I am not looking for a fight, but well, maybe I am looking for a fight.
I am certainly looking for Katz. She is in her room, Facebooking. She closes the page so quickly when I walk in that I think she was probably talking about me.
“Hey Katz,” I say. Keep it friendly, keep it calm.
“The Vice President came to our house!” she says. “I was just telling all my friends.”
“Are you allowed to do that?” I ask. “Security and all that.”
“It was a private message,” she says.
She is still young enough to think that anything on the internet is actually private.
“Is Mom okay?” I ask.
She nods. “She’s having a lie down. She’ll feel better after she has a rest. What did you do to upset her?”
“Nothing. She just had a go at me for not being ready when the VP arrived this morning,” I say.
“Why weren’t you?” she asks.
Friendly. Calm.
“Because you were supposed to let me know she was coming, and you didn’t say anything,” I say.
“I went looking for you, and couldn’t find you, so I texted you,” she says.
“No you…” I pull out my phone and check it. There it is. The text from Katz. I missed it. My phone is still on silent from last night.
“Couldn’t you have tried a bit harder to find me?” I ask, but it sounds weak.
“So, you’re blaming me?”
“It was an important visit,” I say. “Didn’t it occur to you, when I didn’t message you back, that I might not have seen it?”
“It’s not my fault,” she says. “It’s your own fault. Everything is your fault. Mom, Dad, everything.”
That takes my breath away. I am used to getting blamed, but this goes beyond reason. And I am not sure I am ready for it, so soon after the screaming match with Mom.
“How can this possibly be my fault?”
“You just wanted to get far enough away that you could do what you want with your Secret Service boyfriend and nobody would find out.”
“That is not true, and it’s not fair,” I say. “You just wanted me to stay at home so that you wouldn’t have to when you go to college.”
“I am going to stay at home,” she says. “Especially now. With what’s happened. Your life is all about you, you, you, but there are other people to consider.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “You’re so immature.”
“I know about Penn State,” she says, and I catch my breath.
“What about them?” I ask.
“They sent you a follow-up letter,” she says. “I destroyed it. It would have really upset Mom if she found it.”
“Why were you opening my mail?” I ask, but it is a lame response.
“You were lucky Mom didn’t see it. She’d have opened it for sure.”
I had to give her that. Mom has no boundaries when it comes to our education. I can tell Katz can see she’s scored that one, but she just has to push it.
“If you’d gone to Penn State then Mom wouldn’t have been so unhappy, and Dad wouldn’t have had an affair, and he’d still be here now.”
That is wrong on so many levels that I can barely count them, but the biggest one is her believing that Dad could cheat on Mom. I am so much like Dad and I know that I would never cheat on Cam, for example, if we were to be married, which would never happen because he is way too old for me.
“That is way out of line,” I say, because I can think of nothing else to say.
“And if you’re not interested in Cam, then maybe I am,” Katz says. “He’s such a hunk. Do you think him and me…?”
My sister has the same kind of disconnected thought structure as my mother.
“He wouldn’t be interested in you,” I say, far too angrily and far too quickly, then realise I have played right into her hands.
“Because he totally only has eyes for you,” Katz says. “How sweet.”
“Because he’s far too old for you,” I say. “He’s far too old for me too. And he’s a bit of a goof-ball. But you keep your hands off him. He can’t have his mind on his job with some love-struck child fawning all over him every time he turns around. It’s embarrassing even to talk about it.”
I shut my mouth in a hurry. I have violated one of my cardinal rules. I have told my sister what to do.
You cannot tell Katz what to do.
If she gets even a whiff that you might be trying to tell her how she should behave she will react like a cat faced with a dog, all arched back, claws and hissing.
I had a dream once in which Katz was about to step on a snake and I yelled “Stop!” and she said, “Don’t tell me what to do,” and kept on walking – and got bitten.
The most likely result from me telling her to leave Cam alone is for her to drape herself all over him at the earliest opportunity.
But she surprises me.
“I am not going to,” she says. “I only said that to get a reaction. And I got it. I wouldn’t make a move on your bodyguard. Number one, he’s like an employee and that wouldn’t be appropriate. Number two, I already have a boyfriend. Number three, Dad is missing. Do you seriously think that jumping into bed with the hired help is what’s on my mind right now? What’s wrong with you?”
At this point I give up and turn away. You can’t win an argument with Katz. I even forget to ask her about her new boyfriend. I just hope she doesn’t get so angry with me that she tells Mom about the Penn State letter.
“And I want my diary back,” she yells after me.
I turn back.
“I haven’t got your diary,” I say.
“So, it just happened to go missing just after you arrived,” she says.
“I haven’t seen it,” I say.
“Liar,” she says.
I walk off. I say again, you can’t win an argument with Katz.
Coming here was a mistake. That is clear now. This is not the way to help Mom. The only way to really do that is to find out what happened to Dad.
The only thing stopping me is the scene I know my leaving will cause. I need a really good excuse, and I don’t want to tell Mom that I am going to Los Angeles. She will consider that a waste of time and dangerous.
I can’t find Cam, so I message him. He meets me on the front porch and I ask him to walk with me in the olive grove.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I start crying and totally against all protocol he puts his arms around me and lets me cry on his shoulder. Actually his chest, because that’s all I can reach.
The olive grove is my favourite part of the estate and normally just a quiet walk here is enough to cheer me up or settle me down, depending on what mood I am in at the time. There are two long rows of trees with grey-green leaves that join overhead protectively, to create a sheltered tunnel. At the far end is a stand of dancing daffodils, bright yellow when in season, but at this time of year a broad patch of expectant green. Behind that is a shrub garden grown into hedges, which Katz and I played in like a maze when we were younger. When everything was so much simpler.
“It’s not easy,” I say when I regather myself.
“Your mom?” he asks.
“Mostly,” I say.
“Some people push away the people who love them the most, when they need them the most,” Cam says.
I know this. I have lived this truth for many years, but I am surprised to hear this come out of Cam’s mouth. It sounds like he knows from first-hand experience.
“It’s not really Mom, it’s me,” I say. “I feel so helpless. So useless. I can’t sit around here doing nothing while my father is missing.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” he says, and I hate him for saying that, but love him for saying ‘we’.
“I think there is,” I say.
“I know what you’re thinking and I already think it’s a bad idea,” he says.
“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” I say.
“The sightings of your father. You want to investigate them.”
There has been no shortage of sightings of my dad since he disappeared, keeping the Secret Service, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies busy. Dad and the mystery woman have been spotted everywhere from Mexico to Canada (with one report of them at a naturist resort in Samoa). A psychic from Des Moines says my father has been talking to her from beyond the grave.
The crass stupidity of that supposed psychic and the appalling bad taste and insensitivity of the news channels that reported her story blow my mind.
The problem I think is that my dad looks like a lot of other men his age. Tall, slim, grey-haired, still vaguely athletic-looking. He could be easily mistaken for someone else.
“I’m not entirely stupid,” I say. “I wouldn’t even know where to start with all the crazies.”
“Then you’re right,” Cam says.
“About what?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
I sigh, pointedly. “I googled that woman who disappeared with my father. The reporter.”
“And?”
“She was married. Perhaps her husband knows something.”
“I should try and talk you out of this, but you won’t give up will you?” he says. “You get a whiff of something and you’re like a dog with a bone.”
“He’s a lawyer,” I say. “He lives in Los Angeles. You think you can find out his address?”
“Probably,” he says. “But I can guarantee you that he will have already been put through the wringer by the police, the FBI and the Secret Service.”
“I figured that,” I say. “But maybe he’ll talk more freely to me. I mean we have a connection.”
I don’t say it, but I also know that sometimes people will talk more freely when they don’t feel threatened. There are some advantages to being just a teenage girl.
“I don’t know how you’re going to tell your mother,” he says.
“Easy,” I say, although I know it won’t be. “I’m going to blame you.”
Katz is pretty, like my mom.
I am not pretty, but I’m okay. And I’m okay with being okay. And if anybody is not okay with it, that’s their problem. There’s a lot more going on inside of this girl than what you see on the outside and I bet that’s the same for just about everyone.
When I was younger I sometimes found it hard to deal with the fact that Katz got all the attention, just because of the way she looks. But I got over that. I sometimes figure that God dishes out stuff more or less equally, so if he gives you good looks then he short-changes you in some other department. And if he doesn’t dish out the beauty then he makes up for it with other stuff.
I got brains. I got the ability to figure stuff out, to solve problems. I got a calm, steady nature, I don’t anger quickly, and I’m generally pretty happy. And I got a dogged determination that Dad says will take me a long way in life. If that’s the tradeoff for the pretty face, I can live with that.
Right now I feel pretty damned doggedly determined.
That night I find Katz’s diary. I used the toilet in the guest en suite because Katz was using the bathroom. She must have been using the room earlier and was writing her diary in there. She left it in the wicker basket of reading material, mostly old Time magazines and Reader’s Digests, that have been in there, unchanged since I was a little girl.
I don’t look at it. No matter how angry I get with my little sister, no matter how curious I am about what she spends so many hours writing, I have always respected her privacy.
And maybe a part of me doesn’t want to know. Finding out her innermost thoughts about me might lead to an irreconcilable breakdown of our relationship.
Obviously, she has forgotten where she left it, so I take it, intending to give it back to her. I am almost at her bedroom door when I realise I can’t just give it back to her or she will assume that I read it, and no amount of protest will convince her otherwise.