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she headed to where Danny himself had driven it last: the park-
ing lot at the Fish Pond.
The place was officially named Windsor Lake, but nobody
called it that; for reasons lost to history, it was universally re-
ferred to as the Fish Pond. Where Ginny grew up, such things
weren t unusual; even if a store changed hands three times in the
past fifty years, people still doggedly called it by its original
name. The local state college, for instance, had tried to raise its
profile by renaming itself the Massachusetts College of Liberal
Arts. But everybody still called it State, and fell over themselves
T he M or ti ci an s D aughter 113
buying the old T-shirts and coffee mugs before they got pulled
off the shelves.
Ginny had the parking lot to herself. School was in session,
and since it was after Labor Day, there was no one around to
collect parking fees. She cut the engine and was again struck by
the sheer weight of silence. The city was never quiet: there were
always neighbors, sirens, car alarms, bus engines, squealing
brakes, boom boxes, honking horns. It was a constant cacoph-
ony, so loud and unrelenting it could be hard to think straight.
She d forgotten how just incredibly silent it was here. Maybe
that was why she was feeling so discombobulated: there was
nothing to drown out that inner voice telling her what a mess
she d made of her life. Since she was staying at Sonya s, she
hadn t even been drinking much; she could hardly curl up in
Danny s bed with a fifth of Crown Royal. So no background
noise, no chemical anesthesia: for the first time in a long time,
she was alive to how bad things really were.
She got out of the truck, looking out over the lake. The rain
had stopped the night before, but the sky was still clogged and
threatening. The leaves were changing, though, and there was
something undeniably beautiful about the melancholy mood.
It was the first time she d been back to the Fish Pond scene
of so many childhood hijinks and adolescent rendezvous. The
playground equipment had been replaced, but it was essentially
the same: swing sets, slides, that rotating thing that had always
made her nauseous.
She had no idea what Danny had been doing here the night
he died; neither did Sonya. She d come there for no other rea-
son than to walk a mile in Danny s shoes or, rather, drive in
them.
With the grounds entirely empty, it also seemed a good place
to take a closer look inside the truck. When she d searched it,
114 E li zabeth B loom
she hadn t been thinking about drugs; although she still hoped
she was way off base, she knew she had to toss the truck prop-
erly. There were all sorts of places dealers hid their stashes: in-
side the doors, in the wheel wells, in false compartments under
the floor. She had to rip the truck down to its constituent parts,
and do it where Sonya couldn t see. She hung her leather jacket
on a jungle gym and went to work, searching the truck using
Danny s own tools.
Two hours later no one had so much as driven into the park-
ing lot and she had found next to nothing. Danny, being his
mother s son, had kept his vehicle fantastically clean; even the
capped bed seemed sterile enough for surgery. The only thing
she found, stuck in the crack where the seat bottom met the
back, was a piece ripped off the top of a navy-blue condom
wrapper. There was nothing else in any of the nooks and cran-
nies, no secret compartments, nothing hidden under the hood.
Having saved the worst for last, she lay on her back and
shimmied under the truck, shining a flashlight over the under-
carriage. She saw no new welding, nothing to indicate that any-
thing had been added after it had been driven off the dealer s
lot. With a resigned sigh she reached for a wrench and started to
take off the spare tire suspended underneath; it was covered in
mud, probably caked on since its fastidious owner s death. She
was going to get filthy.
The nut turned with surprising ease; it must have been re-
moved recently. She spun it until the housing came free and the
tire landed on her stomach.
And finally, there was something: a plastic bag, wrapped in
tape, sealed up tight. Exactly as Danny had left it.
19
Z
t wasn t crystal meth; that much she could tell right away. The
Ipackage was thin and pliable, weighing no more than a few
ounces. She crawled out from under the truck, examining it in
the skewing afternoon light. It was a stack of papers, wrapped
in a Ziploc bag, reinforced with electrical tape.
Before she opened it, she cleaned her hands with the Handi
Wipes Danny kept in the cargo bin next to the Armor All and
Turtle Wax, and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then she sliced
the tape with a knife and unzipped the bag. Inside was a small
stack of documents, folded in half and squished at the corners
from having been jammed inside the spare tire.
On top was a photocopy of Danny s birth certificate, his tiny
footprints forming a pair of black smudges at the bottom.
Daniel Michael Libanski had been born on January 8, weighing
in at 7 pounds 11 ounces; he wouldn t become a Markowicz
until five years later, when Pete and Sonya formally adopted
him.
Beside MOTHER was the name Paula Marie Libanski; FATHER
was listed as unknown. Ginny remembered that the local hospi-
tal usually decorated its birth certificates with gold seals and
pink or blue ribbons, but there was no sign of either on the pho-
tocopy. She wondered if the lack of them was due to some long-
ago clerk s moral outrage: no curlicues for the bastard children.
She turned to the next page and realized with a start that
she d seen this paper before had even held it in her hands. It
was an original, worn and stained, folded and unfolded umpteen
times until it threatened to fall apart.
116 E li zabeth B loom
Hey, Sonya,
Don t be mad at me but I gotta go. I gotta have a life, OK?
Your real good with Danny and he likes you a lot and mom can
help so its no big deal. OK? It will just be for a couple months or
whatever and he s so litle he wont even know I m gone. I ll send some
$ to pay for his food and stuff if I can maybe. OK?
Love ya lots yer big sis
Ginny remembered when that letter had arrived, two days
after Paula had asked Sonya to babysit and never returned. The
fact that she didn t come home that evening had surprised no
one; although Sonya s parents had given her the basement apart-
ment rent-free once the baby was born, where Paula slept on
any given night was anybody s guess.
By the next day her absence was remarkable only in that she [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]