Only Child(13)

On the last normal Tuesday, Daddy came walking in and I was waiting for him by the front door, but he was still on a phone call, so I wasn’t allowed to say hi to him yet. He put a finger up on his mouth to say “Shush,” and he went upstairs to change from his suit to his game clothes. He always does that, I don’t know why, because Andy was playing, not him.

I waited in the hallway for him to come back down because there was fighting in the kitchen. The fighting was between Mommy and Andy, and it was about homework. Andy wasn’t doing it again, and it all has to be finished before practice because we come home really late, at nine almost, one hour after my bedtime. I did my homework already right after I got off the bus.

When I was sitting next to Daddy on the barstool, eating my Honey Bunches, I thought about the fighting yesterday. How Mommy yelled at Andy, and how the fighting got worse because of Daddy, after he came downstairs from changing his clothes. And I thought about how we didn’t know then that it was going to be the last normal day, or maybe we would have tried not to have all the same fighting that we always have.

I looked over to Daddy and wondered if he was thinking about the fighting, too. He was putting cereal in his mouth, one spoonful after the next, and he didn’t even chew, only swallowed. He looked like a robot, one that was moving too slow because it was running out of batteries.

“Daddy?”

“Hm?” Daddy turned his slow robot head and looked at me.

“Daddy, where’s Andy?”

Daddy looked at me funny and said, “Zach, Andy is dead. Remember?”

“No, I know he’s dead, but where is he right now?”

“Oh, I’m not sure, bud. I wasn’t allowed to…go see him.” Daddy’s voice got different when he said the last words. He looked down fast and stared at his Honey Bunches floating in the milk, and he didn’t blink for a long time.

“Is he still at the school?” I asked, and I thought about the people lying in the hallway with blood around them, and that one of them was Andy. Was he dead then already, when I walked down the hallway to the back door? And when I was hiding in the closet with Miss Russell and my class, was he already dead?

I thought about how it must have hurt badly to get killed with bullets from a gun, and Andy was probably really scared when he saw that the gunman was about to shoot him.

“Where did the gunman shoot him?” I meant where on his body, but Daddy said, “In the auditorium, I think. His class was in the auditorium when…it happened.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Today the fourth and fifth graders got to see the snakes!”

“Huh? What snakes?”

I remembered that I never got to tell Daddy about the emerald tree boa yesterday. Last night I waited in the hallway for Daddy to come down from changing his clothes because I wanted to tell him that I touched a real live snake at school. I really did. It was long and bright green with white marks on it, called an emerald tree boa, and all the kids were scared of it except me.

We had an assembly and this guy came in with different kinds of snakes and birds and a ferret, and he told us snake facts. It was so cool. I love snakes. I wish I could have one in a terrarium like my friend Spencer. But Mommy hates them and she thinks they’re dangerous. I told her not all of them are, and she said, “Well, you don’t know that though until they bite you, do you? And then it could be too late.”

So when the guy asked if someone wanted to touch the boa, I raised my hand fast, and he picked me to come to the front and pet it. It was wrapped around his arm, like it would be around a tree branch waiting for its prey, he told me. The boa’s skin was dry and had hard scales, and it wasn’t slimy like I thought. The guy told us lots of facts about the emerald tree boa: emerald is a green color, the color of the snake. The snake doesn’t have any venom, but it wraps its body around its prey and squeezes it so tight that the prey can’t breathe and dies.

But when Daddy came down and I tried to tell him, he heard Mommy and Andy’s fighting and said, “Hold on, bud, let me handle that first. Tell me later,” and he went in the kitchen, and of course right away the fighting got worse. That’s how it always is—it always starts because of Andy acting bad, and he and Mommy have a fight. When Daddy is home and gets involved, he and Mommy get into a fight, too. “Jim, I was dealing with this,” Mommy tells Daddy, and then everyone is mad at everyone, except me, because I’m not part of the fighting.

I followed Daddy in the kitchen and started getting napkins out and forks and knives—that’s my job before dinner. Andy’s job is to get plates and make our milk cups, but he wasn’t doing that again tonight because he was still not done with his homework. I did it instead. Daddy sat down at the table and said he worked like a crazy person all day and could he never come home and have dinner in peace? And by the way, the back door was open so the neighbors could probably hear all the yelling. Mommy sat down, too, and she gave me a fake-like smile and said, “Thank you for setting the table, Zach. You’re such a good helper.”

“Yeah, Zach, little suck-up,” Andy said.

Daddy slammed his hands on the table so that everything moved and the milk spilled out of the cups. It made me jump because it was so loud, and then Daddy yelled at Andy, and the neighbors were definitely going to hear that.

That was the last normal dinner on the last normal day, and now it was only one day later and I was eating cereal for dinner with just Daddy, and not Mommy and Andy. That was going to be the last fight because now Andy was gone, and so there wouldn’t be any more fighting without him here.