A Little Bit of Spectacular

by Gin Phillips

  After school, I went for my usual water and scone. I couldn’t see Amelia until after school the next day—she had gymnastics on Thursdays—and I wanted to visit Trattoria’s bathroom again, the place where everything started. Like I’d told Rachel, I loved feeling as if there were countless strangers talking to me, telling me bits and pieces about their lives, expecting me to make sense of them.

  I slipped into the bathroom, just standing there, sipping my coffee, considering the walls. Trying to imagine who wrote the words, imagining what she meant, what she wanted. Did she think about who would read them? Did she mean them as a message at all?

  “Who are you, Plantagenet?” I whispered at the wall.

  As many words as the wall had on it, it didn’t have any answers for me.

  I had my book bag with me, and there was a pen in it. I thought of the other verses I’d seen around town. And I had a really intense need to see them all together. To see the whole thing written out smooth and whole, like a poem. I found the darkest pen I had, and I wrote in block letters underneath the original “We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.” By the time I finished, I had a significant block of the wall covered. It read:

  We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.

  WE WILL NEVER GROW OLD.

  WE ARE PLANTAGENET.

  WE WALK NEXT TO YOU.

  BUT WE ARE NOT ONE OF YOU.

  WE ARE PLANTAGENET.

  OUR HOME IS IN THE STARS.

  When I got back to my seat, I noticed I had ink on my hands, and I didn’t want to clean it off. There was something nice about leaving a message. I’d never left one myself before. It felt satisfying. Important. I had my own words there—well, sort of my own words—jammed in with a million other words. I hadn’t just left a message—I was part of something. I’d added my mark to all the other marks, and even though I didn’t know the people who’d written on the wall, my words were part of theirs now. I was permanent. I was unerasable.

  Chapter 6

  COUCH REST

  When I got home, I was surprised to find Mom on the couch. She gave a cheerful little wave when I walked through the door.

  “The days of taking it easy are over,” she said as I leaned down to hug her. “Checked off the list. Now I’m supposed to get some real exercise.”

  “Exercise?” I didn’t think she looked like she was in any shape for swimming.

  “Well, move around more, at least,” she said. “I’m supposed to stretch my muscles a little. Walk up and down the stairs if I can.”

  “Is that safe? Shouldn’t you maybe just walk around the couch a little?”

  “No, Dr. Mario, I do not need to do laps around the couch. According to my actual doctor, exercise is totally safe. And necessary. If I don’t work my muscles, I won’t heal as well.”

  Well, that changed things. I wanted her to heal perfectly. Quickly. Permanently. And if she needed exercise, I could help.

  “You want to try a flight of stairs?” I asked. “I’ll hold your arm.”

  So that’s how we wound up in the stairwell, surrounded by concrete walls and concrete floor and concrete ceiling, both of us blowing wispy puffs in the cold air every time we exhaled because the stairwells weren’t heated. Mom was doing pretty well—she’d done fine going down one flight, and she was working her way back up to our floor now. Her bare feet were completely silent on the stairs. Her arm was looped around my shoulders, and I had an arm around her waist. I thought she felt too light. Wispy as a puff of air.

  “Hey, I could go get you a milk shake when we get back upstairs,” I said. I was barefoot, too—neither one of us ever liked shoes—and my toes were starting to get numb from the icy concrete. “Or hot chocolate. Or there’s that cupcake place down the street.”

  “Gram will definitely think those are unnecessary expenses,” she said, pausing between the words, catching her breath. She was leaning a little more heavily on me with each step. I counted five more stairs left.

  “Are you . . .” she started to ask. Three more steps. “Are you trying to fatten me up?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think you’ve lost some weight.”

  One stair left. No stairs left. Her arm lifted off my shoulder, and I straightened once the weight was gone. I didn’t realize I’d been stooping. I lifted my arms over my head and stretched, enjoying the pull all the way from my back to my fingertips.

  Mom stood with the stairwell door open, doing her own more subtle stretches. Tilting her head from side to side, flexing and pointing her toes. She watched me and frowned.

  “I put too much weight on you, didn’t I? You’re sore?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow, head still cocked to the side from rolling her neck. “I thought that was my line,” she said.

  We padded back down the hallway, both of us glad to be off the cold concrete and onto the soft carpet. After Mom unlocked the door, she took both my hands in hers and pulled me to the sofa.

  “We need to talk, Mario,” she said.

  I couldn’t help it—I jerked my hands away from her and scooted back, scooted as far away from her as I could get. My skin felt tight all of a sudden, and I felt a small earthquake run through me, a shiver from my lips to my fingers.

  Those were the exact words she’d used after she hung up with the doctor’s office in Charleston. We need to talk.

  Mom winced and ran a hand over her face. I could see she remembered, too.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “Bad choice of words. It’s nothing bad. Don’t worry.”

  Why was everyone always telling me that? As if two words were all it took to change the thoughts running through your mind. As if you could just tell yourself, “Stop worrying, self,” and all the bad thoughts would evaporate and instead your head would be filled with rainbows and flowers and unicorns.

  “I want to apologize,” Mom said, and that got my attention. It made no sense. She had nothing to apologize for.

  “I leaned on you too much in Charleston,” she said, settling herself deeper into the couch. “I was scared and I felt bad, and I let you take care of me more than you should have. And that’s not the way it should be. I’m the mother; you’re the daughter. I take care of you. Not the other way around.”

  I stared at her. At her tired eyes and bird-nest hair and face that was sweaty from walking up one flight of stairs. And she was telling me I shouldn’t take care of her? That I shouldn’t protect her?

  Of course I should. Someone had to protect her. Someone had to keep her safe. And if she was telling me that I shouldn’t do it, it must mean that I’d done a very bad job of it. I hadn’t made her feel safe. Even though I’d tried to be strong and happy and keep my face smooth and smiling, I must have let the cracks show. She must have noticed that sometimes I didn’t feel strong and happy. And now she was worried about me. On top of herself.

  I’d screwed it all up.

  She just kept talking.

  “I’m getting better now,” she said, “and things are going to go back to the way they were before I got sick. You don’t need to stay home with me. You don’t need to go get me ice cream or medicine or offer to rub my feet or fix my hair. You are no longer on nurse duty. You are on eleven-year-old-girl duty.”

  Those last few weeks in Charleston, this is how I started the morning: I woke up at six a.m., without an alarm clock, and I woke up fast. I’ve always had an alarm clock in my head. One minute I was dead asleep, and then my eyes flew open and I sat up in bed. Not groggy, not blurry-eyed. Totally awake. You know how a dog can be snoring on the floor one second, and then—maybe you open the door or something—it jumps up and wags its tail so fast you think it was faking sleep in the first place? That’s how I was. And the second my feet hit the ground, I headed to Mom’s room. She usually slept a little later, but I would creep over to her bed and be sure her ch
est was moving. If I couldn’t tell, I would put my hand under her nose to feel the little snorts of air. Then, once I knew she was alive, I would go make her toast. Two pieces, no butter. And tea, not coffee, because coffee made her stomach get upset.

  And every morning, when I brought the tray into her room, she would tell me not to do it anymore, that I didn’t need to make her breakfast. That she could get it herself. But she’d eat every bite of the toast. And drink every sip of the tea. And it felt so good to know that I was helping, that I was doing something. That maybe, if she had a full belly from toast and tea, it would make her stronger. It would make her better.

  If I hadn’t been able to make her toast every morning, I think I would have screamed. Or broken things. Or run out the door and kept running until my legs gave out. Because I had to do something while she was lying in bed so still.

  Mom was still talking.

  “And especially after your father,” she said. “You’d already had to . . .”

  I jumped off the sofa then. Actually jumped off of it. I ran to the front door, then remembered I didn’t have anywhere to go. Trattoria would close any minute. Gram would be home soon, expecting me to be there. There wasn’t even a door on my bedroom. But I just wanted to leave. I wanted to be by myself, without walls around me and doors closing me in. Sometimes I thought the condo was too small to hold enough air for all three of us. I’d wake up in the middle of the night gasping, sweating. Sometimes in the middle of the day, with sunlight pouring in from the windows, I still felt like gasping, like I’d been underwater for too long and I was kicking and kicking as fast as I could and I’d die if I didn’t break the surface of the water soon.

  This was one of those gasping moments. I had to get out. Before Mom kept talking and talking.

  “I’m going to, um, get something I dropped. In the hall. Or somewhere. I won’t leave the building,” I said as I swung open the door.

  “Mario!” yelled Mom. “Wait!”

  Then the door swung closed and cut off anything else she might have said. She knew I was lying. I was a terrible liar at the best of moments, and that whole I dropped something was not my cleverest moment. But I knew I was safe. I felt guilty as I ran down the hallway, but I knew she couldn’t come after me. She could barely walk, much less run.

  I wound up back in the stairwell, which was every bit as cold as the outdoors, trudging up and up and up. My thighs burned. This time the winter air felt crisp and good as it bit into my skin. I liked how it stung my throat and the inside of my nose. It was like taking a cold shower without needing water. When I ran out of stairs, I tucked myself into a ball on the top floor of the building, my knees against my chest, my back pressing against the concrete.

  I had a place of my own in Charleston. A few blocks from our apartment was a church built in the 1800s. If you were walking down the sidewalk, you’d pass the church, then an ice-cream shop, then a lawyer’s office. And if you didn’t know it was there, you might completely miss an iron gate on the side of the church that led to what looked like an overgrown garden.

  It wasn’t a garden, though—it was an old cemetery. Once you got through the iron gate, a stone path twisted through trees and vines, palmettos and monkey grass. In some spots, sunshine hit the ground like a spotlight. But mostly the trees kept all the tombstones shaded. The magnolia trees were the biggest I’ve ever seen, and in spring, the blooms filled up the air with the smell of lemon and honey.

  The gravestones were the real reason I loved to go there. They stood up like dominoes all through the grass and weeds. I’d first visited the cemetery on a field trip at my old school; the teachers taught us how to do gravestone rubbings. I’d kept my stack of thin papers, the pencil marks gray like stone, even though I’d also etched plenty of the grave markers into my memory. Some had nothing but all-capital last names carved into the stone. JENNINGS. TWOMEY. ST. CROIX. Those were the most mysterious graves—you couldn’t tell when the people had lived, how old they’d been when they’d died, or even if they’d been men or women. Lots of the stones at least gave you full names and dates:

  LYDA WENTWORTH

  June 1, 1834

  September 16, 1891

  HENRY ADAM ELLS

  February 1803

  May 1824

  But the best stones read like very short stories of people’s lives . . .

  ALLISTER SOLOMON HANOVER

  Born in Charleston

  on the thirteenth day of January 1894.

  Called by God to minister to the masses in Indonesia. Lived among his people for forty years, survived fire and pestilence. Returned to Charleston after he was called home to God on the twentieth day of July 1951.

  LELA ALVINIA MONROE

  February 1822–May 1846

  Our darling lived briefly but well, leaving behind doting parents, a heartbroken husband, and three daughters who will feel her absence. She will be missed most by another one whose name is unwritten.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about Allister and Lela. What fire and pestilence did Allister survive? What exactly was pestilence? Was he scarred, wounded? Did he save lives? Did he ask to be brought back to Charleston after he died, or would he rather have stayed in Indonesia? And Lela—what killed her when she was only twenty-four? And—this is the part I wondered most about—who was the one who missed her most, whose name couldn’t be written on her gravestone? And if they wouldn’t write the name, why mention the person at all?

  In some ways I guess the bathroom stalls reminded me of my cemetery back home. Because even after they’ve left, people leave bits of themselves behind, pieces of their story. As long as they’ve left words, they’re never really gone. Lela died over 150 years ago, and I still knew her. Thought about her. Even if everybody else forgot, I would remember.

  I’d never even seen my dad’s gravestone.

  Sometimes it’d be nice not to have a memory. To wake up in the morning with your mind scrubbed clean as a Dry Erase Board, white and empty.

  As I was sitting there in the empty stairwell, thinking of gravestones and Dry Erase Boards, my butt getting colder and colder through my jeans, I let myself think about What if. The big What if that I had been trying to keep myself from considering. What if the possibilities I’d told myself were crazy were actually true? What if the Plantagenets were magical—if they were aliens or a secret club or whatever—and they had some kind of special powers?

  Maybe the Plantagenets wrote on the walls because they wanted to be found. And if you found them, they could do all sorts of wonderful things. Make all your wishes come true. Make anything happen. Or unhappen.

  Maybe.

  As Amelia would say, I needed more data. The only question was where to find it. And I was beginning to think I had a decent guess.

  Gram was waiting for me on the sofa when I finally let myself back into the condo. I didn’t see Mom.

  “Good day?” Gram asked, sipping a glass of water.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That’s why you were out there lurking on the stairs?”

  “I wasn’t lurking.”

  “Your mom says you disappeared nearly an hour ago.”

  She patted the sofa next to her, and I didn’t see any easy way to avoid sitting down for more talking. But when I eased onto the cushions, folding my legs up under me, Gram didn’t say anything. She turned back to the television, which had some dumb judge show on it. I hate judge shows. The judges are always so sure of themselves. Just once I’d like to hear one of them say, “Hmm, that’s a tough one. I don’t know. I tell you what—I’m thinking of a number between one and a hundred. Whoever guesses closest wins. Loser goes to jail. Case dismissed.”

  That’s how things are really decided, isn’t it? Just luck or no luck.

  “Homework?” asked Gram after a while.

  “Finished,” I said. “And no tests tomo
rrow.”

  “You see Amelia at school today?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I did good, didn’t I? I told you you’d like her.”

  We’d sort of already been through this—I’d told Gram when we drove back from Amelia’s that we’d had fun. I’d said I liked her. I’d said we were going to hang out again. But Gram wasn’t letting it go. She liked to hear how right she’d been.

  “I know,” I said, trying to smile. “I’m glad you introduced me to her.”

  “You still hoping to go over to her place tomorrow?”

  I didn’t want to get into that quite yet. “I think so. Or we might go somewhere else, I guess. I’m going to call her tonight.”

  The judge on television banged her gavel, and Gram was quiet for a while.

  “You should go talk to your mom,” she said.

  I just kept looking at the television.

  “She asked me to send you into her room.”

  Gram flexed her bare feet back and forth like they were bothering her. Her ankles looked swollen.

  “And she said to tell you that you didn’t have to talk,” she added. “Or that you could talk about how many times the average human blinks in a day. Something like that. I never know what you two mean.”

  “Okay,” I said, relieved. “I know what she means.”

  No more Dad conversation. I felt my mood improve a little bit.

  Gram nodded, either at me or at the television.

  “You know,” she said, “these poor people come on this show and let that judge ask them all sorts of questions and insult them and order them around. Don’t you wonder why anyone would ever come on this program?”

  “Yes,” I said, because I had always wondered that exact thing.

  “I think,” she said, “that it’s because people just need to talk. They get stuff built up inside them, and they need to let it out. They need somebody to listen. Even if they don’t know it.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said.

  I stood up and turned away from the television.