Golden Delicious (4 page)

I picked up the comma and walked over to him on weak legs. “Appa,” I said to him.

“Do you know how many
diseases
that thing has?” my Mom said.

“Put that down,
,” said my Dad. “Those can make you sick.”

“Wash
’s hands,” my Mom spat, and stormed inside.

My Dad led me over to the spout and held my hands under the freezing cold water. My Mom appeared at the kitchen window. “Did you wash his hands?” she shouted.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are they clean?”

“Yeah,” my Dad said.

Then my Dad led me to the back door. He tried to open it, but it was locked. “Door’s locked,” my Dad said.

Smoke billowed through the screen and up the side of the house.

“Diane,” my Dad said.

My Mom stared out the kitchen window at us.

“Open the door,” my Dad said.

My Mom took a drag on her cigarette.

I was a badseed—I knew that from the very first pages. I just couldn’t be good, no matter how hard I tried. I remember, at six or so, making a trueheart sentence-gift for my Mom on the lawnpage. In the time that it took for me to go get her and bring her outside, though, the sentence changed. She read it and said, “You
loaf
me?”

“Love,” I said.

“Now it says,” she scanned the lawn, “
loathe
. You
loathe
me?”

I was confused. “What the heck?” said a thought. “No,” I told her. “That’s supposed to say—”

“How dare you,” she said. “I’m your
mother
!”

Those were the years when my Mom worked long hours at the hospital. Sometimes, if my Dad was working, too, I’d have to go with her to work; she’d put me in an empty room in the hospital with some paper and paints and a snack. I wasn’t supposed to leave the room until she came to get me. But my legs would hurt from sitting, and so sometimes I would step out of the room and go for walks: down the halls, over to the elevators, to other floors. Most of the time I could get back to the room before my Mom returned, but every once in a while I’d get caught. Then my Mom would punish me by giving me double the snack—dumbcrackers and sadcola—and I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until I’d finished every bite.

Once, I was walking the hallways of the hospital when I saw my Mom in a room of doctors and nurses. All of their backs were turned to me, and something was screaming in the room—I didn’t know what or who. When my Mom turned around there was oil on her hands. “
!” she yelled. “What are you doing out here?”

Then I saw what was on the table: a motorcycle, its body bent and contorted. Everyone was shouting. The motorcycle screamed and then the screaming died.

“Vocal pressure’s dropping,” said one of the doctors.

My Mom turned to me. “Go,
! I don’t want you to see this. Get back to the room right now.”

I went into the room with new thoughts. “Where did the screaming go?” one of my thoughts asked.

“I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping,” said another thought.

“It’s not
sleeping
,” said another. “That screaming died, dumbass.”

“Died for how long?” asked the second thought.

“Forever,” said the first thought. “It’s dead.”

I turned to the hospital bed. “Have people
died
on you?” I asked it.

“What do you mean?” said the bed. “Of course they have.”

“A lot?” I said.

“Hundreds,” said the bed. “That’s my job, to be died on.”

A few days later, I was in my room in the hospital when I rolled up my sleeve, opened the tube of yellow paint, and poured it on my arm. Then I walked out to the nurse’s station. My Mom was smoking a six-foot cigarette and talking with another nurse.

“I’ve had an accident,” I announced.

My Mom looked up at me. “Go back in the room,
,” she said.

I held out my arm. “I’m bleeding.”

“That’s
paint
,” she said.

“I’m bleeding yellow,” I said.

“You better not have spilled any paint in that room,” she said. “Did you?” She rushed out from behind the desk, grabbed me by my yellow arm, and marched me back to the room. Then she studied the walls and the floor. “I better not see one
drop
of yellow paint in here.”

“People have died in this room!” I announced.

“Wash off your arm,” my Mom said. Then she slammed the door.

As I was rinsing my arm off in the sink, I noticed a supply cabinet underneath. When I opened the drawers I found cotton balls, wooden sticks, bandages, and a pair of
scissors. I pulled out the scissors; they blinked their eyes in the light. “What year is it?” they asked me.

“Nineteen eighty-six,” I told them.

“
Eighty
-six?” they said.

“Can you help me?” I said.

“Help you how?” the scissors said.

“I want you to cut me,” I told them.

The scissors studied my face. “Why?” they said.

“Just do it. Cut me,” I told them.

Two minutes later I walked out of the room again. This time there was blood on my wrist, dripping down my hand. “I’m injured,” I said. I held out my arm.

None of the nurses responded. My Mom was sitting with a patient—a heavy woman with gray toiled skin—and wrapping a blood-pressure cuff around her arm.

“I’m bleeding,” I said.

“Go back to the room,
,” said my Mom.

“I’m injured,” I said.

“Sal,” my Mom said to another nurse. “Can you check on him?”

“You do it,” I said to my Mom. “You check on me.”

“Sal?”

Another nurse came over to me, crouched down, and saw my wrist. “Jesus,
,” she said. She called my Mom over. When she saw the blood, her face norsed and all of the color drained from it. “What did you do,
?” my Mom said. I remember how her hands shook as she wrapped the bandages around my arm and said, “How did this happen?”

One night when I was eleven, though, one of my thoughts—a thought of green—thought over to the Hu Ke Lau (“Puke-E-Lau,” we called it) while I slept. At last call my thought hopped off his bar stool, pushed through the heavy doors, dropped his skateboard on the sidewalk and thought across the parking lot. He waved goodbye to some friendthoughts at the bike rack and then coasted past the snoring stores—the Big Why, Bagel Beagle—when car headlights suddenly grazed his shoulder. The thought of green turned around and studied the car: an old, brown Plymouth Duster with a number 8 behind the wheel. As my thought was watching, the number 8 changed into a B.