The five toddlers’ outfits were released by the authorities to Taina’s parents in 1989. Taina’s dress had been white linen, size 2T. It was a curious and unique dress, hand-embroidered with yellow ducks that tumbled from the pockets and then landed on their feet and scattered across the fine yellow piping of the hem. On the seat of the dress, one little duck has its little tail feathers sticking up in the air. Finery with a sense of humor. One-of-a-kind.
The craftsmanship of the dress was what inspired Taina to study textile design. Taina and her mother, Natasha, had examined that dress with the care of forensic scientists. Taina became knowledgeable about fabrics and makers of children’s clothing in an effort to discover something about herself through the history of the dress. She consulted experts and a psychic or two about the nature of the fabric, the design, style, and crafting, but she knew very little to this day about where it came from. There was a tag, in English: “Lilly Pad Designs. Cotton linen. Handwash. Warm iron as needed.” There had been a small company in Boston specializing in children’s clothing called Lilly Pad Designs, but it had closed in 1985. The owner, Lilly Patterson, was deceased.
The dress takes thirty minutes to iron, Taina timed it herself. The high-maintenance quality of the dress, she decided, was evidence of her early exposure to beauty and good taste despite whatever calamities marked her infancy. She eventually came to feel that she was born in that outfit, that nothing before mattered because her life was a single continuum from then on. The dress had given her a life, a passion, a focus. After attending NYU, Taina found work in the New York garment district, for a prestigious fabric designer. There, she created a unique fabric theme, called “Caribbean Lagoon,” a line of rich cottons and linens that evoked a tropical vacation. Even her abstract patterns, such as argyle, implied a life of white wicker on terraces overlooking swaying palms and a turquoise sea, lemons and pineapples and poolside gardens of hibiscus and birds of paradise. The designs had sold to a label that catered to the Palm Beach country-club set. Her parents were her biggest fans, and as soon as the temperature hit seventy in New York, they went to work wearing absurdly bright outfits made out of her “Lagoon” fabrics.
The week before David’s surgery, Taina had been on her way to work when she spotted Doug a half-block behind her. She knew that Doug had seen her too. She felt detected. This encounter had been prophesied the night before by Holly, a.k.a. Big Mouth. Holly had taken it upon herself to inform Doug about David’s illness. “Be ready, Taina” she had warned. “You know how Doug loves to be a hero, and he’s still very much in love with you.”
Taina felt Doug’s eyes on her back. She darted into the yawning mouth of a church. In the dim light, she made a sharp left and sunk her knees into the pads of a kneeler, pulling up the hood of her raincoat and bowing her head before a row of candles glowing softly in the shadowy darkness. Doug passed behind her, and when she turned to look at him, she could see him scanning to the left and right. She heard the size-thirteen shoes clicking distinctly across the marble despite the din of tourists’ voices, each step carrying him deeper into the gloom of the church. She dashed out the door and exited to the street. Once at a safe distance, she bought coffee and a bottle of water from a cart and headed back to the office.
But Doug was already waiting for Taina in her studio. He was fingering the bolts of fabric that she had left on her work table, a cream-colored, textured raw silk that, based on orders alone, was destined to become all the rage next season for brides, flower girls, first communions, and bat mitzvahs. He looked up at her, then back at the bolt of fabric, which looked like a small, pearly mummy, aglow under the wash of soft track lighting. Doug said, “Lucky you. You work with beauty every day.” Taina reached past him and yanked the bolt of fabric away. She placed it on a shelf, feeling his eyes on her backside. She was anxious to get to work. If she had any chance at all of being able to take time off to be with David, she would have to work twelve- and fourteen-hour days in the weeks ahead.
“Doug,” she cleared her throat, put her hands on her hips, and said, “let’s cut to the chase. David is going to be fine.”
Doug folded his hands in front of him. “Taina,” he said softly, “it’s a grade-four primary brain tumor. You know what the doctors call this type of tumor amongst themselves? They call it ‘the terminator.’ Your brother is dying and he doesn’t have much time.” Doug sighed. “He called me. He said that he thinks it’s time. You know.” He reached over and tapped the top of her hand. Taina pulled it away, as if he had touched her with a burning cigarette. “The boss is watching me.” She pointed at the clock on the wall.
“I’m going to help you, Taina. I’ve already started.”
“Help me?”
“Help David. Help you. He knows what it would mean to know. To give you your life back.”
“I don’t want my life back,” she said. “You can keep it.”
“Let this be my final gift to David. And to you. We don’t have to tell the others. If they don’t want to know, that’s their business. But you—you ought to know. It’s the only way . . .”
“The only way for what? For us to get back together?”
“Yeah,” he said, relieved. “It’s my last hope.”
Taina shook her head. She made a cutting gesture with her hand. “We’re done, Doug.” She plopped into her chair, then swiveled her body around on the stool to face her computer.
He left. Her hand was shaking as she turned back around to reach for the water bottle she had been sipping, but it was gone. She looked out the window and saw Doug walking in the opposite direction, three levels down, on the sidewalk. One arm hung beside him as he walked. In the other, he carried something close to his body.
Taina had met Doug while walking her dog near her parents’ house on the Upper East Side. Doug had been a stockbroker, the only son of a couple who lived in the same row of brownstones as her parents. He always wore expensive cologne and dark overcoats that in retrospect Taina had thought of as a kind of yuppie super-hero cape. He was tall and bulky, busy, sporty, manly. His voice had the rich, sonorous chime of a grandfather clock. He could figure out a waiter’s tip in seconds, pick up the bill, and say, “Let’s get out of here,” as if she needed to be rescued from a five-star restaurant. At first, he courted her in the old-fashioned way, by opening car doors and taking her to expensive restaurants. But there wasn’t enough chemistry there to take things up a notch. She certainly wasn’t going to sleep with someone she only liked. Besides, she had this paranoia about Caucasian men. Did he think she was easy because her skin was bronze? Five dates and all she gave him were kisses on the cheek and awkward hugs. She knew he would tire of it eventually, and he did. He stopped calling and she let it be. She didn’t see him again for a year. Then she walked into a hospital room after a neighbor had been assaulted and had her car stolen, there was Doug with his mother. Doug’s eyes popped out when he saw her walk in. Everyone wanted to help the neighbor get her life back to normal, and so by the end of the visit, the bed-ridden woman had assigned them all some kind of a task. Doug and Taina volunteered to make a three-hour drive upstate to fetch a vehicle borrowed from the victim’s elderly aunt. After three hours in a car together, they relaxed. Doug took her hand and said, “I want to get to know you for real this time.” Then he said, “I’m gonna have to kiss you, just to take the edge off.” So they kissed good and hard right there in front of the neighbor’s mother’s house, and Taina saw the old aunt peel back the curtain to see why they were still in her driveway. They knew that they couldn’t start up their boring formality again. So instead, they walked the dog, ordered Chinese, and played board games. He killed her at Monopoly, but she won at Scrabble. Soon they had found a new, strangely sexy, endearing comfort zone. There were six more low-budget weekday dates before they moved to Sunday afternoons. They went bowling, to the museum, on a long bike ride, to a dog obedience-school graduation ceremony, and to a Cajun cooking class.
Two months passed before they promoted each other back to Friday and Saturday nights. He took her sailing on his parents’ boat. They had so much fun that they forgot the time. They ended up having to sleep on Block Island. By then they were all worked up from a whole day’s worth of kissing and pressing themselves against each other, drunk with a combination of white wine, lust, and all that sunshine. Taina opened up then, quite literally, and experienced what became one of her all-time favorite life moments: falling in love surrounded by inky, starlit darkness.
They made love three times that night. Then they headed back to the boat before dawn. They jumped into the cold water, and, shivering, wrapped each other in towels and had coffee and watched the sun come up. “This is so much better than those stiff dates we had,” Doug said.
“Of course it is. We had sex.”
“It’s not because of the sex,” he said, in a gentle scolding tone. “Hell, I had sex last week and I didn’t feel like this.” He instantly regretted what he had said. “It was just—” he said helplessly. “Err. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
She looked away. “I knew it. I knew it.”
“What I was trying to say . . .” He fell to his knees and looked up at her. “Is that I’m really enjoying getting to know you. I want to see you again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Okay?”
She looked at him sideways. “That depends on whether you plan to continue shagging people while you’re ‘getting to know me’ better.”
He laughed. “No. That’s the point. I’ve been ‘unhappily shagging.’ I will unhappily shag no more.”
So they continued to date in a way that felt natural and friendly and fun, and eventually they added some conventional stuff now and then. She took him on a few of her business trips. He was so leading and confident that his reaction to their separations always amazed her: “What? I’m not going to see you for a whole week?” Or if he had a big power meeting at work, he’d give her all the credit for getting him though it. “I get to see your face at night, so I can put up with anything during the day.” Then he would give her that look.
The next phase of their courtship was the meeting of the families. They proceeded with caution, formality having been established as the undisputable enemy of their relationship.
Fast-forward a year. Doug’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the same day that his dad is named president of a global charitable foundation. It soon became impossible for Doug’s father to shoulder his wife’s illness, so Taina and Doug stepped in, watching over her and taking her to chemotherapy appointments. His mother had always been polite with Taina, but after that, she adored her. For Taina’s birthday, she gave her a white gold and diamond heart locket from Tiffany’s. There was an anniversary party for the parents that year, and with secret joy, Taina basked in the admiration and gratitude of the family’s friends and extended relatives for being such a great support to the family. She had never been happier; and Doug began to talk about marriage.
A month later, Doug’s mother reached the stage of baldness. She was throwing up in the next room, when Doug held up a ring and asked Taina to be his wife. The timing and location of his marriage proposal was perfect, given their aversion to tradition. Taina said, “Of course,” and they went into the rancid-smelling bathroom to give his mom the good news. The woman’s skin went from green to pink in ten seconds, and she had named her grandchildren and great-grandchildren before she even made it out of the bathroom. Months went by and she went into remission. Life went back to normal, but the family was fatigued so the wedding was put on hold. Then, bad news. Doug got fired from his high-power job on Wall Street for “underperforming.” He had spent too much time caring for his mother. He had a flurry of lunches with other firms, but Taina could see that he was deeply affected. His heart wasn’t in it anymore.
Doug and Taina got married in a small ceremony attended by only twenty guests. Holly was the only sibling missing, since she was in her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy and on mandatory bed rest with her second child. Shortly after the wedding, Doug announced that he would never set foot on Wall Street or in corporate America again. For a while, after having talked to Erick, he toyed with the idea of becoming a pilot. Law school was a little closer to the mark but he just couldn’t get himself to apply. Several sessions with a career counselor led him back to his childhood dream of being a homicide detective. He had abandoned the dream because his parents had vehemently discouraged it. He knew he had to start at the bottom, as a beat cop; and the idea of it utterly electrified him. Six months later, he began training at the police academy. They had to give up their apartment, and move to more modest quarters.
Technically, Taina was in favor of his “unconventional” new career, but in reality, the change rattled her to the core. She had been toying with the idea of a professional transition herself. She had done well in drawing and painting and college, and felt that she could be a “real” artist as well as a designer. She attended a lecture on the subject of Latinos in the arts, where they discussed the dangers of assimilation into mainstream American culture, using mutually understood terms like “othering” and “post-identity.” In these circles, the worst kind of self-betrayal by an artist of color was to produce work that was culturally anonymous. Taina sat through it, looking every bit Latina, with her bronze skin and black hair pulled back shiny and flat like a salsa dancer, but everything they talked about was foreign to her. Inside, Taina felt as white as a Swiss milkmaid; and this, she feared, was a basic failure of integrity. She felt like a fraud culturally, artistically, and perhaps most grievous of all: emotionally.
Taina’s own personal anxiety just heightened the tensions at home about Doug’s career change. He was a person whose very identity was undergoing transformation too, but rather than make Taina feel closer to him, it felt like she’d hitched up with someone just as confused as she was. One day, they were having lunch in the city on a Saturday, when his mobile phone rang. He was in the restroom so Taina answered. It was a woman. Taina asked the caller how she knew Doug. The caller said that they had met at the police academy, that they were friends and had plans to meet for lunch the following Monday.
When Doug returned to the table, Taina simply looked at him and said, “So I hear you’re dating again.”
Doug pulled his head back. “Huh?”
She picked up the phone and held it up. “Katie called.”
He blinked twice, licked his lips. “Yeah?”
“She filled me in.”
“Filled you in on what? We just went to a few happy hours together after training,” he said with a strained voice.
“You’re cheating on me, aren’t you?”
“Taina,” he begged. “You’re my life, baby. You have absolutely no reason to be jealous. Trust me.”
“You slept with her,” she said flatly. “I can tell.”
“Look at me,” he said, pointing at his own eyes. “No. I did not cheat and I never will.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said in a zombie-like voice. And when she got up from her chair, Doug saw that she had wet herself.
Doug made several grandiose attempts to reassure her. He sent huge bunches of roses to her at work, an embarrassment. What else could two dozen roses mean, really?
She “forgave” him eventually, but back came the dreaded formality, a way to punish him or keep him at arm’s length. They went back to the peck on the cheek at the end of the night, only this time she expected to be treated like a diva. She even made him buy her silk roses from a street vendor in front of all his work friends, really tacky ones with wax dewdrops on their fake petals, which she tossed in the garbage on the way home.
Taina began to talk about Adrian a lot. Adrian this, Adrian that. She played his music constantly, had his lyrics memorized, even though she didn’t speak Spanish. She began to throw Spanish words around and act Latina, as if to make Doug feel the same disorientation he had felt when he switched from a stockbroker to a policeman. Their relationship was out of the corral again, bucking and running off into the hills. In the meantime, Doug had never been happier at work: he was already a star at the NYPD, and his new line of work fulfilled him like never before. In an unfortunate coincidence, and through absolutely no fault of his own, he was assigned to work with an unusual number of women. He was put on a big case that required frequent contact with a renowned criminal profiler, a very attractive blonde who looked like she had stepped out of her own TV show. His partner? A woman. His immediate boss? A woman.
“Do you work at the NYPD or at Victoria’s Secret?” David had joked. But Taina didn’t think it was so funny. She couldn’t adjust to his new life, his new persona, his new vocabulary and street accent, even his new happiness was confusing. Then he made the colossal mistake of revealing an extremely intimate fact about their marriage to a coworker (Taina overheard him on the phone with someone, probably the dreaded Katie, saying that Taina was “a raging insomniac”). Worst of all, he let it slip that she had begun sleeping in the other room. Outraged, Taina changed the locks and kicked him out for good. She went to see a divorce lawyer that same week. Doug’s next move was to visit Taina’s mother at her office at the university. Natasha Brighton had experienced her daughter’s ups and downs and didn’t hesitate to help him, although she made him promise to keep her contribution a secret. She had handed Doug two files: one labeled “news clippings” and another labeled “adoption file.”
Doug never once considered that Taina didn’t love him, nor did he believe that she could possibly love Adrian. Adrian’s name came up after every argument they had ever had; he represented some kind of emotional refuge for her, an excuse to focus her energy elsewhere. It was true that Doug had betrayed their marital secrets but only after her insecurities had really gone berserk. Later, he had consulted with a trusted colleague who knew a great deal about the psychology of traumatized children. Taina, he was told, was being manipulated by fears so deep and so old that even she didn’t recognize them as imaginary anymore.
When David was diagnosed with brain cancer, Doug had been saddened and shocked like everyone else. But his first concern was for his wife. If David died, Taina might never recover emotionally, she might lose trust in life itself. And the psychologist at work had been spot-on about David’s reaction to his own illness. He predicted that David would suddenly want to resolve the mystery of his origins, so Doug wasn’t a bit surprised; in fact, he was ready, with research in hand, when David e-mailed him a message two weeks after his diagnosis. The message contained just a few lines confirming his desire to proceed with the search; a message with the words “Ready to open Pandora’s Box” written in the subject line.