Oxblood (3 page)

The Cheesecake Factory with Tiffany was really great. Half the fun was flipping through their twenty-five–page menu and figuring out what we were going to gorge ourselves on before we dug into two huge pieces of cheesecake. I hadn't done a birthday dinner with her since before my parents died. I had kept it just Gil and me because it seemed so strange not to have Mom and Dad there. This time, though, I felt like I had taken a baby step into a place where special days didn't feel so empty without them.

“Oh,
mija
!” Mrs. Vasquez swung her apartment door open just as we reached the top of the steps upon returning home. “I forgot to give you something!” She reached inside her apartment and pulled a box through the dingy doorway. As she handed it to me, I noticed a small red line on her wrist. A burn, the third one this week. “This was delivered for you yesterday. I knew your brother wouldn't forget your birthday.”

I turned the box around and examined the package. It was wrapped in brown paper, my name and address written in Gil's chicken-scratch handwriting. And there were red and blue stamps with Italian words. The corners of the paper were rough and frayed from its journey.

“I told him not to get me anything. He doesn't listen,” I said, laughing as I tucked the shallow box under my arm. “Thank you for rescuing the gift. I don't know what's in it, but I'm very thankful you kept it safe.”

Tiff and I entered my apartment, and I dropped my bag on the table by the door before we flung ourselves onto the couch, both stuffed beyond reason. It was getting late and I could see myself surrendering to a food coma any second. But opening Gil's gift trumped everything else.

“What is it?” Tiffany asked eagerly.

“He said he would send me something from Italy since he wouldn't be here for my birthday, but I told him not to worry about it.” I rolled my eyes as I tore the paper wrapped around the shallow box. “I have no idea what it could be.”

“Well it sure ain't a pair of Prada shoes straight from Milan,” Tiffany laughed.

I let the paper fall to the floor as I removed a small gift box. I shimmied open the lid and found one of Gil's leather-bound research journals.

“Oh, that's sweet. He sent you a diary,” Tiffany said in a sappy tone.

I felt my eyebrows scrunch together. Gil knew I wasn't into journaling. I picked up the book and felt the smooth faux leather in my hands and let my fingers trace the embossed design. I opened the cover to see if Gil had written a note—but what I found made my blood run cold.

“Oxblood,” I whispered, reading the single word written in bold letters across the otherwise empty cover page.

I examined the emblem on the cover again and walked into Gil's room.

Screw his rules
, I thought and picked up one of the journals off his desk. The designs were exactly the same.
Why had he sent me one of his journals?

I flipped through the pages of my gift and searched for an explanation. They were filled with his handwriting, but none of the few sentences I skimmed made sense. My heart was pounding inside my chest as I lifted the front and back covers up like a bird, shaking the book with hope that some kind of note would fall out telling me why Gil had sent me something he explicitly told me never to touch. But nothing fell from the pages.

“Something terrible has happened,” I whispered. “Gil is in trouble.”

Chapter 2

Tiffany wrapped her arm around my shoulders, trying to calm my nerves. She understood how big a deal it was that Gil would send me something so personal, but only I understood the gravity of our family's code word for “the shit has hit the fan.” I flipped through the book again looking for clues. The pages were filled with oddly drawn trees with bare branches.

“What are those drawings?” Tiffany asked.

I traced my finger along the lines of the crudely drawn pictures. “They look like trees. But I don't understand why he would send me a journal filled with leafless trees.”

“Who's Noah Brown?” she asked, pointing to a name written on one of the branches.

“He's a cousin of ours. Lives in New York,” I told her. I stared at the picture and willed my brain to comprehend what I was looking at. Each branch had a name written on it, and as the pages progressed, more branches appeared with new names on them. I recognized the names, but their connection to one another on the trees made no sense.

They were family trees.

“Maybe it got lost and someone found it and returned it,” Tiffany suggested.

I examined the first and last pages in hopes that she was right and that I had just missed an obvious clue.

“His name isn't in it and there's no address, Tiff,” I countered.

“So . . . what's ‘oxblood'?”

“It's a color. A shade of dark red. It was our mother's favorite. She used colors to describe feelings: chartreuse for happiness, ebony for sadness. Mom always said oxblood was actually a muddled-up conglomerate of other colors. That's what she said about problems, too. So,
oxblood
always meant something was very wrong,” I explained.

Worry filled every inch of my heart and I knew I had to do something. What was Gil up to? How had a simple research trip turned “oxblood” dangerous?

I grabbed Gil's itinerary from the fridge and darted into my room for my laptop. The thirty seconds it took the screen to flicker on seemed like an eternity. I went straight for my inbox.

Still no email from Gil.

I'd heard from him last Sunday, but his email was shorter than usual. Still, everything seemed fine. He told me about the progress he was making on his immigration law research and how working on a culturally diverse team could be challenging, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. He even shared a funny story about mixing up the Italian words for
door
and
port
—
la porta
and
il porto
—when giving another student directions. There was nothing to indicate there was any problem, except now it was almost ten o'clock and I still had no email from my brother.

“He's supposed to be in Palermo right now, but the postmark is from Bologna.” I quickly googled a map of Italy and found that these two cities were nowhere near each other.

“That doesn't mean anything. It can take weeks for a package to come from overseas. And, look, he was in Bologna right before Palermo,” Tiffany pointed out on the itinerary. “I'm sure everything is fine. You'll get an email from him any day now when he finds out the university in Bologna sent the journal to his home address. And he'll explain that he wrote the . . . what is it . . . the ‘
oxbloo
d
' code for some random reason.”

“If they were sending it to him here, why was it addressed to
me
? And Gil would never use the word
oxblood
randomly. Seriously, Tiff. We hated when our mom made us use her color chart to describe our feelings. He's not going to start using it again on a whim.” Out of reasonable answers, Tiffany looked at me and shrugged and squeezed my shoulder.

I found the last email Gil sent and replied to it again. First, I yelled at him in bold, capital letters to emphasize how freaked out I was. Then I told him to contact me right away to tell me what was going on. He knew what sending me a journal would mean, let alone using that word.

I went back to Gil's itinerary and began emailing the law school department chairs at the universities directly. Gil didn't leave phone numbers because he said it was silly to waste an international call.

I pretty much cut-and-pasted the same message to the seven email addresses he left me. I told them who I was, that there was a family emergency, and that I needed to speak with Gil as soon as possible. I didn't want to sound like a crazy person just in case Tiffany was right and there was nothing to worry about, but I definitely wanted them to have a sense of urgency.

“You're going to feel really silly when Gil replies and gives you a completely reasonable explanation for this,” Tiffany warned. “Why don't you try to get some sleep? I'm sure you will have heard from one of the universities or Gil by morning.”

“I can't sleep, Tiff,” I protested.

“You can't just sit here and stare at your inbox all night. There's nothing you can do about anything, if there is even anything to have something done about. . . . You know what I mean.” Tiffany knelt down next to me by the desk and covered my hands with hers. “I know you're afraid of losing him. You're not going to lose him, Vic.”

Fear was rushing through me, the same fear from the day Gil said he was going to Italy for his exchange program. After losing Mom and Dad, I couldn't handle the thought of losing Gil, too. But he went back and forth a couple of times for interviews before he actually began his six-month project, and I slowly acclimated to the idea. To think that he got all the way to Italy only to have something horrible happen to him filled me with dread.

I stared at the screen for thirty minutes, repeatedly refreshing my inbox, before I conceded to Tiffany's insistence that I sleep. I shut down the computer, changed into my pajamas, and crawled into bed.

It took longer than usual to fall asleep because my mind was imagining terrible things. I understood Gil's desire to go to Italy to study. We had talked about wanting a better life. We knew it was what Mom and Dad would have wanted for us. Gil was going on this trip to make him a better lawyer. I may have even been a bit jealous—he was in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and I was waiting tables at a diner in one of the worst parts of Miami—but I was happy for him.

Not going to college was my choice so it wasn't like I could complain. I knew college wasn't for me. Maybe my feelings would change once Gil was done with law school. Perhaps I'd find something I could be passionate about the way Gil was about the law. Until then, I felt fine about getting by on my street smarts.

But I missed him. All the time. What was Italy
really
like? Who was he meeting? What exciting things was he experiencing? Was he touring the Colosseum and tossing coins into Trevi Fountain? I wanted so desperately to hear the
ping
on my phone telling me I had an email. One from Gil, apologizing for making me worried, for forgetting to write.

That email never came.

What did come were seven emails from seven universities in Italy that had never heard of Gil Asher. They were all very sorry for the confusion and offered to contact me if they heard anything from him.

“Can't you just call his cell?” Tiffany suggested as she handed me a cup of coffee. She offered to make me some breakfast, too, but I had absolutely no appetite. It was barely after eight in the morning and too early to eat anyway.

“His phone doesn't work internationally. I wouldn't let him spend the extra money to have temporary service abroad,” I told her. “I don't understand what's going on.”

“Why don't you contact his professors here? If he's on this exchange program, surely they'll have some information. Maybe all those professors have teaching assistants who answer their emails, and they just didn't know who he was?”

“
No one
has heard of him? That's crazy, Tiff. You're right, though. I should just call and talk to his professors here. I've never met any of them, but he talks about his favorite one, Professor Engskow, a lot. If I can't get in touch with him, I can at least call the school and talk to someone in that department.”

I spent the next thirty minutes on hold listening to the University of Miami's prerecorded commercials for everything from their biology degrees to their prestigious law degrees. Twice a woman picked up and asked if I wanted to leave a message or speak with someone else, but I refused to become a lost piece of paper on someone's desk or get the runaround from a random teaching assistant. I was determined to speak directly to Professor Engskow as soon as was humanly possible.

“Miss Asher?” the voice on the line said through the speaker on my cell phone. “I'm Jim Engskow. How may I help you?”

“Yes, Professor Engskow, I need to speak to you about my brother, Gil,” I told him.

“Oh yes! How is Gil?”

“Well, I don't know. See, I'm having trouble contacting him in Italy and I wondered if maybe you or someone in your department could help me reach him at the university in Palermo where I think he's supposed to be right now.” I tried not to let it, but desperation filled my voice, making me talk too fast.

“Oh, I'm sorry you're having trouble connecting with him, but he didn't leave any contact information with us. Well, at least not with me. But I'd be happy to ask around the department. I didn't realize he was going to be in Italy! When he said he was taking the semester off to dive deeper into his thesis paper, I just assumed he would be burying himself in books and interviews locally.”

“Wait. What? He's on an exchange program with the universities in Italy.” I hoped to jog Professor Engskow's memory.

“The law department at the University of Miami doesn't have an exchange agreement with any university in Italy, Miss Asher.”

“But . . . he went to Italy to interview for the program. He said the university told him it was required for such a competitive internship,” I explained.

What the hell was going on? Nothing was making sense. Before the six-month visit, Gil had taken three trips to Italy for what he told me were interviews and meetings to finalize the exchange program. What had he really been doing? More importantly, why would he have lied to me?

“I wish I could be of more help,” Professor Engskow said. He sounded concerned.

“Well . . . um . . . thank you for your time, Professor Engskow. Sorry to have bothered you,” I said with a shaky voice.

“It's no problem at all. I'll ask around. If I hear anything, I'll be sure to contact you.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay. We can worry now,” Tiffany whispered.

I put the phone down and tried to think, but I was completely out of ideas. Did Italy do APBs? Would they even care enough to do one for an American citizen?

That's it!
“Gil is an American citizen missing in a foreign country. The FBI or the US Embassy or somebody has to do something, right?”

“Oh my God! Yes! They have to!” Tiffany sat down in front of my laptop and began googling the number for the FBI. “Holy crap! There's a field office here in Miami. We should totally go down there. If you're there, if they see you, Vic, they'll have to help!”

“Okay. First, let me find a recent picture of Gil so they have something.” I grabbed the laptop from Tiffany and began searching my Facebook pictures for a good one of Gil. I only had to scroll down a few times before I landed on one of Gil from his birthday last February. I got dressed while it printed.

Tiffany and I were out the door and following the Hugh Jackman–sounding voice on her phone's GPS in no time. In forty minutes, we were parking outside the FBI's Miami field office. It was a square white concrete building, and I assumed they were going for discreet when they designed it. The only thing it had going for it was the line of palm trees in front, standing like lazy soldiers.

It felt surreal walking up to the front desk to tell the receptionist that I needed to report my brother missing in Italy. Like I was watching someone else live an alternate version of my life. Finally, the last piece of my old existence was getting ripped from my hands.

Apparently, my idea of emergency and the FBI's were two different things. Tiffany and I waited thirty minutes in the stark white waiting room before an agent graced us with his presence.

“Miss Asher? I'm Agent Stokes. Please follow me.” Agent Stokes was a tall, older gentleman who looked to be about fifty. His eyes were dark and his aging face was mapped with lines—proof, I guess, of the stress of being an FBI agent. As he approached, I could see his left arm was stiffer than his right; it didn't swing with the same ease when he walked. There was a faint scar next to his left eye, too, and I wondered if that side of his body had been injured on an assignment.

We walked down a long, industrial-looking hall and stepped into a waiting elevator. Agent Stokes pushed the number two, and we quickly traveled up. Tiffany and I followed him out of the elevator and down the hall to a conference room.

In the center of the room, there was a large, dark wooden table with twelve chairs tucked neatly under. A huge modern art canvas adorned one end of the long room, while a television hung opposite it. The inside wall was made of glass. The windows overlooked the parking lot, and I could see cars zooming along I-95 and the Ronald Regan Turnpike. When I turned around, Agent Stokes was closing the door behind Tiffany.

“Would you like to have a seat, Miss Asher?” he offered. I sat down and my shorts slid up my thigh.
Why didn't I think about wearing something more professional
, I chided myself. Then I instantly took it back. I was here to find my brother, not interview for a job. “How can the FBI be of assistance to you?”

“Well,” I began. My voice seemed small. Tiffany put her hand on my arm and gave me a nod of support. “My brother is missing in Italy.”