Where'd You Go, Bernadette(75)

I gave her my room number and pulled myself along the ropes and back to my room. I had been all excited about having a TV, but then got less excited when the only two stations were showing Happy Feet and the seabird lecture. The door swung open. I jumped up. It was Dad… followed by the gift shop lady.

“Polly said you asked to see a copy of Mom’s receipt?”

“We were instructed to get your father,” she told me, shamefaced. “I did bring some origami paper.” I glowered at her, Kubrick style, and threw myself on the bed.

Dad gave Polly a look like, I’ll take it from here. The door closed, and Dad sat across from me. “The naturalists felt really bad about last night,” he said to my back. “They came to find me. The captain spoke to the whole crew.” There was a long pause. “Talk to me, Bee. I want to know what you’re thinking and feeling.”

“I want to find Mom,” I said into the pillow.

“I know you do, baby. So do I.”

I turned my head. “Then why were you at a stupid seabird lecture? You’re acting like she’s dead. You should be trying to find her.”

“Now?” he said. “On the ship?” The side table was crammed with Dad’s eyedrops, reading glasses with one lens taped over, dark glasses with one lens taped over, those awful Croakie things that keep your glasses on, his heart-rate monitor, and a bunch of little tubes of vitamins you put under your tongue. I had to sit up.

“In Antarctica.” I pulled the captain’s report out of my backpack.

Dad took a deep breath. “What are you doing with that?”

“It’s going to help me find Mom.”

“That’s not why we’re here,” he said. “We’re here because you wanted closure.”

“I just told you that to trick you.” It’s pretty obvious to me now that you can’t say that to somebody and expect them to be fine with it. But I was too excited. “You’re the one who made me think of it, Dad, when you said the letter from the Harmsen guy was just a lawyer talking. Because if you look at the captain’s report with an open mind, it proves that Mom loved it down here. She was having such a good time, drinking and going out all day, that she decided to stay. And she wrote me a letter telling me that, so I wouldn’t get worried.”

“Can I give you another interpretation?” Dad said. “I see a woman who kept to herself and drank a bottle of wine at dinner, and then moved on to the hard stuff. That’s not having a fun time. That’s drinking yourself to death. And I’m sure Mom did write you a letter. But it was mainly full of paranoid rants about Audrey Griffin.”

“It says, ‘highly probable.’ ”

“But we’ll never know,” Dad said. “Because she never mailed it.”

“She gave it to a passenger to mail when they got back home, but it got lost.”

“How come this passenger failed to report that during the interrogation?”

“Because Mom told them to keep quiet.”

“There’s a saying,” Dad said. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah.” I fell onto the pillow and gave a big puff.

“It means that when you’re trying to figure something out, don’t start off being too exotic in your reasoning.”

“I know what it means.” I moved my head because I had landed in a patch of drool.

“It’s been six weeks, and nobody’s heard from her,” he said.

“She’s somewhere waiting for me,” I said. “It’s a fact.” A pulsing aura of energy attacked the right side of my face. It was emanating from Dad’s junk on the table. There was so much of it, and it was so neatly arranged, it was worse than a girl, it just made me sick. I jerked myself up to get away from it.

“I don’t know where you’re getting this from, sweetheart, I really don’t.”

“Mom didn’t kill herself, Dad.”

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t have too much to drink one night and fell overboard.”

“She wouldn’t have let that happen,” I said.

“I’m talking about an accident, Bee. By definition, nobody lets an accident happen.”

A plume of smoke rose from behind the desk chair. It was the humidifier Mom had bought for Dad, now plugged in with an upside-down bottle of water sticking out of it. Just like Dad wanted.

“I know why it’s convenient for you if Mom killed herself.” Until I started saying the words, I had no idea they were tamped down in my stomach. “Because you were cheating on her, and it gets you off the hook because you can go, Blah blah blah, she was crazy all along.”

“Bee, that’s not true.”

“You look for horses,” I said. “While you spent your whole life at work, me and Mom were having the best, funnest time ever. Mom and I lived for each other. She wouldn’t do anything close to getting drunk and walking next to a ship’s balcony because it would mean she might never see me again. That you think she would shows how little you know her. You look for horses, Dad.”

“Where is she hiding, then?” Dad asked, starting to blow. “On an iceberg? Floating on a raft? What’s she been eating? How’s she keeping warm?”