by Exile
I saw nothing. After a beat too long, I said, “Cute.”
Melvin tossed a look of scorn over his shoulder. He reached into the empty space and seemed to pet the air. He and Julius both laughed. Melvin asked, “Can you make him bark?”
Julius’s forehead pleated. His eyes bugged out, reminding me of Melvin. Finally, he shook his head.
“Keep trying,” said Melvin. To me, he said more softly, almost with pity, “The puppy’s running around Julius. He just jumped out of the sandbox. There!” Melvin pointed.
Julius chortled. I smiled back, but Melvin’s pointing hand shook. Not a big tremor, but it reminded me of the way my grandfather’s hands used to shake all the time.
Melvin shoved his hand in his pocket.
My spaghetti water frothed over the edge of the pot just as the phone rang. I grabbed the pot with one hand while Julius said, “I need more water, Mommy.” He’d dragged his stool to the sink and held his measuring cup under the faucet.
The phone rang again. I turned off the burner and said, “Don’t touch the stove, Julius.” I moved the pot to the other back burner. No matter how much I scrubbed it, something black crusted on that burner always stank when I turned the heat on.
“Mom-my! Wa-ter!” Julius called.
I pay for the water. But I needed quiet and we both had to eat. I opened the tap and wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder, keeping an eye on Julius. “Yes, hello?”
Julius grinned. His cup overflowed with water. I shut off the tap. He said, “No, more!”
A low, cultured woman’s voice poured into my ear. “Hello, this is Melvin’s mother, Sandra.”
“Hi, ah, Sandra.” I fought the urge to call her Mrs. Sachs. With her silver bob and immaculate pantsuits, she seemed older than my mom. I scraped the hardened spaghetti from the bottom of the pot. At least I’d caught it before it burned.
“I’m sorry to bother you at suppertime. I just wanted to let you know that Melvin won’t be able to come for a play date tomorrow.” Her voice broke on the last word.
“Is everything all right?” I tried to sponge up the pasta water with one hand while watching Julius pour water from the cup into a dirty pot in the sink.
I heard her inhale sharply. “He has a…doctor’s appointment.” The way she talked, it wasn’t a regular checkup.
My heart plunged the way it did for any kid in trouble. Ever since I had Julius, watching the news makes me cry. “Can I help?”
Julius tipped forward to hit the faucet handle open himself. I removed his hand. He yowled like I’d held his hand to the burner.
Mrs. Sachs’s voice cooled. “No, thank you. I’ll see you at the daycare. Goodbye.”
For the next week, Julius did circle time, played on the jungle gym, filled dump trucks with sand, and traced his hands on paper. No golden balls of light. No chanting. He acted like a normal kid, except he kept asking, “Where’s Melvin?”
“I don’t know, hon,” I said every day, every hour, but by Friday I had to call and ask.
Mr. Sachs answered. I’d never met him, but I heard he was an engineer, so he had to be really smart. His voice rasped a little. “Melvin’s been admitted to the Montreal Children’s.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” I sat down on our wobbly metal folding chair and massaged my feet hard, like the pressure might be able to help a sick little boy.
Julius seized my big toe. “Where’s Melvin?”
“Shh, Julius. I’m talking to Melvin’s daddy.”
He shook my toe. “Where’s Melvin’s daddy?”
I handed Julius a plastic dog toy we got from Value Village. Normally, he scorns it, but this time he dropped to his knees and started barking. “Sorry,” I said into the phone. “What’s wrong with him? I mean…” Probably rich people have a better way of asking.
“We have no idea. And neither do the doctors.” He forced a laugh the way I do when people ask where Julius’s father went.
“Could we come see him?” I didn’t know how that slipped out.
Silence. “You’re Julius’s mother?”
“Yes. Julius really wants to see him. But if we can’t come, that’s okay.” I’d have to cut out of work early. Again. I’d have to pull Julius out of daycare. I’d have to buy a present and pay both our bus fares.
Julius sat on the floor with his knees tucked under his bum, dog toy abandoned. “Mommy, where’s—”
Mr. Sachs’s breath gusted into my ear. “Okay.”
Julius said, “Carry me.”
I swung him up on my hip and pressed his head into my shoulder. I hated that we were in a hospital. Even though Melvin’s bed lined up by the window, the air-conditioned air seemed to smell like alcohol hand wash and dirty bandages.
I tried not to look at Melvin himself. He hadn’t even opened his eyes when we trooped into the room. In less than two weeks, he’d shrunk. His formerly fat cheeks sagged, his skin looked thinner and kind of yellow. If I hadn’t seen the thin white hospital blanket rise and fall with each slow breath, I would have thought he was dead.
Melvin’s mother stood to greet us. She wore a beige pantsuit, but I noticed the wrinkles at the crotch, and her eyeliner was crooked. “Thank you for coming.” She tried to smile at us, even though her eyes flickered to Julius in a way that said, Your son is healthy and mine isn’t.
I dropped the skinny bouquet of grocery mums on Melvin’s table. Julius didn’t twist to look at his friend. Would seeing Melvin like this give him nightmares?
I murmured into Julius’s ear, “Do you want to go?” My pulse drummed in my throat. Please say yes.
Julius nestled his face in my shoulder without answering.
I whispered, “We’ll just stay for a minute.” I’d personally count the seconds. To the mother, I said, “Hi…” I could not remember her name, so I switched to, “How’s he doing?”
She dropped back into the only chair. I hefted Julius upward, rearranging my already-sore arms. She said, “All his blood tests have come back normal. We’re still waiting for some metabolic tests. Inborn errors of metabolism.”
Whatever that was, it sounded bad. I glanced at Melvin’s right hand, splinted on a board and wrapped like a mummy in white gauze. A clear fluid dripped from an IV into his mummy hand. I watched each drop fall. Easier than looking at Melvin’s face. For some reason I remembered how I hid the graham crackers the last time he came over, so he wouldn’t eat them all. Guilt ping-ponged in my stomach. “Is he…contagious?”
She focused on me for the first time. “No, no. Donald didn’t tell you? They think it’s some degenerative disorder. Like Rett Syndrome.”
“Oh.” Should I pretend I understood? A Mylar balloon beside Melvin’s head bobbed in the air conditioning. GET WELL SOON.
Mrs. Sachs rubbed Melvin’s foot and talked, almost to herself. “Only Rett Syndrome usually affects girls. And it doesn’t make them go downhill so fast. All of a sudden, he started tripping over his own feet. He started sleeping all the time, he wouldn’t eat, he can’t even talk…”
I remembered Melvin’s hand shaking.
“And do you know what the worst thing is?” Reluctantly, I met her eyes, the same bulging blue eyes as Melvin. Her face was almost as pale as her son’s. “He told me a long time ago. After his birthday party, when he was putting away the toys. He said, ‘Let’s give some of them away. I don’t need them all.’ I kept asking him why, and he finally said, ‘I’m going to die.’”
I hugged Julius harder and pressed my cheek against the hair on top of his head. Fine, medium brown hair that sticks up in the morning. Healthy, little boy hair. Finally I said, “I’m sorry.”
Her voice rose. “I never understood him. Ever since he could talk. Once he said he was supposed to be the Antichrist—”
I sucked my breath through my teeth and clutched Julius so hard he murmured in protest. What kind of kid calls himself the Antichrist?
“—but it’s okay; he’s not anymore because we baptized him.” Tear
s slid down her face and dripped down her chin on and into the folds of her neck. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. “But we didn’t baptize him! We’re Jewish! When I told him that, he just laughed and said he was getting his lives mixed up, especially since he was always living backwards.”
I flinched.
She smeared a tissue across her blotchy face. “I know what you’re thinking. You think we’re nuts.” She splintered a laugh. “But we’ve seen a psychiatrist. Melvin couldn’t talk, but we did. I told him Melvin was obsessed with Merlin and magic and airy fairy stuff like that, but otherwise he was a normal kid.”
I pressed my cheek against Julius’s and closed my eyes. Had she never seen Melvin’s yellow ball?
“We saw endocrinologists, toxicologists, neurologists. Every kind of ‘ist,’ but he’s dying.” Her voice rose to a shriek.
Julius slipped below hip-height. I bent my leg and tightened my grip on him, starting to heave him up, but he wiggled free. He slid down my leg like a miniature fireman gliding down a pole.
I started to make my excuses to Mrs. Sachs, but instead of bolting for the door, Julius launched himself at Melvin’s bed. He gripped the metal rails with his tiny hands and thrust his chin forward, desperately eyeing Melvin’s still face.
“No!” I yelled. I seized the back of his Finding Nemo shirt and knotted it in my hand. He clung to the rails so hard that his hands turned white. I started to pry them off the bars, finger by finger.
“Stop!” Mrs. Sachs gripped my shoulder.
I wrenched away from her.
Her hand bit like iron. She gasped, “Don’t you see?”
I saw Julius, his baby brown eyes wide, pupils dilated, in a chalky face. I saw his little feet rise on tiptoe, reaching through the rails to touch Melvin’s unmoving body. And I saw Melvin’s face begin to glow.
“Julius,” I whispered, before my voice fell away completely.
My son’s lips parted. He panted once, twice, before he squeezed his eyes closed and grunted, red-faced, almost like he was filling his pants.
Heat radiated off Melvin now like a stove turned on low. His skin burned bright, like afternoon sunlight. My eyes watered, but I could still see his entire body shining through the blanket, even beaming through the holes in the gauze of his mummy hand.
I smelled a damp, sharp smell like cotton scorched from the iron turned up too high.
A tiny, persistent scream rose in my ears, as if the cockroaches in the walls, or the walls themselves screeched in protest.
And then it was gone. As suddenly and sharply as it had come. Whatever “it” was.
The pressure in the room shifted.
Slowly, I released Julius’s shirt, still bunched in my fist. The air conditioner hummed at us. The GET WELL SOON balloon still wafted in the air.
I seized Julius into my arms. He folded willingly against me, but I caught his mischievous grin before he nestled his face against my breastbone.
Melvin’s eyes cracked open. He tried to speak.
His mother cried out, a high-pitched noise of joy and terror.
Melvin’s mouth worked. He licked his lips. His slitted eyes focused on my son. He whispered, “Thanks, Art.”
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Melvin bounced back to Apple Tree Daycare within the week. His parents sent Julius and me a basket full of cheese, salami, chocolate, and expensive crackers shaped like diamonds.
I have no idea what happened in the hospital. Even the doctors couldn’t figure it out. But I’m more worried about what happened to Julius.
Yesterday, I woke up on the fold-out couch with Julius curled against my stomach. He’s supposed to sleep in his bed like a big boy. I started to lift him out, but then I noticed my arms were glowing.
Yesterday, my tips tripled. One guy in coveralls even gave me a hundred dollars and wouldn’t take it back.
Like I said, nothing comes for free. I sure hope Melvin didn’t hurt Julius. I have to say, though, my son seems totally okay except he said he learned how to talk to cats. And today he asked me to call him Arthur.
WHEN THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME
Shane Simmons
“Is it broken?”
“No, it just doesn’t work right.”
“Because if it’s broken, I can take it back for a refund and get you something else.”
“It’s fine,” we assured our mother at the same time, with one voice.
We loved the model train set and we didn’t want anything else. Usually, having our birthdays so close together with a single mother strapped for cash amounted to shared gifts most years – something we could play together. Board games were common. Worse was the occasion we got two badminton rackets and a single bird to bat back and forth. We immediately lost the bird and smashed the rackets fencing with each other.
Through whatever miracle of timing, a deluxe train set had gone on sale at the toy shop a week before our joint celebration. After we were tucked in our bunk beds, Mother had stayed up very late assembling it all on the dining room table that hardly saw any use before Father died and none since. It was waiting for us when we got up the next morning, and we could hardly be convinced to touch our breakfast cereal before we were taking turns flipping the knob that sent an electric current through the metal tracks and caused the engine to pull its load along its route. We watched in awe as it climbed a green Styrofoam hill, looped around twice, passed through a curved tunnel, and went into the station.
There were no switches, no parallel tracks, just the double loop that was the same every time, but it was a marvel just the same. Our fascination was limitless and we reconfigured the cars in every conceivable combination for the next circuit and the hundreds that followed.
We’d been at it for less than an hour when we noticed there was something not quite right with the tunnel portion of the track. The train kept a consistent speed of our choosing on each trip, but seemed to slow in the tunnel. It would briefly disappear from sight in the dark cave and take just a bit longer than we expected to emerge from the other side. When Mother heard us discussing the phenomenon she made the horrifying suggestion of taking the set back to the store. After we’d successfully quashed that plan, a silent understanding passed between Jim and me to never criticize the train set in front of her again.
Jim was my older brother by two years, but he was small for his age – smaller even than me. Picked on and bullied in school, he often said he couldn’t wait to be older. He claimed it was because once he was a grown up, he would be able to celebrate his birthday alone, and wouldn’t have to share gifts with his kid brother. But I always suspected it had more to do with him wanting to be bigger, stronger, and no longer the target for harassment in the halls and shoulder punches from his peers.
Every day, we raced each other home, trying to be the one who would get to be the sole engineer running the freight train through its paces. In truth, it didn’t much matter who was operating the controls. It was still fun to watch, still fun to pass the time rearranging the toy buildings in the village square while the other brother had command of the moving parts.
The issue with the tunnel remained, however, and became a growing source of mystery. Jim swore, when all the freight cars and caboose were hooked together behind the engine, that the train was longer than the tunnel. And yet, the entire thing would disappear from sight for several seconds when passing through, before there was any sign of it on the other end. Finally, Jim suggested an experiment.
“Go get Nibbles,” he instructed me.
“Why?” I asked, not sure what he could want with my pet mouse.
“He’ll be our test pilot.”
I didn’t question the plan further. Jim was older and smarter, and Nibbles, I figured, could use a bit of adventure away from his life in a small glass fish tank sprinkled with wood chips.
I gently placed Nibbles in the empty grain hopper. He seemed content to sniff around and didn’t try to climb out, so Jim flipped on the power and sent the train into the tun
nel. We ran around to the other side and waited for the engine to come barrelling out. As usual, it took several seconds more than it should, but at last we saw the tiny headlight come around the bend in the track and poke out of the dark hole. We counted the cars, waiting for number seven, the grain hopper, to clear the tunnel. At last it emerged and I could see my little white mouse exactly where I’d left him moments ago. It took me a while to realize that it was no longer a white mouse I was looking at, but white bones. Nibbles had been reduced to a delicate rodent skeleton, gripping the plastic edges of the hopper with his tiny claws. If he hadn’t been dead, I would have said it looked like he was enjoying the ride.
I cried for my dead mouse all night, but we didn’t tell Mother about Nibbles’s untimely demise until after we had flushed the evidence.
“It’s poison in there,” I told Jim after we were in bed and the lights were out.
I couldn’t see him in the bunk overhead, but I could hear his whispers in the silent room. “No, it’s not poison.” He’d been pondering the puzzle all evening and had arrived at baseless but sound conclusions. “I just think it takes a lot longer to go through the tunnel than it seems on the outside.”
“It’s forever in there,” I said.
“No, not forever. Maybe a few years. Mice don’t live very long. If it took too long for the train to get through, it would crumble to pieces before it even got to the other side. It’s only cheap plastic.”
I stopped sniffling for the first time and asked, “Can we send a goldfish through next?”
“Maybe,” was all Jim would commit to. “Go to sleep.”
The subsequent days saw us load the train with a variety of items to test our time-stretching theory. Bits of food came back stale and hard as a rock, or decayed away to nearly nothing. A watch returned perfectly intact, but stopped, with the batteries run dry. It wasn’t forever in the tunnel, but it was certainly a lengthy period of time.
One afternoon when I rushed home from school, eager to beat Jim to the train set, I discovered he had already come and gone. The tunnel was missing, unscrewed from its position in the track layout. I played without it and was pleased to see the train passed the trouble-spot at full speed. Removing the superfluous tunnel had corrected its performance and I decided it was a piece of scenery we didn’t really need anyway.