“It seems to me,” Dad said slowly, “that my son’s question is perfectly reasonable.” Jonah was relieved to see that Dad had apparently calmed down now or at least was keeping himself under better control. “I don’t quite understand the need for all this secrecy. Don’t law enforcement agencies usually want to publicize big arrests? Aren’t smuggling busts public information?”
“Not always,” Mr. Reardon said. “Many times we have strong reasons to keep something like this secret. And I can’t tell you the reasons without giving away the secrets. Quite a quandary, isn’t it?”
Dad and Mr. Reardon seemed to be staring each other down.
“I understand,” Dad said, “that there are ways for American citizens to request information that they believe should be open to the public. My wife and I could make a Freedom of Information request. We could file a lawsuit if we had to. We would be willing to do that, on our son’s behalf.”
Dad wasn’t blinking—but neither was Mr. Reardon.
Jonah was. He was actually scrunching up his entire face, trying to understand. Was Dad threatening to sue? Mom and Dad weren’t the type to go around filing lawsuits. They were turn-the-other-cheek types.
“You could do those things,” Mr. Reardon agreed, “but you might want to consider your actions very, very carefully. Sometimes there are…repercussions. I think your son’s documentation is in order, but perhaps if we were forced to revisit his case, we might discover some unfortunate discrepancies. Did you hear about the Venezuelan boy who was deported recently? He was only seventeen years old, he’d spent his whole life in the U.S. except for the first three months, he didn’t even speak Spanish, but”—another careless shrug—“he wasn’t here legally. I’m sure he’ll survive in Venezuela somehow.”
“Are you threatening us?” Mom asked in a shrill, unnatural voice Jonah was sure he’d never heard her use before. Her hand pressed down on Jonah’s. Jonah thought about all those times she’d given him her hand to squeeze when he was a little kid getting shots or that time he had to have sixteen stitches in his knee. Now she was squeezing his hand just as hard. “You couldn’t take him away from us. We wouldn’t let him go. He’s our son!”
“ Is he?” Mr. Reardon asked. “What if his real parents came forward, wherever they are? What if they told their story?—’Our son, stolen away from us…’”
Jonah wanted to correct Mr. Reardon just as he’d corrected Chip: birth parents, you mean. My real parents are Mom and Dad. “B—” he started to say. But his churning stomach lurched; he changed his mind about what he wanted to say. “Bathroom,” he moaned, his face contorting. “Got to get to the—”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Mr. Reardon snapped, just as Mom, with much more sympathy, gasped, “Oh, Jonah—maybe the trash can—”
Mr. Reardon reacted as if having a boy vomit in his office would be a form of torture. He sprang up, rushed to the door, flung it open. “There!” he said, pointing down the hall. “Fourth door on the right. Hurry!”
Jonah ran, clutching his stomach. The hallway seemed even longer than it had before. He had a few dry heaves. Second door. Third door. Here it is, just in time—
He stumbled into darkness, fumbled for the light, hurried into a stall. All the Mountain Dew he’d drunk came back up, along with the— never mind, Jonah told himself. Don’t even try to remember what you had for lunch.
Then he was done. He leaned his head miserably against the cool metal of the stall.
“Sorry about that,” someone said behind him. “It wasn’t supposed to make you sick.”
TEN
Jonah spun around—or, spun as well as anyone could, three seconds after vomiting. A man in a gray maintenance-staff sweatshirt stood leaning against the tile wall, but it wasn’t the same janitor who’d given him the Mountain Dew. That guy had been older, paunchier. This guy was young and didn’t really look like a janitor somehow.
“We’ve had to do way too much planning on the fly here—we just thought, twenty ounces of Mountain Dew, at some point you’d have to leave that office and go to the bathroom,” the man said. “So we could get you alone.”
Jonah realized he was practically trapped in the bathroom stall. To get out, he’d have to walk right past the man. Hadn’t this day already been horrifying enough? He darted a quick glance down—maybe if he dived fast enough, he could roll out under the wall of the stall and make it to the door out into the hallway before the man saw what he was doing.
The man caught Jonah’s glance.
“It’s not like that!” the man said, holding up his hands innocently. “I just wanted to tell you something.”
“What?” Jonah said, cautiously. Maybe he could swing the stall door into the man’s face, maybe he could jump up on the toilet and hang on to the stall’s walls to get leverage to kick, maybe—
“When you go back to Mr. Reardon’s office,” the man said, quickly, like he thought he might run out of time, “find a way to look in the file of papers on his desk. Memorize all the names you can.”
“There isn’t a file on Mr. Reardon’s desk,” Jonah said. “Just a laptop.”
He was sure of that. He could close his eyes and picture the vast expanse of the desk, almost completely empty.
“There will be when you get back,” the man said.
The man took a step toward Jonah, and Jonah tensed. But the man kept going, around the corner of the stall toward the door out into the hallway. Jonah didn’t hear the door open and close, but when he peeked out, the man was gone.
Jonah collapsed against the metal stall again. He took a deep breath. Steady… He found he was clearheaded enough now to remember to flush the toilet.
A pounding noise came from the hallway, somebody pounding on the door.
“Jonah! Jonah, are you all right in there?”
It was Mom, treating him like a kindergartener again.
“I’m fine!” he yelled out.
“Do you need any help?”
“No! Just give me a minute!”
He went to the sink, splashed water on his face, scooped water up into his mouth, and swallowed. His mouth still tasted gross. He leaned his forehead against the mirror.
Papers, he thought. Look into the file on Mr. Reardon’s desk….