Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2)

by Charlotte Roth

  Mom looked up from the letter and smiled. “How I feel about men in tights singing,” she repeated. “Just what Dad would say, huh?”

  I nodded. Even for a romantic guy like Dad, marathon-long musicals were a bit too much. He had more or less banned musicals in the house—especially the ones starring Julie Andrews. The only exceptions had been High School Musical because of me, and Grease, but that, Mom had suspected, was only because he had a secret crush on Olivia Newton John in her tight black leather pants.

  “Well,” Mom sighed, “that would be the last Frederick letter, the last C-letter ever. And now...” She closed her eyes and took in the deepest breath I had ever heard from her. “Here comes the very last one,” she said, dragging out the last part.

  I nodded and took in a less dramatic breath. Not ready at all! Not ready at all!

  “Oh boy, it gives me the chills.” She rubbed her hands together. “You?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, looking down at my arms. My face was burning up, but I had little tiny goose bumps all over. I was hot and cold at the same time.

  “It better be the best one ever,” she said as she unfolded the letter.

  It turned out to be the worst.

  Dear Frederick,

  I’m sitting at the hospital, and I know writing a letter to you right now doesn’t make any sense at all, since we now talk about five times a day. But I’m losing my mind here, and I need to do something else, something besides waiting and watching him lie there so helpless, so fragile, so silent.

  Mom was here this morning and we actually prayed together. “It can’t hurt him,” she said to me. And she sure is right about that; nothing can hurt him; he doesn’t feel anything at all. But...

  Mom stopped reading and looked up with tears in her eyes. “Oh no, baby,” she whispered, slightly shaking her head.

  I looked down into her lap; the letter was upside down, the devastating words facing down. Was it Thomas? Instantly, my hand reached for my heart, one step, I guess, ahead of my mind. It was already pounding away, waiting for the next words, preparing for the worst. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize Martha’s little heart-shaped o’s in the word “love” but I all could see were the words, “he doesn’t feel anything at all.” Of course, it had to be Thomas. Who else could it be?

  “Oh no, baby,” Mom said again, shaking her head harder this time.

  “Thomas?” I asked, even though in my heart I already knew the answer.

  “Yes, Thomas,” she gasped, holding the letter up as proof, “but please, please, please no, he’s just a little boy,” she pleaded. She wiped her face on the blanket and looked at me. “She just barely got him home,” she whispered.

  I nodded and glanced at the letter in Mom’s hand. “But Mom,” I said, searching for one of Martha’s smiley stickers, “please, go on. We need to know. Maybe it’ll all be all right further down,” I said, trying to convince the both of us.

  Mom rubbed her eyes. “You’re right,” she agreed, not too convincingly. “Okay, let’s read.” She looked down at the words and hesitated for a second before she began.

  But, Frederick, I prayed. I prayed for the first time in my entire life. I prayed to God not to take this little precious boy away from us. “We’ve only had him for such a short time,” I explained to him, “and we want to keep him for the rest of our lives. Do you hear me?” I said. At the same time, I heard Dad’s voice in my head saying, “God is an invention made by scared people.”

  But that’s me; I’m scared. I’m so scared. I’m so scared that I’m praying to God. Oh, Frederick, I know I keep telling you that it won’t do him any good if you quit your job and come home. We need your job, now more than ever, to pay for the medical bills, piling up day by day. But in the darkest of hours (which is pretty much all the time now), how I wish you could be here with me.

  I’m not sure how much more I can take, alone. I know you keep telling me how strong a woman I am, but even the strongest person in the world would be weak with sorrow if she had to watch her son just lying there, so lost and lifeless.

  Please, Frederick, come home to me, to us, to our son! I know what I’ve said earlier, but just come home. I’ll call you in an hour, when Copenhagen wakes up, and I want to apologize in advance for crying and feeling so sad and hopeless every time we talk on the phone. I really try hard not to, but I fail every single time.

  Please forgive me.

  While still holding my breath, I watched as Mom folded the letter with the utmost precision and placed it on top of the picture of me and Mom at Love Field in Dallas.

  “That’s it?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded.

  That was it? Not even the word “love” with a heart-shaped o? Not even Martha’s signature capital letter, M?

  “That’s it?” I asked again, my head filled with heartbreaking images of little children dressed in hospital gowns, tubes attached to their small and innocent faces.

  “That’s it, peanut. I think it’s okay to breathe now,” she said, forcing a smile.

  I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. “But that can’t be the last letter,” I insisted, still trying to push out the images in my head. “It can’t end here. We can’t leave them now!”

  “It is,” she said quietly, gently stroking my back.

  “You know what this means, right? It means that we’ll never found out what happened.”

  “I know, honey, but for all we know, he could be just fine and alive, walking around out there in the world.” She pointed up into the dark night. “He would be what? Mid, um, early thirties? Try to think of it in those terms.” She looked at me and gave me her best reassuring smile.

  “Mom, do you really believe that yourself?” I kicked off the blanket and moved to the edge of the bed. “Honestly?”

  She looked up again and swallowed. “No, of course not,” she finally said with a tired voice.

  I looked down at the box of letters. It almost looked as if Martha’s final words were soaring on top of the picture of me and Mom, holding hands, saying goodbye to Miss T on the airplane field. The symbolic gesture couldn’t speak any louder. I looked up at Mom. She was looking at the picture, too.

  “Mom, do you really think he’s dead? I mean, do you think he died back then?” I looked at the picture again. Even though I still missed her so incredibly much, at least Miss T had been old. It had been her time to go. Thomas had only been five, maybe six. It wasn’t his time yet.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t really want to think about it anymore. It’s out of our hands.” She stood up and started to fold the blanket. “I know we’ve both felt a really strong emotional connection to all three of them for quite a while now, but we don’t really know them, Ella. We don’t.”

  “But Mom, that’s just it. We do know them. We know their every thought and feeling. We’ve been right in there—inside their heads, inside their minds.” I pointed a finger at my own head. “And if that’s not really knowing someone, then I don’t know what that means.”

  Mom sat down again on Miss T’s empty spot. With only silence between us, I watched her as she very carefully smoothed the blanket on top of her knees. “You know,” she finally said, “who am I kidding? You are absolutely right.” She looked up. “If that’s not knowing them, then I don’t know what that is either. Hell, at this point I probably know Martha a lot better than my best friend Michelle from college, and I’ve known Michelle for twenty years.” She dropped the blanket on the floor. “Twenty years,” she sighed, shaking her head.

  “Maybe he was in some kind of coma. At least, at this point, we know he’s not dead, not yet, that is. Maybe he just woke up one day?” I tried to convince myself. Again.

  “Maybe,” Mom said, not looking too convinced either. “Could be.”

  “What are the chances of waking up from a coma?”

  “Not great, I’m afraid.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t a coma, then,” I tried again. “Maybe he just had s
ome kind of severe case of the, what do I know, um, measles, perhaps?”

  “Yeah, what do we know?” she said, but what she was really saying was, “Let it go!” She looked at me and smiled her I’m-your-overbearing-mother smile. “You know, Ella, there’s nothing wrong with being a strong believer in happy endings. I am, and I guess it defines the people we are; always hoping for the best, always seeing the best in people. I love happy endings.”

  “Me too.”

  “Good.” She stood up and stretched her arms high up in the air. “Then let’s just leave it at that. And they lived happily ever after. Okay?” She looked down at me and smiled.

  “Okay,” I promised, even though I already knew that I would never be able to let it go. Our little angel-faced Thomas lying lifeless in some hospital thirty years ago, and we would never know what happened to him, to Martha and Frederick. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. My summer-long love and dedication to Martha, Frederick, and Thomas couldn’t end here. Not like this! All the letters, so filled with love, life, and hope couldn’t end like this.

  That night, I had a hard time falling asleep. I just lay there, trying to come up with all kinds of plausible explanations as to why and how Thomas had ended up at the hospital in the first place, and of course when and if he had ever woken up again (so much for happy endings).

  When I finally managed to fall asleep that night, I had this terrifying nightmare about Mom and Miss T, and a woman I figured had to be Martha, sitting next to some hospital bed, holding hands and crying together. When I looked into the bed, there was nothing there but an empty blanket.

  The nightmare went on for weeks until the day I woke up in the middle of the night and felt the first little kick from Jensen Junior. At first, I almost screamed. It was that weird! By the third kick, I was already having some very disturbing images in my head—not far from the ones in Alien where that thing shoots right out of Sigourney Weaver’s stomach. With the next few kicks, I couldn’t help smiling. It was still really weird, but in a kinda nice way. I figured Junior was kicking my butt for worrying way too much about an almost-fictional boy of the past and not being here—as in getting enough uninterrupted sleep—in the present.

  From that moment and on, I promised myself to leave the past and a boy, whose life I couldn’t save anyway, and go on with my own. And just like that, the terrible nightmares stopped.

  The ghost

  One night, only three days before Christmas day, Dad dropped the bomb.

  We were sitting at the dinner table, having Mom’s newest second-trimester-craving, Chicken parmesan sandwiches, when Dad told us about this friendly call he had gotten from the previous owner of the house earlier that morning.

  “Well, he said, he just wanted to check up on things. He wanted to know if we had settled in properly, and if we had gotten used to the rain.” Dad looked at me and smiled. “I said that Tom Hanks had prepared us for the worst,” he chuckled. “He was very friendly, in fact. He said we could give them a call any time if we had some questions about the house or the area, and he was happy to learn that the old lawn mower was still up and running.” He paused and pointed proudly with his sandwich in the direction of the shed. “You know me, I take good care of my stuff.” He took a huge bite of his sandwich and winked at Mom. “Well anyway,” he continued with his mouth full, “he and his wife, Martha, I think her name was, just wanted to say hi and wish us a Merry Christmas in our new house, which they had some kind of weird nickname for, named, um, after some old historic castle or something...” He looked up at the ceiling, trying, I guess, to recall what it was. “The last part was definitely ‘borg’ just like in that last name of that old Swedish tennis dude, Bjoern Borg, remember, the one with the underwear?” He smiled at Mom and grabbed a carrot stick from his plate, looking at it like it was some kind of foreign object.

  “Um, Emily or Amelia or something-something followed by ‘borg.’ Well, it doesn’t really matter, but it was some foreign-sounding name. Hell, even Frederick had a hard time pronouncing it himself.” Dad leaned back and gulped down the rest of his beer and smiled at Mom.

  “It’s pronounced ‘Amalienborg,’ and it’s Danish. It’s the name of the Queen’s castle in Copenhagen,” Mom explained like she was reading out loud from a traveler’s guide. “In Denmark,” she added, staring right through Dad.

  “Wow, Miss Wikipedia. How on earth...?” Dad set his beer down and looked at Mom, frowning. “How on earth...?” he repeated, still not finishing his sentence.

  Slowly, I put down my sandwich and ran a finger over the fine little crack in the “heirloom” china plate. But it couldn’t be, I tried to tell myself when I felt that familiar tightening in my throat. It couldn’t be that Frederick. It couldn’t be our Frederick! That would be too much of a coincidence, too weird, too close to home. I looked up at Mom. She was sitting perfectly still with her sandwich half in, half out of her mouth. She was still staring right through Dad, not even blinking. Finally, she pulled the sandwich out of her mouth and placed it on the table. She reached for her glass of water, but knocked it over and made the entire table, including Dad’s plate of alien carrot sticks, soaking wet.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, not making any move whatsoever to clean it up.

  “Hello. Earth calling!” Dad teased, looking at Mom. “You okay?” When Mom didn’t answer, he turned to me. “Is it the baby?” he asked, looking a little nervous all of a sudden.

  When I didn’t answer him fast enough, he turned to Mom again. “The baby?” he tried again, this time raising his voice. “Is it the baby? Please answer me!”

  Instinctively, Moms eyes shifted to her protruding belly. “No,” she said, shaking her head, “the babies are just fine, Frank,” she announced in a monotone.

  I nodded. “Just fine,” I assured him.

  “But what’s with the two of you, then? You looked like you’ve seen a ghost.” He sank into his chair and started fidgeting with the label on the front of his beer bottle.

  “Ella,” Mom said with tears in her eyes, “it has to be... With those three names... What are the odds?”

  I looked up at the old grandfather clock. It still showed three AM, just as it had the night we had read about Martha bringing Thomas home. What if she was right? What if it were Frederick and Martha, the Frederick and Martha? What were the odds? Wouldn’t it be too good, too much karma, that all this time we had been living in this house, we had actually been living in the very same house where Martha had slept, cried, laughed, dreamed, and of course written all of her beautiful letters? And Thomas?

  I know I had promised myself and Jensen Junior not to think about him, but this would change everything. This was before Dad had placed an emotional bomb right on the middle of the dinner table.

  “Ella, we have to!”

  I looked at Mom. A silent tear slowly made its way down her chin—a happy tear as Martha had tried to explain to Thomas.

  “We just have to.”

  We both looked at Dad as he moved to the edge of his chair and took a sip of his beer. Somewhere between the mispronunciation of “Amalienborg,” Mom’s water spill, and my body going into alert mode, he must have gotten up and grabbed another beer. He set the beer down and rested his elbows on the table and placed his head between his hands.

  “Okay,” he said very calmly with his face all squeezed together, “either one of you starts talking, or I swear I’ll...” He looked up at me. I guess I was it.

  I took a deep breath and looked at Mom. She nodded, encouraging me, I guess, to go on. I was it!

  “Dad,” I began, my eyes darting to the floor, my heart rate hitting the roof, “um, remember when we found that mailbox with letters when we first got here? And we opened it, um, looking for some kind of papers with, um, a name or an address on it, and we, um, read that one letter about how this Frederick person had gone all the way to, um, Denmark, leaving his wife behind?”

  “Uh-huh,” he mumbled, nodding his head, “and I also rememb
er getting maybe a little too upset with you girls.” He looked at Mom and smiled. “Sorry, honey.” He grabbed his beer and was about to take a sip, when all of a sudden he set it down hard against the table. “I don’t remember the mentioning of Denmark. And I clearly re—” He stopped in the middle of his sentence and stared at me. “You didn’t?” he said, his nostrils already flaring. “You didn’t!” he said a little louder, throwing his napkin across the floor.

  “Maybe.” That was as much of the truth I dared to give away at this point.

  “Maybe?” he said a lot louder. He got up from his chair and started pacing the floor, pulling at his beard. “Maybe?” he roared without warning. “After I specifically told you not to.” He turned toward Mom. “Did you know about this?”

  “Kinda,” she said, avoiding his eyes, too.

  “Kinda? Maybe?” he said in a patronizing tone of voice, looking first at me then at Mom. “What is this? Did you both go behind my back and read the letters when I specifically told you not to? When we,” he drew a circle in the air of what I believed to be our little circle of trust, “when we agreed that it was not that right thing to do. Did you? And how many? Two, three, four, or even more than that? And I want a straight answer this time.” He stood up straight and displayed his strong torso, looking more like a male gorilla in mating season than warm and fuzzy old Dad.

  Mom looked at me and bit down on her lip. She looked exactly like how I was feeling: warm, blushing, the word “shit” on top of my tongue. We both looked at Dad, the gorilla. He was looking in the direction of the fridge, probably looking at the ultrasound pictures of the babies, attached to the fridge by a magnet saying, “Double trouble.”

  “Abby?” He looked at Mom, brows knit together.

  “Yes,” Mom confessed, looking down.

  “But it was my idea,” I added, trying to save at least one of us. “Mom wasn’t in on it, well, um, at least not to begin with. I was the one who found the box, and I read the first letters. Alone. Mom just kinda came along.”