All That I Can Fix

by Crystal Chan

  Mom said, later, that there were signs of his depression all along, but when I pressed her on it, she didn’t give me any details. Still, there’s a difference between being able to cover up for your depression and the depression exploding in your face—and everyone else’s. I know that the doctors told us that depression just is and not to think about what started it all, but they’re jackwads: It’s impossible not to think that something made everything change, not to look for something to blame, which is exactly what we looked for. Mom said it could have been his old job, which he hated. I said it could’ve been when he realized he was stuck in a loser life and hadn’t saved the world yet. Mina said it could’ve been when she got that one and only D on her social studies quiz. When she said that, I grabbed one of our kitchen chairs, went outside, and smashed it on the sidewalk until she ran out, sobbing, and begged me to stop. Anyway, if there were cracks in his great windowpane of life, he certainly didn’t show it—or at least Mom covered up for it—until one day he woke up and the whole thing came shattering down on him in a million irreparable pieces. And I don’t know, maybe I myself had turned a blind eye to Dad’s “bad days” because I didn’t want to see reality either. Maybe it was my fault.

  Once, about two years ago now, he stayed in bed for a week straight. At first Mom said he had the flu. She was constantly in and out of their bedroom, tiptoeing around the house. On the fourth day, though, I ran into him in the hallway, and I knew this was no virus. His eyes were flat, and he walked like each step was a million pounds, each blink of the eye painful. I was confused: What had happened to him? Where had Dad gone? How could I fix this?

  Mina, of course, tried to cheer him up, but it was like hugging a brick wall. That didn’t stop her from trying, and she got really good at hugging brick walls. I tried too. I asked if he wanted to go bowling or if he could help me repair the lawn mower. But each time he barely gave us a word, as if making a sound would take up all his energy.

  In the beginning I really worried about him—I stayed up late into the night thinking about what could make him better, what could make him worse, and I got a lot of detentions for being late to my first-period class because I’d gotten shit sleep worrying about him all night long. I’d try to talk with him, but he’d give me one-word answers, or no-word answers, or lock the bedroom door so I couldn’t talk to him, period. I know people say that the heart heals, but those people are assholes because they never mention the scars.

  So anyway, I watched Dad wander around the house, neglect things that he’d always done—putting winterizing putty on the windows in the fall, mowing the lawn, spreading the mulch. One day about a year later, the bone-awful truth hit me: The Dad I knew—my bowling dad, my car-fixing dad—was gone for good. It was like he had died, right in front of us. A dead living person.

  I have to admit, though, there were nights when I snuck out of the house, crawled under the car in the garage, and lay down under one side, leaving room for a make-believe dad beside me. As I stared up at all that metal and power, it felt like that entire car was pressing down on my chest. Every single time I wanted to cry, I tried to cry, but I couldn’t.

  • • •

  The next day was a Thursday, which sucked. I have a Thursday routine that’s different from my other-day routines. On any normal non-Thursday, I get up, spend some time on the can until Mom starts yelling, brush my teeth, dig around in my bedroom for my clothes, flop back into my bed for as long as possible, then finally finish getting dressed. I go into the kitchen, pour myself some cereal, and if I’m in a good mood, I dick around with Mina—maybe fling some cereal at her—and let her give me a good-morning hug, which she always gives me, wet cereal or not. That always cracks me up. If I’m not in a good mood, I take my cereal and eat in the living room.

  Anyway, on Thursdays things are different. When I wake up, I spend at least ten minutes in bed debating if I should stay in bed, and if I’d be like Dad if I do. Deciding that I will be, I get out of bed, go into the bathroom, and use my special Thursday toothbrush. I also use my Thursday tube of toothpaste and wear a special pair of jeans. They look like normal jeans, but they’re a little cleaner—a little newer—because I only wear them on Thursdays. I always outgrow them and have to get new ones, but I really like my most recent ones: The first day I wore them, I won my bike from my school’s raffle fund-raiser, then afterward some random-ass dude in line in front of me paid for my vanilla custard cone, and later that same day George gave me a kiss on the cheek for saying something witty. That’s the word she used: “witty.” So those are the jeans I wear on Thursdays, and I used to wear them exclusively, every Thursday, until I found those question-mark blue jeans at the secondhand store, and I started alternating the two pairs of jeans because I figured that jeans with a bunch of questions on them had to protect me from something. But then I gave that pair to Sam, so now I’m back to one. Which is cool.

  On Thursdays I don’t eat breakfast. That minimizes the chances of things going wrong. Nothing to spill, no empty cereal boxes that I think still have cereal in them. I just sit in the living room and wait for Mina to be ready to go to school; then I take her to her bus stop. I make sure to give her a hug on Thursdays. She knows this and squeezes me extra hard.

  I look both ways, twice, before crossing every street.

  I always make sure I have at least a dollar in change in my pocket, because you never know when some sort of emergency will pop up.

  Most importantly, I make sure to put my lucky medallion in my pocket. It’s a cool thing, with this king or something on it, and it’s in this language I’ve never seen. I found it one day some years ago now, and it was sitting on the ground by the cemetery’s cast-iron fence, like someone knew I was going to be walking by and dropped it there for me. It looked so odd, this gold medallion—okay, so it’s probably not really gold, but it looks gold—sitting there on the grass. When I took it, I could tell it was meant for me. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. Later that night, in my bedroom, I put the medallion on my nightstand. I couldn’t get over the feeling that someone had left it for me, and damn, did that make me feel great. And if I was remembered, I’d better take good care of it, right? So I keep it on my nightstand all the time, except for Thursdays, which is when it goes into my pocket with my loose change, and no one knows the difference except for me.

  That Thursday morning the phone rang, which was strange, being so early in the day. Mina was eating her breakfast, and Mom had already left for work. Dad wouldn’t get the phone, of course, so I picked it up. I wasn’t feeling good about a phone ringing so early in the day.

  “Hello?” I said, jingling the coins in my pocket.

  “Hello?” said the other voice. It was a guy.

  “Yes?” I said testily.

  “Are you Ronney?” the guy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who is this?”

  “Hey, Ronney,” the guy said, his voice relaxing a bit. “This is Nick.”

  16

  “WHOA,” I SAID. “FOR REAL?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. His voice was deeper than mine. A little thicker, too.

  My brain was spinning. “How’d you get my number?” I asked.

  “When you go looking for someone all across town, word gets out,” Nick said. He sounded guilty.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I stated the obvious. “Sam’s been hanging out with me.”

  “I know.” Nick gave a little laugh. “That kid is truly amazing.”

  I held the phone, quiet for a moment. That’s something I would say, I thought. I cleared my throat. “You got that right—he’s amazing.” I paused. “He’s been trying to buy all your shit back from the secondhand store.”

  “Really? They threw my stuff out already?”

  “Yeah, and Sam’s been in there, getting back what he can. He thought you left him a message on that Lennon poster.”

  Nick sighed. “That was the plan.” I heard him take a drink of something, and I realized his speech was a
little slurred. What was this, a drunk dial early in the morning?

  “So, where are you?” I asked, feeling more ballsy. I was sick of the chitchat.

  “Doesn’t everyone want to know.” Nick gave a little laugh.

  The way he said that sent my temperature soaring. I gritted my teeth. “You know, the kid needs you.”

  “He’s better off by himself.”

  “Is that what I should tell him you said? ‘Nick said you’re better off by yourself ’?”

  “No, no,” Nick said quickly. He took another sip. “That’s just between you and me.”

  This whole conversation was quickly heading south. Sam had been idolizing his brother, who was a drunken dickwad. He was just too young to know it—or too desperate to acknowledge it.

  “I met your dad the other night,” I said.

  “Oh, you did?” Nick’s words were measured.

  “He’s an ass.”

  Nick snorted. “You got that right.”

  “And you’re an ass for leaving Sam alone with him,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Score one for Ronney,” I said, smirking.

  “Mom’s all right,” Nick said, recovering. “She’s just . . . weak.”

  “Like I said, you’re an ass for leaving Sam alone with him.”

  “You’re real smart,” Nick said sharply. “When I see Sam next, he’s going to sound like a jerk. A smart jerk, but a jerk.”

  “And when are you going to see Sam next?” I prompted.

  “I just . . . have some things to finish here,” Nick said.

  “Like your couple of kegs.”

  “Shut up,” Nick said. “You have no idea what’s going on.”

  “You’re right, I don’t,” I said. “And you have every idea what’s going on with Sam, and you don’t give a fuck.” I gripped the phone. “Way to go, hero.”

  “Tell Sam . . . to take care of himself,” Nick said tightly.

  “Why don’t you? I could get him on the phone, you know.”

  “That’s no—”

  “Or does being weak run in the family?” I asked.

  “Fuck you,” Nick said.

  “Fuck you,” I said back.

  I don’t know who hung up first.

  At first I was afraid Mina had overheard the conversation, but when I checked on her in the kitchen, she was still talking to her cereal. Mina talks to her cereal every morning; she asks it if it likes swimming in its swimming pool, if it wants to swim underwater. Then she moves it around in her bowl, pretending that it’s doing the backstroke. Then she eats it.

  “Don’t you think that’s mean?” I say when I see her eating the food she was talking with.

  “It’s meant to be eaten,” she replies, as if I were stupid.

  Anyway, she was talking with her various cereal bits, which calmed me down; at the very least, she wouldn’t be running and texting Sam that I’d told his beloved brother to fuck off.

  My stomach lurched a little. What do I tell Sam?

  “I’m done, Ron-Ron,” Mina said, putting her bowl in the dishwasher. She was so good to Mom like that; I just leave my dishes on the table.

  “Got your backpack?” I asked.

  “Yup,” she said.

  She skipped next to me as I walked her to the bus stop, and all the while I was thinking about Sam. Do I tell him we don’t need to look for his brother because his brother doesn’t want to be found? That he doesn’t give a shit about what Sam’s going through? That he’s too drunk to be of help, anyway? Or do I pretend the call never happened, maybe even continue looking for him?

  I had a headache. I sighed and rubbed the base of my skull with my hand.

  “The bus is coming,” Mina announced.

  I gave her my usual Thursday hug, tight as hell.

  “You behave,” I said, tousling her hair.

  “You too.” She grinned at me. Then, right before she hopped onto the bus, she turned back to me and called out, “But, Ron-Ron, you wouldn’t make a good politician.”

  I stared at the bus as it sped away.

  • • •

  I didn’t have to worry about Mina telling Sam about the phone call, because she ended up texting me when her school went into lockdown later that day. Three guys were in the parking lot of her elementary school, and they started arguing about something; one person brought out his semiautomatic gun, the other two did too, and the three of them started running through the playground shooting at each other like it was some Western show, except with semiautomatics. Once the gunshots started, the school’s alarms shrieked, and all the teachers started the lockdown procedures: Close and lock the doors. Barricade them. Kids in the closet. I was in geometry when I got her first text.

  Help me Ronney, there are guns.

  Where?

  Outside, and I’m in the closet and I think I peed my pants.

  It’s okay. Calm down. Is the teacher with you?

  Yes, she is, but I’m scaredscaredscared

  Calm down. What’s your spelling list this week?

  It’s a stupid list, so I’m studying the word tessellation instead.

  Good girl. Spell it again. And go through your other words.

  On my modified list?

  Yes. And I’m coming.

  That was when the geometry teacher called my ass out for texting in class. I stood up, told him to go fuck himself, picked up my bag, and left. I raced on my bike to Mina’s school, and there were tons of police cars and fire trucks and TV news people and parents on the sidewalks and big sisters coming to pick up their siblings. Mina and I were still texting spelling words back and forth, one maybe every thirty seconds, steadier than a heartbeat. In the end the police shot two of the three guys because they turned their guns on the police, one of them surrendered with his hands up, and then they were all loaded into vehicles and hauled away. Maybe ten minutes later, hundreds of crying kids came running out of the school, running to hundreds of crying parents.

  I don’t know who started it, but at one point a kid took out a foghorn and blasted it long and hard. People flinched, and a number of folks bent over and brought their hands to their ears. Some adults rushed over to try to make the kid put it away, but then another kid sounded a foghorn, and another kid, and another. And then they raised their foghorns to the sky, arm after arm extended, so many little hands pressing those little buttons, those foghorns sounding out cries that you could hear for miles. The adults couldn’t look at each other, didn’t do anything except look ashamed, like this crappy world was the best world they could give us.

  Throughout it all, Mina barely said a word. I didn’t know what to think about that. She did want me to carry her home, though, which sucked because she was heavy, she had peed her pants, and I had to leave my bike at her school to do so. Since it was a Thursday, it would be stolen, but she wouldn’t walk, even when I asked her nicely. So I left my bike there and carried her wet ass all the way home.

  We were almost at our door when I remembered that Mina and Sam were in the same class. “Where was Sam?” I asked her as I put her down. My back hurt like hell.

  Mina shook her head.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, alarmed.

  “He wasn’t at school today,” she said.

  “Thank God,” I muttered.

  Mina didn’t say anything at all.

  • • •

  Two days later there was another shooting, this time at Mike’s Place, which is a bar in town. I guess the guys were drunk and they started fighting. One of them was hit in the chest; he died on the way to the hospital. It was on the news, which I watched when Mina wasn’t in the house. I unplugged the TV before she got home, but she must have known, because she went straight to my bed and crawled in, even though it was plain in the afternoon. She wanted me to lie in bed with her. So I did, and I held her.

  “Why is everyone shooting each other?” she whispered, laying her head on my chest.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

/>   “Why does everyone have guns?”

  “For protection. You know that.” I smoothed her hair from her face, and I could feel my shirt getting wet.

  “Then why is everyone getting hurt? We’re not protected then, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m scared, Ron-Ron.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to be alone,” she said softly.

  I asked her what she meant by that since she has me, but that was all she said about it.

  I thought she had maybe even forgotten about the shooting at school until a couple nights later she and Mom came back from the store with bags of new clothes in their hands. Mina walked into the house with blue jeans on. And a white T-shirt.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Mina looked at Mom.

  “Mina doesn’t want to wear orange anymore,” Mom said, as if this explained everything. “She changed out of her old clothes right there in the store.”

  “This must have cost a fortune,” I said.

  “It’ll be okay,” Mom said.

  “How do I look, Ron-Ron?” Mina asked. But she didn’t twirl around like I expected her to. Instead, she just stood there and looked at me.

  I stood up and left the room.

  • • •

  Mom kept saying how nice it was now that Mina’s orange phase was over, and she said it so many times I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. I didn’t put Mina on the school bus anymore; Mom made sure to drive her to school, which meant she dropped Mina off super early. I didn’t like that Mina was hanging around school for over an hour every day before classes, but driving Mina to school calmed Mom down. So every day Mina left in blue jeans and a non-orange T-shirt. Every time she hugged me and got into Mom’s car, my chest clenched from not seeing that flash of orange; another part of me was pissed at Mom for being so nonchalant about it. The only good thing was that none of the kids at Mina’s school were allowed to play outside for a month after the shooting, which helped calm me down, but still it was weird thinking about romp-and-polly Mina being stuck indoors, caged up.