The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Aaron glumly agreed and we trudged toward the corner. While we waited for the light to change at Second Avenue, I noticed the daily newspaper for sale on a rack outside a deli.

  One of the smaller headlines, fortunately not the main headline for the feature story of the day, was:

  CHRISTIAN LEADER SCRAMBLES IN WAKE OF ABORTION SCANDAL

  “Oh, Lord,” I whispered. The light changed and Aaron and I were free to cross the street, but instead we lingered in front of the deli. I dared to open the paper and read the story that accompanied the headline and Daddy’s picture. It suggested that The Church of the Spirit was standing behind Daddy, riding out the storm with him. But there was definitely going to be a lawsuit, and because it was an election year and many of Daddy’s main supporters lived in states where abortion rights were hotly contested, it wasn’t going to be out of the headlines any time soon.

  Already, even after just one day, it felt like our parents were strangers. Like they inhabited another galaxy. As if I was standing on a corner in downtown New York City reading about people I didn’t know instead of about the father I had just kissed and hugged the week before.

  “This is really bad,” Aaron shrugged.

  I felt bad that I’d stopped to look. Aaron was in a sour enough mood that he really didn’t need additional reasons to be upset. But then I noticed a sign taped to the outside wall of the deli, surrounded by other crudely designed and printed flyers showcasing lost dogs and men with vans for hire. This particular sign said, “SUBLET AVAILABLE: OCTOBER 30 – APRIL 30.”

  “That’s what we need,” I said excitedly. “A sublet!”

  Before we took even one step further, Aaron called and spoke to the man who had placed the sign at the deli. The apartment was still on the market, as it turned out, but was nowhere in this cute neighborhood of coffee shops and sushi restaurants.

  “Well,” Aaron said, after hanging up with the man. “It’s still available but it’s in Chinatown. It’s eighteen hundred a month and he’s moving to San Francisco, so he’s only asking for first month’s rent and a security deposit. He’s actually moving in two days so he’s pretty eager to rent it.”

  I put my hands on my hips to prove a point, but then immediately realized I was posing the same way Mama would in this situation and dropped my arms back to my sides.

  “Let’s go,” I commanded. “We have a train to catch, to Chinatown.”

  As we stepped down the stairs on our way once again to the subway track, I checked my watch and made note of the fact that if I had been at school where I rightly belonged at that very moment, I’d be zoning out at my desk in Ms. Hobbs’ trigonometry class room, my belly full of turkey burger (Monday lunch special at the dining hall). I wondered if anyone missed me. I wondered if anyone had noticed my absence.

  As much as the East Village, where we had seen the last apartment, was orderly and bohemian and cute, Chinatown was a sprawling, weaving disaster. We spent nearly an hour looking for Baxter St., roaming down alleys that dead-ended, holding our noses as we passed barrels of bug-eyed shrimp and cuttlefish on display at markets, and linking arms to avoid being separated in the thick, loud crowds where men were selling fake handbags and women were shouting at us to buy counterfeit DVD’s of movies that were still showing in the theaters. We finally found the right address, and buzzed up to the apartment.

  No voice greeted us. The buzzer simply sounded, and Aaron pushed the door open.

  “This is it,” he said.

  We entered the building with trepidation. We walked up six – no joke – six flights of stairs. By the top of the fourth flight, I tried to remember the last time I went running, and couldn’t. Before we even saw this apartment I was ready to remove it from our consideration. There was no way I wanted to walk up six flights of stairs every day.

  “Glad you could make it,” a deep male voice said at the top of the sixth flight of stairs. It belonged to John, a very fashionable Chinese man in his mid-twenties, standing in the open doorway of the apartment he was hoping to rent us.

  “Yeah, sure,” Aaron said.

  “So this is the place,” John said, stepping aside so that we could enter. The apartment had an entirely different layout than the one we had seen in the East Village. There was no long hallway between the front door and the living room to create an illusion of space in this apartment; this front doorway opened right into a tiny room where an oven occupied one corner and a futon couch was stationed in the other. There were three additional doorways, two of which led to tiny bedrooms, each with one window. The third doorway opened into a miniscule bathroom with no tub, only a stand-up shower unit. There was an odd window in the bathroom only about four inches wide, but probably three feet high, which faced a brick wall.

  “So you can see, this is technically a one-bedroom, but I built a wall when I moved in to create an office space. You can fit a full-sized bed in each, but probably not much more.”

  This guy, John, hadn’t been kidding when he had said he was moving to San Francisco in two days. There were three large brown cardboard boxes stacked in the living room and there was literally nothing else in the apartment. Both tiny bedrooms were empty except for a framed Beastie Boys poster in the room on the right, and the detritus of a move-out (balls of duct tape on the floor, a dust pile around the edge of where the bed used to be on the floor in the left room, blinds hanging in the window at strange angles). There was a brown stain on the floor of the bedroom on the left that I hoped had been caused by coffee.

  I stepped into the bedroom on the right side, which would be mine if, of course, we were approved to rent. The window faced a brick wall, but if I stepped up to it closely and looked to the right, toward the street, I could see an amazing work of graffiti art on the brick wall of the building next to ours. It was a shame such an awesome painting could probably barely be seen from the street; and I paused for a moment to wonder how the artist had managed to wedge his or herself between the buildings, into a space literally only about four feet wide, and paint the scene I was witnessing, so high up off the ground. It was a magnificent portrait of a couple on their wedding day: the young couple, holding hands in a style that was boldly contrasting black and white to simulate a Xerox, but the background behind them was spray-painted in such meticulous detail that it looked like a black and white photo of a living room.

  I asked if I could visit the bathroom and realized (too late, of course, another unmistakable sign that God was playing games with me) that there wasn’t even a roll of toilet paper.

  “This is great,” my brother said nervously. “It would totally work for us and we’re kind of in a hurry to find something.”

  I could tell by the way he was agreeing to everything and nodding his head that he wanted this to work out. Aaron had definitely not inherited my dad’s natural knack for negotiating. Striking a bargain or playing hard-to-get were not tactics in his play book.

  “Sweet,” John said. “I’m a software engineer and I was hired at a company in San Francisco a month ago, but like, the economy is so bad? That I’ve been having a hard time finding people to rent because like, everyone just wants to sign their own lease. Rents are falling all over town.”

  John had a tendency to end every sentence as if it were a question, which I found strangely appealing.

  “So what’s the deal with this place?” Aaron asked. “Your lease is up in April?”

  “Yeah, man. My name’s on the lease until April. My mom’s cousin owns the building so like, most of the residents are Chinese. But if you like living here and it all works out and everything, you could probably sign the lease over to your name in the spring and they won’t raise the rent. It’s a pretty chill arrangement,” John said.

  “What are the terms for move-in?” I asked, getting down to business.

  John wanted thirty-six hundred dollars up front, and would accept cash. He was ready to give us a set of keys that afternoon if we wanted to move in. The only hitch was that we couldn’t
sleep there for at least two days because his flight wasn’t until Thursday morning.

  “So, like, what do you guys do for a living?” John asked, looking us up and down.

  I almost laughed out loud. My brother looked like he could be the kind of actor who starred in family movies on cable channels, but he definitely didn’t look old enough to have a profession. And for pete’s sake, I knew what I looked like. I looked like a twelve-year-old who was barely old enough to babysit.

  “I wait tables,” Aaron said immediately, and convincingly. “My sister’s a student.”

  “What are you studying?” John asked me, catching me off guard.

  “Art,” I blurted out.

  “Where?” he asked, overly interested in my academic career.

  “The school of art,” I improvised, and not very well.

  “Oh, School of Visual Arts?” John asked. “Great school. Well, you guys seem pretty honest. The place is yours if you want it.”

  An hour and a trip to the hardware store to copy the keys later, we were jubilant renters. John had given us his e-mail address and phone number and had told us that rent was always due on the first of the month and should be paid in a check to the landlord, who lived in Apartment 1C on the first floor and was called Mr. Shin.

  We were ecstatic. As much as the apartment wasn’t anywhere near as cute or cozy as the first one we’d seen, it didn’t matter; this one was ours. All ours until April.

  And surely everything in our lives would be sorted out by April. I’d fall behind in school between now and then, but there were worse things that could happen.

  Knowing that we had a thousand dollars in Aaron’s pocket now that the apartment had been taken care of, we decided to splurge on a small lunch of paninis and soup back in Greenwich Village. When the check came, I couldn’t help but notice that it had cost us almost thirty dollars. We were going to regret that expense in the coming weeks.

  We rented a real hotel room in Hell’s Kitchen for the next three nights rather than hoofing it all the way back up to Morningside Heights. The room cost us almost six hundred precious dollars, but it gave us a chance to catch up on sleep, shower, and watch TV. We had to pay for it with six pre-paid credit cards because hotels don’t accept cash, but thankfully the concierge spared us a dirty look and didn’t press the issue when we said we did not have identification. It was nowhere near as fancy as the hotels in which I had stayed with Mama; to be honest, compared to the hotel we had just stayed in when we were in Bogota, the hotel in New York seemed like a flophouse. But it was clean and the beds were comfortable, and even though the noise from the sidewalk outside below our window never stopped, I was at least able to sleep knowing my brother was only a few feet away in case anything bad happened.

  Tuesday morning, as I ate an enormous bagel sandwich on my twin bed and watched television, I realized the media had not made any mention yet of Aaron and Grace Mathison being missing. The scandal was everywhere. It was a topic brought up on all of the morning talk shows, with legal experts invited to weigh in on the political significance of the case against our parents. It was on the late morning gossip shows, where middle-aged talk show hosts berated our parents for their beliefs and said horrible things about my brother for abandoning Heather (which of course, he hadn’t done).

  “I think this demonstrates the enormity of right-wing Conservatism’s hypocrisy,” a high-powered Democratic senator from Connecticut was saying in a round-table discussion on a serious news show. “It says to the whole nation, do what we say and not what we do.”

  I flipped channels.

  On MSNBC, a female news anchor with an angry frown and tightly crossed legs was interviewing a journalist from The New York Times and a Republican Congresswoman from Iowa via some kind of satellite link-up. Apparently, whatever I had missed in the discussion prior to tuning in had brought them into a heated debate.

  “Excuse me, Ted,” the Congresswoman snapped. “Who are you to know the details of this very private situation? The Mathison family has not disclosed whether or not the young man involved arranged for the abortion. I think it’s our responsibility to honor the facts and not make assumptions.”

  “Whether or not they’ve acknowledged their son’s involvement is irrelevant,” the journalist retorted calmly in a voice that exuded intelligence. “The fact remains that this young woman’s unplanned pregnancy serves as proof that Chuck Mathison’s own immediate family members do not abide by the doctrine that he preaches. This is going to prove to be very unfavorable for The Church of the Spirit. There is a lot riding on how Chuck Mathison addresses this scandal and the longer his team takes to prepare their response, the worse it’s looking for him.”

  “Again,” the female Congresswoman yelled, cutting off the news anchor. “I don’t think it’s fair to even refer to these allegations as a scandal. We have no proof that the young man accused of impregnating this girl is actually guilty of these actions.”

  “Nevertheless, Congresswoman Lowe,” the journalist said impatiently, “whether the allegations are true or not, this is going to have a significant impact on the relationship between The Church of the Spirit and Republican candidates relying on campaign donations. The GOP has a long history of reluctance to align with religious leaders involved in sex scandals of this nature and candidates like Rick Davies and Graham Drummond are going to be wise to step away from Chuck Mathison in the coming weeks.”

  I temporarily switched channels to kiddy cartoons and was relieved that Aaron had gone outside to buy hair dye so that we could begin our transformation into the Martins. It would hardly bring him comfort to know that he was nationally being blamed for not only the impending downfall of our father’s professional empire, but potentially also having a huge influence on the vote less than one week away.

  All of that was troubling, but what I found most disturbing was that there had been no mention made of our disappearance.

  Wasn’t anyone looking for us?

  And if not, why weren’t they?

  By now it was impossible that my disappearance from Treadwell had gone unnoticed. No one could just skip classes for a whole day and not answer the door to their dorm room without a parent being called. Why hadn’t my parents contacted the police? Or the FBI? Why wasn’t my photograph plastered all over the country? Had they just assumed I had taken sides with Aaron? Was I disowned, too?

  I kept skipping channels all morning. There was no mention of me or my brother in the news. Newscasters would simply say, “A spokesperson from The Church of the Spirit informs us that the Mathison family does not wish to comment at this difficult time.”

  Then the topic would switch to Ponzi schemes, and the images on my hotel room’s television set would change from my parents’ to Juliette’s. Fortunately no one in the media industry had made the brilliant connection that these two news sensations were connected by Room 6E of Colgate Hall at the Treadwell Preparatory Academy, where the daughters of the two men probably in the most hot water in all of the United States had been roommates until a week ago.

  Everything else on the news was about Halloween. Rachael Ray was making meringue cookies in the shape of ghosts. On the Oprah network, a gentleman with well-styled hair was showing a housewife in New Jersey how to turn her home into a spooky haunted house for her kids’ party. The co-hosts of the Today show were in costume as super heroes, which I found to be particularly offensive as they discussed my family’s legal predicament.

  As crazy as this might sound, I had never celebrated Halloween before. Aaron and I were never allowed to dress up; Mama and Daddy considered the holiday to be a pagan festival and somewhat sacrilegious. I had never had much interest in dressing up before going to Treadwell, either. Typically on Halloween night, my father would lead a special youth service in Phoenix to discourage kids from wearing costumes to promote evil, and from making mischief. My freshman year at Treadwell, Juliette had convinced me to dress up as Ms. DiMico. She insisted it would be hilarious, and it was.
Even Ms. DiMico complimented me at the Treadwell Halloween party in the dining hall; I had totally nailed her fortune-teller look with my gauzy shawl and dangly gypsy earrings.

  But Halloween in New York was a totally different story.

  We both dyed our hair in the hotel bathroom when Aaron returned to the room carrying a plastic CVS bag after roaming around the Upper West Side checking out restaurants. He dyed his naturally golden hair a dark shade of brown, and he had bought a very light shade of blond for me.

  Not surprisingly, since neither of us had any experience with hair dye whatsoever, we botched both of our appearances irreparably. When Aaron was finished, I studied his strange appearance and realized that he looked very unconvincing with dark hair because he had forgotten to dye his eyebrows. He looked (kind of humorously) like an asexual alien being whose spaceship had left him behind on planet Earth.

  “Shut up,” he commanded as he retrieved the remainder of the dark brown solution in the squeeze bottle from the trash can in the bathroom and gently tapped a bit on his eyebrows for twenty more minutes. I was cackling to myself at his predicament on my bed.

  “I swear to God,” Aaron called from the bathroom. “Stop laughing, Gracie. It’s not that funny.”

  But I wasn’t laughing anymore twenty minutes later when I was staring in the mirror at my own reflection. The red hair I had hated my whole life was gone, which in itself was a relief. However, it had been replaced by a shade of bright yellow so vile that I am not exaggerating when I say that I was physically unable to leave the bathroom.

  “Let me see,” Aaron commanded.

  I kept staring in the mirror in disbelief. My hair was still dripping wet from the shower I had taken to rinse out all of the noxious-smelling dye. Somehow, the shade of silvery platinum blond that Aaron had selected (Moonlit Bombshell) had joined forces with my natural shade of strawberry and resulted in a neon shade of mustard that looked not only unnatural on me, but like a color that simply did not exist in nature. My body was frozen in front of the sink and mirror. Especially with my pale skin tone and boring beige freckles, I looked like someone had painted my hair strand by strand with yellow poster paint.