Only Child(52)

“I know, honey, this is so impossibly hard for all of us,” Mimi said. “You know, I think you should consider the counseling option Mr. Stanley mentioned. Or call Dr. Byrne. It’s important for Zach to get the help and have someone to turn to, an outsider, so to speak. This is too much to handle on your own. You can’t expect so much of yourself all the time. And you should really consider getting help yourself. There’s no shame in admitting—”

Mommy interrupted Mimi’s sentence and her voice sounded very mad. “I don’t need help. What I really need is to get the hell out of here, OK? I can’t be here anymore. It’s like I can’t breathe in this house. I’m trying to get justice for our family, for my SON, and everyone is telling me what I can and cannot do. You shouldn’t be doing this, you really need to do this….I’m sick and tired of it.” I heard the squeak sound of one of the barstools getting pushed back on the floor.

“Can you stay here with him for a while?” Mommy asked. “If I don’t get out of here, I’m literally going to go crazy.”

“OK,” Mimi said. “But do you think that’s a good idea—in your state? Can you at least tell me where you will be? So I know?”

“I don’t know yet, Mom.” Mommy came walking out of the kitchen fast, and she stopped when she saw me sitting on the steps. Her face was all red from crying.

“I’ll be…I’ll come back in a little while, OK, Zach?” she said to me, and then she grabbed the car keys from the table and started to walk backward, away from me. She opened the door to the garage and disappeared through it. I heard the garage door open, and Mommy’s car started and drove out of the garage. The garage door closed again and Mommy was gone. It was quiet, and it was like Mommy ran away from home.





[ 31 ]


    Sharing Space


I PUT THE NEW BATTERIES in Buzz and flipped the switch on. Buzz made a bright light circle again. I looked through my book pile for Magic Tree House #39, Dark Day in the Deep Sea. On the back it said Jack and Annie were going to find the third secret of happiness to save Merlin, but then the Magic Tree House lands on a tiny island in the ocean. I wanted to know what was going to happen to them on the island, and how they were going to get off it, and also what the third secret of happiness was, so I started to read.

I was on page thirty when the door to the hideout opened a little from the outside and let some light in. I jumped because I didn’t expect it.

“Zach?” It was Daddy, and that was a surprise because I didn’t know Daddy came home. I didn’t think it was even dinnertime yet. “Would it be OK for me to come in there with you for a bit?”

I flashed the Buzz light circle all around the hideout. Daddy was going to see all of this—the feelings pages and the picture of me and Andy and everything else. Maybe he saw it before when he found me when I had my bad dream about shooting Andy with my arrow, but I didn’t think so. Also we didn’t talk about the hideout again after he found me in it, so I thought maybe he forgot all about it.

I thought that it was going to make me embarrassed to show him my hideout. But maybe it was going to be good, too, if it wasn’t a secret anymore.

“OK,” I told Daddy, and the door opened all the way and Daddy came in and closed the door behind him. He couldn’t walk in like me because he was too tall, so he crawled in on his hands and knees all the way to the back to where I was.

“Boy, this is tight,” he said when he sat down on the sleeping bag. Then he started to look around and his eyes stopped on the picture of me and Andy, and he pushed a big breath out of his mouth. He leaned forward to look at the picture, and I pointed Buzz on it so he could see it better. He stared at the picture for a while and then he looked under the picture and pointed at the feelings pages. “What are those?” he asked.

“Feelings pages,” I said, and I looked at Daddy’s face to see if he was going to laugh, but he didn’t. He was making a serious face, like he was thinking about it.

“Feelings pages,” he said. “What are feelings pages?”

“They’re for the feelings inside of me. I can make the feelings separated on the papers so it’s easier and they’re not all mixed up anymore,” I told him.

“Huh. So your feelings are all mixed up?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was too complicated like that.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Daddy said. “How did you figure out what colors they’re supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. I could just feel them. The colors come attached to the feelings.”

“They do? I didn’t know that.” Daddy pointed at green and gray. “So what are those for?”

“Mad and sad.”

Daddy shook his head yes. Then he pointed at the feelings pages on the other wall. “So all of those are feelings, too? What is red for?”

“Embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? Why embarrassed?”

“Because of the peeing,” I said, and my face started to feel hot.

“Black?”

“Scared.”

“Yellow?” It was like Daddy was giving me a quiz.

“Happy,” I said, and I looked at Daddy again to see if he thought it was bad that I made a page for happy even though Andy died and I thought that actually, now, I didn’t even want that page up there anymore.