One Cold Night

thought of how cold Lisa would be outside, alone, at this hour of the night.

Chapter 2
    Tuesday, 10:29 p.m.
    It was dark out, and cold. Lisa ran along Washington Street, where patches of asphalt had worn away to reveal hand-laid cobblestones. When she got to the old rail tracks — twin seams of metal emerging from the lumpy stone — her bright blue suede sneakers immediately landed on one of them. She walked the years-polished track heel-to-toe like a tightrope, arms flung out for balance.
    I am your birth mother.
    It couldn’t be true; this had never remotely been one of Lisa’s daydreams. She had pictured her birth mother as valiant, brilliant, alone; an outsider with a dissident’s inability to practice the language and habits of the mundane world. A woman whose soul would die from the stench of a dirty diaper; a woman whose essence was nonetheless transformed by the act of birth; a woman who was unable to seek Lisa out, for the sheer practical effort of it, but who had spent fourteen years waiting to be found.
    Her mother was a rebel; her mother was a genius,someone living far above the workaday crowd. And she had inherited her mother’s genius, the inextinguishable light.
    She used to think her mother was Joni Mitchell, and Lisa was Little Green, that memory of a lost springtime. But that dream evaporated when Joni’s birth daughter tracked her down and there they were, reunited in the public eye: two grown women, look-alikes. Lisa had known the dates were all wrong, anyway; wrong dates, right idea. Joni’s voice and her spirit evolved into Lisa’s next conviction: that there was a mother for every girl, a father for every boy. Out there, answers waited.
    Like her, her mother had a fantastic gift and was certain of her right to possess it.
    Her mother was not an insecure college dropout who made fancy chocolates in Brooklyn.
    Like her, her mother was small and blond and radiated an inner beauty; her mother was loaded with talents; her mother was her long-lost twin.
    Her mother was not a strong-limbed woman with short, dark, practical hair. Her mother did not wear a white coat and a porkpie hat and shape truffles until her hands ached.
    Her true mother would never question her clothes or her hours or her friends. Her true mother would intuitively understand everything about her. Her true mother could not possibly have changed her diaper, been that close to her dark smells, or tasted her salty, inconsolable cries as a baby. Her true mother had never suffered her, and so was untainted by her faults. Her true mother would thrill at the chance to know her.
    She had imagined her birth mother so many ways: a queen locked in the tower of her own brilliance; anabused mother of seven who couldn’t feed another mouth; a Monte Carlo con woman. Her mother was at the epicenter of a drama. She was a magic trick who knew herself in and out and had made the only possible choice in giving up her baby.
    Not Susan. Her sister. A woman who had it both ways, patched together with a lie.
    Lisa walked the old track, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. She could hear the undulating water just beyond the swell of green lawn and curved stone paths of the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park. The ship-themed playground, dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge Park, hadn’t been there when she was a little girl — how she would have loved a designated place to play when she first visited at the age of five. Back then, the only things this neighborhood offered up were left to the imagination. She remembered tightroping these same tracks but with much smaller feet, visiting her big sister in her big loft in the big city. Such a far cry from their hometown of Carthage, Texas.
    Back then Susan’s loft was like a palace, with its big windows drinking in the glittering Manhattan view; back then Lisa had no interest in the loft’s lack of hot water or even, in winter, heat. Susan was a princess living a fairy-tale life far away from home. The streets were empty way back then, when it was an urban backwater here in Dumbo — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — a derelict neighborhood of abandoned warehouses beneath two roaring bridge ramps. Now every ghostly, echoing warehouse was a renovation project, a fixed-up blight, mixing the overhead bridge noise with the grind of nonstop construction. By day, the neighborhood was deafening, overcome by its own sudden growth. But by night,when the workers left and the galleries and patisseries gated their