“Mom, is he coming back?” I could barely squeak it out.
And she shook her head.
I saw it again. My father getting carried out on a stretcher.
His face grayer than dirt.
My father in a . . .
My father beneath a flag. The flag folded perfectly at the corners.
My father . . .
“He’s staying in Germany,” she said.
I looked at her. “They won’t fly him home?”
“He says Germany is his home.”
“What?”
She started to cry again.
“He’s hurt?”
She shook her head.
“He’s not hurt?”
Shook her head.
“I don’t understand.”
My mother held me so tightly. “Carter,” she said, still crying.
She showed me the email she had printed out.
And that’s when I got it.
That’s when I really got it.
It wasn’t that Captain Jackson Jones was hurt.
It wasn’t that Captain Jackson Jones couldn’t come home.
It was that Captain Jackson Jones didn’t want to come home.
It was that Captain Jackson Jones had met someone else.
It was that Captain Jackson Jones wanted to stay in Germany.
It was that Captain Jackson Jones didn’t want to be with us anymore.
How’s that for a googly?
· 13 ·
The Stumps
The three stakes on which the bails sit are the stumps. They stand at both ends of the pitch. Protected by the batsman, they are the object of the bowler.
My brother, currier, was small as a bug and fast like one too. He was the only kid in the family who liked to play with marbles, but I played with him anyway, and I always gave him back all the marbles I won, especially the green and blue shooters, because those were his favorites—especially his green shooter. He swam like a drowning dog, so lifeguards at pools watched him half out of their chairs. He laughed easy. He sat on his feet with his legs folded underneath him. He read Captain Underpants books. He and I watched reruns of Ace Robotroid and the Robotroid Rangers every Saturday morning together—even though I’d seen them all when I was his age and they were sort of dumb then too. He would not eat yellow M&M’s. He would not eat pizza if pepperoni had even come near it. He liked to race Ned down the driveway. He liked to race me down the stairs, but I never let him win.
I wish I had. Once, at least.
Currier died when he was six years old. He would be in third grade now, between Charlie and Emily.
One Sunday, when we came home from St. Michael’s, he had a fever. My mother figured it was from running around with the other six-year-olds in Junior Church. “He’ll be fine in a day or so.” She sent him outside to play with me and Ned.
He didn’t play much. Ned beat him down the driveway.
That afternoon, he lost at marbles as usual and said I could keep his favorite green shooter. I’d won it fair and square, he said. Don’t ever lose it, he said.
Then he went to bed.
I figured we’d play again the next day and I’d let him win the green shooter back.
But the fever wasn’t gone in a day or so.
My mother called my father, who was deployed then too. She told him she needed him to come home. We all needed him to come home. Now.
He said he would leave that day, but we waited and waited, and Currier asked when he was coming, and we told him soon. Before you know it. Any day now. Probably tomorrow.
But he didn’t make it home in time.
We haven’t been to St. Michael’s since. My mother told the ladies on the Committee for Funeral Teas that she wouldn’t be coming. She told Father Jarrett she didn’t need counseling, thank you very much. And no, she didn’t need any literature on the process of grieving. She was learning well enough on her own. And as for their prayers . . .
My father returned to his deployment after ten days home.
For a while, Father Jarrett called a couple of times a week. Then my mother stopped answering the phone. And she didn’t even return Father Jarrett’s calls. After two months, when my mother told him to stop, he did.
This is how it felt after Currier died: like being hit in the glutes and the stomach and the face all at the same time. Every morning when I woke up, there was this moment when I’d forgotten, except the feeling of being hit in the glutes and the stomach and the face was still there. But sometimes, for a moment, I wouldn’t remember why, exactly.
Then I would.
And just so you know, when you carry stuff like this around, you never know what kind of day it’s going to be. Sometimes you get through the whole day and you’re okay. Sometimes there’s this little thing that happens—like you see a yellow M&M, or Ned races down the driveway, or some little kid walks by who’s the same age as Currier (who’s always going to be the same age), and this kid is carrying a Captain Underpants book, or you see your mother crying her eyes out on the side of her bed holding Ba-Bear—and that’s it: the rest of the day you feel like you’ve been hit in the glutes and the stomach and the face again. And you wonder if that’s how it’s always going to be.
It probably is.
And now my father had finally sent a stupid email. A stupid email to my mother.
A stupid stupid stupid email.
He’d met someone else.
I wondered if the Butler knew.
· 14 ·
Side Out
A side, or team, is said to be out when all but one of its batsmen has batted and been dismissed. The two teams then trade places.
The butler did decide to be our coach—when I asked him, he said that Carson Krebs had already proffered the question, and he, following proper pondering, would accept. So the next Saturday, the Butler, splendid in his whites, decided to open cricket practice with a drill to demonstrate his skills. He would be the batsman and we would be bowlers, he said. We would stand behind each other in a line, not far up the pitch, and we would bowl at him, one after the other, as quickly as we could. As hard as we could.
He didn’t let a single ball through. Not one. The stumps were never touched, the bails never knocked down. Not even when Carson Krebs and Michael Chall bowled two balls at the same time.
The Butler took both balls on his bat together and lobbed them to the slips.
Pretty amazing.
When Chall said he’d be just as good as batsman, the Butler looked at him sort of sideways. “You have a great deal of experience as a batsman, young Master Chall?” he said.
Chall hesitated.
“Some?” said the Butler.
Chall still hesitating.
“Any at all, then?” said the Butler.
“How hard can it be?” said Chall.
The Butler stood very still.
“I mean, you did it,” said Chall, “and you’re . . .”
“How do you intend to finish that identification?” said the Butler. “‘Old’?”
“Not exactly.”
“Portly?”
“What does that mean?” said Chall.
“It means ‘satisfied with life.’ Line up, gentlemen,” said the Butler, and he tossed cricket balls to us all.
Chall did pretty well as batsman. Two balls got through, but they didn’t hit the stumps. Then Krebs bowled the seventh ball, and maybe it jumped a bit to the inside stump. Maybe it hit a bump in the turf. Maybe he bowled a googly. But whatever he did, the ball jumped up and Chall didn’t move and it took him square in the stomach. Chall coughed and turned a little so that he faced the pitch. He started to double over. And all this happened at the same time that Singh, who was right behind Krebs, bowled his ball, and it bounced into Chall too, but a little lower.
I guess you know what happened then.
And as the rest of the eighth-grade varsity cricket team rushed toward Michael Chall, and then stepped back when he started t
o gag, and then rushed away when he threw up what had probably been a pretty big breakfast, I thought, That’s how I feel all the time now. Like a couple of cricket balls have smashed into my stomach.
Except after a while, Chall was better.
* * *
At home, we mostly talked around my father, bowling googlies away from the stumps. My mother and I didn’t say anything about it to the girls. I mean, what could we say? “Hey, Emily, Charlie, Annie, we’ve got something to tell you. Daddy isn’t coming home because now he wants to live in Germany with someone else and not with us.”
It isn’t exactly news you want to break to your sisters.
Those first nights after the email, my mother decided to cook instead of the Butler, and she clattered around in the kitchen a lot, making everything we liked. Macaroni and cheese with bacon for Emily, fried banana dessert for Charlie, spaghetti and sweet Italian sausage for Annie. They were pretty happy, because they didn’t know why she was making macaroni and cheese and fried bananas and spaghetti with sweet Italian sausage.
But I knew.
You know what macaroni and cheese and fried bananas and spaghetti with sweet Italian sausage taste like when your father isn’t coming home from deployment because he doesn’t want to?
Nothing.
They tasted like nothing.
They may as well have been liverwurst.
Well, not liverwurst.
Boiled ham and green beans.
They may as well have been boiled ham and green beans.
I don’t know what they tasted like to my mother, since she mostly didn’t eat them. She’d sit at the table and smile as Emily and Charlie and Annie chattered about school. When we were done the Butler would come out from the kitchen and take all the plates, and my mother would get homework organized, and then she’d sit in the living room and read some book without turning a page. The girls would finish homework and they’d come downstairs and turn on the television, and the Butler would come out from the kitchen and turn it to PBS. In an hour or so the Butler would announce bedtimes. Emily and Charlie and Annie would go upstairs and Annie would complain that I got to stay up later than she did, and the Butler would nod and explain that I had more homework in sixth grade and would she prefer staying up for another hour to do some of Mr. Barkus’s math problems in which you had to show your work and justify your solutions?
And after all that, my mother would put her book down and she’d go into the kitchen and thank the Butler for all he had done, and then she would go upstairs too. And after a while the Butler would come out and say goodnight, and that I had ten minutes left before bedtime, that preparing my backpack would not be amiss, and to dream imaginatively. Then he’d go home to the Krebses’ house.
It was pretty lonely. Like being in the Blue Mountains all by yourself, listening to the slithering in the low grass.
Feeling like two cricket balls had just bounced into me because Captain Jackson Jonathan Jones wasn’t coming home.
And there was no one to talk to about it. I mean, my mother didn’t want to say anything. And the girls didn’t know. And I wasn’t going to tell Billy Colt since it would have gotten around the whole school by lunchtime.
I don’t think I would even have told Father Jarrett, and it’s, like, against the law for him to repeat stuff.
So there was no one to talk to.
You know what?
It really stunk.
* * *
You know what else stinks?
Ballet.
Ballet really stinks.
And who knew there was so much of it in Marysville, New York?
So when the Butler asked me to attend a performance of scenes from Swan Lake courtesy of my grandfather’s endowment in the arts because Emily and Charlie really really really wanted to see it and love of the arts was always to be encouraged, and though he had three tickets he had another commitment that night but he would drive us, and would I be so kind as to chaperone, what was I supposed to say?
Because Emily and Charlie were watching me the whole time the Butler was asking.
What could I do?
That night, there were a whole lot of people running around the stage up on their toes, which is sort of pointless and not the way normal people run, as anyone could tell you—and a whole lot of twirling around, which is another thing that normal people tend not to do—and a whole lot of graceful posing by the girls while the guys held them up in the air, which is still another thing that normal people tend not to do. Who poses gracefully when they’re being held up in the air?
Ballet stinks.
But Emily loved it and Charlie loved it and they hugged me when it was finally over.
Later, the Butler asked me how I liked Swan Lake.
“It stunk,” I said.
“Perhaps, young Master Carter, you might expand upon that judgment.”
“It really stunk,” I said.
“So I should consider that ballet, as an art form, is dead to you, then?” said the Butler.
“It really, really stunk,” I said.
“Dead and buried,” he said.
* * *
On the last Friday of September, the wind was cool and dry in that way that tells you maybe summer is finally over. It was the kind of day when you notice that some of the trees have changed to yellows and reds, and the breeze has started to take down a few of the leaves, and there are pots of orange and yellow chrysanthemums on porches, and last summer seems a bazillion years ago and next summer’s vacation seems a bazillion years away—because it is.
It was that kind of day when Krebs found me before school and told me to hold up. He and the rest of the eighth-grade varsity cross-country team were heading to the locker room, since they ran in the mornings now so they could play cricket in the afternoons.
“How about we stay late after practice and get in some more batting?” he said.
Remember, Carson Krebs is an eighth grader. He never talks to a normal sixth grader. Even to a sixth grader on an eighth-grade team By Invitation Only, he hardly ever talks.
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ll set up a net behind the wicket and take turns batting.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Just for a little while,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Until the late buses,” he said.
“Okay.”
That afternoon was great. We stayed late after practice, and I bowled first, and Krebs batted away ball after ball after ball. I came close to his wicket a couple of times, and once I thought I even nicked a stump—but the bails didn’t come down.
And once . . .
“Was that a googly?” said Krebs.
I nodded.
“Not bad. Let’s see that googly.”
But I couldn’t make it work again.
Then Krebs bowled, and I batted away most of them. He hit my wicket three times—twice with a googly—and caught two of my shots. He was that good.
Simon Singh came by, and Michael Chall, and Steve Yang, but Krebs told them it was just the two of us practicing, and they said okay. And that’s what we did until it was almost time for the late buses, and we took down the net and gathered the cricket balls and carried everything into the gym, and Krebs said, “You’re striking the ball really well.”
“Not like you,” I said.
“So listen, Jones,” he said. “Things will get sorted.”
“You mean in cricket?”
“In cricket, too.”
I looked at him.
He opened the door to Coach Krosoczka’s office and hauled the bag of cricket balls inside. I followed him in and propped the bats on the bag. Krebs folded the net on top.
“Coach gave you a key?” I said.
“We don’t have an equipment manager, so I’m it. For cross and for cricket.”
We left. Krebs locked the door behind him and hefted his backpack to his shoulder. “I was a couple of years younger than
you when my mother left. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t even know if I should be mad or sad or what. And my dad might just as well have walked out too. He used to be this amazing athlete. Cricket, mostly, but soccer too, and cross-country. He coached our school cricket team in New Delhi for the two years we were there. When she left, he started to spend most of his time up in his room, when he wasn’t burning something in the kitchen.” He shrugged. “He still spends most of his time up in his room.”
“So did things get sorted?”
He shrugged again. “I cook now. We get by. And Coach is working on him.”
We headed toward the late buses idling in front of the school. The wind had come up, blustery and even cold, and I was sweaty enough to feel the chill.
“See you tomorrow,” said Krebs. “And Jones . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let the bails come down. Okay? Just don’t.”
And suddenly, I couldn’t let him go. It seemed important—like something that really mattered was happening. Something that mattered so much, I could almost have started to bawl.
Something I should pay attention to.
“How do you keep the bails from coming down?” I said.
Krebs started to laugh. “You know what Coach would say. ‘Make good decisions and remember who you are.’” Then he ran to the north side bus—it was just about to pull away—and it stopped and the door opened. He waved, and was gone.
The eastbound bus was waiting, and I got on that.
The whole ride home, I wondered how I was going to keep the bails up.
· 15 ·
The Shooter
A shooter is a ball from the bowler that, after it bounces, comes in much lower than the batsman had anticipated. The surprising placement can lead to many a fallen bail.
The butler was waiting for me—almost as if he knew I’d be on the late bus. He stood outside the house, Ned beside him on his leash.
“Really?” I said. “I just got home.”
“Something Ned is most keenly aware of, as you may conclude by the manner in which his back legs are crossed.”
Pay Attention, Carter Jones Page 7