The Bullet Page 4

  “But what about later? When I was an adult? I’m thirty-seven years old, for God’s sake!”

  “We—they advised us not to. The adoption counselors. They said it would confuse you. And, Caroline, that’s the way it was done back then. Adoptions were nearly always closed. Even children with less . . . less dramatic histories never learned who their birth parents were. Lots of children grew up not knowing they were adopted.”

  I pulled away from her. “You should have told me.”

  For the first time she looked impatient. “Sweet girl, would it have made you happy? What good would it have done?”

  • • •

  LATER THAT MORNING I taught my Friday class as usual. FREN 388, the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. It’s frowned upon to call in sick, and it turned out to be a relief to pass an hour focused on something I understood, a subject that I had mastered.

  Today’s assignment was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book I always look forward to teaching. The portrait of a woman trapped in a dull marriage, it is a groundbreaking work for feminists. It was scandalous back in its day: in 1857, Flaubert was put on trial for obscenity and “crimes against public morality.” This because of the disgraceful behavior of his protagonist, Emma Bovary. She lies to her husband and lavishes a cigar case and a silver-handled riding crop on her lover. Still, she has her charms, and usually I take the time with my students to savor her seductions, her little vanities. Today, though, I felt impatient. Her sins felt tame set against the revelations of my last twenty-four hours. Emma Bovary thought she had problems? At least she knew who her parents were, and no one had murdered them, and she wasn’t running around with a bullet jammed against her spine.

  With considerable effort I managed to stick with my prepared lecture notes. I even ended with a flourish, about how provocatively Flaubert had illuminated the turbulent social and political landscape of 1850s France. My students seemed to like this; they all diligently scribbled it down. I rewarded them by ending class a few minutes early. Then I gathered my notes, switched off the lights, and stepped into the quiet hallway. What now? According to my usual Friday routine, I should retire to my fourth-floor library nook for an exciting afternoon of grading papers and sipping herbal tea. I pictured my blue armchair, my electric kettle, my I ♥ NPR mug, neatly rinsed and left to dry. I couldn’t face them. Instead I headed toward the White-Gravenor building’s wide staircase.

  Outside, the lawn of the main quad was busy. Students throwing Frisbees, calling to friends, making weekend plans. The day was pretty but cool. I began to walk, with no particular direction in mind. I just needed to move. I was near the main university gates and the John Carroll statue when my legs folded. One moment I was walking, and the next I was on the ground. I had eaten nothing since yesterday morning, but this wasn’t a faint. Nothing so dainty. I just . . . gave out. The body overriding the brain.

  Here is something I did not know before but was about to learn. When a person receives a great shock, that person both continues to function and doesn’t. Let me explain: At that moment I could not stand up. But I was capable of sitting there on the cold sidewalk and registering quite clearly how I must look. My legs splayed, my hair askew, my bag strewn behind me. Some tiny part of me relished the spectacle. Students were cutting me a wide berth. I calculated what they must be thinking, how long it would take before someone bent down to ask if I was all right.

  What would my answer be?

  Seven

  * * *

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013

  It was Saturday morning when the bullet began to throb.

  Not a steady ache, like my wrist. This felt more ragged, more demanding. The pain came and went, but when it was there it was hot. I imagined the bullet pulsing, like an organ.

  Back when I was a girl, the whole country was caught up in the frenzy for the Star Wars movies. I was a baby when the first one came out, but I do remember weeping on the morning that Return of the Jedi hit the theaters. I must have been six or seven by then. Tony and Martin were allowed to go see it; I was deemed too young and ordered to stay home. It seemed an unbearable injustice. Afterward, my brothers annoyed me for weeks by conversing in garbled Yoda syntax (“Told you I did, the potatoes please pass”). They also joked about sensing a Disturbance in the Force. It sounds hokey, but thirty years later, this is the phrase that now came to mind. I did sense something like a Disturbance. As though the bullet wielded some force that was disturbing the normal rhythms of my body.

  I thought about the veins and muscles in my neck. How for years they must have grown and pushed and curved around the lead, like the roots of a tree when they meet resistance from a stone.

  I had been three years old when I was shot.

  Three.

  That meant the bullet had been inside my body for longer than my teeth.

  • • •

  I CALLED MY doctor late that afternoon.

  Was it possible? I asked him. That an ancient wound could start hurting, just like that?

  “Unlikely,” he replied. “But describe the pain?”

  I thought about it. “Hot. Like it’s radiating heat or something.”

  “Well, it’s definitely not doing that. Unless it’s gotten infected, but I didn’t see any sign of that when I examined you this week.”

  “Okay, but it really is . . . throbbing. I can feel the metal. The physical weight of it. Like it’s jabbing me.”

  “I suspect that might be psychosomatic.”

  “I am not imagining this, Dr. Zartman.”

  “Call me Will. And I’m not suggesting you are. It would be an entirely normal reaction. Now that you know it’s there, you’re going to feel it. I suppose it’s also possible that the bullet has shifted. Perhaps it’s pressing on a nerve that it wasn’t before.”

  “Why would it shift?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “And would that be why my wrist started aching?”

  A long pause. “I don’t know that either. Half the patients I see seem to be suffering from mild cases of carpal tunnel. It’s almost always because they spend too much time in front of their keyboards. So that was my natural assumption in your case. But if—if that bullet is pressing on a nerve—then, sure. Symptoms might be presenting in your wrist.”

  “And maybe I really am feeling pain in my neck, too.”

  He ignored this. “I’ll call and hassle the lab again. Try to hurry them up on your blood work. I’d like to see your blood lead level. They work seven days a week over there. Maybe they’ll have something by tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I should hear back on Monday from Marshall Gellert. The neurosurgeon. I couldn’t track him down yesterday, but he’s the best in town. I’ll ask him to see you right away.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll have to see what he says. Meanwhile, what did you find out from your parents? Can they help with figuring out how it got there?”

  I made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a bark. “You were right. They knew.”

  “And?”

  I laugh-barked again. “How much time have you got?”

  He listened for nearly an hour. After we hung up, I stepped out my front door and went for a long walk through the streets of Georgetown. No collapses this time. Just the steady beat of my boots hitting brick. And in my neck the dark mass of the bullet, throbbing, pulsing, keeping time.

  • • •

  THE TOMBS is a Georgetown institution. A big, dark, brick cellar one block from campus. There’s a bar on one end and a noisy restaurant packed with undergrads on the other. It is the kind of place where students meet their roommates for happy-hour pitchers and buffalo wings on a Saturday night, then return hungover the next morning, to meet their parents for an eggs-Benedict brunch. It’s tradition to come to the door at midnight on your twenty-first bi
rthday. They stamp you on the head and pour your first legal beer on the house.

  I did think twice about turning up on Saturday night. I might bump into someone I knew from the university, and I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. But the thought of staying home was too depressing. Plus the Tombs is right around the corner from me, and I couldn’t be bothered dressing up and heading anywhere swanky. So I called Martin and told him to meet me.

  We settled ourselves in a leather booth in the back corner and sat staring at each other. Martin knows me too well to bother with small talk. Instead he flagged down a waiter, ordered the artichoke dip and a beer for himself, and a glass of white wine for me.

  It is not quite true what I said earlier, about not liking whisky. I like rye whiskey fine. I can’t stand Scotch, but a few years back I was seeing a man from Kentucky. He liked to drink Sazeracs, mixed with rye from a distillery near where he grew up. Rye tastes like bourbon but better. More peppery and less sweet. I acquired the taste and still drink it on the rare occasion when I am drinking to get drunk. Martin knows this. He raised an eyebrow when I canceled the wine and requested instead a double Bulleit, neat.

  All he said, though, was “Make it two.”

  We sipped in silence for a bit. Then he said, “Irritating, isn’t it? How it’s become all fashionable lately?”

  “What?”

  “Rye.”

  “It’s fashionable?”

  “Don’t you ever go out? It’s the hip thing. Laura and I actually got invited to a rye tasting the other night. All these fortysomethings who never drink anything but seventy-five-dollar-a-bottle Bordeaux, sipping and pretending to detect notes of green apple and tobacco.”

  “I just like the taste.”

  “See, that’s the fashionable thing to say. Very authentic of you.” He took another sip, then looked into my eyes. “You used to have nightmares, when you first came. You would crawl into my bed and curl up against me, hot and all wet with tears. When I woke up in the morning, you were always gone. Do you remember?”

  “God, I’m getting sick of people asking me that.”

  He looked hurt.

  “I’m sorry. Martin? I’m sorry. But you know, you’re one of the worst parts of all this.” I pointed at him. “You and me. Finding out that—that you’re not really my brother.”

  “I am really your brother.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean we aren’t related by blood.”

  I nodded.

  “I thought about that, too.” He glanced around, then picked up a steak knife lying on the table. He held out his finger and drew the serrated blade across it. Drops of blood sprang out.

  He reached across the table. “Your turn.”

  I must have looked aghast.

  “Come on, trust me. Give me your hand.”

  I did as he said. The blade hurt more than you would think as it sank into my flesh.

  He set down the knife and pressed his finger against mine. “Now I am. Your blood brother.”

  For the first time since this all began, I started to cry. I knew it was only a gesture, but at that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. We sat there, hands clasped, tears running down my face. He wrapped a napkin around our fingers and held it tight.

  “Martin, I didn’t mean—”

  “Shush. You don’t have to say anything.”

  He caught our waiter’s eye and mouthed, Two more.

  The waiter looked at me with misgiving, no doubt thinking I was enough of a mess as it was. But he trotted off. The drinks went down easy. We were on our third round when suddenly I grinned.

  “What?” asked Martin.

  “We’re drinking Bulleit.”

  “So?”

  “Pronounced bull-it. And I’ve got a bullet in my neck!”

  “Not funny.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s hilarious.” I clinked my glass against his.

  Slowly he smiled. “Technically, you know, we’re drinking shots of Bulleit. Get it? Bullet shots?”

  “Okay, that was lame,” I said, but I started to laugh.

  We were both laughing and laughing, and it was around that time that the room began to spin.

  At some point Martin must have paid and bundled me up the Tombs’ steep stairs, out onto Thirty-Sixth Street, and then home and into my own bed. Brothers are good for things like that.

  Eight

  * * *

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2013

  If you have ever been run down and flattened by a bus, then you have some idea how I felt the next morning. I doubt I would have crawled out of bed at all if the phone hadn’t rung.

  “Did I wake you?” asked Will Zartman.

  “No, no, I was just . . . Actually, yes. What time is it?”

  “Coming up to eleven o’clock.”

  “Christ. Right. I had—I guess I had a big night last night.”

  “Oh. Out at a party?”

  “Just a bar.” I groaned. “I think I drank half my body weight in rye.”

  “Very trendy.”

  “So I’m told. I’d rather never see the stuff again.”

  “Hair of the dog,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Go fix yourself a Bloody Mary. You’ll feel better. Only hangover cure I’ve ever tried that works. Mind you, that’s just me talking. As your doctor, I suggest you make a pot of coffee and go back to bed. And of course never, ever, consume more than four units of alcohol in a single session again.”

  “Right.”

  “So who were you out with?” he asked casually. “Some girlfriends?”

  Was I imagining it, or was something more than purely medical solicitousness in his voice?

  “My brother.”

  “Oh. Fun.” He must also have sensed he’d crossed a line, because he cleared his throat and adopted a more clinical tone. “Anyway, sorry to have disturbed you on a Sunday morning. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I got your results from the lab this morning. Nothing we need to be majorly alarmed about at this point, but your blood lead level is quite high.”

  “How high?”

  “Twenty-nine. That’s micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. For adults, anything over twenty-five is considered elevated. That’s when people start showing symptoms. Headache, irritability, delayed reaction time, that type thing.”

  “Great,” I said miserably. “I needed something else to worry about.”

  “Of course, it could be completely unrelated. Where do you live?”

  “Georgetown.”

  “Ah. Old house?”

  “Eighteen fifty-nine.” Georgetown is a historic district; almost all the houses are a hundred years old or more.

  “Well, there you go. You could have lead paint on the walls. Or lead pipes. Do you drink DC tap water?”

  “Every day.”

  “Ghastly stuff. Swimming with critters you don’t even want to imagine. And of course, for years it was contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. But listen, put this out of your mind for now. We’ll cross that bridge when we have to. It’s just one more factor in the mix.”

  “In what mix?”

  “In the mix as we make a decision. On whether to schedule surgery to try to get that bullet out.”

  • • •

  A GOOGLE SEARCH turned up little.

  I had finally dragged myself out of bed and brewed a pot of tea. Then I settled myself with my laptop on the living-room sofa and tried to ferret out any information I could find about Sadie Rawson and Boone Smith.

  It was strange. These days even the dullest person would generate a dozen search hits, if only from friends tagging him in photos. But my birth parents had died fifteen years before the Internet became widespread. You couldn’t google them.

/>   The main newspaper in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution, must have reported on the murders. Crime was worse back then in big American cities, but surely a double homicide and the near-fatal wounding of a child would have drawn media attention. But the Journal-Constitution’s online archives were only digitized back to 1990. Everything older was presumably on microfiche, gathering dust somewhere.

  The only hit I got was for a class of 1974 “In Memoriam List,” on the website for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It had been updated this past spring, in advance of a fortieth-reunion gathering planned for next year. The list was titled “In memory of those classmates who have passed away since graduation” and included dozens of names. Both Boone and Sadie Rawson were on it. There was no other information, not even the date of their deaths.

  That was it. No wedding announcement, no work-related press releases, no photographs.

  I pulled out the birth certificate that my mother, Frannie, had fetched from the upstairs files for me. It stated that I had been delivered at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. The home address it gave for Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith was Eulalia Road, in the northeast of the city.

  I plugged that into Google Maps and selected the street-view option. A minute later I was staring at their old house. Eulalia Road appeared to be a short, quiet, residential street. My first home had been in the middle of the block, a one-story brick house with a separate, detached garage farther up the driveway. The grass lawn in front had a big tree, which blocked my view of the front door itself. But you could see that the house was well kept, the brick and shutters freshly painted.

  I had no way of knowing if this was the house in which my birth mother and father died. They were murdered three years after they had brought me home from the hospital. They might have moved. Still, I couldn’t stop staring. The zoom function was frustratingly blurry; the picture wasn’t sharp enough to let me see in the windows. Yes, I knew the interior would have been redecorated. The owners might have changed many times since 1979. No trace of me or of my first family would remain in that pretty, little house.