The Whole Story of Half a Girl

by Veera Hiranandani

  “How come?” Mom asks.

  “She said she was embarrassed by my dress.”

  Mom puts her hands on my shoulders and looks me over. “Why? You look gorgeous.”

  “It wasn’t the right style. Too fancy,” I manage.

  “Well, maybe to Kate, but that’s for you to answer for yourself.”

  “And a boy kissed me at the party,” I say. I wonder if this will make her angry. I straighten up, wipe my nose, but keep my eyes down.

  “Did you want him to kiss you?” she asks, pronouncing every word carefully.

  “No, not really. We were all playing a game, Spin the Bottle.”

  “Oh,” she says. She takes a few seconds before continuing. “So you felt like you had to let him kiss you?”

  “Yes,” I say, lifting my eyes.

  “You don’t ever have to kiss anyone unless you want to. Even if it’s embarrassing not to. I think being embarrassed is easier to get over than kissing boys you don’t want to kiss.”

  “I guess,” I say, and know that she’s right. It would be nice to feel so free, to do whatever I felt was right and true. And then I remember that I used to feel that way all the time.

  “It’s hard, though, in a game like that, with everyone watching. I know, I played it, although I was a little older than you are now,” she says, and smooths my hair off my forehead. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” I take an easy, slow breath. That’s all I wanted her to say.

  “Mom, I’m sorry I said I wasn’t Jewish.”

  She just stares at me for a moment. It scares me. “And there as well, you didn’t do anything wrong,” she finally says. “I did. You should be able to ask questions and try things, and you should be able to talk to me about anything. But Sonia …” She says my name again, serious and slow. Her voice is too deep. Now I notice her eyes are red, like she’s been crying too.

  “Something’s happened, and I know you’re already upset, but I have to tell you,” she goes on. She puts her warm hands on my shoulders. I can hear a soft thud, thud in my ears.

  “It’s your dad,” she says, and then I can’t hear any more. There’s too much in my brain. Like an overloaded computer, I come crashing to a stop.

  chapter twenty-three

  My father’s gone. Well, not gone—he’s disappeared. Dad was supposed to show up in Hong Kong last night, but when he wasn’t at some big meeting this morning, they called his office. His office called the airport and found out that he never boarded the plane, which is actually a good thing, Mom says. It means that wherever he is, he’s not all the way in Hong Kong.

  I think of how Dad used to play hide-and-seek with me and Natasha. He picked the best hiding places, under the sink in the laundry room, or in the little closet I always forgot was in the guest room. He’d have to call out sometimes to give us hints. I’m tempted to go looking for him now, in the closets, in the laundry room. He must be close by, just playing a game.

  But this is not a game. The police are here, and Mom’s showing them pictures of Dad. Natasha and I are supposed to be watching TV upstairs, but instead we’re sitting on the stairs listening to every word.

  “When was the last time you spoke with your husband?” the policeman asks.

  Mom is quiet for a moment. “Two days ago. When he left.”

  “Did he say anything out of character?”

  “No,” she says. “He seemed excited for the trip.”

  “Had anything unusual been going on before he left?”

  Silence again.

  “Actually, yes,” Mom finally says. She continues in a low voice, the kind of hush-hush voice she uses with Dad when she needs to talk about things Natasha and I aren’t supposed to hear. We both creep down to a lower stair.

  “He, my husband …” She clears her throat before going on. “He’s been suffering from a clinical depression ever since he lost his previous job about six months ago.”

  “Was he taking any medication for it?” the policeman asks.

  “Yes,” she says, and mentions the pills Dad was taking. “But he wasn’t getting better, or at least, not as fast as he did the last time, twelve years ago.”

  “Has he ever disappeared before or …” The policeman pauses and coughs a little before going on. “Attempted to take his own life?”

  “No, never.” On the word “never,” her voice cracks. I can hear a few muffled sobs, and the sound of Mom blowing her nose and the policeman saying that he’s sorry, and that he’ll do everything he can to help find Dad.

  Natasha’s sucking her thumb, something she hasn’t done in ages. I brush her hand away from her mouth. “Is Dad coming back?” she says, and puts her thumb right where it was before.

  “Of course,” I say, knowing that’s what Mom would want me to say, and I wish I believed it. That night I can’t sleep and I can’t stop crying. I don’t care anymore about what happened at Peter’s party. It’s small and stupid now. I just want my father back.

  Eventually I stop crying and go to my closet. I take out my red dress, slip it on over my nightgown, and get back into bed. I pretend that the dress is made out of the sari silk I saw drying in the fields on the way to the Taj Mahal. I pull it tight around me, wishing I really were an Indian princess and could use my magical princess powers to make anything happen, make my father come back with a flick of my fingers. Maybe, I think as I drift off to sleep, Dad went to India instead. Maybe he missed the mango trees.

  On Monday Mom keeps Natasha and me out of school and calls in sick herself. She’s on and off the phone a lot. Talking to my grandparents in Florida. Talking to the police, who haven’t found anything yet. Talking to my aunt, Mom’s sister in California. And my aunties. They’re all in Maryland. They didn’t even know Dad had lost his job. Mom talks and paces on the cordless. She drinks coffee and wipes down the kitchen counter over and over. She begs everyone on the phone not to come and help. She says the best thing everyone can do is think of where my father might be. That’s the only thing anyone can do, she says. Everyone listens except my grandparents, who are coming anyway.

  I think of my other grandparents, my Indian grandparents, who died before I was born. Dad has two black-and-white pictures of them, the only pictures I’ve seen. They hang in the den. They both look very serious in the pictures, even angry. I wonder how angry they’d be if they knew about this.

  The next day, my grandparents arrive early in the morning carrying a big old green suitcase and a cooler filled with challah bread, frozen brisket, chicken soup, pickles, and my favorite, stuffed cabbage.

  “Oh, Ma,” Mom says to Grandma as she loads the food into the freezer. “You didn’t have to.”

  Grandma waves Mom’s comment away. Grandpa’s already seated at the dining room table reading the paper, which is something he does a lot of.

  “Max,” Grandma says. “Now’s not the time.”

  Grandpa looks at her over his bifocals. “What?” he says, but folds the paper anyway.

  Grandma gives me a hard hug when she sees me. She smells the way she always smells, like a new box of tissues mixed with her flowery perfume. She brushes the hair away from my face.

  “How’s my girl doing?” she asks softly.

  I shrug, knowing there’s no way to explain. She looks at me a little longer. “Ah, the strong, silent type, like your dad,” she says. Mom flashes her a look. Grandma always tells me how much I’m like my father. Normally it puffs my chest with pride, but not today. I watch my feet, twist my toe into the yellow linoleum. What an ugly kitchen floor, I think, and picture Kate’s kitchen floor, shiny black and white tiles. Grandma opens her mouth, flustered, realizing her mistake. She seems about to say something else, but then Natasha comes running down the stairs.

  “Grammy, Gramps!” she yells. She runs over to Grandma and leaps into her arms. While Grandma is busy fussing over her, I sit next to Grandpa.

  “Can we do cartoons?” I ask him. He can draw anything. His sketches of me and Natasha hang in our bedrooms.
He also teaches me how to draw my favorite comic strips out of the newspaper. Mostly I do Peanuts.

  He nods and finds the right page and takes two pencils out of his breast pocket. He always carries a few with him. They’re the right kind for drawing, dark and chalky.

  He draws Snoopy’s nose on the edge of the paper and I copy him. He draws the rest of his head and I copy him. By the end I have a perfect Snoopy sitting on his doghouse. When I try to draw cartoons on my own, they look like little-kid drawings, all wavy and shaped funny.

  “Grandpa?” I say. He looks up at me over his bifocals. His gray hair is longer on one side than the other. He combs the longer side over his bald spot, but it always falls back, giving him lopsided hair. He doesn’t seem to care, though. Grandma is always smoothing the long side back over his head for him. “Where do you think Dad is?” If anyone might know it’s probably Grandpa, since he’s a man, and a dad, and loves me.

  He leans back in his chair and taps his pencil on the paper.

  “I don’t know,” he finally says, and sees my face fall. “I wish I did, we all do. But I’m sure there’s an explanation for all this. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “Really?” I say. “How are you sure?”

  He leans in close and kisses me on the top of my head. “I’m sure, because I wish to be. Simple as that. You want to do some more?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “I’m kind of tired. I’m gonna take a nap.” Suddenly I want to cry again, but not in front of Grandpa. I get up and walk past the kitchen, where Grandma and Natasha are starting a batch of cookies. I wonder where Mom is and go to look for her. Her door is closed; I press my ear to it. She’s crying. Right now it seems like the only thing that makes any sense. I knock.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “It’s Sonia,” I say. She answers the door with red eyes and a tissue in her hand. She takes my hand and we sit on the bed.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “No, but I will be.”

  “I want to lie down, Mom.”

  “Me too,” she says, and we both lie down on the bed. I curl into her and she puts her arms around me.

  “Mom?” I ask with my eyes closed.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “What if Dad never comes back?” I can’t say what I really mean, but Mom must know. She must be thinking it too.

  “We have to take this a day at a time,” she says, smoothing my hair back. “What we know today is that there are lots of smart people out there looking for him.”

  “But—”

  “Sonia,” she interrupts. “We have to believe in your dad. He wouldn’t leave us like this. He wouldn’t …”

  Her voice trails off and she hugs me tighter and all the hard stuff between us melts away.

  It’s dark when I wake and I see a figure standing in the doorway. Dad, I think. He’s home. It was all just a mistake, or a dream. I sit up and squint into the lighted doorway. It’s not Dad. It’s Grandma, and Natasha’s standing beside her like a little ghost in her white nightgown.

  “She wants to sleep in here,” Grandma says. Mom lifts up the blankets for Natasha to get in. And she does.

  For the next three nights, Natasha and I sleep in Mom’s bed. Grandma cooks us big, hot meals of brisket or chicken with lots of gravy and bread, hardly a vegetable in sight. I just eat, sleep, play cards with Grandma, draw cartoons with Grandpa, and try to pretend there isn’t a hole as big as the Grand Canyon in my heart.

  Something about all this, though—the cuddling in bed like kittens, the warm, heavy food sitting in my stomach, my grandparents treating me special—feels good, feels like a holiday. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want this coziness to end. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want Dad to come back if he’s going to be sad and empty and ruin it.

  On Friday, Kate calls.

  “Are you okay?” she asks when I answer the phone. Her voice sounds different, tiny.

  “Yeah,” I say, and wonder if somehow she’s heard.

  “How come you haven’t been in school? Are you sick?”

  “No.” I let the quiet that follows hang there like a soaked towel, wet and heavy.

  “What’s going on?” she says finally. “Is this about Peter’s party? I didn’t know I made you so upset.”

  I have to smile. Kate thinks I’m staying home because of her.

  “It has nothing to do with that. I don’t even care anymore.”

  “Oh.” She sounds disappointed.

  “It’s my dad. He’s—” I start to say, but I can’t tell her. “He’s in the hospital. He has pneumonia, but he’ll be okay.”

  “Oh, no. Well, I’m glad he’s going to be okay,” she says, not questioning it. “So are you going to be at the game tomorrow?”

  “I can’t. We have to visit him.”

  “Can’t you go after?”

  “I don’t think so. The game’s during visiting hours.” God, how I wish it were true. I picture bringing Dad a big bouquet of flowers at the hospital. He smiles a happy, weak smile when he sees me, and the best part is that he’s not going anywhere.

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to change the halftime routine.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Hey, Kate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have to go.” I don’t even bother to give her a reason before hanging up. I wish Kate were a different person. I wish I could have told her the truth and trusted her with it, but after the way she acted at the party, I see her whispering to Jess at lunch, thrilled that she has the most interesting story to tell at the table. I want so badly to talk to someone who’s not Mom, Natasha, Grandma, or Grandpa. I dial before I can think about it too long.

  “Hi,” I say to Sam, and as soon as I hear her voice I start to cry.

  “Sonia? What’s wrong?”

  I tell her everything. About Kate, Peter’s party, Danny’s kiss, watching Kate and Jess at the party, that last year feels like another universe, a much better one. I tell her I’m jealous that she gets to be there in that universe and I don’t. I tell her that I miss her.

  “I was jealous of you,” she said. “You have your big new school, new friends, cheerleading. What do you need me for?”

  “Who else am I going to have ESP with?” I say, laughing, but still sort of crying too.

  Then I tell her about Dad. She listens quietly.

  “The worst part is that I can’t do anything. I just have to wait. It’s the hardest waiting I’ve ever done. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.”

  That’s when she gets an idea. She runs and gets her Magic 8 Ball and asks the question: Is my dad coming home?

  “I’m shaking it,” Sam says, fast and breathy.

  I chew the hard skin around my thumb.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a stupid Magic Eight Ball.”

  “What? What did it say?” I try to swallow, but my mouth has gone as dry as paper.

  “It says, My reply is no.”

  “No?”

  “My reply is no,” Sam says.

  chapter twenty-four

  That Monday, Natasha and I go back to school, Mom goes back to work, and my grandparents go back to Florida. We all go back to sleeping in our own beds. It’s a short week, anyway, because of Thanksgiving. Mom says we’ll wait to celebrate when Dad comes home. That’s okay with me. I couldn’t imagine having Thanksgiving without him either.

  The police say that Dad took out a thousand dollars in cash at the airport on the day he was supposed to fly to Hong Kong. But Mom already knew that. She looked up their bank statement on the computer. So much for the police, she said after they told her. The police say it’s a good sign that he took out the money. I keep hearing Sam’s voice telling me about the Magic 8 Ball. My reply is no, it says to me all day long in my classes. I want to stick my fingers in my ears to drown it out.

  People know now in school. Mom called the principal to tell her what was going on and she told my teachers.
Somehow every person in school, and maybe the town, and maybe the world, has found out. I assume this because no one has looked me in the eye this week except Alisha. She keeps trying to catch my attention in English, but I just keep staring at Mrs. Langley like she’s saying the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard.

  When the next bell rings, I try to disappear into the crowd of kids rushing off to their lockers, hoping no one says anything to me. Then I hear my name. I ignore it, not even sure where it’s coming from until I feel a tap on my shoulder. Mrs. Langley is standing right behind me.

  “I want to talk to you,” she says. “It will only take a second.”

  I follow her to her classroom, wondering what I could have done. I haven’t been passing notes or anything. She pulls up a chair by her desk and motions for me to sit down. I do and cross my arms tightly over my chest.

  “I’m sorry about what you’re going through,” she says. Her voice sounds different, lower, almost gentle.

  I look down at my knees. “Thanks,” I mumble, not really knowing how I’m supposed to be. Should I act really sad, or pretend I’m okay, like it doesn’t bother me?

  “I’ve wanted to say this to you for a while, and maybe this isn’t the right time, but I know how smart you are, Sonia. I can tell by your writing assignments, but I know I haven’t seen what you can really do.”

  “I miss my old school,” I blurt out, the tears springing to my eyes.

  “I know you do, but there’s always something new to learn wherever you are.”

  I nod.

  “I understand your mind is elsewhere right now, but remember, I’m here to help. Don’t be afraid to ask.”

  I just nod again. She stands up and hands me a tissue. I take it, give her a half smile, and rush off to my next class.

  At lunch I quietly eat my avocado, Swiss cheese, and sprout sandwich at the end of Kate’s table, trying to be invisible. Mrs. Langley’s words play over in my head. Was she nice to me because she felt sorry for me? Has she really thought I was smart all this time, even when she gave me a D on my vocabulary test?

  Jess and another Jessica whisper together at the other end of the table and take sneaky sideways glances at me. Kate sits by them, but doesn’t whisper. She’s leaning back in her chair eating M&M’s, and glances, but not in a sneaky way, in my direction. Then she gets up and comes over.