The morning they were to leave for Iowa, she visited her sick father.
The house was heavy with his illness—water ticking in the sink basin, her mother’s radio burbling in a back room. The house was cold because his medication made his body scream with heat, and Alex pulled a coat around her as she crossed into the living room. Her father sat in his favorite chair, sweating, his teeth chattering. He wore a shirt that read MY DAUGHTER IS A JASPER COLLEGE TIGER.
“Hi, Daddy. How have you been?”
The man’s eyes were rimmed red, and the strands of his thinning hair were pulled away from his forehead. She touched him there, pushed his moist hair up with her palm, blew softly onto his cheeks.
“The same, Allie,” he said. “Always the same.”
“Mom have you doing chores?”
The man smiled weakly. Even this was a task. “She’s good to me. Don’t talk about your mother like she isn’t here.”
“Hey, Mom.”
Alex turned and saw her mother. She had been crying, as she usually did in the mornings. A Kleenex was balled in her fist, and her nose glistened. “My girl.” The woman came over and wrapped Alex up in a hug, and for a skittish moment she thought, I won’t go. I’ll stay here with them and I won’t finish the class.
But then it passed and her mother stepped back to observe her.
“Skinny!” she said. “Have they been feeding you over at that college?”
“Yes, Mom,” Alex said. She drifted into the kitchen, opened a cabinet and took out the Ovaltine, and filled her favorite VERMONT: FREEDOM AND UNITY glass with milk. This, all of this: familiar, safe.
“He’s declining,” her mother said now, her voice at a whisper. Both women were in the kitchen, the morning light bleeding through her mother’s grapevine curtains above the sink. Alex turned and stared through the slit at the white foaming trees in her old front yard. “When you go off to Harvard, Alex, I just don’t know what we’ll do. What I’ll do.”
“What if I don’t go to Harvard?”
She felt her mother close in on her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . .” She stopped. She didn’t know what she meant, not exactly.
“What’s wrong with you, Alex? What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on, Mom. Nothing.”
“Something is. I can see it.”
“It’s . . .” A boy, she wanted to say. A new boy. But that would have only been part of it. A small part.
“It’s that class, isn’t it? That evil man. I told you not to get involved with him.”
“No,” Alex said, maybe too defensively. “It isn’t that.”
“Then what?”
Alex opened her mouth, wanted to say something, to tell her mother that this morning she would go off to a place she had never been, would board an airplane for only the third time in her life with someone who was still a stranger to her, and together the two of them would try to solve a twenty-year-old mystery. It was comical even to her.
“I just want you to know I love you,” she said. “Whatever happens, whatever comes at me, just know that I love you both more than anything.”
Her mother’s chin quivered, one tear toppling over and sliding down her face. “Well. I’m sure your father will be pleased that you took some time to check on him.”
Her father. Alex poured the rest of the chocolate milk out and went back to him.
She leaned down, got close to his ear. “I’ll come back to see you in a few days, Daddy. I promise.”
The man finally turned and looked at her. Smiled again, his lips cracking in places, the purple skin underneath showing through. It was as if the cancer were tearing him apart.
“It’s okay, Allie,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Then she was gone. She had a plane to catch.
* * *
He was waiting for her in front of Culver, his backpack slung across his shoulder and the note cards out. He tapped his foot nervously, mumbling to himself as she approached him from behind. “Don’t even know the plays yet, Keller?”
He turned on her. She knew by his eyes that he hadn’t slept. “Just ready to get going,” he said.
“Do you think the others . . .”
“No,” he said. “It’s only us. We’re the only ones brave enough to finish it.”
“Or crazy enough.”
They walked toward the east campus, where Keller’s pickup waited to take them to the airport. They had pooled all their money together—five hundred and eighty dollars, just enough to last them until Sunday.
“You okay?”
Alex looked up. “Yeah, just thinking.”
“You scared?”
She thought about the question. Turned it around in her mind and said, in a voice as pale as a whisper, “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
And with that, Keller took her hand and they went out together into the unknown.