“Nick,” Mr. Jarvis said, pointing at his watch. “Tick-tock.”
He bent down a little and kissed me on the cheek. “Three weeks,” he said. “It’s gonna be great.”
I watched him walk away with Mr. Jarvis, and I wondered again about his appointment. Still, if he was going to be leaving Somerset on schedule, everything was probably okay.
. . .
I don’t remember walking from where Nick had left me to the Buddha. I was still thinking about him, still feeling his lips on my cheek. I spotted Billy first. He was sitting opposite Morgan, with a puppyish look on his face. I was beginning to think that he had developed more than friendly feelings for Morgan over the summer. She had been away at her family’s cabin while he had been working in the city at a camp for young activists. Had her absence made his heart grow fonder? But as soon as I got inside, I knew I was wrong. They were arguing— well, actually, Morgan was giving Billy a hard time. Billy was his usual calm self.
As Morgan squished over to make room for me, she said, “I’m glad you’re here. Now we can talk about something that someone actually cares about.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I was just wondering. . . .” Billy began.
“No way,” Morgan said. “I don’t even want to hear her name. I told you yesterday that I didn’t care. You’ve managed to make it through today without mentioning her. Let’s keep it that way, okay Billy? Besides, Robyn isn’t interested in her either.”
“Interested in who?” I said.
“Trisha Carnegie,” Billy said.
Morgan scowled. “Didn’t I just say that I didn’t want to hear her name? Didn’t I tell you that she was the last person we want to talk about, or even think about?”
“Maybe she’s the last thing you want to think about,” Billy said. “But Robyn’s interested, aren’t you, Robyn?”
“I guess,” I said. Actually, I wasn’t interested in Trisha. But I didn’t want to hurt Billy’s feelings. Morgan, however, took a typical Morgan approach. She jabbed me in the ribs.
“Tell him,” she said.
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him that you don’t care about Trisha Carnegie.”
“Well. . . .” I began.
“See?” Morgan said. “Robyn doesn’t care. I don’t care. So can we please talk about something else?”
“You’re putting words in Robyn’s mouth,” Billy protested. “Robyn is a sensitive person. She cares about the people around her.”
Morgan gave him an irritated look. “I’m someone around her,” she said. “You’re someone around her. But Trisha Carnegie? Trisha Carnegie is not around her.”
“Around her?” I said. “Hello? Am I invisible all of a sudden?”
“Besides,” Morgan said, “Trisha is so weird.”
She wasn’t the only person with that opinion. Everyone thought that Trisha was weird. She dressed funny—plaid skirts with knee socks and cardigans; capri pants and bowling shirt combinations; shirtwaist dresses vintage 1955, paired with blazers. Some people could pull off a look like that. Not Trisha. Her crazy clothes only reinforced the weird way she acted. She had a row of safety pins stuck into one ear and a big metal stud stuck in the other—a look that was as retro as her wardrobe. Half the time, she wore twelve-hole steel-toed boots, the rest of the time, ballet slippers. She always carried a genuine Dolce & Gabbana backpack, though, because, by the way, trash-dressing Trisha was a rich girl. And always, always around her neck was a chain from which hung a gold ring—her father’s wedding band— and a little leather pouch containing a chunk of crystal.
Trisha wasn’t a friend of mine. I don’t think she was anyone’s friend. She didn’t hang out with any group that I knew of. She barely talked in class. Sure, she had to do presentations like the rest of us, but she always picked out-there topics. Last year, in Western Civilization Up to the Fifteenth Century, she did a show-and-tell on the history of torture. Her poetry presentation in English was on—who else?—Sylvia Plath. In World Issues, she enlightened us all about the globalization of disease, including a gruesomely detailed account of the progress of the Ebola Virus through the human body. Very dark— that was Trisha.
Kids who had gone to elementary school with Trisha swore that she hadn’t always been so weird. One kid I knew even insisted that she had been perfectly normal up until she was twelve years old. That was when she had completely freaked out. Apparently, she had never freaked back in again. The story I had heard went like this: Trisha and her father had gone on a camping trip together. It had been a real wilderness trip. They canoed their way through the backcountry, just the two of them, miles from civilization. Then one night when they were sitting around a campfire, her father had a heart attack. Trisha wanted to help him. But she was twelve years old and out in the wilds. What could she do? Someone said her father had taken a cell phone on the trip, but Trisha couldn’t get a signal. Someone else said that Trisha had tried to get her father into the canoe. Her plan: to travel back however many miles to where they had started. Maybe she would get lucky along the way. Maybe she would come across another camper. Maybe she would hit the jackpot and run into a doctor who was out camping with his family.
But Trisha’s father was in no shape to walk, and she was too small to carry him. She dragged him a little way, but she couldn’t get him into the canoe.
He died.
Someone said he died while Trisha was signaling SOS into the darkness with a flashlight. Someone else said he died with Trisha screaming for help into an empty night on an island who knows how far from another living soul. Everyone who told the story said that Trisha had screamed herself silent by morning, when a canoe with two teenage boys in it happened by. Trisha got their attention by throwing rocks at them from the shore. But by then it was too late for the boys to do anything but tell her to stay calm while they went and got somebody. Somebody to take the body out. From what I’d heard, Trisha had been in serious therapy after that. Some people said she still was.
Two years later—or, as someone who had known Trisha at the time put it, two short years later—Trisha’s mother had remarried. Some people said the guy she married was a real jerk. Other people said he was okay. Everybody agreed that Trisha had never forgiven her mother for replacing her father. This was supposedly why she wore her father’s wedding ring around her neck—to let her mother and her stepfather know that, as far as she was concerned, she had only one father. She had even worn the ring to her mother’s wedding.
These days, Trisha could be seen talking to a chunk of crystal. I had no idea what that was all about—maybe she was into new age meditation. All I know is that I’d see her at lunchtime or between classes or sometimes even during classes, sitting cross-legged at the end of some hall, muttering to herself.
“Psycho,” is how Morgan summed up Trisha. “You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to figure that out.” Morgan’s mother was a psychiatrist. “Whoever her therapist is, he should lose his license. I mean, Trisha just gets crazier and crazier.”
Nobody I knew disagreed with that—not even me, although I had more complicated feelings about Trisha.
I looked across the table at Billy and said, “Okay, I give up. Why are you so interested in Trisha all of a sudden? What did she do?” As far as I knew, Billy didn’t know Trisha any better than I did. I had never seen him talk to her. She wasn’t in any of his classes, except for homeroom.
“Didn’t you hear the announcement at school yesterday?” he said.
I shook my head. Every morning, while our homeroom teachers took attendance, we were subjected to a barrage of announcements from the school office— only five thousand tickets left for the school dance this Friday; anyone who wants to participate in the car wash to raise money for the school band should sign up online; the next chess club meeting will be held Tuesday at lunch. Stuff that hardly anyone listened to. Besides, the past morning, I’d had earphones on. I was scheduled to give a speech in my second period
Urban Geography class. I had recorded it and kept playing it over and over. It was the best way I knew to learn a speech. So I hadn’t heard, and no one had mentioned it to me. Right after my speech, my French class left school to take in a French film downtown.
“Trisha made an announcement?” I said. “What about?”
“She didn’t make an announcement,” Billy said. “The announcement was about her. She’s missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?” I said.
“I mean, no one knows where she is,” Billy said. “Supposedly she’s been missing since Wednesday. Mr. Elton”—our school principal—“read a note from her mother asking anyone who knows where she might be to contact her.”
Since Wednesday?
Morgan rolled her eyes again. “That is so typical,” she said.
“What is?” Billy said.
“It’s axiomatic,” Morgan said. “The weirder the kid, the less likely the parents are to realize that she has no friends and that probably nobody even notices that she hasn’t turned up at school.”
The pathetically adoring look in Billy’s eyes changed to one of shocked disapproval.
“You’re talking about another human being,” he said.
Morgan looked sternly at him. “Really?” she said. She was more selective than Billy about which sentient beings she included in her personal universe. “Did you notice she wasn’t there before the announcement?”
Billy admitted that he hadn’t.
“I rest my case,” Morgan said. She turned to me. “Look on the bright side, huh, Robyn? Maybe she’s gone for good. If she is, you definitely won’t have to do another project with her.”
“You know what?” I said. “Let’s change the subject.” Because, boy, if there was one thing I didn’t want to think about, it was Trisha Carnegie.
Morgan cheerfully changed the subject—to her-self—and that, I thought, was that.
I was wrong.
Mostly I live with my mother, but I spend every other weekend at my father’s place, and I drop by to see him whenever I’m in the neighborhood. This was my father’s weekend, although you wouldn’t know it based on how much I had actually seen him. He wasn’t home when I got back after my afternoon at the library, and he still hadn’t returned by the time I went to bed, although he did call to tell me not to wait up for him. He was gone again when I rolled out of bed on Sunday morning. I did some homework, went for a late-afternoon run in the park, and came back to his still-empty loft. He must have come in while I was in the shower because after I had dried my hair and changed, I found him sitting in the living room. He had a file folder open on his lap, but he was staring out the window, thinking. He kept right on thinking, even when I asked him a question—twice.
So I tried a new question. “Big case, huh, Dad?” My father used to be a cop. Now he has his own private security company. Business is booming, which, if you ask me, doesn’t say much about the state of the world.
He nodded distractedly. Whatever he was thinking about, he seemed to be deeply immersed in it. I repeated my earlier question for a third time. My usually alert father seemed to catch only one word.
“Birthday?” he said. A look of alarm appeared in his eyes. “Is it your birthday already?”
“Relax, Dad,” I said. “You haven’t missed it yet. It’s still three weeks away.”
His face flooded with relief and he flashed me his trademark Mac Hunter grin, the one my mother said had made her weaken, as she put it, in the first place.
“I can’t believe my baby’s going to be sixteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Why, I remember the day you were born as if it were yesterday.”
“That’s not the way I heard it,” I said. The story my mother told was that my father had been working on a big case when she went into labor. He had promised her he’d get to the hospital, and he did. A day late.
He shrugged.“Okay,” he said,“so maybe I remember the day after you were born a little better.” My father has a guy’s-got-to-do-what-a-guy’s-got-to-do attitude to his work. It still drives my mother crazy, although she has to be more careful about complaining now. A few years before my parents separated, my mother had gone back to school. She’s a lawyer now and puts in long hours at the office, which means that, like my father, she isn’t always able to get home at the time she promised.
“So is it okay, Dad? Can I spend my birthday here this year?”
My father lost the faraway look in his eyes and focused in hard on me. “Won’t your mother have something planned?”
“She hasn’t mentioned anything,” I said, even though I knew that she would probably want to take me out to dinner to celebrate. My mother is very big on special occasions.
“The whole time I’ve been living here,” my father said, “you’ve never spent your birthday with me.” He peered harder at me. “So what gives?”
I looked back at him and tried to decide whether he would blab my reason to my mother if I told him. But I didn’t have a chance to make that decision because the intercom buzzer sounded. My father lives on the third floor of what used to be a carpet factory. He owns the whole building too, which makes him the landlord for a gourmet restaurant on the ground floor and half a dozen apartments on the second floor. He could easily live on what he makes from rent, but my father isn’t the kind of guy who could ever be happy sitting around cashing rent checks.
“Get that for me, would you, Robbie?” he said. “It’s probably Vern.”
I pressed the button on the wall and said hello into the speaker, expecting that the answering voice would be that of Vernon Deloitte, another ex-cop and my father’s business partner. Instead, I heard a voice that I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” it said. “My name is Carl Hanover. I’m looking for MacKenzie Hunter.”
That got my father’s attention in a way that I hadn’t managed to. He set aside the file folder he had been holding and strode across an expanse of hardwood floor to the door.
“Carl, is that really you?” he said into the speaker.
“Mac? Thank goodness,” the voice said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Come on up. I’m on the third floor,” my father said. He pressed the red button that releases the lock down on the first floor. Then he stepped out into the hall to wait. A few moments later, I heard footsteps on the concrete steps that led up to the third floor.
I stood in the doorway, wondering who Carl was and why Dad had sounded so surprised to hear his voice. I watched my father step back a pace from the top of the stairs as his visitor came into the hall.When he said Carl’s name again, the surprise in his voice was still there. He and Carl hugged each other. It was quite a sight, two big men embracing like long-lost brothers.
“My God, how long has it been?” my father said, pulling back to look at his old friend. “Ten years?”
“More like thirteen or fourteen,” Carl said. He was a good-looking man who either spent a lot of time in the sun or was completely oblivious to the hazards of tanning machines. He had a deep, rich tan. “As I recall, the last time I saw you, you were singing the blues about the terrible twos.” He looked around my father at me. “This must be Robyn.”
My father turned and beamed at me. “She’s a real chip off the old block,” he said. “Robbie, this is Carl Hanover. We’ve known each other since. . . .”
“Since forever,” Carl said. He slapped my father on the back. “We went to school together.”
My father offered Carl something to drink—beer, coffee, bottled water. Carl said thanks but he was fine. They sat in the living room area while I retreated to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. Then I perched on a stool at the counter that divides the kitchen from the dining room. I had a newspaper open in front of me, but because my father’s loft is almost entirely open (the only completely private spaces are the bathrooms, the two bedrooms, and a room that my father calls his office), I could see my father and Carl Hanover. And hear every word they were saying.
At first, it was catch-up stuff. My father asked about the ten years Carl had spent out west. Different pace out there, Carl said. Slower. Then Carl wanted to know how my mom was. “Great,” my father said. “By the way, we’re divorced.” Carl said that was too bad.
“I heard you have your own business now,” Carl added. “I’ve been hearing all about you and your dirty tricks.”
I glanced at my father, who shook his head and said he didn’t think he would go so far as to call them dirty.
“But they are tricks,” Carl said. “I heard one story about a woman who hired you to find her ex-husband and her kids. You tracked the guy to Mexico, right?”
“Right,” my father said.
“The way I heard it, you sent someone into his house, supposedly to work as a maid, and she kidnapped the kids from him and you spirited them back here. I heard the guy actually called the cops.” Carl laughed at that. “Borderline illegal,” he said. “But that’s never bothered you, has it, Mac? The end justifies the means, right?”
My father replied that the guy had given up custody of the kids, that he’d never paid a dime in child support, but that when his ex-wife wanted to remarry, he’d decided to punish her by taking the kids. All my father had done, he said, was make things right. Then he said, “How’s the insurance business treating you?”
Carl said, “I can’t complain, although I haven’t spent much time in the office lately.” My father said he had heard about Howie Maritz. Did Carl happen to know him? Carl said, no, he’d met him professionally a couple of times, that was all—and that he couldn’t imagine what would drive a man to do something like that. Then my father caught Carl off guard by asking him how fatherhood was working out for him.
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