“It’s an illness,” he said.
“Your dad thinks it’s Christmas. That’s crazy,” Oliver said. Everyone laughed.
Foster was so full of things to say that he couldn’t squeeze a single word out. He was like the sauce bottle in the fridge when it got that drip booger crusting the opening. He would squeeze and squeeze, knowing the bottle was full, until eventually the contents would explode from the tip, always on an angle so that sauce shot across the room and he got in trouble for making a mess. He was pretty sure if he said anything right now, it would be that messy.
Lately Foster had been able to turn off his sadness. It used to be that his sadness was a noisy thing. That breathing while choking on mucus and tears produced a racket. But lately he’d been able cry without tears even spilling out. His eyes would get a bit fat, and just as his lashes would begin to get wet, the tears would disappear. He’d watched himself in the mirror. It was as if he could suck them back in, drain them back to where they came from. Sadness returning to sadness’s origin. It was in his face, though. All that noise he reabsorbed would flush out his skin terribly and make him shake. His soundless crying could be very noisy indeed. He knew he was wearing that face when he saw Mom looking at him from across the room.
He walked away from the red sausages as Mom started to walk toward him. She had just settled Dad into a chair. He had been quite excited when everyone was arriving but had since quietened in a way Foster recognized. He was getting confused. He was looking frightened. Aunty was sitting on the arm of the chair, where Mom said you weren’t supposed to sit, with her arm around him. Dad was picking at the threads in the upholstery.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. She intercepted Foster in the hall, her hand on his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“To my room to get a game for us to play.”
“Oh, okay. I thought you looked upset.”
“No.”
“Well, don’t be too long. You wanted this party, so your friends are your responsibility.”
Foster nodded. He waited for Mom to turn and walk away before running to his bedroom and shutting the door. Then he dragged the table next to the door across, just enough to prevent anyone from being able to open it. He knew he would get in a lot of trouble for that, but he didn’t know what else to do with his feelings.
“Your friends are your responsibility.” Foster knew he was responsible. He was responsible for what they thought and what they said, because he had thought it and said it himself. For all the times his heart was under the clothespin basket with the general, there were just as many times he had chosen saving himself over defending his dad. Foster lay down on his bed and imagined never having to leave his room again.
At first he thought the raised voices were just party voices. But only for a moment. Foster pushed himself up onto his elbows and stared at the back of his bedroom door, trying to untangle the sounds he could hear from the hall. They were far away at first, but then closer and closer to his bedroom door. They weren’t happy sounds. It was yelling and pleading, which was okay because Foster had become accustomed to yelling and pleading. But private yelling and pleading was different from putting on a show for friends who already thought Dad was crazy. He crawled off the bed and moved quietly toward the door. He didn’t know why he was doing it quietly, because no one would have been able to hear him over the noise on the other side. He pulled his table back and wrapped his fingers around the door handle. Just as he was turning it, he heard Dad, right on the other side, ask, “Who are they? Why are they here?”
Foster carefully opened the door. Dad was standing with his back to him. Mom was halfway down the hall looking a bit wild. At the end of the hallway, in a swarm that spilled out into the kitchen, were party guests. Drinks in hand, bobbleheads zigzagging for a better view—and in the middle, Aunty trying to steer people toward the front door with her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. Oliver waved at Foster awkwardly as he was maneuvered out of sight, Aunty’s hand firmly on his shoulder. Foster heard her opening the front door.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Dad said. “I know what’s going on.”
“No one’s trying to do anything,” Mom said softly, conciliatorily. It was her make-everything-all-right voice. It didn’t work very well lately. “Nothing’s going on, Malcolm. These are your friends.”
“They’re not. You’ve changed them. They want to hurt me. Everything’s changed.”
Aunty was getting angry. She was taking the drinks out of people’s hands now, hissing, “Party’s over!” People were getting angry back too. Mom took a couple of steps toward Dad, which seemed to frighten him even more. He put his hands up in front of himself, his body rigidly poised for defense. Then he stepped forward and Mom stepped back. The crowd was thinning. Foster could hear Aunty shepherding the last of the guests out to their cars. He was thinking about climbing out his window and making his way back in through the front door. He felt oddly vulnerable as a bookend to Dad’s increasing fear. That was when Mom said, “Close your door, Fossie.”
Dad immediately spun around with his arms still raised and gasped, his face twisted with the shock of discovering someone behind him. Foster skidded backward into his room, his arms windmilling to maintain balance. Dad’s expression was dragged like a mad cat through alarm, then panic, then rage in the few seconds that hovered unmoving in the thickened air. Then he turned and bolted for the bathroom.
Foster ran out of his room and would have thrown himself at Mom had she not countered with a side step, heading toward the bathroom door herself. She moved so fast that Foster tripped slightly, forced into a running stop when his velocity wasn’t halted by Mom’s firm grasp. Foster could see out the open front door now. Aunty was shoving Blinky into the back of his parents’ car. Foster thought it looked like a shove, anyway, and when she turned around, even from this distance, Foster could see the party wreckage on her face. She was striding back to the house with arms pumping while Blinky’s dad was still talking at her. She was just a few steps from the front door when the sound of shattering glass ricocheted down the hall. Foster let out a yelp at the shock, which was quickly followed by a long and distressed scream from the bathroom.
Aunty was running by the time she made it to the hallway. She clipped Foster on the way past, but she kept going. Foster was really irritated by now. On top of being plain frightened by the chaos, he was having trouble staying on his feet. Foster watched, appalled, as Mom pounded on the bathroom door, begging Dad to unlock it. Dad was screaming, stopping only to bemoan the stranger in the bathroom with him and the blood.
“Blood? There’s blood?” Aunty called to him through the door. Then she said to Mom, “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Who’s in there with you?” Mom was calling. “Hello? Hello? Please open the door!”
“No one’s in there with him,” Aunty said. Then she was giving their address to someone on the phone.
Foster was mesmerized. Every one of his senses was tingling, and yet he felt strangely detached. He couldn’t seem to move his deadened limbs, but his skin was crawling and his chest was alight. He felt he had to move to survive this. The front door was right there, still open. He knew he had to run, but he couldn’t. Then he had the loneliest thought he had ever had: He would stand here, unseen and unheard, and be consumed by this havoc inside him as surely as Grandma had been consumed by dragon fire. He would likely die of it.
The noises were terrible. Everyone’s noises were terrible. The ambulance siren, which at first hovered like distant smoke and then became as loud as a kick in the head, did nothing to induce the calming relief of help being on the way. It was when the siren shut off in the driveway, and they were all slapped by the sudden silencing of it, that a moment of quiet landed. But it didn’t last long.
The ambulance men rushed in. Foster thought they looked like soldiers. He hadn’t noticed before, but Mom was on her knees trying to pick the lock on the bathroom door with a knife
. She stood suddenly, sweaty and panting, the knife pointed directly at the ambulance man in front of her, and said, “I think he might have hurt himself.”
“Why don’t you go and look after the young one,” he said, easing the knife from Mom’s shaking hand. Aunty grabbed her arm then and pulled her away.
The men shouldered the bathroom door open. Foster had only ever seen that done in the movies. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies either. It took several tries, and when it finally gave way, the doorframe cracked like a lightning strike.
The men were in the bathroom with Dad for a while. He yelled at them a lot, but they kept talking in quiet, calm voices. Dad was getting tired. Mom was crying. Aunty was leaning against the wall. Eventually one of the ambulance men went and got a gurney, and they helped Dad climb onto it and then strapped him down. Foster could see bandages on Dad’s hands and there was blood on his clothes.
As they wheeled Dad down the hall and toward the front door, Foster backed up until he was on the veranda. That was when he noticed how many people were out on the street. Some of the party guests hadn’t left at all. They were still sitting in their cars waiting and watching. Miss Watson was on the sidewalk. Foster waited to feel humiliated, or angry, or protective. He waited to feel something. He watched Dad being loaded into the ambulance and realized the dead in his limbs had crawled through his entire body and snatched his heart. He would have to feel about this later.
Mom went with Dad in the ambulance. Aunty stayed behind with Foster, who had to be coaxed back into the house from his rigid position on the veranda. Cars and people began to leave once the ambulance had left. It had left quietly, sirens and lights dormant. Foster knew that meant Dad was going to be okay. They weren’t planning on running any traffic lights to speed up the journey to the hospital. Foster had seen ambulances do that, and had been in the car with Mom when she’d mounted a sidewalk to get out of the way of a wailing ambulance. She’d said that meant the person inside was very, very sick. But Foster’s relief at the lack of a loud, flashy-light departure immediately disappeared when he saw the bathroom.
He didn’t know how long he had been standing in the hallway. He didn’t even remember Aunty closing the front door. But by the time he wheedled his limbs into motion and made his way down the hall, Aunty was already in the bathroom cleaning up.
The bathroom mirror was broken. A few pieces were still attached to the frame, sharp and sinister as monster teeth, but the rest were scattered on the tiles, some bejeweled with tremulous baubles of bright blood. There was blood on the walls and on the side of the bathtub, and more on the floor and on the underside of the sink. Aunty was carefully lifting the pieces of mirror and laying them onto sheets of newspaper, some of which had become soaked at the edges. She looked up at Foster, her fingertips slick, and said, “Oh, Fossie, I thought you were in your room. Don’t watch this.”
“Is that Dad’s blood?”
Aunty began folding the edges of the newspaper together, wrapping the glass as carefully as Foster had wrapped The General.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “All he did was cut his hands a bit.”
“Why?”
“Because the glass is sharp.”
“No, I mean why did the mirror break?”
“I…I’m not sure.”
“Did Dad break the mirror? Is that how he cut his hands?”
“I think so.”
“Why did Dad break the mirror?”
“Fossie, please. Go and find something to do and we’ll talk about this later.”
“You have blood on you.”
“Fossie! Please!”
Aunty heaved the words at Foster unexpectedly loudly. He could hear the pieces of mirror chinking about in the newspaper parcel Aunty was making. He didn’t go and find something to do, though. What was he supposed to do? He had just discovered that a room spattered with blood has a rusty smell that clears out the senses and coats the tongue. He didn’t think he could play right now.
“Get me a plastic bag from the kitchen, Fossie?”
He was going to. He could see himself walking in there, opening that bottom drawer, pulling out a squeaky bag or two, returning to the bathroom. But he hadn’t moved. He realized he hadn’t moved when there was a firm knock at the front door. In his head he was holding plastic bags for Aunty. In his body he was empty-handed, being knocked on as surely as if he were a door.
“For goodness’ sake,” Aunty muttered. Then she looked up and said, “Foster, get me a plastic bag!”
“Are you going to answer the door?”
“No.”
Foster was walking to the kitchen for real this time when the knock on the door happened again. He didn’t think about it. He just opened the door. It was the normal thing to do.
Miss Watson was wringing her hands in a way that gave Foster goose bumps. She looked down at him, then past him down the hall, before saying, “Go and get your mom.”
“She’s not here.”
“You’re not home alone?”
“No, he’s not,” Aunty said, walking up behind Foster. “Can I help you, Myra?”
“I came to see if I could help you,” Miss Watson said.
“Thank you. No.”
“Is that blood?”
Foster turned around to see what Miss Watson was seeing. Aunty was looking down at her shirt and her hands. But the blood was on one knee of her jeans. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. Perhaps she hadn’t heard Foster when he told her about it. So he pointed to it. “There,” he said.
“Is someone hurt?” Miss Watson asked.
“No,” Aunty replied.
“Yes,” Foster said. He felt Aunty’s fingers grip his shoulder, just like the old lady’s church grip. He didn’t care. “Dad broke a mirror and cut himself. There was blood everywhere. Aunty and I are cleaning it up.”
“Not really a job for a child,” Miss Watson said to Aunty.
“What do you want, Myra?”
“What do you want, Myra?” Foster hadn’t known he was going to repeat it until the words were out of his mouth. Miss Watson looked shocked. It felt good to him. Aunty squeezed his shoulder more firmly.
“Cheeky!” Miss Watson said.
“Cheeky,” Foster repeated.
“Fossie, stop it!” Aunty demanded.
Foster turned and looked at Aunty and said, “Fossie, stop it,” straight back at her, but without the distress he could plainly feel in her grip and tone.
“Myra, I have to go,” Aunty said, pulling Foster back from the open door.
“There’s something wrong with that child,” Miss Watson said as the door swung closed.
“There’s something wrong with that child,” Foster said. Aunty leaned her back against the front door, her hands on her hips.
“Plastic bag?” she said.
Foster stood for a long time in front of the mirror in his bedroom. It was the only one that hadn’t been turned to the wall. So far. The big mirror with the fancy frame in the family room had been taken down. The small one in the hall that Mom used to check her face before going out had been turned around. That had been easy to do, because it hung on a little chain. The miniature cheval mirror Dad had bought Mom as a birthday gift had been tucked in the bottom of her wardrobe with her shoes. She had another long one in their bedroom that was bolted to the wall. That had been covered with a sheet that draped in long, stiff meringues of shiny cotton, ghostlike. It bothered Foster even when he wasn’t looking at it. He just had to imagine it. Foster thought there was something unpleasant, wrong even, in covering mirrors. Rooms looked darker, unlived in. It was like putting away pieces of Dad himself.
A boy at school had said that when his granddad died, they had to cover all the mirrors in the house in case his granddad’s soul got trapped in one and couldn’t get to heaven. Foster had said that was stupid. But now he felt nervous and helpless watching Mom treating mirrors as if Dad were dead.
So he stood in front of the mirror in his bedr
oom, which he was allowed to do as long as he covered it with a tea towel afterward in case Dad went in there. He tried to imagine seeing a stranger there instead of his own reflection. He squeezed his eyes shut for so long that when he opened them, he had to rapid-blink his face into focus, but it was still and always his own face. He turned his back to the mirror and spun around to see if some other person peeked out of the mirror while he wasn’t looking. It didn’t matter what he did—he only ever saw himself. He even touched the mirror, something Mom hated because they were so difficult to polish. He wondered how hard Dad had had to punch the stranger he saw to shatter the cold, hard surface. He liked the way the mirror felt, and Mom wasn’t likely to be polishing the mirrors now anyway.
Everyone said it was a mistake—that Dad just hadn’t recognized himself and that this was a part of his illness. When he thought he saw a stranger in the mirror, he’d been frightened. Foster heard them all talking about it when Dad came home from the hospital. James was there, and Aunty, and another person he hadn’t seen before. It was this other person, a chubby woman, who suggested covering or removing the mirrors. Mom had made some tea and they were all sitting at the kitchen table, including Dad.
“If Dad punched the mirror because he thought it was a stranger, why isn’t he punching you?” Foster asked Chubby Lady.
Everyone looked at him. His voice seemed to have the ability to startle people lately. It was powerful to be forgotten.
Sticky Notes Page 12