Until I Find You

boyfriend—apparently on the subject of Michele’s commitment to him, or lack thereof. Michele had never lived with anyone. To her old-fashioned thinking, cohabitation meant marriage and children; living with someone wasn’t supposed to be an experiment. But because Jack mentioned her name—to an audience of millions—Michele’s sort-of boyfriend insisted that they live together. Michele gave in, though she stopped short of marriage and children.

He was a fellow doctor, an internist—a friend of a friend she’d known in medical school. They were very much (perhaps too much) alike, she wrote.

“Everything in Dr. Maher’s letter,” Dr. Garcia said, when she’d finished reading it, “suggests a pragmatism unlike your approach to anything in this world, Jack.”

But Jack had come away with something a little different from Michele’s letter—for starters, it hadn’t worked out with the live-in boyfriend. (“A year of commitment, in which I’ve never felt so uncommitted,” as Michele put it.) She was living alone again; she had no boyfriend. She was finally free to congratulate Jack for winning the Oscar, and to suggest that—were he ever to find himself in the Boston area—they should meet for lunch.

“I realize that you don’t get nominated for an Oscar every year,” Michele wrote. “Moreover, should you ever go back to the Academy Awards, I wouldn’t expect you to consider asking me to go with you again. But, in retrospect, I might have spared myself an unhappy year by saying yes to you the first time.”

“There’s more than a hint of a come-on in the ‘in retrospect’ part, isn’t there?” Dr. Garcia commented. (This was not phrased as a question she expected Jack to answer; this was simply Dr. Garcia’s way of presuming his agreement.)

“Spater—vielleicht,” Michele’s letter concluded.

“You’ll have to help me with the German,” Dr. Garcia said, almost as an afterthought.

“ ‘Later—perhaps,’ ” Jack translated.

“Hmm.” (This was Dr. Garcia’s way of downplaying the importance of something.)

“I could come back from Halifax via Boston,” he suggested.

“How old is Michele—thirty-five, thirty-six?” Dr. Garcia asked, as if she didn’t know.

“Yes, she’s my age,” Jack replied.

“Most doctors are workaholics,” Dr. Garcia said, “but, like any woman her age, Michele’s clock is ticking.”

He should have told Dr. Garcia about Michele’s letter in chronological order, Jack was thinking, but he didn’t say anything.

“On the other hand, she doesn’t exactly sound like a star-fucker, does she?” Dr. Garcia said.

“She was just suggesting lunch,” Jack said.

“Hmm.”

There were no new photographs in Dr. Garcia’s office; there hadn’t been any new photos in the three years he’d been her patient. But there wasn’t any room for new ones, not unless she threw some of the old ones away.

“Call me from Halifax if you get in trouble, Jack.”

“I won’t get in any trouble,” he told her.

Dr. Garcia took a good look at the sky-blue, businesslike letterhead on Michele’s stationery before handing the letter back to him. “Call me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, then,” she said. “I can almost guarantee you, Jack—you’re going to get in trouble there.”

At the time, in the chronological-order part of his life story as told to Dr. Garcia, he was up to what Miss Wurtz called “the second time in Amsterdam.” Understandably, he was in no hurry to relate that part of his life story to the doctor. Jack thought that a little trip to Halifax, with a stopover in Boston on the way back, might do him a world of good.

When he came out into the waiting room, Jack was distracted by a woman—one of the young mothers who was a regular patient of Dr. Garcia’s. She commenced to scream the second she saw him. (Jack hated it when that happened.)

The receptionist quickly led him to the Montana Avenue exit. Jack saw that another young mother, or the screaming woman’s friend or nanny, was trying to comfort the screamer, whose wailing had frightened the children; some of the kids were crying.

He got into his Audi and tucked Michele Maher’s letter under the sun visor on the driver’s side. He was approaching the intersection of Montana Avenue and Fourth Street when Lucy’s face appeared in his rearview mirror. Jack almost had an accident when she said, “I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant.”

He still didn’t get it. Jack knew only that he’d last seen her in Dr. Garcia’s waiting room, but he didn’t know who she was. (The nanny with groupie potential, as he’d thought of her.)

“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the strange girl said. “I can’t believe you keep buying Audis, and they’re always silver!”

“Lucy?” Jack said.

“It took you long enough,” she told him, “but I didn’t have any tits when you met me. I guess it’s understandable that you didn’t recognize me.”

An unfortunate coincidence, he realized. Lucy wasn’t anyone’s nanny; like Jack, she was one of Dr. Garcia’s patients. (One of the less stable ones, he would soon discover.)

It was hard to see what faint resemblance she still bore to the worried but courageous little four-year-old Jack had picked up in his arms at Stan’s. Some of her courage had remained, or it had hardened into something else. Now in her late teens, Lucy wasn’t worried about anything—not anymore.

She had dead-calm, unblinking eyes—suggesting the steely recklessness of a car thief. If you dared her to do it—or bet her five bucks that she couldn’t—she would drive foot-to-the-floor through every red light on Wilshire Boulevard, all the way from Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. Unless she got broadsided in Brentwood, or shot by a cop in Westwood Village, there’d be no stopping her—her bare left arm would be lolling out the window, giving everyone the finger the whole way.

Jack turned right on Ocean Avenue and pulled the Audi to the curb. “I think you better get out of the car, Lucy,” he said.

“I’ll take off all my clothes before you can get me out of the backseat,” the girl told him.

Jack held the steering wheel in both hands, looking at Lucy in his rearview mirror. She was wearing a pink tank top—barely more than a sports bra—and black Puma running shorts, like a jogger. Jack knew she could take off everything she was wearing in the time it would take him to get out of the driver’s seat and open the back door.

“What do you want, Lucy?” he asked her.

“Let’s go to your house,” she said. “I know where you live, and I got a helluva story to tell you.”

“You know where I live?” he asked the girl.

“My mom and I drive by your house all the time,” she told him. “But we never see you. I guess you’re not there much or something.”

“Let’s just talk in the car,” Jack suggested.

“It’s kind of a long story,” the girl explained. In the rearview mirror, he could see that she was wriggling her running shorts down over her hips. Her thong was pink; it didn’t look as if it would be comfortable to run in.

“Please pull your shorts up,” he said. “We’ll go to my house.”

She was wearing dirty running shoes with those short socks that all the kids seemed to like—the kind that didn’t even cover your ankles. She walked all over Jack’s house on the balls of her feet, as if she were imitating Mr. Ramsey—or else she was too restless to sit down. Jack followed her around like a dog; it was as if they were in Lucy’s house and she was in charge.

“When you head-butted my dad, that was a life-changing moment,” Lucy told him. “That was when my mom decided she’d had enough of him. I remember she screamed at him all the way home. They would’ve been divorced before breakfast the next morning, if my mom could’ve arranged it.”