“Yes! We! Do!” she snapped back in the harshest whisper I’ve ever heard. I looked to Principal Sinclair, but he was intimidated by her, too.
No one was stepping forward, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe Neena might put the school into lockdown, and we’d be there until morning. Then, from the back of the room, I heard, “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” And my salvation came marching down the center aisle.
My father!
I could not have been more grateful as he made his way to the stage. After all I had put him through, here he was saving the day!
Neena reached out to shake his hand, but his expression definitely lacked the spirit Neena was looking for, and she put her hand down.
“How much do you need?” he asked, getting right to business.
“Two years,” Nina answered.
“You got it. Where do I sign?”
I took a time contract and handed it to my father, showing what to fill in, and where to sign.
“Thank you, Dad,” I said. “Really.”
“Your aunt is driving us crazy,” he told me. “It was either this or a grudge match between her and your mother.” He wiped sweat from his brow, then signed the document. The principal signed as witness, and Neena snatched the paper, holding it up to the audience.
“Mr. Bonano has given us two full years! We’ve reached our goal!” And the crowd went wild, whooping and hollering at the prospect of moving on to page three.
Dad shook Gunnar’s hand, turned to leave the stage . . . then he hesitated. He turned to me, wiping his forehead again. It was the first time that I noticed he was sweating a bit more than anyone else onstage. He looked pale, too, and it wasn’t just the stage lights.
“Dad?”
He waved me off. “I’m fine.”
Then he rubbed his chest, took a deep breath, and suddenly fell to one knee.
“Dad!”
I was down there with him in an instant. A volley of gasps came from the audience, blending with the clatter of sleet on the windows.
“Joe!” I hear my mother scream.
“I’m okay. It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
But now he went all the way down, on all fours. “I . . . I just need someone to help me up.” But instead of getting up, he kept going down. In a second he had rolled over and was flat on his back, struggling to breathe.
And still my father insists that everything’s okay. I want to believe him. This is not happening, I tell myself. And if I say it enough, maybe I’ll believe it.
From this moment on, nothing made proper sense. Everything was random shouts and disconnected images. Time fell apart.
Mom is there holding his hand.
Mona’s on the stage, clutching her coat beside her, and gets pushed out of the way by the security guard who claims to know CPR, but doesn’t seem too confident.
A million cell phones dialing 911 all at once.
“I’m fine. I’m fine. Oh God.”
Gunnar standing next to Kjersten standing next to me, none of us able to do a damn thing.
The guard counting, and doing chest compressions.
The whole audience standing like it’s the national anthem all over again.
Dad’s not talking anymore.
The squealing wheels of a gurney rolling down the aisle. How did they get here so fast? How long has he been lying on that stage?
An oxygen mask, and his fingers feel so cold, and the crowd parts before us as the wheels squeal again, and me, Mom, Christina, and Mona are carried along in the wake of the gurney toward the auditorium door, where cold air rolls in, hitting the heat and making fog that rolls like ocean surf.
And in the madness of this terrible moment, one voice in the crowd, loud and clear, pierces the panic. Once voice that says:
“My God! He gave two years, and he died!”
I turn to seek out the owner of that voice. “SHUT UP!” I scream. “SHUT UP! HE’S NOT DEAD!” If I found who said it, I’d break him up so bad he’d be joining us at the hospital, but I’m pulled along too quickly in the gurney’s wake, out the door and into the wet night. He’s not dead. He’s not. Even as they load him into the ambulance, they’re talking to him, and he’s nodding. Weakly, but he’s nodding.
We pile into our car to follow, leaving Gunnar, and Kjersten, and the thermometer and the crowd. Now there’s nothing but the sleet, and the cold, and the wail and flashing lights of the ambulance as we break every traffic law and run every red light to keep up with it, because we don’t know which hospital they’re taking him to, so we can’t lose the ambulance. We can’t. We can’t.
17 My Head Explodes Like Mount St. Helens, and I’ll Probably Be Picking Up the Pieces for Years
Our lives get spent worrying about such pointless, stupid things. Does this girl like me? Does this boy know I exist? Did I get an A, B, or C? And will everyone laugh when they see my ugly shirt? It’s amazing how quickly—how, in the smallest moment of time, all of that can implode into nothing, when the universe suddenly opens up, revealing itself with all these impossible depths and dizzying heights. You’re swept up into it, and as you look down, the perspective is terrifying. People look like ants from so far away.
I understand hell now, and you don’t have to leave this world to get there. You can get there just fine sitting in a hospital waiting room.
Coney Island Hospital’s emergency room didn’t seem to have much to do with health. It seemed more like this sickly mix of bad luck, bad timing, and even worse news. My father got rushed in right away, and the rest of us were left to wait in the reception area, where people who weren’t immediately dying waited for service like it was a deli counter.
“Did they have to bring him here?” says Aunt Mona. “What’s wrong with Kings County, or Maimonides?”
There were a lot of people with bloody clothes, poorly bandaged wounds, and bloated, feverish faces—all hanging their hopes on a single overtired receptionist who was, in theory, calling names, although it was more than half an hour until I heard her call a single one. I tried to read a magazine, but couldn’t focus. Christina played halfheartedly with a battered old Boggle game she got from a toy chest that smelled of small children. Mom seemed to be studying the pattern of the carpet.
“Why aren’t they telling us anything?” says Aunt Mona. “I don’t like how they run this hospital.”
There was a huge fish tank filled with fake coral rocks and a plastic diver all covered with green tank scum. There seemed to be only three fish in the giant tank, and I’m thinking, If this place can’t take care of their fish, what does it say about patient care?
“I don’t know what this stain on this seat is,” says Aunt Mona, “but I’m going to sit over there.”
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t pick up. But then it had been ringing a lot, and I hadn’t picked up for anybody. Thinking of the phone reminded me of something.
“You gotta call Frankie,” I told Mom.
Mom shook her head. “Not yet.”
“You gotta call Frankie!” I told her more forcefully.
“If I do, he’ll come driving all the way from Binghamton in the middle of the night in this weather at a hundred miles an hour! No thank you, I don’t need two in the hospital! We’ll call your brother in the morning.”
I was about to protest—but then I got it. Even though I couldn’t see the look in her eyes, I got it. You gather the whole family at a deathbed. So as long as Frankie’s not here, it’s not a deathbed, is it? It’s the same reason she hadn’t asked to talk to a priest.
My phone rang again, and I finally turned it off. Did people think I would actually answer it? As if their need to know was more important than my need not to talk about it.
An hour later a doctor came out and asked for Mrs. Benini. I took no notice until Mom says, “Do you mean Bonano?”
The doctor looked at his chart and corrected himself. “Yes—Bonano.”
Suddenly I think the heart attack might h
ave spread to me. We all stand up.
“Mrs. Bonano,” the doctor said, “your husband has an acute blockage of the—”
But that’s all I hear, because I get stuck on one word.
Has.
Present tense! “Has” means “is,” not “was.” It means my father’s alive. Never have I appreciated tense so completely. I swore I’ll never take tense for granted again.
“He’s going to need emergency bypass surgery,” the doctor told us. “Triple bypass, actually.” The fact that they had a name for it was a good thing, I figured. If they knew what they had to do, then they could do it, but Mom covered her mouth and found a new wellspring of tears, so I knew this wasn’t so good.
“It’s a long operation, but your husband’s a fighter,” the doctor said. “I have every hope that he’ll pull through.” And then he added, “There’s a chapel on the second floor, if you’d like some privacy.” Which is not something you say to someone if you truly believe their loved one is going to pull through.
The doctor said he’d keep us posted, and disappeared through the double doors. Mom said nothing. Christina and I said nothing. But Aunt Mona said, “It’s all that cholesterol in his diet. I’ve warned him for years. Our father, rest his soul, went the same way, but did Joe listen?”
Back in eighth grade, I had a geology unit in science. We studied volcanoes. Some erupt predictably, spewing magma, and others just explode. The rock is so hot it actually becomes gas, and the blast is more powerful than a hydrogen bomb.
That’s the closest I can come to explaining what happened to me next. I could feel it coming the moment Aunt Mona opened her mouth, and I had no way to control it.
Mom saw me about to blow. She tried to grab me, but I shook her off. There was no stopping this—not by her, not by anybody.
“Shut your freaking mouth!” I screamed. Everyone in the waiting room turned to me, but I didn’t care. “Shut your freaking mouth before I shut it for you!” Mona gaped, unable to speak as I looked her in the eye, refusing to look away. “You sit there and complain every day of your stupid life, passing judgment on everyone, and even now you won’t shut up!”
And then I said it. I said the words that had been brewing inside since the moment my father went down on that stage.
“It should have been you.”
She looked at me like I had plunged a dagger through her heart.
“Anthony!” my mother said, losing all her wind with that single word.
I kept Mona locked in my gaze, feeling as if my eyes could just burn her away. “It should be you in that operating room. I wish it was you dying instead of him.”
So now it was out. I meant it, she knew I meant it—everyone in the waiting room knew.
And from somewhere beside me, I heard Christina, in a tiny voice say, “So do I . . .”
Suddenly it felt like there was no air in that room, and the walls had closed in. I had to escape. I don’t even remember leaving. The next thing I knew I was in the parking garage, searching for our car, and I found it. I didn’t have the keys, but Mom, in her panic, had forgotten to lock it. Good thing, too, because I was fully prepared to break a window. I almost wanted to.
I sat in the car that smelled so strongly of Aunt Mona’s perfume, and I pounded the dashboard. Mona was the one with all the anxiety. She was a human propeller churning up stress until everyone was drowning in it. Why couldn’t it have been her? Why?
I was starting to cool down by the time my mom came, and sat in the car beside me.
“No lectures!” I yelled, even before she opened her mouth.
“No lectures,” she agreed quietly.
We sat there for a while in silence, and when she finally did speak, she said, “Aunt Mona decided it was best if she took a hotel room across the street from the hospital. That way she can be close.” Which meant she wouldn’t be staying with us anymore. I wondered if I’d ever see her again. I wondered if I cared.
“Good,” I said. I might have cooled down, but it didn’t change what I said, or the fact that I meant it. But then my mother said something I didn’t see coming.
“Anthony . . . don’t you realize I was thinking the same thing?”
I looked to her, not sure that I had heard her right. “What?”
“From the moment I knew your father was having a heart attack, I had to fight to keep it out of my mind. ‘It should have been her, not Joe—it should have been her . . .’” Mom closed her eyes, and I could see her trying to force the worst of those god-awful feelings away. “But honey, there are some things that must never be said out loud.”
Knowing she was right just made me angrier. I gritted my teeth so hard I thought I might break them—and then what? We’d have dental bills on top of bypass.
“I’m not sorry.”
Mom patted my arm. “That’s okay,” she said. “Someday you will be, and you can deal with it then.”
Somewhere in the garage a car alarm went off, echoing all around.
“No word from the doctor?” I asked.
“Not yet. But that’s good.”
I knew what she meant. It was a four-, maybe five-hour operation. There’s only one reason it would end early.
“I’d better get back,” Mom said. “Come when you’re ready. We’ll be in the chapel.” And she left.
My anger at the unfairness of it all still raged inside, but some of that anger was bouncing off of Mona and sticking to me. Wasn’t I the one who dumped that pitcher of water on Boswell, making life that much harder on my father? Wasn’t I always talking back, creating problems, making things harder at home? Could I have been the one who pushed him one step too far?
And then I got to thinking about the time contracts, and how I, in a way, had been tempting fate—playing God. Was this my punishment? Was this, as they say, the wage of my sin?
My brain had already turned to cottage cheese, and now it was going funnier still. You can call it another volcanic burst, you can call it temporary insanity, you can call it whatever you like. All I know is that in my current dairy-brained state, the letters in my own mental Boggle game suddenly came together and started talking in tongues.
Fact: My father’s heart attack happened within moments of him signing a contract for two years of his life.
Fact: It was my fault the contract even existed.
Fact: There was a fat black binder filled with almost fifty years sitting in Gunnar Ümlaut’s bedroom.
. . . but I could get those years back.
Maybe if I got all those pages and brought them to my father—or better yet, brought them to the chapel and laid them down on the altar . . . Did a hospital chapel have an altar? If not, I would make one. I’d take a table, and sprinkle it with holy water. I’d renounce what I had done—truly renounce it, and those pages would be my bargain with God. Then, once that bargain had been struck, the morning would come, the operation would be a success, and I would still have a father.
This wasn’t just an answer, it felt like a vision! I could almost hear the gospel choir singing the hallelujahs.
I left the car, my breath coming in fast puffs of steam in the midnight cold, and took to the street, searching for the nearest subway station.
18 Go Ahead . . . Tenderize My Meat.
There were things I didn’t know, which I didn’t find out until much later—like what happened in the auditorium after my father was rushed out.
My God—he gave two years of his life and he died!
It hadn’t occurred to me that others had heard that—and even though news of my father’s death had been greatly exaggerated, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the possibility that he’d die. Just like my eruption at Aunt Mona, it was something everyone was thinking, but it was too dangerous to say aloud.
In the awkward, uneasy moments after we had left, Principal Sinclair tried to get things back on track—the show must go on, and all. It was no use. The crowd was murmuring up a cloud of worry—not about my father, but about
themselves. Then someone yelled, “Hey, I want my month back,” and all eyes turned to Gunnar.
In less than a minute, people were asking him, tugging at him, grabbing at him, demanding their time back—and when he didn’t give it back right then and there, things started to get ugly. People were yelling, pushing one another, and then kids who didn’t even care took this as their cue to make further mischief, by fighting, throwing stuff, and creating a general atmosphere of havoc. Mob mentality took over.
Gunnar and Kjersten escaped through a back door, along with the superintendent, leaving poor Mr. Sinclair and a skeletal faculty desperately struggling to bring back sanity, like that was gonna happen. In the end, Wendell Tiggor led about twenty semihardened criminals and delinquent wannabes on a rampage through the school. The rest was history.
But I didn’t know any of this when I arrived at Gunnar and Kjersten’s house at twelve-thirty in the morning.
I rang the bell and knocked, rang and knocked, over and over until Mrs. Ümlaut came to the door in a bathrobe. There was luggage just inside the door, and I knew she must have arrived home that evening. I didn’t bother with pleasantries, I pushed right past her and bounded up the stairs.
“What are you doing? What do you want?” she wailed, but I really didn’t have time for explanations.
Gunnar’s door was closed, but not locked. The one thing I had going for me tonight was unlocked doors. I found a light switch, flicked it on, and Gunnar sat up in bed, blinking, not entirely conscious yet.
“Where is it?” I demanded.
“Antsy? Wh-what’s going on?”
“The notebook. Where is it? Answer me!”
It took him a moment to process the question, then he glanced over at his desk. “It’s there, but—”
That’s all I needed to know. I grabbed the notebook—and noticed right away that it felt way too light. I opened it up and saw that it was empty. The pages were all gone.
“Where’s all the time? I have to have that time!”
“You can’t!” Gunnar said.