Yes, I Know the Monkey Man

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  I first noticed her in the park when I was on my way home from softball. It was her hair that caught my attention; it was the exact same color as mine and Joe’s. You don’t see people with hair as light as ours very often. She was with another girl, a girl with darker hair, and they were sitting on the merry-go-round, in the boiling hot sun, talking. I didn’t know why anyone would want to sit out in the sun on such a hot day, but I was too hot and sweaty myself to care what anyone else was doing. I just wanted to get home.

  But then she’d called out to me. “Tara?”

  Tara? Everyone always called me T.J.

  I turned around and even from a distance I could tell we kind of looked alike.

  “Oh, my God!” she said, running up to me. “You really are alive.”

  What?

  “Your name’s Sarah, right?” she said when I didn’t say anything. Sarah, not Tara.

  “My name’s T.J,” I said. Then I turned and walked away. But she and that other girl followed me. I could hear them talking behind me. Sam thought I was her sister; the friend said she was wrong; they started arguing.

  I crossed the street and was about to go in my house when one of them yelled, “WAIT!”

  Sam came barreling across the street. “You live here?” She was out of breath from running so fast. “Is Joseph Wright your dad?”

  She was exactly my height. Her hair was way longer than mine, but both her hair and her eyes were the same color as mine. And there was something about her face. She wore quite a bit of makeup, which was all blotchy because of the heat, but underneath the makeup, her face looked strangely like mine.

  My head warned: Get away … go inside … don’t talk to this girl. But my feet refused to budge. “Who are you?” I asked. How did she know my dad?

  “I’m Sam!” she said as though that explained everything.

  I didn’t know any Sam.

  I used to have a brother named Sam. He died in a fire with my parents when I was three. I hardly remembered him. What were the odds that this girl who thought I was her sister, this girl who kind of looked like me, would have the same name as my dead brother?

  “Don’t you know who I am?” She really, really wanted me to know who she was, but I had no idea.

  “I’m Samantha Wright. Joseph Wright is my dad.”

  Joe had a kid?

  That was impossible. Joe wasn’t even my real dad. He was my dad’s friend. He took me in when my whole family died and he adopted me … because he and my real dad were friends. That was what he’d always told me.

  I tried to tell her she was confused, but she shook her head. “No. Joseph Wright is your real dad. He’s my dad, too. And you’re my sister. My twin sister. Your dad used to be married to my mom and we all lived together in Clearwater, Iowa. But then you drowned in the quarry when we were three. At least, that’s what everyone thought. And after that our parents got divorced and my dad went away and I haven’t seen him since.”

  She told me she wanted to find her dad, so she went to a psychic. The psychic couldn’t help her, but she told Sam that her sister was still alive. Sam didn’t believe it at first, but then she found all these newspaper articles in her basement that talked about how three-year-old Sarah Wright was out in a canoe with her dad, Joseph, and the canoe capsized. Sarah drowned. But her body was never found.

  Sam thought I was Sarah.

  This had to be a joke. A really bad one. Except … Joe had said I was born in a town called Clearwater, Iowa. I didn’t remember it; I was a baby when I lived there, and I’d never been back. But that was the name of the town where I’d been born. How did she know?

  As Sam kept talking, I saw a picture of a pink bathroom in my head. It had a pink toilet and pink carpet and there was a picture of a ballerina on the wall. I was in the tub, splashing around with my… brother, right? It had to be my brother because I only ever had a brother. I never had any sisters.

  But this was a brand new memory. And I was pretty sure the other kid in the tub was a girl.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  Sam blabbered on about how she hired some detective over the Internet to find her dad, and how she did this all behind her mom’s back because her mom never talked about Joe and didn’t believe I could still be alive. The detective gave her phone numbers for three different Joseph Wrights and she called them all. That was how she knew she had the right Joseph.

  “You mean you actually talked to Joe?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” she admitted. “I heard his voice on the answering machine. I left a message, but he never called me back.”

  I didn’t remember any strange message on our machine, but she swore she left one. And she was one hundred percent positive she had the right Joseph Wright. She said she called again when Joe didn’t call her back, but our phone was disconnected. She said it like that proved Joe was her dad.

  What? Did she think Joe heard her message and then had our phone disconnected to get rid of her? It’s true, our phone was disconnected for a while, but that was because we hadn’t paid the bill, not because Joe and me were on the run. If we were on the run, wouldn’t we have just run again when Sam called rather than disconnect our phone?

  Maybe not, a small voice inside me said. Not when we were living in Gram’s house and Gram was in a nursing home.

  “We could probably clear this whole thing up really fast if you have a picture of your dad,” Sam’s friend said. “Something so Sam can see whether or not she’s got the right Joseph Wright.”

  We didn’t have a lot of pictures. Joe wasn’t real big on taking pictures. But I let Sam and her friend come into our house to see what we had. I thought it was the quickest way to get rid of them. We had a photo album on the shelf in the closet; I went to get it. The earliest picture we had of me was my kindergarten school picture. Joe always said my baby pictures got burned in the fire. I flipped through until I found a picture of Joe. It was one I took of him in our backyard when I needed a picture of my family for school.

  “That’s him!” Sam cried. “I know it’s him!”

  How did she know? I wondered. She just said she hadn’t seen him since she was three years old.

  She had a picture she wanted me to look at, too. It wasn’t a picture of Joe. It was a picture of two little blond girls who were dressed in matching pink dresses and standing in front of a white house.

  “Is one of those girls you?” Sam asked.

  I shivered. It was ninety-eight degrees outside and I was shivering. “I don’t know,” I said. But I couldn’t help but notice that the girl on the right had a mole on the left side of her chin. Just like mine.

  I called Joe and left a message for him to come home. While we waited, Sam asked me a bunch of questions. We found out we had some weird things in common. Like our birthdays. We had the same birthday, except she was a year older than me. If we really were twins, how could she be a year older than me? We both named our pets Sherlock, but she had a cat and I had a dog. And then there was the whole thing with Chester. How could she possibly have a monkey just like the one Gram made especially for me?

  When Joe got home, he didn’t have to say a word. I could tell by the way he looked at Sam that every single thing she said was true.

  I couldn’t deal with this. I couldn’t deal with any of it, so I ran next door, hoping to hide out in Nick and David’s house. But Joe came to get me right away. We sat outside our house and he tried to explain, but there was no explaining it. My dad—and he admitted he really was my dad—had told everyone I was dead and then he had taken me away.

  Joe told me we’d moved around a lot those first few years. He had worked when he could, but mostly we’d lived on money Gram sent us. Joe had changed my name, my age, our whole family history. I could hardly wrap my brain around everything I was hearing. I just kept thinking, you lied to me. You lied to me about everything.

  We were still sitting there when three police cars pulled up in front of our house. While Joe and I were talking, Sam was i
nside our house calling her mom. After they hung up, her mom had called the police. Everything happened really fast after that.

  We all rode to the police station in separate cars: Joe, Sam, and me. A lady police officer who said her name was Officer Kroll took me into a room that reminded me of the counselor’s office at school. She asked me to tell her what had just happened, but I couldn’t. One minute I was on my way home from softball, the next minute my entire life had been turned upside down.

  Some time later Suzanne showed up at the police station.

  “Oh, my God,” she said when she saw me for the first time.

  I have to admit that those exact same words went through my head when I looked at her. This was my mother. I actually had a mother.

  No. I didn’t want to believe it. And it was pretty easy to tell myself she wasn’t my mother because we didn’t look anything alike. Her hair was darker than mine and Sam’s, and her face was rounder. But then she ran over and threw her arms around me, hugging me so hard she squeezed the air right out of me. Her tears dribbled all over my shoulder and all I could do was stand there. I don’t think I even hugged her back.

  “When can I take her home?” Suzanne asked the two police officers who were standing in the doorway.

  “What?” I backed away. “No!” I shouted. “I’m not going with her.” Where did she think she was going to take me, anyway? To Iowa? No way!

  I was pretty mad at Joe, but I never once thought I wouldn’t stay with him.

  “How do we know she is who she says she is?” I asked Officer Kroll. “Does anyone have any DNA proof that she’s really my.” I couldn’t even say the word. To say it out loud was to admit it. She was my mother.

  “Of course I’m your mother,” Suzanne said, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “You can tell just by looking at us that I’m her mother, can’t you?” she asked the three police officers. “Can’t you?” The tears spilled down her cheeks.

  I didn’t care who she was. “I’m not going with her,” I said again. She couldn’t make me. “I want to go home. I want to see Joe.”

  Suzanne’s eyes flashed and for a second I thought she was going to hit me. But instead she got right in my face and said, “You are never going to see Joseph Wright again!”

  Well, I wasn’t going to let her tell me who I could and could not see. I started yelling at her and she started yelling at me and eventually the police had to separate us. They took Suzanne away and that was the last I saw of her. I met Mrs. Morris right after that and she took me to a foster home that night, which was kind of scary. I shared an attic room with four other girls, one of whom cried half the night. I didn’t cry, though. I never cried. I just lay awake and wondered what was going to happen to me.

  The next morning Mrs. Morris picked me up and took me to see a judge. The guy didn’t look or act much like a judge. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and instead of sitting behind a big desk in a courtroom, he took me to a cafeteria in the basement of the courthouse. He bought me a muffin and a carton of orange juice. Then we sat down at a table and talked.

  He wanted to know what living with Joe had been like the last ten years. Where had we lived? Not just what city, but what kind of house or apartment? What kind of jobs did Joe have? Was he home when I was or did he leave me home alone? Did I get clothes and shoes when I needed them? Did I go to the doctor and the dentist? Did I have enough to eat? Did he ever do anything illegal?

  I told the judge Joe was great, which he was. Mostly. When he wasn’t lying to me.

  Then the judge wanted to know what I thought about Suzanne.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know her.”

  “Would you like to know her?”

  That seemed like a trick question. There was no right answer. If I said yes, the judge would make it happen. He’d take me away from Joe and make me go live with her. But if I said no, he’d think Joe had poisoned me against her, and then he’d still take me away from Joe and make me go live with her.

  “If it was up to you, T.J.,” the judge rephrased his question. “Who do you think I should award custody to?”

  “Joe,” I said right away. “But that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  “It could,” the judge said, wadding up the paper from his muffin and tossing it on the tray. “Your mother has decided not to fight for custody.”

  “What?” That was about the last thing I expected him to say.

  “You’ve been with your dad the last ten years,” the judge said. “You seem happy and settled with him. Your mother has decided that if you really want to stay with him, you can. As long as we can be certain he really is a good father.”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I should have been happy. No, I should’ve been ecstatic. Suzanne wasn’t going to make me go live with her. But instead I was just more confused. Yesterday she’d said I would never see Joe again. Now she was going to let me stay with him? Why did she change her mind?

  “Of course, your mom would like an opportunity to get to know you. She wants you to come for regular visits, starting …” He riffled through some papers on the table until he found the one he wanted. Then he read from it. “Starting three weeks from right now. She’s getting married the first weekend in August and she’d like you to be there for the wedding.” He looked up at me. “Would you be willing to do that?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.” And that was the end of that.

  I hadn’t seen Suzanne since. She didn’t even try and call me once she got back home. Sam called, though. She called a lot. But I never picked up. I didn’t know what to say to her.

  Then Suzanne wrote me a letter. It began, My darling daughter. Not Dear T.J. Or worse, Dear Sarah. I only read the letter once or twice, but I had the whole thing memorized.

  My darling daughter,

  I know this must be difficult for you. It’s difficult for me, too. But despite everything that’s happened, I can’t tell you how happy I am to know that you are alive and well. I’m so looking forward to getting to know you and having you come for monthly visits. I hope you’re looking forward to it, too. Please use the enclosed $200 for your bus ticket. I love you more than words can say.

  Mom

  She didn’t even know me. How could she possibly love me?

  I never wrote back.

  Chapter Seven

  I pressed my forehead against the window as we pulled into the bus station parking lot. There weren’t a lot of people here, so I saw Suzanne and Sam right away. They were standing in the outside bus lane. It looked like they had dressed up to come and get me. Suzanne was wearing a flowery blue skirt with a white blouse, and Sam was wearing a brand new pair of jeans and a green blouse with poufy sleeves. I just had on an old pair of denim cut-offs with a plain white T-shirt.

  They moved closer to the bus and I could tell they were looking for me in all the windows. I leaned back against my seat so they wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want them to think I was staring at them.

  Oh man. I wasn’t ready for this. My hands were clammy and I felt really sick to my stomach. I wondered what would happen if I just stayed on the bus and continued on to St. Louis or wherever else this bus was headed? Suzanne would call Mrs. Morris and ask where I was, that’s what would happen. Mrs. Morris would call the bus station and they’d track me down. No, staying on the bus was not an option.

  I grabbed my duffel bag and followed the other people off the bus.

  Sam waved eagerly at me as soon as I stepped onto the curb. She was a lot more excited to see me than I was to see her. But I didn’t want her to think I was scared or nervous or anything, so even though my heart was pounding, I took a deep breath and marched over to her.

  “Hey,” I said, like I was the coolest, most confident person in the world.

  “Hey,” she said back.

  Wow. Take away her long hair and makeup, we really did look alike. Same eyes. Same mouth. Even the same mole on our chins, except hers was on the right and mine was on the left.

 
; “T.J.,” Suzanne said, throwing her arms around me and practically knocking me over. “We’re so glad you’re here!”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to hug her back. And I tried not to notice the tears in her eyes when she finally let me go.

  “Is that all you brought?” Sam asked, nodding at my duffel.

  “No. I’ll go get … my other stuff.” I headed over to the open cargo bay. The bus driver had already set a bunch of suitcases on the sidewalk and was reaching for Sherlock’s kennel. My dog looked a little nervous as his kennel rocked back and forth in the air. Then he saw me and he let out an excited little yip.

  “Hey, boy!” I grinned as the bus driver set the kennel down at my feet. “That bag over there is mine, too.” I pointed to the grocery bag with Sherlock’s stuff, and the bus driver handed it to me.

  I could feel Suzanne and Sam moving in closer behind me. I grabbed the leash out of the bag, opened the kennel door, and snapped the leash onto Sherlock’s collar. He jumped all over me and started licking my face. “Good boy,” I whispered, gently pushing him away. Then I stood up and slowly turned around.

  “I-I hope you don’t mind that I brought my dog,” I said, holding tight to his leash. My heart was pounding a mile a minute.

  “Sit,” I hissed as my dog yipped and leaped against my leg. But he was too wound up to do what I said. Plus he’d been sitting, or lying down, for the last nine hours.

  Suzanne and Sam both had sort of stunned looks on their faces. Suzanne pulled herself together first. “No, of course we don’t mind,” she said with a forced smile. “Sam, why don’t you grab that bag. Do you have any other suitcases, T.J.? Maybe a garment bag?”

  Garment bag? What the heck was a garment bag?

  “No, this is it.” I hoisted my duffel back up onto my shoulder and twisted the leash around my wrist a few times. “And I can carry my own bag.” I tried to take it from Sam, but she shifted it to her other arm.