All That's Bright and Gone

by Eliza Nellums

  My whole life I guess I’ve struggled, and sometimes it seems easier to go out like a firework, all in a pop. There are times I’m sure you would be better off without me, times when it seems like I’m only going to hold you back. There are a million ways that I could make an exit before I screw up both our lives even more. I think I must have considered every one of them, more this week than any other.

  But today we cheered and blessed America and drummed along on our knees to imaginary music. And my heart was a Saint Catherine’s wheel after all, but not the way I used to think, not torturing my poor body on the rack, but spinning and shouting in glory.

  Hold on, baby.

  If you can keep trying, I swear I will too.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Uncle Donny is trying to get us out the door. He wants us to go see Dr. Pearlman first thing.

  I did not sleep so good, and now I’m tired. “Do we have to go?” I ask. I’d much rather never leave the house again.

  “I think it’s important,” says Uncle Donny. “Come on, I’ll make you breakfast and you can eat in the car.”

  It’s oatmeal again. Uncle Donny tells me to finish my milk and brushes my hair. He does a good job this time, and uses fewer clips.

  “All right, are you ready to jet?” asks Uncle Donny. He sounds like he’s trying to sound happy even though he doesn’t really mean it. Mama does that sometimes, too, but I’m not fooled anymore.

  “I want to stay here,” I say.

  “Ah, no, Aoife, we need to go.” Uncle Donny doesn’t even give me the chance to disagree.

  As we pull away, I see Hannah come out of her house and stand on the front porch, but I don’t wave and she doesn’t either. She called Mama crazy and she said I was crazy, too, and we’re not friends anymore.

  “Are you ready to see Dr. Pearlman again?” asks Uncle Donny. “You remember her from the hospital, right? You liked her.”

  I’m not sure that’s true—I mostly just liked the play dough—but I don’t bother to say that.

  “Now I want you to feel comfortable talking about anything, okay? This is your chance to really get stuff off your chest.”

  I don’t have anything on my chest. I put my head on my arms and look out the window.

  “Tough crowd,” says Uncle Donny.

  I remember Mama and me in the car singing Princess Jasmine and how Mama always sings the harmony parts because she knows they don’t stick in my head. Uncle Donny does not play any music.

  We pull into a parking lot. I thought we were going to go back to the hospital where Dr. Pearlman works, but instead we are in front of a brick building that looks like someone’s house. But outside there’s a sign, so I know it’s a store.

  “Whelp, end of the line,” says Uncle Donny. I don’t say anything, because I don’t feel like talking. Maybe I’ll never talk again, and my throat will close up. That sounds okay.

  We get out. Uncle Donny puts his big hand on my shoulder as we walk in. Inside there’s a big wooden desk with a pretty red-haired lady sitting behind it.

  “Hi,” says Uncle Donny. “Uh, Scott? The first name is—well, it’s spelled A-O-I-F-E.”

  “EE-fah,” I say.

  “Oh, yes! You have an appointment for ten o’clock. Dr. Pearlman is just running a few minutes behind, if you don’t mind taking a seat. There’s coffee in the corner and juice for your daughter.”

  “He’s not my dad,” I say.

  The girl looks at us. “Ah, sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” she says to Uncle Donny, not to me.

  “Of course, no problem. C’mon, kiddo,” says Uncle Donny, putting his hand back on my shoulder and pushing me towards the juice.

  “Look, there’s lots of books for you,” he says, pointing to a low table that’s just for kids. There are lots of books in bright colors, but they just remind me of the books in Mr. Rutledge’s house, with Ned Slater’s name in them. That’s as far as I’ve gotten solving the mystery, and I don’t even know what it means. So I don’t want to read any books today.

  “Can I have juice?” I say instead, but I don’t say please like you’re supposed to.

  Uncle Donny squeezes my shoulder and then lets go. “Sure thing,” he says, and he goes over to pour some for me.

  I pick up a book with a bear on the front and open it to the middle, where the baby bear has gotten lost and is trying to find his den in the woods. If Uncle Donny is right, and the saints aren’t real, then Ned Slater doesn’t matter to bringing Mama home anyway. It doesn’t matter why Mr. Rutledge has all his things in the room with the rocket-ship bed.

  “Uh, Miss Scott?” calls the pretty lady. “Dr. Pearlman is ready for you. Right through there.”

  Uncle Donny brings the juice and leads the way down a hallway with ugly carpeting. I put the book under my arm and bring it with us. Nobody tells me I can’t. Dr. Pearlman comes to the door and waves to me. She’s still wearing big round earrings, just like the last time I saw her, but no necklace this time. She still looks like a bird. Maybe those earrings are her eggs.

  “Dr. Pearlman, hi, good to see you again,” says Uncle Donny, holding the cup out to me so he can shake her hand. But I don’t take it, and he frowns at me and carries it into the office and puts in on the desk.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” says Dr. Pearlman. “Do you remember me from the hospital?”

  I don’t like to think about the hospital, because it reminds me that Mama is still gone. “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ve heard you had an exciting couple of days since then,” says Dr. Pearlman.

  “I guess.”

  “And you had a pretty big adventure all by yourself?”

  I nod yes.

  “I’d like to talk to you about that for a little bit, if that would be okay with you. Would you like your uncle Donny to stay? Or it can be just us girls if you’d rather.”

  “Yeah, I don’t mind either way, Aoife,” says Uncle Donny.

  “Uncle Donny can stay,” I say. “I don’t care.”

  The back of the bear book does not have any names in it. It is not like the books in Mr. Rutledge’s house.

  “Okay.” Dr. Pearlman takes a notepad out of her drawer and sets it on the desk in front of her. “So, Eva, your uncle Donny says you’ve been having some trouble lately. I’d like to ask you a few questions to see if we can help you feel better.”

  My trouble is that I still need to figure out how to bring Mama home, and I don’t know how. Especially if Uncle Donny is right about the saints.

  “Eva, how do you feel when you think about the day when your mommy went to the hospital?”

  “I don’t like to think about it,” I say, which is true.

  “Okay. That makes sense. I bet it was pretty scary, huh? Maybe it makes you feel sad?”

  I guess. I don’t want to remember. If you don’t think about things, sometimes they go away.

  “Sometimes when things are scary or sad, people can feel like it’s hard to concentrate afterwards, or they keep feeling sad or scared after it’s over. They can even have trouble sleeping. That’s okay that’s a normal way to feel.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I just keep nodding. I want to go home. “Okay,” I say. I miss Teddy. He would be doing something fun to make me laugh.

  “You know, nobody here would be mad at you if you said you were still feeling sad or scared.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I just want Mama to come back.”

  Dr. Pearlman makes a sad face. “I know you do, sweetheart. You know, I hear you’ve had some other big changes lately, too. You had a conversation with a friend of your mom’s, Mac?”

  Does she mean the trip to the zoo? That feels like a long time ago, but I nod anyway. Who cares about that?

  “And I understand Mac told you something important?”

  I wonder if Dr. Pearlman is talking about the dad part of it, which is not really very important compared to trying to figure out if he might have killed Theo. But I don’t think she knows about me investigat
ing the case, and I don’t want to tell her. “He told me he’s my father,” I guess.

  Dr. Pearlman is nodding, so I know I guessed right. “Wow!” she says, even though she must have already known what he said. I think her and Uncle Donny have been talking. “That is big news. And how did you feel when he said that?”

  I can’t actually remember. “No special way, I guess,” I say.

  “No? How do you feel about it now?”

  I don’t want to say I don’t care, because that sounds mean. “Happy?” I ask. “Although …” I shouldn’t keep talking. I don’t want to talk about any of this.

  “Although what?” asks Dr. Pearlman.

  I look at her kind eyes. “I don’t really understand why Mama lied,” I say. “Mama said she found me in a cabbage patch. Mama always says that.”

  “Aoife, maybe that’s something you should talk about with your ma when she gets home, because I know she would want to discuss that with you herself,” says Uncle Donny.

  “It’s all right,” Dr. Pearlman tells him. “Eva, sometimes grown-ups say things, and they don’t mean they’re literally true. Do you know what literally means?”

  I shake my head no.

  “For example, when someone says, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat an elephant.’ Now, they don’t mean they would actually eat an elephant, do they? They just mean they feel as if they could, in their imagination. So sometimes when adults say things, they may be explaining how something feels, but not how it really truly happened.”

  “That’s stupid,” I say.

  “Aoife, be polite,” says Uncle Donny.

  “Sorry.” I’m not really sorry.

  “It’s okay to be upset, Eva,” says Dr. Pearlman.

  “It’s EE-fah,” I say. “Fah, fah, with an f.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Uncle Donny. “It’s been a really long week.”

  “That’s okay, that’s fine. Thank you for telling me, Aoife. Am I saying it right now?”

  She is, pretty much. But I’m still mad. I nod, but I don’t look at Dr. Pearlman. I look at the book in my lap. The pages are curling.

  “She was asking—in the car on the way home—if her ma was, you know, gone away like Theo,” Uncle Donny butted in.

  That was private, I think. If I had wanted to ask Dr. Pearlman about Theo, I would have asked her! “No I didn’t,” I say.

  “She did,” says Uncle Donny.

  Dr. Pearlman sighs. “Sweetheart, I know it’s scary that your mommy had to go away. But just like I told you at the hospital, my friends there are going to do everything they can to help her so she can be less confused. I know it’s hard to understand, but what you really need to remember is that your mommy loves you very, very much and she wants to get better so she can come home and be with you. Okay?”

  But I’m pretty sure Mama won’t come home until I’m not confused anymore.

  Dr. Pearlman seems sad. The corners of her eyes are turned down. “Do you remember your brother well?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “But you remember that one day he went away,” she says.

  “I think she would have been too young to remember,” says Uncle Donny, but I am already nodding. I remember Mama crying, and explaining that Theo was gone away to a place where he couldn’t come back.

  It was a sad day.

  “I do remember,” I say. I remember that night we went to church and said a special prayer for Theo’s soul. Mama lit two candles because one wasn’t enough.

  “She was only four,” Uncle Donny says.

  “Actually, studies suggest that children Aoife’s age can retain very early memories, even though most adults don’t clearly remember much before eight years of age.”

  And I do remember some things.

  I run my thumb along the edge of the bear book,

  “And by the way, how’s Teddy doing?” asks Dr. Pearlman, smiling.

  But I don’t want to talk about Teddy, ever again. Teddy went away when I needed him, and he still hasn’t come back. “Teddy’s just made-up,” I say.

  If grown-ups can lie, then I can, too.

  I can feel Dr. Pearlman and Uncle Donny looking at each other, and I hate it.

  “I’m really sorry if I made you feel like it’s not okay to talk about Teddy, kiddo,” says Uncle Donny finally. “You can talk about him if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him. He’s just pretend. I made him up because I wanted a special friend,” I say.

  “Sweetheart, however you’re feeling right now is okay,” says Dr. Pearlman. “Nobody is going to get angry with you or try to tell you that you’re wrong. I promise.”

  But Dr. Pearlman already said that sometimes when adults say things, they don’t really mean them. That’s why Mama said I was born in a cabbage patch, and why she said she would be home soon, even though neither of those things were true. So maybe Dr. Pearlman isn’t telling the truth either—maybe she’s just saying how she feels.

  “I guess that brings us to two nights ago. Can you tell me what happened that night?” asks Dr. Pearlman.

  I have to think fast.

  “I was having a dream about … cats,” I say. “I was following a cat, and we walked around the neighborhood. But then I woke up by the church and I was scared.”

  “Sleepwalking runs in the family,” says Uncle Donny, rubbing his forehead.

  “Sometimes a change of routine can be a trigger, particularly if a child isn’t getting enough sleep. Are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. Mostly because Uncle Donny wakes me up.

  “I know it can be scary to wake up and not know where you are. But there are techniques your family can use to make sure you don’t accidentally leave the house again, okay? I’m going to work with you all to make sure you stay safe. I don’t want you to worry about that happening a second time.”

  I’m not really all that worried, but I say okay anyway.

  Dr. Pearlman is talking to Uncle Donny, but I’m not listening anymore. I am thinking about what she said, that sometimes grown-ups only say what they feel like. That is not real. What you feel like is only a lie.

  The only things that are real are what you can see and hear. I am real. Uncle Donny is real. Teddy is real.

  Maybe when Uncle Donny said the saints aren’t real, he meant they’re not literally real life. They are just explaining how something feels. But I remember standing at the base of Mr. Rutledge’s stairs, afraid to run. I remember the saints cheering me on, and then I could be brave. And they told me how to bring Mama home. If I don’t believe in them, then how am I supposed to see her again?

  I saw them myself. And I heard them in the church and I saw them at the Secret Place. And they took me to Mr. Rutledge’s house, but I still don’t understand why.

  “Aoife, honey, do you understand?” says Dr. Pearlman.

  “Yes,” I say.

  And Ned Slater was real, too. I saw a picture of him. I held his book. I slept in his bed.

  Dr. Pearlman talks more, and I look down at my hands. I have a splinter under my thumb because of Mr. Rutledge’s firework that he threw at me. And the bottom of my feet still hurt in my shoes.

  There is only one person I could ask about Ned Slater, but I am afraid.

  “So Aoife, do you think you can be patient a little longer?” asks Uncle Donny.

  No, I can’t be patient. Mama is counting on me. And that is not just how I feel, but it is literally true.

  But I still say “Yes,” because I can lie, too.

  * * *

  So that evening after dinner, when Uncle Donny is inside doing math problems and I’m supposed to be drawing on the steps with chalk, I walk out to the end of the street.

  The kitty from next door is sitting in the lawn, watching me. The sight of her makes me think about Teddy. I don’t know if I’m ever going to watch him catch fireflies again.

  It’s quiet out here.

  Kitty and I walk together to the co
rner where I’m not supposed to go to.

  “Do you think he’ll come?” I ask the kitty. She flicks her tail at me. I don’t know if that means yes or no.

  I’m waiting long enough that I think Uncle Donny is going to realize I left the steps. But then I can hear the jingling of a small dog on a long leash. It makes me shudder, because the last time I heard that sound I almost got caught in the garage. But I know how to be brave now. I don’t run away. I wait.

  Mr. Rutledge comes around the corner with Roo. When he sees me, he crosses to the other side of the street. He doesn’t look over again, just keeps walking.

  I remember how angry he sounded when he was yelling, You piece of shit. I remember how he threw that firework in the garage, and it knocked splinters out of the door.

  But I have to do it. For Mama.

  I cross the street to catch up to him and take a deep breath. “Excuse me,” I say. My voice comes out soft, and he doesn’t hear me. I clear my throat. “Excuse me, Mr. Rutledge.”

  Mr. Rutledge ignores me. He keeps walking, and Roo pulls on the end of his leash to come and sniff at my shoes. I can’t feel a thing below my knees.

  “Hello, Mr. Rutledge, I’m Aoife Scott, and I’m sorry but I really need to talk to you.” I can’t even believe I got that out all the way.

  He sniffs but keeps walking, so I walk next to him.

  “I need to ask you—”

  “What you need to do, little girl, is go home and not bother me.”

  He must still be mad about the other day. “I’m really sorry I broke into your house,” I say, because it’s good to apologize if somebody is mad at you, especially if you need to ask them something.

  “What?” Mr. Rutledge stops walking. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The other day,” I say. “When I broke into your house. I’m very sorry. So can I ask you a question now?” Because I need to ask about Ned Slater.