“Yeah. I know.” But I don’t know, really. I have no idea why I’m working this hard. I have triple the sources I need. I had to ask Mr. Sorenson for extra of those note-taking sheets. Plus I have an A-minus in history already and this is only 25 percent of our grade.
Axl Rose jumps into a centimeter of space on my bed and then sprawls out on the book I’m reading. I push her off, but Phuc calls her over. He loves cats, but one of his sisters is allergic. He scratches her head until she purrs; then he opens his book and starts his homework. For a while we work without talking. Axl Rose falls asleep on Murphy’s pillow. Phuc stops every few minutes to watch the lava. “I wish some girl would give me one of these for my birthday,” he says. He puts his math book away and pulls out geography.
I turn the page of a massive book that’s so musty it made my whole backpack stink, and I see a black-and-white picture of Spirit Knob, when it existed. Some men are pulling a sailboat onto the shore, and one man’s already standing on the sand, looking out at the camera instead of up at the most sacred place on the lake. But probably he doesn’t know that. And something clicks, like when Dad used to fix the chain on my dirt bike. “This!” I say, too loud, and Phuc looks at me like I’ve finally lost it, and also like he expected it. Axl Rose lifts her head and puts it back down, uninterested.
I turn the book around and point to the highest tree on Spirit Knob. “This is the reason I’m obsessed.”
“That tree?”
“Yeah. I mean, not just that, but all of it. Like, all this stuff happened on this lake, and we live here and we don’t even know about it. This place isn’t even here anymore. It’s under some tennis courts.” I turn the page and point to a picture taken from the top of Spirit Knob, looking down, like the view God has, or used to have. “There were six hundred burial mounds in Wicapi. And now there’s zero. All these books”—I pick one up and toss it back down—“are full of the way things used to be. People who used to be. And no one remembers them.”
Phuc blinks and leans forward a little, watching me basically the same way he watched the lava.
“And I just think it…matters.” Dad slides into my head. He’s sitting at the kitchen table. Silent, with his glass of Jack Daniel’s, one quarter full. War in his head. Death seeped into all the cracks of his brain, into all his memories, taking over. “We all go around like nothing bad ever happened,” I tell Phuc. “Like there’s not millions of bones under us and ghosts all around us. We just go out waterskiing!” Dad, dead on the tracks. I see it as a memory even though I wasn’t there. And new soldiers on TV, young ones, and the president saying words like “liberation.” “I just think someone should remember,” I tell Phuc, and he smiles.
“Guess that’s gonna be you.”
* * *
It’s my third time in church in a week (Palm Sunday, Lenten Soup, Good Friday) but at least the end (Easter) is in sight, which I guess for Jesus was just the beginning. (If Mom had made me go on Maundy Thursday, this would’ve been my fourth time. But I said I’d only go if she could tell me what Maundy Thursday is. Which she couldn’t.) I swear I’ll never be happier to hear those trumpets blast my eardrums and sit squished in a pew full of perfume and drooly babies in white suits. Unless the church has some new thing planned for Pentecost. God, I hope not.
The lights are dim and the cross is draped in black, which makes the song “Back in Black” pop into my head. I’ve been looking at the sky ’cause it’s gettin’ me high. Forget the hearse ’cause I never die. I start to laugh, thinking about Jesus rocking an electric guitar at the front of the church, but I bite my lip in time. Even Pastor Steve looks appropriately sad tonight. Not as sad as he looked when Dad died, but I guess he’s more used to Jesus dying, since he does it every year.
Mom’s been dabbing her eyes with a tissue the whole service, which makes me want to scream because she’s cried about Jesus more than she’s cried about Dad, as far as I can tell, and what did Jesus ever do for her? I mean, at least Dad went to work and fixed stuff. Plus Jesus is going to rise in like two days, and Dad never will. Dad’s at the bottom of a grave that (hopefully) someone filled with dirt after we left.
I stare at the dark stained-glass window over the piano, where Moses stands on a mountain holding the Ten Commandments and think of Animal Farm. I started reading it last night in case I decide to go back to book club on Monday (which I probably won’t, because Mrs. Peterson will make me raise a salient point, and I don’t have one). In the book there’s a raven named Moses who tells all the animals that when they die, they’ll go to Sugarcandy Mountain, up in the sky. Sugarcandy Mountain is full of clover and sugar and every day is Sunday (barf). So the animals keep killing themselves with work so they can get there when they’re dead. It sounds so totally and obviously bogus to me.
Finally church ends and I wait for Mom to do whatever she does afterwards, and when she comes back to the pew, all the sniffling people are gone and it’s just me. She sits down. She seems thinner. Or her hair seems thinner. I don’t know. “Ready?” she asks. “Or do you need a minute?”
“Mom. Would you be mad if I didn’t believe in heaven?” I ask.
Her eyes get big, but Mom has a killer poker face, and she puts it on quick. “Of course not. Dad and I always said, you and Murphy are free to believe whatever you want to believe.”
“I just think heaven…I just think it sounds like something that’s supposed to make us feel better. About dying. So we picture angels and clouds and harps instead of worms eating our flesh until we’re bones and then the bones turning to dust.” Mom clears her throat. “Sorry.”
She shakes her head. “No, I get it. But you know, heaven is supposed to be for souls. Not bodies.”
“Phuc says we exist at all times of our life in other dimensions.”
Mom nods. “I like the sound of that.”
“Yeah. Me too. I just don’t know how to…picture him.”
“Who? Jesus?”
“Mom! No!”
“Sorry! I just…You were looking at the cross, so…” She drops her voice a little. “How to picture Dad?”
“Yes.”
We sit for a minute, still staring at the cross, which has nothing to do with anything, but it’s just where we look. Then Mom says, “You know my favorite way to picture Dad?” I shake my head. “On the day you came home from the hospital, Dad fell asleep in his chair with you in one arm and Murphy in the other. And he didn’t call out or jerk awake or sweat or even move. After a while he just…opened his eyes. And smiled at me. And it was the most content I ever saw him. The most peaceful. That’s what I like to picture. I hope if he’s in another dimension, like Phuc says, he’s living that moment a lot.”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out like a tired ghost. “Me too.”
* * *
Murphy’s tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and looking at the church door every seven seconds.
“Where is she?” he asks.
“In the church,” I say.
“Duh.”
“You asked. What’s your problem anyway? You got somewhere to be? ’Cause, you know, it’s like, Easter Sunday. Family. Baskets. Big fluffy bunny. Ring a bell?”
“Shut up, Justin. What’s eating you?”
“Me? I’m minding my own business. You’re the one acting like a junkie.”
Murphy laughs. “You know all about that, right? Big drug deals going down in seventh grade?”
“Shut up.”
Mom opens the back door and sets three huge lilies next to me on the seat. One pokes my face. It smells like a funeral. “Aren’t these beautiful?” Mom asks. “The church let us have them for free!” Then she looks at our faces, which are the opposite of big beautiful flowers on Easter. “What’s wrong? Are you two fighting?”
“No,” Murphy says.
“No,” I say.
&
nbsp; “Good,” Mom says, and slams the door harder than she needs to.
I want to glare at Murphy in the rearview mirror but I don’t want Mom to see so I glare at the lilies instead, which isn’t really fair, because they can’t help it that humans designated them the death flower. Maybe in another dimension they’re wedding flowers, and whenever people smell them they want to sing and dance and fall in love. And the wedding lilies think about the death lilies in our dimension and just feel sad for them.
Murphy turns in to the cemetery and we pass through the black gate and the gravel crunches under the tires. Like bones. “Home,” I tell the lilies.
“What?” Mom says.
“Nothing.”
Murphy rolls his eyes. He parks the car and we get out. The birds are chirping like they figured out what’s going on at all the churches this morning and are just as excited as we are. He is risen! they tell us. Hallelujah! What a weird day to visit a cemetery. Jesus is risen but everyone else is still dead. But there’s a bunch of other families doing it too. With their own pastel ties and church flowers and stomachs thinking about ham.
We carry the lilies to Dad’s grave, one for each of us, and set them down next to the stone, which came in last week. It’s basically the worst stone ever. It has three lines:
Lawrence Arthur Olson
November 23, 1950 – December 18, 1990
Beloved husband and father
That’s it. No hearts or flags or even a little squiggly line somewhere. And the gray of the stone is—what’s the word? Mottled. Like barf. Or soup. Or someone with the flu.
Mom arranges the lilies around the back of the stone. “I should have gotten one more,” she says.
“Or one less,” Murphy says, and Mom gives him a look that says, If I could punch you in the face, I would. “I’m going to wait in the car,” Murphy says. Hallelujah! the birds chirp. He walks away. The car door shuts. Mom and I stare at the stone and the lilies, kind of like we stared at the cross on Friday. There’s just nowhere else to look. The sun is buttery above us, climbing to its highest point. He is risen!
“Do you like the stone?” Mom asks.
“Yes.”
We walk back to the car so we can visit Grandpa before the nursing home serves lunch at 10:45 in the morning. Murphy will pace in the hallway. Mom will open every drawer in Grandpa’s dresser to make sure all the socks and shirts are clean. (They will be.) And I’ll stare at the birds flapping around Dad’s birdfeeders and say, “Look, Grandpa. A nuthatch.”
* * *
I get to the library so early that it’s only Jenni sitting on the “reading rug,” which is not a thing that belongs in junior high, but tell that to Mrs. Peterson who says sitting on the ground in a circle “equalizes” us.
“You came!” Jenni says.
“Yeah.” I drop my backpack onto a smiling green bookworm with bifocals. “I read the book, so…”
She nods. “What’d you think?”
I shrug. “Cool, I guess.” I sit down next to her, and the air buzzes between us. I hope I’m wearing deodorant.
“And do you have a salient point to raise today?” she asks, in a perfect Mrs. Peterson voice.
“That’s freaky.”
“Thanks. I’ve been working on it for like two months.” I picture Jenni at home, talking like Mrs. Peterson in the mirror, and laugh.
“Actually, I do have one,” I tell her.
“Well done, young man. Let’s have it,” Jenni (Mrs. Peterson) says.
I find the page I folded down and read, “And when they heard the gun booming and saw the green flag fluttering at the masthead, their hearts swelled with imperishable pride.”
Jenni’s face turns back into her own.
“It reminds me of my dad,” I tell the open book. “Because as much as he hated the war, as much as he…suffered from it…he was still proud to be an American. I think. Like, he would tear up hearing the national anthem, but he never sang it. And we went to the parade every Memorial Day, but he never wore his uniform like the other guys.”
Jenni leans toward me a little, so I can smell her shampoo. I take a deep breath. “When we buried him, we didn’t even know if we should use the flag.” I scratch at the hole in the knee of my jeans. “We did, though,” I tell her. “We did use it.”
Then I just run out of words and it’s quiet around us. Quieter than any library ever, and that’s saying something.
“That,” Jenni whispers, “was a very salient point.”
The rest of book club arrives and everyone drops their backpacks on the reading rug and Mrs. Peterson passes around the snacks and the air gets loud, but between Jenni and me it stays quiet, like a small secret, like knowing everything is made of superstrings.
* * *
“Hello. Are you a Skipper?” the parrot asks when I walk into the art room.
I blink at him. I’m the opposite of a Skipper. I’ve never even been on a sailboat. He means a Minnetonka Skipper, but can you even be that if you don’t play sports?
Kyle lifts up the black hair that hangs down over his eyes, and says, “You don’t have to answer him, you know.”
“Oh. Right.” I’d planned to just, like, slide into the art room and sit in the corner, but I guess not.
“Cheese and crackers!” the parrot says.
Kyle rolls his eyes, which have black makeup around them. “I hate whoever taught him that. It’s so predictable.”
I smile. Kyle and I used to be friends in elementary school. I guess we still are. I mean, we’re not not friends. But when we got to junior high Kyle started wearing all black and painting his fingernails and listening to weird music, and I…I guess I just kept being the same.
“So, what are you doing here?” he asks. We’re the only ones in the room, besides the parrot.
“I just, came to draw something.”
“For a girl?”
I look down at my shoes and realize they’re the same kind I’ve been wearing since fourth grade and feel predictable, like the parrot. I look back up. “How’d you know?”
Kyle shrugs and looks down at his drawing. “Lucky guess. Can you draw?”
“Kind of. What are you working on?”
He holds up his sketchbook, and it’s the most amazing drawing of a tiny house on a hill but in outer space. It’s all in pencil but it looks 3-D. It’s weird but familiar at the same time. “Wow,” I say. “That’s so good. How’d you learn to do that?”
Kyle shrugs again. “Practice. I’m not happy with it, though. There’s paper and pencils in that drawer.” He points by tipping his head because he’s already drawing again.
I get some paper and have to sharpen the pencil, which sounds like an auger in ice because the room is so quiet, but Kyle doesn’t seem to care. I sit down a few stools away from him and for a long time it’s just the sound of our pencils scratching and erasers erasing and the parrot whistling the Minnetonka Skipper fight song.
“So how’s it going?” Kyle asks after a while.
I look up to see if he’s talking about in general or with the drawing and luckily he’s looking at my paper. “I don’t know,” I say, which would actually work for both questions. “I can’t get this right.” I’m trying to draw a flower for Jenni, which is so lame, and feels even lamer when Kyle comes over to see it. “I’m trying to make it seem like it’s growing,” I say. Lamely.
He nods. “Maybe some lines, like, going up here. Can I?”
“Yeah.” I slide the paper over and he fixes it in two seconds. “Jeez. Thanks.”
He nods and goes back to his stool. After a few minutes he says, “I like that. A flower growing instead of just sitting there in a vase.”
“Thanks.”
The parrot sings, “Spread far the fame of our fair name, and fight, you Skippers. Win this ga
me!”
“I don’t get it,” Phuc says. “You’re so good at English. Which is, like, words. How can you be so bad at this?” He’s trying to explain (again) how to set up an equation from a word problem.
I shrug. “I really don’t know.”
The thing about Phuc is, he never gives up. Never. If Phuc ever gives up on anything, you better collect your valuables because it’s definitely the apocalypse. He puffs one cheek up with air, then the other one, back and forth, thinking. Then he puts his pencil on one side of his desk and mine on the other. “Okay. This is point A.” He taps his pencil. “And this is point B.” He taps my pencil. “So this train leaves point A traveling at twenty miles an hour.” His pencil chugs across the desk. Slow. Like an inchworm. About the speed of the trolley that killed Dad. “And this train leaves point B moving at thirty miles an hour.” He pushes my pencil, faster. I picture a little plume of smoke coming from the point. I hear a train whistle. “So we have to figure out where they’ll meet.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not. You just have to know how to set up the equation.”
I picture Dad at the edge of the lake. The trolley’s coming and he’s setting up the equation. The wind is a cold slice. The ice on the lake is eleven inches thick. The sky is black with white stars. The trolley moves in a colorful haze, full of glowing Christmas lights and bundled-up riders. To his right, the ladies at the hot chocolate stand are filling up the cups. Dropping a marshmallow in each one. He thinks, If the trolley is traveling at twenty-three miles an hour and I step out at point A, is it fast enough to kill me? He’s squinting at the trolley. It’s clattering down the tracks. He’s ticking off the seconds.
Or not. Or he’s looking at the lake and smoking a cigarette and thinking misty, mystical thoughts full of green leaves and wet air and he turns around to cross and the timing’s off.
Like Nothing Amazing Ever Happened Page 8