You Have Seven Messages
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Stewart Lewis
Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Anna Moller/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
WAIT IT OUT by IMOGEN JENNIFER JANE HEAP
© 2009 MEGAPHONIC LIMITED (NS)
All Rights Administered by WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD.
All Rights Reserved.
Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Stewart.
You have seven messages / Stewart Lewis. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Teenaged Luna, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her movie director father, tries to piece together the death of her mother with the seven unheard messages left on her forgotten cell phone.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89904-1
[1. Mothers—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.L5881Yo 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010032345
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
FOR MY MOM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank first Emma Specter, who was the spark that ignited Luna, a character I feel I have somehow always known, and her musical muse, Imogen Heap, for her poetry and lush soundscapes.
Amelia Greene for her keen eye. Jessica Potts Lahey and Amy Chamberlin for being early, passionate readers. Jasmine Goguen for letting me pick her brain.
My dear friends and family who inspire and encourage me … the Foehls, Katrina Van Pelt, Hilary Old, Bill Candiloros, Flavia Stanley, Mia and Jeff, Paul Bosko, Susan Holland, Jennifer Phelps Montgomery, Ryan Daniel, Russell Swanson, Martin Hyatt, Vicka Tinetti, Bradford Noble, Michael Aisner, Leslie Novak, Nick Difruscia, Linda Yellen, Manuela Noble.
Stephen McCauley, Christopher Schelling, and Rebecca Barry for their unparalleled guidance and wit.
My skillful editor, Stephanie Elliott, for her hard work.
My agent, Mitchell Waters, for believing.
My daughter, Rowan, for her big open heart.
And lastly, Steve Swenson, my copilot.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - A Little About Moi
Chapter 2 - Then There were Three
Chapter 3 - Truth
Chapter 4 - The Next Step
Chapter 5 - Pied-À-Terre
Chapter 6 - I Dare You
Chapter 7 - Moon Over Brooklyn
Chapter 8 - Plan of Attack
Chapter 9 - Quince
Chapter 10 - The First Shot
Chapter 11 - The Happy Face
Chapter 12 - Aka Diane
Chapter 13 - Digging for Cole
Chapter 14 - Signs
Chapter 15 - Deep Breathing
Chapter 16 - Heavy Stuff
Chapter 17 - Indiscretion
Chapter 18 - Stakeout
Chapter 19 - On the Market
Chapter 20 - Partners in Crime?
Chapter 21 - Innocence
Chapter 22 - Show-and-Tell
Chapter 23 - Red Flags
Chapter 24 - Treading Water
Chapter 25 - A Fine Imitation
Chapter 26 - Larger than Life
Chapter 27 - My Babies
Chapter 28 - Self-Portrait
Chapter 29 - Kindred Spirits
Chapter 30 - Raw Vision
Chapter 31 - A Tipping Point
Chapter 32 - Fly on the Wall
Chapter 33 - Ulterior Motives
Chapter 34 - How Could You?
Chapter 35 - Two-Face
Chapter 36 - Reflections
Chapter 37 - Spilling the Dirt
Chapter 38 - Red Doormat, Red Phone
Chapter 39 - Ready for My Close-Up
Chapter 40 - Take Me Away
Chapter 41 - O Italia
Chapter 42 - My New Best Friend
Chapter 43 - The Villagers
Chapter 44 - Personal Items
Chapter 45 - Beetlemania
Chapter 46 - Big Things, Small Packages
Chapter 47 - All Roads Lead to Paris
Chapter 48 - Spotlight
Chapter 49 - Aftermath
Chapter 50 - Je Reviens
About the Author
I want to be with those
who know secret things
or else alone.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin
CHAPTER 1
A LITTLE ABOUT MOI
I may be fourteen, but I read the New York Times. I don’t wear hair clips or paint my cell phone with nail polish, and I’m not boy crazy. I don’t have a subscription to Twist or Bop or Flop or whatever they call those glossy magazines full of posters of shiny-haired, full-lipped hunks.
Whatever you do, don’t call me a tween. That makes me feel like I’m trapped in some adolescent purgatory where I get force-fed Disney-themed cupcakes while watching Hannah Montana reruns—that stage is over. Who came up with that name, anyway? I bet the person who came up with the name Hannah Montana gets paid a quarter of a million dollars a year and drives a Lexus. My cousin could’ve come up with a better name, and she’s five and rides a tricycle.
I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, and when I was really little, I thought my driver was my father. He’d take me to school every day and make sure my shoelaces were tied. Sometimes he’d let me listen to NPR while he chatted with the doormen. He seemed to know them all, a secret society of men in pressed black coats standing as straight as the buildings they protected. But of course, he wasn’t my father. My real father is a film director who was at the height of his career when I was born, which is why he was never around. He was always shooting in places like Africa, Japan, Australia, and Canada. Now some critics say he’s washed up, but I think the reason people become film critics is because they failed to be film directors themselves. I don’t usually feel famous myself, but I went to the premiere of his last film (the one that supposedly washed him up) and a couple months later there was a picture of us in Vanity Fair. My overenthusiastic English teacher, Ms. Gray, cut out the picture and taped it to the whiteboard. At first I was thrilled, but then I felt weird about it. I ended up sneaking in after class and bending the page so that you could only see my father, with his shiny face, his jet-black hair, and those wire-thin glasses that always seem to be sliding off his nose. He’s the one who should be recognized. He literal
ly spends years putting actors, writers, cinematographers, editors, studios, and locations all in a big blender until his movies pour out smoothly onto the screen. All I did that evening was walk next to him and carry the cheat sheet for his speech.
My little brother, Tile, was too young to come to the premiere with us or have his photo taken. When my mom was pregnant with him, the only thing that helped her nausea was lying on the cold Spanish tile in our townhouse bathroom, so that became his name. Everyone calls him Kyle by mistake.
My uncle, a professor who lives in Italy, gave me a small book of Shakespeare’s sonnets for my tenth birthday, and sometimes I read Tile my favorite ones. Even though he’s ten, he pretends to understand them. I think he just likes the musical way the words go together. Tile is a good listener, and he leaves me alone pretty much every time I ask him to. If a genie said I could wish for any little brother in the whole world, I would stick with Tile. He smells nice and never talks with his mouth full. He also keeps my secrets.
Here’s one: I know I told you that I’m not boy crazy, mostly because boys are dirty and unpredictable, but there is one I’ve had my eye on since I was eight. He is very clean. He lives across the street and our drivers are friends. He goes to a school somewhere outside the city. I like to imagine it’s an exotic place like Barbados, but it’s probably in Westchester. He’s only said ten words to me in seven years. Sometimes when I read Shakespeare’s sonnets I think of his big mop of strawberry curls, and the way he swings his book bag in wide circles.
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground
He’s one year older than me, and his name is Oliver. He walks with a peculiar grace, almost like he’s floating. He also plays the cello, and he’s so good at it that when I listen to him through my bedroom window, the tiny hairs on my arms stick up.
Sometimes I lie on my bed imagining the music was written just for me, coming in through the window as a personal serenade. Music sounds better when you close your eyes.
CHAPTER 2
THEN THERE WERE THREE
Tile and I are on spring break, so on our driver’s day off, we take the subway to the zoo in the Bronx. I love to look at all the different kinds of people on the train and try to eavesdrop on their thoughts for just a minute. I notice Tile’s feet hanging off the seat, not able to touch the ground. My feet have touched the ground since I was six. People think it’s great to be tall, but it’s not when you’re a young girl. Once when I tried talking to some boys at our school dance I had to crouch down like I was their Little League coach.
The train makes a loud screeching noise and Tile inches closer to my dad. This might be the first time we are actually going on an outing as a family of three. I uncurl my fingers and look down at my hands. They are my mother’s, thin and delicate. I think of the last line from the poem that is stenciled onto the wall in my father’s office: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. Maybe what the author meant is that every person is completely unique. Every raindrop, every pair of hands, everyone on this train.
When my father came to my camp in New Hampshire almost a year ago in the middle of the summer, I knew something was terribly wrong. I was sailing on the lake, but suddenly I saw him on the dock, looking out over the water and wearing his light blue Windbreaker. He was supposed to have been in Scotland shooting a movie. When I saw the camp director next to him, waving frantically to my counselor to sail back, I really knew something wasn’t right. When we reached the dock and I jumped from the boat, my father kneeled down and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe. He cried into my hair.
Your mother is gone and she’s never coming back.
The words caught in his throat, and it was a voice I had never heard come out of him. I instantly knew he meant gone, as in forever. That she hadn’t simply run away or skipped town.
“What?”
“It was an accident. In the city. She got hit.…”
I wanted to slap him across the face. How could he tell me this? How could my mother, so vibrant and alive, just suddenly be gone? Accidents happened in Manhattan every day—but not to my mother. Everything suddenly felt terribly unfair. I looked up at the trees surrounding the lake, the wispy clouds slowly becoming drained of color.
“Do you think she’s in the sky or in the ground?” I asked him.
I thought he said “Both,” but it might have been “Oh.”
I couldn’t cry. I remember looking at my own reflection in the water, thinking of Narcissus, who died falling in love with his own reflection. I could’ve died right there, because the thought of living without someone you love is like a pair of giant hands pressing around your heart, making it smaller and smaller, until you are left with only a memory of warmth. It’s like when the sun comes through a window, moving across the room with each hour, until night falls and all you can do is try to remember the soothing shapes it made.
CHAPTER 3
TRUTH
The whole way back from the zoo I feel like people are whispering about my dad. I want to tell them to mind their own business. When tragedy happens to people who are famous, it is treated more like a scandal—what people don’t realize is yes, my dad made some pretty iconic movies, but deep down he is vulnerable just like everyone else.
My mother once told me that the truth is like my skin, a beautiful, protective covering, and the things people say or think are like clothes that can be easily changed or discarded. She told me truth comes from your heart.
When I was ten, there was a rumor spread about my father and an underage actress he had never even met. School turned into pure hell, and everyone shunned me. It was amazing how much venom people had, like a tabloid was even trustworthy.
One morning my mother marched into my PE class and didn’t even bother telling the teacher she was taking me. She just gave her the Look, as she did into so many cameras all over the world: Don’t mess with me. She didn’t tell me where we were going until we got there, two hours later. It was her friend’s old house on the Hudson River, with screened-in porches that had antique beds on them. He was a chef, and he made us macaroni and cheese with shaved truffles. She’d pulled strings with the AV guy at my school, who she knew from a shoot long before, and got him to hunt down and fax all my homework assignments. It was her way of helping me deal with the rumor thing: home school for a week. I loved it, even though I missed Tile. He was so cute at that time, a little nugget.
On our last night there was tons of moonlight and we had ice cream on the porch. It was the kind of moment where you remember every detail. Mint chocolate chip. Three boats, one called Seas the Day. It was there, in front of the glassy river so bright it could have been a mirror, that my mother told me about truth.
“But how do you really know what’s true? Is there some big book of truth?”
She laughed. When my mother laughed she looked like an angel, that’s what my father always said. Her big eyes looked up, squinting a little, and she would slightly shake her head, like a happy dog.
“The book is in here.” She placed her hand where my heart is.
“Yes, but why do people just make things up?”
“Usually because they are bored, or insecure. There was this gossip website that used to print all this stuff about me. At first I was really angry, you know, like you probably were with those kids. Then, I remember going to an opening gala, I think it was for a fragrance of some kind … anyway, there were all these celebrities there, and none of them looked at me strange or had even bought into the rumors. And I realized that all of them had lies written about them all the time, but they were above it, you know? They were secure in who they were.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned toward me and ran her fingers down the side of my face.
“Do you remember the time you wanted to wear that green hat, the one that was too big for you, that you found on one of your father’s sets?”
“Yes.”
“We tried to get you to rethink wearing it to school, but when we dropped you off, you owned it. You walked with confidence. That is being secure.”
“Well, more like stupid.”
She laughed again, and the angel came through her. Then she put on her serious face and said, “No choice is stupid if it comes from you. And you, you are … you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world, inside and out. Never let anyone take away the choices in your heart; it’s what makes you one of a kind.”
She had lost me a little, but I got the idea.
“I mean, if you want to look like Kermit the Frog, go for it!”
This time I laughed. Then I heard a car crunching down the gravel driveway. It was our driver. I remember running up with Mom because I thought it might be Tile, but it was my father coming up from the city to surprise us. He had stolen away from his film set to visit for the night. He had a large bouquet of flowers for Mom and a huge lollipop for me. I grabbed the lollipop and went to the hammock.
The stars were like a million fireflies, and I remember feeling so safe, like nothing could ever touch me. I looked inside and all the lights were on. My father was coaxing my mother out of the kitchen chair, and they started to dance. My father looked like a boy, and he had so much hope, so much wonder in his eyes, that I secretly wished someone like him would love me someday.
CHAPTER 4
THE NEXT STEP
The zoo is crowded today, and the animals look really bored. But no matter how many people stare at them, they don’t act vain. Kind of like my mother. She was a model, but not really because she liked to be looked at. It was a way for her to make a lot of money in a little time, so she could do what she really wanted to do—write. Her book was optioned by my father, which was how they met. My father claimed she wanted nothing to do with him at first. Even after the movie was made, she barely took his calls. It wasn’t until they ran into each other years later at a party for Paper magazine that my dad spotted her across the room, and decided then and there he would stop at nothing to win her over. He sent her flowers every day for a month.