A Little Bit of Spectacular

by Gin Phillips

  “Mom, come look at this,” I said.

  She stood and came to the window, her hand resting on my shoulder. Part of me expected the glow to vanish as soon as I tried to show it to her. That’s what would happen in a movie. But it didn’t vanish.

  “What in the world?” said my mom, pressing her cheek against the window to get as close as possible. “There’s nothing but houses over there. I think that’s over in Forest Park.”

  After a few minutes, the glow faded and then died out. The city darkened to black, with not even a glimmer of moon or stars in the cloudy sky.

  “I wonder if anybody else saw that,” mused Mom as she headed back to the candle and our bag of marshmallows.

  We had our answer the next morning. For the first time in days or maybe weeks, the newspaper headlines didn’t focus on the blackouts. Instead the front page read, “Unknown Lights Spark Curiosity of Downtown Residents.” Rachel and her friends were all chattering about the lights as soon as I sat down—my guess was that even people who didn’t see the lights were talking about them like they had. There were all sorts of theories—an explosion, a house fire, top-secret government experiments, and, of course, UFOs.

  It was a relief to get to Amelia’s house that afternoon. There’d been so much talk about the mysterious lights all day that I hadn’t been able to sort through my own thoughts. Amelia’s yard was a good place for thinking. We were surrounded by green—drooping leaves and winding vines everywhere, a jungle of trees and shrubbery and out-of-control flowers. It felt like a world away from Gram’s condo and our school, like instead of taking a car, I should have had to row a boat downriver, past alligators and snakes, over waterfalls, and through caves. But I didn’t. I just had to wait with Amelia for her mother to pick us up from school. It wasn’t as adventurous as my imaginary boat trip, but it was a lot less sweaty.

  We sat in the grass watching two frogs enjoy their exercise time. They had plenty of room to hop in their boxes, but Amelia thought it was good for them to broaden their horizons and have new experiences, so she liked to let them play in the yard.

  I was watching Bertha, who was apparently not a frog at all but something called a Fowler’s toad, bump against my right foot. Bertha seemed to think my foot was some insurmountable obstacle, like the Great Wall of China or the Grand Canyon.

  “I wish you’d seen it,” I said to Amelia, who’d only heard about the lights when she got to school. “The whole sky was glowing.”

  “Me too,” she said. “As soon as I heard, I knew you’d think it was them.”

  In our conversations, “them” almost always meant the Plantagenets. The rest of the time, “them” usually meant frogs.

  “What else could it be?” I asked. “We suddenly start having blackouts and strange lights . . . it has to be related to the messages.”

  “So . . . ,” Amelia said, trying to act casual, “that means you do think we’re talking about aliens?”

  When she said it out loud, it sounded so silly. Geez, even when I said it in my head it sounded silly. The truth was, I wasn’t sure it was aliens. Even in my most excited, optimistic moments, it was hard to convince myself we had a blue-eyed race of aliens running around the city messing with the power lines. But I was more and more convinced that whoever—whatever—the Plantagenets were, they had powers. Talents. Secrets. Every day that passed made me want to meet them more.

  It was hard to put into words, and I decided to just change the subject.

  “Where did you get these boxes anyway?” I asked Amelia.

  “My dad built them, or, at least, he sawed the pieces,” she said, prodding a frog named Alexander until it took a giant leap. “I helped him hammer and nail them together.”

  I watched Bertha try to navigate my leg. “I’ve never even seen your dad,” I said. “I didn’t know he lived with you.”

  “Course he does. He works nights—his shift is from four till midnight. He’s never here when I get home from school. I haven’t seen your dad, either. Where is he?”

  Even if she hadn’t just explained about her dad, I would have known by the way she asked the question that in her world, fathers were safe subjects. That she assumed fathers were kind and good and interested. And alive. It’s not like she was the first person to ask the question. I’d figured out I could tell a lot about a person just by the tone of their voice when they asked. Sometimes, like with Amelia, there was no thought, no concern, like they were asking “What’s your favorite color?” Those people usually had a really happy life with their dads, and they assumed you did, too.

  Sometimes there was a little hesitation when people asked the question, a little pause between the words, a little fear that this might be an awkward subject. A lot of times those people had parents who were divorced, so they thought my dad just lived somewhere different than my mom. In my experience, people whose fathers had died never asked the question period.

  I watched Amelia run one fingertip along Alexander’s spine, assuming frogs had spines. I ran through my normal answers: I haven’t seen him for a while. I never really knew him. He doesn’t live with us. Usually any of those were enough to stop the questions.

  I didn’t speak, though. I didn’t use any of my automatic answers. I just sat there.

  “Olivia?” said Amelia, her hand paused a few inches above the frog.

  Here’s another thing that’s good about bathroom walls: Sometimes you have stuff in your head that wants out. It’s too big to be held inside, but you’re nervous about what might happen if you let it out in front of people. No telling how it might look or sound once it’s outside of your head. It’s like the time I had a piece of vanilla birthday cake left over, and I stuck it in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator. When I opened it a while later, it didn’t look anything like birthday cake. It was green and purple and bubbly, and the smell made me want to throw up. So what if a thought is like that? What if it grosses people out once you take the lid off?

  You don’t have to worry about that with a bathroom wall. You let out the thoughts in your head—who you love, what you want, just the fact that you exist—and there’s no one around to watch you let them out. If anyone reacts to you, you’re long gone before they do. You won’t have to see sympathy or pity or awkwardness on anyone’s face. You don’t have to have a conversation. You just let it out, leave it there on the wall, and walk away.

  It had been a long time since I stuck the thoughts of my dad on the back shelf of my head. The lid was on very tight, but, lately, I’d been thinking I wanted to take it off the shelf. It was heavy, and it took up a lot of room in there.

  “Olivia!” said Amelia. She’d turned away from the frogs totally, and she looked like she was about to call 9-1-1. “What’s going on? You okay?”

  I was fine. I just couldn’t talk. So I imagined the air in front of me as a large white wall, totally blank. I imagined my mouth as a pen and my voice as the ink.

  “He died,” I said. “My dad.”

  I didn’t look at Amelia. I let the words write themselves on the wall.

  “I don’t remember him. He was home watching me, my mom says. When I was two. And he had something go wrong with his brain. A little explosion in a blood vessel. So he died in less than a second. Poof. Gone.”

  I had a sudden thought of the power going out. Lights one second, then everything blinking into darkness. I wondered if that was what it had been like for my dad.

  “I’m sorry,” said Amelia.

  “I didn’t know him. So I can’t miss him. Right? You can’t miss someone you don’t know, can you?”

  “I think you can. Probably.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you can. I think about him sometimes. We lived in North Carolina then, and he’s buried with his parents there, so I don’t even have a grave to visit or anything. But Mom tells me stories. How he used to hold me up and sing to me like I was Simba in
The Lion King. How he used to moonwalk when she got mad at him, just to crack her up. How he drank coffee all the time, and he sweetened it with maple syrup, not sugar. But they’d only known each other four years when he died, so I don’t know if she knew him too much herself. You need lots of years, don’t you? To really know someone?”

  “You know me. I know you,” said Amelia.

  “If he’d been around when Mom got sick, he could have helped. He was strong, she says. He used to do push-ups before he went to bed. He could have lifted her into the shower and held her up when she got dressed and carried her down to the ambulance when it came that one time. I tried to, but I had to leave her on the stairs and go wait outside without her. Do you think she would have felt better if he was still around?”

  Amelia had scooted closer to me, her foot just an inch or so away from mine. “You’re not really listening to my answers, are you?” she said softly.

  I kept writing on the wall with my voice.

  “Sometimes I think it would have been better if he were here. If there were two of us to help her. But, still, he wouldn’t have known her as well as I do. I’ve had a lot more years with her. I know she can’t chew gum because she always forgets and swallows it, and she’s allergic to Windex, and she always gets teary-eyed when she sees an old person in a wheelchair. For some reason.”

  I could have gone on for hours about Mom, all the little things about her that I knew. I could have written an entire book on her—Mysteries of Mom, and it would’ve had a thousand pages of facts.

  “So I’m the one who should know when there’s something wrong,” I said to Amelia. “I’d be able to see it better than anybody. If she starts feeling bad again and doesn’t want to admit it, I’m the one who can tell if she’s out of breath or holding her side or sleeping more than she usually does. If I’m watching her, I could maybe stop it.”

  “Stop what?” asked Amelia.

  I looked at her. It seemed so obvious.

  “The sickness,” I said. “The tumors. If I see it happening again and I get her to the doctors, she’ll have a better chance of getting well. The earlier they catch things, the better the chance they can fix them. I read that.”

  “But she’s well, isn’t she?” said Amelia. “She’s totally recovered now. It’s not like she had a disease or anything. She had surgery, they took some stuff out, and now she’s all better.”

  “That’s what they say,” I said. “But so what? Dad was perfectly healthy. No surgery, no nothing. And—poof—he was gone. That can happen. It could happen to Mom.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” asked Amelia.

  “What?”

  “That’s what your wish is about. Your wish is that she’s really well. That the tumors are gone.”

  I reached down and picked up Bertha, flinching when I first touched her skin, which was rough and bumpy like something out of an alien invasion movie. But she was also cool and dry and surprisingly delicate. She trembled in my hand, her heartbeat thumping against my fingers.

  “That’s not my wish,” I said to Amelia. I stroked my thumb over Bertha’s head, watching the pulse beat in her throat. “My wish is that Mom gets well forever. Forever and ever. That she’s never sick again. She never gets old or weak. She just stays strong and happy and perfect, and nothing ever hurts her again. That’s my wish.”

  Bertha blinked at me. It’s very hard to read a frog’s expression. Amelia’s face, though, was easier to read, even before she spoke.

  “Oh, Olivia,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “I don’t think you can get that wish.”

  “You didn’t ask me if it could come true,” I said. “You asked me what I wished for.”

  She didn’t say anything after that—we both seemed to become totally fascinated by the frogs. Eventually we went back to talking about a spot on Bertha’s back and a fire drill at school and whether a bump on my arm was a mosquito bite or poison ivy. I mostly stopped thinking about either one of my parents. Then I found a sheet of paper from Mom when I got home. She’d taped it to the door of my room. The paper was a letter typed on hospital stationery, and attached to it was a yellow sticky note.

  “Mario,” wrote my mother in blue pen, “I had my doctor give me this note just for you. Am out now bungee jumping. Be back about 6:00 p.m. Kidding about the bungee jumping. Am really buying groceries.”

  The typed note read:

  Dear Olivia:

  I’m Dr. Ingram—I met you while your mother was still in the hospital. She’s asked me to write you this note, which she calls a permission slip. I promise you that your mother has recovered wonderfully from her operation. We removed the tumors, and she’s healed perfectly. She is in excellent health now, and she can do everything she did before the surgery. She has recovered.

  She asked me to repeat that at least once. She has recovered. I give you permission to take her swimming.

  Best,

  Kathleen Ingram

  When Mom came home an hour later, she dropped an armload of brown paper bags on the counter, then shot me a look like, “Well? Was that enough for you?”

  I tried to look amused. I mean, really, I have a decent sense of humor. But I had a hard time meeting her smile. She was practically sparkling over there in the kitchen, so giddy to be feeling strong again that she looked like she might leap onto the counter and do a little dance with the grocery bags.

  I sat there knowing I didn’t feel happy or amused or even relieved. Relief would have been a reasonable thing to feel when your mother’s doctor guarantees you she’s all better. No, as I was sitting there wondering why I didn’t feel any of those things, I realized what I did feel: afraid.

  The doctor’s note scared me, and I had no idea why.

  “So we’ll go out later this week, huh?” said Mom. “To a pool?”

  “Sure,” I said, but I knew my voice didn’t sound like I was sure.

  We unpacked groceries, and later I helped Gram make spaghetti for supper—lots of red peppers, just like I liked it. Mom sprinkled extra Parmesan on my plate, and Gram tried to show me how to eat spaghetti with a spoon and fork at the same time. I should have had a great time. And I tried. I tried to taste how delicious it all was. But my mouth didn’t seem to be working right. I could hardly taste anything, I couldn’t smile like Mom and Gram were smiling, and I could barely manage to speak to them.

  I left half the spaghetti on my plate and asked to be excused. When Mom asked me if my stomach was bothering me, I said of course not. I said everything was so wonderful that I couldn’t handle any more. She laughed and let me clear my plate.

  My appetite didn’t really come back that night.

  It didn’t come back the next morning, either, not even when Gram made pancakes.

  By the end of school that day, I was getting concerned. I didn’t know why the fact that Mom getting better made me feel so unsettled. But being unsettled was one thing—not enjoying food was a whole other thing. An unacceptable thing. I figured maybe a scone would jolt my stomach—or taste buds or whatever—back into action.

  And, of course, on the first day where I hadn’t been obsessing about the Plantagenets once every five minutes, I finally heard from them. The chalk must have gotten their attention faster than boring old marker on a bathroom wall, because the answer to my chalk message was written on the bathroom door of Trattoria.

  Let’s do meet,

  Though Saturn is a bit far.

  You know where my home is.

  Meet me there for coffee

  6:00 p.m. this Thursday.

  Chapter 10

  A CUP OF TEA

  The note kind of freaked me out at first—I mean, find a place not on this earth where I could buy coffee? My first thought was that NASA had set up a space station with a coffee bar. Then I thought about all the coffee shops I knew so well: Other than Trattoria, there was U
rban Standard, Celestial Realm, La Reunion, Crestwood Coffee. I had a feeling I knew what Celestial Realm meant, but I thought I’d look it up to make sure. (When I was little, every time I asked her what a word meant, Mom drove me crazy by telling me to look it up in the dictionary. It had become habit.)

  The dictionary told me this:

  celestial: (adj.) Relating to the sky or heavens

  realm: (n.) a community or territory

  That seemed clear enough. But Celestial Realm was too far to walk from the apartment, which meant we needed someone to drive us. I didn’t want to ask too much of Olivia’s mom since she’d already taken us to the high school, and Mom did keep pestering me to give Gram a chance. So I asked her for a ride. That got me a lecture about coffee not being good for young women. But it also got me and Amelia an invitation to dinner at Gram’s favorite restaurant, Rojo.

  That was more helpful than it sounds. Because Rojo happened to be next door to Celestial Realm. Apparently Gram felt like caffeine was less harmful on a full stomach.

  So on Thursday night, Amelia and I sat across a table from Gram, devouring quesadillas and something called Hog Wings, which were like hot wings only they were made of pork. Very tasty.

  Gram had handed us the kids’ menu when we got there. “Ages eight and under,” I’d read aloud. And she’d looked at me a little puzzled until I said, “And I’m eleven, remember? I usually order off the adult menu now.”

  I was a surprised she didn’t expect me to entertain myself with crayons and a coloring book.

  Anyway, we’d nearly finished our quesadillas—my appetite was back to its old reliable self—when Gram surprised me.

  “So you two aren’t really just interested in coffee, are you?” she said.