Do You Know the Monkey Man?

by Dori Hillestad Butler

“Definitely not,” I agreed. “In fact, she’s probably the opposite of Joe. She’s very serious and responsible. She doesn’t know much about having fun.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Angela said. “She’s gotten better since she and Bob got engaged.”

  “Your mom’s engaged?” T. J. asked.

  Before I could answer, the front door burst open. We all shut up. “T. J.?” a man’s voice called.

  Sherlock scampered out from under T. J.’s chair and raced down the hall. “Woof! Woof!”

  T. J. looked at me. “Joe’s home.”

  “I figured.”

  “T. J.?” the voice called again. “Where are you? What’s the big emergency?”

  He poked his head into T. J.’s room and it was like everything stopped. He looked at me and I looked at him. And nobody said a word.

  Chapter Seventeen

  If I ever had any doubt that this Joseph Wright was my father, that doubt was gone now. He was thinner than I expected. Shorter, too. But other than that, he looked exactly like that photo T. J. had. Exactly like the photo of him and my mom in those old newspaper articles. Except older.

  He had the same white blond hair as me and T. J., a long face, and a full mustache. He wore an old white T-shirt that was spotted with flecks of paint and jeans that were so faded they were practically white.

  This was my dad! I had waited for this moment for so long and now that it was here, I didn’t know what to do. But I got the feeling he didn’t know what to do, either.

  T. J. broke the silence. “Joe, this is Sam and her friend, Angela. From Iowa.” Her voice sounded funny. Like there was something caught in her throat. “Sam thinks you’re her dad.”

  He still didn’t say anything. He just stared at me. And I stared back.

  “Joe?” T. J. said, her voice rising. Her knuckles were white from gripping the back of her desk chair so hard.

  “H-how did you find us?” Joe asked, his voice cracking.

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I swallowed hard, then tried again. “A detective,” I croaked. “On the Internet.”

  Joe rubbed his face tiredly, as though he hadn’t slept in days. “I don’t suppose it was all that hard,” he said finally. “I wouldn’t have thought anyone was looking for me anymore, so these last few years I haven’t exactly tried to hide.”

  “Hide?” T. J. asked. “W-why would you want to hide?”

  Joe glanced around nervously. “Is your mom here?” he asked me.

  “She’s in Clearwater. She doesn’t know I’m here.”

  His shoulders relaxed a little when I said that. But I couldn’t tell what he thought about me being there in his house. Was he happy to see me or not?

  “Sam says she had a sister,” T. J. said. “She showed me a picture. She thinks I’m the sister she thought was dead. That’s not…it’s not true, is it?”

  Beside me I heard Angela draw in a deep breath.

  Joe rubbed the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows, then slumped against the doorjamb. He looked totally defeated.

  A thousand questions swirled around in my head, but I couldn’t grab one to ask. All I could do was stare wide-eyed at him—this man who was my dad.

  “If it’s true, then…you’d be my dad, too,” T. J. rose up from her chair. There was panic in her eyes. “My real dad. But that’s not right. My real dad died in a fire. You were my dad’s best friend, right?”

  Joe let out a long sigh. “No, Teej.” He shook his head. “I…I am your real dad.”

  T. J.’s whole face went white.

  “T. J… .” Joe went over to her, but she backed away from him. “Let me explain.”

  “Stop.” She held up her hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I-I can’t deal with this.” She pushed past Joe and bolted out of her room. Sherlock dashed after her. A few seconds later we heard the front door open, then slam shut. Sherlock let out a soft whimper.

  Joe cocked his head to the little rectangular window above. We could all hear T. J.’s heavy stomps across the yard.

  “It’s okay,” Joe said nervously. “She’s just going next door. She’s got friends there. David and Nick. They’re twins.” He smiled ruefully.

  I didn’t know what to say. I glanced at Angela, but she looked just as uncomfortable as I felt.

  Joe rubbed his face again and smiled at me. “So…what do we do now?”

  He was asking me?

  “Maybe we should go in the other room and talk,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I sure could use something to drink.”

  “Okay,” I said, slowly unfolding my legs. Oh my gosh! This was my dad. I was going to have a real conversation with my dad.

  “Um, I think I’ll wait here,” Angela said, biting her lip. She pulled out her cell phone. “I should call my dad and let him know where we are.”

  Uh oh! We were going to miss that last bus back to Hill Valley! But …

  “Do you want something to drink?” Joe asked Angela.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m fine.” She smiled nervously.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  Angela gestured for me to go, so I hurried after him. Hopefully Angela and her dad would figure out how we would get back to Hill Valley tonight.

  My legs were so shaky I wasn’t sure they’d hold me up. I did manage to make it to the kitchen, though. It was a small galley-style kitchen with a back door at one end and a table and chairs at the other.

  I found my dad resting his elbow on the top of the open refrigerator door, peering inside. “Do you want a Coke?” he asked me.

  “Okay.” I tried to act casual, like this was no big deal, having a Coke with my dad.

  He grabbed two cans from the fridge—a can of Coke and a can of beer—then plopped them on the table. Wow! When he stood next to me, I could see I was almost as tall as he was.

  I waited until he motioned for me to sit. Then I pulled out a chair and slowly eased myself into it. He sat down heavily in the chair beside me. Then we just sort of looked at each other. A ceiling fan hummed above us. For a moment, it was the only sound in the room.

  “I don’t know where to start,” he said with a short laugh.

  “Me either.”

  He shook his head. “Look at you. You’re all grown up.”

  I blushed.

  “Of course, T. J.’s grown up, too, but that’s different. I haven’t watched you grow. Whenever I think of you, I still picture that three-year-old kid with the broken front tooth.”

  I did have a broken front tooth when I was a little kid. I got it from a fall off my tricycle.

  “I never meant for it to be like this,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I never thought…I never wanted …” His voice trailed off.

  “Y-you took my sister,” I prompted.

  He looked down at his beer. “Yes.”

  “You took her and you let everyone think she was dead.” I didn’t get it. This man sitting so close to me, my dad, seemed like a regular person. How could he have done this terrible thing?

  “You have to understand, Sam. Your mom was taking the two of you away from me. She was heading off to medical school in Florida—”

  What?

  “My mom never went to medical school.” She’d be a doctor if she’d gone to medical school. Not a nurse.

  “Well, that was her plan. Ever since I first met her, that was all she talked about. Becoming a doctor.”

  It was?

  T. J. said she wanted to be a doctor. How bizarre was that?

  “Then your mom got pregnant and we got married and I thought she’d given up all those big ideas,” Joe said. “But she didn’t. As soon as her folks moved down to Florida, they started telling her about this great medical school down there and how she could still go if she wanted to. They even said they’d pay for it. And they’d take care of you and T. J. while she was in class. All she had to do was move down there and everything would be set.

 
; “So one day she decided this was what she was going to do. She went to see some hotshot lawyer. She said they were going to write up some paper they wanted me to sign that said it was okay if she took you two out of state. But it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay at all.” He held his head in his hands.

  “But …” I didn’t even know where to begin with the questions. This was so totally different from anything I’d ever heard before. “I always thought you guys got divorced because Sarah died.”

  Joe pressed his lips together. “Is that what your mother told you?”

  “I think so.” It was either her or Grandma Sperling. I wasn’t sure who now.

  “No.” He shook his head vehemently. “Your mother wanted a divorce practically the day after we got married.”

  “She did? Why?”

  But then I put it all together. They got married young. Really young. And Joe just said she got pregnant and they got married. He didn’t say they got married and then she got pregnant.

  “My mom was pregnant before you guys got married?” I asked, totally shocked.

  Hearing the words so bluntly seemed to shock Joe, too. “Well,” he hesitated. “Yeah. I guess that’s the way it happened.”

  I couldn’t believe it! My mom, Ms. Responsibility, got herself knocked up? Okay, but what did that have to do with why he took my sister? And he didn’t just take her, he faked her death. That was worse than kidnapping. It was like…murder in a way. Sarah didn’t really die, but we all thought she did. Joe didn’t actually kill her, but he killed her in our minds. He even gave her a different name.

  “So, how did you …” I couldn’t even say it out loud. I couldn’t say how did you fake my sister’s death.

  “I never planned to take T. J. that day,” he said. “It just…happened.”

  “How?” How did something like that just “happen?” And the other question that gnawed at the back of my brain: Why did you only take her? Why did you leave me behind? Didn’t you want me?

  He took another swallow of beer. “Like I said, your mom was taking you guys away. This was going to be my last chance to see either of you for quite a while. Maybe ever, if your grandparents had their way. So I wanted to do something special. Just the three of us. Go on a picnic or something. But then you came down with the flu.”

  Yes! I remember that!

  “I didn’t think you were that sick. I thought you could come, too. But your mom wouldn’t hear of it. She let me take T. J., but not you. So T. J. and me, we ended up at that old quarry outside Clearwater. She didn’t know what was happening. She just ran up and down the path picking dandelions for your mom. But me, my heart was breaking. All I could do was think about how unfair it was that your mom could take you both away from me, just like that.”

  “So you decided to…make it look like Sarah died?” I asked, squeezing my hands around my Coke.

  “No! I didn’t want to take her back to your mom, but I never…I never thought about taking her away. Not at first. I just…I didn’t know what to do. So I drove her to my mom’s. She was living in Waterloo then. She never thought it was right that your mother could take you both away. She wanted to help me. She said she’d keep T. J. for me and in the morning I should call my lawyer and tell him I wasn’t going to sign that paper.

  “So I drove back to Clearwater. But instead of going to your mom’s, I drove back out to the quarry. I needed to figure out what I was going to say to your mom, how I was going to tell her T. J. wasn’t coming home that night and she wasn’t going to take you guys to Florida. There was an old canoe lying in some brush. I don’t know whose it was. You’re not even supposed to go canoeing out there. But it was there, so I put it in the water and just sort of drifted around on the water for a while.

  “A little while later, I heard voices. The sound startled me. It startled me so bad I dropped one of the oars. So I jumped in after it. And all of a sudden these people came running. They thought they saw a kid fall in.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. It all happened so fast. I just sort of went along and said ‘Yes, my little girl fell in the water!’ The lady went to get help and her husband tried to get me to come out of the water. But I wouldn’t. I just kept diving under and coming back up. I don’t know what I was doing.

  “By the time the cops got there, I had done such a good job convincing these people that my kid really was in the water that I almost believed it myself.

  “Then one of the cops found a kid’s life preserver in the canoe. I didn’t even know it was there. I told him Sarah had taken it off before she fell in. It was all so easy because everyone believed me. The fire department came out and started a search.

  “Someone pulled me out of the water and dried me off. And then pretty soon, your mom showed up. Those folks from that other car told the cops they saw a little girl fall into the water.” He closed his eyes as though remembering was too painful. “Everyone kept yelling at me, telling me how stupid it was to take a little girl out in a canoe there, like I didn’t know that. People asked me whether I saw the No Swimming and No Boating signs. Your mom started beating on me. Literally. I couldn’t believe they all thought I was so stupid. That I would really take a little girl out on that water. But that was exactly what they thought. Every last one of them.

  “Of course, your Grandma Wright was in a tizzy,” Joe went on. “She didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t what we planned, but it was too late to go back. The story made news all over Iowa. And she had the kid that everyone was looking for. So the first thing she did was tell everyone that T. J. was you. Then she told one of her friends that her other granddaughter was missing and that she had to come to Clearwater to be with the rest of the family. She asked the friend to take care of T. J. while she was gone.”

  “What did you tell Sarah—er—T. J. about all of this?” I asked. “Didn’t she think it was weird that she never got to go home again? Didn’t she think it was weird that people were calling her Sam?”

  “Well, she was only three years old. Grandma told her it was a funny game and she should pretend she was you. She always liked to play pretend. She stayed with Grandma’s friend until after the search was called off and we had the funeral. Then Grandma thought I’d better get T. J.—er, Sarah—and disappear. Which was pretty easy because your mom wanted a divorce anyway. She was picking up and moving to Florida.”

  Except she never did!

  Why not? Was she so broken up over losing one of her children that she couldn’t do it? She couldn’t follow her dream of becoming a doctor?

  “So what happened after that?” I asked.

  “I told T. J. we were going on a little trip. Just her and me. It was hard at first because she missed her mom and she especially missed you.”

  I smiled, then looked down at my can of pop. I liked that she’d missed me.

  “There was a time she thought I called her Tara instead of Sarah and she thought that was a funny joke. She thought it was more pretend. So I kept on calling her Tara Jo instead of Sarah Jo. I realized it was probably a good idea to change her name anyway. And pretty soon Tara Jo got shortened to T. J.

  “For the first couple of years, we just drove around the country. I told her you and your mom had died and we couldn’t go back to Iowa. That we were going to have a whole new life. She didn’t like it at first, but she got used to it. Grandma sent us money now and then and told us what was going on. As far as the police were concerned, the case was closed. Sarah was dead.

  “After a while, when I was sure no one was looking for T. J., we settled down in a small town in southern California. I got a job. Your sister started kindergarten. She started a year late because of all the moving around we did before that.”

  “That’s why she’s only going into eighth grade?”

  “Yeah. We sort of skipped that first birthday, so when you guys turned five, she thought she was turning four.

  “Then we moved to Oregon and South Dakota and finally Minnesota, because my mom had move
d here. I found a guy who drew up some fake adoption papers a few years ago. He thought it was better to say T. J. was originally someone else’s kid rather than mine. That way no one could trace her to Sarah.

  “So once I got the adoption papers, I told T. J. she was adopted. I told her her real family died in a fire. I told her her dad and I were real close. She didn’t even question it. She doesn’t remember much about her life in Clearwater.”

  “She didn’t even remember me,” I said, picking at the tab on my can of Coke. “She said she once had a brother named Sam, but she doesn’t remember ever having a sister.”

  “There was a boy in California she used to play with. His name was Sam, too. Somewhere along the way I think she confused the two of you, and I guess I thought that was okay.”

  I closed my eyes. Maybe when I opened them I’d find out this whole thing was just a dream. A bad dream.

  Unfortunately, it was all real.

  “I never stopped thinking about you, Sam,” Joe said, his elbows on the table, leaning toward me. “I knew I could never go looking for you. But I always hoped you’d come looking for me. I just didn’t think you’d come looking so soon. And I never figured out what I’d do if you actually found me.”

  “That’s why you didn’t call me back last week?”

  “When I heard that message on the machine, I wanted to take T. J. and run again. But I couldn’t do that. My mom—your grandma—she’s pretty sick. She’s had a couple of strokes and she can’t take care of herself anymore. T. J. and me, we’re all she has left. She was always there for us, so now it’s our turn to be there for her.”

  I didn’t know what to think of this grandmother who had not only abandoned me my whole life, but had helped my dad take T. J. away from us. This grandmother who was probably too sick to explain to me why she’d done it.

  “So I had our number changed,” Joe went on. “Got it unlisted and hoped that would be enough. After all, it wasn’t Suzanne who’d found me, it was you. If you were the one looking for me instead of your mom, I thought maybe you’d just give up. But I bet you’re like your mom. You probably never give up.”