Even Now (24 page)

Emily’s expression was blank. She looked from Angela to Bill and back again. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes.” It was time to get to the heart of the matter. “Something is wrong, honey.” She led the way into the living room. “Come sit down.”

Bill took his usual seat, the recliner closest to the television. His cheeks were still full of color from the dance and the laughter. Angela felt a surge of hope. He hadn’t looked this well in months. Emily moved slowly, probably because she was caught off guard at the possibility that anything could be wrong.

Angela sat on one end of the tweed sofa and Emily took the other, fidgeting, her eyebrows knit together. All that athletic energy made her struggle with sitting still. That was always the case, but it was especially difficult when something serious was at hand.

“Okay.” Emily’s tone was a mix of hurt and fear. “So what’s wrong? And how come you didn’t say anything until now?”

“I’m going to let your papa tell you.” Angela swallowed the lump in her throat. She folded her hands and bit her lip, unable to say another word without losing control.

Emily slid to the edge of the sofa, her eyes locked on Bill’s. “What, Papa? Tell me.”

“Well, honey.” Bill coughed and his chin quivered. He shaded his eyes with his hands but only for a few seconds. “See . . . I have cancer.” His eyes welled up, but he managed a sad, crooked sort of smile. “Doc says I’ve got about two months.”

Emily was on her feet. The color drained from her face and she began to shake. “Two
months?
” She took a few steps in his direction, stopped, and took a step toward the front door. Another stop, and a step toward the sofa again. She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should run out the door and scream or run to her grandpa and hold him tight. Finally she looked over her shoulder at Angela. “Two months? How long . . . how long have you known about this?”

“The doctors have been running tests for a few weeks.” Angela blinked back the tears, but it didn’t help. Her voice cracked all the same. “They told us the Thursday before you came home. It’s all through his body, honey. It’s very aggressive.”

Emily went to Bill and stood near his chair, her hand on his shoulder. “But, Papa, you look so good. You — ” she gestured toward the CD player — “you can sing and dance and laugh.” Her eyes found Angela again. “Maybe there’s been a mistake.”

Angela understood the hope in her grand daughter’s voice. Hadn’t she felt the same way when the doctors told them the results of the tests? But like the doctors, she had to be honest. “There’s no mistake. From the first test they told us this was possible.”

Emily shook her head. “What about surgery? What about chemo or radiation or something. I mean — ” she shot an anxious look at Angela — “we can’t just take a death sentence and not fight it, right?”

“Honey, MRIs don’t lie. We had the tests read by three doctors. The reports came in Thursday and Friday, but we wanted to wait until after Christmas to tell you.” Her eyes met her husband’s. “That was your papa’s wish.”

He reached for Emily’s hand, and she leaned down, hugging him even as the tears broke free. “No, Papa, no. I still need you.”

His arms closed around her. “I still need you, too, honey.”

That was all Angela could take. She covered her face with her hands and wept. And across the room she could hear Bill and Emily weeping too. From somewhere in the midst of her pain, Angela heard her granddaughter mumble something about God being in control, and miracles, and how quickly everything would have to come together now. And her sweet Bill was saying something about strength and prayer and feeling healthy enough to fight the cancer. Angela wasn’t getting all of it, but she understood why. She couldn’t hear it over the loudest sound of all.

The sound of her breaking heart.

It was some horrible nightmare. It had to be.

Even after she finished helping her grandma with the dishes, and after her grandparents had gone to their room for an early nap, Emily still couldn’t believe it.

Papa had cancer? Okay, he looked a little pale and maybe thinner than usual. But that could be a good thing, couldn’t it? Maybe the doctors were wrong. Everyone’s MRI couldn’t possibly be the same. Maybe her grandpa had the sort of blood and bones that tricked machinery like the MRI. She went to her room, sat on her bed cross-legged, and tried to concentrate. Suppose the news was true and her grandpa had only a few months to live. If that was the case, she couldn’t wait another day. She couldn’t take her time sorting through the box her mother left behind.

They were in a race now. And time wasn’t going to win.

The miracle she was praying for wasn’t just to find her mom and eventually her dad, but to help her mom make peace with her grandparents. Which meant if it didn’t happen in the next few months, it might not happen at all.

She pressed her hands against the sides of her head, shutting out everything but the problem at hand. The cardboard box sat near the end of her bed. It held hours and hours of fascinating, heart-wrenching mementos, but did it really hold any clues to finding her mother or father? It was still only the day after Christmas, so nothing official would be open yet, which meant she had no way to make phone calls that might offer a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

So be it. She’d use this day to get through the box. Just in case something vital lay hidden. She’d already gone through a third of the contents. Most of it she’d stacked along the far wall, out of the way so nothing would be bumped or kicked or stepped on. Now she lifted another photo album from the box and scanned it. She could come back and savor it later.

Two more smaller photo albums were next, and then she found another journal. Again she skimmed, though anything her mother had written had far more potential for holding a clue of some sort. Maybe mention of a favorite place where she and Lauren’s dad wanted to live when they were older, or something she’d always wanted to do, a place where she wanted to work. Anything that would shine a light on a trail, no matter how narrow that trail might be.

“Come on, Mom, show me something.”

More framed photos and a stack of yearbooks were next. It was all Emily could do to pass over them, to place them in another stack by her wall until later. But the minute she removed the last yearbook, she felt her mouth fall open. A slight gasp escaped her as she reached into the bottom of the carton.

Notebooks.

One after another. Emily’s heart raced. These had to be the notebooks her grandma had told her about. The journals held no short stories, so maybe they were here in the notebooks. The ones her mother was always writing in.

A chill ran down Emily’s back as she lifted the stack of them — maybe twenty in all — and placed them on her bed. They wouldn’t be journals. Her mother seemed to like journaling in hardback books with lined paper and pretty covers. These were simple, ordinary spiral notebooks. She opened the first one and scanned the front page. Half of it was taken up by oversized handwritten letters that read:

The Greatest Walk

by Lauren Gibbs

Emily frowned and ran her thumb over the words. It was indeed a short story, but who was Lauren Gibbs? If her mother wrote these stories, then why had she used a different last name? Whose last name was it, anyway? She let her eyes move down the page to the beginning of the story.

A sidewalk can be many things to many people. But for Rudy Johnson, in the summer of 1985, the sidewalk was his path to freedom . . .

Emily flipped the pages, one at a time. The story went on for half the notebook. She turned back to the beginning and studied the title page again. Lauren Gibbs? Had a cousin or a friend of her mother’s written the story? Emily’s eyes narrowed. The story was written by hand, so all she had to do was compare handwriting styles.

She jumped to her feet and grabbed one of her mother’s journals from the floor. In a rush she opened the journal, laying it side by side with the notebook. She compared the printing styles, then the cursive. Both had
y
’s that dropped low on the line and
i
’s with tiny circles where the dot should be. It didn’t take a detective to see that the writing was from the same person. No question about it. Her mother wrote the short story.

So where did Lauren
Gibbs
come from?

Emily checked the back of the notebook for more stories, details, anything. It was empty, so she set it to the side and opened the second notebook. The title area on the first page read:

A Summer Sunset

by Lauren Gibbs

Emily’s heart began to pound. Whatever it was with
Gibbs
, her mother hadn’t merely pretended to be someone else for a single story. She sifted through the entire stack, checking the first page of each notebook. When she was finished, there were goose bumps on her arms.

Every single one was written by Lauren Gibbs.

She swallowed hard and straightened the stack. The name was worth asking about, at least. She was about to stand up and go find her grandparents when something else caught her attention. On the front of one of the notebooks, her mom had scribbled this:

Lauren Anderson loves Shane Galanter.

Only something looked different about it. Emily stared at the sentence for nearly three minutes before it finally hither. She had always spelled her father’s name
Galenter
. She’d never asked her grandparents, not when their conversations about the past were almost entirely taken up by questions about her mother. Somewhere along the years she must’ve seen her dad’s name scribbled somewhere and assumed she was reading an
e
where an
a
should’ve been.

A fountain of possibility welled within her. She raced to her door, flung it open — and hesitated. It was just past three and the house was quiet. She tiptoed down the stairs and peeked into her grandparents’ room. They were both on the bed, still sleeping. She could ask them about the spelling later. She zipped back up the stairs and went into the office, the room that used to belong to her mother.

She flicked on the computer, pulled out the chair, and sat down. “Hurry,” she ordered it. “Warm up, already.” Her eyes stayed glued to the screen while she massaged her calves. They were still sore from the soccer game the other day, a reminder that she needed to get out and jog. But she couldn’t think clearly about anything — not even breathing — until she at least ran a check.

She’d have to ask her grandma about the Lauren Gibbs thing. Maybe there was a family member who had that name, or a friend out in California. It was the best clue in the entire box, and even then it might be nothing. But her father’s name? That was huge. Now that she knew the right spelling, she couldn’t wait to Google it.

The computer was up and ready. Next she signed onto the Internet and waited. Her grandparents had a blazing fast connection, and she was online in seconds. She found the search line and took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes.” Her father’s name was familiar to her, because she’d typed it into a search engine hundreds of times, easily, before she finally gave up. But now . . .

Once more she typed in S-h-a-n-e G-a-l-e-n-t-e-r, just in cased she’d missed something all these years.

The results came up instantly and there in the top corner it said . . .

Her mouth hung open. How come she hadn’t seen it before? At the top of the page it read, “Did you mean:
Shane Galanter
?”

She exhaled hard and exaggerated. “Yes. I meant that, okay?” She clicked the link beneath the correct spelling of his name. Another list came up and Emily felt her heart in her throat. Somewhere in this list of possibilities might lie the information that would lead her to her father. She scanned the few lines of details for the first four websites. Shane Galanter wasn’t exactly a common name, but still there were a few hundred entries. The first one was for a Shane Galanter, president of a pest control company.

“Pest control?” Emily wrinkled her nose. “You wouldn’t be doing pest control, would you, Dad?” She clicked the link and a home page covered with spiders filled the screen. Once every few seconds a cockroach scurried across the page. Emily shuddered. Bugs were the worst. But where was a picture of this Shane Galanter who owned the company?

She scanned the page and near the top she saw a link that said “Contact Me.”

“Okay, I will.” She clicked the words and another page popped up. This one had the smiling face of a black man. Next to the photo it said, “Shane Galanter has what you need for pest control!”

Emily blew at a piece of her dark hair. “One down.”

She hit the back button and returned to the list of websites. One was a playwright, with a photo of a white-haired man in his seventies. Emily returned to the list once more. “Two down.”

The next Shane Galanter ran track at Azusa Pacific University. Just for fun, she clicked the link and found his picture. “Hmm.” She raised an eyebrow at the online photo. “You’re cute, but you’re not my dad.”

The fourth website had the words
Top Gunfight instructor
next to Shane Galanter. Emily angled her head. “Interesting . . . ” She clicked the link, but this time there was no photograph. The page was a listing of personnel at a naval air base outside Reno, Nevada. She clicked the link and read a few paragraphs. In the late 1990s, the Top Gun fighter pilot training academy moved to Nevada, but it was still called Top Gun. Like the old 1980s movie.