Jack chose Tybee for a reason.
Compared to Savannah, life on Tybee was like wearing swim trunks to a cotillion. The island didn’t get all up in family lineage and historic preservation boards of review. On any given morning, half of Tybee looked hungover—even the buildings. It boasted about being the worldwide headquarters of fish art. It hosted an annual pirate festival. To visitors, Tybee looked like one long, salty party from morning to night.
Jack had lived there for seventeen years, moved to Tybee not long after a man who introduced himself as Ford wandered into the bar in Breckenridge, ordered a Jim Beam and Coke and swore he was “never goin’ up that summa’bitch mountain again.” Business was slow that day, so he and Jack got to talking. About how Ford had booked the trip to Colorado after his soon-to-be ex-wife accused him of being a boring old coot. About his real life as a fishing guide off the coast of Georgia. About the difference between saltwater catch and the freshwater varieties Jack had grown up fishing in Colorado.
Jack proved himself decent company, and when his shift ended, Ford handed him his card. “You ever feel like tryin’ your hand at bein’ a saltwater fishing guide, you come work for me.”
Ford had changed Jack’s prospects all those years ago, altered his trajectory from near-certain disaster. He’d been making decent money as a bartender and even had plans to leave Colorado for a big resort in Oregon. His new boss had offered him a cash raise, plus a steamier sort of compensation as a bonus, and he’d come within a razor’s edge of falling for her proposal.
Ford’s offer woke him up just in time.
Now, anchored in the South Channel of the Savannah River beneath the shadow of Fort Pulaski, Jack’s Colorado past loomed unexpectedly before his eyes.
“They’re looking for their biodad,” the kid from the boat had told him. “S’posed to be some guy their mom met skiing in Colorado.”
If it had only been a picture of the girl, Savannah, Jack probably wouldn’t have even paused. Thomas, though. He could’ve been his twin, the face of a younger Jack.
He binged every episode of the podcast that night. He listened again the next morning. Again that night. And when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he played a game with his head, the kind you play when you wake up from a dream and tell yourself none of it really happened.
No way he was the guy they were looking for. And still, it had to be him—their story tracked his.
It wasn’t complicated.
Jack had left his hometown of Hartwell, Colorado, for college and made it about eighteen months—his second year more blur than recollection—until the University of Northern Colorado memorialized his brief tenure in a letter stating that his time as a UNC student was officially over.
“I need a break anyway,” he told his roommate.
“Got an opportunity I can’t pass up,” he told his landlord.
“I’ll be back to school. Six months, tops,” he told the girl he was sleeping with when he couldn’t make it the five blocks to his own place because he was so drunk.
Getting kicked out of UNC seemed like a favor for a while, woke him up to the fact that he had higher priorities than the classroom. The mountains, he hoped, would be just the distraction he needed. He found his way to Breckenridge and got a job bartending at The Mine. His first night he made more money than he’d ever held in his pocket, and it was easy. He liked hearing people’s stories. Life in a ski town narrows conversation to a handful of topics. What slopes you skied today and what you’re going to ski tomorrow. The snow conditions today and the snow conditions expected tomorrow. The mountains you’ve already skied and the mountains you hoped to ski before you died. Everyone comes down the mountain at the end of the day with an experience all their own.
The most consequential thing about a ski town, though, is the impermanence. Only the mountain itself is there to stay. Everything else is fleeting—the weather, the stories and especially the people.
He didn’t have a lot of flings, but he had a few, and like everything in a ski town, the romance melted with time. As soon as the women went back to where they came from, Jack moved on—to work or to hit the slopes. He rarely had any more expectation of seeing a woman again in the morning than he did of seeing the same flake fall from the sky.
But he’d never forgotten Bess. He wouldn’t have talked about her to anyone. They weren’t destined to be together. But he remembered her the way land remembers a flood, her mark brief but indelible.
The morning episode six dropped, Jack was in his truck on the way to the landing. The sun was just breaking, the mist clinging to the marsh, all quiet, the edge of eerie.
“You’re going to have to excuse my brother,” Savannah said. “He’s a zombie today. I’ll translate when he’s not making sense.”
“Shut it, Van. You know I can’t sleep when there’s lightning.”
Jack slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road under a sign warning drivers to watch for crossing turtles. No one else reacted to thunderstorms the way Jack did—until now. After what he’d just heard, there was no doubt he was the father these seventeen-year-old kids were looking for.
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: Further info
Jack,
Thank you for writing. We appreciate you listening to the podcast.
You’re right that we have been getting a lot of emails like yours, though you did include a few details that haven’t been in the broadcast. Like your full name and our mom’s tattoo.
I hope you won’t take my skepticism personally, but it is conceivable that someone could dig through public files for the name John Jack Thorson. And most people my mom used to meet noticed her tattoo and asked about it.
Even so, I’d like to hear more. Are there any personal characteristics you can tell us about yourself or your time with our mom that other people wouldn’t be able to claim?
Feel free to email back. And, no, we won’t put personal details into the podcast.
Thanks,
Thomas McClair
Nineteen
Savannah
Savannah looked at her phone to find a text from Trigg.
What do you want me to tell Kyle?????
No emojis. Meaning, Trigg wanted an answer now. Savannah texted back.
I don’t know...just tell him you haven’t been able to get ahold of me.
She was standing in the kitchen. Maggie was down a rabbit hole on her laptop. Nadine was flipping channels on the TV and Chef Bart had his head in the refrigerator.
Can’t. He knows I’m texting with you right now.
What?
TRIGG!!!!!
Only when Nadine turned did Savannah realize she’d said this out loud.
“Sorry.” Savannah felt herself flush. “Just—stupid Trigg.” She put her phone facedown on the table and pulled out the chair next to Nadine. “So, how’s your summer so far?”
“Pretty good. I’m taking driver’s ed.”
“Oh, nice.”
Everything about Nadine was nice. Not extraordinary. Not awful. Just nice. A nice person with a nice dad and a nice, whatever. They laughed and talked when she came over. Mostly about stuff like YouTube and music and movies. Funny stuff. Nice stuff.
Savannah, though, could do with some cute. And Kyle Larson, who Trigg was all over her about, was definitely cute. But was he nice? He was a friend of Carrie Westlund, which meant nice seemed unlikely.
“Trigg’s bugging me about this guy at school,” she said, explaining her earlier outburst. “Says he’s been asking about me.”
“Yeah?” Nadine said. “Is he nice?”
“See?” She threw her hands up. “You totally get it.”
Nadine was what Maggie would’ve called wise beyond her years. Savannah knew this because that was the other t
hing they talked about, the awful something in Nadine’s past. Thomas didn’t know what that thing was, only that the one time they asked Maggie why Chef Bart brought his daughter to work with him, she said it was because life can be cruel. Then Maggie turned and left the room before they could ask any more questions, which Savannah and Thomas both knew was code for, that’s all I’m going to tell you about that.
But Savannah wasn’t as strong as Thomas and Maggie. One night, late, when Chef Bart was cleaning up and Nadine was half-asleep on the couch waiting, Savannah gave in to temptation. She’d felt dark all day, and she couldn’t help herself.
“Why are you always here?” she’d said, knowing how cruel and ripe with accusation she sounded. But dark people, she also knew, were willing to ask such things.
Then Nadine told her, and for a long time Savannah wished she’d never asked. Eventually, though, she grew to appreciate the reminder that she wasn’t the only member of the Dead Mother’s Club.
And now, here they were. Chef Bart cooking, Maggie lost in her own world, Thomas up in his room, and Savannah and Nadine watching TV. Savannah was about to offer to take Nadine out driving when Nadine grabbed the remote and spiked the volume.
“These McClair dupes,” said a woman with blond streaks and incredible cheekbones, “are an obvious demonstration of blatant hypocrisy. Because here we have a mother and a grandmother who conspired to rob these children and their father from ever having any sort of relationship. And, yes, I mean it when I say conspired because can there be any other way of looking at this tragedy? It’s more than a conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy of angry women.”
Savannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Is she kidding me? Is she seriously talking about us?”
Maggie was alert now, too. “What in the world?”
Maggie grabbed her glasses and read the news crawl at the bottom of the screen aloud. “‘BREAKING NEWS: Minnesota twins caught in the middle of paternity mystery of their own mother’s making.’”
Savannah, for a moment, couldn’t decide what was more ridiculous—the assertion of malicious intent, or the fact that their story would be considered breaking news on this planet or any other.
“Hand me that.” Savannah pointed at the remote and Nadine surrendered it. She flipped channels. Every cable news program seemed to be stuck in the same vortex.
Channel 813 asked viewers, “Paternity privacy pickle or podcasting stunt?” She didn’t know what that meant and didn’t stop to find out.
Channel 814 was giving uninterrupted camera time to the hour’s host—the woman with the blond hair and the cheekbones, Kristian Caldwell. She was working herself up into a righteous glow over what she was calling an “angry feminist conspiracy.” Savannah knew better than to stop and listen to whatever this woman had to spew, but she couldn’t help herself.
“And hear me when I tell you—this outpouring of public sympathy for these McClair dupes, let’s be honest here, folks, unduly glorifies the horrific choice made by their conspiring mother and grandmother all those years ago. Seventeen years, to be exact, that they could have been benefiting from getting to know their father, from gaining a balanced influence, a balanced perspective on life—female and male. Yes, she chose to keep these babies. But at what cost?”
Savannah’s stomach lurched. She wanted to puke, then scream, then cry, and for sure laugh. What was happening? She was either going to have to break for the bathroom or tuck herself into a ball until she could function again. Luckily, Chef Bart saw what was happening and brought her a glass of water.
“Take slow sips,” he said.
Maggie, meanwhile, was just getting started, fighting back as if all those talking heads could hear her. “Horrific choice? You’re the horrific choice!” she hollered. “We don’t see any outpouring of public sympathy. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Chef Bart clicked off the TV, and the room went blessedly silent.
Something awful was happening.
“I don’t get it. The podcast is doing great.” Savannah dropped her head and felt the world tilt. “Sam told us we’re getting mind-bending numbers. They monitor all the chat rooms. I mean, we know there are haters and trolls. But—is this because of our interview? They told us we did great.”
Everything she’d said was true. They did have excellent audience numbers, and that always came with haters and trolls. But according to Sam, they had just as many, if not more, fans who cheered them on and wanted to help. Their interviewers pressed the hard questions, but never—
People must have misunderstood. These broadcasters couldn’t be talking about them. Their tiny podcast couldn’t be on cable news. The jump was too big.
Maggie pointed a finger at the dark screen like Kristian Caldwell was still there. “You,” she said. “I see your game. You think you are the Red Queen.”
Savannah shot a questioning look at Nadine, but then it hit her. The Red Queen. From Alice in Wonderland. The one who cried, “Off with their heads!” The one who said, “It is far better to be feared than loved.”
Savannah didn’t know what’d brought her and Thomas to the attention of the nation’s cable news producers, but she did understand what Maggie was trying to say. The horrible fact that their story had been widely appreciated when it was about love and family and connection. But it took off when it became a story about anger.
Seconds later, the house phone rang, and Maggie picked it up to find Sam Tamblin on the other end.
“Hang on,” she said. “Let me put you on speaker so Thomas and Savannah can both hear.”
Savannah bolted out of the kitchen and up the first few stairs, hollering at Thomas to come quick.
“What?” he yelled back. “I’m trying to finish something!”
“I mean it! Come now!” Savannah heard her voice break, and she couldn’t tell if she was excited or scared or both.
“This coverage is a harvest we have to reap,” Sam said, coming through the speakerphone. “We’ve got Saj in NYC working the gears on at least a dozen different angles right now. We need to be in front of this. Dale Earnhardting the debate.”
Maggie asked him to back up and explain.
“The podcast has been gaining attention since its inception—which we knew—but this was a total turn of events. Bryce Sawyer. Big on talk radio. Turns out, his daughters listen to the podcast and talked about it at dinner one night. They’d also heard a bunch of Brynn’s interviews. Next morning, Bryce does a full segment on the show’s incipient dangers. That’s the word. Incipient. Had to look it up. Anyway, BOOM! That’s all it took. The jaws of the nation’s top culture warriors snapped shut and now won’t let go.”
Sam’s metaphor reminded Savannah of the stories Maggie always told them about her dog, Elga, catching squirrels and shaking them to death, then dropping their dead bodies at the door like offerings. Oh god. Were they the squirrels?
“Who is Sage?” said Maggie.
“Who?”
“You said there was a Sage in NYC.”
“Oh, Saj. Pronounced like ‘Madge.’ She’s our PR guru. Her name’s really SaraJane but everyone calls her Saj. Like I said, she’s taken this on personally. And that is huge. She’s like a horse whisperer. Only better.”
Savannah looked at Thomas, who raised a tentative eyebrow. He didn’t seem to have any more idea what Sam was proposing than she did.
“So,” Maggie continued, “you trust this Saj woman to manage something like this?”
“Manage? No. Exploit? Abso-freaking-lutely.”
Savannah began to feel blobs of skepticism stick to her every thought, like the commercial illustrations of cholesterol in your bloodstream. All the excitement she’d felt following the first round of interviews was gone. This felt heavy, impossible and dark.
Maggie pressed the mute button and looked at them. “You don’t have to agree to
this, you know. You can keep going, just as you have been. Do the podcast without the publicity.”
Thomas looked at Savannah, and she was surprised to see she’d misinterpreted him a moment ago. He was red and antsy, obviously coming to very different conclusions than she was. Angry to her wary.
“They’re out there telling lies,” he said. The words flew like he was spitting out poison.
“So? That’s been happening all along. The trolls have been after us since we started.” Given other circumstances, Savannah would have laughed, hearing herself. They sounded like characters in a fairy tale, twins being chased by the creature under the bridge. But this wasn’t a story. The troll army really was on the loose and they were outnumbered. “No matter what we say, they’re still going to hate us. Still going to believe they won.”
“Maybe. But—” Thomas stopped, struggling for words. He wouldn’t look at her. “We said we were never going to do anything that might make our dad think any less of us.”
“We don’t even know him yet!”
“Exactly! If we don’t say anything, they’ll be free to say anything! Trash us, trash him—” Again, he stopped short of a full thought.
Savannah felt an ever-escalating panic in her throat. Thomas wasn’t going to back down.
“I get that,” she said. “But what is Sam even proposing? I don’t know what he wants us to do.”
Maggie unmuted the line. “To confirm, Sam, you’re proposing another interview?”
“A full slate of interviews,” he said. “Take our version of the story to TV. Saj can set ’em up and prep you here.”
“In New York?” Savannah asked.
Thomas rolled his eyes at her question. “That’s where all the cable networks are.”
She glared at him. “I’m just checking.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Here in the city.”
The Kids Are Gonna Ask Page 13