Until I Find You

father explained.

“Probably when Mom was unfaithful to her,” Jack said.

“I never inquired about your mother, Jack. I only asked about you.”

There was a photograph of Jack with Miss Wurtz that time he and Claudia took her to the Toronto film festival. Miss Wurtz looked radiant, in her former-film-star attire. Claudia must have taken the picture, but there was no mistaking the way The Wurtz was smiling seductively at the camera; Caroline clearly knew that either she or Claudia would be sending the photo to William.

And there was one of Jack and Claudia, which Miss Wurtz had to have taken. Jack couldn’t remember if it was the night before the Mishima misunderstanding or the night after it. They’d successfully crashed a private party, because the bouncers had mistaken Miss Wurtz for a celebrity. In the snapshot, Claudia is looking fondly at Jack, but his eyes are elsewhere; he’s not looking at her or the camera. (Knowing Jack, he was scanning the party to see if he could spot Sonia Braga.)

“How did you find me, dear boy?” his dad asked.

“Heather found me. She called Miss Wurtz. Caroline always knows where to find me.”

“Dear Caroline,” William said, as if he’d been meaning to write her a letter. “Talk about meeting someone at the wrong time!”

“I was just in Edinburgh with Heather,” Jack told him.

“She’s a bossy little thing, isn’t she?” his dad asked.

“I love her,” Jack said.

“So do I, dear boy—so do I!”

There were more photos of Jack with Emma—for so much of his life, Emma had been there. In the Bar Marmont, around the pool at the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and in one of those private villas on the grounds of the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. There were shots of Jack holding the steering wheel of his Audi, of one Audi after another. (He knew now that Emma had snapped all of these, but he’d never paid much attention to anyone taking his picture, because it was always happening.)

There were photographs of Heather and her mother, too—some were duplicates of those photos Heather had shown Jack—and there were more skiing pictures, but most surprising was the number of times that Alice appeared in the photographs of Jack. (He wondered why his father hadn’t cut her out of the pictures; Jack would have.) And some of these photos were from Jack’s first trip to those North Sea ports, when he’d been four and was still inclined to hold his mother’s hand.

There they were on the Nyhavn, in front of Tattoo Ole’s; either Ladies’ Man Madsen or Ole himself had to have taken the picture. And in Stockholm, posing by a ship from the archipelago—it was docked at the Grand. Had Torsten Lindberg taken that one? Jack would never forget that he’d met his father, but he hadn’t known it, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol—in Oslo, where William had never slept with Ingrid Moe. But who had taken the photograph of Jack holding his mom’s hand in front of the Domkirke, the Oslo Cathedral?

From his grave, Jack would not fail to recognize the American Bar in what was now the lobby of the Hotel Torni, but which of those lesbian music students in Helsinki had snapped that shot of Jack and his mom going up the stairs? (They were always climbing the stairs, because the elevator was never working, and they were always —as they were in the snapshot—holding hands.)

Why hadn’t William Burns removed every trace of Jack’s mother from his sight?

Jack was staring so intently at the pictures from Amsterdam that he hadn’t noticed how close to him his father was standing, or that William was staring intently at his son. There was a photograph of Jack with his mother and Tattoo Theo, and another of Jack with Tattoo Peter—the great Peter de Haan, with his left leg missing below the knee. Tattoo Peter had the same slicked-back hair that Jack remembered, but in the photo he seemed more blond; Tattoo Peter had the same Woody the Woodpecker tattoo on his right biceps, too.

“Tattoo Peter was only fifteen when he stepped on that mine,” William was saying, but Jack had moved on. He was looking at himself as a four-year-old, walking with his mom in the red-light district. Cameras were not welcome there; the prostitutes didn’t want their pictures taken. Yet someone—Els or Saskia, probably—must have had a camera. Alice was smiling at the photographer as if nothing were the matter, as if nothing had ever been the matter.

“How dare you look at your mother like that?” his father asked him sharply.

“What?”

“My dear boy! She’s been dead how many years? And you still haven’t forgiven her! How dare you not forgive her? Did she blame you?”

“She shouldn’t have blamed you, either!” Jack cried.

“De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. How’s your Latin, Jack?” (William clearly knew that Jack’s Latin wasn’t strong.) “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”

“That’s a tough one,” Jack said.

“If you don’t forgive her, Jack, you’ll never have a worthwhile relationship with a woman in your life. Or have you had a worthwhile relationship that I’m unaware of? Dr. Garcia doesn’t count! Emma almost doesn’t count.” (He even knew about Dr. Garcia!)

Jack hadn’t noticed when his father had started to shiver, but William was shivering now. He paced back and forth, from the bedroom to the sitting room—and into the bedroom again, with his arms hugging his chest.

“Are you cold, Pop?” Jack asked him. He didn’t know where the “Pop” came from. (Not Billy Rainbow, thankfully—not this time.)

“What did you call me?” his dad asked.

“ ‘Pop.’ ”

“I love that!” William cried. “It’s so American! Heather calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’—you can’t call me that, too. It’s perfect that you call me ‘Pop’!”

“Okay, Pop.” Jack was thinking that his father might let him off the hook about his mom, but no such luck.

“It’s time to close the windows—it’s that time of the evening,” William was saying, his teeth chattering. Jack helped him close the windows. Although the sun hadn’t set, the lake was a darker color than before; only a few sailboats still dotted the water. His father was shaking so violently that Jack put his arms around him.

“If you can’t forgive your mother, Jack, you’ll never be free of her. It’s for your own sake, you know—for your soul. When you forgive someone who’s hurt you, it’s like escaping your skin —you’re that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.” William suddenly stopped shivering. Jack stepped a little away from him, so that he could see him better; William’s mischievous little smile was back, once more transforming him. “Uh-oh,” Jack’s father said. “Did I say skin? I didn’t say skin, did I?”

“Yes, you did,” Jack told him.

“Uh-oh,” his dad said again. He was beginning to unbutton his flannel shirt, but he unbuttoned it only halfway before pulling the shirt off—over his head.

“What’s wrong, Pop?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” William said impatiently; he was busy taking off his socks. “ ‘Skin’ is one of those triggers. I’m surprised they didn’t tell you. They can’t give me antidepressants and expect me to remember all the stupid triggers!”

On the tops of both feet, where it is painful to be tattooed, were Jack’s name and Heather’s— Jack on his father’s right foot, Heather on his left. (Since Jack couldn’t read music, he didn’t know what the notes were, but their names had been put to music.)

By now, Jack’s father had taken off his T-shirt and his corduroy trousers, too. In a pair of striped boxer shorts, which were too big for him—and which Jack could not imagine his father buying on one of the shopping trips with Waltraut Bleibel—his dad appeared to have the body of a former bantamweight. At most, William weighed one-thirty or one-thirty-five—Jack’s old weight class. The tattoos covered his father’s sinewy body with the patina of wet newspaper.

Doc Forest’s tattoo stood out against all the music as vividly as a burn. The words, which were not as near to his heart as William would have liked them, marked the left side of his rib cage like a whiplash.