Tillie and Jake texted all weekend about the rental car.
i called a bunch of rental places, he texted her on Saturday. asked if they rented out a blue chevy malibu recently. no help
Understandable, Tillie responded. They can’t give out that info just like that …
even tried my old man hausmann voice where i sound intimidating. no luck.
He sent her screenshots of spy and action movies. they say you do your best learning outside of school, he wrote, followed by a smiley face. no seriously im learning some crazy stuff.
Saturday night he tried to hack into his mom’s email and see if she’d really been communicating with his dad.
i cant get in! he texted. what kind of parent doesnt use their kids name or birthday for a password. whatever. now i search for those bank statements. maybe ill find something. An hour later he added, no luck.
By Sunday he had grown unhinged.
over a week now. gone over a week. ten days. TEN DAYS!!!! he wrote at 10 a.m.
Only ten minutes later, he added: my dad definitely saw cubicle man do something. or cubicle man is money hungry. but what does jim know? he must be in on it too.
Around lunchtime, he wrote: biking to my dads office. no one is there but I don’t care. cant stay here. cant sit still
Later in the afternoon, she received a series of nonsensical emojis—guy golfing, medical syringe, heart with a bow on it, Israeli flag, unicorn—followed by freakin out freakin out freakin out
On her end, she printed out the important photos in the case and put them all in chronological order. She wrote out a timeline of all the events as best she knew about them. She made a list of all the rental car places in town and noted which ones were close to Jake’s dad’s office so they could go to those first. But it had been ten days since he left home, and they weren’t close to an answer, and a big part of her prayed that by the end of the weekend his dad would waltz through the door and say, “I’m home from my trip, son! Why would you have worried?”
Around dinnertime Jake started to call her multiple times, and she plugged in her phone near the kitchen and went to her bedroom to ignore it. Just for a little bit. She needed a break. She needed life to go back to normal for a few hours.
That night, as Tillie studied her pictures, she got a step closer to finding the missing glasses. Ms. Martinez had been wearing the lost pair, light brown with white polka dots, on March 8, a date recorded on the digital image. Tillie had a picture from that day of Ms. Martinez, her mouth frozen mid-sentence while she held up Deshaun’s sculpture in her hand as an example to the class of how to portray movement, her glasses obscuring her nearly black eyes.
In a picture from the next day, taken when Tillie was waiting for the school bus to come, Ms. Martinez wore those glasses pushed up on her hair like a headband as she headed toward the faculty parking lot. But the next class, March 10, the day that they started to learn about cut-outs and collages, her brown glasses were replaced by her other pair. All Tillie had to do was ask Ms. Martinez where she went that day after the clay sculptures, and then go there, and ask around to see if a pair of glasses had been left by a pretty woman with dark hair. Maybe she’d get lucky.
The array of Ms. Martinez photos covered so much of Tillie’s desk that some of them had slipped off onto the floor.
Tillie heard a light knock at her door.
“I’m busy!” she hollered.
The door opened. For once, it wasn’t her mom.
“How’s it going?” her dad asked her.
He looked at his feet just like she did, she saw.
“Pretty good,” she answered.
“Great,” her dad said.
Tillie attempted to cover the spread of the Ms. Martinez photos on her desk with her hands.
“Look, I know I said this the other day, but … But I’m really sorry I didn’t take you to the doctor’s.”
“Huh?” Tillie said.
“The other day. I really am sorry,” he answered. His big toe twitched up and down inside his sock.
“It’s okay.” She hadn’t even been thinking about it.
“I will from now on.”
“Okay,” Tillie said. Her mom must have really gotten to him this time.
“No, Til, I just—”
Tillie waited for him to finish, but he didn’t.
He paused, standing awkwardly by her door. “Oh, hey—lots of talk this week about the World Cup.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Looks like it’s going to be too hot, so they might have to move locations. Let’s hope they bring it to Illinois, right?” Her dad chuckled.
“Well, I don’t know much about it,” she responded. She could hardly remember ever having been interested in soccer.
“Oh, of course. Sure.”
“Well, not for any good reason,” she added. It wasn’t because of her leg that she didn’t know, she wanted to say. She probably would’ve lost interest in soccer at some point, anyway, no matter what had happened. Come to think of it, her grandpa might’ve given her a camera at some point, accident or not. Maybe he just thought it suited her. And if he hadn’t, she probably would’ve found photography in some other way. “Just not really my thing.”
“Yes, of course. Okay, well, I’ll take you to the doctor’s next time, Til.”
“Okay, Dad,” Tillie said, wanting to believe him.
He started to leave but stopped, turned around again, and said, “Oh, and Vivian Maier was a photographer.” He paused. “Her stuff is great.”
“Really?” Tillie sat up a little straighter.
“Yeah.” He smiled.
“What’d she like to take pictures of?” Tillie asked.
“People. People everywhere. Shopping, playing with their kids, working. And all kinds—rich, poor. She took … I mean, it must have been over a hundred thousand photographs. And this was on film, of course, not digital or anything.”
“Wow,” Tillie whispered.
“Yeah. But she never showed them to anyone while she was alive.”
“Why?”
Her dad shrugged. “I don’t know.” After a beat he added, “She was a bit of an outsider. A loner, I think. Didn’t want attention.”
A loner, Tillie repeated in her head.
He nodded over and over like he did when there was nothing left to talk about. “Okay, Til, I’m heading to bed. Night.” He closed the door, leaving her alone to exhale and let the pictures under her hands go free.
She had to print those pictures of her dad from that morning and search his face. Something was going on with him. Something new.
She had to sleep.
She had to learn more about Vivian Maier and her thousands of photographs.
She had to find out how to go from a bar code on a car window to an answer.
She had to …
Her mom knocked on the door and opened it. She held out Tillie’s cell phone.
“I didn’t pick it up,” her mom said immediately, as if to stop any of Tillie’s protestations before they began. “But that boy Jake is definitely trying to reach you. I wasn’t snooping, I swear! I just saw his name when it lit up!”
Tillie let out a small laugh at her mom. “‘That boy…’”
“What? I just—”
“I know, Mom. He’s just a kid from school, okay?”
Her mom nodded. “Okay, sweetie.” She paused. “You guys have sure been talking a lot. Maybe you should have him over sometime? We could meet him?”
“Sure, Mom,” Tillie soothed her. “It’s not like that, though.”
“Whatever you say.” Her mom’s attempts at trying to now be okay with the “boyfriend” she’d created for Tillie in her mind were so transparent it was funny. She blew Tillie a quick kiss and shut the door.
Tillie’s phone vibrated in her hand. And then it vibrated again, and again.
“What’s going on?” Tillie answered.
“Where have you been?”
“I was—”
But Jake cut her off.
“Forget all other leads. Forget everything else. It happened. He made contact.” Jake was nearly hyperventilating. “He called and I picked up. And I know where he was calling from.”