I felt like calling Maddie. She and Ben were relative newcomers in my life. They wouldn’t know my family history, so they couldn’t tell me anything.
There was this girl, Stacie Marr, who I grew up with. But how would she know more than I did?
Besides, Stacie had vanished. Completely. To begin with, she stole my first ever boyfriend, so I didn’t want to talk to her. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t. Shortly after the boyfriend thing, her father got arrested for molesting her. It made her so humiliated, she dropped out of school and disappeared. I didn’t mind her being gone, but I couldn’t help some curiosity about where she went and what she was doing.
I read Dad’s letter again and was no more enlightened than the first time. Who in heck was Hey Buddy? The very term Buddy made me think it was a man. He must have been somewhere near enough Kennedy Airport to meet Dad there. How could he do that if he was in prison?
I perked up when I heard a key in the lock. We always locked up since the time some lowlife sneaked in and stole Jasper. Luckily we got him back, but it made us a lot more careful.
Grandma came in wearing sweatpants and sneakers. She had short red hair with some natural curl that I didn’t inherit. Mine was more a mahogany shade, long and straight. She had on blue mascara to match her eyes, and she carried a mesh bag with her bowling shoes in it.
I said, “Is there something you people never told me?”
She straightened up from petting Jasper, who’d been jumping all over her.
“What are you talking about?” She set her bowling shoes on the floor and sat down next to me. The sofa faced a picture window that looked out on Riverview Boulevard. She kept one eye on the street in case anything interesting happened, which it almost never did, and one eye on me.
I showed her the envelope. “We got a letter from my dad, but it’s not for us. I want to know what’s going on.”
“Who said anything is? What are you talking about?”
“Take a look.” I pushed the letter into her hand.
She read it. A frown appeared on her forehead and got deeper as she went along.
“Huh!” she said, and gave it back to me. “How can you be sure it’s from him?”
“Grandma! How many people do we know in Borneo? That’s his address and his typewriter, I’d recognize it anywhere. And his signature, except it’s D instead of J. Is he leading a double life?”
It sounded crazy and I got embarrassed. But what other explanation could there be?
“Double life?” She spoke thoughtfully, as if considering it.
Then she tossed the whole thing back at me. “You’ll have to ask your mom.”
“Grandma! If you don’t know, why can’t you say so?”
She looked at me with those blue eyes. “Fine. Now I’m saying so.”
My eyes are brown, but they have the same ability as hers. We can both look completely innocent even when we’re not. At least I think I can. I know she can.
I also knew that was all I would get from her.
Chapter Two
It was after nine when Mom came home. I didn’t know if most agents worked that late. She said it was the only time a lot of people have for looking at houses. I worried about her touring empty places at night with some stranger who might be a nutcase. You never know about people. I’d run into a few nutcases myself. I was glad she had her cell with 911 in the speed dial.
She came home frazzled. Before starting on Hey Buddy, I let her have her nightly screwdriver with crackers and cheese so she would be in a more receptive mood.
Then I showed her the letter. She was sitting in bed with her glasses on, paging through a real estate catalog.
My mom was an elegant-looking woman who kept her figure and wore her reddish hair in a French twist. Even her glasses made a bold statement, with big round tortoise-shell frames. She spent a while studying the letter and frowning at it.
“I know it’s Dad’s typewriter,” I said by way of explanation. “And it’s his return address, but I kind of think he didn’t mean it for us.”
“I kind of think so, too.” She handed it back to me.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Mom!”
“Mom, what?”
“What am I missing?”
“Missing?”
She couldn’t fool me with that pretended ignorance. I waited her out and finally she caved.
“It seems to me,” she said, as though it were a big revelation, “he must have written to someone else at the same time and mixed up the envelopes.”
“Thanks, Mom. I figured out that much all by myself, but it doesn’t explain anything.”
“What did you want explained?” she asked, still pretending.
“Like, who is this other person?”
Mom lounged on her bed under a lacy afghan. She rested against a pile of pillows and gave me a steady look. “What makes you think I would know that?”
“You knew him longer and better than I did,” I said. “I don’t know him at all.”
“You know him through his letters.”
“He doesn’t say anything in his letters.”
It was true. He revealed very little about himself. Only superficial stuff, like the places he had seen or if he happened to sell an article to some magazine nobody ever heard of. In my almost seventeen years I’d learned scarcely anything about Jules Penny, the man. About his thoughts, his feelings, his ideas and goals. Do other people know things like that about their dads? Maybe not. But I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. He was half of me. I had a right to know.
I thought of calling Ben just to talk. He ought to be home by now, but probably exhausted and hitting the sack. If I irritated him, he wouldn’t hesitate to say so. That was part of being an Aspie. They tell it like it is.
And next year he’d be away at MIT, surrounded by genius girls who were smart and sophisticated. All the while I’d still be a dumb little high school kid stuck in dumb old Southbridge. Sometimes I felt as if I’d lost him already.
I wanted our relationship to be forever. He said I was the only girl besides Maddie who understood his Asperger’s. Probably at MIT at least half the girls have Asperger’s. The guys, too. I could apply there myself, but knew I didn’t have the brains to get in.
My life was a wreck. All I had to look forward to was my dad coming.
But not for us. Only for Hey Buddy, who might be in prison.
Mom went back to her reading and I wandered around the room, visiting all the things I used to play with when I was little. The miniature elephants from India on her dresser. The cut glass atomizer from somebody who never noticed that she didn’t wear perfume. The Victorian-style lamp with roses painted on it and crystal icicles dangling from the shade.
She was looking at a fat catalog of real estate listings. Reading in bed was a favorite luxury of hers, but real estate listings? Okay, it was her job.
The luxury part was the bed itself, a big four-poster with swans carved on the headboard. She and Daddy bought it, at least the frame, at an antiques fair not long after they were married, which wasn’t long before I was born. It was obvious they’d had to get married because of me.
Maybe they weren’t really married and the antiques fair was only a story. Maybe he wasn’t really my father.
She looked up from her listings. “Did you want something?”
“I would like to know…” I couldn’t say “who I am.” I would get an earful about how loony that was.
So I tried a different approach. “When he came that other time…”
He actually did visit a few years back, but the visit was brief and he was always running off somewhere.
“Yes?” Her eyes went back to the catalog.
It’s hard to talk when your listener isn’t listening, but I tried.
“He kept going into the city. What did they have there that he wanted to see more than us?”
“The way he put it—” Mom didn’t sound very convinced, �
�he was trying to establish some contacts for selling his articles. Have a good night, sweetie. Would you close the door on your way out?”
Well, if that wasn’t a brush-off. I said, “’Night,” and went across the hall to my own room.
From there I could see down the street to Olive Hurlow’s house. That’s where I used to spend afternoons and evenings, looking after her two little boys while she served drinks at Bernie’s Bar & Grill and paid me not too badly. I missed that job, especially the money. I missed the kids, and when the baby got kidnapped, I was the one who found him.
And almost got killed in the process. Olive was grateful, but she blamed me because I’d been late getting there that day. I blamed Olive. She could have waited for me even if it made her late for work. She couldn’t see it that way, or didn’t want to.
I lay on the bed and looked up at my poster of a ballet dancer sitting on the floor in worn and tattered practice clothes. That was me—in my dreams.
Since my dreams had changed, maybe it was time to take down the poster. But I still liked it. I liked the idea of working so hard that your tights got full of holes and your pointe shoes turned to mush.
What would I do for a job? Frosty Dan didn’t want me; they’d made that clear, even though I’d always been a good customer. Maddie wouldn’t have any work for me unless she got desperately swamped. She’d stay up all night rather than share her riches. After all, she did have a car to support. And very often I got the benefit of her having it.
I thought about starting my own home-based typing service. Mom would have a fit at strange people coming to the house. I’d have to rent office space somewhere and that would give me a fit.
I rested my arm beside me and it landed on Dad’s letter that I had dropped there. Why couldn’t I get any answers? Somebody had to know something, and for a very good reason.
I went down to the living room where Grandma was watching the ten o’clock news. She muted it and looked up at me.
“Do you realize,” I said, “if we got that letter meant for Hey Buddy, we might be the only ones who know Dad’s coming? He gave Hey Buddy all the flight information and he’ll expect Hey Buddy to be at the airport and Hey Buddy doesn’t know anything about it.”
Grandma said, “How do you know he didn’t give the same information in the letter that went to Hey Buddy, if it did?”
“Why would he, if he thought this one was going there? Even if he did, there’s no way we can find out. Unless you know who and where Hey Buddy is.”
Grandma shook her head. “Honest to goodness.”
“Even if I wrote to him now,” I said, “he wouldn’t get it in time. He never gave us any sort of phone number. Why can’t he move up a century and have a computer like everybody else?”
“I can’t speak for him, honeybun. All I know is there’s a lot of stuff about electric plugs not fitting everywhere. When your grandpa and I went to Paris that time, somebody gave us a set of adaptors for different places. Maybe that’s all changed now, I don’t know. Maybe they came up with a universal plug. It would make a lotta sense, but then they’d have to change all the wall sockets and the wiring—”
“Grandma.”
“Sorry, kid. I got a little off topic there. What was your question?”
“About Dad. Somebody meeting him. He’ll be waiting at the gate forever because Hey Buddy doesn’t know he’s coming.” I felt a shiver of excitement as I pictured my dad actually being there in person.
“It wouldn’t be a gate,” Grandma said. “Not the regular kind. It’d be Customs.”
“Okay, but that’s not the point.”
“So what is the point? You want me to go and meet him?”
“Well, um…us? I’d go myself if I had a car. Anyway, he and you would recognize each other better than him and me.”
She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “Yeah, you’ve changed quite a bit in what, six years? Almost seven.”
I’d been ten when he came that other time. I hadn’t filled out yet, as Grandma liked to remind me. In all the right places, as she described it. Like now I had a bust and hips and what she called a wasp waist. That was what inspired the comparison with 1890s chorus girls. She’d even dug out a picture of one to make her point.
Even though I was grown up “in all the right places,” Grandma refused to lend me her car. She let me use it other times, but this was different. “It’s complicated, driving in the city,” she said.
“Oh, and you’ve had more experience than I have?” We both got our licenses not quite a year ago.
“I know the city better than you do,” was her reply. “Come to think of it, for Kennedy you don’t go in the city, you go around it. But that’s complicated, too.”
I happened to know you did go through parts of it, but for her, only Manhattan was “the city.” She considered the other boroughs to be mere suburbs.
“Don’t you have a GPS?” I asked. She’d gotten it because she had a terrible sense of direction. Even MapQuest didn’t do it for her.
“A GPS,” she explained, “can be complicated.”
“Okay, I’ll do it the MapQuest way and you do your GPS. Somehow we ought to manage.”
“You think?”
I had to believe it. I couldn’t think of any other way.
“I assume Dad will know how to find Hey Buddy once he gets here,” I said. “It’s going to be a big surprise when he shows up if Hey Buddy doesn’t know he’s coming.”
Of course he knew where Hey Buddy was, if he’d written to him. He just sent him the wrong letter, is all.
Maybe Dad would come to our house instead, if Hey Buddy was still in prison.
Chapter Three
Grandma let me take Friday off from school so I could go with her. We didn’t tell Mom I was doing that. On Friday morning, after Mom left for work, we set out for Kennedy Airport.
At first Grandma had been adamant that she wasn’t going to meet him. I figured she was scared. She hadn’t been driving all that long and it really was complicated going through Westchester, the Bronx, and onto Long Island where the airport was.
I told her Maddie would be happy to do it. I knew Maddie wouldn’t, but sometimes I find myself bending the truth a little. Only when it’s necessary, of course.
Grandma pointed out that this was a family thing and Dad wouldn’t know what to make of a strange girl coming to meet him. Especially as he would be expecting Hey Buddy.
Once again I told her, “I’d go myself if I had a car.”
Again she reminded me that it was complicated. “Better to have two people, one of ’em navigating.”
So I was the navigator. I had an atlas on my lap that showed New York City and its surrounding areas. I’d also printed the instructions from both MapQuest and Google Maps, and Grandma had her GPS. The trouble was, the GPS didn’t always agree with the maps, but I liked hearing it. It had a male voice with a delightful British accent.
The day was warm with just a hint of mugginess. Dad would think he’d never left Borneo. He might wish he hadn’t. I wondered if living there was cheaper and that was why he stayed. I had looked it up on the Internet. Mostly it showed fancy resorts and tropical scenery.
We drove along the parkway, onto the Thruway, down through Yonkers and the Bronx past endless apartment buildings, and over the Triborough Bridge. They called it that because it touched three of the city’s five boroughs: the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. When we got off it we were in Queens, which was on Long Island. Getting close to the airport.
What if he wasn’t on the plane? He might have missed it or changed his mind. I couldn’t understand why I felt so nervous. Grandma seemed nervous, too. Not about him, but driving in an unfamiliar area with all the traffic. So far we were doing okay.
“Are you navigating?” she asked suddenly.
Oops, I’d forgotten to watch. We were on the Grand Central Parkway, I knew that much. I scrambled to find where it went.
“You gotta pay attention, kiddo,�
� she scolded. “I’m having enough trouble just doing my part.”
“Grandma, I thought you were cool with this.”
“I am. Aren’t you?”
“I’m a wreck,” I said.
“About what? Not my driving, I hope.”
“No, you’re doing great. I’m nervous about him. He doesn’t like me.”
“Why do you say that? He doesn’t even know you, much.”
“That’s what I mean. He never wanted to know me. Even when he visited that other time, he kept going off to the city.”
“Or someplace.”
I gave her a quick look but couldn’t ask what she meant. She’d have been on my case for distracting her.
“Van Wyck Expressway coming up,” I said.
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“It goes straight to the airport. Then we have to look for International Arrivals.” I felt really excited now. It was all so—international.
“Kota Kinabalu,” I said.
“What on God’s green earth is that?”
“It’s where he lives. Didn’t you ever notice on his letters?”
“I didn’t know how you pronounce it,” she grumbled.
“Neither do I; I’m just guessing. It’s where his flight comes from. That’s what we have to look for on the board.”
The whole thing seemed unreal. I couldn’t believe it was happening.
We had to do some circling before we found International Arrivals. The huge parking lot looked full, but there was space at the back. It meant walking. Luckily the day was nice for that.
Once inside the building, we looked for Kota Kinabalu and the flight number. The board said it was on time.
And we were early. Grandma had a way of getting compulsive about those things.
“You never know,” she would say. “Anything can happen. Better to give yourself some leeway.”
They had a large window where you could watch the planes come and go. I looked for his. It wasn’t in yet. I knew that even after it landed and taxied up to the gate, it would take a while for the people to start deplaning. And then they’d have to go through Customs. I had never met an international arrival before, only domestic flights, but I knew about Customs.
Under Cover Page 2
