before you could be blamed, or blame yourself? “But why didn’t she take him with her?” Jude asked.
Ravi smacked his lips lightly, as though he were trying to rid his mouth of a bitter taste. “I imagine that, as her hate for me lost its edge, she ceased to care so fiercely.”
Jude squinted into the sun. Ravi was speaking abstractly, but Jude caught the compact weight of his implication, like a shot put in his lap. “To care about Teddy, you mean.”
Ravi waved his hands, as though to soften that idea. “Perhaps she meant to come back for him, to send him some explanation.” Jude knew the benefit of the doubt Ravi was extending was for Teddy’s sake, not his mother’s. “But, of course, she never got the chance.”
From the pocket of his shorts, the boy took out a Velcro wallet, patched with stickers, and from the wallet he took out a photo. He handed it to Ravi. In it, a group of American teenagers smiled widely, toasting the camera with their red plastic cups. Jude leaned across the table and pointed. “That’s Teddy.” At the edge of the picture was a boy, eyes closed, mouth open.
“It’s not a very good picture, but it’s all I’ve got on me.”
Ravi stared at the photograph, his mouth also hanging open. Edward. What was he trying to say, his son, what word was he trying to speak to him?
“Johnny hasn’t shown me any pictures,” was all he could say.
Jude put his wallet away. “You can keep it. My sister’s got another one at home. They put it in the yearbook.”
Ravi thanked him, tucking the picture away in his briefcase.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Your friend wants to give up the child. Why doesn’t she want to give it to me?”
Jude downed the last of his orange juice. He was glad that Teddy’s dad hadn’t abandoned him, that at least one of his parents was decent. But what might have been a happy reunion with his friend’s father had been poisoned by Johnny. When Di had come home, shortly after Neena, she had ordered Johnny and Ravi out of the apartment, and Jude had gathered his things and left, too.
“Because,” Jude said, “she doesn’t want Johnny to be able to see the baby. He’s just been using her so he can hold on to Teddy.”
“But why shouldn’t he see the baby? Eliza can see the baby, too. Doesn’t a child belong with its family?”
Ravi’s clipped sentences, his backward, belated desperation to control his grandchild’s future, reminded Jude of Di. It occurred to him that they would make a fine couple. Ravi and Di, filing their paperwork, placing long-distance phone calls to private investigators while they swirled wine in their glasses. It was impossible to imagine this man with the slovenly Queen Bea, who would have made a more appropriate mate for Les. How did anyone end up with anyone?
“I didn’t get to raise my son,” Ravi said. “This is my second chance.” He presented his credentials. A house with a pool in Coconut Grove, a position at the second largest law firm in Miami, a loving wife who would be a loving mother. He started to take out his own wallet, to show Jude pictures of his own, but Jude didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to know what the woman who would hold Teddy’s baby looked like. All his life, he thought he wanted to know the face of the woman who had given birth to him, but a single picture, a name—it would be too much. It was the not knowing that protected him, the blank page that allowed him to believe she might be anyone, or might not exist at all. He could have been raised by wolves. He could be the son of God or a test tube miracle or for all he knew he could have fallen to Earth with the snow from the sky.
We welcome with love our gift from above.
The waitress came by to clear their paper plates and to refill Ravi’s coffee. When he was little, Harriet hadn’t told Jude about his adoption—Les had gotten to him first. Even now, she rarely mentioned it, the glass elephant she’d built to fill their house. She, too, preferred to be blind to it, to pretend Jude had sprung from her alone. He wondered now if his birth mother felt the same way, if anonymity was a gift to her, too.