Year of Mistaken Discoveries (12 page)

“Careful, it might be the undead,” Dad called out. My mom punched him in the shoulder. “Brains . . . ,” he moaned.

I opened the door. Brody was standing there, his lower face hidden by a scarf. I stood there blinking at him.

“Surprise.” His breath came out like white smoke.

I took a step back into the house to make space. “Do you want to come in?”

Brody shook his head. “Nah. Can you come out?”

“Now?”

“Well, you could come out later, but I wouldn’t be here. It’s sort of cold to wait around.”

I blinked and then poked my head into the living room. “Do you mind if I go out for a bit?”

My parents’ heads swiveled in tandem to check out the clock above the fireplace. “It’s getting late,” Mom said.

“A friend of mine is outside. We’re going to take a walk.”

“Friend?” Dad asked in that voice that implied he was considering having Brody come in and fill out a biography form and complete a full psychological workup.

“His name is Brody.” I crossed my fingers that they wouldn’t make him come in and do the whole “so tell us about yourself” thing. “He’s the one I’m doing my senior project with.”

Mom started to shake her head, but Dad’s hand reached over and took hers. “You be back in an hour,” he said.

Mom turned to argue with him, but there must have been something in his expression that changed her mind. “Take your mittens. It’s cold.”

“I will.” I bolted for the hall closet and pulled out my jacket.

“And a scarf. It’s really cold out there.”

I stepped outside, my breath freezing in my lungs. “I’m glad you came over,” I said.

“Sure.” He didn’t look at me. “I would have called you back, but I was really busy this week.”

“No problem.” I knew he was lying, but it didn’t seem like the time to argue. “I’m glad you’re here now.”

He pulled the Batman sticker out of his jacket pocket. “You sent me the Bat-Signal, so I knew I had to respond.”

My parents were standing by the living room window, looking out at us. I pulled him toward the street. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Or we could give them something to watch. I could start doing some interpretive dance.” Brody started to jerk around.

I giggled. I grabbed his arm and steered him down the sidewalk. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought we should talk and figure out what we’re doing.”

My face flushed, and I was glad the scarf covered it. “I’m happy the bat signal worked.”

“It’s my dance moves, isn’t it? Chicks dig guys who can dance.” Brody busted out another funky move that made him look like a squirrel that had accidentally bitten into an electrical wire. He stopped dancing. “It’s good you were home. I thought you might be out.”

“A bunch of people went to the movies, but I didn’t feel like it.”

“I heard you and Colton were getting back together.” His hands were shoved deep in his pockets.

“No.” I shuffled through the last of the fall leaves that hadn’t been raked up. “It’s complicated. Everyone in our group sort of wants us to get back together, and it wasn’t like there was some big reason we broke up. Colton’s not a bad guy. I just don’t think he’s the guy for me. It’s like we don’t fit.”

He looked down the street as if he were fascinated by the Christmas decorations some of the neighbors had already put up. “I thought that might be why you blew me off.” He shrugged like it was no big deal. “You know, you didn’t need to worry. No one would think you’d choose me over Colton. King of the senior class.”

“I’m so sorry about what I said in the cafeteria. I didn’t mean it to sound how it came out.” I realized I was biting my lip and made myself stop. I wanted to tell him that he was way more interesting than Colton, but that seemed the wrong thing to say.

“I came by to say if you don’t want to be partners for this project, it’s fine with me. Bradshaw kinda shoved us together. If you’d rather do something with your friends, it’s okay.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I want to do this with you.” I grabbed the sleeve of his coat to make him stop. I had to convince him. “Please do this project with me. I don’t think I could do it without you.”

chapter sixteen

I
held my breath, waiting to see if he was still willing to do the project. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it on my own, but I didn’t want to anymore.

“Okay.” He paused as we walked up to the park at the entrance to my subdivision. He crunched through the leaves to the swing set. He bent gallantly down and motioned that I should take the first swing. He sat next to me and pushed off, his legs pumping so that his swing started to reach for the sky. “What did you find out when you went to the state office?”

I felt the tension in my stomach disappear. For a second I’d been afraid he’d walk away and leave me standing there. “Not much. Unless I’m willing to wait until I’m eighteen, they won’t tell me anything.”

“Not too surprising. Nora didn’t have any luck that way
either. We should go to the library. There’s a bunch of research Nora and I did when we were looking for her mom. Some of it might help us.”

I leaned back so that I was looking up at the sky. “I was thinking about Nora today. We’re coming up to the first of the firsts. Next week will be the first Thanksgiving Nora won’t be around. Then there will be the first Christmas she won’t be here, the first New Year, the first summer vacation, the first start of school, and the first anniversary of her death. Then eventually it will be the second of everything, and then after that I’ll have to think about how long it’s been since she was alive, take time to calculate it.” I watched the stars slide past as I swung back and forth.

“You won’t forget her—that’s what matters, not if you can say how many years or weeks since she’s been gone.” In the cold air his breath plumed out like dragon smoke from his mouth.

“What if I do? What if I get to a point where it seems easier to not think about her? What if a few years from now she doesn’t even cross my mind, and my life goes on like I never even knew her?”

Brody raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think that will happen?”

“People do. They move on. Everyone is always talking about how we’ll all be friends forever, but you know we won’t. Everyone will go off. Some people will stay in touch, but not most of us. After graduation there will be a time when we won’t remember
everyone’s names anymore without being prompted.”

“Forgetting large chunks of high school might be a good thing. Sort of a way of dealing with PTSD.”

“It’s not just school. My birth mom moved on. She decided she didn’t want to be bothered anymore, and I was her child. She used to keep in touch with my mom, and then when I was about four, she stopped. Maybe she got sick of celebrating the first, second, third, fourth Christmas we were apart, the fourth birthday and so on. Maybe it wasn’t worth it anymore, easier to forget.”

“Could be,” Brody acknowledged. “I don’t know your birth mom. It’s possible that she couldn’t be bothered with having a kid anymore. There’s no real way to know.”

“Can you just accept that? That there’s no reason?”

He pumped the swing back and forth. “Lots of stuff in life doesn’t have a good reason. My dad left a few years ago. I wanted there to be a reason. That he was seeing someone else, or that my mom spent all his money, or even that I was such a disappointment to him that he couldn’t stand it anymore. But nope. Nothing. He got sick of being married and being a dad.”

“Do you see him anymore?”

Brody sighed. “Sort of. It’s this thing where I feel like he sees me because his parents, my grandparents, guilt him into it. Last year my mom moved us here so she could be closer to her sister. He hasn’t been great with making his child support and she wanted more help. My dad lives back in Oregon. He acted
like he was bummed that we wouldn’t get together much, but I think he’s relieved. It’s like the perfect excuse.” He mimicked his dad’s voice. “Gosh, son, I’d love to see you, but darn it all, you’re halfway across the country. Maybe some other time.”

My feet traced the groove under the swing. “That sucks.”

“Yeah. Not much I can do about it. It’s his call. All sorts of people in the world, some good, some bad. Sometimes there are good people who do bad things. The issue isn’t what your birth mom would do or wouldn’t do. It’s about you. You aren’t the type to forget Nora. That’s what matters.”

The night air was cold, but I didn’t want to go home. “What if I’m like Lisa? What if I walk away from people when things get difficult? I basically walked away from Nora when she was alive. I didn’t completely dump her as a friend, but I certainly didn’t go out of my way, either.”

Brody stopped his swing, his foot dragging in the wood chips. “Is this one of those things where you ask if you look fat in an outfit just so I’ll tell you that no, you look amazing?”

“No,” I insisted.

“Everyone makes mistakes. My dad should try harder. I’m his kid. Maybe you should have made more time for Nora. Maybe your birth mom made a mistake when she stopped the letters. But that’s not the point. Being a good person isn’t just about what you’ve done.”

I forced myself to stop staring up into the sky. It was making me dizzy, like I might suddenly fly free of the swing and
disappear into the darkness. “If it isn’t about what you’ve done, what is it about?”

“About what you choose to do next.”

I realized Brody was staring at me. I spun my swing so we were knee to knee. I could feel the heat of his body through the fabric of his jeans. His knee was pressed against mine. A shock ran up my back at the touch. I leaned forward slightly and so did he. His breath was warm on my face. “You’re a good person,” I said quietly.

He stood up suddenly so he was standing on the swing. I blinked. I’d been so sure he was about to kiss me. The night air froze the warm space where his breath had warmed my skin.

“You should stand up here too.”

I slid my hands along the metal links of the chains and pulled myself up, swinging slightly off balance. The height made everything look different. The two of us looked out across the park. I could see my house. My parents had all the lights on, so that pools of warm light were reaching out into the night. I knew they would wait up until I got home.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do next?” Brody asked.

I thought about answering that I’d thought I would kiss him, but I didn’t have nearly the guts to put the words out there. “About what?” I asked instead.

“How will you handle it if you find her?”

His comment surprised me. My foot slipped off the swing
and I had to catch myself before I fell. “I don’t know. I have this image where we get to be almost like friends. It’s not like I want her to be my mom or suddenly where we’re besties. It’s just I’d like to know her. I want her to want to know me. I have all these questions I’d like to ask.”

“How do your parents feel about all of this? Any better?”

I blew a long breath out. “Not good. They say they get it, that they understand, but I know they wish I’d leave it alone. We’re pretending the whole thing isn’t happening. They don’t ask about it and I don’t talk. It’s funny in a way. I think my mom worries that I want to find my birth mom because there’s something she didn’t do right, but that’s not it. My parents are—” My brain scrambled to find the word. “Perfect. My mom is a lawyer who still found time to hand sew each of my Halloween costumes, and my dad was the kind who hung on to the back of my bike and ran alongside for blocks while I learned to ride.”

“I’m trying to understand the part where having perfect parents is a bad thing.”

I laughed. “It’s more that I’ve always felt like I didn’t quite match up to what they wanted. That they should have gotten this perfect kid, someone to keep up the standards. It’s like if I can find my birth mom, I’ll know where I come from, maybe make sense of it. I don’t know how to explain it.” There were also things I couldn’t explain, to him or my parents. If I didn’t get into Duke, then everything I’d done so far was for nothing.

Now that I’d started the project, it wasn’t just about getting into Duke anymore. There were so many things I wanted to ask Lisa that weren’t in any of the paperwork from the adoption agency that my parents had saved in my scrapbook. I had a medical history and a letter, but they’d left so much out. My freakishly long second toe, did she have that too? When she was angry or anxious, did she break out in blotchy red-hot hives all over her chest? How did she know she was in love with my birth dad? Had she loved him? Most importantly, did she still think about me, or was she glad I was gone?

“Hate to break it to you, but feeling like you’re letting your parents down is sort of universal, even if you share the same genetic material.” Brody jumped down from the swing so that he was standing on the ground. He offered his hand to help me down. I stepped onto the ground next to him. “You should prepare yourself for that, for when we find her.”

“You really think we’ll find her?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Oh my God. I’m going to do this.” My heart started to race. I’d been so focused on impressing Duke that I hadn’t thought past that moment. If the project went well, I would meet my birth mom. It was as if I’d stumbled and suddenly realized I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I almost couldn’t breathe. “I’m going to find her. We’re going to find her.”

Brody nodded. “That was kinda the point.”

I threw myself into his arms with a whoop. He held me for a second, but the shift in weight threw him off balance. Brody slipped on the leaves underfoot, and we fell backward into a pile of wood chips. He let out a loud
ooph
as I landed on top of him.

“Shit. Are you okay?” I pulled myself up on my elbow.

“You might consider giving a guy some warning before you use your ninja moves on him.”

I started giggling. “I thought you were Batman. Aren’t you supposed to have lightning-fast reflexes?”

He propped himself up and smiled, then tossed a handful of frozen leaves into my face. I sucked in a breath in shock and then spit out a piece of leaf. Brody laughed, so I reached over and shoved a handful of leaves down the neck of his coat.