Only Child(57)
There was no more snow after the one day when Daddy and I had milkshakes at the diner, but also no more rain. It just stayed really cold. I could see the white from the coldness on top of the grass and the cars. I touched the window with my hand, and the cold glass made me do a shiver with my whole body.
When I went downstairs, I heard the TV was on in the family room and I saw Mimi sitting on the couch. “Is Mommy on the TV?” I asked, and Mimi turned around to me fast because I surprised her.
“Not yet, sweetie. Good morning,” Mimi said, and she picked up the remote and turned off the TV.
“Can I watch with you?” I sat down on the couch next to Mimi.
“Oh, um, I don’t think so, sweetie. I’m not sure…” Mimi was still looking at the turned-off TV.
“But I want to see Mommy,” I said, and I felt the mad feeling starting out in my stomach. Then I yelled at Mimi: “I want to see Mommy on the TV!”
“Zach, honey, please don’t get upset. I…I don’t know if Mommy would want you to watch—” Mimi said.
I interrupted her and I said a lie to her: “Mommy promised me that I could watch it, so you can’t break her promise.”
“She did? I didn’t talk to her about it, so…OK, well, I think she’s about to…” Mimi picked up the remote again and turned the TV back on.
A man with very shiny black hair was sitting in the middle of a long red couch in between two women. He said, “Just over a month has passed since the horrific McKinley shooting. While we and our nation as a whole are still trying to come to grips with a tragedy of this magnitude, we continue to remember the nineteen families that are dealing with a loss that is impossible to imagine.” The two women on the couch made sad faces. “Fifteen families in particular, trying to deal with the loss of a young child who was taken away from them in such a violent way.”
The man turned to the side and talked to the one woman on the couch. “Jennifer, few of the families have come forward to speak about their loss, but you spoke to a handful of them in the last couple of weeks. Earlier this morning you had the chance to sit down and speak to one of the mothers, Melissa Taylor, who lost her ten-year-old son Andy in the McKinley shooting.”
“Yes, Rupert,” the woman Jennifer answered. “It’s really heart-wrenching to see firsthand what these families are going through. They are trying to find ways to cope with their loss, day in and day out, and they hope to find comfort in the memories they have of their children. Especially now, with the holidays right around the corner, you know, they are often just trying to go through the motions for…the other kids in the family sometimes, the siblings.”
The man Rupert and the other woman shook their heads yes.
“The Taylors are one of the families, like you said, Rupert. They lost their son Andy on that tragic day in Wake Gardens. Andy was in fifth grade—ten years old—and he was in the auditorium for an assembly when the shooter entered the school. As you probably know, the school’s auditorium was the first place where the shooter opened fire and where most of the victims lost their lives. Andy’s mother, Melissa Taylor, kindly agreed to speak with me this morning. She gave me a very moving and, as you can imagine, emotional insight into her and her family’s ordeal. Take a look with me.”
Then the TV switched away from the man and the women on the couch and all of a sudden there was Mommy. She looked different. Her hair didn’t look normal, it was bigger on the top of her head, and she had on a lot of makeup that made her face different. She was wearing a red jacket and skirt that I never saw before, and she sat in a big brown chair that made her look smaller. She looked like she was the girl from “The Three Bears” and she was sitting in the wrong chair, the Daddy or the Mommy Bear’s chair, because it was too big for her. It was strange to see Mommy on the TV. I was here, in our house, on our couch, and Mommy was inside the TV like she was not a real person in the real world.
The woman Jennifer sat in a big brown chair, too, a little bit away from Mommy, and there was a table in between them with tissues on it and two cups.
“Mrs. Taylor, your son Andy was one of the fifteen children whose lives were taken on that terrible day in Wake Gardens. Thank you for being here today and agreeing to share your family’s story and your memories of Andy with us.”
On the TV, the picture switched from Mommy and Jennifer to a picture of Andy, the one from the field day where he has his silly face and it looks like he’s about to jump off the screen. But I could still hear Mommy’s voice: “Andy was a force of nature. He was incredibly smart and he had all this energy. He was this big ball of energy, you know?” It sounded like Mommy was crying.
“He turned ten, a few weeks before…he died. I wanted to have a party at our house like we always did, but he didn’t want a party. He said he was getting too old….” Mommy’s voice went up very high, it sounded squeaky, and the TV switched back to her, and her face was big on the screen. I could see the tears coming out of her eyes, and some black from the makeup was on her cheeks.
Mommy wiped her eyes with a tissue, and then she talked again. “Andy said he was getting too old for parties now. Now that he was ‘double digits,’ he loved saying that. So he wanted to invite a few friends to do something special. And we did, we went to this go-kart racing track and he had a blast. But I wish…I wish we had had a big party for him for…one last time….”