Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

He assessed the girl again. She was smart enough to find food for Max; hell, she had even known he was hungry, which he couldn’t tell for sure. He sat down across from her at the table, and she folded the remains of the ice cream sandwich into a napkin. “He liked it,” she said defensively. “A little bit can’t hurt him, not once he’s hit tdia€†hree months.”

Nicholas stared at her. “How do you know these things?” he asked. Dawn looked at him as if he were crazy. Nicholas leaned forward conspiratorially. “How much do you make for candy striping?”

“Money? We don’t make money. That’s why we’re called volunteers.”

Nicholas grabbed her hand. “If you come back tomorrow, I’ll pay you. Four bucks an hour, if you’ll watch Max.”

“I don’t candy-stripe on Thursdays. Only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have band on Thursdays.”

“Surely,” Nicholas said, “you have friends.”

Dawn stood up and shied away from the two of them. Nicholas held his hand out in the air as if that might stop her. He wondered what he looked like through her eyes: a weary, mussed surgeon, sweaty and wild-eyed, who probably wasn’t even holding his baby the right way. He wondered what was the right way.

For a second, Nicholas thought he was going to lose control. He saw himself breaking down, his face in his hands, sobbing. He saw Max rolling to the floor and striking his head on the beveled edge of the chair. He saw his career destroyed, all his colleagues turning their heads away in embarrassment. His only salvation was the girl in front of him, an angel half his age. “Please,” he murmured to Dawn. “You don’t understand what it’s like.”

Dawn held her arms out for Max and tugged the diaper bag onto her thin shoulder. She put her hand on the back of Nicholas’s neck. The hand was gloriously cool, like a waterfall, and gentle as a breath. “Five bucks,” she said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

I f Jake hadn’t been with me, I would have run from Eddie Savoy’s without ever going inside. His office was thirty miles outside Chicago, in the heartland of the country. The building was little more than a brown weathered shack attached to a chicken farm. The stench of droppings was overpowering, and there were feathers stuck to the wheels of my car when I got out. “Are you sure?” I asked Jake. “You know this guy?”

Eddie Savoy burst out of the door at that point, knocking it off its hinges. “Flan-man!” he yelled, wrapping Jake in a bear hug. They broke away and did some funny handshake that looked like two birds mating.

Jake introduced me to Eddie Savoy. “Paige,” he said, “me and Eddie were in the war together.”

“The war,” I repeated.

“The Gulf War,” Eddie said proudly. His voice was as rough as a grindstone.

I turned to Jake. The Gulf War? He had been in the army? The sun slanted off his cheekbones and lightened his eyes so that they fonurnedv›‹ jake="Jake" i="I" how="how" had="had" flanagan="Flanagan" about="about"›

When I told Jake about leaving Nicholas and Max, and then about wanting to find my mother, I’d expected him to be surprised -maybe even angry, since I’d been telling him all those years that my mother had died. But Jake just smiled at me. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time.” I could tell by the brush of his hands that he had known all along. He told me he had a friend who might be able to help, and then he asked one of his mechanics to watch the station.

Eddie Savoy was a private investigator. He’d been getting started in the business, working as a lackey for another detective, and then he’d joined the army when the war broke out in the Persian Gulf. When he came back he felt he’d had enough of taking orders; he started his own agency.

He led us into a small room that looked as if it had been a meat storage refrigerator in a different life. We sat on the floor on tasseled Indian cushions, and Eddie sat across from us, behind a low parsons bench. “Hate chairs,” he explained. “They do things to my back.”

He was not much older than Jake, but his hair was completely white. It had been shaved in a crew cut and stood away from his scalp as if each individual piece was very frightened. He had no mustache but the beginnings of a beard, which also seemed to stick straight out from his chin. He reminded me of a tennis ball. “So you haven’t seen your ma for twenty years,” he said, tugging the old wedding photo from my hand.

“No,” I said, “and I’ve never tried to find her before.” I leaned closer. “Do I have a chance?”

Eddie leaned back and pulled a cigarette out of his sleeve. He struck a match against his low desk and drew in deeply. When he spoke, his words came out in smoke. “Your mother,” he said to me, “did not disappear off the face of the earth.”

Eddie told me it was all in the numbers. You couldn’t escape your numbers, not for that long a time. Social Security, Registry of Motor Vehicles, school records, work records. Even if people intentionally changed their identity, eventually they’d collect a pension or welfare, or file taxes, and the numbers would lead you to them. Eddie told me how the previous week he’d found in half a day the kid a mother gave up for adoption.

“What if she’s changed her Social Security number?” I said. “What if her name isn’t May anymore?”

Eddie smirked. “If you change your Social Security number, it’s recorded as being changed. And the address and age of the person changing the number is listed too. You can’t just walk in and get someone else’s, either. So if your mother is using someone else’s number-say her own mom’s-we’ll still be able to find her.”

Eddie took down the family history that I knew. He was particularly concerned about genetic illnesses, because he had just wrapped up a missing persons case that involved diabetes. “This woman’s whole family has the sugar,” he says, “so I chase her for three years and I know she’s in Maine, but I can’t get the exact location. And then I figure she’s about the age all her relatives start dying. So I call up eveiv ‘€†ry hospital in Maine and see what patients have the sugar. Sure enough, there she is, getting her last rites.”

I swallowed, and Eddie reached across the table and took my hand. His skin felt like a snake’s. “It’s very difficult to disappear,” he said. “It’s all a matter of public records. The hardest people to find are the ones who live in tenements, because they move around a lot. But then you get them through welfare.”

I had an image of my mother on welfare, living on the streets, and I winced. “What if my mother isn’t my mother anymore?” I asked. “It’s been twenty years. What if she’s found a new identity?”

Eddie blew smoke rings that expanded and settled around my neck. “You know, Paige,” he said, pronouncing my name Pej, “people just ain’t creative. If they get a new identity, they do something stupid like flip their first and middle names. They use their maiden names or the last name of their favorite uncle. Or they spell their same name different or change one digit in their Social Security number. They aren’t willing to completely give up what they’re leaving behind.” He leaned forward, almost whispering. “Of course, the really sharp ones get a whole new image. I found a guy once who’d taken a new identity by striking up a conversation at a bar with a fellow who looked like him. He got the other guy to compare IDs, just for kicks, and he memorized the number on the driver’s license and then got himself a copy by saying it had been stolen. It ain’t so hard to become someone else. You look in the local papers and find the name of someone who died within the past week who was about your own age. That gives you a name and an address. Then you go to the place where the death occurred, and it’s on public record, and bingo, you got a date of birth. Then you go to Social Security and make up a wacko story about your wallet being filched and you get a new card with this new name-the death records are usually slow in getting over to Social Security, so nothing seems out of the ordinary. And then you pull the same shit at the RMV and you get a new driver’s license…” He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “The thing is, Paige, I know all this stuff. I got connections. I’m one step ahead of your mother.”