Walking Backward (7 page)
I went into the basement to show Dad the pictures Cheetah brought this afternoon, but he must have been out in the yard with Sammy. He has half the basement curtained off. Behind the curtain is a strange rocket-shaped construction covered in a tarp, which I’m guessing is his time machine. I didn’t want to look.
Dad’s journal was lying on a table behind the curtain. It wasn’t full of time-travel theories. It was full of sad thoughts about how much he misses Mom and how he doesn’t know if he can go on living and how much he loves me and Sammy. It was frightening to read that he’s so sad. I would rather he were just insane.
I don’t think Dad put the snake in Mom’s car anymore. He wrote that he thinks I did it as a prank. Or maybe he just wrote that to cover his tracks and set me up in case the police start investigating again, and they take his journal as evidence. He should know that I’m not a prankster. Okay, I put fake poop on the porch once. And on April Fools’ Day, I wrote a letter saying Dad won a million dollars a year for life. But I would never scare Mom with a snake.
If he reads my journal like I read his, he’ll find out it wasn’t me.
So I’ll say right here that it isn’t very nice of him to keep walking forward when Sammy asked him to walk backward. A total stranger did it! But Dad won’t do it for his own four-year-old kid who has obviously gone wacko, peeing the bed and speaking to Mom through a Power Ranger. How is Sammy ever going to get through kindergarten without being labeled a freak? It starts in three weeks.
I’d understand if Dad were trying to help Sammy break his walking-backward habit. But Dad’s not helping Sammy. He’s not even making him supper. We’ve been eating microwaved hot dogs and Mr. Noodles for five weeks straight. Tonight Sammy clapped when I gave him cinnamon toast. We could use a real dad.
I’m going to accidentally-on-purpose leave this journal on the kitchen counter by the coffeepot so Dad will find it and know for sure that I didn’t put the snake in Mom’s car. And he can learn that he’s failing as a parent.
D
ad was showing no sign of having read my journal, and it was in exactly the same spot where I left it two days ago, so I just went up to him and said, “I didn’t put the snake in Mom’s car, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He said, “I would never think that, Josh.” So obviously he doesn’t know that I read his journal. I asked him straight out, “Did you put the snake in Mom’s car on purpose so she’d have an accident?” He looked pretty shocked at that. He walked away toward the basement.
I freaked out. I shoved the plant stand over and yelled, “You’re a terrible father! You’re worse than no parent at all!” Then I started to cry. Sammy ran into the hall, and the girl Power Ranger said she loved me. Then Cleo came over and started pawing the dirt I’d spilled, like maybe she was going to poop in it. I started laughing hysterically. We’re such a pathetic family.
Later, when Dad and I were alone again, he said maybe Sammy put the snake in Mom’s car, and that’s why he’s gone wacko. But I can’t see Sammy catching a snake without getting a hundred bites and a lot of bad-smelling anal secretion all over him. The kid can’t catch a baseball. I’ve never tried to catch a snake, but once in the schoolyard I saw Karen grab one right behind its head. She said if you grab a snake anywhere else, it will swing around and bite you. I asked if she’d ever been bitten, and she said, “Yeah, but it doesn’t hurt that much.” Then she chased me around the schoolyard, laughing.
I wonder why Dad suspected me, since he’s seen me run away from snakes. Last fall I lifted up a wooden board behind the shed, and I totally spazzed out when I saw a snake under it. I ran to the deck as if it were chasing me. Meanwhile, Sammy rushed over to check out the snake. If he were older, he’d have shouted, “Josh, my boy, you’ve discovered a common garter snake!” He loves snakes. He could probably learn to identify all the different species if he took half a minute away from the tv and just looked at a book sometime.
Mom always said she wished she were like Sammy around snakes. If he did manage to catch one, he might have put it in her car, thinking it would help her become unafraid like he was. But it’s a long shot.
Dr. Tierney said kids Sammy’s age can feel like murderers if they were mad at the person who died. But Sam was never mad at Mom. When she was alive, you could ask Sam if he was having a good day, and he’d look at you like the question was retarded, and he’d say, “Every day is a good day.” He really meant it—every single day of his life was a slice of Heaven. I don’t think he would say that now. I don’t know if he’ll ever say that again.
I don’t believe Sam put the snake in Mom’s car. I asked Dad if he thought it might have been the crying guy. Dad said, “Why would Professor Johnston try to kill your mother?” I said, “I don’t know. Maybe if he’s a crazy stalker?” Dad gave me his confused smile. Then he asked, “Did your mother ever talk about him?” It was way obvious he suspected something was going on between them.
The crying guy is totally good-looking when he’s not crying. Aunt Laura says that women like men who are tall, dark and handsome, and he’s all three. Plus, she says that women like men who aren’t afraid to show their feelings, which obviously he isn’t, since he cried for hours in front of hundreds of people.
I said to Dad, “I never heard of the guy in my life, but he cried an awful lot at the funeral.” And Dad said, “Hmm.”
W
e have to get to work on the scrapbook right away, because I’m already forgetting stuff. Today when Dad opened the door and shouted “Charlemagne!” I thought he’d gone insane. Like more than usual. I forgot that’s our cat Charlie’s full name. I don’t know why Mom named him that. The real Charlemagne changed the face of Europe and conquered a whole empire. Our cat hasn’t even conquered the yard—there’s a bigger cat who pees on our porch regularly, and Charlie just runs inside when he comes around.
Our other cat is named after Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt. She killed herself with an asp, which is a poisonous snake. That would have been the most horrible death Mom could have imagined. If Mom were Cleopatra, she’d have drowned herself in the Nile.
Other people name a cat “Boots” because it has white feet, or “Ginger” because it’s orange. Mom felt the need to name Cleo and Charlie after great historical leaders, even though all they do is sleep and eat and roll around all day biting each other’s heads.
I miss talking to Mom about history. She would tell me about things she learned at work, or she’d ask what I was reading or which empire I was playing in
Civilization
. Then she’d tell me something cool about it or listen to me tell her something. Now there’s no one to talk to.
There’s no point in talking to Dad. Sam and I tried to interview him for the Mom Book, but he said that if he talked about Mom too much, he wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. That’s a great thing to tell your four-year-old.
Dad’s mental health must be seriously diving, because he asked if I want to go to church with him on Sunday. I’ve never been to church in my life, and I’ve never seen Dad go either. I told him the joke, “Why do you have to be quiet in church? Because people are sleeping.” He said, all seriously, “That’s disrespectful, Josh.” Like he’s a priest or something, when really he hasn’t been in a church since the day he got married. Mom laughed her head off when I told her that joke.
Maybe Dad heard me teaching Sammy how to pray, so he thinks I’m dying to go to church. I’m working on a step-by-step plan to get Sam ready for kindergarten. Step One is, “Don’t let Power Rangers talk out loud, especially not in a girly voice.” Sam said Step One would be impossible to tackle at this point in his life. We moved on to Step Two, “Don’t talk out loud to Mom, with or without the Ranger.” Sam started to cry over the thought of Step Two.
I told him he could talk to Mom at the cemetery or in a church or praying by his bedside. I showed him how to pray. He thought it was the greatest thing. I told him he wasn’t allowed to kneel down and pray wherever he happened to be, like in the mall or somewhere. I could totally see him doing that, and even if people think he’s talking to God instead of his dead mother, it’s still weird. He asked if he could talk to Mom just in his head, and I said okay. Maybe that’ll be Step Six or something, but he’s not ready for it yet. He’s still in mourning.
Japanese Buddhists mourn for forty-nine days. If there’s something unsolved about the person’s death, like, say you don’t know how a snake got in their car, the mourners say, “My forty-nine days are not over.” That’s exactly how I feel. My forty-nine days are not over. I feel like my forty-nine days will go on forever.
Sammy’s beside me now, drawing in his journal. His profile looks like Mom’s. She had long eyelashes and a round happy face. She was a happy person, like Sam. That’s why it’s so sad with her gone. She made up a large percentage of our family’s happiness.
Sammy just let me see his journal, and I made him cry again. I skimmed the most recent pages. They’re full of snakes scratched out. First he draws a snake, then he scratches it out. The one he’s working on now is a snake attacking a person. I asked him if it was supposed to be Mom. He said, “No, it’s Daddy.” Then he asked if I would write in his journal that Daddy was killed in the car crash and snakes must be eliminated. Except Sammy called it “lemonated,” which sounds like he wants to make them into a beverage.
I got mad and told him he was demented, and if Dad heard him it would break his heart. So of course Sammy bawled his eyes out. I got a grip and told him I was sorry. I said, “You’re the best boy ever.” He asked, “Better than you?” And I said, “Yeah, you’re way better than me.”
There’s one drawing in Sam’s journal that isn’t scratched out. It shows the blue Power Ranger fighting a giant green snake. It looks like he put a lot of effort into it. I told him Mom would have loved that drawing, and he should be proud of it. He said Mom will be proud of him when he starts soccer and scores a hundred goals. I felt terrible because I’d forgotten all about that. I better talk to our neighbor about getting Sam on the team. Dr. Tierney said this is a bad time for disappointments and betrayals.
Speaking of disappointment, I got a letter back from Karen this morning. It was weird, like she was writing to a total stranger. It was only one page long. She said she’d heard from Simpson that I was back in soccer, but the rest of it was stuff about her camp. She said they heard an owl hoot in the night, and they tried to identify which species it was. She thought it was a great horned owl. Why would she write me about that? My mother just died. I couldn’t care less which owl she heard. She didn’t even ask how I’m doing. I think she doesn’t like me anymore and she wishes she’d never kissed me. I’m not writing to her again. She comes home in a week anyway. I hope she still likes me, because it would be something to look forward to, but I wish she’d never written, because now I’m just depressed.
Sammy’s bouncing on my bed right now, and the girl Power Ranger is laughing in a high-pitched hysterical scream. He’s staring at her and laughing so hard I almost believe she’s a real person instead of an eight-inch plastic doll. It’s freakish, the sound he has her making. Like he has a split personality. He sure looks happy, in a demented sort of way.
There was a university student in Singapore who was bouncing on his bed listening to music and bounced himself right out the window. He fell three stories to his death and won a Darwin Award. I figure Mom’s death was stupider than that guy’s, so she’ll probably get an award too. What’s stupid about bouncing on a bed? I could use a good bounce right now. If I fell out the window, it wouldn’t be stupid. It would just be an accident.
I was reading about evolution for my computer game, and I read a good monkey joke that Mom would have liked. It goes like this: A woman walks into a restaurant with her baby in a carriage. The waiter says to her, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” The woman complains to the manager that the waiter insulted her. The manager apologizes. He tells her to choose something from the dessert counter for free to make up for being insulted. He says, “You go on up and see what we have. I’ll stay here and watch your monkey.”
That cracked me up. It would have cracked Mom up too. I told Dad, but he didn’t even get it. He asked, “So was it really a monkey?” Duh. I don’t know how Mom put up with his total lack of humor.
I tried the joke on Sammy just now, and he laughed his head off in two voices, which totally freaked me out. And he doesn’t have a clue what the joke means.
S
ammy and I went around the neighborhood looking for scrapbook stories this weekend, and we introduced ourselves to the coach of five-year-old soccer. His daughter immediately fell in love with Sammy. They’ve never played together before— Sam never plays with girls because he’s scared of them—but apparently Sam’s insanity makes him more exciting than normal boys. They walked backward down the hallway about thirty-seven times, giggling. All three of them—Sammy and the girl and the Power Ranger.
Her name is Chloe. I told her that was almost the same as our cat’s name, Cleo. She said, “My name’s Chloe, not Cleo.” Her dad laid his hand on my shoulder and said very politely, “It’s not quite the same name.” As if I were mentally retarded and needed to have that pointed out. He looked like he was about to explain the differences in vowel order, so I stepped away and asked if he had any cats. He seems like the kind of guy who’d own the big cat that scares Charlie and pees on our porch. But he said, “No, we don’t have any pets.” I find that suspicious.
He knew all about Mom dying. The first thing he said when he opened the door was, “Oh, boys, I’m so sorry about your mother.” We’ve never spoken to the guy before in our lives. Maybe it’s the kind of thing people talk about when they take out the garbage. “Did you hear? That nice lady across the street freaked out and drove into a tree.”
I asked him if Sammy could join his soccer team. He laughed as if it were a joke, because registration was in April and there are only two games left in the season. The championship games are on Labor Day weekend, and we’ll be away camping. We go to the same campsite every year—Mom books it in advance. I was honest about that. I told the coach that Sam would have to miss the tournament, which would only leave two games for him to play. He laughed and looked around like maybe he was on
Prank Patrol
. Then Sammy said, “Mommy likes soccer and she’ll be proud of me when I score some goals.” And the coach said, “Sure, you can join.” Just like that.