Hold Tight
Mike took the stairs two at a time. He felt a small pang in his knee, an old injury from his hockey days. He’d had it operated on a few months ago by his friend, an orthopedic surgeon named David Gold. He told David that he didn’t want to give up hockey and asked him if playing had caused the long-term damage. David gave him a prescription for Percocet and replied: “I don’t get a lot of ex-chess players here—you tell me.”
He opened Adam’s door. The room was empty. Mike looked for clues as to where his son had gone. There were none.
“Oh, he wouldn’t . . . ,” Mike said out loud.
He checked his watch. Adam should definitely be home by now—should have been home the whole time. How could he leave his sister alone? He knew better than that. Mike took out his cell phone and pushed the speed dial. He heard it ring and then Adam’s voice came on and asked him to leave a message.
“Where are you? We need to leave soon for the Rangers. And you just left your sister alone? Call me immediately.”
He pressed the END button.
Ten more minutes passed. Nothing from Adam. Mike called again. Left another message through gritted teeth.
Jill said, “Dad?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Where’s Adam?”
“I’m sure he’ll be home soon. Look, I’ll drop you off at Yasmin’s and come back for your brother, okay?”
Mike called, left a third message on Adam’s cell explaining that he’d be back soon. He flashed back to last time he had done this—leaving repeated messages on the voice mails—when Adam had run away and they didn’t hear from him for two days. Mike and Tia had gone nuts trying to find him, and in the end it had been nothing.
He better not be playing that game again, Mike thought. And then, at the very same moment, he thought: God, I hope he’s playing that game again.
Mike took out a sheet of paper, jotted down a note, left it on the kitchen table: ADAM,
I’M DROPPING JILL OFF, BE READY WHEN I GET BACK.
Jill’s backpack had a New York Rangers insignia on the back. She didn’t care much for hockey, but it had been her older brother’s. Jill cherished Adam’s hand-me-downs. She had taken lately to wearing a much-too-large-for-her green windbreaker from when Adam played Pee Wee hockey. Adam’s name was stenciled in threaded script on the right chest.
“Dad?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“I’m worried about Adam.”
She did not say it like a little girl playing grown-up. She said it like a kid too wise for her years.
“Why do you say that?”
She shrugged.
“Has he said anything to you?”
“No.”
Mike pulled onto Yasmin’s street, hoping that Jill would say more. She didn’t.
In the old days—way back when Mike was a kid—you just dropped kids off and drove away or maybe waited in the car for the front door to open. Now you walked your offspring all the way to the door. Normally this bothered Mike somewhat, but when there was a sleepover, especially at this relatively young age, Mike liked to check in. He knocked on the door and Guy Novak, Yasmin’s father, answered.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Hey, Guy.”
Guy still wore his suit from work, though the tie was undone. He wore too-fashionable framed tortoiseshell glasses and his hair looked strategically mussed. Guy was yet another father in town who worked on Wall Street, and for the life of him, Mike could never figure out what any of them did. Hedge funds or trust accounts or credit services or IPOs or working on the floor or trading securities or selling bonds, whatever—it all became one big blurry mass of finance to Mike.
Guy had been divorced for years and, according to the scuttlebutt Mike got from his eleven-year-old daughter, dated a lot.
“His girlfriends always kiss up to Yasmin,” Jill had told him. “It’s kind of funny.”
Jill pushed passed them. “Bye, Dad.”
“Bye, pumpkin.”
Mike waited a second, watched her disappear, then he turned to Guy Novak. Sexist, yes, but he preferred to leave his child with a single mom. Something about his prepubescent daughter spending a night in the same house with only an adult male—it shouldn’t matter. Mike took care of the girls sometimes without Tia. But still.
They both stood there. Mike broke the silence.
“So,” Mike said, “what do you have planned for the night?”
“Might take them to the movies,” Guy said. “Ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery. I, uh, hope you don’t mind. I have a girlfriend coming out tonight. She’ll go with us.”
“No problem,” Mike said, thinking: Even better.
Guy glanced behind him. When he saw both girls were out of sight, he turned back to Mike. “You got a second?” he asked.
“Sure, what’s up?”
Guy stepped outside onto the stoop. He let the door close behind him. He looked into the street and put his hands deep in his pockets. Mike watched him in profile.
“Everything all right?” Mike asked.
“Jill has been great,” Guy said.
Mike was not sure how to react to that so he stayed silent.
“I’m not sure what to do here. I mean, as a parent, you do all you can, right? You try your best to raise them, feed them, educate them. Yasmin already had to deal with a divorce at a very young age. But she adjusted to that. She was happy and outgoing and popular. And then, well, something like this happens.”
“You mean with Mr. Lewiston?”
Guy nodded. He bit down and his jaw began to quake. “You’ve seen the changes in Yasmin, haven’t you?”
Mike opted for the truth. “She seems more withdrawn.”
“Do you know what Lewiston said to her?”
“Not really, no.”
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again. “I guess Yasmin was acting up in class, not paying attention, whatever, I don’t know. When I confronted Lewiston, he said he gave her two warnings. The thing is, Yasmin has a little facial hair. Not much, but you know, a bit of a mustache. Not something a father would notice, and her mother, well, she’s not around, so I never thought about electrolysis or whatever. So anyway he’s explaining chromosomes and she’s whispering in the back of the room and Lewiston finally snaps. He says, ‘Some women display male traits like facial hair—Yasmin, are you listening?’ Something like that.”
Mike said, “Awful.”
“Inexcusable, right? He doesn’t apologize right away because, he says, he didn’t want to draw more attention to what he said. Meanwhile every kid in the class starts cracking up. Yasmin is beyond mortified. They start calling her the Bearded Lady and XY—for the male chromosome. He apologizes the next day, implores the kids to stop, I go in, shout at the principal, but now it’s like unringing a bell, you know what I mean?”