Only Child(21)

    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?”