And Then Everything Unraveled (2 page)

I was a bit on edge by the time my flight arrived, a little after midnight. It turned out that a long plane ride alone wasn’t exactly the best way to take my mind off T.K. calling my aunts “a last resort,” and it hadn’t helped that the movie was about tap-dancing penguins. I didn’t want to think about how they were much better equipped for polar survival than my mother.

So I wasn’t feeling like the least anxious version of myself as I followed the other passengers to the baggage claim. Then it seemed like it took forever for luggage to start sliding down the chute and onto the carousel, which gave the anxious feeling the opportunity to swell and morph into something closer to full-fledged dread.

My suitcase finally tumbled onto the conveyor belt, though as soon as it did, I wished I could delay until I was in a mental state that was more likely to make a favorable impression on estranged relatives. But instead I pushed through the doors to the terminal, where Charity had told Thad she’d pick me up. (I’d refused to speak to her directly, since I’d still been trying
to convince everyone I wasn’t an orphan and had no intention of going to New York.)

Nobody rushed over to greet me, but I figured it would take a while to locate my aunt in the crowd, especially since I had no idea what she even looked like. All I had to go on was an old snapshot I’d found in a folder labeled
PERSONAL MEMORABILIA
filed between
PALO ALTO CONSERVATION LEAGUE
and
PRIUS (TOYOTA)
in my mother’s home office.

The photo was of three girls on a sandy beach, and I’d recognized one of them as T.K. right away. She still wears her hair in the same shiny brown bob, and I’ve seen the same impatient expression on her face more times than I can count, usually while she’s helping with my science homework. I’m okay at most subjects, but science is pretty much a lost cause.

Anyhow, my mother was probably younger than I am now when the picture was taken, and the two other girls looked even younger than that. The middle one had blond braids and a big fake beauty-pageant smile, while the smallest one was squinting her green eyes at the camera and scowling underneath a tangle of black curls. Neither of them looked anything like each other or like T.K., though there was something oddly familiar about the one with dark hair. But I didn’t even know for sure they were her sisters, and if they were, who knew what they’d look like now?

Either way, I found myself scanning the crowd for anyone
with hair matching one of the two girls in the picture. There was a blondish woman, but she was too old to be my aunt, and she was with a man who was even older. As I watched, they started waving and smiling, and a younger blond woman lugging a matching blond toddler shouted a hello and hurried in their direction. A tired-looking guy who was probably her husband trailed behind with their bags.

The stream of travelers flowed around me and peeled off in groups of two and three and four. As the crowd grew smaller, the thick feeling that had been in my throat off and on for the last week came back, but I swallowed and kept looking.

When nobody was left but a man with a sign that said
BIG APPLE LIMOS
, I tried to convince myself that Thad must have misunderstood and that my aunt would be waiting for me outside. But outside I saw only a straggling taxi line and people making their way to the parking garage.

As a general rule, I believe that panic is a healthy response to being stranded in a strange city in the middle of the night, but it also seemed like freaking out wasn’t an option just then. So I tried to stave off the panic by thinking what my mother would do.

T.K. approaches every problem with steady, cool logic. This comes a lot less easily for me, but now I did my best to channel her levelheaded calm. There was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for my aunt not being there, and a simple phone call was all it would take to straighten everything out.

Even though T.K. considers it “an invasion of privacy and lapse in common courtesy” to call someone after ten
P.M.
, I thought she’d okay it under the circumstances, so I dialed the number Charity had given Thad. And I broke another of T.K.’s rules of phone etiquette by not hanging up after five rings, which she says is long enough to give someone a chance to get to the phone or for voice mail to pick up but not long enough to be obnoxious.

It was eight whole rings before an automated voice came on to tell me that “the subscriber you have called is not available at this time.” Then another automated voice came on and said, “The mailbox for this subscriber is full” before hanging up on me.

I stared at my phone. Then I checked the number and dialed again, but I got the same result.

At this point, no amount of swallowing could get rid of the thick feeling in my throat. It was also getting harder to keep channeling my mother, especially since Nora had spent so much time warning me about how careful I needed to be in a place like New York, where even the most harmless-looking person could be packing heat and intent on criminal mayhem.

But the next step was still pretty obvious. After all, I had Charity’s address, and Thad had given me a bunch of twenties back at the airport in San Francisco. So I took my roller bag by the handle and went to join the taxi line with as much poise as I could scrape together.

I’ve traveled a lot for someone my age—my dad took me to India once, and we’d gone snowboarding a bunch of times in places like Colorado and Utah. One Christmas break we went to Hawaii, and we even convinced T.K. to come with us, though she refused to surf and spent the entire vacation sitting under a beach umbrella, slathered in sunscreen and working on her laptop.

But I’d never been to New York before. For the first fifteen minutes it looked like any other city, and we sped along a series of highways lined with residential neighborhoods and the occasional more industrial zone. Then the cab rounded a curve, and the Manhattan skyline popped up in the distance, just like in the movies, and I couldn’t help but feel a little rush in spite of everything.

I managed to pick out the Empire State Building, its familiar outline lit in red, white, and blue, before we zoomed up a ramp and onto the 59th Street Bridge, which I would’ve recognized from the first
Spider-Man
even if there hadn’t been an electronic map on the back of the driver’s seat. A purple blip on the screen represented the taxi, chewing its way across the East River like a real-life version of the old Pac-Man game Erin had hacked to work on her Wii.

The bridge spilled us out onto an expressway with the river to one side and a blur of buildings to the other. I’d just caught a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge and the skyscrapers of lower
Manhattan, and even the Statue of Liberty, planted on its own island in the harbor, when, without warning, the driver cut across two lanes of traffic. We raced down an exit ramp and onto a street still busy with cars and people hours after everyone in Palo Alto would’ve been in bed.

Snatches of music coming from other cars mixed with the sounds of honking traffic and sirens, and now that the taxi was moving more slowly and wind wasn’t rushing in through the window, I could feel the humidity in the air. We passed block after block of stores and restaurants, a lot of them with signs in Spanish or Hebrew or Chinese.

Even though most of what I knew of New York came filtered through Hollywood, I’d still thought I had a pretty good handle on what different neighborhoods were supposed to look like. The Upper East Side was elegant apartment buildings, and Midtown was glass-and-steel corporate headquarters, and SoHo was chic restaurants and boutiques. But we were now on the Lower East Side heading toward TriBeCa—at least, that’s where the purple blip on the map was headed—and the confusion of people and languages reminded me more of Mumbai or New Delhi than anything I’d seen on TV.

Then the driver made a series of sharp turns, and suddenly the crowds and the noise were gone. “Fifteen Laight,” he announced, jerking the taxi to a stop on a particularly deserted cobblestone street.

This was the first thing he’d said to me the entire ride—he’d spent most of it on his cell phone talking in what I was pretty sure was Urdu. But he helped get my bag out of the trunk, and when I paid him, he insisted on giving some of the money back, saying I’d tipped too much.

“I’ll wait until you get inside,” he offered, and I have to admit, I was glad he did. Now I understood why the taxi dispatcher at the airport had looked so surprised when I told her where I was going.

I’d never heard of Laight Street the way I’d heard of Park Avenue, but I knew from my mother that her parents were wealthy, so I’d assumed my aunts were, too, and that Charity’s address would be just as fancy as Patience’s.

But the building definitely didn’t look fancy. If anything, it looked like a warehouse, and not the kind that had been made over into condos with a Starbucks and a dry cleaner in the lobby, like the ones I’d seen in San Francisco. There was no doorman like on
Gossip Girl
or even a neat, glass-enclosed directory like the apartment buildings I’d been to in Palo Alto. There was just a plastic intercom panel with a handful of names written on stickers and peeling pieces of tape.

The topmost label said TRUESDALE—#5 in bold capital letters, and I took a deep breath as I reached out to press the button next to it. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if nobody answered. Did hotels take unaccompanied minors?

But then I heard the speaker click on.

“Is this the Truesdale resi—” I started to ask, but before I could finish, the speaker clicked off and the door’s lock buzzed open.

The cabdriver gave me a wave, put the taxi in gear, and disappeared around a corner.

The heavy steel door led into a small foyer with an elevator to one side and a staircase to the other. The elevator was the kind that needed a key to set it in motion, but nobody came rushing down with a key, so after a minute I picked up my suitcase and headed for the stairs.

Between surfing and snowboarding and playing soccer at school, I like to think I’m in pretty good shape, but my pulse was beating hard when I finally reached the landing on the fifth floor. Though that might also have been because I was completely furious.

I probably should’ve been relieved to be safely inside, but as soon as the front door shut behind me, all the anxiety and dread erupted into pure, unadulterated rage. I’d been the ultimate in cool resourcefulness back at the airport. I hadn’t panicked or done anything silly. There’d been no hysteria or accosting of random strangers, telling them my life story and throwing myself on their mercy. I’d gotten into a taxi and gotten myself here, with a minimum of fuss and as if I did that sort of thing all the time. T.K. would’ve been proud.

But instead of effusive apologies, or at the very least an explanation, I’d been greeted by an anonymous buzzer and the world’s steepest stairs. And the single door on the fifth floor, the door with a big 5 scrawled on it in what looked like spray paint, remained closed.

I began counting backward from ten to get my temper under control, but as I counted I just got more and more angry. I knew that suddenly being responsible for the care of a sixteen-year-old girl might not have been what my aunt had planned—it sure wasn’t what I’d planned, either—but it seemed like she could’ve said something instead of just flaking, and preferably before I flew across an entire continent.

There wasn’t a doorbell, which was fine, because pounding on the door felt good even if it did make my knuckles hurt. Given how things were going, I half expected nobody to answer, so I wasn’t that surprised when nobody did.

I was leaning against the door, trying to figure out what my mother would do next, when I spotted a sign taped to the banister of the next flight of stairs. WE’RE ON THE ROOF, it said, in the same handwriting as the label next to the buzzer downstairs. There was also an arrow, pointing up, as if whoever made the sign thought maybe I couldn’t read.

I said a few of the sort of words that T.K. thinks are “indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination” before following the arrow up the final set of stairs. These let out onto another small landing and yet another heavy metal door.

I glared at the door, not even wanting to consider the possibility of nobody being on the other side. Then I pushed it open and stepped into the dazzling brightness of full day.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust, at which point I realized that the brightness was from banks of brilliant white lights. Extension cords snaked around my feet, and a bunch of glamorous-looking people in tuxes and ball gowns stood posed in little groups under the lights.

But nobody noticed me, because they were all focused on a skinny man in black. “NO NO NO!” he was yelling. “Zat is not vat I vant!” He had spiky blond hair and a long beaky nose, and he wore a scarf around his neck even though it must have been ninety degrees out. One end flowed behind him as he swept from group to group, and I had the feeling he’d spent a lot of time in front of a mirror figuring out how to make it flow that way.

“Zere!” he commanded, repositioning somebody an inch or two so he faced at a slight angle to the others. “And zere!” He made a minuscule adjustment to the tilt of a woman’s head. Then he stepped back to admire his work, and I saw that a guy with a huge camera stood behind him, waiting to start filming.

“Zat is better,” said the man in black. “Now, remember, it is a party, but you are sad. It is a celebration, but you are mourning. You are eager, but also vistful.”

“Dieter!” a woman cried out from next to the cameraman. “Come on already. We’re losing the light.” Which made no sense
to me. I mean, unless they were running out of electricity. But maybe this was movie-speak for something else.

The man in black—Dieter, I assumed—turned toward the woman. “Ze art cannot be rushed, Gertrude,” he said haughtily.

Gertrude, who was wearing a female version of Dieter’s outfit, complete with the scarf, made a sound that was a combination of a grunt and a snort. “But the budget can be busted. We’re already paying everyone here time-and-a-half.”

Dieter sighed, but he clapped his hands together. “Vight, vight. Places, everyvone. Places!”

Nobody moved, probably because they were already in the places he’d put them.

“Vight. Ready and—ACTION!”

Immediately, the crowd came to life. And almost as immediately, Dieter yelled, “CUT!”

“Now what?” demanded Gertrude.

“HER! Ze face! It is mesmerizing!” And before I knew what was happening, Dieter had my chin in his hand and was turning my head first one way and then the other.

“Mesmerizing” was pretty much the last word I’d ever used to describe myself—mostly I was just short—so I probably should’ve been flattered, but I was too busy being completely mortified. There must have been fifty beautifully dressed and made-up strangers on that roof, and they were all staring right at me. And none of them could possibly know that the
only reason I was wearing the jeans and T-shirt I had on was that Nora had packed all of the clothes I actually liked, or that my nose wasn’t usually such a striking shade of beet but I’d forgotten to use sunblock on my last trip to Ross’s Cove.

It also wasn’t like I could explain any of this with Dieter’s fingers clamped around my jaw. “Ve must find her a part in ze scene,” he declared.

“Fine,” said Gertrude, but she didn’t sound like she really thought so. In fact, she sounded like she was ready to throttle Dieter, and potentially me. “But she has to sign the release.”

I tried to say something, but all I could manage was an ineffectual mumble. For such a scrawny guy, Dieter had an impressive grip.

“You are over eighteen, right?” Gertrude asked, stalking up and thrusting a clipboard in my face.

“No,” I said, finally managing to free my chin from Dieter’s grasp. “I’m sixteen.”

Gertrude looked at me as if I’d been born when I had on purpose, just to make her life difficult. “Why is the agency sending us minors?” she said to Dieter. “We can’t use her.”

“But she’s perfect. Ve MUST use her,” Dieter insisted. “Vere is Zarley? ZARLEY!”

An especially glamorous dark-haired woman broke loose from one of the carefully arranged groups and made her way toward us, her red satin dress shimmering under the lights.

“What’s the problem?” she asked brightly.

“This is the problem,” growled Gertrude, pointing at me.

“I must have zis girl in ze film,” said Dieter. “But she is ze minor, so she can’t sign ze release.”

“That’s all right, one of her parents can sign ze—I mean,
the
—release.” The woman turned to me. “We’ll just need you to get a signature from your mom or dad.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“She says she can’t,” the woman reported to Dieter and Gertrude.

“Then she can’t be in the film,” Gertrude said to Dieter, in a “so there” sort of way.

“But she MUST be in ze film!” Dieter said stubbornly.

Gertrude heaved a sigh of exasperation. “This is what we get for working with amateurs.”

The woman in the red dress didn’t seem to appreciate either of us being called amateurs. She put her hands on her hips and her voice took on a steely edge. “Excuse me?”

Maybe it was her tone, or her height—she was nearly a foot taller than me—or maybe it was simply the way her green eyes flashed as she spoke, but she was suddenly imposing. Gertrude swallowed whatever she was planning to say, and Dieter moved closer to her, like she might come in handy as a human shield.

Satisfied, the woman turned her attention back to me. “Sorry
it won’t work out this time,” she said. “But maybe you can be in the next film.”

The steeliness was gone from her tone, and her smile was kind, but it was also dismissive, and somehow the dismissiveness was the last straw. It had been a long day, complete with more mood swings than I usually have in any given week, and I’d been teetering on the brink since the plane landed. I put my own hands on my own hips and let all of the words I’d been holding back pour out.

“I don’t want to be in this film or the next film or any film! I don’t want to be here at all! It wasn’t my idea to leave California, and my home, and my friends, and my school, and my entire LIFE, and to fly three thousand miles to live with someone I’ve never met who doesn’t even pick me up at the airport when she says she’s going to. And I can’t get permission from my parents because my dad is dead, and everyone thinks my mother is, too—”

That’s when I ran out of words, which was just as well, because Dieter cracked up. Which isn’t exactly the reaction you want when you’re trying to show you’re a force to be reckoned with.

“I can see how hilarious this must be for you,” I said to him.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to stop laughing. “It’s just zat you are like ze Mini-Me. You know, from ze
Austin Powers.
Not an artistic vork, but very entertaining is zis film—”

Meanwhile, the woman in the red dress was staring at me. “Who
are
you?” she asked.

“I’m Delia,” I said. “Who are
you
?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You can’t be Delia. Delia’s coming tomorrow.”

“It
is
tomorrow,” I said.

“But Delia’s flight doesn’t get in until five past twelve. That’s hours away.”

“My flight did get in at five past twelve,” I said. “Twelve midnight.”

“Midnight?” she said in disbelief. “What kind of flight gets in at midnight? Flights get in at noon, not midnight.”

I didn’t point out that a plane would’ve had to leave the West Coast at three in the morning to arrive in New York at noon. I only said, “My flight got in at midnight.”

“Then you’re Delia?” she asked. “But when did—how did—I mean—you’re absolutely sure you’re Delia?”

She ran a hand through her hair, and a black curl came loose from its knot. And all at once, I saw her resemblance to the scowling little girl in the picture and realized why the little girl had seemed familiar.

She looked a lot like me.

The thick feeling was suddenly back in my throat, making it hard to say anything, so I just nodded.

Her mouth formed a perfect red
O
as realization washed over
her. Then, slowly, her hands fell from her hips and the
O
melted into a wide, warm smile.

“Well, Delia,” she said. “I’m your aunt Charley.”

And when she hugged me, it felt like hitting a wave just right.