MY MOUTH WAS dry and lifeless. The rest of my body felt the same.
Dr. Patterson let me sit, and left the room when I wouldn’t answer questions. It wasn’t that I wanted to be silent; I just couldn’t will myself to speak.
The further inside myself I looked, the worse it got. It was like my brain was at the center of a hundred wrestling matches, nerve endings having it out over what I remembered and didn’t remember, believed and didn’t believe.
The dominant parts felt cheated and unsure of who to blame—Dr. Sandoval, or Dr. Patterson, or my dad, or Kaitlin, or Mason, or my grandpa, or myself. The weaker parts wondered if anything had actually happened—the clues, or the Great Purpose, or Mara—or if the entire last week had actually been just a vividly convoluted dream, too perfect for reality, a story I played out behind my eyelids while sitting in the front seat of the Camaro, slowly waiting for all of the thoughts to stop.
All of it looked broken. The past was a dull and fractured kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, out of focus, black and gray images. It wasn’t that I wanted to be unsure, I just couldn’t will myself to understand.
So I sat, the room getting darker as the sun disappeared. I could hear voices talking about me in the hallway.
“—just a confused kid, didn’t mean any—”
“—stations all over the country are still getting calls—”
“—keep him here that long? We’d be—”
“—all the way to Chicago, but he insisted—”
Occasionally I’d shoot a glance across the room where I could see parts of my face in the small mirror, but the person looking back was a stranger. My hair was wild and unwashed, and my face was covered in someone else’s bruises. I couldn’t look for long without wanting to smash it, so I collapsed back into my hands, unmoving, wanting to be as far from myself as I possibly could.
I felt a soft hand on my shoulder, Dr. Patterson, likely to tell me it was back to the cell until they could figure out a punishment for me. Community service, jail time, thousands of dollars in fines . . . it all sounded like the same thing.
“Can we call someone for you, Arthur?” she asked.
I shook my head once.
“Okay.” Dr. Patterson inhaled. “You don’t have to, but we strongly suggest it. In moments like this, it helps to talk to someone who . . . who’ll be honest with you.”
I thought for a long moment. Kaitlin was illegal. Mason might betray me again. Mara would be angry. My auntie and uncle would keep panicking.
“You can do it, Arthur,” she said. “You can talk to someone.”
I sighed. “My dad,” I heard myself say. “I’ll talk to my dad.”
Dr. Patterson moved slowly back toward the door and disappeared, leaving me alone again with the plant.
When it reopened, my father stood in her place.
“Hey, buddy.” He looked exhausted and unsettled, inching toward me. He sat hesitantly in the doctor’s chair. “I heard you wanted to talk to me.”
“You’re here.”
“I had to be. We didn’t know where you were, and when they called . . .” He shifted in his seat. “They thought you were in Albuquerque,” he told the ring, still on the table. “Denver, Omaha, Minneapolis, Kansas . . . someone called from Miami, thought they saw you there, driving a sports car. Karen’s been a mess, all of us have been. You wouldn’t believe these last few days, Arthur. It’s been terrible.” He ran a hand through his hair. It looked like it had been just as long since he’d showered, maybe longer since he’d slept. “And all I had from you was that phone call about your grandfather? This fight to remember of you?”
“I know,” I breathed. “I know.”
I closed my eyes and there it was: the guilt. My father, my family were waiting for me, waiting for answers. They weren’t pretending to be grieving, they were actually grieving—the real and familiar dread of losing a family member—and it was all my fault. When I opened my eyes, my dad was still looking at me.
“So?”
The lights in the room were off, and as the sun continued to disappear, it was getting difficult to see detail around the room.
I took a deep breath. “I fucked everything up.” I exhaled, and took another enormous breath. “I, I ruined it. I ruined all of it. I don’t know, I don’t know what happened.” My breathing scattered, fighting the words, fighting my throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so . . .” He didn’t interrupt me and I felt more tears form under my eyes. “I thought I knew what I was doing. I, I thought I was figuring things out, and it was all gonna be okay, but . . . but it wasn’t. I wasn’t.” And suddenly, I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out now. “I was so . . . so sure, about everything . . . and I came all the way out here, and lied, and . . . but it was wrong. I was so wrong. I don’t even know what I was looking for. I don’t even know . . .”
He let my sentence dissolve into wet nothing. The clock in the room ticked slowly; the sun fell farther outside the window.
“That’s nothing,” my dad said finally. His voice was barely loud enough to hear. “One time I almost bought a plane ticket to Australia, because I thought I heard my dad say something about Melbourne.” I heard him smile. “But, of course, that didn’t make sense. None of it ever did. Just got worse the harder I tried.”
For the first time, I tried looking up into his eyes. They weren’t frustrated or judgmental. They were just looking for me.
“What’d you find?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I told him, my voice beginning to dry.
“You came all the way to Chicago for nothing?”
“I was just wrong about it. All of it.”
“What happened?”
I sighed. “‘Just got worse the harder I tried.’”
He smiled. “Well, what got you out here?”
An image of my first night at my auntie and uncle’s clicked into the kaleidoscope. “He left a little journal, on a page about western tanagers in a book in Tim’s attic, so I figured it must have been a clue or something. He must have known I’d be the one to find it. But it was stupid.”
He looked confused.
“Because he always had that story, about the tanager?”
He shook his head.
I sighed again. “The old Native American story or something he used to tell me, about this village that was in a drought, and they needed to get to this weird, magical river to keep them alive. But the river was through a wood, with all of these—you know, you don’t realize how stupid stories like this are until you’re trying to retell them when you’re older.”
My dad laughed and I almost smiled. “Well, try.”
I swallowed. “So there was a young man in the village, the son of the chief, and they had kind of decided he was the only one strong enough to make the journey. But because he was so vital, they weren’t sure if they wanted to send him out to die, because if he died, then the village was done for, for sure.
“So I guess they decided to wait for a sign from God—or the divine, or whatever they called it—to let them know whether or not they should send him into the woods, because that’s the kind of people they were. And they waited and waited, and nothing happened. And the young man started to get sick, because he didn’t have enough water, but they didn’t want to send him, because they trusted the divine to tell them when.
“Then one day, the boy’s father, the chief, came running into the village, shouting about how he’d just seen a cardinal, which, according to their superstitions, was a sign of good fortune. So they prayed, or whatever it is you do, and they sent the boy into the woods to get water.
“But after the boy left, the chief confessed—it wasn’t a cardinal. It was a tanager. Which isn’t lucky at all; evidently it was common in that area. And the father knew that, and still he lied, to his own son, just for the sake of trying to save his village.”
My dad took it in silently, waiting for me to continue.
“So, yeah. That’s the story. I don’t know if the kid survived or not, but I don’t think that’s the point.”
He didn’t move. “What is the point, then?”
“The point is, I was wrong the whole time. I thought . . . I thought because he told me that story, he was giving me a sign, but in the story, the sign is fake.” I got louder as I spoke. “The point is, sometimes when you think you’re getting a sign, and you’re actually getting lied to. It wasn’t a cardinal. It was never a cardinal,” I said. “It was just a fucking tanager.”
I couldn’t believe how strong and fast the words came out of my mouth. They hung in the air, thick and heavy like a quilt around us. My dad must have been shaken as well, because he didn’t respond. Watching him, I wished I’d never left home. I wished I’d never found the clues, or followed them like I had. I wished I’d never heard the story from my grandpa, or told it again now.
“I didn’t know if I was being brave or being stupid.” His voice cut through the quiet. “But to tell you the truth, the more I’ve lived, the less I’ve understood the difference.”
I blinked up to him.
“Arthur Louis Pullman. A World Away, 1975. It’s not a Native American tale, Arthur; a hooker tells that story to the main character outside of a gas station.” He smirked. “I really would’ve thought you’d read the book by now.”
I sat back in my chair and breathed.
My dad continued. “You’re not that different from your grandpa. Did you know that?”
Hearing him use the word Grandpa turned my insides over.
“He used to take us to church, and I didn’t really get it, so one day, I asked him why everyone would believe in God, if nobody ever saw him. And he said, ‘If they saw him, that would ruin it. It’s the faith in the mystery—that’s the part that matters.’” He paused. “Now, granted, he was a devout Christian, and you’re a bloodsucking atheist—”
I accidentally smiled.
“—but you got his . . . his ability to . . .” He stopped himself and leaned toward me. “He didn’t mean that sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. He meant that it doesn’t matter. He meant that a tanager is an invitation to be extraordinary if you just decide that it’s time for you to be extraordinary.” He swallowed. “And what you’re doing, Arthur . . . signs, or cardinals, or answers, or not. You’re chasing something you can’t see, and . . . and that’s more than most people ever do.”
Outside, the moon was rising, and its light was spilling into the room. I hadn’t realized it for the hours I’d been there, but the Chicago Police Department building was next to the lake, with no skyscrapers to obscure the view. The moon must have been incredibly bright over our heads, because while I couldn’t see it, it was starting to paint the horizon line a soft orange.
“Anyway, I don’t know if they told you, but someone bailed you out. I tried, but resisting arrest is expensive, and I couldn’t quite . . . Either way, someone stepped in.”
I sat up abruptly.
“Sounds like one of your friends from this week,” my dad said, looking toward the door.
I’d been in the station so long I’d forgotten the world around me and moved on from the idea that there might be more to the trip. There was still Ohio, but who would know that? Mara?
My father stood and knocked on the door. A moment later, Dr. Patterson answered. “How’re we feeling?” she asked.
“Better, I think,” my dad said. I shrugged.
“You’re going to be charged with misdemeanor assault,” Dr. Patterson said flatly. “That’s going to come with a fine and some community service time, but I’ve spoken with your father, and Dr. Sandoval, and we agreed. You’re an adult, and . . .”
She let my father continue. “And we think you should finish going wherever it is that you’re going.”
My head restarted and groaned back to life, engines beginning to fire as if the gears were shifting too rapidly upward, grinding against each other to force the machine forward. I didn’t know what I wanted: to go home and be done, or to go on and be frustrated again.
“You’re very lucky, Arthur.” Dr. Patterson still spoke as a matter of fact. “You may not be paying much attention to it now, but . . . a lot of young men don’t get this many second chances.”
I flashed to an image of Jack on the train, how close he had been to being apprehended for nothing.
“So,” my dad said, standing to lead us out the door. “The guy’s here already—”
“The guy?”
“I don’t remember their names,” he said. Names. Multiple. “But it sounds like he was a part of some organization your grandfather was in.”
The room turned to ice. I felt cold water up the back of my spine, chilling realization shooting its way to my brain.
“Something plain, real normal name. Like—”
“Jack?” I said, trying to stop, but the officers kept us moving toward the door. “Was it Jack?”
“I don’t know. He’s waiting for you outside, I figure we’ll—”
“No, Dad, I can’t—” I stopped myself. If Jack was here to bail me out, I was either going to be punished or, even worse, forced to work for them, but if I told him that I didn’t want to go, told him that this was an enemy, that I had enemies, then I’d have to go home. Or, without being bailed out, I’d have to stay in jail. And whatever was in Ohio would belong to Jack, and only Jack.
“—does that sound alright, Arthur?”
I didn’t respond. The final door was in front of us, the continental divide between bad and worse. I didn’t know which side was which. I held my breath as we plunged through it.
But Jack wasn’t waiting for me in the lobby.
It was another man. Short, old, wearing a necktie and a bowler hat, a briefcase to his right, and a British girl to his left.