Central Park Showdown Page 6

The last time I saw Finn, I was in his arms, being carried out of the arena after I flew over Luna’s head. The whole carrying business only lasted a few minutes but I had replayed it so many times in my mind that I felt a rush of embarrassment when I saw Finn. I had to keep clearing my throat because it felt like there was a big clump of oatmeal stuck in it. Finn spoke to me very casually as if the incident never happened. Clearly, he has not been replaying anything in his mind.

  He assigned Lorcan and me the area around the reservoir in the north of the Park to search.

  ‘That’s not my favourite section of the Park,’ Lorcan said.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  ‘If Dr Pepper fell into the reservoir, I’m sure it’s not his favourite section either,’ Finn replied.

  ‘What?’ gulped Greg. ‘Fell into the reservoir. Dr Pepper can’t swim! Remember I put him in the bath tub that time—’

  ‘Keep it together Greg,’ said Finn, ‘I was kidding. Dr Pepper isn’t in a watery grave. He’s far too smart. We’ll find him.’

  ‘Yes of course we will, Greg,’ I said, heading off to start the search.

  Finn called after me. ‘Why don’t you like the reservoir, Evie?’

  I stopped and looked back and shrugged.

  ‘It always seems a little lost and lonely, an outsider who doesn’t really belong in Central Park and secretly wishes it had been built in some provincial town in Canada.’

  I thought Finn would laugh, but he didn’t. He just nodded almost imperceptibly and turned back to the maps.

  Lorcan and I set off in opposite directions around the reservoir, expecting to meet somewhere in the middle. Central Park is a very big area in which to find one black rabbit enjoying a bid for freedom. I hustled around the reservoir, poking in the foliage with a stick and calling out Dr Pepper’s name, which was kind of dumb because he’s never come in response to his name before. Even though it was super cold and big slushy snowflakes were falling lightly, there were loads of joggers and skaters around. New Yorkers aren’t nosey at all. Nobody stopped me and asked, ‘Hey, what are you looking for, kid?’

  About one-third of the way around the reservoir, I saw Finn walking towards me, a bundle of black fur in his arms.

  ‘Dr Pepper, Yay! You found him!’ I said.

  ‘Not me. Some kids found him,’ said Finn, ‘he’d been trapped under one of the wooden rowing boats, stored upside down for winter and managed to tunnel his way out. The Great Rabbit Escape. I’ve texted Greg,’ added Finn. ‘He’ll meet us by the Wollman rink. Come on.’

  ‘Ok, let me just text Lorcan to let him know Dr Pepper is alive and hungry and to head for the Wollman rink.’

  After sending the text, I fell into step beside Finn. I had to take two steps for every one of his to keep up with him so I felt a little like a trotting pony. Finn seemed to notice because he slowed down a little. Isn’t it funny how even walking beside someone, not saying anything at all, can be so … intense? I noticed he had had a haircut since I last saw him. His coat sleeves rode up a little and I could see the thin white scars on his left arm. Finn had told me he got those scars from playing ice hockey but Greg told me once that their biological Mom’s drug-dealer-boyfriend used to beat Finn. I don’t blame Finn for lying about what must have been a super crappy childhood before he and Greg were adopted by the Winters.

  ‘So how are things going, Evie?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘I heard about the whole my-dad-is-a-terrorist-from-Iceland thing at school,’ said Finn with his half-smile.

  ‘Oh, yeah. That was centuries ago. Everyone seems to have forgotten about that now. Stale news. Now, they’re talking about some kid who was found living in the girls’ bathroom on the third floor. But I bet that kid doesn’t exist. It’s probably a particularly large and active cockroach.’

  ‘Imagine your Dad really was a terrorist,’ said Finn, ‘You don’t know, he could be anywhere doing anything.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘he’s actually here in Manhattan fighting Scott in court to get custody of me.’

  ‘What?’ asked Finn, ‘are you for real?’

  ‘No, I mean, yes, my so-called Dad’s camped out in some hotel uptown. He just turned up at the clinic one day and seemed to think we’d have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together and … and I don’t know, go bowling or something. Scott told him to take a hike. I haven’t told Greg and Kylie yet, but I will.’

  ‘Let’s sit here for a minute,’ said Finn pointing at a bench half-hidden under some snow-laden pine trees. It would have been prettier if it wasn’t so cold. Way too cold to sit down, I thought but I swept some snow off the bench and sat down. Finn put Dr Pepper on the ground and stood in front of me, very close, keeping Dr Pepper gripped between his ankles. Without warning, he leaned forward and brushed my hair with his hand. I jumped as if he had tasered me.

  ‘You had snow in your hair,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh,’ I said very intelligently.

  ‘So, wow, your deadbeat dad’s rolled into town. What’s he like?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to meet him. I haven’t even seen him and with even a teeny bit of luck and Scott’s lawyer, I never will.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Finn said bluntly.

  I stiffened, feeling horribly hurt and offended.

  ‘Bet you wouldn’t want to see your mum who abandoned you,’ I said.

  ‘You’d lose that bet,’ said Finn. ‘Mom had lots of bad luck. It was her stupid dealer, every time she tried to get herself clean and move us away, he would find her, and come around. He was always there. He wouldn’t let her go. I hope she beat it, that she’s clean now wherever she is.’

  ‘Clean?’ I said.

  ‘Free from drugs,’ he explained.

  There was a silence. I was still smarting at being called crazy. I opened my big fat stupid mouth.

  ‘Druggies don’t change,’ I snapped.

  Finn’s dark eyes flashed and I will never ever forget the look he gave me. He looked at me as if he didn’t know me. After a couple of seconds he said,

  ‘You’re just a kid brought up in some cute, artsy Bohemian lifestyle in Ireland. You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Hey, there you guys are! I’ve been waiting for you forever at the rink!’ yelled Greg.

  He ran over and scooped up Dr Pepper and began to examine him. Dr Pepper didn’t seem any the worse for his tunneling misadventures except for being very dirty. Coltan sauntered up wearing the artificial grin he keeps permanently plastered on his smooth face. He looked slyly at me and at Finn and then back at me again and he smirked a little. Without so much as a ‘see ya’, Finn walked off with him, leaving me sitting there on a very cold bench, staring at the shoelaces in my boots as if they were the most interesting things I had ever seen.

  For the rest of the day, I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation with Finn over and over in my head giving us both different dialogue each time. I don’t know why I said what I did. The worst part is I don’t even believe it. I’m sure people can change. I mean, it’s really, really hard, but it’s possible. All the thinking was totally exhausting. When your thoughts whirl around in circles, they tend to suck all your energy into the pool in the middle, leaving you feeling drained and empty. I spent hours trying to write a text to Finn to try and apologise. Everything I wrote seemed so wrong and stiff or else it was inappropriately silly and jokey. In the end, just before eight o’clock, I texted: ‘Hi, I’m sorry for saying that stupid thing today. Evie’

  Then I stared at my phone waiting for a reply. It was AGONY. I was incapable of doing anything but stare at my phone, waiting and waiting and then waiting some more. A solid two hours later, a few minutes after 10, Finn sent a text back: ‘k’

  That was it, just ‘k.’ He must hate me. No, worse than that. He doesn’t care what I think.

  Chapter 12

  When the blood test result came back stating that Mi
chael Carey was my biological father with a 99.97 per cent probability, I wasn’t surprised, I wasn’t really anything, kind of numb, I suppose. I was shocked when Scott told me that the Court had appointed a lawyer for me. It made me imagine that the words ‘EVIE BROOKS SHALL HAVE A LAWYER,’ appeared overnight in white chalk on the ceiling of some court building.

  Scott got an email from my lawyer scheduling our first meeting for 10 on a Wednesday in a conference room, 4G, in the Family Law Court on Lafayette Street. At least, I got to miss double math, which I have every Wednesday morning under Mr Papadopoulos’s excessively-hairy nostrils.

  Scott and I took the A subway downtown and walked the rest of the way to the courthouse. We got there in plenty of time, around 9:30. The line of people (mainly women and kids) stretched out the double glass doors and around the block, nearly to the Starbucks on the corner. We shuffled forward excruciatingly slowly towards the security checks. Nobody in the line made a sound, not even the toddler in a stroller patched together with duct tape.

  By the time we made it to the front of the line and through security and retrieved our shoes and Scott had put his belt back on, it was a few minutes to ten. Scott took one look at the silent huddle of people waiting resignedly at the elevator bank and decided we’d be quicker taking the stairs. I think we both regretted those breakfast burritos.

  My lawyer, Marcy, was waiting for us. There was a dwarfish quality about her. She was not much bigger than me, with rather messy mousy hair and big glasses with peach frames. She wore a navy and black checked trouser suit stained with what looked like mayonnaise on the right lapel.

  Conference Room 4G was small room with just enough space for a small table and two plastic chairs. There was a sprinkling of used staples on the table and a couple of pieces of torn paper. The only picture on the walls was a black and white poster advertising HIV counseling services. The room smelt faintly of despair and spicy chicken empanadas.

  ‘You must be Evangeline,’ Marcy said, shaking my hand.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘call me Evie.’

  Then she said to Scott, ‘You can pick her up in half an hour.’

  ‘I’ll stay with her,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Marcy, ‘I need to speak to my client alone. You can wait out in the hallway.’

  It took me a few seconds to realise I was the ‘client,’ she was talking about. I said, ‘It’s ok,’ to Scott and he said he’d wait right outside.

  Marcy and I sat down on the two chairs and she fumbled in her briefcase and pulled out two thick velobound bundles of paper, which she placed on the desk. She scooted her chair around to bring it much closer to mine and I had to resist the impulse to push my chair back further. She smiled very widely at me. She had dark burgundy lipstick on one of her front teeth.

  ‘Evie,’ she said, ‘I’m a lawyer that represents children. We used to be called law guardians but now we’re just called lawyers for the child.’

  ‘Em, ok, that’s nice,’ I said inanely.

  She smiled again. The lipstick stain had spread to a second tooth. ‘I love representing children, so that I can give them a voice,’ she said.

  I didn’t say anything to that. I’m thirteen, not a child and I have a voice of my own and I can make it very loud when I feel like it.

  Marcy showed me photographs on her phone of her three-year-old twin boys. I said, ‘They look cute,’ and passed her phone back. I guessed that she was trying to ‘bond’ with me but I didn’t feel bonded with Marcy because she happened to have pushed out some kids of her own. Why should I? I wondered when we would get to the part about why I was there. Maybe Marcy sensed that because she put her phone away and said,

  ‘Like I said, I’m your lawyer. I will be representing you in connection with the litigation. Your biological father wants to have custody of you and your uncle, Dr Brooks, wants to retain custody. Everything you say to me is confidential. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You are the boss. I must follow your instructions. Whatever you tell me to do, I have to do it, unless I feel that you are not capable of making decisions in your own best interests, in which case, I can decide how best to act for you.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Marcy, ‘you seem pretty sharp and I’m sure it will never happen that I have to substitute my judgment for yours. That happens very rarely.’

  Then she began to talk about the case. She talked solidly for about twenty minutes, all about what a custody case involves and what might or might not happen and about the other cases she has had and how well she did in them. Marcy said the judge in my case is the Honourable Susanna Flicker, and she’s one of the screamer judges, but I wasn’t to worry about that because she knows how to handle Psycho Suzie. I didn’t find that very reassuring.

  It was all quite confusing but I didn’t get the opportunity to ask any more questions. There was a knock on the door and a fat man with a face like a bull mastiff, came in and said, ‘Marcy, I really need to talk to you now about the settlement in the Polowski case,’ and she said, ‘Fine, I’ll be right with you,’ and she went out the door with him, leaving me alone in the room. There was nothing to do and nothing to look at. Ten minutes later, Marcy came back and she talked some more, this time about the father in the Polowski case, who she said was a cheap alcoholic.

  I wasn’t interested in Mr Polowski’s issues. Finally, I interrupted her and said,

  ‘Just to be clear, I don’t want anything to do with Michael at all. I want to stay with Scott.’

  Marcy reached out and rubbed my hand as if I were a five-year-old and asked me if I had a therapist to help me work through my feelings. I told her that I know what my feelings are. I don’t want to see Michael. I don’t want anything to do with him. Then she looked at her Blackberry and said she had leave to pick up her kids but that she would see me again soon. I wished she had written down what I had said but I guess it’s not difficult to remember. As we went through the door, she gave me a card with her phone number and email address on it and said, ‘remember, you’re on Team Marcy now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, which was a bit cowardly of me because what I felt like saying was, ‘I don’t want to be on Team Marcy or any other team. I just want all this stupid legal stuff to be over.’

  Scott was waiting outside, leaning up against a wall with his hands in his pockets. I could tell from the way his hair was standing up in spikes that he’d been anxiously running his hands through it. He looked as eager to get out there as I did. I think it was the atmosphere. It’s one of those places where you feel – nothing good happens here – nothing much of anything happens here, only waiting and waiting. But the security guards all seemed very friendly and nice; almost apologetic that you had to be there as if it was their fault.

  It was a ‘B’ week so Greg was living with his mom in the East Village. I went over there to hang out that evening with him and Kylie. I told them about my Dad turning up and about my meeting with Marcy. Greg was astounded and a little hurt that I hadn’t said anything before. But Kylie was surprisingly ok about it. She said she understood that sometimes you have to keep stuff to yourself for a little while until you figure it out. They didn’t think Marcy sounded too impressive. They asked a lot of questions about Michael. I explained that Scott and I only knew what Rob, Scott’s lawyer had told us – Michael lives in Melbourne in Australia and is married to a woman named Emily.

  ‘Oh and he’s some kind of music producer,’ I added.

  ‘OMG,’ said Kylie, ‘your long-lost dad is a famous, billionaire music producer!’

  ‘No,’ I said a little testily, ‘he was never lost and he’s not a billionaire although he does make a LOT more money than Scott and before you ask, I don’t know what acts he produces and I don’t care.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kylie.

  ‘That’s ok,’ I said and then I very point
edly changed the subject by asking Greg about his infected mosquito bite. It’s pretty amazing to get a mosquito bite in winter.

  Chapter 13

  Early this morning before school, because Holly called in sick, I was in the unenviable position of having to inform Scott that Mrs Rubenstein was in the waiting room. He grimaced before asking cheerlessly,

  ‘Which cat is it this time that I am supposed to have poisoned?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘she didn’t bring any of her cats with her; she says she wants a hands-off consultation.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’ sighed Scott. ‘Ok, send her in and if she doesn’t reemerge in ten minutes, I want you to run in here and scream “fire” as loudly as you can. You think you can do that?’

  ‘Sure, I got it, Fire, Scream, Everyone Out.’

  He nodded, ‘and I’m not kidding!’

  ‘I know,’ I said. It might seem a little drastic but only if you have never met Mrs Rubenstein.

  Back out in the waiting room, Mrs Rubenstein had pointedly moved her chair as far away as possible from the young couple with the small, shaggy, white dog wearing a spiked collar. The couple sat together quietly holding hands. They had matching tattoos of fire-breathing purple and orange dragons on their pale inner arms. Both of them had a lot of piercings on their eyebrows, noses and lips and when the girl yawned, a shiny silvery stud flashed on her tongue.

  ‘You can go through to Dr Brooks now Mrs Rubenstein,’ I said and with a parting dismissive sniff at the young couple, she donned a clear plastic glove on her right hand to touch the door handle.

  ‘Hi,’ said the girl to me. Her hair was long on the right side and shaved on the other. ‘I’m Nikki and this is Max and Eddie.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘what’s the problem with Max?’

  The young man grinned. ‘I’m Max and there’s plenty wrong with me. But we’re here about Eddie; he’s got a cough,’ he said patting the dog.

  ‘What kind of dog is Eddie?’ I asked curiously.