When I got back to the house Alouette was on the phone, as she’d been on the phone pretty much nonstop since the morning before. Thus far she had set up two job interviews, attended another, arranged for information to be mailed concerning GED testing and night classes at Delgado, Xavier and UNO, and spoken with an MHMR counselor about vocational programs. Now she was talking to Richard Garces about outpatient therapy and local support groups.
Not long after I came in, she hung up, scribbled one final note and shut the notebook.
“How’d it go?”
I shrugged.
“That bad, huh?”
“Maybe a little worse.”
“I’m sorry.”
So of course I had to laugh, then explain why.
“Did you know Richard was a hippie? And a junkie? A long time ago, of course.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“Were you a hippie, Lewis? You know, wearing vests without shirts and bell-bottoms and flowers in your hair? Back in the sixties, I mean.”
“What I was in the sixties, mostly, was drunk-at least from about ‘68 on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to social movements. Or to other people, for that matter.”
“You were a bodyguard then, right?”
I looked up, surprised. Not many people knew about that. Verne had, naturally. And Walsh, because that was how we’d first met.
“I haven’t said anything before, but I know quite a bit about you, Lewis. More than you think.”
I poured tea into my cup, added milk.
“When I was in grade school I had this friend, your classic nerd type, glasses and ugly print shirts, the whole thing, but he was a computer whiz. What everybody calls a hacker now. He was really weird. Look, this is kind of a long story.”
“I’ll drink slowly.”
“And probably a dull one.”
“About me? Impossible.”
“Yeah, right. Well anyway, Cornell’s dad was an engineer with IBM or Apple or someone, and he always had these new computers around the house, products they were developing, or marketing. Cornell told me he grew up with these things as playmates instead of other kids. He thought everybody did. And he could do anything he wanted with them.
“I was twelve or thirteen. And I just decided one day that my father couldn’t really be my father. Mother was gone, I was hopelessly miserable. I couldn’t talk to him, or to anyone else in the house, and I knew there was just no way I belonged there.”
“Most children go through that at some point.”
“I know that, now. I think I kind of knew it even then. I was never lucky enough to be stupid.”
“But you had to set yourself apart.”
She nodded. “And I knew a little about you, just from things I’d heard. So I decided you had to be my father. It made a lot of sense at the time; it was the only thing that did. This was about when Cornell and I started being friends. Neither of us had ever had friends before, and I can’t remember now how it happened, but somehow he started coming over after school, spending recess and lunch hour with me. One afternoon we sneaked into this office my father had at home, though I wasn’t ever supposed to be in there, and Cornell showed me how to use the computer. If you knew how, you could dial into all kinds of information banks, he told me; you could find out almost anything you wanted to know.
“I thought about that for days. Then the next Saturday when Cornell came over-my father was at work, as usual-I told him about you. What little I knew, and a lot more I made up. And Monday he brought me this folder full of stuff. Copies of official forms, printouts of what I guess had been newspaper articles, parts of some kind of dossier the FBI had on you. That one said you killed a man.”
I nodded.
“A sniper, according to the dossier. It said he’d killed at least eight people.”
“At least.”
“You stopped working as a bodyguard after that.”
“I stopped doing much of anything. Just kind of drifted into it. Drank a lot. It was a bad time.”
“Every night I’d get out that folder and read it. It was like making constellations out of stars: just raw information, that you could fill out any way you wanted. So every night I’d look at some facts, facts I knew by heart by then, and use them to make up stories about you. Those stories became more real to me than the world around me, more real than anything else, and for a time, far more important. Though all along I knew it wasn’t true. I knew you weren’t my father.”
“And that I wasn’t a hero.”
She nodded. “And that life is just doing the things you have to do: staying alive, getting through the day, turning into your parents. Maybe I was wrong about that part, huh? Maybe there’s something more to it?”
“Maybe.”
“Can I make you another pot of tea? That has to be cold by now.”
“Only if you’ll have some too. I’m already sloshing when I walk.”
“Deal.”
We went out to the kitchen. I leaned against the sink thinking of meals I’d prepared long ago for Verne, for Vicky and Cherie, remembering their laughter, seeing their faces, as Alouette emptied the kettle, drew fresh water and put it on to boil, filled the pot with hot water from the tap.
“Transportation’s going to be the biggest problem,” she said. “I figure between work, group meetings and whatever classes I settle on, I’m going to be piling up a lot of miles. I’ll centralize what I can, find locations closer in to home. But some of it, like work and school, won’t be so easy.”
“Give it time. We’ll see. Things start working out so that you decide you need a car, I’ll match whatever money you can save up for one. And I’ll take you to a friend who has a used-car lot and owes me a few favors.”
“All right.”
She emptied the pot, measured in Earl Grey, poured water, stirred once and set it to steep under a brocade cozy Vicky had sent me from Scotland years back.
When the tea was ready, we went back into the living room. Alouette settled on the couch with her notebook, feet tucked under her. I sat in my chair with a copy of Queneau’s Zazie dans le metro. I looked up at her after a while and thought how strange this tableau, this quiet domestic scene, was for both of us. Then how very alone I had been all these years, and how good it was to have someone here again.