Only Child(12)

I sat very still in my seat in the back and watched the raindrops on the sunroof, the sky crying on top of the car. After a while Daddy put the sweater down on his lap and wiped his face with his hand. Then he turned around to me. “We need to be strong now, Zach, you and me. We need to be strong for Mommy. OK?”

“OK,” I said, and then we drove home through the sky tears, just me and Daddy.





[ 8 ]


    The Last Normal Tuesday


DADDY WALKED AROUND the house with me right behind him, and my socks made wet footprints on the floor. Daddy turned on all the lights in all the rooms, and that was the opposite of what he does on other days, which is turn all the lights off all the time because lights use up electricity and electricity costs a lot of money.

“I’m hungry,” I said, and Daddy said, “Right.” We went in the kitchen, but then Daddy just stood there and looked around like he was in someone else’s kitchen and he didn’t know where stuff was. I heard his phone ringing again in his pocket, but he didn’t take it out to answer it again. He opened up the fridge and looked inside for a while and then he took out the milk. “Cereal OK?”

“Sure,” I said, because with Mommy I’m never allowed to have cereal for dinner.

We sat down on the barstools at the counter and ate Honey Bunches—that’s my favorite cereal. I looked at the family calendar on the wall next to me. It’s Mommy’s big calendar, and everyone in the family has a row with their name on the left and all the things we have on the days of the week next to the names. So that way Mommy can look at it in the morning and remember everything we have that day.

My row on the calendar doesn’t have a lot on it, only piano for today, Wednesday, and lacrosse for Saturday. I wondered if Mr. Bernard still came to the house today at 4:30 for my lesson, but no one opened the door for him because we stayed at the hospital the whole day.

Andy’s row has something almost every day. He gets to do a lot more things because he’s older, and also it’s better when he’s busy with activities. For yesterday, Tuesday, it said lacrosse for Andy and that was only one day ago, but it felt like a long time ago, maybe a month.

Yesterday we did all the things we do every Tuesday, because we didn’t know that today a gunman was going to come. Sometimes on Tuesdays Daddy comes home early so he can go to Andy’s lacrosse practice. He works in New York City where we used to live when I was little, but then we moved to this house because there’s more space here, and New York City is not a safe place for kids to live, Mommy says. And here we could have a whole house, not just an apartment.

Daddy’s office is in the MetLife Building, and that’s really cool because it’s a building on top of a train station. He made partner at his firm last year, and we had a party to celebrate. But I don’t think it’s such a great thing for celebrating because now Daddy is always working until late, so on school days I don’t even see him, only on weekends. He always leaves before I wake up in the morning, and I have to go to bed before he comes back home. Andy gets to stay up longer than me, because he’s three and a half years older, so he sometimes gets to see Daddy before bed, and that’s not fair.

In the summer I went with Daddy to his office one time because Mommy had to take Andy to the doctor. I was excited to go and I was going to be with Daddy all day, and that never happened before. And also Daddy told me about the cool new office he got that has all windows on two sides, and you can see the Empire State Building from it. I couldn’t wait to see it, and I even brought my bird-watching binoculars to see all the way downtown with them.

But then I didn’t get to be with Daddy very much inside his new office because he went to a lot of meetings where I couldn’t come. I had to stay with Angela most of the time. Angela is Daddy’s assistant, and she’s nice. She took me to Grand Central for lunch—that’s the name of the train station under Daddy’s office—and there’s a bunch of restaurants all the way in the basement. Angela let me have Shake Shack and I even got a chocolate milkshake, and that’s not a healthy lunch. Milkshakes are my favorite drink. I always dip my French fries in them, Uncle Chip taught me to do that, and everyone thinks it’s disgusting, but me and Uncle Chip love it. Now I still always do it, and it makes me think about Uncle Chip.

Andy has lacrosse practice on every Tuesday and Friday and then games on the weekends, and the whole family has to go to show our support. He’s really good at lacrosse, like all the sports, and he scores a lot of goals at the games. Daddy says Andy’s probably good enough to play in college, like him when he went to college. He talks about that a lot and he still has a record at his college for most goals in one game, and no one has broken it yet even though that was a long time ago that Daddy made that record. But Daddy says Andy isn’t trying hard enough to get better, and he should be working on his stick skills more. Andy gets mad and says it’s a stupid sport anyway, and maybe he’s only going to play soccer next year and no lacrosse.

I started lacrosse this year, too—it starts in first grade. But I only had three clinics so far, and the whole family did not come to show their support, because Andy’s games are at the same time, so Daddy takes him and Mommy takes me. I don’t think I am going to be very good at lacrosse, it’s hard to hold the stick and scoop up the ball. I don’t even like it, the other boys bump into me too hard, and I hate putting the helmet over my head, it’s too tight.