Signs of You (9 page)

Kate turns her iPhone
light away from me and sighs. “Well, I guess I should feel relieved that I'm not the only one who hasn't shared
everything
. You'll tell me once we're out of here. Deal?”

“Deal,” I whisper. “We continue to pick our way through the tunnel and bend down low again as we round a tight corner. But on the other side, the cave abruptly ends.

“What the hell?” Kate says as she f lashes her light along the walls and the ceiling. “Where's Jay? Where could he have gone?”

I run my hands along the walls, looking for an exit. And then I feel it: a tiny opening to our right, barely big enough to crawl through.

“Look,” I say. Kate f lashes her light on the hole. “You don't think he—?”

“Yeah. I do,” she says. “He totally went through there.”

Kate's iPhone casts a pale, weak light on our faces, but it's enough to see how worried she looks. The cave could collapse on Jay and kill him instantly; it could collapse on us. Maybe it's already collapsed on Noah. We might never be found. She arches her eyebrows, asking.

“Obviously,” I mouth silently.

Kate's shoulders sag, but she shimmies through the hole. I follow her into the narrow passageway; the ceiling is so low we have to get on our stomachs and pull ourselves along. After about ten seconds, I'm out of breath from the crawling, and I start to feel claustrophobic.

Kate's light alone isn't strong enough in this cramped darkness, so I reach for my phone and tap on the f lashlight app, hoping a little more light will calm me down. But it doesn't. In the light I can see just how tight a space we're in. There are only a few inches of room between the craggy rock walls and me. I frantically shine the light all around and above—and that's when I see the drawing.

I manage to roll over on my back to get a better look.

Etched deep into the stone is an image of a man in a cloak with rays of light emanating from his head, terrifying and beautiful all at once. He clutches a book in his left hand and dangling from his right hand is a cross necklace
.
And below it is that word—
magis.

More.

I want to call out to Kate, tell her about the drawing, tell her we've found it: the place where Jay's dad found the necklace. But suddenly the thick darkness, the voices, the small space—it's too much for me. My lungs lock up, and I push myself back out toward the opening. I try to get a deep breath, but I can't; my chest is too tight. I struggle hard to get out as tiny bits of rock and dust fall from the ceiling. My hands burn as I f ight against the rough sides of the tunnel.
I just want out.
But then I hear another voice: Jay's.

“Riley!” He's shouting from the other end of the tunnel. “Kate! You guys okay?”

“Jay?” I manage.

“Are you all stuck?”

“I can't breathe. There's a drawing—” My chest jerks up and down as I f ight for an even breath.

“I know,” he says. “I saw it. Just keep coming. Come toward my voice, you guys. You're almost there. There's a huge room at this end. Come on.”

“We're coming,” Kate calls, scrambling ahead of me. “Riley? You got this. Just take it slow. Go towards Jay's voice. Okay?”

I don't say anything back, but I manage to start moving forward again, toward Kate, who has taken it upon herself to pretend that she's suddenly courageous—for my sake. Their voices are like ladders; each word a rung I grip and pull. I close my eyes and ignore the sounds of the children still echoing around me. I think about how Jay looked a few days ago when he showed up at my door, sickly pale and terrif ied because he'd just seen his dead father. I think about walking through the door to get to him, to lead him up to my room. I think about the feeling of us pressed together on the porch that night with the f iref lies blinking like Christmas lights all around us.

And then I feel him. He reaches in and grabs my arm. As soon as he touches me, I feel like I take the breath that saves my life; I couldn't have survived another second in that tunnel. I put my other hand up toward him, and he takes it and pulls. Hard. He drags me out of the tunnel, and I lie on my back in a large opening. The air is cold and rushes into my lungs. He bends over me and gently wipes the dust from my face.

“Sorry,” he says as he puts his arm around me, “that I didn't wait for you guys. I was just so—”

“Oblivious to the fact that you abandoned your two best girl friends in a cave?” The words come out in a jumbled rush.

“Worried about the
kids
,” Jay says softly. “And Noah.”

I sit up and Jay pulls me to my feet. Kate points her iPhone light all along the cave walls. Jay's right; the cavern is enormous.

“But they're not here,” he says. “It dead ends, there's no—” He starts but is cut off by the sound of a child's giggle. I hold my breath and listen.

“Let's just go, then,” Kate pleads. “We'll send for help.”

“But we're at the end,” Jay says. “There are no more openings, and we didn't pass any side tunnels along the way. Where are the voices coming from?”

“Maybe there were passageways we didn't see,” I say, to avoid suggesting what I'm certain we're all thinking, that the voices are just the aural versions of what we've seen since discovering the cross. “They could be a mile farther down some side tunnel we missed. Maybe Noah is with them.”

“Okay, we'll go. But if Noah was here to put the cross back, then it's probably in this room somewhere,” Jay says, sweeping his phone light around the walls. “Let's at least try to f ind it before we bail.”

We each take a wall and run our hands along them, looking for a place where Noah might have hidden the cross: a hole, a break in the rock, a little indentation.

Kate freezes. “I think I found something,” she says.

I stop and point my iPhone light at her. She's found another drawing, just like the one in the tunnel. Etched into the cave wall is the small f igure of a man holding a cross and a book. And below it, there's a nook that's covered up with tiny stones. We watch as she gently pulls the rocks away and uncovers a small shelf in the cave wall, about the size of a loaf of bread. She slowly reaches in and pulls something out.
Is it the cross?
Suddenly I feel so desperate to see the cross necklace again, as if it will take me directly to my mom, as if it's a piece of her itself. I hold my breath even though my lungs still burn with cave dust.

“Check this out,” she says.

My thudding heart sinks. She's holding a very old-looking, very thin book.

And then—silence.

The voices are suddenly quiet, hushed instantly as if someone hit
stop
. The only sound I hear now is a slow drip of water from the cave ceiling. Jay's eyes are as wide as mine. Kate blows the dust off the book's cover and wipes it a few times with her sleeve. We group around her as she holds her iPhone light on its leather cover.

The title is etched in a fancy, looping script, and I can barely make out words:

Gogo-Jardunak

“Whoa,” Jay says slowly. “Is that Spanish?”

“No,” I say, leaning a little closer over Kate's shoulder. “I may only have a C in that class, but even I know that's not Spanish. Not even close. Except—” I peer at the cover. “But see these words, down here? I think that's
a-r-a-b-e-r-a
? And then,
Iñazio Loiolako.
”

“Iñazio looks like Iñigo,” Jay says. “Ignatius's Spanish name before he was a saint. And you think
Loiolako
, is—”

“Yeah,” I say. “I think it says Ignatius of Loyola.”

“I'm going to pass out,” Kate whispers, leaning on me.

“And check it out, inside,” Jay says, gently f lipping through the pages. “This whole thing is
handwritten.
” He turns to the last page and there, at the very bottom, is the name again, a signature this time:
Iñazio Loiolako, 1522.

“And what year did he write his famous book?” I ask.

“Fifteen twenty-two,” Jay says slowly.

“So are you thinking this is like, his original?” Kate asks.

“Maybe,” Jay says. “But if it is, then I'm totally confused. Noah's map led us right to it. And Noah got all of his research from my dad's stuff. If it was so easy to f ind, why didn't my dad f ind it? He never found a manuscript, just the cross.”

“Exactly,” I say. “And if Noah was actually here, hell-bent on putting the cross back, then where is it?”

I look back at the book's dusty cover. I'm not thinking how amazing it is that we might have just discovered a saint's original manuscript, an important historical artifact. I'm thinking about the only thing that really matters—that maybe this book will explain the cross necklace. That maybe this book will tell me why I saw my mom.
And more importantly,
maybe it will tell me how to make her come back.

Chapter 9

Lost in Translation

It's not until we're back in the car and almost completely out of the state park that we have a signal strong enough to Google the manuscript. None of our phones buzz or gong or chime with incoming texts or voicemails from Noah. I begin to wonder if he even went to the cave at all. But we don't have time to second-guess ourselves. It's 4:15 and we have to be back by ten.

Jay drives while Kate and I work our phones. The f irst hits I get don't say anything about the history of the book itself, but f inally, I f ind some information in an online Catholic dictionary.

“Here,” I say. “It says the original version that Saint Ignatius wrote right after his enlightenment is missing and was never published. The only version that was shown to the pope and published in 1548 was a watered-down Latin translation. Apparently, Ignatius was too afraid to reveal the original because the Roman Inquisition was going on. The Jesuits were getting persecuted.”

Kate gasps. “So if we're right and we just found the 1522 original—no one has ever read it?”

“Looks like it,” Jay says. His voice is faraway, his eyes on the road but cloudy. I can tell he's thinking of his dad, spinning his wheels, wondering why his dad didn't f ind it if he was right there in that cave. I'm wondering the same thing.

“OMG,” Kate says, her eyes lighting up. “We have to f igure out what it says. STAT.”

My stomach twists into a knot. I agree. I want this book to tell me why I saw my mom; I want it to tell me how to see her again. Even if it's just for one last time.

“Okay,” Jay says, slowing to exit. “But I'm going to need food.”

A few minutes later, he wheels into the parking lot of a Subway, apparently making the executive decision that ancient book translation calls for a f ive-dollar foot-long sandwich.

“Driver gets to pick the food,” he says as he parks. “We'll be quick.”

Kate and I concede, grab the manuscript, and follow him. An electronic bell bing-bongs to announce our arrival.

“Welcome to Subway!” the girl behind the counter chirps. She's wearing a black Subway visor, a skin-tight white tank top, even tighter jeans, and her nametag (Crystal, Sandwich Artist) is stuck on her shirt exactly at nipple level. It clings there like a tiny mountain climber terrif ied it's going to slip from the perilous slopes of Crystal's breast and plunge into the vat of tuna salad below. “What can I make for you today?”

Except her question doesn't sound normal. It sounds
southern
. Like her words have gotten subdued on their way out of her mouth, slowed to a crawl by some mysterious force that lurks in the Appalachian Mountains and preys on unsuspecting vowels.

Jay stands below the Order Here sign, and stares at Crystal like an animal in heat.
Really?
I think. The silent pause is excruciating as he launches into an open and obvious ogle. I gently nudge him out of my way. “I'll take a six-inch chicken on honey-oat. And he'll take a drool cup. Thanks.”

He blushes, but f inally manages to squeak out a sandwich order.

When Crystal f inishes our subs, we f ill our cups at the pop machine, pick out bags of chips, and settle into a booth by the window.

“So does anyone have any great ideas about the fastest way to translate a sixteenth century manuscript that's written in who-knows-what language?” I ask. Kate shakes her head no, but Jay doesn't even respond. He's acting super awkward and is all thumbs with his sandwich. He can't even get the thing out of the bag. “I guess Jay will weigh in when the testosterone fog lifts?”

Kate laughs with her cheeks stuffed full of chips. “Don't tell me you're jealous of the super-stacked sandwich artist . . .”

I reach for the manuscript, but Jay stops me, suddenly waking from his Hot Sub Girl reverie.

“Whoa,” he says. “Wipe your hands f irst. You're about to get sweet onion teriyaki sauce on a priceless religious artifact.” He takes the book and starts gently f lipping through the pages. “The whole thing is in that
crazy
language. Somebody pull up Google Translate. It has a detect-language feature.”

I'm glaring at Jay for being such a jerk, but shove the feeling aside. Besides, this isn't about him; it's about Noah. I'm the quickest draw at the table and have the website pulled up on my phone in like .5 seconds. “Ready,” I say.

“Okay, let's start with the title. Put in
Gogo-Jardunak.
”

So I do. I type it in slowly. And the result comes up right away.

“It says Basque detected,” I say. “Never heard of it. Anyone else?”

Jay nods. “It's a region of Spain. It's in that stuff in the car, those articles. It's a region in the north, near the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France . . .”

“Hold up. Googling,” Kate says, tapping her iPhone screen. “Basque. Internet says it's the ancestral language of the Basque people, the only remnant of the language spoken in Southwest Europe before the region was Romanized in the second century. And it's a ‘language isolate,' whatever that means.”

“But why is it not in Latin?” I ask, looking at Jay. “I mean, it just seems like the ancient European saint thing to do: write in Latin.”

“Yeah,” Jay says, stuff ing his sub in his mouth, muff ling his speech. “But the backshtory shaid he washn't a very educated guy at f irsht. Didn't know Latin.”

“Gross. Can you chew f irst?” I say. Seeing my opportunity, I grab the manuscript and plug the f irst three major words from the f irst page into Google Translate:
sekretuak
,
nire,
and
ilustrazioaren
. The meanings pop up straight away.
Sekretuak
means “secrets” in Basque,
nire
means “my” and
ilustrazioaren
means “illustration.”

I look up.

“Need a pen?” Kate asks, reading my mind, per usual. She reaches into her purse and hands me a pen that appears brand new—clearly never used for actual note-taking in class.

I jot the words down on a Subway napkin. “So I think this f irst sentence says something about the secrets of his illustration.”

“I bet it means more like, enlightenment,” Jay says once he's swallowed another huge mouthful. “He's writing about the secrets of his enlightenment. The one he had by the Cardoner River. I don't think Saint Ignatius was an artist.”

“But what about the drawings in the cave?” I ask.

Jay shrugs.

I type in the third word into the Basque box—
nuntavatious
. And the English translation is—
nuntavatious
.

“I don't get it,” I say, typing it in again. “It's just spitting the word back out at me instead of translating it.”

“Let me see,” Jay says, taking my phone. “Yep. That's what Google Translate does when it doesn't know the word. It just repeats it in the translation box.”

“Maybe it's not Basque,” Kate pipes in. “Try language detect again.”

And I do. And it detects
nuntavatious
as Finnish. But still doesn't translate the word. I type it in again, and this time it guesses Slovak.

“Guessing Finnish,” Kate says. “And Slovak. That's Google Translate's way of saying W-T-F, my friends. W-T-F.”

“Shit,” I say. “We need a plan. GT isn't going to be able to handle all of these words.”

“I have an idea,” Kate says.

She hops up and bolts back to the drink station, returning with two enormous handfuls of napkins. She looks at us like we're supposed to get why the hell she has nearly emptied the Subway napkin supply. This time, for once, our mutual mind-reading abilities have failed us completely.

“We're going to need an explanation,” Jay says.

“One sec,” she says. “I'm just taking a moment to marvel at my organizational genius.”

The impromptu-sub-shop-translation strategy is this: First, Jay will scan a few pages at a time of the manuscript and make lists, on Subway napkins, of all major words—meaning anything longer than four letters. Then, as soon as he gets a napkin-full, he'll slide it across the crumb-covered table at me, and I'll go to work on Google Translate. If it's a Basque word, then the def inition will come up and I'll jot it down on the napkin. If we stump Google Translate, I'll just plain Google the word to see if I can f igure it out. And if both of those things fail, then Kate will transfer the word to a whole new set of napkins known as the what-the-hell-language-is-this pile.

“Get it?” Kate f inishes. “It's like, a dictionary on a pile of napkins. It's a
Napkinary.
” She smiles at us. “And when we're done with it, we'll read the whole book from cover to cover, moving from major word to major word, consulting the Napkinary as we go. Hopefully we'll have found enough words to piece together the gist of what the book is saying.”

Jay looks skeptical, but nods. He shoves the remnants of his sandwich aside. “I'm not sure it will work, but I don't have any better ideas.”

“I can just see it now,” Kate says, her wide eyes on some imaginary place above our heads. “Harvard and Brown will f ight over us, the famous kids with the totally pathetic GPAs who discovered and translated a saint's lost manuscript. And we'll talk about how we did it all on Subway napkins
.
We'll be
heroes
.”

“Yeah,” Jay says f latly. “We'll go to Harvard. And then we'll fail calc once we get there. And get kicked out.”

“No way,” Kate says, carefully putting the napkins into a neat pile. “Noah will get us through math and—”

But she stops at the mention of Noah's name. We all look at each other. We don't have to say anything more. If the Napkinary will help us f ind him, then that's what we'll do.

Slowly, miraculously, the Napkinary
starts to take shape. The only trouble is that the pile of napkins Kate is f illing with words I
can't
f igure out is growing rapidly as well. My hope that we'll make sense of this thing is fading fast, but we keep going. We abuse the hell out of Subway's free ref ill policy to keep us all fully caffeinated for the project, and Kate occasionally goes up and orders a cookie or another bag of chips in an attempt to placate Crystal who looks pissed that we're using the shop as our makeshift library
and
draining the napkin supply.

Occasionally, I glance at the clock on the wall. It's almost six o'clock. I know we need to leave soon if we're going to maintain the lie at home, but I can't stop.

The absurdity of our extremely unorthodox Subway treatment of an ancient document is not lost on me. We all know that what we
should be
doing with this thing is driving it straight up to Case Western where Jay's dad was a prof,
not
pawing all over it with our sub-covered hands during amateur translation hour. But there's no way I'll let this book get taken away from us. Because I know what the snooty academics would do. They'd take ten million years to translate it and write esoteric articles about it for their boring journals
.
If the book
does
hold secrets about how to f ind my mom, I'd never f ind out. Plus, we wouldn't have any more clues about how to f ind Noah.

So we're keeping it. End of story.

But about an hour in, Kate and Jay start dragging. Jay takes forever to write down words and Kate keeps getting distracted by email coming through on her phone.

“OMG,” she says, yawning. “It's almost six-thirty. We should start for home. I promised to be home by nine at the latest.”

“Then let's just translate what we've got so far,” I say. “We've got enough words to start—”

“We've got to
go
, Riley,” Kate says. “If I'm home too late, I'll be grounded. And if I'm grounded, I'll miss junior prom. And if I miss junior prom, I'll fall into a depression. And if I fall into a depression, I'll start making a string of poor choices. I could get knocked up. Or marry the wrong guy. Who
knows
where it could lead?” She's trying to make me laugh, but this time I'm not taking the bait. Jay starts gathering up handfuls of the Napkinary.

“Fine.” I sigh and begrudgingly help him gather napkins. “I mean, I understand that thinking about normal crap like prom can be a panacea of sorts, but still.”

“OMG, I'm not even going to ask you to def ine panacea right now,” Kate says as she gets up. “I'm hitting the girls' room. I'll meet you in the car.”

I have no choice but to head out. My translation team has clearly had enough. The door bing-bongs again as I leave, and I make my way out to the car. I crawl in the backseat where I can spread out to work on the way home. As I wait for Jay and Kate, I look down at my phone and realize I should check in with Dad because we probably
will
be very late. So I text him and lie like crazy. I say we're still studying. That we may study until one or two in the morning. I say we're at Noah's house.

My jaw drops when he texts back.

Sounds good. Friends over. See you when you get home.

Friends? Dad has friends? At our house?
As far as I know, he hasn't hosted a party or had one single friend over since Mom died. I stare at the text again to make sure I read it right.
See you when you get home?
I mean, my dad is not the Captain of the Watchful Parents League, but this is lax, even for him. I'm still gaping at the screen when Kate comes back to the car and buckles herself in the front passenger seat.

“Where's Jay?” I ask.

“Sure you want to know?”

“Crystal? Are you serious?” I ask.

She nods. “He stopped to say bye to the Sandwich Artist Centerfold. I saw them talking when I came out of the bathroom, and I was totally disgusted. I couldn't even look at him.”