All That's Bright and Gone (ARC)

by Eliza Nellums

  Uncle Donny sighs. “How about we go for a walk. It’s still light outside. We could take a little stroll around the neighborhood.”

  “No!”

  “C’mon, let’s take a walk.” Uncle Donny takes my arm and walks me to the front door, stopping to hook Mama’s purse over one shoulder as he goes. He shuts the door before Teddy can get out, so Teddy has to climb out the window to join us.

  I’m so mad I can’t even see where we’re going. If Mama was here, we wouldn’t be talking about skipping church tomorrow. And she would never throw away the home-base pizza box. How are we going to be safe now?

  “Walk, Aoife.” Uncle Donny nudges my shoulder, and I walk.

  For a while we are quiet. The shadows are just starting to come over the lawn from the fence between our house and Hannah’s. As we pass the house next door on the left, the neighbor’s gray cat comes out to sit on the sidewalk.

  “That’s a nice cat,” says Uncle Donny.

  “It doesn’t like me,” I say. Those neighbors are gone a lot, and sometimes in the winter Mama puts out food for it, so it likes her better. But if I go near it, it runs away. Maybe it’s scared because of Teddy, who’s usually right behind me. I don’t think cats like bears.

  “What a pretty night,” says Uncle Donny.

  Maybe it is kind of pretty. I look around to make sure. I once heard Mac tell Mama that the neighborhood is going downhill, and there is a big hill from Midland Road to our house. It’s good for sledding.

  Every house in my neighborhood is little and square, packed together on top of one another so you can see in every window from every yard. In the big neighborhood on the other side of the street, the houses are spaced so far apart that Mama says it looks like a golf course.

  We like our neighborhood better because each yard is different here. Some of them are full of bushes and trees, and some are just lawn. Some have dandelions, or the grass is so long it looks like a jungle. Some have a little stone path through the middle of the yard. Those ones look like a fairy-tale cottage.

  Mama says our house is a four-on-four—it’s square like a monopoly house. I think it is the best house of all. And from the window in Mama’s room, you can see the lights of Detroit.

  “Look,” says Uncle Donny. “There’s a doggy.”

  I look. “That’s the mean neighbor’s dog,” I say. “We should go the other way.” It’s a kind of a poodle, I guess. It’s little and white with curly fur. Its name is Roo, but Mama calls it Rheumy because that means sickly. It’s on a long leash, but Mr. Rutledge hasn’t come around the corner yet.

  “We’re just walking. I think it’s okay,” says Uncle Donny.

  “No, we should go this way.” I pull on Uncle Donny’s arm, but he doesn’t come with me. Suddenly there’s Mr. Rutledge behind the dog and he sees us. I look down at my feet. Teddy pulls on my hand, wanting to go play with Roo, but I don’t let him.

  “Good evening,” says Uncle Donny as we walk past.

  I already know Mr. Rutledge isn’t going to answer. One time when Hannah and I were playing on the sidewalk, we didn’t see him coming until it was too late. He spat right in the middle of our chalk picture and it made an ugly swirl of purple, right where the door of the magic princess castle was supposed to be. We didn’t want to draw any more after that.

  Because I’m looking down, I only see Mr. Rutledge’s shoes and Roo, who looks up at Teddy with pink, cloudy eyes. Mama says he’s blind and that’s why his eyes are that way. He comes close enough to sniff my leg, but Mr. Rutledge jerks the leash and pulls him back.

  I don’t look up.

  “Okay then,” says Uncle Donny, as the feet move further away. “You have a good night.”

  I wait until I hear the jingle of the dog’s leash get quieter and quieter until I know they’re gone. Then I pull on Uncle Donny’s sleeve. “You shouldn’t have talked to him,” I say fiercely. “Mama says we should never, ever talk to Mr. Rutledge, and if he says something to us we should go home and tell her right away.”

  “Rutledge?” asks Uncle Donny. His voice sounds funny. “That was Mr. Rutledge?”

  I nod my head yes. Uncle Donny puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes tight. “Okay,” he says. His face looks just like Mama’s before she throws up. “Okay. Let’s go this way.” He nudges me to keep walking ahead of him. “We won’t run into him again. Now, why is it so important that we go to church, huh?”

  I’d forgotten about that. I don’t feel so mad about it anymore. “We go on Sundays,” I say. “That’s what we always do on Sundays.”

  “Your uncle Donovan is not a huge fan of church. Uh, is there like a carpool or anything?”

  I don’t know what that word means, carpool. I shrug my shoulder. “Mama and I walk there, and then we get ice cream afterwards.”

  “We can still get ice cream,” he says.

  “It doesn’t count unless we go to church first!” I’m getting mad again. I would stomp my feet, except we’re walking, and it’s hard to do that and still keep up without tripping.

  “Okay, okay. Sheesh. Fine, we’ll go. All right?”

  “And we’ll get ice cream,” I say.

  “I already said we could get ice cream.”

  So then I’m happy. When we get back to our street, I even try to pet the gray neighbor cat. Teddy is chasing fireflies—he loves fireflies—so I hope the kitty will let me get close.

  “Here, kitty,” I say, in my very sweetest, highest voice. But that stupid cat just waits until I start to get close, its eyes all big and bugged out, and puts its ears back. And when I take another step, it turns around and runs into the bushes.

  Teddy snaps a firefly right between his teeth, and it makes him glow like a lightbulb from the inside.

  “Better luck next time, champ,” says Uncle Donny.

  When we get home, Hannah is waiting for us on the front step.

  “Aoife, do you want to play dollies?” she asks. She has the big plastic tub of Barbies under her arm.

  “Who’s this, Aoife?” says Uncle Donny.

  “This is Hannah from next door,” I say.

  Hannah has been my best friend since she stopped Hazel Merkowicz from stealing my pączki on Pączki Day. I got the last raspberry one, and Hazel, who is a year older than me, had to take a lemon one. And she said if I didn’t give her mine, she’d knock my teeth in. But Hannah heard her and told her to get lost or she’d tell on her. And Hazel said, Who are you going to tell, and Hannah said, My dad, who’s a cop.

  I remember how much I wished I had a dad when Hannah said that. I don’t know if Hannah’s dad would have really arrested Hazel Merkowicz for knocking my teeth in (or for stealing my raspberry pączki?), but he might have. Mama would probably have told me to turn the other cheek and try to get along.

  “Aha, Hannah from next door! Hi Hannah from next door; I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Aoife’s uncle Donovan. Any friend of Aoife’s is a friend of mine.” Uncle Donny puts his hand out for Hannah to shake, and she does, her round face all pink. It’s funny, because he’s talking to her like she’s a real grown-up. Hannah’s older than me, but she’s still only eight.

  “Can Aoife play tonight?” she asks.

  I realize then that Hannah doesn’t know anything that happened. As far as she knows, today is the same as any other day. It doesn’t seem right that while Mama and I were going to the hospital, Hannah was just sitting around in the yard at home like normal, and now she wants to know if I’ll play dollies.

  “I guess there’s a little daylight left,” says Uncle Donny. He looks at me. “Whattaya say, Aoife, you wanna play for a little while?”

  I do want to play. Hannah has much better Barbies than I do. I only have three and one of them is Pocahontas, who’s not even that good. And Hannah has real-size Princess Barbie dress-up clothes, even though they’re mostly too big for me.

  But Hannah’s mom never gets confused. And I don’t want to tell her what happened. In fact, I don’t want to tell
anybody, ever. And I know she’ll probably figure it out. Hannah is much cleverer than I am, and she’s really good at solving mysteries.

  But sometimes Hannah can explain stuff, too, and I want to talk to someone about Theo.

  Where is he, Aoife? What happened? What happened to him?

  So I say okay, I do want to play.

  “Just until it gets dark, all right? And stay nearby.”

  “We’re not allowed to go as far as the corner anyway,” I say. That’s what Mama always tells us, because that’s the street where Mr. Rutledge lives.

  “Sounds good.”

  Teddy is making faces. He hates to play Barbies.

  Hannah takes my hand and pulls me over to her yard. She takes out Marine Biologist Barbie, who looks regular right now because she’s wearing regular clothes. She hands her to me and keeps Totally Rad Barbie for herself.

  “Hannah, how do you find out how somebody died?” I ask, after checking that Uncle Donny won’t hear.

  “You investigate,” she says at once. “You write down all the facts, and then you make a list of suspects, and then you interview the witnesses, and then you solve the case.”

  I knew Hannah would know.

  “Why?” she says. “Whose death are you investigating?”

  I don’t answer. I watch Teddy where he’s chasing fireflies in the grass. Uncle Donny walks down to his silver car and starts unloading the trunk. It looks funny at the end of our driveway where our minivan belongs. But we left the van in the parking lot at the mall. It’s probably still sitting there waiting for us to come back for it.

  “I bet I know who,” says Hannah. “I bet it’s Theo.” She is brushing Totally Rad Barbie’s pink hair with a plastic brush. One pink hair catches in the bristles and pulls right out of her head.

  Teddy comes over to listen too.

  “How did you guess?” I ask.

  “Easy. Nobody else has even died.”

  That’s true. Except one time Mama and I found a dead bird, a starling, under the little crab apple tree. Mama said it must have been trying to leave the nest but it couldn’t fly right. And it fell.

  “Okay,” I admit. “You’re right. It is Theo.”

  “I knew it! You know, I had a dream about Theo once,” says Hannah.

  Hannah has a lot of dreams. Not me. Sometimes I dream that Teddy and I are playing in the park, or that Mama and I are in the grocery story, but I don’t usually remember my dreams like Hannah does. Maybe it’s because she’s eight and I’m only six.

  Mama says dreams aren’t real. They are only in your mind. But when Mama has bad dreams, she wakes herself up screaming. Then the two of us sit together on the couch with all the lights on and watch TV until we fall back to sleep. I heard Mama tell Mac once that she dreams about demons, that they’ve taken Theo. She doesn’t know that I heard her say that.

  “Aoife, I’m trying to tell you my dream, and you’re not listening,” says Hannah, and Teddy bumps my shoulder to pay attention.

  “I’m sorry. Okay, tell me,” I say, even though I don’t really care.

  “I was right here in the yard, and his ghost came to talk to me. He was all blue and cold-looking. And he told me that we have to solve his murder.”

  I shiver. Hannah likes to read ghost stories, but Mama doesn’t ever let me read them because they’re too scary. Mama and I only like stories about animals or princesses. Or The Illustrated Volume of the Saints.

  I don’t tell her this, but I don’t think I believe in ghosts. After they die, people go to heaven to watch over us, and God wouldn’t let them come back and scare people. Hannah probably doesn’t know that because her family doesn’t go to church except at Christmas.

  “Even if he was murdered, why he would he come talk to you about it?” Hannah’s family moved here after Theo died, so she never knew him.

  I am trying to make a braid in Marine Barbie’s hair, but it’s slippery. Hannah can do it better. Mine always fall out.

  “Be-cause,” says Hannah, getting mad. “That’s what ghosts do. They haunt people because they’re trying to tell you something, and they won’t go away until you figure it out.”

  Teddy nods. Maybe everybody knows that about ghosts.

  “Do you really think Theo was murdered?” I ask.

  Hannah nods her head. “He told me he was,” she says, “and when a ghost tells you something, it has to be true, because they can’t tell a lie.”

  That does make sense, I guess.

  Hannah takes her Barbie out of my hand. “Aoife, are you really going to tell your dead brother that you won’t try to find his killer?”

  “I didn’t say that! It’s just that—I’m not even supposed to talk about Theo.”

  “That’s probably why his ghost is so angry. Everyone is forgetting about him, and nobody is trying to solve his murder.”

  But I don’t think anybody has forgotten about Theo. Sometimes it seems like he’s just as real to Mama as I am. All along the staircase there are pictures of Theo as a baby, Theo at three, Theo at six, Theo at ten. We couldn’t forget Theo if we tried.

  At the top of the stairs is the last picture, when he was thirteen. Every time I go upstairs to go to the bathroom, I have to pass Theo. He’s looking straight into the camera, his face all pointy like Mama’s. He has dark hair, cut straight across his forehead.

  When I look at his face, I feel like I almost do remember him, a little bit. I remember that day at the beach, his hand reaching out. His red swimsuit. And I remember how his hand was so much bigger than mine.

  But now I am remembering how Mama was calling out to Theo when the blue men came, like he was standing right there.

  Is Theo haunting my Mama because we haven’t solved his murder?

  I can hear the phone ringing inside. But Uncle Donny sticks his head out instead of answering. “Five more minutes, ladies,” he says.

  “I’m going to do more digging,” says Hannah, trying to fix what I did to Marine Barbie’s hair while Teddy watches closely. “My dad showed me how to look up child molesters on the Internet, so maybe we can find some clues.”

  Mama says it’s because Hannah’s dad shows her stuff like that that he doesn’t get to see her more often.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Thinking about Theo being murdered makes me feel funny. It sounds like something that comes on the TV late at night, after Mama has fallen asleep and I’m still watching. A murder happening to my own brother is like seeing the dragon in the end of Sleeping Beauty for real, or the giant octopus at the end of The Little Mermaid. I don’t think stuff like that is real life.

  But Theo was real. His picture is real, hanging next to mine.

  If Hannah’s right—and she usually is—then someone out there killed my brother.

  “Okay, it’s getting dark,” calls Uncle Donny. “Time to go inside.”

  “Okay, Mr. Donovan,” Hannah calls back. She gets up and brushes off her skirt. She raises her eyebrows in the way that means she’s trying to be sly. “We can talk later, Aoife. We need to make a plan.”

  “Do you think we can solve a mystery without getting in trouble? I don’t want to go to Children’s Prison,” I say.

  “Well, you probably won’t,” says Hannah. “Maybe people will thank us for catching the murderer and sending him to jail!”

  Uncle Donny comes out to stand in the grass. “Say goodnight, girls,” he says.

  “It’s okay, we can talk when there’s no grown-ups around,” Hannah tells me, and she scrunches up her whole face to wink.

  “Oh yeah,” says Uncle Donny, “that didn’t look suspicious at all.” But he’s smiling when he says it. He puts his hand on my shoulder and holds open the front door.

  I wish I could tell Uncle Donny about Hannah’s dream. But he already told me not to talk about Theo any more today.

  “Hey Mr. Donovan?” Hannah has one hand on the railing, but she isn’t going up the front steps to her hou
se. “Where’s Mrs. Scott?”

  I look up at Uncle Donny, afraid he’ll say something about how Mama started yelling and had to go to the hospital. Or he’ll ask why Hannah said Mrs. Scott (which she always does) when Mama isn’t married.

  “She’s got something important to take care of, so I’m going to be staying with Aoife for a while,” he says instead.

  “Because she works so hard,” I say. I don’t actually know what that has to do with anything, but it’s what Mama always says about Uncle Donny when he can’t come over.

  Hannah nods, so maybe it works. “Okay,” she says. “Goodnight.”

  But I know she likes to investigate everything, and she’ll just ask me again later.

  Uncle Donny leads me inside. “Did you have fun, Aoife?”

  “I guess I did,” I say, although I’m not so sure. I still feel creepy after talking about ghosts and murders and Children’s Prison. I wish Hannah had never told me her dream.

  Teddy doesn’t seem scared, though. He’s bouncing around just like always.

  The phone starts ringing, but Uncle Donny looks at it on the counter and doesn’t answer. After a few rings, it hangs up. I don’t ask who it is. In a few minutes it starts ringing again. Uncle Donny takes it off the hook after that. I can hear the dial tone.

  “Almost time for bed,” he tells me.

  I watch Uncle Donny drag the bags of garbage out to the curb even though it’s not Tuesday. He doesn’t sing the garbage song like Mama does, but he says I can sing it if I want. So Teddy and I sing it together, real quietly, and then Uncle Donny says it’s time to go upstairs and brush teeth.

  It feels like it’s been the longest day ever, like this morning was years and years ago. Walking up the stairs, it’s hard to put one foot in front of the other. I’m afraid I will fall asleep on the toilet.

  “Wash your hands first,” says Uncle Donny, so I do, and then we read a story in bed for a little while.

  Mama usually reads me stories from The Illustrated Volume of the Saints. It’s got pretty pictures on each page, with a paragraph about how each saint lived or was martyred. Mama’s favorite is Saint Catherine, who was almost beaten to death on a wheel but got to have her head cut off instead. I already know that when I go to catechism, I’m going to pick Saint Joan as my saint. I was born on May thirtieth, which is her special day.