“Well, he’s sad again,” I said. “And I don’t know how to make him feel better.”
“Maybe he needs some time to himself.”
I shook my head. “That’s all he ever has. Time to himself.”
“What about you?” Walt said. “Don’t you ever need anything?”
I did. I needed a lot of things. A lot of things that I didn’t have and hadn’t thought about in a long time.
That night I stayed out until three. A bunch of us sneaked over to the Roland Park Pool, jumped the fence, and went skinny-dipping. Walt drove me home, both of us soaking wet, and I let him kiss me.
Then I went inside, fell onto my bed, and turned on the radio.
Kreplax:
I want to remind everybody that the Twelfth Annual Powwow is this weekend, off Waterview Avenue—just look for the long lines of parked cars. No cops allowed!
Herb:
Are you racing this year?
Kreplax:
I’m racing my supercanoe, the Time Viking. It’s the boat to beat. Come down to watch the race and say goodbye. After I pick up my Wildflower Wreath of Victory and a few nitrous balloons for the road, I’ll be paddling the Viking out of there.
Herb:
Where are you going?
Kreplax:
Back to the future, Herb. You’re all welcome to visit me, if you can figure out how to get there. I’ll just paddle out over the horizon and bloop! I’ll be gone.
Herb:
Thanks, Kreplax. Hope you make it this time. Next caller, you’re on the air.
Larry:
This song is in honor of the departure of the great time traveler, Kreplax.
[A needle drops on a record. A song plays: the Fifth Dimension’s “One Less Bell to Answer.”]
Larry:
[singing along] “One less man to pick up after, I should be happy…”
The phone rang. It was four-thirty A.M. I turned down the radio, my heart happily speeding. It had to be Jonah.
“Let’s run away together,” he said.
He was back!
“You mean, to Ocean City?” I said.
“No, I mean for real. Let’s run off to someplace far away, someplace we’ve never been before, a place we know nothing about, where they know nothing about us.”
“Okay. I’ll start packing.”
There was a silence on his end. Then he said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“We’ll be gone soon. We just have to make it through the summer. We’ll drive up to New York together. I have to live in a dorm next year, but after that we can get an apartment. Everything will be different up there—”
“Bea, I’m not going to SVA.”
He’d never said…but how could he not go?
“I’m not ready for more school right now. I need a year off. To think about stuff.”
“No,” I said. “You think too much already. You don’t need to think about Matthew anymore. Think about yourself. Think about art. You need a distraction.”
“Nothing can distract me. That’s the trouble.”
“Just come to New York with me. You don’t have to go to school. You could get a job, something easy, and just hang out. You can live in my dorm room if you want. I’ll hide you under the bed—”
“You don’t understand. It’s too much.”
“I’ll sneak you food from the cafeteria—”
“That’s not what I mean.” In the background, his radio echoed mine. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have called you—”
“No! You snapped out of your trance. I’m so happy you called me.”
“It’s more than a trance,” Jonah said. “The whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down and down. And there’s nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. It’s not enough. It won’t protect me. It doesn’t keep anything out. The outside will keep pressing in until my ribs are crushed, and then my organs, my heart and liver and stomach…”
“Jonah—”
“It hurts, Bea. It really hurts.”
The crack in my heart ached, a dull throb, in sympathy.
“I know,” I said. “But it can’t hurt forever. Eventually you’ll feel better, and we’ll have fun again.”
“It can hurt forever. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Jonah, stop it. I’ll take care of you. I’ll do whatever you need to make you feel better.”
His voice was faint. “I know you would, Bea.”
The radio echoed again. YOU’RE ON THE AIRyou’re on the air. Jonah could be calling from anywhere: from overseas, from Europe or Asia, from Iceland, from far away.
“Want to go to Powwow next Sunday?” I said. “Kreplax’s canoe is ready. After he wins, he’s going to paddle it into the future. Or something.”
“I don’t know—”
“It will make us both feel better,” I said. “Come on. Take me to Powwow. I’ve been looking forward to it all year.”
“All right, Bea. We’ll go to Powwow.”
“Pick me up at noon?”
“Yeah.”
We hung up. The radio transmitted clearly now, the echo gone.
That week was oppressively muggy for June: ninety every day, over-cast, humid. The pinkish-green air promised rain that never came. Moisture hung in the atmosphere, weighing down on us. We were living inside a cloud.
In spite of the heat, the new, perky Mom persisted. She installed air conditioners downstairs and in our bedrooms. The guest room remained stifling, but she didn’t use it much anymore. “If we ever have a guest,” she said, “they’ll just have to suffer.”
“Or we could limit guests to wintertime,” I said. “No summer guests allowed.”
“Good idea,” she said. “Want to go to the pool?” At last she had a place to wear her polka-dot bikini. Fun Mom was back. Fun Beatrice, however, was in a coma. I resented Mom. I didn’t think she should be enjoying separation from Dad so much. And I still didn’t understand what was going on between them. Now I was the one who had changed. I didn’t depend on Mom anymore. I had Jonah. Sort of.
“You need to find a summer job at some point, kiddo,” Dad said. “I’m not rushing you or anything.”
“I will,” I said, though I’d made no efforts at all to find a job. We were having pasta primavera for dinner at the bachelor pad, a spacious two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the Broadview, right across from the Hopkins campus. The Broadview was known as a blue-hair building because most of the tenants were old ladies. I liked the bachelor pad—Dad had tried to make it feel modern and less blue-hairy—but I’d yet to spend the night in the room Dad kept for me, though he’d invited me many times. It felt weird, and I still had a reflexive anxiety about leaving Mom alone, even though she didn’t seem to mind.
Mom slept over at Dad’s a few times, though, leaving me home alone with no qualms at all.
“You want to go to a movie tonight?” Dad asked. “They’re showing Vertigo on campus.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Why don’t we call your mother and see if she wants to come too?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t remember the last time the three of us had gone to a movie together.
“Do you know if she’s busy tonight?” Dad asked.
“No idea,” I said.
Turned out she had a tai chi class, but she could meet us after the movie for dessert if we wanted. “Great!” Dad said.
I felt like I was dating my own parents.
“Why won’t you call Walt back?” Anne asked me. We were standing in line at the pool snack bar, waiting for snowballs. “He really likes you.”
“I know—”
“And look at his bod! You can’t tell so much when he’s wearing clothes, but whoa. He’s skinny, but he’s cut.”
Walt did look good in a bathing suit, though he seemed unaware of it.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I said.
That wasn’t true. I had very little on
my mind. Mostly I just felt limp, lazy, and unmotivated. And anxious. Swimming through clouds. Dad said it was the weather, that we had to get used to it. I didn’t see how anyone could ever get used to such sticky air, like a thicket of cobwebs clinging to my skin.
“Bea, he’s a really good guy,” Anne said. “Not like Garber.”
Tom Garber, apparently trying to revisit every old girlfriend before he left for college, had dumped Anne for Carter Blessing, who’d let him feel her up three times in eighth grade.
“I don’t hold it against him,” Anne said. “Tom’s Tom. We’re still friends. I’m just saying, Walt’s different.”
“I’ll say hi to him,” I said. “I do like him. I just…I don’t know.”
I felt like you could open a door in my hollow, tin chest—just flip it open, easy—and see my heart throbbing, raw and bloody and sore. You could even reach in and squish it if you wanted to. I didn’t want anyone getting close enough to open that door and see that mess.
We had reached the front of the line. “Get a cherry snowball,” Anne advised. “It turns your lips red. Like lipstick.”
“I was going to get a blue one,” I said.
“Two cherry snowballs,” Anne told the boy behind the counter.
He gave us two paper cones filled with red ice. “Take a bite, then go say hi to Walt,” Anne said. “I’m going to bug you all afternoon until you do it.”
I took my cherry snowball to Walt’s towel. “Want some?” I said.
“Thanks.” He spooned out a dripping chunk of ice. I sat down on the grass.
“What are you doing this summer?” I asked.
“Working at the Sun. I got an internship on the sports desk.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“Yeah. How about you?”
“I don’t know yet. I’d like to take an internship, but I need to earn some money.”
“Me too. I’m mowing lawns on weekends for extra cash.”
I nodded.
“How about at night?” he said. “What kind of stuff do you do?”
“Nothing much. Read. Listen to the radio.”
“The ball game?”
I laughed. I was so not an Orioles fan. “No, the Night Lights. Just this crazy weird talk show. It comes on late.”
“Maybe we could catch a movie one night,” he said. “Get out of the heat for a couple of hours.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“So I’ll call you?”
“Okay.”
“Do you promise to come to the phone?”
“If I’m home,” I said.
“Will you call me back if you’re not home?”
“I will,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back before. It’s nothing personal.”
“You’re on probation until I actually get you on the phone,” Walt said.
“That’s fair,” I said.
“Or you could call me. But maybe that’s expecting too much.”
“Call me,” I said. “I’ll be good.”
I went back to my lounge chair. Anne sat up on her towel and gave me a thumbs-up sign. My snowball had turned to red water.
“I like that boy Walt,” Mom said from her chair.
“I know you do,” I said.
“Jonah always struck me as kind of, I don’t know, insubstantial.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “He has substance. It just flickers off and on.”
“Reminds me of somebody else we both know,” Mom said. I think she was talking about Dad but, frankly, it could have been anybody.
CHAPTER 26
The weather broke on Sunday. Thunderstorms had swept through during the night, washing the pinkish-green gunk out of the air. By noon it was clear and sunny, the perfect day for Powwow. I put on my bathing suit under a red thrift-store dress and sat on the front porch, waiting for Gertie to chug around the corner.
Kids rode by on their bikes, ringing their bells. An ice-cream truck squealed past as if it were being chased by the police. Various non-Gertie cars whizzed by, their new engines lacking her heft and character.
But no Gertie. By twelve-thirty, Jonah was officially late.
I went inside and called his house. No answer.
Something wasn’t right. Jonah and I were going to Powwow together. We were going to root for Kreplax’s Viking canoe to win, and drink beer on an industrial beach in the harbor, surrounded by abandoned factories and urban decay and people who thought those things were beautiful. Maybe we’d buy a big balloon full of nitrous oxide and huff it, to see what it felt like. Look at the day! The weather had changed. There would never be a more perfect day for a powwow.
But where was Jonah?
At one o’clock I drove to Jonah’s house. Gertie was parked in the driveway. So was Mr. Tate’s old gray Mercedes.
I knocked on the front door. No one answered. I checked the driveway again. Somebody had to be home. The Tates weren’t in the habit of going out for Sunday walks together.
I knocked once more, but no one came. I walked around to the back. The yard was empty. A little grass had started to grow around Matthew’s stone.
I peered through the kitchen door and rapped on the window. I thought I saw something, a shadow, move through the hall past the kitchen. I tried the door. It opened. I stepped inside.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
The floor creaked somewhere deep inside the house. “Hello? Jonah? Mr. Tate?”
I found him in the living room, sitting in a monstrous leather chair. All alone, hands folded on his lap, staring at his knees.
“Mr. Tate? I’m sorry I walked in, but I was looking for Jonah—”
“Jonah is gone,” Mr. Tate said.
“Gone? What do you mean?”
“He’s gone. He left. He’s disappeared.”
I still didn’t understand.
“He took a few things and left. No note.”
“Have you called the police?” I said.
“He’s eighteen. He has every right to do as he pleases.”
“But…I was supposed to see him today—”
“He’s gone for good. He isn’t coming back.”
I stared at a clutch of family photos on the table. There was a picture of Mr. Tate with a multiracial group of children standing under a banner that said THE CHILDREN’S FUND THANKS YOU! There was a framed certificate from the Episcopal Charities of Baltimore thanking Mr. Tate for their largest gift ever.
I picked up a picture of Jonah, age three, his hair as white as dandelion fluff. I felt a pang and remembered what Jonah had said months earlier about Matthew and the phantom limb, the tugging he’d always feel.
“How do you know?” I said. “How do you know he isn’t coming back?”
“I know my son. He’s been planning this for a long time.”
“Planning this?” I didn’t understand. “If he’s gone, we’ll look for him. I’ll look for him.”
“There’s no point in looking for him.”
“We could call the TV stations and the newspapers. Put up posters with his picture on them and…and start a Find Jonah website—“
“There are no pictures. He took all the pictures.”
“What do you mean?” I was holding a picture of Jonah in my hand.
“Look.” Mr. Tate pushed a photo album at me. I turned the heavy cover and flipped through it. There were baby pictures encased in plastic, pictures of Jonah and Matthew as children, pictures of their penny-bright young mother. Then there were no more pictures of their mother, or of Matthew. Or of Jonah. After age eight, there were blank spots in the album where the pictures of Jonah used to be. Mr. Tate was still there, but Jonah aged ten, twelve, sixteen, eighteen…all gone.
And in the few family shots, the group portraits taken on birthdays or holidays, there were holes. Little round white holes. Mr. Tate and maybe an aunt or a friend stood next to someone who had no head. A thin, pale, headless boy. A round, empty circle, cut with a scalpel.
He�
�d cut his face out of every picture. Every picture in the house.
The yearbook, I thought. The baby picture on his page. The hats and funny glasses in the Yearbook Committee shot. And the Casper cartoon in our class photo.
He’d made himself impossible to find.
Mr. Tate was right. Jonah had planned this. But for how long? How long had he been planning to disappear?
When I thought about it later, I realized he’d been planning for at least a year. He volunteered to design the yearbook knowing it was the only way to keep his picture out of it. And then he found out Matthew was alive. Finding Matthew might have derailed Jonah’s plan, but only temporarily. Losing Matthew a second time sealed the decision. Everything was in place. All Jonah had to do was fade away.
“I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” Mr. Tate said. “He was there when those pictures were taken. Just because he cut his face out doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. It doesn’t change anything.”
I clutched at a thread of hope. Maybe he left for the weekend. He went to Ocean City. He had to get away, but he’ll be back. He left a message at my house, and Mom forgot to give it to me…
“You’d better be going now,” Mr. Tate said. His eyes still stared ahead, unseeing. “There’s nothing to be done.”
I didn’t believe it. I ran upstairs to Jonah’s room. The Casper mask we’d bought in Ocean City hung from the doorknob. The room was a mess, the drawers and closet open and hemorrhaging clothes and papers, books and records and art supplies. I sat on the rumpled bed and looked around. There was no note. No message for me. No coded clue scrawled on his dresser mirror.
He was really gone.
I walked down the polished stairs, numb. I heard my feet hit the floor but I couldn’t feel my weight on them. I had to trust that they were carrying me safely down. One hand gripped the banister—I saw it with my eyes but couldn’t feel my palm glide along the wood. I felt nothing but a prickly tingle, my whole body shot full of Novocain.
How to Say Goodbye in Robot Page 21