Chapter 4
Patricia arranged the testing. It was completed within a week, because the Montgomery family's resources made a week feel like an abundance of time rather than a rush. The results came back on a Thursday morning and I sat in Patricia's office and read the percentage on the page and put the paper down on the desk and looked at the window for a moment before I could speak.
Ninety-nine point nine percent.
Three of them.
Emily, Nora, and Claire.
Patricia gave me a moment and then she said: "What do you want to do?"
I had been thinking about nothing else for two weeks. I had thought about Rachel, about the life we had been building before the cancer interrupted it and the life I had been living since in the specific diminished way of a person who is present but not fully inhabiting their own days. I had thought about three little girls in matching cream coats who had walked across a park with the directness of children who see something interesting and go toward it. I had thought about a compass tattoo on a cocktail napkin and two people who had no idea where their lives were going.
"I want to meet them," I said. "Properly. With time. I want to do this the way it deserves to be done."
The first meeting was in a park, because Camila thought familiar ground would help, and because parks were neutral in the way that offices and living rooms were not. It was a Saturday in November, cold enough for coats but not cold enough to shorten the afternoon, and I arrived before them and sat on a bench and waited, and when the black SUV pulled up I watched three small figures climb out and look toward me with three versions of the same expression, curious and assessing and not afraid.
They remembered me from Central Park. I could see it in their faces.
Emily walked up first, the bold one, I was already learning to distinguish them by the velocity of their decisions. She stopped in front of me and looked at my forearm, where the sleeve was pushed up the same way it had been that first afternoon.
"You came back," she said.
"I did," I said.
"Mommy said you might be someone important."
I looked at Camila, standing a few feet back with her hands in her coat pockets, watching the way a person watches something they have been waiting a long time to see.
"I might be," I said. "We're figuring that out."
Nora came up beside her sister. Claire was a half-step behind, the one who watched before she committed, the one who had pressed her palm against the SUV window in Central Park and looked at me with complete clear attention. She looked at me the same way now.
"Do you know which direction the compass points?" she asked.
I looked down at the tattoo.
"That's the thing about a broken compass," I said. "It doesn't point anywhere specific. That's sort of the point."
May you like
Claire considered this with the seriousness she apparently applied to everything. Then she said: "Maybe it pointed here."
I did not have an answer for that. I sat on the bench in the November park with three seven-year-old girls looking at me with three faces that were all, unmistakably, partly mine, and I thought about a night in Seattle and a napkin and two people who had no idea where their lives were going, and I thought about the word here, and what here meant now.
