Akin Read online

  The “person in parental relationship” was authorized by the parent to get the child immunized, consent to mental health treatment, permit absences from school… Noah finally found the line for him to sign.

  After all the hurry, they had time on their hands, waiting for Lucas Weinburg to get back through security. Noah watched the clock.

  Rosa Figueroa wrote down Michael’s school details, doctor, and dentist for Noah. Also Noah’s address and number for Amber’s reference, and Amber’s inmate number and the correctional facility’s details, “so you can stay in touch.”

  Noah tried to think of pertinent questions to ask. But what came out of his mouth was, “You and Victor…”

  Amber’s eyes flared. “Vic.”

  Was that her name for him? Tell me how it all happened, was what Noah wanted to say.

  But really, he could imagine. He’d seen puberty lure away the little nephew who’d once wet his pants laughing at a Monty Python video with Noah, and metamorphose him into a handsome devil: height, sideburns, a reek of plausibility, a libidinal swagger. Amber might have had no idea Victor had been only fifteen when they’d met; of course he’d have bullshitted about his age as well as everything else. The couple would have been careless, many times or once, and one time was often all it took for the young.

  Joan and Noah had never had to have the conversation; never had a pregnancy scare. They’d always been careful, because it had mattered so much not to have their lives interrupted—their work lives, yes, and their life together. Noah didn’t care if that sounded ruthless, or pathetic.

  “This Valentine’s would have been our twelve years.” Amber folded up his handkerchief.

  Noah found her tone unreadable: loving, raging, lamenting? Fernande hadn’t known how to get in touch with the young woman when Victor died; not realizing that Amber was in prison, she’d had to assume they’d broken up. But Amber spoke as if she and Victor were lovers, even now. “It must have been a shock,” he said.

  Don’t pussyfoot, Joan advised.

  He spelled it out: “The overdose.”

  “That shit was never his poison.” Amber almost growled it.

  Confused, Noah tried to meet Rosa Figueroa’s eyes. But she was jumping up, because here came the notary, a sheaf of forms in his hand.

  Manhattan was noisy with cold wind.

  Back in his apartment, Noah called Vivienne. Twice in one weekend, after months of silence; the woman would think he was wooing her, or getting dementia. He wound up his summary: “So I seem to have sabotaged my big trip.”

  “No, no, this will do you good, you old fart-in-the-mud.”

  “You still sound like an immigrant. It’s an old fart or a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “You sit down in the mud and fart in it,” Vivienne insisted.

  “What have I done to bring this on myself?”

  “Well, now it’s happened, it’ll pull you out of the mud,” she told him.

  Try new things, if you wanted to reduce the cognitive deficits of aging, the New York Times was always advising: do crossword puzzles and brush your teeth with your nondominant hand. Of course there were losses; Noah wasn’t senile enough not to have noticed. He knew he got distracted when reading, these days. (Mind you, wasn’t everyone like that, since the internet?) He had to look up facts he’d known all his life, and resort to paper and pen for arithmetic. Joan had sworn by a simple maxim: keep working like a dog. But then, she’d only had to make it to seventy-four, herself; her mind (twice at sharp as Noah’s to start with) crystalline to the end.

  “When men retire they need projects, or they tend to keel over the first year.”

  That was what had happened to Frank, so Noah couldn’t argue. “Michael’s not a project. He’s a bereaved child who deserves a home.”

  “Yes, yes, but you’ll do for a couple of weeks,” Vivienne said. “Besides, such a tale! This child your sister tried to reach out to, all those years ago, this boychik who was lost…”

  Noah thought of the Prodigal Son. “Hardly lost. He’s been with the Davises all along. He just didn’t know us Youngs and Selvaggios.”

  “Well, high time he did.”

  Us, what us was there now? Eleven years ago, there’d still been just enough of them to constitute some kind of clan. Of course Noah and Joan would have been willing to meet Victor’s girlfriend and son if he’d ever proposed a get-together. (If he’d ever reached out to his aunt and uncle for any purpose other than ripping them off.) But now Noah was the only one left of his own generation or the next; too late for any family preservation.

  “Don’t underestimate the blood tie,” Vivienne added. “Like calls to like.”

  Noah loathed this kind of mysticism. “Strands of DNA do not sniff each other out.”

  But she was already going on about a woman in Philadelphia whose daughter had been abducted at birth. The grieving mother had run into a girl at a party six years on and somehow known, and made an excuse to steal a sample of her hair…

  Joan had been even more of a cold-blooded scientist than Noah; how had she put up with this ditz? “I have to go now. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork involved.”

  “All right, well, mazel tov.”

  He let out a scornful grunt.

  “Bon voyage, anyway.”

  Noah sat down with his tablet and bought the kid’s flights first, because you couldn’t even apply for a passport without proof of immediate travel, paid in full. The app kept glitching. He missed travel agents. (Joan had left everything up to theirs, preferring to save her brain for what it was best at.) No seats left on his New York to Nice flight, so Noah had to change to a later one—ugh, more tiring—and add Master Michael Young. (Why did airlines insist on addressing male children as if this were the eighteenth century?) The whole eleventh-hour farrago was costing more than two thousand dollars, on top of what he’d already spent on a trip that he now considered a write-off. A trip an eleven-year-old who’d never left the States before might very well hate.

  Complete purchase?

  Noah clicked on the green button.

  Monday at 8:55 a.m., on a freezing corner down in SoHo. When Noah spotted the social worker running up, he dropped his butt on the sidewalk—almost letting his latte fall too—and ground it out.

  Rosa Figueroa nodded at him as she talked on the phone. “Mm, but only because his grandma was dying… Yes, I can assure you, it’ll be very enriching.” After another minute she clicked off. “I’ve gotten the truancy probation officer off your back for now, but when you’re back from France, Michael can’t miss another day of sixth grade.”

  Splendid, Noah was already in trouble.

  “Oh, and the principal wants him to keep a diary.”

  A log of any mistreatment? Times that Noah might send him to bed hungry, or wallop him, or lock him out of the hotel room?

  “For literacy, cultural studies.” Rosa Figueroa covered a yawn.

  Oh, a travel diary.

  “How heavy a smoker are you, Mr. Selvaggio?”

  “Very light.” A faint hope: might that disqualify him as a foster parent?

  “You know not to expose Michael to secondhand smoke, keep all cigarettes and lighters locked away?”

  “Sure, fine.”

  “What about alcohol?”

  Noah managed not to roll his eyes. “I was born in France. We’re known for our moderate and civilized use of wine.”

  “Anything else at all by way of recreational—”

  He cut her off with a shake of the head. It was pure hypocrisy, interrogating him at this point, as if she hadn’t already put all her eggs in his frayed basket.

  The two of them had to pass through a metal detector, into the passport office, and—NO WEAPONS, FOOD, OR DRINKS—the guard gestured for Noah to drop his latte and half-eaten muffin in the garbage.

  He and Rosa Figueroa took the elevator to the tenth floor, collected a ticket (D452) from a machine, and sat on more plastic chairs to wait for one of the so-called
passport specialists. Rosa Figueroa’s name would always conjure up pressure on the buttocks for Noah. That was how it was, approaching eighty: everything got close to the bone.

  “Proof of travel?” she asked him, like a fretful mother.

  Noah handed over the printout. (A hard copy, they called it now, as if it were steel rather than flimsy paper.)

  “Expedited fee for will-call service?”

  Noah patted the pocket that held his wallet.

  As the minutes ticked by, he tried to relativize this line. The worst days of Soviet Russia, breadlines of a thousand people. Or that Beijing traffic jam, a few years ago, that had lasted twelve days.

  “Should be here by now.” Rosa Figueroa checked her phone again.

  “Who?”

  She looked at him oddly. “Michael has to be present for the application.”

  Evidence that the child was real, Noah supposed, rather than part of some passport-selling scheme. He found himself sick with nerves. A bald, skull-faced senior citizen, that’s what he looked like.

  No child’s idea of a good time, Joan joked.

  Noah stared down at the names Rosa Figueroa had filled in. “Statement of Exigent/Special Family Circumstances for Issuance of a U.S. Passport to a Minor Under Age 16.” A whole category of words survived only on governmental forms meant to intimidate citizens, words even a professor could get through his life without saying aloud: exigent, issuance. He struggled to make sense of the fine print. The circumstances counted as exigent if Michael’s health or welfare would be jeopardized by not getting a passport immediately. (Quick, I must see the Mediterranean or I’ll fall into a decline!) This request might qualify as a “special family circumstance IF the minor’s situation makes it exceptionally difficult or impossible for one or both of the minor’s custodial parents/legal guardians to apply in person or provide the notarized, written consent.” A situation such as Amber being locked up and Victor being dead?

  Noah watched numbers change on the screen over the booths. D445. C926. A188. Quite random, perhaps—meant to break applicants of any expectation that it would be their turn soon. “So what does Amber do all day?” He wondered if they had a writer-in-residence in her correctional facility. You heard of lifers getting PhDs, sometimes.

  “Various programs.” Rosa Figueroa flicked through her papers. “Parenting,” she read, “Life Skills slash Budgeting, Alternatives to Aggression, Introduction to Building Maintenance.”

  Oh dear.

  “Also she’s working in a Signs and Metal Shop for twenty an hour.”

  He blinked. “That has to be more than twice minimum wage.”

  “Twenty cents.”

  “Sorry—of course.” Hot-faced. The only word that came to mind was slavery. “She can’t even get her GED in there?”

  Rosa Figueroa’s head tilted. “Amber graduated high school when she was eighteen.”

  Ah. He shouldn’t have assumed she was a dropout. “I just thought, with the drugs…”

  “She has no record of any substance-abuse problem. Never failed a urine test, even.”

  “My mistake.” But could you really work in that world without being sucked in?

  “She studied business at a community college for almost a year,” Rosa Figueroa added, leafing through the file, “before she moved back in with her mom for the birth. While Michael was little, she worked at a local discount store.”

  Nineteen when motherhood hit her like a truck: so she couldn’t be more than thirty now. Victor must have been gone so much, walled up in his various placements. Had he been any use to Amber at all?

  D448, said the screen.

  Then, immediately, D449.

  Noah checked the little scalloped ticket; they were D452. If the boy didn’t turn up in time, they’d miss their appointment, the whole improvised plan would fall through, and what then?

  “By the way,” Rosa Figueroa murmured, “I got a friend in the NYPD to take a quick look at Victor’s record. He was arrested that same night as Amber.”

  Noah stared. A little more than three months before he’d died.

  “Also, he’d previously served a year in a men’s prison for dealing. This was in 2014 to ’15.”

  His mouth was dry. “We…I never heard that.” It occurred to Noah that Fernande—ashamed of her son—must have decided to keep that adult sentence to herself. Late 2014, that was when Dan’s strokes had begun. Was prison, rather than callousness, why Victor hadn’t been at his father’s scattering? Fernande hadn’t said. Then again, Noah hadn’t asked. Or had she not even known? Instead of calling his worn-out parents and asking for another expensive lawyer, had Victor gone it alone? “Only a year. How come Amber got five?”

  “More weight.”

  Noah thought she meant morally. Then he realized it was a technical term: grams of drugs.

  “For August 2016—the night he and Amber were picked up in her car—the record’s pretty minimal. They seem to have let Victor go the next day, and no charges were filed, whereas they threw the book at Amber.”

  “Well, then. The police must have known the stash was hers.” But this rang hollow even as Noah said it. Since when were American police so reliably discerning?

  She gave a tiny shrug. “Legally, there are always a number of factors at play, arrangements…”

  It was Victor who was selling those drugs. Joan, like a hammer tapping in his head.

  We don’t know—

  Come off it! In all kinds of trouble since he was thirteen, a convicted dealer…

  Oh Christ, Amber’s doing his time for him. Five years.

  Facedown on a carpet, three months after they’d let him go. What was it Amber had said about the overdose? “That shit was never his poison.” Pushers made a point of abstaining from their product. So why had Victor succumbed and pressed the plunger, in the end? Maybe it had been too much for him, life without his girlfriend. Life outside, the freedom that should have been hers.

  Idiot. Stupid, useless wastrel. You weren’t meant to speak ill of the dead, but sometimes…

  “Anyway,” Rosa Figueroa said. “Between the two of them, Amber and her mother seem to have done a great job with Michael. Even stayed on top of the paperwork. Birth cert, Medicaid card, immunizations, school reports…”

  “A smart cookie, is he?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Noah felt awkward. “I mean, I remember his father as distinctly clever.” He’d taught Victor to play chess, around eleven or so, and soon the boy had mopped the floor with him.

  Rosa Figueroa closed the folder and smoothed it with her hand. “Michael’s a good kid, he’s on track. But he hasn’t been performing up to his capacities in a classroom setting.”

  “You mean he’s flunking?”

  She shook her head. “There’s a Behavioral Plan in here that indicates he can be oppositional, makes bids for negative attention…”

  Oppositional Defiant Disorder, that was one of the many labels the specialists had tried hanging on Victor, before he started refusing to talk to them. When Noah had looked it up, the so-called symptoms had seemed to boil down to being adolescent. How did it help to medicalize rebellion? “Any concrete examples?”

  “Well, Michael was recently suspended for three days for being found in possession of a knife.”

  Pocketknives had been normal in Noah’s childhood, but bringing one to school nowadays, he supposed that showed poor judgment. A psychologist had once told him at a cocktail party that if you didn’t teach impulse control in the first four years…

  “But I know that school, and it can be an intimidating environment.” Rosa Figueroa gave a little grimace. “Though the new principal seems to be trying to turn things around. Anyway, the knife incident is not typical. You just need to know it’s likely Michael’s going to act out and test your boundaries, especially while you two are getting acquainted.”

  D450, said the screen.

  A woman hurried in and stared around.

  Rosa Fig
ueroa leaped up. “Ms. Johnson?” And then, as the woman hurried up to her, “Did you get the passport photos?”

  “Ain’t had time. I applied at the Burial Claims Unit like you said, but they only going to pay me back nine hundred, and the cremation come to fourteen hundred ninety-five.” Bernice Johnson was stern with stress.

  Not till then, while Rosa Figueroa was assuring her she’d speak to the burial claims people, did Noah notice the boy trailing in the woman’s wake. Her hand grasping not his, but the sleeve of his puffy coat.

  The small face pale, blank; no obvious resemblance to Victor. A ball cap with a flat brim pushed off to one side and an angular Y with an N over it, in exotic lettering; Noah couldn’t remember if that meant Mets or Yankees.

  “Well, let’s get to it.” Rosa Figueroa hurried them all over to Photograph Service. “Oh, Michael, sorry,” she threw over her shoulder, flustered, “this is your father’s uncle who’s going to be taking care of you for a little while, Mr. Noah Selvaggio.”

  The boy let out a small, explosive sound.

  A sob? No, Noah decided, a snigger. “Hello there,” was all he could think to say.

  No response from Michael.

  “I’m going to be late for work. You be good now,” Bernice Johnson told the boy. “Keep your head straight. Don’t be no stranger.” She mashed a kiss on his ear before she left.

  At the photo booth, Rosa Figueroa was already filling in yet another form in a rapid scribble.

  Waiting beside the child, Noah decided to risk it. “Is it the surname? Is that what made you laugh?”

  Eyes on his phone, Michael appeared not to hear him. Noah noticed it had cracks radiating from a hole.

  “When I first came to America, I used to get teased a lot for that.” You sell vag or something? “This was back in 1942.” How unreal that sounded now, an ominous date from the history books.

  “You’re how old?” Michael still wasn’t looking at Noah. His voice was a child’s, but getting husky, unless that was put on for machismo.

  “I’ll turn eighty in a week.”

  “You don’t sound like an immigrant.”

  “Well, I arrived at the age of four, and kids are adaptable.” Noah winced. This kid had just lost his grandmother, on top of everything else; how fast was he supposed to adapt to that? “But I am French.” Though as a US citizen Noah always felt rather a fraud, saying that. I’m from France, was that any better? “So are you, partially.”