“Evidence,” Mel says, her face twisting into a concentrated scowl.
Mel’s father is a police officer. Her mother’s a librarian at the high school. And Mel always gets 100 percent on the weekly vocabulary tests in school, which means Mel knows things. Things like the definitions of abdicate and fortuitous, how to lift fingerprints off a drinking glass with Scotch tape and talcum powder, and maybe even how to get two broken people to love each other again.
“Okay,” Emma agrees. “But if we get caught, they’ll kill us.”
Mel loops her arm around Emma’s neck, pulling her tight in what could be a hug or the beginning of a headlock, and says, “You won’t regret it.” Mel’s words are hot, sour puffs against Emma’s cheek, whispered in a fiery excitement that immediately makes Emma wonder if she should have agreed to this after all.
Their search (now officially dubbed Operation Reunite—OR for short—by Mel) begins with Tess’s bedroom. Henry’s at work. Tess is in the basement working out—Emma can hear the thunk of her mother’s gloved hands on the huge black punching bag hung by chains from the floor joist. Everlast, the bag says. Thump. Ka-chang. Thump. Ka-chang.
Emma stands guard in the hall, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, while Mel pokes through all of her mother’s things. A closet full of clothes from Land’s End and L.L. Bean. Practical shoes. In the drawer of the bedside table Mel finds only a flashlight and a paperback mystery with a noose on the cover.
Emma plays with the brass knob on her mother’s bedroom door, turning it to the left nine times, then nine to the right, for luck.
“Nothing here,” Mel says, dejected. “Let’s try the office.”
They tramp down the stairs, through the living room and into the tiny room that serves as the office. Mel sits in the old leather swivel chair and goes through the desk. Emma gets the file cabinet. All they come up with are monthly budgets, bills, old coupons, and dust bunnies. Emma hates dust. She read once that household dust is 80 percent flaked-off human skin. Gross. People are like snakes, they just shed differently. Emma vacuums her room every day. She ties a bandanna around her nose and mouth, bandit style, while she cleans, to keep from breathing in all those sloughed-off skin cells.
“I don’t know how you got to be so fastidious,” her mom always says.
“You’re a super freak,” Mel tells her.
“No,” Emma says. “I’m just fastidious.”
Mel laughs. “Like you even know what that means!”
But Emma does know. She looked it up. And it has nothing to do with being either fast or hideous. It just means she’s careful and particular. Nothing freakish about that. Emma believes in order. In putting things together in exactly the right way so that the universe makes sense. Which is why she wants her parents back together. If things are out of order, bad stuff can happen. Storms, car accidents, brain aneurysms. Right after Emma’s dad moved out, a huge tree fell in the yard, almost crushing the house. If that wasn’t proof, what was?
Emma closes the door to the file cabinet. Then, worried she forgot to straighten the hanging folders inside, she opens it again to check. All straight. She closes the metal drawer, resists the urge to open it and check again.
Fastidious.
Sometimes, she hates these feelings. This need to make sure things are put together just right. She can get stuck in one spot forever fixing something, then checking it again and again.
She gives in, opens the drawer, runs her fingers over the perfectly straight files, feels her body relax.
“There’s nothing here,” Mel says, scratching her head. Mel cuts her own hair, so it’s shaggy, with brown bangs at a funny angle across her forehead. She needs a shower. Sometimes Mel gets so caught up in inventing her own secret language or figuring out how to make cupcakes explode that she forgets about details like eating and taking a bath. Her dad works a lot of extra hours and her mom’s kind of a hippie, so Mel gets away with stuff most kids wouldn’t.
Thump, thump goes Emma’s mom in the basement. Left, right. Jabs and hooks.
“Now what?” Emma asks.
Mel looks out the window, across the yard, her blue eyes glimmering. “Your dad’s barn.”
“I’m not allowed in there when he’s not home.” Emma’s voice comes out as a near whine and she’s a little embarrassed.
“Do you want your parents back together or not?” Mel asks, pushing her glasses with the heavy square plastic frames up her nose. Mel doesn’t even need glasses—these are from a costume shop. She thinks they make her look smarter. Emma thinks they make her look like Velma from Scooby-Doo—who is, she admits, the smart one.
“Yes. Of course.” Thump, thump, thump, thump. Ka-CHANG! Emma can feel through her feet the vibrations of her mother pounding the bag, feels the fury and is sure that one of these days, her mother’s punching is going to knock the entire house off its old granite foundation. Her mother swears the boxing isn’t about anger, it’s about exercise.
“Then quit being a dumbass,” Mel says. “Come on.”
Mel makes her way out of the house and to the barn, Emma behind her, stopping in the front hall to whisper nine when Mel’s out of earshot—smart as she is, there are some things Mel just doesn’t get. Like the importance of Francis. And Danner. Mel doesn’t get Danner at all. If Danner shows up when Mel is over, Emma just has to pretend Danner’s not there. Sometimes this makes Danner mad—she doesn’t like to be ignored.
It takes Emma eighty-one steps to get to her father’s barn. Very lucky. Nine goes into eighty-one nine times, which makes it the square root. Trees have roots and so do numbers.
It doesn’t get much luckier than eighty-one.
When Emma gets to the barn, she sees Mel has lit up one of her homemade cigarettes. Mel uses Wrigley chewing gum wrappers and dried herbs from her kitchen: oregano, basil, thyme.
“You can’t smoke that inside,” Emma says.
Mel rolls her eyes, licks her thumb and forefinger, and pinches the burning end of the Juicy Fruit cigarette until it’s out. Then she puts the remains into the Altoid tin she keeps her smokes and pack of matches in.
Mel and Emma start with the south side of the barn, the part converted into living quarters. It’s a studio apartment—one compact room for cooking, eating, and sleeping, and a bathroom tucked into a corner. Emma’s grandpa had it built as a little retirement cottage for himself. He didn’t want to be “in the way” in the main house and felt he didn’t need much space of his own. He was ready to downsize. To simplify.
It doesn’t take Emma and Mel long to search the small living area. Her dad doesn’t have much stuff: a daybed, a desk, some shelves, and a table with two chairs. It feels more like a motel room than a home, and this gives Emma hope. Like somehow he knows it’s only temporary, that he’ll move back into the house one day, so it’s best not to get too settled in the barn.
They move through the kitchenette and open the door to the other side, where her dad has his workshop. It’s an old horse barn, but the stalls and loft were taken out. Now it’s just one huge cavernous space, big enough for a small airplane, Emma guesses. The workshop smells like sawdust and grease. There are metal shelves, workbenches, and tools from three generations of DeForge men: a lathe, drill press, band saw, table saw, seemingly endless hand tools. Her dad also keeps some company equipment in the barn: an extra power washer, scaffolding, broken ladders.
Mel steps through. Emma’s heart is pounding. She knows she’s not allowed in there. She has this sense that if she passes through the doorway without her father’s permission, something terrible is sure to happen. She hesitates at the threshold, turns the doorknob nine times each way, but the feeling doesn’t go away.
“Sometimes my dad comes home for lunch,” she says.
Mel checks her watch. “Please! It’s ten thirty, Em.” She flips on the lights. “Now get in here and help me.”
Emma holds her breath and steps through. Nothing terrible happens. Not yet. But the truly horrible
things take time.
“Global warming,” she whispers. “Cancer.” She imagines one little cell somewhere in her body going bad, dividing into another.
“What?” Mel barks.
“Nothing.”
There, in the center of the cathedral-size room, raised up on its own specially constructed frame, is the dugout canoe Emma’s dad is making. He’s installed bright track lighting above it, leaving the rest of the workshop in shadow. Large and pale, with graceful curves, the canoe reminds Emma of a long, white dolphin. It makes her nervous, seeing something so obviously meant for water stuck on land. Not just stuck, but held with wooden clamps and braces. Imprisoned.
“You look over there,” Mel orders, pointing to the metal shelves and cabinets that line the east wall of the workshop. Mel goes to the old wooden workbench, starts picking up tools.
“My dad doesn’t like people to touch his stuff,” Emma complains. It’s not RESPECTFUL.
“He’ll never know,” Mel promises, dropping a large metal rasp back down on the bench with a clang.
Emma scans the shelves: chain saw, pruning shears, a burned-out headlight. Mostly what she finds is row after row of half-empty paint cans. She picks one up, reads the top: Bone White. She counts the letters in the name: nine. Emma hears from up above what sounds like a cat sneeze.
There, sitting on the edge of the top shelf, with her long legs dangling over, is Danner, smiling down.
Danner is a girl with dirty blond hair, just like Emma’s. She’s around Emma’s age. In fact, she could almost be Emma’s twin. Her nose is a little different, her chin a little more pointy, but every now and then, Emma catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror or shop window, and thinks it’s Danner she’s seeing.
Sometimes Danner shows up in Emma’s clothes, which Emma can’t stand, but Danner always puts them back, clean and folded. Sometimes Danner arrives in some outfit of her mom’s or dad’s. For some reason, she never puts back the clothes she borrows from Emma’s mom. If Danner shows up in Emma’s mom’s new running shorts, you can bet that they’ll either disappear forever or turn up ruined. One time, she borrowed Emma’s mom’s cashmere coat and the next day, it showed up at the bottom of the pool.
Today, Danner’s wearing Emma’s dad’s old fishing vest.
Danner gives a little snicker, which is what makes the cat-sneeze noise.
Emma puts her finger to her lips: hush. Danner puts her own finger to her lips, smile growing wider. Then she takes the finger from her mouth, and rests it on one of the paint cans on the top shelf. Emma shakes her head no! but it’s too late. The paint can crashes down on the floor, the lid pops off, and a thick, dark green paint splatters everywhere.
Emma’s whole body vibrates with panic. How is she ever going to clean up this mess? If there’s paint on the floor, her dad will know she’s been in his workshop. She should never have come. What was she thinking? She grabs some rags from the shelf. Danner snickers. Emma’s too mad to even look up at her.
“I’ve got something!” Mel yells. She’s hunched over an old red metal toolbox.
Emma’s skin gets prickly. She drops the rags into the center of the forest green puddle, leaves Danner and the spilled paint, and moves in for a closer look. There, stuffed into the rusty bottom of the toolbox, is a stack of Polaroids and a heavy black book with the words DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM painted across the front.
“No way!” Mel squeals, picking up the photos and looking at the one on top. “It’s your parents. Look!”
Emma snatches the photo. Her mom and dad are in the picture, but even though Emma knows it’s her mom and dad, everything about them is different, wrong somehow. Mom’s hair is long and tangly, and Daddy looks like he’s growing a beard. And they’re smiling! They actually look genuinely happy. He has his arm around her. Emma can barely remember the last time her parents touched, with the exception of bumping into each other accidentally, which is always followed by a very awkward Excuse me.
Beside her parents are two ladies Emma doesn’t recognize. The lady at the far right has short dark hair and is holding a gun. A rifle, like for hunting. The other lady, a blonde, has her head on the shoulder of the gun lady. And the blond lady is showing her middle finger to whoever is taking the photo, which is a dirty thing to do. Like swearing.
“Check it out!” Mel says, snickering. “She’s giving someone the bird.”
Emma looks for a bird, but just sees the gun, the girl holding up her middle finger, her mother leaning in to her father, her head on his shoulder.
Emma stares at the picture so long and hard that she starts to feel dizzy. She knows she’s seeing her parents A Long Time Ago. She hardly hears Mel speaking, and when she does, it takes her a minute to remember where she is, how she got here, who it is who’s speaking to her.
“It’s a journal by someone named Suz,” Mel says, holding the heavy black book. “You’re not gonna believe this, Em! Your parents were part of some group called ‘the Compassionate Dismantlers.’ They had a manifesto and everything!”
“Manifesto,” Emma repeats, not 100 percent sure what the word means, but thinking it sure doesn’t sound like anything her parents would ever be involved with.
Emma looks back across the workshop to Danner, still perched on the top of the shelves, to see if she’s catching all this. Danner gives her a wink.
“Listen to this,” Mel reads, “‘To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.’”
Emma just nods. She thinks of Francis the moose. “Nine,” she whispers without thinking, looking back down at the photo in her hand. Suz is the lady who painted Francis. Is she the one with the gun or the one giving the camera the finger? And who had taken the picture?
“What’d you say, super freak?” Mel asks.
“Nothing.”
Emma tucks the photo into the back pocket of her shorts, then looks up again, searching for Danner, but she’s gone. Danner’s like that. Here one minute. Gone the next.
“Holy crap!” Mel says, holding the journal out to Emma. “Check it out: there are addresses in the front for all the group members. We’ve gotta write to them!”
“And say what?” Emma asks.
Mel studies the names and addresses, thinking. Then, she smiles so big that all her teeth are showing. “Oh my god!” she howls. “This is it!”
“What?” Emma asks.
Mel holds the book out in front of her in both hands, shaking it like a tambourine. “Don’t you get it? We’ve gotta write to these people and find a way to make them come back. Maybe if we can remind your parents of their old college days, they’ll like go back in time and be all gaga for each other again. This is our answer.” She shakes the book again. “Right here. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for!”
“But these addresses are like ten years old,” Emma says.
Mel nods. “They were in college. Which means these are probably their parents’ addresses. And parents can stay in the same house forever. Trust me.” Mel pulls a small spiral notebook and pen from the back pocket of her grungy army fatigues and copies the addresses from the journal. When she’s done, she puts the journal and photos back into the toolbox. “I’ll get the bikes and meet you out front. Go tell your mom we’re going to D.J.’s for Cokes. And get some money.”
Emma shakes her head. “I’ve got to clean up the spilled paint first.”
Mel looks over at the huge green mess on the floor. “Great going, super freak,” she says, shaking her head. Then Mel goes over, grabs a bunch of rags, and starts wiping it up.
AT D.J.’S GENERAL STORE, they choose three cheesy Vermont postcards from the spinning rack (each with a moose, in honor of Francis) and stamps. Bernice sells them to the girls, and says, “Doing a little correspondence this morning, huh?”
Bernice has run the store forever. Even Emma’s grandpa couldn’t remember there ever having been a D.J.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mel says with a proud smile. “We’re writing to our friends at summ
er camp.”
Mel says that Bernice is a textbook case of split-personality disorder. Sometimes, you walk in and she’s all smiles, and gives you a free piece of licorice. Other days, she snarls, “This ain’t the place to window-shop. If you don’t have money, go on home.”
“Maybe it’s menopause,” Mel guesses, and Emma nods, but has no idea what she means.
The best part is, you can always tell which Bernice you’re up against by her face: on the days when she’s evil Bernice, she’s got on makeup—little circles of pink rouge, orange frosted lipstick put on all wrong.
This morning, she’s just plain old friendly Bernice with her gray hair in a ponytail, her pale liver-spotted skin scrubbed clean.
“Good girls,” she says. “Kids can get homesick at camp. A postcard from a friend will put a smile on their faces. You each take a root beer barrel. On the house.”
“Thanks, Bernice,” they both chime, reaching into the plastic bin on the counter.
Mel rolls her eyes, unwraps her candy, mouths the words mental case, and Emma steps hard on Mel’s foot to shut her up. They both start laughing.
Emma is sure she can still see a trace of green just under her fingernails even though she scrubbed her hands with hot water and a brush. It took them almost forty-five minutes to clean up the paint. Mel kept saying it was good enough, but Emma was sure her dad would be able to tell.
“This floor is a mess,” Mel said. “It’s already covered with paint splatters and grease and Christ knows what all. Trust me, Em, the only one who’s going to notice whatever little smudge of green we left is you.”
ON THE POSTCARDS, THEY write down words carefully copied from Suz’s journal: DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM. To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart. They address the postcards to Spencer Styles, Valerie (Winnie) Delmarco, and Suz Pierce with PLEASE FORWARD in big letters beneath each address.
“If you write that, whoever lives there will send it to the right address,” Mel explains. “My dad showed me. His sister, my aunt Linda, she moves around a lot, and whenever we write her, we put that on the envelope.”
The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Page 45