Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  He’s gotten a Brooksby classic—an enormous long white roll with roast beef slathered in vinegary orange barbecue sauce. It looks amazing; I loved those subs when I was a kid. But I’m determined to make Pepe’s a special occasion. “No thanks. So listen, I—”

  “You want to ask me about your ma,” Manny says.

  I stare at him for what feels like a full minute, enough to see that he has a drop of barbecue sauce on the bottom of his lip, waiting to drip onto the table. He laughs at the expression on my face. “I’m not as dumb a lug as you think, kid,” he says. “Besides, your pop talked about it at the station, you asking questions about her. Told him to be straight with you, but I could tell he wasn’t going to listen. You’re a smart kid, though. Knew you’d figure out he was full of shit. Dropped some hints to try and help you out, and you found Reggie, so it sounds like they worked.”

  My mind races back to that day in the gym, Manny singing that terrible song and razzing Dad about his high-school girlfriend. He’d been the one to describe her in a way I could easily recognize if I saw a picture. “You did that on purpose?” If that’s true, then I picked the right person to talk to. Manny can’t be one of the bad guys. I feel my shoulders relax—I’d been so tense they were all scrunched up practically to my ears. I hadn’t realized how much I didn’t want Manny to be a bad guy.

  “Least I could do,” he says. “Had to be careful, though. If you still got questions, you know why.”

  I don’t know why, though. I don’t know anything. Not even what to ask next. “Why help me?” I ask. It’s a place to start, anyway.

  “I loved your mom,” he says simply. “She was my friend, that’s all—I’d never do anything to hurt your dad—but there’s no point in bullshitting you. I had a thing for her from way back, and we were close. She got a bum deal. She made some mistakes, sure, but who didn’t? She’s paid enough. And so have you. So, did you find her?” His eyes are shiny and hopeful, and I can see he still loves her.

  And that he doesn’t know where she is.

  With that, the feeling of relief goes away. “No,” I say. “I got close, but she was gone already. I found some of her stuff, though.” I go into my backpack and pull out the picture I brought with me, the one of Manny and my mother together. “She saved this.”

  He picks up the photo and stares at it for a long time. “She was a beautiful girl,” he says. “Too bad I wasn’t her type. Didn’t think your dad was either, but hey, young love, am I right?” He closes his eyes for a minute, then opens them again, still fixated on the picture.

  “You can keep that,” I tell him. It obviously means a lot that she kept it with her for so long. I get out the notebook and open it to the page with the time line on it. “Can you help me understand this? Who these people are?” I tell him about my library research, going through the history of the drug problems in Brooksby. “I’ve got a bunch of names of people from Tom’s team, but you would know way more about that than I would.”

  Manny reads carefully, and it’s not long before he smiles. “Bolo,” he says. “That’s me. Your mom started calling me that after she came by the house one day and my grandma gave her all kinds of pastry. Bolo is Portuguese for cake. Natalie always said I was a sweetie.”

  Hearing him explain the nickname makes me see him completely differently. He always seemed like a big meathead to me, all gruff with the arm punching and the mean teasing. But maybe he hadn’t always been that way, or maybe my mother saw past the rough parts into his actual heart.

  But more than that—he’s handed me the puzzle piece I’ve been looking for. He’s the person who told my mother that Dad wasn’t the one dealing drugs. That means he knows who was.

  He’s still reading the time line, though, and I don’t want to interrupt him. I watch as the smile leaves his face, and I wait to speak until he gives the notebook back to me. “Does it make sense to you?” I ask.

  “It does, but I’m not going to be able to help much,” he says. “This goes way deeper than you think. It’s not just your ma who could get hurt here.”

  There’s no way I’m letting anything go, not after everything I’ve been through to get here, but I don’t need to tell him that. “Please, tell me what you can. I’ve got a lot of it figured out already—I think my mother thought Dad was selling drugs out of the evidence room, and that’s why she took me. From what it says here, though, you’re the one who told her she was wrong.”

  He nods. “I wish she’d come to me before she split. I could have saved her the trouble.”

  I don’t want to have to prod him, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to say anything else.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  “That’s the part you need to let go,” he says.

  “It’s true, though, right? There were cops selling drugs. Just not Dad.” He looks puzzled for a second—something I’ve said confused him. But he doesn’t say what.

  “I’m telling you, kid, I can’t give you any more about that side of things. All I can say is it’s worse than you think, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

  That can’t be true. It just can’t. I open the notebook again. “Please, you have to tell me who the two cops are. I know she got set up—I know they planted those drugs on her. One of them has to be the person who sold heroin to her friend.” I tell him about the phone she keeps, the person who tracks her. “Maybe they’re the same person.”

  “Let’s say I knew who it was. Even if I told you, what do you think would happen? You’re going to go to the cops?”

  “So you do know who it is,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not saying I do or don’t. But don’t you think I’ve tried to find a way out of this for her? You saw those notes—I tried to help her see you when she first got out of prison, and that turned out to be a real bad plan. If anyone ever found out I was the one who told her it wasn’t your pops, or that I helped her out later on, I’d be in even worse trouble than she is. This goes way deeper than some crooked cops selling Gs out the back of a squad car, and you and me aren’t going to be the ones to stop it. I know you want to find her, but she’s got good reasons for staying away this long. If she wants to stay gone, you should respect that.”

  Does she want to stay gone, though? Isn’t the letter an indication that she doesn’t? But Manny’s not going to change his mind. “All right,” I say. “Thanks for talking to me.”

  “Anytime, kid,” he says. “Anytime.”

  24

  I leave Manny’s apartment feeling a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment. It’s becoming clear that no one person is going to be able to tell me everything that happened, but this patchwork approach of getting different pieces from different people is starting to yield some results. Manny helped me fill in some gaps, and it’s surprising to find that the random conversation he had with Dad about Dad’s high-school girlfriend wasn’t so random after all. Manny has turned out to be a hero in my mom’s story, not a villain, and I’m glad.

  But this means that I was wrong about him. I spent years thinking he was a muscle-bound lug with a mean streak, and he’s actually this big marshmallow. I’m starting to feel like I’m always going to be wrong. About everything. I was wrong about staying with Maddie forever, and I was wrong that me and Dad had this perfectly open and honest relationship, and I was wrong about not having a mother, or a family. Wrong about that not mattering. Wrong about the world outside Brooksby being something I didn’t care about. Wrong that I’m not a curious person, because now I’m consumed by curiosity. I’m curiosity on legs.

  Dad’s been wrong about a lot too. He was wrong about why my mother left, and that her family helped, which means he was also wrong to keep us apart. He was wrong about her being dead, and I can’t even imagine how he’s dealing with that. I’m not sure he’s ready to admit or accept any of it, though; that might be what’s keeping me from going to him with all the things I’ve learned. I guess being a full-fledged grown-up doesn�
��t stop you from being wrong sometimes, or even a lot; he’s not the only one who screwed up here. My mother was wrong about my father, wrong to take me away; my aunt and grandparents were wrong to think my mother was back on drugs. It’s a strange combination of comforting and disturbing—getting older doesn’t keep you from fucking up, but maybe that means fucking up now isn’t the catastrophe it feels like, sometimes.

  The one person who hasn’t been wrong about anything, at least not with respect to me, is Maddie. She was right that she was going to leave and that it was unrealistic for us to think nothing would change. She was right that there was something off about Dad lying to me about my mother. She was right that the world outside Brooksby was one I should have wanted to see. She was right that somewhere, deep inside, I really do want to know things. I really do want answers.

  And what did I do, in my infinite wrongness? I hurt her. She tried to ease us into the new world we would enter in the fall, to find a way to keep our friendship even if we didn’t stay together, and I had all but told her that if we weren’t a couple, I didn’t want to be friends. I made it sound like they couldn’t be separated, but Maddie had been everything to me for so long—girlfriend, best friend, family—that I thought that was true. Another thing I was wrong about. Now that I have more family than just my dad, I can see how it might not be such a good idea for one person—or even two people—to be everything. And now that I don’t have Maddie as my girlfriend, my friend, or my family, I’ve lost her in more than one way. I don’t deserve to have any of those things back, but Maddie didn’t deserve for our relationship to end the way it did.

  I have to do something to apologize. Calling or showing up at her house isn’t a good idea; based on her facial expression at the gym, she isn’t going to want to talk to me in person for a long time, if ever. But we’ve had so few fights I don’t know how to try and make up. I could buy her flowers, but that seems like something a boyfriend would do, and I want her to understand that I get it, that I would love to have her back in my life, as my friend more than anything else.

  The mall is open for another hour or so after I leave Manny’s, so I stop there on my way home and wander around, trying to think of a gesture that means something. It has to be more about her than me, but maybe I can still be in there? I end up at the sporting goods store and walk up and down the aisles for a while before I see the perfect thing: a pull-up bar she can put over her dorm room door. There’s even a packet of bands I can buy to go with it, in case she needs more time to get her unassisted pull-up.

  I run up to the register and buy it all before it occurs to me that this gift isn’t enough. Not in terms of money—it costs almost all the money I have in my wallet, which is most of what I have right now—but in terms of the message. It says I’m thinking about her going away and I’m okay, but that’s still too much about me. I want to show her that I’ve been listening, that I understand everything she’s been trying to tell me.

  So the next morning, before I go to the gym, I stop at Market Basket. I buy the fanciest, most beautiful cupcake I’ve ever seen—the frosting is silver and pink and looks like a rose—along with a bunch of bananas. I hope she’ll see I’m trying to loosen up, that I don’t want to deprive her of anything, whether it’s a piece of cake at a party or her whole college experience. I put all the gifts in a bag, write her name on it, and leave the bag behind the main desk, instructing the receptionist to give it to her when the noon workout is over, after I’ve left for lunch.

  I haven’t figured out what my next step is in the quest to answer all my questions about my mother, but at least I’ve taken a step to deal with how I screwed up with Maddie. And that, for the moment, makes me feel a little bit better.

  I don’t expect her to respond to the gifts right away, but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed when she doesn’t. All that week I keep the same schedule: I go to my morning class, work until lunch, take a break to avoid Maddie, work the rest of the day, and then go to the library to do more research for an hour or two, carrying some of the contents of the duffel bag around with me in my backpack. I stare at the photos my mother left, and the notebook, as if looking at them over and over again will suddenly give me a new idea. I obsessively Google the list of cops working drug cases to see if I can find anything I missed; I review the news articles to look for names I might have skipped.

  I haven’t found anything specifically helpful, but I notice that while Brooksby’s drug problem is going away, the issues in other towns are getting worse. I guess the cops in those communities didn’t take well to the Boston Globe reporter’s suggestion that they all start working together. Or maybe Tom doesn’t want to share the magic, though that doesn’t seem like him. He’s always been a good guy, a generous guy. There’s a reason he and Dad have been friends for so many years, after all.

  I only go home from the library after I know Dad’s left for work. We’ve reached some sort of impasse. We’re not avoiding each other, exactly; he comes to the morning class sometimes, and I make enough dinner for both of us, though including the library in my schedule means we’re not home to eat together, which means he eats leftovers from the previous night before going to work. We’ve become cordial roommates, but when we see each other there’s an undercurrent of tension. He might still be angry with me for leaving without telling him where I was going; I don’t really care. I’m still angry with him for lying.

  It’s hard not to feel like our relationship has changed in some fundamental way. We’ve gone from him being both my father and my friend to this weird chilly situation, and I wonder how long it will last. I know there are lots of people who don’t get along with their parents, and somehow they manage to forge these fragile relationships with them, as long as they don’t run into any of the trip wires that start fights. Is this what that feels like? Will we be like this forever?

  I hope not. But I also know the person getting in the way of fixing our problems is me. I don’t want to go back to how we were, when I took everything he said at face value and didn’t investigate for myself. I’m starting to consider whether living with him in Brooksby for the indefinite future is really the best idea. It’s not that I all of a sudden want to leave, like Maddie; it’s more that I’m open to the possibility that my world could be a little bigger than I imagined before. To the extent I imagined it at all.

  Sunday is Rest Day at the gym, which means there’s no set workout, just open gym—a couple of trainers hang around to help people work on areas they need to improve. It’s also my day off, the first time I’ve had a whole day to myself since graduation, and it’s not until the expanse of free time stretches out in front of me that I realize I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve exhausted my research, I’m still avoiding Dad, and it’s still radio silence from Maddie. I text some of the guys to see if they want to go to the beach or hang out, but everyone’s busy, whether with summer jobs or family stuff. I’m alone, with no plan and nothing to look forward to. I try watching TV but I’m too restless, so I decide to go to the box and use the open gym time to work on some PRs.

  As soon as I pull into the parking lot I see Maddie’s car, and I look at the clock to see that it’s noon. I thought my deal with her was for actual classes, but we didn’t actually sit down and negotiate. Should I go in, or should I respect the arrangement and go back to the empty apartment, to a depressing afternoon of convincing myself watching cold-case shows without Dad is still fun?

  I’m going in, I decide. The gym is my happy place, and I’m not giving up the possibility of salvaging the day. We can avoid each other just fine. I steel myself and head inside.

  Maddie’s over by the pull-up bar, her foot in an orange band, straining to lift her head above the bar. She’s done what she set out to do, it seems—she’s gotten comfortable with the red band and moved on. I feel this surge of pride, as if her accomplishment is also mine, but the surge fades as I think about what it means for her to have moved to the next phase. By July she’
ll be doing pull-ups on her own. By the end of August she’ll be gone.

  She’s so focused she can’t see me, which is helpful. The weights are in a separate room, so avoiding her isn’t hard. My favorite trainer, Jeff, has come in to spot people, so I go tell him what I want to work on and we get set up.

  Lifting usually makes me feel better. I get so intense about what I’m doing, my brain has no space to think about anything else, and it’s such an adrenaline rush to accomplish something I’ve never managed before. A lot of people talk about the endorphin high of running, but I’ve never pulled that off—running is distracting, sure, but it never gives me the same sense of satisfaction lifting does.

  Until today, that is. I warm up until I’m ready, then Jeff and I plan a sequence of lifts that will get me to my record. The clean and jerk is a lift I’ve always found difficult; I can do the clean part no problem, where you squat, lift the bar, and then squat again, with the bar balanced almost on the fingertips of your lifting gloves, elbows bent and up as high as you can get them, racking the bar on your shoulders. But the jerk part—where you throw the bar above your head, jumping into a split stance for balance—that’s always really hard for me. The heavier the weight, the more likely I am to tip over as I push the weight overhead, and then I lose my balance and have to drop the bar. Today’s no better—I’m fine for the warm-up lifts, but every time the weight gets heavy I only get the bar to about eye-level before I have to let it go. The clanging noise of weights hitting the floor is starting to bug me.

  “It’s a trust thing,” Jeff says. “You’re leaning forward because you don’t believe you can get the weight where it needs to be, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t make yourself believe it, it won’t happen.” He tells me to try leaning further back than I think is correct, to trust that I won’t overextend and hurt my back. “Your body will be there for you, I promise.”