Love Love (41 page)

“Something like that.”

At this, Roger laughed. “Sometimes, Judy, I think you see me as an android, like Data on
Star Trek
. If it's funny, I laugh. It's just that it doesn't elevate my mood. I guess you could say I don't enjoy it.”

“It's something I can't even pretend to imagine, that disconnect. Laughter
is
enjoyment.”

“Yeah,” Roger said. “Well.”

For their final meal at the house on the Cape, they ordered in, a pizza with pineapple and ham toppings and a loaf of cheesy garlic bread. Snaps watched them eat with great expectation, hoping for the crusts to be tossed into her dish. Momo, perched on the middle shelf of his cat tree, yowled his disapproval and batted at her butt as Snaps paced back and forth.

That night, as Judy and Roger made love, she felt every touch, every drop, everything that his body offered, as if through her hypersensitive efforts at seeking her own pleasure, she could enjoy it enough for the both of them. She couldn't, of course, and as he drifted to sleep under the cold darkness of the November Massachusetts sky, she stayed awake and stifled her tears. For all her problems with her job or self-worth or whatever, she had her health, and yet Roger did not. Was it selfish of her to want him to feel what she felt? She loved him, she knew this now, but he would never be able to fully return that love.

Somehow, night turned to morning. Judy was woken up by a shake on the shoulder and Momo at her face. For a second, she thought it was the cat calling her name.

“Judy,” Roger said, “I think there's something wrong with Snaps.”

26

T
he woman had climbed to the top of the flat roof of the Sanctuary, stood tall with her arms at her side, up against the ledge. Up there, three stories and an attic high, her hair whipped around in every direction at once so that under the morning sun, she looked faceless, an oval mass of flying golden strands. All she had on was a silky white bathrobe cinched loosely against her body, the belt billowing like an angry flag.

Kevin stood in the yard with Angeles and a handful of other Sanctuary residents, watching as Norman climbed up the fire escape. According to Angeles, the only person Amy would talk to was Norman. She was the mother of the two young kids he saw last time.

“She's jumped before,” Angeles said, shading her eyes against the two figures. She was in her bathrobe, too, one of her ample breasts barely contained. “Luckily she only broke her leg. But that was before she met your dad.”

“So it's an improvement that she's now threatening to jump instead of actually jumping.”

“Baby steps,” Angeles said, “baby steps.”

Norman, having climbed all the way to the top, now skulked his way toward Amy. He moved with the grace of an old dancer, and once again Kevin was reminded of how much of this man's genes were passed down to him.

Everyone lived within the confines of their genetic makeup. It was a box big enough that you could take a little walk and back, but no matter how hard you tried, you could never escape its borders. There were parts of this strange man in him, a pathological liar who talked suicidal porn stars out of committing the irreversible, as he did now, his legs swinging and dangling from the roof's edge as he sat down
next to Amy. He spoke to her as if this were the most normal thing to do on a Monday morning.

“You talk with him, too?” he asked.

“Wednesdays at three.”

“So he's good at what he does.”

“We talk, we look, we meditate,” she said. “I don't always feel like spinning cartwheels after our sessions, but I learn something. So yeah, I'd say he's very, very good at what he does. I've seen shrinks with degrees from Harvard and Berkeley, but dealing with people is an instinctive art, you know? You're born with it.”

Up above, Amy was no longer standing but sitting next to Norman. She talked with her hands, throwing them up and slicing the air, and Norman nodded and listened. Bits of Amy's voice, high-pitched like a young girl's, shot down like stray bullets:
trespass, motherfucker, hopeless.
Norman offered his hand, and she placed it over her heart.

“You're pissed at him,” Angeles said. “About the whole Denise half-sister thing.”

“You know about that?”

“We all live in this house. Nothing stays a secret for long around here.”

“Don't you think it's a pretty strange thing to do?”

“I'd agree with you on that. But I'm sure he had his reasons.”

“So this doesn't change anything for you. You'd still listen to him.”

Amy was off the roof's edge and headed for the steps of the fire escape, with Norman close behind her. Angeles stretched out her arms, yawned, then tightened the belt around her robe.

“What the man does with his own life has little to do with his talents. Unless his own failings bleed into his counseling, I have no problems with him. Sorry. But you can discuss this with your fake half-sister.” She pointed at the car pulling into the lot.

“Very funny.”

“I try,” Angeles said. She ran up to Denise, and they walked back together arm in arm to where Kevin was standing. In a pink hoodie and a pair of well-worn jeans and with her hair tied back in a ponytail, his nonsister looked collegiate. All Denise needed was a book bag slung over a shoulder to complete the illusion.

“He's still mad at you,” Angeles said. “If you need me so we can gang up on him, you know where to find me.” She blew Kevin a kiss, and then she was gone, too, and now it was just the two of them, Kevin
and Denise. Fat clouds the color of steel wool floated across the sky, blotting the sun with their puffiness.

“I got here as soon as I heard. Everything's okay?”

Kevin zipped up his windbreaker against the rising wind. It felt as if a rainstorm was coming. “Norman worked his usual miracle, apparently.”

“He often does,” she said. “I don't know what I'd do without him.”

“Wish I could say the same.”

“Listen,” she said. “Would you at least give me a chance to tell you my side of the story? You were too mad last night to hear me out, but I was hoping that you'd be more open after a good night's sleep.”

“You're going to lecture me on reason?”

“I know you want to light into Norman, but please don't, at least not until lunchtime. I've scheduled him for three sessions this morning, and all of these people need him at his best.”

“So I'm supposed to wait my turn to tell him how nuts he is.”

She took him by the arm and led him to the back door and into the kitchen of the Sanctuary. According to the clock on the wall, it was almost eight, prime time for breakfast, but it was deserted.

“They're all fasting today,” Denise said, rooting through the bottom cabinets until she found what she wanted, a cast-iron skillet that looked heavy enough to have its own gravitational pull. “Have a seat. I'll make us some breakfast.”

The ruckus had woken him up, so he hadn't had a chance to wash up or even brush his teeth, but Denise waved off his complaints. From one fridge she got out a carton of eggs and a block of butter, and from the other fridge, a carton of milk and a jug of orange juice, both of which she opened and sniffed approvingly.

She pointed at the stool by the island with her spatula, and Kevin sat. Denise slid him a glass of orange juice and took a long, satisfying drink from her own.

“I don't like to talk about myself,” she said, “so it helps if I do something.” She turned on the oven. “First, I'll make the batter, and then I'll make us some eggs. How do you like yours?”

“Scrambled.”

Denise lifted a tub of flour onto the counter; a puff of white dust announced its arrival. “Remember me telling you last night that you're a real sweet guy? See, this is why. I know you don't really care to eat breakfast now. I also know that you'd like nothing more than
to tell Norman off. But you're here, sitting with me, humoring me, even.”

“You might be mistaking sweetness with stupidity.”

“I just complimented you,” she said. “Don't turn it into the opposite.”

It was words like those that made him like her, her straightforwardness. “What are you doing?”

“It's a surprise. What I can tell you is that it's easy to make, easy on the eyes, and tastes as good as it looks. It's the only thing left from my childhood that's worth remembering.”

“You don't owe me anything,” Kevin said, surprising himself as he said it.

“The hell I don't.”

“To take a page out of Claudia's book, tell me whatever you plan to tell me only if it'll give you pleasure. Not because you feel guilty and you want to appease me in some way.”

Denise dumped eggs into a large bowl and sliced a third from a stick of butter.

“I can't lie, of course.”

“Not in the Sanctuary.”

“It may not give me pleasure to say what I have to say, but I believe it will give me satisfaction. Is that enough?”

“Probably,” he said. “It's not like I'm an expert in living selfishly.”

Denise stayed silent during this final part of the preparation, adding milk, nutmeg, and vanilla to the bowl, but Kevin could see she was figuring out what she wanted to say and how. She set the timer on the oven for nineteen minutes.

“That's pretty exact, nineteen,” Kevin said. “You've done this before.”

She pulled up the empty stool next to Kevin. “I was gonna make some omelets for us while we waited.”

“To further distract yourself.”

“Even with Norman, when I have my sessions with him, I'm doing jigsaw puzzles, knitting, anything to keep me from feeling the feelings I should be feeling.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

She smiled, and it was a thing of beauty. Kevin hadn't known that all the smiles preceding this one had been guarded, careful. He
wished he could see her without her makeup, the way she looked right after she woke up.

“If you don't mind, just listen, okay? Until I'm done.”

They were interrupted by Kevin's ringing cell phone. Area code 617—it was an unfamiliar number. He sent it to voicemail and swtiched it to silent mode.

“I'm ready,” he said, and Denise spoke.

“The reason why I agreed to play along with this ruse of Norman's, Kevin, was because you and I share something that most people are fortunate enough not to experience. Like yourself, I, too, am an adoptee, but unlike you, I was aware of my situation as soon as I was old enough to question why my face looked nothing like the faces of my parents.

“I was adopted when I was four months old. I don't know who my birth mother is, and I don't care to know. From what Kay, my adoptive mother, told me, I was no different than most of the kids who get abandoned in Korea, cast out from a single mother who did not want to bear the stigma of having a bastard child. This was in the late '70s, and the country was nowhere as rich as it is now, but here's a statistic that might disturb you: One in two hundred children who are born in Korea, today, are still sent overseas. Considering that our mother country has twice the gross domestic product as Switzerland, why is it that children are still sent from there for adoption every year? Right now, South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any developed nation, and yet Koreans decline to adopt one of their own due to societal pressures. Because back there, it's all about the bloodline.

“I can rail on about this forever—the way single mothers are ostracized, the lack of government-sponsored programs to help them, et cetera. It wasn't that long ago that the country refused to consider orphans legal citizens, if you can believe that. Changing the viewpoints of a culture is always slow. There was a time when I thought I could make a difference, volunteering for transnational adoptee support groups to hold meetings, put up flyers, make cold calls, but you really can't help others if you can't help yourself first, and I had my own demons to beat out of me.

“So it was Kay and Robert, my adoptive parents, and my sister, Jenny, and me, in the flat little town of Skillen, Illinois, where I was one of only three nonwhite kids in my elementary school. I went
through the usual troubles transnational adoptees go through, feelings of abandonment, the inability to fit in anywhere because I wasn't blue-eyed and blond-haired like my family, nor was I Korean, since I didn't speak the language and wouldn't have known kimchi if it hit me in the face. I felt inadequate most of the time, that there was something wrong with me. It all comes back to the inescapable fact that I shouldn't have been born. I know that sounds cruel, but it's the hard truth for anyone who's an adoptee. Yes, your mother chose to have you instead of aborting you, but that's because she didn't have the guts. You and I, Kevin, are the products of fear and regret.

“Kids made fun of me, of course, as kids do. Running up to me with fingers pulled at the corners of their eyes, telling me my hair looked like a dirty mop. Big sister Jenny did her job, protecting me as much as she could, but she couldn't always be there, and soon she had her own problems to deal with.