Taking Terri Mueller Read online

  “Terri. Terri, wait!”

  “Sorry.” Terri slowed down. “Sorry, Shaundra. Maybe you ought to go home, because when my father finds out, you could be in trouble with your mother.”

  “When your father finds out?” Shaundra said. “How do you know he’s going to find out?”

  “He’ll find out. Because I’ll tell him.”

  Shaundra’s eyes got big. “You’re going to break into the box, and then tell him? What kind of sense is that?”

  “Shaundra—what’s the point of me doing this, trying to find out the truth, if I’m going to keep secrets, too?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, I didn’t think of that.”

  The apartment was still, had that closed-off feeling. Terri opened a window in the kitchen, then tried another in the living room. It was stuck tight. She tugged, trying to push it up.

  “What are you doing, you crazy girl? I thought you were going to open the box, not the dumb window.”

  Terri tugged. “I want some air. Fresh air. Don’t you think this apartment smells moldy?”

  “What time does your father come home? If we’re going to do the box, let’s do it!”

  “Once more—” This time Terri got the window open. “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

  “No. Where is the stupid box?”

  In Mr. Higgens’ class, thinking of this moment, she had felt herself balanced as if on a sliver of glass, but now, as she took the grey box down from the closet and set it on the floor, she seemed to feel nothing, to be utterly nerveless.

  They knelt down on either side of the box. It was an ordinary gunmetal-grey box with a small metal handle. Beneath the lock were the words Safety Lock Company in silver letters.

  “Is that it?” Shaundra whispered.

  “Yes.” Terri’s voice sounded loud. “That’s it.”

  Suddenly Shaundra took one of the pillows off Terri’s father’s bed and threw it at her. Terri caught it and slung it at Shaundra. “Touch you last!”

  Shaundra yelped and picked up the other pillow. They slammed each other, laughing hysterically, and finally falling on the floor.

  “Maybe your father’s coming home early,” Shaundra said.

  “He usually tells me.” Terri got up and looked out the window. “He’s not here yet.” Then they both looked at the box again.

  “Well . . . so . . . are you going to do it?” Shaundra said.

  “Okay. I’m going to do it.” Terri went to her room and got her jackknife. In her father’s room again she went to work on the lock. Shaundra kept making bad jokes. “Real criminal stuff, Terri. I wonder how many years they’ll give us.”

  “Shaundra, shut up,” Terri said, at last. Her tongue between her teeth, she bent the lock. A little more pressure, and it snapped.

  “You did it!” Shaundra said. “Open it now. Go on.”

  Terri’s hand was on the closed box. Her calm had vanished. “Shaundra—I’m afraid of what I’ll find—”

  “Terri! All this, and—Oh, well, if you don’t want to go through with it, you shouldn’t.” She got up and checked out the window. “So put it back and forget it.”

  “No. I have to see what’s inside.” Without allowing herself any more time to think, she opened the box and began to go through the manila envelopes. She hardly paused to look at most things. Her father’s high school diploma, an old driver’s license, some letters, a pink slip indicating she’d been inoculated against polio, diphtheria, and whooping cough, report cards, but no newspaper clippings. No stories of accidents and police proceedings.

  She squatted back on her heels and rested her head on her folded arms. “I am a fool.”

  “Terri? I thought you said you didn’t have any family pictures.” Shaundra pointed to one of the envelopes. It was half-filled with snapshots. She spilled the prints onto the floor. “Who are all those people?”

  “I don’t know.” A young girl on a horse . . . three boys slouching in front of a ramshackle porch . . . an older woman with glasses . . . “Here, this one, this looks like Aunt Vivian when she was young—But I don’t know who that is with her.”

  Shaundra looked over her shoulder. “Why’d he keep the pictures locked up?”

  Terri shook her head silently. No mysteries revealed. New mysteries added to old ones. She went through the box again, slowly this time. She found a silver ring, several old coins, and a watch inscribed on the back, Richard Valenti. More papers. An outdated membership in the Automobile Club. A notice to report theft of credit cards to a toll-free number. A legal-looking document that announced the dissolution by divorce of the marriage of Kathryn Susso Mueller and Philip James Mueller.

  She read this again. She saw the date, and she almost laughed. What was this? Some kind of weird Halloween joke? On the date of this so-called divorce, her mother hadn’t even been alive.

  “What is it?” Shaundra said. “What’ve you got there?” Terri handed her the paper without speaking. “I didn’t know your parents were divorced.”

  “They weren’t.”

  “But it says here—”

  “It says wrong.” Terri pointed to the date. “My mother had been dead for a year.”

  “That’s freaky,” Shaundra said. “Are you sure you know when your mother died?”

  Terri jammed the envelope back into the box. How could Shaundra ask something so stupid with such a serious expression?

  “I was four years old when she died. The year of this—this divorce, I was five.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure? Do you think I’m retarded?”

  “Well, maybe you got mixed up.”

  “I didn’t get mixed up,” Terri said coldly.

  She closed the box and put it back on the closet shelf.

  “Terri?” Shaundra said.

  “What?” Something was choking her. She went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She had never felt so thirsty.

  “Terri.” Shaundra leaned against the kitchen door. “Hey, listen, I’ve figured it out.” Her voice was very quiet. “You know what I think?”

  Terri stared at the calendar hanging over the phone. It had been hanging right there when they moved into the apartment way back in August, and they’d never taken it down. She had forgotten about it, actually stopped seeing it. Now, she noticed that it was turned to the month of March, and that someone had circled the sixteenth in blue crayon. March. That was the month in which Philip and Kathryn Mueller had legally dissolved their marriage. March. That was fine. The only problem was that the year was wrong. Another little problem was that there hadn’t been a divorce. Her father had been a widower in March of that year; her mother, if anything, a ghost. Could a ghost get a divorce?

  “Terri, what I think is—I think your father lied to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Terri turned on her. “He doesn’t lie.”

  Shaundra chewed on her hair. “Well, that paper’s got to be right. So your mom was living when they got the divorce—”

  “They didn’t get a divorce! Can’t you get that through your head? She was killed in a car crash.”

  “Yeah, well—the thing is, it’s pretty much like my mom’s divorce paper. You see what I mean?” Shaundra peered at Terri. “It’s not so awful—divorce. I mean, it is. It’s terrible. But . . . it’s okay that your mom and dad got a divorce. You know?”

  “They didn’t,” Terri said. “They didn’t! How could they? She was killed in a car crash one whole year before that.” She bent down and petted Barkley rapidly. “I keep telling you—!”

  “Well, maybe the car crash happened after the divorce. It’s funny that your father didn’t tell you. I mean, he did lie to you, Terri. Whatever it is about your mother, he must have lied to you,” Shaundra said.

  NINE

  “Terr, come on, you’re not even dressed.” Her father glanced into her bedroom. He was wearing a plaid shirt, cords, sneakers. “We told Nancy we’d pick her up around eleven.”

&
nbsp; Terri didn’t move. She was sitting on her bed, still in pajamas, chewing on a twist of red licorice.

  “What did Nancy say we should bring besides hardboiled eggs?”

  She didn’t answer. You lied to me. Why? She gave him a bright flat glance. Why had he and her mother gotten divorced? Was there something about her mother he hadn’t told her? Something bad?

  Other, worse thoughts entered her mind. That he had lied about other things. Had he been the driver of the car that killed her mother?

  “Daddy, you—” A chunk of licorice caught in her throat.

  Looking down, she saw that she had twisted the licorice so much the palms of her hands were red.

  “You better go wash,” her father said, “and then move along and get dressed.”

  She kept looking down at her red palms and thinking of the red ink the judge had used to sign his name on the divorce paper. But maybe it was just a stamp, not a real signature. “Why didn’t you tell me you and my mother got a divorce?” There. She had said it. She felt as if the breath had been slammed out of her.

  Her father rolled up the window shades. One of them flapped loosely. He turned his head cautiously toward her. “Divorce? Where did you get that idea?”

  “It’s true,” she said. “I know it’s true.”

  He got a fork from the kitchen and began tightening the spring on the window shade roller. “Vivian,” he said. “She told you something?”

  “No,” Terri said.

  “She must have told you—”

  “No. She wouldn’t tell me anything. Neither of you would.”

  He checked the other window shade and began to tighten that spring, slotting it between the fork tines. Next to his mouth a muscle tightened as he tightened the spring.

  “How could you get a divorce? She was dead when you got the divorce.”

  “How’d you get this idea? ‘A’ for imagination, Terri.”

  She hated his false hearty laugh. She hated him. Then, seeing his hands tremble as he put up the shade, she loved him and wished she had never gone into the box. The alarm clock suddenly buzzed. It was a crazy clock, always going off at the wrong time.

  Phil pushed in the button. “We’ll be late,” he said, as if the alarm had been meant to remind them that they were going on a picnic. But neither of them moved.

  “I saw the divorce paper,” Terri said.

  “You saw—what do you mean?” His hand went to his pocket for his key ring.

  “I saw it in the box.”

  “The box?”

  “I opened the metal box.”

  “You opened it?” he repeated. And again his hand went to his pocket.

  “I opened it,” she confirmed.

  He stared at her, just stared—surprised, she felt, and hurt, as if she had betrayed him. Then she saw something else move across his face like a shadow. Fear? She wanted to shout, Don’t you be afraid!

  He walked out. She sat there, feeling stunned, numb. She had told him. Now what? Where was he going? What was he doing? She heard him in his room. Then he was back, carrying the metal box. “You opened it,” he said, as if he hadn’t really believed it until he saw for himself. “How?”

  “I pried it open with a knife. My jackknife.”

  The phone rang. It rang three times, then stopped.

  “You wouldn’t tell me anything,” she said. “I asked you to tell me. I wanted to know . . . I thought I would find out . . . find something in the box—”

  “That’s private,” he said. “I don’t see how you just did that. It’s private,” he repeated, as if that was the really important thing.

  How could her father talk that way? Yes, she had gone into the private box, but he had lied to her. It was as if they were in a bombed-out building, but all her father would talk about was a broken window.

  “If I’d wanted you to see what was in there, I would have showed you.” His face looked chalky. “Couldn’t you trust me?”

  She felt a painful tightening under her ribs. She didn’t know how to fight with her father. They never had fights. They had always seemed to naturally agree about most things. “You could have told me . . . and those pictures—why didn’t you show them to me . . . why?” She began to cry, but when he tried to put his arm around her, she jerked away. “Don’t! Leave me alone!”

  They hardly spoke on the way to Nancy’s house. She and Leif were waiting on the steps with a Styrofoam picnic box next to them. Nancy was wearing a boy’s baseball cap perched backward on her blonde hair, and a green nylon jacket with SLUGGER written on it. As soon as he saw the truck, Leif ran to the curb.

  “Hi, Phil! Hi, Terri! Open up! Can I do the steering wheel?”

  In the truck, Nancy leaned across Terri to kiss Phil. “Isn’t it a super day for a picnic? Might be the last one of the year. I’m so glad we decided . . .” She glanced at Terri, then Phil, then Terri. “Hey, am I interrupting something?”

  “Oh, Terri and I are having a small disagreement,” her father said.

  Terri, squeezed between her father, and Nancy and Leif, moved so no part of her touched her father. A small disagreement? He made it sound as if they were bickering over her allowance, or watching a TV show.

  In the park the air was smoky and the smell of cooking meat hung over everything. It was a perfect, clear, crisp fall day. The park was filled with people. Nancy and Phil set out the food while Terri played with Leif. “Chow time,” Nancy called. Everything looked good, but Terri didn’t feel hungry. Not even for the German potato salad Nancy had made and which was one of her favorite foods.

  “You’re eating like a bird, hon,” Nancy said. Her own plate was heaped with food.

  Terri’s father glanced at her. She looked away. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to, and she just couldn’t. A red maple leaf drifted through the air and landed on the dish of hard-boiled eggs. “If that doesn’t remind me of pressing leaves between waxed paper.” Nancy was doing all the talking, trying hard to keep things cheerful. “Terri, you remember pressing leaves?”

  “Second grade.” Terri forced a smile. She had gone to school with her three big yellow tulip tree leaves and her roll of waxed paper in its long narrow blue box.

  “What’s this for?” her teacher had said, looking at the waxed paper.

  “For the leaves. You said waxed paper.”

  “But, dear, I wanted you to iron them at home. Everyone did it at home. We don’t have an ironing board in school.”

  “I know,” Terri said. She and Phil didn’t have an ironing board, or an iron either. Kids were laughing. Terri told herself, Guess what! You did a funny thing! She laughed as loud as everyone else, covering the shame. She still hated to use waxed paper, even to wrap up a sandwich.

  They finished eating, threw the paper plates into a trash basket, and sat around the table, talking. At any rate, Nancy talked. But in the middle of a story about one of her courses, she broke off to say, “You two are still mad at each other! Why don’t you use me as mediator? Each tell me your side of the problem. I promise not to be prejudiced.”

  “Terri and I will settle it,” her father said. He put his hand over Terri’s. “What are we fighting about?” he said, not as if he didn’t remember, but only as if all the heat had been over a little nothing. And for a moment, confused by the familiar warmth of his hand, Terri thought the same thing. What are we fighting over? Terri and Phil fighting? Unreal!

  She pushed her toe deep into leaves. Her father’s hand stayed on hers. Leif left the table and picked up a stick. “This is a road,” he sang, dragging the stick, “this is a house, this is me. This is a truck. I’m gonna drive, gonna drive Phil’s truck. Vrooom . . . vrooom . . .”

  Her father’s hand pressed on hers and the warmth of it crept through her. All she had to say was, We’re not fighting about anything. Forget it . . . I was wrong . . . All she had to do was forget what she had seen . . . go back to being Daddy’s good little girl . . .

  She yanked her hand free. “Wh
y did you lie to me?” she whispered tightly.

  TEN

  As they walked along the path, Nancy let herself lean a little against Phil. Leif, perched on Phil’s shoulders, looked down at her, his face bathed in dappled light. “Hi, there,” she said, squeezing her son’s hand. What a shame Terri wasn’t with them, that she was back at the picnic table feeling bad. Nancy, herself, felt so good she wanted everyone else to feel just as good.

  “What’s with Terri?” she said. “Case of adolescent sulks?” Oh, thank god, she was through that part of her life! Thank god she was past the misery of her marriage. Thank god she had met Phil and that he was the kind of man he was—wholeheartedly devoted to his child. “It’s so unlike Terri to sulk,” she went on. “Even if you did have a disagreement.”

  “Well . . . she’s been this way all morning.” Phil held Leif’s ankles firmly. His voice was mild enough, but he had rarely, if ever, felt so annoyed—no, angry—with his daughter. Underneath the anger, a thread of fear moved, crawled into his gut.

  “If you’d tell me what happened,” Nancy said, “I’m sure I could help you two straighten it out.”

  “I don’t think so,” Phil said. What a mess that Terri had gotten into the box. Stupid of him to have hung onto the divorce certificate. He had wiped out the past with Kathryn, erased the slate clean, but kept that paper. Why? Some primitive fear of destroying documents? He mused over this idea. There were a lot of things people did that were inexplicable. Himself included. He was an emotional, feeling person, depended on his instincts. In the long run, it was best, but sometimes it got you into a fix.

  Never mind that. The question was—now what? From Terri he’d never expected anything like breaking into the box. She was such a straightforward kid. Not a sneaky bone in her body. It was overhearing that conversation he’d had with Vivian . . . it had gotten her all fevered up. Why couldn’t Vivian give up playing big sister-mother to him? If only she hadn’t started in on him . . .