Broken Soup (10 page)

I wanted to say, “Which kid? Because I'm actually one too, remember?”

Everybody sat there without saying anything and then I stood up and said we had to go. Harper offered to drive us, but I turned him down in a cold sort of way and only threw in a thank-you out of habit. There was this voice in my head, some tiny bit of me that was still calm, saying
Don't blow it
and
What's he done?
Stuff like that. But I wasn't really listening.

My brother and Bee. That's what I was thinking, over and over, about how sad it was.

I hadn't missed Jack in a while like I was missing him right then, like a slice had been taken out of me, like a big gaping hole.

Poor Bee, missing him too.

On the way home Stroma started asking questions about Jack. It was the weirdest thing.

She did that a lot at first, with this cold-blooded kind of curiosity, like she didn't care he was dead that much but she just really needed to get at the facts. The whole time Mum and Dad were in France, calling every night in these leaden voices, trying not to tell me too much and then saying it all by crying just before they put the phone down. The whole time they were away and I was trying to be the big grown-up, Stroma was this seething bag of questions.

How did he die? Where did he go? Would he keep on growing? Would we see him again? Could he see us? Was he going to get burned or buried? Where?

I almost went insane.

I wasn't sleeping then either. I'm not sure how much sleep I got while we were on our own. I'd never been
left before, to take care of things. I didn't even like the dark back then, for God's sake. I think I pretended like everything was fine, saying good-bye to Mum and Dad and all that, because what choice did I have? But that first night, when the light started to go and the rooms got dark and every sound seemed strange to me—too loud and kind of angry—I knew how hard it was going to be.

Stroma slept, of course, and ate like a horse, and walked around the house talking about coloring books just like everything was normal. I sort of hated and admired her at the same time. And I tried to answer her questions, even though my voice felt like it was coming from somewhere outside of itself, even though I thought my heart and the inside of my head must have been scooped out just to be able to stand them.

Maybe someone else's answers would have had more icing on, but I gave it to Stroma pretty straight. I thought she deserved it. Anyway, I'm not big on icing. Mum and Dad didn't bring us up that way. I wouldn't line up to see a weeping statue, or a woman who can heal the sick just by touching them, or the face of Jesus on a tortilla. I never believed that Jack was watching us from his new home on a cloud, or was about to be reborn somewhere else, a future midwife in India, or goatherd in the Andes.

I do believe in some miracles, earthly ones, things
that happen every day and get overlooked. Miracles of probability, like the fact you get born as you and not someone else entirely.

Dad explained the math of it to me and Jack once. “Two people choose each other out of a possible six and a half billion and growing,” he said. “They have sex countless times, and at one moment and not another of these occasions they conceive a child.” (I giggled at the sex bit, but only because Jack was elbowing me.) “For conception to happen, one out of five hundred million sperm”—giggle—“has to get to one of four hundred thousand eggs”—snigger—“chosen at random and present in the woman's body since she was in her own mother's womb. Cell division then begins to make one unique and unrepeatable human to add to the six and a half billion.”

We were never fooled into expecting an afterlife, like the life we got given somehow wasn't enough. But it clearly hadn't stopped Stroma from checking. Maybe that's just something you have when you're little that you lose later on, a complete and total trust in the supernatural.

One of Stroma's words back then was
possible
. She knew the Earth was round and gravity kept us from falling off because she'd been taught it by Mrs. Hall, her teacher, and everything Mrs. Hall said was “biblical fact.” But she still said the Earth and all the other
planets could just be crumbs in a giant's pocket—it was still “possible.”

 

“Do you think a little bit of Jack got left behind anywhere?” Stroma asked me on the way back from the shop. My head was full of Bee and him, him and Bee.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, I know he's dead and everything, and he's not coming back, because I'm not a
total
idiot,” she started, “but I just thought a bit of him might be somewhere.”

“Like where?”

“In his room or his pictures or that ‘Sorry, Stroma' thing on my tape.”

“What thing?” I said.

“My tape,” Stroma said. “Didn't you hear it?” I shook my head. “That means you don't stay until I'm asleep like you say you do.”

“Whatever, Stroma. What are you talking about? What's ‘Sorry, Stroma'?”

“It's Jack,” she said. “Little Miss Muffet is on and it's near the end of side one I think, maybe side two, and then I say ‘Jack' like this—
Jaaaack
—and my voice is really little, and he says, ‘Sorry, Stroma.' And then it's Miss Muffet again and I want to know if that's an actual bit of Jack I've got, because it's his real voice and everything.”

“It's possible,” I said, because it was such a good thought for her to have and I was dying to hear him. I said if she played it to me, I'd show her a picture I thought had a bit of Jack in it too.

“Seen it,” she said.

“No you haven't,” I said. “This isn't one of Mum's. It's a new one.”

“Yes, it's under your bed and I have,” she said, and then she realized she shouldn't have seen it and made this little
um
noise. Her eyes went all wide and she looked away.

“You're not supposed to go in other people's rooms without asking. When have you been in my room?”

“When you were in Jack's,” she said, like she'd prepared that one, tested it for holes, and found it watertight.

We were quiet for a minute while I swung between letting her off and getting a lock for my door. Then Stroma said, “There's definitely a bit of him in it, I think.”

“In the picture you broke into my room to see?”

“Yes. It's a good one.”

“Bee took it,” I said, and Stroma went “Huh?” and lost pace for a step or two. “You heard me. Bee took it.”

“Your Bee? My Bee? That Bee?”

“Jack's Bee,” I said. We sounded like one of her Dr. Seuss books.

There was that “Huh?” again.

“Jack and Bee were together,” I said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“Like you and Harper?”

“No, not like me and Harper. We're friends. We're not anything else, not really.”

“Not
yet
,” Stroma said, and I thought, God, she's too knowing for her own good, too damn precocious. I pushed her a little, not hard, in a “shut up” kind of way.

“How do you know about Bee?” she said.

“I just know.”

“Well, how? Did she tell you?”

“Kind of. I found out.”

“How?”

“I found a postcard from Jack to Bee. I asked her.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In a book in her room,” I said.

“Hah!”

“Oh, OK, Stroma, the room thing doesn't matter. It's not exactly the issue here.”

“What about letters?” Stroma said. “Would they be important? Would it be OK to find them in a room that isn't yours?”

“Letters?”

“Yep. Letters to Jack. I can't hardly read them, though. It's all scraggly writing and scraps and some of them are
teeny
.”

“Where?” I said. “In Bee's room?”

She wasn't listening. “Do you write letters to Jack? Do you think you can still read when you're dead?”

“Stroma!” I said. “You are doing my head in. What letters?”

“The ones in Jack's floorboard. Do you know about that?”

I did know. It was the place he hid his weed, the place Mum never found. He showed me once. I hadn't thought to look in it, no idea why, it just hadn't occurred to me. Maybe because I was the complete idiot.

“Am I in trouble?” Stroma said.

“Course not.”

“Mrs. Hall says there are bits of Jack
everywhere
, like dust. She said letters were a good idea and so did one of her leaflets.”

“Have you told anyone else about them? Have you told Mum and Dad?”

“Duh!” Stroma said, which I took to mean she could tell them she was marrying a Martian and moving to the moon and they wouldn't hear her. She had a point.

 

Dad was waiting outside when we got home. He said, “Your mother is in, but she's not answering the door.”

I asked if he was sure because I thought she was going
out that morning, and I tried to look all wide-eyed and innocent while he studied me for signs of lying.

“I can hear the TV,” he said.

Stroma said, “I left it on for the fish.” She had two goldfish called Bigs and Orange that she hadn't paid the slightest bit of attention to since the day she got them. I'd almost forgotten they existed and I thought she had too.

The lie worked on Dad. I was pretty alarmed at the seamless way she handled it. He ruffled her hair and picked her up in a fireman's lift and walked her to the car. Halfway down the path he said, “Sure you won't come, Rowan?”

“No thanks. I've got homework.”

He'd already turned away from me and he waved with the back of his hand while Stroma looked at me from down by his trouser pockets, upside down and grinning.

I let myself in the house and checked where Mum was. The TV was on pretty loud, but she wasn't in there so I turned it off. I found her in the bath with the door open, steam filling up the hallway, flowering in the light.

“Dad was knocking,” I said.

“Didn't hear him,” she told me, turning on the hot tap with her foot.

I wondered how long this could go on before every
thing came apart and Dad found out, because the lies weren't going to keep on working forever.

I pulled the door shut because I didn't want Mum to see me going into Jack's room. I went straight to the floorboard, which was under his bed near the back right leg, against the wall. I crawled in on my stomach. Most of me stuck out and I had to listen for sounds of Mum getting out of the bath so she wouldn't catch me.

The broken board was about thirty centimeters long. I had to pry up one end of it with my fingernails and press down hard on the other with my elbow. When the board sprang up, it nearly caught my head between itself and the bedsprings. I felt around with my left hand and found a wedge of papers and a bag of weed I thought maybe I should give to Carl. Then I wriggled back out of there and ran down the stairs to my room before Mum was out of the water.

There were three letters from Stroma on matching paper weighed down with stickers. Everything was fairies and “make a wish…,” nothing darker than lilac. Jack would have laughed at it, stuck two fingers down his throat, but now she could pretend he liked it. It was that “reinventing Jack” thing again, that “make him who you like” game because where was he to argue? I wondered if I did that, which bits of him I was guilty of airbrushing.

There was a letter from me too, a really old one apologizing for something, I couldn't remember what. It surprised me that he'd kept it. I'd drawn a picture of him crying, teardrops flying out to the side like fountains, and me saying “Sorry” in a speech bubble. I felt like it was from someone else. I didn't recognize my handwriting or the way I drew or anything. As if being eight or nine or however old I was then was like being in another life entirely. Which it was.

I didn't read my or Stroma's letters first because I wanted to see the others. I guess I knew before I looked that they'd be from Bee. And I only looked at one, maybe one and a half, before I stopped and put them in my bag to take them back to her, because it felt like spying.

Bee still wasn't picking up her phone, so I went around there. I read one of Stroma's letters on the way.

Carl let me in. I could tell by his face he knew what I knew and all that, but he didn't mention it. He just said
she was in her room and kind of touched me on the shoulder as I walked through.

Bee was reading and I asked her what the book was and she said, “Right now it's a short story about an Eskimo girl whose lover dies so she makes a model of him out of whale fat.”

“Then what?”

“She melts him and makes another one. I haven't finished it yet. I'm not thinking of trying it though.” She shrugged and laughed quietly.

She put the book down and moved over for me on the bed. I sat on the edge with my bag on my knee and I told her I found something. “What?” she said, and she shuffled back against the headboard and wrapped her arms around her legs.

I got out the pile of letters and Bee rested her cheek against her knees, held out a hand for them. I'd tied them all up with a shoelace so they wouldn't get lost in my bag. Her fingers were shaking while she picked at the knots. I wondered if I'd done the right thing.