Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  “That hair ribbon is beautiful,” I say. “Why haven’t you worn it before?”

  You give me a curious look. “I haven’t worn it before because I just found it.”

  “Found it?”

  “This morning. It was looped around the center pole of our tent.”

  In a magical canyon, moon meets moon and a woman is crowned by a singing spirit. Do you think this is just a fanciful story? It’s not.

  Don’t give up on us, and we can make it real. This story and a thousand others.

  Please call me. Please message me.

  Jack

  CHAPTER 60

  When Annie woke up Tuesday morning, her legs were screaming, “No,” her arms were shrieking, “I hate you,” and her stomach? Well, her stomach was frozen in an Edvard Munchian wail of pain.

  In that first moment of morning fog, Annie Hollerman couldn’t figure out why she felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Then she remembered.

  “Oh man,” she groaned as she hobbled to the shower, “no more salsa boxing.”

  An hour later she walked into her office, limped past Fred, and held up her hand to silence him.

  “Don’t even ask,” she said. “I got a little carried away last night.”

  Fred nodded and pretended to work. Under normal circumstances he would have called her Wonder Woman, told her to take up ballroom dancing, and perhaps quoted something pertinent from Shakespeare. But he knew she was hurting on a much deeper level than the muscular, so he remained silent.

  Annie had gotten home late last night. She and Lala had talked for hours. Given Annie’s recent phone call with Kathleen Faulkner and Lala’s difficult divorce, the carcass of the male species had been picked clean.

  Usually Annie checked her e-mail before turning in, but last night she went directly from her front door to her bed. And now there was payback in the form of forty-six new messages.

  Had Annie been expecting to see something from Jack? Maybe. Probably. Yes. But that didn’t stop the sizzle of current that jolted her body when she saw jdepaul listed in new mail.

  She looked at his name and for a split second she forgot about Kathleen and New York. For a split second, she was Annie the snake slayer of Hemet, California, ready for another trip to their past.

  “Annie, are you alright?”

  It was Fred, bringing her back to the present.

  “He wrote me,” Annie said.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Fred. “That is what he does, you know. By the way, I know you told me not to tell you, but he called yesterday. He was very distraught.”

  “Maybe Kathleen dumped him already,” Annie said.

  “Are you going to read it?”

  Annie’s hands were poised over the keyboard, the same way they’d been poised over the keyboard a month ago while she fretted about responding to Jack’s first e-mail. This time, however, instead of the send button, her finger hovered over delete.

  She wished she could just press the damn key and send it to cyber trash or, better yet, let it rot in her mailbox. She imagined Jack’s no doubt beautiful, but lying, words decomposing there, so that when she did finally open it in, say, sixty-seven years, the letters would crumble before her eyes, leaving a pile of black dust at the bottom of her screen.

  But who was she kidding? She had no more willpower now than she had thirty years ago when she was singing “Let it please be him” to a silent blue Princess telephone.

  “Annie, he sounded quite upset yesterday. Read the e-mail. I think you should hear him out.”

  “Maybe. Maybe tonight.”

  CHAPTER 61

  To jdepaul@aol.com

  From ahollerman@aol.com

  Re: Words

  Jack,

  I read your e-mail. It seems Kathleen and I could agree on at least one thing—you are good with words.

  You know the expression “Words are cheap”? I disagree. There’s nothing more expensive than the wrong word, sentence, or paragraph. Just look what it cost me. Almost an entire life of hiding and regret.

  And now I have your words again, trying to lure me back into something that probably should never have been. Jack, we went so fast and built everything on the wrong words. Lies. Certainly mine. Maybe yours. Maybe Kathleen’s. There’ve been so many words, it’s hard to know which ones are true.

  I agree it’s time to move away from the past, but not to the future. I’ve got the present to think about. I think it would be best if you didn’t write again. Save your words for your next partner in time travel. I’m sure she’ll love them. We all do.

  Annie

  CHAPTER 62

  Mom, I can’t find Mr. Planters.”

  Annie was wearing black jogging shorts and an old Outward Bound T-shirt frayed around the neck. It was Friday afternoon and she’d just run half the length of the Atlantic City Boardwalk and back. She was playing hooky for the day but excused herself on the grounds that it had been a horrible week and that it would be a treat for her mother to see her daughter twice in less than a month. Her mother had been so excited when she’d said yes, she’d meet her in Atlantic City, that she’d agreed to Annie’s one condition: no mention of the name Jack DePaul.

  Annie needed a Jack DePaul–free weekend. Because no matter how hard she’d tried to push it away, his name kept bubbling back into her thoughts all week. Telephone calls helped—momentarily. Conversations with Fred kept it at bay—for a few minutes. But the quiet in Annie’s office left too much open space in her brain. Was he lying? Was he telling the truth? Either way, she’d been an idiot.

  What she needed was sensory overload, what she needed was Atlantic City, a place that would drown out all her thoughts about Jack DePaul. A place that would chase away her humiliation.

  “Forget Mr. Planters,” said Joan Hollerman Silver as she slipped four quarters into the poker machine in front of her. “He’s gone. Like most of my money.”

  “Don’t blame me,” said Annie. “I asked you to come with me. I would’ve walked instead of run. But you had to win back the two hundred dollars you lost last night.”

  “Now it’s five hundred. Here, sit and play.’’ Annie’s mother handed her a fistful of quarters.

  Annie wasn’t much of a gambler. Yet another of her mother’s genes that hadn’t attached itself to Annie’s DNA ladder. When she was a kid, she’d worried that she’d been adopted. One more thing to set her apart. It was bad enough that she had screaming red hair and her mother was the only unmarried woman on the block—back then she was called a divorcee, pronounced in the French way—div-or-SAY—to imply wantonness. But to be adopted, too?

  Both her parents had black hair and olive skin and on more than one occasion she’d heard people say, “Where’d you get the little carrot top, Joanie? The milkman?”

  For the longest time, Annie imagined the milkman dropping off a baby with fuzzy red hair, along with the three quart glass bottles. It wasn’t until an afternoon at Sid Gold’s, an expensive dress store on Haverford Avenue in Philadelphia, that Annie heard two of the most comforting words in her life: recessive gene.

  Annie and her mother were in Philly for the March of Dimes dinner honoring her grandmother. Her grandmother didn’t like the dress Annie’s mother was going to wear to the dinner dance, so they went to Sid Gold’s. One of the salesladies made the milk-man joke to Annie’s mother. Sid, a squat woman with a deep voice who’d been dressing Annie’s grandmother, Bea Gerber, since she was a young woman, said, “Oh, can it, Delores, Bea had the same hair color until she went gray. Rose Schwartz told me hair and eye color can skip a generation. Her husband’s a doctor and she said it’s something called a recessive gene.”

  Recessive gene. Just one textbook phrase and a whole childhood of feeling like she didn’t belong—uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a scratchy wool sweater against her skin—was booted out the window. Kapow! Right there on Haverford Avenue on September 28, 1966, at 3:15 P.M., Annie Beth Hollerman first felt the power of words a
nd started her love affair with the English language.

  “More,” Annie said, reaching an open hand her mother’s way. “You’ve lost that already? You’re obviously my daughter. Here.” Over coins slamming against metal, the ding, ding, ding of winning machines, and the piped-in Muzak of the seventies and eighties, Annie and her mother played video poker and talked.

  “Don’t you miss it?” Annie said.

  “Miss what?”

  “Atlantic City,” Annie said. “I mean the real Atlantic City. Mr. Planters. The dressed-up ladies. The Sodamat. The rolling chairs, when the seats weren’t faded. Don’t you miss it, Mom?”

  Joan Hollerman Silver stopped feeding the machine. She tilted her head from side to side, weighing past against present.

  “Miss it?” she said. “To tell you the truth, those weren’t such good times for me. It’s better this way. Now when I go on the Boardwalk, what I see is all new. Maybe not good new, but new. So the Peanut Man is gone and hardly anyone even speaks English here anymore. Used to be the closest thing we ever heard to a foreign language was Harry Adler from the Bronx.

  “Not to bring up a sore subject—and I know I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t say anything else about him—but it’s a little like the Romeo and that thing he was doing with his e-mails, changing your past. When I come here and walk down the Boardwalk and there’s nothing left from the way it used to be, it almost feels like that old time never happened. That the Joan Hollerman who worked for fifty dollars a week keeping books and fought with your father in court never was. And that’s fine by me.”

  Annie nodded and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. All those years yearning for floor wax. She wished she could have realized, back then, that it was harder being a “divorsay” than a daughter of a “divorsay.”

  She looked at her mother’s perfect hair and perfect nails. At the way her jaw jutted out each time she put another four quarters in the machine, as if daring it to cross her. She wore the same expression in court when she cross-examined witnesses. Imagine that: her mother had gone from a job as a fifty-dollar-a-week bookkeeper to being one of the most successful attorneys in Greensboro.

  So Annie hadn’t gotten her mother’s hair, skin, or chest genes, she’d gotten the more important ones.

  “Nope, Annie. I don’t miss it one bit. And to tell you the truth, the girdles and the spike heels—good riddance.”

  Annie had stopped playing while her mother had been talking. A big mistake in Atlantic City.

  “Are you using that machine or not?” barked a white-haired woman in a walker.

  Annie stood up. “It’s all yours. But it’s a loser, I’m warning you.” The woman sat down, lit a cigarette, and started fishing quarters from her plastic Caesar’s cup. Annie turned to her mother and said, “I’m going up to the room to shower and change. After that, how about a stroll down new memory lane?”

  “We’ll see,” said her mother. “Now I have five hundred and fifty dollars to win back—thanks to you.”

  CHAPTER 63

  There had been a 10K race early Saturday at Fort McHenry, so when Jack met Matthew at One World around nine that morning, the coffeehouse was overflowing with runners wearing numbers and carrying plastic sports bottles.

  It was a mild day, though blustery. The two of them waited outside for fifteen minutes until a table opened up. Plenty of time for Matthew to learn about the Annie–Kathleen disaster and to offer an opinion.

  “Dad, you’re a knucklehead.”

  “Look, son …” said Jack.

  “Dad, you’re an imbecile. A moron.”

  “Well…”

  “My father, a retard.”

  “Okay, Matthew, I get the picture.”

  “But I really liked her. She was great. I can’t believe you let this happen.”

  “I didn’t exactly ‘let it happen.’ It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Oh?” said Matthew. “Like Kathleen Faulkner is not your fault.” Up until then, he’d been bantering. But this remark, with its sharp edge honed by divorce, suddenly brought the conversation to the edge of hurt and resentment.

  “That was a very complicated situation,” Jack said in the severe tone he used with reporters who missed deadlines. “And it’s not something I really want to talk to you about. Besides, it was over nearly a year ago.”

  Matthew almost replied, “I’ve heard that before,” but stopped short. Leaning against a wall, he looked down at his father, who was sitting on an outside window ledge. Was it his imagination, or had he gotten smaller and grayer in the past two weeks? The resentment began to fade. Matthew’s face softened, he reached down and punched his father lightly on the shoulder. “That doesn’t alter the facts: you’re still a knucklehead and you’ve still blown it with Annie. What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” said Jack. “She thinks I’m scum.”

  “That’s it? You’re just giving up? You’re not going to fight for her?”

  “What can I do?” said Jack with a shrug.

  “You could get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness. That’s what I’d do.”

  “Well, you’re twenty-two and have no dignity.”

  “Dignity, my left testicle! From what you’ve told me, she’s the best thing to happen to you in …” He was going to say twenty years, but it sounded disloyal to his mother, so instead he said, “a very long time.”

  Then, warming to his new role as Dear Abby, he grabbed one of his father’s shoulders and gave it a shake. “How will she know how you feel if you don’t tell her?”

  “Okay, smart guy, how do I tell her? She won’t take my calls and I’ve tried e-mail. She blew me off.”

  “Go to her house.”

  “That’s harassment. I won’t do it.”

  “Coward.”

  “Maybe. But I won’t.”

  “What about Laura Goodbread? Make her your go-between.” “If Annie thinks I’m scum, Laura thinks I’m something you scrape off your shoes.”

  “But you’re innocent. Explain to Laura what happened.” “She’ll stab me with a pair of scissors,” said Jack with a grin, then added seriously, “it’s hard to have such a personal conversation in the newsroom.”

  “Well, go to her house and tell her. It wouldn’t be harassment with Laura. You work together, you’re friends—or used to be. It’s Saturday, we could go there right now.”

  “We?” said Jack, narrowing his eyes.

  “Us,” said Matthew. “You obviously need my help in this matter. Let’s go right now.” He ended this last sentence on an upturned note of encouragement.

  My son the motivational speaker, Jack thought. He knew there must be good reasons to ignore this suggestion, but he couldn’t think of any so he stalled. Still scowling, he said, “Let me think about it over breakfast.”

  After they ordered omelets, Jack steered the conversation away from the minefield of emotional entanglements to subjects such as the O’s, the ten-year anniversary of their trip to Chile, and eventually to the Anasazi, which he figured would occupy his son for at least twenty-five minutes.

  But he couldn’t steer his own mind from stubborn memories of the confrontations at the Star-News offices Monday morning and of Annie’s dismissive e-mail that he’d read Tuesday evening. He’d felt dull and passive ever since; every night had been fitful and filled with menacing dreams. Twice he’d stayed up till early morning writing pleading e-mails to Annie, and twice he’d deleted them.

  After a week of lethargy, he was embarrassed by his son’s pep and can-do optimism. Maybe Matthew was right. If I feel this bad about losing Annie, shouldn’t I be fighting harder to get her back? After all, what’s more important, dignity or love?

  He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and gave out a rueful little laugh, stopping Matthew in the middle of a tangent on the domestication of corn in Mesoamerica.

  “What?” Matthew said.

  “I guess I’m in love,” said Jack to his son and a waitress wh
o’d stopped by with coffee refills. Then he nodded to himself. “Yes, I’m in love.”

  “Well, duh,” said Matthew. “You’ve only been talking about, writing about, and thinking about Annie nonstop for a month.”

  “Don’t ‘duh’ me, wretched child. We need to do something.” “Dad, didn’t I say this just a half hour ago?”

  Jack ignored him. “We should go to Laura’s house,” he said, a surprised look in his eyes as if he had just been shaken awake. “What do we have to lose?” He started to get up out of his chair.

  “We?” said Matthew, with a grin.

  “We,” said his father. “She won’t stab me if I bring a witness.”

  CHAPTER 64

  It was Becky who answered the doorbell. She was wearing a grass-stained soccer outfit; in her left hand was a muffin with a big bite missing.

  “Yes?” she said tentatively, clinging to the half-opened door. “Hi, Becky,” said Jack, “is your mother home?’

  “Oh, hi, Mr. DePaul,” she said. “Yeah, she’s home, but you’re not exactly her favorite person right now.”

  Jack hesitated and Matthew nudged him. “Right,” Jack said, nodding his head. “I’m sure that’s true. Could you just tell her I’ve come to explain?”

  “Okay,” she said and, without leaving her post by the door, put her head back and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Mom! Mr. DePaul’s here! He says he wants to explain things.”

  Jack winced. This wasn’t exactly how the Make-Laura-Understand scene was supposed to unfold. He had envisioned a surprised greeting, a soulful discussion—preferably over coffee—a dawning realization, and reason triumphant. Instead he was getting the Marx Brothers. He looked past Becky into the house but there was no sign of an adult or the sound of one approaching.

  The three of them stood in the doorway silently, fidgeting. Jack decided there were few things more obnoxious than a precocious, smart-mouthed twelve-year-old version of Laura Goodbread. More silence. Jack felt like there was concrete hardening around his ankles. Finally Matthew spoke up. “Think we could wait inside?”