Under Cover (3 page)

“He kept going into the city. What did they
have there that he wanted to see more than us?”

“The way he put it—” Mom didn’t sound very
convinced, “he was trying to establish some contacts for selling
his articles. Have a good night, sweetie. Would you close the door
on your way out?”

Well, if that wasn’t a brush-off. I said,
“’Night,” and went across the hall to my own room.

From there I could see down the street to
Olive Hurlow’s house. That’s where I used to spend afternoons and
evenings, looking after her two little boys while she served drinks
at Bernie’s Bar & Grill and paid me not too badly. I missed
that job, especially the money. I missed the kids, and when the
baby got kidnapped, I was the one who found him.

And almost got killed in the process. Olive
was grateful, but she blamed me because I’d been late getting there
that day. I blamed Olive. She could have waited for me even if it
made
her
late for work. She couldn’t see it that way, or
didn’t want to.

I lay on the bed and looked up at my poster
of a ballet dancer sitting on the floor in worn and tattered
practice clothes. That was me—in my dreams.

Since my dreams had changed, maybe it was
time to take down the poster. But I still liked it. I liked the
idea of working so hard that your tights got full of holes and your
pointe
shoes turned to mush.

What would I do for a
job?
Frosty Dan
didn’t want me; they’d made that clear, even though I’d always been
a good customer. Maddie wouldn’t have any work for me unless she
got desperately swamped. She’d stay up all night rather than share
her riches. After all, she did have a car to support. And very
often I got the benefit of her having it.

I thought about starting my own home-based
typing service. Mom would have a fit at strange people coming to
the house. I’d have to rent office space somewhere and that would
give
me
a fit.

I rested my arm beside me and it landed on
Dad’s letter that I had dropped there. Why couldn’t I get any
answers? Somebody had to know
something,
and for a very good
reason.

I went down to the living room where Grandma
was watching the ten o’clock news. She muted it and looked up at
me.

“Do you realize,” I said, “if we got that
letter meant for Hey Buddy, we might be the only ones who know
Dad’s coming? He gave Hey Buddy all the flight information and
he’ll expect Hey Buddy to be at the airport and Hey Buddy doesn’t
know anything about it.”

Grandma said, “How do you know he didn’t give
the same information in the letter that went to Hey Buddy, if it
did?”

“Why would he, if he thought this one was
going there? Even if he did, there’s no way we can find out. Unless
you know who and where Hey Buddy is.”

Grandma shook her head. “Honest to
goodness.”

“Even if I wrote to him now,” I said, “he
wouldn’t get it in time. He never gave us any sort of phone number.
Why can’t he move up a century and have a computer like everybody
else?”

“I can’t speak for him, honeybun. All I know
is there’s a lot of stuff about electric plugs not fitting
everywhere. When your grandpa and I went to Paris that time,
somebody gave us a set of adaptors for different places. Maybe
that’s all changed now, I don’t know. Maybe they came up with a
universal plug. It would make a lotta sense, but then they’d have
to change all the wall sockets and the wiring—”

“Grandma.”

“Sorry, kid. I got a little off topic there.
What was your question?”

“About Dad. Somebody meeting him. He’ll be
waiting at the gate forever because Hey Buddy doesn’t know he’s
coming.” I felt a shiver of excitement as I pictured my dad
actually being there in person.

“It wouldn’t be a gate,” Grandma said. “Not
the regular kind. It’d be Customs.”

“Okay, but that’s not the point.”

“So what is the point? You want
me
to
go and meet him?”

“Well, um…us? I’d go myself if I had a car.
Anyway, he and you would recognize each other better than him and
me.”

She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “Yeah,
you’ve changed quite a bit in what, six years? Almost seven.”

I’d been ten when he came that other time. I
hadn’t filled out yet, as Grandma liked to remind me. In all the
right places, as she described it. Like now I had a bust and hips
and what she called a wasp waist. That was what inspired the
comparison with 1890s chorus girls. She’d even dug out a picture of
one to make her point.

Even though I was grown up “in all the right
places,” Grandma refused to lend me her car. She let me use it
other times, but this was different. “It’s complicated, driving in
the city,” she said.

“Oh, and you’ve had more experience than I
have?” We both got our licenses not quite a year ago.

“I know the city better than you do,” was her
reply. “Come to think of it, for Kennedy you don’t go in the city,
you go around it. But that’s complicated, too.”

I happened to know you did go through parts
of it, but for her, only Manhattan was “the city.” She considered
the other boroughs to be mere suburbs.

“Don’t you have a GPS?” I asked. She’d gotten
it because she had a terrible sense of direction. Even MapQuest
didn’t do it for her.

“A GPS,” she explained, “can be
complicated.”

“Okay, I’ll do it the MapQuest way and you do
your GPS. Somehow we ought to manage.”

“You think?”

I had to believe it. I couldn’t think of any
other way.

“I assume Dad will know how to find Hey Buddy
once he gets here,” I said. “It’s going to be a big surprise when
he shows up if Hey Buddy doesn’t know he’s coming.”

Of course he knew where Hey Buddy was, if
he’d written to him. He just sent him the wrong letter, is all.

Maybe Dad would come to our house instead, if
Hey Buddy was still in prison.

Chapter
Three

Grandma let me take Friday off from school so
I could go with her. We didn’t tell Mom I was doing that. On Friday
morning, after Mom left for work, we set out for Kennedy
Airport.

At first Grandma had been adamant that she
wasn’t going to meet him. I figured she was scared. She hadn’t been
driving all that long and it really was complicated going through
Westchester, the Bronx, and onto Long Island where the airport
was.

I told her Maddie would be happy to do it. I
knew Maddie wouldn’t, but sometimes I find myself bending the truth
a little. Only when it’s necessary, of course.

Grandma pointed out that this was a family
thing and Dad wouldn’t know what to make of a strange girl coming
to meet him. Especially as he would be expecting Hey Buddy.

Once again I told her, “I’d go myself if I
had a car.”

Again she reminded me that it was
complicated. “Better to have two people, one of ’em
navigating.”

So I was the navigator. I had an atlas on my
lap that showed New York City and its surrounding areas. I’d also
printed the instructions from both MapQuest and Google Maps, and
Grandma had her GPS. The trouble was, the GPS didn’t always agree
with the maps, but I liked hearing it. It had a male voice with a
delightful British accent.

The day was warm with just a hint of
mugginess. Dad would think he’d never left Borneo. He might wish he
hadn’t. I wondered if living there was cheaper and that was why he
stayed. I had looked it up on the Internet. Mostly it showed fancy
resorts and tropical scenery.

We drove along the parkway, onto the Thruway,
down through Yonkers and the Bronx past endless apartment
buildings, and over the Triborough Bridge. They called it that
because it touched three of the city’s five boroughs: the Bronx,
Manhattan, and Queens. When we got off it we were in Queens, which
was on Long Island. Getting close to the airport.

What if he wasn’t on the plane? He might have
missed it or changed his mind. I couldn’t understand why I felt so
nervous. Grandma seemed nervous, too. Not about him, but driving in
an unfamiliar area with all the traffic. So far we were doing
okay.

“Are you navigating?” she asked suddenly.

Oops, I’d forgotten to watch. We were on the
Grand Central Parkway, I knew that much. I scrambled to find where
it went.

“You gotta pay attention, kiddo,” she
scolded. “I’m having enough trouble just doing my part.”

“Grandma, I thought you were cool with
this.”

“I am. Aren’t you?”

“I’m a wreck,” I said.

“About what? Not my driving, I hope.”

“No, you’re doing great. I’m nervous about
him. He doesn’t like me.”

“Why do you say that? He doesn’t even know
you, much.”

“That’s what I mean. He never wanted to know
me. Even when he visited that other time, he kept going off to the
city.”

“Or someplace.”

I gave her a quick look but couldn’t ask what
she meant. She’d have been on my case for distracting her.

“Van Wyck Expressway coming up,” I said.

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

“It goes straight to the airport. Then we
have to look for International Arrivals.” I felt really excited
now. It was all so—international.

“Kota Kinabalu,” I said.

“What on God’s green earth is that?”

“It’s where he lives. Didn’t you ever notice
on his letters?”

“I didn’t know how you pronounce it,” she
grumbled.

“Neither do I; I’m just guessing. It’s where
his flight comes from. That’s what we have to look for on the
board.”

The whole thing seemed unreal. I couldn’t
believe it was happening.

We had to do some circling before we found
International Arrivals. The huge parking lot looked full, but there
was space at the back. It meant walking. Luckily the day was nice
for that.

Once inside the building, we looked for Kota
Kinabalu and the flight number. The board said it was on time.

And we were early. Grandma had a way of
getting compulsive about those things.

“You never know,” she would say. “Anything
can happen. Better to give yourself some leeway.”

They had a large window where you could watch
the planes come and go. I looked for his. It wasn’t in yet. I knew
that even after it landed and taxied up to the gate, it would take
a while for the people to start deplaning. And then they’d have to
go through Customs. I had never met an international arrival
before, only domestic flights, but I knew about Customs.

Grandma went to have a cup of coffee so she’d
be perky for the trip home. I stayed and watched the planes. All
those big birds coming from faraway places. It almost took my mind
off the dad who didn’t like me.

Grandma came back, announcing, “I’m gonna
have to make another stop soon. That was a lotta coffee.”

“I hope you do it before they start coming
through that door. You know him better than I do.”

“He looks like Yves Montand,” she said.

“Considering I don’t know who that is . .
.”

“He used to be a French movie star. He’s gone
now. I always thought he looked like your dad.”

I didn’t know my dad any more than I knew
Yves Montand, so that was no help. I went to the restroom as a
precaution, and then Grandma went.

The board changed. The plane had landed. An
announcement confirmed it.

“Now we wait,” Grandma said. Exactly what
we’d been doing.

“What if we wait and he never shows?” That
was what I was afraid of. Things like that always happen. You get
keyed up about something and it falls flat.

“If he doesn’t show,” she said, “we check to
see if he’s on the manifest. If he is, we keep waiting. If he
isn’t, we go home.”

She was right about waiting. It took a while
before even the first people began to trickle out of Customs. We
moved from the big window to get closer to the trickle.

We had to keep moving. People got in the way.
People came out and were greeted and hugged, presented with flowers
and kisses, and more people got in the way.

“He wasn’t on it, was he?” I said.

“Knowing Jules, he’ll be the last one
off.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s more space at the end of the line.
He likes his space.”

That was the excuse he gave when he first
left us. I was thinking it over when she waved and shouted. “Hey,
Jules!”

There he was, the wiry frame, the wide mouth
with smile lines, and downward-slanting eyebrows, all familiar from
the pictures he sent.

And someone else, familiar from the last
batch of photos. A young woman. She looked Chinese.

“Jules!” Grandma shouted again. “Over
here!”

He was taller than I expected from the
pictures I’d seen. He wore a navy blue jacket over a white dress
shirt with no tie, and creased chino pants. He’d been scanning the
waiting crowd. When she called the second time, his eyes opened
wide. He broke into a surprised smile. “Iva?”

They collided in a hug and kissed each other.
Grandma had no hard feelings against the man who walked out on her
daughter and granddaughter almost seventeen years ago.

She pushed me forward. “Do you know who this
is?”

He stared at me with brownish-bluish eyes.
“That can’t be Cree.”

“Um—hi, Dad.”

“The hair,” he said. “I know the hair. It’s
longer now.”

My reddish hair grew almost to my waist. It
had to be longer than it was six years ago. I kept it pinned back
with a barrette shaped like a butterfly.

“This,” he said, “is my friend Mei.” He
pronounced it “May.” I only learned the spelling later.

She was a lot younger than he was, maybe
early twenties. And cute. I couldn’t help wondering how Mom was
going to like this. I had wondered that last fall when he sent a
picture of her. Grandma reminded me that he and Mom were history
ages ago.