by Ben Clabaugh
CHAPTER 11
David cleared his throat and blinked back the heat he felt behind his eyes. He placed his glass and dish in the sink, looked out the window and saw Shelton walking across the yard. Seeing David through the window, Shelton waved. David sighed and waved back.
Shelton arrived at the door breathing hard, his hat askew. David looked him over.
“Geez, Shel,” he said. “You look Amish.” Shelton shrugged, glanced back toward his house. His mother’s pale face shone through the kitchen window, watching. As David glanced up, the face hovered another moment, then disappeared. He ushered Shelton into the house.
“What about you?” Shelton said pointing at the pajama bottoms David still wore.
“Oh yeah. Just a sec.”
Leaving Shelton with Pete, David scrambled upstairs to throw on some shorts and a shirt. He returned to find Shelton sitting at the breakfast table. Pete’s head was in his lap, eyes half closed as Shelton scratched behind his ears.
“It’s quiet, here,” Shelton said. The television was always on in Shelton’s house. Even at night, sometimes late, David could see the flickering blue glow through the windows.
“Too quiet,” David said, hunching his shoulders and glancing back and forth, trying to be funny.
“No, I mean really quiet. Empty.”
“Well,” David shrugged, “there’s never anyone here. I mean my dad works all day and night, and Mom’s always out working, too, so it’s usually just me and Pete.”
“Why’s your Dad always working?”
“I dunno.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s an engineer.”
“He drives a train?” Shelton asked, his eyes wide with wonder.
“No. Gaagh!” David said, shaking his head in exasperation. “He designs bridges and stuff.”
Shelton nodded, making an “Oh,” with his mouth. After a moment he said, “So, why’s he work all the time?”
“Billable hours,” David said trying to make it sound important.
“Huh?” Shelton asked.
“Look. I don’t know, okay?” David snapped. Shelton’s lips formed another “Oh,” and he resumed petting Pete.
“Wanna see pictures of what he works on?”
Shelton brightened and nodded. David led the way upstairs to the third bedroom his dad used as an office. The desk was cluttered with piles of paper, books heaped around a computer monitor. A three dimensional line drawing of some kind of motor rotated across the screen. A drawing table sat, the surface tilted at an angle, behind the desk, so that anyone sitting in the chair at the desk would just have to spin around in the chair, and start drawing. Framed line drawings of old European buildings hung on the wall opposite the desk. A drawing, just started, was taped to the drawing table. It was still too early to tell what it was going to be, but little drawings around the edges of the paper showed bolts, and beams, and joints in close-up.
Shelton pointed at the huge rack of colored pencils and magic markers, arranged in neat rows and sorted by color shade like an enormous box of crayons.
“I thought they used computers for making buildings and stuff.”
David sat in the chair. “My dad says design is an art and he gets a better feel for a project if he draws it with his hands.” Then he tucked his legs to his chest, and with a push on the desk, sent himself spinning.
Shelton, looking disappointed, examined the pictures on the walls and the drawing on the table. “No trains, huh?” he asked.
David stopped spinning. He rolled his eyes, sighed, and prepared to patiently explain about engineers when he saw the corner of Shelton’s mouth twitch. David’s breath hitched in his throat and he stared at Shelton, his mouth half-open as he realized that that was the first joke he had heard Shelton make.
Shelton lost his battle to keep a straight face and broke into a huge grin. He pointed at David, mimed the shocked look on his face and laughed. To cover his surprise and annoyance at being mocked, David stood and motioned for Shelton to take a turn in the chair.
After both took a few turns in the chair, David pulled up another chair to the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out two fresh pieces of paper. From a small, multi-tiered carousel on a side table, he selected two mechanical pencils, and they both began to draw. David used an assortment of rulers, plastic triangles, and a plastic form shaped a little like a treble clef used for drawing smooth curves. He pretended he was designing the newest, most modern baseball stadium ever built. When finally finished, it looked like a flat-topped, crooked, donut-shaped cake right out of Dr. Seuss.
David slumped in his chair.
“Mine sucks,” he said holding the paper toward Shelton. “How’s yours?”
Shelton shrugged, passed the picture over his shoulder, grabbed another piece of paper and began another drawing.
David stared at the picture. At first glance, the picture appeared to be just a mass of scribbles, some light, some dark. The paper was deeply indented in places as if Shelton had tried to press the pencil through the table-top. David turned the paper sideways, then back, squinting. As he stared, the scribbles resolved into three figures—little more than stick figures with rectangular clothing, circular heads, bulbous hands and feet. David blinked and held the page at an angle, then looked straight at it again. Somehow, the contrasting light and dark squiggles seemed to give the image depth and contour, and the images almost seemed to move on the page. The picture looked like two parents and a child.
The mom and the dad were facing each other, each extending a stick-arm outward, pointing a single finger at the other. The child stood between them, below the pointing fingers. The parents’ other hands were pressed against the side of the child’s head. Their faces were drawn with dark, slanted eyebrows and squinted eyes. Tight, looping swirls issued from each of their mouths, the swirls colliding to form a rat’s nest of dark scribble between them. It seemed to David that the parents were arguing and trying to cover the child’s ears so that he could not hear. A tight, thick cable shot from the center of the tangled mass directly into the child’s heart.
The child wore shorts and a T-shirt with the Nike ‘Swoosh’ across the chest—the same clothes David was wearing. His eyes widened and his face flushed.
“Very funny,” David growled clenching the drawing in his fist. Shelton looked up from his new drawing, his tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth and said, “Huh?”
“This!” David shook the drawing at him. “You been spying on me or something?”
Shelton stared back at David, a very calm, patient look on his face.
“Look again,” he said, his voice quiet and flat.
The answer was so unexpected David looked at the picture again and gasped. The picture shimmered, seemed to shift. David could not identify any one thing that had actually changed, and yet the picture looked entirely different. He even felt differently as he looked at it.
The line from the rat’s nest to the child’s heart had neither arrows nor any other sign to indicate direction. Nevertheless, David was sure that the flow had reversed. The parents’ hands on the side of the child’s head no longer seemed to be covering the child’s ears, they were gently, lovingly caressing. The rat’s nest between the two parents had changed as well. The cable from the child and the tight swirls from the parents came together and intertwined into a loose, lovely weave that seemed to flow and swell. David blinked back sudden tears.
“Shelton….,” David said, his voice cracking. He wanted to ask Shelton what he had done to the drawing, but his throat would not unclench. David shook his head, drew in a deep breath, and looked back at the drawing. His first impression of the drawing had been of two parents—his own, he presumed—arguing. They tried to keep David from hearing, but he could hear. They were arguing about him, what to do ‘about him,’ and that hurt him.
He looked closely at the eyes and mouths of the figures, remembering how he had, at first, thought they looked as if they had been drawn to convey anger, but he
found only love and peace radiating from the faces, now. The scrawls and lines wove a web of a connection in among and around the figures.
David cleared his throat, took another breath, and turned.
“Shelton, how did you….,”
“Let’s get something to eat,” Shelton said, abruptly dropping his pencil and walking out the door.
“But….” David called. Shelton kept walking. David looked once more at the drawing before hurrying after him, still clutching the drawing.
He found Shelton standing next to the dining table holding one of the vitamin bottles his mom had dropped the night before.
He grasped Shelton by the arm. “Hey, what about this picture. You gotta tell me….,”
“These look just like the pills my Aunt Nettie started taking before she had my cousin Adam. I remember ‘cause she came for a visit when she was, you know….” he stretched his arms out in front of him like he was holding a beach ball, his fingers spread. David focused on the bottle, felt his mind go blank with the sudden change of topic.
“I ate one, and she got real mad.” Shelton shrugged. “I thought it was candy.” He handed the bottle to David.
“Tasted terrible,” Shelton said and headed for the kitchen.
As David turned the bottle in his hands, he felt the knot under his rib cage twist and harden. The label read:
“Pre-natal formula - Healthy mothers mean healthy babies!”
Is it that easy? He wondered bitterly. Let some time pass, move to a new town then replace her, just like that?
Or maybe they just want to rub what happened in my face. I wasn’t enough for them the first time, and now I’m still not.
And then another thought followed that one. How would his mom be able to continue in her brand new job—the one she said made her feel so alive, the one she spent weeks training for and dressed up with too much makeup and horrid, old woman’s perfume for—and take care of a brand new baby?
Shelton came out of the kitchen, a peanut butter encrusted spoon in one hand, two fingers of his other hand wrestling a glob of peanut butter from the roof of his mouth.
“Wha’s goig od?” he mumbled.
“My mom’s gonna have a baby,” David said, his voice flat. He still couldn’t believe it.
“Oh,” Shelton replied, swallowing hard. He looked around, his brow creased. “Your mom just tell you?”
“Well, no. But these vitamins,” David held up the bottle, “are for pregnant women. She just brought them home last night, so she must be pregnant.”
“Hm.” Shelton pondered for a moment. “What will that be like?”
“What?”
“Having a little brother or sister?”
It’s frustrating and awful. They always follow you around and break your things, and when you yell at them, they go crying to Mom and you get in trouble. Everything they do is okay, and everything you do is wrong, because you’re bigger and older. But when they come running to you to help get the monsters out from under their bed, or need help with a drawing, or want to know how birds can fly, it can be pretty great, too, David thought.
He shook his head, knowing it could never be the same. There would never be another Janie. Plus this time he was already twelve, and by the time the baby was born, he’d be thirteen.
An image arose, unbidden, in his mind. He was sitting at the table, a baby cradled in his arms, its deafening cries reverberating through the empty house. His parents were off working, as usual. He looked through the window and saw groups of other kids his age playing kickball, baseball, throwing water balloons, riding bikes—having a ball.
But not him.
He was stuck taking care of the baby. He looked down at the red face, teary eyes, and wide-open mouth. The baby’s cries were piercing, cutting through him, from his ears, down his spine, and down the backs of his legs.
He felt…. nothing. He searched the face looking for something he could connect with, some spark of brotherly love, but all he could think was, Not Janie. Not even close.
By the angle of the sun he knew it was late afternoon, but even the knowledge that Mom would be home soon and his shift watching the baby would be over brought no relief. The next day, and the next, and the next, would be the same. His punishment for losing Janie would be a lifetime of helping with this one. They would make sure he got this one right.
Well, we’ll just see about that, David thought. His parents lived their lives indifferent to him, and he could do the same to her, or him…. It. His vision shimmered, and suddenly he was looking up into his own face. He waved his tiny arms, clutched at the air with his tiny, pudgy fingers, trying to get the attention of the Big Brother. He felt ignored and alone, like excess baggage. The feelings were all too familiar.
David recoiled and covered his eyes. The feelings the baby had felt… would feel…. were David’s fault. And David could not do to the little one what had been done to him.
This baby would arrive, through no choice of its own, helpless, defenseless, and blameless. It wasn’t the baby’s fault David was saddled with the responsibility of watching over it. It was born and stuck with whatever circumstances it was placed in.
Then he realized the same applied to him. He was given no choices. He did not choose to move from the only place he knew as home. He did not choose to make his parents argue. He did not choose to be standing on the sidewalk watching his little sister breathe her last breath. In fact, he had no real choices, at all. He was a sapling in a field, swaying whichever way the wind blew. He controlled nothing, yet he was blamed for everything.
“It’s so unfair,” David whispered. “It’s not right.”
“What’s not?” Shelton asked, looking worried, his hand on David’s arm.
“They blame me, but it’s not my fault,” David answered, not sure it was really true, which only added to his frustration.
“It’s not?” Shelton asked. David looked up. Shelton was standing close enough that David could smell the peanut butter on his breath.
David glared at Shelton. His face was hot, and he felt the beginnings of a headache across his tightly knit brow.
“How could it be?” he yelled. “What choices do I have? Hell, I can’t even choose my own friends.”
David’s anger dissipated as the words he had just spoken echoed through his ears. He looked away from Shelton, ashamed.
Shelton’s calm eyes and half smile did not falter. In a quiet, reassuring voice he said, “I choose to enjoy my peanut butter sandwich.” He turned toward the kitchen.
