Mommy was asleep in the bed next to me, and I shook her shoulder a little bit.
“Mommy?” I said. Mommy rolled over and opened her eyes. When she saw me, she smiled and put her hand on my cheek.
“Mommy, did Daddy leave again?” I asked.
“No, sweetie. He’s sleeping on the couch downstairs.” Mommy rolled over and looked at the clock on her nightstand. It said 8:27. “Wow, we slept late. You can go wake up Daddy if you want.”
I went downstairs, and Daddy wasn’t sleeping anymore. He was in the kitchen, reading the newspaper on his iPad.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Daddy said when he saw me. He picked me up and squeezed me tight, and I could smell his breath—it smelled like coffee. “Hey, I want to tell you something, Zach. I am incredibly proud of you, I really am.” I got a warm feeling in my stomach when Daddy said this to me.
“That was a brave thing you did yesterday, do you know that?” Daddy asked.
“I wanted to be brave for once like you and Andy. But it didn’t work. My mission didn’t work,” I said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Daddy said, and he grabbed my chin with his hand and looked at me with a serious face. “And I think you’re brave all the time.”
“Not at Andy’s wake. I acted like a baby then. And when Mommy took me to school I wasn’t brave,” I said.
“Oh, Zach, that had nothing to do with you not being brave. That was…it wasn’t the right time to ask you to go back to school,” Daddy said.
“OK, but, Daddy?” I asked.
“Yes, bud?”
“I think after Christmas I could go back. To school.”
“Yeah? Cool,” Daddy said. “Is Mommy still in bed? Do you want to bring her a cup of coffee?”
“OK,” I said, and Daddy let me put the sugar in Mommy’s coffee and the half-and-half and stir everything up. I tried to carry the cup, but it was very full with coffee and hot, so Daddy took it and we went upstairs together. Mommy did a little smile when Daddy gave her the cup.
“Did you finish the book?” I asked.
“No way. You passed out pretty much right after I started reading. We want to finish it together, right?” Daddy said.
“Can we finish it now?”
“Sure, if it’s OK with Mommy,” he said, and Mommy said, “Well, we need to find out what that last secret is, don’t we? Back to the hideout?”
I put my shoulders up and down. “We can stay in the bed, too. The hideout isn’t working anymore,” I said.
“Oh, but I liked it in there yesterday,” Mommy said. “I would like to finish the book there if you don’t mind.”
So we crawled back in the hideout and sat the same way like yesterday, me leaning against Mommy, and Daddy against the wall. Daddy picked up the book. “What’s the last part you heard?”
“I don’t remember. Just how they were in the ravine,” I said.
“OK, let me see….” Daddy went through the pages. “Chapter seven then, I think.” He started and he read the book all the way to the end. Jack and Annie meet some dancing penguins. There’s a little orphan penguin that Jack names Penny, and Jack and Annie take Penny with them to Camelot, where Merlin lives. They tell the first three secrets of happiness to Merlin and give him Penny. Merlin takes care of Penny and he gets happy again.
Jack and Annie realize that the fourth secret of happiness is to take care of someone who needs you. And Jack thinks it maybe works the other way around, too: “I think sometimes you can make other people happy by letting them take care of you.”
After Daddy got done reading he closed the book and he looked at me and Mommy, and his eyes looked very shiny. No one said anything for a while.
Then Mommy said in a quiet voice, “This is a good one, this secret. What do you think?”
“Yes,” I said. “We could try this one maybe. Me, you, and Daddy. Take care of each other. Right?”
“Yes,” Mommy said.
“Is it going to make us happy again?” I asked.
“Well, I think it could help us feel better,” Daddy said. I saw him look at Mommy behind me and he gave her a little sad smile.
“I think that the way we’ve been trying to deal with…everything, the death of your brother, all separately, instead of together—that wasn’t the right way,” Mommy said.
I leaned forward and looked at the picture on the wall. “I really miss Andy,” I said. “It’s like it hurts my whole insides sometimes.”
“Me too, buddy,” Daddy said.
“I wish I could still feel him in here, but I can’t. Now I’m scared he went away forever.” A big lump came in my throat when I thought about that.
Daddy leaned over and hugged me for a long time. He said with a quiet voice, “Missing Andy—that’s a form of feeling him, though, isn’t it? Don’t you think? Maybe one day it won’t hurt our whole insides anymore, I don’t know. I think we will miss him and we will be thinking about him all the time, our whole lives. That’s always going to be part of…who we are. And that way he’s never gone, he’s always going to be with us and inside us.”
“He’s looking over us from heaven?” I asked.
“Yes, sweetie, he is,” Mommy said.
I touched Andy’s face in the picture with my hand. “And then we will see him in heaven after we die?” I asked.
“I hope so,” Daddy said, and tears ran from his eyes into his beard.
“I think Daddy’s right,” Mommy said. “You’ve been doing the right thing all along, talking to him and about him, keeping him close to you.”
Daddy stretched out his back and wiped the tears off of his face. “We don’t have to hang out in this closet forever though, do we? Because it’s killing my back right now. And I stopped feeling my left butt cheek a while ago.” He poked his finger in the left side of his butt a few times.
“It could be our meeting spot in here,” I said. “Like our clubhouse or something.”
“I like that idea,” Mommy said. “What should we call our club?”
I thought about that for a minute. “Club Andy?” I said.
“Club Andy it is,” Daddy said. “Now let’s go get some breakfast.”
[ 54 ]
Keep On Living
“READY, MOMMY?” I asked, and Mommy stared at the handle of the front door for a little while like she was waiting for the door to open by itself. I looked up at Mommy’s face, and she had her lips pressed together. I grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. Mommy squeezed my hand back, and then she let go of it and opened the door.
A big cold wind came in the house, and Mommy took the two sides of her sweater and pulled it closed in front of her belly. She walked down the porch steps, and the wind blew her hair all around. I walked down the porch steps behind her, and Daddy was behind me. Mommy turned around and looked at us, and her chest went up like she took a big breath in. Then she turned back and went straight to the news van that was still parked in front of our house.
Mommy looked in the front seat of the van, but no one was there, so she knocked on the side of the van. The side door popped open and I could see Dexter and another man coming out of the van. Dexter was holding a plastic container with food in it—rice and chicken, it looked like—in his one hand and a fork in the other hand.
“Oh hey, guys, um…” Dexter looked at the food container in his hand, and then he put it inside the van and wiped his hands on his pants. “Hey, what’s going on?” Dexter asked. He looked at Mommy and then over at me and Daddy. I looked down at my feet because I didn’t want to look at Dexter.
“I would like to give a brief statement,” Mommy said.
“Right now?” the man who came out of the van with Dexter asked.
“Yes,” Mommy said.
“Oh OK, cool. That’s cool,” Dexter said. “Can you give us just a minute
? We didn’t expect…sorry, we were just eating lunch.”
“That’s fine,” Mommy said, and another big wind came blowing up against us and made her hair fly all around again. I could feel the wind go all the way through my clothes and I did a shiver. Daddy put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him.
Dexter and the other man went back inside the van, and Dexter came back out with a camera. It looked like the ones me and him put up in our living room, only smaller, and Dexter pushed some buttons on the side of the camera, and then he put it on his shoulder and looked through the one end of it at Mommy.
“Where do you want to be?” he asked Mommy.
“Oh, I don’t care. Right there is OK,” Mommy said.
“Sure, great,” Dexter said, and then the other man came back out of the van with a microphone in his hand.
“OK, if you’re ready, we can begin,” he said, and he pointed the microphone at Mommy. Mommy looked at Daddy, and Daddy gave her a little smile and shook his head yes. Mommy looked back at the camera.
“This is just a recording, so don’t worry. We can do this a few times if you want,” the man with the microphone said.
“OK,” Mommy said. “Um, so I wanted to say, just briefly, that I have decided to no longer pursue the Ranalezes about…in regards to the shooting. I’ve spoken to the parents of the other victims and we…we agree.” Mommy’s lower lip went up and down like her teeth were clicking together from being cold. She put her sleeves over her hands, and she crossed her arms and tucked her sleeve-hands into her armpits.
“I know I’ve been very outspoken since the shooting committed by their son, and I’ve placed the blame…I blamed them for his actions and for the death of my son Andy.” Mommy did a pause and then she took another big breath and kept talking in the microphone: “I’ve come to realize that further pursuing them, the Ranalezes, is not…it’s not going to bring my son back. It’s not going to undo the terrible thing that happened to me, our family, and the families of the other victims.” Tears started rolling down Mommy’s face.
“What my family is going through—I don’t wish that on anybody. And I…I can now see that the Ranalezes themselves are also faced with loss. They are grieving, like us. They are going through hell, like us.” Mommy looked over at me and did a little smile. I smiled back. I was feeling very proud of Mommy that she was saying these things.
“My very wise son Zach was the one who made me see that. We…our family is going to focus on taking care of each other now and trying to heal, together, and figure out how to keep on living without Andy in our lives. Find some peace. We would like to, in the future, try to figure out ways how we can contribute to…how we can help prevent something like this from happening again, to other families. To help keep guns from ending up in the wrong hands and to help protect our children and loved ones. That’s it…that’s really all I wanted to say.” More tears were running down Mommy’s face, and she wiped them away with her sleeve-hands.
“Thank you,” the man with the microphone said. “I think, I mean that was good the way it was, right? We can keep it like that unless you want to do it again or something?”
“No,” Mommy said, and her voice came out very quiet.
Dexter took the camera off his shoulder and stared at Mommy. “Wow,” he said. “That was big…of you,” he said.
“OK,” Mommy said, and then she turned around and walked over to me and Daddy.
Daddy touched Mommy’s arm and rubbed it up and down. “You all right?” he asked.
“I’m OK,” Mommy said. “Freezing. I just want to go back inside with you guys and close that door behind me. What do you think?”
“I think yes,” I said, and I ran ahead and sprinted up the porch stairs.
[ 55 ]
Still Here with You
DADDY PARKED OUR CAR, but he didn’t turn it off right away. We just sat there, me, Daddy, and Mommy, and no one said anything. My heart was pounding loud in my chest and my ears. I looked out the window and in the almost-dark I saw all the rows of gravestones, and further in the back, on the right side, I saw someone standing.
“Shall we?” Daddy asked, and turned off the car, and I said, “We shall.” Mommy didn’t say anything, but she opened her door and started to get out of the car. I picked up the flowers from the seat next to me, and Daddy opened my car door. When I got out of the car, I saw Charlie’s car parked right in front of ours.
I started to walk up the walkway. The ground was all hard and frozen underneath my shoes, and my breath was making white clouds in the air around me. Daddy and Mommy walked behind me and they were going very slow. I was holding the flowers pressed against my chest, and when I got to Andy’s grave, I put them down on it gently.
Daddy and Mommy got to Andy’s grave, too. Mommy went down on her knees and touched the flowers that I laid down for Andy. Then she took one of her gloves off and put her hand up and her fingers touched Andy’s name on the gravestone.
“Hi, sweet boy,” Mommy whispered. Tears ran down her face, and she let them drip down.
Then she touched the ground on Andy’s grave. “It’s so cold and hard,” she said, and then she put her arms around her belly and made loud crying sounds. Daddy was standing behind Mommy. He put his hands on her shoulders, and I leaned my head against Daddy’s arm. We stayed like that for a long time with Mommy on her knees, crying, and Daddy holding on to her shoulders and me leaning against Daddy.
After a while I looked over to where Charlie’s son’s grave was and I saw Charlie was staring over at us. He didn’t move, he just stood there with his arms hanging down on his sides. From how far away I was from him, he looked like a very old and skinny man.
“Can I go over now?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” Daddy said.
I started to walk to where Charlie was standing when I heard Mommy’s voice behind me: “Wait, Zach.”
I turned back around and Mommy was looking down at the flowers that I laid down on Andy’s grave. They were all white—some with big petals and some with tiny petals that looked like a bunch of snowflakes. All the petals were hanging down and they looked sad. Mommy picked up a few of them and held them in front of her belly for a minute like she was giving them a hug.
“Here, take these…with you. OK?” Mommy said, and she gave me the flowers.
I turned back around and walked over to Charlie. I looked behind me a couple times and Mommy and Daddy were standing next to each other, watching me. When I got closer to Charlie, I could see his chin was shaking a lot.
“Hi, Charlie,” I said.
“Hi, Zach,” Charlie said.
“We came to say good night to Andy. Like you.”
Charlie shook his head yes very slow.
“Mommy told the people from the news yesterday that she doesn’t want to do any more fighting,” I told Charlie. Then I remembered I was still holding the flowers, and I gave them to Charlie.
Charlie did a little cough and his chin was still shaking a lot. “I saw,” he said.
“I wanted to come tell that to you, and Mommy and Daddy said OK.”
“Thank you, Zach,” Charlie said.
“Mommy doesn’t want to talk to you still, though.”
“I understand,” Charlie said, and he looked behind me to where Daddy and Mommy were standing. His face looked very sad. He pressed his lips together tight and held up the flowers a little bit to where Mommy and Daddy were standing.
I took my glove off and put my hand in my pants pocket. I pulled out the angel wing charm and rubbed it a couple of times in between my fingers. Then I held it out on my hand to Charlie.
“This is for you,” I told him. Charlie took the charm and looked at it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It means love and protection,” I said. “It means your son is still here with you.”
Charlie stared at the charm in his hand for a long time and his chin kept shaking and shaking. Then he whispered, “Thank you,” and it came out so quiet, I almost didn’t hear it.
I stayed there for a little while with Charlie and I didn’t know what else I should say, so I said, “Merry Christmas,” and Charlie said, “Merry Christmas,” and then I went back to Daddy and Mommy and it was time to say good night to Andy.
“Can we sing our song?” I asked.
Mommy did a little smile. “Oh, Zach, I don’t think I can sing right now. Maybe we could say the words?” and so we did that. We said the words of our song, taking turns.
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor
We love you
We love you
You’re our handsome buddy
And we’ll love you always
Yes, we do
Yes, we do
Our breath made white clouds in front of our faces.
I could feel the coldness from the ground come through my shoes, and I stomped my feet a little to make them warmer. My fingers felt cold, too, so I blew air in my gloves.
“Here, let me,” Mommy said. She went down on her knees in front of me and blew her warm breath in my gloves, and my fingers started to feel warmer.
I looked at Mommy’s face and she looked cold, too. Her nose was red and she had goose bumps on her cheeks. Her face looked really tired and sad. I put my arms around her and gave her a hug, and we stayed like that for a while on top of Andy’s grave, hugging, with Mommy on her knees.
“Should we say good night now?” Daddy asked in a quiet voice.
Me and Mommy stopped hugging. Mommy looked at Andy’s gravestone and started crying again.
“Good night, sweet boy,” Mommy whispered.
“Good night, Andy,” I said.
“Good night,” Daddy said.
Mommy stood up and we looked at Andy’s grave for a minute longer and then we turned around and walked back down the walkway to our car with me in the middle. Me, Daddy, and Mommy.
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