NINETEEN

Dad didn’t mean to take me to a bar, but that’s what he did. I was five, and we were in the middle of an art project when he decided we needed more supplies. And we couldn’t just go to any art store; we had to go to his favorite one in the East Village. He wanted me to switch from watercolors to acrylics because the colors were better—cadmium lemon 86, cerulean blue 137, permanent sap green 503. Never mind that I’d be covered in paints that wouldn’t wash off—it was all for the sake of art. At least, that’s what he said when he paid for five tubes of paint and left. Then, to improve my chances of becoming the next Picasso, we stopped at Waikiki Wally’s to pray to the art gods.

In addition to saints, Dad taught me there were gods for everything. When the kitchen trash overflowed, we prayed to the garbage gods, hoping they’d take it out. When we ran out of food, we prayed to the delivery gods to bring some. When Mom was in a bad mood, we prayed to the vacation gods for plane tickets and some new luggage. So when Dad said we were stopping off to pray to the art gods, it wasn’t anything new.

“Welcome to paradise!” Dad said, swinging open a huge wooden door to reveal the closest thing to a tropical island I’d ever seen. Huge glass lanterns hung from the ceiling in all the colors from the art store. The one in the corner? Yellow ochre. That one above my head? Burnt sienna. And if the one by the bar wasn’t phthalo green, I didn’t know what was. There were masks, tropical flowers and totem poles. And except for the woman wearing the lei, we were the only ones there.

“Aloha,” she said in a totally monotone voice. “Welcome to Waikiki Wally’s.”

She motioned toward the bar and clomped away, leaving us to island music. Dad ordered something called a “pu pu platter,” which sounded gross. I looked around, and there in the corner was the reason we came: an Easter Island head surrounded by fading fake flowers. It was the art god. I went over and knelt in front of it.

“Hula-ha-ha,” I said to the statue, bowing forward, but nothing happened. “Mekka-mekka-pukka!” I said, even louder. I thought the art gods might hear me better if I spoke up.

Dad knelt beside me.

“What are you doing, Sophie?” Each of his hands held a ceramic coconut with a yellow umbrella and a pink straw sticking out of it.

“I’m praying to the art god,” I said. “Am I saying the right thing?”

The coconut was full of pineapple juice. Foamy and delicious.

“Mai tai, Sophie,” he said, raising his coconut. “The prayer is mai tai.”

We chanted different variations of it in between sipping our drinks. He went high, I went low. He held his notes long, I kept mine short. At one point, I stole the umbrella from his drink, put it behind my ear and did the hula for a minute. When I finished, the guy behind the bar clapped. I followed Dad to the bar and had started to climb up on a stool when a bunch of other men came in.

“Why don’t you go back to the art god, and I’ll bring you the pu pu platter when it’s ready, okay?”

“Sure, but I’m not eating that,” I said. “And you can’t make me.” I was six going on eighteen, and he knew it.

“Make mine a double,” Dad said to the waiter as I walked away. I wondered if he meant double umbrellas.

I wandered around, getting lost in the fake ferns and palm trees, creepy masks and puffed-up blowfish. I was looking for more hula girls when Mom walked in.

“Sophie!” She ran in and grabbed me, folding me into one of her patented suffocating hugs. “I was so worried.”

I wriggled away. “We went the art store and then came here to pray to the art god, see?” I pointed to the Easter Island head.

“I see,” she said. She had that tone in her voice, the one that happened before a fight. “Where’s your father?”

I pointed in his direction. At the time I didn’t wonder how she found us. It was only later, after I learned about his favorite places, that it made sense. He had three favorites, and Waikiki Wally’s was one of them.

Dad perched on one of the bamboo barstools, drinking pineapple juice and chatting with a guy who stumbled. Mom stormed over and tapped Dad on the shoulder, which almost made him fall off his stool. They talked, and she used her hands a lot, I remember that. I also remember that I didn’t want to be a part of it. I never wanted to be a part of it. So I started praying, again.

“Mai tai!” I said. “Maaaaaaaiiiiii taaaaaaiii!”

They both ran over to me.

“Honey,” she said, “that’s enough. I’m taking you home, and your dad’s going to stay here and finish up some . . . business.”

He leaned down, and I reached up and hugged his neck. “Bye, Daddy,” I said.

“Bye, pumpkin,” he said, raising his coconut. “See you soon.”

On the way home, we picked up rocky road ice cream and ate it before the quiche that had to be reheated. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d been in a bar. Once, when I asked to go back to Waikiki Wally’s because I was feeling brave and wanted to try the pu pu platter, Dad said no, that place was inappropriate for someone my age. It made me think about that word, inappropriate, since I loved the big statues, flowered necklaces and the way I’d felt lost in there. Kind of like the way I felt on the inside all the time, but at least there it came with pineapple juice.

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I walked down the basement stairs and grass grew beneath my feet. It was Astroturf, slippery but lush, like descending into a forest. Dad had never met a surface he didn’t make better. Around him, pancakes became faces, doors became murals, and basements were turned into playgrounds that were almost too good to be true.

Paper lanterns bobbed from the ceiling like spaceships and gave the room an aqua and tangerine glow. Lime-green streamers ran from corner to corner in between stuffed clouds made from patchwork quilts. Every inch of every surface was covered in fabric or curly ribbon, patches of carpet or tinfoil. There was even a chair covered with bubble wrap that popped when you sat in it. Everything was old because Dad said found things were the best things. “Why bring home apples and orange juice when you could show up with tricycle wheels instead?” he’d say. Mom never agreed and made him go back to the store, but that didn’t stop him from bringing home bricks instead of bagels anyway.

The back wall was painted plaid. And in front of it, Dad built a makeshift hitching post out of two broomsticks and a rope from which a team of eggbeater horses hung. I should have been amazed by his ability to make something out of nothing, but I was used to it.

On another wall was a bulletin board filled with sketches of inventions, numbers that didn’t make sense and blueprints for contraptions that were probably never built. Quotes by famous physicists and authors hung everywhere next to photos of places he probably never went. And there, in the middle, was a picture of me during Christmas 2000, holding my Holiday Surprise Barbie. I ripped an article next to it off the wall, tore it into tiny pieces and threw them above my head, like confetti.

I heard the basement door creak open, and Finny’s voice floated down.

“Sophie? You okay?” I heard footsteps.

“Don’t come down here,” I said.

“I just wanted to check on you,” he said. “Need anything?”

“Just privacy,” I said. “Keep Peyton out, too.”

“No problem,” Finny yelled down. “But if you need anything, scream. We’ll hear you.”

The door closed, like a vacuum, and the air suddenly smelled like peppermints. I grabbed the photo off the bulletin board and one of the sketches fell off, too. It was labeled “inter-dimensional travel machine.” It looked more like a new version of a spaceship and didn’t come with any instructions, but I loved it anyway. I stuck it in my pocket and walked on a path made of old oatmeal labels and jelly beans, packing peanuts and stickpins. I passed a collection of pogo sticks and stilts, a table of rubber bands and toothbrushes and a huge sculpture made out of tennis balls and putty. It sat on a card table with a sign next to it that read ATOM SMASHER. I was dying to touch it, but it looked fragile, like it had been there awhile. There were two towers, five tiers high, made of tennis balls on toilet paper rolls and connected with Silly Putty that had hardened. I wasn’t sure what an atom smasher was, but I liked the idea of it, particles crashing into each other and forming something else. Like a horse with the body of an octopus. Or a bicycle spaceship. I had moved on to something made of marbles when I stepped on a squeaky hot dog. It let out a wheeeeee, and I kicked it to the side. That’s when I saw a box with my name on it.

If Dad had been there, he would have insisted I wear an eye patch. “You can’t find a treasure box if you’re not properly attired,” he would say. “Even the most amateur pirates have to look the part.”

I lifted the box and would have shaken it like a Christmas present, but it was heavy. So I sat on the floor around it, legs in a V with the box between them. Maybe it was old baby clothes or papers from school. Art projects and poems and things not worth saving. I opened the lid, and dust flew out, making me cough. A homemade postcard sat on top, a Warhol head floating in the middle of a galaxy. Dad must have made it, but Warhol would have liked it. Especially if the galaxy contained celebrities. “It’s better to be a head than a derriere, darling,” he’d say, and then run off to film someone sleeping. I hoped the back of the postcard would say something. It didn’t, but it was what was underneath that counted: hundreds of mixtapes. The ultimate treasure.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “No way.”

I checked the lid again. It still said FOR SOPHIE, so I took out the tapes and looked at them, one by one. Were they full of songs or conversations or both? Did he spend hours picking the right tracks or talking into a microphone? The tapes were titled everything from Chai Tea Catastrophe to String Theory Orchestra. If I hadn’t left my Walkman upstairs, I would have popped them in and listened until I knew him better than I knew myself. Some of the tapes looked older, like he’d bought a pack at a garage sale or taped over ones he had, but some of them were brand-new—tapes made in a time when no one was making tapes anymore. Dad, always and forever the purist.

I grabbed a handful of cassettes and brought them to my face, drinking him in. I traced the cases with my finger, imagining what it would have been like to have been him making tapes for me. I picked one out of the bunch, hoping it was about something meaningful, something he wanted to share that he couldn’t say in person. Instead I got a tape called Gravitons and Gravy. On the inside there was a list of tracks, plus a recipe for making the best gravy in the universe.

I read a few more, knowing I’d have time to listen to them and decode their secret messages later. At a glance, Atomic Antics was full of Adam and the Ants, which I loved, but hoped when I listened to it, it would be more about the atoms themselves. And even though Equation Store was full of songs with numbers in them, I was sure there was more to it. I kept digging around, hoping to find one that was less cryptic, which is when I saw it, stuck to the bottom. The case was cracked and dirty, but that didn’t matter, especially since the word on the cover was one I’d been thinking about for years: Love.

My hands shook as I opened the case. It was stiff, like it was one of the first tapes he’d made. I went to remove the tape, but the entire thing flew out of my hand like a plastic bag in the wind. I chased it until I caught up with it in the corner, underneath a bunch of deflated beach balls. I picked up Love and put it in my pocket. I didn’t have my Walkman, but I wasn’t prepared to hear it. When I thought about what could be on it—a missive or a miss—I wasn’t ready to go there. Not yet. Just like I was never ready when Mom had pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night, even though she said we were doing it for love.

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“You know I love you, don’t you?” Mom would say, tossing the covers back and helping me put my coat on over my pajamas. Most nights I kicked the blankets off in my sleep, and Mom showed up and tucked me in tighter, building a cocoon to keep me in. But then, on other nights, she took me out of bed and put me in the car.

“Where are we going?” I asked as she drove away from our house.

“To find your father,” she said.

“Isn’t he in bed?”

“No,” she said. “That’s why we’re going to find him.”

“Why do we have to go and look for him?” I said. “He’ll come back.”

“Because,” she said, giving me a little squeeze on my shoulders. “No one should be out alone in the middle of the night. Would you like to be out alone in the middle of the night?”

“I’d like it if I were alone in my bed.”

“Smart girl,” she said. “You’ll be back there soon.”

I sat in the backseat with my blanket and pillow. Some mornings I woke up still in the backseat, driving around the city. I felt a breeze or smelled food cooking, morning air blowing in, filling the car with the rest of the world. I liked it better when the windows were closed, when it was just the smell of my blanket and Mom’s flowery lotion. One morning I woke up and the car was parked in the driveway. Mom was in the front seat, drinking coffee. She said she didn’t want to wake me up because I was sleeping so well. Another time Dad was in the front seat, snoring. I guess she didn’t want to wake him up, either. And still other times, he was already home when we got back, a box of doughnuts in his hands and a smile on his face. “My girls!” he’d say. “I’ve been waiting for you. I brought sprinkles!”

At the time, it never occurred to me that this wasn’t normal—driving around looking for your father instead of just having him there, sleeping, making pancake faces when you woke up in the morning.

“You know I love you, don’t you?” Mom would always say. Whether she was taking me out of bed and into the night or trying to make me feel good after Dad left, she always said it the same way, like a quiz. Like she was checking to make sure that even with the chaos in our lives, I knew the answer: Yes.

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I added some confetti into my pocket and walked upstairs. My legs moved slowly, like sandbags. Step, step. Away from the past. Step, step, into the future. The weight of a thousand conversations in a box at the bottom of the stairs. I opened the door and the smell of tomato sauce hit me in the face. Peyton stood at the stove, stirring with a wooden spoon.

“Perfect timing,” she said. “Dinner’s ready.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, my eyes glazing. “I think I have to go to bed now. Like, immediately.”

“You’re not going to tell us about the basement?” Finny said.

My right knee buckled.

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

Peyton put her arm around me, which I would have resisted if I hadn’t been so tired.

“It’s late,” she said. “Head upstairs and take the second bedroom on the left. I’ll be up to check on you soon.”

“Me too,” Finny said, his voice like an echo.

Hours later, I woke up, yawned and stretched my arms over my head. The room was dark, and the blanket was scratchy, like my throat. Finny came into focus, sitting in a chair in the corner.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“One o’clock,” he said. “You’ve been asleep for a few hours.”

“Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I felt bad,” he said. “You went down there by yourself, and I stayed upstairs and talked to Peyton, and when you came up, you looked really upset. I just wanted to be here in case you woke up.”

“You’re reading Dad’s book, aren’t you?” I said.

“Of course,” he said, grinning. “Like you could keep me away from it.”

I could tell he wanted to launch into a conversation about Dad and his amazing brain, but I wasn’t up for it. I flopped a sleeve against my face. Flannel. Like Dad used to wear. I loved that even under extreme duress, my brain knew enough to put me in comfy clothes.

“What are you wearing?” I said, pointing to his jogging pants and sweatshirt.

“Whatever Peyton left out for me,” he said. “Same as you. She’s washing our clothes.”

“Why?” I said. “We only wore them one day.”

“I think she just wanted something to do,” he said. “That or they had travel smell.”

I laughed and sank into my pillows. “We should go to sleep. We have a big day tomorrow.”

“A big day of what?”

“Seeing whatever you came to New York to see,” I said. “I know you’re here to meet my dad, but this is the greatest city in the world. Don’t you want to go to the World Science Festival?”

“That was in June,” he said. “But maybe I could go to the Museum of Natural History after we’ve done some Dad research.”

“Perfect,” I said, even though I was developing another plan that didn’t include Finny. “But all work and no play makes Finny kind of a pain to be around. I’ll talk to Dad’s old coworkers while you hit the library. Then we’ll meet, share intel, and you can go do something cool. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said, yawning. “You know, your dad was kind of brilliant.”

“Is kind of brilliant,” I said. I felt shaky on the inside. “I overheard you, you know.”

“Overheard what?”

“On the stairs,” I said. “Before the basement.”

“Sophie . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t kick Dad out, Mom did.”

“I was going to tell you,” he said. “I wanted to wait until you had some sleep.”

“It’s not your job to tell me,” I said. “That job belongs to Mom.”

Finny sat on the edge of my bed, sinking in as I felt my heart do the same. “Can I ask you a question?”

I nodded as he moved even closer.

“Can I give you a hug?”

I wanted to say no. I wanted to be the girl of steel, the one who didn’t need anyone or anything, but I knew we were past that. Finny knew my truths and hadn’t told anyone. And no matter what amount of weirdness I threw at him, he was still there.

“I guess a hug wouldn’t kill me,” I said, sitting up off the pillows.

And even though he wasn’t that much taller than me, Finny scooped me up like Walt, reaching around and right through to my heart. I coughed and tried to push back a sob.

“Let it go,” he said into my hair. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

I leaned in, and the tears came. My whole body shook as I cried like I did when I was little, like when Dad left. But Finny stayed right where he was. He didn’t bundle me up and put me in the car in the middle of the night or pretend he didn’t hear me. He held on and didn’t let go. All so that I could.