Sticky Notes

by Dianne Touchell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Dianne Touchell

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Oriol Vidal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in paperback as Forgetting Foster by Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, Australia, in 2016.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Touchell, Dianne, author.

  Title: Sticky notes / Dianne Touchell.

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2018] | “Originally published in paperback by Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, Australia in 2016”—Title page verso. | Summary: Seven-year-old Foster has always been close to his father, but now his father is changing and forgetting things, Mum is tired and grumpy, and Foster feels invisible.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059412 | ISBN 978-1-5247-6548-4 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6549-1 (glb) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6550-7 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Alzheimer’s disease—Fiction. | Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Memory—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.T647152 St 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524765507

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Spontaneous Bacon Combustion

  Hole in the Head

  Spontaneous Human Combustion

  Suits and Sympathy

  Stories and Shortbread

  Funny Forgetting

  Post-Its and Pills

  Bats in the Belfry

  Eggs and Emancipation

  Taxis and Templars

  Missing Mussels

  Bottoms in the Big Shops

  Christmas Socks and Cornflakes

  Pee and Prayer

  Itchy Feet and Isolation

  Cake and Class News

  Not-So-Nice Necessities

  Bullying and Broken Things

  Cold-Shouldered Courage

  Earworms and Eavesdropping

  Apples and Anger

  Going Away and Getting Back

  Sausage Rolls and Strangers

  Candor and Contradiction

  Signs Sans Wonders

  Dog Collars and Day Care

  Locked in, Locked Out

  Tilting and Taking Sides

  Temporary Tattoos

  Distraction by Design

  Red Sausages and Shame

  On with the Show

  Blood and Glass

  My Stranger, Myself

  Tender Meat

  March Hares

  The General

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For William George Touchell

  Foster smelled it first. A bitter smell like microwave popcorn popped too long. Except Dad wasn’t making popcorn. Dad was making bacon sandwiches.

  Foster walked into the kitchen. He could see blue flames licking the sides of the pan; the shiny white enamel blackening; and long, sooty fingers crawling toward the lip. A soupy gloom of darkening smoke rolled up and up until it hit the range hood like a solid mass and spilled into the space above Foster’s head. It formed clouds he could taste.

  “Dad?”

  Dad wasn’t in the kitchen. You weren’t supposed to leave pans on the stove unattended. That’s what Mom always said.

  “Dad!”

  Foster wasn’t allowed to touch the stove. He knew how to turn it off, but he didn’t want to get in trouble. He took a couple of steps forward, arced himself up on his tippy-toes, and was suddenly and shockingly backhanded by the whooshing heat of the oil in the pan catching fire. Foster ran from the room as the smoke morphed into a pillar of bright orange.

  “Dad!”

  Foster ran down the hall, instinctively slapping doors ajar, until he got to the last room on the left. Dad was standing at the side of his and Mom’s bed sorting socks from the clean laundry pile. He wasn’t doing a very good job.

  “Dad! Bacon!” Foster pulled at his dad’s arm, the smell of smoke indistinguishable from the stinging choke of his panic. It was the smoke alarm that yanked Dad out of his sock daze. He ran to the kitchen, Foster immediately behind him. Foster pressed himself against the pantry door, the relentless squawk of the smoke alarm pulling his breath tighter and faster. Dad clamped the lid on the pan and threw it in the sink. He grabbed a tea towel and started flapping it about wildly, throwing open the kitchen window with such force that it skidded out of the track and cracked as it landed against the frame. Foster slid down the pantry door onto the kitchen floor and squished his ears with his fists. The smoke alarm kept going and going until Dad finally silenced it by stabbing it with a broom handle. Then he slid down to the floor next to Foster.

  The wall was black. There were some little blisters in the paint and mucky grease skid marks down the front of the stove and cabinets. The smoke alarm dangled from the ceiling, and splinters of plastic were littered around the discarded broom like flower petals. Foster held Dad’s hand, and their breathing gradually slowed together.

  “Mom’s going to be mad,” Foster said.

  He could no longer remember the first thing his father forgot. It came on slowly, his dad’s forgetting. Like a spider building its web in a doorway. For a while Foster could walk straight through it. He felt it cling to him each time he broke it down, each time he picked the broken bits of it off his face. But then it would reappear in the same place—so fine it was impossible to see unless his eyes were trained on its exact position. Eventually it was like a veil, this forgetting. He could no longer break it; he could only part it to gain a quick peek of his dad on the other side of his lost stories.

  His name was Foster Hirum Wylie Sumner, and he was ten years old. His dad told stories. Lots of them. At night before bed, while Foster was brushing his teeth, at the kitchen table, in the car. His dad told stories as if they were real, and long after Foster grew to realize they were just stories, he still craved them. He often asked for his favorite ones to be repeated.

  “There are stories in everything,” his dad told him. “They are all around you, waiting to be discovered. You just have to look for them.”

  On story day at school, when moms and dads were invited to come to class to read aloud, it was always his dad who came, even though he had a suit job. Hardly any dads came. It was mostly moms in jeans. But his dad would come from work in the middle of the day carrying a briefcase with a lock that popped like a bad knuckle, and inside would be Foster’s favorite books from home. Sometimes his dad would just make a story up on the spot, and even with no pictures everyone was still and quiet, his dad’s voice dusting the room like bow rosin, rising and falling to the rhythm of battle cries, dragons, and triumphant heroes. He would walk around the room while he spoke, using his hands and eyes as punctuation, circumnavigating the clusters of desks while boys’ faces followed like awestruck marionettes. His dad would always kiss him goodbye afterward. Foster wasn’t embarrassed. His dad held more authority in that classroom than the teacher, Mr. Ballantyne, for the brief
time he was there. He would shake Mr. Ballantyne’s hand before he left, and all the boys would clap. Foster thought he would burst with the pride of it.

  Foster’s dad encouraged Foster to tell his own stories. “Tell stories to whoever will listen, and then listen to theirs,” he would say. Foster liked to tell stories about knights on great quests who would battle bad guys and save ladies, because he knew they were his dad’s favorites. Sometimes they would tell a story in tandem. His dad would stop midsentence and look at Foster with his eyebrows knitted and a pressed-lip smile, and Foster would know it was his turn to tell the next bit. He saw this as great trust. Sometimes his mom would listen and laugh at the funny parts and gasp at the scary parts, but when they asked her to join in, she’d say she didn’t want to spoil the story.

  Foster lived inside his head a lot. His dad said this was a good thing, because there was so much to see there. His mom wanted him to join the local soccer team or something.

  “Know thyself,” Dad said.

  “What’s that mean, Dad? Mom talks about her thighs a lot and she thinks I should play soccer.”

  His dad’s laugh was always astonishing, especially when unexpected. He could crack a hole in the air with the bigness of it. It trailed off into snorty giggles before he said, “What?”

  “Heard her on the phone,” Foster said. “She’s on another diet.”

  “Excuse me,” Mom said. “I’m right here.”

  “Maybe you should play soccer, Mom.”

  “Knowing thyself,” Dad continued, chuckling, “is about being happy inside your own head. It means not letting other people tell you what stories are right and what stories are wrong. And it’s a wise saying that extends to dieting.” Dad leaned across and curled a wisp of Mom’s hair behind her ear.

  Foster was pretty sure he knew himself relatively well. He liked books and toy soldiers and tadpole hunting and the beach. He liked going to school. He liked the routine—the unremarkable sameness of school days with lessons and bells and his best friend, Blinky, to eat lunch with. There were things he didn’t like. He didn’t like asparagus or the smell of dog food or prickly grass under his bare feet. He knew these things as surely as he knew the day his mom had put fresh sheets on his bed and the moment his dad had a new story to tell: just by feel. He was unprepared for how much a change in someone else could wilt the pieces of himself he thought he knew best.

  Foster sometimes forgot things—mostly at school, when he was supposed to be remembering. When remembering mattered most. But he forgot things other times too. Sometimes he forgot to flush the toilet or hang his towel up after a bath. Twice he’d forgotten to return a library book on time. It never bothered him when he forgot things, because the things eventually came back, or someone would remind him. His dad called it having a hole in his head.

  “Got a hole in your head today, Fossie? Better go find those library books.”

  Everyone had a hole in their head sometimes. Foster had thought it would stay the same size, though, not become bigger and bigger until even a reminder could no longer nudge the forgotten thing back into place.

  So it began as only a little worry when his dad started to forget things. Foster wanted to ask him about it, but he wasn’t sure what to say. And once in a while there would be a small return of the storyteller, just for a moment, in the car or in the bath, and Foster would think he was being silly and the forgetting had gone away for good.

  Rumor had it that his grandma was the victim of spontaneous human combustion. Apparently, a little fire had started somewhere inside her while she was sitting alone, crocheting squares to be stitched together to make a blanket. It must have been a little fire initially, because if she’d gone up like a torch, she would have taken the whole house with her. She didn’t, which his dad said was just as well because it was the only asset she had. So this little fire started and ate away at her with a gentle fierceness, melting her into her mattress and leaving behind one foot still immaculately tied into a brown lace-up oxford shoe.

  Foster watched his own limbs carefully after that, and even sniffed himself occasionally to make sure there were no tendrils of invisible smoke curling from his pores. He asked his dad why his grandma didn’t have time to beat herself out. His dad speculated that the fire was somehow magical and impermeable to the quenching effect of smothering like a normal fire.

  Grandma had, after all, kept dragons at the bottom of the garden, and fairies lived in their scale-creviced hides like pretty fleas. His dad said the fireflies he sometimes saw weaving about the apple blossoms were actually fairies braiding the eyelashes of the dragons so that when they yawned, the ribbons of flame that escaped their mouths wouldn’t set their lashes on fire. So perhaps, his dad said, one of the dragons that sat at the end of Grandma’s bed at night, protecting her from thieves and bad dreams, had sneezed and accidentally set her alight. It would have been very quick, like one of those pinwheel fireworks he loved so much. Grandma would have spun and spun, faster and faster, and all the colors of her soul would have flown to the magical place where dragons rest and fairies weave.

  “Why was there a foot left behind?” Foster asked.

  “She was spinning so fast that it just flew off,” his dad replied. “You don’t need two feet when you’ve earned wings.”

  “Stop it, Malcolm,” his mom said. “You know she was smoking in bed.”

  Foster felt bad when his grandma died. He’d never known anyone who had gone away permanently before, and he didn’t like the bruised feeling it gave him in the chest. It was a bad way to go too, and he worried that Grandma might have been frightened. It had been on the news, and the police had walked around her house in white jumpsuits, and Foster heard the word misadventure a lot. He supposed this meant Grandma had been planning an adventure and missed out on that on top of everything else, which made her dying even sadder, really. But then his dad had told him about the dragon fire, and it made him feel better.

  Foster’s mom had almost died, but that was a long time ago, and Foster knew about it mostly from the way she looked and the stories his dad told him. Foster’s mom had an unusual face. Foster grew up with this face, so it never bothered him. It was the face that leaned over him at night to smell his breath in the random tooth-brushing check. It was the face that kissed his forehead after ministering to the slashed knee he got falling off his bike. It was the face that greeted him in the car after school. Foster knew her face was different from his—and his dad’s—but it wasn’t until he started school and saw the way other people looked at it that he began to feel self-conscious.

  “Can you take me to school instead of Mom?” Foster asked his dad.

  “Why?”

  “Kids at school say Mom looks weird,” Foster confessed quietly. “They make fun of her.”

  “Do they make fun of her, or do they make fun of you?” Dad asked.

  “Umm…”

  “Mom’s got a different face because she had an accident.”

  “I know,” Foster said. “Tell me the story again, Dad.”

  His dad put down the book they were sharing, took a breath that raised his shoulders high, and said, “Once upon a time, there was a princess imprisoned in a castle surrounded by a moat filled with giant sea snakes. She was the most beautiful lady in the kingdom. Knights came from far and wide and wrote songs about her and battled the snakes that prevented her escape. But she was waiting for her prince. She became so sad that she decided to call upon the old magic of her forefathers. This was a dangerous thing to do. Old magic was rarely used because when it gave you power, it took something in return. But she was lonely. A spell was given to her: the snakes would remain in the moat and she could walk from the confines of her prison across the drawbridge in safety.”

  “Oh, yes?” his mom said. Foster looked up to see her standing in the doorway, listening.

  “Yes!” his dad continued. “But the moment she stepped onto the bank—the moment she gained her freedom—her face would forever bear
the mark of the snakes she had charmed to win her escape. She walked slowly across the bridge and hesitated only a second before placing her toe on free ground. It was then she felt a great slithering inside her head, and all at once, one side of her face was paralyzed. She hid her face, sure that she would forever be completely alone.”

  Foster could almost feel the cold air shimmying off the dark water of the moat, clinging to his face.

  “Then she heard a restless horse approaching, and she knew it was her prince. She stood before him, frightened and ashamed, but he saw in her crooked face a courage and strength that eclipsed any beauty he had ever seen. He knelt before her and offered her his fealty for the rest of her life.”

  “What’s fealty?” Foster asked.

  “Room and board in exchange for laundry and cooking skills,” his mom said. Dad laughed.

  “What happened to them after that?” Foster asked.

  “They lived happily ever after,” his dad said.

  “Forever and ever?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Mom said. But Foster saw she was smiling.

  Foster heard other stories about his mom’s face. He overheard conversations that had words and phrases in them he didn’t understand, like coma and traumatic injury. He asked his mom what a coma was, and she said it was like being in a prison of sleep; so his dad’s story satisfied him, and when asked at school about his mom, he repeated it to a wide-eyed audience.

  “Your mom is not a princess,” Blinky said. “You shouldn’t tell lies.”

  “It’s not a lie,” Foster said. “It’s a story.”

  “It’s a stupid story!”

  Foster wasn’t worried when the stories first began to dwindle, because it happened in a creeping-up sort of way. Dad seemed too distracted to concentrate. The quiet at the dinner table became more and more frequent. Then his mom seemed to catch whatever bug it was that shushed his dad up. Foster knew that could happen. Whenever one of them got a cold, his mom would always say, “Now it’ll go through all of us!” with a sort of good-humored resignation, and she was usually right. So when Mom too grew quiet (and a bit sad, Foster thought), he began to worry about this thing, whatever it was, going through him too. He began telling stories to himself and his toys—just a preventive thing, much like the vitamin C pills Mom gave him to prevent colds. They never worked.