Do You Know the Monkey Man?: A Novel

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s not my real dad.”

  “He isn’t?” Angela and I said at the same time.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not that it’s any of your business. Sometimes people think he’s my dad because we have the same blond hair. But Joe was my real dad’s best friend. He adopted me when my parents died.”

  “Your parents died?” I repeated. This wasn’t making any sense.

  “They died when I was little. I don’t really remember them.”

  “Did you ever have a sister?” I asked desperately.

  T. J. blew a bubble with her gum, then sucked it back in. “No. I had a brother. An older brother. But he died when my parents did.”

  “I’m sorry,” Angela said.

  T. J. shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t really remember them. It was a long time ago. What makes you think Joe is your dad?”

  I launched into the whole story, beginning with the psychic and the newspaper clippings and ending with the disconnected phone. I had to admit, the whole thing sounded pretty lame when I said it out loud.

  “So…when you saw me, you thought I was your sister?” T. J. asked. She clearly wasn’t buying it.

  “Well—”

  “Look, I’ll get you that picture,” T. J. said abruptly. “You can at least see if Joe is your dad. But if he’s not, I want you to leave, okay? This is just too bizarre.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. That was all I really wanted anyway.

  Angela and I stayed on the driveway while T. J. turned back to her house. As soon as she pulled the screen door open, the dog started barking. “Hang on, Sherlock! I’m coming.”

  Both Angela and I whipped our heads around. “Sherlock?” I ran toward her. “Your dog’s name is Sherlock?”

  T. J. grinned. “Yeah.” She opened the door and this shaggy mass of white fur leaped at her legs. T. J. bent down and picked him up. His whole hind end wiggled in her arms and he licked her neck.

  “Isn’t he the greatest?” T. J. asked, bringing the dog over to me so I could pet him. “He’s a West Highland terrier.”

  I gave the dog an obligatory pat on the head.

  “We got him when he was just a pup and he was so nosy! Into everything. That’s why we named him Sherlock.”

  “My cat’s name is Sherlock,” I said.

  T. J.’s smile froze to her face. “What?”

  “It’s true,” Angela said. She could vouch for me.

  “I got him when I was ten. I named him after Sherlock Holmes.”

  “That’s…weird,” T. J. said, hugging her dog close to her chest. I could tell she didn’t like it that our pets had the same name.

  “It’s really weird,” Angela said.

  T. J. bit her bottom lip like she was debating whether or not to say something. She took a step closer to me. “You want to hear something that’s even weirder?” she asked.

  I swallowed hard. “What?”

  T. J. hesitated for just a second. “Your name is Sam, right?”

  “Well, my real name is Samantha. But everyone calls me Sam.”

  T. J.’s eyes locked on mine and she said, “My brother? The one who died? His name was Sam, too.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I shivered. T. J. didn’t remember ever having a sister, but she had a brother named Sam who died? How creepy was that?

  “When’s your birthday?” I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. We were still standing out in T. J.’s driveway.

  T. J. eyed me warily. “August 26,” she replied.

  Okay, that proved it. We had to be twins!

  “That’s my birthday, too!” I told her excitedly. “You’re going to be fourteen, right?”

  T. J. shook her head. “Thirteen,” she said, chomping her gum.

  I blinked. “Thirteen? You mean you’re only twelve now?”

  She nodded.

  That couldn’t be right.

  “What grade are you going into?” Angela asked.

  “Eighth.”

  And I was going into ninth. “But we have the same birthday,” I protested. “The same birthday, same hair color, same eye color, same pet names, same dad—” Even though he was her adopted dad.

  “But T. J.’s a year younger than you,” Angela pointed out. “And she’s adopted. And we haven’t actually seen a picture of this guy yet. We don’t know for sure that he’s your dad.”

  T. J. looked as uneasy as I felt. “Why don’t you guys come in and I’ll get that picture of Joe.”

  “Y-you call him Joe?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “That’s his name. Come on.” T. J. put the dog down and opened the front door. The little dog scampered into the house, his tail wagging the whole way. Angela and I followed close behind.

  It was warm in the house. T. J. and Joe didn’t have air conditioning. But despite the heat, I felt chilled just being inside their house. My dad’s house. This was where he got up every morning, had breakfast, went to work, came home, had dinner, watched TV, and did whatever else he did.

  The house looked totally different from our house. It had what you’d call that “lived-in” look. None of the furniture matched. There was an old caramel-colored couch that was piled with newspapers, a couple of scratched-up tables (one of them had a dirty glass on it), and a green wooden rocker. There was a picture of a group of dogs playing band instruments hanging on the wall. I couldn’t imagine any of this stuff in our house. Or in Bob’s house, for that matter.

  T. J. opened a closet and pulled a photo album down from the shelf. “Okay,” she said, opening it up. “This is Joe.” She pointed.

  I peered over her shoulder and saw a photo of a man raking leaves. He looked older than the guy in those newspaper articles I’d found in our basement, but I recognized the hair, the eyes, the mustache. He used to tickle me with that mustache!

  “That’s him!” I cried, drawing in my breath. “That’s my dad.”

  T. J. stiffened.

  “Are you sure?” Angela asked.

  “Positive.” Too bad I didn’t have that photo from the newspaper article to prove it. But I did have another one. I opened my purse and took out the photo of Sarah and me that I’d taken from that same box.

  “Look at this,” I said, handing T. J. the photo.

  She looked at it so hard she practically burned a hole in it. She even stopped chewing her gum.

  I could hardly breathe. “Is one of those girls you?”

  T. J. didn’t take her eyes off the photo. “I don’t know,” she said softly.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked. “How can you not know whether a photo is you or not?” Of course, I wasn’t sure which one was me, either.

  “Let’s compare it to a photo you have of yourself when you were little,” Angela suggested.

  “That’s just it,” T. J. said, raising her eyes to meet mine. “I don’t have any photos of me from when I was little.”

  “You don’t?”

  She shook her head. “They all got burned in the fire.”

  “What fire?”

  “The fire that killed my parents and my brother.”

  I chewed my bottom lip. I didn’t know what to think anymore. There were so many coincidences. But so many other things didn’t quite add up.

  “Where did you live with your parents and your brother?” I asked. “Did you live in Iowa?”

  “Yes,” T. J. said, surprised. “I was born in a town called Clearwater.”

  “That’s where I live!” I cried.

  T. J. and I just stared at one another in amazement. I’m not sure either one of us took a breath.

  I cleared my throat. “When will …” I didn’t know what to say. Your dad? My dad? Our dad? “When will Joe be home?” I said finally. Joe was what she called him. He was the key to this whole thing. The one who could answer all our questions.

  “I don’t know.” She glanced at the little round clock on the wall above the kitchen table.
“Before last week, he probably would’ve been home by now. He’s a handyman, so he just works a couple hours here and a couple hours there. Whenever he’s got a job, I mean. But he hasn’t been home much lately because Gram’s been pretty sick—”

  Gram? Did she mean Grandma Wright?

  “She’s in a nursing home,” T. J. went on. “And she’s not doing very well. Joe just got a job this week, too. So he’s been splitting his time between the job and the nursing home. He hasn’t been coming home until like nine or ten o’clock at night.”

  “Nine or ten at night?” Angela repeated. “We can’t hang around that long. We have to get back to Hill Valley, Sam. She checked her watch, “In fact, if we don’t leave soon, we’re going to miss the bus!”

  The last thing on my mind was catching a bus back to Hill Valley.

  “I can’t leave,” I said. “Not until I see my dad.”

  “I know,” Angela said. “But Sam, that’s the only bus back to Hill Valley tonight. If we’re not on it, how are we going to get back?”

  “Maybe I should call Joe’s cell phone and tell him I need him to come home,” T. J. offered. She still looked a little unsure about all this.

  “Could you?” I asked. As far as I was concerned, the sooner he got here, the better.

  “He only wants me to call if it’s an emergency,” T. J. explained. “But this is sort of an emergency.”

  “Go call,” Angela said. “If Sam and I aren’t on that last bus to Hill Valley, it will definitely be an emergency!”

  So T. J. went into the kitchen to make her call. Angela and I just stood around in the living room.

  “What do you think?” I whispered. “Do you think she’s Sarah?”

  “I don’t know,” Angela whispered back. “I didn’t at first, but now? I don’t know.”

  I paced back and forth. I couldn’t stand still. “What makes you think it’s possible?” I asked. “The fact that we look so much alike? Or that she doesn’t have any pictures from when she was little? Or that she was born in Clearwater? Or that we have the same birthday?”

  “I don’t know. All of that together, I guess.”

  “I couldn’t get ahold of him,” T. J. said as she came back into the living room. “I left a message with his answering service, though. He’ll come home as soon as he gets the message.”

  “What’d you say in the message?” I asked. Would she have just come right out and said, “Hey, Joe. Your other daughter is here”? And what would his reaction be? After all, if this was true—if T. J. was Sarah—then I was the daughter he’d left behind. The one he didn’t want.

  Why didn’t he want me?

  “I didn’t really say anything. I just said there was a family emergency and I needed him to come home. He’ll probably think it’s about Gram.”

  My head was spinning. Grandma Wright. Dad. Sarah. T. J. It was all too much. What was going on here? What happened all those years ago?

  “Should we wait in my room?” T. J. asked.

  “Sure,” Angela said.

  “Why not,” I said. So we followed T. J. down the hall. Sherlock plodded along behind us, his nose to the floor.

  I couldn’t help but look in all the rooms we passed along the way—the paneled TV room, the small bathroom, Joe’s bedroom…I lingered in the doorway there. This was where my dad slept.

  The window shades were pulled and there was paneling on the walls in here too, only this paneling was darker than the stuff in the other room. It was so dark you could go to sleep right in the middle of the day. I spotted a single unmade bed against one wall and a banged-up old dresser against another. A ceiling fan hummed as it spun above. But there was nothing on the walls. Nothing that told me who this Joe Wright was or what was important to him.

  “Are you coming?” T. J. poked her head out of her room and looked at me.

  “Yeah.” I pulled myself away from my dad’s room. When I got to T. J.’s room, I thought I was in a boy’s room. There were tons of sports posters on the wall. Most of the people looked like baseball players, but there was at least one basketball player, too. I didn’t even know who half those people were.

  “I guess you like sports, huh?” Angela said as we both sat down on the navy comforter. T. J. pulled out her desk chair and straddled it backwards, her arms resting on the top of the chair back.

  “Yeah. Joe and I are into all kinds of sports.”

  Didn’t she like any movie stars or singers? And what about pictures of her friends? She didn’t even have a mirror above her dresser to stick pictures of her friends in like I did. How did she do her makeup and hair without a mirror?

  Speaking of hair, no doubt mine looked terrible. And I was about to meet my dad for the very first time.

  I hopped up. “Do you have a curling iron I could borrow real quick?” I asked T. J. Hopefully I had time to do something with my hair before my dad got here.

  “No,” she said.

  I frowned. “You don’t have one that you’re willing to let me borrow?”

  “No, I don’t have one.”

  “You don’t have a curling iron?” I gaped at her. How could anyone not have a curling iron?

  She snorted. “What do I need one for?” she asked, poking at her short, spiky hair. It couldn’t have been more than half an inch long anywhere on her head.

  Did she always wear her hair so short?

  “You look fine, Sam,” Angela said in a tired voice. She pulled me back down onto T. J.’s bed.

  I knew I did not look fine, but—ugh, I was sitting on something. I reached under me and—whoa!—pulled out a stuffed monkey that looked an awful lot like my monkey back home.

  “Hey, where did you get this?” I asked, holding it up.

  T. J. grabbed the monkey out of my hands. “My grandma made it,” she said, dusting it off. Then she tossed it onto her desk, out of my reach.

  “I have one just like it at home.”

  T. J. frowned. “You couldn’t have one just like it. I just told you, my grandma made it!”

  “It looks the same to me,” Angela said.

  I heard a voice in my head:

  Do you know the monkey man?

  The monkey man? The monkey man.

  Do you know the monkey man?

  Who lives on Hartman Lane …

  “Does Joe ever call himself the monkey man?” I asked T. J.

  “The monkey man?”

  “Yeah. You know that song ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man’? Does Joe ever sing it as ‘Do You Know the Monkey Man’?”

  “Joe? Sing?” T. J. snorted. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sing.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  “Do you guys play any sports?” T. J. asked.

  “Sam and I both play softball,” Angela said.

  “Oh yeah? What positions?” T. J. asked, growing more interested.

  “I play first base,” Angela said.

  “What about you?” T. J. looked at me.

  “Oh. I’m not very good. They like to keep me out of the way, so I play right field.”

  Angela rolled her eyes.

  “What do you mean ‘out of the way’?” T. J. slapped her leg and Sherlock popped his head up. “I play right field. Right field is a very important position. You have to have a really good arm to play outfield.”

  “Sure. Whatever.” No way could she convince me Coach Frye put me in right field because of my stellar arm.

  The conversation fizzled out there, and T. J. and I just sort of checked each other out without being too obvious about it. Neither one of us really knew what to say. Thank goodness for Angela. Whenever the silences stretched too long, she always came up with something for us to talk about. Like hobbies. Or school.

  T. J. and I discovered we both played in band. But I played the flute, she played the tuba. I liked social studies, she liked science. We both hated English, though. Finally, something in common! And she didn’t think it was at all strange that I could hate English class and
still want to be a writer when I grew up.

  “Those books they make us read?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Bo-ring!”

  “No kidding,” I said. “I’m going to write way better books than those when I grow up. I’m going to write the kinds of books people actually want to read.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind of books?”

  “Mysteries, of course. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  T. J. sat up a little straighter. “A doctor.” She said it like there were no other options.

  “Wow.”

  She shrugged. “I want to make a difference in the world.”

  “You mean you want to find a cure for cancer or something?” Angela asked.

  “Maybe,” T. J. mused. “Or maybe I’ll do something to help people after they’ve had a stroke. Some sort of surgery that can make them the way they were before.”

  “Boy, my mom would love you,” I blurted out. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could pull them back in. Because if I was right about all this, then my mom was T. J.’s mom, too. And I could tell by the cloud that passed through T. J.’s eyes that she was thinking the same thing.

  “What’s she like?” T. J. asked, pulling her legs up under her on the chair. “Your mom, I mean.”

  “Well …” I looked at Angela. Too bad I didn’t have a picture. “How would you describe my mom?

  “She’s a nurse,” Angela said, giving me a jump start.

  “That’s right,” I said. “She started out just working in the hospital, then she went to night school and became a nurse’s aide. And now she’s a nurse.”

  “Yeah, but what’s she like?” T. J. repeated. “I don’t even remember what it’s like to have a mom. Joe’s great. He’s really laid back and lots of fun. But sometimes he forgets important stuff like dentist appointments and school conferences. Of course, he doesn’t think things like that are important. In some ways, he’s like a big kid. He thinks the fun stuff is what really matters.”

  That was exactly how Mom described him.

  “Sam’s mom is definitely not a big kid,” Angela said.