100 Days

by Nicole McInnes

  She winks at my dad. “And who is this handsome gentleman?”

  “I’m Tom,” he says, holding out his hand.

  “Kitty doesn’t do handshakes,” she tells him. “Come here, you.”

  “Oh,” he says, glancing at me for a terrified second as she grabs his forearm and pulls him into an embrace. “Okay.”

  I try my best to keep a straight face. My dad has never been too comfortable around old people. The older I’ve gotten, the more he’s treated me like an antique porcelain doll. We do less and less of the roughhousing I used to love when I was little and my parents were still together. Heck, even arm wrestling is out now. He’s afraid I might get a dislocated shoulder or a broken humerus.

  Kitty has released my dad. “Here for your checkup?” she asks, readjusting the elastic waistband of her suit.

  I nod.

  We check in at the front desk, and a pretty nurse who’s new at the center shows us to the usual exam room. She hands me a gown and tells me I can change in the bathroom down the hall. “It could be a bit of a wait,” she tells us. “The doctor’s a little behind schedule this afternoon.”

  “No worries,” Dad says, smiling at her.

  When I get back from the bathroom (clutching the gown closed with both hands), he’s engrossed in one of the well-worn tabloid magazines from a rack next to his chair.

  Before too long, Dr. Caslow comes in and gives me a high five. I wonder if he does this with his chronologically old patients, too. “How is she doing with medications?” he asks my dad as they shake hands. “Any issues with the statins?”

  Dad looks at me and then back at Dr. Caslow. He knows I was put on statins in addition to the baby aspirin I was already taking to help keep my arteries from getting too hard and narrow, but the truth is he and I only see each other a few times a month, not enough for him to know much more than that. “I’m doing fine, mostly,” I say. “Sometimes my muscles get a little achy.”

  The doctor pulls a little flashlight from the pocket of his coat and looks inside my mouth. “Well, that’s to be expected, unfortunately,” he says. “While we don’t really know if that’s a medication issue or a progeria issue, we’ll have a better idea of whether or not the meds are helping when we do your next round of blood work and scans.” He pulls an otoscope from the front pocket of his lab coat and looks inside my ears. “Still doing your stretches at home?”

  “Yeah,” I say, grimacing. Every night before I go to sleep, Mom comes into my room and says, “Time for the rack.” Then she proceeds to stretch my joints and limbs in different directions just a little farther than is comfortable. It’s supposed to limber me up and prevent injuries by keeping my muscles and tendons flexible, but I’m not sure it actually helps.

  The nurse comes back in, and Dr. Caslow says he’ll need to do a full physical exam. He asks my dad if he wants to stay in the room.

  “He can leave,” I say, answering for him. Dad looks surprised and a little hurt, but I just say, “What? I’m almost sixteen!” So what if my body’s closer to a hundred? I’m still a teenager, darn it.

  * * *

  My stepmother, Jamey, has dinner ready when we get to the house. She’s wearing her usual homeschool mom uniform—long denim skirt, a man’s oversize button-down shirt, and no makeup. (Holy roller, Mom called her when Jamey and my dad first got married. Tambourine smacker.) Even now, more than five years later, Jamey and my mom have still only spoken a handful of times, usually on those rare occasions when Mom has picked me up from their house or Jamey has driven me home to Mom’s. Jamey is born-again, and she believes in modesty and not in physical affection. To prove it, she doesn’t hug me or Dad when we walk in, but she does say, “Greetings, fellow Delaneys.” (Mom also thought it was hilarious that Jamey’s name changed to Jamey Delaney when she got married: “She sounds like a Dr. Seuss character!”)

  I help Jamey finish setting the table for dinner and then go upstairs to summon my siblings. There are pictures of all of us on the wall next to the stairs, including one of me as a normal-looking baby. Of the three kids who live in this house full-time, Isaiah’s the oldest. He’s eleven, and he’s Jamey’s son from her first marriage. Even though Isaiah and I aren’t related by blood, I still consider him to be my brother. Then there are my dad and Jamey’s twins, Obadiah and Nevaeh, who are five now. They’re playing Legos on the floor of Obi’s bedroom, and when they see me standing in the doorway, they jump up to give me hugs. When they do, I realize that they’re officially taller than me now. “Will you guys stop growing already?” I tease them. The twins are also starting to look more and more like my dad. He’s their dad, too, of course, so it makes sense. Still, I’m hit by strange pangs of pride and jealousy at these new developments.

  Isaiah, ever the vigilant big brother, comes out of his room and sees the twins wrapped around me. “Be careful,” he scolds them. “Agnes is delicate, remember?”

  “It’s okay,” I say, giving him a smile. “I’m sturdier than I look.” I grab the camera from my backpack and get the three of them to stand together in the hallway. “Say ‘stinky cheese,’” I tell them. Isaiah rolls his eyes, but the twins crack up and flash these huge grins, complete with gaps from their missing baby teeth, right as the shutter clicks.

  * * *

  Obi and Nevaeh snuggle up on either side of me before bedtime that night while I read their favorite story out loud. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” I begin, holding open the title page. “My friend Moira loves this one, too.”

  “Who’s Moira?” Nevvie wants to know.

  “She’s what you might call my BFF,” I tell her.

  Nevvie looks at me for a long moment. Then she looks up toward the ceiling like she’s puzzling something out in her head. “Bunny … Foo Foo?” she finally asks.

  Obi throws his head back and lets out a high-pitched laugh, but it’s clear he doesn’t know what the letters stand for, either.

  “No, silly. It means ‘best friend forever.’ Seriously, you’ve never heard that?” I laugh, too, like my little sister made a funny joke on purpose, but I’m going to have to talk to Dad about this. What little kid doesn’t know about BFFs? It’s like not knowing about LOL or OMG. It’s basic communication. I won’t be around for too many more years to teach the twins these things, and I don’t want any siblings of mine being treated like freaks when they go out into the real world.

  “I’ve heard about Moira,” Obi says, still laughing. “Your BFF is big and fat.”

  I freeze. “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me. She has a big fat butt. Butts are hilarious.”

  Even though I’m completely aghast, I try to keep a lid on it. “It’s not nice to talk about people like that,” I tell Obi in the calmest voice possible. Nice use of the word hilarious, though, I think. I consider complimenting him on his vocabulary, but then I think better of it. The mixed message would probably just confuse him.

  “But that’s what Dad says,” Obi continues. “He says she’s big and fat and that people get that way from eating too much.”

  Wait, what? Breath is backing up in my chest now. Dad and Moira have only met each other a few times over the years. After the first time, he called Mom and raised a stink about “that scary girl” being a bad influence on me.

  “Why?” Mom challenged him. “Because of her fashion choices?”

  “You call that fashion?” I could hear Dad’s voice bristling through the phone as she held the receiver away from her ear and rolled her eyes.

  “I call it independent thinking,” she fired back, “which is obviously something you’re not familiar with.”

  “It’s not nice to talk about people like that,” I repeat to Obi in a stern voice. “Even if Dad’s the one doing the talking. Do you understand me?”

  My brother nods. His eyes are wide now, and he looks like he might be about to cry.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” I tell him. “You didn’t know. But Moira’s my friend, and I don’t want anyone ta
lking bad about her. Friends have each other’s back.”

  “Like SpongeBob and Patrick?”

  “Exactly,” I tell him. “Exactly like … Wait. When does your mom let you watch SpongeBob?”

  For a second, Obi’s eyes get even bigger. I’ve never seen his face so solemn. Then he locks his eyes on to mine, slowly raises a finger to his lips, and goes, “Shhhh.”

  I’m not sure why this makes me so happy, but it does. Jamey’s not going to know what hit her when this one’s a teenager. “Don’t worry,” I whisper. “I’ve got your back.”

  15

  MOIRA

  DAY 86: MARCH 31

  By the end of sixth grade it dawned on me that things were only going to get worse in junior high if I didn’t take action. I’d heard the stories of what happened to kids on the dystopian fringe of seventh grade. Insults would turn into shoving and tripping; hallway confrontations would end in toilet swirlies.

  Without a doubt, the socially acceptable course of action would have been to starve myself down over the summer and just get with the skinny-girl program for a change, but I couldn’t do it. For one thing, my love of food has always been stronger than my hatred of my body. For another, even at the time, I suspected that it wouldn’t end up mattering how small I made myself. I’d already been marked as an outcast. And I never wanted to look like the rail-thin girls in teen magazines, anyway. True, I wanted to disappear most days. If an invisibility cloak was ever invented, I’d be the first in line to buy one. But I knew it wasn’t an option for me to disappear via starvation.

  Instead, I figured it was better to flip my middle finger to the world and work on accepting the random stoutness gene or slow metabolism or whatever the hell it was that had somehow worked its way into my DNA. It was better to fight back.

  I probably would have chosen to homeschool starting in seventh grade if it hadn’t been for Agnes. Not that I blame her for all the sucktastic school years that followed. Agnes just wanted to be as much of an actual “normal” preteen as possible. As her best friend and protector, I vowed to do whatever it took to help make that happen. Which meant there was no turning back from the impending potential crisis that would be junior high if something didn’t give and give quick.

  For starters, the homemade clothes and hippie food weren’t going to cut it. They just amplified my existence as an easy target, so they’d be the first to go. Instead of going back to tie-dye when seventh grade started, I decided to cultivate my own look. I moved away from creating clothes from scratch and instead started embellishing clothes that already existed, changing them to suit my needs. I convinced my mom to buy bowling shirts and full-length skirts dirt cheap at the thrift store. And because my parents encouraged self-acceptance at home, because they sincerely believed that I was a perfect, capable, creative being of light, they didn’t argue with me. The same held true for lunch. As long as I packed my own most days and included at least a couple of healthy things, no questions were asked.

  For the most part, it worked. I survived seventh grade, and I still got to hang out with Agnes for much of each school day. Boone Craddock was there, but our schedules didn’t cross much. That was just as well, since I didn’t plan on ever talking to him again anyway, not after what he did to Agnes. He was there for the first part of eighth grade, too, and then he was just … gone. It wasn’t until after the winter break that I heard his father had died. I have only vague memories of Boone’s dad. Sometimes I’d see him pick Boone up after school in a beat-up Chevy truck. Once he came to get Boone from Agnes’s birthday party, but he didn’t come up to the door and say hi or anything.

  “Should we call him?” Agnes wondered out loud as soon as we heard the news.

  “You can call him,” I said. “If you want to.” I felt bad about the thing with his dad, but what was I supposed to do? Just ring him up out of the blue like nothing had ever happened, like he hadn’t gotten Agnes hurt? I wasn’t that big of a person. Well, I was that big of a person, but only in the literal sense.

  16

  BOONE

  DAY 85: APRIL 1

  That first winter Mom and I were on our own was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to get through. My dad had always been protective of his expensive sledgehammer and wedge; since he’d only recently allowed me to start using those tools to split firewood by myself, I still wasn’t very good at it. I tended to either not tap the wedge into the wood deep enough, so that it fell away when I brought the sledge down, or I’d sink it too deep into a knot. In that case, my only option was to hammer at the stump over and over again until it finally split open and the steel cone could be pried loose. God knew we couldn’t afford a new one.

  Dad and I had loaded a bunch of big Douglas fir rounds onto the truck bed the day of the accident. Weeks later, when I realized how low the wood supply was already getting, I started splitting them. It wouldn’t be any easier to chop and stack the stuff once the really serious weather set in come January, that was for sure. It was hard, inefficient work getting the rounds cut down to pieces that would fit inside our old woodstove, but the work helped me focus the blackness within. It helped me compartmentalize the near-constant current of rage running beneath the surface of my skin—rage at my father for not being there, for leaving me alone to take care of Mom, who had all but stopped speaking, who would mutter only single-syllable words through her closed bedroom door in response to my questioning: “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does soup sound good for dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  I felt like a complete shit heel being so angry about the whole thing. If anyone was really suffering, it was her. She was the one who’d become a widow and a single mother in one fell swoop. I was just half an orphan.

  For a while after my father died, I figured her inability to deal was just a phase. Life had thrown both of us overboard without any warning, and we were just trying to stay afloat. As the weeks went by, though, it seemed like Mom’s grief was dragging her farther and farther out to sea. I was getting knocked around by the waves of sadness and fear, too, but I could still see the shore, and I could also see how life might someday get back to normal if we just swam hard enough in the right direction.

  I waited one month after my dad wasn’t around anymore before even thinking about whether or not I should go back to eighth grade. I didn’t want to put more pressure on Mom, but it wasn’t like anyone was coming around to offer me rides, either: my parents didn’t really have friends to speak of, and my dad’s family had pretty much all died off before he did. If we were a normal family, Mom’s parents might have helped, but they lived back East. They hadn’t been thrilled with her decision to marry my dad, from what I’d heard over the years, and I only met them once, when I was a baby and too young to remember them. Still, weren’t grandparents supposed to help out at a time like this? Women from a couple of local churches had been dropping off meals at our house since word got out about what happened to my dad, but I knew the charity of local strangers would only last so long until we’d be expected to start standing on our own feet again.

  Another reason I waited before going back to school was that I didn’t like the thought of leaving Mom alone during the day when she was such a mess. What if she … did something during the hours I was away? What if I came home and she … wasn’t there anymore? When the middle school secretary called about a week into my absence, I told her I was being homeschooled now. Which was a laugh, but it worked to get her off my back, at least for the time being.

  “Can you have your mom send a note verifying this so we can add it to your file?” she asked me. “At some point we’ll need the necessary paperwork as well.”

  “No problem,” I answered. “My mom will send the note tomorrow.” The next day I wrote a note, forged Mom’s signature, and rode my bike six miles to the post office to drop it in the mail.

  Not too long after that, the shock of my dad’s being gone for good seemed to wear off for her, and the ne
w reality of our situation set in. The man who’d once been the center of her life was never coming back. Even during the year after he fell off that roof and turned into more and more of a ragey drunk, there was always hope that things would get better. My mother took her pills and insisted on two things: his body and his mind would heal, and he would get back to being the man he once was. Now all that hope was gone. Without warning, she and I were on our own. There was no tidy wrap-up of my parents’ marriage, no Happily Ever After to balance out the Once Upon a Time we’d enjoyed back when we were a relatively normal family with the same ups and downs as everyone else.

  This realization, combined with her new refusal to stay on the antidepressants (“There’s no point,” she told me when I asked her about the full pill bottle I found in the bathroom trash), seemed to flip a switch somewhere inside my mother’s brain. Within a matter of weeks, she stopped taking all but the most basic care of herself, and she became terrified of being out in public. Anything from a drive to the gas station to fill the truck’s tank to a trip to the grocery store usually ended up with my mother acting as shaken and traumatized as if she’d just had a brush with violent death. I ended up doing everything—educating myself the best I could, cleaning the house, cooking our meals, and taking care of Diablo. When she was too freaked out or zoned out to leave the house (which was most of the time), I’d hitchhike to town and get as much done as I could. Sometimes I’d ride my bike, but it was a long ride. Also, it was almost impossible to balance the plastic bags of groceries on the handlebars without wiping out on the dirt road. This went on for a couple of months, and then something else happened. My mother became an addict.

  Not a drug addict or an alcoholic, mind you. No sirree. She didn’t knock back a few shots with her morning cup of coffee like my dad had, and she didn’t suddenly start scoring heroin or meth from a local dealer. Instead, my mother developed a jones for jigsaw puzzles. I don’t know what it was about those things. I do remember Dad buying one for the three of us to piece together on New Year’s Eve when I was little. For some reason, Mom’s brain must have latched on to that particular memory for comfort after he was gone, the way my brain latched on to the idea that I was the man of the house now, that it was my time to step up and there was no room for feeling sorry for myself. She’d stay holed up in her room for hours, trying to fit the borders of different pieces together. And because I didn’t know what else to do to make her feel better, I started picking up the cheapest ones I could find on my bike trips into town. It wasn’t long before every surface in her bedroom was covered with cardboard fragments. Eventually, she had to expand the jigsaw operation to the living room and the kitchen table. To this day, she goes through even the thousand-piece ones like wildfire, so I still pick them up for her at the thrift store whenever I have a few extra bucks.