Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  What am I supposed to do? It would be easy to nod, to show these new family members how much they already mean to me. But the easy nod also feels like a betrayal. Less than a week of new-family bonding can’t make up for eighteen years of Dad being there for me. But what about Dad and his lies? I don’t know what to think. So I freeze.

  “Come on, Pack. Let’s go.” Dad’s never gotten physical with me before, and he doesn’t now, but somehow I can tell he’s fighting the urge to grab my arm, to pull me away from Aunt Reggie.

  I don’t like what’s happening, but I can’t see how to fix it. We have to leave. “My stuff’s upstairs,” I say, and Aunt Reggie’s arm falls away from my shoulders. I run up to the guest room and throw my clothes into my backpack. I bring that and the duffel bag downstairs with me, trying to strategically hide the duffel bag behind my backpack so Dad doesn’t see it. “Thanks for the visit. I’m so glad I got to meet all of you.” I want to do more, to fall into one of Aunt Reggie’s all-encompassing hugs, to hear Matt call me “cuz” one more time, to do something to stop Mia from crying.

  But I also want to get Dad out of there. We’re going to have a massive fight, and I don’t want the Lombardis to hear it.

  He’s already at the front door, and he holds it open for me as I walk out. Not in the polite way, more like an implied threat, as if his body itself will keep me from running back in and saying a proper good-bye. This is not the Dad I know.

  “Give me your keys,” he says when we reach my car.

  I look around, but I don’t see Dad’s Crown Vic anywhere. “How did you get here?” I try to sound calm; I don’t want the Lombardis hearing me scream in their driveway. We can save the yelling for when we’re alone.

  “Took the train, then a cab. Thought we could use the ride home to talk. I’ll do the driving, and you do the talking.”

  I’m not a huge fan of this arrangement, but I don’t want to drive home in the dark, and it’s after seven—there isn’t much daylight left. I hand him the keys and throw my bags on the floor of the backseat before getting in the passenger side. The seat’s pulled all the way up, just how Maddie likes it, and it reminds me of graduation day, the last time she was in my car. The last time anyone had been in it but me. I adjust the seat to stretch my legs and reach for the radio.

  “Nope,” Dad says. “No distractions. You’re going to talk to me. Could’ve saved yourself the trouble by answering the damn phone.”

  I haven’t looked at it all day, but now I turn it on to see fourteen missed calls. Oops. “I’m sorry about that,” I say. I mean it, too. Dad catching me lying means I’ve lost the high ground. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “You’re not as good at hiding your tracks as you think you are. I might be working the desk now, but I’ve got a little experience finding bad guys. And right now, you fall in that category. So do your boys, by the way—Manny busted them drinking in the woods behind the school last night. Not hard to figure out you weren’t in Maine with them after that. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  This ride home’s going to be fun.

  Dad puts me in charge of the GPS, and I read the directions aloud to him until we hit I-91. That’s when he launches in. “What were you thinking, Pack? What are you doing with these people? You have no idea who they are.”

  I’m tempted to hit back and accuse him of going through my stuff, but I’m struck by what he said. “I do too know them,” I say. “I spent almost a week with them. They’re good people, and they’re my family. Why did you keep me away from them? And why have you spent my whole life lying to me? Even when I asked you to tell me the truth?”

  “We talked about this already,” he says. “I told you everything.”

  Is he really going to pretend he isn’t busted? “My mother isn’t dead,” I say. “I can’t find her, so I did the next best thing.”

  “What are you talking about?” He sounds genuinely confused. It didn’t occur to me that he believed that part of his story, but now I wonder. Does he really think she’s dead?

  If I’m going to get him to tell me the truth, I have to be honest myself. “I didn’t just ask you about her on my birthday out of nowhere. She sent me a letter, and I asked you to tell me the truth about her, and you told me she was dead. But she isn’t. I needed to know what really happened, so I found her family. Because I couldn’t count on you.” I know it’s harsh, but I need him to know how I really feel.

  Dad pulls the truck over to the shoulder of the highway and puts it in park. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, and I can feel the truck shaking as cars whiz by it, over the speed limit even in the far-right lane. Finally, he blows out a long, whistling breath, like the air coming out of a balloon, and when he speaks, his voice is quiet. “You can always count on me,” he says. “I thought you knew that. And you have to believe that until just now, I really did think your mother was gone for good. There are reasons I kept you away from her family, reasons you know nothing about.”

  “I’m sure you think that,” I say. “But I asked them to tell me the truth, and they did. Or at least they told me a story that sounded a lot more realistic than the bullshit you told me.”

  “What did Reggie say?” he asks.

  “Nope.” I’m the angry one now. “You don’t get to hear that yet. Not until you say something I can believe.”

  He shakes his head and puts the truck back in drive. We get on the highway in silence, driving until we reach the Mass Pike, the sun setting behind us, the sky striped with orange and pink. I know I hurt Dad, but I don’t care. “I loved your mother,” he says, finally. “I loved her like you love Maddie. From the moment we got together, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. I wanted to marry her, and maybe if I’d insisted on it before you were born, or even after, things would be different now. I don’t know.”

  He sounds unlike I’ve ever heard him sound before. Maybe he’s being honest. At least it’s something new.

  “I assume Reggie told you she left, that she—” He pauses. “This part is hard, okay? Give me a minute.”

  I don’t say a word. I want him to keep talking.

  “I don’t know why she took you, exactly. It might be that I’d started working so much overtime—with you around I knew we’d need more money, and Brooksby needed help because of how bad the drug situation was in those days. This was before Tom took over; back then, we were on the team together, with Manny and some other guys. I was working too much, exhausted, not paying as much attention to everything as I should have. That’s when I got shot.”

  “You what?” This is news to me. “How did I not know you got shot?”

  “That’s why I’ve been on the desk all these years. I got shot in the leg. That’s where all the hip problems started. I know we didn’t talk about it, but we didn’t talk about a lot of things. You were never all that curious a kid. I wonder sometimes whether that’s just how you were, or whether I made you that way, because of all the things I didn’t want to tell you. Whether I failed you as a parent somehow.”

  I fight the urge to say something comforting, to tell him he hasn’t failed me. But I’m not ready to let him off the hook yet. “You’re getting off track,” I say.

  “Yeah, okay. Well, I didn’t handle being on desk duty so great. I always thought of myself as a street guy—I just wanted to work cases. I wasn’t much fun to be around, and your mom and I started fighting. I hated her being angry at me but I couldn’t seem to stop being miserable. So I picked up more overtime. It was easier than being at home, and I could tell myself I was just making sure you were provided for. Wasn’t like I was wearing myself out sitting in the evidence room, where they stuck me at first. I had to watch all my friends get promoted ahead of me—that’s when Tom got put in charge of the drug beat, with Manny as his second-in-command.

  “Anyway, I started working more and more hours, then the night shift, and we didn’t see each other as much. We fought less, so I thought we were doing better. Then
one day I came home from work and you were both gone. She left a note saying she had to keep you safe and I shouldn’t try to find her. She’d make sure you had a good life.” He rubs at his eye, and tears pool out when he pulls his hand away. I’ve never seen him cry before. “It was the worst day of my life. Losing either one of you would have been awful, but losing both of you at once?”

  I’m tempted to tell him what I know, but I don’t want him to stop talking. “Do you, like, want to pull over so I can drive?” Driving and crying seems like a bad combo.

  He wipes his eye and shakes his head. “I’m fine.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I had to get you back. I told the chief you were gone, asked if he could put some good people on it but keep it under the radar. I had this idea that it was all a misunderstanding, that if your mom and I could just talk, we would work it out. I didn’t want her getting arrested; I just wanted you both home.”

  “That’s not exactly how it went,” I mutter.

  “No, it’s not. The chief put a team together, and they kept it quiet, but she was arrested, and she refused to speak to me. She made some deal and went to prison, but she wouldn’t put me on the visitor list. I got you back, but I lost her forever.”

  He sounds so sad, and I want to be a good son, or even just a good person, and say something nice. But I can’t. Not when I’m so close to hearing everything. His story finally sounds enough like everything else I’ve learned to convince me he’s being honest. “Aunt Reggie said you filed a restraining order against her and my grandparents. That you were the reason they couldn’t see me.”

  Dad grips the steering wheel so tight his knuckles look like they’ve been drained of blood. “That family—they helped her steal you,” he says. “She was going to Italy, and I’d never be able to find you. So yes, I wanted you as far away from them as possible.”

  “You’re wrong that they helped,” I say. “They didn’t know anything about her leaving. And they cut her off when they found out what she did.”

  “They did what?” he asks, voice sharp.

  “Cut her off,” I say. “The trip was a bust—they don’t know where she is. They haven’t talked to her since she went to prison.” I don’t tell him about Nonna and the address she gave me in Brooklyn. I don’t know whether she was just pointing out one of my mother’s old friends, or if Nonna was in touch with my mother herself, in secret.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Dad says.

  “None of this makes sense. Especially the drug stuff.”

  “Reggie told you that part too?”

  “What, you thought it was a good idea to leave it out? Way to build trust, Dad.” I was so sure he was finally coming clean. Looks like I got that one wrong.

  Dad sighs. “Look, bud, I’ve been trying to keep you from knowing about all the terrible things your mother did to you, to us. She is the person I loved most in the world besides you, who did the worst thing to me anyone could even dream up. And it’s wrecked me. I never wanted you to feel that way. Ever.”

  “But you were willing to let me think she basically sold me to you,” I point out. “Like that wasn’t going to make me hate her?”

  “That was different,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t true. And it wouldn’t send you running off to find her.”

  “Which wouldn’t matter if she were dead,” I say. “But are you saying you thought the drug stuff was true?”

  “It made sense,” he says. “She didn’t take much money out of our joint account, and she didn’t have much of her own. How was she going to take care of you without money? Without a job, in a foreign country? She’d been involved with drugs before.”

  Now is when I should tell him what I learned about the drugs, that my mother didn’t really steal them. I should try and make him feel better.

  But the sympathy I was starting to feel for him has quickly morphed back into anger. He might be telling me the truth now, but that doesn’t change the fact that he lied before. And, I remind myself, he had to have gone through my stuff, or at least my browser history, to find out where I was. He embarrassed me in front of my family, a family he basically stole me from by getting restraining orders instead of talking to them. I’m not ready to make him feel better. Not yet.

  “How much longer?” I ask.

  “For what?”

  Before I can trust you again, I think. Before things will start to feel normal. “Before we get home,” I say.

  “Soon,” he says, and I want that to be the answer to all my questions, even though I know it isn’t.

  21

  As soon as we get back to the apartment I run into my room and close the door. I have no interest in continuing the conversation with Dad, not until I’ve calmed down a little. Besides, I’m more desperate than ever to go through the duffel bag. Maybe it will have some of the answers I’ve been looking for.

  Before I unzip it, though, there’s one thing I want to do: I get out my phone and text Matt. Sorry for the drama. Tell everyone else, okay?

  He must have been waiting to hear from me, because he texts back right away. You okay, cuz? Your dad seemed kind of scary.

  He’s not really, I write back, though I get why he would think so. Long story.

  Okay. Keep in touch, will you?

  I wrote that I would. I promise.

  Texting him makes me feel better. I’ll have to call Aunt Reggie at some point, too. But not now.

  I probably should hold off on the bag until Dad either goes to bed or to work, though I’m pretty sure he’s off tomorrow—that’s why I’d wanted to make sure I got home in time for us to sit down together. That impulse to talk seems really far away now. After that drive, he’ll probably leave me alone, and even if he doesn’t, I’m not sure I care. I have to know what really happened. I have to know if what’s in the bag will help me.

  Inside the bag is a series of brownish envelopes of varying thickness, the kind with those metal butterfly clasps at the top, along with something lumpy in a paper bag. I dump everything out on my desk. The envelopes are unlabeled, no writing on them at all; there’s no organized way to start, so I just pick one at random, pry the clasp open, and pull out the contents. It’s a stack of photographs, bound together with a rubber band. I take it off and start going through them.

  Every single picture is of me, as a baby. They seem to be in chronological order, starting from right when I was born—whoever says newborns are cute has never seen the slimy, dark-haired, purple-faced monstrosity I was when I came out of my mother. I flip through the stack, hoping for pictures of the two of us, but they’re all literally just me. I’m relieved to see I got cuter with age—the big fluff of dark hair I was born with fell out and was replaced by a more manageable amount of dark fuzz, and I must have put on a lot of weight fast because I was super chubby even from this early age. Some of these pictures I’ve seen before, in Aunt Reggie’s album; there I am in the christening gown, angry at having water flicked at my head.

  But most are new to me. They tell the story of a happy, loved baby, in a stroller wearing little striped T-shirts, in a high chair spitting out mashed-up green peas. I could have been looking at some other kid’s happy childhood. I’ve never seen baby pictures of me in this house, and certainly not in Dad’s cardboard box.

  My mother must have taken all of them.

  This is what she kept, from her time with me. She must have really loved me. But she also must have been furious with Dad, not to leave anything behind for him. How could she go from that much rage to abandoning me? There are a lot of pieces of the puzzle missing, but right now, that feels like the most important one.

  Most of the other envelopes have pictures too. One is a stack of photos of both of my parents—so strange, to think of them that way, together. Those are chronological, too—there are pictures of them looking impossibly young, back when they first met in high school. There’s a duplicate of the prom photo I saw at Aunt Reggie’s, and other pictures of the two of them with their friends. The most surprising
one is of my mother and Manny, standing with their arms around each other as if they were close. The way Manny talked at the gym made me wonder if he and my mother even knew each other all that well; it’s odd to see a photo of them together like this. The pictures move past high school, and I get to see Dad in his uniform back when he was in the police academy and just beyond, when he was in better shape and on active duty.

  Why had she kept these? They’re like a romance novel about someone she hated enough to leave, taking me with her in the process. What did she think Dad did to make her believe I was unsafe with him? There’s no way to look at these pictures and not think about how desperately in love they’d been, at one time. If she hated him so much, why would she want to remember that? Or was it just that she didn’t want him to have these pictures either?

  It’s the last stack of photos that kind of blows my mind, though. Another packet held together with an elastic band, this one worn from being used over and over; another packet arranged chronologically. Another packet of photos of me. But this one starts from when I was about two years old, after my mother went to prison, and they move through time until they reach my graduation. That’s just over a week ago. How is that even possible? The only person who took pictures of me at graduation is Dad, and they’re all on his phone camera. Is it possible he’s the one who sent them to her? I’d actually believed him when he said he really thought she was dead. Was it just another lie?

  The last envelope doesn’t have photos in it. Instead, there’s a notebook, one of those black-and-white composition books with the marbled cover. The sheets of paper inside have horizontal blue lines and a vertical pink margin stripe, just like the letter she sent me, but they’re filled with barely legible scribbles. It’s the same handwriting, but it’s the writing of someone taking notes for herself, not being careful and writing for someone else to read. Some of it seems to be in some kind of code, too; I skim a few pages but the words don’t make much sense. I’m going to want to go over everything more carefully, but first I need to see what’s in the paper bag.