Even Now

by Karen Kingsbury

  So be it. She’d use this day to get through the box. Just in case something vital lay hidden. She’d already gone through a third of the contents. Most of it she’d stacked along the far wall, out of the way so nothing would be bumped or kicked or stepped on. Now she lifted another photo album from the box and scanned it. She could come back and savor it later.

  Two more smaller photo albums were next, and then she found another journal. Again she skimmed, though anything her mother had written had far more potential for holding a clue of some sort. Maybe mention of a favorite place where she and Lauren’s dad wanted to live when they were older, or something she’d always wanted to do, a place where she wanted to work. Anything that would shine a light on a trail, no matter how narrow that trail might be.

  “Come on, Mom, show me something.”

  More framed photos and a stack of yearbooks were next. It was all Emily could do to pass over them, to place them in another stack by her wall until later. But the minute she removed the last yearbook, she felt her mouth fall open. A slight gasp escaped her as she reached into the bottom of the carton.

  Notebooks.

  One after another. Emily’s heart raced. These had to be the notebooks her grandma had told her about. The journals held no short stories, so maybe they were here in the notebooks. The ones her mother was always writing in.

  A chill ran down Emily’s back as she lifted the stack of them — maybe twenty in all — and placed them on her bed. They wouldn’t be journals. Her mother seemed to like journaling in hardback books with lined paper and pretty covers. These were simple, ordinary spiral notebooks. She opened the first one and scanned the front page. Half of it was taken up by oversized handwritten letters that read:

  The Greatest Walk

  by Lauren Gibbs

  Emily frowned and ran her thumb over the words. It was indeed a short story, but who was Lauren Gibbs? If her mother wrote these stories, then why had she used a different last name? Whose last name was it, anyway? She let her eyes move down the page to the beginning of the story.

  A sidewalk can be many things to many people. But for Rudy Johnson, in the summer of 1985, the sidewalk was his path to freedom . . .

  Emily flipped the pages, one at a time. The story went on for half the notebook. She turned back to the beginning and studied the title page again. Lauren Gibbs? Had a cousin or a friend of her mother’s written the story? Emily’s eyes narrowed. The story was written by hand, so all she had to do was compare handwriting styles.

  She jumped to her feet and grabbed one of her mother’s journals from the floor. In a rush she opened the journal, laying it side by side with the notebook. She compared the printing styles, then the cursive. Both had y’s that dropped low on the line and i’s with tiny circles where the dot should be. It didn’t take a detective to see that the writing was from the same person. No question about it. Her mother wrote the short story.

  So where did Lauren Gibbs come from?

  Emily checked the back of the notebook for more stories, details, anything. It was empty, so she set it to the side and opened the second notebook. The title area on the first page read:

  A Summer Sunset

  by Lauren Gibbs

  Emily’s heart began to pound. Whatever it was with Gibbs, her mother hadn’t merely pretended to be someone else for a single story. She sifted through the entire stack, checking the first page of each notebook. When she was finished, there were goose bumps on her arms.

  Every single one was written by Lauren Gibbs.

  She swallowed hard and straightened the stack. The name was worth asking about, at least. She was about to stand up and go find her grandparents when something else caught her attention. On the front of one of the notebooks, her mom had scribbled this:

  Lauren Anderson loves Shane Galanter.

  Only something looked different about it. Emily stared at the sentence for nearly three minutes before it finally hither. She had always spelled her father’s name Galenter. She’d never asked her grandparents, not when their conversations about the past were almost entirely taken up by questions about her mother. Somewhere along the years she must’ve seen her dad’s name scribbled somewhere and assumed she was reading an e where an a should’ve been.

  A fountain of possibility welled within her. She raced to her door, flung it open — and hesitated. It was just past three and the house was quiet. She tiptoed down the stairs and peeked into her grandparents’ room. They were both on the bed, still sleeping. She could ask them about the spelling later. She zipped back up the stairs and went into the office, the room that used to belong to her mother.

  She flicked on the computer, pulled out the chair, and sat down. “Hurry,” she ordered it. “Warm up, already.” Her eyes stayed glued to the screen while she massaged her calves. They were still sore from the soccer game the other day, a reminder that she needed to get out and jog. But she couldn’t think clearly about anything — not even breathing — until she at least ran a check.

  She’d have to ask her grandma about the Lauren Gibbs thing. Maybe there was a family member who had that name, or a friend out in California. It was the best clue in the entire box, and even then it might be nothing. But her father’s name? That was huge. Now that she knew the right spelling, she couldn’t wait to Google it.

  The computer was up and ready. Next she signed onto the Internet and waited. Her grandparents had a blazing fast connection, and she was online in seconds. She found the search line and took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes.” Her father’s name was familiar to her, because she’d typed it into a search engine hundreds of times, easily, before she finally gave up. But now . . .

  Once more she typed in S-h-a-n-e G-a-l-e-n-t-e-r, just in cased she’d missed something all these years.

  The results came up instantly and there in the top corner it said . . .

  Her mouth hung open. How come she hadn’t seen it before? At the top of the page it read, “Did you mean: Shane Galanter?”

  She exhaled hard and exaggerated. “Yes. I meant that, okay?” She clicked the link beneath the correct spelling of his name. Another list came up and Emily felt her heart in her throat. Somewhere in this list of possibilities might lie the information that would lead her to her father. She scanned the few lines of details for the first four websites. Shane Galanter wasn’t exactly a common name, but still there were a few hundred entries. The first one was for a Shane Galanter, president of a pest control company.

  “Pest control?” Emily wrinkled her nose. “You wouldn’t be doing pest control, would you, Dad?” She clicked the link and a home page covered with spiders filled the screen. Once every few seconds a cockroach scurried across the page. Emily shuddered. Bugs were the worst. But where was a picture of this Shane Galanter who owned the company?

  She scanned the page and near the top she saw a link that said “Contact Me.”

  “Okay, I will.” She clicked the words and another page popped up. This one had the smiling face of a black man. Next to the photo it said, “Shane Galanter has what you need for pest control!”

  Emily blew at a piece of her dark hair. “One down.”

  She hit the back button and returned to the list of websites. One was a playwright, with a photo of a white-haired man in his seventies. Emily returned to the list once more. “Two down.”

  The next Shane Galanter ran track at Azusa Pacific University. Just for fun, she clicked the link and found his picture. “Hmm.” She raised an eyebrow at the online photo. “You’re cute, but you’re not my dad.”

  The fourth website had the words Top Gunfight instructor next to Shane Galanter. Emily angled her head. “Interesting . . . ” She clicked the link, but this time there was no photograph. The page was a listing of personnel at a naval air base outside Reno, Nevada. She clicked the link and read a few paragraphs. In the late 1990s, the Top Gun fighter pilot training academy moved to Nevada, but it was still called Top Gun. Like the old 1980s movie.

  Was her dad
an instructor for fighter pilots? Her grandma had said he came from a wealthy family, a family involved in banking and investments. Papa said Shane’s parents had plans for him to be a businessman. Most likely that’s what he had become. She grabbed a pad of paper and scribbled down the information.

  She went back to the list of search results again and found a few more possibilities. One Shane Galanter managed a grocery store in Utah, and another served as president of the Boys and Girls Club in Portland, Oregon. She wrote down the details for both, and for one more: a Shane Galanter selling insurance in Riverside, California.

  “Perfect!” She stared at her list of details. “One in California!”

  The hope inside her doubled. It was Sunday, and with so few Shane Galanters, she could start making phone calls in the morning. Her dad was thirty-six, just like her mom. And she could describe him over the phone or fax a photo if she had to. She looked out the window at the setting sun. Morning couldn’t come fast enough.

  From downstairs, she heard her grandparents up and moving around. She was on her feet instantly, racing out the room and headed for them. “Grandma! Papa!” Her stocking feet slipped and she nearly lost her balance as she rounded the corner into the kitchen. Adrenaline poured through her body, leaving her out of breath by the time she anchored herself at the kitchen counter and looked from one of them to the other. “I found something.”

  “You did?” Her grandma was putting a tray of leftover turkey into the oven. Even cold, the smell filled the kitchen. “What’d you find?”

  Emily ran her tongue over her lips. Her throat was dry. She looked at her grandpa and then shifted her eyes to her grandma again. “What do you know about the name Lauren Gibbs?”

  Her grandma frowned, and her grandpa’s expression went slack. He spoke first. “Never heard of her.”

  Emily’s hope leaked from her soul like air from a punctured tire. “Never?”

  “Me neither.” Her grandma pulled a serving fork from the drawer in the island and set it on the counter. “Where’d you see that, sweetheart? Was it something your mother wrote about?”

  She pulled out one of the bar stools and sat down. “It was the name she wrote all her short stories under.” Emily used her hands to show the size of the stack of notebooks she’d looked through. “Mom had tons of short stories, Grandma.” She looked at her grandpa. “Every one of them has a title and under that it says, ‘By Lauren Gibbs.’ ”

  “Lauren Gibbs?” Her grandma stopped moving and wrinkled her nose. “Why in the world would she do that?”

  “Wait a minute.” At the other side of the kitchen, her grandpa leaned against the refrigerator and waved a finger in the air. He looked at the two of them, one at a time. “Angie, you remember that book Lauren read when she was, I don’t know, maybe twelve or thirteen?”

  Her grandma released a single baffled laugh. “Honey, I didn’t keep track of the books Lauren read. Besides — ” she took as tack of plates from the cupboard — “that was twenty-three years ago.”

  “I know, but I remember her telling me about it. At least . . . I think I do.” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he was trying to take himself back to that time, to remember every detail. When he blinked open, his eyes were brighter. “Yes, I remember exactly. It was one of her favorites. Every few nights she’d come find me and read a chapter out loud.” He looked at his wife. “Remember?One of the characters in that book was Lauren Gibbs.”

  “Really?” Emily felt the thrill of discovery course through her again. She crossed the kitchen and pulled a series of salads and side dishes out of the fridge. There were six in all, and she set them on the counter opposite the oven.

  “It doesn’t sound even a little familiar.” Her grandma slid the green bean casserole into the microwave. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned to her husband. “Did Lauren say something about it?”

  “Yes.” He punctuated the air in front of him. “I remember now. She told me she loved the name Lauren Gibbs. She liked something about the character, I guess. I remember her saying something about being that way when she grew up.”

  “So what was the book, Papa?” Emily went to him, her eyes wide as she searched his. “Maybe that’d give us another clue.”

  He squinted at nothing in particular and waited for several seconds. Then he shook his head and looked at her. “I can’t remember.”

  Emily didn’t care. At least it was something to go on. Then there was her father’s name, the way it was supposed to be spelled. Over dinner she told them about the Shane Galanters detailed on the website.

  “A flight instructor?” Her grandma set her fork down. “What was the other one?”

  “An insurance guy from California.”

  “I’d put money on the insurance guy, if it’s either of them.” Papa looked tired. His words lacked the energy they’d held even half an hour earlier. “Samuel Galanter’s son wouldn’t have joined the navy. Not with the business plans that man had for his son.”

  “I’d have to agree.” Her grandmother gave Emily a guarded smile. “But sweetheart, you need to be realistic. There’s no reason Shane’s name has to be on the Internet. You know that, right?”

  “Yes.” Emily looked at her nearly full plate. She was far too excited to think about eating. Her eyes found her grandma’s again. “It’s a long shot.” She smiled. “But that’s what a miracle is, right?”

  “Right.” Her grandma’s expression softened. “I guess maybe it’s time I believed in long shots too.”

  That night, after they’d watched a movie and talked a little bit more about her papa’s cancer, Emily turned in early. She lay in her bed staring at the ceiling, willing the clock to speed past the hours so she could start checking out the Shane Galanters on her list. But that wasn’t what filled her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother and the book she’d told Papa about, and how she’d been crazy about the name Lauren Gibbs. Crazy enough to use it as her pen name for every one of her short stories.

  “God — ” she turned onto her side so she could see out the window — “there has to be something in that box besides a bunch of short stories, doesn’t there? Can you help me find what I need?Please?” She thought about her grandpa and the battle that had just begun. “I don’t have much time, Lord.”

  Usually when she talked to God, a peace filled her from the inside out. That was true this time, also, but there was something else. An urging grew within her . . . as if she’d stumbled onto something important.

  Now all she had to figure out was what, exactly, it was.

  EIGHTEEN

  The orphanage story turned out to be more than a sentimental feature.

  On Lauren’s first visit to the badly damaged building, where a hundred children were housed, she assumed the story was obvious. Capture a detailed look at the children orphaned by war, make it heartfelt, and get it in before her Friday deadline. The feature part of the story had gone as anticipated, and the staff at the New York office was thrilled with the piece.

  “This story would make a right-winger do an about-face,” her editor told her. “It’s a five-hanky read for sure.”

  That would’ve been enough, especially combined with the amazing photo-essay Scanlon pulled together during their day with the children. But during lunch, one of the workers carrying a water pitcher came up and whispered something in her ear.

  “Some of the babies are American.”

  Then the worker looked around, her eyes darting about as if she could be in danger for what she’d just said. “They were fathered by American soldiers.”

  Lauren wanted to react, but she kept cool. She smiled and pointed to her sandwich and nodded, as if the woman’s comment had something to do with the food on her plate. Then she whispered, “I’ll meet you outside in five minutes.”

  The woman refilled Lauren’s water, nodded, then moved on down the line. At the right time, Lauren excused herself from the table and found Scanlon. “I’ll be right back.”

&nb
sp; “Where’re you going?” He looked nervous. For the past eighteen months he’d taken on the unspoken role of bodyguard for her. She was an easy American target because of her pale blonde hair and her involvement in every facet of life in Afghanistan. Her editors had warned her about being alone, since Westerners were still often the focus of kidnappings for ransom or political favors.

  “I’ll be fine.” She nodded to the courtyard outside the orphanage. “One of the workers needs to talk to me.”

  Scanlon arched a brow, then shifted from one foot to the other and adjusted his camera. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

  “Okay.” She squeezed his shoulder and gave him a quick grin. Then she worked her way through the main room, stopping to chat with three children. When she reached the door, she stretched and drew a deep breath. She looked around — no one seemed to be watching her. Once outside, she spotted the worker near a broken brick wall. The wind was howling, and the woman had a veil over her nose and mouth. She still had the water pitcher in her hand, and Lauren realized she was standing near a leaky tap. Lauren went to her, glancing over her shoulder to make sure they were alone.

  “This big,” the woman said in broken English. “Your people say Americans here help us.” She nodded. “Some yes. Some no. Some sleep with our women and make babies.” She pointed back to the orphanage. “American babies have no place here. No one wants them.”

  Lauren was horrified. Why hadn’t the idea occurred to her before? There were thousands of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them men. Of course some of them must be having their way with the local women. They probably figured it was one way to spend a weekend. No doubt some of the women were willing parties to that sort of carousing. But until now it hadn’t occurred to her that those women might’ve gotten pregnant.