The ticket’s another twenty-five dollars out of my fake-prom fund, and the train ride will probably be another ten dollars, which leaves me twenty-three dollars to flag a taxi to the island, and not nearly enough to get back home again. I’d better be right.
Because the next bus doesn’t leave till eight thirty, I’ve got plenty of time to sit on a bench outside the Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk and ponder the trouble I’m heaping on myself. Even if I can pull this off, I almost definitely shouldn’t. Lindy will think I’ve run away like Dad. It isn’t right to do that to her.
There’s still the nonrefundable, nonexchangeable return ticket I bought earlier that day that is set to take me from here to Framingham to Sugarbrook, though there’s little chance that I could get home before Lindy. She’ll be beyond furious that I left the house while grounded—correction, left the state while grounded. I’ll be spending lunchtime in her office until I’m eating mashed bananas with dentures.
Risking my prime spot on the bench, I hustle over to the trash can and stuff my Sugarbrook ticket inside. With that decision symbolically made, I start rehearsing my speech for Dad, hoping I get the chance to make it tonight.
Mostly, trains are great. I’ve taken the rail lots of times with Dad, because it’s even cheaper than parking in Boston, and often quicker than driving alongside Massholes at rush hour. The ride is even kind of peaceful. You can sit back and watch the trees blur by, and the fields, and the lakes like big silver coins. Trains are reliable and punctual; if the schedule says you’ll be at Yawkey at 5:55 p.m., you’ll probably be swimming upstream through the sweaty, noisy, beery crowds outside Fenway by six.
Except when it’s really hot, and they slow the trains way down so the heat won’t swell the steel and make the tracks all squiggly. Then again, they sometimes run late when it rains and an important patch of track floods, so everything has to shuffle around the water. And of course, there are delays when a conductor’s out sick, or when a passenger falls down in the tiny bathroom and the whole line backs up for a medical emergency.
And when it’s been snowing steadily all day, with six more inches set to fall before the weather clears in the early morning? Sometimes the trains stop completely.
I watch the big electronic boards at North Station flash CANCELED, CANCELED, CANCELED down the list. Most unfortunately, among them is the 10:40 train on the Newburyport/Rockport line, the last one that stops in Newburyport until the 6:30 a.m. train.
Dropping down on a bench far away from the drafty track doors, I look out on the flotsam of stranded people. There’s a lot of frantic phone-calling, probably to best friends or parents or boyfriends. Some are stretching out on benches and in corners, buried deep inside the hoods of their coats, using backpacks as pillows. None of my (admittedly wobbly) plans involved spending the night in a big city train station. Even as I watch, it’s clearing out, two Dunkin’ Donuts and the Crazy Dough Pizza stand closed, McDonald’s closing, stranded passengers flushing back out into the snow. I pull my bag into my lap and hug my knees to my chest. This is just the latest of at least a dozen rules I’ve broken in the What Girls Shouldn’t Do Ever handbook. Still, I rip off my strawberry hat, pull up my hood, and settle in for a long night. It’s just like sleeping in an airport, I tell myself, except slightly stupider.
Of course, I could still head to the payphone bank and call my stepmother to come get me. She’ll never let me go to Victory Island, but I can convince her to call Officer Griffin. The police can find Dad; he could be home with us tomorrow night, everything put back the way it was.
And everything I have to say to him will have waited until I’ve lost the guts to say it, so it will never get said. We’ll go on the same way we have been, till the next bad time.
I bury my hands in my pockets. Knocking past the geode, my fingertips find the greasy metal of the hotel room key. Sidonie gave it to me before I left Windham; I told her I wanted it, and she didn’t complain.
The plain little key is light in my palm, with a yellowed plastic tag dangling from the cap. The Tiki Motel, it reads in swirly font. A silly, Hawaiian-themed motel that might be closed and condemned, for all I know. Maybe Dad’s in a Super 8 somewhere along the shore. Or Dad isn’t at Victory Island at all. Maybe he’s waiting on a bench by a random duck pond in Malden. Or, Jesus, Miami Beach.
But no. Joshua Zhi Scott, after all, is a connect-the-dots, picture-in-the-stars kind of guy.
“Now arriving at . . . Newburyport,” the pleasant, prerecorded voice over the train speakers wakes me up early on Thursday morning. Flinching in the glare of the just-risen sun, I slide upright against the cold window, toweling drool off my chin with my coat sleeve. Classy, Imogene. Pulling my gloves on, I squeeze down the aisle and spill out the doors onto the vaguely familiar concrete platform. A handful of shivering passengers shove roughly past me to get inside. I’m dead tired and hungry and cold, but I don’t blame them. At least the snow has passed and the blue-gray sky is clear over the deserted parking lots that sandwich the platform.
Lindy must be awake in Sugarbrook—according to the train schedule, it’s got to be seven thirty—but then again, I doubt she went to bed last night. She’s going to slaughter me when I find my way home. I’ve broken so many rules, girl-specific and otherwise, that I wouldn’t put it past her to have me homeschooled till graduation. Maybe home-colleged after that.
I pick my way across the messy sidewalks out onto Boston Way, where a few taxis idle. I knock on one window and ask if twenty bucks will get me to Victory Island. It will.
The lobby of the Tiki Motel is surprisingly spacious, but the brown-speckled carpeting and flowered yellow wallpaper aren’t exactly elegant. Sidonie was right; the décor is a laugh. Over the front desk is a fake thatched roof, fake tropical birds pinned in the plastic straws. Artwork hangs on the walls, pictures of the sea in every size and color frame. I’m no expert—no assistant to the curator of prints and drawings—but none of it is museum quality. Except for one familiar print by the luggage cart. Small fishermen in a small boat on inky waters. A wistful dream of plentiful food. It seems unlikely that the place hasn’t been remodeled in seventeen years, but my mother did say she knew straightaway that this was the place for them.
All of a sudden, it’s depressing that this ridiculous tourist trap, which once meant so much to my parents and, I’m hoping, still means so much to Dad, never crossed her mind, not even after she heard his message. She really did leave us in the past.
The front desk clerk has his back to me, rooting around under the desk, and hasn’t seen me yet. Betting he won’t give out a guest’s room number to just any uncombed teenager, I duck down a short hallway to my left, past the elevator and to the vending machine humming away at the end. Kicking off my boots and peeling off my coat, gloves, and hat, I stuff them and my bag into the corner beside the machine. With the last few coins in the bottom of my pocket I buy a Coke. I turn and survey my reflection in the tarnished gold doors, cloudy with handprints. I’m a static-haired, red-eyed mess, but it could work for me.
Shuffling out into the lobby in my socks, I call out, “Hi, um, excuse me?”
The clerk turns slowly. He looks exhausted. Probably worked the nightshift and won’t be relieved till nine or so. Hopefully he won’t give three craps about protocol this late in his shift.
“So, I locked myself out of my room?” I shrug and smile at him, channeling my inner Jessa. “I woke up and, like, came down to get a soda, but I forgot I lost my key card yesterday? And my dad’s not answering the door? I think he’s in the shower, maybe?”
“What room?” the clerk mutters, crossing to his computer.
“Umm . . . oh my god, I should totally know this. One forty? Or one fourteen? It’s under Joshua Scott. He’s my dad.”
His fingers skate across the keyboard. “Sorry, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Are you sure?”
More clicks of the keys, and a sigh. “No, it doesn’t look like it.” Now he’s peering o
ver the monitor at me, perhaps trying to remember if he’s seen me check in.
Black panic coils up around me. What if, what if, what if . . .
“Or”—I suck in my breath—“could it be under my . . . other dad’s name? Miles Faye? He could’ve, like, booked the room for us.”
I wait for the clerk to wave me off, but he doesn’t. “I’ve got a Miles Faye in room two fifty-six.”
Oh thank god. I slap my forehead with my free hand. “I am such a flake. That’s totally it.”
“I’m guessing you’ll want a spare key?”
“That would be amazing,” I gush, collecting the key card from him after he feeds it through a little machine on the desk. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I grin as brightly as possible and walk away, casually sipping my Coke.
Jessa would be proud, I think.
Back at the elevators I drain the soda—I could use the caffeine—and collect my things. I ride up to the narrow corridor of the second floor, where the wallpaper is the red-orange of a bright, bloody sunset. Just around the corner is room 256. A dull orange door like every door, except not. The key card is in my sweat-slick hand, but I’m afraid to use it.
I think it’s like this: as long as you don’t turn the last page in a book, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. You can have faith the good guys will win, the clearly identifiable bad guys will lose, and everyone will go home and eat Spicy Italians on flatbread on their cheerfully dumpy living room sofa. I’m not living in a sunshiny state of delusion. I know this is real life, not some story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie or Rex Stout. Whatever’s in room 256 will be in the room, whether I open the door or not.
But I am so fucking scared to turn the page.
When the key card slot blips green, I ease the handle down, peering into the dark behind the door. A wall of stale heat and the pretentious sweet-spicy smell of Djarum Blacks break over me.
Carefully, I make my way across the cluttered floor, to the single bed where a long lump under the sheets is illuminated in the slice of hallway light, and steady my voice.
“It’s time to get up, Dad.”
While my father splashes water on himself in the bathroom, I poke the toe of my boot through the debris of empty beer cans and fast-food delivery cartons covering the carpet. There are a lot more cans than cartons, but at least he’s been eating. I’m reminded by my percolating stomach that I haven’t, and none of the half-full boxes of rice or feebly rewrapped burgers look farm fresh. I sniff one—which has recently pulled double duty as an ashtray—then carefully pat the wrapper back in place.
He emerges in a dingy T-shirt and his old pinch-kneed sweatpants. He blinks in the lamplight, and I wonder where his glasses are. His black hair is wild and sopping. Droplets trickle through the dark scruff shadowing his cheeks and chin. As he stands there unshaven in sports-themed loungewear, reeking of clove cigarettes, it could almost be funny, except for how thin and grayish-pale and crumpled Dad looks, and how he eyes the covers like he’d love nothing more than to slip back under them and sleep.
To stop this from happening, I sit stiffly on the bed, fisting my hands in the papery brown sheets. I’ve been waiting for this moment, and now I don’t know how to start.
Surprisingly, Dad does. “What are you doing here, Imogene.” It’s not even a question. More like a line in a script he has to read, instead of a topic of actual curiosity.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? I followed you. The clues you left me.”
He stares at me, almost-black eyes blank.
I dig through my bag, dumped at the foot of the bed, and pull out the heart. “You left this for me, didn’t you? To tell me where you’d gone? To tell me where I could find you?”
The longer the silence drags on, the more stupid my words sound echoing in my own ears.
“If you didn’t want me to look for you, then why did you give me the heart?”
His hand rasps against thick stubble as he drags it down his face. “I don’t know.”
“You have to! You’re the grown-up! Isn’t it, like, your job to know what you’re doing?”
Shrinking down onto the bed, he shuts his eyes. “Maybe—I just wanted you to have something from me.”
“Why?” I ask, cold and quiet. “How long were you planning on being gone?”
He doesn’t answer.
The blood is sort of fuzzing out of my brain and toes and fingers, so I can barely feel the roughness of the stone, or the sharpness of the crystals. Just a solid, unknowable weight. “I’m your daughter. Lindy is your wife. We were pretty much falling apart. And this is what you were gonna leave us with?” I hold it up for him to see.
Dad winces.
With all my strength I hurl the thing across the room, against the wall. It dings the plaster and tiny chips of rock fly, but the geode rebounds and thumps to the floor, intact. “This is nothing!” I shriek. “It’s a stupid fucking rock!”
“Imogene, stop!” he cries.
But I don’t. I stomp on it with my winter boot, and it only grinds into the thin carpet. “It’s a story! It isn’t Mom and it isn’t you and it doesn’t mean shit! So I don’t want it!” I don’t even look so much as feel around the room for something heavy. I land on the squat brass lamp on the bedside table and heft it, knocking off the shade and lightbulb in one swipe.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” Dad protests.
With shaking hands I raise the lamp to bring the base down on the stone as hard as I can. There’s a sound like splintering bone, and it caves. Furiously, I kick at the shards. Bits of crunched crystal and pulverized stone scatter across the carpet. I bring the lamp up again, but a sweaty band of strong fingers closes around my wrist.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he hushes, like he’s a father and I’m a newborn. Sitting back on the bed, Dad drops his head into his hands. “Uhssry,” he mumbles.
“Huh?”
He lifts his chin. “I said I’m sorry.”
“Good. So . . .” I set the lamp down and rub my palms on my pants legs. “Good.” Joining him on the bed, I sit still for a minute before tipping my head against his shoulder, my nose squashed against his chest. He hesitates, then slings his arm around me, which puts this scratchy feeling in my throat.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
Slowly he reaches into the pocket of sweatpants I’m positive he’s been wearing for a longer stretch of time than is appropriate. He pulls out a piece of paper, one that’s clearly been folded and unfolded and refolded times infinity until the creases have become needle-sharp, and hands it to me.
On it is a printed photo of my mother, of Sidonie Malachai, outside her peach-colored condo on Pines Road. It doesn’t look like she knows her picture’s being taken. Below it, a pageful of information is typed out—phone number, address, the name of the law firm she works for. Her husband’s name.
“Last month I hired this PI,” he says. “Guy I’ve consulted for my books a few times. Good at his job.”
I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry. “You’re telling me you hired a detective? Like, paid some other guy to track Mom down?” I remember one of the few facts of Dad’s disappearance. “What did it cost, fifteen hundred dollars?”
“Almost.” He stares at my mother’s picture while he speaks. “How did you find me?”
“Hard fucking work, and no cheating, that’s how!”
“Don’t swear, Imogene.”
“What are you gonna do, send me to my hotel room?” But I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I press myself tighter against him and give him the short version.
Maybe I’m looking for a little admiration, a little Boy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I don’t get it. “You shouldn’t waste your life trying to save me,” he says, and sighs. “I never wanted that. You don’t deserve this.”
“I mean, I’m on school vacation, so there’s that. And I did other stuff. I slept over Jessa’s. Played video games. Lost my prom
date.”
He jerks backward. “You have a prom date?”
“No.” I smile tightly into his shoulder. “Keep up.” We’re quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room the out-of-beat percussion of the old heating system pumping out rusty-smelling air, and then I take a deep breath of cigarettes and unwashed Dad and ask, “Why did you need to see Mom so bad? You have me. And Lindy. We’re not enough?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says dully. “I was scared. Your mother . . . she always got to me. I’d be going along just fine, and then I’d look at the calendar and it’d be her birthday, or I’d pass a store and see her favorite color in the window. I’m not saying all the bad times were about her, but remembering her . . . it could get me down. And our anniversary was coming up, but I’d been so good for so long. With you, and with your stepmother. I thought if I could know about Sid, if she could stop being this question mark, if I could just know, then I would be all right. Officially, once and for all. I hired the PI, and then I knew what I knew, what I never quite expected, that she was married and happy, and I kept waiting for the crash. But it didn’t come.”
“That’s a good thing, right? But . . . Dad, you seem a little . . . crashed.”
He nods. “I wasn’t, though. Not at first. Then I wondered, what if these aren’t my real feelings? What if it’s all just medication, and how would I know? Shouldn’t I be feeling this? I thought that would be the real test.”
“You stopped taking your meds,” I guess. “Okay, I don’t get it. Were you afraid you were going to crash, or afraid you weren’t?”
Dad drops his head back into his hands. “Both. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know you don’t get it. I don’t know how anyone could, if they haven’t been through it.”
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 18