“Cara, dear,” he said when she pushed it open further, looking up over the glasses that were set low on his nose. He was reading in his armchair, legs crossed. “How was the beach?”
“You hired a housekeeper?” she asked.
“Apparently,” said her dad.
“But what if—you know—I mean she could come home any day, couldn’t she?”
“When your mother comes home, Lolly will go,” he said gently. “She needed to pick up a few hours. She has a two-year-old grandson she takes care of. I’m sure you’ll like her cooking.”
Cara nodded, the tense feeling in her stomach growing a little less.
Her dad was sad, she thought. Just like her.
“Very good, then,” he said, and went back to his reading. When he was reading, he was lost to the world.
Softly she walked over to the big dictionary he kept on a stand in the corner. Under the cover he’d tucked the note her mother left. She didn’t know if he’d even noticed she’d found it, but she liked to go into his study when he was out and just gaze at the note, smoothing her fingers over the scrawled words her mother had written.
Now she turned the heavy sheaf of pages over and exposed the fragment.
Have to go. Danger. Keep them safe — love
That was all.
Now, with her hand touching the worn paper, she felt tears filling her eyes. It had been two months, and there was still no sign of her mother coming back. No one was doing anything to help, either. The police hadn’t taken it seriously. Despite her mother’s note—the word danger echoed in Cara’s head when she was trying to fall asleep—the cops obviously thought her mother had left her dad. For some other guy.
They had looked at the pictures of her mother in the family albums—her mother was beautiful, with long dark hair, olive skin, and green eyes, and people often thought she was Cara’s sister—and then looked at her dad, in his glasses and vest, and decided it was a “routine domestic situation.” Cara had heard one of them say that when they didn’t think any kids were listening.
She’d felt so bad for her dad. It was like the cops didn’t think he was good enough for her mother.
But he was. They all were. They were all good enough for each other.
It wasn’t like that.
“Sweetheart,” came her dad’s gruff voice behind her, as he put a hand on her shoulder, “don’t worry. Your mother is a strong person. She can take care of herself. And she will come back to us.”
She wiped away the tear that had leaked out, sniffed, and turned around.
“OK,” she said stiffly, and gave a small nod. If she hugged him she would lose it.
Standing there together, they heard the low roll of thunder.
“Well, I guess we’ll be driving to the movies after all,” said her dad.
She trudged up the creaky staircase to take a shower before dinner. Max’s door, at the end of the hall, had a glossy picture of Joe Strummer on it. Jax’s, on the other end of the hall beside her own door, featured your typical Einstein-with-messy-hair photo. It was taped right on top of an older poster of fossils.
She didn’t know if Jax was a genius Einstein-style, exactly, but he definitely had some kind of photographic memory—among other things. Last year his elementary school had wanted him to skip three years, which would have put him in Cara’s grade at Nauset. Luckily her parents had said no, because even if he was a brainiac he was still just a ten-year-old at heart. Since June 20th he had been teaching himself about Great Geniuses of the Past: Mozart, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Kurt Gödel, and sometimes child prodigies like Bobby Fischer.
It hadn’t escaped Cara’s notice that a lot of the Great Geniuses of the Past hadn’t ended up too happy.
She knocked sharply on Einstein’s face.
“Enter please,” said Jax, using his most annoying robot voice.
She pushed the door open. The room smelled like a moldy sock.
“Ew,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
Jax was sitting on the floor, books spread open around him, fooling with a database on his laptop.
“Did you meet the housekeeper?” she asked.
Jax nodded, intent on his database.
“So? What did you think?”
She always asked what Jax thought of new people. Jax had a way of knowing things he shouldn’t know, and if he didn’t trust someone, she’d learned from experience to steer clear of them herself. One guy who mowed their lawn last year had gotten Jax’s thumbs-down even though he seemed really friendly; then it turned out he was some kind of perv. A lady at the post office told them: outside the Stop & Shop, men in suits came and took him away.
Now Jax gave her a thumbs-up. Lolly must be OK.
Cara leaned in close to see what he was typing about.
“Watch out. Right foot,” he said, never looking away from the screen, and kept typing rapidly on the keyboard.
She glanced down and narrowly missed stepping on a big snail that had left a slimy trail on his floor.
“Jax!” she said, irritated. “You’re not supposed to do that!”
“There is a prejudice in this house against gastropod mollusks,” said Jax sternly.
He used even bigger words than her dad, the PhD. It was one reason most kids his age made fun of him and the only real friend he had was a bigger geek than he was. She was glad he was past his “citations phase,” at least. That was what her parents had called it. The citations phase was when he used to give footnotes for practically everything he said, like “Scientific American, September 1997, Volume 277 #3, pages 70-75.”
It had been pretty tough to talk to him during the citations. Her parents had made him get checked for Asperger syndrome, but it turned out he didn’t have it.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“And also against chelicerate arthropods and decapod crustaceans.”
“Talk normally,”
