If You Find This

by Matthew Baker

  Strips of maroon wallpaper hung from the walls, like bark peeling from a tree.

  “This must have been a bedroom,” I(mezzo-piano) said.

  “Once,” Zeke(mezzo-forte) said.

  We (forte)stomped downstairs. The grandfathers had vanished. Jordan was sitting cross-legged on the fireplace, eating a can of peas.

  “Didn’t you say you were grounded?” I (forte)said.

  “So?” Jordan(fermata) said.

  Both sides of the staircase were wallpapered with a faded pattern of bluish vines. Zeke studied the blueprint, paced along the staircase running his fingers across the wallpaper, found the edges of the door buried there. I took my knife, cut into the wall, (mezzo-forte)sawed the outline of the door. We (mezzo-piano)tore the wallpaper from the handle. Jordan was watching us, had stopped chewing.

  “Ready?” Zeke(piano) said.

  We gripped the handle. Zeke nodded. We heaved.

  The door budged, stopped.

  “Weak!” Jordan (forte)called.

  We gripped the handle with both hands. Zeke nodded again. We heaved.

  The door shot open, black dust flew at our faces, a broom (forte)clunked to the floor.

  Jordan was dying (fortissimo)laughing.

  “The heirloom was a broom?” Jordan (forte)laughed, knuckling tears from his eyes.

  We dug through the room under the staircase. Aside from empty barrels, mildewed curtains, and another broom, the room was empty.

  “Let’s try the crawlspace,” Zeke(piano) muttered.

  We wiped the dust from our faces. Zeke got the lantern. We hopped through the window onto the porch. Grandpa Rose was perched on a stool there, surrounded by a circle of white hair. Grandpa Dykhouse was standing behind the stool, (mezzo-piano)snipping hair with metal scissors. Jordan wandered onto the porch, through the doorway, his hands on his hips.

  “King Gunga, you can cut hair?” Jordan (forte)said.

  Grandpa Dykhouse was the sort of grandfather who had a totally silent laugh.

  “We never spent money on barbershops, when your mom was younger. Once a month, it was me who cut her hair. She hated it, but it was fun for me,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

  Grandpa Rose (piano)muttered something about poorhouses, confused still.

  We rounded the porch, studied the blueprint, tore at the wall of weeds. We found the entrance to the crawlspace. Jordan wandered around the porch. He frowned. He (mezzo-piano)sniffed.

  “Boylover, are you wearing perfume?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “One squirt,” Zeke (forte)said.

  “Listen, just keep your hands to yourself. You try to kiss me, I’ll drown you in the well,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “Kiss?” Zeke (fermata)said.

  “Isn’t that what you do? Kiss boys?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “Only ones I think are cute, and only boys who like boys too,” Zeke (forte)said.

  “Little Isaac doesn’t like boys,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “He pretends he doesn’t,” Zeke (forte)said.

  “Little Isaac hates you for kissing him,” Jordan (forte)said.

  Zeke(mezzo-piano) lit a match, cupped a hand around the flame, lit the lantern. Sunlight flashed across the silver mermaids on his arms. He crawled into the crawlspace, dragging the lantern.

  “And who says I’m not cute?” Jordan (mezzo-piano)muttered.

  I crawled into the crawlspace. Brown weeds and monster cobwebs were lit by the light of the lantern. Farther ahead, the soles of Zeke’s high-tops. I could hear Grandpa Dykhouse (piano)pacing the porch above, Grandpa Rose(pianissimo) murmuring.

  Zeke tossed a rusted can. The can (piano)clattered into a patch of weeds.

  “Nothing?” I (forte)said.

  “Let’s try the cellar,” Zeke (pianissimo)muttered.

  We crawled from the crawlspace, wiping cobwebs from our high-tops.

  Zeke got the hatchet from the duffel bag. We took turns hacking apart the cellar door. Jordan just watched, despite that out of the three of us he was the only one with actual muscles. He had his teeth bared, kept poking the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth. Whenever the hatchet (forte)struck the door, the lock (glissando)rattled on its chain.

  “Calculator, what would you use the treasure for, if the treasure wasn’t fake?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “My brother,” I (forte)said.

  “Brother?” Zeke (forte)said.

  I told them about my brother the tree.

  Jordan squinted, leaning forward to peer at me like at a bizarre creature in a museum display.

  “Don’t you think that’s sort of weird to just tell to people?” Jordan (forte)said.

  Zeke glanced at me, then glared at Jordan.

  “What’s so weird about that?” Zeke (forte)said.

  “You really don’t think there’s anything weird about that?” Jordan (forte)said.

  Zeke swung the hatchet, sending wood splinters flying. The blade was stuck in the door. Zeke jerked on the handle, (mezzo-forte)ripped the hatchet out again.

  “No. I can relate to it, actually. That same thing almost happened to me,” Zeke (forte)said.

  “A miscarriage?” I (forte)said.

  Zeke took his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face, chin to hairline. “No,” Zeke (mezzo-piano)said, talking through the fabric. His tone had changed, like now he was talking only to me. “But I am still really lucky to exist. My dad didn’t want my mom to have me.” His shirt dropped. His face had left blotches of sweat along the hem. He gripped the hatchet, grimaced, swung again. “This was before they were married. My dad had the money even. He gave her the money and made her swear to abort me. Then he left for boot camp, to become a soldier. My mom used the money to buy a crib. She wanted to have me.”

  “I like soldiers normally, but, sorry, your dad’s evil,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “Evil?” Zeke (forte)said.

  “You must really hate him,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “Just for that?” Zeke (forte)said, frowning.

  “Yup, killing an unborn baby, you’d have to be a monster to do something like that,” Jordan (forte)said, folding his arms together and nodding.

  Zeke shook his head. “My dad, other soldiers, they’re paid to kill people every day. How can killing babies be wrong, but you let them grow up, and you pay our soldiers to kill them, and then it’s right?” Zeke (forte)said.

  Jordan shrugged. “Those aren’t our kids. Those are just the grown-up kids of other countries,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “Those countries are like you, or me, or him,” Zeke (forte)said, pointing with the hatchet, grip suddenly majorly tremolo. “Maybe none of the other countries are friends with them, but that doesn’t mean that bullying them isn’t wrong.”

  Jordan grinned—poking the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth again—then (forte)said, “The only thing I like about you is how easy you are to rile up.” He pointed at the cellar. “Now that you’ve got some adrenaline, would you hit that with some muscle, and finish this already?”

  Zeke scowled. His cheeks were flushed. He planted his high-tops, gripped the hatchet so tight his knuckles went white, then swung.

  The hatchet (fortissimo)split through the door.

  “Finally!” Jordan (forte)said.

  We (fortissimo)kicked the planks out. We wriggled through the hole into the cellar. In the dusty light there, we found dirt, cobwebs, and a pair of crumpled socks.

  Zeke chewed a lip.

  “A waste of time,” Zeke (piano)muttered.

  Grandpa Rose’s hair was less messy than before. Grandpa Dykhouse was (piano)snipping at the beard now.

  “Listen, King Gunga, maybe he wants to keep the beard,” Jordan (forte)said.

  “He acts like the beard bothers him,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

  Grandpa Rose (piano)muttered something about housebreakers, confused still. The sun was vanishing into the meadow beyond the ghosthouse. The shadows of the birch trees, the stone well,
the ghosthouse, stretched across the grass. Loons (piano)hooted on a pond somewhere. I stunk of sweat.

  Zeke threw the blueprint into the grass.

  “We’ll never find the heirlooms without the map,” Zeke (piano)muttered.

  “There isn’t any map,” Jordan (piano)muttered.

  “The curse of being a memory factory,” Grandpa Rose (piano)muttered.

  Even Jordan looked upset, like some part of him had believed in the heirlooms all along.

  “Prison,” Grandpa Rose(mezzo-piano) said. His fingers twitched, like the fingers of someone dreaming. “In prison usually nobody knows it’s your birthday. On my eighty-third birthday, a doctor tested me. The doctor said my mind was failing. The doctor said my memories were fading. The doctor said happy birthday. Even I hadn’t known. I had forgotten. My cellmate was a younger kid with skin made of tattoos. An arm of stingrays, an arm of jellyfish. A chest with a diagram of a ship. The kid kept a needle, bottles of ink, hidden under his bed. My mind was failing. My memories were fading. There were things I needed to remember. That night, while the kid was sleeping, I tattooed myself with ink and the needle.”

  Grandpa Rose wrung his hands.

  “Where the tattoos would be impossible to miss,” Grandpa Rose(piano) said.

  Grandpa Rose blinked, tilted his head, blinked again.

  “What were the things I needed to remember?” Grandpa Rose (pianissimo)said.

  I (forte)kicked the porch.

  “It’s a fake memory!” I (forte)shouted. “I kidnap you, I hide you here, I lie to my mom, I lie to everyone, and all for nothing! You said the tattoos were the map to the heirlooms! And the tattoos don’t exist! Which means we don’t have a map! Which means we can’t find the heirlooms! If the heirlooms even exist!”

  Grandpa Rose looked at me like someone watching a storm through a window.

  “There were things I needed to remember,” Grandpa Rose (pianissimo)muttered.

  The scissors (pianissimo)snipped. Clumps of matted white hair drifted from the scissors to the porch. Patches of skin surfaced where before there had been beard. A pair of wrinkles surfaced. A blemish. A letter. A number. More numbers.

  The scissors stopped. Grandpa Dykhouse squinted. The breeze caught another clump of snipped hair, blew it away, revealed another number. Jordan was making (piano)stuttering noises. Zeke was making (forte)yelping noises. My mouth was moving, but noises weren’t coming out. We gaped at Grandpa Rose.

  It wasn’t a fake memory.

  He had tattoos on his cheeks.

  KEY OF C, KEY OF G, KEY OF E

  Grandpa Rose’s cheeks were tattooed with shaky bluish writing. One cheek said PAWPAW ISLAND THERE BOTTLED SHIPS BONES FROM BOW NINE PACES INLAND under a symbol of a key. One cheek said X18471913 under a symbol of a box.

  My brain said 18,471,913 = prime.

  “I tattooed myself while the kid was sleeping,” Grandpa Rose (forte)said.

  Grandpa Rose peered into the cloudy mirror above the sink, poking his cheeks with his fingers. We stood around him, in the light of the lantern, staring at the tattoos. Grandpa Dykhouse was gripping the whiskery scissors he had used to trim the beard to stubble, the foamy razor he had used to shave the stubble to skin.

  Grandpa Rose poked the symbol of the key.

  “We’re looking for a key,” Grandpa Rose (forte)said.

  “A key to what?” I (forte)said.

  Grandpa Rose poked the symbol of the box.

  “A trunk. A dark trunk. A dark trunk with a brass lock,” Grandpa Rose (forte)said.

  “The heirlooms are in a trunk?” I (forte)said.

  “I remember a dark trunk with a brass lock,” Grandpa Rose (forte)said.

  “So we need to find the key and then the trunk?” I (forte)said.

  “Yes,” Grandpa Rose (forte)said.

  “What’s PAWPAW ISLAND?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “I don’t remember,” Grandpa Rose(mezzo-forte) said.

  “THERE BOTTLED SHIPS?” Zeke (forte)said. “BONES FROM BOW?”

  “I don’t remember,” Grandpa Rose (mezzo-piano)said.

  “NINE PACES INLAND starting where exactly?” I (forte)said.

  “I don’t remember,” Grandpa Rose (piano)said.

  “Couldn’t the tattoos have been more specific?” I (fortissimo)shouted.

  “Calculator, relax, do you know how much being tattooed hurts?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “You can’t write itemized instructions if you’re writing on your skin,” Zeke (forte)said.

  They seemed awestruck that Grandpa Rose had actually tattooed himself. I hadn’t thought about how much that would have hurt. Especially on his face.

  “Every word would have mattered,” Grandpa Dykhouse (mezzo-piano)whispered.

  I touched the tattoo, X18471913, under the symbol of the box. Some large primes are so massively powerful that using them is illegal—you can use them to unlock government codes, or computer programs, or other things you aren’t supposed to. That’s what 18,471,913 was like. An illegal prime. One number that could unlock everything.

  Grandpa Rose was (pianissimo)mumbling to himself again, hunched over his cane.

  “If you want to find these heirlooms, you’ll need to learn everything about Monte’s life that you can,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said. “I’ll keep logging his memories. I’ll make note of every name, every word, every number. The meaning of the tattoos might become plain once you understand his roots.”

  “King Gunga is unstoppable in librarian mode,” Jordan (forte)bragged.

  “We still don’t know if the heirlooms are worth anything,” Zeke (forte)said.

  “Why would he have tattooed himself if there wasn’t anything worth coming back for?” I (forte)said.

  Zeke uncapped a silver marker. He wrote PAWPAW ISLAND THERE BOTTLED SHIPS BONES FROM BOW NINE PACES INLAND between drawings of a mermaid leaping toward his elbow and a mermaid swimming toward his wrist.

  “Aren’t you worried that your arms won’t look as pretty now, Boylover?” Jordan (forte)said.

  “If you write something on your skin, it sinks in eventually and becomes a part of you,” Zeke (forte)said.

  Jordan pointed at Grandpa Rose.

  “That didn’t work with those tattoos,” Jordan (forte)said.

  We split in the woods, each heading home through a different thicket of darkened trees. Once I was alone, I tightened the straps of my backpack and ran home at a breakneck tempo, taking shortcuts between garages and through backyards. The wind crept behind me from house to house, chimes (pianissimo)jingling in the key of C, unlatched doors (piano)knocking in the key of G, the lids of garbage cans (forte)thudding and (fortissimo)clattering in the key of E. Pairs of eyes, pairs of pairs of eyes, blinked in the trees. I felt nervoushunted. My house was dark except for a single window.

  As I rounded my house, I took my violin from my backpack and plucked notes at my brother.

  SORRY, IN A HURRY, GOODNIGHT FOR NOW! my song said.

  I tucked my violin into my backpack and hopped the railing onto the deck.

  With the wind in his branches my brother said, SOMEONE’S LAUNDRY HAS BLOWN INTO OUR YARD AND GOTTEN STUCK ON MY LIMBS.

  I stopped. I spun around. I dropped my backpack and hopped the railing again and ran across the grass and the dancing shadows to my brother the tree. A sheet was caught halfway in his branches. The sheet (mezzo-piano)snapped with the wind, like the sail of a boat. I yanked the sheet down and ran into Emma Dirge’s backyard and pinned the sheet to the line there.

  I FEEL BETTER, THANK YOU, GOODNIGHT, my brother’s song said.

  I hopped the railing again and grabbed my backpack and shoved through the door.

  Our house smelled like chemicals. The windows were gleaming. The wood of the piano was darker, less dusty than it had been, and its keys were white as bones. My mom was (mezzo-piano)humming to herself and mopping the floor. Where she was stepping, the floor was marked with footprints, like the blueprint of a dance. When she
was a kid she was a dancer, and she still moves like one. Dancing is her music, her math, the language she speaks. She has books of dance choreography, ballet scores written in symbols only dancers understand. It’s like the X’s and O’s on the locker room’s chalkboard, the X’s and O’s that only the Isaacs and other basketball players understand, the X’s and O’s that tell them how to score.

  “Where were you?” my mom (mezzo-forte)said.

  “Outside,” I (forte)said.

  “Your dad called while you were out,” my mom (mezzo-forte)said.

  I wrenched off my high-tops, then crossed the kitchen, stepping from footprint to footprint.

  “Why are you cleaning everything?” I (forte)said.

  “We’re doing a showing of the house tomorrow,” my mom (mezzo-forte)said.

  I froze.

  Here was what could happen, from bad to worst. Bad was “a showing”—this meant that families that wanted to buy a house would come visit ours. Worse was “an offer”—after a showing, if a family liked our house, they could make an offer of however much money they were willing to pay. Worst was “a closing”—if my parents agreed to the offer, everyone would sign official paperwork, and that’s when we would have to leave the house and my brother forever.

  A showing didn’t mean things were hopeless. But things hadn’t been this bad since my mom had planted the FOR SALE sign in our yard.

  “Hey, kiddo, you look pale. Do you feel okay?” my mom (forte)said.

  “I feel normal, I feel great, I feel 100%,” I (mezzo-forte)said. I unfroze. I ran to my room and (forte)shut my door and dumped all of my clothes onto the floor, socks and jeans and sweatshirts and jackets, like a pile of boys who had vanished. I (mezzo-piano)bent the window blinds. I took my knife and climbed onto my bed and (piano)scraped paint from the walls. I wanted my room to look messy. I wanted my room to look unlivable. I wanted whoever came through the house for that showing to think, I wouldn’t want to live here.