They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Red Shoe

At seven a.m. Jackie meets shipping billionaire Ulysses Norcross, who has kept the other red shoe for twenty-five years, and asks him for thirty days of silence, until she finds her name erased from the Selwyn website and hears Gwendolyn say they only ever had one daughter.

I did not sleep, and my assistant did not let me pretend I had.

She was waiting at the kitchen table of my house on Lantern Row in Charlestown.

She was in her robe, with a pot of coffee and a legal pad.

She was sixty-three, she had run a Coast Guard dispatch desk for thirty years, and she now ran me.

"Kid," she said when I came through the door soaked. "Sit. Talk. Eat."

I put the rabbit on the table and the lab report beside it.

She read the second page twice.

Then she took off her glasses and said a word that would have gotten her written up at the Coast Guard.

"Norcross," she said. "The ships Norcross?"

"The ships Norcross."

"And the family?"

"Gone," I said. "Out the door. I left the suitcases."

"Good," she said. "Hand me the phone."

"No," I said.

"I wasn't going to do anything," she said.

"You were going to call the lawyer about the note."

She put the phone down. "Not till you say."

I ate the eggs she put in front of me.

At six I took the red shoe out of the rabbit.

I had cut a slit in the lining when I was seven and kept it there ever since.

It was a toddler's right shoe, scuffed and gone brown at the toe, with a strap that did not close any more.

At seven I walked into the lobby of Norcross Maritime on the waterfront with the shoe in my coat pocket and my hair still wet.

"I need to see Mr. Norcross," I told the guard at the desk. "It's about a lab report."

He started to say that Mr. Norcross did not see anyone without an appointment.

Behind him, the lobby television was playing the morning news with the sound low.

I did not look at it.

"Tell him it's about the Mystic River," I said.

The guard stopped talking, and he picked up the phone.

The elevator took me to a corner office with windows on three sides and cranes standing in the gray harbor.

A big white-haired man was already on his feet behind the desk.

He leaned on a cane with both hands, and his knuckles were white.

His eyes were gray.

They were my eyes, exactly, set in a face that was older and rougher and wider than mine.

I had spent twenty-eight years looking in mirrors for somebody else's face.

Now I stood in a doorway and found it.

"Miss," he said. His voice came out cracked. "I'm Ulysses Norcross. Whatever you have for me, I'll look at it."

I walked across the carpet and set the shoe on his desk.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he opened the top drawer with a hand that shook and took out a small box.

From the box he took another red shoe.

It was the left one.

He put it down beside mine, heel to heel, and they were a pair.

"The divers found it on the bank," he said. "That night. The car was in the river with my wife in it, and the child seat was empty. I was told you went into the water. I was told for twenty-five years."

"I walked," I said. "I don't remember how far. A man at a truck stop outside Providence found me three days later. I told the state my name was Jackie."

He sat down in his chair, all at once, with the cane clattering to the floor.

I picked it up and gave it back to him.

His hand closed on mine around the cane, and he held on.

"Jackie," he said. "She called you Jackie. Your name was Jacqueline on the birth certificate, and your mother called you Jackie from the first day. I gave that name to the divers every night for a month."

He looked up at me, and his face was wet and he did not care.

"What do you need?" he said. "Anything. A house. A name. The company. Tell me."

"Nothing," I said. "I don't want money. I have money." "I want thirty days."

"For what?"

"No press. No announcement. Nobody knows who I am but you until I say, and I keep the name I have."

"Selwyn," he said slowly. "You're the Selwyn girl. The adopted one. Winston Selwyn's daughter."

"Not since last night."

His grip tightened on the cane.

"They put you out?"

"They found their own daughter," I said. "I'm glad they did. I'd like to finish a few things before the world finds out whose I am."

He studied me a while.

Then something in his face gave way, and I saw him decide.

"Thirty days," he said. "I can keep my mouth shut for you. I've kept it shut for twenty-five years." He tried to smile. "One condition."

"What?"

"You eat with me on Sundays. I'll tell you about your mother. You don't owe me one other thing."

"That's a fair deal," I said.

"She took you to the pier every Sunday to count ships," he said. "She peeled you an orange and you held each slice up to the sun before you ate it."

I had not remembered that for twenty years, and my whole chest hurt.

I remembered oranges and a horn, and somebody laughing above me.

When I could walk again, I walked out through the lobby.

The guard was staring at the television.

On the screen my mother sat on a pale yellow sofa in the Boston Morning studio.

Clary sat beside her, and my mother had pearls at her throat and a tissue in her hand.

The host leaned in. "Mrs. Selwyn, there's talk about another young woman in your household."

"We were so lucky to have her for a time," my mother said gently. "But we only ever had one daughter."

On my phone my assistant had sent a link.

I opened it.

The Selwyn Harbor Hotels website had a new page called Our Family.

It showed my mother, my father and Clary on the front steps of the Chestnut Street house.

There was no photograph of me anywhere, in any year, on any page of the site, and I had been in two thirds of them.

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