Missing You Read online

  “That,” I said, touched in spite of myself, “is so sweet, you guys.”

  “Are you insane?” Ruth asked both boys. “He could beat the crap out of both of you with one hand tied behind his back.”

  “Aw, come on,” Skip said. “He’s not that tough.”

  Ruth said, “Skip, we had to take you to Promptcare once because you got a quarter-inch splinter under your pinkie nail and you wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “Come on,” Skip said, looking embarrassed. “I was twelve.”

  “Yeah,” Ruth said. “You know what guys like Rob Wilkins were doing when they were twelve? Smashing beer cans against their foreheads, that’s what.”

  “Nobody needs to beat anybody up for me,” I said to ward off a sibling-smackdown. “I’m fine. Really. Thanks for the concern.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Mike wanted to know.

  “About what?” I asked. “Rob?”

  He nodded.

  I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t find his sister for him, however much I might want to.”

  “How do you know?” Mike asked.

  Both Ruth and I turned our heads to stare at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  “I’m serious,” he said in a voice that cracked. He cleared it. “I mean, you haven’t tried to find anyone in, what, a year? How do you know you don’t have it back? You’ve been sleeping through the night lately.”

  Everyone, including me, looked at the beat-up wood floor. The fact that I woke up everyone in the apartment with shrieks of unmitigated terror on a semi-regular basis was a fact that had always previously gone unmentioned by mutual agreement.

  “Well,” Mike said indignantly. “It’s true. You seem to be doing better, since you started working with—”

  “Don’t say it,” I interrupted quickly.

  Mike looked confused. “Why not? It’s true. Ever since you started—”

  “You’ll jinx it,” I said, “if you say it out loud.”

  I didn’t know whether or not this was true. But I wasn’t taking the chance. I hadn’t had a nightmare in quite a while. All summer, practically. And I wanted to keep it that way.

  “But just because she’s sleeping again doesn’t mean she’s got her you-know-what back,” Skip said.

  Ruth looked at him. “Skip,” she said. “Shut up.”

  “You know what I mean,” Skip said. “Her powers. You know. To find people.”

  “Skip,” Ruth said again.

  “And what if she does get it back?” Skip wanted to know. “That means they’ll make her come work for them again, right? The government? Or the FBI, or whoever. Right? And then what’s Ruth supposed to do? Find a new roommate?”

  “SKIP!”

  “I’m just saying, if she’s got the ability back, why would she even bother with school and stuff when she could be raking in a fortune, hiring herself out as—”

  “SHUT UP, SKIP!” Mike and Ruth both shouted together.

  Skip shut up but looked defensive about it.

  “Come on,” Mike said to him. “CSI is on.”

  “I hate that show,” Skip complained. “All we have to do is look out the window, and we can live that show.”

  “Then we’ll watch something else, okay?” Mike shook his head as he steered Skip from our room. “Can’t you tell they want to be alone?”

  “Who? Ruth and Jess? What for?”

  The door closed, as Mike tried to explain it to Skip. Ruth, meanwhile, looked at me.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, sounding worried.

  “I’m sure,” I said, and picked up Hannah’s picture again and gazed at it.

  “I can’t believe he had a sister all this time,” Ruth said, “and didn’t even know it. And he really wants to—what? Adopt her?”

  “Be her legal guardian,” I said. “I guess her mom’s a crackhead, or something.”

  Ruth sighed. “Thank God you guys broke up. Right? Because it sounds to me like he might be in over his head. With a missing teen sister and all. Believe me, Jess, you would not want any part of that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess not.”

  Ruth rolled her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “Don’t even tell me you’d help him. You know, if you still could. After the way he treated you.”

  “I wouldn’t be helping him,” I said. “I’d be helping her. Hannah.”

  “Right,” Ruth said sarcastically. And got up to get ready for bed.

  Right.

  Six

  At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, I banged on the door to room 1520 at the Hilton on West Fifty-third Street.

  Rob came to the door looking bleary-eyed, wrapped in the comforter from his hotel bed, his dark hair sticking up in some very interesting tufts.

  “Jess,” he said dazedly, when he saw it was me. “What are you—how did you—?”

  “Nice hair,” I said.

  He reached up and tried to mash down some of the tufts.

  “Wait,” he said. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I called your house,” I said. “Why? Were you trying to keep a low profile? Because Chick was more than happy to tell me where you were staying.”

  “No,” Rob said. “No, it’s okay. I asked Chick to stay there in case Hannah turned up while I was gone. I just…Sorry. I’m not really awake. Here. Come in.”

  I followed him into his room. It wasn’t spacious—no hotel room in New York (that I’d ever seen, anyway) ever is. But it was nice. Rob was obviously making some decent change out of the garage these days, if he could afford digs like this.

  “You want some breakfast?” he asked, still wandering around with the comforter trailing after him, like the train of a bride. “I can order us up some pancakes if you want. Oh, hey, there’s a coffeemaker. Want some coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it would be simpler just to have it at the airport.”

  He threw me a startled glance from the little alcove where the coffeemaker sat. “Airport?” he echoed.

  It was hard not to notice how adorable he looked, straight out of bed. Even with the hair. He kept the room very tidy, too, in spite of the fact that it was just a hotel room. His jean jacket was even hung up on one of those hangers you can’t take off the pole.

  “Airport,” I repeated. “Do you want me to find your sister, or not?”

  He said, still looking perplexed, “Well, yeah. But I thought—”

  “Then I need to go back to Indiana with you,” I said.

  “But…” He’d loosened his hold on the comforter a little in his confusion, and I was awarded a glimpse of his naked chest. It was a relief to note that even though he was a responsible business owner now, he still had a six-pack. “But I thought you said…I mean, yesterday you told me—”

  “I know what I said yesterday,” I interrupted him.

  “But—”

  “Don’t talk about it, okay?” I found that I was hugging myself, my arms crossed against my chest. I dropped my hands. “Let’s just go.”

  He reached up to run a hand through his thick dark hair—which just made the tuft-problem worse. And also allowed the comforter to slip even more, so that I saw the waistband of his Calvins.

  “Okay. But…” He stared at me. Having that blue-gray gaze on me, so searching, so penetrating, was almost more than I could take. I had to look at the floor instead of back at him. “You know where she is?”

  “I seriously don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Can we just go?”

  But Rob couldn’t let it rest at that.

  “Honest to God, Jess,” he said. “I didn’t mean for—I mean, I just thought this whole thing with you saying you can’t find people anymore was to get out of having to work for that Cyrus guy. Like it was last time. I didn’t know it was real. I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t ready for. I don’t want to…to disrupt this new life you’ve built for yourself.”

&nb
sp; Too late for that, isn’t it? That’s what I wanted to ask.

  But what would have been the point? He obviously felt bad enough. No sense rubbing it in.

  Which is not to say I wasn’t glad he felt bad. He should feel bad, after what he’d put me through. I wasn’t about to mention the fact that waking up an hour ago knowing where his sister was, after more than a year of not being able to find my shoes, let alone another human being, had thrilled me beyond words. I mean, that didn’t have anything to do with HIM, really. It just meant that I was finally beginning to heal, after everything I’d been through. That was all.

  And that maybe Mike was right. About the fact that since I’d started working with those kids of Ruth’s, I’d started to dream again, instead of tossing around all night, lost in the throes of a never-ending nightmare.

  “Look,” I said to Rob in a hard voice. Because I wasn’t about to let him know any of this. “Do you want your sister back or not?”

  “I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Of course.”

  “Then don’t question,” I said. “Just do.”

  “Sure,” Rob said, reaching for the phone. “Sure, I’ll call and book you a seat on the same return flight I’ve got. We’ll go right after I’ve had a shower.”

  “Great,” I said.

  And watched as he dialed, asking myself (for the thousandth time that morning) what the hell I thought I was doing. Was this really something I wanted to get myself involved in? I mean, the progress I’d already made, just by being able to come up with an address for Hannah, was incredible. The shrinks back in Washington would have been throwing their hands into the air with joy if they knew, calling it a breakthrough. Why was I trying to push it, by going WITH him to find her? I mean, I could just give Rob the address and be done with it. Wash my hands of it. Go to work with Ruth, teach some more kids that there’s more to life than video games and pizza by the slice.

  But for an hour last night, before I’d been able to fall asleep, I’d lain there thinking over what he’d said. The part about me being broken, I mean. What if he was right? I was pretty sure he WAS right. Part of me had come back from overseas…different. Broken, I guess you could even call it.

  And not just the part of me that knew how to find people in my sleep, either.

  Maybe I HAD been a little hasty to condemn him for the Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head girl. Clearly we had never worked as a couple, Rob and I. First the age difference, then the cultural difference, and then finally, the fact that I’m a huge biological freak had come between us.

  But we could still be friends, like he’d said.

  And friends help each other out. Right?

  Rob didn’t, I notice, ask me any questions on the way to the airport. He was following my advice to a T: doing, not questioning. Once we got through airport security, he bought me an egg-and-sausage biscuit—breakfast of champions—and an orange juice and himself some kind of waffle thing, which we ate in silence in the crowded, noisy food court at LaGuardia.

  Maybe, I thought to myself, he still isn’t quite awake. Maybe he doesn’t know what to make of my sudden change in attitude towards him and his problem.

  Which wasn’t so odd, actually. I didn’t quite know what to make of it myself.

  Ruth had seemed to think she did, though. She’d rolled over at six, when our alarm went off, took one look at me, lying there staring at the ceiling, as I’d been doing since I’d wakened at five, and went, “Oh, crap. It’s back, isn’t it?”

  I hadn’t taken my eyes off the ceiling. There’s a crack up there that looks a lot like a rabbit, just like in those books I’d loved when I was little about a badger named Frances.

  “It’s back,” I’d said quietly, so as not to wake the boys.

  “Well,” Ruth said. “What are you going to do? Call Cyrus Krantz?”

  “Um,” I’d said. “Try not.”

  “Oh my God.” Ruth rose up on one elbow. “You’re going home with him, aren’t you? Rob, I mean.”

  I tore my gaze from the ceiling and blinked at her. “How did you know?”

  “Because I know you,” she said. “And I know how you operate. You can never leave well enough alone. You can’t just save the world. You have to micromanage every aspect of its rescue. That’s why,” she added wearily, swinging her legs from the bed and sitting up, “you’d make a crappy superhero. You’d stick around after the big save to make sure everybody’s okay with what you just did, instead of just flying off into the sunset, the way you’re supposed to.”

  It was good to know I had the support of my friends, I’d said sarcastically. To which Ruth had replied, with her usual early-morning cheerfulness, “Oh, shut up.”

  “Will you tell the kids I’ll be back in a few days?” I asked her.

  “You won’t be back,” Ruth said.

  I’d stared at her. “What are you talking about? Of course I will. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “You won’t come back,” Ruth said again. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. For you, it probably isn’t. But just face it, Jess. You aren’t coming back.”

  “What? You think I’m going to DIE tracking down Rob Wilkins’s runaway little sister?”

  “Not die, no,” Ruth said. “But you just might let yourself get rescued after all.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said darkly.

  I didn’t let her negativity towards the whole thing bother me. The truth is, Ruth’s never been much of a morning person.

  There are flights from New York City to Indianapolis every few hours from LaGuardia. Rob managed to get me onto the one he’d been planning on taking home. It wasn’t a big jet, like the kind they used to shuttle people from New York to LA. After 9/11, the airlines downsized, and now when you fly to Indiana from New York, it’s on one of those small planes you walk out onto the tarmac to get into. They only seat about thirty people, at most. And the quarters are cramped, to say the least. Rob had gotten us seats together—without, I’d like to point out, asking me if that was what I wanted. The flight wasn’t full, and there were plenty of empty rows behind us where I could have gone and stretched out. Well, sort of.

  But I told myself we were friends now, and friends stick together. Right?

  It was a quick flight. I’d barely finished the in-flight magazine before we were landing. Rob just had a carry-on, same as me, so we didn’t have to wait for our baggage to get unloaded. We walked straight out to where he was parked.

  And I saw that he’d traveled to the airport on his Indian.

  “Sorry,” he said when he saw my face. “I didn’t think you’d be coming back with me. We can rent a car, if you want.”

  “No,” I said. It was stupid that the sight of that motorcycle should freak me out so much. “No, it’s fine. Do you still have the spare helmet?”

  He did, of course. The same one he used to loan me back when we—well, whatever we were doing back then. I put it on, then straddled the seat behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist and trying not to notice how good he smelled—like Hilton Hotel shower gel and whatever laundry detergent his mom—I mean, he—was using these days.

  It was weird to be back in Indiana. The last time I’d been there had been over spring break. Buds that had only just been starting to show back then had now burst into midsummer bloom. Everything was lush and green. Everywhere you looked, you saw green. There’s green in New York—trees line almost every street. But the overall color is gray, the color of the sidewalks and streets and buildings.

  Here all I could see was green, stretching until it met a cloudless, achingly blue sky.

  I hadn’t realized, until then, how much I’d missed it.

  The sky, I mean. And all that green.

  When we reached the outskirts of our town, an hour later, I saw that other things besides the buds had changed since I’d last been there. The Chocolate Moose was gone, sold out to Dairy Queen. Same building, new sign.
r />   When we stopped at the red light in front of the courthouse, Rob turned his head to ask me, “Where to?”

  “My house,” I shouted back, over the thunder of his engine. “I need to drop my stuff off.”

  He nodded and roared off in the direction of Lumbley Lane.

  And I soon saw that even the house I’d grown up in looked different, though the only thing that had changed was the color of the trim, which my mother had had spruced up to white from its former cream.

  But the place seemed…smaller, in a way.

  Rob turned into the driveway and cut the engine. I hopped off the back of the bike, then took off the helmet and handed it to him.

  “I’ll call you later,” I said to him. “Will you be at home or the garage?”

  He’d pulled off his own helmet. Now he looked at me oddly—as if he thought he’d done something wrong, but couldn’t figure out what.

  Welcome to my world.

  “What about—” he started to ask.

  “I said I’ll call you.” I didn’t know how else to make him understand that I needed to be alone for this next part.

  He looked a little angry as he jammed his helmet back on.

  “Fine,” he said. “Call me at home. That’s where I’ll be. I should check to see—I mean, maybe she came back by now.”

  “She didn’t,” I said.

  He studied me through the clear plastic screen of his helmet. There was something he wanted to say. That was obvious.

  But he seemed to think better of it and settled for saying instead, “Fine. See you later.”

  Then he turned around and drove away…

  …Just as the screen door on the front porch of my house squeaked open, and my dad came out and went, “Jess? What are YOU doing here?”

  I didn’t tell them the truth. My family, I mean. That I was there for Rob, or that I had my power back…for now.

  Sure, all they’d have to do was call Mikey. He’d have cracked under the pressure eventually—though I’d left him with firm instructions not to say a word to anyone about Rob’s visit OR my apparently rejuvenated ability to dream.

  But I knew it would be a while before Mike succumbed to the peer pressure to tell. Especially if he wanted to stay on Ruth’s good side. Which I suspected he did.