If Birds Fly Back Read online

  “Criminal masterminds,” Ray adds.

  “Yes! And we are on the run because we are literally too brilliant for anyone to handle.”

  “From now on, I will only answer to the name Mr. Brilliant McBrilliant. Or the Red Falcon!” He actually flaps his arms. We’re attracting curious stares from passersby on the beach; an older man and his much-much-younger wife stop in their tracks.

  I slap my hand on my thigh. “Guys. Pay attention. Ask me about Silver Springs.”

  “Sorry,” Ray says, withdrawing his wings. “So, how terrible was it? On a scale from one to I’m About to Be Eaten by Vultures.”

  “Actually,” I burst, “it wasn’t bad at all. I—”

  “There was Jell-O, then?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I assumed you must’ve gotten free Jell-O or something.”

  “No, I—”

  “Because the last time I visited my nan, I got free Jell-O, and she smoked me at canasta—”

  I cut him off. This is bigger than desserts. I adjust to close-up. “Ray. I saw Álvaro Herrera.”

  I expect Cass to drop her bronzing oil or Ray to drop his jaw. I get neither.

  “So . . .,” Cass says. “He is . . . who?”

  Slowing my speech and enunciating, as if this will do the trick, I say, “Ál-va-ro Her-rer-a.”

  “Nope,” Ray says. “Still don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on,” I say, flicking off the camera. “Really?”

  “Wait, wait,” Cass chimes in. “Didn’t you tell me about him? Famous writer guy. What’s that website: findalvaro.com? You can submit a video of him and win, like, a thousand bucks.”

  “Thank you,” I say, gently punching Ray’s shoulder. “At least one of you was paying attention.”

  Cass says, “Well, did you get a video, Camera Girl?”

  That’s one of her nicknames for me. Half of me likes it, because it comes from a good place; the other half hates how I sound like the subject of an endangered species documentary. Behold, the elusive Camera Girl in her natural habitat!

  I shake my head and straighten out a curl, press it between my lips.

  “Ugh,” Cass moans. “Why not? Do you know how many Pie in the Sky croissants that would buy?”

  “Um, yes,” I admit. “We could fill the bottom of a swimming pool.”

  “Then what’s the deal?”

  All during high school, I’ve carried my camcorder everywhere, gathering images like magpies collect shiny objects. How can I explain that seeing Álvaro means more to me than every single one of those images combined? That it has everything to do with my sister? Whenever I get into a situation like this, I picture Brad Pitt in Fight Club, except he’s saying: “The first rule of Grace’s disappearance is you do not talk about Grace’s disappearance.”

  I settle for a white lie: “I—um—just couldn’t get my camera out fast enough.”

  “But he’s definitely alive?” Cass says.

  “Or definitely a ghost walking among us.”

  “Don’t be creepy.”

  “In that case,” Ray concludes, “we’ll meet you outside the lobby in the morning.”

  I cock an eyebrow. “You can’t be serious.”

  He smiles with all his teeth. “We never joke about celebrities.”

  Around five o’clock, just before biking home from the beach, I check my texts: eight panicked messages, all from MomandDad.

  Where are you?

  Please call when you can.

  Linny, you have a curfew.

  Linny. Call in the next fifteen minutes.

  It escalates from there.

  I call them “MomandDad” because, in the weeks following Grace’s disappearance, my parents started becoming the same person, as if their unanimity would somehow hold our family together. They’re developing similar faces: tight skin, fake smiles, shiny cheekbones. Mom’s skin is five shades darker than Dad’s, but if you squint, the color differences blur. Even before Grace ditched us, they liked uniformity in everything. Case in point: most houses on our street are painted a tasteful Dolphin Egg Blue, and they like that. “Seriously,” Grace used to say, “what the hell is a dolphin egg?”

  Parking my bike, I check our mail (no letters from my sister, again) and have barely stepped onto the porch when Mom swings open the door with “Why didn’t you return my text messages?” Lysol fumes trail from the kitchen. We have a cleaning lady, but Mom now insists that Ella misses spots, that merely clean isn’t good enough. I think she’s trying to scrub out every stain my sister left behind, to give me a stable environment or whatever.

  “I—I didn’t hear it ring,” I say.

  “Then turn it up louder.”

  Inside, I flop belly up on the living-room couch, and she hovers over me, her nose razor-sharp from this angle, all her curls pinned in a knot at the back of her head. “Really, Marilyn? Ella just had those pillow covers dry-cleaned. . . . She was supposed to, at least.” Although the outside temperature is trending toward ninety degrees, Mom shows no evidence of sweating in her gray pantsuit (a perfectly reasonable outfit for cleaning?). If she has one superpower, besides her uncanny ability to stress me out, it’s her freakish tolerance for the Miami heat. “And you’re all drippy. And sandy. Those pillows are pashmina,” she says, as if the word should resonate.

  When I film people, I often focus on their mouths. Most directors say that “the eyes have it,” but I disagree. Mouths straighten out in anger and purse in frustration and pucker in love. From below, I can see all the way into Mom’s mouth: the arc of its roof, the sharpness of her molars, how wide she opens her jaw when she speaks—like an anaconda accommodating its prey. I start mind-filming the scene: on set there would be a great storm cloud behind her. A tornado or a hurricane.

  “Well,” she says, “dinner’s in fifteen. You can tell us all about your day at Silver Springs.”

  I roll over and firmly press my face into the pillows. Mom wasn’t kidding: they do smell clean, like spring. I hear her heels click-clack back into the kitchen, then the frustrated snap of rubber gloves, the suctioned pop of the cleaning-solution bottle, opening, spilling again onto white tile.

  Mom is laying silverware on the table, and she no longer sets a place for Grace; it makes me nauseated.

  It’s a Monday—and we used to grill suya on Mondays (from Grandpa’s spice mix recipe). We are now a take-out family: Chinese noodles, Mediterranean deli grape leaves in plastic boxes, pizza and more pizza, and did I mention pizza? Tonight it’s hot dogs with ceviche (trust me, the combo works) from one of my favorite restaurants in town. Mom looks like she wants to disinfect everything before we eat it, but I dive right in. I’m tempted to shout at her: And I’ve only washed my hands seven times today! Only seven times!

  What makes you stay silent when every inch of your body wants to scream?

  Dad is still in his white doctor’s coat, his blondish hair slicked to precision. “Excellent flavor profile,” he says, biting into his hot dog. We discuss food a lot to avoid discussing other things. I’m not sure that any of us has said Grace’s name out loud in months.

  And I can’t exactly talk to them about their work—because I have been forbidden to say “vagina” at the dinner table (although I hardly think it’s a dirty word). MomandDad are gynecologists. Every adult on my dad’s side is a doctor. Like swallows, this family has a predetermined life cycle: Miami to Princeton to Miami again. A recent article in the Miami Home Journal called Dad’s work “majestic,” a peculiar adjective that should be reserved for deep-sea photographers, ballerinas, and unicorn trainers—not people who spend most of their waking hours examining vaginas. Mom graduated second in her class at Princeton Med (just above Dad). Although born in Florida, she’s always talking about how different this country is from Nigeria: “There were so few women practicing medicine in Lagos. So few! I wanted the best for myself—the best for you girls.”

  You girls—meaning Grace and me. MomandDad th
ink we should be doctors, too, and that’s 80 percent of the problem. I haven’t told them about The Left-Behinds yet. My goal is to finish it by the end of August so I have time to tweak it before applying to study film at UCLA. MomandDad won’t take it well—film school, my screenplay, none of it.

  “So,” Mom says, eating her hot dog with a knife and fork. “Meet anyone nice at Silver Springs?”

  Against my better judgment, I tell her about Álvaro Herrera.

  “That pervert writer?” she asks. “Didn’t he write that really trashy book?”

  Leave it to Mom to bypass THE FACT THAT HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD and jump straight to sex. I roll my eyes and wish I could delete my words from the scene. “He’s not actually a pervert.”

  “Anyone who writes about intercourse like that is a pervert.”

  “Mom. Isn’t sex, like, your business?”

  She purses her lips. “There’s a difference.”

  According to MomandDad, discussing sex in a medical capacity is acceptable. They take issue with the practical application, especially when it comes to their daughters. Not that I’m having sex. My experience with guys extends to two quick groping sessions under the school bleachers and one liquor-propelled tongue tangling last winter, which ended in Todd Banbury vomiting all over my new jean jacket. I’m still very much the Virgin Marilyn.

  Dad says, “You really need to meet residents more suited to your life goals. Why not find some retired doctors to network with?”

  Right, because that’s what volunteering at Silver Springs is about: beefing up my Princeton premed application and networking with other do-gooders who’ll grow up to pursue do-gooder careers (and make lots of money, have Dolphin Egg Blue houses, yada yada yada). At least, that’s what this summer was about. Now I’m focused on figuring out where Álvaro went and why he came back, along with finishing The Left-Behinds.

  Mom’s palms are pressed together, a prayer. “Please, you need to make an effort. The biggest barrier between you and Princeton is your attitude. Attitude, attitude, attitude! What am I always telling you about networking? Every encounter is an opportunity.”

  “Got it.”

  “You’re so close.”

  “Yep.”

  “So close.”

  “Oh wow,” I say, “this hot dog is supertasty,” and they both agree. I wish I could fight with them but I can’t. Not yet. For one, Grace always flung herself into the front lines—saving me from the impact—and I never learned the art of combat. But the main reason is, my sister didn’t leave a note for MomandDad. She only left one for me.

  I just have to get away for a while, okay? Feed Hector 4-5x a week, pls.

  Hector is Grace’s pet box turtle who she found injured near a pond a few miles away and was nursing back to health. My sister dictated care instructions for a flipping turtle, but didn’t say good-bye to our parents.

  So I had to tell them.

  I had to show them the message in her handwriting. I had to watch as their souls tried to escape from their mouths. I had to memorize the take-out menus; answer questions for missing-person reports; look at my mother on the couch, her hair zigzagged around her like lightning bolts, as if she’d spent the last few hours trying to pull it out. I remember she didn’t smell like Mom—not like rosemary and latex gloves. She smelled like sadness. (That’s when I learned that sadness has a smell.)

  Now we jump every time the phone rings. We clench our hands at news reports about missing girls. We leave the porch lights on all night, just in case she comes home.

  My family is a newly formed tripod. Any little thing could topple us.

  THE LEFT-BEHINDS (SCENE 2)

  CARSON FAMILY GARAGE

  Full color.

  LINNY (ten years old) and GRACE (twelve) are crawling through a labyrinth of cherry planks—a massive bird’s nest.

  LINNY (Voice-over)

  Remember the summer Grandpa died, and we got all his woodworking equipment?

  GRACE (Voice-over)

  God, that got so ridiculous. Dad was always complaining about how much money he’d get for the wood on eBay.

  LINNY (Voice-over)

  Yep. The garage was such a mess.

  In the center of the nest is a clear space with a little movie set—two feet by two feet of plywood dolled up with wallpaper scraps and flowers. Balls of clay are rolled into miniature people. LINNY and GRACE arrive in the center. LINNY provides stage directions while GRACE maneuvers the clay people around the set.

  CLOSE-UP—

  GRACE’s back: in places, smooth skin gives way to puckering, as if something is growing beneath.

  LINNY (Voice-over)

  That world made me so weirdly happy. You know, being the director and the scriptwriter. Not just Camera Girl.

  GRACE (Voice-over)

  But you remember what happened next, right?

  LINNY (Voice-over)

  Of course I remember.

  CUT TO—

  CARSON FAMILY DRIVEWAY

  DAD cracks the movie set in two, maybe thinking it is junk. MOM leaves the pieces by the mailbox for the garbageman. It is a clay people massacre.

  GRACE (Voice-over)

  Want to know a secret?

  LINNY (Voice-over)

  Yeah?

  GRACE (Voice-over)

  (whispering)

  I’m still not over it.

  4.

  Sebastian

  “This is all hypothetical, of course. Which means that one day, it could be proven true.” A Brief Compendium of Astrophysical Curiosities, p. 340

  “Death by peanut butter toast?” Micah says, after I’ve sneaked out of my house and into his.

  “How tragic is that?” I say.

  “That’s like ‘I decided to take a piss in the middle of a field and accidently peed on an electric fence and died’ type of level.”

  My flight to Miami leaves in two hours and forty-five minutes. In the meantime, I’m recounting this morning’s events to Micah as he fights off enemy troops in Dark Ops Resolution, our favorite video game. The boom-boom-boom of semiautomatic weapons fills his basement.

  I’ve just told him about spending the summer in Florida. He looked confused. Then pissed. And now he’s pretending he’s over it and is mainly focused on securing the high ground behind the bridge.

  I left out the small, insignificant little fact that Álvaro Herrera is my dad, except he doesn’t know he’s my dad, and now I’m traveling to Miami to tell him. I don’t say anything because 1) It’s a heaping gulp of words, 2) Micah would lose his shit, and 3) We cannot simultaneously lose our shit. I’m still working out answers myself.

  I mean, where has Álvaro been?

  A THEORY-IN-PROGRESS FOR NEWLY DISCOVERED FATHERS:

  All hypotheses are fair game.

  He could have mysteriously disappeared like those astronauts in “And When the Sky Was Opened”—the best episode of The Twilight Zone.

  Or maybe he’s a time traveler—actually gone a few seconds, but everyone thinks he’s been gone three years.

  “Incoming! Incoming!” Micah yells. The whoosh of a grenade launcher and then “God! Shitting! Damn it! Where’s your head, dude? You’re killing us.”

  “We still have half our troops.” The sound of a bomb blast. “We still have a third of our troops.”

  Micah’s thumbs dart all over the controls. He’s a finger ninja. “And you’re volunteering at an old-people’s home? Jump left! I said left! I bet you’ll meet an eighty-year-old babe with a healthy appetite for younger men.”

  “Jesus, Micah—”

  “God damn it, Sebastian! Left! With an L! She’s going to fall so head over heels in lust for you that she’s going to write you into her will. ‘To my teenage lover, I bequeath you my cardigan sweaters and set of wooden golf clubs.’”

  “You’re going to make me barf.”

  “I’m just saying, you’re undermaximizing your dating potential by missing out on the over-eighty demographic. Somethin
g to think about. LEFT!”

  “Bueno, got it, got it.”

  “I’ve stuffed your suitcase full of condoms.”

  “What?”

  “And your wallet. There are three in your wallet. DO YOU SERIOUSLY NOT KNOW THAT LEFT IS DIFFERENT FROM RIGHT?”

  We curve around the abandoned amusement park, staying low. It’s hard to focus.

  Partly because I keep thinking about my eighth-grade field trip. My class went to the California Science Center to see bodies without their skin—nothing but muscles and veins and bones. That’s how it feels: like I’ve been stripped down. Like my insides are no longer insides, but I don’t want everyone to see the mess.

  And also because I’m going to be thousands of miles away from Micah this summer, and we’re going to different colleges this fall (me: Cal Tech for astrophysics, him: Berkeley for God knows what). Say what you will, but bromances are real. We’ve been friends since fifth grade, when his Christian missionary parents adopted him from a Korean border town. One of his favorite anecdotes is about the origin of his name: “It was Chung-Hee, but in their infinite wisdom, my parents thought that wasn’t American enough, so they named me after a rock instead. Personally, I would’ve liked ‘Bald Eagle.’ Might as well go full-out.”

  To his credit, Micah goes full-out on everything. Like last year when he decided that not being a rocker couldn’t stop him from looking like one. The result: hair buzzed short in the back but long enough in the front to braid.

  I kind of envy him.

  Blood splatters all over the screen. Micah throws down the controls and sighs. “Dude. You suck.”

  “You were always better at this game.”

  “Don’t say were.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say were. Like you’re dying or something.”

  I push his shoulder. “You ol’ softy.”

  He shrugs me off and looks at the clock. Two and a half hours until takeoff.

  I load my suitcase, which is twenty-eight condoms heavier than at last check, into the back of his rusted-out Ford Fiesta. We drive with the windows down.