I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the wall, which didn’t do anything for the tension headache blooming inside it. Touching Jeremy had stressed me out. The headaches, the nausea . . . they were the reason I’d stopped touching my mother after my father left five years ago. I’d tried, thinking that I could fill the void. That holding tightly to her might ease her pain, and maybe ease my own. But I wasn’t enough, and she’d turned so bitter that when we did touch, the pain stayed with me for days and the taste of her made me vomit. I lost weight and missed school, withdrew under blankets and hid inside long sleeves. Worried, my mother took me to neurologists who told her there was nothing physically wrong with me. They suggested I was suffering from stress, that I was emotionally fragile because my father had left us. Relief clung to the stench of my mother’s grief— maybe, at least partly, because the doctors had given her one more reason to blame him.
But she was wrong. They were all wrong. What I was feeling wasn’t my father’s fault. It wasn’t coming from inside me. It was coming from anyone I got close enough to touch. I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked—it’s not like they teach this stuff in AP Physics—but I had a theory. Emotion is energy, and if energy is strong enough, it can travel between two points. Maybe I was like a channel, someone other people’s energies could pass through. I was somehow experiencing truths about people that others just couldn’t. Most of those truths left a sour taste on my tongue that made me wish I’d never gotten close to them at all. So I didn’t. I didn’t do sports, I avoided parties and crowds, and I didn’t date.
And I never told anyone.
I washed two aspirin down with a palm of tap water. Then I leaned on the sink basin and looked hard in the mirror, the bits and pieces I remembered of my father staring back at me through cross sections of my mother’s face. Almost, but not entirely either one of them.
I was still just nearly.
3
After school, I spread the newspaper out on my bedroom floor. I wasn’t interested in the whole paper, just the section of personal ads called Missed Connections. I’d only had time to skim them, sparing glances between labs and lectures, and I clung to the possibility that maybe I’d missed something important.
“What do you think, Doc? Will I find him this week?” I asked the poster on my wall. It had been a birthday gift from Anh, who thought it was hilarious that Albert Einstein was the only guy who’d ever been in my bedroom, until I’d pointed out that this accounted for one more than had ever been in hers.
I’d never told Anh about all the Friday nights Jeremy and I had spent sprawled across my bedroom floor, eating Twinkies and cackling over the personals when we were younger. That was before the two of us had become the three of us.
Looking at the paper now, I saw that the few ads that had resonated with glimmers of hope that morning turned out to be nothing more than empty pick-up lines.
I saw you on the Blue Line. You got off at Van Dorn.
You have red hair and a great rack. I think you might have noticed me too. If so, same time, same place tomorrow. I’ll save you a seat.
I snorted into my hand, careful not to attract my mother’s attention through the paper-thin walls of our trailer.
You dropped your stamps at the post office on Wythe. I picked them up for you. I was too nervous to think of something to say. If you’re out there, tell me what I was wearing so I know it was you.
I fell backward on the threadbare carpet with an exasperated sigh. Five years gone and still no sign of the man who spent every Saturday with me at Belle Green Park, pulling dandelions out of thin air and making quarters vanish with a wave of his hand.
I reached one hand under my mattress until I grasped a small plastic bag containing a carefully folded personal ad dated five years ago, a worn brown wallet, a gold wedding band, and a train ticket. The wallet and the ring were all that was left of my father’s personal effects. My mother’d found them in his car, abandoned in an airport parking garage.
I’d watched Mona cut up the IDs and credit cards and toss everything, even his ring, in the trash. While she wept, locked in her bedroom, I’d fished the remaining scraps of my father out of the wastebasket and tried to tape them back together. There had been far too many pieces. They fit together like a puzzle and when I was done, I had four driver’s licenses, each with a different name, all of them similar in looks to my father, but only one of them was him. I’d had all these theories about why he had those phony IDs. I imagined he’d been swallowed up by the Witness Protection Program and that’s why he had so many aliases. We lived close to Langley and the Pentagon. I told myself he could have worked covertly for the CIA. My father wouldn’t have just left. He must have had a reason. And I believed that one day, he’d come back. That it was all some necessary sleight of hand, and he’d turn up like a card in a trick, right back where he was supposed to be.
I’d returned the broken pieces of the phony IDs to the garbage can and tucked everything else in a plastic bag.
The personal ad was something I’d found when I was in middle school. Jeremy and I read the ads every Friday night while our dads played poker together. I’d always assumed we were drawn to the ads because of our common loneliness. That maybe we were both searching for something. But then one day, about a year after my father left, I found this particular ad that changed everything.
Careful of the brittle paper, I eased it open. I didn’t actually need to read it. I’d memorized every word.
N—I’m here and I’m okay. I’ll always be nearyou.
I love you, D.
I had no proof it was my dad. Jeremy insisted N could be anybody. But I knew this ad was mine. I knew it was from my father, without proof or probability, all the way through to my soul. My father had known about our Friday ritual, and he must have thought it was the perfect way to contact me discreetly. He’d even included the word near, a safe way to refer to my name without actually using it.
After that, I didn’t want to share the ads anymore. I didn’t find them funny, didn’t laugh at the desperation. I was searching for something. I was desperate. Jeremy didn’t really believe my dad had sent me a message, and the only thing I cared about was finding another one. Jeremy stopped bringing the Missed Connections, and I started buying my own. It wasn’t our ritual anymore. It was mine.
I spent every Friday looking for another ad. Once, I’d thought for sure I’d found him.
It’s been nearly a year since my last ad. I’m in town and want to see you. Meet me at our old hangout next Saturday.
I’d gone to Belle Green Park just after sunup. Spent all day watching the parking lot and the trailheads, the neighborhood parents watching me suspiciously as they pushed their kids on the swings. These are the kids you should be making friends with, my dad had said when I’d asked him why we came to this park every Saturday instead of the one at the end of our street. Their parents looked at me now the same way they had looked at me then. Like I didn’t belong there. They were right. At dusk, I walked home alone. And a week later, I found the response to the ad, confirming it wasn’t him.