A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

This is what he paints: the distances, the silences, the fire, the death. He is in that world all day long.

  Hey, she says. Would you like to paint the moment right after you woke up from your coma, when you knew you were always going to be the one who didn’t die?

  Sometimes, when he breaks for lunch, he stands in the quiet kitchen, hearing the house noises and the traffic sounds from outside. The refrigerator motor comes on, the radiators scream out their protest, water gurgles in the old pipes. This old house has creaks and complaints as it settles even further into the earth. It’s been settling for over a century, and yet it still sinks farther. He waits for Blix to tell him what to do. Marnie claims that Blix can sometimes be reached over by the toaster, the temperamental toaster that should probably be thrown away except that Marnie has this silly idea that Blix might be the one causing the toast to fly out of it at odd times. You can talk to her, Patrick. Ask her a question. She’s with us. I know she is with us.

  But he doesn’t believe in that. Instead, he gets his lunch—a piece of chicken breast left over from dinner, an orange, a piece of Manchego cheese, and a refill of coffee—and he goes back to his studio, not even letting himself glance toward the toaster. He wonders sometimes if the spirit of Blix might rush after him as soon as he closes the door. If she might come in, with her expansive love, her laughter, and change the dynamic for him, the way she did before.

  But there is only Anneliese. Perhaps Anneliese keeps Blix away.

  Hours later, consumed with his work, he hears noises in the other part of the house, and he looks up. Darkness is pressing against the windows, and his neck and back are stiff. His time in the studio is up. He listlessly packs up his paintbrushes and attempts to reclaim all the pieces of himself so he can reenter what everybody else thinks of as his real life, but which he knows is really his fake life. He has to hurry because if he doesn’t, then Fritzie will bound in to fetch him, her face bright with excitement. He knows Marnie tries to keep her from interrupting him, but at some point, if he doesn’t appear, she spring-loads her way in, and cannonballs herself into his arms. She looks at the paintings, and he sees her face change from happy to confused and sad.

  He wants her out of there as soon as possible, so they go together to the kitchen, where the warmth is, where there is music and the crazy comfort of the turquoise refrigerator, and where he grounds himself by touching objects: the vases with flowers, and stoneware pottery and the big old black gas stove with the orange teakettle on it and the worn wooden floor and Blix’s old toaster. Slowly he lets himself be absorbed back into this different kind of life. He greets Marnie with a kiss, gets out plates and glasses for dinner, stirs the spaghetti sauce, pops in the pan of biscuits, pours the milk, wipes the table, smiles, asks questions, half listens to the stories of the day.

  Laughs with them, even though to his own ears, his laughter sounds hollow.

  How is it they don’t know who they’re dealing with? How do they not see his fear? It’s as though every day it’s a little bit harder to bring himself fully back to them. A little more of him has remained behind.

  He sees Marnie looking at him sometimes before his regular personality has fully come back, sees her quizzical glance as she tries to figure out where he is. In some moods he thinks he’d like to tell her. But then he comes to his senses. No, he wouldn’t. He doesn’t want her to know. That would be the worst thing.

  How would he even say it? I still think about my old girlfriend. My relationship with her hasn’t ended. In fact, it may be starting up again, breaking out in a new place. Also—you should be aware—I really did love her, and it was my fault that she died. You need to know that I might kill things I love. I don’t think I can be what you want me to be.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MARNIE

  “I have a big, big, honking stomachache and I can’t go to school today,” Fritzie says one morning. “It’s the worst stomachache I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

  “A honking stomachache?” I say, smiling. “Not even just a beeping one?”

  She doubles over. “It’s HONKING and HONKING.”

  The truth is I’ve been expecting this—the fake stomachache. I know it’s fake because until this exact moment, she has been sitting at the kitchen table drawing a picture of a clown on a bicycle with a monkey on its shoulders, and three times she’s needed me to stop making her lunch and go over and praise her for such an inventive drawing, and she’s given me a huge, grateful smile each time. She’s also had a glass of orange juice, some oatmeal with raisins, and half of a blueberry muffin. And she’s told me in great detail exactly what to pack in her lunch box, detail that a person with a true stomachache wouldn’t be able to bear thinking about.

  Also, she just thought of this stomachache thing when it was time to put on her coat.

  Believe me, I may be a rookie at this mothering an eight-year-old business, but I do know some things.

  “So what’s really wrong?” I say. “Tell me the truth, and I promise to try to understand. Why don’t you want to go to school? Really?”

  She looks like she is going to fake-cry. “Because my stomach hurts so much, and I probably have to throw up, and also I have a fever, and Blanche was sick yesterday and I played with her on the climbing thing, and it was too cold to be outside, and you can get sick if you get too cold. That’s what Lola told me. She said to come in when it’s cold, and I forgot.”

  “See? I’m going to be honest with you. That is too many things. When you’re not telling the exact truth about something, and you want to be convincing, you need to limit it to just one really dazzling airtight excuse.”

  “What does airtight mean?”

  “It means why don’t you really want to go to school? What’s going on?”

  To my surprise, she slips off the chair and falls to the ground and rolls herself into a little ball. “I can’t go to school! My tummy is killing me. If you make me go, I’ll just be in the nurse’s office throwing up all day, and they won’t let me stay at school, and then you will look like a very bad mom.”

  “But you don’t look sick.”

  “But I am. My mom would have let me stay home. So don’t be mean to me.”

  “Here, stand up. Let me feel your forehead.” I don’t know what I’m feeling for, but she is now making herself look like a nineteenth-century waif who has lost the will to live.

  “All right,” I say at last. “You can stay home.”

  She brightens. “Tomorrow, too?”

  “Tomorrow, too? What? Wait a minute. What’s this all about, Fritzie Peach?”

  “Nothing. I just think I’ll still be sick tomorrow. I might not be well yet. If this is the flu, I definitely won’t be well.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t have the flu. What is this all about?”

  She traces a line in the floral pattern of the tablecloth, getting up to follow it all the way to the other side. She won’t look at me.

  “I’m on your side, you know. You and me. Against all the forces of evil.”

  Then she says in a low voice, “Josie says I stole some money.”

  I feel my heart sink at this news. Mostly because I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do is. I want to press pause on this conversation and go off to google “WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN YOUR CHILD IS ACCUSED OF STEALING MONEY?” Do I automatically take her side, or start sussing out whether or not she did do something wrong? Why would she steal money? Is this the acting out that we’ve been waiting to see?

  “That must be very hard,” I finally say. “Why does she think that?”

  “Well, she thinks that because I was the person collecting the money for the book fair. I was the one picked to take the money to the office, and when I got there, the money wasn’t in my pocket anymore.” She holds out her hands, in the universal gesture of what-the-hell-could-have-happened-here.

  “Oh.” I feel a little bit relieved. “So did you drop the money along the way, do you think? Did it fall out of your
pocket maybe?”

  “Maaaay-beeee.”

  “And somebody else possibly came and picked it up and didn’t know where it belonged, and so they . . . took it home with them?” I say, like the good enabler that I am.

  “Yes!” she says, brightening. “I bet that is what happened. Will you tell my teacher that that’s what happened?”

  “Hmm. Why don’t we check with Maybelle? Maybe it’s in the Lost and Found right now. Wait. How much money are we talking about?”

  She shrugs, darkening again.

  “You don’t know? Why don’t I email your teacher and ask her? Maybe we’ll just replace it. This is so fixable, Fritzie. It is not a big problem at all. We all lose things or drop them sometimes. We’ll just explain what happened . . .”

  “It is a big problem,” she says under her breath.

  “I’ll go email Josie right now,” I say, and I get out my laptop from underneath the pile of mail on the counter. But oh dear, as soon as I power it up, I see there’s an email in my inbox from Josie, with the heading, “Can you and Patrick come in?” And then it goes on from there: “There’s a situation I need to bring to your attention concerning Fritzie. We are truly enjoying her liveliness and her inventiveness and her generosity to all her classmates, as I communicated at the teacher conference we had in October. But recently some disturbing things seem to be happening with missing money in our classroom, and each time, Fritzie has been the common denominator.

  “We have reason to believe she’s taking money from the other kids, and from the book fair envelope, and we think she may be giving it to another child she’s become friends with. If you and Patrick could come in sometime with Fritzie, I’d like to handle this privately, if possible. How about after school tomorrow?”

  “Fritzie,” I say, looking up from the laptop. She’s staring at me from across the table.

  “I want my mommy.”

  “I know, and we can call her tonight if you want. But for right now, tell me what’s going on. Please.”

  Her face crumples. “I want to call her right now. I didn’t talk to her in a long time.”

  “We can call her tonight. So tell me—what happened?”

  Her voice rises. “Are you going to believe the teacher, or are you going to believe me? My mommy would totally believe me, you know. But you probably don’t believe me because I’m not your real kid.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” I can’t help but laugh. “Holy moly! Don’t pull that ‘not your real kid’ stuff before you even tell me what it is. Just tell me this: Are you giving money to another kid?”

  “What she says is wrong.”

  “What is she saying that’s wrong?”

  She puts her head down in her arms on the table.

  “Miss Peach. Are you giving money to another child?”

  From her face, still buried in her arms, comes this: “Did you know there is a kid at my school who has to live in a shelter? He’s homeless. Like the guy in the subway.”

  “And . . . ?”

  She lifts her head and starts sniffling, so I hand her a tissue and wait. She looks away and traces her finger on the tablecloth again.

  “Fritzie?”

  “Ohhhkayyy,” she says. “Well, Laramie told me on the playground that he wanted to tell me a secret, and the secret is that he lives in a shelter with a bunch of other families and . . . and . . . his dad is working somewhere far away and can’t come home, and his grandma is trying to send them money because his mom can’t get a job because she’s got little kids and nobody can babysit them. And Laramie is so sad, and I told him it’s not fair that other kids have so much money. Marnie, they have money that just falls out of their pockets sometimes. It falls on the ground even, and he doesn’t even have any good sneakers. The ones he has have holes in them.”

  “Oh, honey,” I say.

  “So I don’t want to tell them I’m sorry. Because I’m not. But everybody is mad at me, and Grady said I’m an idiot and he’s the one who told on me, and now I don’t want to go to the after-school program anymore because I hate everybody there, and Grady told everybody that I’m a stealer, and even Laramie got mad at me because everybody found out.”

  “Okay,” I say. “We’re going to fix this.” I leave the kitchen and go out into the hallway, heading to Patrick’s studio.

  “No, no, no! Don’t bother Patrick!” Fritzie calls after me. “Please! Patrick is too sad!”

  She grabs onto the hem of my shirt. “Don’t go in there. He’s painting all the sad stuff, and we have to let him get the sad stuff out, because then he can paint good.”

  “Did he tell you that?” I ask her.

  “Well, no, but I told him that. I went in there one day because I needed some peanut butter, but the jar was too tight, and he said I shouldn’t come in and bother him when he’s painting, and I said I needed him to open the peanut butter jar, and then I said to him, ‘You should think about happy things, like about when I came to live at your house with you, or maybe you could paint about Marnie. Or taking Bedford for a walk. Any of those things would be good!’ And he said he can’t do that, and I said maybe it’s because the sad stuff needs to come out first. Then he said I needed to leave him alone. And he opened the peanut butter jar and then I left, and I heard him lock the door.”

  I tell her it’s all going to be fine. I say she should go brush her teeth, and that I am going to go get Patrick, sad or not, and that then we are all three of us going to the school to work things out.

  And after we get the school theft stuff figured out—well, then I’m going to have to figure out what is going on with Patrick.

  My phone rings just then in my pocket, and I look down and see that it’s from my mom. Because of course everything always happens at once. There must be a tear in the fabric of the universe somewhere that lets everything tumble in all at the same time. But I can’t talk to her now.

  A few minutes later, there’s a text from her.

  Marnie, your father sat on the couch THE ENTIRE WEEKEND watching movies on his computer. Words he spoke to me = 2. Words I spoke to him = 250,487 approximately. Words I intend to speak to him today = 0.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PATRICK

  They have to go to the principal’s office, which is the worst.

  Just the words principal’s office make Patrick shudder. He’d spent a fair amount of time in one of those back in Barnaby Falls, Wyoming, for petty crimes and misdemeanors he always seemed to be accused of committing in elementary school. Funny how he’d managed to push memories of all those incidents out of his head, and funny how they all come tumbling back when he walks into Brooklyn Kind School, an imposing brick building with high ceilings and checkered tile floors and that school smell, an indefinable mix of white paste, cafeteria vegetable soup, and sweaty children.

  The woman at the front desk of the school, somebody named Maybelle, says, “Well, y’all are just gonna have to go wait in the principal’s office,” and that’s when he feels his insides curdle up.

  Maybelle looks at him and says with a laugh, “Oh, honey? Did I just scare the daylights out of you? You turned about four shades whiter than you were when you came in here.”

  He feels himself stiffen. Here it is, just as he feared: some stranger commenting on his appearance. But then Marnie touches his arm, and he calms down. Even though Maybelle was technically mentioning his appearance, he realizes that she wasn’t talking about his scars—she was joking about him having to see the principal. That’s all. He can be charming about that, can’t he?

  Why, yes he can, and he will.

  Because something else has occurred to him. This meeting, this situation, is bigger than anything about him. Fritzie was attempting to right some injustice she’d seen, and he is here to defend her. Sure, maybe she’d gone about it in a clumsy way—certainly she shouldn’t take money meant for the book fair—but as he looks over at her, sitting up straight on the wooden chair in the principal’s office while they wait, trying
to be brave but fidgeting and squirming around in her seat, licking her lips the way she does when she’s nervous, he feels a little bit sad for humanity. Yet another little human being is about to learn the cold fact that no good deed goes unpunished.

  Poor little duck, he thinks, as he watches her. She’s wearing blue-and-green leggings that have little gold stars on them and a long yellowish sweatshirt that says GRRL POWER on it, and her fine brown hair is a shade too long and might be still tangled from sleep; he’d heard her and Marnie discussing that it might be time to get it cut, but obviously whoever thought it was time now had lost—and he sees that her little face is so pale and skinny, like his, and her eyes look a little red-rimmed and scared. Yet she’s thrusting that chin up in the air. Defiant.

  She feels him looking at her, and he pats the chair next to him, and she scoots over and sits beside him. Leans on him, actually, in a way she hardly ever does. She’s all angles and fidgety action, this one, and if she touches anybody, it’s likely to be Marnie. And where is Marnie, anyway? He can hear her out in the other office, chatting with Maybelle. Buttering up the opposition perhaps. Laying on the charm.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers to Fritzie, patting her arm. “I’ve got a master plan for how we can win this one. We are going into battle together against the overlords who might try to stop us. If necessary, we will invoke Buddhism and Jesus and the Preamble to the US Constitution and the King James Bible and the Kindness Doctrine, even if we have to write the Kindness Doctrine because life doesn’t really have one.”

  She giggles a little. Good, he thinks.

  Then his adversary, the principal—who goes by the intimidating name of Annie just to throw people off—comes rushing in, apologizing. She’s a woman of about forty, with long, straight black hair parted in the middle, and she’s wearing jeans and a harried look, and the first thing she does is stop by Fritzie’s chair and give her a hug.

  “Oh, honey, we have got to figure something out to make this okay,” she says. Then she turns to Patrick and says, “So you’re her father, I gather. And what a sweet, empathetic little soul you’re raising!”