Linny’s entire face goes bright pink. She’s trying so hard not to laugh, because laughing’s still not acceptable, right?
Micah takes advantage of the I’m-staring-at-Linny distraction and shoots my dead player in the left foot. I throw him a look that bursts Linny’s efforts. It sounds so strange—laughter echoing through the condo.
“Sorry,” she says, zipping it immediately.
I say, “Don’t be.”
“Linny!” Micah shouts, breaking into a grin. “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
She shoots, all right—into Micah’s player’s left butt cheek. She laughs once more and sticks out her tongue at him.
And that’s when there’s a knock on the door. Since my player’s bleeding out on some nondescript rooftop, and Ana and Mom have gone somewhere (beach, coffee shop, who knows?), I throw up my hands and say, “Fine! I guess I’ll get it.”
When I wrench open the door, my gut reaction is that someone else has died. What are you supposed to think when a statue-like dude in a black suit shows up at your door? Given his forehead crease and downturned smile, he looks like a man who gets paid to deliver bad news.
I chicken out. Slam the door shut before he has the chance to tell me: “There’s been an accident. Your whole family has perished in unfortunate circumstances. In fact, a freak nuclear disaster has wiped out everyone else in the world.”
“Who was that?” Linny says, peeking her head around the corner.
“Er—Girl Scout.”
“Oh, oh!” Linny squeals. “Let’s get some Thin Mints.”
“No, don’t—”
But she’s already swung the door back open. The man is peering up at the sky, like he’s bird-watching or something. He snaps to look at us. “I apologize for the interruption. I’m looking for the family of Álvaro Herrera.”
Adrenaline shoots right to my heart. “Why do you want to know?”
Linny elbows me gently in the ribs.
“I’m Walter Gomez, Señor Herrera’s lawyer.”
My stomach yo-yos and so do my vocal chords. Every time I try to push out words, they zoom back down my throat. Thankfully, Linny takes the lead. “Sebastian is . . . well . . . you have the right house. Come in.”
“Thank you,” he says.
Micah drops the video game controller as Mr. Gomez enters the living room.
“Um,” Micah whispers to me. “Am I missing something?”
“What’s this about?” I ask.
Mr. Gomez’s eyes take stock of Linny and Micah before finally settling on me. “I am sorry for your loss, Sebastian. Is there somewhere that we can talk privately?”
A balled-up sock bobs in my throat. I gulp, nod, signal to Micah and Linny that it’s okay.
Mr. Gomez follows me into the kitchen, where he opens his briefcase on the countertop and leafs through neatly filed paperwork. He fishes out an envelope from the bottom of the case and hands it to me.
“Álvaro instructed me to give you this letter. I can certify that he authored it.”
I grip the paper. Really grip it. White knuckles. It’s like ten thousand eyes are watching me. What if I don’t like what the letter says? The skin on the back of my neck prickles. My stomach demands that I prep my throat for the likelihood of vomit.
“How—” I stammer. “I mean—when did he write this?”
Mr. Gomez rubs a hand over his bald, shiny head. “I can’t be one hundred percent certain when he wrote it, but Señor Herrera entrusted me with the letter a little less than a year ago and instructed me to deliver it to you only after his passing.” He roots around in his briefcase again. “I would also like to discuss with you the matter of Señor Herrera’s will.”
I swallow the sock in my throat. “What about it?”
“He left everything to you, Sebastian.”
He what?
My brain has no idea how to respond.
With joy?
Anger?
Sadness?
Everything’s oozing out of me at once. “There has to be some mistake.”
“No mistake,” Mr. Gomez says, pulling out another set of papers. “Is there a guardian around so I can go over the particulars with you?”
I shake my head until I shake right out of my skin. “Sorry. Can I just let this sink in first?”
Mr. Gomez studies me for a moment, then extracts a business card from the pocket of his suit. “Of course. When you’re ready, give me a call. I’ll be in the area for the next two days.” With that, he takes his leave.
The letter from Álvaro is still in my hands. I should rip it open. Hungrily devour it. But . . . these are the last words from my dad. I want to save the letter until I’m stronger. Until I can read what it says without falling apart.
Linny pokes her head into the kitchen. “Everything okay in here?”
I surreptitiously slip the envelope into my back pocket. “Yeah. You up for another round of Dark Ops?”
Linny suspects something. She tilts her head. Surveys me up and down like, I thought we weren’t keeping secrets anymore. “Dark Ops is fun, but—”
“Cool, then let’s go.”
But instead of following me back into the living room, she grabs my elbow, opens the back door, and yanks me outside. We stand barefoot, grass between our toes. “I know you well enough to recognize when you’re not okay,” she says. “What did the lawyer tell you?”
Telepathically, I implore an alien spacecraft to beam me up so I don’t have to discuss this. I’m not ready to think about what it all means.
I stare at the grass.
“Oh,” she says as if realizing something. “If you don’t want to talk about it with me, I understand.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it with you.”
“Then what is it?”
Sighing, I reach into my pocket. Show her the letter. “Álvaro wrote something for me a year ago. Haven’t opened it. What if he tells me he hated my mom? That he was having an affair? That he—”
“Whoa, whoa. I don’t think he’d write that.”
“That’s just it. We don’t know him, do we?” I flail the letter, feeling like a gutted fish. “Why the hell did he leave me everything in his will?”
“What?”
I pretend I didn’t hear what she said. Letter flailing again: “This could literally say anything!”
Her eyes pierce mine. She stretches her hand in the direction of the envelope. “It’ll be okay. There’s only one way to find out.”
I release the letter into her grip.
All of a sudden, she drops into the grass, crossing her legs by my ankles. “Sit,” she says. “These things are always better if you sit.”
So I plop down next to her, and she gingerly slits open the envelope. I clamp my eyes shut. Focus on the words as she reads them slowly.
Dear Sebastian,
You have every right to be angry. When you finish reading this, I hope you are less so. I do not want to think, do not want to believe, that I have lost you forever.
Know, I love your mother. My heart is bursting, still. When you were born, you looked so like her. All that hair! Your smile—I remember thinking it was mine, too. I already knew what a great man you would become.
Understand, many years ago, I was not in a good place. I drank and I drank and I drank. Your mother, she tried to help me, but you came along—and I was joyous! You were beautiful! My son! Beautiful! I could not do this to you. I beg you to understand.
Forgive me. If God grants me one selfish wish, it is for you to forgive me.
After rehab, I came looking for you and your mother. I found a phone number first, and your mother and I spoke of you, but by then you had a new family, a good father and a brother and your beautiful mother. I wanted to see you happy, and her happy, so I kept watch from a distance. I have been out of your life for so long, it is better for you this way. But I tell you, it does not mean I love you any less, my son.
There are so many things I want to write
, too much to write here. I wish things had turned out differently. I wish I had turned out better, for you.
I love you, my Sebastian,
Álvaro
My eyes spring open. In my peripheral vision, I see Linny folding the letter. Holding it tight to her chest. “Wow,” she says.
Every muscle and bone in my body springs awake.
He came looking for me.
Yeah, he wasn’t a candidate for World’s Best Dad, but he came looking for me. I made him fly back.
“I guess that solves a few mysteries,” Linny says.
More than she knows. Ever since I found out that Álvaro knew he had a son, I assumed he never loved me. Now I know differently. Maybe I’ll never figure out if he knew me when he saw me at Silver Springs, if mijo was a coincidental phrase or a clue. I have this letter, and that’s enough.
Linny crinkles her forehead. “They’re really similar.”
“Who?”
“Álvaro and Grace. I thought there was this magical answer for why people leave and why they come back, but maybe it’s really simple. They want space to figure out why all their bird bones broke, and they fly home when everything heals.”
“Todo se cura,” I say.
Theoretically, everything should be explainable. But what if the explanation is that things are a gazillion times simpler than we think? That we don’t need formulas and theorems to figure out our own lives?
What if it’s as simple as a boy loving a father? A girl loving a sister?
A boy loving a girl?
Linny’s blue eyes squint. She looks so unbelievably beautiful that it happens immediately: I love her again. Now that I think about it, I never really stopped. Just went into hibernation for a while. I decide to trust this feeling.
Because sometimes you don’t get second chances to say things—sometimes you don’t even get a first chance—I blurt it out. “I love you, Linny Carson.”
I grip the sides of her face and pull her until our noses touch.
She says, “I love you, too.”
THE AFTERGLOW PARADOX 2.0:
Brightness can dim and revive in unpredictable ways.
45.
Linny
WHO: Linny Carson (aka Camera Girl)
WHEN: Half her junior year and most of the summer
WHY: Her sister, Grace, left, so she hid, too.
NOTES: Took you long enough.
Biking back from Ana’s, I veer left before I get to my house, stop, walk up another set of porch stairs, and rap on Cass’s door. She answers, an unraveled look consuming her face. In a pair of rhinestone sandals, she shifts from one foot to another. “Yeah?”
“I want you to have something,” I say, dropping my backpack and rooting through the front pocket. “Here.”
I hand her my Journal of Lost and Found, and she flips to the front, where Grace’s loopy handwriting informs me about Hector’s feeding schedule. Her fingers fumble through the pages, pausing over the Álvaro Herrera section. I hear the confusion in her voice. “What is this?”
“What I’ve been doing since Grace left. I thought—well, I thought it might help bring her back, but that seems kind of silly now. I just wanted to explain why I’ve been acting so . . . unhinged. That’s probably the best word for it.”
She fans the pages again, stopping to skim a few entries, shaking her head slightly as if a stray hair is tickling her nose. “I’ll be right back,” she tells me suddenly.
I wish her thoughts were as open as my book. “Oh,” I mutter. “Okay.”
She dashes upstairs, and I count the bricks on the side of her house, a knot twisting in my throat. Her foam-soled sandals clomp the carpet all the way back down. She’s carrying something—a blue spiral-bound notebook—and she passes it to me with both hands, arms outstretched, like she’s presenting a birthday cake. “I did sort of the same thing.”
I take the notebook and open the first page—flip to the second, third, fourth, keep going until I hit the back. On every page is a list with lines crossed out.
“Are these—” I begin.
“Places where I thought she could be. Places she talked about when we were growing up. Would you believe I called every campground in Florida and Alaska? She always talked about Alaska with me. My dad had a heart attack when he saw the phone bill.” I look back up at her, astounded. She makes a sound almost like a laugh. “I told you. I miss her, too.”
I knew this, but I didn’t know this, so intimately, so wholly. I break first, hugging Cass and closing my eyes for a moment; and as she squeezes me in return, I feel time blowing away like sand, think for the first time that maybe it is possible to turn back the clock—just keep turning and turning until we reach a place where everything isn’t so broken.
“I am so over this fight,” she says into my curls.
“And I’m so, so sorry.”
She pulls away and rubs at her eyes, little swipes of mascara now fading off into her hairline. “You should text Ray. He misses you.”
“I miss him, too. . . . How’s he doing?”
“Better,” she says with a hint of a smile, “now that Lawrence told his dad he’s dating Ray. They’re back to being all lovey-dovey. You know, even though it’s only high school, I kind of feel like they’re made for each other.” We talk for a few minutes longer—about Ray, about the improbability of love lasting years and years and years, how sometimes it does—and then I’m on my bike again.
“Hey, Linny?” she calls to me from her porch. There’s a pause. “You think she’s ever coming back?”
I tell her the truth. “I don’t know.”
Sebastian’s flight leaves tomorrow morning, so this afternoon I’m arranging flowers to pin in my hair. The last time he sees me (rephrase: the last time he sees me this summer), I want to look as colorful—and as unforgettable—as possible. Lining up five yellow daisies from Joe’s garden, I rake my fingers through my curls to prep them for braiding. On my desk is a mirror, and that’s how I see Mom approaching, her footsteps barely audible against the carpet. Her bun is looser than usual, a few stray curls swaying around her ears.
I like her like this—smudged, without all the clean edges.
In Dad’s study there’s a picture of her at fourteen, visiting Nigeria, her hair swept into an emerald-green ichafu—a head scarf flowering toward the sky. We look almost identical: bronze skin, tons of freckles. For most of my life, she’s suffocated her freckles beneath layers of sticky foundation. “God,” Grace once said, “don’t you just want to take a wet cloth to her face or something?”
I imagine doing this now, wiping my thumbs across her cheeks.
She stops several feet behind me and says, “It’s tonight, isn’t it?”
Yep. The idea dawned on me two weeks ago, and since then it’s been a whirlwind of video editing, equipment checklists, and handing out flyers (as well as spending a quarter of my life savings). Cass and Ray have been helping out.
Still, I don’t understand how Mom knows what tonight is. Dad must’ve told her. He and I’ve been talking more lately—at breakfast, when he gets home from work. Last night as I was passing through the living room, he patted his hand on the sofa and said, “Anna Karenina’s on TV. Want to watch it with me?” We even made popcorn, like old times, and believe it or not, I got the sensation that Grace was there, watching it with us.
“Yeah, it’s tonight,” I say to Mom, only half turning around in my seat.
“You doing your hair?” Her fingers dance awkwardly by her sides, and there’s a moment when I think she’s going to offer to braid it for me. Instead, she says, “Well, I’ll let you finish getting ready,” although none of her muscles moves. Years pass. I fiddle with the flowers, and when I look back at her, she’s leaning against my bed, the white blanket crinkling against her gray dress.
“Should we talk?” she says. Based purely on the steadiness of her voice, she could be asking if it’s supposed to rain on Tuesday, or if I picked up a half gallon of milk on m
y way home; but I see how her fingers curl, how she forces out a breath afterward, like she’s blowing out a candle.
I say softly, “Are you going to yell at me again?”
A little less steadily now, she says, “I’m going to try my best to listen, but I do want you to understand that what happened to us this year was . . . unthinkable to me. Unthinkable. And I held on to you too tightly, just like I held on to Grace.”
It’s the most she’s said to me since the morning I came back from the hospital, and she’s speaking about Grace. Even saying her name. I’m not entirely sure how to respond.
“I just couldn’t let her go,” she says. “I just couldn’t let her go, and she went anyway. She—it’s probably my fault.”
I swallow.
Mom picks a speck of lint off her knee. “She came to me, asking to go to a music conservatory in Ohio. Oberlin. And . . . I told her no.”
“She . . . she . . .” I’m processing, but it’s difficult—like straining boulders through mesh. “She didn’t tell me about that.”
Mom’s voice splinters, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “She did leave me a note, Linny. Under my pillow. She left me her acceptance letter to Oberlin, and I keep checking to see if she’s enrolled, and—”
“What?” I stand up. “Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“Because you would’ve followed her, Linny. You would’ve camped out in Ohio for the whole summer, and we never would’ve seen you again. It’s just like with the stars—you look at them all night, and you’ll”—waving a hand as if cleansing the air—“start wishing you’re anywhere but here.”
“That’s why you took them down?”
“Yes, and I’m— Oh, I’m saying this so badly.” She gestures for me to sit. “I still want you to go to Princeton. I still want all the best things for you—the things women like us didn’t always get to have. But if I don’t accept that it’s your life, truly your life, then you’ll run. I know you’ll run. And I don’t want to have to sit up every night worrying about you, worrying if you’re hungry or scared or cold or if something bad has happened, something very bad.” Her voice hitches.
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