Wilde Lake(85)

“Did she ever hold me?” Lu asks her father. “Even once?”

“I’m sure she must have,” he says. His words are less than persuasive.

Fifteen years. Her mother lived for fifteen years after Lu was born. Yet—she was not inclined to be Lu’s mother. Her father gave his children a myth in place of a parent. Two different myths. For young AJ, the story, eventually, was that the woman who had become increasingly unreliable around him had gone into a hospital and never come home. For Lu, it was even simpler. This beautiful woman gave birth to you and now she’s gone. If this is grief, it’s an odd kind of grief, mourning the loss of a lie, the end of a fantasy. Lu might as well cry for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

She wondered if AJ ever confided in Noel. The boy with the absent father had zeroed in on their missing mother that very first day. Norma Talmadge, he had said right before he broke the desk. Where is she buried? What had come between Noel and AJ? He stopped talking to me, AJ said at his funeral. Did the others know what happened?

But Lu has no more time for her family’s mysteries. Work calls, literally. Della is trying to put out any number of fires, and Lu needs to be there, now. She goes to get dressed, frustrated. Her father’s apology was too ready, too easily given. He doesn’t believe he was in the wrong. She’s glad she knows, but it makes her feel odd about her father. Lots of people like to proclaim melodramatically that so-and-so is dead to them. Her father carried through, killing loved ones who became problematic. First he cut his ties to his own parents, then his wife, his in-laws. Why did he find it preferable to end relationships so definitively? What would happen if Lu or AJ ever disappointed him profoundly?





JUNE 27


The revelations about her mother blindside Lu, throw a long shadow over a scorching, relentless June that, after a brief retreat into jacket weather, doubles down on heat and humidity. These are vicious days, Lu thinks, in every sense. Baltimore is experiencing homicide numbers that haven’t been seen since the early days of the crack epidemic. Even Howard County’s homicides for 2015 double—to two.

Lu decides, after much back-and-forth, to take the new case, but only because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is gun-shy after the Rudy “incident.” This one is a domestic, a term she hates. Domestic violence may not be an oxymoron exactly, but the term mitigates murder, as if death at the hands of a former loved one is gentler. It’s hard to imagine a stranger doing something worse to this woman: her ex-husband, returning their nine-month-old after his weekend visit, shot the baby’s mother in the forehead when she asked for her support check. He now claims he was driven to the act by her divorce attorney’s demands. The case against him is so easy that Lu worries it is beneath her, a dunker she ought to hand off to Andi or another deputy. She would be happy to plead it out. Ah, but a man who has the ego to think he can end a person’s life because he doesn’t like the terms of their divorce also has the ego to demand “my day in court.” This phrase, my day in court, comes up so often that Lu feels as if she’s dealing with a demented bride. My day, my day, my day, my day. He believes that he is the wronged party, that all he needs is a venue to tell his story and everyone will agree he had no choice. Okay, sir, you shall have your day. In fact you might have as many as four days in court and then you will have many, many, many days in prison to think about your day.

At least the case offers a distraction, something on which to focus. Something to think about other than her mother, alive in a hospital one county over for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Fifteen years. It’s a dirge that plays in her head.

Lu’s father and the twins don’t even seem to notice the undercurrent of sadness in her, whereas AJ is unusually affectionate. He calls constantly, no matter where his travels take him. He has called almost every day since he has directed her toward this discovery. He has apologized over and over again for not telling her as soon as he knew, back in college. He also has apologized for telling her at all. According to AJ, whatever he did would have been the wrong thing at the wrong time.

“I don’t know why it came out then, when we were walking,” he says at one point. “I guess I was—overwhelmed.”

“Heck, AJ, it was probably jet lag more than anything else. You were loopy.”

She’s glad he told her. And she can’t decide what she thinks her father should have done. Obviously, she couldn’t be told when it happened. She was a newborn. At what age would she have been able to absorb the information? And what could her father have told her that wasn’t a lie? She is not a stranger to such issues: there are articles and books written for parents such as herself who have to explain the facts of life to their children, then explain why those facts don’t apply to them. When the twins were five, she began to drop hints: “You know, you weren’t in Mama’s belly.” How they laughed, thinking her droll. Of course they were in her belly. Then, last year, when they asked where babies came from, she had given them the full information, adding that they had been in another woman’s belly.

“So we had a different mama?”

“No,” she said. “I was always your mama. But my body couldn’t make a baby, so we found someone to help us.”

So far, this version has satisfied them. But the books warn to expect flare-ups later. They may ask to meet their surrogate. (They have met her, in fact, and would see her more often if she lived nearby. They know her as Miss Michelle.) If they want to meet the donor—well, good luck with that. All Lu knows about her is that she looked a lot like Adele Closter Brant, because Lu chose a light-eyed, dark-haired donor who had more in common with AJ than her. No matter—the kids came out looking like miniature Gabes. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin.