And Then Everything Unraveled Read online

  And Then

  Everything

  Unraveled

  by

  Jennifer Sturman

  This book is dedicated to Michele Jaffe.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO BY JENNIFER STURMAN

  Copyright

  One

  It’s hard to believe, but this whole thing didn’t even start until a couple of weeks ago, when my mother left for Antarctica with one of her environmental groups. They were on their way to document the damage to polar ice shelves from global warming, just in case there’s still anyone out there who doesn’t think it’s a problem.

  Of course, I didn’t know then that my life was about to change forever. Everything seemed completely normal. T.K.—my mother’s full name is Temperance Kittredge Truesdale, but for obvious reasons she prefers to go by T.K.—anyhow, she travels a lot, so I was used to her being away. In fact, I was sort of glad about this trip, because it meant I could spend the last days of summer at the beach, guilt-free.

  I have a semisecret surfing habit, something neither my mother nor my friends know much about—T.K. because she doesn’t believe surfing is a “high-return use of scarce time” and my friends because everyone thinks business plans are cooler than slacker sports in Silicon Valley, where it seems like nearly all of the parents and most of the kids have started their own Internet companies.

  Google and Microsoft are already fighting over a widget my best friend, Erin, came up with for mobile messaging, and my other friend Justin sits in on engineering classes at Stanford—for fun, not because anyone makes him. Meanwhile, I do a lot of pretending to understand what they’re talking about.

  I’m pretty sure they’re just as mystified about how I spend my spare time, not that we really discuss it. But my dad was the one who taught me how to surf, and even now there’s something about hitting a wave just right that makes me feel like he’s still around, and like things make sense in a way they never do on dry land.

  All of which is a long way of explaining why I spent the whole afternoon at Ross’s Cove that Monday, making the most of nobody paying any attention to what I was up to. I probably stayed out later than I should have, but I had no idea that everything had already begun to unravel.

  The big black BMW parked in front of our house was the first clue that something wasn’t right. Even without the TJW-4 vanity plate I would’ve recognized the car. Only Thaddeus J. Wilcox IV would drive something that flashy in our neighborhood, where it’s practically illegal to own anything but a hybrid.

  Thad’s the guy who manages the day-to-day operations of my mother’s company. He comes by the house sometimes, but it’s always to see T.K.—his being there when she was away was sort of strange. Still, when I saw his car, I just figured he was dropping off some paperwork for when she got back, and mostly I was hoping he’d be gone before I got inside. While Thad’s supposed to be a total genius at business, he’s not exactly the most gifted conversationalist.

  So I was taking as long as I possibly could to hang up my wet suit on the porch when I heard Nora calling my name from the kitchen. Nora’s our housekeeper, and she stays overnight when my mother’s out of town, which means a lot of TV and junk food since those are two of our shared interests. She also likes to ask about my love life, but that’s a pretty short conversation since I don’t have one.

  I went in through the back door, and Thad was still there, waiting for me in the kitchen with Nora and fiddling with his BlackBerry, which I think must be surgically attached since I’ve never seen him without it. They sat me down at the kitchen table, and Nora poured me a glass of milk, which she knows perfectly well I hate.

  I was so busy protesting about the milk that I didn’t even notice the weird look on Nora’s face until after she’d taken a deep breath and said, “Delia, honey, we have something important to tell you.”

  Then Thad cleared his throat and explained about the SOS signal my mother’s ship had sent out, and how none of the ships or planes that came to the rescue found a trace either of her ship or any survivors.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Do you understand what Thad is saying?” Nora asked. Her forehead crinkled, and she automatically reached up a hand to smooth it. Nora’s a grandmother, but she’s very proud of not looking like it, and also of looking that way naturally. One of our other shared interests is checking out pictures of face-lifts gone horribly wrong on AwfulPlasticSurgery.com. “Sweetie, if the ship went down, and they didn’t find any survivors, it means your mom is d—”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  They were probably expecting a more over-the-top response. And I have to admit, for a split second I did feel like somebody had vacuumed out my insides.

  But almost instantly that feeling gave way to a bizarre sort of calm. When I reached for the emotion that was usually right there, waiting to be tapped, I came up empty.

  Because I just couldn’t believe my mother was dead.

  I still can’t. I mean, everyone else is using the past tense when they talk about her, but it’s all a huge mistake. It has to be. I don’t know what happened exactly, but T.K. will explain everything when she returns.

  And I’m sure she will return. This is a woman whose favorite appliance is a label maker—she’s way too organized to die by just disappearing like that, and she’s much too determined to let a little thing like being stranded in the Antarctic do her in.

  Especially when she’s the only parent I have left.

  My dad, Ashok Navare, and T.K. met in the computer lab at Stanford. I suspect I was conceived there, too, but that’s one of those things I’m happier not knowing about. They were in the same graduate program, and together they came up with a way to speed up e-mail traffic on the Internet. This sounds like an easy fix, but whenever people send e-mail, the company my parents started makes money. Only a fraction of a penny each time, but since it happens billions of times a day, it adds up.

  T.K. was really into building the business, but my dad cashed out to pursue his true passion, which was, embarrassingly, the type of extreme sports they show on ESPN2. Some fathers play golf, and the ones who’re trying extra hard to seem young might do yoga. Ash was the only one jumping out of planes with a surfboard strapped to his feet. He liked defying expectations, and people tend not to expect Indian software engineers to be into that sort of thing.

  The irony was that he died doing something as ordinary as grocery shopping. He was coming out of the Whole Foods in Palo Alto when a car swerved to avoid a runaway cart and hit him instead. That was three years ago, and I’d thought I was finally okay with it, but hearing about T.K.’s disappearance made me miss him all over again.

  So, I was already down to one parent, and I knew T.K. would never just desert me, and definitely not in such a haphazard manner. And it wa
sn’t like there was even any proof that she was actually dead—I didn’t get the science gene, but I’m still enough of my parents’ daughter to know how important empirical data is, and in this particular situation there wasn’t the tiniest shred of it.

  But nobody seemed to agree with me on that point—not Nora, and not even Erin and Justin, though they were a lot nicer about it than people like Thad. And nobody paid the slightest attention to any of my ideas about search-and-rescue missions, either. A person can’t be declared officially dead until she’s been missing for seven years, but the general consensus of everyone who was old enough to have a say—as in, not me—was that my mother’s gone forever. Thad and the lawyers hardly waited seven seconds to dig up T.K.’s will.

  Knowing my mother, I wasn’t surprised that she had a will or that she’d filed copies in all of the appropriate places, including in a folder labeled WILL in the cabinet in her home office, right behind the folder labeled WETLANDS PRESERVATION and right in front of the one labeled WIND FARM—SOLANO COUNTY. But I was still surprised by what it said.

  Her plans for her money were completely predictable. I knew she had a lot and I knew exactly what she’d do with it. Sure enough, a sensibly sized chunk goes to me—enough to cover the basics, but not enough for Paris Hilton to start worrying about the competition. The remainder’s supposed to go to organizations supporting “socially liberal but fiscally conservative causes.”

  Her plans for her company, TrueTech, were predictable, too, since it’s been entrusted to Thad’s care. There was also some ominous language about Thad training me to take over one day, and he seemed pretty worked up about it, but he’s always worked up about something. Since I’ve barely finished the tenth grade, and since I have plenty of other things to worry about, it seems as if this is a request we can safely ignore for now.

  No, the stuff about the money and the company was fine. It was the final paragraph that floored me. Here’s what it said:

  In the event of my death prior to my daughter, Cordelia Navare Truesdale, reaching maturity, I appoint my sister Charity Dennis Truesdale of 15 Laight Street, Manhattan, to act as her legal guardian.

  However, while Charity will have sole custody of Cordelia, I appoint my other sister, Patience Truesdale-Babbitt of 888 Park Avenue, Manhattan, to act as her trustee, with full discretion over all financial and academic decisions.

  This would have been fine, too. I know orphans are supposed to go live with their relatives, and even if my parents had ever been married, what family my dad had is in India—it wasn’t like I expected anyone to send me to an entirely different country.

  There was just one small problem: I’d never even met my mother’s sisters. Or anyone else in her family, for that matter. All I really knew was that T.K. hadn’t spoken to her parents since before I was born.

  The rift started when she decided to go to Stanford. Truesdales had been attending Princeton for generations, so this was a big deal. Then things got worse when she decided to have me on her own. Apparently, voluntary single motherhood wasn’t done, at least not in her parents’ social circles, but T.K. considers marriage to be an “archaic manifestation of patriarchal oppression” and says life is too short to waste on “antiquated convention and East Coast snobbery.”

  She’d explained this back when I was in the second grade and wondering why I didn’t have a lot of relatives giving me presents on my birthday or coming to watch my soccer games. But when she’d told me about her family, all she’d really said about my aunts was that the three of them didn’t have much in common besides being the victims of their parents’ unfortunate taste in names.

  And, as if finding out that my mother had recklessly handed my future over to two complete strangers wasn’t enough of a shock, then came the real kicker. T.K. saw fit to add the following little coda, right before the signatures and dates and notary’s seal:

  To be clear, I make these arrangements only as a last resort. For Cordelia’s sake, I hope they never become necessary.

  These aren’t exactly the sort of words in which an orphan can take comfort, even an orphan who’s only temporarily an orphan. But they also didn’t stop Thad from calling up my aunts and turning my entire life upside down.

  After several hurried conversations among the adults on each coast and a lot of me fruitlessly pointing out how ridiculous it was to write T.K. off so soon, Nora packed my things into boxes to be shipped to my aunt Charity’s, and Thad arranged for my plane ticket. It was all done so quickly that I barely had time to process what was happening, though I did manage to sneak in a final afternoon at Ross’s Cove before saying goodbye to Erin and Justin.

  It was the first Sunday in September, right before Labor Day and the start of the school year, when Thad drove me to the airport in San Francisco. Being Thad, he insisted on getting there ridiculously early and then walking me all the way to the security checkpoint. If they’d let him, he probably would’ve followed me onto the plane to make sure I buckled my seat belt properly, but fortunately he didn’t have a boarding pass and I was considered old enough to travel by myself, even if I didn’t have any say over where I was going.

  Six hours later, I landed in New York.

  Two

  I was a bit on edge by the time my flight arrived, a little after midnight. It turned out that a long plane ride alone wasn’t exactly the best way to take my mind off T.K. calling my aunts “a last resort,” and it hadn’t helped that the movie was about tap-dancing penguins. I didn’t want to think about how they were much better equipped for polar survival than my mother.

  So I wasn’t feeling like the least anxious version of myself as I followed the other passengers to the baggage claim. Then it seemed like it took forever for luggage to start sliding down the chute and onto the carousel, which gave the anxious feeling the opportunity to swell and morph into something closer to full-fledged dread.

  My suitcase finally tumbled onto the conveyor belt, though as soon as it did, I wished I could delay until I was in a mental state that was more likely to make a favorable impression on estranged relatives. But instead I pushed through the doors to the terminal, where Charity had told Thad she’d pick me up. (I’d refused to speak to her directly, since I’d still been trying to convince everyone I wasn’t an orphan and had no intention of going to New York.)

  Nobody rushed over to greet me, but I figured it would take a while to locate my aunt in the crowd, especially since I had no idea what she even looked like. All I had to go on was an old snapshot I’d found in a folder labeled PERSONAL MEMORABILIA filed between PALO ALTO CONSERVATION LEAGUE and PRIUS (TOYOTA) in my mother’s home office.

  The photo was of three girls on a sandy beach, and I’d recognized one of them as T.K. right away. She still wears her hair in the same shiny brown bob, and I’ve seen the same impatient expression on her face more times than I can count, usually while she’s helping with my science homework. I’m okay at most subjects, but science is pretty much a lost cause.

  Anyhow, my mother was probably younger than I am now when the picture was taken, and the two other girls looked even younger than that. The middle one had blond braids and a big fake beauty-pageant smile, while the smallest one was squinting her green eyes at the camera and scowling underneath a tangle of black curls. Neither of them looked anything like each other or like T.K., though there was something oddly familiar about the one with dark hair. But I didn’t even know for sure they were her sisters, and if they were, who knew what they’d look like now?

  Either way, I found myself scanning the crowd for anyone with hair matching one of the two girls in the picture. There was a blondish woman, but she was too old to be my aunt, and she was with a man who was even older. As I watched, they started waving and smiling, and a younger blond woman lugging a matching blond toddler shouted a hello and hurried in their direction. A tired-looking guy who was probably her husband trailed behind with their bags.

  The stream of travelers flowed around me and peeled off
in groups of two and three and four. As the crowd grew smaller, the thick feeling that had been in my throat off and on for the last week came back, but I swallowed and kept looking.

  When nobody was left but a man with a sign that said BIG APPLE LIMOS, I tried to convince myself that Thad must have misunderstood and that my aunt would be waiting for me outside. But outside I saw only a straggling taxi line and people making their way to the parking garage.

  As a general rule, I believe that panic is a healthy response to being stranded in a strange city in the middle of the night, but it also seemed like freaking out wasn’t an option just then. So I tried to stave off the panic by thinking what my mother would do.

  T.K. approaches every problem with steady, cool logic. This comes a lot less easily for me, but now I did my best to channel her levelheaded calm. There was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for my aunt not being there, and a simple phone call was all it would take to straighten everything out.

  Even though T.K. considers it “an invasion of privacy and lapse in common courtesy” to call someone after ten P.M., I thought she’d okay it under the circumstances, so I dialed the number Charity had given Thad. And I broke another of T.K.’s rules of phone etiquette by not hanging up after five rings, which she says is long enough to give someone a chance to get to the phone or for voice mail to pick up but not long enough to be obnoxious.

  It was eight whole rings before an automated voice came on to tell me that “the subscriber you have called is not available at this time.” Then another automated voice came on and said, “The mailbox for this subscriber is full” before hanging up on me.

  I stared at my phone. Then I checked the number and dialed again, but I got the same result.

  At this point, no amount of swallowing could get rid of the thick feeling in my throat. It was also getting harder to keep channeling my mother, especially since Nora had spent so much time warning me about how careful I needed to be in a place like New York, where even the most harmless-looking person could be packing heat and intent on criminal mayhem.