Worth a Thousand Words

by Brigit Young

  Thompson Street arrived and Tillie directed Ms. Martinez toward it. The sign above the tiny office, which was in an old house, read “Rehabilitation and Pain Management, Dr. Samuel Kregger, MD,” the words written in bright blue letters surrounded by bubbly stars, making the place appear more homey than it actually was. Reluctant to leave, Tillie wished she didn’t have to go to the doctor’s appointment at all. In the office, she’d hear the same thing as always—“Everything’s looking great, Tillie!”—which really meant, “You look exactly the same and things won’t change, but here’s some new medicine to help with the pain in the calf, and here’s some for the inflammation of the nerves, and because of a random car accident, you won’t be able to do a whole bunch of things ever again,” and then she’d be on her way.

  As Ms. Martinez pulled up to the curb, Tillie inhaled the scent of her car. It smelled like the two short weeks in May when lilacs bloom. It must’ve been her perfume.

  Tillie took a deep breath to steel herself and asked, her voice a tad shaky, “Hey, Ms. Martinez? Would you mind if I took your portrait real quick?”

  “Not at all, Tillie.” As Ms. Martinez turned toward Tillie, she said, “They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Maybe your pictures can tell my story, huh?” Ms. Martinez smiled sweetly, her head tilted to the side. “How’s that?”

  “Perfect.” Tillie beamed and took the shot. “Thanks for the ride,” she said as she opened the door.

  “No problem, Tillie. See you tomorrow. You and all your excellent mistakes.”

  8

  Into the Night

  When Tillie’s mom picked her up after the appointment, she apologized over and over for her dad flaking out, and asked her a million questions about what the doctor said. The car smelled like worry and stress and the sweat of a long workday, without a whiff of lilacs or anything easy and flowery at all.

  Back at home, in front of the full-length mirror in her closet, she held her film camera against her chest and took a photo of herself. Ms. Martinez was right—pictures told stories. Just like Ms. Martinez’s told the story of an artist, and the man in the cubicle’s told one of a secret, her picture told a story, too. But of what? A quiet girl with a limp? A detective, like Jake had said? What was her story?

  * * *

  On her laptop, Tillie zoomed in on the face of the man in the cubicle, cropping the shot into a blurry portrait. Cursing herself for having used her range finder on its automatic setting, sacrificing crispness and detail for expediency, she pressed print.

  Tillie’s aunt Kerry had given her a photo printer as a Hanukkah present one year, and it wasn’t the highest quality, but it was a life-changer. Her mom often pleaded with her to cut down on printing. The price of ink and paper added up. Tillie tried to be choosy about what she printed, but sometimes it was hard to resist, and in the case of a mystery like this, it was nearly impossible.

  She grabbed the warm, wet print of the cubicle man. Tillie couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but she could see that they were placed far back in his face. His eyebrows made a straight line. And was it just in her imagination, or did he have a scar? A small one, right above his left eye?

  Tillie had to put the portrait away. If she didn’t finish her Elizabeth Cady Stanton paper that night, she’d be in big trouble in history class. As long as she got a B she was fine, but a C or lower would be a problem and give her mom something else to worry about.

  But this man’s face pulled her in. His face, and Jim’s jittery avoidance, and the car’s U-turn … They added up to something.

  His face provided her only clue. She’d almost caught the blue Chevy’s license plate in one of her shots, but she couldn’t make out the last digit. How could she decode the meaning behind the finger covering Cubicle Man’s lips? What was he telling Jim to keep quiet about?

  But it didn’t need to be solved tonight, she told herself. It couldn’t be. She had other work to do. And not just history class.

  Diana Farr had given her an assignment: Find out if Joaquin Silva liked her as much as she thought he did. Ordinarily, Tillie wouldn’t take on all these “personal” cases, but Diana was an exception to any rule. After all, Diana had basically created her.

  “He’s so cute, right? I always feel him looking at me,” Diana had said to her. “I need to know if I’m right.”

  She was. After a quick scan through the “Lunchroom Photos” file on her laptop, Tillie found the admittedly cute Joaquin gawking at Diana in four different shots within only two weeks. In one, his chin rested on his palm, his eyes aimed at the back of Diana’s perfectly highlighted head as she spoke animatedly to some other boy. In another, the camera caught him glancing her way as she strolled by with her tray. In still others, he beamed over toward her as she spoke at her lunch table, his swooning eyes nearly begging her to look back at him.

  She’d tell Diana tomorrow.

  She picked up her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But, putting it down, her fingers—as if they were magnetized—returned toward the Cubicle Man photo on her desk’s corner.

  What is Jake’s mom’s part in all this? Tillie thought as she gazed at the man’s face. Jake figured his mom was protecting him from something, but what if she was just protecting herself? Maybe the bank statements were a part of something more nefarious. What if she had something to do with his dad’s disappearance? What if she had … hurt him somehow? Maybe Zayde and Bubbe’s money wasn’t enough for her. Maybe she had something more in mind …

  Tillie pushed the thought away and put the picture down. Yes, something was bizarre about Jake’s dad. But they weren’t in an action movie.

  She turned to another case of hers.

  Hailey Granito had lost a sheet of homework she’d done and was freaking out because it was due the next Monday, and in a wide shot Tillie had taken of the classroom as she was leaving it, a folder lay visible under Hailey’s desk. The paper was probably in it. It was most likely in the real lost and found in the office, or with the math teacher, who might have picked it up after class. Simple enough. Hailey lost things once a week.

  Back to Cubicle Man.

  He appeared to be bald, but maybe he had patches of hair in the back, where the camera’s lens couldn’t reach. His glasses reflected the dim light of a computer screen. He glowered at Jim with such focus that without knowing he was in a cubicle someone looking at the picture might have thought he was a Bond villain.

  No, it couldn’t be Jake’s mom who was behind any of this lost-dad confusion. It all came down, in some way, to this man. This man, with his beady, menacing little face, and his finger, placed against his lips, sealing off something essential from her and Jake. Something that frightened her.

  As crazy as Jake sometimes sounded, she saw that some kind of huge, grown-up secret just might exist here. And it couldn’t be cracked as easily as determining if a gorgeous boy had a crush on a gorgeous girl. Jake had called it “the big, bad world.” It was true she hadn’t seen much of it, but maybe she didn’t want to.

  She shut off the questions in her mind, and forced out a history paper.

  * * *

  Tillie heard her dad come home from work, and she made her way down to the doorway where he was taking off his shoes and coat.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said, leaning against the wall.

  “Oh, hey, Til,” he replied with a pre-apology sigh. “I am so sorry I couldn’t pick you up today. I really was overloaded at work and I—”

  “It’s okay.” Tillie cut him off hurriedly. “Um, I’m curious about something. For school.”

  “Oh.” He leaned against the wall opposite her. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

  “What’s the most unbelievable story you ever worked on?”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “I…” He hesitated.

  “I mean…” She paused to collect her thoughts. “Have you ever worked on a story where some normal person was caught up in an out-of-the-movies-type situation? Like, does anything in the movie
s, or anything even like that, ever actually happen?”

  “What class is this for?”

  “History,” she answered too hastily.

  “Hmm.” Her dad’s face lit up a little. “I guess the one thing that comes to mind is a story I worked on, back when I was a student, actually, about people who find out they’ve been married for years to spies. You know, you don’t know your husband or wife is in the CIA or something, or even—back in the eighties, especially—some people were married to foreign spies without knowing.”

  “What?” Tillie’s jaw fell. “And they didn’t know it?”

  “Yeah! It ruins people’s lives. They’ll live for years, decades sometimes, not knowing.”

  Tillie tried to process all this. “Okay, well, what about things like people going on the run, or getting kidnapped or blackmailed or something?” It seemed just as unimaginable as marriage to a spy.

  “One thing you learn very quickly working in the news is that life can be a lot more unbelievable than you ever thought.” He shrugged, as if embarrassed at his own passion on the topic. “But I, personally, have not worked on any kidnapping cases.”

  “Okay,” Tillie said, nodding. “Okay, Dad. Great. Thanks!”

  She left her dad in the hallway and headed to her room to text Jake.

  I got the license plate but it’s too fuzzy to make out all of it. We need to focus on Cubicle Man.

  Jake responded, next stop—house on maple street

  Tillie pulled out her laptop and started watching one of her parents’ favorite shows she hadn’t started yet—a British mystery.

  Twenty minutes into it, her parents’ voices infiltrated the story.

  She turned off the show and the lights and put a pillow over her head. She knew who the murderer was, anyway. It was always so obvious.

  Tillie fell asleep to her mom’s voice.

  I can’t believe you didn’t pick her up from school. What is wrong with you?

  She dreamt of finding the ginger-haired, happy-looking man, leading him to Jake and watching them embrace, both of them thanking her for saving him from the evil Cubicle Man.

  * * *

  Her cell phone rang at two in the morning. Tillie jumped up.

  “Hello?” she answered, knowing who it was within a groggy split second. “Why are you calling?”

  “Because I needed to reach you,” the whispering voice responded.

  Tillie sighed a sleepy sigh.

  “I thought we could go to Maple Street. You couldn’t go earlier.”

  Tillie pulled herself up to sit. She felt her leg twitch like it always did upon waking and she stretched her back so that it would wake up with her. She looked out the window and saw the glow of the street lamps. There was no moon tonight.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Not anymore, you aren’t.” She could hear Jake’s pleased-with-himself smile through the phone line.

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I know.”

  “Good night, Jake.”

  “Wait!” Jake’s whisper shifted to a raspy plea. “You know we have to find him. You saw those guys being so weird. Like, who’s afraid of two twelve-year-olds? You saw the car. You said you’d go with me.”

  “I told you I was busy today.”

  “But now it’s tomorrow.”

  Tillie groaned.

  “Look, he’s either detained somewhere, by someone, or he’s running and hiding from someone or something. And I think that if he wanted to send me a message, or leave a clue for me, he’d leave it in the tree house at the old house.”

  “Even if I wanted to go, Jake,” she said, feeling herself become more awake, “it’s nighttime. That’s … dangerous.” She sounded more like her mom than she would have liked.

  Jake laughed quietly. “Oh, yeah, because of all the crime in Templeton. Murder and mayhem.”

  He was right. The only crimes that ever happened in their town were probably the noise violations from the college’s one fraternity.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I’ve snuck out lots before. One time my dad even caught me, and he wasn’t so mad. He just sighed and was like, ‘You’re a rabble-rouser, kid.’ Come on, Tillie. Have a little adventure! Live a little! Rabble-rouse with me!”

  “Well, how would we even get to Maple Street? The buses don’t run past midnight and it’s a long walk.”

  “It’s like fifteen minutes from your house,” Jake said. “I’ll pick you up.”

  “In a car? Wow, you’re pretty small for a sixteen-year-old,” Tillie responded. Jake turned her into a teasing, sarcastic person she felt like she had never met before.

  “Ha-ha,” Jake fake-laughed. “I mean I’ll—what’s the word?—escort you.”

  “It doesn’t take me fifteen minutes to walk,” she said with an anger in her voice that surprised her. “It takes me double. Maybe more than double. If you haven’t noticed, I walk kind of slowly.”

  “You’re right.” Jake paused. “I’ll have to do something about that.”

  “You would be way ahead of people with medical degrees, then,” Tillie scoffed.

  “Never underestimate me, Tillie. My great-grandpa was a doctor.”

  Tillie got out of her bed and put her ear to her door. There was no sound. The house was asleep.

  Meanwhile Jake was going on and on about an old movie he’d seen with his dad called North by Northwest, in which some random guy is on the run because the wrong people think he’s a spy.

  “A spy?” Tillie heard herself ask.

  “The point is, the guy had to run away,” Jake explained. He proceeded to tell her the entire plot of the film.

  Tillie went to her pictures and poured them out of their folder onto the desk again. She picked up the picture of the cubicle man and held it under the light by the window. She shuddered.

  “Jake, I can’t go out,” she said as he finished the story.

  “I already have a plan. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You’ll walk just fine.”

  “Jake!” Tillie protested. “What if I get caught? What if something happens and I can’t get back? I don’t do this stuff. I don’t talk at two in the morning. And I don’t sneak out!”

  “Well, maybe it’s about time you start doing some more things! You can do it,” Jake assured her. “Just don’t get caught. I’ll see you in twenty minutes, outside your house.”

  “I don’t even know how to sneak out,” she said.

  “How do you normally leave your house?”

  “I … walk out the door? Obviously.”

  “Try that.” He hung up.

  Tillie paced by the window. Five minutes went by. She texted him.

  You better not be coming over here.

  There was no response.

  Hellooooo. This was not the deal.

  I WORK ALONE. I told you.

  Nothing.

  Tillie’s heart pounded. Sometimes, when she was about to embark on a long day, she could feel her heart beat in her feet, and sometimes she could feel it when she saw something that she knew would make a perfect photograph. She tried to wiggle her toes to get the pulsing, thrilling, painful feeling out of her appendages.

  She put on her hoodie and grabbed her DSLR. “Live a little,” she whispered to herself. She kept her pajama pants on, figuring that if her parents saw her walking out she could make up a lie more easily than if she had jeans on. The PJs had moons and hearts on them, and Jake would see them. Her eleven-year-old self had picked them out at Target and destined her twelve-year-old self for embarrassment. She stopped for a second in the hallway and considered going back to change, but then she decided she didn’t care.

  The silence Tillie had learned from sneaking snapshots of her parents got her through the hallway and out the door without a sound.

  She sat on the steps and waited quietly for Jake. So much time went by that she started to think of one of those movies where a girl gets stood up for prom. Sometimes the girl never got over it. Sometim
es they showed the character years later, still thinking about it, still never having been kissed. But, ew, she didn’t want to be kissed by Jake.

  As Tillie’s eyes began to droop and close, Jake showed up.

  “Hey, there!”

  “Shhh,” Tillie responded. Her parents’ window was literally a stone’s throw away.

  Jake rolled his eyes.

  He wore a flashlight tied with a thick string around his neck and carried a long black bag. Tillie noticed that it, too, had a moon design on it. She fingered the sides of her pajama pants.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Oh, just equipment. You have a camera? Of course you do. Okay.” Jake gave his scalp a big scratch.

  Tillie’s foot throbbed a little more intensely. “So how am I going to do this?” she whispered. “It’ll take me forever to walk that far.”

  “Never fear,” Jake declared.

  He dug into his bag, which reached all the way down to his feet, and pulled out a long, straight branch with some kind of carving on one end.

  “And what. Is that.”

  “It’s Gandalf’s walking stick!”

  “It’s what?”

  “A walking stick.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I was Gandalf for Halloween,” Jake told her. “This is his walking stick, or his walking stick-slash-wand, I guess you’d say. Is that the right word? He also has a sword, but the costume didn’t come with that, so … sorry.”

  “No. Absolutely not using a staff.”

  “His staff! That’s the word. Tillie, what knowledge of the wonderful world of fantasy have you been hiding from me? And come on,” he said, dragging out the “on” like a little kid, “it’s perfect.”

  “No, I am not walking with that,” Tillie declared, and she stood up. She would look ridiculous with a big wizard staff from Halloween.

  A couple of cats chased each other through her yard and she jumped, knocking herself off balance a little. Jake grabbed her arm as she steadied herself and moved to reach for the doorknob.

  “Wait. I knew you’d be embarrassed.”

  “I am not embarrassed, it just won’t help!” What embarrassed her was being told she was embarrassed.