Barbara Delinsky: The Family Tree

‘Accessed messages, mostly. I talked with Robert. Dad’s in a stew.’

‘Then it’s good that this isn’t Dad’s baby,’ Dana remarked, mimicking Hugh. When he didn’t reply, she added, ‘Did you talk with him directly?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should. Get it out in the open.’

‘I’m not ready. My parents are … my parents.’

‘They’re elitist,’ Dana said.

‘That’s unfair.’

‘Does it fit?’

‘No,’ he replied, but not quickly enough.

‘Then it’s only the surprise that’s the problem,’ said Dana. ‘They’ll get over this, Hugh. It isn’t a tragedy.’

Shifting the baby in his arms, he turned and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘It isn’t,’ Dana insisted. ‘Tragedy is when a baby is born with a heart defect or a degenerative disease. Our baby is healthy. She’s responsive. She’s beautiful.’

‘She just isn’t us ,’ Hugh said, sounding bewildered.

‘Isn’t us? Or just isn’t the us we know?’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Yes. Babies are born all the time with features from earlier generations. It just takes a little digging to learn the source.’ When Hugh didn’t answer, Dana added, ‘Look at it this way. Having a baby of color will boost your image as the rebel lawyer.’ When Hugh snorted again, she teased, ‘You did want to be different, didn’t you?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Come on, Hugh,’ she pleaded. ‘Smile?’

The smile came only when he looked at the baby again. ‘She is special, that’s for sure.’

‘Have you taken any good pictures?’

He glanced toward his camera, which lay in the folds of her bag by the wall, and said with a brief burst of enthusiasm, even wonder, ‘Y’know, I have.’ Securing the baby in his left arm, he retrieved the camera and turned it on. With the ease of intimacy, he sat close beside Dana and scrolled through the shots with her. In that split-second of closeness, everything was right.

‘Omigod, look,’ she cried. ‘She’s what there – seconds old?’

‘And this one of you holding her for the first time.’

‘I look awful!’

He chuckled. ‘It wasn’t like you’d just been to a picnic.’ He pulled up another shot. ‘Look at those eyes. She’s remarkable. So aware from the start. And wait.’ He scrolled farther. ‘Here.’

Dana caught her breath. ‘Amazing you got that. She’s looking at me with total intelligence. Can you crop me out?’

‘Why would I want to? This is an incredible mother-daughter shot.’

‘For the announcement. We want one just of her.’

Hugh scrolled through several more pictures. ‘Here’s a nice one. I’ll print these up tonight and put them in the album you got at the shower.’

‘How about the announcement?’ Dana said again. ‘We need a picture for that. The stationery store promised they’d have them ready to go in a week once we give them everything.’

Hugh was focused on the monitor, scrolling forward and back. ‘I’m not sure any of these is perfect.’

‘Even that first one? I love it because she isn’t all swaddled. Her hands are so delicate.’

‘She’s still messed up from the birth in that one.’

‘Which gives it an immediacy,’ Dana coaxed. ‘But you can take more now.’

‘She’s sleeping now.’

Dana thought Lizzie’s features were as striking in sleep as when she was awake. ‘Oh, Hugh. I don’t want to wait. The envelopes are all addressed and stamped. There are so many people we want to tell.’

‘Most of them will know anyway,’ he said with sudden sharpness. ‘In fact, I’m not sure why we’re even sending announcements.’

Startled, Dana said, ‘But you were after me for weeks to make an appointment with the stationer. You insisted on coming. You chose the photo announcement and insisted you could get a good shot to use.’

He didn’t move, stayed close, yet she felt a chill seeping in. A moment later, he rose, put his camera away, and gently set the baby in the crib.

‘Hugh?’

When his eyes finally met hers, they were troubled. ‘I’m not sure we should include a picture with the announcement.’

Dana sank into her pillow. ‘You don’t want people to see her. But they will eventually. We can’t keep her in the house under wraps.’

‘I know. But sending a picture out now is only going to provoke questions.’ He took a quick breath. ‘Do we need to put ourselves on display? Word’ll spread about the baby anyway. People love to talk.’

‘So?’

‘So do we have to fuel the gossip? It’d be one thing if I could say that my wife’s grandfather was black.’

‘Why does it matter ?’ Dana cried. She didn’t care if her grandfather was black. She didn’t care if her father was black. It wouldn’t change who she was.

Unfortunately, Hugh cared. ‘We need to locate your father.’

Dana was immediately defensive. ‘I suggested doing it before I was ever pregnant, and you said it didn’t matter. I said what if there was a medical problem, and you said you didn’t want to know and that if something arose we’d deal with it.’

‘That’s exactly what we’re doing. Dealing with it means tracking down your dad now. My man can do that.’

His man was Lakey McElroy. A computer nerd from a family of Irish cops, Lakey was socially inept, but very smart. Where his brothers knew the streets, he knew the hidden alleys. He also knew his way around the Web. On more than one occasion, he had found information that Hugh had given up on. If anyone could find Dana’s father, Lakey could.

Dana felt the old ambivalence – wanting to know, not wanting to know. Perhaps Hugh was right to insist. This wasn’t only about her anymore. It was about Lizzie, too.

‘We don’t have much to go on,’ she reminded him.

‘We have a name, and a picture. We have a place, a month, and a year.’

‘Roughly,’ she cautioned, because she had thought about this far more than he had. ‘My mother never said exactly when they were together, so it’s fine to count backward from the day I was born, but if she delivered me early or late, we could be wrong.’

‘You never asked?’

‘I was five when she died.’

‘Ellie Jo must know.’

‘She says no.’

‘What about your mom’s friends? Wouldn’t she have confided in them?’

‘I’ve asked before. I could ask again.’

‘Sooner rather than later, please.’

It was the please that bothered her – like this was a business matter, and she had let him down. She told herself it was only the Clarke seeping out through a crack in his otherwise human veneer, but tears filled her eyes. ‘I can’t do it now,’ she said. ‘I just had a baby.’

‘I’m not saying now.’ His cell phone vibrated. He looked at the ID panel. ‘Let me take this. It may help.’

Genevieve Falk was a geneticist whom Hugh had found years before when he needed a DNA expert for a case. She was intelligent and down-to-earth.

Now, standing at the window with the phone to his ear, he said a grateful, ‘Genevieve. Thanks for calling back.’

‘We’re on Nantucket, but you said it was urgent.’

‘I need your help. Here’s the scenario. A very white couple gives birth to a baby that has the skin and hair of an African American. Neither parents nor grandparents have remotely brown skin or curly hair. The assumption is that there’s an African-American connection further back – mabe a great-grandparent. Is this possible?’

‘Great-grandparent, singular? On only one side of the baby’s family? That’s not as probable as if there were such a relative on both sides.’

‘There isn’t. The baby’s father’s family is thoroughly documented.’