“DAD, DAD! WHAT’S UP? Who were those guys?” Eddie said, butting up against me in the hall as I headed out of the kitchen.
I could see that the rest of the kids in the living room were all sitting up straight—eyes wide, still as statues—like patients in a doctor’s waiting room about to get a painful shot. I wondered how much they had heard.
“Nobody,” I mumbled at Eddie as I gently lifted the short thirteen-year-old and moved him out of my path.
“Nobody?!” Juliana said at my back as she stood up from the couch. “Don’t lie to us, Dad. We know something’s up. Those men weren’t nobody.”
“Don’t you ‘Dad’ me,” I said, wheeling around and stabbing a finger at my eldest daughter’s surprised face.
I knew the anger that I was expressing was really just the sense of free-falling fear that I’d felt in the kitchen, growing now with each second. And yet I couldn’t stop it. I was pretty much off my rocker at that point with dread and powerlessness and confusion.
“What? You guys don’t have homework anymore?” I yelled at my wide-eyed children. “Get out of this living room and into your own rooms with your noses in your schoolbooks, now, every last one of you. And heaven help you if I hear a single sound!”
The kids stared at me in dead silence, then instantly scattered. Had they ever seen me so crazed? Even I knew I was being a jerk, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from melting down.
“Oh, Daddy, what’s wrong?” Chrissy said, suddenly next to me with tears in her eyes. “Why is everyone so upset? Why are you upset? Are you OK?”
I stared at her, at her pale-blue eyes. I swallowed, my face hot, fighting back tears. Chrissy’s father? I thought. Out of nowhere. How can this be happening?
“Daddy just has a headache, kiddo,” I lied as I knelt down and gave her a hug. “But he’s going to get some aspirin and get better, OK? Now go find your sisters.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder as I stood. It was Mary Catherine. She looked crestfallen.
“Mike, I’m so sorry about this. I was doing laundry when Joseph called from the lobby and told Bridget there were two men here to go over a case with you. She let them in, thinking they were police officers working with you. But when I came back up from the basement and they started talking about Chrissy and what adoption agency you had used, that’s when I called you.”
She balled her hands into fists as she stared down at the floor.
“I was an idiot. I should have thrown them out right then and there, but I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“It’s not your fault, Mary Catherine,” I said, placing a hand at the back of her neck. “That slick lawyer was definitely playing games, coming here out of the blue.”
“Do you think it’s true?” Mary Catherine whispered to me frantically. “Was that young man Chrissy’s father?”
“I’m not sure what’s going on, Mary Catherine,” I said as I gave her neck a squeeze and turned.
“But I’m going to get to the bottom of it right now.”
CHAPTER 38
I WENT INTO MY bedroom and closed the door. I walked over to the small closet that I’d converted into a home office. I paused and took a breath before I opened the bottom file drawer in the desk.
And almost found myself crying again.
I looked at the neat rows of folders and paper, the color-coded cellophane tabs, scanning my dead wife’s nunlike script. In addition to being the world’s greatest wife and mother, Maeve had managed all our home office stuff with an iron fist, somehow never missing a trick with the credit-card bills, the kids’ education stuff, all of our dental and medical records.
I let my fingers do the walking until I got to Chrissy’s adoption folder and pulled it out.
Everything came back to me as I slid on a pair of reading glasses and went through it. Chrissy’s birth mother’s name was Barbara Anjou, and she was a runaway from a physically and sexually abusive home in rural Pennsylvania. At the age of fourteen, she had come to New York to change her life but instead was almost immediately sucked into the world of drug addiction and prostitution.
When she found out she was pregnant at the age of eighteen, she appealed to a Catholic charity in the rough Hunts Point section of the Bronx that protected battered women. Sister Christina, the nun who ran the shelter, was a friend of the family through Seamus, and when she heard that the only thing Chrissy’s mom wanted for her daughter was to be placed with the largest, most loving family possible, she gave my wife and me a call.
I’ll never forget how happy the short, spunky, pregnant blond teenager seemed when she interviewed us for the first time at a Dunkin’ Donuts on East Tremont Avenue. She teared up as she beamed from ear to ear, know
ing that her daughter was going to have what she herself had been denied: a loving mother and father and more protective big brothers and sisters than she could count.
When we asked Barbara if she wanted an open adoption, she was vehemently against it, saying it would be better if Chrissy never knew who she was. And when we asked about the father, she said she had no idea who the father was.
Wait a second, I thought as I took off the glasses and thumbed at my eyes. That had bothered our family lawyer, Gun “Gunny” Chung, at the time, I remembered. That there was no father on the contract had really rubbed him the wrong way.