Only Child(42)

When I took breaks from reading, I looked at the picture a lot. It was from when we went to Grandma’s beach house in the summer, not this year, but last year. Uncle Chip was still alive, but he was really sick, and in the same year, in the fall, he died. Grandma wanted us all to wear matching clothes, white shirts and beige pants, and a photographer came and took a bunch of pictures of us on the beach. There was fighting, because Andy ran in the ocean and his pants got wet, and that wasn’t going to look good in the pictures. Also he kept making his funny faces in almost every picture.

In this picture, we were sitting on the beach on the big sand hills in front of Grandma’s beach house, and Andy wasn’t making a funny face in it, but a serious face. I was sitting next to Andy with some space in between us, and I did a cheese for the camera, but Andy looked like he was staring at something next to the camera. His wet pants were rolled up to his knees, and he was sitting with his legs pulled up and his arms were hugging his knees.

He looked sad, and when I first noticed Andy’s sad face, my throat started to hurt a lot. I moved the picture onto the sad feelings page, the gray one, and the whole picture didn’t look like it belonged there, because it had a sunny blue sky, but it did, because of Andy’s face and because of how it made me feel when I looked at it.

I never saw a sad face on Andy before when he was still alive, only the funny faces he made and the mad faces, always the mad faces. But maybe I never looked at his face for a long time, like now.

I liked the ending of Dragon of the Red Dawn and how Jack and Annie are feeling in the end. In this book, Jack and Annie go on a quest to find one of the secrets of happiness, the first one—there are four secrets in total—to help the magician Merlin. Merlin doesn’t feel good and doesn’t eat and sleep, and he’s tired a lot. The secrets of happiness are going to make him feel better. Jack and Annie travel in the Magic Tree House to a place called Japan, and they meet a famous poet named Matsuo Basho. Matsuo Basho invented a type of short poem called haiku, and Jack and Annie learn how to make haikus, too.

And they learn what the first secret of happiness is: “Paying attention to small things around you, like in nature.”

I said it a few times so I would remember it: “Paying attention to small things around you, like in nature.” I didn’t know that was something that you could do to get happy, but when Jack and Annie came back from their adventure, they were feeling very happy, so it must have worked.

“I really wish we could have done adventures, too, like Jack and Annie,” I said to Andy in the picture. “Before you died. Like do more fun stuff.”

I tried to look for small things around us in the beach picture. I couldn’t see any, but I remembered some things that are at a beach: sand and rocks and seashells—those are all pretty. And the grass that grows on the sand hills that gets really tall and it’s sharp, so you have to be careful when you try to rip a piece off because you can get a cut, but it still looks pretty.

Right next to where we were sitting, I noticed patterns in the sand, maybe from the wind or the ocean, and they looked cool. I didn’t see those when we were at the beach to take pictures. So maybe then if we could have tried to notice those things around us, everyone would have felt happier, and then we would have had no fighting. Maybe then Andy’s face wouldn’t be sad in the picture.

I wanted to go try out the first secret of happiness with Mommy and Daddy. I could tell them about it and we could try it out together, and then maybe we could feel happier again. “I’ll be back later,” I said into the closet before I went out.

Every time when I first come out of the hideout, it hurts my eyes because it’s dark in the closet with just the light from Buzz. When you first come back out, it’s too bright and it takes a while to see things right.

I didn’t hear any sounds anywhere, and our house was like the Magic Tree House after it spins and lands in a new place. It’s always the same in every book: “Then everything was still. Absolutely still.” When I went downstairs to look for Mommy and Daddy, I thought that our house did kind of spin and it landed in a new place after the gunman came, except we didn’t land somewhere to start a fun adventure. We just landed somewhere and it was absolutely still. And everyone was sad or mad. And we weren’t doing stuff together, like Jack and Annie when they go someplace new, but we all did separate things most of the time.

I walked past Daddy’s office, but he wasn’t in there, and I heard Mommy’s voice in the kitchen: “I think this will be good, to start with this interview….Yes, let people see my family and what this…what they did to us. I just want to start the conversation,…raise the questions, you know? Exactly…It can’t just be like, oh, what a horrible thing that happened and everyone will be upset about this for a while and then people will move on and nothing changes….I want to at least start the conversation about them, how they could let this happen. Put things in motion to…Exactly…” Then Mommy was quiet for a while and listened to someone talking on the phone.

“All right…that sounds good….Exactly,” she said in between listening, and then she said, “Oh, Zach?” I went to her because I thought she was talking to me. “Mommy?” I said. But Mommy was still talking on the phone, and when I said her name, she got up fast from where she was sitting and walked in the family room and stayed with her back to me like she didn’t want me to hear her, but she wasn’t even standing far away from me, so I still could.