CHAPTER FOUR
They drove onto the campus of the University of Oklahoma, immediately overwhelmed by the size of the school, with students pouring out of every single building, ignoring the multiple crosswalks and simply moving with the sheer force of youth toward whatever they had to do next.
No matter how much information the private investigator had given Rube, Mad now realized how incredibly stupid this plan was.
“Oh, jeez,”
Rube said, “this was a lot easier with you.”
And he was right, the ease of driving down some country road onto a property where it was only Mad and her mom, where they had a stand where you could just walk right up, buy some sweet corn, and tell the person behind the counter that you were their half brother.
Here there were buildings that required key cards, dorms that were not clearly labeled and all looked alike, parking lots that required stickers or the PT Cruiser would simply disappear from the campus and Rube and Mad would have to enroll at OU and hope to meet Pepper at graduation.
But this was how a quest worked, Mad figured, having never left her farm except to go to college and go right back to the farm.
You set out with grand designs, expecting glory and riches, and then you ended up surrounded by people who were so much younger than you and did not give a shit about your quest and you realized, oh, god, you weren’t even halfway into your quest, and the campus police would arrest you if they heard you talking to the students and saying the word quest over and over and over, holding up a picture of a young woman.
As they finally found a parking lot that allowed for guest parking, Rube and Mad started walking aimlessly across the vast expanse of the campus.
Rube had a photocopied map, but he seemed unable to reconcile it with the real world.
He had his briefcase and was fumbling for the folder on Pepper.
Mad finally took the map from him so he could search the briefcase.
Rube sifted through the papers until he found what he was looking for, what seemed to be a class schedule for Pepper, as well as her dorm building and campus phone number.
“You have her phone number?”
Mad asked.
“Yeah, it’s right here,”
he replied.
“Wait, did you have my phone number, too?”
“Of course. I got it from the private detective. Yours was easy to find, just in the phone book. I think she had to do a bit more work to get a student number from a campus directory.”
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
Mad asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You could have called me, right? And told me that you were my half brother and everything about our dad.”
“Yeah, I guess so,”
he replied, though he was now looking around to see in which direction they needed to move. “So it looks like she would be in this Political Science class, and it gets out in thirty minutes—oh, no, that class is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so I guess—”
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
Mad asked, her voice getting louder. “Why did you drive to tell me?”
He seemed startled by the question, but now he considered it. “Well, because I was starting this journey to find Dad. And, you know, I wanted you to come with me. And I thought you’d hang up on me if I called.”
“You thought it would be harder to say no if you just showed up at my house and made eggs for me and my mom and begged me to come with you.”
“Mad? Yes! Of course. That’s exactly right. That’s not insidious. I wanted to see you, face-to-face. No matter what, I would have told you that we were related. But for the trip to find him, I wanted to get a sense of what you were like. If you were unstable or something, if I got to the farm and you were in bad shape and maybe needed a hundred thousand dollars to get out of debt, I could just leave.”
Mad wanted to be upset, but what did it matter? She would still be here, in Norman, Oklahoma, searching for their sister. And maybe she needed the shock of having this strange guy crying in front of her. It would have been so easy to refuse him over the phone. She made a point to get over it, to clear her mind. Rube had his methods. He’d found her; they’d find Pepper.
“But, now, Rube? Think about it. There’s two of us. Couldn’t we just call her? Tell her that we’re here and we would like to talk to her about our dad?”
“It worked so well the first time, though,”
Rube told her. “I really think the visual aspect of it is important.”
“It’s different. You’re a guy, so it’s not totally apparent to you, maybe, but when you came to see me, I was working the stand. Customers had come all day long, so when you showed up, even though you looked a little anxious, it wasn’t completely unexpected. The fact that you were my brother was shocking, but it wasn’t as bad. But, think about it, we are two old people who don’t belong on a college campus, and we are going to hang around outside her classroom or her dorm. She will pepper-spray us so fast. She’ll get her teammates to stomp us to dust.”
“Okay, well, I guess I understand that. But it’s not like we’ll be sitting on her bed in her dorm when she opens the door. But I get your point. I do.”
“So what do we do?”
“It’s just … we’re already here. We’re on campus. We came all this way, and it feels so silly to just call her on my cell phone.”
“Please call her on your cell phone,” she said.
“And then what? I tell her that we are her long-lost brother and sister and—oh, by the way—we’re outside your dorm right now, so come on down, we just want to talk?”
Mad realized she was angry at the wrong person. Rube was doing the best he could with the raw materials he had been given. The raw materials? That was their dad’s fault. It would have been so much easier if he’d just told each new family, “Hey, I left behind another family, but don’t let it worry you because they were real bummers. You guys? I just can feel it; you guys are gonna be great.”
And then, when he left that family for the next one, the mom and the kid would be at the dinner table and they’d say, “He mentioned this other family, right? One day, maybe we’ll meet them.”
And then, when they showed up to your campus in the middle of the country on a clear day in March of 2007, you weren’t completely surprised.
“Okay, how about this?”
Rube offered. “We say we’re reporters, and we’re doing a story about her, and we want to talk to her about her dad, Charles Hill.”
“We’re going to start out immediately lying to her?”
Mad responded. She could not figure out how this was going to end in any other way than her and Rube getting pepper-sprayed and put in jail. Why was this so hard? Why was family so difficult?
“Okay, okay, I’ll call, goddamn, and just tell her the truth. I wish we weren’t outside on the street with all the kids making noise and cars and stuff. It’s gonna sound weird.”
“It’s the best option,”
Mad told him, and Rube got his flip phone out of his briefcase and, checking the number on the sheet, dialed. Mad realized she wouldn’t be able to hear the call, and she hissed, “Put it on speaker,”
and she watched Rube fumble on the little screen and hit the spkr button, which amplified the sound of the phone ringing, a sound that instantly made Mad’s heart race. After the third ring, they heard someone answer.
“I’m coming, okay?”
the voice said.
“Um, hello, yes, hello,”
Rube said.
“Wait, who is this?”
the voice said. “Courtney?”
“Is this Pepper?”
Rube asked. He sounded so formal again, like when Mad had first met him, the weird way he turned into a Mormon missionary or a defeated vacuum cleaner salesman, like he had a pitch all ready to go, but suddenly couldn’t remember it and was stalling for time.
“Yeah,”
Pepper said.
“This is, well, my name is Rube Hill. We have, you know, I think we have the same last name.”
“Why are you calling me?”
Pepper replied. “I’m late. I’ve gotta go.”
“Go to class?”
Rube asked.
“Dude,”
Pepper said. “I’m going to get on the bus to Austin.”
“Austin?”
Rube said, so clearly confused.
“I’ve gotta go, dude, sorry,”
Pepper said, and then Mad grabbed the phone from Rube and said, “Sorry, Pepper, this is Madeline Hill, and this is really weird, I know, and I’m sorry about this, but our dad is Charles Hill and I think he’s your dad, too, and we just wanted to talk to you.”
There was a beat of quiet, and Mad listened to the hum of air-conditioning coming through the line.
“We’re your brother and sister. Half brother and half sister,”
Rube clarified.
“What the fuck?”
Pepper finally replied. “This is so stupid. This is a joke, right?”
“It’s not,”
Rube said. “We’re actually here in Oklahoma. We were hoping we could talk.”
“I’m leaving for Austin!”
Pepper shouted. “We have a game in two days, you idiot. The NCAA tournament!”
“Oh, shit,”
Rube said. Mad slapped her head. Why had they not checked this? How were they so stupid? She was a basketball star. It was March. She didn’t follow basketball closely, especially not women’s college basketball, but she knew this much.
“March Madness,”
Mad said, before realizing she had said it out loud.
“You guys sound like fucking aliens,”
Pepper said. “I’m hanging up.”
“No, wait!”
Mad said. “I know it sounds strange and I’m sorry about the timing of this.”
“Spring break is starting, too, you know,”
Pepper added.
“We didn’t!”
Mad replied.
“We so did not realize any of this or we would have figured out a better way.
But if your dad was Charles Hill, and if he left your family, we just wanted to say that he did the same to us.
He did it to the guy you were talking to, and then he did it to me.
And after he left you guys, he did it again. And we just wanted to meet you and to tell you.”
“We’re playing Southeast Missouri State,”
Pepper said, as if she hadn’t heard any of what Mad had said.
“We’ll be rooting for you,”
Rube added, and Mad tried to slap him but he put his hands up in defense.
“Are you serious about all this?”
Pepper said. Her voice, so deep, had softened a bit. “If you are fucking with me to throw me off my game …”
“We’re not!”
Mad shouted. Some students were walking by them and stopped to stare, but Mad kept going, “We’re not, like, spies from … what was it? Mississippi State?”
“Southeast Missouri State,”
Pepper said. “The Redhawks.”
“We’re not Redhawks,”
Rube assured her.
“I’m so sorry,”
Mad repeated. “But we’re your brother and sister, kind of. We hope you win.”
There was a long pause, silence again. “You’re here in Norman?”
Pepper asked.
“We’re on campus, actually,”
Rube said. “We’re close to the Visitors’ Center. There’s—let me look—okay, there’s a Carpenter Hall, maybe?”
“I have to go meet the bus to go to Austin,”
she told them.
“If you want, you can meet me at the Noble Center, okay? It’s the basketball arena.
There’s this part of it, the Legacy Court.
It’s like a museum for basketball. You can wait there and maybe I’ll talk to you before I leave. I gotta get my stuff. I’m late. I just came back because I forgot my headphones.”
“Thanks so much, Pepper,” Mad said.
“I go by Pep,”
she told them.
“Okay, Pep, thank you so much. Sorry. Sorry again. I know this is weird. Thank you,”
Mad said, but Pep had already hung up on them.
Mad’s heart was racing.
Was this what Rube had felt when he’d pulled up to the farm? There was a rush to this that felt more than just familial; it was the terror of putting yourself in a position where someone could absolutely destroy you.
You had to rely on the hope that something, and maybe it was genetic, would keep the person from hurting you, to believe you when you said you only wanted to stand close to them and feel less alone.
And Pep was young.
She was an elite collegiate athlete.
If she wanted to throw them down a flight of stairs, she could.
If she wanted to say the cruelest things about Mad’s flannel shirt, it would be so instinctual that Pep wouldn’t even have to think about it.
If she wanted to say that Mad and Rube were desperate old people who wanted to steal her fame and her youth and pull her down to their level, she could say it and both Rube and Mad would cry so much.
And if she just didn’t want them in her life, what else could they do but leave her to the life she’d made without them? They’d have to keep going, knowing that they lacked something, that they wouldn’t be whole, but, honestly, Mad was okay with this.
A life of farming had prepared her better than Rube, perhaps, who made his living creating stories that would bend to his will.
You took what the earth gave you, and you could cultivate it and respect it and work hard, but it decided what you could and could not have.
If you didn’t die, sometimes that was enough.
And Mad knew, no matter how embarrassing it might be to have an entire basketball team call you awful names, that this would not kill her.
Rube, however, looked less convinced.
But it would be two on one.
She did not know basketball well enough to say with certainty, but weren’t your odds so much better when it was two on one? Mad grabbed Rube’s hand and tugged him toward a reckoning.
THE LLOYD NOBLE CENTER’S LEGACY COURT LOOKED LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF a science-fiction movie, one where citizens of the future would line up to step onto the center court feature and be turned into a cyborg Sooner.
There were numerous TV screens above their heads, the blaring sounds of announcers voicing indisputable proof of Oklahoma’s basketball dominance, and lenticular images of players who were unrecognizable to Mad, and the swirling star-like auras around the players made them look like Jedi Knights from Star Wars .
This is all to say that, even if they weren’t about to meet their half sister for the first time, this location would be deeply strange.
As Mad and Rube paced nervously around the first floor of the interactive museum, which was populated by only a few other people, they stared at trophies and jerseys and listened to former coaches talk about the almost mystical quality of Sooner basketball.
And then their sister, Pepper, appeared in front of them, and Mad almost gasped, after all the holograms and videos and life-size posters, to see a real person before them.
“Okay,”
Pep said to them, her arms crossed, looking slouchy in her oversize warm-up gear emblazoned with the giant red letters of OU.
“Hi, Pepper,”
Rube said.
“You guys are tall,” she said.
“You’re tall, too,”
Rube offered.
“Blonde hair,”
Pep observed.
“Like Dad,”
Rube replied.
Mad saw that Pep flinched a bit, but she recovered, making her face into a mask of indifference again. “Tell me your names again.”
“I’m Rube,”
Rube replied, “and that’s Mad.”
“Matt?”
“Mad,”
Rube said, and Mad wasn’t sure why she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “Like, if you’re mad at someone. Dad liked nicknames, I guess.”
“You’re Dad’s kids? You’re, like, my brother and sister?”
“Yeah,”
Mad finally said, afraid that if she didn’t talk, she would stay silent for the entire meeting. “His dad,”
she said, pointing to Rube, “is also your dad, but his dad was a mystery writer and he lived in Boston.”
“What?”
Pep asked.
“And my dad—who is also your dad and his dad—was a farmer and lived in Tennessee.”
“My dad was a farmer?”
she asked.
“And a mystery writer,”
Rube added.
“Yeah, he was,”
Mad continued, “and we’re your half sister and half brother. And we’re really sorry about all this. But Dad had other families, and so Rube and I decided to go find him and we’re just, like, kind of stopping along the way to meet his other kids.”
“’Cause he has more kids?”
Pep asked. “Like, after me?”
Rube nodded. “One other kid, at least,”
he offered.
“He had another kid after he left us?”
“Yes,”
Rube replied.
“I have to go in a second,”
she said. “My coach is already a little weirded out that I’m not there. I told her it was a family emergency, but, like, I don’t think she knew what that meant.”
She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t know what it means.”
“We’re sorry about this,”
Mad repeated. “We knew it would be hard. It’s been weird for both of us, too, but we just wanted to meet you. We didn’t know it would be at such a bad time.”
Pep nodded. It was, she seemed to be acknowledging, a really bad time, but Mad knew that there wasn’t a good time.
“We’re going to go see Dad,”
Rube offered. “Me and Mad are traveling to go see him, because we’ve not seen him since he left us. I mean, he left me and then ten years later he left Mad, but we’re going to go see him.”
“I can’t go with you,”
Pep replied.
“No, I understand. We would have loved for you to come, though. But, yeah, you’ve got the basketball.”
“It might be a few weeks if we get to the championship.”
“Yes, of course,”
Rube acknowledged, though it seemed like he was thinking about how they might meet up after the tournament and she could join them on the trip. But Mad thought that if this trip took more than two weeks, she would die. She had been a little afraid of another person on the trip, but now she felt sad to leave Oklahoma without adding to their ranks.
“Can I just ask,”
Rube said, “if you’ve seen our dad since he left you?”
“Nope,”
Pep answered. “Never again. He just left and he never came back.”
“Maybe he talked to your mom?”
Rube asked.
“No way; he’s never contacted us.”
“It’s just that he ended up talking to both of our moms after he left,”
Rube offered, and Mad saw Pep’s eyes blaze with real anger.
“My mom would have told me,”
she said. She looked around the museum, like it was the first time she’d realized where she was, as if all of these trophies and jerseys were entirely new to her. “I gotta go,” she said.
“Maybe we can come see the game?”
Rube offered.
“I can’t stop you,”
Pep said. “I thought you were going to find Dad, though.”
Mad looked at Rube. They had not discussed this, but how could they have discussed it before this moment? But just like Graceland after Rube had picked up Mad, there needed to be some absurd thing that helped you come to terms with the new discovery of your family. And if Pep wasn’t going to travel with them, they could at least be together for a little longer.
“Well, he’s not expecting us,”
Mad said. “There’s no set date for our arrival.”
Pep smiled a little. “He doesn’t know you’re coming?”
she asked.
“He doesn’t even know that we know about each other,”
Mad replied, and Pep actually laughed.
“Okay, yeah,”
she finally said. “You can come see me. I do have to go now, though. ’Bye. It was nice to meet you, I guess.”
“Nice to meet you!”
Rube said. “Oh, wait!”
He had a business card that he gave to Pep, who reluctantly took it. “It’s got my cell phone number on it. You can call anytime if you have any questions or want to … want to talk about him.”
“Okay. Cool,”
Pep said. As she turned to leave, Mad suddenly asked, “What did your dad do for a living?”
Pep smiled again, a lovely smile, and Mad could see how much she looked like Rube at that moment. “He was a basketball coach,”
she said, and then she was gone, out the door and fading from view, and all that was left for Mad and Rube were the players still trapped inside the Legacy Court, held in place.
Mad looked around at everything for a moment longer before they, too, had to leave it behind.