The Forgotten Girl Page 9

  She brings the leaf to her face, inhales deeply, like someone breathing the ocean from a shell. Her smile is small, delightful, as if she and the leaf share some secret.

  “You’re so kindhearted,” you say. “Do you always see the best in people?”

  “For as long as I’m able,” she replies. “It’s a better way to live.”

  You walk from the stop on Ribbon Road to Dad’s house. The air is tinted green and deliciously scented. This is the first time you have made the walk with Sally. With anybody. And your heart, brother: wham and bam. You are so nervous.

  “Consider this fair warning,” you say. “You can give me your full assessment after you’ve met him.”

  “I’m sure he’s wonderful.”

  You’ve had girlfriends before. Brief misadventures with the fairer sex that left you hurting/confused/resentful. Remember Delores Covington, skater girl and pyromaniac? Dating her was like being a contestant on a Japanese game show. Then there was Eloise Dance. Pixie eyes. Voice like Betty Boop. Slept with a loaded .357 beneath her pillow. These relationships did not last long, nor were they particularly serious, but they left you wondering what was required for two people to find true happiness. Did their shapes have to align to begin with, or was there some magic relationship cement that was used to patch the gaps? You’d asked Dad, because he’d found happiness with Mom, and because … well, a boy should be able to turn to his father for anything, including matters of the heart. “Even the best relationships are balancing acts,” he’d said. “They take time, patience, and exactness.” Remarkably coherent. Normal, even. And then he’d said, “Unless you’re coexisting with a reptilian, in which case there’s nothing you can do.”

  Thankfully, Sally has provided a clearer response. Not in what she says, but in who she is: sweet, intelligent, considerate, mysterious. Simply put: easy to love. No surprise that you want her to meet your old man. A true test of compatibility. If she loves you after this, she’ll love you through anything.

  “Do you think I’m eccentric?” she asks, pushing the leaf into her hair. “Different?”

  “Sure,” you say. “That’s why I dig you.”

  “Dig? That’s sweet.”

  “Aw, you know…”

  A truck rolls westbound and you step to the edge of the shoulder until it has passed. The wind gust it creates ripples your clothes and lifts Sally’s hair, but the leaf stays in place.

  “Maybe I’m more different than you think,” she says.

  Dad’s barn house comes into view, with its rutted driveway and perilous yard. A cat is poised statuelike atop a fencepost—doesn’t deign to look as you pass. “Hey, kitty,” Sally says, and does the kissy-kissy thing, but the cat only flicks her tail and stares straight ahead. Cats manage arrogance and cool better than any creature alive.

  “I told you about the cats, right?” you ask.

  “I’m ready,” Sally says.

  You have cleared the visit with Dad, of course. You know better than to show up out of the blue with your new girlfriend. He’d pissed and grumbled for a few weeks, but finally succumbed. “Expect no airs,” he had announced. “No graces.” As if he were capable of either. But—having navigated the yard without mishap—you enter his house to find it cleaner than it has been in years, with scented candles flickering and Brahms on the stereo. There’s an open bottle of merlot on the kitchen table. Several cats skate comically across the newly polished floor.

  Dad—while not as presentable as the house—has no doubt made an effort. He wears a faded paisley shirt tucked into clean dress pants, with a cravat fashioned from one of Mom’s old headscarves. A long black wig covers the left side of his face, hiding the scars.

  “Miss Starling…” He greets Sally with an elegant handshake and a pompous, affected tone of voice. “An absolute delight to make your acquaintance.”

  “Likewise,” Sally says, then tilts her head to one side. “Do you like my leaf? It’s a maple.”

  “Like it? I love it.” He lets go of Sally’s hand and snaps his fingers. “Harvey, be a darling and pour the wine.”

  His posturing is sweetly intended, but makes for a more peculiar atmosphere. You think it a shame that you can’t fully relax, and don’t know whether to blame yourself or Dad for that. All you want is for the old man to not embarrass you or upset Sally. You don’t think it too much to ask.

  The real Dad briefly appears when an overweight cat flops onto the sofa beside Sally, and she ill-advisedly asks his name.

  “That,” he says, adjusting his cravat, “is lovable Hollywood actor Dom DeLuise. Can you see the resemblance?”

  “Actually,” Sally says, “I can.”

  “He’s been with me for about five weeks. A part of the family now.”

  Dom mewls and licks his balls.

  “Harvey will confirm this,” Dad continues, flicking a finger in your direction. “Within days—sometimes hours—of a celebrity’s death, a stray or feral cat appears on my doorstep. Make of that what you will.”

  “Reincarnation?” Sally asks.

  “Or some form of possession.”

  “Or,” you venture, “complete coincidence.”

  “Poor Harvey,” Dad says, and gives you a dismissive look.

  “Well, cats are connected to the spirit world,” Sally notes. She glances at you. Her mouth twitches and her eyes brim with fondness.

  “Yes. They’re also remarkable companions.” Dad scoops one from the floor and places her on his lap. “They have all the qualities you hope to see in people: loyalty, independence, intelligence, cleanliness…”

  A ruthless killer instinct, you almost add.

  “I have seventeen of them,” Dad says. “This beautiful lady”—he holds up the cat on his lap—“is Katharine Hepburn.”

  When Sally leaves the room a moment later, you take the opportunity to address Dad’s behavior.

  “What happened to no airs or graces?” you ask.

  “I thought I’d make an effort,” Dad replies.

  “But it’s a mask, Dad. It’s false.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “What I want,” you insist, “is for you to be yourself.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  Sally returns full of bounce and color. She suggests you all take advantage of the June sunshine and go for a walk.

  “There must be some amazing trails around here,” she says.

  “There are,” Dad says. “You go, the two of you. I need to feed the cats.”

  “Come with us,” you say halfheartedly.

  “You go,” he says again.

  Sunlight floods the trees. They shine with color and movement, parting on the banks of Spirit Lake like beautiful gates. The water flickers, dark and gold. A blue heron skims the northern edge and disappears across the wetlands.

  “The lake looks still enough to walk across,” Sally says.

  You smile and kiss her. To the west, the Kittatinny Ridge looms through the summer haze. There are no traffic sounds, but you hear the trees and the life within them, everything calling.

  Sally takes off her shoes, lifts her skirt, and wades to her thighs. You have no inclination to join her, only watch. She quavers and tells you that the fish are tickling her calves. Amid the sun glare, she is sublime.

  “Don’t go too far,” you warn. “It gets deep in a hurry.”

  “I’ll stay where it’s safe,” she says. “It’s what I do best.”

  You sit on the shale. It cracks and slides, then settles. Sally emerges after a moment and lies beside you with her skirt still pulled up. You draw patterns in the water on her thighs. Her eyes are closed. She quavers again.

  “You’re like him,” she says later, when her legs have dried and her skirt is back around her knees.

  “Him?”

  “Your dad.”

  You’d been slouching on one elbow but now you sit upright and look at her with a questioning expression. She smiles and takes your hand. You pull it free.


  “How can you say that?” you ask. “You haven’t even met him. What you’ve seen … it’s not real.”

  “I’m a good judge of character,” Sally says.

  “Not on this occasion.”

  “Your distrust of people. Your insecurity and individualism.” She takes your hand again. “You’re more like him than you want to admit.”

  “Insecurity?”

  Sally holds her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

  You shake your head and look across the water. Not angry, but a little hurt, although you can’t work out if it’s because Sally is so wrong, or so right.

  “Hey, this doesn’t have to get frosty,” she says. “Your dad has a big heart, and you don’t take in that many cats without being kind and caring. You have those qualities, too.”

  “Well, gee. Thanks.”

  “And sure, he’s a little out there—”

  “A lot out there.”

  “But I’m willing to bet he’s strong inside, and that he can step up when needed.”

  You recall how he once devised plans for a gigantic Faraday cage to be built around the house, and how he spent three weeks analyzing Microsoft Word’s Wingdings font for anti-Semitic messages. But you also recall the man who sat at Mom’s bedside for hours on end, reading Shakespeare to her (admittedly, in the style of Richard Burton), holding her hand while she slept, feeding her tiny drops of food, like a sick lamb.

  “Yeah, well…” You shrug, trail off.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Sally says.

  “I take after my mom,” you insist.

  You walk back in near silence and find Dad sitting in the gloom of his living room. The long black wig is gone. He wears a plain T-shirt, blue jeans, and athletic socks with holes in them. Several cats are arranged like gargoyles around him.

  No music plays. The candles have been snuffed out.

  “Dad?” you say, trying to study his face in the light coming through the windows. “Everything okay?”

  “You were right, Harvey,” he says. “It’s no good pretending to be someone I’m not.”

  You inch closer. Dad shifts in his chair and looks at Sally.

  “Clearly, that wasn’t my real hair,” he says to her. “It was a Morticia Addams Halloween wig. I bought it at the dollar store.”

  Sally presses her lips together.

  “The way I dressed and spoke … that was a lie, too.” He shakes his head. “I wanted to make a good first impression. Not for me. For Harvey.”

  “Dad—”

  He shushes you by raising a hand. The ruined side of his face catches the light. Sally doesn’t flinch.

  “Harvey loved his mom so much,” he continues. The gleam in his eye lasts a second, then fades. “I always felt he was ashamed of me. On this occasion, I wanted him to be proud.”

  You want to tell him you are proud, but can’t. That—like the wig—would be a lie. You lower your head and shuffle your feet.

  Sally, who always sees the best in people, at least for as long as she’s able, says: “I know who you are.”

  He regards her with an expectant expression, and is about to say something when his attention is diverted by movement at the living room window. His single eye widens. His upper lip twitches. You turn and see a cat sitting on the outside ledge, pawing at the glass.

  “Hello, friend,” Dad says. He crosses the room, opens the window, and the cat leaps into his arms. “Where did you come from?”

  You play along because you have hurt Dad’s feelings enough for one day. You fetch the new cat a bowl of water and stroke behind his ears. He’s an American shorthair, black with a dirty white ruff. His eyes are bright drops of hazel, exactly the same color as Sally’s.

  “Ed McMahon died the other day,” you offer, and look around for Johnny Carson, who you’d last seen clawing the drapes in the entranceway.

  “Hmm,” Dad says, then shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so. Sally?”

  “I don’t think so, either,” Sally says.

  Dad has a flat-screen TV in the corner of his living room, which he calls his Window of Lies. He finds the remote and turns it on—flicks from a Cialis commercial to Fox News, where a reporter stands outside the UCLA Medical Center, babbling into her microphone while the lower third announces in sensational uppercase that Michael Jackson—the king of pop—is dead.

  You turn as one and look at the cat.

  He meows and blinks brightly.

  The remainder of the evening passes in a surreal haze. You eat supper on the rear deck while Dad recounts war stories, all of which you’ve heard before, then retire to the living room for more wine. The radio plays nonstop Michael Jackson songs. Sally pirouettes with tears in her eyes. She sings along to some of them. Her voice is beautiful. Carefree, but with measured tenderness.

  When “Human Nature” comes on she says, “I love this song,” and pirouettes again, then grabs Dad from where he sits on the sofa and dances him around the room. He is hesitant at first—definitely self-conscious about being so close to her—then relaxes and follows her lead. After a moment, he presses his scarred face to the top of her head.

  Sally looks at you and winks. She still has the leaf in her hair.

  Michael Jackson curls up on your lap and sleeps.

  Nine

  I stayed with Dad for three days. I thought the change of scene would help me get my shit together, but I also longed for echoes of yesteryear—for normalcy. Sure, the old man had alarming levels of bullcrap flying through his head on a constant basis, but this was the person I knew and loved, and who had a hand—a small one—in raising me.

  “Why are you here?” he asked on the night I arrived, after cutting me down from the tree and all but carrying me to the house. I lay on the sofa while he bandaged my throbbing ankle, and thought about how best to answer.

  “I wanted to see you,” I replied, keeping it simple.

  “See me? At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night?” He raised his only eyebrow. “You’re not drunk, you’re not high, and you’re not displaying signs of an alien abduction.”

  I gave him a Vulcan salute just to fuck with him.

  He finished wrapping my ankle, securing the bandage with a strip of first-aid tape. He’d done a pretty good job, all told.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Nothing to tell,” I said.

  “You’re lying.” Dad raised an admonitory finger. “Does this have anything to do with the men who came looking for Sally?”

  Information. This was another reason for going to Dad’s. I wasn’t sure how much he could provide, but it was safe to assume he’d seen me and Sally together on numerous occasions. He knew things about us, and might be able to repair connection points where the spider could not.

  “When were they here?” I asked.

  “August tenth,” he replied at once. “Seven fourteen. A hot evening. Swampy, almost.”

  “Good memory,” I said. August tenth was the day before they’d grabbed me.

  “I wrote everything down,” Dad said. “Including what I remember of the conversation. I plan to tell the guys on Truth Matters all about it.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “The men claimed to be from a privately funded organization investigating extraterrestrial activity,” Dad explained. “They had reason to believe Sally was from the Alpha Draconis star system, and that you—all of us—could be in danger.”

  The hunt dogs, using fear to obtain information. They’d terrorized me, and had told Marzipan they were from the IRS (which made me wonder how thorough she was with her bookkeeping). With all of Dad’s paranoia and fear, they would have been spoiled for choice.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  “Not a whole lot,” Dad said. “I can’t say why, but I didn’t trust them. Instinct, I guess. Anyway, I told them I didn’t know where Sally was, but that I’d keep my eye on the sky.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

&nb
sp; “No. Why would they hurt me?”

  I bit my lip. He was the only person in the world who would believe the crazy shit I was going through, and the last person I wanted to tell.

  “Is that what this is all about?” Dad touched my face, running his thumb over my new scar. “Is that what this is all about?”

  I pulled away from him. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.” I looked at him with a mostly honest expression. “I’m still trying to work it all out.”

  He narrowed his eye and furrowed half a brow.

  “But I can tell you this,” I said. “Sally isn’t from Alpha Draconis.”

  “Shit, I know that.” He squared his shoulders defensively. “You think I don’t know how to identify a reptilian? I wrote a book about it, after all.”

  He had. It was called Reptilians Among Us. Its opening sentence read: We all know that Barack Obama is a negro, but what you probably don’t realize is that he’s actually a lizard, too. It was rejected by every publishing house in New York City.

  “Men like that don’t come looking for you unless you’ve ruffled a few feathers,” Dad said. “I liked Sally. She had a big heart, but I always thought there was something peculiar about her.”

  “Peculiar how?”

  “The way she’d tighten up when she talked about herself,” Dad replied. “You must remember that.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, love can blind a man,” Dad said. “Me … I got the feeling she was hiding something, and I guess I was right. She hit the road and left you with nothing but questions.”

  “True dat.”

  “Doesn’t make her a lizard, though.”

  “No,” I said. “Just alone somewhere. And scared.”

  “You don’t know where she is?”

  “No, but I’m going to find her.”

  Lou Reed sauntered into the room. He meowed and brushed against Dad’s leg. Dad lifted him into one arm, nuzzled his wiry ruff, and kissed him between the ears.

  “I don’t like your lies, Harvey.” Dad regarded me with a no-nonsense expression and raised that finger again. “If you’re in trouble, I want to know about it. I want to help.”

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle.” I sat up, put a little pressure on my left ankle, and winced. It was better, but still sore. “And you’re already helping … letting me stay here. I appreciate it.”