“OK, Melissa, I think we’re ready to begin. Remember, please look at me and not directly at the camera, OK?”
Mommy squeezed her hands tight in her lap.
“Do me a favor and slide right into the very center of the couch. Then we can have Jim and Zach join you on either side later on, OK?” I wanted to tell Mommy that I didn’t want to sit on the couch later, with the cameras pointing right at me and the lights, and I didn’t want to be on the interview, and Daddy said maybe I didn’t have to.
“Mommy?” I said.
Mommy looked up, but one of the lights got in her eyes and she couldn’t see me.
“Mommy?” I said again. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I turned around, I saw Tina smiling at me.
“Hey, buddy, can you come with me and maybe you can hang out with your dad in the kitchen for a little while?”
Me and Daddy sat in the kitchen when Miss Wanda started giving Mommy the interview. We could hear a loud man’s voice say, “Picture’s up! Quiet, please!” and all the people in the house said “Ssshhhhh” together. Daddy sat up very straight on the barstool, like Grandma, and made a fake serious face at me and pretended to use a zipper to close his mouth.
[ 27 ]
Breaking News
I LIKED SITTING IN THE KITCHEN with Daddy. It was like we were in trouble together so we had to take a time-away in the kitchen. We had to sit and be quiet for a long time and weren’t allowed to come out from our time-away. A couple times Daddy pretended like he was falling asleep from being bored, and it made me laugh. I put my face in my elbow on the counter really quick so I wouldn’t make a sound.
Tina came back in the kitchen and ruined Daddy’s and my fun. “All right, guys, you’re up!” Daddy followed Tina into the living room, and I waited for him to tell her that I wasn’t going to get included in the interview, but he didn’t say anything.
In the living room, Mommy’s face had red dots on it like she cried, but she wasn’t crying now.
“Let’s have Jim sit right here, and Zach, can you sit next to your mom right there?” Tina pointed on the couch next to Mommy.
Daddy sat down and I sat down. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the living room on me, and the cameras were like extra-big eyes staring at me.
“Zach, honey, can you please not look at the cameras? Can you please look at me?” Miss Wanda said to me. I looked at her and I noticed her curly black hair was very shiny in the lights like it was wet, and then my eyes went back to the cameras. “Can you…can he please not look at the cameras?” she said to Mommy, and it didn’t sound friendly, and her face didn’t look friendly.
“Zach, can you please just…” Mommy’s voice didn’t sound friendly either. I tried to get my eyes to stop looking at the cameras, but they kept doing the opposite. “Zach, stop it!” Mommy squeezed my leg hard. It was like a hard pinch, and tears came in my eyes.
“Melissa…,” Daddy started to say.
“Hey, man!” All of a sudden Dexter was behind Miss Wanda and he looked short because he was on his knees, and it looked funny. He gave me a wink and a smile. “Can you try to look at me? I’ll stay here if you want. Keep your eyes right on me for the next few minutes?” I shook my head yes, and the tears went away.
“OK, great. Here we go then. Let’s get started,” Miss Wanda said, and a man next to the camera said in a loud voice again, “Picture’s up! Quiet, please!” and everyone else answered with the “Ssshhhhh” again. Then it was quiet for a little while before Miss Wanda started to talk.
“Jim, you learned about Andy’s death while waiting at St. Paul’s Church for news about your son. Can you tell me about that?”
It took Daddy a while until he said his answer. “Yeah. OK. I…stayed behind at the church where the children and families gathered after the shooting to wait for updates from the police regarding the…missing children. Melissa took Zach to West-Medical to try and see if Andy had been taken there. Um…” Daddy coughed and then he was quiet.
“Can you describe to us the situation at the church?” Miss Wanda said.
“OK,” Daddy said. “It had emptied out quite a bit. It was chaotic at first when parents were coming in looking for their children, but over time most families left the church and there were only a few of us left. I hadn’t heard from Melissa at the hospital yet, and waiting for news was…it was hard. We were told there had been fatalities, and not being able to locate Andy…It wasn’t a good sign. We waited for a long time.”
“How did you finally learn that Andy was indeed one of the casualties?” Miss Wanda asked.
“Eventually some clergymen entered the church. A priest and a rabbi…and they came with Mr. Stanley, the assistant principal. I knew when I saw them. I knew right away.”
I didn’t move and I kept staring at Dexter. Dexter looked right at me, and I could see his long beard on his chin was shaking.
“And you had to break the awful news to your wife and son,” Miss Wanda said. It was weird she said “break the news”—I know it’s called “make the news.”
Daddy coughed again. “Yes. I drove to West-Medical and I found them in the waiting room. Me showing up there…Melissa knew what it meant.” I thought about when Daddy came to the hospital and what his face looked like, and how Mommy started howling and hitting him and throwing up. My throat started to hurt a lot.
“Zach, do you remember what it was like—when your dad came to the hospital to tell you about your brother?” All of a sudden Miss Wanda was talking to me, and I didn’t know it was going to be my turn on the interview and right away I got hot all over. I forgot what she asked me.
“Zach?” she said again. “Do you remember what it was like when your dad told you about your brother?” Now she was talking to me in a nice voice, not like earlier.
“Yes,” I said very quietly. My throat still hurt too much to talk. I could feel the red juice starting to spill up my neck into my face, and I started to feel hot. Everyone in the room was going to see, and on the video on TV they were going to see, too. Dexter said something to me with his lips, no sound, and it looked like he said “OK,” but I wasn’t sure.
“What was it like, Zach?” Miss Wanda asked the same question again. I looked down at my lap because I wanted to hide my red face. I wanted to wait for the red juice spill to go back down.
“I don’t want to say,” I said, and it came out like a whisper.
“What was that, honey?”
I kept my eyes on my lap, but I started to feel a mad feeling starting up in my belly. I wanted her to stop asking me the same stupid question. I didn’t want to talk.
Mommy bumped her arm into my side. “Zach?” she said.
And then I didn’t know what happened. The mad feeling got big. Like the Hulk. “I don’t want to say! I don’t want to say!” I yelled a lot of times.
“OK, then you don’t have to….” I heard Mommy’s voice next to me, and she tried to put her arm around me, but I pushed her away and it was too late, because when the Hulk gets mad, he stays mad. Everyone in the room stared at me, even Dexter, and stupid tears came back in my eyes.
“Stop looking at me!” I yelled, and the yelling felt good. I looked around, but everyone was still looking at me, and then I saw the cameras. Now I was going to be on TV like this, mad and yelling. So I went over to the camera that was next to Miss Wanda and I kicked it. It fell over, and the man with the loud voice tried to catch it, but he was too slow and the camera landed on the ground with a loud crash. Pieces fell off it, so it was broken.
All of a sudden I felt someone picking me up and holding me tight. I couldn’t move, and I saw it was Daddy and I yelled, “Let go of me! Let go of me!” But Daddy didn’t let go of me. He carried me out of the living room and up the stairs, and the whole time I yelled and tried to kick Daddy with my feet.
Daddy put me down on the mattress
, but his arms stayed around me tight. I stopped yelling and kicking and I started crying, and then the crying made my mad feeling wash away.
[ 28 ]
Trick or Treat
“TRICK OR TREAT, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!”
I sat on the stairs in the dark and I heard laughing and shouting outside. Halloween is my favorite holiday—well, maybe Christmas is the number one favorite, but Halloween is definitely number two. I love going trick-or-treating and we get new costumes every year, and all year long I think about what I should be on the next Halloween, but Mommy doesn’t buy the costumes until right before because I change my mind too many times.
This year we were skipping Halloween. No new costume and no trick-or-treating. Daddy said we could go for a little while, but I didn’t want to go as Iron Man again, two years in a row, plus there was a big rip in the pants. I was going to go as Luke Skywalker this year. That was going to be my final decision.
A few times already kids came to our front door and rang the doorbell even though our porch light was turned off and they should know that’s a sign that we weren’t giving out candy. And our house wasn’t even decorated for Halloween this time, so that’s another sign.
I had a bowl of Halloween candy on the step next to me that Mimi brought over earlier. At first, when the trick-or-treating started, I sat on the stairs with Daddy, and when the doorbell rang for the first time, we went to open the door.
“Happy Halloweeeen!” Some little kids stood right in front of me and yelled too loud, and their moms smiled big smiles behind them. The mad feeling came back in my belly because it wasn’t a “Happy Halloweeeen,” and I didn’t want to look at how excited they all were.
“Here, only take one,” I said to the little kids in kind of a mean way, and I shoved the candy bowl at them. Their moms’ big smiles went away, and when they left Daddy said, “We don’t have to do this, you know,” so we decided to turn off all the lights inside the house, too. Daddy sat on the stairs with me for a little while longer and then went back in his office.
“Trick or treat!” someone yelled right outside our door. I went upstairs and into the hideout. I sat down on the sleeping bag and pointed Buzz’s light circle on the picture of me and Andy.
“Happy stupid Halloween,” I said to Andy.
Last year, at the end of Halloween, there was fighting. Daddy didn’t come trick-or-treating because he had to stay at work late, so Mommy went with me and Andy before it started to get dark. Mommy had the same purple witch hat on that she always wears on Halloween, and Andy went as a zombie with a scary mask.
After the second house we bumped into James and some other kids from school. They were by themselves with no grown-ups, and they were going to go all the way down Erickson Road to go trick-or-treating there. Andy begged Mommy to let him go with them. Ricky and his mom bumped into us, too, and then Ricky wanted to go with the boys like Andy. Mommy said no, we should all go as a family, but then Ricky’s mom said yes to Ricky, and that they were probably too old to go with their moms, so Mommy let Andy go, too. Mommy looked very mad after that.
Andy didn’t come home until after it was really dark outside and me and Mommy were about to go back out to look for him. “Wait ’til you see all the stuff I got!” he said when he came running in, and he didn’t notice that Mommy was mad and she just turned around and went in the kitchen to make dinner.
We poured out our bags on the living room carpet to see all the things we got. “Keep your pile on that side of the rug so we don’t mix up our stashes,” Andy said, and he pushed his pile of candy farther away from mine. His pile was huge, like double mine, because he was out a lot longer than me, and also because he always takes more than one candy, and you’re not supposed to do that.
“Awesome, I got a bunch of big M&M’s packs! One, two, three…like ten of them and a ton of small ones!” Andy said. M&M’s are his favorite candy. I’m not allowed to have them because they could have peanuts. Andy started to make smaller piles around himself with all the different types of candy he got—M&M’s, Tootsie Rolls, Skittles, Kit Kats…He kept eating the small candy bars, the ones that say “fun size,” and they’re so little you can eat them with two bites. He put the wrappers in his pocket so that Mommy wouldn’t notice.
I started piling up my candy, too. “Can I have this one?” I held up a round ball that had an eyeball on it, but it didn’t say what type of candy was inside. Andy came over and took it from me. “I don’t know what this one is. So don’t eat it,” he said, and he threw the eyeball over on his pile. “This you definitely can’t have. And that one and this one…” Andy started grabbing different candies from my stash.
“Hey, stop!” I yelled. “Those are mine. Don’t take all of mine!”
“ANDY!” a voice yelled behind us. It was Daddy and he scared us because we didn’t hear him come home from work. “Let go of his goddamn candy!” Daddy came over and grabbed Andy’s arm and pulled him up hard. Andy dropped the candies he was holding.
“What the hell are you doing? Look at your massive pile and look at your brother’s. Why are you stealing his?”
“I wasn’t stealing his—,” Andy started to say back, but Daddy got more mad because Andy was back-talking. He told Andy to stop lying, and he started to drag him out of the room by his arm.
Right then Mommy came in the living room. “Jim, let go of him. What are you doing?” she said to Daddy, and she grabbed Andy’s other arm and now they were both standing there with Andy in the middle, and it looked like they were going to pull him from both sides.
“I’m throwing him in his room. This kid is overdue for a grounding!”
“That’s not how we’re supposed to be handling these types of situations,” Mommy said, and her and Daddy stared at each other in a mad way over Andy’s head.
“OK, why don’t you tell me how I’m allowed to handle it then, Melissa, because your way is working so damn well,” Daddy said, and he let go of Andy’s arm. “So glad I tried to rush home to be with my family on Halloween!” And then he went in the hallway and slammed the front door. A minute later I heard his Audi turn on and drive out of the driveway.
“That’s what I get for helping you, you little snitch,” Andy said, and gave me a push.
Mommy said, “OK, that will do, Andy,” and she took him upstairs for a time-away.
I bent down to pick up the candies Andy dropped. It was all Reese’s and Butterfingers, all candies with peanuts in them.
I thought about last Halloween and the fighting, and I looked at Andy’s sad face in the picture. I wanted to say something to him, that I was sorry that he got in trouble, because he was actually trying to help me with the peanut candies. But I didn’t say it out loud, the words stayed in my head only.
[ 29 ]
Snow and Milkshakes
THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN, in the morning, it started to snow and that was a surprise—to see snow and not rain. The sky looked white and the air looked white from the snowflakes twirling around, and all the gray from the rain was gone. First it was rain, rain, rain for all the days and weeks since when the gunman came, and now, just like that, it stopped and there was snow instead even though it wasn’t even winter yet. It was the first day of November.
Mommy wasn’t in the bed again. It was like she was too mad to lie down and sleep now, and she went from sleeping all the time to no sleeping at all. Daddy was in the bed, and I tried to tell him about the snow, but he rolled over the other way. “Let me sleep for a bit, bud,” he said with a sleepy voice, so I went to find Mommy downstairs. She was in the living room, making all the decoration pillows on the couch all straight in a line.
“Mommy, it’s snowing!”
I went to the living room window to watch the snowflakes fall down and land on the piles of leaves on the ground.
“I saw,” she said. “Finally, a break fro
m the rain. Don’t get too excited, though. It’s not going to stick.”
“OK, but if some of it sticks, can we go sledding?”
“It’s not going to. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m going to be very busy today anyway,” Mommy said, and left the living room. “Hey, Zach,” she called from the kitchen. “Let’s get you some breakfast and then I want you to get dressed. There are some people coming over to the house in a bit, so I want everything squared away by then.”
“What people?” I asked.
“People I need to talk to.”
The doorbell rang right when I came down from getting dressed. I opened the door and Ricky’s mom stood outside, and this time she wore a coat, but she still looked cold and her face looked very white. I noticed a lot of reddish-brown spots on her nose and cheeks, and some snowflakes were on her hair, it was reddish-brown, too, except at the top it looked like it was coming out of her head in a different color, gray. The last time she was at our house, Daddy told her she couldn’t be at our house anymore, but now she came back. I wondered if Daddy was going to get mad at her.
Mommy came from behind me and walked out on the porch to give Ricky’s mom a hug. It was a long hug, and I watched how their hair was touching, the reddish-brown from Ricky’s mom and the shiny brown from Mommy. I looked up the stairs. Before I came down, Daddy was in the shower and maybe he wouldn’t come down yet and see Ricky’s mom.
“Nancy. Come in, please. Let’s head into the living room,” Mommy said, and they both sat down on the couch, very close together.
I sat down on the chair across from them, and like two seconds later I heard Daddy’s voice in the hallway: “Hey, Zach, do you want to come to the…?” He walked in the living room and then he saw Ricky’s mom sitting on the couch with Mommy. He stopped walking and finished his sentence very slow: “…store with me?” But he didn’t look at me, he stared at Ricky’s mom like she was a ghost or something. Ricky’s mom stared back at him, and I saw her chin was moving up and down fast.
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