Ma wiped her face and blew her nose and sniffed. Then she gave me a look that was one hundred percent suspicious. “Is this your way of buttering me up about the cat?”
“No!”
She laughed and sniffed some more and put her arms out. And when I came in for a hug, she whispered, “I would have said yes anyway.”
“Ma!”
She laughed again. “Now tell me what happened. How’d we get a cat?”
So I told her about Mrs. Graves and the Mirror Cats attacking Jack and how I’d been going back every hour all afternoon to check on things next door. “She doesn’t want me to call anyone, and she doesn’t want to go to the hospital. I think she just wants to die, Ma, right there in her sunny window.”
“What if a doctor could help her?”
“She told me a hundred times to let her go in peace.”
Ma was quiet for a long time, staring at the floor, her head shaking back and forth from time to time. Finally, she heaved a sigh and said, “Take me there?”
So I did, and after Ma checked Mrs. Graves over, she pulled a chair right alongside her and held her hand. “You can go home, Lincoln, but I need to stay here,” she said. “So she knows she’s not alone.”
“I think she wants to be alone, Ma.”
Ma looked at me with a smile that was three parts sad and seven parts wise. “No one wants to be alone, especially now.”
“But she’s sleepin’,” I whispered. “She’s been sleepin’ all afternoon. She doesn’t even know we’re here.”
“Oh, she knows, Lincoln.” Her face was now all parts wise. “She knows.”
So I pulled up a chair alongside, too. I didn’t know how long I could take just sitting there, but I did know one thing.
I didn’t want Ma to be alone, either.
Mrs. Graves passed during the night. I was asleep in the chair when Ma shook me awake and whispered, “She’s gone, Lincoln. Let’s get home.”
I was still half in a dream where I was trying to leave a strange room but the door going out took me right back inside the very same room. I kept going round and round and round, not knowing how to get out.
And now I was wakin’ up in a strange room with a dead body in it.
I was feeling mighty bamboozled.
“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked.
“Shh.”
Didn’t seem like much of an answer to me. And I wasn’t sure why we were bein’ quiet, or why tiptoein’ was in order. It wasn’t like we were going to wake her up. But I was too tired to put up a fuss and more’n happy to go. I followed Ma out the door, glad it didn’t take me back inside the very same room.
When we were in our own apartment, I went straight for my mattress. And I was half asleep and half wishing for an extra blanket when Ma came over and whispered, “I’ll be back. I need to make a few calls.”
I don’t know how long she was gone, but when she slipped back in, I thought I was dreaming, ’cause there was a cat curled up at my chest, purring.
And then I remembered—I had a cat!
“Ma?”
“Shh. Everything’s fine.”
The purring at my chest made me believe it was so.
—
Ma did not take pity on me in the morning. “You’re coming with me,” she said soon after her alarm went off.
“But, Ma!”
“Don’t fuss. You’re comin’.”
“What about Mrs. Graves?”
“They came and got her last night.”
“Who did?”
“The coroner’s office. You didn’t hear?”
“No!”
“Well, they did. Now get movin’.”
“But, Ma!”
“Get movin’!”
On the bus ride to Brookside, I noticed the dark bags under Ma’s eyes, but she wasn’t lettin’ on how little sleep she’d had, if she’d had any at all. She told me that the Mirror Cats would be fine and that everything else would be taken care of without us. “Families have responsibilities, whether they like it or not.”
“She had family?”
“I told you she did.”
“But…who are they?”
“Two feuding sons. One’s in Florida, the other’s in Los Angeles.”
“How do you know?”
“I found a letter and instructions in a drawer.”
“You went nosin’ through her stuff?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said.
It was a highfalutin mm-hmm, too. One that said loud and clear that I’d best not be passing judgment.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking about it. How could someone have two kids and wind up dyin’ with strangers? What were her sons like? Why were they feuding? Did they know where she was living? Did they know how she was living? Did they know their ma had lost track of what was garbage and what wasn’t?
Did they know she needed help?
At Brookside, I tried escapin’ into my notebook. Into a story. I had to be at Brookside all day, and I just wanted to block it out. Before, I could always do that with writing stories, but now I couldn’t seem to get into one. I couldn’t tune out bein’ there. And bein’ there felt like it was sucking the life right out of me.
“You doing okay today, dear?” Gloria asked me after lunch. “Your mother told me about what happened. You’ve had quite a couple of days, haven’t you?”
I just nodded and told her I was fine. But I felt strange.
Like something inside me had changed.
Ma seemed to have changed, too, but in a different way. “I got a raise!” she whispered on the bus ride home.
“Really?”
“A good one! It came with a glowing review from the director, too. He said he likes my work ethic and my patience with the residents. He told me he always hears good things about me and that he’s grateful for the way I stepped up during Thanksgiving. He also noticed the way you pitched in and told me I’m raising a fine young man.”
“He said that?”
She gave me a look that was all parts mischief. “Well, he doesn’t know about you callin’ folks crazies or forcing garlic on me to fight off psychic vampires.”
“I didn’t force garlic on you! And I sure didn’t tell you to peel it!”
She laughed. A big, smiley, cheek-poppin’ laugh. I hadn’t seen her this happy in…ever.
“You know what this is?” she asked, wagging a Brookside envelope with her paycheck in it.
“A Brookside envelope with your paycheck in it?” I ventured.
“It’s more than that. It’s freedom. Tomorrow I’ll send Ellie what I owe her, plus some thank-you money, and then I can start savin’ for us.”
“Uh…can the thank-you money and the savin’ maybe wait ’til after Christmas?”
She turned a cool look on me. “What? Getting a cat’s not enough?”
My face flashed wide, but it came back in quick. The truth is, if she’d have asked me what my wildest dreams would bring me for Christmas, I’d have said a cat. Jack had just arrived early, is all.
She laughed at my face flashing around and said, “We’ll have a fine Christmas, Lincoln. I promise. And next year? What do you say we start looking for an apartment with heat in it?”
“That would be nice,” I agreed.
“Mighty nice,” she said, and she smiled the whole way home.
The best thing about what was left of Thanksgiving break was Jack. He was like my new shadow, followin’ me everywhere I went. And when I sat down or rested on my bed, he’d curl up right there with me. I spent a whole lot of the weekend talking to Jack.
I also spent a whole lot of the weekend wishing Jack could talk to me. I had questions! Had Mrs. Graves taken him in after he’d become One-Eyed Jack? Or had the Mirror Cats slashed his eye? I wished he could tell me.
The worst thing about the weekend was not the shopping or the chores. It was Sunday morning, when it was just Jack and me in the apartment and Ma was at work. I almost wished she’d made me go to
Brookside with her.
It wasn’t just being trapped by my promise to stay inside the apartment. It was everything that was going on outside the apartment. I guess they wanted to clear Mrs. Graves’s place out quick, ’cause even though it was Sunday, workers were walking back and forth, back and forth, emptying out the apartment. I spied on them through the window blinds, careful not to let on that I was home. Someone figuring out I was home was the first step in them knowing I was home alone.
The workers did carry out some boxes of stuff, but mostly what they hauled away were black trash bags, stuffed full and round. One after the other after the other. It was like an army of big black ants marching past, working in a line.
I wondered about Mrs. Graves’s feuding sons. Where were they? The men cleaning out the apartment were hired workers. I could tell by their boots and shirts and the way they marched along and worked together. This was a job. They didn’t care about anything else.
So why weren’t the sons here? Didn’t they care?
I also wondered about all the stuff Mrs. Graves had saved, thinking she might need it someday. Toothbrushes, toilet-paper rolls, butter tubs, bread bags…it was all being hauled off to the dump. She treated it like treasure, but to everyone else it was just trash.
It all felt sad. And it lingered in my mind long after the army had stopped marching. I couldn’t figure out answers for any of it, and after Ma was finally home, she was no help at all. “Hoarding’s a common problem with seniors, and folks have fallings-out, Lincoln. You can’t solve all the world’s problems. You gotta start by fixin’ your own.”
Seemed kinda funny coming from someone who’d delivered zombie chicken to a homeless guy and sat up all night with a dying stranger. And what had Ma meant about “fixin’ your own”?
I was almost asleep when I remembered how Ma had called her sister to patch things up. She could have just left things as they were, but she’d called Ellie and tried to make them better. I lay there in the dark, figuring out, finally, how important that was.
Then my mind started rewinding. Working backward in time, thinking about all the things that had happened since Ma had made her resolution on New Year’s almost a year ago.
I always knew Ma worked hard. And I knew she’d made a plan and was sticking to it. As tough as everything was, she was sticking to it.
But there was something else. Something I hadn’t known before. And right there, in the dark, it clicked. More than any of the heroes in my stories, more than any other person I’d ever known, Ma was brave.
Truly brave.
And seein’ that clear as day right through the dark made me know something else. It had come and gone in little waves before, but it was settling now, way down inside.
I could be brave, too.
Isaac was waiting for me when I got off the bus Monday morning. “Hey!” he called.
His hair was combed back and still a little wet. I went over to him, thinking that instead of a wild anemone mule, he looked like a turtle walking on two legs. “What’s in there?” I asked, slapping his backpack.
“Oh, everything!”
He sounded mighty excited, and it made me laugh. I slipped him a wily look. “Like…a zombie in a wheelchair?”
He laughed, too. “Wish I’d known you were going to be at Brookside on Friday,” he said. “I’d have come.”
“To Brookside?” My face went a little screwy. “Why? And how’d you know I was there?”
“My mom. She said she saw you looking all miserable in a corner.”
“She did?” I thought back to Friday. It had been a long and miserable day. One that would have been a whole lot better with Isaac there. “It was the slowest day ever….”
“No food fights?”
I laughed again. “Dentures went flyin’, but that’s about it.”
“Hey, are you doing the Alzheimer’s Walk on Saturday?”
“Uh…I don’t think so. It’s Ma’s only real day off.”
“Well, my mom said if you wanted, you could come home with me Friday after school and we could camp out in the tree fort and then do the walk on Saturday.”
My mind went twirlin’. “You have a tree fort?”
“Yeah! It’s got a trapdoor, a pulley-system dumbwaiter, and a telescope for stars.”
I was in. I was all in. “I need to ask Ma, but…sure!”
The warning bell rang. “Hey,” he said, “you want to meet up at lunch?”
I laughed. “For a food fight?”
He smiled, big and bright. “I’m up for that!”
“Maybe they’re servin’ Jell-O!”
He laughed, too, then said, “What do you do at recess?”
I shrugged, not wantin’ to say I hid out somewhere with my notebook.
“I could meet you right here if you want. We could hang out?”
For the first time since school started, I was bubblin’ inside. Bubblin’ with the excitement of findin’ a friend. “Sure!”
Then Kandi came running up. Her cheeks were all rosy, and her fingernails were painted white with red stripes. Like candy canes. She probably thought she was being clever, but I thought it was annoying. December was still a day away, and she was already claimin’ it as her month.
She looked back and forth between Isaac and me with nosy written all over her face. “So…did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”
I slid a look at Isaac.
He slid a look at me.
“It was fine,” I said, and Isaac nodded his agreement.
“I didn’t know you two were friends,” she said, and she was twitchin’ a little. Like she was feeling guilty for what she’d said about Isaac.
“Uh-huh,” I said, giving her a cool look.
“I’m glad,” she said, still twitching. And since we weren’t saying anything more, she ran off, calling, “We need to get to class!”
“Her mother died last year,” Isaac said, watching her go.
“What?” I wasn’t even sure he’d actually said it. It was so out of the blue.
“Brain cancer. It happened quick.”
“What?” I still wasn’t sure this was a real conversation.
“My sister says she’s a mess.”
“Your sister does?”
“Yeah. She knows her sister.”
“Whose sister?”
“Kandi’s sister.”
“Kandi has a sister?” I said it like it was the world’s biggest revelation. I have no idea why.
Isaac laughed. “A lot of people do.”
The blacktop was almost cleared, and we were going to be late, so we took off running. “I’ll meet you at recess!” I called.
“Righty-o!” he called back.
In class, Kandi was being chatty with everyone around her. She sure didn’t seem messed up to me. She seemed nosy. And annoying. And seeing her flit around, smiling all the time…seeing her boss folks like a camp director…seeing her throw little tantrums when things didn’t go her way…none of it added up to her being messed up. It added up to her being kinda spoiled.
But maybe I’d added things up wrong.
It felt like when I’d read the Resident Spotlights in the Brookside Bulletin. I’d thought I had folks all figured out, then it turned out I didn’t know much about them at all. But it was more than that. All this time I’d been writing stories about made-up people that I could see clear as day, but the real folks around me had stories I’d been completely blind to.
The thought put me in a wobbly mood. Ms. Miller, though, was in a great mood, and very excited about our new writing assignment. “You’re going to detail your Thanksgiving experience,” she said, pacing around like a caged tiger. “I want you to use all the senses. What you saw, what you heard, what you smelled, what you tasted….Make me feel like I was there.”
Colby’s hand shot up, and when Ms. Miller called on her, Colby asked, “So you want us to describe Thanksgiving dinner?”
“You don’t have to limit yourself to dinner. The bui
ldup to dinner, the cleanup after dinner, the family traditions, the games you played or movies you watched. Did you travel? What was that like? How about Black Friday? Did you go shopping?” She laughed, like she was going back in her mind, remembering. “Lots of sights and sounds there!”
Benny called out, “How long does it have to be?”
“This is a volume piece. The longer the better,” she said. “Grab me with your opening line and go! I will not be grading on syntax. I want you just to write, write, write. I want you to enjoy the process and not worry about anything but getting your experience down on paper.”
“So how many pages for an A?” Colby asked.
“Hmm,” she said, studying her. “How about ten? Yes, ten!”
She was winging it like no teacher I’d ever known.
“Ten?!” Benny cried. “I can’t write ten pages!”
“Then maybe you’ll only write seven and get a C.” She leveled a look at the class. “You had five days off. Tell me about them.”
Back before Thanksgiving break, I could have written ten pages about any made-up story, easy. Which means that before Thanksgiving break, I could have made up a story of what happened on my Thanksgiving break, easy. Like, I could have made up a story about Aunt Ellie and Cheyenne coming over to our big house for a feast. Wild turkeys could have been flappin’ and gobble-gobblin’ in the backyard tree, tryin’ to escape their doom. Our dog—a big, happy hound—could have been barking and bounding around all over the place, trying to reach the turkeys. I could have planted our own garden in the story, where corn and yams and carrots were just waitin’ to be harvested.
I could have, and who would’ve known it wasn’t true?
Nobody.
And nobody would’ve cared.
But now I felt strange inside. Like I was done with making stuff up. Done running from things. Done hiding.
But I couldn’t write about what had happened. If I told the truth, Ms. Miller might call the cops. Besides, how could I explain how I’d spent most of my vacation with folks who had lost their minds? How I’d seen two old ladies die? How I’d eaten leftovers from a food-fight Thanksgiving meal for four days running and had hidden out from an army of ants in an apartment with my new, one-eyed cat?