I make a little finger gun as if to say, “Count on it,” but Maddie knows I mean something closer to literal. “Be nice,” she says as Colin walks away. “He might be my only friend at school this fall.”
“Not if you change your mind,” I say. “Stay here with me and you won’t need friends.”
“Everyone needs friends.” She looks like she wants to say something else, but instead she frowns.
I kiss her, hoping that will take the frown away. It doesn’t hurt that I know Colin is still watching us. She smells like coconut sunscreen and tastes like . . . beer? I pull back and look next to her chair, where a Natty Light is nestled in the sand. “What’s that about?” I nod at the can.
She shrugs. “School’s over. Maybe we can lighten up on the Paleo thing, hang out with some new people, have a good time. We don’t need to be so serious about everything.”
I’ve never considered myself a particularly serious person. And I’m not super into lightening up on the Paleo thing, either. It’s been a constant for me for so long I’m not sure how I’d function without it. “You do what you want.”
“Oh, don’t be mad. Sit with me and tell me how the conversation with your dad went.”
“It was fine.” I cross my arms over my chest and dig my feet into the sand.
“Don’t be like that. The world isn’t going to end if I drink one beer, and the thing with your dad is a big deal. Did he tell you everything? Did it help you figure out whether the letter’s really from your mom?”
“Yeah, he told me everything,” I say. “And no, it didn’t help.” I tell her what he said, how I can’t tell if he really thinks she’s dead or if he’s lying. Which means I still don’t know what to think about that letter. “I mean, he’s never lied to me before, so I should assume he isn’t lying now, right?”
“That’s not quite right,” Maddie points out. “He lied to you about your mom dying after you were born.”
“She did die after I was born. He just left out a bunch of stuff in between, to keep me from knowing that she was kind of a fucked-up person. Not the same thing.”
Maddie gives this little shrug, lips pursed. “Lying by omission is still lying, to me.”
“It doesn’t mean he’s lying now,” I say. “I just wish I knew how to tell.”
“You have to trust your instincts. What does your gut say?”
I have to think about it. “The story made sense, and his reasons for not telling me earlier made sense, too. The overdose part, though—it was so sad, and yet it sounded like maybe he wasn’t sure. Like maybe she could be alive.”
Maddie sits up straighter in her chair. “So you believe it now? That the letter really is from her?”
“I don’t know. It could be.” I wonder why I’m having so much trouble deciding how I feel about it. Maybe I don’t want it to be real.
“How can you be so casual about this?” Maddie throws her hands in the air. “You have this opportunity to blow your whole world open, to learn about your mother, who you thought was lost to you forever, to find out if you have even more family when you thought you had no one but your dad—if I were you, I’d be freaking out.”
When she puts it like that I get why she finds it—and me—so strange. She’s got two parents, a sibling, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins who all live within five miles of one another. She has no idea what it’s like to have just one parent, to know there’s only a single person in all the world you can count on. If I’d always wondered about my mother and her family, maybe things would be different, but I never have. I watch enough TV to know that other people’s lives might not look like mine, but the TV people don’t look so much happier than me.
How to explain that to Maddie, though? “I like my world the way it is. I don’t want it broken open.”
“I know.” Again she looks like she’s biting back more words, but I can hear the options in the silence. It occurs to me in a way it hasn’t before that when she leaves for school she’ll really be gone. I’ve brought up me visiting, talked to her about coming up with a schedule, but we’ve never gotten it locked down. I thought it was just about logistics, but maybe she’s been avoiding the conversation for a reason. If I’m not careful, we’ll end up having it now, and I will do anything to avoid that.
“What would you do if you were me?” Better to talk about my mother than our future, I guess.
“Well, if it were me? I’d try to find her, immediately. But if I were you? I’d maybe do some research first before deciding what to do next. I’d look into that overdose.”
“How?” I’m not being sarcastic; I don’t have the first clue about where to start.
“Research, babe.” She smiles. “The internet is your friend. Libraries are your friends. And librarians. There’s a big bad world out there—that’s what all those term papers you hate so much were trying to teach you.”
“Hilarious.” She knows how much I hate doing those papers because she’s the one who always ends up helping me, even though she says I’m more than capable of doing them myself. She thinks I’m way smarter than I give myself credit for. I’m not convinced, but even if she’s right, school has never been my thing. Especially research. “I don’t even know her full name. Dad never said it.”
“You’ve got your first assignment, then. Find out her last name.”
“I don’t think the internet can help with that one,” I say. “There are lots of Natalies out there.”
“True. But not many grew up here. Besides, there are other places you can look. Where’s your birth certificate?”
I have no idea. “Maybe Dad has it? I don’t really want to ask him.”
Maddie snorted. “You don’t have to ask him. You’ve got that apartment to yourself for like ninety percent of your waking hours. Go get it.”
“Like snoop? What if I get caught?”
“Oh, sweetie. Spoken like someone who’s never tried to find the Christmas presents before they went under the tree. Is there not one curious bone in your whole body?”
I have an answer for that, but I keep it to myself.
“The fact that you’ve never gone through his stuff before means you’re not likely to get busted now—your dad won’t see it coming. Just leave everything the way you found it. The birth certificate’s bound to be in the apartment somewhere. Your dad doesn’t strike me as a safety-deposit-box kind of guy.”
She’s got that right. Dad barely believes in banks. He keeps like half his savings in a flour canister in the kitchen. “So that’s where you’d start. The name.”
Maddie reaches over to my chair and hugs me. “You’ll do it? Really?”
“I’ll think about it,” I say. I’m not yet convinced it’s a good idea, but I like the thought of Maddie and me having a project we can work on together. Maybe we can be so busy looking for my mother that she doesn’t have time to talk about college with Colin. It’s worth a shot, anyway.
“That’ll have to do,” she says. She knows she won, even if she doesn’t know how selfish my motives are.
The air fills with the smell of charcoal, mixing with the salty ocean air in a way that evokes summer for me. “Want a burger?” I ask.
“Sure, thanks.” Maddie reaches into the little cooler she brought and takes out two enormous leaves of lettuce.
“I thought you were branching out. I was going to get you a bun.”
“Let’s not get too crazy,” she says. “Besides, that beer was gross.”
5
The idea of going through Dad’s stuff makes me a little queasy. He’s always made such a big deal out of trust, and as far as I know he’s never done anything like that to me. But I thought he’d never lied to me either, and Maddie’s whole lying-by-omission thing has me questioning that. I just don’t know whether it’s enough to justify what I’m about to do. If it keeps Maddie close to me, it might be worth it.
I’m not in the greatest mood after the beach. Maddie went home early, saying she wasn’t feeling
well but that she didn’t need a ride—she had her car. Colin, that sneaky bastard, snagged a lift with her. Can’t he wait until they’re at UMass together to make his move? I stayed for a while after they left, sulking and thinking about what we’d discussed, like my mother, and also what we hadn’t, like our future, as in whether we have one.
Dad’s at work, so I don’t have to eat dinner with him, knowing what I have to do. Instead I eat by myself, watching Cold Case Files on the couch while I power through a bowl of chicken, quinoa, and roasted veggies. Two hours later, I’ve watched three episodes and ignored an increasingly frantic series of texts from Maddie asking whether I’ve found the birth certificate yet. I resist the temptation to write back something snarky about Colin and turn off the TV. No point putting off the search any longer.
Dad’s room is a pit, as usual. It smells like unwashed sheets and aftershave, though I’ve offered to do his laundry with mine whenever he wants. But he doesn’t take me up on it all that often, and besides, his room has always smelled this way. There’s something comforting about it, so I don’t fight him that hard.
Finding anything in the mess is a challenge, though. The floor’s covered with workout clothes that double as pajamas—Brooksby Police Department shirts and Adidas track pants, mostly. The closet isn’t much better, and it’s tiny; I have to plow through more laundry just to see whether he’s got any shoe boxes on the floor. Nope. There aren’t any shelves higher up, which makes me wonder where Dad really had stored my Christmas presents, back when I was young enough that it mattered for me to believe Santa really brought them.
The only place left to look is under the bed. I sneeze twice from pushing dust bunnies aside so I can peer under it, nearly banging my head on the bed frame in the process. But it’s worth it, because that’s where Dad keeps his one and only shoe box. I know him well enough to know there’s no chance he bought a special container, even for important stuff.
I pull the box out from under the bed, making sure to save some dust bunnies to cover its path, just in case Dad looks for it again before more dirt has a chance to accumulate. The odds aren’t good, but you never know. I open it carefully, trying not to leave fingerprints. It’s full of papers and photographs.
Maddie was right, of course.
You were right, of course, I text. She deserves the glory.
She must have been waiting with her phone in hand, because it takes her all of 2.5 seconds to write back. Knew it! So wish I was there.
The stuff inside the box doesn’t seem to be organized in any special way; my dad’s graduation certificate from the police academy is on top, followed by a bunch of pictures of sports teams from when he was in high school. I recognize Tom, along with Manny Bettencourt, another of Dad’s buddies who goes to the six-thirty class at the box, in one of the baseball team photos. They look incredibly young; Tom even has a full head of bright red hair, not the faded orange fuzz he has left now. They went from one kind of team to another now that they’re all cops together.
I wonder whether not being such a team sport kind of guy is why I’m so reluctant to follow in Dad’s footsteps. Not that he wants that—he wants me to be the first Walsh to go to college, so he’s been pushing for me to sign up for classes at the local community college. But Tom’s been on my ass to go to the police academy. He says that between watching me at the gym and listening to Dad and me yammer on about TV mysteries he’s sure I’d make a good detective like Dad had wanted to be before he got hurt. I can tell Dad’s not completely on board, but he’s never shut down the idea either, so I told Tom I’d think about it.
I’m not sure it’s for me, though. CrossFit is all about measuring your accomplishments against what you did in the past—that’s why personal records, PRs, are so important to track. There’s a competitive element, sure; that’s why everyone writes their times or their reps on the gym’s whiteboard. But I like the fact that, in the end, the only competitor I really care about is my past self.
That said, CrossFitters are the most supportive group of people I can imagine, cheering everyone on during the WODs, no matter how they’re doing. In fact, they always cheer hardest for the people who struggle the most, and that meant so much to me back when I was consistently the last person to finish. During those moments, when we’re pushing people who are having a hard time so we can help them get through the workout, I feel a brief glimpse of what it must be like to be a member of a team. Would being a cop make me feel that way? I’m not sure yet.
More papers: Dad’s birth certificate, high-school diploma. More pictures: still high school, but now fewer sports and more parties. Girls and guys alike with long, lank straight hair, wearing enormous flannel shirts over jeans and hiking boots, as if they were all about to move to Seattle together and live in the woods. I say a silent prayer of thanks that fashion has changed so much. No pictures of me, even from when I was a baby, which seems strange, but maybe all these old photos were taken by other people. And I know Dad’s been keeping his photos online for as long as he’s had either a digital camera or a good cell phone, which is as long as I can remember. Maybe no one gave him any baby pics, or maybe he wasn’t sentimental about keeping them. He’s never been a particularly sentimental guy.
Finally, near the bottom of the box, I find my birth certificate. Sure enough, it has my mother’s name on it: Natalie Cristina Russo. Dad didn’t lie about who she was, at least. I text the name to Maddie, then check the few papers under the birth certificate to make sure there isn’t anything else worth seeing; they’re just insurance forms. Then something catches the light under the forms, something that isn’t paper or a photograph. It’s cold when I touch it and at first I’m not even sure what I’m looking at when I take it out of the box. There’s a diamond set in gold—a tiny, tiny diamond, barely a chip, even—and I know what it is. An engagement ring.
What would Dad be doing with one of those?
I’m tempted to ask him the next morning at the gym, but that would mean admitting I went through his stuff, and I’m not about to do that. Besides, Tom and Manny are there, and I don’t want to ask in front of his friends. Maddie texted that she’s still kind of sick and sleeping in, so it’s just me and the guys and Linda—the workout, not the person. All the hardest CrossFit workouts are named after girls. “Women,” Dad would remind me. “And don’t get any ideas in your head about talking about them the way some of these guys do.”
No need to warn me. I find the T-shirts some of the CrossFit guys wear as offensive as Maddie does. She almost quit the gym over it, but luckily the owners of this franchise aren’t fans of shirts that say things like “I Smacked Down All These Bitches,” with a list of the girl workouts on the back. After Dad complained, they banned members from referring to the workouts that way. Not that it stopped people, but they don’t do it as often, and definitely not in front of Maddie or my dad.
The girl workouts are really hard, much harder than the regular WODs. This one, Linda, is informally known as the Three Bars of Death. It’s my favorite of the bunch, since it’s all lifting and no running, but Maddie likes the cardio workouts better, so she picked a good day to stay home. I can’t quite finish the WOD as prescribed, but my numbers are pretty respectable, and I finish in just over half an hour.
“Not bad, little Walsh, not bad,” Manny says. He’s a beefy dude who almost always comes in first for every workout—he’s incredibly strong, and surprisingly fast for someone as big as he is. “You beat your old man, anyway.” He punches me in the right bicep.
I can already tell I’m going to be sore from this workout, and the punch doesn’t help, but I know enough not to rub my arm in front of him—he’s the kind of guy who would call me a wuss for showing that I feel pain. I’ve never been much of a fan, but Dad and Tom like him, so I try to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Leave the kid alone,” Tom says. “Can’t be giving him bruises if we want him getting ready for the entrance exam.” He’s talking about the physical fitnes
s test I’d have to take to get into the police academy. It’s pretty intense. Tom gave me a printout of it a while back, along with a list of extra workouts he suggested I do to get ready. I thanked him and put it away; I haven’t looked at it since. But I didn’t throw it out. I’m still not sure why.
Dad groans. “Don’t you start. I got enough on my plate trying to get him to do something besides staying in this gym forever now that school’s out.”
We all start the cooldown together, walking a couple of laps around the box, doing some stretching, then rolling out. I learned the hard way how important cooldowns are after the first time I did the Linda workout—I left right after instead of stretching and was so stiff the next day I looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
Manny starts singing in a screechy rock band voice about school being out for summer and playing air guitar. People have no idea how goofy some cops can be when they’re not at work.
“You realize that song’s like a hundred years old, right?” I ask.
“That song never goes out of style.” Manny arches his back over the foam roller and groans. “We brought boom boxes to the beach when school let out and blasted it every day. You guys still have barbecues at Good Harbor?”
“Heading there later today. I was there yesterday, too. We’ve let go of the boom boxes, though. They have these things called smartphones now? And Bluetooth speakers? Fit right in your pocket.”
“Yeah, wiseass, I know all about you kids and your fancy technology. Maddie going with you? Nice girl, that one. You got good taste, like your pops.”
Tom nods his approval but doesn’t say anything. I remember Dad saying that Tom knew my mother too, at least a little bit. I wonder if he’d tell me what she was like, if I asked him. I’d have to do it when Dad wasn’t around, though.
“Maddie’s sick today.”
“Beach is always better with a girl,” Manny says. “You remember those days, right, Joey? After graduation, you and the hot chick you were so into, the Italian one—dark hair, nice rack, always with that lipstick. What was her name?”
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