Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (2 page)

“Oh good lord, Roo, you’re not buckled?” Mom shrieks. “Buckle up! Buckle up! Buckle up! Mad, help her! Quick, quick! Hurry!”

Mom’s way more scared of small planes than I am. But Roo’s not scared at all. Roo isn’t scared of anything. She’s not even scared of The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter, which she’s pulling out of her little backpack now that I got her buckled. It’s the last thing in the world I want to see because it’s the thing I’m most scared of, the thing I’ve been most scared of ever since we got it in April. The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter is what I call the last letter Dad sent from La Lava before he stopped contacting us at all. That’s when The Weirdness began. After that we didn’t get any more letters or phone calls or emails from him. For a while Mom kept sending emails, kept leaving voice mails at
La Lava Resort and Spa. For a while I kept writing letters. Roo, of course, never stopped sending coded notes to Dad. But all we got in return were phone calls from some official person at La Lava, informing us that Dad was deep in the jungle and out of contact, and that he was doing very important work about which he felt very passionate, and that he sent us all the love in his heart and would be in touch soon, and was very sorry to keep extending his trip this way.

“All the love in his heart?” Mom repeated suspiciously.

“Indeed,” said the extremely calm and beautiful voice on the other end of the line, which I know because Roo and I snuck upstairs to listen in from the phone in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. We were dying to figure out more about The Weirdness. Roo said I had to start thinking like a detective. I said what about her, didn’t she have to start thinking like a detective too? And Roo said she already did, obvi.

The voice on the phone was a woman’s voice, and it had some kind of slight accent but I couldn’t tell what kind. Actually, even though it was a calm and beautiful voice, it was also kind of a chilly voice. And what the voice from La Lava said
was
suspicious, because Dad would never say something like “All the love in my heart.” He’d say, “I love you with all the bananas in my brain” or “I love you like a chair loves a table.” But he would
never
say “All the love in my heart.”

“I’m paraphrasing, of course,” the voice said in its flat, elegant way, and then added, “Dr. Wade sends his regrets that his greetings to you can’t be more personal.”

We were used to it, sort of, because sometimes Dad went to look for rare birds out in The Middle of Nowhere so he could track them and count them and study their behavior and stuff. Then we’d have
to wait a little while for him to get somewhere where he could call or email or even just mail letters. We missed him but it was okay because, as Mom always said, Being the Bird Guy is Part of What We Love Him For, Right, Girls?

But. It had never been like this before. It had never been seven months away from home and three months without contact. It had never been The Weirdness. It had always been a month at most. A month was no problem. A month we could do. When Dad headed off to La Lava and said it would just be a month, we didn’t think it was such a big deal.

I feel stupid now, that we just said goodbye and let him go and didn’t even worry.

And as Roo smoothes out The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter on the folding airplane tray table, I refuse to look at it. I don’t want to see the way Dad decorated the page with badly drawn flowers and vines as though he’s a little girl (Roo and I can both draw
way
better than that). I don’t want to read the bizarro poem that makes absolutely no sense. I don’t want to think about it at all, so that’s what I’m doing. Not thinking about it.

Roo strokes the letter and bites her tongue in the corner of her mouth that way she does, then opens up her code notebook and writes a few things down. She’s been trying to break the code ever since we got the letter.

The code, I’ve sometimes wanted to scream at her, is that there
is
no code! The code is that Dad has gone completely, 110 percent, totally, absolutely,
thoroughly
(Dad’s word) CRAZY. Okay?

I used to be a tiny bit jealous of Roo and Dad’s code thing. Pretty much as soon as she could read, Roo started to make codes. Dad got her the
Super Little Giant Book of Secret Codes
, and
Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing
, and the
Top-Secret Handbook of Codes
. I’m not
really into that kind of thing. I’d rather just read, you know, books with stories. Like the ones Mom always brings home from her job at the library. But Dad and Roo had their code thing, just the way they had their bird-tracking thing, and whenever Dad was out of town he’d send us coded letters for Roo to crack. First it would be not too hard, like flipping the alphabet, so that you’d write
Z
when you meant
A
, and
Y
when you meant
B
, but then it got more and more complicated and I lost track of it, and I had a small feeling of, Hey, what about me?

Back in January, when Dad first went to La Lava, before The Weirdness, Roo didn’t have too much trouble breaking Dad’s codes. Those first few letters were exciting. He wrote that he was going to bring us lots of presents from the rain forest—rare extrasweet nuts and raw chocolate bars and pretty little animals carved from jungle wood. He wrote:
Madpie & KangaRoo & Mama Bear, I have some REALLY GOOD NEWS! But it’s a big secret, so BE PATIENT!
Madpie—sort of like the bird—and KangaRoo. That’s what Dad liked to call us. Another good thing to not think about. Anyway, nowadays I’m not at all jealous of Roo. I’m just glad I’m not the one who’s obsessed with the freaky letter from Dad.

I pull out my poetry notebook, which I’ve been using a ton ever since I made the New Year’s resolution to write a poem a day, but quickly I realize there’s no hope of me writing a poem while I’m sitting this close to The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter. It’s too much of a distraction in the corner of my eye. I put my notebook away and shut my eyes for a few minutes.

“Hey, Roo,” Ken/Neth says from across the aisle. I open my eyes to glare at him. “—by. It’s time to put your tray up. We’re about to land! Hey, girls, listen to the flight attendant’s announcements and
see if you can hear any words you know from Spanish class.
Gracias
, you know that one, right?”

It bugs me a lot that anyone who overheard this would probably think Ken/Neth is our dad. Also, is there a single person in America who doesn’t know the word
gracias
?

But Roo doesn’t seem annoyed. She just carefully refolds The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter, slides it back into its envelope, kisses the flap, slips it into her backpack, and locks her tray.

The plane starts to descend, leaving my stomach behind with each jolt.

“Woo
-hoo
!” Roo goes every time the plane jerks downward.

Even though Mom has to grab Ken/Neth’s arm (ugh) because she’s so terrified, the little plane lands without anyone dying.

“Hey,” Roo whispers to me as the plane brakes, her breath smelling like orange Tic Tacs, “do you think Dad is coming up with something special for when he sees us?”

Suddenly there’s a huge hard lump in my throat. I can hardly wait to see him. I can’t believe it’s been seven whole months.

“Something special?” I say. “What kind of thing?”

“Well”—Roo pauses, thinking—“like, a song he made up just for us. Or a cake with our names on it.”

Sometimes I feel so much older than Roo.

“I have no idea,” I snap at her. “He’s probably doing actual
work
right now.”

I don’t want Roo to know that my heart’s swelling with excitement. It scares me to be this excited about seeing Dad. It makes me feel superstitious, like things might go extra wrong the more excited I am. I know if Dad were here, he’d tell me to take a deep breath. Slow and steady wins the race, Madpie. Slow and steady.

But slow and steady is really hard to do, because we’re finally here, we’re finally going to find out what’s up with Dad. Roo and I have been begging Mom to take us to Dad in the jungle since March.

“I don’t care if he’s in the middle of the middle of the middle of the jungle!” Roo said back then, digging her fork into her mashed potatoes but not eating any. “I don’t even care if he’s in the middle of the middle of the middle of the
volcano
. I. Just. Want. To. See. Dad.”

“I can’t pull you out of school right now,” Mom informed her. “You’re learning about the solar system.”

“Solar system schmolar system,” Roo said.

“It’s a work trip,” Mom said quietly. “It’s not like Dad’s on vacation. He’s very busy. He wouldn’t be able to hang out with you. Besides, it’s dangerous for kids.”

I looked across the table at Roo to see if she realized that Mom wanted to visit Dad just as much as we did. But she was too young to notice.

“
What’s
dangerous for kids?” Roo demanded.

“Roo,” Mom said, looking suddenly exhausted, “please.”

A few times, when Roo was out of earshot or over at a friend’s house, Mom said to me, “Mad, what do you think? You think we should go and …?” She always trailed off, not quite wanting to say
figure out what the heck is going on with Dad
.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I told her, and once we even sat down and got online to look for plane tickets, but right then Ken/Neth called to ask if he could drop by with some ratatouille he’d just made. He’d accidentally doubled the recipe.

Things kept on happening. The lady with the beautiful voice would call again from La Lava to assure Mom that Dad was doing groundbreaking work in the inner jungle and his one regret was that
he couldn’t be in touch with us personally, but he knew we—more than any other people in the entire world—understood how much this work meant to him. Mom would hang up and say, “We’ve been overreacting, girls. Everything is fine.”

Or Ken/Neth would stop by with a chocolate cake and three tickets for Cirque du Soleil. “It’s the least we can do,” he said, “given all that Dr. Wade is doing for us. You’re very generous, ladies, to lend us your dad and”—with a wink at Mom—“husband for all this time.” I don’t know why I didn’t say, Hel-
lo
, we didn’t lend him to you; it’s not like we had any choice, and besides, we had no idea it would take “all this time.”

And then there was the night Mom opened the monthly bank statement and gave this enormous gasp, and I was like, “What’s
wrong
?” After not being able to talk for a few seconds she said, “Well, Mad, La Lava is being exceedingly generous, that’s all.”

So weeks went by, and then months, and we never bought plane tickets. When Roo bugged her about it, Mom would say that as far as she knew, Dad might come home tomorrow, and business trips get extended all the time, and we just had to be patient and calm, and this is Part of What We Love Him For, Right, Girls?, and it really didn’t make sense for us to leave school and for her to take time off from the library right in the middle of the semester, and Dad would be furious if we did.

It wasn’t till May that Mom decided we really did have to go to the jungle. Ken/Neth had gotten in the habit of coming for dinner once a week or so, which was pretty much starting to get on my nerves. So he was there at the dinner table when Mom announced that the time had come—she was going to book the plane tickets.

But Ken/Neth insisted that she let
him
book the tickets.

“Are you sure?” she said, though I could tell it would be a relief for her if he’d take care of it. “I don’t want to burden you.”

“Sylvia,” he said in that really sincere way of his, “it’s not a burden, it’s an honor.”

I noticed Mom slightly rolling her eyes, but Ken/Neth didn’t see.

“Not only that,” he continued, “but it just so happens that today my contacts at La Lava informed me that they wish to invite you ladies to the Gold Circle Investors’ Gala in early July.”

“The what?” Mom said.

“It’s La Lava’s huge annual celebration for all of their investors, where they honor the ‘Geniuses’ who have contributed to the success of the organization in the past year. It’s basically the party to end all parties. I know you girls will get a kick out of it.”

“Oh!” Roo yelped with glittering eyes. “I love parties! When’s July?”

“Roo,” Mom said severely. “You know when July is.”

“May, June, July,” Roo recited. “Wait, that’s not soon!”

“The time will fly,” Ken/Neth said with a grin. “It’s just a little over a month.”

“July is good,” Mom said. “We can all finish out the school year. And James very well may be back before then anyway.”

“Maybe so,” Ken/Neth agreed. “Maybe so.”

And from then on it was all: Ken booked the tickets, Ken says we should head down the Sunday before the gala, Ken is going to notify La Lava that we’re coming, Ken said we should be sure to bring some special dresses for the party, Ken this, Ken that.

And every day Mom’s been telling us, “Look, girls, we’ll see Dad soon and everything will be normal.”

But I know the truth. The truth is that Mom is mad, and hurt, and confused, and lonely. She thought I’d left the kitchen when she
said to Aunt Sarah, “When I married James I never thought I’d be a single mother. And look at me now. Months now my kids haven’t had a dad.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Roo is saying as the plane glides to a stop on the runway. She shrugs and kicks gently at the seats in front of us, still offended that I snapped at her about Dad. “Jeez, I was just wondering if Dad’s as excited to see us as we are to see him.”

And the truth is: I’ve been wondering the exact same thing.