Chapter 11
Now, this is the certified copy,” George said, tapping the manila envelope on the kitchen table without letting go of it.
“The laboratory retains the original, naturally, and a second certified copy has gone to the court along with the guardianship filing, so what you’re holding is your copy, for your records, which I’d advise you keep somewhere secure.
A fireproof box would not be excessive.”
“George,” Rognar said.
“The methodology is a standard buccal swab comparison—we did yours at the clinic in, ah, that first week, you’ll recall the cotton bud—and the result is what’s called a probability of paternity, expressed as a percentage, which for the layperson can be slightly counterintuitive, because you’ll see a number and think it means one thing when in the legal sense it means—”
“George. It’s been four minutes.”
George Barrington Jr. adjusted his reading glasses. “I like people to understand what they’re signing.”
“I understand it. You’ve done a beautiful job. Mildred would’ve handed it over and said ‘she’s yours, sign here.’”
“Mildred,” George said, with the pained expression of a man who had colleagues, “is not always as thorough as the situation warrants.”
He handed over the envelope. Then he produced three forms and a good pen, and Rognar signed all three—acknowledgment of receipt, an affidavit, and a form whose entire purpose he’d already forgotten—and made the joke he’d been holding for four minutes.
“If it says she’s not mine, do I get the crib back to the store? Because I have opinions about that crib.”
George did not laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved, which for George was a standing ovation. He capped his pen, gathered his copies, and let Rognar walk him to the door, where he paused, and Rognar braced for another four minutes.
Instead George reached into his inside pocket and took out a second envelope. Smaller. Cream-colored. No lab logo, no case number, nothing typed on it at all.
Just Rognar, in handwriting he knew.
“This isn’t part of the estate,” George said, and for once he used the correct number of words. “She left it with me to give you directly. I’ll see myself out.”
And he did.
Rognar stood in the open doorway a moment with an envelope in each hand, the big one heavy with certification and the small one weighing nothing.
Then he shut the door and carried both back to the kitchen table, and set the small one down, and opened the big one, because that was the one that had a job to do.
There wasn’t much in it. A cover sheet. A page of dense legal boilerplate. And then the page.
He found the line. There was a lot of language around it—combined paternity index, a string of numbers, the name of a laboratory in a city three hours away. But the line was one line. It had a percentage on it. The percentage was 99.99%.
He read it.
Then he read it again. God knows why. The number wasn’t going to change and he’d never once thought it would.
He’d looked at her the first day in George’s office.
The green of her, the ears, the dark hair, the two stubs of tusk coming up crooked exactly the way his had come up crooked.
His mother had a photo. And he’d known. There was no version of the last few weeks in which he’d doubted it. He’d built a crib for a certainty.
He read the percentage a third time.
The house was empty. Charlie was down, properly down, the ten-past-one nap having drifted lately to a longer afternoon one.
Deb had gone at four. There was nobody in the house at all, nobody to be easy for, nobody watching to see how Rognar Stonebreaker took a piece of news.
He’d spent a career making sure there was always somebody around.
God, he hated a house this quiet. With nobody in it he found out what his face did when he wasn’t running it.
His did nothing for a second. Then his legs gave out and he sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard, the certified copy still in his hand. He stayed there for a while. It turned out that a number he’d never doubted felt different when he saw it on paper.
99.99%.
She was his. Officially. Fireproof-box his.
He put the big envelope on the floor beside him and looked at the small one on the table above him, out of reach, with his name on it in Val’s writing, and he did not open it.
He carried it around for most of the next day.
It went in his jacket pocket to morning skate and sat there through a full practice.
He wasn’t thinking about it, exactly. He just knew where it was all day, the way he knew where a bruise was without having to press on it.
Brogan looked at him twice on the bench and said nothing, which from Brogan was a full conversation.
Fen asked if he was hungover and Rognar let him think so, because it was easier than the truth, because it was always easier than the truth, and he was starting to notice how often he chose easier.
It went back in the jacket after. It sat on the passenger seat on the drive home, and then on the kitchen counter while he did the evening with Charlie. He didn’t open it while she was awake. Whatever was in it, he didn’t want to read it with her looking at him.
He got her down, and returned to the kitchen. The envelope was on the counter where he’d left it. The house was quiet in the way it got at night now. He stood at the counter and turned it over and slid his thumb under the flap and opened it.
Two pages. Her handwriting, which he’d forgotten and now remembered all at once—hard slant, no loops, the writing of a woman who wrote fast and did not decorate anything.
Rognar,
If you’re reading this, then the thing I told the lawyer to plan for happened, which means I’m sorry, and also that George did his job, so pay his bill.
He huffed—not a laugh, but the start of one—and kept reading.
I’m not going to spend a lot of ink on being sorry, because you can’t do anything with a sorry and neither can she, but I want you to know that I was wrong. Not confused or scared, but wrong. There’s a difference and I want to be on the correct side of it even here.
I didn’t tell you about her. That was a choice, and I want to be honest that I didn’t decide it once.
I decided it about four hundred times, over about the course of a year, and every single time I decided the same way.
I’d like to tell you there was a good reason.
There wasn’t. I was independent to the point of stupidity and I convinced myself that needing no one was the same thing as protecting her.
I told myself that you had a good life, a happy, carefree life, and you didn’t need a child interrupting it.
He stopped there and read it twice.
So why did I ask you to take care of her if something happened to me?
Everybody’s got a version of you. The team’s version, the papers’ version, the version women tell their friends.
The charming one. The one who’s fun at parties and gone by morning.
I got told that version by three separate people before I met you, and I met you anyway, because I was thirty and I figured I could handle fun-and-gone.
It wasn’t the right version. I want you to know I knew that before there was any reason to care whether I knew it.
There was a night—you won’t remember it because there’s no reason you would.
We were leaving that place on Sixth and there was a kid working the door.
He couldn’t have been twenty. He’d been chewed out by somebody important for something that wasn’t his fault.
You saw it, and you stopped, and you spent five minutes telling him some story about screwing up your first year.
By the end of it he was laughing. Nobody who mattered was watching.
There was nothing in it for you. You didn’t tell me you’d done it and you didn’t do it because I was there.
I only saw it because I’d forgotten my scarf and came back for it.
You were kind when there was nothing in it for you and nobody around to notice. That’s the reason. It wasn’t much to go on and it turned out to be enough.
He read that part, and then he stopped reading and stood holding the two pages for several minutes before he could start reading again.
So here’s what I decided, this time correctly.
If anything happened to me, I wanted her to have you.
Not the team’s you. The you I saw when I went back for my scarf.
I trust you to love her, which I realize is a strange thing to trust a near-stranger with, except I don’t think you were ever the stranger everyone thought you were.
Practical things, because someone has to say them and it isn’t going to be me for much longer:
She hates the blue blanket. I don’t know why. Don’t waste your time on it. There’s a grey one.
She’s a good sleeper if you don’t make it weird. You’ll make it weird. Try not to.
That’s it. Look after her. You were always going to be better at this than you’d have believed, and worse at it than you’ll want to admit, and that’s parenthood in a nutshell.
— Val
Rognar set the letter face down on the counter.
Then he went and got his daughter out of her crib.
He carried her back to the dark kitchen and stood there with her tucked against his shoulder and said it out loud.
There was nobody else to say it to, and it would not stay quiet in his head.
He was three weeks in. She was six and a half months old.
“Six months,” he told her. “Give or take. Before George’s office. Before the swab. Before the crib.”
He went through them for her, out loud, in the dark.
Her first smile. That would’ve been at Val in some room he’d never seen, and he wasn’t there.
The first time she held her head up, which Brogan had told him took no time at all.
It had already happened by the time he got her, so somebody had watched that, and it wasn’t him.
The first tusk breaking through—that had definitely happened before he had her, because they were both through when George handed her over.
Cutting a tusk is not a quiet business. So someone had walked a screaming baby around a room at two in the morning with a thumb on the gum above the tusk.
The trick Brogan knew and he had had to be taught.
And it hadn’t been him doing the walking.
He ran out of them eventually. Every first she’d had before he existed for her. He heard himself say it out loud and wished he hadn’t. It had been easier before he put words on it.
He was furious with her. And then, in the same breath, he was ashamed of it, because she was dead and she had been right about him, and where was he supposed to put that?
She’d seen the doorman. She’d kept her scarf story and used it to decide the most important thing she’d ever decide, and she’d got it right.
And you couldn’t be angry at a dead woman who’d been right about you.
The anger had no ground under it. She’d wronged him and admitted it.
And left him the one person he most wanted and would never have known to ask for, all in the same two pages.
There was no clean thing to feel and nowhere to put any of it.
He turned the letter back over, face up, and read the last practical line again. You’ll make it weird. Try not to.
He turned it face down. He turned it face up. He turned it face down again and left it that way, and carried Charlie back to bed. He was on the nursery floor when Nora found him.
He hadn’t planned to sit down. He’d gone in to check on Charlie and she’d stirred, and picking her up had seemed easier than not, and then sitting down had seemed easier than standing.
So he was on the floor with his back against the crib he’d built on his first night.
Charlie was asleep on his chest, her cheek against his heart, one fist curled into his shirt, breathing the way babies breathed, too fast and completely at ease.
The nursery door was open. He’d left the front door unlocked, because he always left it unlocked now. It had happened without his deciding it, the same way the coffee had.
He heard Nora in the hallway. He knew her step now. She appeared in the doorway with something in her hand—something small she’d carried over as a reason—and she stopped when she saw them, one hand still on the frame.
He looked up at her.
And he didn’t do it. The smile, the joke, the light-hearted charm he always reached for were right there, but tonight he couldn’t do it. So he just looked at her.
She saw him put it aside and her eyes softened
“The letter from Val came today,” he said, his voice flat.
She didn’t say anything. Her lips parted, and he could almost hear the sentence forming, some version of I could file that for you, do you want me to put it somewhere safe, I’ve got a box. And he watched her stop. As much as she instinctively wanted to help, she stopped.
She didn’t offer to make tea or reach for something to write in. She just came in and sat down on the floor next to him, her back against the crib rail. She settled down next to him and got comfortable there, like she meant to stay a while.
Charlie sighed against his chest and didn’t wake.
He tipped his head back against the top rail of the crib. His shoulder was against hers, warm through two shirts, and neither of them moved, and neither of them said anything, and that was all it was.