Later, that will be a clue.
Another clue will be that when the bus comes rumbling down the street, she clings to him for a long moment. She kisses him on both cheeks, and then she does a butterfly kiss, where she flutters her eyelashes against his eyelashes.
And when she gets on the bus, she sits by the window and looks down at him, waving and smiling. “Thank you, Patrick!” she yells out the window.
Thank you?
He walks back to the house, taking out his phone while he walks. It’s time to get Marnie back, and he is so ready.
He’s decided to start off by texting her. Funny, humble, clever texts. That’s the way he won her over in the first place, so it’s bound to work now. She’ll see that he’s back to being his old self and that he loves her. Then he’ll beg her to come back home, where he will show her how much he’s changed.
Marnie, he types. There are people here in Brooklyn who are not meeting their soul mates because you are not here to run across the park (or restaurant, or wherever) and introduce them. Mayor is declaring state of emergency. #LoveEmergency
There is no answer. Of course there’s no answer. It’s the stupidest text ever.
Ten minutes later, he writes: That didn’t sound like what I meant to say. The truth is that the #LoveEmergency is happening in our kitchen.
Nothing. Nada. He types a heart and sends that.
He makes himself a cup of coffee, does some knee bends and boxing moves. Feeds the cat and dog. Washes up the breakfast dishes. Stares out of the window. Wonders if she’ll want to get one of those deluxe strollers, or if she’ll want the tiny, foldable kind that looks like an umbrella. That is just one of hundreds of discussions they’ll have.
He types: (Clearing throat here, beginning again.) I miss you so much. I don’t think I can go on without you. People here in this house think eight weeks is too long without you. #Me #Fritzie #Bedford #Roy
It may sound selfish, but we voted and we think we need you more than your dad does at this point, he types. That was risky. Maybe her dad has had a relapse.
And anyway she’s not going to answer him. She’s mad. She may be actually done with him.
I love you, and I’m sorry, he writes.
But now he has to stop this. Step away from the phone. But he can’t help himself from typing one more:
Please forgive me.
He slips the phone into his pocket, and then to his surprise, it makes a beeping sound, and he leaps in midair. Feels his pulse quicken. There’s a voice message from a missed call. He can’t imagine how he missed a call when he’s been standing right here, holding the thing in his hand. But there it is. He’s shaking as he presses the buttons to hear the message. It’s got to be her.
But it’s not her. It’s the Brooklyn Kind School. Maybelle’s voice. “Hi, Patrick. Just wanted to check in with you this morning to see if Fritzie is sick again. You didn’t call in this morning to report her absent. Sure hope she’s not having another bout of flu. Let her know we miss her.”
And that’s it: he thinks he might die right then and there.
Fritzie didn’t show up at school, and nothing that has ever happened to him before has prepared him for this moment. The air has gone out of him.
His fingers punch in Marnie’s phone number, and to his surprise, she answers.
“Patrick, what in the hell is going on with you? These texts!” she says. Not even “hello.”
“It’s Fritzie,” he says, all in a rush. “She never made it to school today. I put her on the bus, and then Maybelle called and said she isn’t there.”
Marnie is silent for a moment. “Is this for real?”
“Yes! God. Yes.”
“Listen. Call Maybelle. Maybe there’s a mistake when they did the attendance. That must happen sometimes. Don’t panic yet.”
Right. Of course, he thinks. He hangs up and calls Maybelle, who says she’ll make sure and call back—and sure enough, she calls back five minutes later and tells him there is no Fritzie at Brooklyn Kind School today.
“Where might she have gone?” she asks him. “She’s impulsive, so we should try to think of something she might have decided on her own.”
“I’m calling the police,” he says, and Maybelle says, “Right. That’s a good idea.”
He gets off the phone and thinks to call Fritzie’s cell phone first. His breathing matches each thrumming sound as it rings. Two times . . . three times . . . four . . . five . . . There’s no answer, which of course there wouldn’t be, because most likely the kidnappers who have taken her have thrown her phone into the East River to hide any evidence. He thinks he’s going to throw up.
Marnie calls him back. “So? Is she at school after all?”
“No. She’s not.”
“Okay, Patrick. I think you should call the police. And we have to think good thoughts. Not go into a huge panic. This is Fritzie, after all. She’d fight off anybody who tried to kidnap her. She’s most likely had some crazy idea and has gone off to do it—”
“Marnie, I-I’m flattened by this.” He’s surprised at how calm his voice sounds to his own ears, even though his whole brain seems to have gone on red alert. He remembers this feeling. He’s moving through a fog. It’s as though the world has so many sharp edges, and the worst thing are the edges he can’t see to focus on.
“I know.”
“Please, can you come back home?” he hears himself say from very far away. “Not just for this! For everything. Marnie, I can’t tell—I mean, this isn’t the time to tell you how much I love you and how much you mean to me, because I have to call the police now. But—could you come?”
“Call the police, Patrick.”
“Wait,” he says. Something is beeping in his ear. “There’s a call on the other line.”
“This is Officer Timothy Pettigrew with the Kennedy Airport police unit,” says the voice on the phone when Patrick clicks over. “To whom am I speaking?”
He tries to explain who he is, says it all too fast, has to repeat it. Tongue is suddenly all too thick. Can’t remember how it is a person can breathe and talk at the same time. The police are calling him? Kennedy Airport—what? So . . . kidnappers? Traffickers, then? IS SHE ALIVE?
“We have your daughter, Fritzie Delaney, here in custody, and we’re requesting that you come down . . .”
“The airport?” he says. His breath is high in his chest. “Oh my God. Is she all right?” So it was kidnappers. Traffickers. Smuggling her somewhere. His breath leaves his body.
The officer seems to be talking to someone else. He can hear the muffled sounds of voices; some kind of explaining is going on.
Patrick has died three times by now. He’s surprised to realize that he’s now slumped on the floor. Bedford has come over to investigate. “Is she all right?” he says again, yelling this time, and then Officer Whoever the Hell His Name Is returns to the phone and says, “She’s fine, sir. A little scared, but she’s all right. She was trying to get on a flight, but she got stopped in the security line. She was pretending to be with a family of four, but when they went through security, they told the TSA worker that she wasn’t with them, so our officer went over and took her into custody.”
So no kidnappers. Or maybe the family of four was the kidnappers, and then Fritzie outsmarted—
“I’ll be there,” says Patrick. “May I talk to her?”
“Fritzie,” says the officer. “Your father is on his way, but first he wants to talk to you.”
There’s the squawking of radios in the background, and then he hears her say quite clearly, “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“What?” he says to the cop. “Why not?”
“It’s just what she says,” says the cop. Then he lowers his voice, changes his tone. “I’ve got kids like this myself. Especially one of them. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s embarrassed right now. This was a pretty big mistake. Guess she thought she was going to see her mom maybe? Had her plans wrecked. She’ll be real h
appy to see you when you’re here.”
Her mom. Fritzie was heading to Italy? He has so many questions he needs to have answered this second. He’s tempted to ask the cop, but he knows he can’t. How had she planned all this? Did she have a ticket? And how did she get to the airport in the first place? And why, why, why was she thinking that going to see Tessa was going to solve anything? Is that who she’s been pining for? Do kids always run back to the neglectful parent?
“So, Mr. Delaney, if you’ll bring her birth certificate with you when you come. Just so we know we’re releasing her to the right person.”
Her birth certificate.
Does he even have that? After he hangs up, he calls Marnie back. She listens silently as he tells her the whole story.
“Okay,” she says when he finally winds down.
“I thought we were doing so well,” he says. “I thought I could do this job. We did homework, bedtimes, guessing games, playtime. We cooked. It was all good. She was sick—so sick for days and days, and I didn’t sleep, I stayed by her side—”
“Patrick,” she says, interrupting him. “I’m sure you’ve been brilliant at all this. And I’m coming. I already made a reservation, and I’ll get in tonight. But you have to know something: I’m not coming because you asked me to. I know we’re not together anymore. I’m coming because I want to see Fritzie. And I’m probably going to come right back here. Just so you know.”
“Okay,” he says. He wonders if she was being sarcastic about the brilliant part. “Thank you for that.”
“Not a problem,” she says crisply. “I want to see her.”
“Do you happen to know where her birth certificate might be?”
She says it’s in the top drawer in the kitchen, the one near the toaster. Like this was something she had told him before. She keeps some important stuff there. He finds the envelope containing it while he’s still on the phone with her. His guts feel like they’re in a knot. He can’t seem to bring himself to hang up the phone.
“I love you,” he says. “Thank you for helping me through this. And I don’t think I can live without you.”
“Patrick, I am really, really mad at you.”
“I know. I know you are.”
“I guess she really has been missing her mom all this time,” Marnie says. “I hope Tessa steps up here. Otherwise this is just going to be so sad.”
“It is sad,” says Patrick. “Now would you please go get on that plane? I think if you miss it, I might actually die.”
The airport police office has a big counter and uncomfortable plastic chairs and officers coming in and out, some filling out paperwork, while others are drinking coffee or talking. One cop is standing with his foot up on his desk chair while he talks on a cell phone. Radios are crackling, cutting in and out with the static news of police business. A German shepherd, all harnessed up for duty, lies on the floor with his eyes open. He raises his head when Patrick comes in.
Fritzie is sitting in a black plastic chair, with her feet in their scuffed-up boots not touching the ground, her legs swinging back and forth. Patrick can’t believe how tiny she looks. She is such a force in his life, so loud and powerful that he is shocked to see that she’s really such a little girl, so small in that busy, government-business room, with her crazy haircut. Big saucer eyes, fingers in her mouth, looking around at all the activity. Waiting for him with an empty granola wrapper next to her on the chair.
When she sees Patrick rounding the corner, her lower lip starts to tremble, and then she puts her face in her hands and brings her knees up and scoots backward in the chair.
He makes his way over to her, squats down next to her, and puts his arms around her. After a moment of hesitation, she buries her head in his neck. He feels her shaking, and her tears are wet against his skin.
“Hey. It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says. His own eyes are watering, too.
She’s whispering. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Sssh,” he says. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”
He sees a police officer approaching them and then backing off, letting them be. Patrick is grateful for that. He’s not sure he can compose himself just yet.
“What were you doing?” he whispers. He rubs his thumb against her cheek.
“I just wanted to find Marnie for you.”
He pulls back and looks at her face. “You were trying to get to Marnie? I thought you were trying to go to Italy.”
“No. I wanted to go get Marnie back. For you.” She looks down at her fingers and starts pulling at them. “You weren’t going to get her to come back. You know you weren’t.”
“Ahhh, Fritzie, that wasn’t your job. Not your job at all.” He takes her hand. “You—you scared me so much. I’ve been out of my mind with worrying about you! You know that, right? I was terrified when I heard you’d gone to the airport.”
“I had to do it.”
“No, you didn’t have to do it. You should have told me how you felt. We’re a team, remember? We agreed to talk everything over. How did you think I was going to feel when I discovered you were gone?”
“I knew you’d be worried, but then it would all work out okay because Marnie would call you and say I was there with her, and then we would come back together.”
“No,” he says. “That’s not how that works.” He sits back on his haunches and looks at her.
“Are you gonna keep me?” Her eyes are enormous, all black pupils, boring into his.
“Am I going to . . . keep you?”
“Yeah. Are you gonna take me back home with you and keep me?”
“Fritzie.” Her face is smeared with snot and tears and something that he hopes is granola pieces. “Of course I’m going to keep you. Did you think I was going to leave you here?”
She sticks her fingers in her mouth. “I thought you might be so mad at me.”
“Look at me. I don’t get mad. And I wouldn’t ever be that mad.”
“Yes. Patrick, do you remember when you first met me, and you didn’t love me? You didn’t want to keep me, and I was your daughter, but you didn’t want me there.”
He shakes his head, runs his hands through his hair, entertains an irrational hope that the cop isn’t hearing all this. “Yeah, well, I’m—Fritzie, wait. You really thought I’d just leave you here at the airport?”
“Marnie loved me, and I miss her, and you miss her, and you were not doing it right, Patrick. You know you weren’t saying the things to get her to come back!”
“Never mind all that. Did you get a plane ticket for this, or were you just going to charm your way onto the plane?”
“Yes. I had a ticket. The policeman took it.”
“But how—how did you get it? You’re eight.”
“On the computer. I saw her do the buying on the computer, and I went in and did it, too.”
“On her credit card . . . ?”
“I saw that in her drawer.”
“Oh, Fritzie.”
“I know. That was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Not the best, I guess,” he says. He lets out a long breath, tries to think of what to do.
She’s chewing on her lip, looking around the police station. “The dog here is pretty nice.”
“Yeah.” He looks over at the German shepherd lying ominously on the floor, pretending to be resting but obviously at high alert. If Patrick made one false move, he has no doubt that dog would have him in its jaws. Leave it to Fritzie to have made friends with it. He stands up and his knees make a creaking sound. “Well, let’s get out of here. See what we have to do to get them to release you.” He hopes this next part is going to be easy, but he doesn’t hold out a lot of hope, knowing what he does about airports, security, rules, and children’s welfare.
“Does . . . Marnie know?” she says. “What I did?”
“Yeah. She knows. She’s already got a ticket to come home tonight.”
She claps her hands and then evidently remembers she’s on shaky
ground and says meekly, “Is she mad?”
“Nobody’s mad. You act like we’re these angry monsters. We’re shocked, yes. But we’re glad you’re safe. We were scared. There’s a big difference.”
The police officer comes over. Officer Pettigrew, it says on the tag. “Quite an adventurous day for you, missy,” he says. “You’re lucky to have this guy as your daddy, I’ll tell you that.” He shakes his head, and Patrick’s afraid they’re now going to have to hear tales of things Officer Pettigrew has seen in this job, but at the last instant, Pettigrew seems to think better of it. Patrick knows he’s probably relieved that this particular story has an okay ending: nobody’s raging, the kid is wanted, and security managed to do its job and not let her fly across country unaccompanied. Nevertheless, for a moment Patrick fears that there is going to be other questioning, talk of fraud and child neglect—who knows what could be drummed up?
And here it comes. “Sir, I’ll just need to see your identification and the birth certificate of the child. And then you can sign these forms.”
He gets the birth certificate out of his pocket and then remembers it’s not going to have his name on it. He starts a bumbling explanation about how he’s not married to the mother—but the cop looks around and then quietly says it’s okay. “I can see you two belong together. Same eyes and hair. Same blubbering tears.” He smiles and pretends to wipe away nonexistent tears from his own face.
Patrick opens the envelope and hands him the birth certificate anyway . . . and there, on the line where it says Father, there he sees his own name. Typed there. Patrick Delaney.
And just like that, there’s a crack in the awful, and he feels the flood of . . . something . . . love, maybe, hope . . . rushing in.
Fritzie holds his hand as they walk out of the airport to catch their Uber. By the time they get there, he’s actually kind of glad to see she looks spunky and defiant again.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 32