Windfall

  He smiles at me. “Alex, right?”

  “Alice.”

  “Sorry,” he says, holding the door for me. “It’s been a while.”

  Inside, Teddy is sitting on the couch, and when our eyes meet, he grins. He’s holding a small dog-shaped robot in his hands, which he was obviously showing his dad, and it makes him look just like a kid on Christmas.

  “Hey,” he says. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”

  “Well, you weren’t answering my calls.”

  “Sorry,” Charlie says. “We were busy catching up.”

  I kick off my damp shoes, glancing around the apartment, then at Teddy. “Where’s your mom?”

  “Grocery store,” he says, still fidgeting with the control panel on the robot.

  “So how have you been, Alice?” Charlie asks as he gets himself a glass of water. He looks completely at ease here, though this has never been his home—this is, in fact, the place his family was forced to move to because of everything he did. “It’s nice to see you two are still pals. And who was your other friend? The skinny kid with glasses?”

  “Leo,” Teddy says, then looks over at me. “Is he okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, which isn’t exactly the truth, but I don’t really want to talk about it in front of Charlie. This whole thing is so surreal, all of us acting as if barely any time has passed, as if he didn’t ruin their lives. I turn back to him. “So you live in Utah now?”

  “Salt Lake City,” he says, nodding. “I bounced around a bit after…well, you know. I was in Tulsa, then Minneapolis, and now Salt Lake. It’s a good little town.” He looks over at Teddy and winks. “And no gambling there.”

  “And you’re here on business? What do you do now?”

  “Well, I got out of the electrician game,” he says. “Turns out flexible hours weren’t great for me. Something I learned at my meetings.” Again he glances over at Teddy, who smiles back at him encouragingly. “So now I do sales for a tech company.”

  “What kind of tech company?”

  He laughs. “What are you, like, a budding reporter?”

  “No,” I say without smiling. “Just catching up.”

  “She thinks,” Teddy says from the couch, “that you’re here for the money.”

  I turn to glare at him. He’s dead right, of course, but I’m stunned that he’s outed me so casually. “That’s not—”

  “No,” Charlie says, holding up his hands. “I get that. I do. With my history, and the timing of it all, I’m not surprised. But honestly I didn’t even know about it till I got here. I just had some meetings in town, and it seemed like maybe enough time had gone by that Katherine would be open to letting me come see my son.”

  Teddy is giving me a look that says I told you so, and Charlie is watching me with such sincerity that I feel a little uneasy.

  “Anyway, I heard you were the one who bought the ticket,” he says. “And I wanted to say what an amazing gift that is. I wish I could’ve been the one to do it for them, but it means a lot to me, knowing that Teddy and his mom will be taken care of now. So thank you.” He presses a hand to his chest. “From the bottom of my heart.”

  “You’re welcome,” I manage to say, and he beams at us, which only makes me feel more off-balance. It’s hard not to fall under his spell.

  “And Teddy was telling me they’re moving back to the old neighborhood now…,” he says, like he doesn’t remember why they had to move out of it in the first place.

  “Oh,” I say, turning to Teddy with a frown. “So you got it?”

  I’m not sure why this news should make me feel so unsteady. But the idea that he could’ve bought a building—a whole building!—without mentioning it to me is jarring.

  “Well, I made the offers,” he says. “But it might be a while before I hear.”

  “I think we’ve got a real estate tycoon in the making here,” Charlie says with obvious pride, then he glances down at his watch. “Hey, you know what, T? I’ve got to get going. Can’t keep my clients waiting. But I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

  “You bet,” Teddy says, hopping up to give him a hug, and my heart goes soft again because I know he’s waited such a long time for this.

  “Hope to see you again too, Alice,” Charlie says, then pauses near the door. “Where’s the best place to find a cab around here?”

  “Just on the corner,” Teddy says, reaching for his wallet and pulling out a thick wad of twenties. “Here. This should cover it.”

  Charlie waves his hands. “Not necessary. Really.”

  “Just take it,” Teddy insists, holding out the money, but Charlie demurs again with a cheerful smile.

  “My son,” he says, winking at me. “The millionaire.”

  Once the door closes behind him, Teddy and I are both silent. My back is to him as I try to figure out how to say what I need to say. But before I can, he flops back onto the couch and says, “I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong. He’s different. We spent the whole morning talking, and he’s got his life together now.”

  I turn around, unsure where to begin. “Teddy,” I say gently. “There’s just no way the timing is coincidental.”

  “You heard him. He’s here for work. I mean, he’s staying at the Four Seasons.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course it does. Look, when all that stuff happened when I was a kid, he couldn’t even afford a plane ticket home. We had to borrow money from your aunt and uncle to get him back from Vegas. He was a total mess. It was awful. All of it.”

  “I remember,” I say quietly.

  “So it makes sense that it took him some time to get back on his feet,” he says. “It’s not like he’s showing up here claiming it was magic. He had a bunch of setbacks along the way. But people can change. He’s been going to meetings regularly, and he hasn’t gambled in a year. It wasn’t instant. He’s been working on it. And now he just wants to see me for a few days while he’s in town, and you automatically assume—”

  “What does your mom say?”

  “Well, she’s not as paranoid as you.”

  “But?”

  He scowls. “She knows it’s only for a few days, and she said it’s okay if I want to see him. That it’s my decision.” He says this last part defiantly, his chin up, and I have a feeling this isn’t all she said. “And that’s what I want.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I just want to make sure you’re—”

  “Stop. That’s enough, okay? He’s my dad, not yours,” he says, and there’s a heat to his words. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  I know he doesn’t mean it that way, but it still feels like a kick to the stomach, and I drop my eyes to the floor, unable to look at him. Even so I can feel him recoil, equally surprised by what he’s said.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “It’s fine.”

  He sighs. “It’s just…it’s really nice to see him again, you know?”

  “I know,” I say, walking over and sitting down beside him. I fall back against the cushions, suddenly weary.

  “He wants to come to the boat race on Monday.”

  “He’ll still be in town?” I ask, and when Teddy nods I tighten my jaw. “Just be careful, okay? You’ve always been really trusting—it’s one of the best things about you. But now that you have all this money…”

  “Honestly, Al. I swear that’s not why he’s here.”

  I’m still not sure I can believe this, still not sure I can bend my imagination far enough—or generously enough—to allow for the possibility that he just happened to be in town so soon after the son he hasn’t seen in six years won a hundred and forty million dollars. But pressing the point obviously isn’t getting me anywhere. So I nod.

  “Just be careful,” I say again. “You have something that people want now, and a lot of them will be happy to take advantage of you.”

  “I know,” he agrees, but I can tell how b
adly he wants to believe otherwise, how determined he is to refuse this way of thinking.

  “Well,” I say, “if he’s planning to come to the boat race, that means we should probably finish building the boat.”

  “That might help.”

  “All Uncle Jake and I did was draw up the plans and cut the pieces. So this is where you come in.”

  “Armed with tape.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How about we work on it tonight?”

  “I can’t,” I say, shaking my head. “I have dinner plans.”

  Teddy raises his eyebrows. “With that guy?”

  “What guy?” I say, though we both know exactly who he’s talking about.

  “The one you were making out with last night,” he says, and though his tone is teasing, there’s something serious in his eyes.

  My face goes prickly. I didn’t realize he saw us. “We weren’t making out. He just kissed me good night.”

  “That was more than a good-night kiss.”

  I sit there for a few seconds, thinking about my kiss with him, reminding myself that it didn’t mean anything, that he said so himself. I clear my throat, anxious to change the subject. “No, actually, my aunt and uncle are taking us out, if you want to join.”

  “How come?”

  “Because,” I say with a small smile, “I got into Stanford.”

  Teddy half-turns to face me. “You did? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I just found out. That’s why I came over.”

  He slings an arm around my shoulders, the way he always used to before things got complicated between us, and I burrow into the crook of his arm, resting my head on his chest, and we stay there like that—our breathing syncing up, our hearts beating in time—and it feels like coming home again.

  “That’s awesome, Al,” he says, his breath warm against my cheek. “Congrats.”

  “Thanks.”

  There’s a pause, and then he asks, “So I guess that means you’ll be moving to California?”

  “Probably,” I say, happy that I can’t see his face, because this would all be so much harder if I could. “But you never know. Aunt Sofia’s dragging me to Northwestern this weekend. She wants to make sure I consider my options.”

  “Yeah, but that won’t happen. We all knew you’d go back there eventually. California’s always been home, right?”

  I nod, but sitting here now, tucked under his arm in this little apartment in the middle of Chicago, the rain beating against the window and turning the afternoon sky the color of a bruise, it seems strange to me. I’ve been away from California for nine years now, which is just as long as I lived there in the first place. There’s nothing waiting for me there. Everything I know, everyone I love, is here now.

  So why does it still have such a hold on me?

  I push the question out of my mind, pressing myself closer to Teddy, and we sit there together for a long time, until the rain slows, and then stops. Until, finally, the light comes back again.

  It’s Sunday morning and the Northwestern campus is quiet. It rained again last night, so the paths that cut between buildings are slick with wet leaves. We pause beneath a metal arch near the entrance, and Aunt Sofia lets out a happy sigh.

  “This place,” she says, shaking her head. “Best four years of my life. Just don’t tell Jake that. I didn’t meet him until after I graduated.”

  I give her a smile, but I don’t want to be swayed by nostalgic stories of her college days or the clusters of castlelike buildings with their high-gabled roofs and spires that stretch into the low gray sky. Not when I’ve already settled on Stanford.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never taken you here before,” she says, looking around. “I should really come up more often myself. I always forget how close it is.”

  “We’ve been to football games,” I remind her. “Just not for a while.”

  She laughs. “Not since that time you and Leo got into a fight and spilled your drink on the guy in front of you.”

  “We weren’t fighting,” I say with a frown. “Were we?”

  I remember the drink getting knocked out of my hands and landing on someone’s lap: an enormous guy who stood up to glare at us, soda dripping from his purple sweatshirt. But it’s harder to imagine that Leo and I could have been fighting. We used to squabble all the time, the way any siblings do. But we never fought for real.

  “Oh yeah,” Aunt Sofia says as we head toward the sprawling green of the quad. “He was worked up because you were off to visit your grandma the next day without him. You’d only been with us about a year, and I think he’d gotten a little too attached.”

  A dim light switches on in a dusty corner of my memory, and I can picture Leo—red-faced and teary-eyed—trying to explain to Aunt Sofia that I belonged to them now, which meant I should be spending Thanksgiving at home rather than in Boston. This was before my grandmother on my mom’s side passed away, my last remaining relative outside of the little family I’d recently joined.

  “And you couldn’t stop talking about the trip,” Aunt Sofia is remembering, “so Leo just kept getting more upset, and you two started arguing, and he knocked the drink out of your hand. It was a total disaster. We had to leave in the middle of the second quarter. Last time we ever took you troublemakers to a game with us.”

  “Wow,” I say, blinking. “I didn’t remember that.”

  Aunt Sofia gives me a sideways glance. “Well, memory can be a tricky thing.” It seems as if she’s about to say more, but then she looks up and spots a huge, blocky building up ahead and her face breaks into a smile. “My home away from home.”

  “The library?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guess,” I say, watching her closely. “You really loved it here, huh?”

  “I really did,” she agrees. “Though it took a little time. I almost left after the first semester. The cold really got to me. All I’d brought was this flimsy jacket, and there was a big snowstorm at the beginning of October that year. It was brutal.”

  “I can’t imagine coming here from Florida,” I say. “It was a rough transition even from San Francisco. Why’d you apply in the first place?”

  “The plan was to go back to Buenos Aires for university. It was where I was from, and we still had family there, and whenever we visited I fell in love with the city a little more. It wasn’t home, exactly, but—well, you know what it’s like.”

  “What?”

  “To spend your life wondering about a place like that,” she says. “To always feel like you have one foot in and one foot out.”

  I feel my face grow hot under her gaze. “So what happened?”

  “I ended up getting a scholarship here,” she says, sweeping an arm out. “And my dad thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up. They’d sacrificed a lot to come to this country. He really wanted me to go to school here.”

  “Do you ever regret it?”

  She shakes her head. “I came to really love it after a while. And eventually I fell in love with Chicago too. And Jake.”

  “But what about—”

  “Argentina will always be my home in some ways. Florida too.” She smiles. “It’s possible to have more than one, you know.”

  We walk in silence for a few minutes. Above us the sky is threaded with light, the sun pushing its way through the silver clouds. Between buildings I can see flashes of Lake Michigan, the water blue-gray and tipped with white.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” I say, breaking the silence, and Aunt Sofia glances over at me, her face untroubled.

  “What’s that?”

  “You want me to pick Northwestern over Stanford. You want me to be closer.”

  She stops walking. “Alice.”

  “I just don’t get why,” I say, speaking fast now. “I always thought you guys were on board about Stanford, but the minute I finally get in you bring me here? I know you love it, but Northwestern was never part of the plan, and—”
r />   “Alice,” she says again, her voice full of patience, but I can’t stop. Not yet.

  “And Stanford, it’s…it’s what my mom wanted.”

  The words come out with more force than intended, and when Aunt Sofia doesn’t say anything, when she just continues to look at me with a mixture of worry and understanding, something heavy washes over me.

  She did, I want to say, suddenly eager to be understood. She wanted it.

  And if she couldn’t do it, then shouldn’t I?

  The sun moves behind the clouds again, and the world grows dim. I pull in a shaky breath. Taking my arm, Aunt Sofia steers me gently over to a bench. The wood is damp and cold, but we sit down anyway, and I stare out at the too-green grass of the quad, wondering why my insides feel like they’re splitting open.

  “Hey,” she says softly. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to be close to you guys,” I say, my voice trembling. “It’s just…”

  “It’s what your mom wanted,” she says. “I get that. I do. And I can’t imagine how hard this must be.”

  “What?”

  She looks surprised. “Well, not having her here for this. It’s such a big decision.”

  “She would’ve wanted Stanford,” I say firmly.

  “Right. Of course.” She nods. “It’s just…I want to make sure that’s what you want too.”

  “It is,” I say automatically. “I want…”

  I stop. Then pause. Then try again.

  “I want…”

  But I trail off, because the truth is I’m not totally sure what I want. And if I’m being really honest, I don’t know what she’d want either.

  The last time I saw my mom—looking small and pale in a hospital bed—college was still half a life away for me. Her worries must have been so much more immediate than that: who would leave notes in my lunch box when she was gone and who would talk to me about boys one day, who would make faces out of blueberries on my waffles and who would bring me soup when I was home sick.