Haffling (The Haffling series)

by Caleb James

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “NYU,” I said, keeping my voice low, feeling if I said it too loud something bad might happen.

  “Awesome! You going to shoot for early decision?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s really great, Alex.”

  “And you?”

  “Yale, Stanford, MIT. Not necessarily in that order. Actually, I think flip it, and that’s the way I’d want it.”

  “Eggheads rule,” I said, easily picturing him getting into MIT.

  “I hope so.” He glanced toward Jerrod, Anna, and Ashley. The trio’s conversation—or rather Ashley and Anna’s portion of it—was easily overheard.

  “My dress is gorgeous,” Ashley gushed. “Sexy but not slutty.” Her words were directed to Anna, but her gaze was glued to Jerod. Even from behind, I saw the flush in Jerod’s cheek.

  He turned back and looked at me. “You going to the prom?” he asked.

  “No.” And I hoped the conversation would drop. It didn’t.

  Ashley’s head pivoted, “Why not? OMG, you’re talking a once-in-a-lifetime thing… okay, not for me. I’ve been going every year since I was a freshman. But OMG, Alex, don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  “No,” I said, and hoped she’d drop it.

  “Why? I mean, sure, you’re a year younger than everyone else. You’re really good-looking. I mean, not that I’m shopping around, but TDH is classic.”

  This was far too much scrutiny for me. Couldn’t somebody just jab a stick in my eye, or maybe the ground would open up and swallow me.

  “Huh?” Jerod asked.

  Anna offered, “TDH—tall, dark, and handsome.”

  Jerod caught my eye. I felt my breath catch. I couldn’t read his expression. And while my intuition is good, I’d not expected him to say, “He is that.”

  “Gross,” Ashley commented. “You’re not supposed to notice… you going gay on me? God, I hope not. At least not till after the prom.”

  Jerod didn’t answer as we headed toward the security guards at the school’s entrance.

  I let myself get pulled back in the morning crush. I didn’t want Ashley fixing me up with someone for the prom. I didn’t want a make-believe girlfriend, and I didn’t get the prom. Or maybe I did and just knew it was so far out of my world that it wasn’t worth thinking about. Kids spent a ton of money on clothes, limos, even hotel rooms. What must it be like to have that? And not just the money.

  I drifted through the morning. The rhythm of the day was nice and mindless. Homeroom, followed by physics lab, and then AP English. Figuring this morning was an anomaly, I headed to my seat, and pulled out our reading assignment—The Duchess of Malfi—a gory play about a woman being driven insane by relatives who wanted to steal her property. I felt a tingle down my back, and thought it was Nimby. Then I heard Jerod’s voice.

  “Sorry about Ashley,” he whispered. “She likes to stir the pot.”

  “It’s okay.” I felt his breath on my neck. It sent shivers.

  “But if you want her to fix you up, just let me know. I’ll make sure she finds you someone cute.”

  “Thanks.” I couldn’t breathe, and I stared straight ahead, willing Mr. Jurzak to start the class, which he did. I wasn’t out at school. I didn’t see the point. There were a fair number of openly gay and lesbian students at Stuy, and for the most part it was no big deal. I knew in a lot of other places that wasn’t true. But I wasn’t busting my butt to get through high school to get a date. That kind of stuff didn’t matter…. I just had to get through this. I had to get into college. I had to do well, and I had to get older, old enough to where… and I felt the vibration before the muffled sounds of the harp strummed through the outer pocket of my book bag.

  Mr. Jurzak, who’d been reading from the play, shot me an annoyed glance. “Alex, don’t make me have to take your phone. Turn it off.”

  “Sorry, sir.” And I reached down, pulled it out, and glanced at the caller ID. “Shit!” In glowing backlit letters: State of New York OMH. I turned off the ringer and glanced at the clock. This was bad. My mind spun through the possibilities as to why I’d be getting a call from the Office of Mental Health. Obviously it had to do with Mom. Best-case scenario was someone—probably her caseworker, Lorraine Needleman—had located Mom and gotten her an inpatient bed. Worst-case scenario… so many to choose from, and why things like the prom and dates, and maybe having a boyfriend, didn’t matter.

  The bell rang, and I bolted for a quiet corner outside the sixth-floor library. Figuring it had to be Lorraine calling, I dialed her direct number.

  She picked up on the second ring. “Alex, where’s Marilyn?”

  “At home, I guess,” I lied.

  “She’s not, Alex, and don’t bullshit me. I need her here, like an hour ago.”

  Lorraine, who’d been one of the few staples in our lives over the past four years, did not pull punches. She was worried. “What’s the problem?” I asked, praying that it was something small.

  “I’m at DSS,” she said. “It’s Marilyn’s annual redetermination review. Where is she?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I shot back before I could stop myself.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that pissing off Lorraine was about the worst thing I could do. Alice and I lived in a house of cards, and this was the kind of shit storm that could blow it down. “It’s just if I’d known….”

  “Right, you would have made sure she was here. Right?”

  “Yeah.” And this was why, four years ago, I put a lock on my mother’s bedroom door. Sometimes she needed to be locked up.

  “Alex, I need the truth. Do you have any idea where she is?”

  “No.”

  “Shit! But you can find her, right?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll tell the hearing officer… crap, I don’t know what. This is bad, Alex. On so many levels. Do you have any idea how far I’ve put myself out for you and your sister?”

  “I do.” And I did. I felt Lorraine’s anxiety pulse through the phone.

  “How quickly can you find her?”

  “I could get her there tomorrow.”

  There was silence. “Alex, I don’t have to tell you how serious this is. I know you get it. I should have told you about this. I’ll see what I can do to get them to rebook for tomorrow. I’ll let you know. Just be prepared.” She hung up.

  My mind raced. This was a catastrophe. If Lorraine couldn’t talk the DSS hearing board into squeezing Marilyn in, things could unravel in a number of horrible ways. The $864 we got each month from her social security disability was our major source of income. Her status as disabled also qualified us for our incredibly cheap—by Manhattan standards—apartment. That was just scratching the surface. The DSS board was comprised of social worker types, who for the past four years raised the issue of Marilyn Nevus’s suitability to care for her two minor children. Each year Lorraine presented clear and compelling documentation of how well we were doing. And each year I made certain that Mom was well medicated and that she nodded and smiled through the hearing and didn’t say or do anything too bizarre or disturbing. Yes, Lorraine should have told me about the hearing. Then again, why get mad at her? She had a caseload of over thirty adults with serious mental illness. My mother was a single case, and I didn’t want to think how much time Lorraine spent with her—too much, probably. Basic math told me that if she spent the time with each of her clients that she spent on us… not enough hours in the day. This was my fault. Every year Mom had to go for a DSS hearing. I should have tracked down the date. I should have locked her in her room.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I startled and looked across into Jerod’s brown eyes. “Everything. I got to get out of here.”

  “You’re skipping?”

  “Family stuff.” I couldn’t look at him.

  “Anything I can do?”

&nb
sp; I stopped and realized how he and I lived in different worlds. He had no clue of the nightmare I faced. Yes, Lorraine’s call was like a tornado set to touch down, but it wasn’t the only one. This was my life, and handsome Jerod, with his America’s Next Top Model girlfriend, lived on a different planet. “No, but thanks.” And I bolted for the stairs.

  Four

  MY BREAKOUT from Stuyvesant at ten thirty was easy. I presented myself to the nurse’s office. My eyes were hooded, a pained expression on my face. The nurse—who’d danced this dance with me before—examined me. “How bad is it?”

  “I just need to get into a dark room and take my pill.”

  “Do you have one with you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Alex, you know you’re supposed to keep one with you at all times, and take it when the migraine first starts.”

  “I know. I thought I had one. I just need to get into a dark room.”

  She nodded, her expression was sympathetic. “They’re awful things,” she commented while scribbling the pass that would let me out through security.

  Ten minutes later, and I was outside. I only pulled the migraine ploy when absolutely necessary. Truth was, I loved school, everything about it. The routine, the normalcy, the work-hard-and-improve reality of it. Loved it. But now… it was time to dive down the rabbit hole and track down Mom.

  Like faking migraines, I’d been here before. Years from now, when I was finally an adult and Alice was safe, I’d find myself a therapist and I’d excavate the layers of my rage. I’d whirr like a band saw through all the bad stuff we’d been through and scream at how fucked up my childhood was. I didn’t know if any of that helped, but I was so sick of having to hold it together. Why did Marilyn have to do shit like this? Why couldn’t she be normal? Why did I have to clean up her messes?

  As often happened when I slipped into self-pity, Nimby broke through my mental prison.

  “Oh, waa, waa, waa. It is what it is, Alex. Time to hunt down mother Marilyn.” She started to sing, “Oh where, oh where has Marilyn gone? Oh where, oh where can she be?”

  “Shut up!” I needed to focus and not be reminded of the sure sign of my own madness, a bare-breasted black fairy with butterfly wings on my shoulder.

  My first step in tracking Mom, and why I’d splurged with our pathetic funds—albeit augmented by a grant from the Department of Mental Health—for cell phones, was GPS. I clicked on the app for Marilyn’s phone finder and prayed she had it on her. The good news was, she did. The bad news was, she wasn’t close. “What the hell?” I stared at the screen, and with two fingers, enlarged the map surrounding the blinking “X” that indicated her location. She was at the very tip of Manhattan—past Harlem somewhere, in Fort Tyron Park.

  I checked my cell’s battery; it was fully charged. Hopefully she’d stay put, and I jogged toward the Chambers Street Subway station. “You can do this,” I told myself. “There’s nothing you can’t do, Alex.” I fed myself uplifting messages while Nimby ran through an annoying stream of show tunes. As she launched into “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” I resurrected my brick wall and shut her up and out.

  Sitting on the A train, I fidgeted with my phone. Reception underground was iffy, but I still checked. I didn’t want to think about how many things could go wrong as I stared at the blank screen. But I did. My gut clenched—what would happen if Lorraine couldn’t talk the board into postponing Mom’s hearing? It had taken years to get Marilyn’s disability approved. She’d been turned down three times before Lorraine found an attorney willing to take her case… for a cut, of course. That had been a desperate year, not the worst, but close. The worst—hands down—had been the one before, when I was eleven and Alice was six. The year we’d been pulled from Marilyn’s custody and put into foster care.

  It was the year Alice was molested.

  It was the year I killed the man who did it.

  The knot in my stomach tightened as I pictured Sean McGuire’s surprised expression. His red-rimmed eyes, the whites bugging like a cartoon, his arms flailing as he fell backward down the cellar stairs. I heard the crack of his skull on the cement floor, and I could still feel my palms against his chest as I’d pushed him hard. That had been the worst year, and no way in hell would I let that happen again.

  It took nearly an hour to get to the 190th Street station. I bolted from the train and ran up the escalator, praying Marilyn hadn’t wandered to some new location. I checked the GPS. She was close, or at least her phone was. “Just stay put.” My eyes fixed on the screen as I headed north up Fort Washington Ave. I felt the tension in my jaw as Fort Tyron Park came into a view, a wall of green behind a spiky iron fence, lots of gray boulders, and meandering paths. I glimpsed The Cloisters on the hilltop, a medieval castle keeping watch at the north end of Manhattan.

  The “X” for Mom was close, but weak. I checked the battery—still had eighty-eight percent. The map on the screen showed her less than a hundred yards away. I jogged across the street and entered the park. Dappled light spilled through the canopy of budding trees. With each step, the city sounds grew fewer, like stepping from one world into another. The path was steep, and the higher I climbed, the closer I got to the “X.” But as I came to what should have been “X” marks the spot and Marilyn—like I was right on top of it—the “X” blinked and went out.

  I stood still. Birdsong in the trees above and one of the best views in the city. Far below was the Hudson River, with Jersey on the far shore. All around me lush woods and beautifully tended walking paths. I glared at my phone; my rage was near the boiling point. The “X” was gone. I powered down the phone and rebooted. For a moment or two there was a faint “X” right where I stood, and then it went out again. “Shit!” I bit back the scream—it did no good. My teeth clenched. “Where the fuck are you?”

  I turned in place, biting back my fury. Sifu’s words were like oil on rolling waters. “Dive into your pain, Alex, find the stillness below.” Scanning with my eyes, listening, smelling. I caught the whiff of patchouli, and in the midst of this artfully manicured woods noticed an unintended path in a yew hedge. Tiny branches had been snapped, and the ground was smooth. If we were out of the city—like at the McGuires’ little house of horrors—I’d say it was a deer run. I looked at my phone—“Useless.” I squeezed through the hedge, wondering how bloodhounds did this. Was the patchouli stronger? Was it even hers?

  There were scuffed footprints in the dirt, some old and some that looked fresh. This seemed a well-trod path.

  Nimby emerged. “Go home, Alex.” She sounded scared.

  Alone in the woods, I acknowledged this sign of my own insanity. ’Cause I’d long ago faced the fact—my mom had schizophrenia, and I heard and saw a little pointy-eared black fairy. “Why?” I asked, breaking my own rule about not talking to my imaginary hitchhiker; it only made her more real. “I need to find her, or everything goes to shit.”

  “Go home, Alex,” she repeated. Her voice was tinny—she was frightened. Which, considering she was a hallucination, was merely an echo of my own fear.

  I definitely smelled patchouli, more than before…. My gaze fixed on a tiny glass bottle on the ground. Like the ones drug dealers use to sell crack and meth. I know, because we were forever finding them in the hallway of our building. Mom liked to use them in her art and for the perfumes and potions she made whenever she got manic. I picked it up. There was a small amount of amber fluid in the bottom. I sniffed—okay, so she was here somewhere. I didn’t want to think how it had been over twenty-four hours since I last saw her. I checked the phone again, no “X” at all.

  “Go home, please!” Nimby squeaked and pleaded.

  Holding the vial, I did something else I never do—I looked directly at her. “Why do you want me to go home?”

  My hallucinated fairy hovered in front of me. Her tiny red eyes stared, her mouth twitched, revealing pointy white teeth. When I was little, those had frightened me—not human, and not the kind of teeth used for
munching salad or a sandwich. They were like something from a horror movie. They were made for ripping meat, probably from something that wasn’t dead.

  “Go home, Alex. This is bad.”

  I held her in my gaze, noting the swirling gold tattoos on her cheeks, eyebrows, neck, and naked torso. They glowed against her black skin, catching the filtered light through the trees. Her only garment was a ragged skirt the same orange as the dominant color of her fluttering butterfly wings. As hallucinations went, she was crisp as a new penny and exactly how I remembered her as a little boy. “I have to find her and bring her home.”

  She moaned and shook her head. “Noooooo.”

  She seemed in pain. But the health and well-being of my hallucinated fairy wasn’t really important. “Are you of any use?” I asked. “Or are you just here to remind me I’m going to wind up in the nut house?”

  She shuddered. “Please! Go home.” Her gaze darted nervously.

  “Where’s my mother?”

  She shrieked, and her hand flew to her ears. “Don’t ask questions! Go home, Alex.”

  As I watched her face, I observed how, more than once, she’d glanced down and to the right. I moved in that direction.

  She grew more agitated. Her wings beat so fast they blurred orange, black, and blue.

  I realized that she was another type of GPS. The farther I headed down the path, the greater Nimby’s pleas. She was screaming by the time I arrived at a towering and untended weeping mulberry. It was the size of a three-story building, its ancient limbs arched high and then dripped down to the ground, creating a dense curtain of interlaced living and dead branches. There were tiny bits of broken stem on the dirt. Someone had been here recently.

  “Go home, Alex!” Nimby shrieked.

  I reached a hand into the thickly meshed branches, some budding with tiny heart-shaped leaves, others old and dead.