“What? I didn’t know any of that.”
“Your dad had just gotten engaged to Lindy and you were kind of blah about it. I didn’t want to drag you down. You take things really seriously, you know?”
“Oh.” That makes me sound like I really am a bucket of water about to tip. “I’m sorry you couldn’t tell me about that.”
“It doesn’t matter. I know you care about me,” she says, and then, “Hey, Im? I have a question, but don’t get mad.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Have you told Lindy what we’re doing? What you think your dad is doing? I mean, maybe she would believe you.”
“Why? Do you believe me?”
“Sure,” she says, toying with her hair. “I guess. Like, I don’t really get all these clues . . . but I’m not smart like you. And I don’t know your dad the way you do, obviously,” Jessa hurries to add.
“Right. You’re just helping because you’re my best friend.” I pause to consider this. “You might be my only actual friend.”
“That’s not true,” she says, but it’s a pretty soft protest.
“Still, thanks, anyway. For helping. You know, Lindy wants to put up posters in Stop and Shop and all over. So if we don’t track him down soon, everyone will find out.”
“Is that such a bad thing? Like, you keep saying it’s your job to find your dad. But I don’t get it. You’re not a detective. You’re not a superhero. I don’t remember you becoming, like, ‘one with the night.’ It is literally the police’s literal job to find him. So shouldn’t we tell the cops what we know? They could look up your mom’s, I don’t know, criminal record and stuff.”
“Why would my mother have a criminal record?”
“Robbed a bank? Stole meatballs from Sweden? Who knows? No offense, Im, but it doesn’t seem like your mom was the most . . . well-adjusted person in the world, right? If you’re sure your dad’s going after her, they can find them faster than we can.”
She’s probably right about the police. She’s definitely right about my mom. But the thing is, I don’t want her to be found. I want to find her. I stumble over my words to make Jessa understand.
“You mean you want to find him, right?” She frowns. “You mean your dad? ’Cause I thought that was the whole point. Find your mom because that’s where your dad’s headed.”
“It was,” I answer slowly. “But now . . .”
I want to explain to her that for other girls, a mother is a makeup lesson in the master bathroom, a set of pearls at junior prom, a handwritten letter every Valentine’s Day. For me, a mother is a small body always out of frame in old photos. Just flashes of dangling hair, the toe of a shoe, the tips of outstretched fingers. A wistful dream of plentiful food. And it isn’t enough to keep me going anymore. My mother is half of who I am, and I don’t know her at all.
But the only way I can explain it is, “I just keep thinking about being in a room with them. Walking into, I don’t know, a crappy little breakfast diner, the kind with a jukebox that only plays the old songs no one remembers, and seeing them at a booth, and then I go sit in the booth with them and . . . there we all are.”
“Okay.” Jessa speaks up after a long moment, saving me. “So we’ll keep looking.”
We sit quietly, watching a cluster of noisy preteen boys. They push each other and pull on each other’s coats in front of a woodprint of a saint being stretched by his limbs between four men on ink-black horses. “Observe.” I scowl at them. “The male of the species at play.”
“Next comes the poop-flinging and penis-fencing.”