“OH NO OH NO OH NO,” said Ono, muffled.
“Your robot is stuck,” Otto said.
“My robot is fine,” Jaime said, before turning and walking out the door, not even bothering to close it behind him.
After Jaime was gone, Cricket spoke for them all when she said, “Nobody and nothing is fine anymore.”
CHAPTER THREE
Jaime
If you were to ask Jaime how he was, he would have said he was fine. Perfectly fine, even. Sure, he wasn’t sleeping well, but that was no big deal. And maybe he’d lost his appetite, but sometimes a person just wasn’t that hungry. And yes, he was a little distracted these days, but he was almost a teenager. (Teenagers! So distractible!) And yeah, it had been weeks since he’d seen the two friends he’d spent almost all summer with. But hey, people got busy. People changed.
Jaime Cruz, soon-to-be teenager, was very, very busy. And possibly a little bit, or a lot, changed.
“But what are you so busy doing?” his grandmother Mima had asked just that morning.
“Things,” he’d said, pushing eggs around on his plate.
“Things,” she repeated. “Like what kind of things?”
“Just . . . things.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mima. “Are you sure you don’t want to call Tess and Theo today? I’m running out of things to say to them when they call.”
“Don’t answer the phone, then,” he said.
Mima raised a brow. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry, Mima,” he mumbled. “I’m just . . .”
“Busy,” she finished. “Yes, I heard you the first four hundred times you told me.” She sighed and took his plate. “I don’t know what happened with you kids, but I think it would be better if you talked about it.”
At this, Jaime merely shook his head. He didn’t want to talk to Tess and Theo. And as much as he loved Mima, he didn’t want to talk to her, either. The only person he really wanted to talk to, the only person who could possibly answer his questions, had disappeared, like the world’s most frustrating magic act. All he was left with were endless drawings in a sketchbook and one funny little robot.
Until now.
Now Jaime ran out of the Morans’ apartment to get back to his. Mima’s text message said that his dad was—
“Here!” Jaime said as he burst through the door.
Jaime’s father stood up from the couch. “My assignment ended a few weeks early and I thought I’d surprise—”
Jaime didn’t let his father finish talking before tackling him with a hug, practically knocking him over. It didn’t matter that he’d been mad that his dad had left in the first place three months before, that he was super mad that his dad kept leaving every time he got a new work assignment. It didn’t matter that he was almost a teenager and should be communicating entirely in grunts and eye rolls.
Jaime said, “I missed you.”
His dad laughed, patted his back. “I missed you, too, hijo.” Jaime’s dad let go of him and held him at arm’s length. His warm brown eyes scoured Jaime’s face. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Jaime said, as he’d been saying every day for weeks, but tears pricked at his eyes. He blinked them away, hoping his dad didn’t see.
If his dad saw the tears, he didn’t say. What he did say was “Well. I love what you and Mima have done with the place.”
Jaime snorted. He and Mima had barely touched anything in the apartment since moving in. The walls were still toothpaste white, the photographs and paintings that had decorated their old place were still in boxes. Mima hadn’t bothered to unroll rugs or display any of her favorite plates. You would have thought they were getting ready to move out of the place rather than trying to settle in.
Mima said, “We’re taking our time decorating, aren’t we, Jaime?”
“You can say that again,” said Jaime’s father. He looked as lean and strong as always. But maybe the creases around his eyes were a little deeper, his skin a little tanner from his time in Sudan. “And I know how hard you’ve been working.”
“I have,” said Mima. “You like my shirt?” She pulled on the hem of her T-shirt, which read THE HANDY WOMAN.
“It’s a great shirt. I’m going to want one of those for myself.” Jaime’s dad put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room. “This place could use some color. What do you two think about yellow? Or blue? We could all go to the paint store together and pick out shades for each room. And maybe we should invest in a few more chairs. Get this place looking like someone actually lives here.”
Jaime was almost afraid to ask. “How long will you be home? I mean, how long till you get your next assignment?”
“I already got my next assignment,” his dad said.
Jaime tried to swallow his disappointment, but it practically choked him. “Where is it? And when do you leave?”
His dad grinned. “I don’t have to leave.”
“What?”
“My assignment is here, in Jersey. Just a half-hour drive away. I might have to take a few trips now and then, but I’m going to be home with you. How does that sound?”
A mix of feelings washed over Jaime. Happiness. Relief. Gratitude. And something unnameable, what he’d felt when he was little when he would wake up in the middle of a nightmare and wander to his dad’s room and just the sound of his dad breathing made him feel better, made him feel safe.
Ono’s head popped up from Jaime’s pocket. “Land of Kings!”
His dad’s eyes widened. “What’s that?”
“This is Ono,” said Jaime. “He only says two things. One is ‘To the Land of Kings.’ The other is—”
“Oh no,” said Ono.
“O . . . kay,” said Jaime’s dad. “Is it broken?”
“OH NO.”
“That’s just how it talks,” Jaime said.
Jaime’s dad shook his head in wonder. “Is that the new thing now? Robots?”
Jaime tucked Ono back into his pocket. “Robots are the old thing.”
“Where did you get it?” Jaime’s dad said.
“I found it.”
“Just lying around?”
Jaime shrugged helplessly. Technically, he and the twins had stolen Ono. Not that they’d known Ono was Ono at the time. At the time, Ono looked like nothing more than an ancient puzzle sitting on a shelf in a quirky little Brooklyn museum. Just one more piece of the riddle that was the Old York Cipher, just another clue, something they could “borrow” and return later. But then Ono became Ono, and Jaime didn’t know how to give him back. He didn’t want to give him back, and it seemed unfair that he should have to, and what kind of person did that make him?
Jaime ached to spill the whole story to his dad, from the very beginning, from the very first clue. He wanted to tell someone he could trust. But he couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t tell his dad what he had become. That he was a liar and a thief, friends with liars and thieves. That he’d thought he and the twins were all keeping the same secrets for the same reasons, but that the twins had even more to hide. That they hadn’t trusted him with the truth—because surely they knew the truth—and now he couldn’t trust them, either. That every good thing he’d tried to do had gotten all mixed up and he’d lost any sense of what he was doing and why he was doing it, of who, exactly, he was saving. That he’d sat in his room and drawn sketches of their old home at 354 W. 73rd Street imploding, caving in on itself, and had felt himself caving in as he drew. That he was just one big pile of rubble.