The Paternity Test (21 page)

“My folks chose well,” I said. “We’re lucky to live so close.”

“And me, I am dumb,” she said. “Living on the Cape so long, and never have I come here. We go always to Seagull Beach. Or Craigville.”

“Better sand on that side, I guess. But aren’t they pretty crowded?”

“Yes, too crowded. And there, it’s just the beach, you know. Not these.” She pointed to the field of dunes, rising on our right, dignifed behind their fence of No Trespassing placards.

When I was a kid, the dunes weren’t cordoned off for conservation, and so I had free rein to rove among them. Nothing much but sand out there, endless sun-baked piles, but I had found affinity with the scattered clumps of dune grass, improbable little tufts of green that somehow stayed alive. I was perched unstably, too: within my arid family. An alien life form, a boy who liked boys. No wonder I admired those blades of grass.

“Where I live,” said Debora. “Where I come from. Near Natal. The dunes, oh my God, they’re so high.”

“Bigger than these?”

“Oh! Like sugar mountains, miles and miles. Genipabu, it’s called. You can even ride a camel. Also, if you want, do
esquibunda
. It means to ski the hills of sand, sitting on your
bumbum
.” To translate, she smacked me on the butt. “And the men there, the
bugeiros
—the ones who have the boogies?”

“The boogies?” I said.

“The open cars . . . no roof on top . . . like jeeps.”

“Dune buggies?”

“You know them!” she cried, as if this proved a bond. “The
bugeiros
drive you out, way way up to the very top, then they ask, ‘Would you like it with emotion, or without?’ ‘Without’ is only normal driving, slow, down the dune. But ‘with emotion’—it’s
so fast
, no brake, almost crashing. Wonderful, just wonderful, it’s perfect!” She beamed with the memory, her features going burnished. “Danny, when we met? He loved so much to go. Hugging to each other when the buggy it went flying. That’s what it was like, you know. Exactly like that: flying.”

Here she paused, and seemed to find something by her feet. She bent down and scooped a bunch of sand.

“He wanted to go again,” she said. “No matter what the price. One more time. One more, with emotion.” She let the sand drop between her fingers.

“How is Danny now?” I asked. “I mean, you know, with this.” I tried making a gesture to encompass the scope of
this
, but what could stand for all the strain and oddness of our efforts? What could stand for borrowing someone’s wife?

“He took Paula to Brockton. To visit with her grandmother.” She said this as though it were an answer to my question, and then veered off, closer to the water.

“To Brockton?” I asked, following. “For a day trip, or . . . how long?”

“Not for long. But still, it’s too long.” She took a phone from her jacket pocket, and held it like an amulet. “Four times I have called today, thinking of new excuses. ‘Don’t forget her cream for rash!’ ‘Nothing to eat with walnuts!’ Just so I can ask to hear her voice.” Her eyes went big, quivery with tears. “All her life, and we have been apart three nights only.”

“Three nights? In all of Paula’s life? Are you serious?”

“Three. Or maybe two, I think. Maybe only two. But Pat,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She stroked my tensing arm. “You will be the same with yours. You’ll see.”

She must have thought I panicked at a future so kid-tethered, but truly I looked forward to that, to feeling that utmost tug. No, what made me tense was a vision of Stu, of
our
future, the way a child would bind us even tighter. Given the way he’d acted lately, it wasn’t an easy thought.

“I’m sure you’re right. I hope so,” I said. “My only comparison’s Stu. And with him, well . . .”

“But no,” she said. “To love a child, it’s much more simple, I think, than with a husband.” She knuckled a tear from one eye, then the other. “To be the parent is not a choice: you are, you always will be. And so you don’t waste time wondering ‘Should I?’”

I smiled. “Yeah, I sometimes ask that question.”

“And,” she said, “Stu? How is Stu?”

“Stu? Well, he’s . . . hard to say. Mostly ‘without emotion.’” I waited for a laugh, but none came. “Except, of course, the other day, with Danny and you, at lunch. ‘With emotion’ then, for sure. A glut.”

“Glut?” she said. “I don’t know this word.”

“Um . . . more than needed? Too much.”

Now she laughed, with no apparent pleasure. “Glut,” she said. “It sounds maybe dirty.”

“Honestly, though?” I said. I picked a stone up, skipped it over the surf. “I can’t say I really disagreed with what Stu said.”

I’d expressed the same to him, driving home from lunch: he’d been right, Danny had been a prick. Stu’s response? “Not especially useful to say that
now
.” “As if it’s useful,” I’d countered, “to totally piss off Danny? Not if you still hope to work things out.”

Stalemate
: a word more apt than I had ever noticed. Same old mate, same old stale maneuvers.

And now, when I turned to Debora, it wasn’t to defend Stu—not entirely. More like to interpret. “The things he said to Danny,” I said, “were pretty much on target. The
way
he said them: that was what was off. You don’t catch flies with vinegar, right? Stu has got a big chip on his shoulder.”

Cliché, cliché. What was I avoiding? Maybe I just couldn’t say exactly what I meant till I figured out exactly how I felt.

Okay, then: I tried to sketch an image of Stu’s childhood. Living in the shadow of his aunt’s and uncle’s deaths, of Walter’s lucky dodge from destruction.
Don’t get used to anything
, was Walter’s constant mantra.
Let yourself be beaten once, the next time’s not so bad—and that’s the kind of “better” you don’t need
. “Because of this, Stu’s fantastic as someone on your side,” I said. “Never lets an insult go unchallenged. A loyal boyfriend—and father, too, I hope. But God forbid you do something that makes him side
against
you . . .”

Debora wore a look now of private, feline pleasure, her brow lined with fligrees of wrinkle.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“
What?
”

“It’s just—sorry. What you said, it sounds so much like
Danny
.” Doubting, always doubting, she said: that was his way with everything—a hand-me-down, like Stu’s, from his parents. Running their shop in Brockton? A used-equipment business? How could they make money if they
trusted
?

Danny had been the frst of the Neumans to try college. Emphasis on
try
. Never finished. “This is why he’s nervous to be with you guys,” she said. “You talk so smooth, you have your education. I think he thinks,
What will they sneak past me?
”

“Sneak? Not a thing,” I said. “Nothing.”

“And jealous,” she said, her grin now gone. “I think. Mostly that.”

I wanted to say he had things backward: Stu and I were jealous. Jealous of him and Debora, of their family.

Debora took my forearm in her hand with great care. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The fighting, it was . . . really, I’m so sorry.”

“No,” I said, “
I
am.” I put my hand on hers. I felt a pleasant tremor of contrition.

She nodded sympathetically, and on we walked, linked, hand over hand over arm. The lovebirds we had seen before, hopping over the breakers, reappeared, their shins splashed with surf. What would they assume of me and Debora? I didn’t care. The
push, push
of waves was compelling.

“Wait,” said Debora, stopping short. “Why should we be—what did
we
do wrong?”

A wave crashed, a perfectly timed gag, and sprayed us both.

“You and I? That’s a decent question. I don’t know.”

The joke of it—our penitence, when we had done no sin; our arrogance, in taking on the blame—sent us into purging fits of laughter. Soon we were galloping arm in arm along the shore, mocking ourselves, a game of verbal Ping-Pong:
I’m
sorry . . . no,
I
am . . . no
I
...

Finally, we both flopped down, winded, at the tide line. Sand was in my shoes and socks, maybe in my lungs. Tiny trails of salt along my cheeks.

Suddenly Debora froze again. “Oh my God. What
is
that?”

“What?” I said. I tried to glance beyond her. A shiv of tail was what I glimpsed, a spiny dome of armor. “Haven’t you ever seen a horseshoe crab?”

“Yes, but it’s . . . it’s
two
of them, fighting. It scared me.”

I rose to my knees till I saw what she referred to, a reckless-looking rear-end crab collision. The crabs had the long-enduring, humbling look of artifacts: coppery and patinated, priceless. “They’re not fighting. They’re mating,” I said. “This is when they spawn. The full moon and the new moon, in May and June. Spring tide.”

“Ah,” she said. “Spring fever.” Her sprightly tone was back. “Everything in the world feels so sex.”

“No,” I said, flustered by her charming dropped
y
. “Or yes, maybe, but that’s not what ‘spring’ means, why it’s called that. ‘Spring’ as in ‘spring up.’ As in ‘leap.’ The spring tides are higher, right? The moon’s effect, I guess. So horseshoe crabs can make it onto shore, farther than normal. The females lay eggs, and then the males go after them. They do it in the nighttime, then swim back with the tide, but some are too worn out—like these two, right here. They burrow in the sand, and wait for the next tide. They have to stay moist to survive.”

Debora put her hand near the crabs but not quite touching. “How do you know so much?” she said. “You’ve written a book about it?”

“No,” I said. “My mother. She took me to see. She taught me.”

“Oh, then, a memory. This is nice.”

Actually, no, the memory was more mixed. I shared it with her.

I had been thirteen. Memorial Day weekend. My mom woke me up in the hours after midnight, saying she had a special treat to show me. We drove down 6A—silver-plated with moonlight—then parked and went wading through a sloping nook of marsh.

“Here,” she said, her smile also silvered. “Here, Pat. Look.”

The grass was shivering. But how? The night was still, windless.

Then I saw a horseshoe crab, a second . . . no,
heaps
. A huge crab ringed by a frantic scrum of smaller ones, each trying to scrabble to the top. Beyond that, another clot of crabs, then another, the whole quaking chaos of them bright with tiny clackings, as if the moonlight flashing on their shells produced a noise.

Mom explained the rite, the same as every other spring since long before the dinosaurs had roamed. “Tough to think of creatures like this mating, no?” she whispered. “They look too weird—like stones. But what choice do they have?”

Now the clacking called to mind a Geiger counter’s tick, gauging the intensity of awesome, hidden forces—the same ones that I had lately felt the frst ignition of and sensed would lead to shaming and exclusion.

“Your father brought me here,” she said. “He wasn’t your father yet. Loony, I thought—the middle of the night, middle of nowhere! But I was nuts about him. I would’ve followed him anywhere. And then,” she said. “Then I saw”—she swept her arms wide—“this.”

The pile was growing ever wilder, closer, more ecstatic, the chains of the crabs getting longer. A large crab had latched on to my boot.

“I wanted,” I told Debora, “to kick the damn thing off. Kick it as far as I could, into the ocean.”

“Why?” she said. “Scared?”

“Yeah, but not of the crab. More about me, my own life. Would I ever bring a girl out here, the way my father had? Or would I turn out to be, you know, a disappointment? Not just to my parents—to myself.”

Tenderly, she brushed away a misplaced hair from my brow. “Your parents, I think, they must have been so proud of you. So proud.”

I knew the truth to be a good deal more complicated. My parents had loved me, I was sure, but pride, in my family, was frugally disbursed, as though it were the interest on an untouchable nest egg of emotion. (If and when I got the chance, I had vowed never to stint on fatherly admiration.)

For now, though, with Debora, I chose not to explain. Instead, I told her, “Thanks. It’s sweet of you to say that, especially knowing how proud you are of Paula.” I smiled, and gazed out at the simmer of the bay, trying to shake off my web of sadness, to shake it so it wouldn’t snare her, too. But looking at her eyes—their scrambled, sullen light—I saw she had already been tainted by my mood, mournfulness as catching as a yawn.

The horseshoe crabs remained locked together, hardly moving. Debora dug some moist sand and patted it around them, as if tucking children into bed. “Paula,” she said. “She loves the beach. The sand. Always making things. ‘This is where the princess lives. This is for her ostriches.’ Ostriches! She plays so
big
, you know?”

“You want to call her? You can,” I said.

“Yes?” she said. “I should?” She opened up her phone, and showed me its start-up picture: Paula in a strawberry patch, her smile a big red smear. “Maybe just . . . or no,” she said. “Maybe I should wait. For her it can be hard, I think. Confusing. I will wait.”

Out on the water, stripers jumped like little tricks of light. A laughing gull—immature, its feathers mostly brown—drifted above, loosing its manic call.

“Don’t you ever wish,” I said, “that you could turn back time, and go back, you know, to your childhood? Back to when you hadn’t closed off any possibilities?”

Debora’s face was tipped up to the clouds, her eyes shut. “Back to my childhood? No,” she said. “So poor we were. And my mother! But somehow going back? Oh yes, I’d like to do this. Back to when I had Paula inside me.”

Her eyes were now open again but lost-looking, glassy. She buried both her fsts in the sand.

“When I came to this country, I could not do anything. Shopping, even: how is
this
thing called, and
this
and
this
? Or winter here, the snow—even
to walk
was hard! The people, they were nice, but a sad kind of nice, like, ‘Oh, she’s not so smart, we should help her.’”

She buried herself further, right up to the elbows. She looked disconcertingly dismembered.