Walking Backward (5 page)
Maybe Dad put the snake right on her seat but it hid underneath and only came out later. It takes about ten minutes to get to the highway, and Mom would have freaked out the very first second she saw it. Maybe Dad just meant to scare her, but he killed her by accident, and that’s why he’s gone insane.
He should have known the snake would kill her. She used to freak out at toy snakes, even when she knew they were plastic. She’d freak out at something on the floor that was just in the shape of a snake, like a sock or a belt. Dad would have to be a total idiot to put a snake in her car. Which doesn’t rule him out.
Maybe the snake had been hiding in the car for a long time. Someone at her work might have put it there on Friday, and it hid under the seat until Saturday. Maybe someone was trying to kill her and the crying guy together. If he’s married or something, his wife might have done it. Really, we’re lucky we weren’t all in the car when the snake came out of hiding.
It’s good that Mom went off the road into a tree instead of hitting other cars and killing people. She would have felt terrible about that. It took the police a while to figure out what had gone wrong. First they thought it was a mechanical failure. Then they found the snake and thought Mom had a heart attack. But Dad knew right away that Mom must have freaked out, so he told them about her phobia.
After that, the police interviewed me and Sammy four times about what Dad was doing before Mom left the house, and whether Mom and Dad had been fighting lately. But then they ruled it an accident. They don’t know where the snake came from. Maybe it was in a bag someone put in the backseat. Or maybe one of the cats carried it to the car. Except our cats hate going in the car, and how could you not notice a snake in your bag? Maybe it had lived in the car ever since Mom bought it.
There could be other things waiting to kill you. Things you’d never think about, like a snake in a car or a tree about to fall down. Anything could kill you at any time. Maybe Sammy is right about walking backward. Except it’s dangerous. Not because he’ll walk into a car—he’s actually very skilled at walking backward—but because our neighbors will see him walking backward in shrunken pajamas talking to his dead mother, and they’ll call the police to take him to another home where he’ll be properly parented. I’ll be left alone with Dad, and I’ll go nuts. And then the whole family will be officially insane.
I told Sammy it was okay to walk backward if he’s with me, but only for now while we’re in our time of mourning. And he said, “No, it’s afternoon.” That cracked me up.
He walked backward the whole way to the park yesterday. I waved at the neighbors to reassure them that he was properly supervised. Karen’s mom was sitting on her porch smoking. She asked how we were doing. I guess she was at the funeral, but I don’t remember because there were so many people. Karen was there, so of course her mom would have been there.
I wish Karen was here right now, so I’d know for sure if she’s my girlfriend. She’s at camp for the summer, one of those camps where you live in a cabin with a group of strangers who become your best friends in a week. I don’t have a clue if she’s my girlfriend or not.
Sammy told Karen’s mom that Mom was killed by a giant snake and that he doesn’t like snakes anymore. Karen’s mom said she never liked snakes either.
She said I should write to Karen at camp. She went inside and came back out with an address. Her cigarette smoke blew in my eyes when she passed it to me.
Sammy told her that smoking was bad for her, but she just laughed like she was going to live forever.
I
think it was either Dad, the crying guy or a nutty student who put the snake in Mom’s car. I don’t think garter snakes climb into shopping bags or get caught by cats. But crazy killers are everywhere.
I looked up snakes online. There’s actually a whole genus of garter snakes called
Thamnophis
, with a dozen different species. The one that killed Mom was a “common garter snake.” That’s a stupid name for a species. It should be called the dog-fearing garter snake or the path-finding garter snake or something halfway interesting.
Common garter snakes are about two feet long and harmless—unless you have a phobia and one slithers out from under your seat while you’re driving on the highway, in which case they’re deadly. The interesting thing about them is that people keep them as pets. They grab them while they’re hibernating and put them in terrariums. So anybody could have kept one as a pet and tossed it in Mom’s car when the opportunity arose.
Another interesting thing is they discharge a bad-smelling secretion from their anal gland if you try to pick them up. That’s a nasty but effective defense strategy. I’d drop any snake that pooped on me, for sure.
I also looked up stalkers online, because they’re the sort of people who might find out you have a phobia and then put a snake in your car. I read that universities are especially full of stalkers.
I went to the university and had a look around, but I couldn’t tell who was a stalker and who wasn’t. I stopped at Mom’s office and met the crying guy from her funeral. He was right there in her office—not stalking but working. It’s his office now. He’s an associate professor, like Mom was. His name is Professor Mitchell Johnston.
Johnston doesn’t sound like a Muslim name, and that’s because the guy’s not Muslim. So he could have bewailed and torn his clothes and jumped on the coffin with me at Mom’s funeral and it wouldn’t have been against his religion. He’s not Jewish either. I asked. He’s Roman Catholic, which is the Christian religion with the pope. I’ve been to Mom’s work a few times, and I never saw the guy before in my life until the funeral. But he must have worked there a while. He had a photograph of Mom on the wall—it showed the two of them sitting together smiling. He probably had his eye on her office for years.
There were two boxes of Mom’s stuff in the corner of the room. The crying guy said he’d been meaning to drop them off at our house, since nobody came to pick them up. I think he was too scared of meeting Dad to come by, either because he killed Mom, or he thinks Dad killed her, or one of his nutty jealous students killed her.
Two students came into the office while I was there. They were totally crazy and could easily have been stalkers. They went on and on about Mom like they knew everything about her. The girl hugged me so hard it was disturbing. I’d never met her before in my life, and she was holding me and crying, which is the sort of thing a stalker would do. Her name was something like “Cheetah.” It was an Indian name and she had a strong accent, so I had no idea what name she said, but four times was enough to ask her to repeat it. Her boyfriend’s name was Jim. He was attached to her practically like a Siamese twin.
Cheetah is getting her PhD in medieval poetry. Mom was her thesis advisor. Jim tagged along on their meetings. Mom told them a lot about me. You never think of people you love talking about you to total strangers.
For example, Dad goes to work every day and he never packs a lunch, so he probably goes out with people from work. It would be strange, even for Dad, to just sit there eating in total silence, so he probably tells people things about me and Sammy. I bet he doesn’t say anything at all about his time machine though, or they’d have fired him by now.
The nutty students stayed a long time in Mom’s old office, but when I started to open a box of her stuff, the crying guy shouted, “I’ll take those home for you!” and shoved everybody out the door. Like he just couldn’t bear to look at Mom’s coffee cup. He put the boxes in the backseat of his car and put my bike in the trunk. It’s a long ride from campus, and I was pretty much overjoyed to get a ride home.
The crying guy carried Mom’s boxes to the porch, but when Aunt Laura stepped outside and gave him the evil eye, he left in a hurry. Aunt Laura had been watching Sammy all afternoon. She was fed up with his walking backward, and she looked about a hundred years old.
I made the mistake of peeking in Sammy’s journal. I thought it would be blank, but it was half-full already. It contains forty-two drawings of killer cars being smacked by trees. Sam’s cars have eyes and teeth and sometimes a person squashed inside them, bloody and dead. Fortunately, Sammy’s not a very good artist, so if a total stranger found his book, they’d think it was abstract art.
After the forty-two killer-car drawings, there are sixteen drawings of scary snakes with enormous fangs striking a person who is bloody and dead. We have a family meeting with Dr. Tierney soon, and I think we should bring our journals. Sammy can’t start kindergarten walking backward and drawing killer snakes. He’ll be the weird kid right from day one. That’s the kind of hole you never dig yourself out of. There’s a kid in my school named Aaron who used to pick his nose and eat his boogers all through kindergarten. He’s twelve now, but I still think of him as the kid who ate his green slimers. In gym class no one wants him on the team because he’ll pass the ball with the hands that went from his nose to his mouth all those years ago.
Dr. Tierney needs to get Sammy on a different path. He needs to give Sam guidelines for working with a journal. I also wish he’d give us guidelines for mourning Mom. Without religion, you’re just left hanging.
Cheetah the stalker-student was very surprised that I knew about the Hindu religion, which has a mourning period of thirteen days after someone dies. During that time, you cover up the pictures in your house, you don’t visit temples, and you don’t serve food or drinks to guests. But you don’t ignore them either. You wear white, which is the Hindu color of mourning, and you bathe twice a day. Cheetah said you can mourn longer than thirteen days, but that could annoy the dead person, who’s about to be reincarnated.
I might wash my white T-shirts to wear in respect of Mom, even though we’re not Hindu and it’s already been forty days. I think Mom would like a good, hard grieving. She’d have been disappointed if we’d stopped mourning thirteen days after she died.
In some religions, you put up a shelf for the dead and keep it forever. You light a special candle on holidays to include the dead person’s memory in your celebrations. I think Mom would want a shelf like that. She wouldn’t want to be forgotten, even if she was reincarnated, which I don’t believe in. Mom kept a picture of her dog Kiwi on the fridge, and he died before I was born. That’s a clue that thirteen days isn’t long enough for her. But then she got Charlie and Cleo, our cats, so who knows? Maybe if we keep Mom’s picture up, she’d be happy even if we get a whole new mom some day.
I know she would want us to be happy, not crying and walking backward and tinkering with the space-time continuum. If she saw us at this exact moment—Dad in the basement denying reality, Sam in his room drawing psycho snakes, and me here griping—she’d just shake her head. Actually, she’d probably tell us all to go to bed because it’s midnight.
Sammy has lost all concept of a bedtime. Mom used to have strict rules for him. She gave fifteen, ten- and five-minute warnings, followed by a bath at seven-thirty, a snack while Sam’s hair dried at eight— either cereal or toast, no exceptions—then two stories in bed and lights out. Now Dad comes upstairs at eight o’clock to use the bathroom and make a cup of tea and he says, “Gee, Sammy, it’s getting late. I think you should go to bed.” Then he goes back to the basement and comes up again at ten and says the exact same thing.
I read Sammy an old Superman comic at bedtime tonight, where Superman gets trapped in Hell and has to trick the devil and escape. Unfortunately, devils are among the bazillion things Sammy’s afraid of, so he was crying by page three. I made up a
Scooby-Doo
ending where the devil isn’t really the devil. He’s a professor who built a pretend Hell as part of an elaborate plan to steal Superman’s money. Sammy was very happy with that ending. Not that it helped him get to sleep.
He’s still awake two hours later, drawing with spyglasses on. Simpson came over tonight and brought his old spyglasses for Sammy. They have a mirror at the side that lets you see what’s behind you, so Sam is less likely to walk backward into a car. It would be better if he’d walk forward, but at least he won’t get killed. Now he won’t take the glasses off. “Safety first,” he says.
A weird thing happened when Simpson was over. We were playing
Shadow of Rome
in my room with the door closed—Sammy’s not allowed to watch that game, because you can rip off a guy’s arm and beat him to death with it, and Sam has enough problems already. Simpson said out of the blue, “I sent Karen a letter at camp to tell her how we’re doing.”
That disturbed me. Simpson knows I’ve liked Karen forever, and he saw us kissing at graduation, so what’s he doing writing to her at camp? Nobody writes to a girl unless he’s her boyfriend.
I was thinking how much I’m going to miss Simpson when he moves, but maybe the upside is that once he’s in a different school, he won’t try to steal my girlfriend behind my back while I’m in mourning. Anyway, I have a lot of other friends.
Yesterday at the park, Simpson and I played basketball with Turner and Ameer. It was great. I hadn’t seen them since school ended. Ameer talked about everything I’d missed at computer camp. That bugged me, but basketball was fun. I took Sammy with us, and he played in the sandbox next to the court.
It got a bit weird, because the four-year-old bully was there—Darren from down the street—and he threw a bucket of sand at Sammy’s face. Like the whole bucket, not just the sand inside it. Sammy got a big red welt on his forehead, and he started to cry. Darren got ready to bash him with the bucket again. Seriously, there is something wrong with that kid. He was laughing like a maniac and getting his bucket ready to swing. Ameer beaned him with the basketball. He got him right in the head, and it was a hard shot. It’s a good thing he didn’t break the kid’s nose, or we’d have been in trouble. It hit him in back of the head and didn’t break anything, but it shut him up pretty fast. He stumbled a little and dropped his bucket on his own foot, which made Sammy laugh right through his tears.