Cold Feet (22 page)

All at once I realized my toes were numb. I longed for the cozy sweater I'd left lying on the red blanket. I motioned to Liv that I was going to head back, and wordlessly we clomped our way out of the fizzy surf and onto the dry sand.

“How long have you thought this?” I asked once we'd plopped down on the blanket, passing a towel back and forth in a fruitless effort to de-sand our feet.

“I think the first time I really thought about it was during our trip to Greece,” Liv answered. This kind of coincidence wasn't unusual for Liv and me, one of us bringing up a topic the other had been silently musing about. Liv had taken the words out of my mouth so often that I'd long since stopped commenting on it.

“Everyone kept asking where we were from and you always said California, instead of Virginia.” Liv laughed kindly at the memory. “It was cute.”

“Yeah, but we'd lived there for three years, and I was staying.”

“I know, I know, don't get defensive. I could tell that you
did
feel like you were from California, that you felt like you belonged here. I remember thinking to myself, why does Emma love California so much? I liked Berkeley, but you always felt more at home here than I did. You never even considered coming back east. Then I remembered one of the only times I heard you bring up your dad. It was junior year of high school, when you drank tequila for the first time and told me your dad lived in California and you wanted to find him
someday. I'm not saying it was a conscious decision, but those two events, they're obviously connected.”

“Maybe you're right.” The sun, which had been providing spotty warmth, was now firmly planted behind a huge cumulus cloud. I scanned the horizon, noticing how gray the ocean looked.

“We missed our flight and we're stuck on a cold beach, with no idea what to do next,” I mused. “And I've been looking for my birth father my whole life and didn't even know it. And it turned out that he wasn't even my dad. Things are really looking up.”

“You know what's funny, Emma?” Liv said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You're not going to believe this, but I envied your home life growing up.”

I barked out a short laugh. “You're right, I don't believe that for a second. Did you want an excuse for a defiant tattoo or something?”

“I knew you and your mom didn't get along, but I always really liked her. She seemed to treat you like a real person, not like a kid. I remember I used to go over to your house and she would be heading out for the night to some fund-raiser or whatever, and she would ask what your plans were, like you were equals. It was cool.”

“I guess the freedom was nice,” I said, not really wanting to go into it.

“It was. And remember all those nights we would pile up sheets and blankets on the porch and talk all night?”

“Of course.” Liv and I would grab dozens of snacks, magazines, and the comfiest blankets we could find, creating a crumbly
nest to sleep in outside. We used to wake up feeling queasy, both from the excessive quantity of lime-flavored chips we'd consumed and from the specificity of the
Cosmo
tips on how to give a holiday-themed blow job we'd read. Still, those were some of my favorite nights of high school. If my mom cared about the noise or the damage to her bed linens, she never mentioned it.

“That
was
fun,” I agreed. “I'd say the porch sleepovers make up for lying about the identity of my father, wouldn't you?”

Liv laughed a little and stood up, wiping the sand off her clothes.

Without discussion, we packed up our picnic. While she folded the blanket, I made a run for the trash can down the beach. We walked back to the car, the wind whipping our backs. The sun was officially gone.

“Plus, you had that attic room. I loved that room.”

“I liked that room, too. I liked that entire house,” I said. “Although living with Caro in it was pretty challenging. To be honest, I never really understood why we moved there in the first place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, at the time she had just started at the lobby; she was at the bottom of the totem pole. We were still pinching pennies, still eating spaghetti most nights. I know we were Italian, but still. I never really understood how we could afford that house, or why she chose to spend the little money we did have on the mortgage. After all, she hated the suburbs. We were much happier in D.C. Of course,” I added diplomatically, “I wouldn't have met you if we hadn't moved, so I wouldn't change a thing.”

Liv didn't seem to hear my compliment. I looked at her over the top of the rental car. She was frozen at the driver's side, keys in hand, caught in an expression of puzzlement.

“That's it,” she said faintly, then with more conviction, “Emma, that's it!”

“What is?” I asked nervously.

“That's how we're going to find your dad!” She let everything in her hands go and ran over to my side of the car, dropping the blanket clean on the ground.

“What do you mean?” I said, almost scared by her level of enthusiasm. Her hands were gripping my arms so hard she was practically cutting off my circulation, and she was standing so far on her tiptoes that we were almost the same height.

“That's how Caro got the house! It has to be.”

“How?” I was struggling both to keep up with her train of thought and to loosen her viselike grip on my arms.

She took a deep breath and settled back on her feet. “What if it was your dad?”

“What was?”

Liv spoke slowly. “What if it was your dad who bought the house?” She paused to allow the notion to sink in. “It makes perfect sense. You're totally right: Caro could never have afforded that house when she first got out of school and started a new job. Plus, she moved out right after you went to college. She hated it there, you're right. I'll bet you anything it was your dad, not Hunter, but your real dad, who bought it for you guys, so you could have someplace nice to live.” She paused again, letting the idea fully sink in.

“And do you know what that means?”

I shook my head, starting to feel heady with excitement, realizing how much sense she was making.

“That means all we have to do is figure out whose name was on the deed at the time you lived there and that's him. That's your dad.”

The answer had been in front of me the whole time, but I couldn't see it. Like I'd been searching frantically for my glasses for the last twenty minutes, and then saw them resting plainly on top of the book I'd been reading. How did Caro buy that house, and why? It was a question I'd wondered so many times. I saw it now, plain as day. My father must have bought it for us. There was no other plausible explanation. Without a doubt, I knew that Liv was right. I also knew one other thing with absolute and utter certainty. That was how I was going to find him.

CHAPTER 22

T
he day we moved to the house on Redwood Lane, it was Labor Day weekend, the time of year when Virginia inevitably tips from summer to fall. No matter how hot the summer, every year during the first week of September, the heavy Virginia humidity is swept away by a chilly, slightly ominous wind that settles comfortably in the sky. As the months pass, the chill digs in deeper and it gets colder and darker until winter. That day in September, however, it was perfect—cool, crisp, and gorgeous.

Caro hired the moving company Starving Student Movers. They seemed like okay guys when they got there, but I had my first clue that they might be less than reputable when I asked the one taking apart my bedroom furniture where he went to school and he looked at me blankly before hustling my scratched wooden desk chair
down the stairs. Starving Students, my ass. When Caro realized at the end of the day that one large box was missing from our belongings, and started tearing through the rest of the boxes, I abandoned my job of unpacking the pots and pans.

“It's fine, Mom, it wasn't that much stuff,” I said, following her around as she deftly sliced through boxes like a seasoned surgeon. “It was only the old wooden jewelry box with barely anything in it, some pictures you don't even like, and the video camera.”

The fact that Caro was so upset about the theft frightened me even more than the missing box itself. It gave credence to the seriousness of the situation, made the nonstudent movers seem more like dangerous villains than the harmless stoners they probably were. I wanted the whole thing forgotten, labeled an innocent mistake. After all, I'd gotten them lunch at Wendy's. Who, except the truly evil, would steal from someone who brought them a Frosty?

“Get in the car,” she said, ignoring my attempts to calm her down and grabbing the keys off the top of an unopened box. “We're getting that video camera.”

The video camera in question was, at the time, my one and only prized possession. When I was younger, I spent long summer days writing, directing, and videotaping one-woman versions of various productions. At age fourteen, I still loved the camera and was randomly inspired by certain things that I thought were artistic but were mostly nauseatingly trite. Like when I set up the camera to record the day the cherry blossoms bloomed in D.C.'s Tidal Basin. I figured I'd fast-forward the footage later and it would be a kind of nature flipbook. It turned out to be the most boring eight hours of
tape ever recorded, which I quit screening after approximately fourteen minutes.

As uncomfortable as the whole situation made me, I headed to the passenger seat without a word. I hugged tight to the knowledge that my mom knew how important the camera was to me.

We spent the next three hours driving from one pawnshop to the next, making efficient stops at places called Fistful of Pesos and Hock-o Bell. It was at the simply put Cash 'n Hand where we found our stolen items. By the time we got to Cash 'n Hand, I knew the drill. I headed straight to the electronics section, ignoring the muddy-complexioned teens staring longingly at the guitars and the indiscernibly aged men with streaky-gray ponytails leaning against the glass case.

“This is it!” I shouted when I found our camera in the corner, hastily propped on a tripod. I mentally congratulated myself on having dragged my book bag on the ground for several blocks the previous summer before realizing the camera was inside, giving it a distinctive metallic scratch.

My mom didn't seem to hear me, though; she was standing frozen at the jewelry counter. She pointed to the rings and the man behind the counter dug through the lowest shelf, his face locked in a grimace, before pulling out a pearl ring I'd never seen before. The man handed it to her, after shooting her an accusatory glance and rubbing his arm dramatically. My mom ignored him and slid on the ring, which appeared to fit perfectly.

I grabbed the camera and approached the counter, triumphantly announcing that I'd found it and it was definitely ours. The man, still holding his elbow as if he'd been injured at war,
looked skeptical, and with an unfriendly glint in his squinty brown eyes, asked how the hell I could tell.

“Open it up,” I suggested, gambling that the thieves hadn't thought to remove the evidence. “If the tape inside is me describing the life cycle of the cherry blossom, it's ours.”

In the end, that was how we proved it. When the tape inside featured my pseudo-artsy voice explaining that the trees bloom
a mere week a year
, there wasn't much they could do but call the cops and let us point out our belongings.

I always thought that story was the most important thing to remember about moving day, that unexpectedly bizarre day in our lives. But what if it was something else as well? What if that was the day we moved into the house my father bought for us?

After Liv figured out that my father's name could likely be found on the deed to the house, we quickly connected the dots. We could use Westlaw, the legal search engine, to track the deed transfers over time and figure out who owned it when Caro and I lived there. The search tool was typically used to identify easements or the identities of bona fide purchasers in foreclosure cases, but it would work for our purposes as well. We would simply type in the address and search for the relevant year. First, however, we would need a law library.

Which was how we found ourselves standing in front of a heavy wooden door on the Berkeley campus, having traversed San Francisco, crossed the Bay Bridge, and weaved through the East Bay to get there.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said anemically, a question we both knew was a formality. We'd come this far. We weren't about to turn back now.

“No, but it's the best one we've got,” Liv answered. I couldn't believe what we were about to do, but she was right. In order to access Westlaw, and the all-powerful legal database of home listings, we'd need a user name and password. Ever since Tom Cruise showed the world how easy it was to take down corrupt lawyers in
The Firm
, law firms had become notoriously paranoid about privacy and now required their lawyers to use matter numbers, which could be billed back to specific cases and clients, to get any information off Westlaw. Although we of course had user names, neither Liv nor I was willing to get disbarred for this mission, so we couldn't use an active case number to log on. We did, however, know one person who could use his Westlaw account for anything he damn well pleased. We knew a law professor.

When STB swung open the door I was intimidated by his handsome, shit-eating grin. He looked like he was trying out for the role of sexy, disheveled professor in a cheesy network sitcom, with his blazer with the patches on the sleeves and his white collared shirt. I smugly noted the overly shiny loafers he wore, which any decent costume designer probably would have replaced with Vans so he wouldn't look like he was trying quite so hard.

I don't have anything to prove to this guy, I reminded myself. It was he who had everything to prove to me. Well, to Liv, but to me by extension. This awareness gave me the burst of confidence I needed to plunge forward with my plan and explain the situation.

“Really, we don't need much from you, besides your Westlaw log-in. I swear we're not stalking anyone or doing any illegal searches—we need to check out some relatively harmless information, which we think will lead us to my dad, but without a client to bill the matter to, we can't use our work passwords.”

I wrapped up my brief explanation from the same awkward position I'd been in since we entered the office, sitting precariously close to the edge of a leather wing chair he'd offered me, while he comfortably swiveled back and forth at his desk and Liv sat with her legs tucked under her on the tan love seat in the corner. She looked far too comfortable in STB's presence for my taste. But what could I say? It was my fault we were there in the first place.

Tony agreed to my request almost at once, and I couldn't help but wonder if this was because of the ancient dirt I had on him. I searched for clues that he was still with Professor Gray, while also examining the way he communicated with Liv. It wasn't that I was worried about her getting involved with him again, but that wouldn't stop the creep from trying.

We followed Tony into a small professors-only research lab down the hall that had sleek MacBook Pros and comfortable chairs. Tony offered us a fancy coffee from the Nespresso, but I declined, ready to get started.

As soon as he logged on, he moved out of the way and let me take his place at the keyboard. As I scrolled and found the proper database, I heard him and Liv wander away, their chatting voices quickly fading away. No doubt they were headed back to his office, presumably to give me some privacy. But it wouldn't have mattered if they'd
been talking directly into my ear; I wouldn't have heard them. It was as if my brain could only take so much stimulation and the task at hand was currently occupying one hundred percent of my senses.

I stared at the search screen, unsure of whether I was ready to take the final step in my journey. After this, we were officially out of ideas. Maybe I was better off not looking, and then the possibility of discovery could always be out there. Or maybe it was better not knowing at all. I hesitated.

Then, out of the blue, a memory popped into my head: the one time I told Val about my birth father. We'd been drinking Sancerre on a Sunday afternoon in my front yard and the buzz I felt gave me the freedom to share this piece of information, which I normally wouldn't have divulged. She responded by remarking that it kind of sucked not to know who he was, but wouldn't it be rad if he was some random famous guy? She went on an amusing rant about my dad as a potential rock star, whose concert we might have attended without even knowing it. She urged me to find him so we could get backstage passes for whatever awesome band he was opening for. I guess even in our fantasy hypothetical we were willing to accept that at his age, he wouldn't be headlining. I remember looking at her in disbelief and thinking how amazing it would be to
be
her, to automatically jump to the positive, unrealistic scenario in your head, before even considering any of the soul-crushing ones.

It was the memory of that afternoon, and Val's perspective on life, that made me find the right search box for house deeds and tentatively type in my home address. Val Baby did exactly what she wanted and assumed everything would turn out fabulously.
As a result, it usually did. I wanted to think like her, just for a second. I wanted to be falsely optimistic, to go for what I wanted, consequences be damned. WWVBD? There was no question in my mind that she'd run the search without hesitation. I pressed enter.