She couldn’t tell me his name; if Joey ever mentioned it, she couldn’t be expected to remember it after all this time, could she? But she took the money with dignity and told me to come back if I was in the neighborhood.

“I don’t expect to see any more of it,” she added with unexpected cheerfulness. “Not from what I know of that bastard. If my old man hadn’t made him, he wouldn’t of married me. And between you and me, I’d of been better off.”

8

The Good Doctor

Louisa and Caroline were returning from the dialysis center when I stopped by. I helped Caroline maneuver Louisa into a wheelchair for the short ride up the front walk. Getting her up the five steep steps took ten minutes of patient labor while she leaned heavily on my shoulder to hoist herself up each rise, then rested until she had enough wind for the next one.

By the time we had her settled in her bed, her breathing had turned to shallow, stertorous gasps. I panicked a little at the sound and at the purplish tinge beneath her waxy green skin, but Caroline treated her with cheerful efficiency, giving her oxygen and massaging her bony shoulders until she could breathe on her own again. However much Caroline might irritate me, I could only admire her unflagging goodwill in looking after her mother.

She left me alone with Louisa while she went off to make herself a snack. Louisa was drifting into sleep, but she remembered the Xerxes doctor with a hoarse little chuckle: Chigwell. They called him Chigwell the Chigger because he was always sucking their blood. I waited until she was sleeping soundly before releasing my hand from the grasp of her bony fingers.

Caroline was hovering in the dining room, her little body vibrating with anxiety. “I’ve wanted to call you every day, but I’ve forced myself not to. Especially last week when Ma told me you’d been by and she’d ordered you not to look for him.” She was eating a peanut-butter sandwich and the words came through thickly. “Have you found out anything?”

I shook my head. “I tracked down the two guys she remembers best, but they’re both dead. It’s possible one of them might have been your father, but I don’t have any real way of knowing. My only hope is the company doctor. He apparently used to compile copious records on the employees, and people tell their doctor things they might not say to anyone else. There’s also a clerk who worked at the corner grocery twenty-five years ago, but Connie couldn’t remember his name.”

She caught my doubtful tone. “You don’t think any of these guys might have been the one?”

I pursed my lips, trying to put my doubts into words. Steve Ferraro had wanted to marry Louisa, baby and all. That sounded as though he knew her after Caroline’s birth, not before. Joey Pankowski did seem like the kind of person who could have gotten Louisa pregnant and gone off unconcerned. Which would fit. That repressive household, Connie’s and her total ignorance of sex—she might well have turned to some happy-go-lucky type. But in that case why be so upset about it now? Unless she’d absorbed so much of the Djiak’s fundamental fear of sex that the very memory of it terrified her. But that didn’t fit my memories of Louisa as a young woman.