I knew that would be impossible, but I crossed my fingers and told him I would.
I spent Thanksgiving alone with Dad. Rosa Rivera had gone to Boston to spend the day with her two daughters. James went to L.A. to see his father.
My dad cooked way too much too-rich food; we ate nearly nothing, and then Dad drove the rest over to a local food bank.
My mother called my cell phone in the afternoon while Dad was out. I had been ignoring her thrice-weekly messages since September, but I was feeling pretty blue that Thanksgiving so I picked up.
“Hi,” I said.
“Nomi,” she said, shocked at getting me. “I was just going to leave a message.”
“I can hang up and then you can still do that.”
Mom didn’t say anything for a moment. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” I said.
“Did you get the coat I sent you for your birthday?”
“I’m wearing it right now.” It was red with tortoiseshell buttons and a hood. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood in it, but it was warm.
“Your dad likes the house pretty frigid.”
“He’s getting better. It’s not his fault; it’s me. I’m always cold.”
“I know. Dad told me.”
“I should go. I have some schoolwork to do.”
“Okay. I love you, Nomi.”
“I should go.”
“Okay. Oh wait, I actually had a reason for calling…”
“Yeah?”
“Dad said you were having some trouble in photography. I could help. I do that, you know.”
“It’s not trouble. I just have to turn in this assignment. I…I really have to go.”
“Thanks for picking up,” she said.
We said goodbye and I hung up the phone. I didn’t want her goddamn help. She was always trying to find ways to insinuate herself back into my life.
And yet, I wondered…
If I had forgiven Dad for lying to me about Rosa Rivera, why couldn’t I seem to do even half that for Mom?
When it came down to it, I didn’t even know why I was in a fight with Mom. I knew the reasons, yes, but the fight itself was just a story I had been told.
I was thinking about calling Mom again when Dad came home.
He turned on the television and started watching a program about the meerkat. “The meerkat,” said the narrator, “is one of the few mammals other than humans to teach their young. Watch the adult parent show its child how to remove the venomous stinger from the scorpion before eating it.”
“Sweet, right?” Dad said.
“What are you planning to teach me?” I asked Dad.
An ad came on and Dad pressed mute on the television. “Unfortunately, your old man is pretty unskilled. I know a bit about cooking and travel. And a very little bit about writing and animals, but other than that, you’d be better off with a meerkat for a pop, I suspect.”
We watched three more nature programs in a row—one on pandas (cute to look at, but basically jerks), one on eagles, and another on bobcats. The one we were currently watching was called Top Ten Smelliest Animals, which was pretty much Dad’s ideal program, combining list-making and nature as it were.
During another ad I asked Dad, “Is this how you spent a lot of time before you met Rosa Rivera?”
He pressed mute again. “Yeah, I was pretty bad there for a while,” he admitted.
I considered this.
“What’s Mom’s husband like?”
Dad nodded and then nodded some more. “He’s in building restoration. Nice guy, I think. Nice-looking. There’re probably better people to sing his praises than me.”
“And Chloe?”
“Smart, she says, but then you were, too. Cass and I, we pretty much thought you were the best little kid in the world, you know? We always said it was a good piece of luck, you getting left in that typewriter case.”
I nodded.
“Will coming by today?” Dad asked.
I shook my head. I hadn’t told Dad about quitting yearbook or our fight.
“You’re not spending as much time with him these days,” Dad said.
“I think we’re growing apart,” I said.
“Happens,” Dad said. “He’s a good egg, though. Takes care of his mom since his father died. Hard worker. Always been a good friend to you.”
“Will’s father died?” I asked. He had never mentioned it.
“Yes, that’s why they moved to Tarrytown. His mother wanted a good school where she could get free tuition for Will by teaching.”
I nodded.
The program came on again and Dad turned up the volume.
Since it was Thanksgiving, I thought about calling Will on the phone and making up with him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Our fight didn’t even have a scab yet, and in my mind he’d said worse things to me than I had to him.
When James got back on Saturday afternoon, he said he had an idea for my photography project. At his dad’s in California, James had noticed all these old cameras. He asked his dad if he could have them, and his dad said sure, because what else was there to do with a bunch of old cameras anyway. They were a pain really—you didn’t want to throw them out because of their perceived value, so they basically ended up taking up space.
“So, it’s supposed to be a personal story, right?” James asked. “My idea is that we go back to those steps at Tom Purdue with my dad’s old cameras and throw them down the steps, simulating your own journey two and a half months ago. In theory, the camera will take the picture either en route or at the point of impact. It’ll be an exercise in point of view. Does that sound like something Weir would like?”
“Sounds perfect.”
“We’re gonna need more cameras, though,” James said.
On Sunday morning we went in search of cheap cameras to throw down the stairs. The first place we went was the local pharmacy, where we bought five disposable cameras of various makes for around ten bucks apiece and fifteen rolls of film. James tried to pay, but I wouldn’t let him. It was my project after all.
We also went to a vintage electronics and repair store in downtown Tarrytown where we found four cameras in a dusty metal trash bin for five bucks apiece. We hoped they would still be functional, but we wouldn’t know until we saw the film.
The owner of the store kept looking at me strangely as I was paying. James had gone outside for a smoke.
“The record player,” he said finally. “You never came for it.”
“What record player?”
“You paid to get one fixed around the beginning of August, but you never came to pick it up.”
The owner ran into the back room and came out with a record player. The base was cherry with a pattern of swirls carved into the side. It was pretty, I guess, though I couldn’t imagine why I’d been getting one repaired. I didn’t have a single record.
My name was taped to the front: NAOMI PORTER.
Clearly, it was mine. I wondered what it was for.
“Use it in good health,” said the storekeeper.
When I got outside, James looked at me curiously. “Impulse buy?” he asked as he helped me put the record player in the backseat of his car.
We spent the rest of the afternoon throwing cameras down the steps of Tom Purdue. Some of them had timers, which we could set prior to throwing them. With others, we’d press the button and throw the camera really fast to get the shot in midair. Still others were total Hail Marys and we hoped they’d land on the button and take a picture as they hit the ground. I had no idea what sort of images we were getting, but at least it was fun.
On the second-to-last camera, James cut his thumb on one of the shattered lenses. He didn’t even realize it until I pointed it out to him. “How could you not notice?” I asked him.
James laughed. “I’m used to bleeding for you.” He held up his palm. I kissed it, right in the middle. I was about to move from palm to mouth when I saw Will watching us from the front do
ors of the school. When he caught my eye, he came outside really fast and started heading down the stairs.
“Hello, Naomi,” he said. “Larkin.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Working on the weekend?” James asked Will.
“Never stops,” Will said stiffly. “You’re bleeding, Larkin.”
“I blame her,” James said.
“Naomi,” Will said softly, “do you really think you should be running up and down these stairs without a helmet?”
“A what?” James asked.
“You know, for her head. If she reinjured herself—”
I cut him off. “I’m fine, Will.”
Will just nodded. “See you around. Naomi. James.” He nodded again as he said each of our names and then he was gone.
“It’s lucky he didn’t see us sledding.” James touched my forehead. “You’d look pretty cute in a helmet actually.”
Because he was cut, I tried to send James home without me, but he wouldn’t go. He insisted on helping me pick up the camera carcasses, which I was against. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a tendency to let other people clean up my messes. I’m trying not to be that way anymore.”
I pointed out that this wasn’t his mess; it was mine.
“Still,” said James. By then, the blood was practically pouring from his thumb. I wondered if he needed stitches.
“You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.”
I didn’t have time to develop the film in the school’s lab until the following Wednesday.
There wasn’t much to look at. A few shots of sky. Some concrete. A lot of black. Still, the point wasn’t always that the pictures be pretty, was it? Sometimes it was about the process, like with Jackson Pollock paintings. As I made enlargements of the photos, I hoped that Mr. Weir would see it that way.
Mr. Weir hated my project. “It’s an interesting gimmick, but it wasn’t the assignment. Your assignment was to tell a personal story in pictures.”
“This is a personal story.” I defended my project. “This is exactly what happened to me.”
“Naomi, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that this isn’t personal. It’s simply that the assignment counts for your whole grade, and I’m expecting something deeper.”
When the bell rang, I took my pictures with me and stuffed them in my locker.
“What did Weir think?” James asked. He was standing behind me at my locker.
“He didn’t get it.”
Blank-slate time all over again.
Saturday afternoon, James, Alice, Yvette, and I took the train into the city to see a show. We hadn’t decided what we would see, and when we got there most everything was sold out. There were a couple of tickets left for the Rockettes’ Holiday Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, so we went to that, despite the fact that Alice found it “degrading to women” and James found it “campy.”
Even if you have no interest in lines of aging showgirls wearing too much makeup kicking up their legs, there’s something impressive about it. Something spectacular. It’s like a sicko cloning experiment.
At intermission, James went outside for a smoke, and I went to the bathroom. Alice and Yvette remained in the theater to argue about whether the show was “objectifying women” (Alice) or “celebrating their athleticism” (Yvette). I didn’t necessarily think the two positions were irresolvable.
There was a long line outside the bathroom. I wondered if I would make it through before the show started again. Not that it mattered. The spectacular didn’t have a story you had to follow—it was just a bunch of women standing in a row.
Someone placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Naomi Porter?”
I turned around. It was a Japanese guy, maybe in his thirties. He was wearing expensive black glasses, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, a red hoodie, charcoal pin-striped pants, and black Converse sneakers. He was holding the hand of a little girl in a gray dress with hearts on it and pink sneakers, Converses like her dad’s.
“You probably don’t remember me,” he said. “I’m Nigel Fusakawa.”
The name was familiar.
“Cass’s husband,” he added. “Everyone calls me Fuse.”
He stuck out his hand, and without thinking I shook it.
“She was supposed to come today, but she has a bit of a cold.”
I nodded.
“Could you do me a favor?” he asked. “I’m here by myself. Would you mind taking Chloe to the bathroom?”
“I—”
“It would really help us out.”
I looked at the little girl. She was sweet, shyer in person than she had been on the phone. Besides, none of what had happened was her fault. I nodded toward Fuse. We were about to enter the interior part of the bathroom, and I took Chloe’s hand.
“What’s your name?” she squeaked.
“I’m Nomi,” I said.
Her eyes grew very wide. “Nobody?”
“Sure, whatever.”
I let her go first. “Do you need any help?”
“No, I’ve been doing this myself forever,” she informed me. I wondered how long forever was. A year? Six months? “I could have gone in here myself, but my daddy doesn’t want me to get raped.”
“Raped?” I nearly burst out laughing. Did she even know what that meant?
“That happens all the time in bathrooms,” she informed me seriously.
She had Mom’s blue eyes and Fuse’s black hair. She was cute. She remembered to wash her hands without my prompting.
“Daddy says you’re my sister,” she said as we were on the way out.
What was I going to do? Tell her it wasn’t true? “Yeah,” I said.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I want to be the only one.”
“You’ll still be the only one,” I said.
She pursed her tiny rosebud mouth. She didn’t look at all convinced.
Fuse was waiting for us right outside the door. “Thanks for saving me from having to be the only man in the women’s room.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Naomi,” Fuse asked, “I hope this isn’t too forward, but why don’t you come over to our apartment after the show? We live about twenty blocks up from here, and I know Cass would be so, so, so psyched to see you. Chloe and I would be glad to have you, too.”
“I’m…I can’t…I’m with friends,” I said.
“Bring them along. Really. Please. Cass would kill me if I didn’t try to get you up to our house. She’s really missed you. I know, trust me I know, things have been hard between you, but it’s nearly Christmas, and what luck us running into you, and isn’t that the coat she sent you for your birthday?”
I nodded. This guy knew so much about me without my knowing a thing about him.
“I helped her pick it out. She’d be really glad to see you in it. Did you get the pictures from your friend?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What pictures?”
“Nothing. I…I must have gotten confused. We’ll meet you right here by the bathroom, okay? The Radio City Music Hall ladies’ room. It’s our special place,” he said with a wink.
The guy sounded sort of desperate, and the little girl was staring at me. The whole situation was starting to get incredibly awkward. A light flashed indicating that intermission was over.
“Please come. I know you weren’t planning to run into us; I know this isn’t how you were thinking you would spend your day. But now we have and it’s lucky, I think. Please, Naomi.”
He was begging. I didn’t want the little girl to have to watch her father beg, so I found myself saying yes.
During the second half of the show, the kicking had lost its novelty for me and the women’s identical painted-on smiles were giving me a headache. It occurred to me that if any of the Rockettes got sick or even murdered, no one would notice. They’d just brin
g on an identical replacement, smack on some lipstick, and the show would go on without any noticeable decrease in quality. Somewhere, some poor Rockette would be dead and buried, and the only people who would notice or care at all would be her family. The thought made me depressed as anything.
I whispered to James that I needed to leave, and he told Alice and Yvette. “It’s her head,” he said. It was my built-in, all-purpose excuse.
“Do you want us to come with you, cookie?” Alice whispered sympathetically.
“No, watch the rest of the show,” I whispered back. “We’ll take the train back early.”
I didn’t tell James about running into Fuse and Chloe. When we got outside I said, “I couldn’t be in there anymore, you know?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I don’t feel like going back yet, though.” I was too wound up from running into my mother’s new family.
James didn’t ask me why, only what I wanted to do instead. I couldn’t think of anything—most of the things I knew were in Brooklyn—so I told him that we should just ride the subways for a while.
We rode all the way down to the South Ferry stop and then all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park and then back to Grand Central. It took three hours total.
We didn’t really talk much during that time. We watched people get off and on the train. There were lots of shopping bags owing to the time of year, and the people carrying them all seemed tired to me, but warily optimistic. It put me in mind of Fuse asking me over to Mom’s house. I wondered how long he and Chloe had waited by the restroom at Radio City Music Hall.
“I have this sister…” I said to James right before we were about to get off the subway.
“You never said.”
“Well, she’s not technically related to me, so…” All of a sudden, it seemed too difficult to explain. Where would I start? From the typewriter case in Moscow Oblast? It would be a very long story. “She’s almost four,” I said. “Roughly the same number of years I lost, you know? Like, if you could take all that time and make a person, it would be her.”
“But you can’t do that.” James shook his head. “My brother,” he began before shaking his head again. “I don’t want to talk about this.”