Catalyst

  Breakfast chez Malone provides our recommended daily requirement of chaos: lost homework, dirty diapers, forgotten phone messages, crumpled construction estimates, tools on the counter, juice spilled in the refrigerator, broken toys, a tsunami of laundry, chewed crayons, abandoned books, and oatmeal. There is peace in my car, just me and Mikey and the miles to school. We practice singing the elements song and the alphabet, and counting. This kid is a lot smarter than Teri realizes. He can say “Kate” and “Spock” and “atom.” I spend my second period lunches in his preschool class. We build towers.

  Classwork and homework are produced by the Kate-a-tron, operating at a tolerable performance level. Everything is under control, with the possible exception of Mitchell “Why Won’t You Answer My Calls?” Pangborn. Sara understands how busy I am with the Litch Invasion. Travis understands. My father and brother get it. Even the dog is giving me some extra space.

  By the end of the week I have a few things to add to the Quantum Futures List:7. Become an Olympic runner.

  8. Become a leading childcare expert.

  9. Become a construction consultant.

  10. Create a new career: Chaos Manager.

  11. Rehabilitate the title: Domestic Goddess.

  12. Make a movie about why MIT should let me in. Enroll.

  13. Reapply to MIT. Pay someone to write my essays. Enroll.

  14. Take a year off and chill (as if).

  The lines between my days and my nights are blurring. The night is filled with the calls of owls and the smell of daffodils, and I run for miles.

  7.0

  Nuclear Stability

  SAFETY TIP: Develop an accident plan.

  I work at the pharmacy until three o’clock on Saturday, then I change into cruddy clothes and hurry down the hill. Dad had more than forty people volunteer to work today, and they had great weather. I can’t wait to see how much they got done.

  (40 people + good weather) x motivation = a miracle.

  Incredible. All that is left of the barn is a neatly raked rectangle bordered by foundation stones. The roof of the house is patched, the gutters have been fixed, and the shutters all taken down. Every window is open to catch the breeze. The kitchen has walls and a roof, a door, and a bay window that looks out over the pond. The air is filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, and some kind of buzzing noise I don’t recognize. When it dies down, I can hear a radio playing and people laughing, shouting, talking. The smell of smoke has been replaced by the smell of new lumber, varnish, and paint: hopeful smells.

  I walk up onto the porch and step inside. The living room is unrecognizable. Everything, absolutely every stick of furniture, has been removed and the rug torn out. The hardwood floor glows. I move down the hall. The kitchen is busy with one guy installing a sink while his buddy sticks tiles in place on the wall where the stove will go. A third guy is sweeping up sawdust. The appliances aren’t in yet, but the cabinets are all hung. Amazing.

  The playroom is where the buzzing noise was coming from. A woman with a mask over her mouth is pushing a giant sander over the floor. Two other women wait until she turns it off, then they follow and clean up behind her. The windows are still grimy, but the floor is looking pretty good. Cans of paint are stacked in the corner, along with floor cloths, brushes, and wooden paint stirrers.

  With the sander off again, I can hear all kinds of commotion upstairs, including Teri’s voice telling somebody that “a blind man could see that thing isn’t straight.” If she doesn’t lighten up with these guys, they’re going to quit. Teri and I need to have a chat about the concept of team play.

  I walk back down the hall, past the parlor, where three guys are busy painting the walls a soft shade of pink. I step through the front door (new doorknob) to the front yard, where the command post has been set up. Betty and Mrs. Litch are crocheting under the new shade of the maple tree. This is the first time I’ve seen Mrs. Litch here since the fire. Mikey is playing with his trucks on the ground in front of them. I don’t have the nerve to ask what they are crocheting. It’s big and orange; could be a car cover, maybe a fishing net.

  Mr. Lockheart is scraping paint off the shutters while Dad watches him intensely. Mr. Lockheart knows better than to let my father touch any tools. Dad’s job is to look encouraging and to hum; he’s very good at humming. He carries things, too. He’s not a big guy, but he’s sturdy, and whenever something heavy needs to be moved, they call for the Reverend.

  Ms. Cummings is pinning wet curtains to a clothesline strung from the maple tree to the front of the house. Toby is washing windows. The kitchen ladies are scrubbing inside. The choir is scraping old paint off the shutters. Everybody has a job. Hammer. Measure. Saw. Sweep. Scrub. Sand. Paint. Boss around. Play with trucks in the grass. Crochet. Gossip.

  Mikey is the first one to notice me. “’Mony, Kate.”

  “Antimony to you, too, Mikey.” What a kid.

  Betty looks up from her crocheting. “There you are, dear. We were just talking about you.”

  I force a smile. “Of course you were. Um, is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You missed another spot,” Toby says.

  I spray the window cleaner directly in his face. It’s a shame we are separated by a pane of dirty glass. My brother is a tyrant. This is the seventh window we have washed together. For a slob, he is strangely concerned about clean glass. It’s taking fifteen minutes to do each one. If he keeps this up, he won’t live to see number eight.

  “No, you didn’t get it yet.” Toby frowns. “Right there. Rub harder.”

  “If I rub any harder the glass is going to break.”

  “Wuss.”

  I rub so hard that paint chips flake off the frame and float to the ground. “Better?”

  “A little.”

  He moves down to the next window and sprays. It takes me longer. I have to climb down the ladder, move the ladder, check and make sure the ladder is properly positioned, ascend halfway, scoot back down, make a few more safety adjustments, then climb up the seven rungs to the top.

  “Could you be any slower?” asks my always-supportive sibling.

  “You missed a spot,” I say.

  He coughs once and coats the glass with spray cleaner. It looks like a wave hit it. I concentrate on my side. After a while I don’t notice Toby’s face or his hands on the other side. We work in silence until the pane is so clear you can’t see anything between us.

  “Looks good,” I say. “Open up.”

  He hits the frame, struggles, then slides the window open six inches.

  “Last one on this floor,” he says. “We’ll have to get the big ladder for the upstairs.”

  My toes try to curl around the rung I am standing on. “It’s getting too late. You have to wash windows when the sun is high enough to see the streaks.”

  “Whatever. We could do it tomorrow after church, I guess.” He sits down on the floor so that his chin is even with the windowsill.

  “You like doing this?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of fun. Spooky, but fun.”

  “Spooky how?”

  “They carted out hundreds of beer bottles and a bunch of guns this morning. I heard Pete say some of the walls upstairs have holes in them. Don’t you think that’s spooky—living in a house that has holes in the walls?”

  I use a paper towel to brush away the loose paint chips and dead flies from the windowsill. “Yeah. But all that stuff was from Teri’s dad and he’s dead. Good-bye, scumbag.”

  “I guess.” He spies a smudge on the glass, sprays it, and wipes carefully. “But here’s what I don’t get. Why didn’t they do any of this cleaning or repair work before? Dad said Mr. Litch died last year.”

  “He died in jail,” I remind him.

  “Whatever. He was dead. He couldn’t come back and put more holes in the wall. Why didn’t they fix it up themselves?”

  I peel off more flakes of paint with my fingernail. Little worms are chewing their way through the wood. “No mone
y, no time, no energy. Remind me to show this to Teri. I bet all the frames are rotting. They’ll have to be replaced.”

  “Maybe that’s another reason. Once you get started on something like this, it just gets bigger and bigger.” He stops to cough. It’s amazing he lasted this long with all the sawdust, paint fumes, and mold spores floating around.

  “You’re done, Tobe. Time for some clean air. Out of there.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Seriously. I shouldn’t have let you stay in there so long. You want to use the nebulizer?”

  “Quit babying me.” Cough. “I’m fine.” Cough, hack, wheeze.

  “Pizza!” someone calls from the front of the house.

  “Yes!” Toby bolts in the direction of the food, hacking all the way.

  I descend the ladder slowly, feeling with my toes to find the ground.

  7.1 Synthesis

  Mitchell A. Pangborn’s Saturn has become the pizza delivery van. He parks it and unloads the boxes from the trunk, handing them to Travis and Sara, who carry them to the side porch. I think I want to say hi to him, but I have to wash my hands first.

  Ms. Cummings and Mikey walk down the hill bearing leftover tuna casserole. Some volunteers use the arrival of dinner as their cue to head home, but a good dozen stay to chow down.

  Before the pizza is dished out, Dad asks us all hold hands and bow our heads for grace. Mikey drags Teri over to me so he can stand between us. When we take his hands, he pulls his feet up off the ground and swings back and forth, his eyes squeezed shut. Dad blesses the house, the food, the families and friends gathered around the pizza boxes. Then he grins and blesses the pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, onions, and extra cheese.

  “Amen. Dig in.”

  Teri carries a plate to her mother, sitting in the best folding chair on the porch, then she sits down beside her to wolf down a slice of pepperoni. Teri’s face has gotten tanned this week, and I swear her biceps are even bigger.

  Mikey is wired. He climbs into Mrs. Litch’s lap and eats a few bites of her pizza, then slides to the floor and rolls his toy fire truck around, scooting the length of the porch on his knees. When he gets to me, he drives the truck up my back and into my hair. I pretend to growl. He giggles and crawls away.

  Travis takes his boom box out of Mitch’s car and turns it on. My father listens to the mildly obscene hip-hop for a minute, then fiddles with the dial until he finds a jazz station. Mrs. Litch unexpectedly pipes up and tells us about going to a jazz festival in Central Park in New York City when she was fifteen, “before I met Charlie, of course.” She says that when she squeezed her eyes, she could see the notes like colors splashing in front of her.

  It is hard to imagine Mrs. Litch was ever fifteen years old.

  Mikey steals a few noodles from the casserole dish, stuffs them in his mouth, and runs inside.

  “Is everything cleaned up in there?” Teri asks.

  “He’s fine. All the tools are put away,” Dad says. “I closed the paint cans myself. The place is as clean as a whistle.”

  I stretch across Sara’s legs and take another slice of extra cheese and onion. The conversation drifts back to jazz, to paint colors, to the sunset. After a few minutes, Mikey comes back out, his hands covered with thick yellow paint.

  “Ucky,” he says.

  Everybody breaks up in laughter.

  “What? What’s that?” Mrs. Litch asks, squinting. “What happened?”

  Teri picks up her brother. “Picasso here was decorating, Ma. I’ll clean him up.”

  As she washes him off in the downstairs bathroom, Mikey babbles about his big trucks and his big-boy room. “Big boy” is the phrase of the day. Through the window, I can see Teri close and lock the door to the future playroom, where the paint cans are. She puts Mikey down to play with his trucks on the smooth living room floor and comes back out, sits next to me, and steals my pizza crust.

  I lean my head against the side of the house. We’re done for the night. Everyone is beat, happy and beat. The old people talk about jazz some more, trumpets, saxophones, drums. Mitchell collects the dirty plates and napkins and puts them in a trash bag, then he sits down on the other side of me. He showered just before he picked up the pizza. I can smell the soap on his neck. I am too tired to move away, almost too tired to be irritated at him anymore. I’m just going to pretend that a very good-smelling, incredibly warm stranger is sitting next to me, a harmless stranger.

  The sun is setting. A few months ago, it would have been dark by now. Mr. Lockheart flicks a switch and the feeble porch light flickers on. A moth bangs into the dirty glass. We should put that on the to-do list: clean porch light.

  My dad tells a dumb joke and Mrs. Litch laughs. Mitchell chuckles. I am on the edge of dropping off; I could actually fall asleep here. Someone else tells a joke. People laugh harder and I open my eyes. The porch light goes out, fades away without a flicker. It must have been an old bulb. The confused moth flutters away.

  “Did you hear that?” Teri asks.

  “It’s crickets, Theresa,” Mrs. Litch says. “Spring is here to stay.”

  “I think the power went out,” Dad says.

  Teri twists around and looks through the open door to the living room. She stands and walks down the steps, peers at the side yard, then jogs around the house. I stand up and look through the door. The living room is empty.

  Mr. Lockheart frowns. “Power can’t be out.” He pulls a flashlight from his belt and turns it on. “Of course, if something caused a short, a mouse or—”

  “Mikey’s gone.” Teri leaps up the porch steps and runs in the house. “Mikey! Mii-key!” She thuds through the house like a giant, the floors shaking under the urgent weight of her boots.

  “He’s probably in front of the television,” says Mrs. Litch.

  “They packed the television away, dear,” Betty says quietly.

  “Mii-keeey!”

  The air crackles.

  “I’ll check the road,” Sara says.

  “The pond,” Mitch says. He jumps off the porch and sprints to the backyard.

  I follow Teri into the house. “Mikey? Mikey?”

  “MIIIIII-KEEEEEEYYYY!” bellows Teri.

  I meet her at the foot of the stairs.

  The safety gate has been ripped down.

  Teri bolts up the stairs, fear trailing her like thunder.

  0.0.0

  Quantum Shift

  Mikey lies in his room, in his big-boy room. He lies on the bare floor. He lies on the bare floor, his fingertips stretched to the snakes in the electrical outlet. His red fire truck, the one with the metal ladder that moves up and down, is blackened. The wall around the electrical outlet is charred. As I watch, a wisp of smoke escapes out the open window.

  Time screeches to a halt, reeking of burnt rubber.

  Outside someone turns down the radio, draining away Mrs. Litch’s jazz. I can hear doors closing, the sound of someone running.

  “It doesn’t look like he’s been near the pond,” Travis tells my father.

  “None of the weeds have been stepped on. He’s not there,” says Mitch.

  They sound like men, grown men far away at the other end of a metal tube.

  Mikey Litch lies on the bare floor of his big-boy room, his eyes open and empty.

  Children don’t die. Not really, not really, they don’t die. They can’t. They are wound up, charged with enough energy, enough juice, to carry them for seventy, seventy-five years. But a bottled bolt of lightning came from the electrical outlet and poured across the red fire truck. It crackled through Mikey’s fingertips and stole him away, even though we were all watching him and doors were locked and the gate was up.

  Teri screams.

  Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodoh

  Time speeds up again.

  Teri sits on the floor, her legs stuck out in front of her like a broken doll, her dead Mikey in her arms. I am a shrieking ghost, seeing everything, unseen.

  Dadd
y runs up the steps, Ms. Cummings runs up the steps, the hard hats run up the steps. They peel Teri away from her Mikey, pry the baby from her hands. They lay him out on the hard floor, his arms thrown carelessly over his head like he wants to be picked up and swung around, spun until he’s dizzy.

  Check his pulse, breathe into his mouth, pizza breath, grape-juice stained. Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe.

  Broken-doll Teri lies forgotten in the corner. I float across the room and settle next to her. Her hands are frozen into the holy shape of Mikey’s head and his chin. I touch her elbow. I pet her shoulder. Her body feels empty. Neither of us is really here. We left when time stopped.

  Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe. My father and my teacher trade positions; you push, I’ll breathe. Their hands are so big for the little body, their shoulders touch, a frantic dance. They read each other, finger Braille on the boy’s dirty skin. He looks at her. She looks at him. Eye talk. Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe.

  Faces hover in the doorway: Sara, Mitchell, Travis. Nameless adults. Pete performs crowd control, sweeps them back down the stairs. Nothing you can do, nothing to see here, out of the way, we’ll let you know.

  A fat pearl of sweat rolls down the side of my father’s face, slips past the lines around his mouth, his Sunday night stubble, and falls—splash—onto Mikey’s glass forehead.

  Red lights chase the shadows around the walls. An ambulance howls and skids into the driveway. My father’s mouth moves, moves, but I can’t hear him. The noise inside Teri has stopped. I hold on to her elbow tighter to keep her from floating out the window.

  The heroes run up the steps, thump-thump-thump, snapping on filmy plastic gloves. The emergency rituals begin. They check Mikey’s pupils and listen to Mikey’s heart. It’s not talking to us, not even a whisper. Scissors riiiiiip . . . his shirt is gone . . . the air so cold for a tiny chest, count his ribs, one-two-three, grease the paddles—