I’d be lying if I said the sales pitch didn’t work, at least a little. Life sounds easy there. Warm weather and nice people and space.
She pulls something else from her bag and sets it on my knee. It’s an ancient, fraying black-and-white photo of an old woman with her large family spread out on the porch of a run-down house. There must be a dozen kids and grandkids. Some are sitting, some are standing, no one smiles. The date on the bottom of the photograph says 1940.
Georgina taps the old woman with her perfect nail. “Alona Feingold—your great-great-grandmother—goodness, do I have that right? I did all the research about her online. Born 1882 in Odessa. That’s in the Ukraine, or maybe Russia now, I can’t keep it straight. Anyway, she came over to America in 1913 with her husband and five children. This is Alona as an old lady with her children and grandchildren at their home in Fenton, Missouri. Only Jews in town, I’d bet.”
On a young man’s lap sits a toddler who looks vaguely like a picture I remember of me at that age. She’s about two or three and wearing a clean white dress. “That’s your grandmother Sarah. You never met Sarah because she died when you were just little. Lovely woman. Strong-willed.”
My breath trembles, and I stifle it to keep Georgina from hearing. I had been only academically aware that I had an aunt and a grandmother and a cousin and family. A few lines of a sketch. But now, here they were, real people in all their detail. I brush my hair back behind my ear. “I’ve never seen pictures of them before,” I say.
“Your mother wasn’t very sentimental about family,” Georgina says. “It was probably our fault, mine and your grandmother’s. We were too conventional for her. So off she goes at eighteen to join the army. What a scandal it was for your grandmother—a nice Jewish girl joining the army! But she was always the brave one, your mom. Always the intrepid explorer.” Georgina reaches up, touches my cheek. “Bet you’re the same way, aren’t you? Fearless. Always looking for adventure.”
She has no idea how wrong she is. “It must skip a generation,” I say.
*
Mrs. Wasserman’s saccharine pity is in fine form as she looks at Georgina and me across the desk. She is a stage actor, projecting her sorrowful eyes all the way to the balcony. The staff, she says, has been informed that my dad went missing while on a business trip in Europe. But hanging in her voice is the busybody’s question mark, an implicit plea for details, mundane or salacious. Neither Georgina nor I give her any, though, and I can see Mrs. Wasserman is disappointed. Still, she purses her lips in kabuki warmth and presses her hands over mine as she tells me Danton will, as always, be a safe space for me in this period of emotional challenges.
As I leave Mrs. Wasserman’s office and walk to my locker, it’s clear to me that news of my dad’s disappearance evidently spread further than the staff. Conversations slam shut as I pass, and all eyes turn to me. Only when my back is to them do the whispers start. Rumors of intrigue and murder? It may be the case that my stature has actually risen. That I am now at least interesting.
Terrance approaches me at my locker. There’s concern and empathy on his face, as if someone he cared about had been hurt. I almost ask him what’s wrong. Then I realize the look is for me.
“Hey,” he says as I stand in front of my open locker. “I heard about your dad. That he was captured or something. I mean, holy shit, Gwen, are you all right?”
Something good and warm pulses inside me at the sound of his voice, but right away I feel guilty and push it away.
“He wasn’t captured. He’s just missing.” My voice is flat and cold. I don’t mean it to come out that way, but it does.
“Do you need anything? Can I help?”
“I’m fine,” I say as I close my locker. “Sorry. Gotta go.”
I head to class and wonder if things would have turned out differently had I answered my dad’s call when I was with Terrance in the park. Probably not. But maybe. It’s all your fault, Gwen.
But it’s to avoid thoughts like these that I’m back in school in the first place, and it mostly works. It’s been eight days without news, eight days of nothing except the torture of my thoughts at what it means to have no news. Luckily, calculus cares not a whit about my troubles, and neither does the civilization of ancient China. To dwell on hard facts and long-ago events is the closest I’ve come to actual pleasure.
After the last class ends, I take the train downtown to my dad’s office, where it’s nothing but the same shit as all the days before. The only difference now is that I can sit and do homework in a conference room between interrogations. Why did you write in your diary about Syrian refugees on April 23? Why did your father charge $79 at a flower shop on June 12?
But it’s clearer to me with each day that passes, with each pointless question, that they have no idea what they’re doing, or even what they’re looking for. It’s obvious that looking for clues in a schoolgirl’s diary entries and old credit card statements is the best they can manage.
I see Joey Diaz rarely, and when I do, he only squeezes my shoulder and tells me, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” I see Carlisle even less often. It’s always some variation of nothing new today, said with a brusque, dickish tone as he stirs his coffee with a pen.
*
It goes this way for yet another week. Monday through Friday, I go to school, then to the building downtown. There they don’t even bother with the interrogations anymore. I study in a conference room, the red VISITOR badge dangling around my neck, and the only time I talk to anyone is when an agent peeks in and asks if I want coffee. Gradually, I realize the badge is right. I’m just a visitor who happens to be there, not the object of inquiry, not even an object of interest. The automatic looks of pity I used to get from everyone have turned to looks of polite tolerance. And one day, when I catch Carlisle in a hallway and ask if he’s heard anything new, he says, “About what?”
Every night, I return home to Georgina, where there is dinner waiting for me, and a recap of her day’s adventures in the city. Every night, I look for a reason to hate her, this interloper, this stranger. But I come up empty.
The truth is, she’s been nothing but kind to me. Nothing but sweet. Nothing but generous. And here, this part, this is where it gets weird: It’s her love that she’s generous with most of all. We’re nothing to each other besides a strand of shared DNA, but that’s not how Georgina sees it. She helps me with my calculus, and turns out to have majored in mathematics in college. She shares the dirty joke she overheard in the salon, then giggles along with me. She holds me when I break down, whispering into my ear it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay until I dry out. And it’s as she holds me that I realize I have to amend that conclusion I came to that first night on Bela and Lili’s couch, that truth I replayed like a chanted mantra a million times a day: He’s already dead and you are alone.
Because that last part isn’t quite true.