The Nix(26)

He felt bad about this now. He felt that he certainly could have eaten the burger, that he just psyched himself out, and if he would have given it a chance he was sure the burger would have been a perfectly acceptable dinner. He felt guilty about the whole thing. The way his mother turned the car around and fetched him chicken nuggets seemed to him now so heroic and good. Good in a way he never could be. He felt selfish. The way his crying let him get whatever he wanted even though that was not his intention at all. And he was trying to figure out a way to tell his mother that if it were up to him he’d never cry again and she’d never have to spend hours calming him down or pandering to his inconsiderate and thoughtless needs.

He wanted to say this. He was getting the words right in his head. His mother, meanwhile, was looking at the trees. One of the neighbor’s front-yard oaks. Like everything else, it was drooping and desiccated and sad, its branches listing to the ground. Leaves not really green but a scorched amber. There was no sound at all. No wind chimes, no birds, dogs were not barking, children were not laughing. His mother looked up at this tree. Samuel stopped and looked too.

She said, “Do you see it?”

Samuel didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. “The tree?” he said.

“Up near the top branch. See?” She pointed. “All the way up. That leaf.”

He followed her finger and saw a single leaf that did not look quite like the others. It was green, thick, it stood straight up and it was flopping around like a fish, twisting as if there were a swirling wind. It was the only leaf on the tree that was doing this. The rest hung quietly in the dead air. There was no wind on the block, and yet this leaf was a maniac.

“Do you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a ghost.”

“It is?” he said.

“That leaf is haunted.”

“A leaf can be haunted?”

“Anything can be haunted. A ghost can live in a leaf as well as anywhere else.”

He watched the leaf spin around as if it were attached to a kite.

“Why is it doing that?” he said.

“That’s the spirit of a person,” she said. “My father told me about this. One of his old stories. From Norway, from when he was a kid. It’s someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He’s in between.”

Samuel had not considered this a possibility.

“He’s restless,” she said. “He wants to move on. Maybe he was a good person who did one really bad thing. Or maybe he did lots of bad things but felt very sorry about them. Maybe he didn’t want to do bad things, but he couldn’t stop himself.”

And at this, once again, Samuel cried. He felt his face crumple. The tears came so unstoppably quickly. Because he knew he did bad things over and over and over. Faye noticed and closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers hard at her temples and covered her face with her hand. He could tell this was about as much as she could tolerate today, how she’d met the limits of her patience, how the crying about bad things was itself another bad thing.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “why are you crying?”

He still wanted to tell her that what he desired more than anything else in the world was to stop crying. But he couldn’t say it. All he managed to do was to spit out something incoherent through the tears and mucus: “I don’t want to be a leaf!”

“Why on earth would you think that?” she said.

She took his hand and pulled him home and the only sound on the whole block was the clacking of the wagon wheels and his whimpering. She took him to his room and told him to put his toys away.

“And I told you to bring nine toys,” she said. “You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention.” And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk, and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.





2


SAMUEL’S FATHER INSISTED that Sunday evenings be devoted to “family time,” and they’d have a mandatory dinner together, all of them sitting around the table while Henry tried valiantly to make conversation. They’d eat some of the packaged meals from his special office freezer, where the experimental and test-market foods were kept. These were usually more daring, more exotic—mango instead of baked apples, sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, sweet-and-sour pork instead of pork chops, or things that would not at first glance seem ideal for freezing: lobster rolls, say, or grilled cheese, or tuna melts.

“You know the interesting thing about frozen meals,” Henry said, “is that they weren’t popular until Swanson decided to call them ‘TV dinners.’ Frozen meals had been around for a decade when they changed the name to TV dinner and boom, sales exploded.”

“Mm-hm,” Faye said as she stared straight down into her chicken cordon bleu.

“It’s like people needed permission to eat in front of the television, you know? It’s like everyone wanted to eat in front of the TV already, but they were waiting for someone to endorse it.”

“That’s super fascinating,” Faye said in a tone that made him shut right up.

Then more silence before Henry asked what the family wanted to do tonight, and Faye suggesting he just go watch TV, and Henry asking if she wanted to join him, and Faye saying no, she had dishes to put away and cleaning to do and “you should go on ahead,” and Henry asking if she needed his help with the cleaning, and Faye saying no, he’d just get in the way, and Henry suggesting that maybe she should relax and he’d do the cleanup tonight, and Faye getting frustrated and standing up and saying “You don’t even know where anything goes,” and Henry looking at her hard and seeming like he was on the verge of saying something but then ultimately not saying it.