by Barbara Park
But no matter who called—or for what reason—sooner or later they almost always got around to saying something about God. And how he had a plan for Mick and all. That’s when I’d say I had to go and I’d hang up on them. I mean forgive me, okay? But even now I don’t feel like giving God a big pat on the back for his wonderful plan.
I answered the doorbell once in a while. It was usually a neighbor with food—which really killed me, ’Cause, like I said, we had no appetites. But still, Mrs. Fischer brought potato salad, and Mr. Penski brought a ham-and-potato casserole, and Zoe’s mom dropped off potatoes au gratin, and Mrs. Davenport from Pop’s work sent over something labeled “Mashed Potato Bake.”
Also, a woman I didn’t know showed up at the door one night with lime Jell-O in the shape of a heart.
“Does it have potatoes in it?” I asked. She told me to get my father.
I didn’t, though. Pop hadn’t shaved for days. And his clothes were a wrinkly mess from being slept in. Plus he had on slipper socks. And when anyone in your family is wearing slipper socks, you pretty much have an obligation to keep the outside world from seeing them, I think.
Not that I looked too good myself. I’m not saying that. Mostly I just wore sweats. The same ones I’d been wearing at soccer practice that day, actually. Only now instead of running sprints, my main exercise was walking to the kitchen and pouring cereal I couldn’t eat into a bowl, then dumping it down the garbage disposal and walking back to my room again.
The nights were unbelievably long. I never stayed asleep for more than an hour at a time. But I swear to God, I never knew how long the dark could last, until the third night after Mick died. That was the night I cried so hard my stomach muscles hurt when I touched them, and my sheets and pillowcase got so soggy with tears and sweat, I got out of bed and lay on the floor till morning.
I made it through, though. And looking back, I realize I probably even lost a pound or two.
That’s the upside of depression, in case you didn’t know it. The weight loss, I mean. Nature balances out your grief by letting you slim down. Then at the funeral, people can say you look good in your clothes and really mean it.
Nature’s real thoughtful that way.
Treasures
ZOE CALLED ME a lot and tried to talk, but I never had much to say. Gossip about school seemed totally stupid. And the really big stuff—about the accident and all—well, it just felt pretty private, that’s all.
We did have one conversation, though. She called me after school on Thursday, and told me Mrs. Berryhill had brought in this psychologist to talk to Mick’s friends about the accident. He was called a grief counselor. Which sounds totally depressing. But Zo said he was kind of young, with longish hair, and he had on jeans.
“You wouldn’t believe how many kids showed up to meet with him, Phoebe. So many came we had to move out of a regular classroom and into the cafeteria.”
I think this is where I was supposed to act real delighted with the turnout or something. I didn’t, though. I mean we weren’t exactly talking about a bake sale here.
Zoe softened her voice. “All I’m trying to tell you is that you’re not alone, Phoebe. A lot of his friends are hurting, too. Like Danny Monroe kept blowing his nose the whole time. And Rickie Bowie had his hat pulled down so far you couldn’t see his face.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Nobody could even say Mick’s name at first,” she told me. “That’s how bad it was. But then the counselor said that talking about him and saying his name were two of the ways we can sort of keep him with us, you know? And so we did it, Phoebe. All of us. At the same time. We all said ‘Mick.’ You should have heard it. His name filled up that whole big room, almost. And then we did it again. Only this time it was even louder. And the counselor said—”
I hung up on her. I know it was wrong to do that, but I didn’t care what the counselor said. And I didn’t care about how much better everybody felt after saying his name.
I didn’t feel better. I would never feel better. Feeling better sounded almost disloyal, if you want to know the truth. And just to make sure I stayed as depressed and loyal as possible, I stopped in Mick’s doorway on the way back to my room.
I hadn’t stopped there since the night of the accident. It just felt so different now, you know? So private. And off limits. Like a church altar or a cemetery or something.
His door was still open. Pop hadn’t tried to shut it again.
I looked in at all the stuff on his shelves, the tons of souvenirs and crap he’d collected over the years. It was mostly junk, but Mick called them his treasures, That killed me. His treasures.
Like on the first shelf of his bookcase, he had the stupidest autograph collection you’ve ever seen. It was just these two old scraps of paper in a plastic cover. One of them was signed by Herb Fogg, the weatherman on Channel 3. The other was from some guy named Tweets who had been dressed in a bird suit at a local pet store opening.
The second shelf was where he kept his favorite paperbacks—joke books and mysteries mostly. It’s also where he kept the ceramic eyeball he’d made in art class one year. The day he brought it home, he snuck it into a package of defrosted chicken that my mother was fixing for dinner. You could hear her scream all over the neighborhood.
“God, that was funny,” I said out loud.
Over on his nightstand was the unopened cigar he’d found in the street coming home from kindergarten one day. It was the kind that new fathers hand out when their wives have a baby. The kind that has “IT’S A GIRL!” on the paper band at the top. But at the time, Mick thought it meant the cigar was a girl, and he named it Helen.
There was a fly swatter on his nightstand too. It was part of a set, actually. The other two were hanging from a hook near his closet door.
Mick had a thing about flies, I guess you’d call it. It started when he did a science report in second grade and found out that when a fly lands on your sandwich, it vomits on your bread. After that, whenever he saw one he pretty much went berserk until he killed it.
He asked for the set of swatters for Christmas that year. He wanted two for his room (one was a “backup”), and another one that he could take to baseball practice and other outdoor activities during fly season. He called it his mobile field unit (MFU).
The MFU didn’t work out that well though. It was way too long for his back pocket and the swatter part kept rubbing on his shirt, which totally made him sick, ’Cause of the fly guts and all. So that’s pretty much why he didn’t have it with him at the Pricketts’ neighborhood Fourth of July barbecue the next year.
It turned out to be a mistake, by the way. All afternoon this huge green fly kept landing on the baked beans. And for two solid hours Mick stood at the food table flailing his arms, screaming, “GET OUT OF HERE! BEGONE!”
Seriously. He said “Begone.”
Mr. Morley from down the street asked my mother if he was in therapy.
The memory of that made me grin. And without even thinking about it, I walked into his room and put the swatter on the hook with the others.
“You finally killed that sucker, remember?” I said. “It landed on Mrs. Prickett as she was refilling the potato salad, and you swatted her in the head with your flipflop.”
I laughed out loud. And as soon as I did, my arms were instantly covered in goose bumps.
Because I swear to God, for just a second, I had the most incredible feeling that somewhere Mick was laughing too.
MY MOTHER WAS SITTING at the table when I walked into the kitchen that afternoon. She had just gotten out of the shower and was all dressed for bed again.
I sat down in the chair next to her and waved my fingers hello.
We hadn’t been talking that much, her and me. Hardly at all, in fact. But I wanted to now. Or needed to, I guess you’d say.
“Mom … I was sort of wondering … do you think he can hear us?”
My mother shut her eyes tight. “Phoebe, please.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, I know, but just think about it a second, okay? I mean wouldn’t that be so great? If he could hear us when we talk? ’Cause, see, I was in his room just now and.
My mother put her hands over her ears and stood up. Then before I even knew what was happening, she had hurried out the back door and shut it hard behind her.
It had been raining most of the day. But now the rain had turned to mist. And through the glass I watched her walk to the middle of the wet yard and sit down in a lawn chair with her back to me.
For the next few seconds I struggled not to cry.
Then all of a sudden, it was like something exploded inside me, and I ran to the door and pulled it open wide.
“THIS ISN’T ONLY ABOUT YOU, MOTHER! I LOVED HIM TOO, YOU KNOW! I MISS HIM TOO!”
I slammed the door so hard I thought the glass would break into a million pieces. Then I charged right through the house and straight out the front door.
And it was weird, too, because even though I hadn’t thought about where I was going, I automatically headed for school. Running. As fast as I could. To where the accident had happened.
It sounds morbid. I know it does. But all I wanted to do was feel close to my brother. And so in my mind, I wasn’t running to the place he had died. I was just running to the last place he had been.
SOMEONE HAD PLACED a flower there.
I started crying then. Not loud, I don’t mean. There were just some tears.
I brushed them away with the back of my hand. And without taking my eyes off the flower, I slowly sat down on the curb.
It was after dark when I finally got up and headed back home.
Tap Dancing on
God’s Piano
I TEND TO BE very rebellious at times. That’s what it says in the comment section on my first-grade report card:
Phoebe tends to be very rebellious at times.
I hated my first-grade teacher, by the way. She tended to be an old bat at times.
Still, I have to admit I can get a little disobedient with authority figures now and then. Okay, I can get a lot disobedient. But the way I treated my mother after our little scene in the kitchen was an all-time low for me.
I started saying Mick’s name. At every opportunity, I mean.
Not to her face. But if she was in hearing distance, I’d find a way to mention him to anyone I could. Real loud. So she couldn’t miss it.
Like the next morning when this delivery boy from the florist knocked on the door with our millionth sympathy bouquet, I started blurting out all this stuff about Mick’s favorite flower.
“You probably think it’s weird for a boy to have a favorite flower,” I said. “But my brother totally loved this one kind called Venus’s-flytrap. Ever heard of it? It eats flies. Eats ’em alive, I mean. Mick sort of had this thing about flies. An obsession, you might call it.”
The boy started backing out of the doorway. I followed him out to the porch.
“They vomit on your bread, you know.”
The kid ended up running back to his truck. It was pretty funny, actually. In a gruesome sort of way.
That afternoon, I told our mail carrier about the time Mick put a rubber snake in the mailbox.
“You should have been there,” I told her. “The guy screamed the s word and threw our mail all over the sidewalk.”
Our mail carrier didn’t even crack a smile. Instead, she informed me that putting a snake in a mailbox was a federal offense, and she wrote my name down.
“You know, you people take your jobs way too serious,” I said.
When I shut the door, my mother was standing there looking at me. There were tears streaming down her face.
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice sounded like a little kid’s.
“Doing what? What am I doing?” I tried to be cool as anything. But inside I was filling up with this awful kind of shame I’d never even felt before.
I left her standing there and went straight to my room.
Then I curled up on my bed and my stomach tied itself up in a million knots as I thought about what I had done. There was no getting around it—I had flat out spent my entire day taunting my mother with her dead son’s name.
What’s next, Phoebe? Want to try imitating his voice or running into her bedroom dressed in his clothes? Boy, that’d really get her, wouldn’t it?
I stared hard at the ceiling. God, how I hated this. All of it. Myself. My life. My new “family of three.”
Mick was dead, and in just a few days we had all turned into people I didn’t even know. My mother was a zombie. My father was some slob in slipper socks. And I was a jolly little monster who got my kicks by tormenting Mom with my brother’s name.
I clenched my fist.
“Damn you, Mick. Damn you for doing this to us,” I whispered, and then the tears started streaming down my face, too.
I WAS STILL CRYING when I finally reached for the phone and called Zo.
“Oh Jesus, Zoe, what’s happening to me? I swear to God, I just don’t know what’s happening.”
On the other end of the line you could practically hear Zo rolling up her sleeves to get right to work.
We started talking then. Really talking for the first time since Mick had died. Talking about my parents. And the accident. And how horrible and confused I felt inside.
And missing Mick, of course. The conversation always came back to missing Mick. And loving him. And worrying about him.
Mostly Zo just listened. Even when I started saying the same stuff over and over again, she acted like she was hearing it for the first time.
I could always talk to her after that too. Always. No matter what I was feeling.
THE INTERMENT of Mick’s ashes was at four-thirty that same afternoon. We were home by five.
At midnight, I got out of bed and dialed Zoe’s number again.
I knew it would wake up her parents, but I didn’t much care. After you’ve been to your brother’s interment, waking people in the middle of the night doesn’t bother you a bit.
Zo picked up on the first ring. “H’lo?”
I didn’t say anything. She knew it was me, though. Me and Zoe sort of have a psychic thing going, sometimes.
“Phoebe?”
I nodded.
“You okay?” she asked.
I took a shaky breath.
“No.”
She came right over.
WE GOT BLANKETS from my bedroom and covered up on the living room couch so my parents wouldn’t hear us. But even before we were settled in, I had already started to tell her about it.
“It only took about ten minutes,” I said. “It was just a few prayers at the grave. And there were only four of us there. Just my parents and me and the minister…
“And, well, you know. The urn was there too. It was box-shaped. Except it was made out of marble or granite or something. Small, though. Like about the size of a shoe box, I’d say. Which is why it wasn’t as sad as a regular funeral, I think. ’Cause it was almost like he wasn’t even there, you know? Like there wasn’t a trace of him left, hardly.
“Only see, that’s what’s starting to get to me. I mean where is he, Zoe? Right now. Right at this very minute.”
She looked a little confused. “He’s in heaven, Phoeb. We talked about all that this afternoon, remember?”
“Yeah, but what does that even mean … heaven? Because see, I need to be able to put him somewhere, Zo. In my head, I mean. I need to be able to close my eyes and picture him and know he’s okay. And just saying the word heaven doesn’t help that much. Because like what is heaven, exactly? And where is it? And what do you do there?”
Zoe shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I always just figured it was up. Like in the clouds or something.”
I stared at her curiously. “That’s what you actually think, Zo? You actually think that after you die, you float up to the clouds? And do what? Sprout a halo and play the harp?”
She frowned. “Don’t make fun of me, Phoebe
. It’s just that I’ve never thought much about heaven’s specific location, okay? And anyway, the important thing is that heaven is where God is.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, but that still doesn’t tell me anything, Zoe. I mean what does it look like there? And what in the world do you do all day?”
Things didn’t get better. Zoe said, “You do God stuff.”
My mouth practically dropped open with that one. “God stuff? What the heck is God stuff? You mean like right now you think Mick is reading Bible stories, and going around saying ‘Peace be with you,’ and junk? Because that’s a little hard to believe, don’t you think? Especially considering he got suspended from choir practice last year for tap dancing on the piano.”
Zoe flopped back on her pillow. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll say it. That way, you won’t have to keep mocking me …”
We didn’t talk for a while after that.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I said finally. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you. It’s just that everyone seems to have all these easy answers. Only none of them make any sense to me.
“Like my nana from Florida keeps saying this is all part of God’s plan for Mick. And we’re not allowed to question the plan, or think that maybe the plan stinks. We just have to accept it. Period. The end.
“And my other grandmother says that God must have needed Mick more than we did. Only what kind of a selfish God is that? To just snatch somebody away from the people who love him? Not to mention the fact that it’s a little hard to believe that the most powerful being in the entire universe needs a seventh-grader who can’t even program a VCR without screwing up the TV.”
Zoe frowned in thought. “So maybe your grandmothers are wrong,” she said. “Maybe Mick’s accident wasn’t planned at all. Maybe it was a real, honest-to-goodness accident, and God is just as sad about it as everybody else.”