Some of the Parts (21 page)

“I'm going to get online and mobilize our fans,” Mel huffs. “The world needs to know our art!”

It turns out that Chase is right. Mel sounds one-hundred-percent sure of herself, and there is no arguing with her. I make a note to practice sounding inarguable.

She turns into my driveway smoothly, which is surprisingly considerate, given her mood. Just as I close my hand around the door handle to let myself out, Mel locks all of the doors. “You're coming tomorrow, right?”

“Where?”

“The taxidermy show,” she says, stung.

“Oh. Well…”

“You said you would be there. C'mon, you have to see Raccoon Zorro in all of his glory!”

My choices may be morally questionable these days, but I keep my promises. I can still claim that much. “I'll be there.”

“Great,” she says, and the doors click once more. I'm free to go.

I gather the mail (nothing from Life Choice, another kick in the gut) and make my way into the house. Dad's car is in the driveway, so I know he's around here somewhere, and I'd like to spare us both the how-was-your-day talk or, worse, another series of self-help platitudes designed to jump-start our healing. Mostly because everything still seems to be moving, almost vibrating, and I am not entirely sure of my ability to act normal. I set the mail silently on the hall table and am about to tiptoe up the stairs when the quiet is shattered.

“Tallie.”

It isn't his kinder, gentler, make-things-better voice. It is his you-are-in-serious-trouble-young-lady voice. Weirdly, my first response is to smile. I haven't heard this voice in so long. But my smile is dashed when he says it again, even more forcefully.
“Tallie.”

I drop my bag and step into the kitchen. Dad is sitting at the table with his back to me.

“Dad?”

“Sit down.” No
sweetheart.
No
please.

I sit across from him, and I can see the red circle peering at me over his shoulder, pulsing like a heart.

“I was getting your laundry today,” he says. “Giving Mom a break. And I noticed you hadn't turned your computer off. So I thought I'd shut it down for you. And when I saw what was on the screen…” His voice cracks, steadies, and his eyes find me. “How could you
do
this?”

He found it. The email account in Mom's name. Every email between me and Gerald—and SparkleCat76, and the others—left right there for Dad to see.

I forgot to log out. Shit.

And there's nothing I can say. This is one of those conversations parents start, with questions that aren't questions, disguised as a search for answers when, really, they do not want to listen. They only want to speak, to lecture and rant. So there's nothing I can say, but I have to say something. Something that's not the entire truth, but something that isn't a lie either.

“I found a letter in the mail. That's how I knew about Nate.”

“You said you heard us arguing—”

“I did hear you. So I knew something was going on.” I can't get my voice above a whisper. I sound contrite, at least. “But I didn't know what it was until the letter came from Life Choice.”

Dad pushes air from his throat, a backward gasp. “And you've been writing to these people? You've been pretending to be your mother and lying to all of us?” He doesn't sound as angry as he first did. Now he sounds sad, which is worse.

That about sums it up,
I think. “Yes,” I say.

I know how these conversations go: The crime is verified, disappointment is expressed, punishment is issued. I grip the table to keep it still, and wait.

“This is…”

Disappointing,
I think.
Unbelievable. Very troubling.

“…an important moment for all of us.”

Oh no.

“Obviously, I'm not happy that you would deceive us this way, or that you would mislead someone like Gerald. Or this SparkleCat woman. They have probably been through a great deal already and they don't deserve to be lied to. But we have an opportunity here, to move forward as a family. I just have to figure out how to tell your mother, because she may not see it quite the way I do….”

He goes on, about how he has finally embraced the chance to communicate with the recipients, how we could use this to learn to communicate with each other again, we've all been so isolated, et cetera. Now he sounds excited, which is even worse than sad. The worst. Because I've just given him the last piece of the puzzle he's been trying to complete. It is all I can do to keep my eyes in one place. It's like I'm on a carousel, with the red circle passing my vision over and over again. It's reminding me, chanting
Time to go
over and over again. All this time I've been dreading October fifteenth, but now it looks like the finish line for a race I've been running for weeks. If I can just get across it, I will be free of the dread, the fear of it, the terrible anticipation.

It's not my parents' circle anymore.

It's mine.

saturday
10/11

A
fter I assure her several times that I will seek medical attention if I start feeling sinkable, my mother says that I can go to Mel's taxidermy show at the town hall. My father says nothing to contradict her, but insists on driving me instead of letting me ride my bike.

“And you can text me when you're ready for me to pick you up, okay?”

Again, the question mark is pure formality, tacked onto the end of Dad's statement so it sounds like I have the option of objecting when we both know that I don't.

Walking around a room full of eviscerated animals is absolutely the last thing I feel like doing, but dammit, I promised. I wish Chase could come with me but he is still under house arrest. And I doubt he could convince Dr. Abbott that attending a taxidermy competition was a required school assignment.

Dad informs me that he will drop me off on his way to Lowe's.

“Big project?” I ask.

“Just a few things for the house,” he says. There's a list sticking out of his shirt pocket of items that would need to be fixed or replaced before the house could be sold. “If that's what we decide to do,” I heard him say to my mother before we left. “Just want to be ready.”

If she said anything in return, I didn't hear. Only the sound of cardboard boxes bumping against each other as she climbed the stairs to Nate's room. I tell myself that it doesn't matter if she puts his things in boxes, that I have Matty and the codebook and the rest is hollow. But it feels like there are rocks in my stomach anyway.

“Thanks for driving me,” I say. My voice sounds strange. I think of the cold night when I saw the banana moon, before the séance. Before all of this.

“Yep,” he says. It's curt, but he looks relieved, to utter such regular things. To know what's coming.

We don't talk much the rest of the way, but the weight of all that we're not saying fills the car like water, making it hard to breathe. When he stops to let me out, Dad offers, “See you later, alligator.” Which is something he used to say when I was little, and now it seems so out of place, a phrase in the wrong language. The world is not the same. But I pretend, I play along and reply, “In a while, crocodile.”

He is smiling as he drives away, and I know I did a good thing because the wind kicks up and the trees wave their branches, rubbing their leaves into whispers.

Walking into the taxidermy show feels like a dream in which I have forgotten how to walk and I have to think through the steps one by one. There is a surprisingly large crowd, probably because there isn't much else going on in Molton on a Saturday morning. Small children cower behind their mothers, hiding from the foxes and possums and squirrels that appear to be preparing to leap at them.

I see Mel before she sees me. She is standing to the side of her display at the far end of the hall, her eyebrows squinched together in a worried way. There is a crowd in front of her but she is looking over their heads, toward the door.

Looking for her parents. Knowing they won't appear.

Some families don't work even when everyone's still around.

I stop next to a huge falcon mounted on a tree branch and holding a snake in its beak. I watch Mel for a minute, my eyes locked on her, and hers on the entrance.

The man standing behind the table—the creator of this entry, I assume—coughs.

“Is that snake poisonous?” I ask him.

He grins eagerly. “Not anymore!”

“Thank you,” I say, and head for Mel, passing through the rows of installations. Most are small and straightforward, animals as they looked before they were dead, doing normal animal things in normal animal ways.

Mel's contribution is very, very different.

The raccoon we retrieved from the side of the road is mounted on a huge cat, brandishing a sword, his furry mask the perfect complement to the black hat on his head and the cape flying out from behind him as the cat rears up and prepares to run. Chipmunks and moles dressed as tiny townspeople stand reverently before him, and a Spanish village is painted on the backdrop behind them, model houses with tile roofs peppering the landscape.

When Mel sees me, she smiles a smile that I can't quite read. Relief, I guess, mixed with pride. Before I can say anything, she hugs me and then seizes my hand. Her fingers are like a clamp.

“Can you stay until the judging?” she asks brightly. She looks amped, almost deranged with glee.

“Are you okay?”

“What? Of course, I'm just—it's just
exciting,
y'know, to be here!” She sounds utterly insane, and I'm just about to ask her if she took some of her mother's pharmaceuticals when she tucks her arm around my shoulders and drops her voice into my ear. “The judges are, like, undercover this year. So I'm trying to sound enthusiastic. Too much?”

“A little,” I tell her. Honesty. It helps, in small doses.

“What is
she
doing here?”

I turn and see Amy pushing a cart loaded with baked goods and some very familiar-looking coffee dispensers across the room. She is wearing a pink-and-green apron and a huge smile, one that is much less complex than Mel's. And Cranky Andy is right behind her.

“Great,” Mel says. “Common Grounds is ruined forever.”

“I'll be right back,” I tell her, and march back between the display tables so swiftly that Amy actually takes a step backward when she sees me coming. She looks away, looks behind me, searching for some way out of the conversation that's about to happen. I can feel her fear like crackling rays shooting out of her body, leaping to mine, and I receive it without flinching.

“Don't,” she says.

“Don't what?” I ask innocently. “Don't buy a cookie?”

Cranky Andy turns from the table where he's arranging the little placards that identify the different kinds of coffee. They are hand-lettered with fancy calligraphy. Either Martha has talents I never suspected, or Andy's been expanding his skill set. “Oh, hey,” he says. “We're not quite set up yet.”

The way he says this, as if I'm nothing more than any other customer, is far more infuriating to me than the fact that Amy is working with him. But not as infuriating as what happens next.

Amy places her hand on Cranky Andy's arm gently, as if it's something valuable, and says, “I think Tallie wanted to talk to me. But”—she glares at me—“I don't think we have anything else to say to each other.”

“Huh.” Cranky Andy looks like he couldn't care less.

“We used to be friends,” Amy tells him.

“Oh,” I say, “but it was so much more than that, wasn't it, Amy?” I have adopted some of Mel's false cheer, and it echoes in my voice like an off-key instrument. “We might have become
family.
”

Her face gets pale as a full moon.

“Amy and my brother were
in love,
” I announce. “High school sweethearts, until—well, you know.”

“Stop it,” Amy hisses.

“It's hard for her to talk about it,” I tell Andy.

He is frozen in place, a huge tray of croissants shielding him from whatever is about to happen. The blood is singing in my ears, rising like a crescendo, and before she can get away, I lock Amy's arms with my hands and hold her there. I make her stand there so she can never say she didn't hear what I say next.

“Maybe I did make him out to be better than he was. Maybe I'm remembering him all wrong. But on his worst day, he deserved way more than you.”

She's trying not to flinch, she's looking right at me, and I see it, an almost invisible flick of her eyes that tells me she knows I'm right. I take my hands off of her, and in that one motion I say goodbye to the friend I thought she was.

Maybe we're all wrong about each other,
I think as I walk back to Mel's Zorro. Maybe all we have is our own version of the stories we wrote, the things we said to each other, the fights we had, the jokes, the sleepovers, the ballet recitals, the day we met. All of it. Maybe we never would have agreed on how any of it happened.

Mel is waiting expectantly, a thousand questions written on her face.

So I ask, “What's the opposite of scud?”

Mel thinks for a moment. “Darling,” she says. And then she goes back to stand next to her raccoon Zorro, and I take what few steps there are between me and the back exit.

The house is quiet when Dad and I get home. The driveway is empty, which means that Mom either went somewhere on her own—a sign, perhaps, that Dad's family-repair project is working—or sold her car and is hiding out somewhere. Probably the former. I hope she's not parked in front of that Victorian again. She's in danger of getting arrested for stalking a house.

Dad explains that he has some work to do in the basement. I assure him that I can handle his absence, trying to keep a straight face. I count his footsteps, match them to the number of stairs, and when I know he's at the bottom, I do a browser check in the study. All of the home-improvement tutorials have been replaced with searches about “talking to your teen” and “grieving” and “healing” and “how your marriage can survive the loss of a child.” Dad is in full-on research mode. I can feel my freedom dwindling. He's preparing his case for Red Circle Day, and he knows too much. In four days we are supposed to walk into Dr. Blankenbaker's office for the verdict to be handed down. Dr. B. has become like an oracle, the one with the magic answer. Will Mom be on my side? Does she want to stay anymore or has Dad convinced her that I need to be saved?

Her journal doesn't offer much new material at first, just some weakly written statements about how she appreciates Dad's efforts but she isn't ready to let go yet. But then there's this.

I feel betrayed by a stranger. This person, whoever he is, asked to make contact with me and never did. How could he do that? Is he just toying with me? Is he flaunting the fact that he is alive and my little boy isn't? I am going to call Life Choice tomorrow and file a complaint.

So Dad hasn't told her yet about my unsanctioned activities, about Gerald. Makes sense—he didn't want her getting in touch with Life Choice in the first place. He likes controlling the variables, holding on to my secret until just the right moment. But if Dad read Mom's journal like I do, he would realize that all this time he's taking to formulate his plan is only making it harder to begin. Or maybe he knows that the plan is the only perfect part of the process. Once you set the plan in motion, things get messy, full of holes and unexpected trouble.

Maybe that's why I haven't left town yet.

Maybe Dad and I have more in common than either one of us wants to admit.

But I can't give up now. I owe this to Nate, to see this through, to find as much of him as I can. It seemed so simple at first. The revelation that Nate had not really left after all, that he had just been redistributed, like jigsaw pieces separated from the puzzle box. That I could find him. That the barriers—death and guilt and the whole stupid world—would vaporize and fade. It all seemed possible. And I don't want to give up.

He found a way to get me to the ceiling, once.

So I prepare. I write a note to my parents explaining that I have to leave for a little while and that they should not worry but I know they will anyway and I'm sorry for that.

For that, I will say I am sorry now.

For the rest, Nate deserves the first apology. My parents can wait their turn.

After my note is written and folded and sealed, I fire up my computer and send an email to SparkleCat76. Dad took my computer but I have my school laptop—I'm not supposed to bring it home but the rules are getting easier to break. My shaking hands make it difficult to type, but I manage to tell her that I will be in Boston this week and I would be so honored if she would allow me to share her story. An in-depth profile,
all
about her. She won't be able to resist.