Only Child
Page 18
Mommy did a laugh, but like a mean laugh. “No, WE can’t give it some time. That’s the point—I don’t want to keep it private. We shouldn’t keep it private. And I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass if your mother agrees or not.”
“It’s not about my mother,” Daddy said. “She was only bringing to my attention what people are saying.”
“People. What people? No one’s going to care about this anymore in a few weeks, Jim! Life’s going to go on, and we’ll be left here, with our lives in shambles, and people are not even going to care anymore then. Don’t you get that? And then it will be too late to try to talk about it!” Mommy’s words were coming out very fast. “I know you’re worried about what it looks like,” Mommy said, and she changed her voice when she said, “looks like,” sort of made it deeper. “Me going in front of the cameras and letting it all hang out, right? But frankly, I don’t give a shit about that anymore, Jim. I honestly don’t give a shit.”
“Please don’t be ridiculous. It has nothing to do with that,” Daddy said.
“It has everything to do with that! I’m tired of putting on a show! I’m so goddamn tired of it. And none of it matters anymore. Can’t you see that?”
“Jesus Christ, Melissa, we’re all hanging on by the skin of our teeth. We need to think about Zach. You saw how Zach reacted at the interview. It wasn’t right to have him there, to do it in the first place. I told you that.” Daddy talked more quietly now, but Mommy did not.
“That must have been embarrassing for you, right? To have him act out that way in front of people? Andy 2.0. And in front of cameras? Well, they ended up not showing that part, so what are you worried about?”
“That’s really not fair,” Daddy said. “That’s not what I’m worried about at all. He is so upset. I’ve never seen him act like this before. And the nightmares and bed-wetting…”
“He lost his brother, for crying out loud,” Mommy yelled. “Of course you’ve never seen him act like this! We’re all trying to deal with our feelings here, the best we can.”
“I know that. But do you know what he just asked me downstairs? If you wished that he had died instead of Andy,” Daddy said. I got tears in my eyes again when I heard that.
Mommy was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I…we had a bad moment downstairs earlier. He gets so angry all the time, and it’s a lot for me to handle on my own. I’m suffering, too. Everyone seems to like to forget that.”
“I know you are, Melissa. And I wish you would accept some help. But when you just disappeared yesterday…Zach thought it was his fault, that he did something wrong.”
“When. I. just. disappeared?” Mommy said every word with a space in between, and she sounded very mad. The way her voice sounded gave me goose bumps on the back of my neck. “Are you serious right now? When I just disappeared? That’s really great, that’s great. YOU are the one who ran back to work the first chance you got. You’re as absent as ever. I’m not disappearing. I am here. I am always here. I dealt with all of it, all the hard stuff. With Andy…that was all on me. So don’t you dare talk to me about disappearing!” Mommy yelled the last part very loud.
“You made it that way! And you chose to be here,” Daddy yelled back. “There was no place for me in any of it!”
“That’s bullshit and we both know it. You wanted him conveniently medicated so we wouldn’t have to deal.”
“I never said that. I never fucking said that. That wasn’t my idea. It’s what the doctor said, the doctor that YOU wanted him to see so badly. You wanted him to see this doctor. He tells us what to do, and then you don’t want to do what he says. It was all up to you. It was all your decision. You called the shots, and I had no chance to participate whatsoever!”
Mommy made a snorting sound. “The sad part is that you actually believe that. You wanted to participate, but I didn’t let you? I suppose it’s my fault that you went out and fucked around, too?” Daddy started to say something, but Mommy interrupted. “Please, I’m not stupid, Jim. I know something’s been going on. You can stop lying now.”
It was quiet in the bedroom for a while after Mommy said that.
Then Mommy started talking again. “You didn’t want to deal with…this. You didn’t want to deal with Andy’s shit. A son with ODD wasn’t part of the plan. You left me completely alone with it. How was not being here ever an option for me? And now…now…I’m still alone with all of it—Zach…I know he is struggling. Do you think I don’t know that? I’m trying—” Mommy stopped talking, and I could tell she had started to cry. I heard her crying sounds.
“Melissa, can I please…?” Daddy said very quietly.
“No! Don’t. Just…don’t.” Mommy squeezed out her words in between crying sounds. “I don’t know how to live like this, OK, Jim? How do I live like this? I need to do this thing, I need justice.”
“How can we get justice?” Daddy asked. It sounded a little bit like when he talked to me in the closet and he was petting my back after I had the bad dream about Andy and it made me calm down.
But Mommy didn’t calm down. Her voice got louder again, and her crying sounds got louder, too. “For Andy. I can’t just do nothing, let them get away with it. If I don’t do this, then I don’t know how to live anymore.”
“Going on a wild rampage for revenge isn’t going to bring him back—” Daddy started to say, and Mommy interrupted him.
“Wild rampage for revenge? Wild rampage for revenge? What the fuck?” she screamed.
I tried to cover my ears—they were hurting from all the screaming and all the bad words. My whole head hurt.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Daddy said.
“Yes, you did!” Mommy screamed. “You! So composed all the time, right? Don’t show your emotions, or better yet, don’t have any, right? How do you do that? I don’t see you cry. How is that possible? How are you not crying? It’s not normal!”
Mommy’s sadness I could hear so loud, and I could feel it like it was coming right at me from under the door. But I could hear Daddy’s sadness, too. It wasn’t loud like Mommy’s, it was quiet. Just maybe Mommy couldn’t hear it, because she was being so loud. And Mommy didn’t see Daddy in his car when I saw him after we left her at the hospital, when it looked like the sadness was hurting his whole body and he cried with no sounds.
“You know what, Jim?” Mommy said. “You want a chance to participate? Well, why don’t you take a stab at it for once? I can’t…deal with Zach right now. I don’t have the capacity. I don’t know how. I can’t…give anymore. I just can’t.” Mommy wasn’t screaming now. She sounded tired. After a while she said, “I need to finish packing.”
I heard footsteps come close to the door, so I got up quickly and ran back downstairs. In my head I remembered what Mommy said at the end of the fight: “I can’t deal with Zach right now,” and when I got back in the kitchen I gave the barstool a hard kick.
[ 33 ]
An Impossible Life to Live
IN THE MORNING, Mommy’s side of the bed was still made, and Daddy wasn’t in the bed either. I went in my room and looked out the window. Daddy’s Audi wasn’t in the driveway, so he already went to work.
There was no more snow after the one day when Daddy and I had milkshakes at the diner, but also no more rain. It just stayed really cold. I could see the white from the coldness on top of the grass and the cars. I touched the window with my hand, and the cold glass made me do a shiver with my whole body.
When I went downstairs, I heard the TV was on in the family room and I saw Mimi sitting on the couch. “Is Mommy on the TV?” I asked, and Mimi turned around to me fast because I surprised her.
“Not yet, sweetie. Good morning,” Mimi said, and she picked up the remote and turned off the TV.
“Can I watch with you?” I sat down on the couch next to Mimi.
“Oh, um, I don’t th
ink so, sweetie. I’m not sure…” Mimi was still looking at the turned-off TV.
“But I want to see Mommy,” I said, and I felt the mad feeling starting out in my stomach. Then I yelled at Mimi: “I want to see Mommy on the TV!”
“Zach, honey, please don’t get upset. I…I don’t know if Mommy would want you to watch—” Mimi said.
I interrupted her and I said a lie to her: “Mommy promised me that I could watch it, so you can’t break her promise.”
“She did? I didn’t talk to her about it, so…OK, well, I think she’s about to…” Mimi picked up the remote again and turned the TV back on.
A man with very shiny black hair was sitting in the middle of a long red couch in between two women. He said, “Just over a month has passed since the horrific McKinley shooting. While we and our nation as a whole are still trying to come to grips with a tragedy of this magnitude, we continue to remember the nineteen families that are dealing with a loss that is impossible to imagine.” The two women on the couch made sad faces. “Fifteen families in particular, trying to deal with the loss of a young child who was taken away from them in such a violent way.”
The man turned to the side and talked to the one woman on the couch. “Jennifer, few of the families have come forward to speak about their loss, but you spoke to a handful of them in the last couple of weeks. Earlier this morning you had the chance to sit down and speak to one of the mothers, Melissa Taylor, who lost her ten-year-old son Andy in the McKinley shooting.”
“Yes, Rupert,” the woman Jennifer answered. “It’s really heart-wrenching to see firsthand what these families are going through. They are trying to find ways to cope with their loss, day in and day out, and they hope to find comfort in the memories they have of their children. Especially now, with the holidays right around the corner, you know, they are often just trying to go through the motions for…the other kids in the family sometimes, the siblings.”
The man Rupert and the other woman shook their heads yes.
“The Taylors are one of the families, like you said, Rupert. They lost their son Andy on that tragic day in Wake Gardens. Andy was in fifth grade—ten years old—and he was in the auditorium for an assembly when the shooter entered the school. As you probably know, the school’s auditorium was the first place where the shooter opened fire and where most of the victims lost their lives. Andy’s mother, Melissa Taylor, kindly agreed to speak with me this morning. She gave me a very moving and, as you can imagine, emotional insight into her and her family’s ordeal. Take a look with me.”
Then the TV switched away from the man and the women on the couch and all of a sudden there was Mommy. She looked different. Her hair didn’t look normal, it was bigger on the top of her head, and she had on a lot of makeup that made her face different. She was wearing a red jacket and skirt that I never saw before, and she sat in a big brown chair that made her look smaller. She looked like she was the girl from “The Three Bears” and she was sitting in the wrong chair, the Daddy or the Mommy Bear’s chair, because it was too big for her. It was strange to see Mommy on the TV. I was here, in our house, on our couch, and Mommy was inside the TV like she was not a real person in the real world.
The woman Jennifer sat in a big brown chair, too, a little bit away from Mommy, and there was a table in between them with tissues on it and two cups.
“Mrs. Taylor, your son Andy was one of the fifteen children whose lives were taken on that terrible day in Wake Gardens. Thank you for being here today and agreeing to share your family’s story and your memories of Andy with us.”
On the TV, the picture switched from Mommy and Jennifer to a picture of Andy, the one from the field day where he has his silly face and it looks like he’s about to jump off the screen. But I could still hear Mommy’s voice: “Andy was a force of nature. He was incredibly smart and he had all this energy. He was this big ball of energy, you know?” It sounded like Mommy was crying.
“He turned ten, a few weeks before…he died. I wanted to have a party at our house like we always did, but he didn’t want a party. He said he was getting too old….” Mommy’s voice went up very high, it sounded squeaky, and the TV switched back to her, and her face was big on the screen. I could see the tears coming out of her eyes, and some black from the makeup was on her cheeks.
Mommy wiped her eyes with a tissue, and then she talked again. “Andy said he was getting too old for parties now. Now that he was ‘double digits,’ he loved saying that. So he wanted to invite a few friends to do something special. And we did, we went to this go-kart racing track and he had a blast. But I wish…I wish we had had a big party for him for…one last time….”
I heard a sound next to me. It was Mimi crying. She was staring at the TV, and her whole face looked crumpled up with wrinkles.
“How are you and your family coping with your loss? You and your husband? And I know you have another son, Zach, who is six,” the woman Jennifer said. My face started to feel hot when she said my name.
“I think all you can do is try to take it one day at a time,” Mommy said, and she moved forward in the big chair and held on to the tissue with both of her hands. “Because…you have to, you’ve got no choice but to.” More tears were running down her face, but she didn’t use the tissue to wipe them off. She just let them drip down.
“I mean, every morning you think, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can make it through this day, but then you do somehow because you have another child who needs you. And you do it again the next day and the next. Every day that passes is one day more that I haven’t held my son, that I haven’t seen my son, that I haven’t seen his beautiful face and his smile. The gap between when I was last with him and now keeps getting bigger, and I can’t stop it from happening. I want to pause time, stay as close to him as I can. Because this…this…” Mommy made a pause and her hands in her lap were shaking a lot. “This is the closest I’m ever going to be to my son again. I can’t bear waking up in the morning and feeling that the gap has gotten even bigger. That my son has slipped away from me even further.”
Mommy picked up her tissue and blew her nose. “My life without my son is an impossible life to live, but I have to live it and keep living it every day.” Mommy’s last words came out like big choking sounds, and the woman Jennifer leaned over from her big brown chair and she gave another tissue to Mommy, and then she petted Mommy’s hand.
Mimi made an “Oh” sound and covered her face with her hands.
The TV switched to a picture of Mommy, but farther away, and she wasn’t crying anymore, weird, like you blinked and she just stopped.
The woman Jennifer said, “Mrs. Taylor, you and a few of the other victims’ families have come together and you are beginning to come forward to voice your anger about this tragic event that you believe might have been avoidable. Could you tell me more about that?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Mommy said. “I…we…don’t believe that we can move on without…if the people we think are responsible are not being held accountable.” Mommy talked fast, and I watched her hands mushing the tissue like it was a ball of Play-Doh.
“When you say ‘the people we think are responsible,’ you mean…,” Jennifer said.
“The shooter’s family. His parents,” Mommy said. Now she said the thing about Charlie and his wife, and she said it on the TV. Everyone was going to hear it, and probably even Charlie was seeing it on his TV right now.
“So you feel that Charles Ranalez’s parents should be held accountable for what their son did? Do you think they are partially to blame?” Jennifer asked.
“Oh, I think they’re more than partially to blame,” Mommy said. Her voice sounded loud all of a sudden. Mimi closed her eyes and let out her breath long and slow. I felt like I wanted to close my eyes, too. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like how Mommy was talking, and I kind of wanted to stop watching.
Mimi stood up and pointed the remote at the TV and turned the volume all the way down. “OK, Zach, I think that’s enough,” she said.
I was still looking at the TV, and I saw Mommy talking for a little while longer, and the woman Jennifer said something a couple more times, and then the picture went back to the man and the woman Jennifer and the other woman on the couch. They were all talking, I could tell by their lips moving, and they shook their heads a lot, yes and no.
“Let’s get you some breakfast, sweetie, OK?” Mimi said, and she turned off the TV. I followed her into the kitchen and watched her make me eggs. The whole time I had a hurting feeling in my belly, a bad feeling, and then I realized it was an embarrassed feeling. But it wasn’t embarrassed about me. It was embarrassed about Mommy.
[ 34 ]
Sympathy
THE DOOR OPENED and I knew it was going to be Daddy. When I peeked through the handsome shirts and jackets, I saw a hand swinging a bag of cookies through the crack in the door. Then the bag started talking to me: “Hello, I wanted to see if you might be interested in eating me, young man.” It was really Daddy making a funny high voice, and I answered in a funny voice, “Yes, I would be very interested in eating you, thank you!” I leaned forward and snatched the bag out of Daddy’s hand.
The closet door opened all the way and Daddy smiled at me and asked, “In the mood for sharing? Cookies and space?” and I told him yes, so he came crawling in.
“Next time you have to bring your own sleeping bag or like a blanket or something. This one is too small for two people,” I told Daddy.