Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  “It’s really kinda cool, though.” Jen looked at Amelia and smiled. “I mean, think about it,” Jen said with a mouthful of food. She stopped chewing as she studied Amelia’s face while she was thinking. “A new brother. Sort of like … discovering that Santa’s real.”

  She looked at Jen and smiled.

  “Maybe,” she said and they looked at each other as if imagining the same thing. A sublime type of peace, something Amelia hadn’t known in topside life for many years settled on her like a dollop of grace. A new connection to her father that was prematurely severed and now reanimated. Curiosity and warmth filled her as she pictured TJ being held by the same arms. The same man who’d reached to scoop each one up just moments after birth, had walked the floor many nights to comfort the many earaches, colds, new teeth erupting through inflamed gum tissue. The same man had held them both, had watched as they’d taken their first steps and taught both how to ride a bicycle. And the same man had left each long before his time.

  “Just think,” Jen went on. “Hearing about your dad will be like meeting him for the first time.”

  Despite the rush that comes with a newfound sense of kin, Amelia reached for more sobering emotions. Not wanting to romanticize it yet equally as riled up about fast-forwarding to do a crash course on her father’s early life and TJ’s family. Shared information that only the two of them might know—A o nia minimi—the Greek Byzantine chant of eternal memory—the only other person who’d known her father in such a way. Feeling a bond with him already, she wondered if he’d felt it back.

  “Yeah.” Amelia’s voice was lighter. “It could be kinda cool.”

  Bryce sat back and picked his teeth after polishing off the tub of Mongolian lamb and glanced at his watch.

  “Well, maybe give Mr. TJ a call tomorrow,” Bryce suggested. “To be continued,” he said, standing as he stretched and yawned.

  Amelia nodded and looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. Too late to call even though she wanted to. Instead she fired up her laptop and e-mailed an apology, asking if tomorrow there’d be a good time to call.

  * * *

  Amelia’s head began to pound from the emotional exhaustion after Bryce and Jen had gone to bed.

  She sat up watching the soft leathery toadstool coral under the pink fluorescent lights. Part of its white bony branch was visible beneath its fleshy leaves that were dotted with dozens of tiny green polyps. Each was covered in slime to catch floating vegetable and animal matter as they would dissolve zooplankton and send the nutrients to its body. The whole fleshy mass would inflate to catch food and then deflate in an instant, almost unrecognizable with the least bit of turbulence in the water. Reaching in a hand would do it. Bright green and red anemones had flowered, spreading along a rock that Bryce had placed in the sand. A few sea horses were coiled around a coral branch, perfectly still as if asleep.

  Then Amelia settled back into the couch and began searching for Ted Drakos Jr. Her search yielded pages of information and articles. She sat reading for hours about his work with wolves in the Great Lakes region, in Montana, Alaska, and with GLIFWC. She found the International Wolf Foundation in Ely, Minnesota, and clicked on it, listening to TJ’s testimony and then onto Wisconsin Eye, to listen to his presentation before the Wisconsin legislature and the DNR against reinstituting a wolf hunt and how it would negatively affect the population. He moved like her father. He sounded like him too; she could close her eyes and hear him.

  Bryce walked out of his room about 3 a.m. and stopped on his way to the bathroom.

  “Whoa, cowgirl, what the hell are you still doing up?” He yawned out the question as the bathroom door shut.

  “Can’t sleep,” she called back.

  “Can’t or won’t?” he called through the bathroom door and the sound of peeing.

  Jen was snoring in her bedroom.

  He walked over and stood behind where she sat on the couch and began to read along about TJ.

  Then he plopped down, shoulder to shoulder next to her and continued to read.

  “Done?” she asked before scrolling down to the next page.

  “Yeah. Wow,” Bryce said. “What a cool dude. Who would’ve thought you’d have a brother almost as cool as you.”

  She turned to look at Bryce and smiled, feeling her eyes getting moist. He kissed her on the forehead.

  23

  Amelia phoned TJ that day after work. He hadn’t returned her e-mail but she couldn’t wait. She was nervous and excited, feeling like a teenager.

  “Sorry if I startled you,” he said after they’d gotten past the usual rounds of hellos.

  “Like I wrote in my e-mail last night, sorry I took off like that.” She laughed as if all was forgiven. “This whole thing must have been a shock for you too.” Her laugh was uncertain, hoping he’d taken that into account and excused her behavior.

  “And thanks for being brave enough to show up like that,” she said, feeling giddy, like she should stop blabbing and give him a chance to speak.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I want to get to know you,” she went on, uncomfortable with his silence. “To know your family, have you know Alex, my son, and Bryce and Jen who are my best friends and fellow scientists.” She felt herself gushing, emotion spilling over with all the unbridled foolishness of a child but couldn’t stop short of sliding into kook territory. “I mean it’s kind of amazing. I couldn’t wait to call today, apologize for running off like that.”

  He didn’t respond. She felt embarrassed.

  “I mean I was just blown away a bit yesterday, weren’t you?” she offered a chance for him to interject. “Why didn’t you tell me in those e-mails that you were my brother?”

  “Half brother,” he corrected.

  “Oh.” It felt like a kick. She wondered if she’d offended him more than she’d thought.

  “Okay, half brother,” she conceded, emphasizing the word. Maybe her gushiness was off-putting and she felt like a kid sister who’s always wrong.

  “I wrote your e-mail off as a scam.”

  “A scam,” he repeated.

  “Yeah. You know, unclaimed money scams? You pay a grand to find ten dollars somewhere in a defunct grandma’s savings account?”

  Apparently he didn’t. The line was silent.

  “Hello?” She looked at her phone.

  “Yeah I’m here,” he said. “And the legal papers about the property?”

  His voice was stern, as if giving correction. She was tempted to lie for a moment, claiming to have never received them but forced herself to tell the truth.

  “Um … I—uh, tossed ’em in Providence.” She chuckled with embarrassment, hoping that confession would help them move forward. “Sorry.”

  “A public place probably wasn’t the best idea,” TJ admitted. “Charlotte, my wife, suggested I call last week.”

  “Well,” Amelia joked. “Nobody died, your strategy worked.”

  Both were quiet. Neither knew what to say. Amelia felt that sudden awkwardness when the eagerness for a relationship outpaces shared history.

  “So you must have just learned about me too.”

  The line was quiet and she checked for the connection.

  “TJ?”

  She heard the hesitation.

  “Why didn’t our father tell us?”

  There was a pause.

  “I can’t answer that,” he said.

  “Or at least tell my mother?”

  “What makes you think he didn’t?” he said, with a bitter laugh as if the joke was on her.

  Amelia didn’t know what to say. His words were unsettling, his laughter stung. It was a breezy chuckle that sported an edge she couldn’t interpret. As if something was her fault. Maybe this was a bad idea. She couldn’t imagine Penelope knowing and not screaming bloody murder all day long within a fifty-mile radius of the New York area.

  “Thank God he’s out of my hair for a week to see his mother,” Amelia remembered Penelope blabbing on the ph
one to her friends during her father’s regular, if not mysterious, trips to Boston. “May the old lady live to be two hundred.” Amelia could hear her mother cackling and swearing in Greek from all the way back in her bedroom.

  The house was too still whenever her father would go, like he’d packed up the house’s breathable air into his suitcase and taken it with him to Boston. It would become Penelope’s domain. Amelia would retreat into her bedroom, staying clear. All evidence of low-impact-Ted was stashed into magazine racks, hall closets, and of course, the garage. Amelia had never understood why her father wouldn’t take her along. Her mother would be out the nights he was gone, unboxing a turkey pot pie, setting the timer, and telling Amelia to finish her homework before she’d gone out.

  “Did he visit?” she asked TJ.

  She heard him pause, sounds of a calculating response being formed.

  “A few times a year. Until his death.”

  Amelia looked down at the floor and smiled in a knowing way. It now made sense. All those trips to Boston were lies. His trip to visit old 102-year-old Aunt Athena in New Hampshire was probably bullshit too. The woman had probably been dead and buried for years. The only thing not bullshit was that their father was killed on Crete and that he’d produced two descendants.

  “So—uh—did you know about me?” She felt timid about asking again.

  “Yes.” The answer came fast. His voice changed but she couldn’t put her finger on how. “Told me when you were born that I had a sister.”

  A sister not a half sister. What a foreign object. And to have the word attributed to her, that he knew of her since she was born but she not of him. What had he done with that knowledge, what had it meant for him. Knowing but not being known, like some child of a lesser god, a second-class citizen who sits in the cheap seats. The hair on her body bristled.

  “So how come I didn’t know about you?” Her voice was quiet, wrapped in tenderness as the picture began to unfold.

  The pause was too long. She checked the bars on her phone again.

  “I can’t say.”

  “How come?”

  “Uhh—maybe that’s a conversation for another time.”

  Privileged information that she guessed might be given up later, after time had passed, maybe through more exposure, several more conversations, maybe trust, she wasn’t sure.

  “Why not now?” She pushed against her better judgment.

  She’d grown up with a father, he hadn’t.

  She waited but felt bricked out.

  “Well, I think it’s cool our livelihoods, our purposes are similar,” she said to break the silence. “But with different species.”

  “I suppose,” he said and sighed with what sounded like disinterest. The distance became harder to negotiate. It left her wondering why she kept trying. TJ turning away, her pursuing, maybe just end the call. Maybe she’d blown it at Pizza Leanings or maybe there’d been nothing to blow. Or maybe it was payback for when Penelope would say, “Help me here, Amelia, it’s like talking to the wall.”

  “Sounds like maybe I caught you at a bad time,” she said. “It is late.” Sounds of her defensiveness and insecurity bothered her. She felt a hole open up inside, the Place of No Comfort.

  “Not really.”

  “You sound busy or preoccupied or something.” She’d give him an out. “Is there another time that’s better?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  Really. “The other day you mentioned something about your mom and our father meeting in the Navy in Germany,” Amelia said.

  “Yes, they met, got married. Got out of the service, moved back up here.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  TJ was quiet.

  “I guess you could say, uh, it didn’t work out.”

  Then more quiet.

  “How so?” she pushed.

  “Things happen,” he said. “Nothing’s unbreakable.”

  “Unbreakable,” she repeated, thinking of the family pods of marine mammals.

  He then sighed as if tired and the conversation was making him even more so.

  “You’d know it if you’d had one.”

  She guessed that she hadn’t except with Alex, Bryce, and Jen. “I suppose,” she said. Heaviness settled on her that felt permanent.

  Maybe Bryce had it with Juney. Jen was still young enough for there to be hope, maybe with Doby, but for Amelia, she’d along ago figured that the love ship had sailed. She’d said I love you back to a few men, even when it felt like a lie. And lately she’d come to believe that the ones who’d told her first probably had known as little about love as she. The biochemical science of pair-bonding was a mystery, in marine animals as well as humans.

  “So why marry my mother?”

  He didn’t say. She was losing patience with Mr. Tight Lipped.

  “Well you know, it’s too late for me to ask her.”

  “Sorry but I can’t answer that for you either.”

  He didn’t sound sorry at all. Her chest tensed with that same bad feeling when things don’t add up because someone’s withholding.

  “So why not get divorced like everybody else in the world?”

  “Don’t know.” His voice was deeper but sounded so much like her father’s.

  “So why leave property to both of us and not just you?”

  “Because it’s stipulated in the will.”

  “And your mother didn’t change it because…”

  “I don’t know.”

  That she believed.

  “Last month our attorney tracked you down,” he said.

  That’s what had prompted his e-mails.

  “It wasn’t hard.” The way he said it made her feel foolish.

  “So what?” she snapped. “It’s not like I’m in a witness protection program.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  “So why didn’t your lawyer contact me?”

  “Because I wanted to,” he said.

  “Really.” How surprising.

  “It’s in the will; you’re part of this family.”

  She was taken aback by the sudden inclusion—strange mix of heart and ice. Her eyes narrowed, noticing a crack in the bedroom wall. She didn’t know what to say.

  An uneasy silence began to imprison them. She wanted to ask more, scramble to create a rapport, fast-track it to closeness, but the conversation wasn’t heading there, if it was a conversation at all.

  “Look,” he began. “As soon as you sign off on the document I’ll put the place up for sale, split it down the middle.” He sounded resolved. “No one’s lived there for years. Been paying property taxes ever since Mom moved in with us. The land’s more valuable than the house.”

  “Oh.” She was surprised at the barrage of information.

  “Property taxes are due next month; your half is around twelve hundred dollars—I’ll let you know the exact figure.”

  “Okay.” How odd, getting a present and a bill for it at the same time, like getting a kiss on the cheek and a slap in the face. In her mind’s eye she tried to imagine her father, a consummate urban dweller and ocean lover living in a place so far away from both.

  “Hey look, Amelia,” he said in a voice that sounded like he was leveling with her. “The attorney’ll send you another set of papers to close out the estate. Just sign off and then you never have to see me again.”

  What made him think that?

  Her heart hurt after he ended the call.

  “Take care.”

  24

  It was not quite 6 a.m. on Monday, the morning after her phone call to TJ. Both Amelia and Bryce had the day off. Across the hall she heard him stirring in his room.

  She stepped through his partially open doorway, already in her down parka. With her hand she nudged the door open a bit more.

  “Hey, Bry?” His breathing sounded like he was awake. “You awake?”

  The sheets swished. He looked at the doorway.

  “Am now,” she heard him say.

 
“Up for a drive?”

  The sheets rustled as he scratched his nose.

  “Where?”

  “Lake Superior, to the property.”

  He sat up and looked at her as if she were crazy.

  “Oh come on,” she said. “It’s not that far.”

  “Jesus, what time is it?” He looked at the window and then around for his phone until finding it on the night table where he’d left it.

  “Almost six,” she said.

  “Christ. It’s so dark,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “When?”

  “Now.” She chuckled.

  “Now?” He spotted her down coat. “Holy Christ, you’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Isn’t there a winter storm warning? I heard my phone app go off about an hour ago.” He picked up the phone, examining the radar and then turned it toward her, the bright blue bands of snow swirling to cover the screen.

  “Eh, alarmist,” she dismissed with a hand. “We’ll be back before it hits.”

  “Uhh—don’t think so, Am.” His expression was one of disbelief as he held up the screen.

  They’d done all sorts of crazy things before: gone out in rickety boats, flipping off all manner of small-craft warnings. In looking back she was sometimes amazed that Alex hadn’t been orphaned before he’d been of legal age. And that they’d never once gotten arrested or jailed on foreign soil, always making it back to the host families who’d cared for Alex when he was too young to come along and crew.

  “For Pete’s sake, it’s only a three-and-a-half-hour drive,” she said, which was nothing considering how they’d bomb up and down the coast of Maine in search of remote marshy backwaters, crashing overnight in the back of her Jeep with young Alex in a sleeping bag on the backseat, she and Bryce cramped in the back or else on a beach.

  Bryce rubbed his eyes again, yawning as he said, “I don’t know, Am.”

  “What’s not to know—said I’d drive,” she offered, leaning in his doorway. “Egg McMuffins on me.”

  He swung over his legs, touched the floor, and stood.

  “God, I hate it when you use food,” he said and remained noncommittal as he ambled past her into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and then burped.