Only Child(76)
“I just think she’s taking it too far, that’s all,” the woman said to Miss Wanda. Right then, after she said that, the balloons to remember started to go up in the sky behind them, so that was when we were sitting in the car after we left the memory ceremony. On TV the woman and Miss Wanda turned around to look at the balloons. They made sad smiles, and then the woman kept talking: “I mean, I can’t imagine the pain she’s going through, and her family, losing her little boy like that. But I don’t see how this is going to help anybody, that’s all. It’s not going to bring her son back. And you have to feel bad for them, too, you know? I can see both sides, that’s all I’m saying.” Miss Wanda shook her head yes, and she was making a serious face.
Mimi walked in the family room. I didn’t even know she was here. “Honey, why are you still watching this? They’re just going to show the same thing over and over.” Mommy kept staring at the TV and said: “Can you believe this, Mom? Fucking Michelle, anything for a minute in the spotlight, huh?” Mimi looked over at me, probably because of the F-word Mommy said.
Mimi let out a long breath. “Maybe it would do you some good to take a step back, give it a little time? You’re so exhausted, honey.” Mommy looked down in her lap and didn’t say anything for a while, and I could see tears dripped from her eyes in her lap.
“How can I give it time, though?” Mommy said. She wiped away her tears, but more kept dripping in her lap. “I AM exhausted, I really am. But what am I supposed to do?—move on? Accept that their son did this to us?” Mommy made choking sounds like she was trying to hold in her crying, but it came out anyway. Her whole face got red dots on it.
“I don’t know, honey,” Mimi said. Her voice came out shaky. “But I hate to see you wearing yourself down like this. It’s all so…hard already.”
“It’s…it’s almost like they’re painting them as the victims now,” Mommy said, and pointed at the TV. “Look, they’re sensationalizing this one thing, this one particular situation. Like Mary is the victim here. Her son did this! I know it’s not bringing Andy back…what I’m doing. I know that! I don’t know what to do…,” Mommy said, and got up and walked in the kitchen fast. Mimi looked at me with a sad face and put her hand through my hair. Then she went in the kitchen after Mommy.
I stayed on the couch and kept looking at the TV and it was commercials, but then the news came back on. It wasn’t about Mommy and Charlie’s wife anymore. It showed a cemetery at nighttime—it was dark and hard to see, but it looked like the cemetery where we went for Andy’s funeral. I recognized the road inside the cemetery where all the people parked who came for Andy’s funeral and where Daddy and Mimi had to hold up Mommy on the sides and put her in our car because she couldn’t stand up anymore from the heavy sadness blanket.
Now only one car was parked there on the road, and a man was walking to it. The TV zoomed in and I could see the man was Charlie and Charlie took keys from his pocket and tried to open the car door, but then he dropped the keys on the ground.
“Charlie, can we talk to you for a second? Charlie?” I heard a voice say, or maybe it was two voices, the second “Charlie” sounded like from a different voice. A man walked up next to where Charlie was bending down to pick up his keys and he was holding a microphone, so he was from the news. A light was shining on him and it made the darkness around him get lighted up. When Charlie stood back up, the man from the news pointed the microphone at him. Charlie blinked his eyes because the light was pointing right in his face. He looked even more old than when I saw him when he came to our house and Mommy talked to him in a mean way. All the bones in his face were sticking out and his eyes had dark all around them.
“Charlie, would you like to comment on the allegations that are being made against you and your wife? By some of the victims’ families?” the man from the news asked. Charlie didn’t say anything. He just turned his head very slow away from the light and looked at the man like he was trying to figure out who was talking to him. Then he turned around and opened his car door and he didn’t drop the keys this time. He sat down in the car and closed the door.
Charlie’s car started to drive away very slow, and the man from the news talked in the microphone: “Every evening, Charlie Ranalez, the father of Charles Ranalez Jr., the McKinley shooter, can be seen visiting his son’s grave. Not a day has gone by that he hasn’t—”
“Zach?” Mimi called from the kitchen. I didn’t answer her. I wanted to hear what the man from the news was saying about Charlie. But then Mimi came in the family room and she picked up the remote from where Mommy left it on the couch and she turned off the TV, right in the middle of what I wanted to listen to.
“Your dad is here to pick you up for breakfast. Let’s get you ready to go, OK?” Mimi said. I forgot that it was breakfast-at-the-diner day with Daddy today. Every Sunday now he picks me up and we go to the diner and have breakfast. It was like a new/old tradition and it used to be me and Andy and Mommy and Daddy, all of us going, but now it was down to me and Daddy.
“Front door!” I heard the lady robot voice say in the kitchen, and then the front door got slammed loud. “Goodness,” Mimi said, and we went in the kitchen. Daddy came walking in from the hallway. He had a mad look on his face.