39

IT WASN’T JUST MY FATHER who was missing that fall; it was Dani, too. She never seemed to be home when I phoned and never called back with an answer to all my messages asking if she was coming to visit over Thanksgiving vacation. When I finally did reach her, it was obvious from the startled, peevish way she said, “Oh, hi, Griffin,” that taking my call had been an accident.

She was not sympathetic when I tried to tell her about my father’s eviction and the lousy luck I was having searching for him. She listened awhile in silence before interrupting me: “You know I know it’s bullshit, right?”

“What’s bullshit?” I was thoroughly taken aback.

“All this garbage about you not knowing where your dad is. You steal shit for him, you’re his little right-hand man and everything, and you honestly expect me to believe you have no clue where he’s living?”

It took a whole lot of probing and arguing before she finally told me what this was all about: the Laing folder.

“A few weeks ago Mom got so tired of me asking why we couldn’t move back to the city that she finally told me the real reason Dad had to leave Columbia—that he was such a drunk, he’d lost the whole freakin’ folder for, like, his most important project. But then when she said it was the weekend of my birthday party last year that it disappeared, I totally realized it was you who took it. I mean, I saw you blunder into my room from his study with your backpack. And the more I heard about how screwed up that Laing project ended up getting, the more obvious it became to me you must’ve stolen the folder for that weird business of your dad’s.” Her disgusted sigh blew through the receiver. “I can’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth, Griffin, and I don’t want you calling me anymore. Okay?”

I was so stung by her anger, so shamed by both my guilt and my ignorance, that I could barely speak. The few words I could get out did nothing to convince her that I didn’t even know who Laing was, much less what was in his folder.

“I thought you were on my side,” she said. “I mean, here I am, stuck in this fucking awful Stepford Wives suburb where nothing ever happens, and now it turns out that it’s all because of you.”