Turtles All the Way Down, Page 8

  I was trying to explain to him why this freaked me out so much but not really succeeding, and I recognized that I'd pulled the conversation very far away from the point where we'd held hands and been close to kissing, that now I was talking about parasite-infected bird feces, which was more or less the opposite of romance, but I couldn't stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.

  I even told him something I'd never actually said to Daisy or Dr. Singh or anybody--that the pressing of my thumbnail against my fingertip had started off as a way of convincing myself that I was real. As a kid, my mom had told me that if you pinch yourself and don't wake up, you can be sure that you're not dreaming; and so every time I thought maybe I wasn't real, I would dig my nail into my fingertip, and I would feel the pain, and for a second I'd think, Of course I'm real. But the fish can feel pain, is the thing. You can't know whether you're doing the bidding of some parasite, not really.

  After I said all that, we were quiet for a long time, until finally he said, "My mom was in the hospital for, like, six months after her aneurysm. Did you know that?" I shook my head. "I guess she was kind of in a coma or whatever--like, she couldn't talk or anything, or feed herself, but sometimes if you put your hand in her hand, she would squeeze.

  "Noah was too young to visit much, but I got to. Every single day after school, Rosa would take me to the hospital and I would lie in bed with her and we would watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the TV in her room.

  "Her eyes were open and everything, and she could breathe by herself, and I would lie there next to her and watch TMNT, and I would always have the Iron Man in my hand, my fingers squeezed into a fist around it, and I would put my fist in her hand and wait, and sometimes she would squeeze, her fist around my fist, and when it happened, it made me feel . . . I don't know . . . loved, I guess.

  "Anyway, I remember once Dad came, and he stood against the wall at the edge of the room like she was contagious or something. At one point, she squeezed my hand, and I told him. I told him she was holding my hand, and he said, 'It's just a reflex,' and I said, 'She's holding my hand, Dad, look.' And he said, 'She's not in there, Davis. She's not in there anymore.'

  "But that's not how it works, Aza. She was still real. She was still alive. She was as much a person as any other person; you're real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts."

  "Then what?" I said.

  He sighed. "I don't know."

  "Thanks for telling me that," I said. I'd turned to him and was looking at his face in profile. Sometimes, Davis looked like a boy--pale skin, acne on his chin. But now he looked handsome. The silence between us grew uncomfortable until eventually I asked him the stupidest question, because I actually wanted to know its answer. "What are you thinking?"

  "I'm thinking it's too good to be true," he said.

  "What is?"

  "You."

  "Oh." And then after a second, I added, "Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true."

  "I know you saw the picture. The night-vision picture." I didn't answer, so he continued. "That's the thing you know, that you want to tell the cops. Did they offer you a reward for it?"

  "I'm not here looking for--" I said.

  "But how can I ever know that, Aza? How will I ever know? With anyone? Did you give it to them yet?"

  "No, we won't. Daisy wants to, but I won't let her. I promise."

  "I can't know that," he said. "I keep trying to forget it, but I can't."

  "I don't want the reward," I said, but even I didn't know if I meant it.

  "Being vulnerable is asking to get used."

  "That's true for anybody, though," I said. "It's not even important. It's just a picture. It doesn't say anything about where he is."

  "It gives them a time and a place. You're right, though. They won't find him. But they will ask me why I didn't turn over that picture. And they'll never believe me, because I don't have a good reason. It's just that I don't want to deal with kids at school while he's on trial. I don't want Noah to have to deal with that. I want . . . for everything to be like it was. And him gone is closer to that than him in jail. The truth is, he didn't tell me he was leaving. But if he had, I wouldn't have stopped him."

  "Even if we gave them that picture, it's not like they're going to arrest you or anything."

  Suddenly, Davis stood up and took off across the golf course. "This is a completely solvable problem," I heard him say to himself.

  I followed him up the walkway to the cottage, and we went inside. It was a rustic cabin with wood paneling everywhere, high ceilings, and an astonishing variety of animal heads on the walls. A plaid, overstuffed couch and matching chairs formed a semicircle facing a massive fireplace.

  Davis walked over to the bar area, opened the cabinet above the sink, pulled out a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, and started shaking out its contents. A few Cheerios poured out of the box into the sink, and then a bundle of bills banded with a strip of paper. I stepped forward and saw that the wrapping read "$10,000," which seemed impossible, because the stack was so small--a quarter-inch high at the most. Another stack came out of the Cheerios box, and then another. He reached up for a box of shredded wheat puffs and repeated the process. "What--what are you doing?"

  As he grabbed a third box of cereal, he said, "My dad, he hides them everywhere. These stacks. I found one inside the living room couch the other day. He hides cash like alcoholics hide vodka bottles." Davis brushed some cereal dust off the hundred-dollar bills, stacked them next to the sink, and then grabbed them. The entire stack fit in one hand. "A hundred thousand dollars," he said, and offered it to me.

  "No way, Davis. I can't--"

  "Aza, the cops found, like, two million dollars executing their warrant, but I bet they didn't even get half of it. Everywhere I look, I find these stacks, okay? Not to sound out of touch, but for my dad, this is a goddamned rounding error. It's a reward for not sharing the picture. I'll have our lawyer call you. Simon Morris. He's nice, just a little lawyery."

  "I'm not trying--"

  "But I can't know that," he said. "Please, just--if you still call or text or whatever, I'll know it's not about the reward. And you will, too. That would be a nice thing to know--even if you don't call." He walked over to a closet, opened it, stuffed the money into a blue tote bag, and offered it to me.

  He looked like a kid now--his watery brown eyes, the fear and fatigue in his face, like a kid waking up from a nightmare or something. I took the bag.

  "I'll call you," I said.

  "We'll see."

  --

  I left the cabin calmly, then sprinted through the golf course, skirting the pool complex, and ran up to the mansion. I ran upstairs and walked along a hallway until I could hear Daisy talking behind a closed door. I opened it. Daisy and Mychal were kissing in a large four-poster bed.

  "Um," I said.

  "A bit of privacy, please?" Daisy asked.

  I closed the door, muttering, "Well, but it isn't your house."

  I didn't know where to go then. I walked back downstairs. Noah was on the couch watching TV. As I walked over to him, I noticed he was wearing actual pajamas--Captain America ones--even though he was thirteen. On his lap, there was a bowl of what appeared to be dry Lucky Charms. He took a handful and shoved them into his mouth. "'Sup," he said while chewing. His hair was greasy and matted to his forehead, and up close he looked pale, almost translucent.

  "You doing okay, Noah?"

  "Kickin' ass and takin' names," he said. He swallowed, and then said, "So, did you find anything yet?"

  "Huh?"

  "About Dad," he said. "Davis said you were after the reward. Did you find anything?"

  "Not really."

  "Can I send you something? I took all the notes off Dad's phone from iCloud. They might help you. Might be a clue or something. The last note, the one he wrote that night, was 'the jogger's mouth.' That mean anything to you?"


  "I don't think so." I gave him my number so he could text me the notes and told him I'd look into it.

  "Thanks," he said. His voice had gotten small. "Davis thinks we're better off with him on the run. Says it'd be worse if he was in jail."

  "What do you think?"

  He stared up at me for a moment, then said, "I want him to come home."

  I sat down on the couch next to him. "I'm sure he'll show up."

  I felt him leaning over until his shoulder was against mine. I wasn't wild about touching strangers, especially given that he didn't seem to have showered in some time, but I said, "It's all right to be scared, Noah." And then he turned his face away from me and started sobbing. "You're okay," I told him, lying. "You're okay. He'll come home."

  "I can't think straight," he said, his little voice half strangled by the crying. "Ever since he left, I can't think straight." I knew how that felt--all my life, I'd been unable to think straight, unable to even finish having a thought because my thoughts came not in lines but in knotted loops curling in upon themselves, in sinking quicksand, in light-swallowing wormholes. "You're okay," I lied to him again. "You probably just need some rest." I didn't know what else to say. He was so small, and so alone.

  "Will you let me know? If you find anything out about Dad, I mean."

  "Yeah, of course."

  After a while, he straightened up and wiped his face against his sleeve. I told him he should get some sleep. It was nearly midnight.

  He put the bowl of Lucky Charms on the coffee table, stood up, and walked upstairs without saying good-bye.

  I didn't know where to go, and having the bag of money in my hand was freaking me out a little, so in the end I just left the house. I looked up at the sky as I ambled toward Harold, and thought about the stars in Cassiopeia, centuries of light-time from me and from one another.

  I swung the bag in my hand as I walked. It weighed almost nothing.

  TEN

  I TEXTED DAISY the next morning while I was still in bed.

  Big news call when you can.

  She called immediately.

  "Hey," I said.

  "I know he is a gigantic baby," she responded, "but I actually think upon close examination he is hot. And in general, quite charming, and very sexually open and comfortable, although we didn't do it or anything."

  "I'm thrilled for you, so last night--"

  "And he really seemed to like me? Usually I feel like boys are a bit afraid of me, but he wasn't. He holds you and you feel held, you know what I'm saying? Also he's already called me this morning, which I found cute instead of worrisomely overeager. But please do not think I am becoming the best friend who falls in love and ditches her bitches. Wait, oh God, I just said I'm in love. We've been hooking up for under twenty-four hours and I'm dropping L-bombs. What is happening to me? Why is this boy I've known since eighth grade suddenly so amazing?"

  "Because you read too much romantic fan fiction?"

  "There is literally no such thing," she answered. "How's Davis?"

  "That's what I want to talk about. Can we meet somewhere? It's better if I can show you." I wanted to see her face when she saw the money.

  "I already have a breakfast date, unfortunately."

  "I thought you weren't ditching your bitches," I said.

  "And I'm not. My breakfast date is with Mr. Charles Cheese. Alas. Can it wait till Monday?"

  "Not really," I said.

  "Okay, I get off work at six. Applebee's. Might have to multitask, though, because I'm trying to finish a story--don't take it personally okay he's calling I have to go thanks love you bye."

  As I put down my phone, I noticed Mom standing in my doorway. "Everything okay?" she asked.

  "Holy Helicopter Parenting, Mom."

  "How was your date with that boy?"

  "Which boy? There are so many. I have a spreadsheet just to keep track of them."

  --

  To kill time that morning, I went through Noah's file of entries from his dad's notes app. It was a long, seemingly random list--everything from book titles to quotes.

  Over time, markets will always seek to become more free.

  Experiential value.

  Floor five Stairway one

  Disgrace--Coetzee

  It went on like that for pages, just little memos to himself that were inscrutable to anyone else. But the last four notes in the documents interested me:

  Maldives Kosovo Cambodia

  Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

  Unless you leave a leg behind

  The jogger's mouth

  It was impossible to know when those notes had been written, and whether they'd all been written at once, but they certainly seemed connected: A quick search told me that Kosovo, Cambodia, and the Maldives were all nations that had no extradition treaty with the United States, meaning that Pickett might be allowed to stay in them without having to face criminal charges at home. Never Tell Our Business to Strangers was a memoir by a woman whose father lived on the run from the law. The top search result for "Unless you leave a leg behind" was a news article called "How White-Collar Fugitives Survive on the Lam;" the quote in question referred to how difficult it is to fake your own death.

  "The jogger's mouth" made no sense to me, and searching turned up nothing except for a bunch of people jogging with their mouths open. But of course we all put ridiculous things in our notes apps that only make sense to us. That's what notes are for. Maybe he'd just seen a jogger with an interesting mouth. I felt bad for Noah, but eventually I set the list aside.

  --

  Harold and I made it to Applebee's half an hour early that afternoon. For some reason, I was scared to actually get out of the car, but if you pulled down the center segment of Harold's backseat, you could reach directly into the trunk. So I wiggled my way back there and fumbled around until I'd found the tote bag with the money, my dad's phone, and its car charger.

  I stuffed the bag under the passenger seat, plugged in my dad's phone, and waited for it to charge enough to turn on.

  Years ago, Mom had backed up all Dad's pictures and emails onto a computer and multiple hard drives, but I liked swiping through them on his phone--partly because that's how I'd always looked at them, but mostly because there was something magical about it being his phone, which still worked eight years after his body stopped working.

  The screen lit up and then loaded the home screen, a picture of my mom and me at Juan Solomon Park, seven-year-old me on a playground swing, leaning so far back that my upside-down face was turned to the camera. Mom always said I remembered the pictures, not what was actually happening when they were taken, but still, I felt like I could remember--him pushing me on the swing, his hand as big as my back, the certainty that swinging away from him also meant swinging back to him.

  I tapped over to his photos. He'd taken most of the pictures himself, so you rarely see him--instead, you see what he saw, what looked interesting to him, which was mostly me, Mom, and the sky broken up by tree branches.

  I swiped right, watching us all get younger. Mom riding a tiny tricycle with tiny me on her shoulders, me eating breakfast with cinnamon sugar plastered all over my face. The only pictures he appeared in were selfies, but phones back then didn't have front-facing cameras, so he had to guess at the framing. The pictures were inevitably crooked, part of us out of the frame, but you could always see me at least, curling into Mom--I was a mama's girl.

  She looked so young in those pictures--her skin taut, her face thin. He'd often take five or six pictures at once in the hopes of getting one right, and if you swiped through them like a flipbook, Mom's smile got bigger and smaller, my squirming six-year-old self moved this way or that, but Dad's face never changed.

  When he fell, his headphones were still playing music. I do remember that. He was listening to some old soul song, and it was coming out of his earbuds loud, his body on its side. He was just lying there, the lawn mower stopped, not far from the one tree in our front
yard. Mom told me to call 911, and I did. I told the operator my dad had fallen. She asked if he was breathing, and I asked Mom, and she said no, and the whole time this totally incongruous soul song was crooning tinnily through his earbuds.

  Mom kept doing CPR on him until the ambulance came. He was dead the whole time, but we didn't know. We didn't know for sure until a doctor opened the door to the windowless hospital "family room" where we were waiting, and said, "Did your husband have a heart condition?" Past tense.

  My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he's out of focus--because that's how people are, really, and so I settled on one of those, a picture he'd taken of himself with a friend at a Pacers game, the basketball court behind them, their features blurred.

  And then I told him. I told him that I lucked into some money and that I'd try to do right by it and that I missed him.

  --

  I'd put the phone and charger away by the time Daisy showed up. She was walking toward Applebee's when I called to her through Harold's open window. She came over and got into the passenger seat.

  "Can you give me a ride home after this? My dad is taking Elena to some math thing."

  "Yeah, of course. Listen, there's a bag under your seat," I said. "Don't freak out."

  She reached down, pulled out the bag, and opened it. "Oh, fuck," she whispered. "Oh my God, Holmesy, what is this? Is this real?" Tears sprouted from her eyes. I'd never seen Daisy cry.

  "Davis said it was worth it to him, that he'd rather give us the reward than have us snooping around."

  "It's real?"

  "Seems to be. I guess his lawyer is going to call me tomorrow."

  "Holmesy, this is, this is--is this one hundred thousand dollars?"

  "Yeah, fifty each. Do you think we can keep it?"

  "Hell yes, we can keep it."