by Lisa Graff
“I do know James,” she says slowly. And even though I asked, I guess I’m surprised. My legs twitch with excitement. “But I don’t think I’m supposed to . . .” The woman trails off.
“Is he here?” I ask, jumping up on my toes. “We just want to talk to him. I think he knew my mom. My dead mom.” I throw that last bit in for sympathy points.
The woman is darting her eyes around like she’s not sure she should be speaking to us. “I’m just a docent,” she says after a long pause. “A volunteer.” She holds up the fossil again. “I can tell you anything you want to know about hooves.”
Behind us, an elephant trumpet-snorts while a group of girls not that much older than I am snaps selfies and squeals.
I squint at the woman. “Look, I know we’re just kids, but this is important.”
Nothing. I get nothing.
I huff and turn around, ready to give up and try to pry info out of the hot dog guy not too far away. That’s when Jax looks right at me, hunches his neck into the collar of his coat, and gives me his not-so-cool-guy smirk, along with a tiny shoulder shrug that I’m pretty sure means, Why not?
I spin back around to the lady. “Would you tell this guy?” I ask, jerking a thumb toward Jax. When the woman blinks at him, confused, I tell her, “Seriously? You don’t recognize him? This is international pop sensation Jackson Gato.”
She only shrugs, and I don’t blame her. I’m more certain than ever that Jax did not get his sister free fro-yo.
“Anyway,” I say to Jax. “Thanks for try—”
But that’s all I get out, because suddenly I hear piercing squeals behind me. I turn to see the group of girls, who must’ve come up behind us just as Jax started acting “cool.”
“No way!” one of them shrieks. “Are you really that guy?” And then I overhear another one saying she’s seen his video—which is nonsense, obviously, because there is no Jackson Gato and there is no video—but before I can say any of that, the girls are totally fawning all over Jax, begging him for autographs and taking selfies with him, and they’re everywhere, there must be at least a dozen of them, and then somehow one of the girls has actually ripped Jax’s jacket right off his back, and he is freaking out, he is absolutely freaking out.
I flash my hands at him. A question.
With a quick bob of his head, he answers, Yes, please. His chest is heaving hard. I need to help him escape right this exact minute.
When I’m sure I have Jax’s attention, I dart my gaze toward the blocked-off construction area right behind him, signaling, That way. Then, turning to the girls, I squeal louder than any of them. “Oh, my god, it’s James Darek!” I screech, and I point way off, past the hot dog guy.
The girls turn away from Jax, just for a second. Just long enough for him to bolt for the construction area. By the time the girls look back and notice he’s missing, he has slipped between two plywood boards and safely out of sight.
“James Darek went that way,” I tell the girls, pointing around a far corner. “He’s even more famous than Jackson Gato.” And I watch the girls squeal off, two of them fighting over Jax’s coat. I’m left alone with the woman behind the cart, who’s clutching her hoof fossil, staring at me like I’m the weirdo.
“Whole lot of help you were,” I tell her. And then, when I’m sure the coast is clear, I sneak inside the construction zone to find Jax.
“You okay?” I ask him. He nods. He is shaken but in one piece. He scratches his goose-pimply bare arm. And then he points, straight ahead.
“Look,” he tells me. And that’s when I finally take in where we’ve found ourselves.
All around us, giant metal mushrooms are sprouting out of the ground, tilting and twirling their way into the sky. Some are stump size, some as big as small trees. The larger ones are miniature towers, with windy staircases inside and teeny windows for kids’ faces to peer through. The mushroom jungle isn’t finished, obviously. Two-by-fours and power tools litter the ground. Tarps cover several blobby structures. But what we can see of the exhibit is beautiful. I can imagine children scrambling and climbing over and through it all as parents laugh and snap photos.
“Neat, right?” comes a voice from across the site. It’s a woman, short and bony in jeans and a puffy black vest with a hard hat on her head. “You the chairman’s kids? Lila and . . . Sam, was it?”
“No, we’re—”
“Wait till you see the full effect.” The woman flips a switch.
“Wow,” I breathe, just as Jax says, “Whoa.”
Light. There is light everywhere. Each mushroom cap glows a different color. Yellow light, blue light, purple, green. It is radiant.
“Go ahead,” says the woman. “Touch one.”
I step forward into the exhibit and place my hand on the cap of a glowing-blue mushroom. The light embraces my palm, growing brighter around my fingers. When I lift my hand, the light disappears altogether, then leapfrogs to the mushroom just beside it. I slap at that mushroom cap, and the light hops away again.
“It’s amazing,” I tell the woman as she steps nearer.
“Be sure to tell your dad, will you?” she says. “Ask him to up my budget.”
Jax gives me a look, and I know what he’s thinking. Truth. Truth is best.
“We’re not the chairman’s kids,” I say. “We’re looking for the artist. James Darek. This is Jax, and I’m CJ.”
The way the woman’s mouth drops open then, you’d think I was some sort of spirit.
“Caraway June?” she says. Breathes the name out like air.
“I . . .” All I can do is blink at her. “How . . . ?”
But then I notice the tendrils of dark curly hair peeking out from under her hard hat. The features of her face, familiar and yet different. The same as in all my photographs, only older. And suddenly, she’s smiling at me. Big as the sun. Like she’s just so thrilled to see me.
“Mom?” I say.
ELEVEN
“OKAY,” I SAY. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”
“So you’re feeling . . .” Jax begins. “Okay?”
“Well, obviously, no.”
It’s just me and Jax at the moment. After a good two minutes of me and my mom blinking at each other, not really knowing exactly what to say because how could we, someone started hollering at her about a mushroom exhibit emergency. So she’s meeting us at the food court for lunch after everything is sorted. In the meantime, I’m in the gift shop helping Jax find a sweatshirt for his frozen arms.
Oh, yeah, and I’m totally freaking out, too.
“Are you positive that’s your mom?” Jax asks, flipping through sweatshirts on the rack. He gestures back in the direction of the exhibit. “She’s really alive?”
“I’m sure,” I say. I’ve studied enough pictures of her that I could pick her out of a crowd of a million curly-haired ladies. But there was something else, too. A feeling. Maybe it was a mother-daughter bond, maybe it was an extra push from Spirit, but whatever it was, it was real. “It’s her. And she looked alive to me.”
“So . . .” Jax stretches the word out like he’s waiting for me to go on. When I don’t, he asks me, “What are you, uh, thinking?” The way he says it, it’s like I’m a balloon he’s worried about popping.
“What am I thinking?” I repeat. I count off all the thoughts bumping around in my head. “Okay, so my mom’s not dead. Which means she’s alive. Which means she’s been alive. Which means she’s been living somewhere this whole time—and maybe I don’t know where she’s been, or why, but I know she’s definitely never been Far Away. Which means my aunt was lying or confused or who knows what. Which means Who the heck was Aunt Nic talking to that whole time? Which means everything my mom told me, about boarding school, or the routes I was planning, or these shoes”—I kick out one foot to show off my gray sneakers, which I thought my mom and I once had a
pretty good conversation about—“never even happened. Which means I never really met her, right? Only I must’ve met her, because she’s my mom. Only I don’t remember that at all. And did she draw those pictures of me because she saw me, like, she lived with me? Because if she lived with me, then Aunt Nic obviously knew she wasn’t dead. Which means Aunt Nic was lying. Which means . . .”
I get a flash of a memory of Aunt Nic’s hands in my wet hair, massaging my scalp under the warm water in the motor home sink, while she passed down messages from my mom. Was Aunt Nic really lying when she said those words? What other words has she been lying about? And was Roger right, that Aunt Nic can’t talk to any spirits, or was my mom’s the only spirit she faked? All of a sudden, it’s like every single thing I know about who my aunt is, who my mom is, who I am—it’s all a lie.
I turn back to the rack of sweatshirts, because that’s way easier to focus on than my world exploding. “Here,” I tell Jax, yanking one off the rack. “This is your size, right?”
Jax wrinkles his nose at the sweatshirt, and as soon as he does I can tell why. The one I’ve pulled out is neon aqua, with a giant black silhouette of a panda and puffy letters that read, I ♥ THE SAN DIEGO ZOO! Not exactly Jax’s style. But I guess I must really look like a popped balloon, because before I can put the sweatshirt back, Jax grabs it from me and says, “It’s perfect. I love it.”
“Shut up, no you don’t,” I tell him, moving to return it to the rack. “You don’t have to humor me or whatever, just because my aunt ruined my whole life by making me think my mom was dead.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s the worst,” Jax agrees. “But on the bright side”—he whips the sweatshirt from my hands—“you have amazing taste in outerwear. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go buy this, because I think it will look fantastic on me.” I snort. But okay, I guess it worked, because I’m smiling, just a little, now.
We’re waiting in line to pay for the ugliest zoo sweatshirt in history when Jax says, “If you want to leave, you know, we can.” His voice is soft, like he doesn’t need everyone around us knowing my business, which is nice of him. Maybe that’s the sort of thing his grandpa wanted him to help me out with. “I mean, this is a lot for you to deal with right now. So maybe we should just go find your mom and figure out a time for you guys to hang out, like, tomorrow, or next week, when your brain’s had a minute to catch up.”
I appreciate Jax looking out for my brain, but I shake my head. “My whole life,” I tell him, “I thought my mom was dead, and now Spirit leads me right to her?” I stick my hand in my coat pocket. Feel the cool, rough cement of that tether, speckled with glass. “Nah, I’m sticking around to see what happens.”
The person in front of us finishes up, and we step to the register. “Okay,” Jax says. “But if you need an escape . . .” And he flashes his hands at me.
“Thanks,” I say, and I smile. And while Jax is paying way too much money for his new sweatshirt, I make up my mind. Since Spirit led me right here, today, I’m going to make the most of meeting my mom. There will be tons of time to deal with Aunt Nic and all the awful things she did later—but for now, I’m just going to focus on the good stuff. My real-life mom, who smiled big as the sun when she saw me.
* * *
• • •
“Don’t like mustard, huh?” my mom asks as we leave the Sabertooth Grill register with burgers on our trays. And then, as we’re settling ourselves at a table, she says, “Check.” Like she’s making a list of things I like and don’t so she can remember everything about me. Just that tiny word makes millions of happiness bubbles fizz up into my chest. I’m sitting next to my mom, I can’t stop thinking. My mom is alive. And she wants to know me.
I am humming with happiness.
“And you really like mayonnaise,” I note, eyeing the three tiny paper cups she’s filled.
“On burgers, mayonnaise is good,” she says. “But on french fries”—she slides me a paper cup of my own—“it’s heaven. I promise.” She says that last part with a laugh when she sees my wrinkled-up nose. “Try it.”
So. I pluck a french fry off my tray and dip it in the mayonnaise. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be disgusting, but it’s the first thing my mom’s ever asked me to do, so I do it.
It tastes amazing. “Oh, wow.” Somehow the salt in the fry is a perfect match for the creaminess of the mayonnaise.
“Right?” she says, and she’s smiling. It’s a smile that says she can’t believe how lucky she is that I stumbled into this spot, in this moment, and found her. I’m pretty sure my own smile says the same thing.
“I’m never eating fries with ketchup again,” I tell her.
My mom claps her hands together. “Another convert!” She slides a mayonnaise cup in Jax’s direction as he wedges himself into the bench beside me. “What do you think, sir?”
“I don’t eat mayonnaise that’s been squirted from a tub,” he replies, and my mom lets out a hoot like she finds him just delightful.
I snag Jax’s mayonnaise cup from him and dunk another fry. Fine with me if he doesn’t want to try it. I’m sort of glad my mom and I have something that’s just ours together.
“So,” Jax says to my mom—and I guess I should take it as a good sign that my mom is one new person he actually wants to talk to. He unscrews the cap of his water bottle and darts his eyes at me before asking, “Why does everyone think you’re dead, and who’s James Darek?”
It’s silent for a moment after that, no one talking, and I shift my butt uncomfortably on the metal bench. Because, I mean, okay, it’s not like I wasn’t wondering the exact same thing, but it seems a little rude, maybe, to just ask like that. What if my mom gets offended and leaves, after Spirit went to all this trouble to get us together?
But my mom just lets out another laugh—a whipping-back-her-head-and-showing-off-all-her-teeth sort of laugh. Which is a good thing for Jax, because if something he said made my mom leave, I’d make sure he was a spirit.
“So, enough with the small talk, huh?” my mom asks. That grin is still on her face.
Jax darts his eyes at me again. Picks up his water bottle but doesn’t take a sip. “It just seems like important information,” he says.
He is nervous, I realize. I can tell by the way his eyes flit all over when he’s talking. Me, my skin is still tingling with happiness. My mom could talk to me about mayonnaise for an hour and I’d want to hear it all. My mom, I keep thinking. My mom.
“Fair enough,” my mom says in response to Jax’s question. She takes another bite of fry. “I guess the easiest answer is that James Darek is me. Although I’m pretty sure somebody”—she winks at me—“already figured that out.”
I grin and dunk another fry. “Why’d you change your name?” I ask.
She shrugs, like the answer is so simple. “I started hearing rumors that Nic was going around telling people I’d died. I guess for her, it was a business decision, made her look more sympathetic, maybe, or more like a realistic ghost-whisperer, I don’t know. Anyway, I was struggling a lot, back then, and I thought—maybe that’s not the worst business decision for me, either. So I let people believe Jennie June was dead, and I started over as James. J. Ames. Nice, right? The ‘Darek’ part just had a ring to it. My career’s skyrocketed since I changed it.”
“So,” I say slowly. Because my skin may be humming with happiness, but there are a million other emotions just under the surface, and I’m worried that if I let one sneak through they’ll all come flying out, and then this nice buzzy happiness might buzz right away. “Aunt Nic just decided to tell me you were dead? For her business?”
Even though I’ve only just met her, my mom knows exactly how to calm the rising storm inside me. She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, her grip warm and comforting. “Please don’t blame your aunt, all right?” she says kindly. “There’s so much I regret about what hap
pened. The truth is, I had a rough time of it, after you were born. I was so young, and Nic always had a better knack than I did for taking care of people—you know my mother had Alzheimer’s, right?”
I nod. “She died about a year before I was born,” I say, but it’s half a question. Because who knows if anything I think is true really is.
“That’s right,” my mom replies, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. One thing about my life, at least, is true. “Our mother had a rough few years, so Nic left college to take care of her. She was a real saint to do it. So when you were on the way, I knew Nic would help me out, too. She was amazing. Is amazing.” Suddenly my mom flashes her eyes at me, like she’s just so excited to see me. “Just look at you, Cara!” she says. “You are stunning in blue, you know that?”
It takes me a second before I realize “Cara” means me.
“Uh, I go by CJ,” I tell her. I feel weird having to tell my own mother my name. And I hate Aunt Nic even more for keeping me away from my mom so long that she doesn’t know what to call me.
But the anger dies down as soon as my mom reaches out and tucks one of my stray curls behind my ear. “CJ’s lovely,” she says. “It suits you. You’re a beautiful girl, you know.” And in that moment, I’m so filled with happiness I’d swear I could float.
“Can I say the thing I don’t get, though?” Jax asks. I can tell by the sound of his voice that I’m about to lose my floaty feeling. “How come you couldn’t be James Darek and take care of CJ?” He still hasn’t touched the hamburger in front of him. “What happened?”
I shoot Jax a What’s the matter with you? look, but he doesn’t even notice. “You can ignore him,” I tell my mom. Floating. I want to be floating. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t—”
“No, I don’t mind,” my mom says. She gives my hand one more squeeze before reaching for her fries again. “I think the simplest answer is that Nic thought she could provide for you better than I could. And I can’t say she was entirely wrong. I was never good at the sorts of jobs that get you paid.” She lets out a little laugh. “This gig is bigger than anything I’ve ever done”—she waves her arms at the zoo around us—“but I’m still eating lettuce sandwiches three nights a week. But I always thought, as soon as I make something of myself, I’m going to get that girl back.”