“Symptoms of concussions can sometimes last years and even cause permanent changes to cognitive function and personality,” I noted.
Josie stared at me, her eyes welling with tears. “Was that supposed to be helpful?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just something I read.”
Archie handed me a menu. “You texted that you had something you wanted to share with me? With us?”
“Yes, so, well, as we discussed, I’ve been focusing on the … particulars of the crash and its causes. Planes want to stay in the air, as I said.”
“I don’t understand,” said Josie. “What is this about?”
“An investigation,” I said. “Not the official one. My own. See, there have been no easy explanations. No storm or bird strike or troubling safety record. So I started to wonder.”
“Wonder what?” asked Archie.
“Your father worked for the military. But do you know what he did?”
“Civilian stuff. Requisitions … accounting … administrative … uh…”
“So no.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“And Josie, it turns out your father’s firm had contracts with the military and government.”
“Daddy?”
“And Dayana’s mom, of course. Plus her dad did some work there when they first moved. That pilot told me planes want to stay in the air. But sometimes people have secrets and other people want these secrets to stay buried.”
Archie took a gulp of water. “I don’t … I mean … Are you saying the plane, our parents’ plane … was like … sabotaged?”
“It’s just a theory. One of several. We haven’t heard from the authorities about a cause. They won’t even respond to my emails most of the time. I leave messages on voicemails that are never returned— Here, look at all of this.” I produced a stack of papers from my backpack. Safety records, newspaper articles, photos of the plane and the crash site. Names and biographies of all involved parties including the Clays and the Gallaghers.
When I looked up from the pages, Josie was holding a photo of her parents and shuddering. Archie put his hand on her back, and it was as if I wasn’t there again. He walked her out of the restaurant, and they never came back.
I sat in the booth with my research and ate the rest of their french fries.
* * *
When I returned home after dropping off Jack at his house from the hospital there were lights on all over the house. I opened the front door slowly and grabbed an extendable umbrella from the stand. “Hello?! Is someone in there?”
I pressed the button and the umbrella shot to its full length.
From out of the kitchen charged a large, bald man with a gray goatee and a Hawaiian shirt. My first instinct was to run for my life. Before I could flee, however, he grabbed me in a bear hug. “Holy hell, is that you, Bud? Looks like they put you on the rack and stretched you.”
Pop? The umbrella tumbled out of my hand.
His scratchy gray chest hair grazed my chin as he swung me around. “Sorry it took so long for me to get my ass in gear. Been chilling down on the Yucatan in Mexico. I’m kinda half off the grid these days. Only way to live.”
I backed away to take a better look at him. The last time I saw him he’d had sandy surfer’s hair that was always falling in his face. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
He snorted and patted me hard on the back. “Doing here? Your mom’s dead, Bud. I’m all you’ve got.”
“I didn’t hear from you. I had to forge your name on the forms. I didn’t even know where you were.”
“Nelson Calderón finally tracked me down. Had to go through a bunch of different channels. Like I said, half off the grid. Probably helped that El Nel spoke the language. Point is, I had to be here. I’m sorry about your mom, Buddy Boy. We had some great times.”
He walked to the fireplace mantel, picked up a photo of my mother with her friends from the trip to California wine country years ago. “Those damn vacations,” he said. “Always got me depressed. Three nights a year in some tourist trap, trying to make up for the other three hundred sixty-two days of drudgery. Can’t believe that’s what got them, though. I always thought Rich Clay would drop dead on the golf course.”
“He didn’t,” I said. It was so unsettling to have Pop here in this house that wasn’t his anymore. Walking on Mom’s rug, drinking from one of her glasses with the cherry on the side. I recognized his voice from his phone calls, but he looked like a completely different person.
“Point is,” said this goateed stranger with Pop’s voice, “the dude was intense, and intense dudes … Well, shit catches up to them. You remember that. No offense, Bud.”
“Bud” was what he called me when I was little. Mom hated the nickname and did everything in her power to discourage it. His name is Harrison, Bobby. Not Bud. Buds drive pickup trucks and drink beer out of cans. But my father didn’t listen. Bobby showed Bud how to karate chop a stick in half and how to drive a car using only your knees. Bobby threw Bud up in the air so high his head would graze the leaves and he never dropped Bud once. It was my favorite game when I was kid. I hadn’t been “Bud” since I was seven, since Pop left.
Pop put a hand on my back. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’ve stayed out of this for most of your life because your mother was in charge. But now we’ve got a chance to reverse some of the damage.”
“Damage?” After all this time, he walked into my house … Mom’s house … and called me damaged?!
Was I damaged? Was it that obvious?
“Look at you. You’re wound as tight as a baseball. You’ve had nothing but structure and pressure since you were five.”
Suddenly I felt like I had to defend myself and prove to him that I was not what he thought. “I drive a car without a license. I busted a guy out of the hospital. And I got suspended for punching a kid in the face.” This man meant nothing to me. Why was I trying so hard to impress him?
“I’m sure he deserved it,” he said. “Come on, show me your room.”
I should’ve said no. I should’ve told him that he didn’t belong in our house. But for the first time since Mom died, someone told me what to do. So I did it. Pop and his sandals clopped up the stairs and into my room. He circled my space, picking up each of my math trophies, reading my certificates and medals.
“Bet these get the ladies all hot and bothered,” he snorted, glancing out the window with a smile.
I imagined cracking him with the hefty Math Olympics MVP award, knocking him through the glass and into the Clays’ yard.
“Rich and Michelle still live there? I mean, did they still live there.” He corrected himself so easily. Jack and Josie’s parents existed one moment. Then they didn’t. “Pool’s new. A little showy for my taste. Rich always had something to prove. Never enough to just have the beautiful wife and the great head of hair. Nope. You still friends with the twins? Wonder how much he left them?”
I couldn’t listen to this anymore. “You can’t say things like that. You don’t know them. You don’t even know me! You ran away from us for my whole life and now Mom is gone and you think you can just come back in and take her place? You don’t know me. You don’t know anything!”
I stood there, panting, waiting for him to defend himself or to punch me or to apologize. Instead he nodded. He nodded.
“You’re right. Let’s go somewhere,” he said.
“I have research to do.” The crash. I had to get back to Mom’s crash.
“It’ll do us both some good. Get some air into the lungs and some life into the bones. You look half dead. When was the last time you went outside and did something?”
“Something?”
“You need to get out of this house. Spend too much time chasing a ghost and you become one yourself.”
I’d forgotten what it was like when he was in the room. He took up all the air. And it was almost impossible to say no to him. I found myself nodding.
“T
here you go. Hey, Bud, I didn’t get a chance to hit the ATM at the airport. Your mom still keep that stash of cash with her delicates?”
* * *
Pop pulled Mom’s car into a parking spot and turned off the ignition. “You come here a lot?” he asked.
I raised my seat and looked out the window. A large, plastic palm tree loomed over us. Island Mini Golf on the boardwalk.
“I used to bring you here all the time. You loved to sit on top of the mermaid and look at the ocean. ’Course they always made me take you down. The mini-golf fun police.”
I had not been here since he left ten and a half years ago. “I really don’t have time to play miniature golf right now.”
“There’s always time for mini golf. Come on. We’ll play a quick eighteen. I remember you were pretty good. Scary concentration for a little kid. Bet you still can’t beat your old man, though. I’ll spot you a couple of strokes. Loser buys ice cream.”
I desperately wanted to beat him into the ground. “I don’t need your strokes.”
We chose our putters and Pop handed me an orange ball. “Still your favorite color, I bet.” I snatched the ball away without giving him the satisfaction of being right. He stepped aside to let me putt first, but from the very first hole he never stopped talking. “I used to cruise down here when I was supposed to be driving you to Sunny Horizons. We’d hang on the beach and eat peanuts and if it wasn’t too cold I’d ride waves with you on my back. No matter how much I wiped you clean your mother would always find a spec or two of sand and she’d start in with one of her lectures. She didn’t really mean it. You wouldn’t know it, but that woman had a wild streak in her. Until you came along, anyway. Not that I’m blaming you.”
I shut him out so I could stay focused on my putting. Your focus and dedication, that’s what makes you special. One hole at a time. I marked our scores on the card with the tiny pencil and we traded the lead back and forth for sixteen holes. We reached the final regular hole in a dead tie.
This was it. Winner take all. Sudden death. As I approached the final tee, my heart thumped harder than it ever did during spelling bees or Math Olympics. I had to beat this man.
As I lined up the putt, Pop put a meaty hand on the back of my neck. “Thanks for coming here with me, Bud. I wasn’t sure you’d give me another crack at this, but it means a lot. And I just—” He choked on his last words. Was he crying? Pop swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Sorry. Brings back a lot of memories, that’s all. Your putt.” Was this real? Mom always told me that Bobby was … That he … I don’t know. It felt real.
Suddenly, my hands were damp. As I stared down at the blurry orange ball I felt the familiar rush of panic coming over me. I couldn’t let Pop see this. I tried to fight off the glitch, gripping the club tighter and tighter. Soon I was overwhelmed. I darted my head around to find somewhere I could hide, somewhere to escape. The closest I could find was the mermaid’s grotto on hole thirteen. I dropped my club, wedged myself into the fake rock, and attempted to catch my breath.
3.14159265388979 …
“Bud?” I opened my eyes to see Pop standing by the entrance. “This happen to you a lot?” I nodded between gasps for air.
He put out his hand. “Take it.” I stared at the thick fingers. “Come on, pal. Take my hand.”
* * *
Pop’s arrival had not been part of The Plan. He insisted I skip school, and come out of my room for meals. He led me on tours around the old neighborhood and to places he called “his old stomping ground.” He snuck us through a gate to swim at a private beach and took me for a hot shave from a real barber. He pulled me into the backyard to lie on the grass and look at the stars. Whether I enjoyed any of these spontaneous excursions was not the point. They were very disruptive to my research into the crash.
In my first week back at school after the suspension, I didn’t make a single visit to Mr. U’s supply closet. In fact I went five full days without a single glitch. But I wasn’t much interested in my classes either. I elected for “independent study” in the library, where I’d mostly take naps on the table. One afternoon, I woke to someone pulling me up by my hair. I blinked at Dayana, who was prying open my eyes. “You taking those meds again?” she asked.
“I’m just tired. I went to a midnight movie with my pop last night.”
“No shit,” she said. “I heard he was here. You good with it?”
I thought about the question. “I have no idea.”
“Listen, I’m the last person to lecture anyone about going to school or doing homework or any of that. But it’s different for you. You’ve got something. Like … you’re going somewhere. Harvard or whatever. And I just don’t want to see you fuck it away.”
“Fuck it away?”
“You know what I mean.”
Dayana studied me some more, her hand still touching my head. I felt her black nails on my scalp. A little shiver ran up my back.
“Nelson wants you and your dad to come over for dinner,” she said. “Don’t blow it off this time. I can’t promise it’s not gonna be a fucking disaster, but hey, at least you’ll have me and I’m the GOAT at dinner parties. Okay. I’ll text you the deets.”
When I passed on the invitation to Pop, he thought about it for a while before responding. “Nelson and Vanesa, the sole survivors … So is Dayana your girlfriend?”
My face got hot and I snapped at him. “No. No, of course not. Before the crash she didn’t even talk to me.” I didn’t like him asking those questions about Dayana. She wasn’t his business. She was with me after Mom died. He wasn’t.
“I’ll bet she’s really pretty. Like her mother. She was a cute kid.”
“She’s … different than you remember.”
Pop asked if I’d ever had a girlfriend and when I explained about The Plan and how busy I was trying to beat Mackenzie Markowitz, he grabbed the car keys and told me we were taking a ride. This time mini golf was not on the menu. Instead he swung Mom’s sedan into a grubby-looking establishment off the side of route 135 with a large pink sign reading “Delilah’s.” I reminded Pop that I was seventeen and would not be allowed into a bar.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “they only serve juice here. That’s why they let them go all-out.” I had no idea to what he was referring until we walked into Delilah’s and I saw the girls.
The room was dim and it smelled like a swimming pool and stale flowers. The music was loud and distorted. But the girls were everywhere. Women. Half to fully naked. They were dancing on the black stage or the bar while several others rubbed against men sitting around small, round tables. As we walked in, a few of the women looked in our direction. They smiled with only the corners of their mouths. One of them, wearing a green bikini she was in the process of removing, winked at me. I averted my eyes to the floor, where popcorn was ground into the dark rug. Even without looking at the dancers, I could feel them around me. Skin and sparkles and perfume. Moving to the pulse of the music. The room was hot, warmed by the energy coming off their bodies.
Pop slapped me on the back. “They’re the naked ones. You got nothing to be nervous about. It’s all good, Bud. Whatever you’ve got going on in there is natural.” It did not feel natural. It felt intense and awkward and terrifying. I stared straight ahead while Pop led me to a table and guided me down into a fake leather seat. I folded my hands on the table, but the top was sticky, so I moved them to my lap, where a lot was happening. Pop pulled out some cash he’d taken from Mom’s drawer and nodded to one of the girls on the stage.
She was very small, wearing pink leather bottoms, clear heels, and nothing else. Nothing else. Glitter all over her bare body. I tried to keep my eyes on her face. Looking down at her nakedness was too …
Pop leaned toward her and raised his voice over the music. “My son’s having a tough time.” He slipped her a couple of bills and she turned and smiled at me. Her smile sent a jolt through my body. My right leg started to vibrate uncontrollably.
&n
bsp; “You two have fun, okay? Relax, Bud. Enjoy yourself.”
Pop went to the bar and left us alone at the table. She leaned in, her lips grazing my ear. “I’m Platinum,” she said. “I’m an expert at cheering people up.” She slid her back against my chest. I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my eyes. What would Mackenzie Markowitz think about me doing this? She was probably at home in those emoji pajamas she wore to school on pj day. What would Mom think about me using her money this way?
“What’s your name?” Platinum blew a little cool air in my ear and I shivered.
“Harrison.”
“You’re cute. I like you. Let’s see if we can get you to loosen up.”
She rubbed her bare back up and down against my chest, her bikini bottom grazing my lap each time.
“You’ve got a good dad,” she said. “You two must be really close.”
I wiped sweat off my forehead, struggling to process the music and her body and the little butterfly tattoo on her back and the pressure of her touching me. “I haven’t seen him in many years. He left me and my mother when I was seven years old. He kissed me goodnight and said ‘I’ll see ya when I see ya.’ And when I woke up the next morning he was gone and it was just me and my mother. She died in a crash and I think maybe someone sabotaged the plane.”
Platinum bolted up and turned around to see if I was telling some kind of weird joke. When she saw I wasn’t kidding, she covered herself with her hands and teetered back on her heels. Up close her face wasn’t what I expected. She had big, innocent eyes like a puppy and a little crooked part to her nose. Beneath the long eyelashes and shimmering makeup she looked like she could be my age.
“Oh my God! You’re one of those kids. The Sunnies. I read about you every day. It breaks my heart.” She grabbed me in a hug. “I’m so sorry, Harry. You must really miss your mom.”
Somehow, being hugged by this stranger, her bare breasts pressed against my shirt, made me finally feel the weight of the loss. Mom was the most important person in my world. No one else loved me and protected me like she did, and no one else ever would. She was there when I woke up every single morning of my life. I never went to sleep without her kissing me goodnight. I didn’t have real friends anymore. Just memories. I didn’t have girlfriends. I had Mom. And she had me. I didn’t know a world without her in it and now I was forced to live it every day. I lingered in the warm embrace of a naked stripper and only wished for one more hug from my mother, one more goodnight kiss on the forehead.
The Year They Fell Page 11