Only Child: A novel

by Rhiannon Navin

  “What is this?” Daddy asked.

  “Geez, Jim, that’s polite. You remember Nancy Brooks, right?” Mommy said, and just when she said it the doorbell rang again. “Here come the others.” Mommy got up and walked out of the living room to open the door.

  Daddy walked a couple steps toward Ricky’s mom and then stopped and looked over at me. “What’s going on here?” he asked Ricky’s mom in a quiet voice.

  “Melissa, um, called me,” Ricky’s mom said. Her voice sounded like she was out of breath, like she just ran really fast. “She asked me over, and a few other parents of the…victims. For a meeting.”

  I could hear people talking in the hallway.

  “A meeting?” Daddy said. “A meeting about what? And you said yes? To come here?”

  I thought that Ricky’s mom would probably start to get mad about how Daddy was talking to her. She answered Daddy, and her voice didn’t sound so out of breath anymore. “Yes, Jim, I said yes. She wants to talk about…our options. If we can do something about Charles’s family to…hold them accountable. And I think she’s right about that. It has nothing to do with…”

  “All right, guys, please come in, have a seat.” Mommy walked back in the living room, and Daddy took a couple steps back. Three women and one man came in behind Mommy and sat down on the couch and chairs. “Do you all know each other?”

  Some said yes and some said no, so Mommy said the names of everyone: “Nancy Brooks, Ricky’s mom; Janice and Dave Eaton, Juliette’s parents; Farrah Sanchez, Nico’s mom; and Laura LaConte, Jessica’s mom.” Juliette, Nico, Jessica—they’re all kids from Andy’s class that got shot from the gunman, too. I saw their pictures on the news on TV.

  “And that’s my husband, Jim, and Zach, my other son.” Mommy pointed at me and Daddy. Daddy didn’t say anything, and he didn’t do handshakes.

  “Can I get you anything? To drink?” Mommy asked, and then she went in the kitchen because some of the people said water, please. The room got very quiet after she left. I saw Ricky’s mom staring at Daddy. Her face looked very sad. Mommy came back with a tray with glasses of water on it, and she put it down on the coffee table. “All right, I think we can get started,” she said. “Jim, could you…?” and she pointed at me with her head.

  Daddy stared at Mommy for a second and then he said, “Come on, Zach, let’s go.”

  I wanted to stay to hear what Mommy and the other people were going to talk about in their meeting, but Daddy said, “Come on. Please, Zach,” in the voice that he does when you better listen. I got up and walked out of the living room behind Daddy. “Let me grab you a sweater from upstairs. It got cold out,” Daddy said, and walked upstairs. “Put your shoes on.”

  I sat down right outside the living room to put my shoes on so I could still hear the talking inside.

  “…We could go over the information we do have…and also what we don’t have. More importantly maybe,” I heard Mommy say, “I wanted to confirm we’re all on the same page. Everyone in this room does want to pursue this…take action, right?”

  “Yes,” and “I think so, yes,” the other people said.

  “OK, good. I thought it would be good to get together and compare notes and figure out how we will proceed against them, the Ranalezes. I think it begins with us speaking out publicly, giving more interviews like the one I did with Wanda Jackson. And we should start looking into ways to take action against them, legally….”

  “Zach, that’s not for you in there!” Daddy stood next to me all of a sudden and busted me spying.

  Daddy drove out of the driveway fast, and the Audi made a loud sound when Daddy started speeding up our road. After we turned the corner, he drove slower and looked at me in the mirror. “Two stops: the dry cleaner’s and the liquor store right next to it,” he said to me. “It’s almost lunchtime. What do you say we go to the diner after?”

  When we got to the parking lot at the diner, there were still some snowflakes in the air. I tried to catch them on my hand, but they melted right when they touched my skin. Inside the diner we sat down in a booth, and that’s my favorite spot because you can watch the gas station across the street. It’s a gas station where they also fix cars, and you can watch how they lift the cars up so they can fix them from underneath.

  Marcus, the boss of the diner, came over to our table, and he knows us because we come here a lot of times for breakfast on the weekends, but not for a long time now.

  “Hi, Jim!” Marcus said to Daddy (it sounds like “Jeeem” when he says Daddy’s name, and that sounds funny). To me he said, “Hi, Bob.” He knows that’s not really my name, but he says it as the same joke every time, and then he laughs loud about his own joke. But this time he just did a little smile, a sad smile.

  “Jeeem, I’m very sorry about your son. Very, very sorry. All of us here,” and he waved his hand around the whole diner, and a lot of people were looking at us now. “Lunch is on me today, OK, Jeeem?” Marcus said, and did a pat on Daddy’s back.

  “OK…that’s…thank you, that’s kind of you,” Daddy said, and he looked embarrassed a little and I was feeling embarrassed, too, with everyone looking at us.

  We ordered the same thing: cheeseburgers and French fries and chocolate milkshakes. We can’t get that when Mommy is with us, but Daddy said, “Well, she’s not with us, is she? Milkshakes on the first day of snow are a must.”

  We waited for the food and watched the workers at the gas station and the snowflakes flying all around. We didn’t talk a lot, and I liked sitting there like that. The food came, and the first thing I did was take a French fry and dip it in my milkshake. Daddy smiled.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why is Mommy having a meeting at our house? To talk about Charlie?”

  Daddy was holding his cheeseburger and was about to take a bite, but then he put it back down on his plate and cleaned off his hands with a napkin. “It’s…Well, your mother is very sad about Andy, right? Everyone is. Her, me, you…”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, Mommy is…She thinks that if things had been…different for Charles, for the…shooter, Charlie’s son, then maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

  “Different how?” I asked.

  “Um, it’s complicated, Zach,” Daddy said.

  I looked at Daddy and waited so he would say more about it.

  “OK, so the shooter, Charles, was sick. He had…behavioral…problems. You know?” Daddy said.

  “What kind of sickness did he have? Like what Andy had?”

  “Oh, God no. One that made him very depressed,…sad, all the time. And I think he didn’t know what was reality, what was real. And what was right or wrong. I’m not sure exactly.”

  “So that’s why he shot Andy and everyone else? Because he didn’t know it was wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, buddy. Some people think that his family should have known that he was…dangerous to other people, that he could hurt someone. And that they should have made sure he was getting proper care. Maybe that could have stopped it from happening,” Daddy said.

  “Do you think Charlie knew that? That his son was going to do that?” I picked up the ketchup bottle and squirted more ketchup on mine and Daddy’s plates.

  “Thanks,” Daddy said, and dipped in a fry. “No. I don’t think he knew Charles was going to do what he did. But I do think he and his wife didn’t take care of him the way he needed to be taken care of. I think they were probably in denial. Know what I mean?”

  “I don’t know what that means, denial,” I said.

  “It means that they…they probably knew there was something very wrong with their son, but they didn’t want to admit it. Or didn’t know how to deal with it,” Daddy explained.

  “So that wasn’t good that they did that.”

  “No, that wa
sn’t good.”

  “So Mommy is mad at them, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she wants them to get in trouble about it? Are the police going to put Charlie in jail?” I asked.

  “No, that’s…I don’t think so, buddy,” Daddy said.

  “Good, because that wouldn’t really be fair, I don’t think,” I told Daddy.

  “No?”

  “No,” I said. “I have the winner, by the way.” I held up my longest French fry from my plate. That’s a game me and Andy always play when we go somewhere where we eat something with French fries—who has the longest one.

  “What? No way! OK, that one is very long,” Daddy said, and he started looking around his whole plate. “This one beats yours, though.” He held one up, but I saw right away he was cheating and he was holding two together with his hand to make one really long one. That used to be Andy’s trick. We laughed about that, and when I looked up I saw a lot of people in the diner were looking at us, and then laughing didn’t feel like a good thing to do anymore.

  [ 30 ]

  The Hulk

  THE THING ABOUT THE HULK is that he hates getting mad. I have a book about the Avengers, and the Hulk is part of the Avengers. I love the Avengers, they’re my favorite superheroes. They fight bad guys and save people. The Hulk’s real name is Bruce Banner, when he’s the real human person. He’s a scientist, and he made a bomb and the bomb went off by accident and he got caught in the blast, and that’s why he turned into the Hulk.

  So then he’s like two people in one that are opposites, because when he’s the human scientist he’s quiet and a good person, but when he gets mad he turns into the big, loud Hulk—and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t control it. Then he yells, “HULK SMASH!” and goes crazy.

  That’s like how it is for me now. One minute I’m the normal Zach Taylor and I’m acting good, and then something happens and I turn into a different version of Zach Taylor, the mad, mean version. I got mad before, like when I didn’t get to do stuff or when I was mad at Andy for being a jerk to me, but now it’s a whole other mad feeling.

  It’s a surprise when it starts, like it sneaks up on me and then it jumps on me, and I don’t notice it until it already lands on me, and then it’s too late, because it changes my whole self. The first thing that happens is tears come out of my eyes, but not normal tears—they’re hot. Hot, mad tears. And then all of me gets hot and like tight, and the hot and tight feeling makes me yell and act bad.

  Today the Zach Taylor Hulk came out two times so far. The first time was when I went downstairs in the morning and I was looking for Daddy to do our school drive, and Mommy said he had to leave early, so no school drive today. Mommy said, “What’s the difference, you don’t go in anyway,” and that was true, but I still got mad about it. I yelled at Mommy, and I lay on the floor and kicked. Mommy stood there and looked at me. She looked surprised and then she looked sad.

  I acted bad and crazy for a long time, and my head started to hurt from all the crying and yelling. Mommy tried a couple times to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying because of all of my yelling. I didn’t even want to hear it. Mommy tried to pick me up, but I didn’t let her. So then Mommy sat down on the stairs and she put her arms on her knees and her head on her arms. I thought she was crying because of how I acted, like she did a lot of times when Andy had his bad temper.

  That was the first time, and the second time happened later when Mimi came in the house and said, “Hey, honey, look what I picked up for you,” and she was holding up my backpack from school. “You’ve been wanting to read your books in your book baggie, haven’t you? Well, here they are! And Miss Russell gave me some work for us to do at home. Do you want to sit down and get started with me?” Mimi gave me a big smile, and I got mad at her. I didn’t even want to read the books from my book baggie anymore, only the Magic Tree House books.

  “No!” I yelled at her. “I don’t want to do stupid homework!” Mad tears that were hot and the tight feeling in my whole body, and BAM! Zach Taylor Hulk was back. I kicked the backpack after Mimi put it down in the hallway and one of my slippers came flying off and hit Mimi on the leg, and Mimi made a face like it hurt. I didn’t say sorry, I just ran upstairs.

  I slammed my bedroom door hard and I wanted it to be loud, but it wasn’t, and it popped back open and that made me even more mad, so I slammed it again, and this time it stayed closed. But my poster over my bed from school when I was class president for the day fell down on one side from the loud BANG! the door made. It was a stupid poster anyway, so I ripped it all the way off the wall and crumpled it up and threw it across the room.

  All my trucks were standing there all mixed up, and that really started to bother me all of a sudden, so I jumped off the bed and kicked them all. Kicking stuff made the tight feeling get better, so I kept kicking and kicking.

  “Zach, honey, can I come in?” Mimi said from outside my door.

  I stood right in the middle of my room and looked at all the mess with the trucks everywhere. “No!” I called through the door.

  “All right,” said Mimi’s voice. “Just…honey? Don’t break anything in there, OK? Mimi doesn’t want you to get hurt.”

  I didn’t say anything back, and I heard Mimi walk away, back down the stairs.

  I walked through the bathroom, in Andy’s room, and in the hideout. I switched on Buzz, and his light wasn’t very bright anymore. Next time I had to remember to bring new batteries in for him, because the old ones were almost empty. At first I thought I wanted to read, but my hands were still shaking too much from the mad feeling. I moved Buzz’s light circle over the wall with the feelings pages instead, and I thought about how all the pages were the same size, and that wasn’t really right, because not all the feelings were the same size.

  Right now, mad was huge. Much bigger than the other feelings. It should be on a huge piece of paper, maybe even the whole wall, one whole wall of green. And the other feelings should be on a different wall.

  Except sad should still be on the same wall as mad.

  “I think now I know why you are making a sad face in the picture,” I said to Andy. “I think it’s because when the mad feeling goes away, a sad feeling always starts, right? It’s like a pattern. Mad, sad, mad, sad.”

  I put Buzz down on the sleeping bag, and that made the closet almost all the way dark. I took all the feelings pages down and put them on the other wall next to me, except mad and sad, and I put those next to each other in the middle of the wall, green and gray, under the picture of me and Andy. Then I picked Buzz back up and stared at the two feelings and at the picture.

  “I acted bad today and made Mommy upset. And Mimi,” I told Andy.

  I noticed the three words I was thinking about: mad, sad, bad. Those rhyme. I pointed the light circle at the green page and said, “Mad.” Then I pointed it at the gray page and said, “Sad.” I said, “Bad,” and first I looked at Andy in the picture, but then also at me. “Bad.”

  “I didn’t see that, that you were making a sad face on the beach. I didn’t notice it.” My throat got a lump in it when I said that to Andy and when I thought about his face. Maybe then he was feeling like me now, sad, but nobody knew that. And now he wasn’t alive anymore, but when he was alive, everyone only noticed the mad feelings and not the sad feelings.

  Buzz’s light started to go on and off by itself, and that means the batteries were almost all the way dead, so I grabbed Buzz and came out of the hideout to get new batteries from downstairs. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I heard Mommy and Mimi talking. Mommy sounded upset, so I sat down on the stairs to listen.

  “He just needs so much right now,” Mommy said. “The bed-wetting and this acting out…He gets so upset, and I can’t figure out how to get him back down from it. It’s like Andy all over again.” That was me she was talking about, how I was acti
ng bad. Like Andy. I was starting to be like him. Or like me and him together.

  “I just can’t…deal with him. I just can’t do it, Mom. I wish I could, but I don’t know how right now. How can I be there for him when I can’t even…deal?” Mommy’s words came out together with big cries, “I don’t know how.”

  “I think all you can do is try your best. I’m a bit relieved, to be honest. That he’s finally showing some emotion. The way he was before…the way he didn’t cry at all after…Andy…That scared me,” Mimi said.

  “But that’s just it. I’m tired of doing my best. You know, I want to get to act out like Zach. I want to kick and scream. I want to get to be mad at the world. But I have to keep it together. It’s all on me, as always. Jim gets to leave. He gets to disappear, business as usual. He’s not interested in dealing with the Ranalezes. And the one thing I asked him to figure out, the one thing, to get Zach to go back to school, not even that…” Mommy was talking very loud now.

  “I know, honey, this is so impossibly hard for all of us,” Mimi said. “You know, I think you should consider the counseling option Mr. Stanley mentioned. Or call Dr. Byrne. It’s important for Zach to get the help and have someone to turn to, an outsider, so to speak. This is too much to handle on your own. You can’t expect so much of yourself all the time. And you should really consider getting help yourself. There’s no shame in admitting—”

  Mommy interrupted Mimi’s sentence and her voice sounded very mad. “I don’t need help. What I really need is to get the hell out of here, OK? I can’t be here anymore. It’s like I can’t breathe in this house. I’m trying to get justice for our family, for my SON, and everyone is telling me what I can and cannot do. You shouldn’t be doing this, you really need to do this….I’m sick and tired of it.” I heard the squeak sound of one of the barstools getting pushed back on the floor.