Carter nodded. “You know those two kids on them there shows?”
“Sort of. I knew their mom.”
“Well that short girl got beat up pretty good on one show. I thought she was gon’ cry. Or hit her brother. Or maybe both.”
The kid’s blunt assessment sent Jack’s head ringing, a near-constant state for him now. He looked at Carter, expecting more info, but his attention was back on the skiers. Jack dug into his pocket for a twenty and shooed Carter out, making sure he took the cereal with him.
He rewound the tape in the VCR but sat there without pressing Play. He knew he was going to watch. Only he had to do it on his terms. Paying Carter to clean up his mess had been easy. A convenience. Getting him to record the interviews a cheap add-on.
These past few days, though, Jack had started to wake up to the fact that he had dues to pay—and it was a lot more than what he already owed Ford. He was forty and his life could be reduced to a single moment. The one he was in right there, alone, pissed off and sitting in a mess of his own making. He’d spent years flinging himself from one distraction to another. Home to college. College to Breck. Breck to Tybee. He thought he’d been living the carefree life. Staying unburdened. He didn’t ask for any extravagances and he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.
Except that he had.
He’d promised Ford a retirement he couldn’t give. And he’d connected himself to two kids wanting a father.
If he had even a trace of decency left in him, he was going to have to do something that qualified, at a minimum, as not shitty.
He pressed Play.
The tape opened on a shot of Savannah laughing, and it was all Jack could do to sit, staring at her. The thick brown hair, the matching eyes. He didn’t know the whole face, but he recognized the likeness. Bess. The woman who’d asked questions with just a squint and called bullshit with a tilt of her head.
He rewound to the beginning of the interview and watched again.
It took him a few minutes to place the voices he knew from the podcast with the faces he’d seen in the photos on their website. He’d constructed them differently in his mind, mostly the same but different. And now, here they were, animated and fully functioning people.
The distinctions between the two kids were astounding. Thomas towered over Savannah, Jack knew to expect that, but she practically burst through the TV with her—what—Savannah-ness. More confident than she ought to be at seventeen, but in a way that made you want to tell her everything was going to be okay.
“We should never have lost our mom,” she told the interviewer, a woman with perfect hair and chiseled cheekbones. “But we did lose her and it’s still awful. A woman in a Toyota Prius is no match for a concrete block falling off an overpass. No kid wants to learn the term blunt force trauma the way we did. But the end of her story isn’t the end of ours. We are loved. We have a wonderful, loyal, strong grandmother.”
Thomas laughed suddenly, and the interviewer shot him a smile that asked what am I missing?
He flushed, seeming to catch himself short. “Oh, I—for a second, I thought Savannah was about to say strange, a strange grandmother.”
Savannah nudged him. “Ha! She’s not going to let you forget that.”
Jack’s eyes went dry he stared so intently at the screen, amazed by every detail. The way Thomas chewed on his lip while he thought. How Savannah nodded constantly and said, Mmm-hmm... Mmm-hmm when listening to a question. The way Thomas was large, but Savannah had presence. They seemed to fit, two pieces of a whole. It made Jack feel—he didn’t know exactly—more optimistic somehow.
“Anyway, my point is,” Savannah continued, “neither of us is trying to replace our mom. If anything, we’re doing exactly what she taught us to do. To be curious. Be open. Support each other.”
A guy with silver hair and a tie to match, asked what they were doing with the money they made from the show.
“What money?” Thomas asked in a tone rich with irony.
“Are you familiar with podcasting?” Savannah added, laughing.
“I mean, yeah,” continued Thomas. “There will be some. I’ll probably buy myself a cup of coffee with it. What about you, Van?”
“I’m thinking doughnuts. But who knows. If the show gets really popular, I might even upgrade to a Danish.”
Another asked them why they thought their mother kept their father a secret from them.
“I sort of think it’s a mistake to characterize her choices as secrets,” said Savannah. “When we asked about our father, she gave us the information she must have considered appropriate at the time. Like, when we were little, she said we were just like the bean plants we’d sprouted in a cup on our windowsill—there was a seed and it grew and as long as someone cared for it, watered it and gave it plenty of room to grow, it flourished. Then when we were older, she talked about how every creature raised their babies a little bit differently, that penguins cared for their young differently than the robins in our yard, but that didn’t make one creature any better than the other.”
Jack watched every segment—sometimes rewinding two or three times, trying to take it all in, every laugh and Hmm. The sky outside was just turning pink when the tape cut to the kids seated in the middle of five women. He’d never seen this show, but he assumed the women served collectively as its hosts; each held a coffee mug with her name in gold.
Except for the woman at the end of the table. Her mug was blank. Her cohosts called her Eaton.
“Is that your goal, Savannah?”
Jack recoiled at the sneer on the woman’s face. She reminded him of the murdering wife in one of the last movies he’d seen. Beautifully Deadly, if he remembered the title right.
“A systematic dismantling of men’s rights?” Eaton went on. “But disguised as a personal quest for connection and family?”
What the hell was this?
On screen, Jack watched as Savannah changed before his eyes, her confidence vanishing, replaced by the face of a frightened little girl. Thomas, too. He looked like he was preparing to dash, to grab his sister’s hand and make a run for it.
And then.
“Why won’t you tell us who John James Thorson is?”
The alarm in Jack’s head began to scream. Not just ringing now, but wailing. An air raid in his brain. His name on national television.
We’re not going to out you or, whatever.
He knew it. Knew he’d be right. The choice to keep his identity confidential hadn’t been theirs to make. It had been Eaton, a woman he wouldn’t otherwise have crossed paths with in a million lifetimes and who didn’t care what her choices meant to anyone except her own arrogant self.
And that wasn’t even the whole of the problem. It was worse. It was worse because Jack saw the last look on Savannah’s face. And he knew—again. Knew they were his. Knew he wasn’t the only one keeping a secret.
Thomas hadn’t told his sister about Jack.
Trigg:
OMG Savannah wtf????? [face screaming in fear emoji] [angry red-face emoji] [crying emoji]
Trigg:
I googled that Eaton chick [devil emoji] and she’s pure evil [flames emoji]
Trigg:
Snapchat is totally blowing up [bomb emoji] [collision emoji]
Trigg:
No one can believe she outed you [ghost emoji] [flashlight emoji] [devil emoji]
Trigg:
Is that guy really your dad? I won’t tell. Promise.
Twenty-Seven
Savannah
Maggie said five words after the interview. “Get us to the airport.”
Sam argued and Saj begged apologies, but Maggie had said what she meant. And when Maggie quit talking, Savannah and Thomas knew there was no changing her mind.
Not that it mattered. New York or home, it was the same. Savannah’s
head only had room for two horrors: the sneer stretching across Eaton Holmes’s face, and the guilt plastered all over Thomas’s.
“I’m so sorry, Van.” They were in a car again, heading back to LaGuardia, and this time, she didn’t care what was outside her window. Thomas had been apologizing to her since they’d walked off the set. Trailing behind her every step with four words of his own.
“I’m so sorry, Van.”
“I’m so, so, sorry.”
Maggie took a window seat and stared out, not talking. Savannah took the middle, desperate for her grandmother’s physical warmth, and grabbed Maggie’s hand.
Thomas refused to leave her be. “Van, are you okay? You’re not talking.”
She wasn’t, because if she opened her mouth there would be words, and those words would come out with a flood of tears, and once the tears started, they wouldn’t stop. So she stayed quiet. Thomas could keep going as long as he needed to. That was his problem. She was going to keep her words all zipped up, keep them from rushing out and knocking her over.
However many hours later, Chef Bart picked them up from the Minneapolis airport in Maggie’s car. No one was talking now. Not even Thomas.
They pulled into the alley at the far end and drove the length of the block toward their house. It didn’t take long to see the blue lights flashing at the other end. Police. Two officers. And talking to them was their neighbor, Tabby Melby.
“Maggie!” Tabby was wailing at them before they even got out of the car. “I’m just sick about it! If only I hadn’t waited until my hair was dry before going out to get the paper this morning, I might have caught them in the act.”
Savannah saw it then. Their welcome home gift. The cause of Mrs. Melby’s distress.
On the fence, the one dividing the yard from the parkway, hung a large stuffed toy—some sort of cotton-candy-colored bear. With a rope tied around its neck.
Next to it, in unskilled and drip-dried spray paint were the words, Waaa! I want my daddy.
* * *
Her mother’s bedroom door was closed, like always, but Savannah knew she was welcome. Inside, she sat down on the bed, just the edge so as not to mess the covers, and took a deep, filling breath. Her mom was disappearing more and more with every visit, but Savannah could still get a hint of her. Just enough to remember.
“Hi, Mom,” she whispered. “We’re home.”
The emptiness felt like a joke. Like her mom’s stuff and her scent and the memories were mocking her, claiming there was magic in this place. That if she kept coming in, she’d feel it. That a miracle might happen.
But even the emptiness was something.
“Things aren’t going so great. I know you were trying to reassure me last night. You did. It helped so much. But then—”
Every breath threatened to bring the tears along with it, forcing her to gulp air as she spoke. She looked down at her hands and saw that her knuckles were white from pressing them together so hard.
“I don’t know what’s happening. Maggie tries to keep the bad stuff from us, but that’s impossible. I know crazies are making threats. We thought it was just online, but I guess you know what we just found in the yard.
“Trigg told me even she’s getting threats. I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out who our friends were. But now her parents are freaking out and taking her phone and threatening to send her to her grandma’s house in Nebraska for the rest of the summer. Her dad even unplugged their Google Home because he thinks someone might have hacked it to eavesdrop. Plus, I’m mad. Mostly at Thomas. I’m sorry. I know you love him just as much as me. But I can’t help it. He knew. He knew who our dad was and he didn’t tell me.”
Her brain lit with anger as she said the words aloud and felt herself begin to sweat, a fire raging from the inside out.
“Thomas has said he’s sorry like a million times—Oh my god, Van, I’m so sorry! You have to forgive me!
“Please. I don’t even want to hear it. I don’t! He wanted this and I did it for him. As if I had a choice! As if I could say, No! I don’t care if it means you never find your biodad, I don’t want to put myself out there for everyone to hate on. Because that’s what’s been happening, of course. They all love Thomas but they call me every horrible name you can imagine. Like having the whole school hate me wasn’t enough. Now the whole world gets to hate me. They’re mad at Thomas, but they despise me. Like he’s just stupid, but I don’t even deserve to live.”
And with that, the first tear fell. Nothing she could do to hold it back. Nothing she could do.
* * *
Savannah wanted to crawl under the covers and was already putting on her pajamas when Maggie called them down for dinner. She was only half-changed—a misbuttoned pajama shirt on top, shorts on the bottom—and Maggie gave her a curious look when she walked into the kitchen.
“Chef Bart made us a dinner rich in stress busters,” Maggie said. “Vitamin K and potassium and magnesium and omega-3 fatty acids.”
Thomas came in through the mudroom. “Ugh. Kale.”
“Kale slaw with pumpkin seeds,” Maggie corrected. “Good for stress and inflammation. We’ll need our immune systems to be as resilient as possible until this mayhem dies down.”
Savannah slid into her chair and burrowed between the table and the wall. She made a not-subtle point of looking only at Maggie and the plate in front of her.
“Did the police take the bear?” Thomas asked.
Maggie nodded. “And I’ve hired someone to come out and repaint the fence tomorrow.”
No one spoke for a few minutes, the silence filled by the sound of utensils on porcelain. Finally, Thomas cracked.
“I mean, think about this, really. Who are we threatening with our search? Like, possibly one man. But all of these thousands of people now are suddenly so concerned with what we’re doing. You have to wonder why.”
Savannah did wonder. But hearing her brother act as if this were nothing but an intellectual exercise made her want to leap across the table and choke him. “Are you kidding me?” She gripped her fork and wondered if she could reach Thomas’s hand to stab it in. “You sound as if this is an assignment for ethics class. But I was assaulted today, in case you didn’t notice. Bullied and accused by a conspiracy theorist on national TV. Did you not see the noose on our fence?”
She needed him to understand, to share the depth of the fear and humiliation her haters wanted her to feel.
“Van.” Thomas reached across the table for her hand. She withdrew, even though his intentions were gentle. Unlike hers had been. “People do crazy things when they’re afraid. Maybe if we can convince them not to fear us—”
“Me,” she said. “They hate me. They attacked me. But you get to be some sort of saint.”
“No, I don’t think that’s true.” Maggie’s lip quivered as she spoke, obviously fighting her emotions back. “Eaton Holmes cornered you today, Savannah, but it’s because she needed to. It made her feel strong, when really it was the move of a weak person. She decided you were the more vulnerable twin in that moment, and she drew you out. A predator thinning the herd.”
Savannah scoffed. “Didn’t feel very weak to me.”
“Of course not. But if she were stronger, she wouldn’t act threatened. What does she gain by attacking a teenager who’s looking for her dad? She’s a pariah. A false prophet.”
Maggie went quiet for a moment, tracing the edge of her plate round and round with her finger. Savannah watched, trying to quiet her mind with the Zen of it. Round and again.
Didn’t work.
“As much as I hate to say this, I don’t know what’s better,” Maggie said finally. “To stand up and fight, or to wait them out, to starve Eaton and all her zombies of the attention they need to survive.”
“Makes me wish I’d paid closer attention to The Walking Dead,” Savannah said, allowing th
e faintest smile to crack.
Thomas leaned in. “Van, I hate that you took the brunt of it this morning. I never would have asked that of you in a million years. But let’s not forget what we got into this for. We want to find our father. Simple. We didn’t ask to get sucked into a tornado.”
“No one asks to get sucked into a tornado.”
Thomas smiled, too. “Trust me,” he said. “I know in my gut it’s going to be worth it.”
Savannah wondered how she could hate her brother so much and still want to cry, desperately thankful to have him.
@eaton_alive
BEST TAKEDOWN EVER!! Wah wah bye bye baby mcclairs
#savannahtrample
@eaton_alive
I used to wonder if you had no shame. Not anymore. Now I know you have no soul.
#wondertwinpowers
@eaton_alive
Have you found John James Thorson yet? WE WANT PICS!!!!!
#savannahtrample
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hi Jack
Jack,
You haven’t heard from me in a while. Sorry about that. I got your email, the one where you sounded mad. And the one after where you said to ignore that. I’m trying to do what you asked. I’ll ignore it. Especially because I’d like to keep writing to each other, if you’re okay with that.
Anyway. You may have heard that one of the interviewers said your name during an interview. I hope it hasn’t caused any trouble for you. Honest, we don’t know where she found out your name and we didn’t tell her.
I understand if you’re mad. Just want you to know I’m really sorry.
Regards,
Thomas McClair
You have six new messages.
[BEEP]
Hey, Junior. It’s your mom. I ran into Mrs. Baca at the Quick Stop and she said she’d heard your name on TV. She said, “Isn’t Johnny’s full name John James? I thought they were talking about him on the TV the other day.” But then, of course she couldn’t remember what show or what they were even talking about. And her fingers looked about ready to jump off her hand from need of a cigarette. Serves me right for listening to her, I guess. Anyway, call me, sweetheart. All this has got me curious.
The Kids Are Gonna Ask Page 18