“I’m sorry, I don’t know about this, June.”
“Don’t worry, Toby. Don’t be afraid.”
He didn’t say anything. Then he sighed. “Okay. All right. I’ll go. For you.”
“You will?” And I realized I was surprised. Maybe I’d been testing him. Maybe I expected him to fail.
“For you. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be there soon.”
I hung up, and right away I felt a shiver hit every part of my skin at once. I should have just told my parents. I should have just let Greta get in trouble. I sat there on my parents’ bedroom floor, letting what I’d done sink in. Then I grabbed the receiver back up and dialed the number again. My fingers fumbled, and when I finally got the number right it didn’t even matter. The phone rang and rang. Toby had already left. I can’t say what I would have said if he’d been there. Would I have begged him not to go? I don’t know. I don’t know my heart that well. All I knew was that Toby’s promises were good. He’d dropped everything, just like that, and came when I called.
Downstairs, my parents were laughing at Saturday Night Live, and I slipped into the living room. My mother was all cozy in pink sweatpants and a huge oversize sweatshirt. They were on the couch, and her head was leaned up against my dad’s shoulder. I sat cross-legged in the recliner.
Dennis Miller was on the show, doing that comedy news thing he did. Both my parents were laughing at some stupid joke about Gary Hart. A commercial came on and I looked over at them.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
My mother glanced over at my father. Then she looked at me for a long time, her lips pressed together tight. Her face hard. Finally, she seemed to lighten a little bit and she nodded her head very slightly. “It’s good to hear you say that, June.”
“I mean it. Really. I am sorry.”
My mother patted the spot next to her on the couch, and I slid off the vinyl recliner and snuggled up next to her in a way I hadn’t done for years. It felt warm and good.
When the commercials were done, Saturday Night Live came back on and there was a sketch with Jon Lovitz about a package-delivery service called Einstein Express, where, because of Einstein’s theories about the space-time continuum, packages could actually arrive before they were sent out. It was a good idea but, like most stuff on that show, the skit wasn’t all that funny.
But I didn’t care. This day would be over soon, and my mother’s shoulder was soft and the couch was soft and Suzanne Vega had come on and she was singing “Luka,” about that sad boy who lived on the second floor, and it was soft and soothing and just right.
The minutes seemed to pass in slow motion that night. My mother’s body shook when she laughed, just like Finn’s, and my father snored lightly. After Saturday Night Live, my parents went up to bed and I went into the kitchen to watch for Toby at the back door. Everything would work out fine. Of course it would. That’s what I told myself. I would thank Toby for doing this for me and everything would be back to normal. The rain pounded the kitchen window and I stared into the darkness of our backyard, at the skeletal shadow of the swing set, at the rhododendron bushes whipping around in the storm. I stood there for a long time, staring out, waiting for the shadow of Toby to arrive.
Then the front doorbell rang.
Fifty-Eight
The two policemen stood in the doorway. I knew one was Officer Gellski. He’d been coming to our school once a year since I was in kindergarten, to tell us about stranger danger and the third rail and bike safety. He was older than my parents. The other one was young.
Between the two of them, looking small, was Greta. She stood stiff, staring down at the ground. She was still in her grass skirt, her Bloody Mary costume, and she was soaked. Her hair was plastered with mud and leaves, her face filthy with smeared stage makeup. The rain pounded down behind the three of them, but my father just stood there, one hand on the edge of the door, and stared.
“Greta—what on earth?” he whispered. “Is she okay?”
“May we?” Officer Gellski asked.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Come in.” My father opened the door wider and the three of them stepped into the front hallway. The younger cop looked down at his muddy shoes, then over to my mother.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, shaking her head. “Come into the kitchen. In here.”
The police walked ahead. Greta hung back. My father put his arm around her and guided her into the kitchen. He pulled a chair out for Greta and sat her down. The two policemen made the kitchen seem tiny. Their navy uniforms and their bulky pistols made everything in our house seem flimsy.
“Take a seat,” my mother said to them.
“It’s okay. We’re fine standing,” Officer Gellski said, forcing a smile. The younger cop held out a plastic bag.
“Your daughter’s coat,” he said. “It was soaked.”
She took the bag from him and held it out, away from her body.
“Throw it in the bathtub, please, June,” she said without looking at me.
I’d been standing in the kitchen doorway, and I went over to my mother and took the bag. I walked as close to Greta as I could, nudging her arm as I went past, trying to get her eyes. But she wouldn’t look at me. Not even for a second.
“June, move it,” my mother said. “It’s dripping all over the floor.”
As I left the room, I heard both my parents frantically questioning the two cops about Greta. All I could think of was Toby. What had happened to Toby? Did this mean he hadn’t made it to Greta? Was he lost in the woods? Was he too late? Would he spend all night out there searching for her, trying to keep his promise to me? I ran up the stairs two at a time, then flipped the light on and dumped the coat out of the bag and into the tub.
I barely looked at it at first, eager to get back downstairs, but as my hand reached for the light switch, I turned. The coat wasn’t black. Greta’s coat was black. I stared at the wet lump in the bathtub for a few seconds, not quite registering what I saw. It wasn’t Greta’s coat in the tub. Slumped in the bottom of the bathtub like some kind of dead animal was a big gray coat. Finn’s coat. Toby’s coat. The one he’d worn to the zoo.
I ran down the stairs two at a time.
“Tell us what’s going on,” my mother was saying.
I stood in the doorway watching. Trying to catch Greta’s eye.
“Well, first of all, we think Greta’s just fine,” Officer Gellski said.
“Where did you find her?” she said, wringing her hands together.
“Behind the school, Mrs. Elbus. In the woods. Kids throw parties back there sometimes. We like to keep an eye on it.” He stretched his arms out across the kitchen counter. “It looks like she’s had a bit too much to drink. Partying a little too hard, that kind of thing, but we’re not too worried about that right now.”
Look at me, Greta. Look at me. I was thinking at Greta as hard as I could, but still nothing.
“You’re not?” my father said.
The young cop kept shifting his weight from left foot to right. He seemed uncomfortable, like he had no real job to do now that he’d handed the coat over.
“No. That’s not what’s worrying us right now,” Officer Gellski said.
“Well, what is it, then?”
“There was a man, Mr. Elbus.”
My stomach felt like it had turned to stone. Heavy and cold and too much for my body to hold. Look at me, Greta. Please look at me.
My father’s voice sounded alarmed now, louder, higher pitched. “A man? What kind of man?”
Then Officer Gellski described exactly what they saw. He said he and the young cop were sitting in the cruiser in the school parking lot. Some people who lived on the street had called in, complaining of noise, which, he said, was not unusual for a Saturday night. What was a little bit different was that the neighbor had reported a scream. Not only the usual party noise, but also a girl screaming. So the two of them were sitting in the cruiser with the headlights off, watchi
ng, looking for any movement in and out of the woods. Anything to indicate that there was a party.
“We got out of the car, about to walk in a ways, and it started raining. Hard. We looked at each other, thinking that it wasn’t worth getting soaked over. The rain was bound to get everyone out of there anyway.”
My thoughts were wild. All over the place.
“We were about to leave. I’d just turned the key in the ignition, just switched on the lights.” Officer Gellski mimed starting the car up. “We were backing out. The car was facing the woods so the lights were shining right into the trees, lighting the whole place up, and that’s when he came out.”
“I don’t understand,” my father said.
The younger cop stepped forward. “The man in question was coming out of the woods, holding your daughter, Mr. Elbus.” He put his arms out in front of him, like he was holding firewood, demonstrating.
“To tell you the truth, at first we thought he was holding a dog or something. A dead dog.” Gellski held up a hand. “No offense.”
“It was that big coat,” said the young cop.
As Gellski described what had happened, I could see the whole thing in my mind. Toby, like that lanky Ichabod Crane, running through the woods, cold and wet, cradling the bundled-up Greta. Charging along, faster and faster, his good heart pounding. I could see him so clearly, trying to do right by me, by Finn, his eyes squinting as he stumbled out of the woods, shocked by the headlights aimed right at him. Clutching Greta tighter, both of them drenched.
“We put the two of them in the back of the car, cuffed the man. We haven’t been able to get a word. From either of them.”
“The man,” my mother said, looking between the cops and Greta. “Greta, who is this man? What are they talking about? The cast party was at the Reeds’, wasn’t it? I don’t . . .”
My father pulled a chair out and my mother sat down, looking defeated. I edged into the room, pulled a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water.
Greta didn’t answer, and my mother turned back to the two cops.
I walked over to Greta and knelt, handing her the glass. From down low, I peered up into her face. As the adults kept talking, I looked right into her eyes until I forced her to look back. For those few seconds, once our eyes met, it was like we were the only two people in the room. I put a hand on her arm, and with everything in me I tried to make her understand that it was all me. That none of this was Toby’s fault. My eyes were begging her to save him. I would forgive every awful thing she’d ever done to me for this. For this one thing. I kept staring, waiting for some sign from her. But I saw nothing. It was Greta who could read people, not me. After a few seconds, she took a long slow sip of the water and turned away.
“The man’s name is Tobias Aldshaw. Does that mean anything to you?”
My mother and father looked at each other like they’d just been told Martians had landed in the backyard.
“Toby?” my mother said.
“So you know the man?” said Officer Gellski.
“Well . . .”
“There’s something else,” Gellski said.
Something else? Was Toby drunk? Had he been drinking when I made him drive out?
Gellski reached inside the chest pocket of his shirt.
“We found this in his back pocket.” He tossed a small navy-blue book on the table, and everyone stared. I gasped, then put my hand over my mouth. My passport. The confusion on my parents’ faces was so deep by that point, I thought it might stay there forever. My mother picked up the passport and flipped to the picture page. She stared at it for a moment, then she looked at me. I stood, but looked away.
“June? This is June’s passport. This is starting to really scare me,” my mother said, turning to my father. “I don’t understand . . .”
I saw everything then. I saw how deep the trap was that Toby was in. If nobody said anything, if it looked like he was here on his own, like a crazy person, with my passport, with Greta, he’d get arrested. And maybe even more. Prison? Sent back to England? But if I did tell them everything—if they all knew he’d been meeting up with me, meeting alone with a fourteen-year-old girl in the city—I didn’t know what would happen. To either of us.
“Greta,” I said, under all the adult voices.
She turned slowly and looked at me over her shoulder. She seemed older than sixteen, in a haggard way, and so tired I couldn’t imagine how she was still sitting upright.
Please, I mouthed.
The words kidnap and AIDS and illegal immigrant flew around the room, but I just watched Greta. She turned slowly back and for a few seconds she sat there, saying nothing. She wasn’t going to help. She was going to leave me drowning in all this mess. She was going to let me watch Toby get everything she thought he deserved.
“Mom,” I said. She didn’t hear me, so I said it again, louder. “Mom.”
“June, it’ll be okay, honey. Don’t worry.”
I shook my head. “No. No, it’s just—”
Then Greta stood up. She stretched her arms at her sides and reached through her grass skirt and into her front pocket for a hair scrunchie. She twisted her hair into a neat bun, wrapping the scrunchie around to hold it in place. Then she took a deep breath and, as slowly as she could, gently blew the air back out. She scanned the room, looking right into the eyes of each person there, and with a voice as loud and clear as the one she used in South Pacific she said, “It’s my fault.”
The room went silent.
The yellow clock ticked.
My hands trembled so much I had to stuff them in my pockets.
As Greta started talking, the only thing I could do was stand and stare in amazement at that person who was my sister. At the way she could invent a whole story on the spot. She told them that she knew Toby. That she’d seen him once when she was in the city with her friends. She’d gone to Finn’s old neighborhood, right past Finn’s building, and there he was, walking out the front door. She said he recognized her, from the portrait, from pictures Finn had in the apartment, and he’d called her over. She said he explained who he was, and then she remembered him from the funeral. “It was the guy you pointed out, remember, Dad?” She described the whole thing in such detail. How she and her friends had all gotten drinks at Gray’s Papaya. How she got the piña colada—nonalcoholic, she said, glancing at my parents—but the other two had mango, and she was about to throw her empty cup away when she saw him. She said she wasn’t going to go over to Toby at first, but then she decided she would, for only a minute. And they started talking.
“It was stupid, I know it was,” she said. “But he looked so sad, and he started going on and on about how much he was missing Finn. How it was so lonely. It was just so totally weird and I didn’t know what to say to him, so I ended up inviting him to the party. I said that maybe getting out would make him feel better and that there was this party.” She’d crinkled her brow, looking helpless. “I . . . I didn’t know what to say to him.”
Nobody said anything, so she went on.
“I didn’t think he’d come. I mean, I was just saying it, I didn’t mean it, you’d think he’d have better things to do—”
“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” my mother said, her lips pursed.
“Let her finish, Danni,” my dad said.
“But in the end, it was a good thing, wasn’t it? I was drunk. Way drunk. If it wasn’t for Toby, I might still be out in the woods, passed out in the pouring rain.”
“But the party was at the Reeds’, wasn’t it?”
“The official party’s at the Reeds’, but . . .”
She didn’t look at me the whole time she was talking. It was like she was giving a performance. Like a perfect actress, pausing exactly long enough when she needed to make a point. Changing the expression on her face at just the right time. Choosing which person to glance at when she was saying a particularly hard thing.
“That doesn’t explain anything, Greta,” my mothe
r said. “A grown man with AIDS out in the woods at a high school party? No. Nothing makes that right. Nothing makes it right for him to be carrying my daughter across a parking lot. And June’s passport. There’s still that. Why on earth would he have June’s passport in his pocket?”
“Those passports are in a locked box in our bedroom,” my father said to Officer Gellski. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
I wanted so badly to have the kind of brain Greta had. I would have given anything to step forward with some elegant explanation of why the man called Tobias Aldshaw had my passport in his back pocket. But all my thoughts seemed to blur and mingle. The possibility of a sensible story coming out of my mouth was zero.
“No. It’s just plain ridiculous. On every level,” my mother said. “Why on earth would that man have June’s passport in his pocket?” she repeated.
I looked at Greta. I thought she’d been flustered by the passport thing, because she didn’t say anything. I kept watching her until I saw something change. I actually saw the exact moment when she switched on a guilty face. She looked down at the floor, then back up, peeking through her bangs, as much like a little girl as she could make herself. Then, cool as anything, she told the whole room a story about making fake IDs to buy alcohol.
“I’d made one for myself a while ago. It’s wrong, I know, but June wanted one too. I thought she was coming to the party. I said I’d try to make something for her, and . . .”
Both cops stood there, nodding their heads.
“We’ve seen this kind of thing, Mrs. Elbus,” the younger one said. “I know it’s difficult to believe when it’s your own kid.”
“Are you saying Toby was helping you make fake identification, Greta?”
“No, no.” Greta shook her head hard. “The passport must have fallen out of my pocket. He must have picked it up for me.”
My mother and father looked stunned. It was hard to tell if they were believing Greta’s story. But then, I thought, what else was there to believe? That this dying man was trying to kidnap Greta and me? Would they want to believe that? Could they really think Finn would be with someone that crazy?