During the week, I dropped the suitcase at the thrift shop in the center of Stewart’s Crossing, and all the trash and recycling was taken away. The house seemed emptier, and I wasn’t sure if it was all the stuff, or the fact that Lili was a world away.
I heard from her sporadically—pictures and quick notes—and I followed Van’s stories and her photos in the online edition of the Journal. Almost all the passengers on the ship had been flown to Athens within a day or two of their arrival in Tirana, but a half-dozen had been detained. Van chased down diplomats and interviewed the members of the crew who were not behind bars. Lili took photos of the ship, the United States embassy, and various diplomats coming and going.
By Friday morning, the story was over. All foreign nationals held in Albania had been repatriated, and the Siren had been made seaworthy. A skeleton crew was to sail it on to Athens for further repairs. No matter how Van tried, he couldn’t make the story into more than it was.
While I was eating breakfast an email from Lili came in with her arrival time in Philadelphia the next evening. I wrote right back to say I’d pick her up at the airport. “Lili’s coming home, boy,” I said, ruffling Rochester’s ears. “That’s good news!”
But it meant that I’d have to tackle that last box of my father’s. When I got home that evening, I took Rochester for a long walk around River Bend. Fixed a complicated dinner, ate, then fed the dog and cleaned up the kitchen. Then I checked my email in case Lili had sent a more recent message.
Finally, there was nothing more to do but open that last box. My dad had kept meticulous records, but his estate was long since settled, so I could throw away his tax returns, his credit card statements and electric bills, all his Medicare statements and medical records.
Toward the bottom of the box I found a sealed envelope with Noodnik on it. That was my father’s favorite nickname for me. It wasn’t until I was a teenager, studying Yiddish at the Jewish Community Center, that I realized it meant ‘pest.’ But Dad had always said it with affection.
I opened it and found a single sheet of lined paper in my father’s handwriting.
Dear Noodnik,
I wish I had told you this story a long time ago. I always thought that you took after your mother, rather than me. You liked to read, like she did, and you never learned to enjoy the pleasure of working with your hands. But now I realize you are more like me than I ever thought. The computer is your tool, and you do things with it that I could never imagine.
But the use of tools requires responsibility. This is something I did not teach you, because the way I learned this lesson was so painful for me. You know you are named for my brother Seth, who died when he was young. But I never told you how he died, because I killed him.
My heart skipped a beat. My father had killed his brother? I had never heard that story, even a faint rumor of it.
You know that when I was a boy, we lived on a farm in Connecticut. My father had a big electric saw he used to cut wood for our fire. From the time I was old enough to, I helped him. By the time I was twelve, I cut all the firewood myself.
My brother Seth was a little noodnik, like you. He was six years younger, always following me around and getting underfoot. One day when I was cutting wood, a chip flew off a log, and landed right in Seth’s eye. The force of the saw sent it deep into his head, and before I could even shut off the saw, he was dead.
My parents never blamed me. It was an accident, they said, even though they cried for my brother’s loss. Soon after that we left the farm and moved into the city, and we didn’t speak much of Seth. But I resolved that I would always treat my tools carefully, and make sure that I never hurt anyone else with them again.
I don’t understand what it is you did that sent you to prison, Steven. But I blame myself, because I didn’t teach you this lesson. I hope you will forgive me, and know that I will always love you.
It was signed Love, Dad in his careful script.
I rocked back on my heels. What a terrible story to have kept inside him all those years. It explained the way he had always been so careful with his tools, and the way he had kept me away from them when I displayed I had no talent for their use.
All those years, he had been protecting me, not shutting me out.
He had to have written the letter after I went to prison. I wondered when he had intended me to read it. At his funeral? Soon after, when I packed up the house? It was just an accident of fate that the letter had been packed away with all that other paperwork, and I’d only stumbled on it now.
But I had always believed in fate, in the idea that the universe did things for us and to us at its own pace. Why had this letter come to me now, when I was trying to put the past behind me and make a new future with Lili? Was this to be my final understanding of my father, my final reconciliation with him?
I doubted that. I knew that I would hear his voice in my head until my own death, all those things he had told me about the world and how it worked, those colloquial Yiddish expressions, and the memory of those everyday things he did that demonstrated his love.
Despite all he had done for me, my father wasn’t open enough with me—he had kept this secret to himself, though it must have caused him great pain. The lesson in it, if there was one for me, was that I had to open myself up to Lili more. Not just by getting rid of these boxes, or by making peace with my past. But by resolving not to keep secrets, to reveal the darkest parts of my heart and receive some absolution in the process.
I sat there, my arms crossed over my chest, until Rochester came over to me. But he didn’t want me to pet him; he kept nosing against the sofa and whimpering.
“What’s the matter, boy?” I asked, getting down on my hands and knees. “You have a toy under there?”
His favorite blue plastic ball was there, and I reached in for it. That’s when I saw Lili’s missing brown-and-yellow butterfly barrette, too.
“Look what you found, boy,” I said, holding it in my hand as I stood up. I looked around my living room. It felt open and welcoming, ready for Lili to return.
Faint Heart
By Gillian Roberts
Amanda Pepper is my thirty-something wannabe alter-ego. For starters, she barely ages through the fourteen books. When I began the series, we were roughly the same age. When the series was complete, I had somehow become her mother’s age. I also have a long-time crush on her guy, C.K. Mackenzie. But more importantly, she’s a good teacher who truly cares about her students along with her subject matter, a feisty enough personality to challenge authority when necessary, and she is way more brave, smart and witty than I am. It’s been fun being her friend and vicariously living her adventures through these books.
It was a gray day in the city of Brotherly Love, inside and out. Something needed to happen to spark things up. Not even a building full of high school students could provide sufficient sparks against this level of blah. Nor did the omnipresent pumpkins and orange decorations of the season.
Truth is, Philadelphia is not Hallowe’en friendly. Just as I had to do most of my childhood, tonight’s trick or treaters would have to wear coats over their costumes, and that’s it for fun because there is no magic in disguised disguises.
Instead of marking my seniors’ essays, I was contemplating this gloom in the faculty lounge, a cramped room full of furniture that made actual lounging painfully impossible. I stood by the window, watching the elderly women in the Square across the street. On better days they aired and sunned themselves on its benches until the after-school tsunami of Philly Prep students drove them out. Today, they were packing it in early, and I could almost feel how chilled their bones must be.
I’d been so lost in the gray I hadn’t noticed that Rosalie Tucker, new to the faculty and brimful of enthusiasm I hoped—but doubted—would last, had joined me. “Wow!” she said. “That was scary!”
“What?”
“That gorilla!” She pointed at the Square but all I saw were slowly retreating seniors.
She pressed closer to the window. “I swear I saw one.”
“We don’t have many gorillas in Phil—” And then I saw it, if only for a second before it disappeared behind greenery.
Was this how the cosmos interpreted my wish for something to happen?
“Hallowe’en,” somebody said.
Of course. Even though it wasn’t till tonight, the ‘e’en’ part of Hallowe’en has expanded into Hallowday and Halloweek. The school secretary was Orphan Annie, a Martian sold me coffee this a.m., the crossing guard was Bo Peep and now someone in a gorilla suit was trick or treating old ladies.
“Lousy weather,” Rosalie sighed. “I’ve got a costume party with my Ronald tonight.”
Rosalie had recently become engaged and she seemed in awe of the fact. She’d become overly fond of the possessive pronoun—as if we’d forget to whom Ronald belonged, and of gesticulating with her pretty be-ringed hand. She pointed at a wobbly table nearby. “Look what my Ronald did! Sent spring flowers in October to brighten my day.”
They were beautiful, a large vase full of purple tulips and pastel forget-me-nots, and it was comforting to see something that wasn’t orange. “They’re beautiful and a message,” I said. “Purple tulips mean love forever, and forget-me-nots, well, it’s obvious from their name.”
Rosalie blushed. “You made that up.”
“Not at all. It’s the language of flowers. My great-aunt loved that sort of thing. She taught it to my sister and me, and she taught us how to read jewels, too.”
“Talk about useless knowledge. That caps it!” Phil Rinck looked up from the newspaper he mined for subjects for rants. “Languages that nobody speaks, made up by florists and jewelers. Waste of brain space.” Phil taught history but hadn’t learned from it. His message to the world was that only he had high enough pedagogical standards. He believed that rote memorization of facts—he always stressed the word “facts”—taught discipline and was the backbone of learning. According to his students, he was interested in only the dates of wars and laws and tariffs. They called him Bo Rinck.
“C’mon, it’s fun,” I said mildly.
Bo Rinck snorted. “Sugar for the mind rots it. Your great-aunt could have taught you something useful instead. And should have!”
The man gave my mind hives. He had spent all the autumn campaigning against budgeting for new books for the English department and had all but convinced my principal. Apparently, he approved of the teaching of grammar, but the rest was a waste of money. He was not my favorite person.
“All knowledge is useful,” I said. “Exercise for the brain feels good. Learning feels good.”
“Of course you’d say that, or how else could you justify teaching untruths, made-up stories! Useless fictions!” He shook out his newspaper and ostentatiously returned to reading it.
Rosalie was still fixated on what I’d said before Rinck interrupted. “Really? You can read jewelry?” Her hand was up on the window, fingers splayed, the better to display her engagement ring, a glittering row of small, multicolored stones.
“Your ring’s unusual,” I said. “An antique?”
“My Ronald’s great-grandmother’s.”
“Of course. Not that many people are named Dora these days.”
“How on earth…?”
“That same great-aunt. She had a brooch with colored stones, and she explained that the first letter of the name of the stones spell a word. Hers spelled ‘Dearest” and we never knew who’d given it to her. You’ve got a diamond, an opal, a ruby and an amethyst. Dora.”
“For God’s sake!” Bo Rinck looked as if my great-aunt’s knowledge was going to make his head explode.
I hoped it would.
Unfortunately, before it could, the bell rang. The handful of students who’d braved the weather to eat lunch in the Square turned and looked at the school, as if to check whether the bell had truly tolled, and tolled for them.
They did that every day. We will not discuss their learning curve.
*
My seniors had read Wuthering Heights. Their final essays were in my briefcase, still unmarked, but I had skimmed them and as always, the girls pitied—and loved—the bad boy. Wanted to save him. Were sad Philly had no moors on which they could run with him. It was part of their teen DNA.
I have an irrational fondness for seniors, who, no matter what adults with bad memories tell them, know—or hope—this isn’t the best time of their life and who express their discomfort by messing with the material at hand—their hair, their skin with piercings, their clothes or their behavior. Most of the time, including today, their peculiarities amused me.
They straggled into the last period of the day. Aiden wore a bowler hat and spats. A costume? Today’s fashion statement? Both?
Lila’s strawberry blonde hair had been braided into corn rows studded with bright green beads. She smiled greetings, possibly because her hair was pulled so tight she couldn’t frown. And Daphne, whose name meant “desire to please” (another useless interest thanks to Great-Aunt Clementine) continued to do anything but. She was in what she’d labelled her “outlaw” mode. Mostly, she made herself look like a James Dean poster—if he’d worn lots of jewelry. Her short hair had a pompadour top, she wore no make-up and nothing but bomber jackets, white t-shirts, and jeans—dungarees, she’d corrected me—with wide rolled up cuffs. But also the bling which, she’d explained, symbolized that she was a rebel with a cause—feminism.
Her parents were a quiet couple who struggled to keep Daphne in private school. I didn’t know how they felt about her limited wardrobe. Maybe it helped the budget. It was surely less expensive than the garb the “girls in black” wore, or the outrageous thrift-store siren dresses one of my sophomores wore—velvet and satin costumes ready for a remake of Sunset Boulevard. Or those tattooed students who made themselves look like aboriginals.
It was Halloween every day in high school as the students played a nonstop game of “who am I supposed to be?”
They settled down as the late bell rang. Today we were all looking forward to an easy time watching Wuthering Heights film clips and discussing the difference between Bronte’s and Hollywood’s versions.
As I started the DVD, Dustin Lambert walked in. I didn’t have the energy or time to stop and lecture him. Dustin was as close to Heathcliff as Philly Prep got. Silent, sullen, handsome as Hollywood (not Emily Bronte) made Heathcliff, he’d perfected teen-aged brooding. And pining. It was painfully clear to me, if not to her, that as Heathcliff yearned for Kathy, Dustin yearned for Daphne.
I liked him. I could see through his practiced dark exterior to a vulnerable, even sweet, core. Mackenzie thinks I romanticize things, wallow in wishful thinking about my kids here, but Mackenzie’s a cop, used to seeing the worst in people.
The film snippets led to a good discussion about movies vs. books, and why all the movie versions ended the story halfway through the novel. The only disappointment, though not a surprise, was Dustin, who didn’t participate because he was preoccupied with watching Daphne. She didn’t participate, either, her eyes on some distant space of her own.
One day recently, I’d quoted Cervantes’ famous “Faint heart ne’er won fair lady,” and Dustin’s eyes widened and he inhaled, as if the words had been a message aimed directly at him.
Should I tell him that the poet had not meant the suitor should stare at the fair lady nonstop?
Still, all in all, it had been a pretty good day. I packed up almost as quickly as the students did, but was barely out of my classroom when Rosalie called out. More news of “my Ronald” I was sure.
I was wrong.
“Did you hear?” she asked as we walked down the stairs. “The gorilla! Remember the gorilla?”
“Of course, but—”
“He mugged an old lady and she’s in a coma!”
I had many questions, but the police were already outside the school office and to my horror, one of them was handcuffing Dustin Lambert.
“No!” I cried out before I could stop myself. “Wait! What are you—”
The officer put a hand up in that stop-traffic sign. “Everything’s under control, Ma’am.”
I didn’t like the Ma’am. I didn’t like that what was under control was Dustin.
“We saw him!” Rosalie cried out.
The policeman pointed at Dustin. “Him?”
“No!” I said. She was making things worse.
“The gorilla!” she said.
“And when was that?”
“Lunch hour,” I said. “Please understand that any student could have been out there in a gorilla suit. If it was a student at all. We did not see this young man in or out of a gorilla suit.”
“Got it,” he said.
While he was taking down our names and contact information, I was holding my breath, hoping he would not ask for details like whether Dustin was late for class.
And he didn’t. Poor police work, I thought, but good for me. I didn’t have to lie or worse, tell the truth.
*
“You’re looking disgruntled,” Mackenzie said next morning. “Or at least, less gruntled than usual.”
We’d had a quiet Hallowe’en. Nobody tricked or treated us, which was no surprise. Locating a warehouse-style elevator in order to go up to a loft they don’t know exists is more of a trick than a treat, especially on a rainy, raw night. And a good thing, too, because buzzing in strangers in weird attire wasn’t wildly inviting, either.
“I thought only teen-aged girls suffered from the Heathcliff syndrome, but here you are, smitten with the bad boy.”
“He didn’t do it. He wouldn’t. He’s surly, yes, sometimes a jerk, but he wouldn’t knock down a teensy ninety-year-old woman.”
“Maybe he didn’t need to. Seeing a gorilla face might be enough to make her keel over.”
That was possible, but not the point. “And why would he? He doesn’t need money.” I drank my coffee. This was a replay of last night’s conversation and we weren’t doing any better the second time around.
“Maybe,” he drawled, “it wasn’t about money. Maybe it was to prove he was some kind of macho. A rite of passage to impress the other guys or a girl.”
The Untreed Detectives Page 8
