Jake opened the door to his house. He didn’t seem surprised to see her.
He shut the door behind him, and came out to her on the porch, leaning against the outside of the house.
“Is your mom okay?” Tillie asked, despite what she already knew.
“I guess she will be,” Jake said. He paused and then added, “They’re getting divorced. He’ll probably continue to stay with Ms. Martinez for now. I think.”
Tillie knelt down to his front step to sit. He joined her.
“It’s nice out.” Tillie looked up at the green trees.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m sorry…” she began.
But before she’d even finished her words, Jake chimed in. “Don’t be.”
“I didn’t—” she started.
“Why didn’t you call me back?” Jake asked.
“Huh?”
“I called you and texted you a bunch. I mean, not at first, but after, like, a week. I tried to catch you a couple times. I called your name once or twice and you ran into the bathroom,” he said. “Abby said she tried to reach you a lot, too. She asked me about you. She thinks you’re awesome.”
“Really?” Tillie couldn’t quite believe it. “My mom took my phone. And I guess I just … didn’t want to see anyone. Didn’t want to be seen.”
“Well, anyway. You’re here.” Jake had bags under his eyes. Even though from afar she’d watched him laughing with his dad, probably trying to pretend he was okay, she bet he’d done some more crying, too.
“Right after all that happened,” he said, “my dad told me how you came to see him. How you yelled at him and those guys.” Jake shook his head in disbelief. “That’s pretty awesome.”
“I told Jim I got my limp from a mountain lion attack.”
Jake snorted, looking like his old self again for a moment. “Oh my God. You’re serious?”
Tillie nodded.
“Oh, that’s brilliant. Ya know, we need to think of other answers you can give people when they ask. You survived an avalanche! Or you fought off a killer octopus or something. Ha!”
She smiled. “Yeah … Not bad ideas, but I think I need to stick to the truth from now on.”
“Yeah … The truth,” Jake said to no one in particular.
“Well, anyway…” Tillie went on, “I should have told you about your dad right away and I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.” She said this quickly so he couldn’t cut her off. She had to say it.
Jake didn’t respond.
“You know, it’s so weird here,” he said after a moment. “My dad comes, picks me up, takes me to lunch. Tells me how great ‘Chrissy’ is.”
“Chrissy?”
“Oh, yeah. Ms. Martinez has a cheerleader name.”
“Wow.”
“And then I come home, and my mom is asking me what he said, and it’s all just … It’s just pretty weird.”
“I’m really sorry,” Tillie said.
Jake paused again, looking up at the sky. “I was so angry at him.” With his elbows resting on his knees, he began softly punching one hand into the other, cracking his knuckles. “That first time I saw him, he sat me down. Told me how he’d met ‘Chrissy’ at our stupid parent-teacher conferences last spring when I first took art, how they became ‘best friends.’ Told me how he couldn’t help what he felt with her … You should have seen me, Tillie. He told me he could take it, that he could take anything I had to say to him and that he’d deserve it. At first, I said to him, ‘I thought I was your best friend,’ which seemed to hurt him. Which was good. And then, I just told him I didn’t understand why he would go off and disappear like that, for any reason. Why he wouldn’t tell me where he was or what was going on. He said…” Jake bit his lip. “He said he couldn’t face me.”
Jake told Tillie that his parents had made a deal: since Jake’s dad had cheated, he would be the one to leave, and he would be the one to tell Jake.
“Your mom made up the work-vacation lie to stall for him,” Tillie jumped in, putting the final pieces together.
“Yup,” Jake said with a tight, stern mouth.
His parents kept making plans for when Jake’s dad would tell Jake, and then his dad would put it off. Jake’s performance at home convinced his mom he was completely innocent of the situation, and so she just kept waiting for his dad to get the courage to confess. Out of anger, Jake’s mom took his dad off the family phone plan, which was why Jake couldn’t reach him.
“That’s why he called from a blocked number. You think he blocked the number of the call from Ms. Martinez’s phone?” Tillie asked.
Jake signaled “yes” with a single nod.
“And when he called from Pins and Whistles you finally saw a number.”
“I guess he had more bravery that night.” Jake continued to crack his knuckles.
Since the family only had one car, his dad rented one for himself—a blue Chevy Malibu. He drove along Jake’s route to school a couple of times, hoping he’d get some courage. After Jake had shown up at his work with Tillie, his dad hid from him, but then jumped in the car, determined to tell him, only to lose his nerve again when he saw Jake. Just as Tillie had suspected, Jake’s dad’s coworkers knew the whole situation, and they had tried to keep Jake away until his dad could handle telling him.
“Basically, my dad’s a huge coward.” Jake gazed out toward the street and the sky. “Why wasn’t someone just straight with me? Divorce sucks.” He put his head in his hands. “And how do I know the lies have stopped? For all I know, he was actually driving toward the school each morning to see ‘Chrissy,’ not to try and tell me. Ya know what? He’s not just a coward. He’s a jerk,” Jake said with a touch of venom, lifting his head up. He squinted in the sunlight and, without his usual wide-eyed expression, he looked much, much older.
Tillie didn’t want to call Jake’s dad a jerk, even though Jake had admitted it already and even though she agreed with him, so she remained quiet.
“But he’s still my dad,” Jake added, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “And my mom’s still my mom.”
They sat in silence and watched the sights before them: the sycamore tree and the forsythia bush in the corner of the yard, the parents strolling by with their little kids, headed to the park for a sweet, sunny Saturday.
“Why are adults so stupid?” she said finally.
“I do not know,” he answered.
A neighborhood cat scrambled by, and a toddler chased it, giggling, stumbling.
“I feel like my dad has been missing for four years,” Tillie said, feeling the words rush out like a wave.
“What do you mean? Your parents aren’t divorced,” Jake said.
“You want to know how my leg really got messed up?” Tillie asked.
Jake nodded.
“I used to be able to walk perfectly,” Tillie said. “And no pain.”
Jake leaned in toward her. “What happened?” he asked faintly.
“My dad…” She tried to speak and had to stop and start twice before it came out. “My dad was being funny. We were in the car. I remember laughing a lot because he was so funny. He was going really fast. That’s what I was told afterward. I…” She struggled to put it all together, to really remember. “I don’t think even so fast, but still, just a little too fast for the weather, because we were late, and my parents both hated being late. They still do.”
She no longer saw the pavement ahead of her or the jeans on her legs or Jake sitting next to her. She saw the snowy trees out the car window. “And we were going to see my grandpa. Grandpa was turning sixty or seventy-something … sixty. Yeah, sixty. And it was just one of those Illinois winter days … There was snow, it was icy, and we were just … going too fast. We were just joking and laughing and in a hurry and we didn’t slow down enough. Or not ‘we.’ Him. He didn’t slow down enough. And when we hit an ice patch we spun and spun,” she said, and just saying the word made her feel dizzy, as if she were in the car again, spinning and spinning and spinning, “and we slammed right into a tree and…”
She saw the slice of black metal as it slammed against her torso. She heard the click her back made when it fractured, and the cry she had let out, and an old memory hit her. Her dad had cried out at exactly the same time.
“My hip shattered. My back fractured. I broke three ribs.”
“Oh my God,” Jake said.
“I know, right?” Tillie shook her head, incredulous at her own story. “I broke a hip! An eight-year-old! Oh, and my pinky toe broke, too,” she added. “Can’t forget that one.”
“Yeah, don’t leave out poor Pinky,” Jake said.
She tilted her chin toward him, but still couldn’t look at him. “And even when the bones healed,” she continued, “somehow things never stopped … hurting.”
“Man,” said Jake. “I’m…” And it sounded like he was going to say, “I’m sorry,” but thought better of it. “So did your dad get hurt, too? Is that why he’s … ‘missing’?”
“No. He’s … not missing like that … Like, he’s just not there. He just couldn’t get over it…” Only as Tillie said all this out loud, finally, did she understand how true it was. “He felt really bad, my mom used to say, back when I used to ask. I guess I don’t remember him much before the accident, anyway, only in these fuzzy memories I wonder if I made up … So maybe he was always … I don’t know. He just can’t look at me. That’s what it is. He doesn’t look at me. Not for more than a second or two at a time. He feels too bad that I can’t play soccer—he loves soccer—or make friends easily, like people might think I’m freakish or not get all I have to deal with, and he feels bad because he thinks I’m weird, I guess. And since he doesn’t look, he doesn’t know I’m actually fine! He doesn’t know me at all.” Tillie looked up and met Jake’s eyes.
“Well … That’s too bad for him, then,” Jake said.
Her phone vibrated on the porch’s cement. They watched it light up and then stop.
“Mom’s on her way,” she said to him.
“So, were you mad at him? Are you?” Jake asked, his face ever-curious.
Tillie paused. “Not mad about the accident. Just the not-getting-over-it part, I guess.”
“Does he think you’re mad about the accident?”
She paused again. Did he?
“I don’t know,” she said, picturing her dad’s face in a hundred photographs. Stricken. Definitely guilty. But was he afraid she was mad? It didn’t seem possible.
“Ya know, there’s something I never told you.” Jake interrupted her thoughts.
Tillie looked at him.
“About my dad leaving.”
She nodded for him to go on.
“A couple days before he disappeared, he and my mom got into this massive fight.” He paused, eyeing her reaction, and then went on. “I mean, they were really screaming at each other. Saying … well, really mean stuff.” He took a breath. “I should have known why he was gone.”
“Maybe you kinda did.” Tillie shrugged.
Tillie pictured how scary it would be if her parents screamed and didn’t just whisper harshly when they thought she wasn’t looking.
“Ya know,” Jake said, “I’m really sad my dad lied to me. But I really don’t think my mom was very happy. I don’t think either of them were.” He sighed. “Are you mad? That I hid a big clue from you?” he asked.
Tillie shook her head hard. “No. Definitely not.”
“Thanks,” he said.
They both looked out at the front yard again. A dozen birds flew through the sky and landed on a telephone line across the street.
“Hey, Tillie?” Jake said.
“Yeah?”
“One more thing.”
“Oh, no…” Tillie said, laughing a little. “What is it now?”
“No, seriously, I have to say this. Ya know how you said you thought you saw me making fun of you?” Jake bit his lip.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I just—”
“The truth is,”—Jake interrupted, holding his hand up to quiet her—“maybe I did.” He looked right at Tillie, contrite. “I honestly don’t remember. And I’d like to think I didn’t, that I wouldn’t do that, but I don’t know. Last year? I was nervous, like, at all times. I did stupid stuff. I do stupid stuff.”
“We all do stupid stuff,” she said.
“You got that right. Well, thanks.”
They both put their legs out straight as they sat on the front step, and leaned into each other so that they were shoulder-to-shoulder, looking out. They sat together for a while, watching the nice day roll by, until her mom pulled up to the curb. Jake stood and offered a hand to Tillie. She took it.
“So no Lost and Found anymore?” he asked her.
“You heard, huh?”
“Well, I noticed you’re missing your most prized appendage,” Jake said.
“Yeah…” She felt like she couldn’t even talk about it. “Things change, I guess. Hey, at least we’re not mad at each other anymore.”
“Yeah.” He waved at her mom and her mom waved enthusiastically back.
“Sorry to disappoint your mom,” he said to Tillie with a big smirk, “but I’m still not your boyfriend, so don’t get any ideas.”
Tillie smiled, and they took a few steps toward the car. “Well, what my mom says usually goes, so … sorry. You’ll just have to accept our love.”
“Poor Tom Wilson, then,” Jake said, chuckling.
“What?!” Tillie stopped walking immediately.
“Oh, come on, you know Tom Wilson is in love with you, right?”
“Shut. Up.”
“I’m serious!”
“You’re so wrong. Tom Wilson is in love with Lauren Canopy. They write each other love notes!”
“What? Are you kidding me? They’re best friends! They probably, like, took baths together as kids. Tillie, seriously? Those love notes he always asks you to look for? The notes you found so easily? They were for you! Lauren Canopy helps him write them! He hoped you would read them! Like any normal person would! Oh my God, I can’t believe you didn’t know this. And here I thought you were an observer.” Jake cracked up, mouth wide in his typical guffaw, which Tillie hadn’t seen in far too long.
“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Tillie felt her face blush scarlet. “I have a limp!”
“Oh, I didn’t realize that also meant you weren’t a girl.”
Tillie punched his arm. “Stop. I’m leaving.”
As she climbed into the car, she heard Jake yell, “Have a lovely day, Mrs. Green!”
“Is everything okay?” her mom asked.
“Yeah,” Tillie answered, turning to her. “Thanks, Mom.”
Her mom’s chin quivered. She put her hand to Tillie’s cheek. “You got it, sweetheart,” she said, tucking a strand of Tillie’s hair behind her ear and out of her eyes.
“He’s a nice boy,” her mom said as she drove away.
“Yeah, Mom, I know,” she said. “But we’re just friends, okay?” Tillie smiled. “We’re friends.”