bubbles might tell her something.
“I went to an elite high school,” she said. “But we did have a few underprivileged students. There was a Puerto Rican girl I was friendly with. My father gave a lot, scholarship funds, that kind of thing, so there was some overlap. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were friendly. And we stayed in touch vaguely after graduation, a letter now and again, a card at the holidays. She wound up studying at Union a hundred miles or so up the Hudson from me.” She pursed her lips. “I was in my junior year at college when she showed up at my dorm room. I supposed she had nowhere else to go. No one she trusted. She’d been…”
“What?”
Veronica shook her head, an etchwork of lines surrounding her tense mouth showing her age at last. “She had bruises around her wrists where they’d been held down.” Her own hands rose and mimed gripping someone. “And she was still wearing the shirt, torn at the collar where it had been…” Her lips trembled, though barely. “Broken fingernails from trying to fight back. A clump of hair missing where it had been yanked out. It was brutal. Savage.”
Evan swallowed. Kept perfectly still.
“And she was worried that … that she could be expecting. And she stayed with me, and she took those damn tests every day, like playing a lottery you don’t want to win. But sure enough she won. And even though this was a child born of violence, it was still a child. People don’t always understand that these days. It’s not some political statement, but it’s different when it happens to you, I suppose. And she decided she wanted to bring this child to term.”
Evan remembered Andre’s skipping out every chance he could to search for his birth parents. And how he’d returned empty-handed time and again. A kid seeking a truth that would wreck him if he ever found it.
Evan said, “Jesus.”
“Well, she didn’t have much money. And there was school debt, too. And when the baby came…” Veronica cleared her throat, straightened up. “When Andrew came, she didn’t have the resources to support him. And I told her that sometimes, sometimes with children, your desire to care for them can ruin them.”
The words came before Evan could stop them. “How would you know that?”
The depth of feeling beneath the words caught him off guard.
She shook her head. “You’re right. Bear in mind I was a twenty-two-year-old kid myself. But she didn’t follow my advice, not initially. She tried to raise this baby who’d done nothing wrong, who deserved so much more. But she found she didn’t have the strength to look in that child’s face every day. I remember her telling me that she could see in his features the face of the man who’d attacked her. Imagine living with that.”
“So she put him up for adoption.”
“Not at first. She fought herself for a year. And gave this child care. But she also detested him. And it was tearing her apart. I’ve never seen a person so conflicted. So yes. But by then he was a toddler, and the problem with that is—”
“The older a kid is, the less anyone wants him.” Again Evan’s words came sharper than he’d intended.
She blinked at him a few times, her eyes glassy from the alcohol. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” he said. “At the Recoleta Cemetery?”
“It was more than I could get out,” she said. “With the police closing in and all. And I was worried you wouldn’t help. That you wouldn’t want to go back to that time.”
“So you thought you’d manipulate me instead.”
“I suppose if you frame it that way…”
“Does Andre know this story? About the rape?”
She shook her head excessively, like a little girl. “It would destroy him.”
“Where’s his mother now?”
“Two years after she parted with him, she took a ferry from Essex one night and slipped overboard with stones in her pockets. Very Kate Chopin.”
Despite the crack, Evan could see the pain in her eyes. A small burst of blood vessels colored her cheek just in front of her left ear, a spiderlike pattern where her concealer had faded. He could sense her years more now than he had in the Buenos Aires night when she’d seemed to glow in the haze of their shared anticipation.
Veronica said, “Her last correspondence to me was to look after him if he ever needed anything. A dying wish. Very dramatic. But impossible to