by Cary Fagan
“The cupboard is bare. I think it’s your turn to shop, Sid,” Mom said to Dad.
“I believe it’s actually yours, Mona.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”
“Pretty sure I’m not. Tell you what,” Dad said. “You go and shop while I replace all the burnt-out lightbulbs.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, mister.”
“I’ll cook dinner.”
“Warmer.”
“And I’ll massage your feet tonight while we watch a show of your choice.”
“Sold. And now, which one of you kids wants to keep me company?”
“No thank you, no thank you, no thank you,” George said, and then tilted his head back to bark like a dog.
“I really would, Mom,” Heather said. “But Jen is calling me in five minutes. She didn’t get the part she wanted in next year’s school musical and really needs to talk.”
Mom sighed loudly and then turned to me. Mom has a lot of looks. She has a Do you really think I’ll believe that? look. She has a Somebody better clean up that mess in two minutes look. And she has a Do you want to be the best child in the world? look.
That was the look she gave me.
“I’ll go. It sounds like such a great time.”
“That’s my little man,” she said, ruffling my hair.
We drove to the supermarket in our blue Subaru. When Dad drives, he often puts jazz on the radio. But Mom likes the classic rock station, so that she can sing at the top of her lungs and honk at slowpokes. I was relieved when we pulled into the supermarket parking lot.
Walking in, Mom chatted about the summer holidays and life felt almost normal. I pulled out a cart for us and pushed it forward, jumping up onto the back for a ride.
“Enough of that, hotshot,” she said.
I got off and began to push it like an old man. “Ach,” I groaned, “kids these days. No respect for the elderly.”
Mom laughed. “That’ll be me one day soon, and you better be nice.”
Mom old? I had never thought of that. We went down the first aisle and I said, “Can we get some cat food and feed stray cats?”
“Now you’re sounding like George.”
“You want to hear George? I’ll show you George,” I said. And then in my best little brother voice I said, “Do you think chickpeas come from chicks? How come celery isn’t pink? Can I climb that stack of toilet paper?”
“Stop it, Hartley,” Mom said, laughing harder. I hadn’t heard her really laugh for a long time and it sure felt good. I was trying to think up some more George-isms to say when I stopped the cart.
Because I saw it.
Another card.
It was sticking out from between two cereal boxes. I could even see the g.o. in the corner. I mean, how likely was it that two people with the same initials were leaving cards around Whirton?
I pulled the card out and slipped it into my back pocket, careful not to bend it. The rest of the shopping felt as if we were moving in slow motion. Now in a good mood, Mom was chatting about taking up watercolor painting again, but I hardly heard what she was saying.
“Are we almost done?” I asked.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you get into line with the cart while I pick up the last couple of things? I’ll meet you there.”
“Roger,” I said, steering the cart away.
The supermarket wasn’t too busy and I found a free cashier, a young man chewing an enormous wad of gum. He must have got a discount. When you think about it, gum is pretty weird. You chew and chew but you don’t get any nourishment, and then finally you have to spit it out. You’re actually using up energy rather than gaining any. I unloaded all our groceries and the cashier scanned and bagged them. When he finished, Mom was still nowhere to be seen. I didn’t have any money to pay. I didn’t even have a credit card. I’m pretty sure kids aren’t allowed to have credit cards, but even if they were, my parents were not the credit-card giving types.
“Sorry,” I said to the cashier. “I better go find my mom.”
“No sweat,” he said, unwrapping another stick of gum.
I went back to the aisles and looked between the first two. No mom. I looked down the next and the next. Nope. I got to the last aisle and there she was.
On her knees.
Weeping.
I ran up but then I stopped, not knowing what to do.
“Jackson,” she sobbed. “Jackson loves…loves…”
I leaned down and put my arm around her shoulders. “I know, Mom. He loves marshmallow puff cookies. Let’s take some home, okay?”
Mom couldn’t speak anymore, so she just nodded.
6
Office Supplies for Fun and Profit
Mom recovered enough to come to the cashier and pay the bill. Then together we pushed the cart to the car, loaded up the trunk, and got in.
“Want me to drive?” I said.
Mom smiled gratefully. “We don’t need to tell the others that I cried over a package of marshmallow puff cookies, do we?”
“You can buy my silence for a price. Three cookies.”
“What is it with all this bargaining? Deal.”
When we got home, George helped us unpack by making a tower out of the cans. Mom said, “Thanks, Hartley. You’re always good company.”
“Am I good company too?” George asked.
“You’re good at being tickled, you are,” Mom said and began to tickle him. George squirmed happily.
I sometimes think we treat George more like a pet than a person.
I went up to my room and turned on my desk lamp. Then I pulled the card from my pocket and put it down.
True enough, I thought. Cereal made me feel better too. So did marshmallow puff cookies.
But were corporations soul-crushing? I thought of my uncle Bill, my dad’s brother. He worked in the regional office of a giant oil corporation in Whirton. Yup, I thought, his soul definitely looked stepped on, if not actually crushed.
This g.o. was a deep thinker. Maybe even a philosopher.
Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what a philosopher did.
I opened my dresser drawer and took out the first card from under the comics. I laid the two of them side by side.
I noticed something. Maybe you already noticed, but it took me a moment.
They both had numbers in the bottom right corner.
The first had the number 1.
The second had the number 2.
That meant that g.o. was numbering the cards. It also meant that I had both. Pretty cool. Maybe there would be more.
I didn’t want them to get dirty or bent, and I wasn’t sure that they were safe enough under a bunch of comics. So I went to find Dad.
He wasn’t changing lightbulbs. He was lying on the sofa reading a magazine.
“Dad, can I have an envelope?”
“Hmm, I don’t know. We treat envelopes pretty carefully around here. Next thing I know you’ll want a postage stamp. Who knows where that will lead. A binder? A notepad? Ballpoint pens?”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Scotch tape, mechanical pencil, sticky notes?”
“Dad…”
“Three-hole punch? Duo-Tang?”
“Nobody uses that stuff anymore.”
He sat up. “Wait a minute. You’re not trying to start an office supply store, are you? Because the name Staples is already taken. You could call it Hartley’s Office Depot. Of course, there’s a lot of competition these days—”
“Never mind,” I said. “I just remembered where they are.”
“Will you sell computers? Because I could use a new one…”
Dad does like a running gag. I found an envelope in the upstairs closet, went back into my room, and slipped the cards inside it.
>
I put the envelope in the drawer and the comics on top.
Then I closed the drawer.
Then I opened the drawer again, just to check.
Then I closed it again.
7
g.o.
She wanted her room to look like a studio. So she had moved the low bedframe and the futon to the corner. Then she had put the long table under the window where it would get the most light.
The table was just an old door resting on a couple of sawhorses left over from her father’s old work. She kept it in a style that she called “organized chaos.” Three cheap paint sets, two soup cans filled with brushes, and a bunch of scissors and X-ACTO knives and glue sticks lined up in a row. At the back were piles of old magazines, books, postcards, maps, and construction paper. The floor was splattered with dried paint. She liked how that looked. It looked like a real artist’s loft in New York City or Paris or someplace like that.
Lately she had started to make these cards. She got the idea after her father gave her a bunch of file cards that he didn’t need anymore because he was putting everything on the computer. She liked their shape, liked that they were small. She could make pictures on them that were—what was the word? Modest. And so she had made a collage with pictures and words, a combination of art and poetry or something like that. Kind of like what the Dada artists did back in Europe after World War I—she’d seen a book about them in the art room in her high school.
But she wasn’t trying to imitate the Dada artists or anyone else. She wanted to find her own way. She wanted to discover what she had to say. She wasn’t going to let anyone shut her up. No matter how hard they tried.
At least that was what she told herself. She hoped that it was true.
8
The Mr. Successful Detective Agency
Before Jackson ran away, he left a note on the kitchen counter.
It was written in pencil on a paper napkin, and nobody noticed it at first because nobody realized he was gone. In fact, George had used it at lunchtime to wipe ketchup off his mouth. It was only the next day, after Jackson hadn’t slept at home, that Dad began searching around and found the napkin in the kitchen trash.
Don’t worry.
“Don’t worry?” Mom had almost shrieked when Dad showed it to her. “Don’t worry? Does he really think that two words are going to make it all right? Could he be more ridiculous? Could he be more idiotic? Could he be more stupid?”
I’d never heard Mom speak that way about any of us, and it spooked me badly. I realized later it was only because she was so scared that she said those things about him. I’m sure that she would have regretted her words if she had remembered them, but I think the emotion wiped them from her mind, along with everything else that happened that first day, because later she said that she couldn’t recall a single moment.
I don’t know if all families have one person who’s known as the difficult one, but we sure did. Things never seemed to be easy with Jackson. He was always getting into arguments with my parents about little things. There was one week when he refused to take a bath or a shower, another when he wouldn’t sit with us at the dinner table. He was erratic in his school work—that’s what the teachers always wrote on his report cards. He might spend a month on one project, creating something splendid, and then not bother to finish it. He also got into fights at school, which he would start. One was about the ownership of a banana. Although he would start it, the other kid would always finish it, and Dad would have to go to school and bring Jackson home with a swollen lip, a black eye, or a chipped tooth.
And then there were the other times he tried to run away.
The first time he was eleven. A woman came to the door and said that Jackson had stolen her son’s skateboard. Jackson denied it but then Mom found it under his bed. He was told to stay in his room, but that night he climbed out his window, jumping down into the bushes and spraining his ankle. He limped the seven blocks over to his friend Dave’s house. He told Dave that he had permission to sleep over.
That was the first time my parents called the police. I was eight and excited by the two police officers who came to the house. They had crackling walkie-talkies on their belts and black holsters and nightsticks. I got confused and thought that they wanted to arrest Jackson for stealing the skateboard. I thought they might put his picture on a Most Wanted poster. It was Dave’s parents who finally got suspicious and drove Jackson home.
The next time, Jackson was fourteen. He was gone for three days. We didn’t know why he left and for a while my mom freaked out at the idea that he might have been kidnapped. My parents called every friend and relative, and all of them came to help knock on doors and search the parks and the malls. Uncle Bill took time off work. On the third day he came home late and went down to his basement to throw a load of laundry into the machine. A figure was sleeping on the broken-down sofa. There were drops of blood on the floor, and also broken glass, because Jackson had cut his hand breaking a window to get in. Uncle Bill woke him up and took him to the hospital. He needed three stitches and a tetanus shot.
But this time was different. For one thing, Jackson wasn’t found anywhere. For another, he was now sixteen years old.
“In this jurisdiction a minor is anyone younger than sixteen,” said the police officer who came to the house. “Your son is old enough to decide where he wants to live. So his running away isn’t a police matter anymore. We can’t do anything unless he breaks the law.” She leaned forward a little. “Now, if he took something from you without permission—then we could do something. Did he maybe take some money when he left?”
I saw my parents exchange looks and knew instantly that Jackson had taken money. I got scared, thinking that my parents would turn him in and he’d be arrested.
Dad said, “No, officer, he didn’t take anything.”
Since the police wouldn’t help, we had to work harder to look for him ourselves. My parents sent an email out for volunteers and a small army came out. We knocked on every door for twenty blocks around. We put posters up in every store, restaurant, and on lampposts too, so that everywhere I went I saw the photograph of my smiling brother looking back at me.
My parents phoned every teen drop-in center in the country that they could find. They phoned every week. And when that didn’t work, they hired a private detective. From the Mr. Successful Detective Agency.
I kid you not.
His real name, he told us, had been Arthur Sousa, but he had legally changed it. “I want people to know that I’m going to be successful as soon as they hear my name,” he said. “And I’ll be successful in finding your son. Trust me, I’m the best in the business.”
Mr. Successful found an accountant in Philadelphia named Jackson Staples, a ninety-three-year-old nursing-home resident in Calgary named Jake Staples, and a seven-year-old baton twirler in New Orleans named Jackie Staples. But he didn’t find my brother.
My parents fired Mr. Successful.
Months went by. My parents kept making phone calls, kept handing out flyers. They hired another private detective. They took unpaid leaves from work to keep searching. They missed our teacher-parent interviews. They forgot to make dinner.
They missed my birthday.
They missed my birthday because the new private detective suspected that Jackson was going under an assumed name and living at a YMCA in Montreal. My parents couldn’t afford the airfare because they had taken so much time off work, so they got in the car and started driving.
“Heather, you’re in charge!” Mom shouted through the open window as they drove off.
Heather, in one of the few nice things she’s ever tried to do for me, bought a Betty Crocker cake mix to make me a birthday cake. It didn’t come out right because she put in too much milk, or used the wrong oven temperature, or something. It came out more like cake soup. We ate it with spoons.
Jackson wasn’t at a YMCA in Montreal. After they came home, my parents asked me and Heather and George to sit down in the living room for a talk.
George thought this was a good time to pretend to fall off the sofa.
“That’s enough, George,” Mom said. “We know how hard this has been on you kids. Maybe even harder than it is on me and Dad.”
“You have no idea,” Heather said.
“We want you to know that we’re going to keep looking for Jackson,” Dad continued. “But we also think that this family has to move on. We can’t let everything fall apart. We have to have regular meals and go on regular outings and have a regular life.”
“That’s right,” Mom said. “We need to be a family that eats together and goes out together and has a good time together.”
“And that means doing something fun every weekend,” Dad said.
“But what if I don’t want to do something fun?” Heather asked.
Mom gave Heather her Please don’t disappoint me look. “We mean everyone. You’ll still have time to see your friends.”
“I think it’s a great idea,” I said. I wanted to make my parents feel better.
“And I think you’re the world’s biggest suck-up,” said Heather.
9
Leaning Bear
“Rise and shine! Up and at ‘em!”
A loud knocking on my door. I buried my face in my pillow. Usually I love getting up early on Saturday morning, but the first thing I thought about on waking was that I still needed a subject for my final project. I put my pillow over my head.
“Come on, Hartley!” Dad called. “You have to set an example here.”
“All right, all right,” I groaned, unburying myself.