Only Child: A novel Page 7

  When I started thinking about what happened yesterday when the gunman came, I wanted to get up and get out of the closet, because my body started to feel exactly the same as yesterday with my heart beating fast. I was breathing too fast and it made me dizzy. But I couldn’t get up for some reason. It was like my body was all hard and frozen from being so scared. I wished Daddy would come and open the closet door and find me, and that was the same as yesterday, too, when I was wishing that Daddy would come.

  But Daddy and nobody else came, and I kept sitting there with my frozen body, listening for sounds. But it stayed very quiet. I put my hand in the pocket of my pants and took out the angel wing charm Miss Russell gave me, and I rubbed it in between my fingers. “Love and protection,” I thought in my head. I started to feel better. My heart started to slow down and my breathing calmed down.

  “No one is coming,” I whispered, and it was strange that I was talking to myself and no one was here to hear it, not even Clancy. But it also felt good, like one part of me was talking to another part of me, and it helped me calm down. So I kept whispering: “There’s nothing even scary in here. It’s just Andy’s closet, and it’s not really that tight in here.”

  I unrolled Andy’s sleeping bag and spread it out and sat on it crisscross applesauce. I looked around and it was hard to see in the dark. There were only a lot of dusty fluffy things in the corners and some of Andy’s socks but nothing else. It was like a secret space in the house that no one knew about except me. “Secret hideout,” I whispered into the closet. “This is going to be my top secret hideout.” I started to like sitting in the quiet and listening to my breathing: in—air up my nose—out through my mouth with a puff, in, out, slow now, because I wasn’t really that scared anymore.

  When I let myself think about yesterday, the scared feeling came back, so I tried not to let those thoughts float around in my brain anymore. “Get out of my brain, bad thoughts!” I pretended like there was a safe in the back of my head like the one Daddy has in his office where he keeps important papers so no one can steal them, and I pushed the bad thoughts into my brain safe. “Zip it, lock it, put it in your pocket.”

  I liked that I was in here and no one in the party knew where I was. I could come in here all the time now because Andy wasn’t here anymore and he couldn’t yell at me anymore and tell me to get out.

  I started to think about how it was going to be without Andy—it was going to be better at home. There wouldn’t be any more fighting, and I was going to be the only child in the family, so Mommy and Daddy could do a lot more stuff with just me. Like they could both come to my piano recitals and they could both stay for the whole time. That never happened before—because of Andy. At the spring recital, Daddy couldn’t come because Andy had lacrosse practice, and at the summer one, right before school started, the whole family did come, Mommy, Daddy, and Andy, but before it was even my turn to play my song, “Für Elise,” Mommy had to get up and leave with Andy because he was behaving bad.

  After a while I had to pee, so I came back out of the closet and I went in the bathroom. Next I went into my room because I wanted to look for stuff to bring in my new hideout.

  “I was looking for you, Zach.”

  I jumped because I didn’t see Grandma standing in the door of my room and she surprised me. I didn’t want Grandma to know about the hideout, so I made up a lie: “I was looking for my dump truck in Andy’s room.”

  “I made you some dinner, OK, darling? Can you come downstairs?”

  “Is the party done?” I asked.

  “The…party? It wasn’t a…Everyone went home, yes,” Grandma said, and she looked at me funny.

  “Is Mommy coming home for dinner?” If it was dinnertime, then Mommy stayed at the hospital the whole night last night and today all day, and that’s a long time just to sleep.

  “No,” Grandma said, “she’s not coming home yet. Maybe tomorrow. But I’ll eat with you, all right?”

  It wasn’t all right. Daddy promised me yesterday that today we were going to see Mommy at the hospital, but we didn’t because of the party, so Daddy said a lie, too.

  [ 12 ]

  Do Souls Have Faces?

  AFTER DINNER WAS DONE, Grandma made me take a shower. Then she tucked me in for bedtime, and I was allowed to sleep in Daddy’s bed again. I asked her about school: “Am I the only one who’s staying home from school, because of what happened to Andy?”

  Grandma was sitting on the side of the bed with her straight back. She wiped the hair on my forehead to the side. “No, darling,” she said. “All the children are staying home. A terrible, terrible thing happened at your school yesterday. I imagine it will be a while until the school reopens. People will need time to heal.”

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Is Andy still there, at the school?” I kept thinking about how Andy was lying there in the school, all by himself except for the other dead people. I was trying not to think about it all day, but now it was bedtime, and at bedtime it’s harder to stop thinking about stuff, maybe because all you do is lie there, so all you can do is think.

  Grandma made a sound like a cough with her throat, like something was stuck in it and she was trying to get it out. “Andy is not at the school anymore,” she said, and she made the coughing sound a few more times. “Andy is up in heaven now with God. God is going to take care of him for us now.”

  “But how did he get up to heaven from the school? Did he get like zoomed up there?”

  Grandma did a little smile with her red lipstick lips. “No. His body doesn’t go up to heaven, only his soul, remember?”

  I remembered that Mommy told me about that when Uncle Chip died. The body is still here on earth, but that’s not the real person anymore, so it’s OK that the body gets put in a casket and buried in a grave, because the important part of the person that is called the soul goes up to heaven. It goes up there right after you die. I wondered if all the souls of the people who died from the gunman went flying up when I was still in the school, hiding in the closet, and if someone saw them, maybe the gunman.

  I don’t know what a soul looks like. Mommy said it’s all your feelings and thoughts and memories, and I thought maybe it looks like a bird or something with wings, like the wing on the charm Miss Russell gave me. I wondered if your soul still has your face when it goes up to heaven, because otherwise how do the people who love you who are already in heaven know it’s your soul and find you so you’re not lonely and you can be together?

  After Grandma said good night and left Mommy and Daddy’s room, I tried to think about Andy’s soul up in heaven together with Uncle Chip’s soul, but my brain kept switching to Andy’s body in the school and the blood in the hallway and on the walls, and I couldn’t get the bad thoughts to go into the brain safe.

  Maybe the brain safe only worked in the hideout. I took Clancy with me and went in my room. I took my Buzz Lightyear flashlight from my nightstand drawer and went through the bathroom in Andy’s room, trying to walk very quiet, because our floors are old wood, so they squeak when you walk on them, and I didn’t want Daddy and Grandma downstairs to know I got out of bed. I flashed Buzz up to Andy’s top bunk. Empty.

  Then I went in Andy’s closet and sat down on his sleeping bag. The flashlight made a little light circle in the dark closet, and I made zigzag patterns with the circle on the walls and shirts and jackets. I lay down on the sleeping bag and put my legs up against the wall, and that was comfy. I put Buzz down next to me and Clancy on my chest, and I crossed my hands under my head for a pillow.

  Right away I felt like I wanted to whisper again: “OK, bad thoughts, go in the safe!” I thought about the bad thoughts like they were little people in my brain marching to where the safe was in my brain. Slam the door. “That’s it. And don’t come back out!”

  It worked! I laid there like that for
a while and thought about Mommy and about if she was coming home tomorrow. Then I got sleepy and went back in Daddy’s bed.

  Then, in the middle of the night, the gunman came back.

  POP POP POP

  I sat up and it was too dark. I couldn’t see anything, I only heard the POP sounds in my ears.

  POP POP POP

  POP POP POP

  Over and over again. Were they far away or close? I pressed my hands on my ears as hard as I could, but I could still hear them.

  POP POP POP

  I could hear sounds coming out of my mouth, but I should have been quiet so the gunman couldn’t find me and shoot me.

  NO NO NO

  Screaming sounds were coming out of my mouth and I couldn’t stop them. A hand touched me, and I didn’t know where it came from, but then I heard Daddy’s voice: “Zach, it’s OK, it’s OK.” A light went on and I still made screaming sounds. I couldn’t help it because the gunman was back. How did he get in our house? Now he was going to shoot us and we would have blood everywhere and be dead like Andy. Daddy said, “It’s not real. You’re having a bad dream,” a lot of times and I stopped screaming. But I was still scared and my breathing went in and out too fast, and the POP sounds were still in my ears like an echo.

  “You’re fine. You’re OK,” Daddy said.

  The next time I woke up it was morning and I didn’t remember when I went back to sleep after I heard the POP sounds or when Daddy got up, because he wasn’t on his side of the bed anymore.

  I found him downstairs, sitting in the kitchen again, and he was staring in his coffee cup. He still didn’t shave and his beard was getting longer. I went to him and sat on his lap, and I watched what Grandma and Aunt Mary were doing. They had our photo albums out and were taking out pictures, mostly of Andy and some of all of the family. They talked in quiet voices and wiped some tears off their faces, but sometimes they laughed a little about all the silly faces Andy was making in the pictures.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I didn’t think Mommy was going to like that they were taking pictures out of the albums, because photo albums are special and you should wash your hands before you touch them, and you should turn the pages carefully so you don’t make any wrinkles in the thin paper in between the pages.

  “Oh…we need to pick out some pictures for the…,” Grandma said, and Aunt Mary interrupted her and said, “We just have to borrow a few of these. We’ll put them back after. Hey, look at this one.” Aunt Mary turned the photo album around and pointed at a picture. “Do you remember where this was?”

  “On the cruise,” I said. The picture had all of us in it—me, Mommy, Daddy, Andy, and also Uncle Chip and Aunt Mary and Grandma. We all had on the big hats, called sombreros, that we bought in the gift shop on the cruise ship. In the summer before I started kindergarten, we all went on a big cruise ship together, when Grandma turned seventy and we did a special family trip to celebrate. It was a lot of fun on the ship, it had a big pool right on top of the ship with water slides. There were a ton of restaurants where they had all kinds of different foods and they were open all day long, so you could just eat, eat, eat all the time. The ship made a lot of stops on different days in Mexico.

  I looked at the picture next to the one Aunt Mary pointed at. It was also from the cruise, but it was just of me, Mommy, Daddy, and Andy. All four of us are laughing really hard in the picture, and it made me smile to think about why, because it was when they had a special Mexican party on the boat and they had a contest to see what family could eat the most spicy things. At first the foods we had to eat weren’t very spicy, but then they gave us spicier ones and we still tried to eat them, even though our mouths were on fire and we had tears coming out of our eyes. We tried to drink lots of water, but that didn’t help at all. In the picture, Mommy is laughing and she has her eyes squeezed shut tight. Daddy is looking at her from the side, laughing also, and me and Andy are sitting in front of them, holding up long red peppers. We didn’t end up eating those, they were way too spicy.

  “That was a fun time, wasn’t it?” Aunt Mary said, and her voice sounded different. When I looked up to see why her voice sounded like that, she was still smiling, but she was also crying again.

  “We should probably get going with these,” Grandma said, and held up a stack of pictures. She picked up her bag from the counter to put them inside. Aunt Mary closed the album with the cruise pictures and ripped off a piece of paper towel to wipe off the tears from her face. Then she followed Grandma toward the kitchen door.

  I leaned back against Daddy on the barstool.

  “Daddy?” I said.

  “Yes?” Daddy said behind me.

  “Did the gunman come in our house last night?”

  Grandma and Aunt Mary both turned back around when I said that.

  “No, bud, you had a nightmare,” Daddy said. “The gunman is not coming to our house. OK?” The way he said it sounded like I asked a stupid question, like duh.

  “But what if he does come and shoots us like Andy?”

  Grandma walked back toward us and she took my hands and held them tight. “Zach, the gunman can’t hurt you anymore, or anyone else, because he’s dead,” she said. “I think it’s important that you know that. There’s no need to be afraid anymore. The police killed him.”

  Then I remembered the policeman at the church said that, I just forgot.

  “He was a bad guy, right?” I asked.

  “Yes, he was. He did a very bad thing,” Grandma answered.

  “Did the gunman’s soul fly up to heaven, too? Will it try to hurt Andy’s soul there?”

  “Oh goodness, Zach, no! Heaven is for the souls of good people. The souls of bad people go somewhere else.”

  [ 13 ]

  You Can’t Be Here

  I WAS IN MY BATHROOM brushing my teeth after breakfast when I heard voices from downstairs in the hallway. Daddy’s voice and another voice, and at first I thought it was Grandma or Aunt Mary, and maybe they came back from where they went with the pictures. I heard Daddy say, “You can’t be here. You…I’m sorry….” I heard the woman’s voice making crying sounds, or choking. I walked over to the stairs and tried not to make the floors squeak, because I wanted to see who Daddy said can’t be here.

  The woman’s voice was from Ricky’s mom. She was in the hallway by the front door, leaning with her back against it, and Daddy was standing right in front of her. Ricky’s mom had both of her hands up, and Daddy was holding her wrists. She was crying and it made her whole face wet and the front of her shirt, or maybe that was from the rain. She had only a T-shirt on, and her arms looked very white and skinny.

  “Jim. Please. Don’t do this to me,” Ricky’s mom said. “Jim, please.” She said that over and over, and I didn’t know what she was asking Daddy not to do. Maybe she didn’t want him to hold her wrists like that. “I am…completely alone.” She did a big choking sound when she said that, and a big thing of snot came flinging out of her nose and it went all the way down to her mouth, and that was really gross.

  Daddy let go of her wrists, and she wiped her nose with her arm, like she was a little kid. Then she started to slide down the front door kind of in slow motion, like she got too tired to stand up, and she sat down right in front of the door. She cried and cried. I could only hear it, not see it, because Daddy was standing in front of her.

  “Nancy,” Daddy said in a quiet voice, “I’m sorry, I really am. I wish I could…” Daddy didn’t finish his sentence, and Ricky’s mom didn’t say anything back. All she did was sit there in front of our door and cry.

  “Nancy,” Daddy said again. “Please.” He leaned forward and touched her cheek, and then I could see her again. “We both agreed that we needed to end…this. We both agreed that it’s better this way, didn’t we?”

  Ricky’s mom grabbed Daddy’s hand wi
th her hands and she put her face on his hand and her tears and snot were probably getting all over his hand, but he didn’t take his hand back.

  “Nancy, Zach is upstairs. And my mother and Mary will be back…soon. I’m sorry. Please, you have to go,” Daddy said.

  “No,” Ricky’s mom said, and she looked up at Daddy. “No, I have to be with you. I need you. How am I supposed to…?” And she started to cry harder and louder, but she kept staring at Daddy. “He’s dead,” she said, and she stretched out the word like deeeeeeeead. “Ricky, oh my God. Ricky, my…what am I going to do? What am I supposed to doooooooo?”

  Ricky died from the gunman like Andy, but Ricky’s mom wasn’t in the hospital because of the shock like Mommy. She came here, in our house, and she said she had to be with Daddy and was holding on to his hand like it belonged to her. I didn’t like that and I didn’t know why he let her do that.

  I wanted her to let go of Daddy’s hand, so I started to go down the stairs. When Daddy heard my steps, he pulled his hand away and turned around to me fast. Ricky’s mom tried to stand up and banged her head against the door handle.

  “Zach!” Daddy said, and then he stared at me like he thought I was going to say something, but I didn’t. “Nancy…Mrs. Brooks is here,” Daddy said like I was blind or something, because she was standing right there.

  I stared at Daddy and Ricky’s mom. Ricky’s mom’s face was very white, like the skin on her arms except there was a lot of red around her eyes, and even inside her eyes it was red instead of the white. Her eyes were very blue, like the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Her long hair was wet and it was stuck to her face and her neck. Through her wet T-shirt I could see two pointy circles from her boobs, and I couldn’t look away from them.