“Not today,” she said, shaking her head as if she were sorrier than I was. “He’s…tired…very tired. We’re getting ready to take him to the hospital.”
“Okay,” I said, not really knowing exactly how to respond. “Is he…I mean…okay? Will he be around later?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits and her mouth chewed words it seemed unable to spit out. Bitter words. She shook her head, let the door close its few, begrudged inches slowly.
I stood there for a minute or two, not sure where to go, what to do.
I went home, stomped to my room, slammed the door.
* * *
Hours later, my mom opened the door, stood in the doorway.
“No dinner tonight, kiddo?”
“No thanks.”
She waited a moment. I think she belched. I could smell beer on the air.
“Charlie?”
I nodded in the darkness, said nothing.
There was silence between us, and I knew that her drunken mind was reeling from thought to thought, trying to figure out what to say to fill it.
I finally did. “I mean, nothing’s working. The doctors, the medicines, all the stuff his mom won’t let him do. It’s not helping. He’s still…still…gonna…”
“Have you prayed for him, kiddo?”
“Yeah, sure, but…”
“Sometimes prayers work better when you sacrifice something.”
I blinked, frowned.
“Sacrifice something?”
“Yeah,” she snorted. “I don’t mean a goat or lamb or anything like that. I mean give up something, something you love.”
I thought about that for a while.
“I gotta make a trade with God?”
“Look it up, it’s in the Bible,” she slurred. “Okay, well, get some sleep. If you get hungry in the night, there’s peanut butter if you want a sandwich. G’night, kiddo.”
“Night, mom.”
She closed the door.
A sacrifice.
Something I love.
I fell asleep with coldness riming my heart.
* * *
The next morning I rose early, shrugged into clean clothing, grabbed five Ziploc bags from the kitchen pantry. I tiptoed through the living room, my mom slumped on the couch, snoring heavily.
Outside, I went to the coffee can, retrieved the frogs, sealed each in a clear plastic bag. Leaving these on the side yard, I went into the garage and found my kite, a big, black, bat-shaped thing, complete with a reel loaded with 500 feet of string.
Working quickly, I wrestled the kite from the garage, grabbed yet another spool of kite string. I collected the wriggling bags of frogs, then walked a block or two down to the entrance to the woods.
I placed the kite and reel onto the dewy grass, sat with the baggies filled with frogs between my legs. I used the spare spool of string to tie the bags together, then tied this bundle to the underside of the kite using a special knot my dad had taught me before he left.
Ironically, it was a knot that untied itself when pulled on.
I rose, lifted the kite. It was heavy, but I thought it was still able to get off the ground. So I set it down, nose in the air, unspooled about fifteen feet of string, and walked away. When I’d pulled the string taut, I took a deep breath, raced away from the kite, sending it jerkily into the air.
It waivered, did a few dipping loops, then grabbed the wind. It lofted itself into the sky on a shallow angle, burdened by its increasingly agitated payload.
I stood below it, grimly playing out the line.
Altitude. That was the last test.
No.
Sacrifice. That was the last test.
That another might live.
After about a hundred feet of line played out, the kite soared, as if the weight of the frogs beneath it, squirming and jostling in the confines of their plastic bags, meant nothing.
Two hundred feet.
I held the other string in the hand that wasn’t keeping the kite tethered to the Earth.
I wanted to think that they were just frogs.
That it was all for my friend, Charlie.
That I wasn’t mean or horrible or cold-hearted.
I convinced myself that all of these things were true.
I pulled the string.
Somewhere, more than 200 feet over the canopy of the woods, the plain little knot my father had taught me how to tie unraveled, pulled through itself.
Free now from this string, the five little plastic parcels it had held tightly as babies to the breast of their mother came away from the kite, tumbled through the air, fell, fell, and then were lost in the dark treetops.
And I felt nothing as I let the other string play out completely, detach from the reel, pull from my hand.
I felt nothing as I watched the kite ascend into the clouds, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a black pinprick against the silent blue of the sky, gone, disappearing utterly.
I went home with just the spare reel, which I carried to my bedroom, past my still snoring mother.
I climbed into bed, fell asleep clasping the reel in both hands across my chest like a corpse clutching a lily.
* * *
The next morning Charlie was gone.
To the hospital, my mother told me at breakfast.
She’d spoken to his mother over the phone before I got up. She related this to me slowly, quietly, all the more so because she was hung over.
Charlie was…well, it was bad.
He might not make it through this, might…well, you know…
I sat at the kitchen table, bleary-eyed, having trouble processing this.
A cereal bowl was set before me, an unopened box of Cap’n Crunch standing over it. My favorite, but too expensive my mom always told me. Who knew how long she’d had that box, hidden away, ready to set before me for just this occasion.
I focused on the wrong things as she spoke.
The plastic milk jug sweating.
The spoon that rested in the bowl, nicked and marred by what looked to be several trips around the garbage disposal.
A stray length of my mother’s hair that curled around her ear, grey and colorless in the morning light.
Die? Was that it, mom? Charlie might die? How was that possible? I prayed for him. I sacrificed for him. Wasn’t it good enough? Wasn’t I good enough?
But I didn’t say any of that.
What I did say was, “Just what the hell does he want?”
It’s a testament to how poorly my mother felt that she didn’t launch a hand across the table to smack my face.
“What does who want?”
“God. What does he want from me anyway?”
My mother thought about this for a moment.
“My ma always used to tell us that God only wants two things from us: faith and sacrifice. But grandma’s a whack-job.”
She ducked her head, sipped at her coffee slowly.
I wanted to rail at her, to shake her, to sweep all the stuff from the kitchen table and roar at her, and through her, at God.
I gave all that to you, and still you do this?
What else do you want?
And it came to me, a thought so pure, so dazzling in its stark obviousness that it vibrated through my body like an electric shock.
The frogs. They’d been Charlie’s thing, his belief.
I’d sacrificed the wrong thing.
Numb, I rose slowly, shaking, left the kitchen, left the house.
And just walked.
I don’t know that there was a coherent thought in my head, just rage, resentment at what I was being forced to do.
Pure anger that vibrated down to my bones, set my teeth on edge, made my scalp crawl.
* * *
I slowed when I realized that I’d reached the top of the bowl in the woods, where the fallen tree stretched across the ravine, touched a hill on the other side.
I didn’t consciously walk there, though I knew exactly why I was there.
I wanted to be quiet, so quiet.
The sun was out in the empty, blue sea of the sky, shimmering in the heat.
And he was there, my skink, there as always sunning atop the log, his eyes closed in sleep or whatever pleasure a lizard experiences.
But he wasn’t my skink, not really, not ever.
I stood there, reached out and touched the rotten wood of the tree trunk to steady myself.
I thought of Charlie.
I realized, standing under that broiling sun, that Charlie wasn’t mine either.
I’d been hanging onto Charlie as if I could have prevented his death, as if I had the right to. It was as selfish a thought as catching this skink and imprisoning him in a glass aquarium in my room.
Trapping him for my pleasure, regardless of what it meant for him, how it felt for him.
In my own way, I wanted to do the same thing to Charlie. I wanted to keep him, protect him, sure, but keep him mostly. So we could hike into the woods and catch frogs and eat sandwiches and drink Kool-Aid that tasted of metal canteens. So we could argue and read comic books and call each other names and do stupid things like test frogs for an astronaut program.
Forever.
Standing there, I knew it could never last forever anyway, even if Charlie weren’t dying—didn’t die.
That thought went deep enough to hurt, and I found myself crying, tears dripping from my cheeks, wetting my already sweat-soaked t-shirt. The pang of that thought—it was the first time I’d ever experienced it.
It was the pang of something slipping away, something you thought never would, never could. And you were powerless to prevent it. It was the sliding away of love, something, someone so deeply loved that their absence seemed impossible, irrecoverable.
It was so raw and new that it tore my heart out.
The tears cooled my cheeks but did nothing to prevent this emotion from growing, and then turning, as emotions so often do, into anger.
I couldn’t cope with that feeling of loss. It was like staring into an abyss, teetering on the edge of something so dark, so profoundly empty that invisible tendrils coming up from within its bottomless depths threatened to pull you in.
To prevent that, my mind simply flipped the feeling over into anger, rage. So much easier for a child to process.
Shaking, and now—not from the tears—I narrowed my eyes at the skink.
Why should it have the perfect life it had?
Why not Charlie?
Surely, Charlie was more deserving of it than a lizard?
What if I could give that to him?
Belief.
What if I could give him this perfect life, trade it for his own sickly, terminal one?
Sacrifice.
I gritted my teeth, felt every muscle in my body tighten.
The skin of my forehead crawled across my skull, and I stepped forward slowly, quietly.
The skink continued to sun itself on the log, oblivious.
My hand fumbled absently across the ground until it closed on a branch, short and thick as a club.
I lifted it quietly above my head, stepped forward again.
The skink glittered in the sun, its coppery scales so achingly beautiful that my breath caught in my constricted throat.
But no.
Tears streaming down my face, I brought the stick down, whickering through the hot summer air. I saw the arc of it descend toward the skink.
Right before it impacted, I think I saw its eyes open, sensing something amiss but not quite realizing what it was.
The branch struck its hindquarters, flattened them against the log.
A great gout of blood vomited from its mouth, followed by the pink wedge of its tongue. Its black eyes seemed to roll in their orbits, and it turned sharply to see what it was that had struck it.
I swear, swear that there was some recognition in those dark, glistening eyes, some disappointment.
Sadness.
That was like a match touched to the tinder of my heart.
Roaring, weeping for what I’d done, what I was about to do, I jerked the branch up again, brought it down with all my might.
Shining copper was blotted out by a shocking burst of red that spattered the log, rained down onto the leaves and grass. Beneath the whack! of the branch against the fallen trunk, there was the crackling of tiny bones, the awful flat sound of something like meat slapping against a hard surface.
My pulse raced and my vision wavered. Heat seemed not just to pound down on me, but also to radiate from me in great, pulsing waves. Sweat literally poured from my skin, and the tears…the tears fell unabated.
I wasn’t just weeping anymore, I was bawling, crying like a newborn wanting something, needing it but unable to express or even know what it was. Streamers of snot ran from my nostrils.
My great, braying cries echoed from the hills.
My rubbery legs gave way, and I fell onto the log, half kneeling, half slumped over it.
The branch fell from my shaking hands, tumbled into the brush on the other side of the log.
I kept my eyes closed for many, many minutes, not wanting to see it…what I’d done.
When I finally did open them, hot and sticky and filled with tears, I saw.
The skink, my skink, was a smear now, a bloody, misshapen mess. Its guts had erupted from the ruin of its head, coils of purple and pink, smeared with red. Its beautiful coppery scales were slicked with blood, the way water beaded on my father’s freshly waxed car. Its spine was crushed, legs smashed, skin pounded into the decaying bark of the tree.
I had taken its beauty as surely as I’d taken its life.
At least its head was smashed, too. I don’t think I could have confronted those eyes again.
I looked at it for a long, long time.
When I finally pulled myself up, when I made my way home, I was crying.
When I fell into my bed, I was still crying.
For me? For the skink? For Charlie?
I had no idea.
* * *
I slept a kind of sleep, filled with nightmares that seared through me unremembered but leaving a horrible, harrowing smear across my mind.
Feeling woozy and disconnected, I sat up in my bed. The house was quiet, and the sunlight filtering through the curtains in my room was the golden, diffuse light of early morning or later afternoon.
I’d either slept all day or all day and all night.
I got out of bed, went into the kitchen. It was definitely the morning of the day after.
My stomach growled and twisted almost to the point of nausea. The box of Cap’n Crunch still sat unopened on the table, my bowl and spoon where my mom had set them yesterday morning.
Quietly, I got the milk out of the refrigerator, opened the box of cereal and had two giant bowls. It fell into the pit of my stomach, somehow without seeming to fill it; as open and empty as the rest of me felt.
Putting the milk back into the fridge, the dishes into the sink, I went into the living room, peered out the window.
Charlie’s parents’ car was in their driveway.
That meant, well, it meant either, or—
I shot out the front door, let it slam behind me. I didn’t worry about what time it was or waking my mother.
Filled with a twisting sense of dread and anticipation, I raced across the street, bounded onto the front porch of Charlie’s house, lifted my hand to knock on the front door.
Which was open.
Not all the way, mind you, just a crack.
It seemed all the worse that it was open just a bit.
I pushed at it timidly, waited for it to swing open all the way.
“Charlie?” I called into the empty doorway. “Anyone?”
I stood there in the open doorway for a moment. The air that floated out of the house seemed wrong, violated. And there was a smell, something I couldn’t place…and another just underneath it that played at the edges of my senses.
Knowing it was a mistak
e, sensing that it was something that I would regret, I stepped inside. Instantly, the house’s atmosphere washed over me, vibrating with echoes of violence, promises of more to come.
“Charlie?” I whispered again, stepping through the foyer and stopping.
Right there, all alone on the white wall of the hallway leading to the family room, was a smeary red handprint. It looked too red against the unforgiving white of the wall, still tacky.
I moved to the other side of the hall to avoid coming close to it. Watching it as if it might leap at me, I stepped into the family room. The living room, dining room and kitchen made one great, open space at the back of the house. Everywhere I looked, it was a shambles.
The dining room chairs and table were upturned, scattered, broken. The light fixture hanging over the table was shattered. There were huge scars on the vinyl floor of the kitchen, slashes across the wood of the cabinets. The door to the refrigerator was open, and a spill of food and liquid disgorged from inside.
On the other side of the room, though, it was worse. The furniture had been thrown over. Lamps lay on the torn carpet, which was absolutely shredded in some areas. The television was smashed, leaned against the fireplace. Pictures on the wall were askew, their glass shattered. Books were tossed from their shelves, lay everywhere like stricken birds.
But that wasn’t what kept me from taking another step into the room.
It was the blood.
It was sloshed over the carpet, splattered against the walls. It dripped from a lampshade, stained the curtains, dotted the faces in the crooked family portraits like some strange, contagious pox. Extravagant red sprays even stained the ceiling.
It trickled down the windows, soaked into the drywall, dripped down the masonry of the fireplace.
And everywhere, everything bore slashes, broad swipes that cut through the wallpaper, leaving it in tatters. The curtains were shredded, the carpet looked like someone had ice-skated over it, cleaving it, raising huge slashes across its tasteful, tan surface.
My lip was quivering now, my body shaking. I could feel a cold wave that rolled down my spine, spun like a frozen cyclone in my stomach. Suddenly, the weight of all the milk I’d consumed with the Cap’n Crunch pressed unmercifully on my bladder.
The End in All Beginnings Page 5