First things first: make the call.
I press the phone against my cheek and wait while it rings. Next to me, Jessa twists her long hair between her hands, strangling it into golden knots I know she’ll regret later. Chad plops down into the lips chair, digging his sister’s old Cabbage Patch doll out from underneath him. He holds the arms out and folds the cloth fingers down so it’s giving me a thumbs-up.
A woman answers on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
I stutter, unprepared for a female voice. “Um, hi. Um, is . . . is Todd there?”
“He’s not home right now,” she says. “Can I have him call you back?”
“Is this his wife?”
“It is,” she says brightly.
I sigh internally. “Oh, sure. Just, if he could give me a call at some point tonight.” I give my number, intending to plug my phone in as soon as I get home.
There’s silence on the other end, and then, “Would that be a Sugarbrook number?” The voice is smaller now, further away.
An uncomfortable numbness starts in the back of my neck and seeps outward, into my cheeks, toward my lips. I realize I’m breathing fast. “You’re Mrs. Malachai?”
“Who is this?”
The tingling is spreading down my arms. “Not . . . not Sidonie Malachai.”
The woman clears her throat. “Yes.”
“No, but—” My fingertips are numb now, bloodlessly white around the phone.
“And who are you?”
I jab at the screen until I hit something that ends the call, then stare at the phone.
“What—”
“Jessa,” Chad cuts her off quietly. The room is so quiet, in fact, that when his phone frog-croaks in my hand, we all jump. “It’s a text,” he says, blushing.
For one crazy, panicked moment I think it must be from my mother and I punch my finger into the text bubble. It reads: Hi, you. Long day at the slopes, and sooo tired after last night. It was worth it. ;) Can’t wait to see you again! My eyes flick to the name above the message.
“It’s Pari,” I say dully, tossing Chad his phone.
He catches it easily and reads her text, and though he very considerately wipes the smile from his face almost instantly, his eyes brighten. He likes Pari and her winky-face and he likes whatever they did last night, which was tiring but worth it.
How stupid am I to think he agreed to go to prom as anything but a pity date for his little sister’s friend? Of course that’s the truth. He’s a nice guy, and I am pitiful. This whole mission to find my dad by finding my mom was pitiful. Because my mother is not troubled waters. She is not lost. She is not holed up with Dad in some secretive place while he tries to save her for the both of us, which I believed since I discovered the heart in my nightstand.
My mother is married. My mother lives in Windham. My mother has a new last name, and my dad is nowhere.
“I’m gonna go,” I manage. “Gotta charge my phone.” Without another glance at Chad in the lips chair, I grab my stuff and hurry out of the room.
Jessa follows me into the hall. “Wait, Im, was that really your—”
“Uh-huh,” I mumble, slipping into my coat and zipping it to the neck. If I’m this cold already, I might just freeze to death before I reach home.
“Well, that’s awesome!”
I turn on her. “What are you talking about?”
Jessa beams. “Im, you just talked to your mother for, like, the first time ever. You really did it, you found her! We thought she was a wreck or something, but it sounds like she’s fine. Isn’t that a good thing? Maybe now she can help us out with your dad.”
I study my friend, so cool in her skinny jeans and hot-pink one-shouldered sweater, her nails newly French manicured. My beautiful, perfect friend, with her beautiful, perfect body, surrounded by her beautiful, perfect family, in her beautiful, perfect home. While eighth-grade me was teaching myself to cook mac ’n’ cheese and trying to convince my father he couldn’t live off clove cigarettes and PBR and three a.m. infomercials, the Prices were “fine.” And god, they always will be.
I cross my legs to hide the ragged hole in the knee of my jeans. “Just do me a favor. Fuck off.”
Jessa’s lips part, then press together. “I’m trying to help you. So is Chad.”
“Like he wanted to help me out with prom? Yeah, no thanks. You shouldn’t have even told Chad, or your asshole boyfriend. That was unbelievably stupid.”
“First, we’re not even going out.” Jessa’s blue eyes ice over as she tilts her head sharply to the side. “And you’re saying I’m stupid?”
It’s too late to go back now—all my misery is boiling into this sick, hot rage that makes me want to tear down the plaster walls, smash the picture frames, shatter the chrome vases on their little tables—crash, kick, destroy, ruin. Why did I think this girl could help me? Jessa has never had to search for anyone or anything, ever. She’s never had to worry, or hope, or wonder. Any mysteries in Jessa’s life have been solved as easily as finding her missing lip gloss in the bottom of her fourth-favorite purse. I let this feeling fill me up, and it’s so much better than feeling pathetic. I shrug. “Should I say it slower?”
“You know what? Whatever.” Her face is almost calm except for one dangerously arched eyebrow. “I’m always trying to help you. I stay home from parties ’cause you’re too scared to go.”
“I’m not—”
“I totally blow off Jeremy to hang out with you so you won’t spend all your time moping. I even share my parents with you when your own dad can’t take care of you.”
“Don’t talk about my dad,” I snap, my fists clenched at my sides.
“Then don’t call me stupid.”
“You’re the dumbest dumbass in the world if you think you know anything about me or my family.”
She’s smiling now, so cold you could catch frostbite. I’ve seen this smile turned on those second-floor-bathroom girls, but never on me. Every word in her oversweet voice is like an icicle shattering on the hardwood floor. “You should probably go home, then. Lindy’s, like, a genius, right? Maybe she’ll be a better only-friend.”
So I leave. As soon as I numbly wave good-bye to Mr. Price and Dr. Van Tassel, who are busy in the kitchen, pretending they didn’t hear a word of our fight, I’m out the door and running, hot-faced, sweating through my stupid puffy coat even in the bitter, damp cold, past lit yellow windows and fancy gated lawns. I don’t stop till I’m slamming in through my own front door. I don’t even have time to shed my bag and coat before Lindy’s in my face.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I try to snap. It comes out more like a gasp, my breath shredded from the brief sprint, from force-swallowing the lump in my throat.
“Imogene,” she says desperately, following me through the living room.
“Leave me alone, Lindy,” I warn her.
“Immy, I can’t do that.” She swoops in front of me. “Something’s obviously going on with you. I know you’re scared.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I know how worried you are about your dad. Lord knows I am.” She grabs for my stiff fingers. “But I’m asking you not to shut me out. Not now, when we’re depending on each other. Josh would want us to—”
“I don’t need a fucking therapist, Lindy.” I tear my hand away. “Nobody in this house does!”
The corners of her carefully painted poppy-red lips wobble. “That’s all that I am to you?”
As Lindy’s face blurs in front of me, I can’t stop myself from saying what I know I shouldn’t say: “That’s what you are. I don’t need your stupid talks, and I don’t need you, and neither does my dad!” I reach out and push, and my thin-boned stepmother stumbles into the wall at the foot of the stairs.
Lindy’s whisper is a whip crack between us. “Please go to your room, Imogene.”
“You can’t—”
“Yes, I can. Maybe I’m not the parent you want, but I’m what you’ve got.
So go to your room.” She no longer seems on the verge of tears, and if she would look me in the eye, I suspect I’d see nothing but careful composure.
Except she won’t look at me.
Why should she? Not only am I pathetic, I’m mean. And I’m the dumbass for truly believing that just because my real mother didn’t want me, she needed saving.
But this isn’t helping me find the only person who I now know really needs me: my dad.
What I do is, once I’m safe in my room, door appropriately slammed, and I’ve flopped facedown on my faded bedspread, I imagine my heart in my chest. I imagine prying it open with a chisel and rock hammer, and once it splits down the seam I push out Lindy and Chad and Jessa, one by one. I fit the halves back together after them and tell myself I’ll learn to love the quiet they leave behind. I don’t need a stepmother, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I really don’t need a best friend.
Dad’s taught me a lot over the years: how to pick the lock on my old Civic, how to choose the best table at Subway. How to read. How to make a Bloody Mary. How to swim and how to breathe out and sink. How to find a woman with only a seventeen-year-old picture in the back of a mystery book and a bedtime story as clues—and I did that much at least.
But if there’s one thing Dad’s bad times have taught me, it’s this: I never, ever want to have anything I can’t survive without.
SIXTEEN
Wednesday morning, I wake up to a horrible raw ache—like Monday’s hangover but full-bodied—and Lindy standing over my bed.
“Where are your keys, Imogene?”
“What?” I mumble into my pillow. I slide my head up and feel something grind into my chest: the stone heart, crystal-side down on the mattress, trapped under me while I slept.
“Your keys. Car and house. Are they in your bag?” By the sound of her perfectly measured voice, she hasn’t forgiven me.
I nod once and pull the comforter over my head, watching through a peephole between the blanket and the mattress.
Going literally undercover doesn’t stop Lindy from monologuing while she roots through my bag. Keys jingle as she pries them out of the front pouch and tucks them in her blazer pocket. “I really wanted us to be a team, but things have to change around here. You’ve been running around without telling me, without asking permission, hardly checking in. You won’t talk to me at all. Phone?” she asks, and despite my silence spots my cell phone on the charger on my nightstand. She pockets that, too. “I don’t know what to do with you, Imogene. I don’t know how to convince you that I’m the parent and you’re the child.” Lindy crosses to my desk and unplugs my laptop, which she tucks beneath her arm. “I’m working late, and then I have my meeting with Officer Griffin. She wants to get together once a week, until this is all . . . over. I’m going to tell her I want us to go the media. Get this on the news and online. It’s time we face facts that your father isn’t going to drift back in and make everything all right on his own steam. I’ll be home before nine, and if you’d like to talk to me then, we’ll figure out what to do and where to go from here. You can spend the day at home, thinking about what you want to say to me.”
Though my own breath stales the air beneath the blankets, I wait until I hear Lindy leave my room, descend, and go out through the garage door. Not until I hear her car rumble to life and pull away do I come out.
I listen to the wind whistling through the cracks in the house and massage the spot below my collarbone where the stone definitely left a bruise. I remember taking it to bed with me, staring into the center of it until I fell asleep. I remember thinking maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. Maybe it never meant anything that Dad left it for me. Maybe I’ve been just as crazy as he is, thinking this was some kind of mystery I was capable of solving, when really he’s god knows where in god knows what kind of shape.
I bury myself under the blankets again. Let Lindy take everything away. Who’s left to talk to? Where is there left to go? Why even bother getting out of bed? All those times I left Dad’s room, defeated, having failed to unearth him from his sheets—maybe he was onto something.
Then I sit up as I remember the last decision I made before falling asleep: to have faith in the one thing that matters. The one thing I know.
My dad is still out there, and he needs me to do my job. To take care of him.
After that, I move slowly. First I roll out of the sheets and boil myself pink under a too-hot shower. Then I take the time to dry my hair with a clunky hand-me-down blow dryer from Lindy, so it won’t freeze around me in the cold. I even dig out my makeup bag. Usually I skim from the top layer of cake-flavored ChapStick and, if I’m feeling ambitious, my un-daring and inexpertly applied brown eyeliner. This time I dig deeper for the works, a disk of blush, and even a tube of red lipstick, a castoff from Jessa I’ve always chickened out of using. Now I trace my mouth like I’m coloring with a crayon, slowly, then smack my lips the way Jessa’s fabulous aunt Annette taught us and lean in toward the mirror.
I try to feel the way I felt in the Prices’ bathroom, preparing to track down Lillian Eugene: unstoppable, armored, badass. But in the toothpaste-spackled mirror I’m puffy-eyed and still pale, with red wax lips. Quickly I scrub my failed attempt off with a tissue.
To stand in front of the bathroom sink and stare at myself is to stop moving, so I give up and get dressed in my warmest sweater and a decent pair of jeans. I pull on my woolen socks and a fuzzy winter hat Jessa bought me two birthdays ago, the one that looks like a strawberry with a green pom-pom for the stem. Just before stuffing myself into my puffy coat, gloves, and winter boots, I do a preflight check on the contents of my bag:
Dad’s hardcover copy of A Time to Chill.
The stack of photos and the MFA brochure from Lil.
Todd Malachai’s phone number and address—56 Pines Road, Windham, Connecticut—copied over from the smudged numbers still glittering on my palm.
The leftover cash from Lindy’s envelope: $92.03, after a tank of gas and the useless prom dress, which I’m now viciously regretting.
When everything seems in order, I zip my jacket up to the collar, turn the latch on the front door, and lock myself out, into a bright winter day. There’s a loose screen I can jiggle off the track to break in through the unlatched window in the back of the house if I get home before Lindy. (And if I don’t, I’ll probably lose the privilege to close the bathroom door while I take a crap.)
Then I start walking.
It takes me forty minutes to make it the two miles to the train and bus station on East Main. The whole way my boots slip over black ice on the sidewalks, and the wind frosts my jeans to my legs so that by the time I tramp snow onto the green marble tiles of Sugarbrook station, the denim has scraped my frozen skin raw. I pull off my gloves and fumble open the zipper of my coat with clawed hands.
For another thirty-eight dollars, I buy a round-trip ticket with a last stop at a Cumberland Farms/Peter Pan bus stop in Willimantic, which the guy who rings me up assures me is a (not-so-nice) part of Windham. The bus doesn’t leave until noon and won’t get me to Willimantic until three thirty, so I plop down on a bench behind the elevated wooden platform where they put up holiday displays—a miniature cobwebbed graveyard for Halloween, a piano-size cornucopia overflowing with papier-mâché gourds and grapes and turkeys for Thanksgiving. Around Christmastime, Dad used to take me to the station every year to see the decorations. They put up a model of Sugarbrook with a toy railroad around it. Not as big as they do in Boston, but super detailed. There’s a set of palm-size, whitewashed buildings on the east and west sides of town representing Sugarbrook High and J. Jefferson Agricultural. There’s the ring of brick businesses and the Patty Linden Memorial Park, as big as a chessboard, studded with plastic paper birches, with a miniature stone fountain that really trickles water. There’s Christy Pond, an oval of rippled green glass with toy paddleboats moored at the dock. Pylons like matchsticks poke up where the old pier rotted away before I was born. A pretty accurat
e web of suburban homes spins out from the town center; there’s even a street Dad and I decided was Cedar Lane. On one end are the delicate little mansions and on the other, wee cookie-cutter houses. Though the town isn’t copied inch by inch, there’s a middle-size home in the middle of the street we declared to be our own. Pale blue instead of pale green, but with a tiny picket fence like ours. Each year, we would lean over the rope around the platform and stare into the miniature electric-lit window, watching for miniature us living out our miniature lives.
For Lindy’s First Christmas with Us (Dad referred to it in Capital Letters) he tried to get us all down to the station to see it. Except my brand-new stepmother had to work, and then we went on a painful holiday visit to magnificent Pahaquarry, New Jersey, to meet my new stepfamily. By the time we got around to Sugarbrook station it was January, and they were tearing down the town. Trees uprooted all over, polka-dotting the Astroturf with empty sockets. Blue and green wires tangling out of the dry park fountain. Paddleboats overturned on the dusty glass pond. And the houses—most were gone by then, whirled away to Oz (or the Sugarbrook station basement). I didn’t even bother peeking at mini Cedar Street.
The next year Dad got Lindy to the station on time, but I stayed out of it. This year and last, we missed it completely. By now the display is long gone. I guess they’ve just taken down their Valentine’s Day setup, because the pink glitter still speckles the platform planks.
I kill the hour-and-a-half wait by rereading A Time to Chill for the eleventy-hundredth time and plowing through vending machine packages of peanut butter crackers and mini cookies. My prom fund is rapidly depleting, though I should have plenty for a taxi from the bus stop to Todd Malachai’s and back, with cash left over. The return trip is a little shorter and I actually stand a chance of beating Lindy home, depending on how long she spends with Officer Griffin at the police station. If not, maybe I can lie and say I went to Jessa’s to make nice. I’ll probably have to add that it didn’t go so great.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 15