When we got home, I sliced vegetables for a stir-fry, then curled up on the couch with my pocket edition of Much Ado About Nothing (a gift from Dad) and started reading from the beginning. The very beginning—page i, not page 1—the part with the introduction and preface and cast of characters. It was slow going.
Dad came home a while later and dumped his satchel on the coffee table. I held up my book; he gave me a thumbs-up.
“Veg is prepped,” I said.
“Hallelujah!” He blew me a kiss, then breezed into the kitchen.
I realized I’d been reading the same paragraph over and over for the last fifteen minutes. I sighed. Maybe I should skip the introduction stuff and just read the play.
ACT I
SCENE I. Before LEONATO’S house.
Enter LEONATO, governor of Messina, HERO his daughter, and BEATRICE his niece, with a MESSENGER.
LEONATO
I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.
He is very near by this: he was not three leagues off when I left him.
I jumped when Dad’s phone rang inside his satchel. His ringtone was the opening notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Dum-dum-dum-dummmmm. Dum-dum-dum-dummmmm.
“Dad!” I yelled without moving. “Your phone!”
Pans rattled in the kitchen. He came in, fished his phone out of the satchel, and looked at the number, then lifted an eyebrow and took it back to the kitchen before answering. I heard the buzz of his voice faintly, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I was feeling too lazy to follow him and eavesdrop.
Twenty minutes later, my stomach rumbled. I yawned, stuck a bookmark in Much Ado, and wandered into the kitchen to see if dinner was ever going to happen.
The vegetables I’d sliced were sitting on the cutting board untouched. Dad was leaning against the counter, still talking quietly on the phone. He said, “If Elizabeth is ready, then we are.”
He noticed me and waved an arm, shooing me away.
Huh?
I wondered who Dad was talking to. He isn’t really a phone guy. No matter who’s on the other end, he finishes calls after just a few minutes. He’s good at making up excuses, like, “What’s that smell? Oh, dinner’s burning!” Or once, with Awful Aunt Marge, “What’s that smell? Oh, the outhouse is overflowing!” (Awful Aunt Marge, who thinks we’re “a bunch of dirty hippies,” did not call him again for a long time.) He says he misses the days of letter writing and express carrier pigeon, that the communication center of his brain doesn’t work as well in real time.
I, however, living in the twenty-first century, went upstairs to my room, dug into my backpack, and grabbed my own phone to call Raven. I was grumpy and hungry and Dad was being weird and secretive. Plus Raven and I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk after school, with me rushing off to art club, and I still hadn’t told her about my horrendous first driving lesson.
“Hey,” I said, when she answered. “You’re going to think I’m a terrible person and I hope you don’t hate me forever because I think I’m going to hate myself forever already.”
“Uhhh,” she said. “Okay?”
I told her what had happened, all the gory details. “They never found a microchip, it was a stray. Someone from Animal Control called and told us. Is that worse? It never even had a loving home!”
“Tragic,” Raven agreed.
“I feel like my soul will never be clean again,” I said.
“You don’t believe in souls,” she pointed out.
“But it’s like I’ve been marked. ‘Cat-killer.’ And I love cats.”
“Well, I guess you could spend the best years of your prime caring for stray cats,” she said. “Wearing cat-lady clothes. That seems like a fitting punishment.”
“My prime? When’s that?”
“Probably right now,” she admitted.
“Ugh, I hope this isn’t my prime. I think you have to know how to drive a car without murdering innocent animals to be considered ‘in your prime.’”
“Stop saying murder, Cadie. You’re being melodramatic.”
“I know, but I’m so good at it.”
“You are. Also, it was an accident. You have to stop beating yourself up about it. You’re going to get back on the horse, right?”
“Horses, sure. Behind the wheel, nope. Never.”
“Never is a long time to be walking everywhere.”
“Then I’ll have great legs.”
“While you’re running around looking for stray cats to feed? With no Farhan to appreciate them?”
“Raven!”
“That reminds me,” she said. “The Fall Ball is in a month. Are you going to ask him to go with you?”
I squeaked. “Me ask him? That would require bravery. Lots of it.”
“Oh, come on. I’m going to ask Max.”
“You and Max have been dating all summer! That doesn’t count. The me-and-Farhan thing is way more complicated. Since there is no me-and-Farhan thing.” But now I was grinning. Raven always managed to cheer me up, sooner or later.
Then Josh knocked on my door and told me that Mom and Dad needed us to come downstairs.
Mom, sitting tight-lipped and red-eyed on the living room couch. Dad, looking sick, perched on the edge of the piano bench. I noticed right away that he was sitting as far from Mom as possible.
“Acadia, Joshua,” she said. “Your father has something to tell you.”
“Okay … ,” I said. “What’s going on? Dad?” I heard my voice rising. “Is everyone all right?”
Josh stood next to me, saying nothing.
“Just have a seat,” Dad said. In a voice I’d never heard him use before. Thinner than Weatherman, sadder than Shakespearean Tragic.
Josh and I sat, squished together on the ottoman.
“Kids …” Dad crossed then uncrossed his legs, smoothed his hands down his pants. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
Mom bit her lip and clenched her fists so tightly her knuckles started turning white. “Oh, that’s an understatement,” she muttered.
“Melissa, please.” Dad paused. “Are you sure you don’t want to—process this some more, before we tell them?”
Mom just glared at him, and he sighed. “Kids,” he said again, and I pinpointed it. The voice. Not a Voice at all, I mean. Just a voice, lowercase v. Dad never talked like that. Only normal people talked like that. Everyone else.
“Get to the point, Ross,” Mom hissed. I’d never seen her this upset, either. Not even when Josh fell off the back porch and we thought his arm was broken.
“Kids,” Dad said a third time. “You have—a sister.”
I gasped. “Mom’s having a baby?”
Mom glared at Dad. “Wouldn’t that be the simple way. Nice and easy. But no, your father went and took care of that without—”
“Melissa, I’ll explain.”
“Well then, get to the point already, because I, for one, am getting tired of sitting here listening to you fumble.” Mom was practically spitting.
Dad shifted on the piano bench, stood, clasped his hands behind his head. Turned to look out the window, and addressed his next words to the street. “It turns out you have a half sister.” He paused again.
“I don’t understand,” I ventured, when it felt like the silence had grown thick enough that a hatchet wouldn’t make a dent.
Mom swore, and I felt Josh stiffen next to me. “Ross found out he has another daughter,” she snapped. “Somewhere in Ohio, of all places. And apparently this woman—the mother—has finally gotten around to letting him know. If she’s even telling the truth.” She muttered something else in Spanish that made Dad’s eyebrows jump.
Okay, Mom occasionally swore, but she hardly ever swore in Spanish—only when she had exhausted the level of fury she could convey in English. And she always referred to him as “Dad” in front of us, not “Ross,” unless she had forgotten we were in the room. Which was odd, because she was still addressing us. Not Dad.
“Melissa,” Dad started, “I have no reason to believe she’s lying. And can you please try not to—not in front of the kids—”
“Not to what?” Mom shouted, her eyes narrowed. “Not to what, Ross?”
Dad sighed. “Are we done here?” he asked, so quietly I barely heard him.
“Are we done here, he wants to know,” Mom reported, staring at a point somewhere just over my head. “As if we could file this one away in a neat little ‘Completed’ folder and move on now.”
I stood up. “Dad. What’s she talking about?”
He turned and looked at me, then Josh. “It’s true. I’m so sorry—I know this is tough to understand. When you’re older—”
“Not when they’re older, Ross, right now!” Mom finally turned her gaze to Dad. “This is going to affect them right now. This is affecting our family right now, you selfish asshole.” And to my horror, Mom burst into tears.
Dad’s face crumpled. He moved toward her, but Mom stood up and slapped him, hard, across the face. Then she turned and walked out the front door.
Dad went upstairs and didn’t come back down, so I finally ordered dinner in for me and Josh.
“I know what it means,” Josh said when I tried to explain it to him over the kung pao shrimp (nonvegetarian rebel food) that neither of us were hungry enough to eat. “I’m not a baby.”
Then he stomped up to his room, slammed the door, and turned on a Shostakovich symphony at top volume. You know, normal ten-year-old boy music. I wasn’t sure if he really did understand, but I didn’t feel like talking about it, either.
After Josh went upstairs, though, Dad came back down and sat on the couch across from me while I wordlessly pushed shrimp around with chopsticks. He didn’t even notice that it wasn’t tofu. Then he told me more details.
She was the same age as me. A few months older, in fact.
“Your mother and I were so young,” he said, still in that thin, sad voice that made him sound like someone else. “Things were rocky that first year we were married. And it was different then—when we were living at Ahimsa House. In theory, it was okay for us to—but I wasn’t honest about it with your mother, that was the problem. I mean, clearly, there was more than one problem.”
“Too much information,” I muttered.
Dad sighed. “Cadie, I’m not denying it. I screwed up. Big-time.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
Oh, and her name was Elizabeth Marie.
Elizabeth Marie?
No one in my family had a name like that. Ross Greenfield, Melissa Laredo-Levy. Colorful names. Names steeped in history, in stories. Elizabeth Marie? How much preppier can you get? Not like Acadia Rose, or Joshua Tree. Those names say, “Hi, I was conceived in a national park by free-spirited parents who lived with seventeen other people in an intentional community.” Otherwise known as a giant purple house in Takoma Park with a composting toilet out back and a telescope on the roof. Back before my mother went MIA—excuse me, became Dr. Laredo-Levy, Head of School at Fern Grove Friends School—and my father went ABD (all but dissertation) and decided to “fritter away his talent” (Mom’s words, of course) selling used books.
“I’m not asking you to understand, Cadie. My head’s still spinning, too. But can you at least forgive me?” I could feel Dad’s eyes on me, but I stared at the shrimp, at their pink question-mark curlicues.
“It was a long time ago, and I’ve changed since then,” he said, trying again. “But this changes nothing about us—about me and you. I promise that. Do you believe me?”
I couldn’t stand it—this version of Dad whose voice I didn’t recognize, who was doing and saying things that made no sense. None of this felt real. I still couldn’t make myself look at him and I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to cry or punch something. Dad was watching me, waiting for a response.
Instead, I went up to my room and slammed the door, too. It wasn’t loud enough the first time, so I opened it and slammed it again, feeling like I was even younger than Josh.