Only Child(59)

“Yes, sir,” Daddy said, and he put his hand to his forehead like a soldier. He sat down crisscross applesauce like me and ripped open the bag of cookies and put it in between us. We both took a cookie. “What are you doing?” Daddy asked.

“Reading.”

“To Andy?” Daddy asked, and he looked at the picture on the wall.

“Yeah.”

“Can I listen, too? What are you reading?”

I showed him the cover of Dark Day in the Deep Sea. “I’m on page seventy-eight already, so you’re not going to know what it’s about,” I told Daddy.

“Can’t you tell me what happened so far?”

“OK. So Jack and Annie land on a tiny island with the Magic Tree House, and a ship called the HMS Challenger comes, and it has explorers and scientists on it. Jack and Annie are allowed to go on the ship with them, and the crew tells them they are looking for a sea monster that looks like a floating nest of snakes.”

“Yikes,” Daddy said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And then a big storm comes and Jack and Annie get washed off the ship from the big waves, but they get rescued by a giant octopus. The giant octopus is the sea monster the crew is looking for, but he’s not a monster, and he saves them from drowning in the ocean. But the crew doesn’t know that, so they try to catch the octopus and kill him. And now Jack and Annie are trying to figure out how they can save the octopus. That’s where I am, and there’s only two chapters left.”

“Sounds very suspenseful. Go ahead!” Daddy grabbed another cookie and leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes. I took one more cookie, too, and then I started to read out loud again.

Jack and Annie end up using their magic wand. It makes the octopus talk, and the crew understands that the octopus is not a monster and they let him go. In the end Jack and Annie discover that the third secret of happiness for Merlin is to have compassion for all living creatures. I didn’t know what compassion meant, but Jack explains it to Annie: “That means feeling sympathy and love for them.”

“What does ‘sympathy’ mean?” I asked Daddy, and that was a hard word to read and say, sympathy.

Daddy opened his eyes. “Well, it means you care about how they feel. And you try to understand their feelings and share them. It’s hard to explain.”

“So you’re like supposed to feel their feelings with them?”

“Yeah, I believe that’s what it says here, right?” Daddy said.

“But then how is that going to make you happy? At first I thought maybe we could try out the secrets of happiness that Jack and Annie find out, but this is about living creatures, and that’s like nature and animals and stuff, so I don’t think we can use it to get happy.”

“Hm. If this is the third secret of happiness, then what were the first two? And what are they for, by the way?” Daddy wanted to know.

“Jack and Annie are trying to find the four secrets of happiness to help Merlin. He’s a magician, and he doesn’t feel well. He’s very sad and he needs the secrets to feel better. The first one was to pay attention to the small things around you in nature, and to feel curious was the second one. But I tried those out and they didn’t work.”

Daddy thought about it for a while before he gave me an answer: “Well, people are living creatures, too. I do think it makes sense what they’re saying. It could make you feel good not to only think about yourself, but to think about others and care about them. When you try to be sympathetic, to have sympathy, maybe it helps you see why people behave in certain ways. So you don’t just see their behavior, but you understand where it’s coming from. What do you think?”

I thought about what Daddy said. Daddy and I both grabbed another cookie, and there were only a couple left in the bag. “I think I should have done that with Andy,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I only noticed how Andy acted bad all the time. That he was being mean to me. A lot of times I didn’t like him because of that, and I didn’t try to feel the sympathy with him,” I said. “Maybe Andy wouldn’t have acted bad a lot of times if he could have noticed that we were feeling the sympathy with him. I don’t know,” I said, and I put my shoulders up and down.

Daddy put down his cookie and looked at me. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but no words came out.

“Why do you think he was doing that?” I asked.

“Doing what?” Daddy’s voice sounded different.

“Acting like that all the time,” I said. “Bad.”

Daddy made a coughing sound. He looked down at his hands and started picking the skin around his fingernails. “I’m not sure, bud.”

“I think maybe it was because of the Hulk,” I said.

“The Hulk?” Daddy looked up from his nails and looked at me. He made lines on his forehead.

“Yeah, the Hulk gets really mad and then he goes crazy, even though on the inside he doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it, and after, when he turns back to normal, when he’s Bruce Banner again, he feels bad about what he did. I think that’s probably what happened to Andy, and now that happens to me a lot, too.”

“Why do you think that is?” Daddy asked.

“I don’t know. The mad feeling kind of sneaks up on me really fast, and then I can’t do anything about it.”