Only Child(41)
“No, I can’t wait and see how things play out!” I could hear Mommy say, “You’re a lawyer, for fuck’s sake. Our son got mowed down by a madman and you’re just sitting here. I’m tired of watching you sit here. We should be doing something about this!”
Daddy scooched backward like he was trying to get away from Mommy. “I’m not saying let’s do nothing about it. I didn’t say that. I—”
Mommy interrupted him. “You did, actually.”
“I did NOT!” Daddy’s voice sounded louder now. “All I said was it’s been two weeks, Melissa, that’s it. Not even.”
“Exactly. Which is why now is the time to do something!” Now Mommy was yelling, and I could feel my chest starting to get tight.
“Can you please…?” Daddy made his voice quiet and waved his hands like he was pushing the air down.
Mommy’s voice got even louder. “Don’t shush me! It’s on them, Jim. It’s on them. My son is dead because of them, and I’m not going to sit on my ass and let them get away with it.” All of a sudden Mommy turned around, and I didn’t have time to move away from the door. Mommy was going to get more mad now because I was listening to their fighting.
Mommy opened the door. “What, Zach?”
I held up the book and said, “I wanted to see if you wanted to take turns reading.”
Mommy stared at me for a minute. I thought maybe she didn’t hear me, but then she said, “I can’t. Not right now, OK, Zach? Later, OK?” and then she walked out of Daddy’s office and around me back to the kitchen, and I heard the TV go on in the family room. Daddy leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands again.
I was wrong about how it was going to get better after Mommy stopped being sad and in shock. There was still fighting, even without Andy here. I went back upstairs and into my hideout. After I got comfy on Andy’s sleeping bag, I switched on my Buzz flashlight and opened the book to the first chapter, and I read all the way through the whole book, no taking turns.
[ 25 ]
The Secrets of Happiness
“I feel like I’m seeing spring for the first time,” said Jack.
“Me too,” said Annie.
“Not just for the first time this year,” said Jack. “But for the first time in my whole life.”
“Me too,” said Annie.
Jack felt happy, really happy, as he and Annie headed for home in the sparkling morning light.
I closed the book and put it on the stack of books in the corner of the hideout, all the books I read in the last few days, and I stood up to stretch my legs. They hurt from sitting crisscross applesauce the whole time, and my neck hurt from leaning over the book. My throat felt scratchy from reading out loud. At first, when I started reading the Magic Tree House books all by myself, I read them quiet in my head, but then I switched to reading out loud. Miss Russell says it’s good to practice your reading out loud. You can read to a person or pretend, and your brain can record the sound of the words and learn faster.
So I started pretending like I was reading to someone.
And that someone was Andy.
I didn’t even know why I started doing that, except that after the funeral, when I first talked to Andy in the hideout and I said the truth to him, that he was being a jerk to me, it felt good to say that. So I decided I wanted to keep saying stuff to Andy. I started out with whispering, I didn’t know why. No one was going to hear me anyway, with Daddy staying in his office with the door closed all the time and Mommy reading on the iPad or cleaning invisible messes. And Mimi wasn’t staying overnight anymore, so we could have space, she said, even though there was already all that space in between everyone in the house.
But I still only whispered at first: “Hi, I’m back in your closet,” and it was like I could hear Andy say, “Duh,” because “Hello, I can see you sitting in there!”
“You didn’t always have to talk to me like that in your meany way,” I told Andy, and then I said all the truth things, all the stuff that he did that was really mean, to me and to Mommy. And it was weird because it was like the most I ever talked to Andy in my whole life.
But then I started to feel bad about saying just the bad things to him and nothing nice, because he was dead, and who knows, maybe he was really sad about that and lonely where he was now, so I wanted to say other things to him, too, but then I didn’t know what, so that’s when I decided to start reading out loud to him instead. Not in a whispering voice because that hurts your mouth after a while.
I started on Magic Tree House #30—that was the one I picked out to read with Mommy—and I read all of that and then #31, 32, 33, 34, 35, and 36, and it took like one whole day to read one book, so I was reading out loud for a lot of days already. The book I finished today was #37, Dragon of the Red Dawn, 105 pages and not a lot of pictures.
I liked reading to Andy, even if it was only pretend. When I was in the middle of reading, it didn’t feel like pretend. I had a feeling like he was right there, listening to me, and I went on adventures with Jack and Annie, and Andy went, too, all four of us.
After I was done stretching my legs, I sat back down and I looked at the wall with my feelings pages. A few days ago, I hung up something else on the wall, a picture of me and Andy. I found it on a whole pile of pictures on the dining room table, the ones that were hanging up at the wake, and I sneaked it upstairs.