Calf Read online

  He was getting smarter. This time he took the stairs. He didn’t want the elevator ding to call attention to himself.

  The lobby was quiet. The lights in the bar and dining room were turned off, as were the overhead lights in the couch-lined waiting area. Only a few table lamps were still lit. It felt cozier this way.

  If the desk clerk bothered him, Jeffrey’s plan was to ask for an extra roll of toilet paper. That wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. You need it when you need it.

  The desk clerk was asleep with his head propped up against the wall and his mouth hanging open. Jeffrey reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter.

  The desk clerk snored and woke himself up. He looked confused for a moment before snapping into action.

  “I’m sorry, can I help you?”

  “I need an extra roll of toilet paper.”

  “Oh sure.” The guy hopped off his stool and disappeared around the back of the mailbox slots.

  When he was gone, Jeffrey placed the letter in the inbox, face down.

  The guy came back and plunked two rolls on the desk.

  “There you go. Sorry about that.”

  Jeffrey smiled. He headed for the stairs, but thought that might look suspicious and opted for the elevator instead. It was less suspicious to do the normal thing.

  “HELLO?” HER VOICE was mushy with sleep.

  “Amber?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi. It’s me. It’s J.”

  “Jay?”

  “From California. We talked for a while yesterday.”

  “Ohh. Right.”

  “Were you asleep?” He imagined her lying there with her blonde hair twisting like vines along the pillowcase.

  “Um, I don’t know. I think so.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I thought if you were up, maybe we could go out for breakfast. Or we could order room service.”

  “What?”

  “I said, or we could order room service.”

  There was a pause. Jeffrey wondered if she was drifting back to sleep. He half hoped she would and he could stay on the line and sleep with her in his ear.

  “Who is this?” she sounded more awake.

  “It’s me.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Jeff.” It slipped out without him noticing it.

  “Jeff?”

  Her phone jostled and he heard her take a few steps and shake something in the background.

  “Wait, is it Jeff or Jay?”

  He wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  “It’s Jeff, but sometimes I go by J. My father’s name is Jeff too, so sometimes people call me J. to tell us apart.” Good answer, he thought. Good answer. Good answer. Clap clap clap. Survey says . . . !

  “Are you the guy who’s been leaving me notes?”

  “What?”

  “Because I really don’t appreciate it.”

  “No, I . . .”

  “I don’t like being followed and I don’t like talking to strangers.”

  “No, I’m not a stranger. We met in California.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  “At the Sunrise.”

  “Sunrise? Sunrise what?”

  “The Sunrise Motel. Right before your movie came out. You were waiting for a ride.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t know you. I appreciate you being a fan and all, but maybe you want to contact my fan club.”

  “No, we met. I’m a writer and a songwriter. We both miss John Lennon. I’m working on some stories and songs, I think they’d be great for you.”

  “That kind of stuff has to go through my manager. I don’t deal with people directly.”

  “I just want to talk to you, take you out. I think you really understand me and what I’m going through, and I think we could help each other. I’m not some crazy . . .”

  “Okay, look. Number one, I don’t go out with people I don’t know. Number two, I would appreciate it if you would stop leaving me messages and stop calling me. If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to have to get the police involved. I don’t know you. We never met. You probably have some problems of your own and you read some article about me in a magazine. Then you developed some idea about me, some fantasy in your head, and now you’ve gone and gotten yourself all worked up. But you don’t know me and I don’t know you. And I’m going to have to ask you to leave me alone and not talk to me. If I were you, I’d go back to my wife and try to patch things up.”

  “But, I’m not . . .”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I really mean it. Leave me the fuck alone.”

  She hung up.

  Jeffrey thought about calling her right back. She had him confused with somebody else. She was probably the type of person who is cranky when she first wakes up in the morning. He decided to let her go back to sleep.

  Jeffrey must’ve drifted off himself, because the next thing he knew, someone was knocking on his door.

  In his sleepiness, he forgot to check the peephole. He just opened up.

  Three men were standing in the hall: the morning desk clerk, one of the movie guys, and a large black man in a red blazer.

  “Mr. Hackney?” the desk clerk asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to say we’ve had complaints about you from some of our other guests.”

  Jeffrey didn’t respond. It was always best to let the other guy go on talking, that way he would eventually reveal more than he wanted to and Jeffrey would be holding all the cards.

  “I hate to do this Mr. Hackney, but we’re going to have to ask you to leave the hotel.”

  Jeffrey stood perfectly still and let the guy sweat.

  “We have to uphold certain safety measures here, especially for some of our more well-known guests who are entitled to their privacy.”

  Jeffrey blinked the perfect blink, perfectly expressionless.

  “I don’t know what your travel plans are, but we’ve taken the liberty of securing you a reservation at another hotel where we’re sure you’ll be quite comfortable. But I’m afraid we are going to have to ask you to leave immediately.”

  Jeffrey looked down at his feet and saw that he was barefoot.

  “We have a shuttle service that can take you to the new hotel free of charge. But I do have to ask you to gather up your personal belongings and leave right now.”

  The guy said all of this with a smile on his face. It never once broke.

  Jeffrey turned away from the door without saying anything. He walked over to his suitcase and flicked it open. He walked around the room and nonchalantly threw his things inside. No folding necessary.

  The men took a few steps into his room. They probably think I’m going to steal something, Jeffrey thought. I’ll probably get blamed for something the maid took. Or Bobby. All those people have keys.

  Jeffrey went into the bathroom. He zipped his prescription bottles into his shaving bag and stuffed in a few bars of hotel soap. They would remind him of Amber.

  As he was packing, he noticed the pad of hotel stationary sitting on the desk. He had only used a few sheets. He felt awkward about just grabbing it in front of these guys.

  “Mind if I take this?” he asked.

  “Please do,” said the desk clerk. “It’s complimentary.”

  Jeffrey placed it on top of his clothes and clicked the suitcase shut. The black man opened the door and Jeffrey walked out into the hallway followed by the other two. He felt like Jesus being escorted by his three wise men: two white guys and a Moor.

  A taxi was waiting for him outside the lobby. Trouble gets you service, he thought.

  Jeffrey climbed into the backseat and told the driver to take him to National Airport.

  LAND OF THE LOST

  Before Tammy left for school she reminded her mother about the form she had brought home the week before. She was supposed to get a donation from her parents for a special
fund that would go toward a memorial for Kirin. They were going to build a bench and plant a tree in front of the school and they needed to collect money for it. Tammy was the only girl in her class who hadn’t turned in the form yet.

  Tammy’s mother set her coffee cup on the kitchen counter. She was dressed in her work outfit of a skirt and blouse.

  “I don’t think we can give money for that right now.” She said that Steffi’s class was having a bake sale to raise money and that Tammy and Steffi could make something for that if they wanted. She said they didn’t have any money for extras at the moment.

  “But it’s not an extra,” Tammy said. “We’re not buying anything extra.”

  “It’s still extra money,” her mother said. “And we just bought the computer not too long ago. Then we gave what extra money we had to the Vietnam vets fund.”

  “Why?” Tammy said.

  “Because the vets are building a memorial, and Nick wanted to contribute something to it. It was important to him. It was his birthday, remember?”

  “Why can’t we do both?”

  “Because there’s not enough money, Tammy. Why don’t you make something for the bake sale?”

  Tammy couldn’t make something for the bake sale because that was what Steffi’s class was doing. Tammy’s class was supposed to collect donations. Tammy should’ve realized this was what her mother would say. Her mother didn’t like collecting donations. She never went to PTA meetings. Sometimes she went to parent-teacher conferences, but sometimes she didn’t. “You always bring home good grades,” she said. “I’m not worried.” She and Nick didn’t go to the meeting about Kirin either. The night it was happening her mother and Nick sat on the couch watching the news. “I know a lot of people think it’s important,” her mother said, “but I just don’t see how being in a room with a lot of other people talking about it all over again is going to help.” Tammy said all her friends’ parents were going. Nick said, “If all of your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you jump too?”

  A FEW DAYS later, Tammy rode her bike down Bemis Street and turned onto 46th Street. She wanted to ride by Kirin’s house. She knew Monique wasn’t home because she said she was going shopping with her mother after school. And Gretchen had to go to the orthodontist. Tammy knew the block would be empty, and if Monique or Gretchen and their moms drove up, Tammy could say she was just riding by to see if they were back yet.

  In front of Kirin’s house Tammy squeezed her brakes to a full stop and kept her hands clasped around her handlebars. She didn’t want to look right away. She didn’t want to be too obvious. She kept her head down and fiddled with the black tape that was beginning to unwind from her handlebars. The brick walkway to Kirin’s house led up to the front door. Tammy stared at the front door and thought about going up to it and ringing the bell and seeing what would happen, seeing if anyone was home. But if anyone was home, she wasn’t sure what she would say. The white door stared back at her. It dared her to come toward it. It dared her to set one sneaker toe on the brick path. Tammy’s eyes found the tiny white doorbell button surrounded by a ring of gold to the side of the door, but the door was saying, don’t even think about it.

  Tammy let go of her hand brakes and the metal levers pressed their way back into position beneath Tammy’s thumbs. Through the downstairs window Tammy could see that the dining room table was still there. So were the chairs. Tammy could see almost all the way through to the kitchen and she thought she could see the round kitchen table still there too. But that was it. That was all she could see. She would need binoculars to see anything specific.

  Tammy didn’t know why she came here. She wanted to remember that Kirin was real and that she used to live here. Steffi had pictures and maybe something of Kirin’s from school, but Tammy didn’t have anything like that.

  Tammy pushed her bike forward and walked toward Gretchen’s house. A Century 21 For Sale sign was planted in the grass at the border of Kirin and Gretchen’s house. Tammy was sure it was for Kirin’s house. Gretchen hadn’t mentioned anything about moving. Kirin’s dad probably didn’t want to live there anymore.

  A car turned down the street causing Tammy to jump. She gave herself a few scoots to get her bike going and pedaled as fast as she could to the corner. She could’ve switched gears to make it easier to pedal, but she was too scared. She didn’t feel like going home, so she rode to the park where she squeezed her brakes and skidded to a halt next to the swing sets. There were no kids in the park, even though it was a perfectly nice day. There was just one really little kid with his mother on the merry-go-round. That was it. It was like all the kids had disappeared from the neighborhood or moved away.

  TAMMY KNEW STEFFI thought about dropping out of the chorus because she and Kirin used to stand next to each other and share a music book. Tammy figured it made Steffi sad to stand there by herself and not share her music book with anyone. Steffi stood all the way over at the end of the second row, the only one without a partner, wearing her Oz bib made out of green construction paper. Her class ended up having to make a second batch of bibs because they got messed up during practice.

  Steffi didn’t drop out. Probably the music teacher wouldn’t let her because it was so close to play night.

  The music teacher made the sixth graders rehearse almost every day during what was supposed to be the Language Arts period. Mrs. Perkins would write the schedule of the day on the blackboard. She was always erasing certain sections and writing “play rehearsal” instead. The word “rehearsal” was on the spelling test. The play was taking over the school.

  Tammy waited for Hugh after school because it was her day to baby-sit him. Kindergartners were always the last to come out because it took them longer to clean up and get their coats on. By the time Hugh got outside, no one from Tammy’s class was still hanging around.

  After the crossing guard waved them through the first intersection, Tammy spotted Gretchen and Monique stopped halfway down the next block. When she caught up with them Gretchen was standing behind Monique trying to unzip her backpack, but the zipper was stuck. When Gretchen finally pulled it free she took a book out of her bag and tried to stuff it into Monique’s backpack.

  “Hurry up!” Monique said. “Someone’s going to see it!”

  Monique’s backpack was packed full of her gymnastic leotards and sections of her big, aluminum foil–covered cardboard Tin Man costume and the book wouldn’t go in all the way. Gretchen pushed it a couple more times, then gave up and pulled the book out. “I’ll give it to you when we get home,” she said.

  “What is it?” Tammy asked. It was the first thing she said since she’d caught up with them and it felt dumb to say it. It felt like she had to remind Gretchen and Monique that she was there.

  “It’s Forever,” Gretchen said. “You know, the sex book. It’s about a girl whose boyfriend names his penis Ralph.”

  “Shhh! Someone could walk by here!” Monique said.

  Forever was the only Judy Blume book Tammy hadn’t read. It was hard to get because a preteen girl couldn’t exactly ask her parents to buy her the Judy Blume sex book and she couldn’t take it out of the library without parental permission.

  “How’d you get it?” Tammy asked.

  “Heather checked it out of the library for me. They believed her when she said she was fifteen.”

  Tammy had to admit that Gretchen was pretty smart, but she didn’t say anything. She walked the rest of the way home with them, Hugh trailing a few steps behind, until they split up at the corner of 43rd Street.

  *

  IF YOU HAD a part in the play, you were in charge of making your own costume. Tammy’s costume was a black turtleneck and a black skirt she borrowed from her mother. She made a cape out of a big piece of black fabric and cut a head hole in the middle. When she melted, she tucked her head inside the hole, hid under the cape, and disappeared into a black blob.

  The only hard thing Tammy had to make was the special golden hat she used to call th
e winged monkeys. She had to ask her mother for help because she didn’t know how to make a hat.

  Tammy’s mother started looking through boxes in her bedroom closet. Her idea was to decorate a hat they already had. She took down a long flat box with glossy roses painted on it. Everything inside the box was white. Her mother said this was her wedding dress when she married Tammy’s dad. She didn’t wear it when she married Nick because Tammy remembered she wore a pink sundress when they got married in her aunt’s backyard.

  Her mother pushed the dress aside and starting unwrapping stuff that was covered in white tissue paper. There was a pair of white shoes, a white purse, and a sprig of fake white flower buds. Then she found a white hat that was attached to a long flowing veil. She turned it over a couple of times, took a pair of little nail scissors, and began to snip off the veil until there was just a hat with a raggedy edge of netting.

  She handed Tammy the hat and said, “I think this will work.” She rewrapped the shoes and the purse in the crinkled tissue paper and put the box back in the closet.

  Tammy wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with the hat, so she stood there waiting for instructions. Her mother shut the closet door, turned around, and squinted at Tammy.

  “You can take it,” she said.

  “It’s supposed to be a golden hat.”

  “You can color it in.”

  “I don’t have to give it back?”

  “No. Do what you want.”

  Tammy felt weird about it. It was as if suddenly a rule had been broken and they were both supposed to pretend the rule never existed.

  “Would Dad be mad?” Tammy asked.

  Her mother had her back to Tammy when she said that. Her shoulders drooped and Tammy could tell she was getting mad. She was probably going to say, “Enough!” which was what she said when she wanted to yell but didn’t have the energy and didn’t want to cause a scene. She didn’t like Tammy mentioning Dad. She once told her not to talk about him in front of Nick. Tammy asked why and she said because it pushes his buttons.

  Tammy didn’t understand why it would push his buttons because she and Steffi only saw their dad on school vacations, and not all of them, only when he wasn’t out of town. Maybe four or five times a year. But they weren’t allowed to open the birthday and Christmas presents he sent in the mail at the same time as the rest of their presents. They had to go up to their rooms and open them in private. Tammy’s mother made up this rule. She said otherwise it would hurt Hugh’s feelings.