THE NEXT MORNING Frank wanted to give his new best friend a tour of the Dream Bunker. Even though Mr. Vargas was also my favorite person in the world, the two of them were so tight already that I’ll admit I was a little jealous.
“I’ll be eager to discuss what you find in there when I get back,” I said to Mr. Vargas. I’d volunteered to drive the manuscript to a copy shop to have it scanned and sent to New York before it could disappear on us again. I could see Frank ricocheting down the hall toward us, so I left it at that. “Don’t have any fun without me,” I said to Mr. Vargas as he handed over the keys to his rental car
It was pretty clear my boys had been having at least a little fun when I came home because I found the two of them wearing tweedy jackets with bow ties and pocket squares, watching Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and that other guy whose name nobody ever remembers trying to see all of New York in a day in On the Town.
“So, in New York City you just raise your hand and a cab appears?” Frank asked Mr. Vargas as I walked in.
“That’s right.”
“New York sounds like a magical place.”
“It can be sometimes,” Mr. Vargas said.
“I miss it,” I said. “Is that a new jacket, Frank?”
“Oh, this? I’d forgotten about this old thing until I saw what he was wearing.” Frank elbowed Mr. Vargas, making me suspect I should re-Sharpie his new best friend’s name on Frank’s hand. “Then I remembered my mother bought a similar one for me long ago. It was such a delicious shade of loden that we couldn’t pass it up. It was always too big for me before now.”
It hit me then that all the outfits I’d come to love would end up folded on shelves in the repository of his childhood before very long. Frank would outgrow them, and then what? Would he continue on in his natty path or take to baseball jerseys and tennis shoes like a regular teenager? Assume a uniform of T-shirts and jeans worn into butter-soft tatters, like Xander? His life might be easier for it, but Frank would be so much less Frank then. It broke my heart to think of it.
I handed Mr. Vargas his car keys and said to Frank, “Scoot over.” Frank moved himself and the three bundles of yellowing typing paper tied up with string he’d been using as a footstool over, and plastered himself against Mr. Vargas the way the kid used to cuddle up to me. I dropped onto the couch beside him and touched the bundles with my toe. “What have we here?” I asked.
Mr. Vargas used the remote to snap off the movie and blinked at me a couple of times. “Aren’t these the things you wanted to discuss with me?”
“No,” I said. “What are they?”
“These,” he said, “are other manuscripts Mimi wrote over the years and then decided to throw away.”
“What?” I asked. And here I thought I’d found the biggest bombshell in that bunker.
“In my role as family archivist, I fished those out of the trash,” Frank said. “My mother had spent so much time with them that I knew they had to be worth something. There may have been other manuscripts before I was tall enough to see into her office wastebasket. We won’t know the answer to that question until I crack the code of time travel. It never ceases to amaze me what treasures Mama throws away. My gravel collection, for example. I still miss it.”
A trove of unpublished manuscripts. So there was one, after all, though Mimi hadn’t exactly tucked them away for publication after her death. Xander had said he’d heard her typing ever since he’d known her, and here was the proof. “Have you looked through them, Mr. Vargas?” I asked.
“That would be an invasion of her privacy,” he said. “Mimi may not have intended for anyone to read these, ever. We’ll have to ask her permission first. The one you sent today she’d written under contract, though, so that’s a different matter.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“You know what I can’t believe?” Frank asked. “How much time my mother has left in her hiatus. I really want to talk to her right now. I’m sick of being brave about not seeing her. And there are questions I really need to ask her. Questions that have been keeping me up at night.”
“Nothing would make me happier than talking to Mimi, but I don’t know how to reach her,” Mr. Vargas said. “I’m worried she’s holed up somewhere trying to write the book she promised me all over again.”
“Is that what she’s doing?” Frank asked. “When she said she needed a month of alone time, I assumed she needed to finish catching up on her sleep. The three days of rest the hospital prescribed for her weren’t nearly enough to make up for all the years I’ve kept her up past her bedtime.”
“Frank,” I said. “Have you been talking to your mother?”
“Outside of my head? No.”
“So how did she tell you she needed a month of alone time?”
“It was in her note.”