volunteers, organized by the day they worked and their staff assignments. There were at least thirty volunteers in the hospital at that moment. Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not do this. He just could not do this.
He left the volunteer lounge with the diaper bag on his shoulder and for the first time noticed a secretary sitting at the makeshift desk outside. “Dr. Prescott,” she said, smiling up at him.
He did not question how she knew his name; many people at the hospital had heard about the wunderkind of cardiac surgery. “Have you seen a baby?” he said.
The woman pointed down the hall. “Dawn had him, last I saw. She took him to the cafeteria. They didn’t need her so badly in ambulatory care today.”
Nicholas heard Max’s laughter before he saw him. Beyond the thick line of residents and nurses and sullen hospital visitors waiting to be served, he spotted his son’s spiky black hair through hazy red cubes of jello. When he reached the table where a candy striper was bouncing Max on her knee, he dropped the diaper bag. The girl was feeding his three-month-old son an ice cream bar.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled, grabbing his son away. Max reached his hand toward the ice cream, but then realized his father had returned and burrowed his sticky face into the neck of Nicholas’s scrubs.
“You must be Dr. Prescott,” the girl said, unruffled. “I’m Dawn. I’ve been with Max since noon.” She opened the diaper bag and held up the one bottle Nicholas had brought to the hospital, now bone dry. “He finished this at ten this morning, you know,” she chided. “I had to take him to the milk bank.”
Nicholas had a fleeting image of Holsteins, wearing pearls and cat’s-eye glasses, acting as tellers and counting out cash. “The milk bank,” he repeated, and then he remembered. In the preemie pediatric ward, new mothers pumped their own milk for strangers’ babies born too early.
He assessed the girl again. She was smart enough to find food for Max; hell, she had even known he was hungry, which he couldn’t tell for sure. He sat down across from her at the table, and she folded the remains of the ice cream sandwich into a napkin. “He liked it,” she said defensively. “A little bit can’t hurt him, not once he’s hit tdia?€†hree months.”
Nicholas stared at her. “How do you know these things?” he asked. Dawn looked at him as if he were crazy. Nicholas leaned forward conspiratorially. “How much do you make for candy striping?”
“Money? We don’t make money. That’s why we’re called volunteers.”
Nicholas grabbed her hand. “If you come back tomorrow, I’ll pay you. Four bucks an hour, if you’ll watch Max.”
“I don’t candy-stripe on Thursdays. Only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have band on Thursdays.”
“Surely,” Nicholas said, “you have friends.”
Dawn stood up and shied away from the two of them. Nicholas held his hand out in the air as if that might stop her. He wondered what he looked like through her eyes: a weary, mussed surgeon, sweaty and wild-eyed, who probably wasn’t even holding his baby the right way. He wondered what
For a second, Nicholas thought he was going to lose control. He saw himself breaking down, his face in his hands, sobbing. He saw Max rolling to the floor and striking his head on the beveled edge of the chair. He saw his career destroyed, all his colleagues turning their heads away in embarrassment. His only salvation was the girl in front of him, an angel half his age. “Please,” he murmured to Dawn. “You don’t understand what it’s like.”
Dawn held her arms out for Max and tugged the diaper bag onto her thin shoulder. She put her hand on the back of Nicholas’s neck. The hand was gloriously cool, like a waterfall, and gentle as a breath. “Five bucks,” she said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”
chapter 23
Eddie Savoy burst out of the door at that point, knocking it off its hinges. “Flan-man!” he yelled, wrapping Jake in a bear hug. They broke away and did some funny handshake that looked like two birds mating.
Jake introduced me to Eddie Savoy. “Paige,” he said, “me and Eddie were in the war together.”
“The war,” I repeated.
“The Gulf War,” Eddie said proudly. His voice was as rough as a grindstone.
I turned to Jake. The Gulf War? He had been in the army? The sun slanted off his cheekbones and lightened his eyes so that they fonurnedv›‹ jake='Jake' i='I' how='how' had='had' flanagan='Flanagan' about='about'›
When I told Jake about leaving Nicholas and Max, and then about wanting to find my mother, I’d expected him to be surprised -maybe even angry, since I’d been telling him all those years that my mother had died. But Jake just smiled at me. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time.” I could tell by the brush of his hands that he had known all along. He told me he had a friend who might be able to help, and then he asked one of his mechanics to watch the station.
Eddie Savoy was a private investigator. He’d been getting started in the business, working as a lackey for another detective, and then he’d joined the army when the war broke out in the Persian Gulf. When he came back he felt he’d had enough of taking orders; he started his own agency.
He led us into a small room that looked as if it had been a meat storage refrigerator in a different life. We sat on the floor on tasseled Indian cushions, and Eddie sat across from us, behind a low parsons bench. “Hate chairs,” he explained. “They do things to my back.”
He was not much older than Jake, but his hair was completely white. It had been shaved in a crew cut and stood away from his scalp as if each individual piece was very frightened. He had no mustache but the beginnings of a beard, which also seemed to stick straight out from his chin. He reminded me of a tennis ball. “So you haven’t seen your ma for twenty years,” he said, tugging the old wedding photo from my hand.
“No,” I said, “and I’ve never tried to find her before.” I leaned closer. “Do I have a chance?”
Eddie leaned back and pulled a cigarette out of his sleeve. He struck a match against his low desk and drew in deeply. When he spoke, his words came out in smoke. “Your mother,” he said to me, “did not disappear off the face of the earth.”
Eddie told me it was all in the numbers. You couldn’t escape your numbers, not for that long a time. Social Security, Registry of Motor Vehicles, school records, work records. Even if people intentionally changed their identity, eventually they’d collect a pension or welfare, or file taxes, and the numbers would lead you to them. Eddie told me how the previous week he’d found in half a day the kid a mother gave up for adoption.
“What if she’s changed her Social Security number?” I said. “What if her name isn’t May anymore?”
Eddie smirked. “If you change your Social Security number, it’s recorded as being changed. And the address and age of the person changing the number is listed too. You can’t just walk in and get someone else’s, either. So if your mother is using someone else’s number-say her own mom’s-we’ll still be able to find her.”
Eddie took down the family history that I knew. He was particularly concerned about genetic illnesses, because he had just wrapped up a missing persons case that involved diabetes. “This woman’s whole family has the sugar,” he says, “so I chase her for three years and I know she’s in Maine, but I can’t get the exact location. And then I figure she’s about the age all her relatives start dying. So I call up eveiv ‘€†ry hospital in Maine and see what patients have the sugar. Sure enough, there she is, getting her last rites.”
I swallowed, and Eddie reached across the table and took my hand. His skin felt like a snake’s. “It’s very difficult to disappear,” he said. “It’s all a matter of public records. The hardest people to find are the ones who live in tenements, because they move around a lot. But then you get them through welfare.”
I had an image of my mother on welfare, living on the streets, and I winced. “What if my mother isn’t my mother anymore?” I asked. “It’s been twenty years. What if she’s found a new identity?”
