I could just hear Mom’s response if I told her I deserved to know the truth: Deserve? What does anyone deserve? She drove me crazy.
I stuffed Lynne’s list in my pocket.
Tuesday after school I went straight home, knowing full well that Mom would have to be at the library until at least six. That gave me three hours for detective work.
I started in Mom’s room, because I felt guiltiest about snooping there. I wanted to get it over with. She has a bed, a dresser, and a desk. Nothing on the walls, nothing lying out. The first dresser drawer contained a comb and a brush—that’s all. The second held a single bottle of hand cream. I closed my eyes, thinking about drawers in the Robertsons’ house. I’d hung around there enough that Lynne felt comfortable yelling out from the bathroom, “Hey go snag my moms silver barrette out of her dresser, will you? It’s in the top drawer on the right.” And I’d go and find the barrette in an explosion of bobby pins and hair clips and old Christmas cards and bank statements and pictures of other people’s babies. It was the same way in every room of the Robertson’s house. Finding Scotch tape meant searching through a kitchen drawer full of Lynne’s old report cards and her older brother’s soccer pictures and her mom’s grocery store receipts from the past five years. Every drawer you opened meant a walk down memory lane, whether you wanted it or not.
No wonder Lynne thought I’d find my birth certificate and my parents’ marriage certificate just lying around. The Robertsons had memories. My mom had a comb and a brush and a single bottle of hand cream.
I went through the rest of the drawers, but they were just as bare. Five pairs of underwear and two bras in one drawer, three T-shirts in another, two sweatshirts and two sweaters at the bottom. No envelope crammed with personal papers and pictures and the past could have been hidden in any of those drawers.
The desk contained ten pens, eleven pencils, and a ruler. Nothing else.
I thought to look for false bottoms, secret doors, but Mom’s furniture was too straightforward: cheaply made, poorly veneered, easily forgotten. It was clearly furniture bought by someone who didn’t really care.
I looked under the mattress and behind each drawer, and I was still in and out of Mom’s room in ten minutes flat.
The rest of the place wasn’t much more challenging. We have sheer, practically see-through curtains on all the windows in the living room, and they seemed to taunt me by blowing around as I searched the couch: Why are you even trying? Nothing could be hidden here.
Who was I fooling? I knew every inch of the apartment, from the front door that squeaked to the bathroom window that didn’t open all the way to the dent in the kitchen linoleum that I myself had made, dropping a tureen of soup years ago. There were no hiding places.
Still, I was ready to go tear apart even my own room—on the off chance that there was some corner of my own drawers that I’d been overlooking for the past dozen years. Then, searching the kitchen, I reached my hand to the back of a cabinet and closed my fingers around something I didn’t know was there: a key. I pulled it out. The hard plastic key chain read, SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX, FIRST BANK OF WILLISTOWN.
Safe-deposit box. Of course. My mom wasn’t exactly what you’d call a big-time risk taker. Naturally, she would have placed all of her important papers in a fireproof bank vault.
Especially if she didn’t want me to see them.
Five
THE NEXT MORNING BEFORE I LEFT FOR SCHOOL, I TUCKED THE SAFE-deposit box key in my pocket. I’m not sure exactly what I wanted to do. I figured Lynne could come up with a plan.
I packed my own lunch and yelled at Mom’s closed bedroom door, “I’m leaving now! Bye!” Mom had the day off, to make up for working Sunday. So she wasn’t even up yet. I didn’t wait around for a response.
I was one of the few kids at Willistown High who could walk to school. It’s ten blocks. A bus would stop for me if I stood on the corner and looked pitiful when it was raining or snowing or just plain cold. I’m sure that all the other walkers had parents who would drive them during bad weather, so the bus drivers really went out of their way to be nice to me.
But this was a pleasant spring day, almost warm already. I took off walking on my own.
I thought again about my mother’s virtually empty drawers, her refusal to go anywhere she couldn’t walk, her strange silences and cryptic replies. She really was an unusual person. I just took her oddities for granted—and so did everyone else in Willistown. Small towns have the reputation of expecting everyone to be the same, but in Willistown people seemed to protect my mom in all her peculiarities. My mom’s boss, Mrs. Steele, probably should have fired my mom when all the library’s records were computerized—what kind of a librarian won’t touch a keyboard, can’t look up any computerized reference source, can’t even answer the question “Is this book checked out already?” without walking over to the shelf to look? Even though she’d kept her title and salary, I didn’t see how Mom could be anything but a glorified clerk now—good for nothing but shelving books. Yet Mrs. Steele always raved about Mom, her knowledge of books, her encyclopedic recall of obscure details, her patience and speed in helping patrons.
Why wouldn’t she help me?
A new thought struck me: Maybe Mrs. Steele was nice to Mom because she knew Mom’s secret. Maybe the whole town knew except me. Maybe even Lynne was just playing along….
Boy, I was really getting paranoid now.
I reached the end of the block and crossed the street to pass Miller’s Drug Store. Miller’s Drug Store is an anachronism—one of those old-fashioned drugstores that every small town had fifty or sixty years ago and practically no town has now. At least, that’s what the articles in the Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Dayton Daily News said. Mr. Miller has them all lined up in the window, yellowing in the sun. I heard someone ask him once what it was like to be famous, and he said, “You know, it’s funny. Thirty years ago everyone was making fun of me because I didn’t get rid of my old cash register, didn’t replace perfectly good display cases, was just plain too lazy to change. That’s what they said. Now people drive here from all over the state and write me up in those big-city papers…. It’s a strange world.”
This morning Mr. Miller was outside scrubbing his plate-glass windows.
“Hi, Kira,” he said as I walked past. “Need any chocolate to make it through the day?”
“No, thanks, Mr. Miller,” I said. I looked past him, through spotless windows, to the famous Miller’s Drug Store candy counter. He had jelly beans, gummy bears, Necco wafers, gumdrops, malted milk balls, chocolate stars, M&M’s, and a dozen other candies all lined up in glass cases, right at a kid’s eye level. When I was little, that candy counter seemed like the eighth wonder of the world.
“Well, if you do, don’t forget who taught you all about it,” Mr. Miller said with a chuckle. “I can still remember you coming in with your mom, pointing at the Milk Duds, and saying, ‘What’s that?’ I couldn’t believe it, a kid not knowing candy. I don’t see how people can stand it, all that health food out in California.”
Mr. Miller had told me this story a thousand times—probably every time I’d seen him over the past decade. I knew his words by heart. Next he was going to remind me how he’d taught me not to bother with the pointless candies, like Smarties and circus peanuts, and go straight for the good stuff: chocolate. Then he was going to rail again about my “wacky California childhood” without candy.
But suddenly I froze, hearing the familiar tale with new ears.
Mom had never once complained about Mr. Miller giving me candy. If she’d opposed it in California, why hadn’t she opposed it here?
Maybe because we hadn’t come from California. California wasn’t so foreign that they didn’t have Milk Duds.
“Mr. Miller,” I said slowly “when you gave me candy for the first time, you could tell I’d never ever had it before, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Miller said, laughing. “Yo
u should have seen your face. Wish I’d had a camera that day.”
“Okay. Thanks,” I said, thinking hard.
Mr. Miller was still shaking his head, savoring the memory. I turned the corner, veering away from my usual path to school.
The bank was three blocks away, right across from the county courthouse. In fact, with its marble pillars and limestone facade, it’s what most people notice instead of the county courthouse.
Of course, at seven thirty in the morning, the bank was closed and deserted. I stood across the street, staring. Somewhere, behind those thick walls, hidden away in a vault, there had to be answers to all the questions growing in my mind. I fingered the key in my pocket, wishing.
Six
LYNNE PUNCHED NUMBERS INTO THE CELL PHONE.
“Yes, I’m thinking of opening a safe-deposit box with your bank” she said into the phone, faking a sophisticated voice. “And I was hoping you could answer a few questions?”
I stood like a guard beside her. We were hiding out in the second-floor bathroom at school. We’d gotten special permission to come up here because Lynne had told Mrs. Grayson, the teacher on cafeteria duty, that the nearest bathroom was too crowded and we really had to go. Mrs. Grayson hadn’t even blinked. It pays to hang out with straight-A Lynne—teachers never think that good students are going to do something bad.
Never mind that students aren’t supposed to be making personal calls during the day. Students aren’t even supposed to be carrying cell phones. But Lynne’s parents had gotten her one right after those shootings at that school in Colorado, and Lynne dutifully carried it everywhere. Other kids might have used it all the time, racking up calls to all their friends. But this was the first time I’d seen Lynne even pull hers out of her backpack.
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” Lynne said. “And how much does that cost each month?”
I dug my elbow into her side, made a face, and moved my hand in a circle. She knew I meant, Come on, get on with it. Ask what we really want to know.
Lynne made a face too and turned her back to me.
“Yes, I see. That does sound inexpensive,” she said. “I was also curious about your security measures. How could I be sure that no one else would have access to my box?”
Lynne waited. I pressed close, trying to hear, but the bank teller’s voice was barely a buzz. Lynne shook her head at me and mouthed, Tell you later.
“Okay. Uh-huh. Hmm,” she said. I hoped Lynne was remembering whatever the woman was telling her, instead of focusing all her attention on coming up with different responses.
“No, I think you’ve told me everything I need to know,” Lynne said. “Thank you very much.”
She shoved down the phone’s antenna and looked at me doubtfully.
“How good are you at impersonating your mother and forging her signature?” she asked. “And how willing are you to go to jail if you’re caught?”
I shook my head.
“It’s hopeless,” I said. “Everyone in town knows my mom.”
“Well, she does kind of stand out,” Lynne said apologetically.
We trudged back to the cafeteria. I spent the rest of lunch period explaining to Andrea and Courtney why I wasn’t going to storm into the bank demanding to see the documents that were—at least in Andrea’s and Courtney’s minds—rightfully mine. Or, alternately, why I wasn’t going to force, trick, or bribe my mom into telling me everything.
“But mothers are so easy,” Andrea argued. “Just act interested in their pitiful little pasts, and in no time at all they’re telling you everything. The name of their high school prom date. The first movie they saw with a boy. How badly Uncle Jake flunked calculus. The only challenge is staying awake for it all.”
“That’s your mom. Not mine,” I said, even as Lynne said to Andrea, with great interest, “Your uncle Jake flunked calculus? Isn’t he the one who’s a math professor now?”
I sighed and stared over my friends’ heads. I wished I’d never told them anything. I couldn’t take back what I’d said under hypnosis, but I could have pretended I’d just made it all up. That way, maybe I could have forgotten it too. I could only imagine what horrible secret Mom was hiding from me: Rape? Murder? Abuse? Alcoholism? Violence? War? What other bogeymen were out there? But discovering the truth could not possibly be worse than this half knowing, this half suspecting.
I barely spoke to my friends the rest of the day. Walking home, I was conscious at every point of how far away I was from the bank. I went two blocks out of my way just so I didn’t have to walk past Mr. Miller’s store again. But I was steeling myself.
I had never demanded anything of my mother in my entire life. But today I was going to demand that she tell me the truth. I didn’t know which of Andrea’s recommended methods I was going to use. I didn’t know if I’d be forced to make up an approach of my own.
But whatever I did, it was going to work.
Seven
MY HEART WAS POUNDING BY THE TIME I REACHED THE TOP OF OUR stairs. I’d never felt so daring. I unlocked the door, banged it open, and yelled out a challenge: “Mom!”
She didn’t answer.
I walked through the kitchen, the dining nook, the living room. I looked in the bathroom, both bedrooms.
Mom was nowhere in sight.
How dare she, I thought.
She had probably just walked to the grocery, or even to Miller’s Drug Store, to pick up something totally boring, like toothpaste. I might have run into her if I’d taken my usual way home. Rationally, I knew I shouldn’t take her absence personally.
But I was still furious.
Trying to calm down, I walked back through the apartment. This time, I saw that one of the chairs at the dining table was turned on its side. I’d probably knocked it over myself, in my haste, and hadn’t even noticed.
That sobered me a bit. I bent down to put the chair back right.
But down low, I had a different perspective. I could see something silver glinting on the floor, half hidden by carpet fibers. I reached for it. As soon as my fingers closed around it, I knew what it was. A key.
This one had no key ring attached, no label explaining it’s use. I turned it over in my hand and saw the initials “GM.” General Motors.
This was the key to Mom’s car.
I kept turning the key over and over, automatically, as if I’d eventually turn up an explanation. Why was the key here? Probably it had just fallen out of Mom’s pocket. But why would she have been carrying around the key to a car she hadn’t touched in more than a decade?
I tried to remember if I’d seen this key the day before, when I’d been searching for my birth certificate. Mom had so few possessions, you would have thought I could have noticed that one was missing. But my mind came up blank.
Honestly, I was a little spooked, finding the key on the floor by an overturned chair. (Had I knocked it over? Or had it been like that when I came home? I couldn’t remember.)
Holding the key tight, I felt around on the floor, just in case Mom had dropped something else. Our carpet is deep green and thick—it’s easy to lose things in it. But all I found were crumbs from the English muffin I’d eaten for breakfast. That was a little odd; usually Mom vacuumed on her day off. She must have been lazy today, I thought scornfully. Too busy keeping secrets to do any work.
That was the attitude I needed to hold on to if I ever had a prayer of confronting her.
I straightened up and slid Mom’s key into my pocket. So I had the safe-deposit box key on my right side and the car key on my left, both held tightly in place by the material of my jeans. Maybe I could hold my mother’s keys hostage until she told me the secrets they might unlock.
I really wanted Mom to hurry up and come home. I wasn’t going to be able to stay mad at her much longer. Soon I was going to start worrying.
Resolutely, I forced myself to sit down at the kitchen table and pull out my history homework. Name three causes of the American Civil War and … War? Did I remembe
r a war?
I kept having to read the history questions over three or four times. It took me a full hour to write ten answers.
And at the end of the hour Mom still hadn’t come back.
This was really weird. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who always left a note whenever she went out. But she also wasn’t the kind of person who was ever gone long.
I called the library. Mrs. Steele answered the phone.
“My mom isn’t there, is she?” I asked. “You didn’t call her in to work at the last minute, did you?”
“No.” Mrs. Steele sounded surprised. “Goodness knows we’re busy enough this afternoon—how many term papers are your classmates trying to do? But I couldn’t call her in to work during a leave of absence. The public employee code prevents it.”
“Leave of absence?” I asked, certain I’d misunderstood.
“Yes, yes. I still can’t believe the library board approved her request so quickly. She didn’t say—Are you two going to be out of town? Is she taking you out of school for that long?” Mrs. Steele was often frustrated with my mom’s closemouthedness and tried to get information out of me instead. Sometimes I played along, sometimes I didn’t. Right now, I was even more baffled than Mrs. Steele. And, in her nosiness, she seemed to have forgotten I thought my mom was at the library. “No, it’s five cents a day for overdue books,” she added.
“What?” I said.
“Sorry, Kira,” Mrs. Steele said. “I was talking to somebody else. Wish I were taking a month off too. Oops—gotta go. No! Do not pull all those books off the—”
I hung up, thoroughly confused. Why would my mother take a leave of absence? For a whole month? And why hadn’t she told me? Why wasn’t she home? Could she possibly have left town? Without me?
I picked up the phone and automatically began dialing Lynne’s number. I didn’t even have to look, I’ve dialed it so many times. But this time, I stopped halfway through. What good would it do to tell Lynne what was going on? Mom would probably walk in, just as I was saying, Yes, my mom is definitely weird. That wouldn’t exactly set the right tone for Mom to reveal all.