Some of the politeness had gone out of Mom’s voice. “Let me get this straight” was the phrase that she always used with Jonah and Katherine when she thought they were stretching the truth a bit. (“Let me get this straight—you started practicing the trumpet at three thirty, according to the kitchen clock, and it’s only three fifty now, but somehow I’m supposed to believe that you practiced for an entire half hour out there in the living room? How could that be?”) Normally, Jonah hated that stern tone in Mom’s voice, that steely look in her eye. But right now he felt like cheering her on.
“Now, now,” Mr. Reardon said, leaning forward again. “I can understand how this might be upsetting to you. That ‘FBI’ title frightens people sometimes. In many ways, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was more involved. But, alas, secrets are secrets….”
“What are you talking about?” Dad asked. “Immigration and Naturalization…are you saying Jonah was born in another country?”
Was that whatImmigration and Naturalization meant?
“I’m an American!” Jonah blurted out, before he could stop himself.
“Of course you are,” Mr. Reardon said. “All your paperwork’s in order. At the moment. I checked.”
He smiled, but it was a dangerous smile. Jonah couldn’t quite understand what was going on, but maybe that was because he felt so dizzy all of a sudden. And so much of his brain was drowning in thoughts like,All those times I said the Pledge of Allegiance at school—doesn’t that count for anything? And the “National Anthem”—I tryto sing it at baseball games; it’s not my fault my voice doesn’t go that high….
“Is Jonah—” Dad took a careful breath. “Is he a naturalized American citizen or native born?”
Mr. Reardon shrugged, still smiling.
“Why does it matter?”
“It doesn’t…when it comes to the love we have for our son,” Mom said.
Jonah’s stomach began to churn, to match his spinning head. If Mom was going to get all sappy right here in front of Mr. Reardon, Jonah wouldn’t be able to take it. For a few seconds, he couldn’t even listen. When he forced himself to tune back in, Mom was saying, “But it might matter to Jonah someday. If he was born in another country, he might want to go back and visit; he might want to do projects about that country’s history for school….”
Mom’s voice cracked on the wordschool , and Jonah decided this was nothing like those times she tried to catch him or Katherine in a lie. Her voice never cracked then.
Mr. Reardon leaned closer. He laid his hands lightly on a closed laptop—the only object on his vast desk—and moved the right corner ever so slightly forward, as if that microscopic readjustment might align it perfectly with the borders of the desk.
“Let me give you a hypothetical,” Mr. Reardon said. “Let’s say there was an international baby-smuggling ring. Lots of poor people in developing countries have babies they can’t afford; lots of rich Americans want babies they can’t have. People get desperate, don’t they?”
Jonah saw his mother flinch. Mr. Reardon went on.
“It’s a bad mix, desperate rich people who want something that desperate poor people have. Laws are broken; rights are trampled; money changes hands illegally—”
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” Dad said coldly.
“I haven’t accused you of anything,” Mr. Reardon said. “Guilty conscience?”
Dad gaped at Mr. Reardon and lurched forward in his chair.
“Of course not,” he said. “Jonah was adopted through a reputable adoption agency—we had no contact with any smuggling rings! We—we didn’t pay anything! Except the regular adoption fee…but—but everyone pays that!”
Jonah had never before seen Dad so angry that he actually sputtered. He was usually the calmest person in the family, mild-mannered, like a Clark Kent without any secrets.
Mr. Reardon laughed, as if he thought Dad’s reaction was funny.
“We’re just talking hypotheticals, remember?”
Dad sat back, but Jonah could tell that it took great effort. Mom reached over and took Dad’s hand—Jonah could tell that they were both holding on so tightly that their knuckles turned white.
“So,hypothetically ,” Mr. Reardon continued, “this smuggling ring gets greedy. They take too many risks; they get caught. They always do, in the end. It’s a big mess for all the governments involved, all the government agencies involved. Do you extradite the smugglers? Do you deport the babies? You probably should, shouldn’t you?” He was staring straight at Jonah now. “Extraditeanddeport both mean ‘send back,’ by the way.”
Katherine gasped.
Jonah’s stomach was still churning, his head still spinning. But Katherine’s gasp was the last straw. He was sick of sitting here listening to Mr. Reardon bully his family with all these “hypotheticals,” all these simpers and smirks, cruel smiles and humorless laughs. He hated the way Mom and Dad were clutching each other, terrified, the way even Katherine had all the color drained from her face. If there was any way Jonah could hurry this along, a sick stomach and a whirling head weren’t going to stop him.
“Which country was it?” Jonah asked.
“Pardon?” Mr. Reardon asked.
“Which country?” Jonah repeated. “I see where you’re going with all this. Some smuggling ring brought me into the United States, the government busted up the smuggling ring, you gave me to a regular adoption agency, and then Mom and Dad got me. I’m really glad you didn’t send me back, if it was one of those countries where people live on five dollars a year. But it would be nice to know where I came from. Just so—just to know.”
Jonah was amazed at how calm his voice sounded.Really, who cares? He thought. He’d always known his DNA came from strangers; did it really matter if they were strangers from Bangladesh or Ethiopia or China instead of Kansas or Kentucky or Maine?
Jonah glanced down and caught a glimpse of his arm: pale skin, light brown hairs, an occasional freckle. Okay, he guessed he couldn’t be from Bangladesh or Ethiopia or China. Which poor country had people who looked like him?
It would be nice to know.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Reardon said. He didn’t sound sorry at all. “You’re asking me for information that I’m not authorized to provide.”
“Then—who would be?”
Mr. Reardon shrugged.
“Nobody.”
It doesn’t matter, Jonah told himself.I don’t care. But that wasn’t true. The room seemed to whirl around him—the room full of lies, Mr. Reardon’s lying words, Jonah’s lying thoughts. He shook his head dizzily. Mom reached out and placed her hand over his, just as she’d done with Dad.
Jonah didn’t shove it away.
“It seems to me,” Dad said slowly, “that my son’s question is perfectly reasonable.” Jonah was relieved to see that Dad had apparently calmed down now or at least was keeping himself under better control. “I don’t quite understand the need for all this secrecy. Don’t law enforcement agencies usually want to publicize big arrests? Aren’t smuggling busts public information?”
“Not always,” Mr. Reardon said. “Many times we have strong reasons to keep something like this secret. And I can’t tell you the reasons without giving away the secrets. Quite a quandary, isn’t it?”
Dad and Mr. Reardon seemed to be staring each other down.
“I understand,” Dad said, “that there are ways for American citizens to request information that they believe should be open to the public. My wife and I could make a Freedom of Information request. We could file a lawsuit if we had to. We would be willing to do that, on our son’s behalf.”
Dad wasn’t blinking—but neither was Mr. Reardon.
Jonah was. He was actually scrunching up his entire face, trying to understand. Was Dad threatening to sue? Mom and Dad weren’t the type to go around filing lawsuits. They were turn-the-other-cheek types.
“You could do those things,” Mr. Reardon agreed, “but you might want to consider your act
ions very, very carefully. Sometimes there are…repercussions. Ithink your son’s documentation is in order, but perhaps if we were forced to revisit his case, we might discover some unfortunate discrepancies. Did you hear about the Venezuelan boy who was deported recently? He was only seventeen years old, he’d spent his whole life in the U.S. except for the first three months, he didn’t even speak Spanish, but”—another careless shrug—“he wasn’t here legally. I’m sure he’ll survive in Venezuela somehow.”
“Are you threatening us?” Mom asked in a shrill, unnatural voice Jonah was sure he’d never heard her use before. Her hand pressed down on Jonah’s. Jonah thought about all those times she’d given him her hand to squeeze when he was a little kid getting shots or that time he had to have sixteen stitches in his knee. Now she was squeezing his hand just as hard. “You couldn’t take him away from us. We wouldn’t let him go. He’s our son!”
“Ishe?” Mr. Reardon asked. “What if his real parents came forward, wherever they are? What if they told their story?—’Our son, stolen away from us…’”
Jonah wanted to correct Mr. Reardon just as he’d corrected Chip:birth parents, you mean. My real parents are Mom and Dad. “B—” he started to say. But his churning stomach lurched; he changed his mind about what he wanted to say. “Bathroom,” he moaned, his face contorting. “Got to get to the—”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Mr. Reardon snapped, just as Mom, with much more sympathy, gasped, “Oh, Jonah—maybe the trash can—”
Mr. Reardon reacted as if having a boy vomit in his office would be a form of torture. He sprang up, rushed to the door, flung it open. “There!” he said, pointing down the hall. “Fourth door on the right. Hurry!”
Jonah ran, clutching his stomach. The hallway seemed even longer than it had before. He had a few dry heaves.Second door. Third door. Here it is, just in time—
He stumbled into darkness, fumbled for the light, hurried into a stall. All the Mountain Dew he’d drunk came back up, along with the—never mind,Jonah told himself.Don’t even try to remember what you had for lunch.
Then he was done. He leaned his head miserably against the cool metal of the stall.
“Sorry about that,” someone said behind him. “It wasn’t supposed to make you sick.”
TEN
Jonah spun around—or, spun as well as anyone could, three seconds after vomiting. A man in a gray maintenance-staff sweatshirt stood leaning against the tile wall, but it wasn’t the same janitor who’d given him the Mountain Dew. That guy had been older, paunchier. This guy was young and didn’t really look like a janitor somehow.
“We’ve had to do way too much planning on the fly here—we just thought, twenty ounces of Mountain Dew, at some point you’d have to leave that office and go to the bathroom,” the man said. “So we could get you alone.”
Jonah realized he was practically trapped in the bathroom stall. To get out, he’d have to walk right past the man. Hadn’t this day already been horrifying enough? He darted a quick glance down—maybe if he dived fast enough, he could roll out under the wall of the stall and make it to the door out into the hallway before the man saw what he was doing.
The man caught Jonah’s glance.
“It’s not like that!” the man said, holding up his hands innocently. “I just wanted to tell you something.”
“What?” Jonah said, cautiously. Maybe he could swing the stall door into the man’s face, maybe he could jump up on the toilet and hang on to the stall’s walls to get leverage to kick, maybe—
“When you go back to Mr. Reardon’s office,” the man said, quickly, like he thought he might run out of time, “find a way to look in the file of papers on his desk. Memorize all the names you can.”
“There isn’t a file on Mr. Reardon’s desk,” Jonah said. “Just a laptop.”
He was sure of that. He could close his eyes and picture the vast expanse of the desk, almost completely empty.
“There will be when you get back,” the man said.
The man took a step toward Jonah, and Jonah tensed. But the man kept going, around the corner of the stall toward the door out into the hallway. Jonah didn’t hear the door open and close, but when he peeked out, the man was gone.
Jonah collapsed against the metal stall again. He took a deep breath.Steady… He found he was clearheaded enough now to remember to flush the toilet.
A pounding noise came from the hallway, somebody pounding on the door.
“Jonah! Jonah, are you all right in there?”
It was Mom, treating him like a kindergartener again.
“I’m fine!” he yelled out.
“Do you need any help?”
“No! Just give me a minute!”
He went to the sink, splashed water on his face, scooped water up into his mouth, and swallowed. His mouth still tasted gross. He leaned his forehead against the mirror.
Papers, he thought.Look into the file on Mr. Reardon’s desk….
“Jonah?” Mom called from the other side of the bathroom door.
“Coming.”
Jonah wiped his face on his sleeve—okay, not good manners, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances—and left the bathroom. Mom was waiting right outside the door; Dad and Mr. Reardon were a little farther down the hall.
“Are you—” Mom started to ask, but Jonah cut her off. “I told you, I’m okay! Let’s just get this over with.”
Mr. Reardon watched coldly as Mom and Jonah went back toward his office.
“Really,” he said, “I believe we’re done here.”
“No, no, please—Jonah’s fine now,” Mom said. “We still need to talk this out. I think we just got off on the wrong foot.”
Getting off on the wrong footwas a Mom catchphrase—that was what she’d said about Jonah and Billy Barton in second grade, when Jonah came home with a black eye. (Jonah had completely misunderstood: “No, Mom,” he’d insisted, “it was his right fist. Not his foot at all.”)
Mr. Reardon looked doubtful, but they all settled back into their chairs near Katherine, who’d evidently never bothered getting up. Jonah shot her a resentful glance, but she looked even worse than he felt: she was deathly pale, and her eyes were huge and round, as if she’d just been terrified out of her wits.
Wow, Jonah thought.I’ve never known Katherineto be that concerned about me getting sick.
“I’m fine,” he half-whispered, half-mouthed to her. But her eyes stayed huge; her skin stayed pale.
Mr. Reardon and Jonah’s parents were still talking, but Jonah tuned it out for a moment. Pretending he was just, oh, maybe trying to see if Mr. Reardon’s laptop was a Mac or a PC, he glanced toward Mr. Reardon’s desk.
There was a file there now. It was one of those thin, cheap, neutral-colored folders people used in offices.
But at the same time Jonah looked at the folder, Mr. Reardon did too. Jonah was sure he did, even though he didn’t move his head at all, and his voice didn’t waver. In fact—Jonah started watching Mr. Reardon now—Mr. Reardon kept glancing at the file surreptitiously, every few seconds. It reminded Jonah of the time that he’d broken a window playing baseball, and he’d thought that if he just didn’t mention it, maybe Mom and Dad wouldn’t notice. But when Dad came out into the backyard, no matter how hard Jonah tried, he couldn’t keep from looking toward the broken window. It was like the window was a magnet with an irresistible pull on his eyes.
The file seemed to have the same pull for Mr. Reardon.
Of course, Jonah had been only six years old then, and Mr. Reardon was a grown-up. But the more Jonah ignored what Mr. Reardon was saying (something about the greater good of the entire nation and compromises made by all Americans for the sake of security), and the more he just paid attention to the small twitches of Mr. Reardon’s eyes, the more Jonah was sure of three things:
Mr. Reardon was surprised and upset—no, make thatfurious —to see that file on his desk.
Mr. Reardon really, really, really di
dn’t want Jonah’s family to notice the file on his desk.
There was no way Jonah would be able to casually lean forward, open the file, then look at and memorize its contents. Not when Mr. Reardon was already alternating his nervous glances at the file with nervous glances at Jonah.
Because I was sick? Because this whole meeting’s about me? Or because he already saw me looking at the file?
“Really,” Mr. Reardon was saying. “I believe we’ve already covered this. I see no reason to continue this discussion.”
Oh, no! Mr. Reardon was about to end the conversation and kick them out of his office!
Jonah panicked. Should he fake another stomach problem? No—Mom and Dad would focus all their attention on him; it’d just give Mr. Reardon the perfect opportunity to hide the file. What then?
Jonah glanced around frantically, at the ceiling, the floor, the windows behind Mr. Reardon’s desk. He glanced back at the floor a second time, at Katherine’s red-striped shoelaces flapping out loose and dangling down beside the leg of the chair.
Hmm. Windows. Shoelaces.
Jonah pitched forward.
“Hey, Katherine,” he said loudly, “your shoelaces are untied.”
For a moment, Jonah was afraid that she wasn’t going to react—why wasshe acting so freaky? But then she did lean forward, at least enough so that their heads were below the level of the desk, out of sight. Then Jonah could whisper, directly into her ear, “I’m going to distract Mr. Reardon. Look inside that file on his desk. Memorize as much of it as you can.”
Katherine nodded—or, at least, Jonah thought she did. He didn’t really have time to make sure. He straightened up.
“Well,” Mom was saying, starting to stand up. “We do appreciate you meeting with us, like I said before. But—”
“What’s that?” Jonah interrupted, pointing out the window. He sincerely hoped Mr. Reardon had never been a middle-school teacher, because if he had, he’d never fall for this. But Jonah tried not to think about that. He made his voice sound innocent and stunned. “Was that, like, a ball of flame?”