Breakfast with Neruda (24 page)

I close the journal.

“That's it?” Shelly says.

“I searched through the whole thing, but that was the last thing my mother wrote.”

“Holy shit,” she says. “Crossed-out-name-guy is your dad.”

I turn off the flashlight and set it on the ground. “But Mom crossed out his name because she didn't want anyone to know.”

“But maybe she did,” Shelly says. “She didn't destroy the book. Maybe she hoped someday you'd find it.”

“Maybe.” I page through to the last entry again. I sit up straight. “Shit, shit, shit!” I say.

“What?”

“This is dated May 28. When was Memorial Day that year?”

Shelly grabs her smartphone and Googles the date on her phone. “Memorial Day, 1995. May 29.”

“Oh man,” I say. “She figured out she was pregnant with me the day before my uncle and Ginny got killed.” I slump back. “And I'll bet she blames herself for Ginny's death since she had to ride with Gil everywhere.” I run my hands over the tacky surface of my mother's journal. Sorrow burns a hole inside me. “Oh, Mom.” Shelly reaches out and touches my arm. “No wonder she cracked,” I say. I sit back and take a deep breath.

Shelly takes my hand. “I'm so sorry, Michael.”

I try to respond but I find I can't speak. Shelly curls up closer to me and strokes my face. The sadness comes like ice, and Shelly places her fingers on my eyes. She kisses my eyes, licks the tears from my face. The ice softens, and our bodies are sand and surf, infinite and immediate, twining night with sorrow and joy. Her touch thaws the snow inside me, melts this anguish I've carried inside me most of my life.

The world drops away, and there, by the pool in the fading candlelight, we shed our skins. We forget the moon and the blooming honeysuckle and only know the salt and wheat of our skin. We devour one another like starving beasts, savoring the bread and wine of our bodies, two thorny weeds, savage undergrowth, pulling one another from a smoky labyrinth and breaking into blossom.

We lie together afterward, with our clothes randomly reassembled, her head resting against my chest. “That was unexpected,” I say.

“Unexpected and wonderful.”

I tighten my hold on her. “Yet I feel like this is the part of the story where one of us suddenly dies.” And a thought occurs to me. “Or gets pregnant.”

“I'm on the pill,” she says, “so you won't repeat your parents' tale.”

“That's a relief,” I say. “But why do I still feel sad?”

“That inability to enjoy life is our inheritance,” she says. “We don't know how to just roll with it because it can get ripped away at any second.”

I think about how the uneven landscape of my life has prepared me to be cautious. I think I am in love with Shelly, and want to say it to her, but I don't want to kill the moment. Instead I say, “My first memory is upheaval. I remember being wrenched from the backseat of a car by a policeman. My mother screaming Jeff's and my names as they separated us.”

“Was your mom being arrested?”

“Yeah, I think so. This is just one of several jumbled memories of being passed through unfamiliar hands.”

“Wow,” Shelly says. “At least my memories are all pretty good. I mean, my mother abandoned me, but to people who love me.” She snuggles against me. “So I think my mother did me a favor by leaving me.”

I stroke Shelly's hair, and listen to the murmur of the pool filter. “My grandmother told me my mom didn't leave the house for two weeks after Gil died,” I say. “Didn't even go to graduation. Then Paul came over one day and said he was moving to Columbus and asked her to join him. My mother packed a bag and left.”

“So her life was also sort of ripped apart,” Shelly says.

“Yeah.”

Shelly sits up and looks at me. “I'll bet your dad doesn't even know he
is
your dad.”

“Probably not.”

“Then we need to find him!”

“How? I don't even know his name,” I say.

“But we have enough details from your mother's journal.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“There's no maybe about it. Crossed-out-name-guy is your father, and we're going to find him.”

Shelly and I stand in the back room of the library, or as Rick and I always called it, the vault. “It's where old documents go to die,” he said to me when we were middle school library aides. “You know, like in
The Adventures of Indiana Jones
.” It always reminds me of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Earlier this morning I told Earl my mom went to school here and asked if I could look in the library storage to find her yearbook picture.

“Sure, kid,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”

During our lunch break, he opens the storeroom for Shelly and me in the library. “Don't leave a mess or Mrs. Morgan will have my hide.”

“We won't,” Shelly says.

“What year did your mom and Paul graduate?” Shelly asks.

“I think '95 or '96.”

She grabs for the 1995 and 1996 books. We sit down and open the 1996 yearbook. The cover is tacky from humidity and all the pictures are in black-and-white. “God, look at the hairstyles,” Shelly says. “Those bangs look like a bird crashed into their foreheads.”

We scan the pages of the seniors. My mother's picture stands out because she is one of the few girls whose hair doesn't look like it exploded. Like she does now, she wore her hair long and straight with a center part. She does not smile in the photograph. She looks at the photographer as if she's thinking,
I'm only getting this picture taken because someone made me.

“Your mom was so pretty,” Shelly says.

“She still is, sort of. Just a little more rough around the edges.” I thumb through the book and find my stepfather. “Look at Paul!” I say. “He had a mullet!”

Shelly looks at Paul's picture. “Oh my God,” she says.

“He looks better now that he's bald.”

Shelly studies several of the senior boy pictures. “Didn't your mom say what's-his-name had dark hair and greenish eyes?”

“Yeah.”

“So we're looking for a clean, intelligent-looking version of you.”

“Shut up!” I nudge her with my shoulder.

“Hey, if the truth fits.” We comb though the pictures and narrow our options down to six guys who might fit that description. “It's hard to tell eye color in black-and-white.”

“Wait,” Shelly says. “Didn't your mom say the guy's dad owned half of Rooster?” I nod. She flips to the back pages. “I'll bet a guy like that bought full-page ads. Or at least half a page.”

We scan the advertisements. Coffman Shoes had a half-page, and McNabb Funeral Services boasted a whole page. “Here's one for Meadows Motors,” I say. “And another for Meadows Appliances & TV, and one for Meadows Sporting Goods.”

“I've never heard of any of them,” she says.

“Me neither. But looks like this Meadows guy did own Rooster back then.” I flip back to the seniors and find Meadows, Ashton. I feel the molecules in my body percolate and I stop breathing for a second. Thick, dark, longish hair with a slight wave. Like mine. Similar brow. Prominent cheekbones. Like me. He's one of the few guys not smiling in his picture, so I see he has the same misshapen lips where one side turns up and the other slightly frowns. “Holy shit,” I say. “I think I found him.”

Shelly leans over the book. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” she says, looking from me to him and back again. “It's like looking in a black-and-white mirror, isn't it?”

We glance through the index and find four more pictures of Ashton Meadows in the yearbook. “My God,” Shelly says. “He even stands like you.”

The picture she points to labeled “Ashton Meadows” shows a lanky guy standing with a group from an intramural basketball team. He wears a T-shirt and cargo pants, and his hands are shoved in the pockets. He stares right at the camera, unsmiling. Shelly dog-ears the page and flips to the next picture of him.

This photo shows him at the prom with a perky blonde named Ellie West. She has one of those birdcage hairstyles. Ashton and Ellie stand on the dance floor in a slow dance, but he looks like he would rather be anywhere but there.

“Oh my God, Neruda. I've seen that look on your face.”

We glance through the 1995 yearbook and find four more pictures of Ashton Meadows from his junior year. He was in choir and basketball. “OMG,” Shelly says. “He was on the track team. It's like you're this guy's clone.”

Shelly flips to the index. “Didn't your mom say he liked to pole-vault? Look at this photo.” The picture captures the moment the guy flies though the air. It's a great shot. Meadows is suspended in mid-air, three-quarters of his body just over the bar. His hands grip the vaulting pole as his body almost clears the bar. Beneath the photo the caption reads:
Ashton Meadows, master of the pole.

Again, he doesn't smile in the team picture. “He doesn't seem like a happy guy, does he?” I say. “Makes me wonder what he's thinking at that moment.”

“Yet your mom said she made him laugh.”

“My mother can be spectacularly funny,” I say. “Like when Jeff and I were kids, Mom used to try to scare us by claiming she was an alien. She'd wait until dark, and come into our room with a flashlight and a towel over her head. She altered her voice to sound like Darth Vader. ‘I'm a hungry alien, and I feed on little children. Are there any children here?' And I would yell, ‘No! Go away,' clinging to Jeff. And she'd roar. ‘Children! Yummy yummy children!' My brother and I would squeal and screech as she lunged for us.”

“That is funny.”

“She used to do stuff like that all the time, back when we were all happy.”

Shelly grabs the yearbooks and walks to the front of the library where the copier sits. She plugs it in and waits for it to warm up. “We're going to copy every picture we can find of him and your mom,” she says.

When we're done we put the yearbooks back and Shelly and I walk down to the staff lounge. “Find what you were looking for?” Earl says.

“Yeah,” I say. I hold out the two pictures of my mother, one each from her junior and senior years.

“I remember her,” Earl says. “Pretty little thing. Dated Paul Nolan.”

“Yeah, that's my mom.” I glance at Shelly, who has stashed the copies of Ashton Meadows in her giant handbag. I look back at Earl. “Do you remember a kid named Ashton Meadows?” I ask.

Earl sighs one of those sighs that means he has bad news. “Oh yeah.”

I'm terrified to ask, but I do anyway. “What happened to him?”

“Not so much to him, but his family,” Earl says. “Big scandal with his dad. They lived in a big place over on Silver Lake. Had its own boat dock and everything. I think it's a restaurant now.”

“Smoky's Ribs?” Shelly says.

“Yeah, that's the place. The kid's dad was a bigwig here. The kids were okay, but Brock Meadows was a prick. Acted like he owned the school. Hell, he kind of did, I guess. He paid for the new gym, the tennis courts, and the track. So he made damn sure his kids played whatever sports they wanted whether they were any good or not.”

“What about the family?” Shelly asks.

“Like I said, his kids were okay.”

“But you said something bad happened to them?” I say.

Earl stuffs a cud of chewing tobacco in his mouth and sucks on it for a bit. “Yeah. Brock Meadows lived big. Big house, big cars, big businesses. But it all caught up with him. He also owed big taxes, and had big-ass gambling debts. Turned out he was worth more dead than alive, so he even died big. Took one of his cars, I think it was an Alfa Romeo, and drove it right into Silver Lake.” Earl shakes his head. “The family lost everything.”

“That's so sad,” Shelly says.

“So what happened to the kids?” I ask.

Earl shrugs. “Happened a long time ago. They all left town, I think.” Earl stands up. “Okay, slaves,” he says. “Back to work.”

After our shift at school, Shelly and I pick my sister up and the three of us head to Shelly's house. We spread the photocopies out on the floor of Shelly's room. “You look just like this guy,” Annie says. “He has to be your dad.”

“But where do I find him?” I ask.

“That's what the Internet is for, dummy.” Shelly sits at her desk and opens her MacBook. She pulls up her browser and types in “Meadows Motors.” Annie and I stand behind her. The screen fills with listings for a place in New Jersey, two in Michigan, and one in Seattle. We scan each website to see if one of these is owned by Ashton Meadows. No dice.

“Type in Meadows Motors AND Rooster, Ohio,” Annie says.

Shelly types it in. Google shows a link to a news article in the
Rooster Call
archive.

“Crap,” I say. “It says we have to pay for access.”

Shelly rolls her eyes at me. “My dad's a lawyer. You think we don't have access?” She logs in and links to the article titled LOCAL BUSINESS LEADER DIES.

The article pretty much summarizes what Earl told us.

Shelly then pulls up her Facebook page. “Let's look under Ashton Meadows and see what we come up with,” she says.

We scan through several guys with variations of the name. Ash Meadows. A. Meadows. No Ashton Meadows. “Maybe he has a LinkedIn account.”

“Just Google him,” Annie says. Shelly types in the name in the Google bar.

The first Ashton Meadows has a blog called
The View Down Under
. She clicks on it. There's a photo of the blog author, an American economics professor living in Australia. He looks to be about sixty and has a beard.

“He's too old,” I say. “My dad will be around forty.”

We go back to the Google page and click on a number of pages that highlight Ashton or Meadows, but we find no matches.