“Lost? Aoife, why were you even out of the house? You do know we’re going to get a report from CPS literally any minute, right? And you decide to run away now?”
I guess he didn’t want me to solve the mystery after all. I don’t understand. “I was following the moon and then the kitty was there and then Teddy went away. And I’m tired. I wanna go to sleep.” I like being high up in Uncle Donny’s arms. He smells good. I lean against his shoulder. My head still hurts.
“Look at your feet,” says Uncle Donny.
“I wanna go home. Can we go back to bed now?”
“Kiddo, I’m about two seconds away from calling the police. Tell me why you left the house.”
“Teddy made me go out, but then he disappeared,” I say.
“What?”
“I was walking, and Teddy had a candle, but then the candle broke, and Teddy disappeared.”
“Does any of this make sense to you?” asks Father Paul.
Uncle Donny puts his hand over my head and sways side to side. “I think she was sleepwalking,” he says. “It’s a family tendency. I used to do it myself, as a child.”
Nobody was walking in their sleep. Teddy was doing it all. He made Uncle Donny open the door and he told me to follow him.
“I’ve never heard of Aoife having the same problem, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. She must have gotten up in the night and gone out, eh munchkin?” He jiggles me on his shoulder. “It’s amazing that she didn’t hurt anything more than her feet.”
I was awake, and I only walked because Teddy told me to. But I don’t bother trying to argue with him, partly because I’m so tired and partly because I already know he’s not going to understand.
“Thank God you’re all right, Aoife,” says Uncle Donny, still rocking me back and forth. “Do you know how sad I would be if anything happened to you?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, sniffing. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“I think maybe it would be best to take Aoife home and let her get some rest,” says Father Paul.
“Yeah, I’ll take her straight back. I’m sorry, we’ve had a lot of—ah—changes at home lately, and I think perhaps it’s got her stirred up. But I’ve got the number for a professional, and believe me I’ll be making an appointment right away. Just—thank you very much, uh, sir. Really.” Uncle Donny juggles me around to shake Father Paul’s hand with the hand that’s not under my knees.
“Aoife, I hope you’re feeling better soon,” says Father Paul.
I don’t know about that, so I don’t say anything, because it would be wrong to tell a holy priest that I’d feel better soon if I didn’t think I would.
“Night-night, Father Paul,” I say instead.
Uncle Donny takes me out to the parking lot, and I fall asleep in his shiny car.
Chapter Twelve
I don’t dream a thing, and when I finally wake up I’m back in my own bed.
Uncle Donny is sitting at the end of the bed, looking at my feet. “Boy, it looks like you really scuffed these up,” he says.
I sit up. It’s bright and sunny outside. “I’m still tired,” I say. “I want to go back to sleep.”
“Sorry, kiddo, but it’s already noon. If I let you sleep all day, you’ll never get back on schedule,” says Uncle Donny. “You don’t want to end up turning into a night owl, do you?”
I don’t want to be an owl. I want to be a bear, like Teddy.
Then I remember Teddy is gone. Usually when you wake up in the morning, whatever was wrong last night is a lot better—Mama always tells me that—but now I’ve woken up and I remember everything and it just makes me want to cry again.
“Anyway,” says Uncle Donny, “if you sleep all day, you’ll miss the fireworks!”
But … but that means today is the Fourth of July. And Mama isn’t home. And it’s all my fault because I didn’t solve the mystery in time, even though I did my absolute best last night.
“Come on, lazybones. Up and at ’em.” Uncle Donny jiggles my arm.
I don’t know what else to do, so I get up. Uncle Donny watches me brush my teeth and then he runs me a bath. It hurts to put my feet in the water, but I don’t cry. Uncle Donny asks if I want bubbles, but I say no.
He makes me oatmeal, but I’m not hungry. I feel funny and floaty after not getting much sleep last night, and missing Mama feels like I swallowed a rock and now its sitting in my stomach.
I thought if I followed the signs and was brave, the saints would help me solve the mystery. But I didn’t learn who killed my brother at all.
Uncle Donny brings in the mail, but he won’t let me look at it. He says there’s nothing in it for me.
“Uncle Donny, Mama isn’t going to be home in time to watch the fireworks, is she?”
Uncle Donny bites his lip. “No, kiddo, she’s not going to be able to,” he says. “I know it’s real important to you, and you don’t know how much I wish I could make it happen. But your ma … well, she’s pretty sick, and even though the doctors are trying really hard to help her, and I know she’s trying too … she’s not better yet. So she needs to stay at the hospital.”
I look at my feet. Lots of people told me that Mama wasn’t coming home, but on TV it always seems like at the last second something comes up and everything turns out fine. The soldier makes it home in time for Christmas, and the superhero catches the piece of burning building right before it hits the girl.
But I guess Joan of Arc only became a saint after she died … God didn’t send the angels to rescue her before she was murdered by the wicked English soldiers. Maybe it’s like that.
The afternoon goes slow. Uncle Donny sets up his computer so I can watch Mr. Wonderbean, and for a while I do. Later he asks if I want to watch the fireworks downtown with Hannah’s family, but I say no. I draw on the front sidewalk in chalk and watch Hannah’s mom loading up boxes and a cooler and a glow-in-the-dark Hula-Hoop. Then they all pile into the minivan—all the boy cousins, and Hannah, her mom and grandma, and her aunt and the new baby, which is crying loudly. They back down the driveway and make a slow turn and then pull away.
I draw bears on the sidewalk. I hope it will make Teddy come back, but it doesn’t. After a while, the cat from next door comes over and sits next to me. This time I know not to grab for her, and she doesn’t run away. After a while, I start drawing cats instead of bears. When I put my hand out, she rubs her head against it and purrs.
It’s still light outside. Today is always going to be the day Mama didn’t come back in time for the fireworks, forever and ever.
Uncle Donny comes out when it’s almost time for dinner. “Aoife, do you want to go to the lake with your favorite uncle?” he asks me. “We could probably see some great fireworks from there.”
He is my favorite uncle, but I shake my head no. I don’t want to go anywhere.
“Nice cats,” he says, looking at my pictures. He puts out a can of tuna for the next-door kitty, just like Mama always does, and we sit on the step and watch her eat it.
Then Uncle Donny puts Toy Story on the laptop, and we watch it while we eat dinner—frozen pizza, which is Teddy’s favorite. It feels weird to eat it without him. Uncle Donny doesn’t watch the whole movie with me—I can hear him walking around upstairs—but he does come back down to watch the last part. He makes me laugh by doing the Woody voice.
When it starts to get dark, we can hear popping noises far away. I turn up the ending music louder because I don’t want to hear.
“You know, when your ma and I were little, we used to have a family tradition,” says Uncle Donny.
I don’t look away from the screen. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. How about we put this on pause for a minute and you come upstairs with me?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Uncle Donny holds his hand out. “C’mon.” So I get up and go with him.
We go up the stairs and into Mama’s room, and I see that the window is open. Uncle Donny has taken off
the screen, too. “Careful,” he says. He puts his head out the window, with his hands on the frame, and then he lifts one foot over the edge, and then the other. “Go slow,” he says.
I creep towards the window, and even though it makes my heart beat hard in my chest, I climb up just like him, and he waits on the other side to help me out. Then we’re standing on the gritty hot surface of the roof. Right outside Mama’s window, it’s not so slanted, and we can walk as long as we’re careful. Uncle Donny tells me to keep one hand on the wall of the house. Together, we creep around the corner and over by where the chimney comes out of the roof.
“When we were growing up, we used to live in Chicago, and we didn’t have a lot of money,” says Uncle Donny as he inches along, with his hand tight around mine. “This was back when your ma was close to the age you are now.”
I can’t imagine Mama ever being the same age as me. I wonder if we would have played together and been friends or if we would have fought like me and Hannah.
“Every Fourth of July, we’d go out on the roof, and if you looked in just the right spot, you could see the fireworks over Lake Michigan. In fact, that’s just about the only thing I can remember from back that long ago. Of course you wouldn’t be able to do it anymore—things have gotten a lot more built up than when I was a kid. But—look! There they are!”
I look where he’s pointing. He’s right. The fireworks start off like a little pinprick on the horizon. Then they bloom into a shower of light—red, and blue, and golden yellow.
“Wow,” I say quietly.
“Here, come sit.” Uncle Donny shows me how we can sit against the chimney with our feet hanging over the edge of the roof. It’s a little scary, but the fireworks are so pretty that I forget to be afraid. They’re far away and kind of small, but with the two of us out here together, I think we might have the best view in the whole city.
“It’s pretty,” I say. Teddy would love this.
I can hear the music playing from far away, echo-y and quiet. It sounds like a marching band, like when Mama and I went to the Flag Day parade. They’re playing a song that Mama taught me silly words to:
Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother …
The fireworks are timed to go off at exciting points in the song.
Uncle Donny hums along. Maybe he knows the same made-up words as Mama. “I’m sorry your ma couldn’t take you to the lake,” he says. “I know you really wanted to go, and I know she really wanted to take you.”
The fireworks are making the shapes of stars, getting bigger and bigger until they just blur away.
“It’s okay,” I say, which isn’t true at all. I just don’t want Uncle Donny to know that it’s all my fault anyway.
“I bet when your ma is less confused, she’ll take us all to the lake together.”
“Can Mac come, too?”
Uncle Donny snorts. “Ah, probably not Mac, baby. But the three of us.”
“Is it because Mac called you a fruit?”
“Uh, yes, among other things. But the point is, when your ma is feeling better, we’ll go out there, and we’ll bring sparklers. Have you ever seen a sparkler, Aoife? It’s like a little mini firework you can hold right in your hand.”
I know Uncle Donny is just saying this to make me feel better. I try not to let it work. The fireworks get faster, and the music, which is now playing The Star-Spangled Banner, is drowned out by the pop-pop-pop of them all going off so fast, one after another. There’s more smoke than light, after a while, but each new firework is bright again for a little while.
“Uncle Donny, do you think prayers really work?” I ask.
Uncle Donny sucks in a breath. “Ooh, kiddo, I am so not the man to ask this stuff,” he says.
I think about this. “Is Mama really going to get better?” I ask.
“Of course she is! Don’t be silly! And it’ll be just like it was before. Okay? It’s just going to take a while, that’s all.”
“But … Mama was confused before, too, sometimes,” I say. “Right?”
The fireworks are all gone now.
Uncle Donny sighs. “All right, well, maybe I shoulda started by saying that there’s different kinds of better. There’s the kind like when you catch a cold, and after a few days it goes away completely. And then there’s the kind that … maybe it doesn’t get worse, and that’s as good as we can do. And we may always be trying to manage it, but it’s never really gone. And that’s the kind your ma has.”
Somehow I knew he was going to say something like that. I nod and look back out at the horizon, where the fireworks aren’t anymore. Quietly, I can still hear the band playing something I don’t recognize. In the end we are both looking at the black sky.
“End of the show,” says Uncle Donny. He takes my hand again and we go back inside together, careful, careful, because the fireworks are over.
“What about miracles?” I ask, as I brush my teeth and Uncle Donny watches. “Do you think miracles are real?” I spit.
“To tell you the truth, Aoife, your uncle Donny is a skeptic. Let’s just say … let’s just say there’s a whole lot of things about my life that the pope and I wouldn’t quite see eye to eye on, okay?” Uncle Donny takes a pair of clean pajamas out of the drawer and puts them on the bed.
“But the saints are real.”
“Well, they were real people. I mean, some of them. Right? But they’re also stories, like, a way to talk about certain ideas or teach us certain lessons. So they’re real in that sense. Okay?”
But either things are real, or they’re not. If the saints are just a story, then they’re not real. But I saw them. They were as real as I am, as real as Teddy. They sent me a vision and a sign, and they led me to the chapel and turned the windows black. Didn’t they?
“But Father Paul thinks they’re really real, right?” I ask, pulling back the blankets. “And Sister Mary Celeste does, too.”
“Well, yes, they probably do. But you know, honey, nobody really knows the truth about this, uh, stuff. Like your mother, for example. She would say that one hundred percent of the things you hear in church are one hundred percent real life. So that’s all of it, uh … the life of Christ, the saints, God, heaven, communion—all of it. And that’s a perfectly fine thing to believe, okay? You can decide to believe that if you want to, just like your ma.”
“But Mama believes in angels and ghosts, too.”
Uncle Donny makes a face. “Ghosts? Really?”
I think about Mama setting out a cupcake for Theo on his birthday every year. I nod my head yes.
“Ah—okay. Well, some people believe in ghosts. Now I personally do not think that ghosts are real life. But some people do.”
“What about demons?”
“No,” says Uncle Donny, and his voice is tight. “No, I don’t believe that demons are real.”
“But Mama saw them,” I say. “When they came out of the TV and the computer.”
Uncle Donny rubs his forehead. He does that a lot, I’ve noticed.
“Well, this is something we could talk about with your ma when she gets home, but, uh, well, sometimes it’s hard to know where the lines are, because she—you know, like you said, she gets confused sometimes. I know that your ma believes that the things she sees are real, so she’s … telling the truth about … that. Ah Christ, Aoife, I don’t know what’s real or not, okay? Nobody really knows. Not me, not Father Paul, nobody. So for me, if you’re asking me what I believe—none of it is real. I don’t think there’s a … a giant old white guy in the sky who watches and judges us, and tells us that some things are right and some things are arbitrarily wrong. And I don’t believe in spirits or saints or demons or ghosts. But that’s just me, okay?”
“But what about prayers?” I say, because he didn’t say before. “You mean you can pray as hard as you want for something, and it still won’t come true?”
“Well, honey, I think—I think that when you pray, it’s a good thing to d
o, okay? Like, I think that it can make you feel better, and that’s good, and I think … I think asking the, uh, universe for what you want is … uh, it’s worthwhile to do, even if you’re sort of only praying to … yourself, I guess. Okay?”
I don’t say okay, because I don’t want to go to hell, but I let him kiss my head and tuck me in and say goodnight.
“In the morning, we’re going to go talk to Dr. Pearlman again,” says Uncle Donny. “These are the kinds of things I want you to talk to her about, okay?”
I’m not so sure that sounds okay.
“I’ve put a special lock on the door, so don’t worry about walking anywhere tonight,” says Uncle Donny, before he heads out into the hallway. He still doesn’t know he’s the one who unlocked the door last time.
The moon is right outside my window, which is wide open. It looks huge, like it’s about to come into my bedroom and land on the floor. I remember the sign of the saints. But Uncle Donny says the saints aren’t real.
So I climb out of bed to close the curtains.
Dear Aoife,
When you and Theo were born, I told myself that I was going to give you a better life than your uncle and I had growing up. You were never going to be hungry or frightened. You were never going to huddle together in a corner and listen to the sounds of bones breaking. That wasn’t going to happen to my children, no. They were going to grow up strong and healthy and secure, like kids on television.
But the truth is, I couldn’t give that to you even though I tried. There have been lots of times when we have been hungry, you and me both, and you stopped asking for a snack because you knew there wasn’t going to be any. And in that car on the way to the mall I made you fear for your life, which my father did to me and I swore I would never do. I made a lot of mistakes. And I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know.
Last night I sat on a hillside with ten crazy people and watched something as beautiful and terrifying as any of us could have imagined. We were too far away to hear any music, and the attendants were definitely not sure this was a good idea. But we were laughing and screaming, and some people clapped, and some cried, and it looked like the end of the world, the city burning under a riot of color and sound, like a war zone, like the End of Days. And we all sang together, the “1812 Overture,” those silly words that Ma used to sing. Until we couldn’t see a thing except the reflections behind our eyeballs.
All That's Bright and Gone (ARC) Page 17