Things You Can't Say

by Jenn Bishop

  I help myself to one of the wraps we grabbed at the deli and sit in a beach chair. Sand sticks to the back of my wet legs as I bite into the crunchy lettuce and tuna.

  “What was Filipe up to today?” Mom asks. “Were they heading out of town for the weekend?”

  I pretend my mouth is full.

  “Everything okay with you two? He left kind of quickly the other day.” She raises her voice. “Xan, watch out, honey, you’re getting sand all over the blanket.”

  “I don’t know,” I say with a shrug. There’s no way I can talk to Mom about how Filipe’s been lately. She’d never understand.

  Mom sweeps off the sand my brother got all over the blanket. I scarf down the rest of my sandwich, and then get on my hands and knees, helping Xan and Mom with the sandcastle.

  After more swimming and napping, the beach starts to clear out again. Families head home for supper while we’re putting the finishing touches on the grandest sandcastle of the day. Xan carefully sticks a seagull feather into the top of the tallest turret.

  Somehow the bridge over the moat is still holding strong, though I know it’s only a matter of time before the water takes down the whole thing. The tide is coming in, and in another hour it’ll take out our sandcastle. Wipe it all away, like it never even existed.

  After we pack up all our stuff, there’s just one thing left to do.

  Mom heads into the changing rooms to switch out of her wet swimsuit and into dry clothes for the ride home while I wait with Xan by the carousel, watching the painted horses go around and around and around. It’s tradition. You can’t visit Watch Hill and not stop at the carousel. It’s more than a hundred years old, one of the oldest in the whole country.

  The sunburned teenage girl working the ride keeps checking her watch, like she can’t wait for her shift to be over so she can do something more exciting. I hand her the money for one ride and then Xan runs straight for his favorite horse. Tan and spotted, with a long blond mane and a red saddle. I help him up, get him all buckled in, and head back outside the gate to watch.

  As the music starts, the carousel slowly whirs to life. It never goes real fast—it’s a carousel, after all, not a roller coaster—but it’s fast enough that you have to practice your timing to get a ring. About halfway through the ride, they sling out this machine with rings for everyone to reach out and grab. There are a few special golden rings mixed in with all the silver ones, and if you’re lucky enough to get one of those, you earn a free ride.

  Xan rounds the corner, grinning and holding up a ring to show me he’s gotten it. Last year his arms weren’t quite long enough to reach.

  Next thing I know, Mom is standing next to me.

  “He got a ring,” I tell her.

  She wraps her arm around me. “I saw! God, we’ll never hear the end of it if he gets a gold one.”

  “Probably not. Wait—what if he keeps getting the gold one? What if he’s stuck riding the carousel forever?”

  Mom laughs. “That sounds like a horror movie.”

  The carousel keeps turning around and around. On the bookshelf in our living room, there’s a framed photo of me that time I got the gold ring. Dad must’ve taken it; he took most of the photos with that big fancy camera of his.

  Is it weird that it feels almost normal now? Just the three of us? I should feel like someone’s missing. Like there’s a big gaping hole in our family.

  I should, but a lot of the time I don’t.

  I stare at the carousel, the past flaking away like the paint on the hundred-year-old horses. What if it was never supposed to be Dad taking me to the beach all those times? What if it should’ve been Phil? But wait. If I’m really Phil’s son, why would he wait so long to be a part of my life, anyway? Would he really just let Dad raise me? Was that why Dad did it? Because he couldn’t stand living a lie? The questions—the possibilities—start branching out again. Maybe they’re not like a tree at all, but a web. A big, tangled web.

  “Drew?”

  “Yeah?” I stammer.

  “Everything okay, bud?”

  I nod. “Yeah. Fine.”

  “You were staring off into space for a while there.” Mom squeezes my shoulder. “Look who got the gold ring!”

  My brother whirs by, a beaming smile on his face. One more ride.

  I know what I have to do on Monday. I have to fix things with Audrey. We need to get our hands on that yearbook. Until Phil gets back into town, it’s all we have, and I need to know.

  If there’s a chance—a real chance—he’s actually my dad, I need to do something about it before he leaves again—this time, for good.

  20

  IT’S NOT EASY TO TELL a person like Audrey that you’re sorry. For starters, she’s got a pretty intense resting face. Her stare could bore holes in the wall.

  It’s not until halfway through Monday morning, when I’m putting away the puppets after story hour, that I work up the courage to even say hi to her and see where we stand.

  Did being apart for the weekend maybe … help?

  Mrs. Eisenberg is across the room recommending books for a fourth grader. Now’s my chance. Audrey doesn’t have her earbuds in as she sits at Mrs. Eisenberg’s computer.

  “How was your … weekend?”

  Audrey doesn’t even turn in my direction. She’s got her eyes fixed on the computer screen, staring so intently she’s not even blinking.

  “Audrey?”

  She startles and turns toward me. “Were you talking to me?”

  “Um … yeah? I was asking … I mean … I just …”

  Audrey stares back at me. It turns out her eyes do remember how to blink. Were they so blue like that last week? Have her eyelashes always been that long? Or did she change her glasses? Since when do I have such a hard time putting together a complete sentence around Audrey?

  “You know, since I have no friends …”

  “Audrey, I didn’t mean that. Of course that’s not true.” Though actually, now that I think about it, for someone who just moved across the country, she doesn’t seem to be texting with her old friends like you’d expect.

  “What if it were true?”

  “It’s not,” I say. “What are you even talking about? I thought we were …” Why is it so hard to say? “I thought we were friends,” I finally spit out. Why is it that I’m expecting her to laugh in my face for thinking we could be friends? “I mean—are.”

  Audrey turns back to the screen and clicks on something.

  I don’t understand this girl. Maybe I need to do something to show her that we’re friends. Like invite her somewhere. The county fair!

  “Would you want to come to the county fair with us? We usually take—” I cut myself off before saying his name. Even though what I was about to say was true, no one likes to feel like a backup choice. And anyway, Audrey’s not only my friend because things have been weird with Filipe the past week.

  “It’s really fun,” I continue. “There’s rides and all kinds of good food and animals. They have cows that are ready to give birth and you can watch and everything.”

  Audrey swivels back around, her nose wrinkled. “Gee, Drew. You’re really selling it. Cow births?” She cracks a smile. “When are you going?”

  “Friday night,” I say. It sounds like a date. Which it is not.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay as in thumbs-up to cow birth?”

  Audrey laughs. “No. Well, maybe? Okay as in it sounds fun. I’ve never been to a county fair before. It sounds like … a unique cultural experience.” Leave it to Audrey to see it that way. “I’ll check with my parents. Let you know tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Audrey turns back to the computer and starts typing. I’m about to head back to the tables and clean up the mess of picture books when Audrey whips around in the swivel chair once more. “Do you still want to do it, then?” Her eyes shoot across the room to Mrs. Eisenberg. That fourth grader’s got quite a stack of books going, but they don’t
seem done.

  “Get the yearbook?”

  Audrey nods.

  “I do,” I say. More than anything. There are things I can’t tell anyone. Not Audrey. Not Xan, not Mom. Not Filipe, even before this summer.

  Like how I thought about him all weekend. Not Phil this time. Dad. I do it sometimes. Flip back through memories like they’re pages in a book I’ve reread a million times. What would it mean if he wasn’t my real dad? Does it undo everything that happened? My whole life?

  I don’t think I can tell. Not yet, anyway. There’s so much I won’t know until I know, for sure, who Phil really is to me.

  Audrey beckons me toward her, and I come.

  “When can we do it?” she asks.

  I think through today’s schedule. “After lunch?”

  Mrs. Eisenberg usually lets me and Audrey go to lunch first. She likes to take a later lunch, leaving us alone downstairs for about half an hour. It’s the quietest time of the day. As she always tells us, if anyone comes in and needs help, the librarians upstairs are just a phone call away.

  “Okay,” Audrey says. “After lunch it is.”

  I glance at the clock. “An hour and a half to think of a better name than Mrs. Muffinbottom.”

  Audrey grins. “You’re on.”

  * * *

  I’m sitting at the table cutting out star name tags for tomorrow’s story hour. Audrey’s at Mrs. Eisenberg’s computer.

  The Devlin twins are taking forever choosing summer reading prizes. I can practically hear Mrs. Eisenberg’s stomach rumbling at this point. She should have gone to lunch ten minutes ago, but just as she was about to leave, the two Devlin boys came racing down the stairs, trailed by their mom. They’d been out of town last week for a vacation and you would think they’ve been gone a whole year given how much Mrs. Devlin needs to get caught up with Mrs. Eisenberg.

  Plus, it means the boys missed out on last week’s summer reading prizes, and they are the most indecisive kids ever. I swear I spent half an hour helping Timmy decide which colored bouncy ball he wanted last year. I could practically feel my hair growing.

  “What do you think, Timmy? How about the train whistle?” Mrs. Eisenberg reaches into the prize drawer and shows him a wooden train whistle.

  Timmy grabs it from her, carefully examining it like he’s never seen one before. Not possible! We went through this whole routine last summer.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  Audrey swivels around in her chair and catches my eye.

  I glance up at the clock, trying to communicate to her without words that we’re in a serious time crunch. If Mrs. Eisenberg doesn’t leave for lunch soon, she’s going to be sneaking bites from her desk later. We’ve got “Reading with Dogs” starting at one p.m., and I know we’re going to get a crowd for that. Who doesn’t love reading to dogs from the shelter?

  “You should take the train whistle,” I say, getting up from the table. “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

  Mrs. Eisenberg beams at me. “Well, if Drew thinks it’s cool, you know what that means.”

  Timmy hugs it to his chest. “Okay. The train whistle.” He presses his mouth to it and blows hard. No returning it now.

  Even his mom looks relieved. “Let’s go home for lunch, boys.”

  Timmy’s twin brother, Daniel, gets up from the table where he’s been coloring. “Finally!”

  Mrs. Eisenberg’s too polite to say what we’ve all been thinking in front of the Devlins, but when the door closes behind them, she lets out a sigh and grabs a spoon from her desk drawer. “Got to beat the dogs,” she says, heading for the elevator. “You know how to reach me.”

  “Yup.” I head back over to the table like I’m about to cut some more name tags, but once the elevator door closes behind Mrs. Eisenberg, I’m darting across the room, rolling over a free chair to squeeze in beside Audrey.

  She’s got the screens open already.

  “This is going to be tight,” she says, and I can feel my heart hammer. “But I’m prepared.” She opens up a Word document. It’s got to have a hundred names on it.

  “When did you—”

  “Eh, I got started over the weekend. And then I kept adding to it when a new one came to me.”

  Over the weekend. So was she just faking being mad at me?

  She scrolls down the list. “Which one do you like best, or—do you have one?”

  “I had a couple,” I say, though none of them compare to this. The amount of time that went into this. Just, wow. “That one,” I say, pointing to a good one. John Jacob Langham.

  “Not this one?” Audrey highlights Ethel Finkelstinkle.

  “Yeah, no.” I laugh. “I mean, you can make a fake library account for her if you really want to, but let’s request the yearbook under a normal-sounding name.”

  Audrey creates a library account for John Jacob Langham, along with a fake street address in town, and a fake e-mail address, too. She comes up with an elaborate backstory for why he needs the yearbook—he lost his in a house fire—and then she hits send. We stare at the Gmail screen, waiting for a response from Loretta. Suddenly I smell coconut and pineapple.

  How’d I get so close to Audrey that I can smell her hair? I creep my chair away until I’m at a more appropriate distance.

  “So.” Audrey swivels her chair so she’s facing me. “I held a baby yesterday.”

  “No way!” It was one thing to see her talk more with the little kids last week, but there’s a big gap between little kids and an actual baby.

  “My next-door neighbor came back from the hospital a few days ago and my mom asked me to go over with her to bring a gift. It all happened so fast. I said yes. And then I sort of wished I’d said no, because, you know, babies. But I went anyway and she let me hold her! This teeny-tiny baby, Drew. She couldn’t really do anything at all yet, just kind of flailed around and made weird noises. Totally helpless, you know?”

  “Did she spit up?”

  “Yeah. A little. But not on me. Thank God.”

  I laugh, and Audrey does too.

  “I guess I get it now, why people like babies so much. They’re just so … new. And innocent. And good. They haven’t made any huge mistakes yet.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but she’s right. I wonder when everything changes, when suddenly your mistakes aren’t the easy-to-fix kinds.

  The screen saver pops up on the monitor. Audrey jiggles the mouse to wake it up, but nothing’s changed. Still no new e-mails.

  “What if she doesn’t write ba—”

  But before I’ve finished saying it, a new e-mail pops up.

  Thanks for your e-mail, John. I’d be more than happy to track down a copy of your yearbook. So sorry to hear about your house. I’ll get back to you once I’ve finalized the request.

  I can feel the tips of my ears begin to burn. Like the house that never burned down in town. Won’t she wonder? A house burning down in our town—that kind of thing would be on the news.

  “Why’d you write that his house burned down?” I ask.

  “Because it made a good story?”

  “Yeah. It does. But Loretta lives in town too. Houses don’t burn down every day. What if she asks questions? What if she looks it up?”

  “Relax,” Audrey says. “She gets these requests all the time. She doesn’t have time to think about why she gets each one. She’s got work to do, you know?”

  I spin around in my chair. “Maybe.”

  “It’ll work. Trust me.”

  I stop spinning and stare back at Audrey.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this.” She wipes off her glasses on her shirt. “I can feel it.”

  21

  IT’S TUESDAY AFTERNOON. AUDREY’S ON Mrs. Eisenberg’s computer and I’m putting away the puppets in the craft closet when Audrey clears her throat. She clears it again. Okay, she starts legitimately hacking up a lung, and finally Mrs. Eisenberg says, “You need some water, dear?” and I look up an
d Audrey is glaring at me.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Her eyes dart to the monitor.

  You know how little kids do that dance when they have to pee and you’re like, just go pee already, but they say they don’t have to? And you’re like, no, seriously, you do, why are you arguing with me, three-year-old despot? It’s sort of like that, except I’m the kid who’s so antsy I’m practically dancing as I wait, wait, wait for Mrs. Eisenberg to go somewhere—a meeting, the bathroom—or help a patron, but instead it’s the quietest time in the history of the universe and she’s just sitting there, feet from Audrey, checking in some new books, and I feel like I might actually explode. Not with pee, though.

  Finally she gets up to use the restroom and I book it for Audrey at the computer.

  “Next week!” She pulls up the e-mail from Loretta.

  Well, John, you’re in luck! They’re sending over a copy of the 1995 yearbook and we should receive it sometime early next week. Would you like a phone call or an e-mail when it comes in?

  “You wrote back ‘e-mail,’ right?”

  “No, I figured it would be more fun to track down some guy to pretend to be John and get a cell phone with this number and—of course, silly.”

  “Okay. Okay. Phew.”

  “Back when I graduated fifth grade in Chicago, my school made yearbooks, and we got to write class wills. Maybe Phil’s yearbook will have class wills! I wonder who he left things to.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Did he leave things to my mom? What else is even in yearbooks, anyway? Were they like Facebook before, well, Facebook?

  “Guess we’ll find out,” I say, glancing at the e-mail again. It’s coming. The yearbook will actually be here, in my—our—hands. Monday. Tuesday? Anything past that is midweek, right? So. Early next week, I’ll know. Well, maybe not for sure. But I’ll have enough—enough to go on to ask my mom or Phil if it’s true. Mom didn’t say exactly when Phil would swing back through town, but it can’t be before then. He was meeting up with folks all the way in northern Maine.