The Match Page 2

  Ten minutes later, they slid into a booth at Mustang Sally’s, a sixties-themed diner located inside a Ford car dealership. The booth had red vinyl seating and tried very hard to bring on nostalgia, but when you come from New Jersey, faux diners just don’t cut it.

  “You after money?” Carter asked him.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” He let loose a long breath. “I guess I could start off by doubting your claim.”

  “You could,” Wilde agreed.

  “We could do a paternity test.”

  “We could.”

  “But I don’t really see the need. There is a resemblance between us.”

  Wilde said nothing.

  Carter ran his hand through his white mane of hair. “Man, this is weird. I have three daughters. Did you know that?”

  Wilde nodded.

  “Greatest blessings of my life, those girls.” He shook his head. “You’re going to have to give me a few minutes with this, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I know you have a ton of questions. So do I.”

  A young waitress came over and said, “Hey, Mr. C.”

  Daniel Carter gave her a warm smile. “Hey, Nancy.”

  “How’s Rosa?”

  “She’s doing great.”

  “Tell her I say hey.”

  “I sure will.”

  “What can I get you fellas?”

  Daniel Carter ordered a club sandwich with fries. He gestured toward Wilde, who ordered the same. Nancy asked if they wanted anything to drink. Both men shook their heads at the same time. Nancy picked up the menus and left.

  “Nancy Urban went to high school with my youngest,” Carter said when she was out of earshot. “Great kid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They both played on the same volleyball team.”

  “Uh-huh,” Wilde said again.

  Carter leaned in a little. “I really don’t get this.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I can’t believe what you’re telling me. You’re really that little boy they found in the woods all those years ago?”

  “I am,” Wilde said.

  “I remember the news stories. They called you Little Tarzan or something. Hikers spotted you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the Appalachians?”

  Wilde nodded. “The Ramapo Mountains.”

  “Where are those?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Seriously? The Appalachians reach New Jersey?”

  “They do.”

  “I didn’t realize that.” Carter shook his head again. “I’ve never been to New Jersey.”

  So there you had it. His birth father had never been to the state Wilde had called home his whole life. Wilde wasn’t sure what, if anything, to make of that.

  “You don’t think of New Jersey as having mountains,” Carter said, trying to grasp at anything. “I think more about overcrowding and pollution and Springsteen and The Sopranos.”

  “It’s a complicated state,” Wilde said.

  “So’s Nevada. You can’t believe the changes I’ve seen.”

  “How long has Nevada been home for you?” Wilde asked, trying to gently steer the conversation.

  “I was born near here, in a town called Searchlight. Ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s about forty minutes south of here.” He pointed with his finger, as though that was helpful, then he looked at the finger, shook his head, put his hand down. “I’m making small talk for no good reason. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” Wilde said.

  “It’s just…a son.” His eyes may have been welling up. “I’m having trouble wrapping my head around that.”

  Wilde said nothing.

  “Let me tell you one thing right off the top, okay, because I’m sure you’re wondering.” He dropped his voice. “I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know I had a son.”

  “When you said ‘didn’t know’—”

  “I mean, never. Not until this very moment. This is all a complete shock to me.”

  Something cold coursed through Wilde. He had waited for answers like this his whole life. He had blocked on it, pretended that it didn’t matter, and in many ways it didn’t, but of course, the curiosity was there. At some point he’d decided that he wouldn’t let the unknowable define him. He had been left in the woods to die and somehow survived. That obviously changed a person, molded them, was part of everything they did or became.

  “Like I said, I have three daughters. To find out now, all these years later, that I had a son before any of them were even born…” He shook his head and blinked his eyes. “Oh boy, I have to get acclimated to this. Just give me a little time to catch my breath.”

  “Take your time.”

  “You said they call you Wilde?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who named you that?”

  “My foster father.”

  “Apropos,” Carter said. Then: “Was he good to you? Your foster father?”

  Wilde didn’t like being on the answering end here, but he said “Yes,” and left it at that.

  Carter still wore his work shirt. There was a film of dust on it. He reached into the breast pocket and pulled out a pen and reading glasses. “Tell me again when you were found.”

  “April of 1986.”

  Carter wrote that down on the paper mat. “And they guessed you were how old?”

  “Six, seven, something like that.”

  He wrote that down too. “So that means, give or take a year, you were born around 1980.”

  “Yes,” Wilde said.

  Daniel Carter nodded, his eyes on his writing. “My guess would be, Wilde, that you were conceived sometime in the summer of 1980 and born nine months later, so that would be, what, between March and May of 1981.”

  A small vibration shook the table. Carter picked up his mobile phone and squinted at the screen. “Sofia,” he said out loud. “My wife. I better answer it.”

  Wilde managed to gesture for him to go ahead.

  “Hey, hon…Yeah, I’m at Mustang Sally’s.” As he listened, Carter flicked his gaze toward Wilde. “A supplier. He’s bidding to get the PVC pipe order. Right, yeah, I’ll tell you about it later.” Another pause before he added a very sincere, “Love you.”

  He hung up and put the phone back on the table. He stared at it for a long time.

  “That woman is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. Still staring at the phone, he added, “It must have been hard on you, Wilde. Not knowing about your past. I’m sorry.”

  Wilde said nothing.

  “Can I trust you?” Carter asked. Before Wilde could respond, Daniel Carter waved him off. “Dumb question. Insulting even. I have no right to ask anything from you. And a man either keeps his word or he doesn’t. Asking him isn’t going to change anything. The biggest liars I’ve ever met are the best at making promises and holding eye contact.”

  Carter folded his hands and put them on the table. “I guess you’re here for answers.”

  Wilde didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded.

  “I’ll tell you what I can, okay? I’m just trying to think of where to start. I guess with…” He looked up in the air, blinked, dove in. “So Sofia and I started dating our senior year of high school. Fell in love pretty fast. We were kids though. You know how it is. Anyway, Sofia is a lot smarter than me. When we graduated, she went to college. Out of state. In Utah. First in her family to attend college. I joined the air force. Did you serve?”

  “Yes.”

  “What branch?”

  “Army.”

  “Did you see action?” he asked.

  Wilde didn’t like to talk about it. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t. My age, I was lucky. After Vietnam, I mean in the seventies and up until Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, it felt like we’d never go to war again. I know how weird that sounds now, but it’s true. That’s what Nam did to our psyche. G
ave us a nationwide case of PTSD, which maybe was a good thing. I was mostly stationed at Nellis, maybe half an hour from here, but I also did short stints overseas. Ramstein in Germany. Mildenhall in the UK. I didn’t fly or anything. I worked Pavement and Construction Equipment, basically building bases. It’s where I learned about construction.”

  Waitress Nancy interrupted. “The fries were ready, so I brought them out first. They’re best when they’re hot.”

  Carter snapped on the wide, charming smile. “Well, isn’t that thoughtful of you? Thank you, Nancy.”

  Nancy Urban set down the big basket of fries between the two men and put small plates in front of them. There was already ketchup on the table, but Nancy moved the bottle to the center, as though to remind them it was there. When she left, Carter reached out and grabbed a single fry.

  “Sofia and I got engaged right before I left for my summer assignment at Ramstein. We were still really young, and I was worried about losing her. She was meeting all these cool people at college. Every high school couple I knew had already broken up—or had a shotgun marriage because they were pregnant. Anyway, I bought an engagement ring from a pawnshop of all places.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you have any trouble with alcohol, Wilde?”

  “No.”

  “Drugs? Any kind of addiction?”

  Wilde shifted in the booth. “No.”

  Carter smiled. “I’m glad to hear that. I had a bout with alcohol, though I’m twenty-eight years sober. But I can’t blame that. Not really. The long and short of it? I had a crazy summer in Europe. I figured it was my last chance as a single man, and stupidly I thought I should sow my wild oats or whatever nonsense we men used to justify acting out that way. That summer was the only time I cheated on Sofia, and sometimes, even after all these years, I look over at her sleeping and feel guilty. But I did it. One-night stands, we used to call it. Heck, I think people probably still call them one-night stands, don’t they?”

  He looked at Wilde as though he expected him to answer.

  “I guess,” Wilde said to keep the conversation going.

  “Right. You married, Wilde?”

  “No.”

  “Not my business, sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Anyway, I slept with eight girls the summer of 1980. Yep, I know the exact number. How pathetic is that? Other than Sofia, they are the only women I’ve had sex with in my entire life. So the obvious conclusion here is that your mother is one of those eight women.”

  Conceived during a one-night stand, Wilde thought. Did that matter? Wilde couldn’t see how. Perhaps there was some irony in the fact that Wilde was most comfortable in short-term situations or, more bluntly, one-night stands. He’d had girlfriends, women he tried to connect with, but somehow it never quite worked out.

  “Those eight women,” Wilde said.

  “What about them?”

  “Do you have their names or addresses?”

  “No.” Carter rubbed his chin, his eyes turning upward. “I only remember a few first names, sorry.”

  “Did any ever reach out to you?”

  “You mean after? No. I never heard from any of them again. You have to remember. This was 1980. None of us had mobile phones or emails. I didn’t know their last names, they didn’t know mine. Do you ever listen to Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band?”

  “Not really.”

  A wistful smile crossed his face. “Oh man, you’re missing out. I bet you’ve heard ‘Night Moves’ or ‘Turn the Page.’ Anyway, in ‘Night Moves,’ Bob sings, ‘I used her, she used me, but neither one cared.’ That’s what it was like for me that summer.”

  “So they were all one-night stands?”

  “Well, one girl was a weekend fling, I guess. In Barcelona. So that was more like three nights.”

  “And they only knew you as Daniel,” Wilde said.

  “I go by Danny mostly, but yeah.”

  “No last names. No addresses.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you tell them you were a soldier or where you were stationed?”

  He thought about that. “I may have.”

  “But even if you did,” Wilde continued, “Ramstein is huge. Over fifty thousand Americans.”

  “You’ve been?”

  Wilde nodded. He had spent three weeks there training for a secret mission in northern Iraq. “So if a young woman got pregnant and she wanted to find the father and came to the base looking for a Danny or Daniel—”

  “Hold up,” Carter interrupted. “Do you think your mother looked for me?”

  “I don’t know. It’s 1980. She’s pregnant. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just one-night-standing too. Maybe she had one-night stands with a bunch of guys and didn’t know or care who the father was. I don’t know.”

  “But you’re right,” Carter said, his face seeming to drain of color. “Even if she tried to find me, she would never have been able to locate me at that base. And I was only there for eight weeks. I may have even been back stateside by the time she’d learned that she was pregnant.”

  Nancy came back with their sandwiches. She placed one platter in front of Carter, one in front of Wilde. Her eyes danced between the two. Sensing the mood, Nancy hurried away.

  “Eight women,” Wilde said. “How many of them were Americans?”

  “What difference does that make?” Then: “Oh right, I see. You were left in the woods in New Jersey. It would stand to reason that your mother would be American.”

  Wilde waited.

  “Only one. I mostly met the girls in Spain. It was like spring break for all kinds of Europeans back then.”

  Wilde tried to keep his breathing even. “What do you remember about her?”

  Carter picked up a single french fry, held it between his thumb and forefinger. He stared down at it as though it might give him the answer. “I think her name was Susan.”

  “Okay,” Wilde said. “Where did you meet Susan?”

  “A discotheque in Fuengirola. That’s a town on the Costa del Sol. I remember saying hi to her and being surprised when I heard her accent because there were so few Americans who vacationed down there.”

  “So you’re at the disco,” Wilde continued. “Try to think back. Who were you with?”

  “Some guys from my regiment, I guess. I don’t remember. Sorry. They may have been there. We’d bounce from disco to disco.”

  “Did Susan tell you where she was from?”

  Carter shook his head. “In fact, I can’t even say for sure she was American. Like I said, we rarely saw young American girls down there. It wasn’t a spot for them back in 1980. But her accent was clearly American, so I’m guessing she was from here. I also had a lot to drink. I remember dancing with her. That’s what you did. You danced hard and sweaty and then you left.”

  “Where did you two go?”

  “A couple of us had chipped in for a room at a hotel.”

  “Do you remember the name of the hotel?”

  “No, but it was right near the nightclub. A high-rise. I remember it was round.”

  “Round?”

  “Yeah. It was a round high-rise. Distinctive. Our room had a balcony. Don’t ask me how I remember that, but I do. If I looked at pictures of hotels online, I could probably figure it out. If it’s still there.”

  Like that would make a difference, Wilde thought. Like he could fly over to Spain and visit some hotel and ask them whether a young American woman named Susan had a one-night stand in their hotel in 1980.

  “Do you remember when exactly this happened?”

  “You mean like the date?”

  “Whatever, yes.”

  “I think she was later in my stay? Like the sixth or seventh girl, so probably August. But that’s a guess.”

  “Was she staying at this round high-rise too?”

  He made a face. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “Who was she traveling with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When
you started talking to her, was she with anyone?”

  He slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry, Wilde. I don’t remember.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Brown hair. Pretty. But…” He shrugged and said that he was sorry again.

  They talked about other possibilities. An Ingrid from Amsterdam. Rachel or Racquel from Manchester. Anna from Berlin. An hour passed. Then another. They eventually ate the sandwiches and the now-cold french fries. Daniel Carter’s phone buzzed several times. He ignored it. They talked, though Carter did the majority of the speaking. Wilde wasn’t one for opening up.

  When the phone buzzed yet again, Daniel Carter signaled Nancy for the bill. Wilde said that he would pay it, but Carter shook him off. “I would say it’s the least I could do, but that would be too insulting.”

  They got back into the pickup truck and started back toward the house on Sundew Avenue. Both men fell into a silence so thick you could reach out and touch it. Wilde looked out the front windshield at the night sky. He had spent his entire life looking up at the stars, but there was something about the color of the sky just past dusk, the turquoise tint that you only find in the American Southwest.

  “Where are you staying tonight?” his father asked.

  “The Holiday Inn Express.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need to ask you a favor, Wilde.”

  Wilde looked over at his father’s profile. There was no doubting the resemblance to his own. Carter was staring out the front windshield, his gnarled hands gripping the wheel at a perfect ten-and-two-o’clock.

  “I’m listening,” Wilde said.

  “I got a really nice family,” he said. “Loving wife, wonderful doting daughters, grandkids even.”

  Wilde said nothing.

  “We are pretty simple people. We work hard. We try to do the right thing. I’ve owned my own business for a long time now. I never cheat anyone. I provide a solid service to my customers. Twice a year, me and Sofia, we take a vacation in an Airstream to a different national park. The girls used to come with us, but now, well, they’ve got families of their own.”