Ask Him Why (6 page)

“Oh,” he said. And looked around my room some more. “So what’s the thing about that guy?”

“What guy?”

“That guy who they say was like another father to him.”

“I didn’t read anything about a guy who was like another father to him.”

“Oh,” he said again.

I decided to fight against this new development—maybe any new developments. If there was one thing we had too much of already in our new world, it was developments.

“You must’ve made a mistake,” I said. “If Joseph had some guy who was like another father to him, don’t you think we’d know it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, which I thought was a bad answer. “Anyway, I’m not wrong. They said his name, but I don’t remember it now. But it’s Scottish. It was a first name most men don’t have. American men, I mean. At least, the ones I know about.”

“I read everything I could find,” I said, which was not entirely true. I had read the news portion of the thing, as much as I’d had time to read before Aubrey came knocking. “And I didn’t see anything about a guy like that.”

“It’s not in the news stories,” he said. “Maybe it will be. You know, later. After they go talk to him. Right now it’s just something people are saying on the blogs.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. Which was not only a slightly mean thing to say, it was pathetic on my part. It was obvious he was not making any of this up, and I couldn’t think of any reason why he would have wanted to. A more honest statement might have gone something like “I desperately want not to believe you.” Or “If I believe you, this whole thing will cross the line into too much for me to hold up,” because, believe me, my toes were right on that line as it was.

He got up and shuffled to my door, as if he barely had the energy to lift his feet off the carpet. His shoulders looked rounded in a way I wasn’t used to seeing.

“Aubrey,” I said, and he stopped. I didn’t know what else I wanted to say, I just knew that I wanted to say something that would be kinder than I’d already been.

But then I got stuck on what that would be.

“Don’t read the comments,” I said.

He actually smiled, but it was a tragic-looking thing. “Too late,” he said, and then he quietly let himself out.

I called Sean’s cell phone seven times and left messages each time, but he didn’t call me back. It was something that felt wrong, even as I was doing it, because I didn’t really know Sean all that well. We had a date for Friday night, but it was going to be our first. So he wasn’t exactly my boyfriend—more like a boyfriend-to-be. But in that moment, I desperately needed a connection to someone, so I tried to speed up our process. That was the part I knew felt wrong, but it was less of a want and more of a need, and I felt utterly helpless and just along for the ride.

I’d really never had an honest-to-goodness boyfriend. I’d had a few brushes with boys, but nothing that carried that genuine sense of connection. There’d been that boy, Jacob, who was the older brother of one of Aubrey’s friends. It was clear that he’d liked me, but he was so shy—pathologically shy—and so we never even held hands. And there had been two boys who wanted to go very far with me very fast, but I didn’t trust them and I wasn’t ready, so they moved on in short order. There was not a boy in that pack that I could have talked to about all this, even if he hadn’t been long gone.

I started to think our date was off. That
we
were off. Maybe he’d read some of the things I’d read, or heard about them from somebody who did, and maybe that was just that. Who would want to walk into a firestorm like this if they didn’t have to?

I spent a big part of the day trying to decide what I would do if the tables were turned. It was scary to think about, but I decided I’d be strong and march into the fray for him, because I was just a solid person like that, and loyalty was the most important thing.

But maybe it’s easy to tell yourself stuff like that when you know you won’t be put to the test for real.

While I was thinking, I saw a piece of paper slide under my door, silently, and with no words or knocks to go with it. I walked over and picked it up, but all the movements felt less than real. Or more than real, I’m not sure which.

It was a blog post that Aubrey had apparently printed off the Internet. A paragraph was highlighted in yellow, too sloppily I thought, not really following the lines of text, as if he’d been too busy or too upset to do it right.

And it didn’t seem like a very professional or well-written blog to me, but maybe I was just anxious to find fault.

The paragraph said this:

Now it’s beginning to come out that Stellkellner told some of his fellow soldiers that he spent every summer, starting at age twelve, with Hamish MacCallum, the man who had this article written about him last year.

The words “this article written about him” were clearly a text link, underlined and in a different color, but of course you can’t click on the paper of a printout.

MacCallum, who emigrated from Scotland decades ago, lives in a house high on a bluff in Northern California, which he purchased because in Scotland he had also lived at the edge of a cliff over the sea, and had become accustomed to inviting potential jumpers into his house for a meal. It’s unclear whether Stellkellner met MacCallum in an aborted suicide attempt, but Stellkellner did tell his fellow soldiers that he met MacCallum when he was twelve, which would place the incident right around the time the press is saying he was institutionalized. Stellkellner reportedly told his former friends in Baghdad that MacCallum was “more of a father to him than his own late biological father or his adopted father.”

Then the yellow highlighting ran out, and the article went on to say that this was unconfirmed, plus it wasn’t clear whether there was any connection between this information and the controversy at hand, and then I stopped reading.

I folded the sheet of paper in half, and on the blank back of it I wrote, “I’ll believe this if and when I see it in the real papers.”

I slid it under Aubrey’s door.

Even as I did, I think I knew it was less of an “
if”
and more of a “
when
.”

Sean called my cell phone about four p.m., around the time he would have been getting home from school.

“Hey,” I said, my gut flooding with relief.

“Sorry I didn’t call you back. I was looking at my phone in math class to see who called, and old Mr. Bertram noticed and confiscated it. I still don’t have it back from him.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s okay.” Then I added, “Sorry. I’m sorry I got your phone taken away.”

“Whatever. Not your fault. I should have waited and called you back in the hall between classes.”

He sounded okay, as if he hadn’t yet decided to treat me like the contagious disease I probably was, but I still needed to approach it as a tenuous reprieve.

“So,” I said. “Is this all crazy, or what?”

“I know,” he said. “Huh?”

Then the conversation just died. And, in a small way, so did I.

“So . . . ,” he began. “What did you want?”

I felt my face turn hot, and probably red, and felt a sudden surge of the heartburn that had become the constant accompaniment to my life, like background music in a movie. I froze in silence for an embarrassing length of time.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I’d needed to talk to someone, and still did, and worse yet that there was no one in my house—not even anyone in my more extended world—who could fill that void for me. That I’d had to turn to a boy who’d just asked me out for the first time and rush him into the role of confidant.

It was all just so wrong now.

“I was wondering if we were still on for Friday,” I said.

“Well, sure,” he said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

But it was a question I couldn’t answer, so it froze me again.

“Wait,” he said. “You didn’t think I was going to drop you just because people are mad at your brother, did you?”

“Um,” I said. I wanted to say no, unequivocally no. Instead I said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You’re not your brother,” he said.

And he may have said more. I’m sure he did, in fact. I could vaguely hear him talking in the background, but not a single word came through, because that was the moment I heard the big knock at our front door.

I didn’t know how to tell Sean to stop talking, so I just stopped listening.

I ran with the phone to the smoking room—I mean the reading room—and looked out the window again. The painters were gone. Standing on the porch were two very official-looking soldiers in uniform, their faces grim, as if the gravity of their mission was weighing them down.

“Sean,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a sentence, but a sentence about what I’ll never know. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

Chapter Six: Aubrey

I ran past Ruth’s room. Down the stairs two at a time. Because I heard my mom arguing with somebody at the door. Well. Arguing
at
somebody. I never heard any other voice argue back.

I didn’t talk to myself on the way down. So I wasn’t clear on what I was expecting. But when I skidded up behind my mom and saw the two uniformed soldiers, then I knew. I knew in retrospect what I’d been hoping for.

I’d hoped maybe Joseph had come back. I could tell. Because I could feel the loss of it. I could feel it being ripped away.

“I will tell you one more time,” my mom said, as if there was
nothing the tiniest bit scary about them. “He was here barely twenty-
four hours. My husband went downstairs to tell him to leave, but he already had. We don’t know where he is, and we don’t want to know. As far as we’re concerned, he’s no longer a part of this family.”

She wound down. Turned around. Saw me there. Her face darkened further, if such a thing were possible.

“This doesn’t concern you,” she said.

She turned me back toward the stairs and sent me on my way with a swat on the butt. Like you do with your four-year-old.

My face burned. But I just ran. Ran up to my room.

I remember thinking in a vague way,
A couple of army soldiers are here to arrest my brother. What could possibly concern me more than that?

At dinner that night, I could tell Isabella was back. Or had been back, anyway. Even though I hadn’t seen her with my own eyes. Because the food was great again. A perfectly seasoned chicken-and-rice casserole. My mom couldn’t have approached it on her best day in a kitchen.

I could hear voices. Motors. No more and no less than I’d been hearing all day, but still. The circus on the other side of our gate was becoming a constant.

I stared at the chandelier while my dad announced that the following day we would go back to school.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said.

“It’s not ridiculous,” he said. “Not at all. What’s ridiculous is thinking we can hide them away from all this. How many days of school do you think they can miss?”

“I can get some homework from their teachers, just the same as if they were sick.”

“For how long, Janet?”

His voice had hardened in that way it did sometimes. I glanced over at my sister, Ruth. She looked a little green around the gills.

My father continued to lecture. “We thought this would blow over. One, two days of lost school for them and that would be that. It didn’t play out that way, Janet. Face it. That was back when we thought Joseph just refused duty. Before this whole . . . mutiny mess. Now we’ve got four times the media clowns out front. And now we’re headed for a military court-martial. With the whole country watching. Assuming they catch him. And if they don’t, that’s an ongoing story, too. This could go on for months. Years. This is our new normal, and everybody’s just going to have to learn to deal with it.”

Absolute silence. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to live this way for months. Or years. I figured everybody else was, too.

“No, we can’t shield them from this anymore,” he said. “They’re just going to have to find their own way through.”

As was usually the case in our family, no one bothered to offer us a pat on the back, a cheerful thought, a boxed lunch, or an instruction manual. We were just thrown out into the harshest corners of the world to figure things out for ourselves.

The following morning, I raided my piggy bank. This is not as childish an act as it may sound. I didn’t have pennies and quarters in there. I had hundred-dollar bills. Thirteen of them.

Every year on my birthday, ever since I was one, my Aunt Clara had given me a hundred-dollar bill. The first one had come with—in—the piggy bank. Or so I’d been told. Because I was always swimming in presents anyway, I was taught to tuck the bills away in the piggy. Save for the future.

It wasn’t one of those banks with the rubber plug in the bottom. It was a deposit-only model. If you wanted what was in there, you had to smash it.

I smashed it. With my math textbook.

I had a savings account at the bank, too. Which didn’t require the smashing of anything. It did, however, require a second signature from one of my parents. So that was out.

I quietly wrapped the pieces in some old newspaper—a sports section I’d rescued from my dad’s smoking room. I snuck them downstairs. Out the kitchen door. I saw no one on the way to the outdoor trash shed.

Until I got there.

Then I was startled to see a total stranger going through our recycling.

He wasn’t a homeless guy. Not down on his luck or anything like that. He was wearing a camel-hair coat that probably cost a grand or more. Wing-tip shoes.

He ran like a thief when he saw me coming.

I stood staring after him for a moment. Then I wedged the piggy-bank shards deep in the trash.

When I got back upstairs, I stuffed the money in my jeans pocket. Already feeling vulnerable. Like muggers and thieves would just sense all that money. Smash me with their own math textbooks the minute I stepped out the door.

I did a little research online. Wrote down an address and phone number. Then I marched out the front door as though headed for school.

My mom walked ahead of us. Ruth and me. Walked us through the crowd. I swear it was a genuine crowd by then. Probably forty people or more. News vans—three or four. Spectators who may have had nothing to do with the media. Women anchors or correspondents talking into microphones, right into the cameras, with our house as the background.

My mom didn’t say one word to them. She just accomplished it all with a look. Plus, in retrospect, I’m thinking the incident where she threatened to run them over with her car might have passed from ear to ear.

They parted like the Red Sea for Moses, and we walked through. In relative silence. Just one news lady in a bright-red pantsuit kept talking.

Nobody had the nerve to follow us to the bus stop.

I was going to wait for the bus with Ruth. Get off at school. Walk away from there and move on.

But I got impatient.

“I’m not going to school,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said. Then, a bit later, “Where are you going?”

“Can I not tell you?”

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever.”

“Thanks.”

My idea had been to take the bus to this Marshall Kendrick’s office. But I started getting uneasy with that plan. Like I’d get lost. Like it would be too confusing. Too much. I think I could have bitten it off easily enough on most other days. Since losing Joseph again, everything felt overwhelming.

I asked Ruth if I could borrow her phone.

“What happened to yours?”

“I forgot it at home.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But you owe me the minutes if I run out.”

“This’ll be quick.”

I called directory assistance for the number of the cab company.

“That’s two dollars extra,” Ruth said when she heard what I was doing. “Dad’ll demand it from my allowance. You owe me.”

Then I let the automated service autodial for the cab.

It arrived in just a matter of minutes. Two or three. It beat the bus.

Ruth gave me the strangest look. But she said nothing.

I decided I loved her for that.

I had no choice but to pay the cab driver with a hundred-dollar bill. He gave me back mostly ones and fives. A ridiculous stack. I gave him a tip which he must not have liked. It must not have been enough. Because he frowned at it.

I wanted to say,
What do you expect? I’m thirteen
.
How am I supposed to know how to tip a cabbie? Who ever taught me stuff like that?

I said nothing.

I climbed out of the cab. Stuffed the ridiculous wad of bills into my jeans pocket. It made me three or four times more sure that everyone would know. Everyone would see. Everyone would be willing to hurt me for that money.

I followed the street numbers.

Marshall Kendrick had an office that, on first glance, was just a glass door. It sat between a furniture store and a dry cleaner. Through the glass I could see stairs. Nothing more.

I tried the door. It was open.

I marched up the stairs and through another door. This one said “Marshall Kendrick” in neatly stenciled paint. And, under that, “Private Investigations.” It opened into a sort of front office. The kind with a desk for a receptionist. But it was tiny, and there was no receptionist. I could hear him talking to someone behind the closed office door.

I sat. Waited. For what, I wasn’t sure. If there was someone in there with him, they’d come out. Eventually. If he was just on the phone, he might never come to the door.

I’d guess I waited about ten minutes, my knee bouncing up and down. It exhausted me, because it reminded me how much tension I had to vent. But I couldn’t stop.

Then the office door swung open. An old couple walked out. Walked through the outer office where I sat. They looked sad. They looked the way I felt.

Kendrick came to the door to walk them out, and he seemed surprised to see me. Startled, in fact. Then again, I hadn’t bothered to tell him I was coming.

“May I help you?” he asked as the old couple made their way through.