“It’s just so all or nothing. There’s a whole world of food out there that’s totally off your radar. I know I talked about getting pizza in New York, but honestly, it’s overrated—the world’s best pizza is in New Haven, I swear. And you missed out on Nonna’s homemade pasta, and her cookies—she baked some of her best stuff for you, and you didn’t try it. She usually only makes those lemon dolci at Christmas. It’s like you brought Christmas with you in June and then slept through it while everyone else opened their presents.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s definitely not how I was looking at it.”
“Sorry,” he says. “That came out wrong. Food is such a big part of our family—Nonna has a recipe book that’s been passed down forever. It’s weird to think about living in a world where it doesn’t matter the same way.”
“It still matters. Me and Dad care about food a lot—we joined a farm-share program at the gym, and we eat only organic meat and produce, and I learned to think about food as fuel. It’s like the gas in the engine of our bodies. But you’re talking about something different, I think.”
He nods, then shakes his head. “Different, but not different, too. Coach is always trying to get us to think of food as fuel too, and I never took him that seriously—you do a better job of explaining it than he does, and maybe it is time for me to quit doughnuts, at least. But there are other kinds of fuel than just the physical stuff. For us, maybe food is kind of an emotional fuel. We eat together, and we eat Italian food because Nonna and Poppa want us to remember where we came from. Isn’t there a way to have both kinds of fuel?”
I’m glad what I said about food resonates with him, but what he’s saying is new to me. “Let me think about it more,” I say. “But now I have a question for you. How are you in such good shape, eating crap like that?” I point at the doughnut, which, despite his suggestion that it might be time to give them up, he’s still munching on. “Is it really just baseball?”
“Just baseball?” He feigns horror. “Coach would shoot you for saying that. Actually, he’d make you run wind sprints until you were dead.” He gets animated then, telling me about the training regimen his coach has him on, what they’re going to do at baseball camp this summer. It’s intense—the workouts are different than what I’m used to, but they make sense to me. They do heavy lifting to build specific muscle groups, especially in the shoulders; they do plyometric workouts to make the players move faster and more efficiently; they do all those wind sprints to work on endurance; they do body-weight exercises to build mobility. No wonder Matt’s in such great shape.
I love that I can so clearly understand why the coach set up the workouts the way he did. It’s like I learned a new language at home, and now I’m testing it out in another country. It makes me look forward to going back home and starting my new job. I really hope working at the gym this summer will help me make a plan for my future.
We talk the whole rest of the trip until we finally reach Grand Central Station and get off the train. I’ve only seen it in movies, but it’s even huger and more overwhelming in person. There are people everywhere, more people than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life. I’m so glad Matt’s here so I don’t freak out; I follow him to the subway entrance, where he studies the map and his phone to find the best way to get to Brooklyn.
“I’m assuming you want to do this first, before any sightseeing-type stuff,” he says. “But if you’d rather check out the Empire State Building first, it’s just a couple of stops away.”
I shake my head. “Later.”
Matt figures out the train situation—on the map the trains all have colors but they also have names and letters and numbers and it’s a confusing mess. He says we have to take the 4/5/6 to the R or the F, and I’m fine with just following him around like a lost puppy. I’m glad he knows what he’s doing. We buy MetroCards and go through the turnstiles, which is kind of like what I remember about taking the T except there are like a thousand times more people everywhere—the subway’s so crowded we have to stand up. It’s filled with all kinds of people, many of whom don’t seem like they should be occupying the same space. There’s a guy with bright pink dreadlocks and a bull ring through his nose that looks really painful, right next to an old woman dreaming peacefully in the corner despite the chaos around her. Everyone seems completely at home here, on the subway, among the crowd but in their own little worlds.
We switch trains to one that’s quieter, where we can sit down. “Next stop’s us,” Matt says.
I follow him off the train like a duckling. He has the street map up on his phone and tells me we have a few blocks to walk before we get there. We go up the stairs and into the street and it’s like I’ve never seen the sun before—it’s so bright after the dark of the subway, and it feels like my whole world is coming alive. If watching the Connecticut suburbs out the window of the train made me feel like the world outside Brooksby isn’t so foreign, New York is having the exact opposite effect. The part of Brooklyn we’re walking through is quiet and all neighborhoody, with brick buildings Matt calls brownstones and lots of little shops and coffee places. It’s not so strange or unusual, but it feels different. There’s an energy in the air I can’t describe but that I definitely feel, and I like it. I didn’t expect that. Maddie told me I needed to get out more, to see places beyond Brooksby. Is this feeling why? Had she known it was out there? Had she felt it? Or was that what she was hoping to find?
We walk until we come to one of those brownstone buildings with a little gate in front. The gate isn’t locked, so we walk up the front steps. “This is fancy,” Matt says, taking it in. “Your mom’s friend is doing okay for herself.”
I’m not sure what he means, but one of the mailboxes has Jennifer Shea’s name on it, so we’re in the right place. I find the doorbell and stare at it.
“So?” Matt asks. “We doing this?”
I blink twice and pull back my shoulders to steel myself. Then I ring the doorbell. Matt and I wait for a minute before the door opens. A woman answers, tall and blond, wearing jeans and a neatly pressed shirt. Definitely not someone related to me. “Are you Jennifer Shea?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says. “Who are you?”
“I’m Patrick Walsh,” I say. “Natalie Russo’s son.”
She looks at me carefully, more of an evaluation than anything else, and then gives a little nod. “Come on in.”
I don’t know what’s past the door, but I feel this sense of possibility. And with that, I step inside.
18
Matt lingers behind me. “Should I meet you somewhere?”
“Is it okay if he comes in too, Ms. Shea? This is my cousin Matt.”
“Sure,” she says. “But call me Jen.”
Matt follows me in and closes the door behind him. I’ve never been in a house like this one before. The room we step into is long and narrow, kind of like a little library, with bookshelves all around and a leather chair and tall lamp in the corner. Jen quickly leads me through it into a living room with an angular gray couch, two square black chairs, and not much else, other than paintings on the wall that are just colorful squiggles. I don’t see a TV at all.
“Have a seat,” Jen says, and Matt and I each take a black chair. “Do you want something to drink? Some water?”
“We’re good,” I say. I want answers, not water. “Is my mother here?” Might as well get right to it.
Jen sits on the couch across from us. “No, she isn’t. She was, but she left a few days ago.”
I can’t believe I was this close and missed her. The weight of it feels like a kettlebell dropped on my stomach. I have no words.
“How do you know my aunt?” Matt asks. Thank god he’s here.
“We were roommates freshman year in college,” Jen says. “We stayed in touch when she dropped out.”
“Do you know where she is now?” I ask. “She sent me a letter, but she didn’t give me a way to get in touch.” No need to hide anything now, I suppose; J
en’s the only lead I have left.
“She told me about that,” Jen says, and smooths her hands over her jeans as if she were wearing a skirt.
“What did she say?” I’m starting to get impatient. Jen clearly knows things, but I don’t know how to make her tell me what they are.
“You have to understand, this is all quite complicated,” she says. “Natalie thought it was safe to write to you once you turned eighteen, when you were an adult. But she knew there were risks, especially if you told anyone. She got a call, and then she was gone. I don’t know where she went.”
Why can’t she be straight with me? “I didn’t tell anyone. Just my girlfriend. I didn’t do anything wrong. Who called her? Why would she just leave like that?” I know I’m starting to sound angry, but I can’t help it.
“Well, someone found out. I wish there was more I could tell you, Patrick, but she didn’t tell me who it was. I can only assume it’s the same person who’s been keeping an eye on her for years, but she never told me who that was.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jen sighs. “What do you know about her situation? Did she explain anything in the letter?”
How did she end up being the one asking the questions? “She didn’t tell me anything. From what everyone else has told me, she kidnapped me, stole a bunch of drugs, got caught, went to jail. No one in my family’s ever seen her again. That’s what I know.” By now I can sum it all up in two sentences, because those are the only two sentences that really matter.
“There’s a lot more to it than that,” Jen says. “She would never steal drugs. She had problems, yes, but drugs were well in her past. Someone set her up, and that person’s been controlling her ever since. She said it wasn’t safe to tell me who it was, but she has a phone that’s just for calls from him. She thought it would be different now that you were grown up, that if she wrote to you directly and you kept it secret, then maybe someday she could find a way to meet you. That’s why she didn’t leave contact information; she had to know that you wouldn’t tell your father. If you told, she’d get the call. And she got it, so you must have told someone. Maybe she’ll come back—she’s done this before—but I don’t know when that would be.”
I’ve somehow unlocked the key to getting Jen to talk, but if I’m understanding her right, then she’s saying this is all my fault. The letter was a test to see if I could keep my mouth shut, and I failed. But the only person I told was Maddie, and who would Maddie even tell who could possibly be the person on the other end of the calls?
“Pack didn’t tell his dad,” Matt says. “If he said he didn’t, he didn’t. He came all this way to find her, and now you’re acting like his mom not being here is on him. Can you just, like, help him? Give him something. Anything.”
I feel a crashing wave of love for my cousin.
Jen does the jeans-smoothing thing again. “It sounds like you already know the most important information. What do you want to know?”
I think about the gaps I have to fill in. Jen clearly can’t help with the most important questions that affect me now, but maybe she knows more about the past. “Why did she leave in the first place? I don’t get why she would go through all the trouble of stealing me from my dad, only to leave me with him when she got caught.” That makes it sound like he’s a bad guy, which isn’t what I mean. “Not that she shouldn’t have. I’ve had a good life. You can tell her that, if she comes back. But it doesn’t make sense, you know?”
Jen nods. “I completely understand why that would be confusing for you. You have to know that she and I haven’t talked about what happened for a long time. She told me some details way back when she first got out of jail and came to stay with me, but there’s only so much I remember.”
“Please,” I say. “Just tell me what you do remember.”
“It started when you were little,” she says. “She’d gotten away from the people she used to do drugs with, but then one of them died. An overdose. He’d moved to a nearby town along with some of their other friends, and they told her they’d been getting their drugs from a cop in Brooksby. Your dad was working in the evidence room, and she became convinced it was him. She decided she had to get you as far away from him as possible.”
I feel my mouth literally falling open. How could anyone ever think Dad would be involved in something like that? I get it together enough to say, “There’s no way.”
“You’re right about that. But it wasn’t until she got caught that she found that out for sure. I don’t know how. She was wrecked by it, though—she’d ruined her relationship with your father, and she’d been wrong.”
“Why didn’t she ask him if he’d done it, before she decided to take me?” I ask. “And why didn’t she explain everything to him afterward?”
“I’m not sure,” Jen says. “I just know that somehow she learned who was really involved, and that person scared her so badly she decided she was safer in prison.”
“And that’s who calls her?” I can’t imagine being that scared.
“As far as I know. Whoever it is, he’s got her terrified, and she’s been hiding from him ever since she got out. I don’t know what he said to convince her to carry that awful phone around, but knowing her as I do, I’m sure it has something to do with keeping you safe. She took a big risk in reaching out to you. I know you say you didn’t show that letter to anyone, but you might want to think about whether you did anything that would clue this guy in that she was trying to communicate with you.”
She still doesn’t believe me. There’s nothing I can do about it, though.
“What about the rest of us?” Matt asks. “Why cut off my family?”
“That’s not entirely on Natalie,” Jen says. “At first she was embarrassed by what she’d done; she wanted to take some time to think about how to explain to everyone why she hadn’t told them what was happening. Why she hadn’t reached out for help. But because she didn’t tell them the story herself, they all heard it from the police. They believed that she’d relapsed and stolen the drugs along with Pack, and it was too much for them to take. Natalie was devastated they would believe she’d do anything to hurt Pack or to let drugs back into her life, so instead of changing her mind and reaching out, she got stubborn.”
“That does sound like someone who’s related to us,” Matt says.
“Does that mean no one ever found out the drugs were a setup?” I ask. “Did my dad ever find out?” Some of the pieces are starting to come together, but there’s just so much it’s hard to hold it all in my head. If everyone still thinks she really did run off with the drugs—not to mention me—then it’s not totally shocking they still might not be inclined to forgive her.
Jen shakes her head. “As far as I’m aware, the only people who know are your mother, me, the person who set her up, and the person who told her it wasn’t your dad. And those last two people might be the same person—she never would tell me. I’ve been trying to convince her to do something about it for years—I’ve got the resources to help her, but she’s still too scared. Reaching out to you was her first big step, but getting that phone call sent her running. I don’t know if she’s protecting herself or you, but she’s definitely convinced that something bad might happen.”
So her staying away is a means of protecting me? Or protecting herself? “There has to be something we can do,” I say. “Please. Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Jen sits quietly for a minute. “You really didn’t tell your father about the letter?” she asks.
“I swear.”
“And you want to find her?”
Those are tricky questions. I want the rest of the story. I’m still not sure how I feel about my mother. “Yes,” I say. It’s not technically a lie because I don’t know whether the answer’s really “no,” either.
“Wait here.” Jen gets up from the couch and leaves the room, returning after a short time with a purple duffel bag with HOLY CROSS stamped on it in white letters
. She hands me the bag. “Natalie left some things here a long time ago. She said she wanted me to keep them safe, but if something happened to her, I could track you down and give them to you. I don’t know that she’d want me to give them to you now, but you’re here, so . . .”
I resist the urge to tear into the bag right in her living room. This alone makes the trip worth it. “Thank you,” I say. “I really do want to help. I don’t want to get her in trouble or anything.” I’m not lying about this, at least.
“I believe you,” she says. “You might want to think about who you did talk to, even if not about the letter, because someone knew she wrote to you. Maybe not everyone you know is as trustworthy as you think.”
I get why she thinks that, but she has to be wrong. “Will you tell my mother I was here, if you speak to her?”
“I will,” she says. “You take care of yourself.”
As excited as I was to see New York for the first time, now I can’t wait to leave. I like it here, I can already tell, and I definitely want to come back someday, but right now I want to get as far away as possible. That’s why when Matt asks if I want to do something touristy before we go, like visit the 9/11 memorial, I tell him I just want to go to the train. He seems to know I’m not ready to talk, or to do anything else, and we walk in silence to the subway, ride in silence underground, battle our way through Grand Central Station in silence, and find seats on the train back to New Haven (facing the normal direction, this time) without saying a word.
After the train chugs its way out of the station, he turns to me. “Did you know,” he asks, “that Grand Central Station is not actually called Grand Central Station?”
He’s gotten my attention. “It’s not?”
“Nope. It’s really Grand Central Terminal, but no one calls it that. Know why?”
Questions I Want to Ask You Page 15
