Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life Read online

  Lizzy claps her hands and we set to work gently lifting the tape up from both ends. We eventually meet in the middle and lift the whole piece straight off. Lizzy drapes it over the top of a kitchen chair. I open the four flaps, and we look in.

  At first all we can see is a bunch of crumpled pieces of newspaper. For a brief moment I think there’s nothing else inside. I’m afraid to touch anything, but Lizzy apparently has no such qualms because she digs right in and pulls out balls of newspaper with both hands. She tosses them onto the table and is about to reach back in for the next layer when I stop her.

  “Wait,” I say, gathering the balls into a neat pile. “We’ll have to pack this back up later exactly how we found it.” I’m about to lay a wad of newspaper onto the pile when a headline catches my eye. I smooth the crumpled page out on the table. My heart quickening, I hold the page out to Lizzy and say, “Look at this article.”

  She shakes her head. “You know I don’t believe in reading the newspaper. Too depressing. Why would I start reading it now?”

  “Just read it,” I persist. “It’s from the science section.”

  She rolls her eyes and grabs the paper from me. “ ‘Scientists Believe Black Holes Might Be Key to Time Travel.’ So what?” she asks. “Just add this to your time travel file. Your mom won’t notice one piece of newspaper missing.”

  “I don’t need to add it to my file,” I tell her, taking the paper back and rolling it back up into a ball. “I already have it.”

  “Huh?”

  “This newspaper is five years old!”

  She grabs more pieces out of the box until she finds one with a date on it. With a sharp intake of breath she says, “You’re right! This page is from the week after… after…” Lizzy’s words trail off and she busies herself pulling more paper out of the box. I know what she was going to say. The paper is from the week after my father died.

  Silently we pull out the rest of the newspaper until only two things are left in the box—a typed letter on business letterhead and a rectangular object the size of a shoe box, wrapped in tissue paper. We stare at each other, wide-eyed. Lizzy starts to reach for the letter and then pulls back. “Maybe you should do it.”

  “But what if it’s something my mom wouldn’t want us to see?”

  “We’ve come this far,” she says, then quickly adds, “but it’s up to you.”

  I wipe my sweating hands on my shorts. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m drawn in by the mysterious package, and I can’t help myself. I square my shoulders and carefully lift out the letter, trying not to wrinkle it. The address on the top is the same as the one on the return label. The letter, at least, is not five years old because it has yesterday’s date on it. I read it out loud, trying to keep my voice steady:

  Dear Laney,

  I hope this finds you well. I know I wasn’t supposed to send it until later this summer, but we have shut down the Manhattan branch, and I didn’t want to take the chance of misplacing it in the move to our Long Island office. Another reason to send it early—and you won’t like this, I’m afraid—is that I seem to have misplaced the keys. I am fairly certain that you sent them along with the box to my office, and I have a vague recollection of hiding them somewhere quite clever. Alas, too clever, I’m sorry to say.

  The locksmith I visited explained that the locking mechanism on the box is an intricate system of levers and pulleys. Each of the four keyholes needs a different type of key, and an internal latch will prevent the box from being pried open. Figures Daniel wouldn’t settle for a normal box with one keyhole like everyone else. I am certain you and Jeremy will figure it out before the time comes.

  I have nothing but fond memories of David from our college days, and I was honored to do him the favor of holding onto this all these years. All my best wishes to you.

  Yours truly,

  Harold

  Lizzy takes the letter from my hand and reads it over to herself. “What does this mean?” she says quietly. Lizzy rarely says anything quietly, so I know she’s as surprised as I am. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just shake my head. I can’t recall my father mentioning a college buddy named Harold, although admittedly I tuned out whenever my parents started reminiscing about the old college days. But this Harold person must have known them pretty well since he called Mom Laney, which only her close friends do. So my mother sent this package to him and told him to send it back five years later? Why would she do that? And what does he mean about doing a favor for my dad?

  Before I can stop myself, I reach in and lift the wrapped object out of the box. The tissue paper slides off and falls to the floor. I am left holding a smooth wooden box with keyholes on four sides. A clear varnish makes the wood seem almost alive. The first thought that strikes me is how pretty it is. I had never thought that a wooden box could be pretty. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever even used the word “pretty” before, and if Lizzy ever asked, I’d deny using it now.

  Lizzy bends down to pick up the piece of tissue paper at my feet. She stands up slowly and says, “Um, Jeremy?”

  “Hmmm?” I’m unable to take my eyes from the box in my hands. I shake it gently and hear some muffled objects shift and knock against each other. It can’t weigh more than two pounds.

  “Um, you might want to turn that over,” Lizzy says. I just keep shaking the box back and forth, mesmerized. She finally grabs it from my hands, flips it over, and hands it back. Staring up at me are the engraved words THE MEANING OF LIFE: FOR JEREMY FINK TO OPEN ON HIS 13TH BIRTHDAY.

  I’d recognize my dad’s handiwork anywhere.

  Chapter 2: The Explanation

  “Looks like the package wasn’t for your mom after all,” Lizzy says after a few minutes.

  I don’t answer. My hands are shaking, and I set the wooden box down on the kitchen table. We back away about two feet and stare at it.

  “So this is a birthday gift from your dad?” Lizzy asks.

  I nod. My heart is beating so fast that I actually hear it pulsing in my ears.

  We stare some more and the words float in front of me. The Meaning of Life. For Jeremy Fink. 13th Birthday. Mom has obviously known about this for at least five years. Why did she keep it from me? I don’t have any secrets from anyone. Well, I guess I haven’t told anyone about kissing Rachel Schwartz at her bat mitzvah last April, but that’s mostly because it wasn’t so much a kiss as it was our lips accidentally occupying the same space as we reached for the last Shirley Temple on the waiter’s tray.

  “So what do you think is inside?” Lizzy asks.

  I finally speak. “No idea.”

  “Can the meaning of life be in a box?”

  “Wouldn’t have thought so,” I say.

  “And you never saw this box before?”

  I shake my head.

  “Your mom never mentioned it?”

  I shake my head again and try to recall what I’m supposed to do to avoid having a panic attack. I’ve only had one, the time Mom and I flew to Florida to visit my grandparents last year. No matter what they say about how safe flying is, I think only birds and superheroes should be in the clouds. Deep breath in, hold it for four counts, deep breath out. I had never considered the meaning of life before. Why hadn’t I considered it? What is wrong with me? Has everyone else thought about this except for me? Maybe I was too busy trying to learn about time travel so I could keep Dad from taking the car out on that fateful day. My time travel research is important though, if not vital, to all of mankind. How was I supposed to put that aside to ponder the meaning of life?

  “Are you all right?” Lizzy asks, looking up at me. “You look a little green.”

  I do feel a little light-headed from all the deep breathing. “I should probably sit down.” We head to the living room and sink down into the tan corduroy couch. I lean back and close my eyes. When I was three, I named this couch Mongo. It was one of the first pieces of furniture that my parents found during the height of their old collecting days, before I was
born. Dad told me that objects people left on the street were called mongo. I think he must have told me this while we were sitting on the couch because somehow I thought he was saying the couch was called Mongo. The couch was old when they found it, and older still now. As the years went by, Mom kept covering up the holes with other pieces of fabric. At this point, the couch is almost ALL other pieces of fabric, but she won’t get rid of it because I named it. She’s sentimental that way. Apparently not sentimental enough to tell me about the box though!

  “You’re starting to look semi-normal again,” Lizzy observes. “Not so green anymore. A little sweaty, maybe.”

  Nothing like the appearance of this box has ever happened to me. Or to anyone I know. Or to anyone I have read about. I need to sort this out, to make a plan. I open my eyes and say, “Let’s recap.”

  “Okay,” Lizzy says, sitting forward eagerly. Lizzy loves a good recap. We saw a detective do it on TV once, and ever since then we’ve occasionally recapped our day.

  I stand up and begin to circle the coffee table. “Okay,” I say. “We were about to go into the building when Nick came by. We convinced him to give us the big package with my mother’s name on it. We promised to leave it for her, and then somehow, without realizing it, we opened it.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Lizzy says encouragingly. “Go on.”

  “Inside the box we found a letter from a lawyer who was an old friend of my father’s. He said he lost the keys to a wooden box that my dad left for him to give to me when I turned thirteen.” I pause here to take a deep breath. “I will turn thirteen in a month with no way to open the box.”

  “Maybe your mom has a spare set,” Lizzy suggests.

  “I doubt it. Harold sounded awfully sorry about losing them, so he must have been pretty sure they were the only ones.”

  “Or what if your dad built the box himself? Then maybe the keys are with his old tools. No, wait, your mom donated all that, right?”

  I nod, remembering how hard it was for her to get rid of his stuff. “It doesn’t matter, though. Dad was good at fixing things up, but I don’t think he could make something as intricate as this, with all the keyholes. He definitely engraved the top himself, though. He loved that engraving tool.”

  “Yeah,” Lizzy says wistfully, no doubt recalling the weekend where Dad went around engraving his initials on every wooden surface until my mother took the tool away (but not before Lizzy got a plaque with her name on it to hang on her bedroom door). “Too bad you didn’t get his handyman genes.”

  “True, but if I had, we wouldn’t have the hole between my room and your room from where I tried to hang those shelves.” Over the years Lizzy and I have made good use of the hole to pass notes back and forth. It’s lucky our bedrooms are back-to-back, or else the hole might have gone into the middle of the Muldouns’ kitchen.

  “We’ll find a way to open the box,” Lizzy says decisively. “I promise.”

  “No offense, but your promises tend to get broken, or at least bent, a lot of the time.”

  “Not this time,” she says, jumping up from Mongo. “Come on, let’s put the package back together. Your mom will be home any minute.”

  I follow her back into the kitchen and watch as she repacks each item in reverse order. I am impressed at how neat she is being, since Lizzy is the messiest person I know. As she tosses in the last of the crumpled newspaper, I realize there is no way I can pretend to my mother that I don’t know what’s inside.

  As Lizzy reaches for the long piece of packing tape, I say, “Don’t bother trying to tape it back together. I might as well tell her I opened it. I’m not as good a liar as you.”

  Lizzy puts her hands on her hips and narrows her eyes. “I think I’ve been insulted.”

  “I just meant that if I were a spy trapped behind enemy lines, I would want you to explain why I was there. We each have our strengths, and making people believe you is one of yours.”

  “So what’s your strength?” she asks.

  Good question. What is my strength? Do I even have a strength? Maybe I have too many strengths, and that’s why I can’t think of just one.

  “Oh, never mind,” she says, heading toward the door. “I can see this is taxing your brain, and I have to get home to set the table for dinner.”

  We agree that I’ll send a note through the hole in the wall once I’ve been punished and sent to my room, which, I’m positive, is what will happen. Our grandfather clock—mongo from 83rd Street and 2nd Avenue—chimes five times. This means I have twenty minutes before Mom comes home to do enough good things around the apartment that maybe she’ll go easy on me for opening her package.

  Grabbing the fish food off the shelf in the kitchen, I hurry into the hallway where the tank sits on top of a long marble table—mongo from 67th Street and Central Park West. The fish all swim to the surface to greet me, except for Cat, the loner. All my fish are named after other animals because Mom won’t let me have real pets due to the fact that she is still mourning her childhood rabbit. Cat is a striped tiger fish who keeps to himself. Dog is brown with white spots and not that bright. He spends most of his day banging his nose into the side of the tank. Hamster is a hyper, orange goldfish who swims back and forth all day like he’s in an Olympic relay race. My newest fish, Ferret, is long and silver and sometimes hard to find because he blends in with the gray rocks on the bottom of the tank. I sprinkle in some food, and they quickly swim to the surface to gobble it down.

  These fish and I are a lot alike. They swim around the same four walls, safe and secure in their familiar environment. That’s how I am, too. Honestly, I don’t see any reason to leave my neighborhood. Everything I could ever want or need is within a few blocks in any direction: Dad’s store (I still think of it as his), movies, school, the doctor, grocery store, dentist, clothes, shoes, the park, the library, the post office, everything. I don’t like change.

  I grab the feather duster from under the sink and run around the apartment, swishing it over every possible dust-collecting surface. I swish the mirrors, Aunt Judi’s many sculptures, the tabletops, bookshelves, and the spines of the books (almost all of which were discarded from the library or bought at flea markets). I dust the television screen and the beaded curtains that Mom made the summer she was pregnant with me and stuck in bed. I am tempted to dust myself even!

  Running into my bedroom, I quickly throw my blanket over the bed, not bothering to straighten the sheets first. The stuffed alligator that Dad won for me by knocking over old milk jars at the state fair is trapped underneath the blanket. Now it looks like I’m hiding something because of the lumps and bumps. I’m about to fix it when I hear the double knock on the wall that indicates a new note is waiting for me. I lift up the poster of the solar system that covers the hole and grab the end of the rolled-up notebook page. Our walls are about six inches apart, so when we first tried to stick notes through on small pieces of paper, they would fall into the hollow space between. One day, years from now, maybe someone will find them and wonder who we were. Now we only use notebook paper, folded the long way, so it reaches all the way through.

  Inside the note are two jelly beans. Watermelon, my favorite. I pop them in my mouth and read the note:

  Good luck! If you get punished, there are more where these came from.

  Lizzy and I look out for each other that way.

  I scribble a big THANKS on the bottom of the note, stick it back through the hole until I see it reach the edge of her wall, and knock twice. It soon disappears from the other end.

  I am straightening the books and papers on my desk when I hear the front door open. I had planned on being in the kitchen next to the box when Mom got home, but now that it’s time, I can’t move. I sit on the edge of my bed and wait. I hear her key ring jingle as she hangs it on the hook by the door. Thud goes her heavy briefcase onto the floor. Now she’s walking into the kitchen to get a glass of iced tea. I know her patterns very well. Three more steps until she’ll see t
he box. Two more steps. One. Now she’ll be examining the package, wondering why it’s open. Now she’s reaching in past the newspaper and pulling out the letter and the wooden box. And now she’ll call my name. Okay… now!

  Now?

  Why don’t I hear anything? I expected, “Jeremy Fink! Get in here immediately!” Instead… silence. What does this mean? Another minute passes, and still nothing. Is she trying to make me squirm by dragging out the inevitable? Or what if she slipped and fell and is lying unconscious on the floor?

  When I reach the kitchen I see that Mom isn’t, thankfully, knocked out on the floor. Instead, she’s standing by the table, staring down at Dad’s box. I am familiar with that position, having been in it myself for quite a while. The letter is in her hand, hanging down at her side. Her face is pale. I can see some gray hair poking through the black, and for some reason it makes me sad. I have the urge to take her hand. Instead I just ask, “Um, Mom? Are you okay?”

  She gives an unconvincing nod and sits down in the bottle cap–covered chair. “You should have this,” she says, and hands me the letter. She runs her fingers over the words Dad engraved on the top of the box. “It was only a week after the accident when I mailed this box to Harold for safekeeping,” she says, not taking her eyes off of it. “Your thirteenth birthday seemed like a million years away back then.”

  She looks so sad that I wish she were angry at me instead. Not that she has a bad temper or anything, but she’s big on boundaries. I know if the package had my name on it, she never would have opened it.

  “Even though your dad insisted he would be here to give you the box himself, I knew that deep down he didn’t believe it. The instructions to send it to Harold were in his will.”

  My throat feels like a snake is wound around it, but I manage to ask, “He believed that palm reader on the boardwalk, didn’t he?”