For fifteen years, every letter that Ravi Milan received was from his son. If the address was handwritten, or the sender’s name unfamiliar, or if the letter was forwarded from the post office, Ravi maintained a hope, until the seal was broken, that the contents of the envelope would lead him to Edward. The letter he’d retrieved from the mailbox that June evening, postmarked New York, New York, had been no different, but he had never imagined that the news, when he finally received it, would be of his son’s death.
This letter had been followed rapidly by two others, to which Ravi had made his swift, somber, and increasingly concise replies. Then came a short period of silence. By the time he heard from Johnny again, by phone, he had been able, for some hours of the day, to put Edward out of his mind. He had a new wife to distract him, and her two lunatic Pomeranians, and the hibiscus hedge they were putting in, and, at the office, countless cases involving other people’s doomed families, including the divorce of a couple who, after spending months torturing Ravi’s answering machine with details of the other’s affairs, cocaine binges, and shopping sprees, decided that they wanted to remarry. He had all but forgotten that, in his last letter to the boy, in his grief-stricken desire to keep his son in his life, he’d written, “If you ever find yourself in Miami, I hope you’ll call.”
He recognized Johnny—no longer a boy, but a full-grown man—as soon as he entered the restaurant. Ravi was unfashionably early and was already nearing the bottom of his first Manhattan. Should he have invited him over to the house instead? He’d worried that his decision to forgo a tie was too casual—with his navy blazer, he’d chosen his gold anchor cuff links—but Johnny was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, like an American film actor from the fifties. He was also wearing earrings and an eye-catching assortment of tattoos, but there was no doubt in Ravi’s mind: he was the little boy he had loved for a short time, and had sheltered in his home, before Bonnie Michaels had run off with him and with their son.
“I thought even vegetarians ate fish these days,” Ravi said once they had dispensed with their hellos and their orders. He’d chosen a seafood place on the bay, with tanks of lobsters and rafters cobwebbed with fishing nets.
“Not this one,” Johnny said, but his smile was meant to reassure. Ravi could tell already he was a good kid. Tattoos or no, Bonnie or no, he’d done well for himself.
“So, tell me about this rock band,” Ravi said, as though Johnny were his stepson, and they were meeting for their weekly meal together. They had a lifetime to catch up on, but the conversation had settled on the present. Neither one of them seemed anxious to overturn the facts of Edward’s life and death, which had already been exhumed, examined, and buried again during their brief exchange of letters. Johnny had written that Edward—Johnny called him Teddy, an infantile name—had died of a drug overdose. This just after Bonnie—who now called herself Beatrice McNicholas—had left the town they were living in, Lintonburg, Vermont, which had followed six or seven other hamlets of similar camouflage. And this just after Johnny, in response to Edward’s questions about his father, had threatened to help find him, sending Bonnie running again. The fact that his son had wanted to know him was a sour comfort, like the taste of a red wine turned to vinegar.
In a manila envelope, Ravi had sent Johnny the mementos, carefully copied on the office machine, that had lived in a shoe box for so many years. HOUSEKEEPER SNATCHES SON? from the local section of the Herald, the question mark that had embittered Ravi more than any epithet; police reports detailing the search for the missing child Edward Michaels; and a photo of the four of them at the beach—Bonnie and Ravi in plastic beach chairs, the baby in her lap, towheaded Johnny in a diaper in the sand, their eye sockets blackened spectrally by the sun. These were the days before the faces on the milk carton, but Ravi would have tried that if he could. He had driven all over the country. (His wife, Arpita, had learned about the United States in a boarding school in Connecticut. Ravi had learned about it by searching for his son.) He had offered a reward. He had hired the best lawyers he could afford on a gardener’s salary. When that hadn’t worked, he’d become one himself. Fifteen years later, he had not found his son, but he had made a decent living furnishing divorces to disgraced American wives.
Ravi did not fail to appreciate the irony: Bonnie had left him because she was disgraced. She had never been his wife, but the day she’d discovered his dalliance with the woman who worked behind the front desk, she and the boys were gone. He’d expected her to be back in a day or two, once she’d cooled off. Bonnie had been a drinker. (He hadn’t been then, but he was now.) She had a temper. They’d go dancing in South Beach—it was the seventies, they were young—and he’d dance too close to another woman, and she’d take the boys and stay with a friend, and come back in the morning, hungover and forgiving. But this time she’d also taken Ravi’s prized family possession, his grandfather’s marble statue of Lord Krishna, no taller than a bottle of wine, with a flute raised to his lips. The heirloom had made its journey across the ocean with Ravi, and no doubt Bonnie had hocked it at some pawnshop off the highway for a few hundred bucks. With it, she had the means to move into a place of her own, and after stealing from him, she knew he wouldn’t take her back.
And now there was this irony, too: that after fighting so spitefully for Edward, the coward had abandoned him. He wondered if Bonnie, who had callously killed off Ravi long ago, knew their son was dead, and hoped she did, and hoped she blamed herself.
Ravi sucked on the ice from his vanished Manhattan. Johnny was talking about his band. Their letters had been written so hotly, as though the two men were young lovers discovering each other. Now they sat in the air-conditioned calm. What was the word? Anticlimactic. There was little that connected them, besides their grim fascination with their roles in Edward’s story. “It’s just a thing for the summer,” Johnny said. “In the fall, I’ve got other things to focus on.”
“Are you going to college?” Ravi signaled the waitress for another Manhattan.
Johnny was drinking water. He was too young to drink alcohol, but the waitress had offered him wine, and he’d declined. The tattoo circling his elbow was Sanskrit, and he was wearing one of those beaded necklaces the Hare Krishnas wore. Did the boy’s fascination, Ravi wondered, extend into the realm of his brother’s heritage? The thought appealed to Ravi’s pride, and also insulted it. Was the boy disappointed that Ravi hadn’t chosen an Indian restaurant? That he was not dressed in a kurta and turban?
“Well, no,” Johnny went on. “I’ve sort of got news. I should have told you already, but I wanted to tell you in person.”
This meant that he’d wanted to size him up, Ravi deduced. He was a cautious kid, not quick to trust. That was the result of being raised by Bonnie. Johnny whipped his napkin into his lap and said, “Ravi, you’re going to be a grandfather.”
Ravi smoothed his mustache, pressing it down with his thumb and forefinger, a habit he did not like, but now could not help. Yes, he had once loved this boy, but he was not his father! The kid had written something about searching for his own father, Marshall, who had not surprisingly turned out to be a con. Bonnie had never had anything good to say about the man, but later, Ravi had wondered if she had demonized Marshall, too, if he was out there searching for Johnny the way Ravi was searching for Edward. Okay, so the guy really was a deadbeat, and Ravi felt sorry for the kid. But what did he want from him? Did he want him to be a substitute, now that he was starting a family of his own? Ravi was no substitute for his father, and Johnny was no substitute for his son. Was it money the kid wanted?
“Congratulations,” he managed to say as he arranged an inane smile on his face. “You’re going to be a father. And not long ago you were just a boy yourself.”
“I’m going to raise the baby,” said Johnny. “But Teddy is the father.”
Ravi ceased stroking his mustache. Johnny was wearing an inane smile as well.
“Edward?”
Johnny nodded. “Edward.”
The waitress brought his drink and served their food, and it cooled in front of them. A sixteen-year-old girl was going to have his dead son’s child, and Johnny had married her in order to raise the baby. The baby was due in September. Very soon! Johnny spoke of levirate marriage, and The Laws of Manu, but Ravi wanted to know the details. Where were they going to live? When could he meet the wife? When could he meet the child? Ravi’s heart was beating so fast that he was sweating. He stood up, took off his jacket, and hung it on the back of the chair. He wanted to call Arpita. Arpita was at the Epcot Center with her sister and her nieces. Remember the talk they’d had, after they’d found out about Edward, about no one carrying on the family name? (At forty, Arpita said her dogs would be her only babies.) Well, Ravi’s son, who had been a baby when he’d last seen him, was going to have a baby! Was it possible to call the Epcot Center? Had she left the number for their hotel?
“Well,” said Johnny, “we’d like to go back to New York.”
Ravi returned to his seat. “So far away?”
“We were staying with a friend in Vermont for a while, but we’ve been forced to relocate again. My wife’s mother—she’s not too hot on the idea.”
“Hot,” Ravi said.
“She wants us to give the baby up. She thinks I’m the father.” Johnny stabbed a tomato, then, reconsidering, withdrew his fork. “Everyone does, actually. We thought she’d be more likely to support our decision if she saw that we were serious about each other, that we wanted to be good parents.”
Ravi didn’t understand. “But why not tell her it is Edward’s? Teddy’s? It is a wonderful thing.”
“She’s going to find out soon enough. But first, we want to make sure we’re . . . protected.”
Of course. It was legal advice he wanted.
“You are married, my boy, yes?”
Johnny nodded.
“Good. You are a smart boy. Now, did she give consent? Your wife’s mother?”
“No, but it was in New Jersey. You don’t need it there if the girl is pregnant.”
“Then she has no legal recourse, none whatsoever. It does not matter who the father is.”
Johnny relaxed visibly.
“Unless,” Ravi said, “she sues for custody.”
“Sues for custody? She doesn’t want the kid. She wants us to give it up for adoption.”
Ravi smiled sadly. “Not your mother-in-law, my boy. Your wife.”
Johnny was tugging on his lower lip. On the inside, beneath his youthful gums, was a tattoo Ravi could not quite read. Why on earth would anyone put a tattoo there? “Why would she want to do that?”
He was still a boy, unschooled in the depravity of the fairer sex. Ravi would die for Arpita, but he had a prenup. When he got home, he would pray to Shiva that his grandchild would be a boy.
“Against women,” said Ravi, “we cannot protect ourselves enough.”
How much did he give you?” Rooster wanted to know.
“A lot,” Johnny said. “At first I said no, but he said it would be an insult.”
“You wouldn’t wanna insult the man.”
“He said it’s for the baby.”
“It’ll be a well-diapered kid.”
Johnny was calling from the pay phone in the McDonald’s parking lot in Vero Beach, Florida, where the band was letting off steam in the Ronald McDonald playground, pelting one another with the plastic balls in the ball pit.
He had told himself he wouldn’t call Rooster, not yet. But the excitement of meeting Ravi had sent him to the phone. He needed to share it with someone.
“How are you feeling?”
“If I tell you I feel like shit, will you come back to New York?”
“You know I can’t. They think I’m talking to some guy in Cleveland.”
“Why Cleveland?”
The recording interrupted to request another quarter, and Johnny complied.
“We’re supposed to do a show there.”
“Well, cancel Cleveland and come back to New York. Ain’t nothin’ you want to see in Cleveland, baby.”
Johnny closed his eyes and imagined the month that lay before him, empty, endless. He didn’t know if he could spend thirty-one more days in the Kramaro, listening to Kram and Delph complain about Jude, or in the van, listening to Jude complain about Kram and Delph, or worst of all, listening to Eliza’s silence. He certainly couldn’t tell them that he’d met Teddy’s father (he’d told them he was going to the local Krishna temple). He couldn’t tell them that Teddy’s father had warned him to keep an eye on Eliza at all times, or that Johnny had already been doing just that.
Through the door of their Philadelphia motel room, while they thought he was sleeping, Johnny had listened to Eliza accuse Jude of accusing her of being on drugs. It had not exactly been a revelation, but Johnny had to fight the urge to jump out of bed. He’d let his guard down. He’d been distracted by Rooster. The next morning, he found his duffel bag open on the floor, and since then, when going through her suitcase and her makeup bag and her backpack, he made sure to zip them back up. He never found any drugs, but this morning he did find a drawing, folded in quarters and tucked inside her pregnancy book. It was a nude drawing of Eliza, and in the corner was Harriet’s signature, and it was so beautiful—the drawing, the girl—that he nearly confessed everything. It seemed such a waste, this pregnant body no one would ever see. He hated himself for squandering her, for using her as he was.
Now, on a bench under a palm tree, Eliza was watching the ball pit through her white-framed sunglasses.
Rooster said, “We’ll say you guys have a show to play back here. Actually, you do.”
“We do?”
“At the Pyramid. When I hang up the phone, I’m gonna set it up.”
“What if they don’t have space?”
“Johnny, Jesus, they always have space. If they don’t, someone else will. We’ll play at fuckin’ Tompkins. Do you know how crazy it is here this summer? The Missin’ Foundation don’t book fuckin’ shows. They’re just showin’ up on the street. There’s a show every night, and our fuckin’ singer is in fuckin’ Paraguay, and I’m here slam dancin’ with myself, waitin’ to croak. Where else you want to be but New York?”
Johnny pictured Rooster up there without him, throwing himself into the pit, looking for someone to spill his blood. “You’re not starting shit with anyone, are you? You know you can’t be getting into fights.”
“Who’s gonna stop me?” Rooster asked. “You?”
Jude waded out of the ball pit and sat down on the bench next to Eliza. Eliza raised a hand to shield her eyes against the sun. Johnny couldn’t hear what they were saying.
“I can’t do both, Roo. I can’t take care of you and the baby, too.”
Now Delph and Kram were drowning Ben in the ball pit. “Quit it, fag!” Their shoes lay in a pile at the edge of the chain-link fence, like the shoes in the hallway of the Krishna temple. Johnny missed the Krishna temple. He missed the smell of the subway, and Blind Jack, and his cats, whom Prudence had promised to take care of. He didn’t want to be on the run anymore. He wasn’t like his mother. He wanted things to be the way they used to be, before his mother disappeared and Teddy died and Eliza got pregnant, before Rooster got sick. He wanted to need no one.
But he’d done what he’d come to do. He’d met Teddy’s dad. He’d cased him out. Call if you need anything else, Ravi had said at the bank as he’d handed over the envelope of cash.
“Just come until the baby,” Rooster said gently. “When will you be able to come, after the baby?”
Again, the operator demanded twenty-five cents.
“Baby, when will you be able to see me, after the baby?”
We need to go back to New York,” Johnny told them.
“Why?” Jude asked. “What’s wrong?”
“We have a show at the Pyramid.”
“What about Cleveland?”
“Cleveland canceled. And you”—he pointed to Eliza—“haven’t seen a doctor in three months. And we need to find a place to live.”
“They just canceled?” Delph said.
“So the tour’s just over,” Kram said.
Eliza said, “I thought we don’t need a doctor.”
“You want me to deliver this kid in the van?” he said, forcing a smile, and even a little laugh.
“What about Di?” Jude asked. “What if we run into her? What if the doctor has to like, report to her?”
“I got it under control, Jude. I talked to a lawyer. He says we’re safe. Di can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do.”
“You talked to a lawyer?” Eliza said. “When?”
“While you guys were eating your Happy Meals. Let’s go.”
The first thing Jude wanted to do when they were back in New York was eat a bean burrito at San Loco, but Eliza wanted to go by her apartment. Not inside. She just wanted to stand on the street and look up at it. “That way I won’t run into her. It’s like, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. Or like being in the eye of the hurricane—we’re safe there.”
“Be careful,” Johnny warned them before they left Rooster’s, after they unloaded all their stuff at his place.
“Aye-aye,” Eliza said, dragging Jude out the door.
“I don’t like the way he talks to you,” Jude said finally as they boarded the uptown 1 train at Times Square. It was the middle of the day on the last Saturday in July, and about 150 degrees in the train car.
“You mean like he’s my dad?”
“I don’t like the way he treats you, either.” The car wasn’t full, but they took seats side by side. “I don’t like the way he thinks he calls all the shots.”
“Now you’re talking about the band.”
“Yeah! We make all these plans together, and then he just cuts the tour short, just like that? Without even talking about it?”
In truth, Jude didn’t mind being back in New York. He was tired of the packing and unpacking, of not knowing where he’d sleep from night to night. Johnny thrived on that—he could sleep anywhere, he’d grown up in motels—but maybe Jude was a homebody after all.
“You’d tell me, right,” Eliza asked, “if Johnny was seeing someone else?”
Jude looked at her sideways. She was wearing the Yankees shirt Les had tie-dyed for her, and the cutoff shorts she rolled down at the waist. His own shirt was like a second skin, and Eliza’s knee and elbow were glancing moistly off of his.
“Who would he be seeing?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s strange that he keeps coming up with an excuse to come back to New York? That all of a sudden he wants me to see a doctor and find us a place to live?”
“Johnny can’t be seeing anyone. He didn’t even see anyone before he was married. Not since he’s been straight edge, at least.”
“Okay,” Eliza said. “Okay.” She was fanning herself frantically with a newspaper she’d picked up.
“That was always his thing.” Jude reached for a sheet of the newspaper on the seat and crunched it into a baseball. “No one’s allowed to go anywhere near girls, and then you come along, and the rules suddenly change.” He hurled the ball at a window. It fell dully, then tumbleweeded a few feet down the aisle. He’d been carrying around this silent little orb of injustice, and when he’d finally discharged it, it sounded like an accusation. Maybe it was.
Eliza stopped fanning. She said, “The rules haven’t changed that much. He still hasn’t come anywhere near girls. At least this one.”
Jude gave her a long look. The lights flickered above as they bounced along.
“We haven’t consummated. Okay?”
Slowly the train came to a halt. Eliza’s weight bore into him, then caromed off. A few yards away, a guy in sunglasses and a leather jacket—leather in July—looked up at them, or at least Jude thought he did, as though he, too, were surprised by this news.
She hadn’t slept with Johnny. How was it possible to be so weightlessly happy when she, the bearer of this heart-lifting news, looked so miserable? She did not look relieved to have shared this truth with Jude. She looked at him as though he were responsible for her misery. As though he should have had his eyes open. He should have known.
“You haven’t?” was all Jude could say.
“And I find it insulting,” she said, “that you assumed we did.”
“Eliza, you’re married to him.”
“So you think I’d just marry anyone? I’m some helpless girl who needs a guy to take care of her?” The guy in the leather stood to exit the train, and then, apparently changing his mind, sat back down. “You think I’m some indiscriminating slut?”
“No, Eliza.” Jude unsealed his body from hers. “You’re the one who married him. Why did you, then?”
“You didn’t have to come with me, Jude. I mean, thanks, but you know, I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Fine. I won’t babysit you anymore. Sorry for being a friend.”
The next stop was Seventy-second Street, and he walked out of the car. On the street, he was greeted by the invigorating freedom of being in a new place, a corner he’d never stood on before. This, along with an irrational empowerment—she hadn’t slept with Johnny!—and his anger at her—why had she attacked him like that?—propelled him down the blistering sidewalk. He didn’t know where he was going. He remembered, now that he thought about it, that both beds in their motel room were sometimes unmade. Jude had assumed that they’d been having such ambitious and nomadic sex that they’d simply traveled from bed to bed. He was walking south, the waves of humidity carrying the smell of taxi exhaust and hose-sprayed sidewalk. And also curiosity—why hadn’t they slept together? Who hadn’t slept with whom?
He turned around and began to run. How could he just leave her like that? With the leather pervert eyeing her on the train? What if Di did see her? What if she wasn’t going home at all, but going somewhere to get a fix? He ran all the way to Riverside, then north, but when he got there, she was not standing in front of her building. He stood under the awning next door, catching his breath.
She stopped in the median at Broadway and Ninety-first. Neena was standing at the fruit stand across the street, inspecting an apple. Plastic grocery bags were looped over her arm, and nestled inside an Indian print sling, a baby clung to her stomach. Eliza decided that she would wait here on the curb for Neena to see her. She would let her decide. But she didn’t look up. Would she even recognize her, another pregnant girl on a street corner in New York? Eliza flew across the street, in front of a bike messenger and a honking bus, and stood panting before her. She slipped her sunglasses back on her head. “Hi, Neena.”
The honking had stirred the baby, who fussed in its sleep. Neena took in the whole enlarged shape of Eliza. “It’s you. Goodness, you nearly run me over.”
“I saw you across the street. It must be a big shock to see me.”
“Your mother been very worried. Very angry with me for letting you go.” Neena, weighed down by the bags and the baby, did not offer a hug. “Where you been?”
It sent a strangely warm current over her skin, her mother’s familiar worry, her housekeeper’s familiar iciness. “Vermont, Florida. Everywhere. Who’s this?” Eliza nodded at the baby, who was wiggling in its sling. The baby had the same crimson dot on its forehead as Neena, and tiny gold studs in its earlobes.
“Grandchild,” said Neena. “My son’s.”
“It’s a girl?”
“A baby girl. Bala.”
“Bala.” Eliza reached, tentatively at first, and then as though she did it all the time, to stroke the baby’s head. It had as much hair as a full-grown man, and it was as silky and warm as the spun sugar Neena used to make. Her little eyes were closed, and she looked as though she were fighting a difficult battle in her dreams. Eliza had never, ever touched a baby.
Suddenly Neena unleashed the largest smile Eliza had ever seen on her face. “She making relief,” she said, bouncing the baby a little with her hips.
Eliza withdrew her hand.
“When your baby will be born?” Neena asked. Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come.
“September.”
“September when?”
“I’m not sure,” Eliza said.
Neena made a dismissive, horsey sound. “Your mother will be glad you home. I tell her when she calls.”
“No, I don’t want her to know,” Eliza said. “Where is she? She’s not home?”
“She looking for you. In Chicago. She call at my son’s house to check if you call. I helping with the baby.”
“She’s still in Chicago? You’re not staying at my mom’s?”
“I just there to cook in the big oven and water the bonsais.”
Now Eliza could see that Neena’s blouse was wet, where the baby had clamped its mouth on one of her breasts. It was hungry. Eliza lifted the keys from the chain between her own breasts.
“No one’s staying there at all?” she asked.