Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Isn’t this just what growing up is?” I asked. “You’re always telling Robbie and me to be nicer, to do more stuff around the house.”

  “You can’t make yourself over for a boy, Melissa.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing? That I’m just being smart and nice because of Daniel? That I’m not actually a very smart or a very nice person and I’m just faking?”

  “That’s not what I said.” She sat back against her chair. “There was this boy in high school. Jimmy MacTavish.”

  “Oh my God. Not another Scot.”

  “Yes, that was part of it. He played football and he was very popular. But he wasn’t a very good student. When I started going out with him, I went out for cheerleading, and I started hanging around with different kids, and my grades went down.”

  “My mom, the after school special,” I said, but I wanted to hear what happened.

  “Very funny. When it came time to apply to college, Jimmy was going to Penn State and he wanted me to go with him. But I couldn’t imagine spending four years in State College. Harrisburg was bad enough. I just had to get to the city, and I had been set on Penn for a long time. He made fun of me—he kept calling me “Ivy Girl” like it was something terrible.”

  “That’s mean.”

  She brushed a strand of her brown hair from her face and for a minute I saw her the way she looked back in those old pictures—a girl, kind of like me.

  “The day I got my acceptance to Penn, I was so excited. And Jimmy broke up with me. That’s when I realized what an idiot I had been to try and change myself for him.”

  “And Dad didn’t want you to change?”

  “By the time I met your dad I had gone completely the other way. All I did was study. Every weekend night you could find me in the Rosengarten Reserve library, studying. I got straight As. I think now I was still reacting to Jimmy MacTavish.”

  “Was Dad studying with you?”

  She shook her head. “Your dad was on the newspaper staff, and he belonged to a fraternity, and he was always on the go. He just swept me up in his wake. But he never expected me to be anybody other than Caroline Macgregor.”

  “Daniel doesn’t want me to be anybody other than I am, either,” I said. “If I’m changing, it’s because I’m becoming the person I’m supposed to be. I haven’t given up literary magazine or anything.”

  My mom leaned over and gave me a hug. “That’s good, Melissa. Because we love you just for who you are.”

  I wasn’t quite sure who that was, though. As I was getting ready for bed I thought back to the year before, when I had refused to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family. I couldn’t even remember why I had been mad, but I was sure I had a reason. And suddenly I got this idea for a short story, about a girl who discovered at seventeen that she was an alien from another race who had been brought up on earth.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning before I turned off the laptop, and I had written almost the whole story. I felt like the old Melissa for the first time in a long time.

  I slept in Friday morning, and since there were no leftovers to take to Daniel I didn’t try to call him. The next night, as I was getting ready to leave, my dad was so pleased with the help I’d given him on Office Barn he slipped me two extra twenty-dollar bills. I stuck them in the back of my wallet for the next time I wanted something I didn’t want to tell my parents about.

  Oops. That reminded me that I had used my mother’s credit card to pay for Daniel’s application to Penn. Maybe I’d have to give that money back to her. When her bill came, I could tell her that Daniel’s mom had asked me to put the payment through because she didn’t have her own credit card, and she’d given me the cash. I had just forgotten to tell my mom. Yeah. That story would fly, I thought.

  And that was the old Melissa too. The sneaky one, always looking for an angle. Guess she was still around.

  Daniel was waiting outside his building when I pulled into the parking lot. He was pacing back and forth like he was upset about something. “What’s up?” I asked, as he got in the car.

  “My mother got a phone call a while ago and it made her really upset. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but she said she had to go out.”

  “Parents are weird,” I said, putting the car in drive.

  “But she’s never done anything like this before.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be okay. Probably just a friend of hers was having a problem and she had to go over there.”

  “She doesn’t have friends.”

  I pulled out into traffic. “What do you mean, she doesn’t have friends? Not even people she works with?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody. We don’t have any family, either. That’s what’s so strange.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My parents’ lives were full of dealing with my aunt and uncle, miscellaneous cousins and other assorted relatives, and their friends from childhood, from college, from work and from our neighborhood. They were always going out to dinner with other couples or going to other peoples’ kids’ weddings and bar mitzvahs.

  My dad had a bunch of guys he played poker with, who got together to watch big sports events like the Super Bowl. My mom had what she called her coffee klatsch, a couple of other women she met up with periodically to bitch about their husbands and kids. Their old friends were always coming by the house.

  How could Daniel’s mom live without friends? If I didn’t have Brie to talk to, I think I’d die sometimes.

  Daniel was really quiet. We ate tacos and burritos and then went to see an adventure movie full of car chases and gunfights. I could sense him squirming in the seat next to me.

  “You want to go out for coffee?” I asked, when the movie was over. “My dad gave me some extra cash.”

  He shook his head. “I just want to go home. I’m worried about my mom.”

  “No prob.” I drove him back to his apartment complex and pulled up in front of his building.

  “Will you come in with me?”

  I could hear a strange note in his voice, something that said he was worried.

  “Sure.” I locked the car, and we walked up to his door. It was about an inch ajar.

  “My mom always locks the door,” he said, as he put his hand on the knob.

  I got a bad feeling. “Daniel. Maybe we should call the police.”

  But he already had the door opened, and we could see someone had ransacked the apartment. Chairs were overturned, books pulled off their shelves, sofa pillows on the floor.

  “Mami!” Daniel cried. He ran through all the junk toward his mother’s bedroom. He was back out in a minute. “She’s not here!”

  “Somebody must have seen you both go out and decided to rob you.” My hands felt ice cold. “We should call the cops, Daniel. Right now.”

  “It’s worse than that. Something’s really wrong.”

  There was a sharp knock on the open door behind us. We both turned around to see one of the gangbangers, a guy in his late twenties, wearing torn jeans and a calico bandana around his head.

  Shit, I thought, sucking my breath in hard.

  Sleepover

  “Hola, amigo,” the gang banger said. “I am Oscar.”

  “What do you want? Where’s my mother?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “But we saw the guys come and rip through your place.”

  “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “Not our business. But your Mami, she asked me a favor. If anything happens, I should give this box to you.”

  He handed Daniel a beat-up metal box with a combination lock.

  “I don’t understand,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Oscar said. “But I saw trouble, so I’m just doing what your mami asked.”

  Daniel reached out and took the box.

  “Your mami, she’s a good person. You need anything, you call me.” Oscar pulled a business card out
of his back pocket. Over Daniel’s shoulder I saw that it read Oscar Hernandez, Graphic Design, with a website and a phone number.

  Daniel looked down at the card and the box, and I did, too. When we both looked up, Oscar was gone.

  I walked over and closed the front door, locking it and throwing the deadbolt. “Daniel. We really have to call the police now. Something could have happened to your mother.”

  He shook his head. “She always told me no police. I remember when I was in third grade, a police officer came to our school to make a presentation and gave us all these little fake badges. I was so proud, I wore mine home. My mother took it away from me and told me I should never, ever trust the police.”

  “She must have meant back in Cuba,” I said. “The police are here to protect us.”

  “Maybe you. Not people like me and my mother.”

  I was really starting to get freaked out. First Daniel’s mother running away, then the robbery, the gangbanger, and now this feeling that he couldn’t trust the cops. The only think I could think of to say was “What’s in the box?”

  Daniel tugged on the combination lock. “I don’t know.”

  “Open it, then.”

  “I don’t have the combination.” His voice was sharp and I could see he was on the verge of tears. I took his hand and led him over to the kitchen table. He put the box down on the table as I picked up the chairs.

  We sat down next to each other, the box in front of us. It was an old lock, probably just three numbers to open it. “What’s your birthday?” I asked.

  “January 21.”

  I took the lock and started fiddling with it, trying as many combinations of his birthday as I could. Nothing.

  “Think, Daniel. What else could it be?”

  We tried his mother’s birthday, and his father’s, and their anniversary.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why would she leave me this box and not the combination? And where is she? Is she all right?”

  I reached over and hugged him. “I’m here. I’m going to help you.”

  He started to cry, and I let him rest his head against my shoulder and cry until he couldn’t anymore. Then he leaned back against his chair and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve.

  I managed to flip the lock over and look at the back. There was Spanish writing there. “What does this mean?” I asked.

  He looked at it. “Just the name of the company that made it.”

  “So your Mom brought it from Cuba with her?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Then his eyes lit up, and he grabbed the box from me. He twirled a combination on the lock and it popped off the hinge. “What did you do?”

  “I remembered something my mom said. How I should always remember the day and time we left Cuba. December fifteenth at two o’clock. I never knew why she kept reminding me of that. But the combination for the lock is twelve-fifteen-two.”

  We both looked at the box. “Well, we’d better open it.” I reached out, but Daniel took my hand.

  “I’ll do it.” He lifted the lid and we both peered inside at a pile of papers.

  “It’s my old Cuban passport.” Daniel lifted it out of the box. It was all written in Spanish, with a picture of six-year-old Daniel. His mother’s old passport was just below it.

  Under that were a bunch of what looked like ID cards. A whole pile of them. Daniel fanned them out on the kitchen table in front of us. There were new ones for every year, with Daniel’s picture changing. But there was something wrong.

  “That’s not your name,” I said, pointing. Though the cards all had pictures of Daniel and his mother, none of them showed the same name, though they all had pictures of Daniel and his mother. “These are fake IDs.”

  “Strange.” He dug into the box again, pulling out some faded pictures from Cuba, of Daniel and his mom and dad when he was little. Some paperwork, all in Spanish, and a yellowed clipping from a Spanish-language newspaper. About two hundred dollars, in tens and twenties. And a single piece of paper with the name Egidio Lopez and an address in Miami.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “No idea. Never heard the name before.”

  “Maybe he’s a friend of your mom’s, or a relative.” I pulled out my cell phone and called directory assistance for Miami, and asked for a phone number for Egidio Lopez. A recording told me, “At the request of the customer, that number is not published.”

  “Not helpful,” I said to the phone.

  “What am I going to do?” Daniel asked.

  It was weird to see him so uncertain. “You can’t stay here by yourself,” I said. “Leave a note for your mom with my cell phone number. You can come stay at my house.”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  I opened my phone and called home. “Mom, Daniel’s mom had to go away suddenly. Is it okay if he comes over to stay?”

  “She just left without making arrangements for him?”

  “He’s seventeen, Mom. I guess she figured he could take care of himself.” I started spinning the story, trying to hit an angle my mom would go for. “But she had to go so fast she couldn’t leave any food behind. And you know Daniel doesn’t have a car or a license. He won’t have anything to eat.”

  “Fine. He can come over here. But make sure his mother knows where he is.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  I looked at Daniel. “See? Just leave her a note. She may not come back until late, and she wouldn’t want you staying here by yourself anyway, not after what happened.”

  “I should try and clean up before we go,” he said.

  “I’ll help.” I neatened up the living room while he tidied his mother’s bedroom and his own.

  By the time I was finished, he came out to the living room with an old camouflage rucksack. “I put some clothes in, in case she doesn’t come back for a couple of days.”

  “Good idea.”

  I went over and hugged him. “It’ll be all right, Daniel. You’ll see.”

  We locked the apartment and I drove us over to my house, neither of us saying anything. When we got there, my mom grilled Daniel on where his mother was, but he didn’t have to lie. He said he just didn’t know, and he was so obviously upset that my mom believed him.

  The Big Mistake and I each had a pair of twin beds in our rooms, in case we ever wanted to have sleepovers. I’d had a bunch, when I was little, though the Big Mistake never had. “Daniel can have the extra bed in Robbie’s room,” my mom said.

  “Is that okay?” Daniel asked Robbie. “I can sleep on the sofa.”

  “It’s all right with me,” Robbie said.

  We all went to bed a little later. It was weird knowing that Daniel was just on the other side of the wall, instead of way across town in his own apartment. In the morning, my dad made us all gluten-free Belgian waffles topped with strawberry jam. I couldn’t help feeling that I could have made them better. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “These are very good, Mr. Torani,” Daniel said. “Thank you for taking me in.”

  “I hope you hear from your mother soon,” my father said. “I can see why you’d be worried.”

  “I left her my cell number,” I said. “So she can call as soon as she gets home.”

  “You want to play Xbox?” Robbie asked Daniel when we were finished breakfast.

  “Sure,” Daniel said.

  “Don’t you have to work at ComputerCo today?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Only every other Sunday now. Sales are down so they’re cutting back.”

  I was pissed that the Big Mistake was appropriating my boyfriend, but I couldn’t say anything without seeming whiny. Instead I sat in my room with my iPod plugged in, listening to music while I read our history homework.

  Daniel’s mother didn’t call. At dinner, my mom said Daniel should plan to stay until we heard from her.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Torani. I really appreciate it.”

  “Melissa, you could learn more than
just how to read quickly from Daniel,” my mother said. “He knows how to be polite.”

  I glowered at her but didn’t say anything.

  Daniel’s mother didn’t call Sunday night or any time on Monday. Since Daniel was coming to my house, we decided to skip studying in the library and go right home.

  My mother had left a frozen chicken in a big dish in the refrigerator, with directions to put it in the oven when I got home. But I couldn’t just do what she asked; that wasn’t me. Since I had some time, I poured some kosher salt into a big pot and left the chicken to brine there while I chopped up some carrots and onions to go in with it.

  Daniel sat at the kitchen counter and watched me. “What if she’s dead?” he asked, as I scrubbed potatoes. “What if whoever broke into our apartment killed my mom?”

  “I think you should call the police,” I said. “At least you could report her missing, so if anything happens they would know.” I had this terrible vision of poor Mrs. Florez lying dead somewhere, no one knowing who she was. I had seen a bunch of shows on TV like that, where the police had a body they couldn’t identify.

  But I didn’t want to upset Daniel even further by saying that. And I could see that he was reluctant to make the call. Sometimes not knowing is better than knowing, I guess.

  I scattered the vegetables in the bottom of the roasting pot and washed my hands. “I need to get something from my room,” I said. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  Where did they take dead people, I wondered as I walked down the hall. The morgue, right? I would call the morgue and see if anyone had brought Mrs. Florez there. I found the phone number online, and used my cell phone to call, closing my bedroom door so Daniel couldn’t overhear me.

  “Hi, I’m wondering if you have any dead ladies there,” I said, when a woman picked up. “Her name is Mrs. Florez, but you might not know that.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “I’m a friend of her son,” I said. “He’s really worried about her.”

  “Hold on.” I listened to some of that gentle jazz music while I was on hold. If I’d been an upset person I probably would have gotten even worse from that crap.

  A man got on the phone. “Can you describe the woman you’re looking for?”