All That's Bright and Gone (ARC)

by Eliza Nellums

  “Are you still mad at me?” she asks.

  “No. You’re my best friend,” I tell her. And now that Teddy’s gone, it’s true. “I could never be mad at you.”

  I can hear Uncle Donny raising his voice. The sound of shouting is my least-favorite sound.

  “You’re my best friend, too,” says Hannah. “Forever and ever. Okay? Pinkie swear.”

  She puts her pinkie in mine, and we squeeze them together and swear.

  “Aoife!” yells Uncle Donny from the kitchen. “Can you come in here, please? I need to talk to you. Right now.”

  I pick up the box of Barbies and wave goodbye to Hannah. I’m glad she’s my friend again, even though I’ll probably never be allowed to play with her after Uncle Donny finds out what I’ve done.

  Uncle Donny is still on the phone when I come inside. He’s holding it against his shoulder and frowning at me. “Aoife, did you call Mac?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that. I told you that you need to be patient and wait until your ma is home before we talk more about Theo.”

  “I know,” I say. I’m not sorry, so I don’t say that I am. “But Mac says he’s my father, so he can say different if he wants to, right?”

  I can hear a grumbly voice that must be Mac answering back, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Uncle Donny frowns harder. “I’m going to put the phone on speaker,” he says, “so stop swearing.” He pushes a button on the handset and holds the phone up.

  “Mac?” I say.

  “Yeah, kiddo. I hear you.”

  “Did you ask him? Did you tell him I get to go see Theo now?”

  “Aoife, this isn’t up to Mac, it’s up to your mother,” says Uncle Donny, cutting off whatever Mac was going to say. “And since your mother is unavailable right now, that means it’s up to me. And I’m saying no.”

  “Maybe it ain’t up to you,” says Mac.

  “Look, she’s too young to understand this,” says Uncle Donny. “She’s only six years old, for Chrissake. We should wait a little longer.”

  “I can understand!” I say. “I want to know.”

  “It will be fine,” says Mac. “I told Siobhan from the start, children are tough. You’re tough, right, Alfie?”

  “Yeah!” I say, nodding.

  “But how are you supposed to explain something like this?” Uncle Donny says. He sounds like he’s getting upset again. “No, this is a terrible idea. We need to wait.”

  “Well, we could ask Siobhan,” says Mac calmly. “Maybe she’ll have a different answer.”

  “Yeah!” I say. “Uncle Donny, let’s talk to Mama! And we can ask her together!”

  “Thanks, Mac. Thanks a lot. Aoife, your ma has a lot on her plate right now, and I’m not going to add any stress to her life. This doesn’t need to be dealt with right now, and we can wait.”

  “We should call her,” I say. “We should call her right now.”

  “Aw, Don, don’t be such a wet blanket,” says Mac. “Siobhan can handle a little controversy. Take off the kid gloves, for Chrissake, and just ask her. That’s what she would want you to do. What’s the alternative? She gets out of the clinic and this all lands in her lap at once? We take care of it now and by the time she’s home, things will be running smooth again.”

  Uncle Donny doesn’t look convinced, but I know this is my best chance. “Please, please, please,” I beg, pulling on his jacket. “Just ask her. I know she’ll say yes if you tell her that—tell her that it’s very important that I talk to Theo right away. Okay? Tell her that it’s what I want for my next birthday present and all my Christmas presents, okay?”

  “Maybe it’s better to have her understand instead of guessing,” says Mac. “It’s only because we’ve done a shit job explaining so far that’s she’s confused.”

  “Please, please, please, please!”

  “Ah, jeez,” says Uncle Donny, rolling his eyes. “All right, I’m going on the record here saying that I think this is a bad idea. Aoife, we’re going to be talking later about how you went about this. I’m disappointed in your behavior today.”

  That makes me feel a little bad, but I still want him to ask Mama. “Now, I’ll talk to her. But you’re not listening in this time, and if she says no, then she says no and that’s it, no more arguing. You wait patiently and you don’t bother her about this when she does come home. Okay?”

  “Okay!” I say, with a big thumbs-up.

  “I want to be in on this phone call, Don,” says Mac.

  “What? You?”

  “Yeah, me. You know I’m pretty—intimately involved here, Donny.”

  I don’t know what that word in-tim-ate-ly means or why Mac says he’s involved. But I know he’ll do a better job of convincing Mama than Uncle Donny, so I nod my head yes, yes, yes.

  “Well, I guess this is all one big family affair,” says Uncle Donny.

  He doesn’t sound happy at all, and I bite my lip but I’m still not sorry. I love Uncle Donny and Mac, but I love Mama more than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe we missed the fireworks, but I still want to sit on her lap and listen to her stories, and I want to show her my cartwheels, and I want her to sing Princess Jasmine to me again.

  “Goodbye, Mac, thanks so much for all your help,” says Uncle Donny. I can tell he doesn’t mean it.

  “Goodbye, Mac, thank you!” I yell into the phone. “I’m glad you’re my father after all!” Uncle Donny covers his ears and makes a face before he hangs up.

  “Not even a week in and she’s already playing the parents against each other. It must be instinct.”

  Sometimes Uncle Donny is only talking to himself, particularly when he grumbles.

  “Aoife, go upstairs to your room,” he says. “And I’ll be checking both phones, so don’t even think about getting on the other line, because I’ll know.”

  I nod my head and pick up the box of Barbies again, and as I climb the stairs, I say a special prayer to Blessed Joan and Catherine and Michael and anybody else who might be listening. Please, please help Mama understand. I know sometimes the saints visit Mama, too, so maybe they can explain it to her better than I can.

  I can hear Uncle Donny talking downstairs. He’s probably calling the hospital right now. I sit on the floor of my room with a box of Legos, but I’m not trying to build anything. I’m just snapping a blue block to a bigger yellow block and then unsnapping it again. Then I put it back together. Snick, snap. Snick, snap.

  Uncle Donny’s voice sounds frustrated. I wonder how Mama sounds and if she’s still confused, or if she’s feeling better.

  It’s weird to think that Mama knew Theo was alive the whole time. That I’m the only one who thought he was dead.

  I hear Uncle Donny walking across the floor in the living room. It sounds like he’s standing at the base of the stairs when he says, “Okay. Okay, all right. Thanks, Siobhan. Feel better. We love you.” Then I hear him press the button—beep!—and the phone hangs up.

  I wait for him to come up the stairs, but he doesn’t come up right away. I hold my breath, and for some reason I think he might be holding his breath, too.

  I can’t stand it anymore. “Uncle Donny?” I call. “What did Mama say?”

  Finally I hear his footsteps on the stairs, the usual creak, creak, creak. I turn around when he gets to the doorframe and he’s standing there watching me.

  “Well, kiddo—” he says.

  “She agreed, didn’t she?”

  “Your ma said if you want to go talk to your brother, I can take you there,” says Uncle Donny. “I still think it would be better for us to wait until your ma comes home, and then we could all go together. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “I want to talk to him now,” I say.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk on the phone first? We could call your brother if you want, if his doctors say that’s okay.”

  But I don’t want to talk on the phone. If my brother is really real, I want to se
e him so that I can know. A phone call isn’t good enough. I shake my head without saying anything.

  Uncle Donny rubs his face. “Are you sure? Because it might be scary. Your brother is still working on getting better, and he might still be … confused.”

  That does sound a little scary. “Can you and Mac come with me?” I ask.

  “Mac isn’t Theo’s father, so he doesn’t have permission to visit. But if you’re sure you want to go, I’ll be right there with you.”

  “Then I want to go.”

  “If you aren’t sure, we don’t have to go,” says Uncle Donny.

  “I want to go, even if it’s scary,” I say.

  Uncle Donny sighs. “Brave girl,” he says, but he doesn’t sound happy about it.

  “Can we go today?”

  “Not today, but we can go tomorrow afternoon.”

  So that’s it. One day, and I’ll see my brother.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next day, Uncle Donny and I get into his shiny car and we drive away. We go on the same highway that Mac took us on when we went to the zoo, but I know we’re not going to the zoo this time. We drive on the freeway that cuts right through the city of Detroit, with high, light-gray cement walls on either side and tall buildings made of glass. We go past the brick downtown churches with their pointy tops. All the way past the factories, and still we keep driving even after that, out the other side and back into the kind of place our house is again.

  “The suburbs just go on and on out here,” says Uncle Donny, looking out the window. “How many strip malls does one state need? And how many fast-food joints? No wonder we have an obesity crisis.”

  Uncle Donny always complains when he’s nervous. I’m nervous, too. I wish we could have brought the next-door cat, but she’s not like Teddy so she can’t come with us everywhere we go. That’s why bears are better than cats. I miss Teddy, but I don’t think he’s coming back anymore. Maybe he lives with Mr. Rutledge now.

  Finally the traffic thins out. We’re in the country. The boondocks, Uncle Donny calls it. There are real cows in the fields, like in the picture books at school. It’s sunny outside and looks friendly.

  “Theo lives in a nice place,” I say, looking out the window. We’re passing a red barn with horsies in the field, which are rolling around in the dirt like the cat from next door.

  “Sure, you could say that,” says Uncle Donny. He doesn’t really sound like he means it, but I think it looks nice. I like how the plants are all growing in straight lines, like the stripes on Uncle Donny’s work suit. It looks a lot more tidy than Mama’s garden, even back when she was weeding it.

  I can’t believe Mama has to drive all this way every other weekend. No wonder she’s gone all day. It’s funny to think how many times Stephanie and Hannah and I played in the park for hours and hours and I didn’t even know that she was with my brother. She never said anything when she came back, except that usually she wanted to lie down afterwards and sometimes her eyes were red from crying.

  That’s the other reason I thought it was like when we visited Gramma Aoife, because it made Mama sad to stand in that field, and she cried, even though Gramma Aoife has gone to heaven to be with the angels. Now that Mama has been away, though, I understand why she was so sad not to be with her ma. I’m glad my mother is only in the hospital and not in heaven, even though it might be a sin to think that.

  You know what is funny? She never, ever talked about how Theo was doing or delivered a message or anything. For years and years. I don’t know why she did that. I don’t like it.

  We keep on driving. Uncle Donny doesn’t put on the radio or anything. I look out the window and imagine music. It’s funny to be in a place where there’s no houses, and almost no cars on the road. There’s no sidewalks and no people walking their dogs or their babies in strollers like at home. There’s no shops and no fast-food restaurants. Nothing but fields until a truck rolls past us.

  “Okay, getting close,” says Uncle Donny. “There, off to your right—there it is.”

  I look where he’s pointing, because I don’t know left from right. At first I can’t see it behind the trees, but then we get closer. There’s a bunch of brown buildings, squatting low on the hillside behind a long fence.

  “Is this where Theo lives?” I ask.

  “This is where Theo is trying to get better, remember? Like a hospital.”

  It does look a little like that. The buildings are all the same, built out of the same kind of bricks. There’s a big parking lot and lots of signs. We turn into the driveway. I’m too excited to be nervous.

  “That says VISITORS’ PARKING,” I say, pointing to the sign we just passed.

  “That’s right,” says Uncle Donny. “Because we’re here visiting Theo.” He pulls into a parking spot and stops the car.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You might not recognize Theo,” he tells me. “That’s okay. You haven’t seen him since you were four years old, so that’s normal. Whatever you feel is okay, all right? There’s not really a right way to feel sometimes.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Did Theo … did he do something bad?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  I look out the window and shrug.

  Uncle Donny rubs his face with his hand. It pulls his scratchy cheeks down and he looks old.

  “Is he a bad guy?” I ask. It’s going to be extra weird seeing my brother for the first time if he’s also a bad guy. I hadn’t really thought about that.

  “No, he’s not—he’s not a bad guy,” says Uncle Donny. “He’s just a boy.”

  “I thought he was almost grown up,” I say. “You said he was almost sixteen.”

  “That’s still just a child,” says Uncle Donny quietly. “But he—he had a lot of trouble, growing up. He lost his father very young, and things were tough sometimes at home. Theo was always a very—a very sensitive boy, and he has an illness, remember I told you? It makes it so that he … isn’t always in control of his choices. Does that make sense?”

  I don’t know if it does or not.

  “Listen, I understand that this is scary, sweetheart. I don’t even know if Theo is going to want to talk today. I don’t know if he’s going to understand who we are. But I don’t want you to be scared, okay? We’re just here so you two can get to know each other a little. It’s going to be a short visit, and I’m going to be right here with you the whole time.”

  “Okay,” I say. So we get out of the car.

  Uncle Donny locks the doors behind us, and he takes my hand. But neither of us starts walking towards the entrance. It’s a regular-looking place, and it does look kind of like the hospital where I met Dr. Pearlman. But for some reason I don’t want to go inside, and it doesn’t seem like Uncle Donny does either.

  “It’s okay to be scared, baby,” says Uncle Donny. “It’s normal.”

  I’m not sure if I’m scared or not. It’s more like, I know I’m about to learn something and then I’ll never be able to not-know it again. When my brother Theo was dead, even though I didn’t know what happened to him, I thought I knew what was going to happen next: he was going to keep on being dead. But now that I know he’s alive, I’m not sure what’s going to happen anymore.

  “Uncle Donny, are you Theo’s uncle, too?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “But Mac is only my dad, and not Theo’s dad, because Theo’s dad is dead.” I think I know who Theo’s dad is.

  “That’s right.”

  And I’m his sister, the only one he has. And he’s my only brother in the whole world.

  Uncle Donny shakes himself off first and says, “Are you ready, Queen La-T-Aoife?” I nod my head even though I’m not sure. Maybe I wish we could get back in the car and drive home. But now that we’re here, this is happening one way or another.

  We hold hands and walk inside together.

  It’s not as bright inside as a hospital. There are signs p
osted on the door, with lots of writing, too much and too small for me to read. Uncle Donny doesn’t let us stop to look at them. He has my hand in his and is pulling me along to the front desk, where a woman in a brown hat is sitting behind the table.

  Uncle Donny gets us checked in at the desk. “You all here for Theodore?” says the brown-hat lady. “We’ve been missing Miz Scott.”

  “Ah, yes, something … came up unexpectedly,” says Uncle Donny, combing through his hair with his hand.

  “Happens to the best of us,” says the woman. She looks over at me and Uncle Donny. “Brought the whole family this time, huh?”

  Uncle Donny smiles tightly. “Sure did. Uh, we have permission, if you check the file…”

  “Sure, no problem,” says the brown-hat lady, looking down at me. “I’m going to call down and have them bring him into the visitors’ room, so you-all can have the chance to talk. If you could just take a seat right there, I’ll let you know when they’re ready for you.”

  “Great,” says Uncle Donny. He takes my hand and leads me to a corner where there are orange plastic chairs against the wall under the window. It looks sunny outside, and a big part of me wants to be out there and not in here.

  There’s a woman sitting in the far corner with her head down in her hands. I don’t know if she’s crying or asleep. She doesn’t move. Uncle Donny pulls me towards chairs across the room, and both of us pretend not to notice her.

  Even if Uncle Donny hadn’t told me this place was a kind of hospital, I would have known. It smells like it’s been cleaned extra hard, but it’s still grubby.

  I’m watching the brown-hat lady at the front desk. Sometimes she gets a call that takes her through the door behind her. There’s a red light over the door, but when she presses a button on her desk, the light goes from red to green. When she walks through the door and closes it behind her, the light goes red again.

  “Can Theo leave whenever he wants?” I ask.

  Uncle Donny doesn’t answer right away. I wait.

  “Theo has to listen to his doctors,” he says at last, “because they’re trying to make him better. So if they say it’s okay, then he could leave, but they haven’t said it’s okay yet. And they might not say it for a long time.”