Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  The day goes by way too slowly, though because it’s the last day, none of my teachers call me out for being such a space cadet in class. At lunch the guys all yammer on about the incredible week we’re going to have once the final bell rings—“Good Harbor every day, right, Pack?”—while they stuff french fries into their face holes and drip ketchup on their T-shirts. I can’t remember the last time I ate a french fry. I’ve been making do with baked sweet-potato wedges for years now.

  Finally the last bell rings and I bolt out of World History and run to the office. “Slow down, young man,” a teacher calls behind me, but I’m already down the stairs and around the corner before I consider reducing speed. I can’t wait anymore.

  The school secretary sits behind the desk closest to the front of the office. She looks like she’s in her twenties but dresses like an old woman, and I don’t know enough about fashion to tell whether she’s completely unstylish or if it’s just some hipster thing. I hand her the pink note. “I’m supposed to come here?”

  She wears a chain around her neck with eyeglasses hanging off it, and she lifts them to her face to read the note. Seriously, what’s the point of wearing glasses as a necklace and then not even putting them all the way on when you need them? “You’re Patrick Walsh?”

  I nod.

  She opens a drawer in her desk, pulls out an envelope, and hands it to me. “Here you go. But tell whoever sent this not to do it again. This is a high school, not a private delivery service.”

  This is it? A letter? I can’t think of anyone who’d send me a letter. I didn’t think people even sent letters anymore. “Um, thanks,” I say.

  A letter. So strange. I look at the envelope, which has my name and the school address written on it in handwriting I don’t recognize, along with PLEASE HOLD UNTIL MAY 22 in all caps on the back. No return address. I start to rip it open but the secretary holds up her hand. “No dilly-dallying in here. You’ll miss your bus.”

  As if any seniors still take the bus. I leave the office, sit on one of the benches near the front door of the building, and open the envelope. There’s a single sheet of notebook paper inside, white with pale blue horizontal lines and a pink vertical line at the left margin, like we used to have in grade school. The handwriting is clear and precise, still unfamiliar. Dear Patrick, it begins, and I scan down to the signature line to see who it’s from. That’s when the day starts to get weird.

  The signature line reads Love, Mom.

  For most people, that would be a perfectly normal thing to see. Reasonable, even. But not for me. For me, those words are impossible.

  My mother is dead.

  2

  I read the whole letter this time, slowly, and I decide it has to be some kind of joke. And I’m not about to let a joke ruin a day that so far has been perfect. I shove it in my backpack and meet Maddie in the parking lot. She’s leaning on the car, reading something on her phone. Her hair has dried into bumpy waves and she’s got this lip gloss on that I like—it looks peachy and tastes that way, too. “So? Was it the grade thing? Do you have to take finals?” She tries to sound casual, but I sense she’s worried. We only have a little time before graduation and then we start summer jobs, and we won’t have as much time to see each other. Then she leaves for college, but that’s a whole other thing.

  “It wasn’t my grades,” I tell her. “Just some issue with my address. No big deal.” I’m dying to talk to her about the letter, but it can wait. I drop her at her house so she can go food shopping for tonight, and then I go home to clean.

  Dad and I live in a town house complex. It’s a mix of multistory units that are pretty nice and smaller, crappier single-story apartments that the complex calls “garden level” but which are basically underground. We live in one of those. The windows are at the top of each room but we only get sunlight for a few hours a day, max, which makes the place kind of depressing. I never noticed how much of a shithole it is until Maddie started coming over, but Dad always says neither of us spends enough time at home for it to matter.

  I park in my designated spot and head inside, where the full force of the cleaning task ahead hits me in the face like someone backhanding me with a shovel. Disaster is an understatement—I can smell the history of at least three different meals in that kitchen, and I know what awaits me in the bathroom. At least I have the place to myself—Dad’s already left for work, which means I can crank the music as loud as I want. I need to keep my brain occupied; otherwise, it’s going to wander back to that stupid letter, like it seems to want to.

  I start in the bathroom. Maddie’s commented more than once on the ever-darkening tile grout, so one of my projects is to impress her by relearning what color it actually is. (Gray, as it turns out. To contrast with the pink fake marble tiles.) Cleaning the grout only highlights that some of the tiles are cracked and badly in need of replacing, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. I scrub the stubborn ring around the toilet and get it to fade slightly, but we’re out of bleach so it’s the best I can do. And the kitchen is even worse than I imagined. Though Dad and I have a deal that he’ll wash up if I cook, he interprets that as only including the dishes. The oven, the fridge, the counters, and the floor are all covered in a sticky film, as if someone sprayed the whole kitchen with sugar water and just let it dry. Since I’m the cook in this family, that someone is probably me.

  After what feels like days but is really only a couple of hours, the apartment looks respectable. Not great—the living room floor is still covered with stained gray carpeting, and the kitchen fixtures still look like they’re about fifty years old. I change my sheets and put in a load of laundry, which makes the house smell like detergent, but it’s an improvement over the ghost-of-meals-past aroma I walked into. It will have to do. The cleaning was a good distraction, too, but now that it’s over, the letter has migrated its way to the front of my brain. I push it back and wait for Maddie.

  She shows up for dinner right on time, wearing a pretty flowered dress, her hair straightened so it looks longer than usual, and with that peachy lip gloss that makes me want to suggest we skip dinner and go straight to my room. But she only allows me a quick peck on the cheek after I open the door; she’s loaded down with grocery bags. “We do have food here,” I say. “Pots, pans, an oven—all the necessary items.”

  “You know I like to do things my way.” Maddie hands me one of the bags and we go into the kitchen to unpack them. She went all out—everything is from Whole Foods, which means she must have gone out of town. Brooksby doesn’t have any grocery stores that fancy, so if we want to eat the good stuff, we sometimes have to travel. She’s bought salmon and brussels sprouts and a whole bunch of strange baking ingredients. I may be the more experienced cook between the two of us, but that’s limited to meals. Desserts have been off-limits to me for a while—I’ve hardly touched one since I went Paleo. I’ve been afraid that even fake Paleo sweets would just make me want sugar again, and then I’d completely lose control and go back to being Padded Paddy.

  “What do you do with this?” I hold up a packet of arrowroot powder and wrinkle my nose.

  Maddie snatches it away from me. “It’s a thickener. For cake. I don’t know if you know this, but we’re celebrating someone’s birthday tonight.” She pulls out an even more random assortment of ingredients—tapioca flour, agave syrup, an enormous bag of beets—and sets me to work prepping the beets. This is going to be the most bizarre cake ever. If anything with vegetables in it can really be called a cake. “You’ve got coconut oil, right?” she asks.

  “Yeah, a whole tub of it.” I’m not kidding, either. Costco sells enormous vats on the cheap. I’ve been cooking with coconut oil for two years and we’ve only just replaced the first tub we bought.

  I wash and dice the beets until there’s a bowlful of magenta cubes and my hands are stained purple. Maddie stirs together the rest of the cake ingredients and waits for the oven to preheat; she tosses the beets into our sad half-broken blender and pu
rees them until they’re a pink pulpy mess. She adds them to the cake batter, pours it all into a square pan, and sticks it in the oven. She sautés the fish and veggies with some fancy Italian bacon and a whole bunch of spices. “This smells great,” I say.

  “I made the same meal for my parents once,” she says, flipping the salmon over. “They were all polite about it, but I could tell my dad wanted to ask where the mashed potatoes were. I think you’ll like it, though.”

  We eat dinner in the tiny dining room instead of sitting on the couch like me and Dad usually do. I even put out cloth napkins and real plates, which feels fancy. The salmon is covered in some sort of spice crust; the brussels sprouts are crispy and taste like bacon, which is always a good thing. Even the cake—a chocolate cake with no frosting—isn’t bad, which is saying a lot for Paleo baked goods. And not too sweet, so I don’t have to be scared of going down the sugar rabbit hole.

  “Thanks so much for dinner,” I say, and pull her up for a kiss.

  “Dishes first.” She smiles, which makes me want to wash the dishes that much faster. I start collecting our plates and silverware; Maddie tells me to just put them in the sink and she’ll take care of them. “It’s still your birthday, after all.”

  “I can think of a better present, though.” I raise my eyebrows and try to exude sexiness, but it’s clearly not working because she starts cracking up.

  “You are such a dude.” She goes into the kitchen and turns on the tap.

  “I’m your dude,” I yell, and even over the sound of running water I hear her laughing.

  But once Maddie’s left the room, my brain runs right back to the letter. It’s not that I don’t want to tell her; it won’t be real until I do, so it’s going to happen eventually. I just don’t want it to be today. I deserve just one perfect day, don’t I?

  “What’s on your mind, birthday boy?”

  I hadn’t even heard Maddie come back in from the kitchen. She’s standing in front of me, brows all crinkled up. Hiding things from her is pointless—she’s always been able to read my mind. I know I won’t be able to forget about the letter anyway. “Give me a sec.” I go into my room and dig the letter out of my backpack, then bring it into the dining room. It feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. “Read this.”

  Maddie takes the envelope from me. “What is it?”

  I shake my head. She pulls the letter out and I watch her read.

  Dear Patrick,

  It’s hard to know where to start this letter, but the easiest way is to begin by wishing you a happy birthday, assuming you got this when I wanted you to. Perhaps you even received it in the afternoon, right around the time you were born.

  The next thing I want to do is apologize. I’m sorry for making so many bad choices when I was young, and for the circumstances that have kept me away from you, for the unnecessary risks I took to make things better that failed so dramatically and that led to me not knowing you, and you not knowing me.

  I don’t know how much your father has told you about me, though I know he has allowed you to believe that I am dead. I understand why that was easier for him, and if I’m being fair, for you as well. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about the choices I’ve made, and it’s time to right my wrongs, to make amends, starting with you. I can’t take the thought of you not knowing I exist. I would rather you know the truth and hate me; with knowledge comes the possibility of forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes the possibility that someday we may come to know one another.

  I wish that were possible now, but this letter will have to do for the moment. Please do not tell your father I’ve contacted you. I thought getting in touch the old-fashioned way, through this letter, would make it easier for you to avoid the temptation of showing it to him. Emails are easy to forward, but this object you hold in your hand is real, and sharing it has real consequences for me. I hope you can respect that.

  Someday I hope things will be different; someday I hope I can tell you the whole story, and perhaps even be a part of your life. Until then, know that not a day has passed when I wasn’t thinking of you, and when I can be sure it’s safe, I will write again. It’s hard for me to picture you as a young man, despite the photographs I’ve managed to get my hands on, from time to time. In my mind and in my heart you are still the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. Not being there for you will always be my greatest regret.

  Love,

  Mom

  “Holy shit,” Maddie says. “Pack.” She doesn’t have to say anything else.

  “I know, right? That’s what came to the office before. Sorry I didn’t tell you then. I didn’t want to think about it today, but now I can’t get it out of my head.”

  “I thought your mother died not that long after you were born.” Maddie knows as much as I do about my mother, which is to say, basically nothing. She asked me lots of questions about her when we first started hanging out, but when I couldn’t answer any of them, she stopped. These days the topic only comes up when she jokes about how lucky I am that it’s just me and Dad because her mom is such a pain in the ass.

  “That’s what Dad told me,” I say. “And I’m still not sure he’s wrong.”

  Her eyes narrow. “You don’t think this is real?”

  “Why should I? It’s not like there’s any proof in there. It’s got to be some kind of joke.”

  Maddie’s lips tighten. “Who would play that kind of a joke on you? Who would even think that was funny?”

  I shrug. How am I supposed to know? “Look, if this letter is real, then Dad’s been lying to me my whole life, and I can’t imagine him doing that. Can you?”

  “Maybe he had reasons for not wanting you to know about her. And maybe she has reasons for not wanting him to know about this letter now. Aren’t you curious about her?”

  I have to think about that. I never had been before—there’s never really been a reason to be—but now? “I guess I’m curious,” I say. “But more about why she left, and why it took her eighteen years to get in touch, and why she’s being so cryptic about it now. I’m just not sure I need the answers to those questions. I mean, is there any reality where they’re going to be good? Are they going to make up for the fact that Dad raised me all by himself? Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “I just don’t get it,” Maddie says. “You spend half your free time watching unsolved murder shows on Netflix and now you have a real-life mystery on your hands and no interest in figuring it out?”

  It’s starting to feel like we’re fighting, which is exactly the opposite of how I wanted my birthday to go. “You don’t understand.” I can’t explain it, though. She’s right that I love mysteries and true crime shows and all that, but they’re fascinating because they have nothing to do with me, with my life, which is simple and uncomplicated and moving along just how I want it to. I have Dad; I have Maddie, even if college is looming; I live in a town I plan to stay in for the rest of my life, with a summer job that might lead to a real job that will keep me happy and healthy until I decide what the next thing is. There are no big surprises ahead, and I like it that way. “Can we maybe not talk about it anymore right now? I want to think about happy birthday stuff, not this.”

  Maddie sits in my lap and puts her head on my shoulder. “Of course, Pack. This is all kind of overwhelming. We can talk any time you want.”

  I run my hands through her smooth hair, and she leans down to kiss me. “Should we watch the movie?” I whisper in her ear.

  “Let’s skip it,” she whispers back.

  Best. Birthday. Ever.

  3

  Growing up, I never realized that having just one parent was at all unusual. In kindergarten, it took me a while to figure out that the women picking up the other kids after school were their moms and not their next-door neighbors. Dad hired Mrs. Lucas, our neighbor, to watch out for me while he was at work, since he’s worked the night shift as long as I can remember. He took me to school every morning when he got off duty, but then he’
d go home and pass out until nighttime, when he had to work again. After school, Mrs. Lucas would come pick me up.

  One day I came home on a mission. “I told Ms. Silver I didn’t have a mommy, but she said everyone has one, even if they’re not here anymore,” I informed Dad. I climbed into his bed and waited for him to open his eyes; the minute he blinked I pounced. “She said I should ask you.”

  I was too little then to know how massive that question was, and how hard it would be for Dad to come up with an answer when he was barely awake. “It’s complicated,” he said, speaking slower than he usually did. “A lot of the time there’s a mommy and a daddy, but sometimes there can be two daddies or two mommies, and sometimes there’s just a mommy or a daddy.”

  “And I just have a daddy!” I yelled. “I knew it!” I started bouncing on the bed, which I wasn’t supposed to do, but I couldn’t help it.

  Dad frowned. “Patrick, calm down. Yes, right now you do just have a daddy, but you did have a mommy. Ms. Silver wasn’t wrong about that.”

  That stopped the bouncing quick. “I do? Where is she?”

  “She’s gone,” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember when we went to the pet store, and we got you that little chameleon, Charlie? And you kept it in a plastic box and gave it lettuce?”

  I remembered. I kept waiting for Charlie to change colors, so after he ate all the lettuce, I filled the box with colored construction paper and waited for him to turn. Chameleons can’t eat paper, though, and I never did bring him any more lettuce. The story did not have a happy ending. “You forgot to feed Mommy?”