Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [144]
They met downstairs at the café in front of the Union Square Inn, at one of the two tables on the sidewalk. Ravi ordered a poppy seed muffin and coffee. The boy ordered a bagel and juice. Flies darted around them in the heat, over their plastic silverware, the emptied pats of butter and jam. Ravi told him what he knew—about Bonnie, his search for Teddy (he was getting used to calling him that), the letter from Johnny. From his briefcase, he withdrew the manila envelope containing the newspaper clipping, the case reports, the photo of the four of them at the beach. The boy looked them over.
“You do believe me?” Ravi asked.
Under the table, the boy rolled his skateboard back and forth.
“So she wanted him for herself,” he said.
Ravi swallowed a hard lump of his breakfast. He did not take pleasure in revealing the truth about Bonnie, but this boy, like Johnny, had to know. “She took him to spite me. It was a rash decision, a heated one, but one that she was stubborn enough to live with. Teddy was a”—Ravi fluttered his hands, searching for a word—“I’m sorry to put it this way, but he was. . . .”
“A pawn?”
Ravi winced. “An instrument. An asset. She knew he was valuable to me.” He emptied a packet of Sweet’n Low into his coffee, even though it was already too sweet. “I’ve seen it with my clients again and again. More than money, more than homes and cars and boats, parents use children to settle their scores. Of course, we had very little money, and we weren’t married. Our child was all that was of use to her.”
Jude thought of his parents, conspiring to keep Eliza and Johnny and himself away from Di, the elaborate and inconsequential game of checkers the adults were playing. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t love Teddy,” he insisted. “All that time she’d been hiding him, and then she just left him behind?”
Ravi told him about Teddy’s wish to find his father, about Johnny’s call to his mother on Christmas, his attempt to help his brother. “If they had found me,” he explained, “I could still have pressed charges. I could have sent her to prison for the abduction of a child. So she abandoned Teddy to save herself.”
That word—abandoned—it was a spiky little briar patch. Jude tried not to think of his own birth mother, but he was caught. It was better, wasn’t it, to be abandoned as a baby, 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