A Thousand Voices Page 4

  I wondered, sometimes, if I might have passed him in the mall, or on a street someplace in Kansas City, and never even known it. When James and I went to the Royals games, I scanned the crowd for boys his age, read the backs of their Little League jerseys, listened when their fathers called them by their names, just to see if I might find Angelo there.

  It was an impractical fantasy—one I could never surrender, or tell anyone else about. It was our secret, Angelo’s and mine, that I would always keep looking until someday I found him.

  CHAPTER 3

  My jet lag turned out to be a case of international flu. Back home in Kansas City, I spent three days with Karen bringing homemade gingersnaps and soup I couldn’t eat, our next-door neighbor, Dr. Rollings, coming by to bring me Tamiflu and sample bottles of electrolyte solution, Barry calling between classes to make sure I was all right, and my mind drifting between the orphanage and home, while conjuring occasional pink elephants on the ceiling and snakes under the bed. When I awoke on the fourth day, sunlight was pressing, hot and insistent, against my eyes. Dimly, I knew that wasn’t right. We were always up before dawn at the mission center so we could dress and attend a short daily devotional with the Spencers before walking next door to begin classes with the orphans at the Internat school. Someone must have forgotten to wake me up….

  Rolling over, I pulled open my eyes and blinked at the blur. The room smelled of cedar and freshly washed fabric, but the scents were out of place. There should have been the odors of damp cement, the antiseptic cleaner that was used regularly to mop the dormitory floors, aging wool blankets, and frozen earth outside. Instead of birds chirping, there should have been the slow, rhythmic drip, drip of icicles lengthening outside the window….

  My vision slowly cleared, and I lay gazing at the steeply pitched pine ceiling, its lazily whirring ceiling fan slicing through the curtain of sunlight.

  I wondered if I was still dreaming—if perhaps I was only home in my mind, and in a few moments I would wake up in the mission in Ukraine. Perhaps even the mission was a dream, and I would wake up back in London.

  I turned to look at the clock on the night table—the same alarm clock that had been there since James, Karen, and I moved into the Kansas City house just before I turned thirteen. The numbers were covered with a folded washrag, still slightly damp.

  Snuggling into the pillow, I let my eyes drift closed again and fell into empty space, vaguely wondering if, when I awoke, I would still be home.

  My dreams took me back to Ukraine, to the Internat mission, but now, rather than being surrounded by the winter-bare remnants of unmowed lots, the faded concrete building sat in a grove of trees along the river. It was summer, and a high, hot sun hung overhead in a cloudless sky. The children were playing in the water, dashing through the shallows with their arms outstretched, their feet so light they skimmed the surface. The air was filled with the sharp, angular sounds of their native tongue.

  Grandma Rose was there, sitting on the shore with a baby in her arms. Even before I reached her, I knew it was Angelo. As I came closer, he smiled and babbled, studying my face just the way he used to when he was tiny. Sometimes, when things were too loud at Granny’s house, I’d take Angelo and carry him to the woods and sit by my favorite tree with him balanced on my legs. He’d frown and hold a hand up toward me, and study my face like he wanted to know everything about it.

  I loved the way Angelo looked at me. I loved the way he smiled. I wanted to sit with him in the quiet of the woods forever. Every time Angelo’s daddy saw me taking him off like that, he’d complain and say I might drop Angelo, or fall into the river with him, or set him down in an ant nest or something.

  Mama would just shrug and tell him it was fine. I was never sure if she was defending me, or just arguing with Angelo’s daddy.

  I wondered if she ever sat with Angelo and just looked at him….

  I could see her down the river now, my mama, in the bandana halter top and the faded denim jeans that were her favorite, her long auburn hair swirling around her shoulders, her eyes blue like the washed-out jeans.

  Grandma Rose stood up, moved along the riverbank, and even though I wanted to, I couldn’t follow. My feet were trapped in the thick deposits of a sandbar. I could only watch as Grandma Rose took my baby brother and gave him to Mama, and the two of them walked away together.

  “No!” I screamed, but no one seemed to hear me. In the river, the kids from the orphans’ home began singing in Russian as Grandma Rose slipped her arm around my mother. Together they walked into the water and disappeared beneath the overhanging branches of a sycamore tree. As they passed, the leaves shuddered, then hushed and folded inward, hiding them away.

  “Angelo!” I called. “Angelo! Angelo!”

  “Dell?” I felt someone shaking me, pulling me from the sand. “Wake up, honey. You’re dreaming again.”

  With an intake of breath, I jerked awake and was once again in my bedroom.

  Karen laid a hand on my forehead. “Hey, sleepyhead,” she said, “you must have really been dreaming. Feels like your fever’s broken, though. Dr. Rollings thought you were probably over the worst of it when he checked on you last night. He thought you’d be perking up by this morning.” Sitting on the edge of the bed with a stack of folded towels in her lap, she smoothed my hair away from my face the way she used to when I was younger. “Did you have a bad dream? You were talking in your sleep just now.”

  “I don’t know.” My throat was raspy and raw. The dream was still fresh in my mind. I could see Grandma Rose and my mother disappearing beneath the sycamore leaves with Angelo. Tears seeped into my eyes, and Karen slipped an arm around me, pulling me close.

  “Honey,” she soothed, “what’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t answer. I just sobbed, filled with emotions I couldn’t frame into words. James’s footsteps came up the hallway and stopped at the edge of the bedroom carpet. I felt Karen shrug helplessly. Her cheek tightened into a clench, then relaxed against my head. I pictured the silent conversation between them, my dad’s face asking, What’s wrong with her?

  And Karen’s answering, I don’t know. She just woke up and started crying. She was talking in her sleep.

  Talking in her sleep? She hasn’t done that in years. I thought she was over that.

  I don’t know what’s going on with her….

  James turned around and walked down the hall without a word. I heard him in the kitchen, putting dishes in the dishwasher, changing the trash bag, frying bacon, doing what he always did—something practical—when he didn’t understand the pervasive female emotions in the room.

  When I’d finally pulled myself together, Karen handed me a tissue and sat rubbing my arm. “What was that all about?”

  “It’s just…” I didn’t have an answer, of course. Not one that I could share. “…good to be home. When I woke up, I thought I was still in Ukraine at first. It…took me a minute to realize I was really back.”

  To her credit, Karen didn’t say something like, If Ukraine was that bad, why did you stay so long? Why didn’t you come home sooner? She was thinking it, though. She was wondering if something terrible had happened to me over there.

  “It’s not that I didn’t like it there.” Switching to a defensive posture at the slightest sign of parental disapproval was one of those kid habits I had yet to overcome. Mr. Spencer at the orphanage had pointed that out once when he overheard my monthly phone conversation with my parents. He chuckled as I hung up, muttering to myself that this was my life and there was plenty of time for college later.

  “When you can say those things before you hang up the phone, it’ll be your life,” he joked. Mr. Spencer approached everything with a good sense of humor and an abiding understanding of human nature that made him good at mission work.

  “When does that happen?” I asked glumly. As much as I loved James and Karen, I could never be totally real with them.

  Mr. Spencer’s thick gray mustache curled upward as he
laughed. “I’ll let you know when I get there. Mama Flo still sends new underwear in my care packages.” Walking out the door, he added, “Don’t be too easy on ’em, kiddo, or they’ll be sending you underwear when you’re fifty-four years old….”

  I chuckled at the memory, and Karen drew back, surprised at the unexpected emotional rebound.

  “I was just remembering something from the mission,” I explained. “Mama Flo still puts new underwear in Mr. Spencer’s care packages.”

  Catching the hidden meaning, Karen rolled her eyes. “Pppfff. Some parents don’t know how to let go.”

  The two of us smiled at each other and I wiped my eyes as Karen set the towels in the bathroom. “Sounds like James has some breakfast under way. Do you feel like eating anything?”

  Groaning, I rubbed my stomach, which felt like it had been reduced to the size of a pea. “I think I’d better wait a while.” Every muscle in my body protested as I climbed from the bed. “I’m sorry for coming home sick. Guess about now you guys are probably wishing I’d stayed in Ukraine, huh?”

  “Not a chance.” Leaning against the door, she smiled at me. “If you were going to get sick, I’m glad you were home where we could take care of you.”

  “Me, too,” I said, and stumbled off to the bathroom to clean up.

  By the time I’d showered and dressed, James and Karen were finished with breakfast. Karen said she’d planned a lazy day for us, which in our family was code for popcorn and old movies. I fell asleep on the sofa halfway through It’s a Wonderful Life and spent the rest of the day fading in and out of movie land, nibbling on soda crackers, sipping chicken noodle soup, and enjoying being home together, just the three of us. “Like the old days,” Karen said .

  By nighttime, I was wide-awake. I lay for hours in my room as the house grew quiet. The dream about Grandma Rose, Mama, and Angelo wound through my thoughts like fine silver mist. I hadn’t dreamed about Mama in years. Why was I dreaming about her now?

  Finally, somewhere near morning, I drifted off. I was in a quiet, dreamless place when I heard James and Karen moving around the house, Karen getting ready to go to work downtown at the Jumpkids office, and James heading for the airport. He was already dressed in his pilot’s uniform. The sound of his heavy black shoes and rolling overnight bag on the ceramic tile told me he was about to leave.

  He poked his head into my bedroom the way he always had when he left at odd hours. When I was younger, he’d kiss me on the forehead and pull the covers up around my shoulders, thinking I was asleep. Sometimes I pretended to be asleep so he would do that. I liked the way it felt.

  This time he stopped at the door, and I had a pang of loss. Now that I was grown up, there was a closeness we couldn’t share anymore. I wondered if it would be that way if I were really his daughter.

  “Be back tomorrow night, Pooh.” At least he still called me Pooh. Some things hadn’t changed.

  “Safe trip,” I muttered drowsily. That was what I always said to him when he left for work. It was our family phrase, code words for all the things that went unsaid. I love you. Be careful. We’ll miss you while you’re gone. Hurry home.

  Safe trip. When I’d left for Europe, we’d parted with only those two words.

  This time, he hovered in the doorway, as if something more needed to be said. “Sorry I have to leave so soon after you’re back home.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  He turned around and left, his travel case clicking down the hall.

  I rolled over and stared at the KC Symphonic Spring Duet poster on the wall—a remnant from my high school days. The picture had been taken during Harrington Academy’s annual performance with the symphonic. There I was in the string section with my violin tucked under my chin and my eyes closed, lost in the music.

  The violin was somewhere in transit between Ukraine and here now, along with other things I’d shipped. It had been sitting in my cubby at the orphans’ home, untouched for almost a year now.

  Who was that girl in the poster? Where had she gone? Now that I was home, why did I still feel…unsettled, restless, as if there were somewhere else I needed to be?

  I knew the answer, even though I didn’t want to face it. I knew why I was dreaming about Mama again, and talking to Barry about Oklahoma, and why I couldn’t look at my cousin’s new baby without feeling cheated. No matter how much I wanted to escape them, questions about all that had happened in Granny’s little house on Mulberry Creek were still with me. They stood like a wall blocking out everyone, everything else in my life. I’d spent two years wandering the world trying to find myself, and I was still lost.

  Tossing off the covers, I sat up, looked hard at the girl in the poster, and made a decision. I was going to Oklahoma. Today.

  I was dressing and condensing clothes into a duffel bag when Karen came into the room. Leaning on the doorframe, she gave the duffel bag a questioning frown, then cut her gaze back to me, her eyes narrow with concern. “I was wondering if you felt good enough to go to the Jumpkids office with me this morning, or if you’d rather stay here and rest.”

  Pretending to be busy putting extra jeans in the closet, I steeled myself and formulated an excuse. I hated lying to James and Karen. I’d never been good at it. But then, in another way, everything about me was a lie. There were so many things I’d never told them, so many leftover emotions I’d never confessed. “I thought I might go by Harrington and visit Mrs. Bradford, then drive on down and see Barry for a couple days.”

  “Really?” Karen sounded surprised and hurt.

  Guilt dropped to my stomach like molten lead, then solidified there. “Since Dad’s out of town, I mean. I thought it’d be better than going later, when we could all be home. Plus, you know, Barry’s got a girlfriend now, and if I go on the weekend, I might be interfering with, you know, dates and stuff. I don’t want to cause problems between Barry and his girl.” I knew I was talking too much, the nervous string of words rushing out in a way that wasn’t like me. If I didn’t stop now, Karen would figure out I was covering up.

  “Are you sure you feel well enough?” Her brows knotted doubtfully in the center. “You’ve been awfully sick, Dell.”

  “I feel good today,” I chirped, adding a toothy grin for effect. “I’m just in the mood for a little…road trip, you know? It’ll be fun to have Barry show me around the college and everything.”

  She thought for a few minutes before answering. As a teenager, I’d always hated those Jeopardy! minutes—the ones in which she tried to read my mind, figure out what was really happening on the inside. Her lips twitched upward. “Sure you’re not going there to check out the girlfriend? See what old Bear-bear’s up to there at Missouri State?” She gave me a knowing smile, one that said she thought she’d figured out my secret.

  My face flushed hot. “Of course not, but…but I’d kind of like to see…for myself.” The blush deepened, fanned by an intense wave of conscience. It was wrong to be telling her an outright lie, especially on my first noncomatose day at home. But it was for her own good. For our good. I couldn’t tell her I wanted to skip off to Oklahoma, to the Choctaw Indian headquarters, to see if I could find out anything about my birth family. I could never make her understand that. I could never say that to her.

  “You’re sure this is a good idea?” She twisted her lips to one side.

  I’m not sure of anything. “Yeah, it’ll be fine. I’ll be back Saturday. Sunday at the latest. Some of the girls from Harrington are at Missouri State. I’ll just, you know, give them a call when I get there. See if I can bunk on somebody’s couch.”

  Karen made the I-know-you’re-a-grown-up-but-I-hate-it sound. Something between a sigh of resignation and a whimper. “Take money for a hotel room in case that doesn’t work out. Do you need money?” She glanced toward the kitchen, where her purse was undoubtedly on the counter next to her briefcase.

  Opening my desk drawer, I found
my checkbook, right where I’d left it two years ago. “Not unless you two have drained my money market while I was away.” All through high school, I’d worked part-time and never really had much use for the money, except to save it in my money market account, ostensibly for college expenses.

  “Well, there was this one little Caribbean cruise….”

  “Yeah, right.” Chuckling, I tossed the checkbook into my purse. “But, come to think of it, a Caribbean cruise might be good for you guys.” Grabbing a ponytail holder and a brush from the desk, I smirked at her in the mirror. “How long has it been since you two have done something wild and fun?” For the past few years, it seemed like all they’d done was worry about me.

  “I beg your pardon.” She grabbed the brush from my hand, combed my hair into a ponytail, and gave it a yank. “What are you insinuating—that your father and I could use a little livening up? Think we’ve settled into the doldrums of midlife since you’ve been gone?”

  “If the shoe fits…,” I teased, and she pulled my hair harder. “Ouch. Okay, okay. You two are the hippest parents on the planet. You’re cool, you’re boss, you’re phat, you’re way bad.”

  “That’s more like it.” Taking a hair clip from the drawer, she flipped my hair up into a twist and secured it so that dark shoots fanned out the top. It was fancier than the usual ponytail I would have done. My time in Ukraine had cured me of any need to primp in the morning. Straightening my shoulders, Karen smiled at our reflection in the mirror, then kissed me on the cheek. “Okay, kiddo, I’ve got to head for work. I’m meeting with the owners of Mariposa restaurants this morning to talk to them about providing suppers for our Friday after-school program. We’ve had to give the kids sandwiches lately because our old Friday vendor changed owners.”