Only Child: A novel Read online

  Mommy said, “I know, OK, all right. I know, OK,” into the phone and, “OK, see you in a few,” and then she put the phone in her coat pocket and pulled me close to her and hugged me, too tight, and cried in my neck. Her breathing felt hot on my neck and it tickled, but it also felt good because it was warm, and I was feeling colder and colder.

  I wanted to hold still when Mommy was hugging me and stay close to her, but I had to move side to side because I still had to pee badly. “I have to go to the bathroom, Mommy,” I said. Mommy pushed away from me and stood up. “Baby, not now,” she said. “Let’s go sit down somewhere until Daddy gets here and until they make the announcement.” But there was nowhere to sit down with all the kids on the benches, so we walked to the side of the church and Mommy leaned with her back up against the wall and squeezed my hand tight. I kept moving side to side and tried to balance on my tippy-toes because my dinky hurt so bad from having to pee. I was scared I was going to go pee in my pants. That would be really embarrassing in front of everyone.

  Mommy’s phone started ringing again in her pocket. Mommy took it out and she said to me, “It’s Mimi,” and then she answered the phone. “Hi, Mom!” Right when she said that she started crying again. “I’m here now, with Zach….He’s fine, he’s OK. But Andy’s not here, Mom. No, he’s not here, I can’t find him….They’re not telling us anything yet….They said they’re making an announcement soon.” Mommy was pressing the phone to her ear hard. I could see the knuckles on her fingers were all white from squeezing the phone so hard. She listened to Mimi talking on the phone and she shook her head yes, and tears were running down her face. “OK, Mom, I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do….He’s coming, he’s on his way. No, don’t come yet. I think they’re only letting parents in right now. OK, I will. I’ll call you then. OK, love you, too.”

  I looked at all the benches and let my eyes do some searching left and right, like when you do a word-search puzzle and look for the first letter of a word, like when you look for the word PINEAPPLE, for example. You try to find all the Ps, and then when you find one, you look if there’s an I next to the P all around it, and that’s how you find the whole word. So my eyes went left and right like that to see if Andy wasn’t on one of the benches after all. Maybe we just didn’t see him earlier and then we could go get him and leave and go home. My eyes were searching, searching, back and forth, but Andy really wasn’t anywhere.

  I started to feel tired, and I didn’t want to stand up anymore. After a long while, the big door opened, swish-squeak, and Daddy came in. His hair was wet and sticking to his forehead, and rain was dripping from his clothes. It took him a while to squeeze past all the people and get to us. When he did, he gave us wet hugs and Mommy started to cry again.

  “It will be OK, babe,” Daddy said. “I’m sure they couldn’t fit all the kids in here. Let’s wait and see. They said they were getting ready to make an announcement when I walked in.” Right when he said that, the policeman Mommy talked to earlier walked in front of the altar table and said, “Hey, listen up, folks! Everyone, quiet down, please!” Then he had to shout, “Quiet down, please!” a few more times because of all the crying and calling and shouting, and no one was noticing he was talking.

  Finally, everyone got quiet and he started to do a speech: “Parents, all children who were unharmed were brought to this church. If you have found your child, please leave the church quickly so we can restore some order in here and incoming parents will have an easier time finding their children. If you are unable to locate your child here in the church, please be advised that wounded children are being taken to West-Medical Hospital for treatment. I regret to inform you that there have been an unknown number of fatalities in this incident, and these will remain at the crime scene while the investigation is under way.”

  When he said fatalities—I didn’t know what that meant—a loud sound went through the whole church, like all the people said “Ohhhh” at the same time. The policeman kept talking: “We don’t have a list of the wounded and fatalities yet, so if you cannot locate your child, please make your way over to West-Medical to check in with the staff there. They are currently in the process of compiling a list of patients who have been admitted. The shooter was killed in a confrontation with the Wake Gardens police force, and we believe he acted alone. There is no further threat to the Wake Gardens community. That is all for now. We are setting up a support hotline, and the information will be posted on the McKinley Elementary and Wake Gardens websites shortly.”

  It stayed quiet for a second after he was done talking, and then it was like a noise explosion with everyone calling out and asking questions. I wasn’t sure what the policeman said, except that he said the shooter was killed, and I thought that was a good thing, so he couldn’t shoot other people anymore. But when I looked at Mommy and Daddy, it didn’t seem like a good thing, because their faces looked all wrinkled up, and Mommy was crying a lot. Daddy said, “All right, he must be at West-Medical then.”

  I went to West-Medical before when I was four and I got allergic to peanuts. I don’t remember it, but Mommy said it was scary. I almost stopped breathing because my face and mouth and throat got swollen. At the hospital they had to give me medicine so I could breathe again. Now I can’t eat anything with peanuts ever again, and I have to sit at the no-nuts table for lunch.

  Mommy also had to take Andy to West-Medical, last summer, because he was riding his bike with no helmet—that’s a big no-no—and he fell down on his head. His forehead was bleeding and he had to get stitches.

  “Melissa, babe, we need to keep it together,” Daddy said to Mommy. “Take Zach and go find Andy at the hospital. Call me when you’re there. I’ll call my mom and yours to let them know, and I’ll stay here…in case…”

  I waited to see in case what, but Mommy grabbed my hand tight and pulled me with her, and we walked out of the church. When we walked through the big door, there were people everywhere, on the sidewalk and on the street, and I saw vans that had big standing-up bowls on the roofs. Lights were flashing and blinking in my face.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mommy said, and we got out of there.

  [ 5 ]

  No-Rules Day

  “WE’RE GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT, Zach, do you hear me? Everything will be OK. We’ll get to the hospital, and we will find Andy, and this whole nightmare will be over, OK, baby?”

  Mommy kept saying the same things over and over again in the car, but I didn’t think she was talking to me, because when I said, “I really have to go to the bathroom when we get there, Mommy,” she didn’t say anything back. She was leaning forward and staring out the front window because it was still raining hard. The wipers were on the highest speed, the one where you get dizzy when you try to follow them with your eyes, and it can make you carsick, so you have to try to look out the front but try to ignore the wipers. Even with the wipers going at dizzy speed, it was hard to see anything. When we got to the road where the hospital is, there was traffic everywhere.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Mommy said.

  Today was a bad-word day. Fuck, stupid, shit, Jesus. Jesus is not actually a bad word, it’s a name, but sometimes people use it as a bad word. There was loud honking. People had their windows down even though it was raining, and the inside of their car was probably getting wet. They were yelling at each other to get the hell out of the way.

  Last time we came to the hospital, when Andy fell off his bike, there was a valet, and that means you can get out of your car with it still on and you leave the keys in it, and the valet man parks it for you. And when you come back, you have to give him the ticket, and he goes and gets your car from where he parked it. This time there was no valet and like a thousand cars in front of us. Mommy started crying again and did drums with her fingers on the steering wheel, and she said, “What do we do now? What do we do now?”

  Mommy’s phone started ringing, lo
ud in the car. I knew it was Daddy because in Mommy’s new GMC Acadia in the front where the radio is you can see who is calling and press on the Accept button and hear the voice in the whole car and that’s cool. We didn’t have that in our old car.

  “Are you there?” Daddy’s voice said into the car.

  “I can’t even get close to the hospital,” Mommy said. “I don’t know what do to. There are cars everywhere. It’s going to take me forever to get to the garage, if there are even any spots left. Crap, Jim, I can’t take this, I need to get in there!”

  “OK, babe, forget finding a spot in the garage. I’m sure it’s madness over there. Dammit, I should have come with you. I just thought…,” and then it was quiet in the car, and Mommy and Daddy didn’t say anything. “Dump the car somewhere, Melissa,” Daddy’s voice said in the car. “It doesn’t matter. Dump the car and walk.”

  I think a lot of people were doing that, dumping their cars, because when I looked out the window, I saw cars parked everywhere, even on the bike paths and sidewalks. That’s against the law and your car will be towed with a tow truck.

  Mommy drove up on the sidewalk and stopped the car. “Let’s go,” she said, and opened my door. I saw that the back of our car was kind of sticking out into the street and the cars behind us started honking, even though I thought they could definitely still get past. “Oh, shut up,” Mommy yelled. Bad-word list getting longer.

  “Mommy, won’t a tow truck take our car?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s please walk quickly.”

  I was walking very fast because Mommy was pulling so hard on my hand. The walking made some pee come out. I couldn’t help it, it just came out. Only a little at first and then all of it. It felt good, and it made my legs feel warm. I thought it probably didn’t matter that the pee got in my pants if it didn’t matter that a tow truck was going to take our car. Today was a day with different rules or no rules. We were getting soaking wet from the rain again, so most of the pee was probably coming off anyway.

  We walked on the actual road, in between the stopped cars. All the honking hurt my ears. Then we walked through the slidey glass doors that said ER on them. Now we could find Andy and see what happened to him and if he needed stitches again like last time or what.

  Inside was like outside except with people instead of cars. People were everywhere inside the waiting room, in front of a desk that had a sign that said CHECK IN. Everyone was talking at the same time to the two women behind the desk. A policeman was talking to a group of people across the room, and Mommy moved closer to him to hear what he was saying: “We can’t let anyone back there yet. We are working on a list of patients. There are a lot of wounded people, and taking care of them has to be the top priority now.” Some people tried to say something to the policeman, and he lifted up his hands like he was blocking their words.

  “As soon as things calm down a bit, we will start informing the relatives of the wounded we could identify. And we will go from there. I urge you to be patient. Look, I know it’s hard, but let’s try and let the doctors and staff do their jobs here.”

  All around the waiting room, people started to sit down. When there were no more empty seats left, people sat down on the floor by the walls. We walked over to the wall that had a big TV. I saw Ricky’s mom sitting on the floor under the TV. Ricky is in fifth grade, like Andy, and they live close to our house, so Ricky is on the same bus as us. Andy and Ricky used to be friends and play outside a lot, but then they had a fight in the summer and didn’t use their words but their fists, and later Daddy took Andy to Ricky’s house to say sorry.

  Ricky’s mom looked up and saw us and looked back down in her lap really fast. Maybe she was still mad about the fight. Mommy sat down next to Ricky’s mom and said, “Hi, Nancy.”

  Ricky’s mom looked at Mommy and said, “Oh, hi, Melissa,” like she didn’t see us before Mommy sat down. I knew she did, though. Then she looked down in her lap again, and then no one said anything.

  I sat down next to Mommy and tried to see the TV, but it was right over our heads, so I had to turn my head too far around, and I still only saw some of the picture. The sound from the TV was off, but I could see it had the news on, and the picture showed McKinley with all the fire trucks and police cars and ambulances in front. There were words running in a line underneath the news pictures, but I couldn’t read them from where I was sitting with my head turned too far and the words were running across the TV too fast. My neck started to hurt, so I stopped looking at the TV.

  We sat there on the floor for a long time, so long that my clothes weren’t even wet anymore from the rain, they were starting to dry off. My stomach did a growl. Lunch was a long time ago and I didn’t even eat my sandwich, only the apple. Mommy gave me two dollars so I could get something from the vending machine over by the bathrooms. I could pick whatever I wanted, she said, so I put in the dollars and pressed the button for Cheetos. That’s junk food, and most of the time it’s a no to junk food, but today was a no-rules day, remember?

  The door at the back of the waiting room that said NO ENTRY on it opened and two nurses with green shirts and pants on came out. Everyone in the waiting room got up at the same time. The nurses were holding papers and started calling names: “Family of Ella O’Neill, family of Julia Smith, family of Danny Romero…” Some people in the waiting room got up and walked over to the nurses and went in the NO ENTRY door with them.

  The nurses didn’t call “Family of Andy Taylor,” and Mommy plopped back down on the floor and put her arms on her knees and her head on her arms like she was trying to hide her face. I sat down next to her again and rubbed her arm up and down, up and down. Mommy’s arms felt like they were shaking, and her hands were making fists. She opened and closed them, opened and closed them.

  “If they haven’t called us by now, it must be bad,” Ricky’s mom said. “Otherwise we would have heard something by now.”

  Mommy didn’t say anything, she just kept opening and closing her fists.

  More waiting and more nurses coming out, calling names, and more people getting up and going behind the NO ENTRY door. Every time a nurse came out, Mommy put her head up and looked at them with her eyes really big, making lines on her forehead. When they called a name, but not Andy’s, she let out her breath really fast and put her head back down on her arms, and I rubbed her arm some more.

  Sometimes the slidey doors in the front opened and people walked in and out. I could see outside and it was getting dark, so we were at the hospital for a long time and it was probably dinnertime by now. Looked like I was going to get to stay up late on no-rules day.

  Not very many people were left in the waiting room, only me and Mommy and Ricky’s mom, and a few people on the chairs and by the vending machines. A couple of policemen were left, and they were talking together with their heads down. There were a lot of empty chairs now, but we didn’t get up to sit on them, even though my butt hurt from the floor.

  Then the slidey doors opened again and Daddy walked in. I was excited to see him. I started to get up to go to him, but then I sat right back down because I saw his face and it didn’t look like Daddy’s face at all. My stomach did a big flip like when I’m excited, but I wasn’t excited, just really scared.

  [ 6 ]

  Werewolf Howling

  DADDY’S FACE WAS LIKE a grayish color, and his mouth looked all funny, with his lower lip pulled down so I could see his teeth. He shook his head no when he saw how I started to get up. He stood there by the slidey doors and stared at us, me sitting next to Mommy and Mommy next to Ricky’s mom. I didn’t move. I was staring back at him because I didn’t know why his face looked like that and why he wasn’t coming over to us.

  It was a long time before he started to walk, and then he walked very slow like he didn’t want to get to us. He turned around a few times—maybe he wanted to check how far he walked from the door
s. All of a sudden I had a feeling that I didn’t want him to get to us, because everything was going to get worse then.

  Ricky’s mom saw Daddy next and made a sound like she was pulling in a lot of air through her mouth. That made Mommy pick up her head from her arms. She looked up and for a minute she just looked at Daddy’s weird face, and he stopped walking. Then everything did get worse, I was right.

  First Mommy’s eyes got really big, and then her whole self started shaking and she started acting crazy. She yelled, “Jim? Oh my God, no no no no no no no no no!”

  Each “no” got louder and I didn’t know why she was yelling so loud all of a sudden. Maybe she was mad that Daddy left the church, because he was supposed to wait there, just in case. Everyone in the waiting room was looking at us.

  Mommy tried to get up, but then she fell back down on her knees. She started to make a loud “Aaaauuuuuuuuuuu” sound and it wasn’t a sound like it was coming from a person, but maybe an animal, like a werewolf when he sees the moon.

  Daddy walked the last bit to us and got down on his knees, too, and tried to put his arms around Mommy. But she started to hit him and yell “No no no no no no no no” again, so she really was mad at him.

  I could tell Daddy felt bad because he kept saying, “I’m sorry, babe, I’m so so sorry!” But Mommy kept hitting him, and he let her even though everyone had their eyes on them. I wanted Mommy to stop being mad at Daddy and stop hitting him. But instead she got even more crazy and started screaming. She screamed Andy’s name over and over again and it was so loud, I put my hands over my ears. There were so many too-loud sounds for my ears today.