Catherine

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To Eli and Noah, with love

As I hurtled toward New York City on a Greyhound bus, I’d imagined my destination
would be a gleaming ultrachic high-rise or a brownstone full of cousins, aunts, and
uncles who would gather me into their arms, thrilled to discover the long-lost relative
they never knew they had. So the reality was a shock: a hulking windowless concrete
block on the corner of Houston and Bowery, painted a forbidding black. There wasn’t
so much as a doorbell beside the locked front door. Big jagged silver letters spelled
out
THE UNDERGROUND
. Whatever it was—a restaurant? a comedy club? a warehouse?—it looked about as welcoming
as a maximum-security prison.

I froze on the front stoop, unsure of what to do next. Had my mother really grown
up here? Two doors down a woman with fluorescent-yellow hair and a zebra-striped minidress
was
arranging thigh-high boots in a boutique window, and a mural of a fire-snorting dragon
on the side of the building vibrated with color. Though cars blasted past me down
the wide street, the sidewalks were surprisingly empty, except for a guy in a long
black apron smoking against a wall and a couple of skaters propelling their boards
in my direction.

Could I have gotten the address wrong? I dug in the front pocket of my backpack for
the letter I’d found last Tuesday, the letter that had changed everything—my past,
my present, my future. The return address, in my mother’s loopy handwriting, assured
me I was in the right place. I pulled it out and unfolded it, hoping for some clue
I’d managed to miss.

No matter how many times I read the letter, her words still sent a jolt through me—an
electric current of love, sadness, and even guilt, because my memories of her had
worn away, vanishing like that tattered blue blanket. All I could summon was warmth,
the tickle of her hair on my face, and the scent of her perfume—cut grass and little
white flowers.

My discovery of the letter had been completely random. I’d had the day off from slinging
crullers at Mr. Donut, but it was the
worst kind of day off, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. I finished the
last of the mystery novels stacked beside my bed, and the thought of walking to the
library to get more in the ninety-five-degree heat gave me a headache. My best (and
only) friend, Larissa, was stranded on a family vacation in a part of Cape Cod so
remote it didn’t even have cell-phone service. She’d be gone for two whole weeks,
and though it was pathetic that I had only one real friend, that’s what moving every
couple of years will do to a person. By the time Dad and I arrived in Marblehead,
I’d grown so tired of starting over that I couldn’t make myself try very hard to fit
in. Luckily, Larissa transferred from private school in the middle of freshman year,
and she was in as dire need of a friend as I was. But with her out of town, I might
as well be a complete pariah.

I could have used a ride to the beach, but of course my dad was at his office, teaching.
He never used to teach in the summer; when I was little, he’d take me to the beach
or the movies, or even to his office, where I would spin around in his chair, make
long paper-clip chains, and draw with fluorescent highlighters. But at some point
I got too old to hang around with my dad, and he started shipping me off to summer
camp to be a counselor in training. This summer I flat out refused to be sent away—I
wasn’t one of those hard-core camp types who lived to make lanyards and fight color
wars. I applied for the job at Mr. Donut so I’d have a reason to stay home all summer
for once.

So I’d gotten my wish, and there I was, hitting refresh at the Nico Rathburn fansite
every fifteen seconds, waiting for someone else to make a post. When nobody did, forcing
me to face the fact
that everyone in the world but me had a life, I decided to look around in Dad’s closet
in search of our old family photos, something I do every now and then so I won’t forget
my mother’s face. She died when I was three, or so my father had always told me.
Of a brief illness
, he would say, to anyone who asked. His face would go all pale and solemn, and you
could tell whoever asked was sorry they’d brought it up.

I riffled all the way through our box of family photos, and somehow it still wasn’t
enough. Dad’s closet was packed with cartons and shoeboxes; there had to be something
else interesting in one of them, but most of what I found was unbelievably pointless.
A stack of old bank statements. A yellowing manuscript from a textbook Dad had helped
edit. Manila envelopes full of tax documents. I’m not sure why I didn’t give up. I
must have been
really
bored.

But then I hit the—pun intended—mother lode: a shoebox at the back of the highest
shelf, where I’d never have stumbled on it by sheer accident. There wasn’t much stuff
inside, but all of it was new to me. My birth certificate. My parents’ marriage license.
Mom’s old passport, stamped in Italy, France, Greece, the Netherlands, and other places
too blurry to make out. The next thing I found set my heart racing: a snapshot of
my radiant, glossy-haired mom in a beret and a man’s flannel shirt. The picture was
cut crookedly in half. She’d been standing beside someone—an old boyfriend, probably.
Part of a hand was still holding hers.

I dug a little deeper and found a few more cut-in-half portraits of Mom. She looked
a lot younger—maybe my age. She was dressed a lot younger, too; I saw none of the
pastel shirts and denim
skirts she’d worn in my baby pictures. Even in a black Pretenders T-shirt and torn
jeans she looked regal and confident in a way that had unfortunately passed me by,
no matter how alike my dad always said we looked. In another photo she wore a short
skirt, motorcycle boots, and a leather bomber jacket, the missing somebody’s tan,
slender but muscular arm draped across her shoulders. In that one, she was glancing
to the side, toward the person who’d been chopped out of the picture, her blue eyes
laughing.

But the next thing I found blew me away: an envelope addressed to me, Chelsea Rose
Price, care of my dad, Max Price. Something about the handwriting on the envelope
made my heart beat faster. The blood whooshed in my ears as I read it and the truth
became clear. There hadn’t been a “brief illness.” And Dad hadn’t sprinkled my mother’s
ashes off the coast of Falmouth, the way he’d said he had.

She hadn’t died at all. She’d run away from us, and he’d been lying to my face about
it for years.

Of all the lies a father could possibly tell his only daughter, this seemed an especially
cruel one—letting me believe my mom was dead when she wasn’t. But why hadn’t she come
home to us, the way she’d wanted to? Had she changed her mind? Or had Dad not let
her? What else had he been hiding from me?

When I could trust my shaking legs, I ran for my laptop and typed my mother’s name
into Google. I found a Catherine Eversole Price in Des Moines, Iowa. A florist posed
beside a prize-winning arrangement of tropical flowers, she looked nothing like my
mom. One Cathy Eversole turned out to be a fifty-something real-estate agent in Bakersfield,
California, and another was a
fluffy blond newscaster in Indianapolis. On the next page of hits, I found what I
was looking for—a four-year-old story in the
North Shore Ledger
.