like Joan, like all Noah’s dead—like he himself would be, at some point—Fernande was humus, dust. And a memory trace, he supposed, not to get too mumbo jumbo about it; a fingerprint of feeling left on her loved ones. So as a nod toward their shared past, Noah was here right now, on this hard, slippery chair.

  The baby’s sobs rose again.

  Beside Noah, Lucas Weinburg (clearly used to such places) was reading his way through the Wall Street Journal.

  The guards—some men, some women, in navy blue—occasionally escorted an inmate to a chair opposite her visitors. Noah couldn’t work out the rationale for the order they arrived in; it seemed to him that his little group had been waiting the longest. In their dark green overalls, the prisoners looked like park rangers. The decor was bucolic, too. Amateurish murals on the walls: the wooded shore of a lake with a bald eagle overhead, and a deserted sandy beach with a single palm tree.

  Noah’s sports coat hung too lightly, and his right hand kept moving to pat it. No wallets were allowed; Rosa Figueroa had made him leave his in her glove compartment, together with his phone, his cigarettes: all contraband. They seemed to Noah more likely to get stolen from her car. He had been allowed to bring in his passport, as ID, for lack of a driver’s license. At the metal detector he’d been sniffed up and down by a German shepherd, then patted down by a male guard in an intrusive way, and asked twice if he had a pacemaker (presumably because he might have forgotten). He’d had to sign a statement agreeing that he’d been shown the rules of visiting—mostly prohibitions on spandex, slit skirts, bandanas, and flip-flops.

  “So, Amber. What did she do, to wind up in here?” He’d heard it was a faux pas to ask that question in prison, but did the same go for the visiting room?

  Rosa Figueroa’s mouth twisted. “Well, the charge was criminal possession of a controlled substance in the second degree.”

  Why was she putting it that way, with an emphasis on charge—surely she didn’t believe Amber was innocent? “Which substance?”

  “The police found crack cocaine, meth, and oxycodone in her car.”

  Noah judged the young woman, of course he did; like hackles rising along his spine. “She’s a dealer, you’re telling me?” What used to be called a pusher, the kind of parasite who was to blame for stupid deaths like Victor’s. Amber had chosen this life, inevitably gotten caught, dumped her child on her own mother in one of the last pockets of Brooklyn resistant to gentrification. Dying mother, as it had turned out.

  Rosa Figueroa shook her head. “I don’t think so. Ms. Davis had no priors, no involvement with law enforcement at all. She helped her mom find a Section 8 apartment in a town house, away from the projects. My sense is, she was doing her best for Michael, for all of them. I believe his dad—Victor—had done time?”

  Shame heated Noah’s face. “Only as a juvenile.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He was a child.” Too loud. “Legally.”

  “Right. But given the history, I’d say ninety-nine to one the stash was your nephew’s.”

  Noah bristled. “Then why wouldn’t they have arrested Victor?”

  The social worker shrugged. “Maybe Amber took the fall. She’d have known he’d get a longer sentence, with his previous convictions.”

  This struck Noah as unconvincing and lurid. “Surely if what you’re claiming were true, it would have come out in court, at her trial?”

  She inhaled as if summoning all her reserves of politeness. “Oh, Mr. Selvaggio. Nobody gets a trial these days.”
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br />   Noah felt rebuked for his naïveté.

  “Amber would have been looking at three to ten years. Possession in the second degree is a Class A-II felony—up there with crimes like predatory sexual assault against a child.”

  That startled him.

  “Her public defender—well, they’re run so ragged, sometimes it’s months before they have a chance to meet their clients. It was probably on his or her advice that Amber accepted a plea of five.”

  He swallowed. Five years.

  Over near the left wall, an inmate put her head down on her crossed arms and a little boy stroked her braids.

  What was keeping Amber? Not that her time was her own, Noah reminded himself. He supposed prison was like the military, that way: hurry up and wait. “And how long has she been here?”

  “Almost eighteen months.”

  It struck him that she couldn’t have supplied the heroin and fentanyl that had done in his nephew, if she’d been locked up months before he died.

  Rosa Figueroa went on: “As a nonviolent first-time offender, very compliant, Amber actually has minimum-security status. But New York’s closed down almost all its minimum-security facilities for women, so she’s held in this medium-security one.” Her eyes slid from table to table. Women chattering, or sullen, or rocking toddlers in their laps. She murmured, “You’d be surprised how many of them are banged up because of their men, one way or another.”

  Noah could tell she was trying to visit the sins of the nephew on the uncle. “If you’ve no actual proof the drugs belonged to Victor,” he barked, “it seems tasteless to keep speculating that this is all his fault.”

  Rosa Figueroa’s lips parted as if she was about to say something else. Then closed. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  An inmate gave an officer with a camera a plastic token, then pressed up against her tattooed man in front of a daubed approximation of a yacht. Belatedly Noah realized the murals were backdrops, where the prisoners could pose with their visitors; aspirational scenes of freedom.