The Whole Story of Half a Girl (16 page)

“I hear my mom coming. Spread out,” he commands in a harsh whisper. And everyone does except me. I just sit there staring at where the bottle once was.

“You kids ready for cake?” Mrs. Hanson says as she enters the room smiling and blinking, still holding her gardening scissors. My body relaxes like a balloon leaking air as I wait for cake.

Mom is late coming to pick us up, me and Kate, and we both have to watch everyone leave. Even Peter leaves with his dad and his older brother to go sailing or hiking or something, I don’t exactly hear. Mrs. Hanson asks if we want to wait inside, but before we can answer, she says it’s a beautiful day
and leads us to the front porch with glasses of lemonade as if it’s the dead of summer. It’s really a gray sort of day, with a breeze that’s almost freezing but not quite.

We sit on a white wooden bench facing the large circular driveway.

“Why are you being such a jerk to me?” I say, the blood pulsing in my temples. A squirrel darts across the blacktop, stops for a second, eyeing us, and continues toward the woods.

“Really? Have I been?” Kate asks, playing with the silver cross on her necklace.

“Yes, you have,” I say, and suddenly feel limp, like I’ve been walking all day in the sun.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she says, and then smiles all goofy.

“What?” I say.

“Here’s the truth. I was embarrassed by your dress. It’s just so fancy. I’m totally sorry. You could have borrowed something.”

Her voice trails off and her eyes fill with tears. I watch her fingers twist the silver cross around and around.

I look away. If I look at her any longer, watch her crying, I’ll tell her it’s okay, and it’s not. I thought she liked me because I was different, but maybe she just liked me because she thought she could make me the same.

Mom finally pulls up. She’s staring straight ahead, not smiling, not waving, not doing the things she normally does. We hop off the bench and climb into the car.

“How was the party?” Mom asks in a quiet, faraway voice.

“Really fun,” Kate says.

No one speaks another word until we get to Kate’s house.

“Call me later,” she says, getting out of the car, and I nod, knowing I won’t call her anytime soon.

I start crying in the backseat on the way home, just like that. The tears fall out and my body shakes, but it feels good. I’ve wanted to cry like this for a long time. It takes Mom a minute to even notice. When she does, she pulls over.

“What? What’s wrong?” She spins around and looks at me, panicked.

Her reaction is not like Mom at all, but nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be anymore, so I don’t think much of it. Normally, though, when I cry Mom seems to know exactly why without me having to explain. She’s always so calm about it. She just rubs my back and waits until I’m ready to talk.

“It’s just …” I try to think of the thing that’s making me cry right now. Is it that Kate became a totally different person because of one wrong red dress? Is it the way I can still feel Danny’s hard skinny fingers pressing down on my shoulders? Is it the way I can still hear his questions echoing inside me?

“It’s … everything,” I say between sobs.

Mom gets out of the front seat and comes in back next to me. I bury my face in her shoulder and she hugs me tight.

“I’m not sure I want to be Kate’s friend anymore,” I say, wiping my face.

“How come?” Mom asks.

“She said she was embarrassed by my dress.”

Mom puts her hands on my shoulders and looks me over. “Why? You look gorgeous.”

“It wasn’t the right style. Too fancy,” I manage.

“Well, maybe to Kate, but that’s for you to answer for yourself.”

“And a boy kissed me at the party,” I say. I wonder if this will make her angry. I straighten up, wipe my nose, but keep my eyes down.

“Did you want him to kiss you?” she asks, pronouncing every word carefully.

“No, not really. We were all playing a game, Spin the Bottle.”

“Oh,” she says. She takes a few seconds before continuing. “So you felt like you had to let him kiss you?”

“Yes,” I say, lifting my eyes.

“You don’t ever have to kiss anyone unless you want to. Even if it’s embarrassing not to. I think being embarrassed is easier to get over than kissing boys you don’t want to kiss.”

“I guess,” I say, and know that she’s right. It would be nice to feel so free, to do whatever I felt was right and true. And then I remember that I used to feel that way all the time.

“It’s hard, though, in a game like that, with everyone watching. I know, I played it, although I was a little older than you are now,” she says, and smooths my hair off my forehead. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” I take an easy, slow breath. That’s all I wanted her to say.

“Mom, I’m sorry I said I wasn’t Jewish.”

She just stares at me for a moment. It scares me. “And there as well, you didn’t do anything wrong,” she finally says. “I did. You should be able to ask questions and try things, and you should be able to talk to me about anything. But Sonia …” She says my name again, serious and slow. Her voice is too deep. Now I notice her eyes are red, like she’s been crying too.

“Something’s happened, and I know you’re already upset, but I have to tell you,” she goes on. She puts her warm hands on my shoulders. I can hear a soft
thud, thud
in my ears.

“It’s your dad,” she says, and then I can’t hear any more. There’s too much in my brain. Like an overloaded computer, I come crashing to a stop.

chapter twenty-three

My father’s gone. Well, not gone—he’s disappeared. Dad was supposed to show up in Hong Kong last night, but when he wasn’t at some big meeting this morning, they called his office. His office called the airport and found out that he never boarded the plane, which is actually a good thing, Mom says. It means that wherever he is, he’s not all the way in Hong Kong.

I think of how Dad used to play hide-and-seek with me and Natasha. He picked the best hiding places, under the sink in the laundry room, or in the little closet I always forgot was in the guest room. He’d have to call out sometimes to give us hints. I’m tempted to go looking for him now, in the closets, in the laundry room. He must be close by, just playing a game.

But this is not a game. The police are here, and Mom’s
showing them pictures of Dad. Natasha and I are supposed to be watching TV upstairs, but instead we’re sitting on the stairs listening to every word.

“When was the last time you spoke with your husband?” the policeman asks.

Mom is quiet for a moment. “Two days ago. When he left.”

“Did he say anything out of character?”

“No,” she says. “He seemed excited for the trip.”

“Had anything unusual been going on before he left?”

Silence again.

“Actually, yes,” Mom finally says. She continues in a low voice, the kind of hush-hush voice she uses with Dad when she needs to talk about things Natasha and I aren’t supposed to hear. We both creep down to a lower stair.

“He, my husband …” She clears her throat before going on. “He’s been suffering from a clinical depression ever since he lost his previous job about six months ago.”

“Was he taking any medication for it?” the policeman asks.

“Yes,” she says, and mentions the pills Dad was taking. “But he wasn’t getting better, or at least, not as fast as he did the last time, twelve years ago.”

“Has he ever disappeared before or …” The policeman pauses and coughs a little before going on. “Attempted to take his own life?”

“No, never.” On the word “never,” her voice cracks. I can hear a few muffled sobs, and the sound of Mom blowing her nose and the policeman saying that he’s sorry, and that he’ll do everything he can to help find Dad.

Natasha’s sucking her thumb, something she hasn’t done in ages. I brush her hand away from her mouth. “Is Dad coming back?” she says, and puts her thumb right where it was before.

“Of course,” I say, knowing that’s what Mom would want me to say, and I wish I believed it. That night I can’t sleep and I can’t stop crying. I don’t care anymore about what happened at Peter’s party. It’s small and stupid now. I just want my father back.

Eventually I stop crying and go to my closet. I take out my red dress, slip it on over my nightgown, and get back into bed. I pretend that the dress is made out of the sari silk I saw drying in the fields on the way to the Taj Mahal. I pull it tight around me, wishing I really were an Indian princess and could use my magical princess powers to make anything happen, make my father come back with a flick of my fingers. Maybe, I think as I drift off to sleep, Dad went to India instead. Maybe he missed the mango trees.

On Monday Mom keeps Natasha and me out of school and calls in sick herself. She’s on and off the phone a lot. Talking
to my grandparents in Florida. Talking to the police, who haven’t found anything yet. Talking to my aunt, Mom’s sister in California. And my aunties. They’re all in Maryland. They didn’t even know Dad had lost his job. Mom talks and paces on the cordless. She drinks coffee and wipes down the kitchen counter over and over. She begs everyone on the phone not to come and help. She says the best thing everyone can do is think of where my father might be. That’s the only thing anyone can do, she says. Everyone listens except my grandparents, who are coming anyway.

I think of my other grandparents, my Indian grandparents, who died before I was born. Dad has two black-and-white pictures of them, the only pictures I’ve seen. They hang in the den. They both look very serious in the pictures, even angry. I wonder how angry they’d be if they knew about this.

The next day, my grandparents arrive early in the morning carrying a big old green suitcase and a cooler filled with challah bread, frozen brisket, chicken soup, pickles, and my favorite, stuffed cabbage.

“Oh, Ma,” Mom says to Grandma as she loads the food into the freezer. “You didn’t have to.”

Grandma waves Mom’s comment away. Grandpa’s already seated at the dining room table reading the paper, which is something he does a lot of.

“Max,” Grandma says. “Now’s not the time.”

Grandpa looks at her over his bifocals. “What?” he says, but folds the paper anyway.

Grandma gives me a hard hug when she sees me. She smells the way she always smells, like a new box of tissues mixed with her flowery perfume. She brushes the hair away from my face.

“How’s my girl doing?” she asks softly.

I shrug, knowing there’s no way to explain. She looks at me a little longer. “Ah, the strong, silent type, like your dad,” she says. Mom flashes her a look. Grandma always tells me how much I’m like my father. Normally it puffs my chest with pride, but not today. I watch my feet, twist my toe into the yellow linoleum. What an ugly kitchen floor, I think, and picture Kate’s kitchen floor, shiny black and white tiles. Grandma opens her mouth, flustered, realizing her mistake. She seems about to say something else, but then Natasha comes running down the stairs.

“Grammy, Gramps!” she yells. She runs over to Grandma and leaps into her arms. While Grandma is busy fussing over her, I sit next to Grandpa.

“Can we do cartoons?” I ask him. He can draw anything. His sketches of me and Natasha hang in our bedrooms. He also teaches me how to draw my favorite comic strips out of the newspaper. Mostly I do Peanuts.

He nods and finds the right page and takes two pencils
out of his breast pocket. He always carries a few with him. They’re the right kind for drawing, dark and chalky.

He draws Snoopy’s nose on the edge of the paper and I copy him. He draws the rest of his head and I copy him. By the end I have a perfect Snoopy sitting on his doghouse. When I try to draw cartoons on my own, they look like little-kid drawings, all wavy and shaped funny.

“Grandpa?” I say. He looks up at me over his bifocals. His gray hair is longer on one side than the other. He combs the longer side over his bald spot, but it always falls back, giving him lopsided hair. He doesn’t seem to care, though. Grandma is always smoothing the long side back over his head for him. “Where do you think Dad is?” If anyone might know it’s probably Grandpa, since he’s a man, and a dad, and loves me.

He leans back in his chair and taps his pencil on the paper.

“I don’t know,” he finally says, and sees my face fall. “I wish I did, we all do. But I’m sure there’s an explanation for all this. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Really?” I say. “How are you sure?”

He leans in close and kisses me on the top of my head. “I’m sure, because I wish to be. Simple as that. You want to do some more?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “I’m kind of tired. I’m gonna take a nap.” Suddenly I want to cry again, but not in front of Grandpa. I get up and walk past the kitchen, where Grandma and Natasha
are starting a batch of cookies. I wonder where Mom is and go to look for her. Her door is closed; I press my ear to it. She’s crying. Right now it seems like the only thing that makes any sense. I knock.

“Yes?” she asks.

“It’s Sonia,” I say. She answers the door with red eyes and a tissue in her hand. She takes my hand and we sit on the bed.