“Yeah,” Skip said. “And if you want us to, Jess, we’ll beat him up for you.”
I regarded the two of them from where I was sprawled across my bed.
“You two are volunteering to beat up Rob Wilkins?”
“Yeah,” Skip said.
“Well, not beat him up, exactly,” Mike said, darting a look at Skip. “But have a word with him. Tell him to leave you alone. If you want.”
“That,” I said, touched in spite of myself, “is so sweet, you guys.”
“Are you insane?” Ruth asked both boys. “He could beat the crap out of both of you with one hand tied behind his back.”
“Aw, come on,” Skip said. “He’s notthat tough.”
Ruth said, “Skip, we had to take you to Promptcare once because you got a quarter-inch splinter under your pinkie nail and you wouldn’t stop crying.”
“Come on,” Skip said, looking embarrassed. “I was twelve.”
“Yeah,” Ruth said. “You know what guys like Rob Wilkins were doing when they were twelve? Smashing beer cans against their foreheads, that’s what.”
“Nobody needs to beat anybody up for me,” I said to ward off a sibling-smackdown. “I’m fine. Really. Thanks for the concern.”
“So what are you going to do?” Mike wanted to know.
“About what?” I asked. “Rob?”
He nodded.
I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing Ican do. I can’t find his sister for him, however much I might want to.”
“How do you know?” Mike asked.
Both Ruth and I turned our heads to stare at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“I’m serious,” he said in a voice that cracked. He cleared it. “I mean, you haven’t tried to find anyone in, what, a year? How do you know you don’t have it back? You’ve been sleeping through the night lately.”
Everyone, including me, looked at the beat-up wood floor. The fact that I woke up everyone in the apartment with shrieks of unmitigated terror on a semi-regular basis was a fact that had always previously gone unmentioned by mutual agreement.
“Well,” Mike said indignantly. “It’s true. You seem to be doing better, since you started working with—”
“Don’t say it,” I interrupted quickly.
Mike looked confused. “Why not? It’s true. Ever since you started—”
“You’ll jinx it,” I said, “if you say it out loud.”
I didn’t know whether or not this was true. But I wasn’t taking the chance. I hadn’t had a nightmare in quite a while. All summer, practically. And I wanted to keep it that way.
“But just because she’s sleeping again doesn’t mean she’s got her you-know-what back,” Skip said.
Ruth looked at him. “Skip,” she said. “Shut up.”
“You know what I mean,” Skip said. “Her powers. You know. To find people.”
“Skip,” Ruth said again.
“And what if she does get it back?” Skip wanted to know. “That means they’ll make her come work for them again, right? The government? Or the FBI, or whoever. Right? And then what’s Ruth supposed to do? Find a new roommate?”
“SKIP!”
“I’m just saying, if she’s got the ability back, why would she even bother with school and stuff when she could be raking in a fortune, hiring herself out as—”
“SHUT UP, SKIP!” Mike and Ruth both shouted together.
Skip shut up but looked defensive about it.
“Come on,” Mike said to him. “CSIis on.”
“I hate that show,” Skip complained. “All we have to do is look out the window, and we canlive that show.”
“Then we’ll watch something else, okay?” Mike shook his head as he steered Skip from our room. “Can’t you tell they want to be alone?”
“Who? Ruth and Jess? What for?”
The door closed, as Mike tried to explain it to Skip. Ruth, meanwhile, looked at me.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, sounding worried.
“I’m sure,” I said, and picked up Hannah’s picture again and gazed at it.
“I can’t believe he had a sister all this time,” Ruth said, “and didn’t even know it. And he really wants to—what? Adopt her?”
“Be her legal guardian,” I said. “I guess her mom’s a crackhead, or something.”
Ruth sighed. “Thank God you guys broke up. Right? Because it sounds to me like he might be in over his head. With a missing teen sister and all. Believe me, Jess, you would not want any part of that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess not.”
Ruth rolled her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “Don’t even tell me you’d help him. You know, if you still could. After the way he treated you.”
“I wouldn’t be helping him,” I said. “I’d be helping her. Hannah.”
“Right,” Ruth said sarcastically. And got up to get ready for bed.
Right.
Six
At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, I banged on the door to room 1520 at the Hilton on West Fifty-third Street.
Rob came to the door looking bleary-eyed, wrapped in the comforter from his hotel bed, his dark hair sticking up in some very interesting tufts.
“Jess,” he said dazedly, when he saw it was me. “What are you—how did you—?”
“Nice hair,” I said.
He reached up and tried to mash down some of the tufts.
“Wait,” he said. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I called your house,” I said. “Why? Were you trying to keep a low profile? Because Chick was more than happy to tell me where you were staying.”
“No,” Rob said. “No, it’s okay. I asked Chick to stay there in case Hannah turned up while I was gone. I just…Sorry. I’m not really awake. Here. Come in.”
I followed him into his room. It wasn’t spacious—no hotel room in New York (that I’d ever seen, anyway) ever is. But it was nice. Rob was obviously making some decent change out of the garage these days, if he could afford digs like this.
“You want some breakfast?” he asked, still wandering around with the comforter trailing after him, like the train of a bride. “I can order us up some pancakes if you want. Oh, hey, there’s a coffeemaker. Want some coffee?”
“Sure,” I said. “But it would be simpler just to have it at the airport.”
He threw me a startled glance from the little alcove where the coffeemaker sat. “Airport?” he echoed.
It was hard not to notice how adorable he looked, straight out of bed. Even with the hair. He kept the room very tidy, too, in spite of the fact that it was just a hotel room. His jean jacket was even hung up on one of those hangers you can’t take off the pole.
“Airport,” I repeated. “Do you want me to find your sister, or not?”
He said, still looking perplexed, “Well, yeah. But I thought—”
“Then I need to go back to Indiana with you,” I said.
“But…” He’d loosened his hold on the comforter a little in his confusion, and I was awarded a glimpse of his naked chest. It was a relief to note that even though he was a responsible business owner now, he still had a six-pack. “But I thought you said…I mean, yesterday you told me—”
“I know what I said yesterday,” I interrupted him.
“But—”
“Don’t talk about it, okay?” I found that I was hugging myself, my arms crossed against my chest. I dropped my hands. “Let’s just go.”
He reached up to run a hand through his thick dark hair—which just made the tuft-problem worse. And also allowed the comforter to slip even more, so that I saw the waistband of his Calvins.
“Okay. But…” He stared at me. Having that blue-gray gaze on me, so searching, so penetrating, was almost more than I could take. I had to look at the floor instead of back at him. “You know where she is?”
“I seriously don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Can we just go?”
But Rob couldn’t let it rest at that.
“Honest to God, Jess,” he said. “I didn’t mean for—I mean, I just thought this whole thing with you saying you can’t find people anymore was to get out of having to work for that Cyrus guy. Like it was last time. I didn’t know it was real. I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t ready for. I don’t want to…to disrupt this new life you’ve built for yourself.”