The Kids Are Gonna Ask

by Gretchen Anthony

  “What sort of issue?” Maggie asked, and Thomas could tell her voice sounded just a little too excited. He felt a surge of panic and glanced at Maggie, trying to gauge how close she was to heading off on a gross-out tangent. There was nothing his grandmother loved more than a good medical mystery.

  Eugenia, turns out, was the one he should have been worried about. “Probably just a Bible bump. Nothing more than fluid collecting at the joint,” she said.

  Thomas frowned. This train was coming no matter what he did, and he couldn’t look away.

  “I get them when I overdo it. Mostly painless,” she added. “Before modern medicine, people used to make the bump go away by hitting it with the heaviest book available. In most households, that was the Bible.”

  Thomas winced. Chef Bart came in from the kitchen carrying the main course, and Savannah, thank god, changed the subject.

  “So, fun fact,” she said. “In the original 1954 Godzilla they made the sound of his roar by running a mitt covered in pine tar over a double-stringed bass.”

  Thomas glanced around the table to measure the interest in this new topic. If Savannah was successful, the bodily ailments portion of their evening might—hopefully—be over.

  “And did you know,” Savannah went on, “that Alfred Hitchcock had his sound man audition different melon varieties for the stabbing sounds in the Psycho shower scene?”

  Eugenia swallowed the last of her drink. “I once escorted Hitchcock to his flight.”

  “Marvelous!” Maggie clapped her hands. “Tell us all about it.”

  “He sat in first class.”

  “Then what?”

  Eugenia shrugged and helped herself to another chunk of crusty bread and took an enormous bite, saying nothing more.

  “That’s not the flight that was hijacked, was it?” Maggie was obviously prompting. She really wanted to hear the hijacking story.

  “No,” Eugenia said.

  Thomas glanced at his watch. This woman was a lot of work for a dinner guest.

  “I’d like to fly first class someday.” Savannah accepted the freshly assembled cheese plate from Chef Bart and took a wedge of whatever he’d marked for her with a toothpick flag. She was lactose intolerant but did all right with hard cheeses. Something about the aging process.

  “Don’t bother,” Eugenia said. “An awful lot of money for a whole lot of nothin’.”

  “Bummer.” Savannah looked as crushed as if Eugenia had just dropped the bad news about Santa. “Still. Maybe someday.”

  “Anyway, I don’t know if I told you,” Eugenia went on, ignoring Savannah’s obvious disappointment. “My father was a twin.”

  Maggie slid a slice of Brie onto her plate. “Oh?”

  Thomas couldn’t figure out how they’d jumped from Godzilla to Alfred Hitchcock to twins. Maggie, though, didn’t pause at Eugenia’s non sequitur. “Identical or fraternal?”

  “My dad said the doctors couldn’t tell.”

  The look on Maggie’s face said one hundred percent intrigued. “I take it your father and his twin were both male?”

  The cheese plate came around, but Thomas passed it to Eugenia, who forked a slice of Havarti. He’d preemptively lost his appetite.

  “Couldn’t tell the other baby’s sex, either.” Eugenia laid the cheese onto another slice of bread and took a hefty bite. She had everyone’s attention now, all of them wondering how it was possible to not know if a baby was a girl or a boy. Thomas looked at Maggie, who eyed her guest. He could see she was willing to ask the inevitable next question, but Eugenia didn’t give her a chance. “My dad ate his twin. In utero. My grandmother claims he kept passing the teeth in his stool.”

  Thomas squeezed his eyes shut as tight as they’d go, trying to block out the room. It was his only option, since he couldn’t exactly stick his fingers in his ears and begin to hum.

  “Oh—dear.” Their grandmother didn’t sound flustered often, but she was flustered now. “I... I’m not sure how to respond to that.”

  “My siblings and I don’t know if we believe it or not, but that was the family story. Never could get our dad to question it.”

  Conversation stopped for at least a full minute. Dead air that Thomas would have to edit out. He opened his eyes to see Chef Bart come in from the kitchen holding a second basket of bread, but, upon seeing their faces, silently backed out again. Savannah looked about ready to bolt for the bathroom, and Thomas wondered if he was going to have to beat her to it.

  “Do twins...run in your family?” Maggie finally asked. She was usually pretty good at changing topics, but even she didn’t seem to know where to steer this one.

  “Not sure. Haven’t had any since,” said Eugenia. “That we know of.”

  “Oh my g—” Savannah choked on her cheese, and they sat for another minute while she tried to cough it up.

  Thomas, meanwhile, thought he ought to be awarded some kind of prize. He thought about jumping up on his chair and declaring himself victorious—he’d known this was going to be one of those dinners. Eugenia Banks and her condom comments and germ phobia and her inability to maintain normal conversation. He’d spotted all the red flags, and he’d been right.

  “Can we please just get through at least one dinner without our stomachs turning?” He realized too late that the words in his head were actually coming from his mouth. Everyone stared at him.

  “Thomas!” Maggie scolded.

  Savannah sniggered.

  Eugenia Banks forked another slice of Havarti. “Well, I didn’t enjoy the grayish tofu, but the rest of the food has been quite acceptable.”

  Maggie began to nod vigorously, obviously stupefied. “Thank you, Eugenia. We are quite blessed to have Chef Bart feeding us.”

  Savannah’s phone buzzed and she again began thumbing furiously. Stupid Trigg. Stupid Savannah. Stupid twin-eating-storytelling Eugenia Banks and stupid Maggie for inviting her.

  “I’ve never met my father,” Thomas said, looking directly at Eugenia. “But I’d like to.”

  The whole room stopped, as if all the air had been sucked out. Where had that even come from?

  Then, Savannah. “Seriously, T! This again? It’s like all you ever talk about lately.”

  “I said it once!” Thomas threw a leftover scrap of bread at his sister. He had only brought it up once to her lately, even if it had been on his mind every day. “How would you know what I talk about anyway? Your face is glued to your phone 24-7.”

  Eugenia Banks reached for the cheese plate. “Far be it from me to overstep my bounds, but I’m not sure that’s appropriate dinner conversation, young man.”

  “Yeah, young man,” Savannah mocked. “Way to throw a wrench into an otherwise lovely dinner.”

  “Shut it, Van.” Thomas panicked and turned toward his grandmother, suddenly waking up to what he’d done. They never talked about their father. Maggie didn’t seem open to it—as if she expected Thomas and Savannah to tiptoe around the subject of him, as if their father was Beetlejuice, or a ghost in the attic who would wake up by saying its name. As if they’d be fine, as long as they never let themselves need him.

  “Maggie, I didn’t mean—” He felt the weight of everything he’d just said settle in his throat. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean you’re not enough. You are. You’re everything to us. It’s just—”

  “I know,” Maggie finished for him. Spoke the truth of what he’d been keeping to himself for so impossibly long. “The reality is, I’m not nearly enough, at all.”

  Three

  Maggie

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Maggie sat with Thomas and Savannah at the kitchen table, the pendant lamp overhead wrapping them under a soft cone of light.

  Chef Bart had cleaned up dinner quickly and left the three of them alone to talk. His daughter, Nadine, had heard everything from the kitc
hen and she gave Maggie and Savannah hugs, then hustled out behind her father. Eugenia hadn’t been difficult, either. When the food stopped coming, she stood up and announced she had somewhere to be.

  Now Maggie looked at Thomas’s almost-man face—the sculpted cheeks, the blue eyes that had appeared so enormous as a baby, the whisper of a someday mustache. Bess had been gone for what finally felt like a long time. Thomas and Savannah were barely teenagers when she died, and now they were nearly adults. Legally, at least. Soon they would no longer need Maggie’s permission for much, if anything.

  “I’m not sure what I want.” Thomas shrugged helplessly. “It’s like, right now I don’t know what I’m missing. He could be a great guy.”

  “Savannah?” Maggie said. It hadn’t escaped notice that her granddaughter had said very little since dinner. “Are you curious about your father?”

  “Of course I’m curious.” She pulled at a strand of hair, some of which she’d recently dyed lavender, wrapping and unwrapping it on her finger. “I just—we never talk about him. Like, we’re not supposed to. Or maybe Mom didn’t want us to.”

  Maggie felt her stomach twist in on itself. “Is that what you think?”

  Savannah didn’t answer, just kept fiddling with her hair.

  “I don’t believe—” Maggie was about to say she didn’t believe Bess hadn’t wanted her children to find their father someday. But she stopped because, really, what did she know? She had asked, but Bess hadn’t told. Then she died and left Maggie alone to improvise.

  That’s not exactly how it went, Bess whispered.

  Maggie hushed her.

  Savannah, still playing with her hair, put a few more thoughts together. “I’ve always been curious, but that’s different than wanting to find him. What if he’s awful? Like one of those idiots on Cops who tries to use a Super Soaker to rob a liquor store?”

  “I doubt Mom would have been dumb enough to get involved with someone like that.” Thomas looked to Maggie for confirmation. He always seemed to do that with her, even when he’d been young. Like he knew the real answers to his questions but didn’t trust Maggie to give them. Once, he had asked her what time it was and when she answered, “Three o’clock,” he’d said, “No, it’s two fifty-five.”

  “Well,” Maggie said to them now, “as her mother, I would hope not. But you know I can’t say for certain.”

  “I will admit to wondering about him,” said Savannah. “How Mom met him, whether they would have been good together, or if he was an awful human being.”

  She looked at Maggie with her dark, chocolate eyes. “You really don’t know anything about him? Or them?”

  Oh, how Maggie wished she did. Eighteen years ago, Bess had gone off on a ski trip her senior year of college. Two months later, she had driven home holding a diploma and a white stick bearing two pink lines.

  “I want to keep it,” she’d said.

  “Trust your instincts, lovey,” Maggie’d answered and hadn’t pried further. Her daughter had seemed happy—that was enough.

  Savannah sagged in her chair. “Anyway, I’m curious about all the random stuff, like the lactose thing. You guys can eat whatever you like. And Mom, too. Remember how much toasted almond fudge ice cream she ate? I’d love to do that, but I can’t.” She smiled. “And the way I look. Mom used to say to me, ‘Let’s imagine you’re a tasty little chocolate drop and I eat you all up!’ But you?” She poked Thomas’s arm. “You’re like the Jolly Green Giant.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say—” He stopped, the words refusing to come. This was the Thomas Maggie knew. Bold to a point, then suddenly fearful. The owlet who needed a push before leaving the nest to fly.

  Savannah surrendered, quiet for a moment. “It’s just...she never talked about him. It’s like she was giving us a clue, or something. Like she was saying it’s better not to know.”

  And there it was, Maggie realized. The key question in their puzzle, pulled from the shadows into the light. Was it better to know, or not? There would always be pieces of Bess’s story that Maggie wished she hadn’t learned. Maggie was no ostrich, not one to bury her head in the sand to avoid hearing the truth, and yet what good had knowledge done her back then? It hadn’t changed the trajectory of her daughter’s fate.

  Sometimes, the answers just led to more questions.

  Maggie reached for Thomas’s hand and he let her take it. “When you were little,” Maggie said, “we spent our mornings watching Sesame Street and eating bowls of Cheerios. Do you remember?”

  Thomas gave a half smile.

  “And they’d sing that song about one of the things not being like the other, and you and Savannah would shout and try to beat the other to point out which one it was—like the red balloon or the baseball hat.”

  Savannah laughed. “I nailed that game. It’s my directorial eye.”

  Maggie nodded but kept her eyes on Thomas, desperate not to lose the connection with this unhappy, searching boy. “And do you remember the day I found you looking at our family pictures and singing the same song? We’d just gotten the proofs back from the photographer and I was trying to choose one for our Christmas cards. I left for a minute to do something and came back to find you there, holding up a photo and singing.”

  Thomas said he remembered.

  “Do you know what you pointed out to me? Which one you said was not like the others?”

  “Me.” He paused, tripping over the memory. “I said me, didn’t I?”

  Yes, that’s exactly what he’d said.

  Maggie had long forgotten that moment, tucked it away with so many other anecdotes from busy days filling busy years. When it had happened, she’d assumed he was merely pointing out that he was a boy in a family of girls.

  Now, though, it struck her.

  “I suppose it feels as if you’ve spent your entire life as the odd man out.”

  Thomas turned his face to the ceiling, as if not wanting to consider anything but the white expanse above. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Maybe.”

  “Being different is difficult.” Maggie gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “I know how important it is to belong, Thomas. But before you decide anything, I want you to consider this—sometimes it’s easier to settle with a little bit of mystery, than to not like what you discover when you dig.”

  * * *

  The decision to find their father wasn’t, as it turned out, entirely theirs. Eugenia Banks’s twin-eating anecdote exploded like a bomb through their small podcast audience. Listeners told their friends, who listened and told their friends, and suddenly, Eugenia’s cannibalistic father went viral. From listener emails to friends on the phone, everyone wanted to know where Maggie had met a character quite as unique as Eugenia Banks. It was all Maggie was hearing about. The previous episode, number twenty-four, had three hundred-some downloads. Episode twenty-five had over four thousand.

  As if that weren’t surprising enough, just two weeks had passed and already Thomas and Savannah had taken to spending their family dinners trading anecdotes about what the internet was now calling the Zombie Baby. Even people who never had any intention of listening to the McClair Dinner Salon knew about Zombie Baby.

  “I can’t believe it,” Thomas said. “Something that happened in this very dining room has become a meme.”

  “Did you see the one of Zombie Baby eating Tide PODS?” Savannah said.

  “Yeah, saw that. You see Dancing Zombie Baby?”

  “Yep. Unicorn Zombie Baby?”

  Maggie cleared her throat—to no avail.

  “Puppy-Monkey-Zombie-Baby?”

  “Nadine showed us that one.”

  “Right. Forgot.”

  Maggie clanged her spoon against the side of her plate.

  “What if Zombie Baby became a Super Bowl commercial?” Thomas said.

  “What if Zombie Baby be
came a Super Bowl commercial with Betty White?” added Savannah.

  “That would be awesome.”

  “I could finally die happy.”

  Maggie clapped her hands—one, two. She waited, then clapped again—one, two, three. They finally looked at her.

  “The two of you will be eighteen in less than six months. And it’s gotten me thinking about our recent discussion.” She paused to ensure she still had their attention. “Legally, once you hit adulthood, you can do whatever you like about your father. So, I want you both to know that I’m behind you. One hundred percent. Whether you start your search now, or in six months, or six years.”

  It hadn’t been an easy decision to come to. But ultimately, Maggie believed her most important job as guardian was to help Savannah and Thomas grow into confident, independent adults. To fix them with all the skills they needed, and then get out of the way. But this puzzle before them, of from where they came and from whom, was never going to disappear. It was a house of cards built on existential questions. Questions of genetics. Of connection, similarity, difference. Questions of missing pieces, and about the people who held them.

  Questions they would ask, regardless.

  She really didn’t have any choice.

  Thomas and Savannah exchanged glances, a sign of something they weren’t telling her.

  What now?

  “Well—” Savannah looked at Thomas, who raised a single eyebrow, reminding Maggie of Savannah’s truly impressive ability to read the myriad subtleties of her brother’s nods and shrugs and blinks. “We weren’t sure whether to bring this up yet or not.”

  Thomas slid a sheet of paper across the table.

  “We got this email through the Dinner Salon website.”

  Maggie picked it up and read.

  Dear Thomas and Savannah,

  My name’s Sam Tamblin and I’m the cofounder of Guava Media. I listened to your most recent episode. I’ll admit, it was Zombie Baby that got my attention, but I’m also intrigued by your desire to find your biological father. I’d like to help you. I want to make sure you find him.