The Theory of Everything (16 page)

“Please,” I said, my voice falling as I said it.

“Just come home,” she said.

But since therapy was still on the table, I had to get off the phone. I had to figure things out. Now, more than ever, I had to find Dad.

“I'll have Peyton call you,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Sophie—”

“Mom,” I said, the courage rising in my voice, “I'll come back tomorrow. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.”

“I don't care if you're mad and never want to speak to me again, but listen to me,” she said. “I love you. I have always loved you. And nothing in the world can change that. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said, wiping the tears as they came. Wishing she would leave me more options. “I'll talk to you soon.”

I hung up the phone and sat on the stairs, the third one from the top. The smell of tomato sauce and onions wafted up, making my stomach growl. I guess you could be melancholy and hungry at the same time.

“Do you believe in the spirit world?” I heard Peyton ask. I almost laughed and blew my eavesdropping cover.

“In what way?”

“I think you two are a sign that Angelino's still out there.”

“Him calling you would be a
better
sign,” Finny said.

“Come on,” she said. “Of all the times for you to show up—it has to be more than coincidence.”

“Sounds like something Sophie's shaman panda would say,” he said.

I wanted to run down and strangle him, but I also wanted to hear the rest of it.

“She has a shaman panda?”

“Maybe,” Finny said. “I'm tired. I don't know what I'm saying.”

“So she
does
hallucinate.”

Silence. He knew he was in trouble. But I knew his silence just gave me away.

“You should ask Sophie all of this,” he said. “But I assume if you wanted to know her, you would have called her.”

“We couldn't,” Peyton said. “Her mom put a restraining order on Angelino. No phone calls, no contact, nothing.”

Wait. A. Minute.

“I met him not long after her mom kicked him out,” Peyton said. “He was such a mess, I didn't think he'd ever get over it. But then he threw himself into researching that book, and since he was doing it for Sophie, it really helped.”

“So he didn't leave,” Finny said.

“Not of his own accord,” Peyton said. “It was more like they left him.”

All of this time I'd hated Dad for leaving, for making Mom cry, for making me think he never loved me at all. Because you don't leave the people you love. Or so I thought.

“We have to tell her,” Finny said. “She thinks her dad doesn't love her.”

“He worships her,” Peyton said. “Everything he does, everything he's ever done has been for her. Some of it's in the book, and some of it's in the basement.”

And there it was. The magic word. I practically ran down the stairs.

“Hi, guys,” I said, waltzing into the kitchen. Playing it cool. “Making dinner?”

“I thought we needed to eat,” Peyton said. “I hope you like spaghetti.”

“I love it,” I said. “But do you think I could look at some of Dad's old stuff while you guys make dinner?”

Finny looked panicked. The longer we knew each other, the harder it was to hide things from each other. And the whole “we left Dad” thing was written all over his face. I loved him for being so transparent, but at the moment I had other things to worry about.

“Sure,” Peyton said. “Your dad's stuff is all over, so give me a second to find it.”

We both looked around, but she was looking for a photo album, while I was looking for a clue. Looking for Dad. And then I found him.

“Does that door go to the basement?” I said, nodding toward the aqua-blue glass doorknob.

It was the kind of thing installed by someone who pulled frogs out of his beret. Strawberry ice cream cones out from behind his back. And flowers made of gum wrapper chains from his pocket. Life with Angelino Sophia was one surprise after another, which is why hallucinating didn't destroy me. And why knowing that Mom and I were the ones who left him wouldn't stop me. If anything, it was going to make me try harder. Go faster. I put my hand on the knob, and Peyton rushed the door like a tree hugger in the redwoods.

“Let me take you down there,” she said.

“Let me go with you,” Finny said, face flushed. Hands shaking.

“Finny, you need to help with dinner, and Peyton, my mom wants you to call her. Finny has the number,” I said, brushing past them. “If it's okay with you guys, I'd rather do this alone.”

I turned the knob, and twinkling white Christmas lights flicked on and lit my way; it was like walking through a constellation. Purple and yellow paper birds flew from the ceiling, and polka dots covered my shirt, showering me with confetti. But this wasn't a hallucination. This was paradise.

“Mai tai,” I said as I floated down the stairs. “Mai tai, mai tai, mai tai . . .”

Dad didn't mean to take me to a bar, but that's what he did. I was five, and we were in the middle of an art project when he decided we needed more supplies. And we couldn't just go to any art store; we had to go to his favorite one in the East Village. He wanted me to switch from watercolors to acrylics because the colors were better—cadmium lemon 86, cerulean blue 137, permanent sap green 503. Never mind that I'd be covered in paints that wouldn't wash off—it was all for the sake of art. At least, that's what he said when he paid for five tubes of paint and left. Then, to improve my chances of becoming the next Picasso, we stopped at Waikiki Wally's to pray to the art gods.

In addition to saints, Dad taught me there were gods for everything. When the kitchen trash overflowed, we prayed to the garbage gods, hoping they'd take it out. When we ran out of food, we prayed to the delivery gods to bring some. When Mom was in a bad mood, we prayed to the vacation gods for plane tickets and some new luggage. So when Dad said we were stopping off to pray to the art gods, it wasn't anything new.

“Welcome to paradise!” Dad said, swinging open a huge wooden door to reveal the closest thing to a tropical island I'd ever seen. Huge glass lanterns hung from the ceiling in all the colors from the art store. The one in the corner? Yellow ochre. That one above my head? Burnt sienna. And if the one by the bar wasn't phthalo green, I didn't know what was. There were masks, tropical flowers and totem poles. And except for the woman wearing the lei, we were the only ones there.

“Aloha,” she said in a totally monotone voice. “Welcome to Waikiki Wally's.”

She motioned toward the bar and clomped away, leaving us to island music. Dad ordered something called a “pu pu platter,” which sounded gross. I looked around, and there in the corner was the reason we came: an Easter Island head surrounded by fading fake flowers. It was the art god. I went over and knelt in front of it.

“Hula-ha-ha,” I said to the statue, bowing forward, but nothing happened. “Mekka-mekka-pukka!” I said, even louder. I thought the art gods might hear me better if I spoke up.

Dad knelt beside me.

“What are you doing, Sophie?” Each of his hands held a ceramic coconut with a yellow umbrella and a pink straw sticking out of it.

“I'm praying to the art god,” I said. “Am I saying the right thing?”

The coconut was full of pineapple juice. Foamy and delicious.

“Mai tai, Sophie,” he said, raising his coconut. “The prayer is mai tai.”

We chanted different variations of it in between sipping our drinks. He went high, I went low. He held his notes long, I kept mine short. At one point, I stole the umbrella from his drink, put it behind my ear and did the hula for a minute. When I finished, the guy behind the bar clapped. I followed Dad to the bar and had started to climb up on a stool when a bunch of other men came in.

“Why don't you go back to the art god, and I'll bring you the pu pu platter when it's ready, okay?”

“Sure, but I'm not eating that,” I said. “And you can't make me.” I was six going on eighteen, and he knew it.

“Make mine a double,” Dad said to the waiter as I walked away. I wondered if he meant double umbrellas.

I wandered around, getting lost in the fake ferns and palm trees, creepy masks and puffed-up blowfish. I was looking for more hula girls when Mom walked in.

“Sophie!” She ran in and grabbed me, folding me into one of her patented suffocating hugs. “I was so worried.”

I wriggled away. “We went the art store and then came here to pray to the art god, see?” I pointed to the Easter Island head.

“I see,” she said. She had that tone in her voice, the one that happened before a fight. “Where's your father?”

I pointed in his direction. At the time I didn't wonder how she found us. It was only later, after I learned about his favorite places, that it made sense. He had three favorites, and Waikiki Wally's was one of them.

Dad perched on one of the bamboo barstools, drinking pineapple juice and chatting with a guy who stumbled. Mom stormed over and tapped Dad on the shoulder, which almost made him fall off his stool. They talked, and she used her hands a lot, I remember that. I also remember that I didn't want to be a part of it. I never wanted to be a part of it. So I started praying, again.

“Mai tai!” I said. “Maaaaaaaiiiiii taaaaaaiii!”

They both ran over to me.

“Honey,” she said, “that's enough. I'm taking you home, and your dad's going to stay here and finish up some . . . business.”

He leaned down, and I reached up and hugged his neck. “Bye, Daddy,” I said.

“Bye, pumpkin,” he said, raising his coconut. “See you soon.”

On the way home, we picked up rocky road ice cream and ate it before the quiche that had to be reheated. It wasn't until years later that I realized I'd been in a bar. Once, when I asked to go back to Waikiki Wally's because I was feeling brave and wanted to try the pu pu platter, Dad said no, that place was inappropriate for someone my age. It made me think about that word,
inappropriate,
since I loved the big statues, flowered necklaces and the way I'd felt lost in there. Kind of like the way I felt on the inside all the time, but at least there it came with pineapple juice.

|||||||||||

I walked down the basement stairs and grass grew beneath my feet. It was Astroturf, slippery but lush, like descending into a forest. Dad had never met a surface he didn't make better. Around him, pancakes became faces, doors became murals, and basements were turned into playgrounds that were almost too good to be true.

Paper lanterns bobbed from the ceiling like spaceships and gave the room an aqua and tangerine glow. Lime-green streamers ran from corner to corner in between stuffed clouds made from patchwork quilts. Every inch of every surface was covered in fabric or curly ribbon, patches of carpet or tinfoil. There was even a chair covered with bubble wrap that popped when you sat in it. Everything was old because Dad said found things were the best things. “Why bring home apples and orange juice when you could show up with tricycle wheels instead?” he'd say. Mom never agreed and made him go back to the store, but that didn't stop him from bringing home bricks instead of bagels anyway.

The back wall was painted plaid. And in front of it, Dad built a makeshift hitching post out of two broomsticks and a rope from which a team of eggbeater horses hung. I should have been amazed by his ability to make something out of nothing, but I was used to it.

On another wall was a bulletin board filled with sketches of inventions, numbers that didn't make sense and blueprints for contraptions that were probably never built. Quotes by famous physicists and authors hung everywhere next to photos of places he probably never went. And there, in the middle, was a picture of me during Christmas 2000, holding my Holiday Surprise Barbie. I ripped an article next to it off the wall, tore it into tiny pieces and threw them above my head, like confetti.

I heard the basement door creak open, and Finny's voice floated down.

“Sophie? You okay?” I heard footsteps.

“Don't come down here,” I said.

“I just wanted to check on you,” he said. “Need anything?”

“Just privacy,” I said. “Keep Peyton out, too.”

“No problem,” Finny yelled down. “But if you need anything, scream. We'll hear you.”

The door closed, like a vacuum, and the air suddenly smelled like peppermints. I grabbed the photo off the bulletin board and one of the sketches fell off, too. It was labeled “inter-dimensional travel machine.” It looked more like a new version of a spaceship and didn't come with any instructions, but I loved it anyway. I stuck it in my pocket and walked on a path made of old oatmeal labels and jelly beans, packing peanuts and stickpins. I passed a collection of pogo sticks and stilts, a table of rubber bands and toothbrushes and a huge sculpture made out of tennis balls and putty. It sat on a card table with a sign next to it that read A
TOM
S
MASHER.
I was dying to touch it, but it looked fragile, like it had been there awhile. There were two towers, five tiers high, made of tennis balls on toilet paper rolls and connected with Silly Putty that had hardened. I wasn't sure what an atom smasher was, but I liked the idea of it, particles crashing into each other and forming something else. Like a horse with the body of an octopus. Or a bicycle spaceship. I had moved on to something made of marbles when I stepped on a squeaky hot dog. It let out a
wheeeeee,
and I kicked it to the side. That's when I saw a box with my name on it.

If Dad had been there, he would have insisted I wear an eye patch. “You can't find a treasure box if you're not properly attired,” he would say. “Even the most amateur pirates have to look the part.”

I lifted the box and would have shaken it like a Christmas present, but it was heavy. So I sat on the floor around it, legs in a V with the box between them. Maybe it was old baby clothes or papers from school. Art projects and poems and things not worth saving. I opened the lid, and dust flew out, making me cough. A homemade postcard sat on top, a Warhol head floating in the middle of a galaxy. Dad must have made it, but Warhol would have liked it. Especially if the galaxy contained celebrities. “It's better to be a head than a derriere, darling,” he'd say, and then run off to film someone sleeping. I hoped the back of the postcard would say something. It didn't, but it was what was underneath that counted: hundreds of mixtapes. The ultimate treasure.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “No way.”

I checked the lid again. It still said F
OR
S
OPHIE
, so I took out the tapes and looked at them, one by one. Were they full of songs or conversations or both? Did he spend hours picking the right tracks or talking into a microphone? The tapes were titled everything from
Chai Tea Catastrophe
to
String Theory Orchestra.
If I hadn't left my Walkman upstairs, I would have popped them in and listened until I knew him better than I knew myself. Some of the tapes looked older, like he'd bought a pack at a garage sale or taped over ones he had, but some of them were brand-new—tapes made in a time when no one was making tapes anymore. Dad, always and forever the purist.

I grabbed a handful of cassettes and brought them to my face, drinking him in. I traced the cases with my finger, imagining what it would have been like to have been him making tapes for me. I picked one out of the bunch, hoping it was about something meaningful, something he wanted to share that he couldn't say in person. Instead I got a tape called
Gravitons and Gravy.
On the inside there was a list of tracks, plus a recipe for making the best gravy in the universe.

I read a few more, knowing I'd have time to listen to them and decode their secret messages later. At a glance,
Atomic Antics
was full of Adam and the Ants, which I loved, but hoped when I listened to it, it would be more about the atoms themselves. And even though
Equation Store
was full of songs with numbers in them, I was sure there was more to it. I kept digging around, hoping to find one that was less cryptic, which is when I saw it, stuck to the bottom. The case was cracked and dirty, but that didn't matter, especially since the word on the cover was one I'd been thinking about for years:
Love.

My hands shook as I opened the case. It was stiff, like it was one of the first tapes he'd made. I went to remove the tape, but the entire thing flew out of my hand like a plastic bag in the wind. I chased it until I caught up with it in the corner, underneath a bunch of deflated beach balls. I picked up
Love
and put it in my pocket. I didn't have my Walkman, but I wasn't prepared to hear it. When I thought about what could be on it—a missive or a miss—I wasn't ready to go there. Not yet. Just like I was never ready when Mom had pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night, even though she said we were doing it for love.

|||||||||||

“You know I love you, don't you?” Mom would say, tossing the covers back and helping me put my coat on over my pajamas. Most nights I kicked the blankets off in my sleep, and Mom showed up and tucked me in tighter, building a cocoon to keep me in. But then, on other nights, she took me out of bed and put me in the car.

“Where are we going?” I asked as she drove away from our house.

“To find your father,” she said.

“Isn't he in bed?”

“No,” she said. “That's why we're going to find him.”

“Why do we have to go and look for him?” I said. “He'll come back.”

“Because,” she said, giving me a little squeeze on my shoulders. “No one should be out alone in the middle of the night. Would you like to be out alone in the middle of the night?”

“I'd like it if I were alone in my bed.”