Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  Finally I hear the mumbling again. “Uh-huh,” the boy says. “Yup. Got it.” He ends the call and opens the door wider. “Come in. She says to stay here. She can’t get away from work yet, but she doesn’t want you to leave.”

  Holy shit. I did it. I’ve found the right person. I can barely believe it.

  As soon as I step into the house it’s clear my aunt and her family have a lot more money than we do. It isn’t that everything is so fancy, or even that the house is particularly big; it’s just obvious that the people who live here care about their space in a way I’m not used to. It’s not like Maddie’s house, all polished and decorated to serve as an advertisement for her mom’s business; there’s a warmth I feel right away, in the open spaces, the big kitchen with copper pots and pans hanging from a rack suspended from the ceiling, the living room with lots of squishy couches and a geometric-patterned rug and colorful throw pillows.

  My cousin, who still hasn’t introduced himself, leads me to a little table in the kitchen, where he gestures toward a chair. I sit down as he opens the fridge. “Soda?” he asks, taking out a Coke for himself.

  Weird how someone who obviously works out—he’s in better shape than me, despite my efforts—would pour liquid sugar into a body he takes care of. None of my business, though. “Water would be great.”

  He gets out a glass and holds it against the dispenser in front of the fridge. Our fridge doesn’t have one of those, and even though the water in Brooksby isn’t the greatest, we never bothered with a filter. I bet the water here doesn’t even need a filter, even if the fridge already has one. Either way, it tastes so much better than what I’m used to, it’s almost like an entirely different drink.

  The almonds and beef jerky made me even thirstier than I realized, and I drain the whole glass before my cousin even sits down. “Another?” he asks, but I shake my head. It feels like we’re delaying the inevitable, even if I don’t know what the inevitable is.

  “So,” he says, after he sits down across from me. “Cousins, huh?”

  “I guess.” I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Are there even things someone is supposed to say, in a situation like this? “I didn’t know about you until recently. I didn’t know about anything. Still don’t, really.”

  “Well, obviously I know even less than you. Like I don’t even know who you’re related to. I thought I knew everyone in this family, and god knows there are a lot of us.”

  “There are?” Who’s this “us” he’s referring to?

  “Sure. There’s me and Mia—that’s my sister—and Nonna and Poppa, and Dad’s family—he’s got three brothers and I have like a million cousins on that side. But you’re not on that side, right? Do you know any of my mom’s family?”

  “I don’t even know you,” I say. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

  “Right,” he says. “I’m Matteo, but everyone in my family calls me Matt. Or Matty.”

  Matty. It sounds exactly like Maddie, how he says it, and I can’t help myself—I start laughing. Not just giggling laughing either, but full-on, hiccuping laughing. I bend over, trying to keep from choking, and will myself to make the laughing stop, but I can’t.

  “Dude, are you okay? It’s not that weird a name. No weirder than Pack, anyway.” I hear him stand up and walk around the table, like he thinks he’s going to have to do the Heimlich or something.

  Finally I catch my breath. “I’m fine. Sorry about that. It’s just—my girlfriend’s name is Maddie. Or was. I mean, she’s still Maddie, she’s just not my girlfriend anymore.”

  “Oh,” Matt says. “Sorry.” I can tell he doesn’t understand why it’s all so funny, and honestly, I don’t either. Maybe it’s just all too much. He walks back around the table and sits down again.

  “No worries,” I say. “Yeah, I’m on your mom’s side, and I don’t know anyone.”

  “Are you like a second cousin or something? Who are you related to?”

  He really doesn’t know who Natalie is. “First cousin. Your mother’s sister is my mom. Apparently.”

  He stares at me for a minute, lips pressed together, trying not to show how surprised he is. I get it—he doesn’t know me, and he has no idea what to say now.

  “She never told you about her,” I say.

  “Nope.” He sounds pissed off, which I totally understand. To find out his mother has a sister she never told him about is pretty crazy.

  “I didn’t know about her either, until like a week ago. I thought she was dead, and then I got this letter.” I didn’t plan to say that, but I figure maybe it will make him feel better to know he’s not the only person who’s been lied to.

  He keeps looking at me, and I wonder whether he’s seeing the same things in my face that I see in his. “I don’t know what to think about all this,” he says. “But, like, why are you here? Why find us and not this Natalie person?”

  “I don’t know where my mom is,” I say. “She didn’t tell me. I’m trying to track her down, and I found your mom. I thought maybe she would know.” I’m not feeling so sure about that now, though.

  “She probably wouldn’t tell you even if she did,” he says, and he doesn’t try to hide the bitterness in his voice. Me coming here is definitely going to start some trouble. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to stop it, but changing the subject might help.

  “You said you have a sister? Mia?”

  “Yeah,” he says, and some warmth comes back into his voice. His relationship with Mia must not be anything like Maddie’s with her sister. “She’s five years younger than me. She’s at some theater camp or some other artsy bullshit. She’s kind of a pain in the ass.” He smiles, and I’m glad I got him out of the bad place, at least for now.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Seventeen. Going into junior year. You?”

  “Just turned eighteen. Just graduated, too.”

  “So this isn’t some discover-your-roots college essay prep or anything like that.”

  I shake my head. “No college for me.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Really? What are you going to do now?”

  I’m probably going to have to answer that question a million times. “Don’t know yet. Still figuring things out. For now, I’m just trying to find my mother.”

  “So we’re, like, the first step in a treasure hunt. A Tomb Raider kind of thing. You play?”

  I’m not super into video games, which I assume is what he’s referring to. “Not really. Not much of a gamer.” I hope he doesn’t think I’m weird. I don’t want my first new family member not to like me.

  Instead of frowning, his face lights up. “So you’re, like, a noob!” He jumps out of his chair. “Come on, we’re going downstairs.”

  Anything to avoid talking about my lack of future plans. I follow him as he opens a door off the kitchen that I thought might lead to a bathroom, but instead it hides a staircase. We go down into the basement, which is clearly the kid zone in this house. The ceiling is low, the walls are wood paneled, and the couch looks like a couple of La-Z-Boy chairs connected together with some extra seats in the middle. I hope the legs pop out like my couch at home.

  The centerpiece, though, is the TV. It’s one of the most massive I’ve ever seen. It covers almost the entire wall. “How big is that thing?” I ask, feeling almost reverent.

  “Sixty-five inches,” Matt says, with some pride. “You won’t believe the graphics, either. Here, let me show you.” He gets out a remote that’s the size of a computer and starts hitting a bunch of buttons, and the room explodes in sound and color. There must be speakers everywhere, because I feel like the noise is coming from all around me. Matt’s loaded up some sort of game demo, and the graphics are so realistic it’s like being in a war zone. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  It’s actually kind of terrifying, but I’m not about to tell him that. “Totally,” I agree.

  “Want me to teach you how to play?”

  “Sure, why not? But
do you have a game that isn’t so . . .” I watch as someone’s head blows up on the screen, the sound of pieces of skull and brain hitting the ground all too easy to identify.

  “Gross?” He grins and hits a few more buttons, and the chaos onscreen is replaced with a still-realistic, super-hot girl. “Better?”

  “Much.” Turns out this is Tomb Raider. Playing with Matt is more fun than I expected; he shows me what to do and we act as a team, killing zombie-people in increasingly violent ways, though nothing as bad as that scene from the demo. We play for a long time, mostly in silence other than yelling out when exciting things happen. Hanging out with him is surprisingly comfortable even though we’re not talking; I wonder whether this is a family thing or whether this is how all guys I know feel when they play video games together. I’ve been invited to their houses to play before, but I always begged off, preferring to hang with Maddie or my dad.

  But there’s something about being on this imaginary quest that’s helping me get to know Matt, even without talking. He’s aggressive even within the game, willing to take all sorts of risks even if it means having to start over. He’s always conscious that nothing we’re doing is real, so there’s no harm in players dying or doing crazy stunts just to see if they’re possible.

  I, on the other hand, am as cautious as ever, even in a world that’s entirely imaginary. I can’t help but try and keep our characters safe; when the game opens up possibilities to travel off the obvious path, I always question them. It’s hard for me to say okay, and it makes me think about everything Maddie said about me. I’ve come all this way, so I have to try.

  We’ve been playing for at least two hours when Matt’s phone dings, and he pauses the game to look at it. “Crap, I totally forgot. I have to get Mia at camp. Sneaky little thing programmed an alarm into my phone, though it’s probably good she did or I’d have left her there. Want to come with me, or do you want to stay here and keep playing?”

  I can’t believe Matt’s willing to leave me alone in the house after knowing me for all of three hours, but just because he’s willing doesn’t make it a good idea. Although maybe he wants time alone with Mia, to warn her about me? “I’ll come with you, if that’s okay.”

  “Good.” I can tell that’s what he hoped I’d say. “Just be warned, though, Mia’s kind of her own thing. She’s a chatterbox, and nosy as hell. She’s going to have a lot of questions.”

  Her and me both.

  11

  Turns out the car in the driveway is Matt’s, a used Camry with some mileage on it but otherwise in good shape, if you don’t count the fact that its seats are covered with dirty gym clothes and baseball equipment. I try to be subtle about opening the window, since the car smells about what you’d expect a car to be filled with that stuff to smell like, but Matt looks over and laughs. “Yeah, I haven’t driven anyone around except Mia since my last breakup. I guess it’s getting kind of rank in here. Mia complains all the time, but I just ignore her.”

  Apparently Matt’s not a gym rat, just a jock. He already seems like less of a dick than the jocks at my school, so that’s a plus. And now we have something in common. Funny he didn’t mention it before. “You just had a breakup too? Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  He pulls out of the driveway so fast the tires squeal. I didn’t think grown-up type sedans could do that. “Ah, no big deal. Better to go into senior year free and clear, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t really know,” I admit. “I was with my girlfriend for most of high school.”

  Matt’s driving really fast given that we’re on side streets, but he seems to be in good control of the car, so I try not to worry. I’ve rarely been a passenger in anyone else’s car since I got my license, except occasionally Dad’s, and he always says it’s important for cops to model proper behavior. Which means the speed limit, always. Still, even Matt seems surprised to find himself swerving around a corner to make the highway onramp. “You sound bummed,” he says. “Must have been a rough one.”

  “The roughest,” I say, but I don’t elaborate. We may have bonded over the video game, but we’re not exactly buddies yet.

  Matt gets off the highway almost as soon as he’s gotten on it, and not long after he turns into the parking lot of an elementary school. “I thought you said Mia was twelve. Is she not in middle school yet?”

  “She is. But they’re using the auditorium here for camp. Pain in the ass, if you ask me, since I’m the one who has to cart her around until my baseball camp starts.”

  That explains why he doesn’t have a job, like most kids I know. Or maybe it’s just because they have money. We wait for a short time until the front door of the school opens and a whole bunch of middle-school kids stream out, each one goofier-looking than the next. I’ve never seen so many kids with multicolored hair before. This is definitely the drama crowd.

  A girl with long black hair and a big royal blue streak down the front runs up to the car, opening the passenger door before Matt can signal for her to get in the back. “There’s a person here,” she says, looking over at Matt. He nods, and she opens the back door and gets in.

  I turn to watch her shoving aside his baseball stuff and wrinkling her nose at the smell. “Hi, Mia,” I say.

  “This person knows my name,” she says to Matt, then turns to me. “Who are you?”

  Matt was right about Mia—she’s very direct. “My name’s Pack,” I say. “I’m your cousin.”

  “No you aren’t,” she says. “I know all my cousins already. Who are you really?”

  “Mia, don’t be rude,” Matt says as we leave the parking lot. “Pack will explain everything when we get home. And you can think about how you’re going to explain that blue streak to Mom. She’s going to lose her mind when she sees it.”

  “That’s technically impossible,” Mia says. “Besides, it’s not permanent. Mr. McMillan brought colored hairspray to camp. Lots of colors. Everyone tried it.”

  That explains the multicolored heads. I’d been wondering whether parents in Connecticut were way more lax about hair dye than parents in Brooksby.

  “So you chose blue. Shocker.”

  “It’s not shocking at all. Blue is my favorite color. Blue is one of only three primary colors, and without it we wouldn’t have green or purple or aqua or lavender or—”

  “We get it, Mia,” Matt says as I try to keep from cracking up. “Pack doesn’t know you yet, so we’re going to keep things simple for him, okay?”

  Mia’s like a pint-sized encyclopedia, but she doesn’t seem to get sarcasm. Matt called her annoying, but he sounds awfully gentle even as he’s basically telling her to stop talking. Their relationship is already interesting to me, especially given the contrast with Maddie and her sister, whose sibling dynamic is the only one I’ve seen up close.

  I watch Mia in the backseat. She’s bouncing up and down a little, but not in an anxious way. At Matt’s reminder to keep things simple, she nods her head like she’s heard it before. “Simple. Yes. Absolutely.”

  I already like her, though I can’t explain why. “How was camp?” I ask. “Are you going to be in a play?”

  Mia considers my question, head tilted even as she continues that slight bouncing. “I like camp. There are other kids like me there. It’s just for fun. I don’t want to be in plays. Plays are long and you have to sit still the whole time. I like books better.”

  “Don’t you have to sit still while you’re reading?” It’s maybe too early in our new relationship to tease her, but she’s pretty funny.

  Matt snorts. “You haven’t seen Mia read. It’s a contact sport. She paces and doesn’t look where she’s going.”

  “Active movement is healthy,” Mia says.

  Back at the house, the sight of my truck on the curb gives me an odd sense of comfort. I check my phone; it’s only four, so we probably have some time before Regina gets home. I follow Matt and Mia into the living room, and me and Matt sit on the sofa while Mia takes the love seat. She doesn’
t hesitate before jumping right in. “How can you be my cousin, when I know all my aunts and uncles and cousins already?”

  “Let him sit, will you?” Matt says.

  “Nah, I’m good,” I say. I like how straightforward she is. “Mia, I only just found out about you guys too. Your mom is going to explain everything to us when she gets home.” I hope she is, anyway.

  Mia contemplates this, head tilted, eyes closed. Then she opens them. “This is all very strange. But I can wait until Mom gets home.”

  “And having a new cousin is exciting, right?” Matt says. I’m glad to hear it; it wasn’t clear how he felt about me just showing up like this. I’m not sure whether he means it or if he’s trying to coax Mia on board. “It’s like a surprise.”

  “I suppose,” Mia says, but she doesn’t sound convinced. “Okay, surprise cousin, tell me your life.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Your life. Tell me your whole life.” She sounds genuinely interested.

  I glance at Matt to see how he’s reacting to all this. He has a little grin, and I realize he doesn’t actually think she’s a pain in the ass at all. The two of them get along really well. He’s not about to stop the interrogation, either.

  “Fine, but only if you tell me yours,” I say. “Both of you.”

  Matt shrugs, and Mia starts bouncing again. “Yes! We can do that! Now go.”

  How am I supposed to sum up my whole life? I like the question, though. There’s a comprehensiveness to it, a desire to really know things about me, rather than the more generic questions, like “Where are you from?” or “What are your plans for next year?” I decide to give it a try, to be as honest as I can.

  “Okay, here goes,” I say. “My life, by Patrick Anthony Walsh. Except I go by Pack. Born eighteen years ago, plus about a week. I live in Brooksby, Massachusetts, just graduated from high school, not sure what I’m going to do with my life yet. My dad’s a cop and he wants me to go to college, but I’m thinking about becoming a personal trainer or a nutritionist. Something to do with health. I was a fat kid and I didn’t feel good about myself, and I want to help people feel better about themselves, no matter how they look.” I’m surprised to hear myself say that part out loud, but there it is. I push on. “Up until a few days ago I had a girlfriend named Maddie, who was also pretty much my only friend. Until I turned eighteen, I thought my mother was dead and that my dad was basically my only family. Is that enough life for you?”