Nearly Gone (2 page)

79% on my algebra test. I passed!!!

I sighed, crumpled her note, and tossed it in the trash. It was
almost
a thank-you. A passing grade meant she could keep her place on the squad, her seat in the social pyramid. Unfortunately, her passing score would do nothing for mine, even though I
had
been the one to tutor her after school.
Every week.
For three months.
Community service. Five days a week. One hour a day. A mandatory requirement of all scholarship candidates. Students with cars and bus money got to volunteer in labs, or hospitals, or at the Smithsonian. Oleksa’s dad hooked him up cracking math codes for some government agency. Meanwhile, we who were vehicularly challenged had to tutor students after school.
Of course, it would all have been worth it if they’d paid me. If I didn’t have to slip money from my mother’s tip jar for my newspaper and depend on Jeremy’s Twinkie donations for my junk food fix
I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the wall, which didn’t do anything for the tension headache blooming inside it. Touching Jeremy had stressed me out. The headaches, the nausea . . . they were the reason I’d stopped touching my mother after my father left five years ago. I’d tried, thinking that I could fill the void. That holding tightly to her might ease her pain, and maybe ease my own. But I wasn’t enough, and she’d turned so bitter that when we did touch, the pain stayed with me for days and the taste of her made me vomit. I lost weight and missed school, withdrew under blankets and hid inside long sleeves. Worried, my mother took me to neurologists who told her there was nothing physically wrong with me. They suggested I was suffering from stress, that I was emotionally fragile because my father had left us. Relief clung to the stench of my mother’s grief— maybe, at least partly, because the doctors had given her one more reason to blame him.
But she was wrong. They were all wrong. What I was feeling wasn’t my father’s fault. It wasn’t coming from
inside
me. It was coming from anyone I got close enough to touch. I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked—it’s not like they teach this stuff in AP Physics—but I had a theory. Emotion is energy, and if energy is strong enough, it can travel between two points. Maybe I was like a channel, someone other people’s energies could pass through. I was somehow experiencing truths about people that others just couldn’t. Most of those truths left a sour taste on my tongue that made me wish I’d never gotten close to them at all. So I didn’t. I didn’t do sports, I avoided parties and crowds, and I didn’t date.
And I never told anyone.
I washed two aspirin down with a palm of tap water. Then I leaned on the sink basin and looked hard in the mirror, the bits and pieces I remembered of my father staring back at me through cross sections of my mother’s face. Almost, but not entirely either one of them.
I was still just nearly.

After school, I spread the newspaper out on my bedroom floor. I wasn’t interested in the whole paper, just the section of personal ads called
Missed Connections.
I’d only had time to skim them, sparing glances between labs and lectures, and I clung to the possibility that maybe I’d missed something important.

“What do you think, Doc? Will I find him this week?” I asked the poster on my wall. It had been a birthday gift from Anh, who thought it was hilarious that Albert Einstein was the only guy who’d ever been in my bedroom, until I’d pointed out that this accounted for one more than had ever been in hers.

I’d never told Anh about all the Friday nights Jeremy and I had spent sprawled across my bedroom floor, eating Twinkies and cackling over the personals when we were younger. That was before the two of us had become the three of us.

Looking at the paper now, I saw that the few ads that had resonated with glimmers of hope that morning turned out to be nothing more than empty pick-up lines.

I saw you on the Blue Line. You got off at Van Dorn.
You have red hair and a great rack. I think you might have noticed me too. If so, same time, same place tomorrow. I’ll save you a seat.

I snorted into my hand, careful not to attract my mother’s attention through the paper-thin walls of our trailer.

You dropped your stamps at the post office on Wythe. I picked them up for you. I was too nervous to think of something to say. If you’re out there, tell me what I was wearing so I know it was you.

I fell backward on the threadbare carpet with an exasperated sigh. Five years gone and still no sign of the man who spent every Saturday with me at Belle Green Park, pulling dandelions out of thin air and making quarters vanish with a wave of his hand.

I reached one hand under my mattress until I grasped a small plastic bag containing a carefully folded personal ad dated five years ago, a worn brown wallet, a gold wedding band, and a train ticket. The wallet and the ring were all that was left of my father’s personal effects. My mother’d found them in his car, abandoned in an airport parking garage.

I’d watched Mona cut up the IDs and credit cards and toss everything, even his ring, in the trash. While she wept, locked in her bedroom, I’d fished the remaining scraps of my father out of the wastebasket and tried to tape them back together. There had been far too many pieces. They fit together like a puzzle and when I was done, I had four driver’s licenses, each with a different name, all of them similar in looks to my father, but only one of them was him. I’d had all these theories about why he had those phony IDs. I imagined he’d been swallowed up by the Witness Protection Program and that’s why he had so many aliases. We lived close to Langley and the Pentagon. I told myself he could have worked covertly for the CIA. My father wouldn’t have just left. He must have had a reason. And I believed that one day, he’d come back. That it was all some necessary sleight of hand, and he’d turn up like a card in a trick, right back where he was supposed to be.

I’d returned the broken pieces of the phony IDs to the garbage can and tucked everything else in a plastic bag.
The personal ad was something I’d found when I was in middle school. Jeremy and I read the ads every Friday night while our dads played poker together. I’d always assumed we were drawn to the ads because of our common loneliness. That maybe we were
both
searching for something. But then one day, about a year after my father left, I found this particular ad that changed everything.
Careful of the brittle paper, I eased it open. I didn’t actually need to read it. I’d memorized every word.

N—I’m here and I’m okay. I’ll always be
near
you.
I love you, D.

I had no proof it was my dad. Jeremy insisted N could be anybody. But I knew this ad was mine. I knew it was from my father, without proof or probability, all the way through to my soul. My father had known about our Friday ritual, and he must have thought it was the perfect way to contact me discreetly. He’d even included the word
near,
a safe way to refer to my name without actually using it.

After that, I didn’t want to share the ads anymore. I didn’t find them funny, didn’t laugh at the desperation.
I
was searching for something. I was desperate. Jeremy didn’t really believe my dad had sent me a message, and the only thing I cared about was finding another one. Jeremy stopped bringing the
Missed Connections
, and I started buying my own. It wasn’t our ritual anymore. It was mine.

I spent every Friday looking for another ad. Once, I’d thought for sure I’d found him.

It’s been nearly a year since my last ad. I’m in town and want to see you. Meet me at our old hangout next Saturday.

I’d gone to Belle Green Park just after sunup. Spent all day watching the parking lot and the trailheads, the neighborhood parents watching me suspiciously as they pushed their kids on the swings.
These are the kids you should be making friends with,
my dad had said when I’d asked him why we came to this park every Saturday instead of the one at the end of our street. Their parents looked at me now the same way they had looked at me then. Like I didn’t belong there. They were right. At dusk, I walked home alone. And a week later, I found the response to the ad, confirming it wasn’t him.

When I was younger, searching the
Missed Connections
had always been about finding my father. But now? Sometimes I’d see an ad that so perfectly expressed my own loneliness that I’d clip it out and save it. Study it, searching for whatever it was that made one ad yield a reaction, and another go unanswered. I wasn’t exactly sure who, or what, I was looking for anymore, but sometimes it felt like I was looking for a missing piece of myself.

I read the clipping again and carefully folded it back into the bag, slipping it deep under my mattress. Then I flipped to the ad that had haunted me all day, the one that got me busted in chem lab.

Newton was wrong. We clash with yellow.
Find me tonight under the bleachers.

Nothing like the saccharine pleas I’d come to associate with Friday mornings, this ad left an acrid taste in my mouth. Something about it was just . . . wrong. Not dirty-pervert-at-the-busstation wrong. Not even unrequited-lovesick-nerd wrong. This was something different. Something I’d never seen in the
Missed Connections
before.

“Nearly!” My mother banged on my door and I jumped. I cursed under my breath and leaped to my feet.
“Nearly, open the door!”
I scrubbed my hands against my shorts, leaving trails of dark smudges.
Breathing deep, I flipped the lock and cracked the door, blocking the narrow opening. Mona stood in the hall holding an empty coffee mug and a full pack of menthols. A full pack meant she hadn’t checked the cookie jar yet. My shoulders relaxed, but only by a fraction. My petty larceny of her tip jar was just a necessary reallocation of household funds—I needed my newspaper fix more than she needed to smoke. But even though
my
addiction wouldn’t kill me, I still had no intention of getting caught.
She raised a thinly tweezed eyebrow. If I didn’t look at her face, I could pretend her frayed robe concealed flannel pajamas with teddy bears and hearts. If I ignored the rhinestones glued to her eyes, she could be anyone’s mother. But she wasn’t anyone else’s mother. She was mine.
Mona lit up and exhaled a long ribbon of smoke. “I’m going to work.”
I paused, torn between slamming the door in her face and locking us both safe inside.
“Jeremy says we’re late with the rent again.”
She was slow to answer, and for a moment I worried there really might not be enough money this time. Jeremy had bought us a day with his dad’s poker money, but I knew I had to pay him back. Where would we go if his parents evicted us? I looked at her, the
what-if
s written all over my face. Her brows drew together, scrunching up the rhinestones and deepening the lines around her eyes.
“Jim hired a new girl and my shifts got cut back,” she said. “I’ll have the money tonight. You can take a check to school on Monday.” Mona looked past me to the personal ads spread across my floor. Her laugh was derisive like she was coughing up bad memories. The same cutting laughter that made me want to keep the loneliest parts of myself hidden. I pulled the door tighter around me, blocking her view of my room.
“They’re not worth it,” she said. “I don’t know what it is you think you’ll find in those papers, but there’s not a man in this world you can count on to fix your life.”
I wanted to tell her the same thing. That the money they threw at her wasn’t worth it. That taking her clothes off for strangers hadn’t fixed anything. But we both knew this argument wasn’t about just any man. It was about the one who’d left us overextended on credit, without money for bills. About how he was the reason their only car was repossessed and Mona would never be able to leave her job at Gentleman Jim’s, the only job she could walk to that paid enough to hold on to the lease on our trailer.
We had the same argument every Friday—about how men can’t be trusted and if you depend on them, you’ll be left alone with more problems than you started with. It was the same argument that drove me to buy a train ticket to California two years ago, because I’d started to believe her. “Even if he did come back, it would only make things worse,” she said.
“Look around, Mona. Could it really get any worse?”
She sucked in a thoughtful drag. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she said in the sultry deep rasp that sounded ancient and sad, but had everyone else fooled. “You’re lucky. Born with a head full of brains. Don’t make the same mistake I did.” She pointed her cigarette at me. “Your education is the only thing you can count on to get you out of this trailer. If I’d spent more time on mine instead of chasing after a boy, neither of us would be here.”
Lucky . . . she thought I was lucky. Of course she couldn’t accept the possibility of my father’s genetic contribution to my intelligence. He was dead to her. And some days, her grief and anger hurt me more than his absence.
Ash balanced precariously from the tip of her cigarette. She looked tired, and so much older than her thirty-five years. “A diploma. A college degree. That’s the only thing that’s going to get you out of here.” She shook her head and exhaled a long smoky sigh, the ash falling to my floor.
I sighed and pointed at the sign I’d tacked to my door. “Do you mind? This is a non-smoking room.”
Mona raised a brow, and amusement tugged at the corner of her mouth. Her smile was painted on and clung outside the natural line of her lip, making it look fuller than it was. But I knew better. Beneath the gloss, she had forgotten how to smile when my father left.
“Don’t you ever wonder where he is?” I asked, tossing my own hope at her as though it were a life raft. “If maybe he’s thinking of us?”
She leaned against the door. “He’s never coming home, Nearly. That much I know.” She stubbed out her cigarette in her empty mug, the life raft abandoned and drifting in the murky waters between us. “Get your studying done.”

I pushed open the door of my trailer, pausing to look up and down the street before dragging the full trash bag onto the front porch and down the rickety wooden steps. Sunny View Mobile Home Village was shaped like a fish. Or at least the decaying remains of one. Run-down trailers lay in parallel rows alongside short alleys protruding like ribs off Sunny View Drive. The crooked backbone of my neighborhood began as a dead-end street, a rutted narrow blacktop that hadn’t been tar-coated since the 1960s. Almost as old was the playground, a skeletal collection of rusted metal wrapped in remnants of yellow police tape where the fish’s tail would have been. On the other end, Sunny View Drive spit into an intersection of a sixlane highway, and beyond that, the parking lot of a run-down strip mall: Anh’s parents’ store, a coin Laundromat, Ink & Angst Tattoos, Gentleman Jim’s, and a video store that would have been obsolete had it not been for the red curtain room at the back. A half-dozen small businesses feeding the addictions of the chewed-up residents of Sunny View.