“Let’s go sit down, children, and I’ll tell you about Mr. Dupree.”
I’ve seen enough daytime talk shows to know there isn’t much you can say to a grieving person. No amount of telling them Hey, I know what you’re going through, it will get better, and time heals all wounds will help. But for some reason, people still hang on to these sentences like emotional life preservers. Someone should toss them in the trash. They are worn out. I don’t say anything, let Mrs. Dupree talk.
“I don’t want you to feel low because of my loss,” she says. “I just wish Mr. Dupree was here, you know.”
Then her tears overcome her face and there is quietness for a long, long time. I know about loss, I could say, even though I know it wouldn’t help. I have felt low already, so anything you say will only make me nod and think, yes, I know. I lost someone, too. We could form a club.
For example, I wonder at all the ways me and Simon would be alike. I guess at the things he’d enjoy, so I can do them instead since he didn’t get the chance, like when I was on a soccer team.
There are a few pictures of the two of us I stare at. I don’t know how, but someday I will take one of his pictures to a crime lab. Let them do that age-progression thing like they do for junk-mail-envelope missing children so you can see what they’d look like today. Wouldn’t I love to see what Simon would look like at twelve? Yes, I would.
Mrs. Dupree’s face is wet now with more tears, and she just lets them fall right onto the plastic mat on her kitchen table, then runs her finger through a puddle of them as she explains about her husband’s death. Pretty soon, Mrs. Dupree has memories to spare of the man she spent more than forty years with. And she doesn’t mind sharing them right here and now. She is a book determined to be read.
“Not only could he do wonderful woodworking projects,” she goes on, “but he could make pens. Did I tell you that? He made pens out of fine pink wood, and he would give them as presents for Christmas.”
“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as pink wood,” I say.
“Are you sure you don’t want another apple, dear?” she asks, touching the top of my hand with hers. The difference in our two hands is like fire and ice. She has lived the life of someone who has worked hard, and my hands have done nothing. She’s traveled, and I’ve stayed home all my life. I hope my hands are like hers someday. Mapped and interesting.
“No, thanks,” I say.
“What about your friend? Would you like more, young man?” she asks.
“No. Thanks.”
The kitchen fills up with words not being said. They float about us. Bubble thoughts waiting to be assigned to a head. I am used to having questions I can’t ask from living with my father. Only now, it feels good to be silent. My grandmother would say we are bathing in the silence. I like that idea. I pretend we are washing off the misery of Mrs. Dupree’s grief and reporters interrupting The Price Is Right with bad news. We sit there and listen to the apple wall clock tick, tick, tick.
After a thousand ticks, Finn says, “Mrs. Dupree, is there anything I can do for you around the house? Do you need something moved, fixed?” The way Finn ends his sentence is so full of help.
“Oh, aren’t you a dear. My son is coming this weekend,” Mrs. Dupree says. “There’s not much to do. It all just happened. I rolled over and he was gone. And then, you just call the authorities and they take him away. Our arrangements had all been made years ago. All I have to do is decide what to wear. It should be harder than that, don’t you think? To take care of someone who has died? There should be more.” She is weeping again, so I take hold of her hand. It’s all I can think to do.
“I lost my father a few years back,” Finn says, “and it was hard.” I kick him under the table for saying the exact wrong thing, comparing one death to another.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says.
Finn gives me a scolded-dog look so I know he gets my meaning.
I scan the dim house for family pictures. The best way to have a friend is to ask them about themselves. A picture might give me a good starting point. Mrs. Dupree pulls her hand away from me and begins smoothing out the place mat, which is already smooth as can be. I notice a beautiful diamond band across her ring finger. It looks like it was just born. Shiny and new.
“Is that your wedding ring?” I ask.
She regards her hands, looking at them as if she is just this minute aware they are attached to her. “Oh my, this? Yes, dear.” She slides it off then, easy as you please, and extends it to me.
She explains how there is a pattern of three diamonds, a ruby, three diamonds, a ruby. How Mr. Dupree wanted rubies because she looked so pretty in red. And diamonds, of course, because he thought she was sparkling. A thin silver band was all he could afford when they were first wed, and then he gave her ten roses on their tenth wedding anniversary, handing them to her one at a time, the last rose bearing the new ring. It’s about the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Would you two care for another apple?” she asks again. Well, this time it just wouldn’t be polite to say no. And instead of silence, the three of us listen to the sharp, crisp sound of three people eating apples. We sit this way until Charlotte’s voice can be heard shouting out in the cul-de-sac. I get to Mrs. Dupree’s window fast and see her standing in the center of the street, screaming my name. Well, if that isn’t embarrassing. Finn and I step outside and wave to her.
“We’re over here with Mrs. Dupree,” I tell her.
“I can’t believe you guys just left,” she says angrily. “Your father is not paying me enough to worry about where you disappeared to.” She says more about me needing to call him right away and what were you thinking, Finn, taking her out without even leaving a note?
There is more to listen to, I am sure, but all I can picture is my father handing Charlotte ten-dollar bills to babysit me. I didn’t know about this. I am so stupid sometimes.
Chapter 24
When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut. This wasn’t because I had any special knowledge about space, which I didn’t. It was because I wanted to see the whole Earth all at once. I saw pictures in a book of what it looked like from space and wanted to see it for myself. A marbled swirl of blue and white. Then I heard an astronaut say he could put his hand up to the space shuttle window and hide a big chunk of the planet behind it. You have to wonder if God does that once in a while just because He can. He might even want to hide certain people just to see what things look like on Earth without them.
Tonight, I would blot out Charlotte and my dad. My dad still thinks I need a babysitter. And I can’t believe she is getting paid to be with me. It is a deep pain I didn’t expect. She is an accessory to the crime.
accessory n.: a person who incites someone to commit a crime or assists the perpetrator of a crime, either before or during its commission
Dad got home from work early. I thought we would talk about the news story, make some kind of plan. I would let it slide that I knew about his undercover babysitting plot. But when he came into the house and put his briefcase on the kitchen counter, he just kissed my head and said, “Let’s not talk about this now.”
Of course that’s what he’d say.
“Did PBroom find out? Did she see the news?” I asked him.
“I have no idea,” he said. “We’ll just wait and see.” Wait and see means stop talking about this, Sarah, and change the subject.
“We went to check on Mrs. Dupree and found out about her dead husband,” I said. “It’s very sad.”
“He was a nice man,” Dad replies.
Dad tried to pretend life was normal, like there weren’t a thousand and one things to talk about. He’d finally remembered to bring home pork chops, which turned out awful because we have the worst kitchen stove in the history of kitchen stoves. The top is slanted to the left side, so you have to pay attention all the time and turn your food around constantly. The oil slides to one side and the meat gets browned there, black on the other side if
you aren’t watching it, which is what happened to me. We had to eat half-brown, half-burned pork chops.
After dinner, I attempted to get another conversation going.
“Do you think a reporter will call us?”
“You don’t need to worry about this.”
“There are things I need to know, like are we going to move?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
He went into his office like he always does and closed the door.
I sat outside and eavesdropped while he called Grandma and Gramps. There wasn’t much I could write in my notebook, just a lot of Mmm-hmmms. Maybe he is getting so much better it doesn’t bother him. No, that is probably not it. The less he talks, the more bothered he is.
So the way I see it, I was in my right to do what I did. There are ways to make a person talk.
I have ways.
First, I went to the garage, took his Jim Beam bottle and started to pour it into Plant. Then I realized I was killing her, which just shows how stupid I am. I apologized to her and then emptied the bottle in the toilet. Flush! It is gone.
Then I refilled his bottle with apple juice. Ha! I can’t wait until he finds it all missing. We’ll see how he feels about things getting switched on him without his knowledge. Still, I worry about getting Plant drunk. I am going to stay up all night with her, make sure she is all right. If her leaves are droopy tomorrow, I will Google what to do.
Now my room feels too hot to sleep. My mind is still running in different directions. I hug my blanket to my chest, try to get it to hug me back, but then I am too hot and kick the sheets off. I turn my pillow over, hold on to the cool side, press it against my skin, and try to stop thinking about how every person in Garland knows our secret. Jimmy Leighton and even Mr. Wistler. I cram my head into the pillow, but it is no use.
So I think of the only thing I can do now. I pop out the window screen, slip into the yard, taking Plant with me. A sliver of light from the full moon stripes the yard, and I follow it outside. It’s warm out, but the air smells sharp, like newly cut grass, and I think, Why don’t I ever sleep outside?
I place Plant on the grass and lie down in the front yard, stretching out into a summer snow angel. The sky is clear and open. Time to switch off the mind like a light. Mine is the only one still on, still running in a loop. A dog barks a couple of blocks over. I like his sound. Even and sure. It’s constant and doesn’t change, almost like a recording.
I wonder if Dad would let me get a dog. A medium-sized one would be fine. Not so big as to knock you down when you come home. A furry little thing to tell all my secrets to. But then, there are no real secrets. Not when the biggest thing can interrupt The Price Is Right and expose you in front of a linguistics student. There is no magazine article on the planet with advice on this particular kind of catastrophe.
A small clicking sound interrupts my thoughts. I think it’s a bird, but no, it is a man in front of Charlotte’s house. I can tell it’s you-know-who by the way his shoulders are sloped forward and the clomp, clomp, clomp of his stupid boots. I wonder why I didn’t hear his car drive up. He’s throwing something at the window, reaching into his pockets and doing it again and again. Her light finally comes on. I flatten myself out in the grass so he won’t see me. Charlotte slides her window up. It is so quiet I can hear their whispery voices. It’s like I’m on a stakeout, gathering evidence.
“What are you doing?”
“You told me to come over and to be quiet.”
“You couldn’t use the front door?”
“I thought it might wake someone up.”
“My mother is gone, remember?”
She says come to the front door like a normal person, and he does.
The porch light flashes on, and she slips out onto the steps. They sit on the front step, and he puts his arm around her.
“I wanted to talk about…” she says, but then stops in the middle of her sentence, leaving the mystery hanging there.
I am still and frozen, desperate to know what they are talking about now. But they are not talking. The sounds coming from her porch are of gum smacking, but would they be chewing gum now? I wish I could watch this up close, see how it’s done. Just hearing the noises without seeing the action is gross.
“No, stop it. Stop it,” I hear Charlotte say.
“Come on,” he says. “Come on.”
I don’t hear Christopher say anything. I lift my head slightly just in time to see him on top of her.
“Christopher!” she says. “No, not now.”
The tone of her voice lets me know she’s in trouble. I wonder if I should do anything, call out. What would investigators do now? They certainly wouldn’t stay pinned to the grass, but here I am. I felt this same way when I was a kid and thought a monster was under my bed, waiting to grab my ankle and pull me under the mattress. My strategy then, as now, was to stay as still and mute as possible. I decide that I will count to twenty and then get up. I will make myself move.
Then, I hear more of her shouts. A loud thump as if someone has fallen to the porch.
I hear the door slam. Then, Finn’s even voice. “Go home.” If I were Christopher, I would be afraid of Finn. But Christopher curses at him, then calls Charlotte a tease and a couple of other words. I turn my head a little. I hear Christopher’s boots clomp down the sidewalk. There is a car door slam. He does a 180 turn in the middle of the cul-de-sac, and headlights spray across our lawn. I pray he keeps going and doesn’t spot me.
Charlotte’s crying and shouting something completely unintelligible at Christopher’s moving car. Whatever she says makes Christopher’s car stop, change gears, and move in reverse.
“You’re going to regret that!” he shouts. His voice is clear as glass.
“Get out of here!” Finn shouts.
The sound of something hard crashing against metal rings out, and Christopher’s car zooms away. I prop myself up on my elbows and catch Finn beaning rocks into Christopher’s car fender.
I wish I could see Charlotte’s expression. There is so much more being said in her eyes than any words would say. She goes inside and Finn stands alone on the sidewalk. There is a moon shadow of his body on the ground. I screw up my courage and do my best to whisper and shout at once.
“Finn!”
“Sarah?”
“Over here.” I’ve broken my cover, but it is okay.
He turns and walks toward me.
“What happened?” I ask him.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Staring at the moon and wishing I was there.”
He sits down on the grass next to me. I lie back and so does he.
“You can blot out the entire moon with one thumb.” I show him how it’s done, and he does it, too. “And from a distance, you can blot out an entire person.”
“Is that wishful thinking, too?”
I give him a smile as my answer even though he can’t see it in the dark. The cool night air washes over us, and suddenly Garland doesn’t seem like a dull, drab town where nothing interesting ever happens.
“Sarah!”
Dad’s voice is filled with anger. His breath probably smells of apple juice. Ha-ha! I picture his puzzled face as he realizes he’d been tricked.
I hide the moon behind my thumb. If I could be on the moon and blot out the entire world, I would.
Dad shouts, “Sarah, where are you?”
Finn asks, “Are you going to answer him?”
“I hate him. He drinks too much because of her. He’s so immature.”
“Sarah!”
“Plus, I can’t hear him because I’m pretending to be in space.” And we lie there looking at the stars. Finn’s phone goes off. That beep that tells you a message is incoming. He looks at it, stuffs it back in his pocket. I hope my father didn’t hear it.
“Who is that?”
“This girl.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“You like her?”<
br />
“I guess. She’s smart.”
Ha! I can be smart, too.
His phone goes off again, but this time he turns it off.
“Sarah! You better answer me!”
“Should you go in?” Finn wants to know.
“I still can’t hear him,” I say. “You can’t hear sound in space like we do on Earth. Sound needs something to travel in, like a gas or solid.”
“Well, thanks for the info.”
I am impressed with myself. “Science fair. Third place.” There it is, proof of my smartness on a shiny white ribbon.
“So how can you hear me?”
“You are in space, too.” But not with that girl and her texts. She must stay on Earth and become stupid while we discover a new galaxy. I will let Finn name it even though it is clear I know more about space than him.
“Fine, stay in your room, then,” my dad calls out.
Fine. I will.
The sky twinkles with dark blue possibility. Diamonds against velvet. Finn rests comfortably next to me as if he wants to be here. My mind records the whole scene, tucks it away safely so I can play the night again and again.
Chapter 25
In the morning, the ceiling fan whirls above me, making a rickety beat that sounds like you’re-going-to-get-it, you’re-going-to-get-it. I turn it off and open the window to the hot, hot air. I don’t want to shut it. I need more room to breathe or possibly a quick way to escape. For all I know, I will be in this pink jail for the rest of my life. He will be angry with me. He’ll have that silent kind of anger, which is the worst. There is no way to enter a person’s mind when he is silent. And of course, it will be my fault. I knew drunk was a trouble word.
When I came inside last night, we’d stood in the narrow hallway, me on one end, him on the other, holding the empty bottle of Jim Beam like we were in a showdown, guns ready to draw.
“What were you doing outside?” he asked. “Why didn’t you come when I called you?”
I used my right to remain silent and waited to hear the smash of glass, see the shatter of a thousand pieces against the wall. There was already a place in the wall that someone else had patched and painted over.
Sure Signs of Crazy Page 11