Goodnight Beautiful(69)
“Did anyone accompany you to New York?”
I laugh. “Yeah, right. Like who? The only friend I had was Linda, and even if her son hadn’t applied for that restraining order, the agency would never have given me permission to take her to New York.” In Penn Station I made my way through a throng of grouchy people to the top floor, where a man in a wrinkled suit who smelled like cigarettes was holding a sign with my name on it. He led me to a black car, two warm bottles of Poland Spring water stuck into the seat pocket in front of me.
“Their offices were on Park Avenue, and a pretty young woman led me to a conference room.” There was a tray of bagels and raw fish, strawberries with their stems already removed. Someone knocked, and then four people in suits marched in, sat in a U shape around me, and showed me photographs of a woman with wild red curls and eyeglasses with bright blue frames. “They told me she had given birth to me fifty-one years ago at a hospital outside Chicago, Illinois.”
“I read her account of the pregnancy and birth,” Dr. Statler says. “Quite traumatic.” My father was some boy she met on a family vacation to the Dominican Republic, whose last name she never asked for. She was seventeen and the top of her class, and her father would not allow it. Arrangements and announcements were made. “Boarding school,” they called it. There were five other girls when she arrived. The oldest girl was twenty-two, the youngest fourteen, all equally well connected. She labored alone for nearly ten hours and was allowed to see me a few times a day for the next six days, before the nice couple from Indiana could make preparations to come for me.
“It devastated her,” Dr. Statler says. “Having to give you away. But she had no say in the matter.” He places the notebook on his lap and folds his hands. “What was it like for you, learning all of this?”
“It finally made sense,” I say. “When my father said I wasn’t his. I wasn’t either of theirs. But I was mostly excited to meet her. Fifty-one years old and a chance to be part of a family.”
“And?”
“They told me she’d died.” I remember the shock when the woman said this, the way I pinched my palm to stop the tears. “She’d been looking for me her whole life, but she had to die to find me. That’s how the attorney explained it to me, at least. It was only after she died that the court would agree to unseal the adoption papers. They had to, in order to let me know that she’d named me the sole heir of the Lawrence family estate.”
“Ninety-two million dollars, it says here.”
“And the family home in Chestnut Hill, New York,” I say. “I’d been out of work for a few months. I didn’t know what else to do, and so I moved here, into her house.” I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering opening the front door and walking into the house for the first time, everything as she had left it, dust on the furniture and accumulating in the corners.
“She wrote you letters.” Dr. Statler pulls something from between the pages of his notebook: one of her pale-yellow envelopes, a letter inside, written in handwriting I’ve come to adore.
“Two hundred and three of them,” I say. “She was determined that I’d know her someday, as well as the family I came from. They were complicated people.” I keep my eyes on the ground. “So was she.”
An alarm beeps twice. Dr. Statler shifts in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time.”
“We are?” I ask.
“Yes, it’s time for me to get some sleep.”
As he reaches to silence the alarm, I see the time. It’s nearly one in the morning. “I’m sorry,” I say, mortified that I’ve kept him up this late. “I lost track of time.” I stand and hurry to the door.
“Come back tomorrow morning, Albert,” Dr. Statler says as I open the door. “Ten a.m. We’ll pick up where we left off. Would you like me to write that down?”
“No,” I say. “Ten a.m. I’ll remember.” I step into the hall. “Good night, Dr. Statler.”
He smiles at me, the warmest smile I think I’ve ever seen. “Good night, beautiful.”
Chapter 50
Franklin Sheehy sighs dramatically on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not convinced that volunteering at an old folks’ home qualifies as suspicious, Annie. And if it is, well, you’ll have to excuse me, as I need to get down to Catholic Charities to arrest my seventy-nine-year-old mother.”
Annie closes her eyes, envisioning pinning him to the wall by his neck. “I’m not suggesting that volunteering, as a concept, is suspicious, Franklin,” she says, measured. “But it’s not just that.”
“What else is it?” he asks.
“The office space,” she says. “It was awfully generous, what he did for Sam. Like, to a fault.”
“Generous to a fault?” Sheehy says. “You’ve been in the city too long, Ms. Potter. You’ve forgotten that people are nice.”
That’s the same thing Sam said, when she first expressed her skepticism about Albert Bitterman and his “generous” offer. Annie was up most of the night, digging out the lease again and combing through her texts with Sam, trying to piece together what she knew about him. Albert Bitterman Jr., new owner of the historic Lawrence House.