Brett McCarthy

by Maria Padian

  “He’s my best friend,” she said. And that was all.

  “Yeah, but is he your boyfriend?” I persisted. “You know. Boyfriend.” I raised my eyebrows suggestively. Nonna laughed.

  “He’s long past being a boy of any sort,” she replied. “So I guess you’d call him a manfriend. But I’d call him my best. Has been for a long time.”

  “You’re avoiding the question,” I said. “I’m gonna make you eat something gross.”

  “You’ll have to wipe it up,” she said dryly. “Now tell me what you don’t understand.”

  “There are friends, and then there are friends,” I said. “There are the guys you just hang out with, and then there are the guys…you date. Or marry. And since you’re not married to Mr. Beady but spend so much time with him, I wondered…”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “You want to know if we make out?”

  “No! Gross!” I exclaimed.

  “Why gross?” she asked. “Do you think old people don’t make out?”

  “Do they?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Of course they do,” Nonna said, a little impatiently. “Old people do everything young people do. Just more carefully.”

  This was information I hadn’t sought. It wasn’t the answer to my question, either, although now the question itself seemed…questionable.

  “I guess I just don’t get your relationship with Mr. Beady,” I said.

  “Well, let me ask you something,” Nonna said. “Is Michael your boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said immediately.

  “Why not?” Nonna asked. “He’s a boy. He’s quite handsome.” I made a face. “He thinks the world of you. I’d say he’s your best friend.”

  “But he’s not my boyfriend,” I replied.

  “Nope,” Nonna said, closing her eyes. “I don’t buy that for a minute. Head straight into the kitchen, fetch the sardines, and eat the entire tin.”

  “I’m telling the truth!” I exclaimed.

  “You are avoiding the truth,” Nonna said. I didn’t want to tell her where I’d heard that before.

  “Nonna, do you think I make out with Michael? Because I’ll tell you: I do not.”

  “Well, I don’t make out with Beady either. Of course, I can scarcely sit up these days, so I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. But don’t you think both of our questions miss the point?” she said. I shrugged.

  “We don’t need to affix some title to Beady or Michael in order to understand what our hearts tell us is so. We don’t need to define them with words like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘best friend’ or ‘lover.’ They are dear to us, and we cherish them, and we keep that in mind with every word we say and everything we do.” Nonna closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

  She was quiet for a long time, and I realized the mere effort of talking exhausted her. I wondered for one hopeful moment if she’d finally fallen asleep, but then she twisted uncomfortably and looked at me with bright, urgent eyes.

  “Brett,” she said, “in the bathroom cabinet there’s a box of fentanyl patches. Bring them in here.”

  Fentanyl patches had only just entered our vocabulary. Band-Aid–like rectangles about the size of your hand, each contained a twelve-hour dose of pain medication. Nonna had begun to use them on the bad nights. The box I retrieved for her, with directions for use, was practically new.

  “Take out two,” Nonna said, rolling to her side and lifting the back of her shirt. You were supposed to peel the adhesive from the patch and stick it directly on the skin. I frowned, reading the box.

  “Nonna, it says one at a time.”

  “That’s okay, honey, I can do two,” she said.

  I hesitated. Unwelcome visions of Officer Hotchkiss shimmered before my eyes. “Abusing prescription drugs, Miss McCarthy?” the vision sneered.

  “I don’t know,” I said reluctantly. “I think two is too much.”

  “Brett!” she said sharply. The tone surprised me. Panicky. A little angry. Nonna never spoke to me that way. “I need to sleep, and one patch just isn’t going to do it.”

  I remember being glad that Nonna’s face was turned away from me, her shoulder bones protruding like wings, as I gently pressed the patches to her back. Tears slid down my cheeks as I wondered whether I was poisoning my grandmother or helping her.

  Nonna finally settled down. Her eyes closed, and she became very still. I thought she was asleep and, after replacing the box of patches in the medicine cabinet, crawled into my sleeping bag on the couch. I heard her say something.

  “What, Nonna?” I asked.

  “Like a poem,” she murmured. “Like a poem, riding on its own melt.” Then Nonna really was asleep, and I followed.

  cru•el

  “April is the cruelest month,” my father always says in…guess…April. He doesn’t just say it once. He says it all month, several times a day, no matter how many times you beg him to put a sock in it. But it’s a quote from a famous poem, and since he’s an English professor, that sort of stuff just pours out of him. Especially since we live in Maine, where April really stinks.

  Cruel: causing injury, grief, or pain; disposed to inflict suffering.

  In other places April is a terrific month, or so I’ve heard. People wear shorts and play ball. Cook burgers on the grill. In those other places it’s called “spring,” but here we call it “mud season.” Daffodils may bloom in Jersey, but here grit-covered piles of dirty snow line the edges of driveways. They may be wearing Easter bonnets in Atlanta, but here little kids wrapped in parkas and mittens hunt for eggs.

  I hate April almost as much as I hate poetry. Well…that might not be fair. I really don’t hate poetry. You can’t be a McCarthy and hate poetry. I just hate having it quoted at me all the time, especially when the weather is driving me bonkers.

  Dad and I were spreading the last of the homemade strawberry jam on peanut butter sandwiches one rainy afternoon when he said it for, like, the fortieth time that week.

  “This is the last jar of jam,” I said, scraping the sides of the Ball jar with a knife. “No more until we pick strawberries in July. One more thing I hate about April: the end of last summer’s jam.”

  “April is the cruelest month,” Dad sighed.

  I slammed the knife down in irritation. “Eliot is the cruelest poet,” I snapped.

  Dad looked at me with pleased surprise. “How did you know he wrote that?” Dad asked.

  Whoops, I thought. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said.

  “Have you been reading poetry when no one was looking?” Dad continued. “Dare I say it…reading good poetry?”

  “Alls I did was look it up, okay?” I said, purposely inserting the grammatically incorrect “alls.” It drives Dad up the wall when I use bad grammar. “I mean, if you’re going to keep saying it, I wanted to at least know where it came from.”

  “And?” he said. I turned to face him.

  “Dad. This ‘April is the cruelest month’ thing? It’s not a poem. I mean, it practically has chapters. It has languages I’ve never heard of. It makes no sense. I think it’s cruel you make your students read it.”

  Dad laughed. “Bravo!” he exclaimed. “Could it be that you are my daughter, after all? And to think I’ve been worried for years that you were switched at birth with the child of professional athletes! But you have the McCarthy poetry gene after all!” He neatly sliced his sandwich in two, chuckling at his own joke.

  I scowled at him. “Poetry obsession, more like,” I groused.

  We carried our plates to the kitchen island, munching in silence, watching through the bay windows as cold rain spattered the deck. Mom had just gone across the backyard to bring lunch to Nonna. She’d worn her Gore-Tex rain jacket and a fleece, sloshing through the grassy puddles and carrying a pot of soup. The house had been dark when she’d set out, but Dad and I could see lights burning now in the Gnome Home kitchen.

  “You inherited it from Nonna,” I said matter-of-factly. “This poetry thing.”

&n
bsp; “Actually, my father,” he said. “That’s one of the few things I remember about him. He was always reading, and it was usually poetry. Mother likes it, but it wasn’t a passion for her the way it was for him.”

  “She and Mr. Beady argue about poems,” I said.

  “They argue about everything,” Dad said ruefully.

  “But she quotes poems, like you,” I said. “You know that night I stayed with her? She was saying poems in her sleep.”

  “Really?” Dad said. “Can you remember what she said?”

  “I only heard a few words,” I said. “Something about poems melting. Or was it poems riding? But it was poetry, I could tell.”

  “A poem rides on its own melt,” Dad said quietly.

  “That’s it!” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”

  “It’s Frost,” he said. “Robert Frost. And it’s not a poem, but how he described how you write one. It’s a very famous line, actually. For students of Frost. I’ll be darned, Mother.” He said this to himself, not me. I saw him stare through the cruel rain to the little house across the yard. The lights burned upstairs too, which should have been a signal to us. Nonna no longer slept upstairs but in a hospital bed on the first floor.

  “You say she said this in her sleep?” he asked.

  “Well…maybe right before she fell asleep,” I said carefully. Hallucinated to sleep, I thought. Drugged to sleep, by her own granddaughter. I had never confessed to my parents about that night. When I woke that morning, Nonna was still out. So out that I was able to gently push her to one side and peel off a patch. I wrapped it in paper towels and buried it at the bottom of the kitchen trash can.

  Nonna and I never spoke of it. I wasn’t sure she even remembered.

  “Well.” Dad smiled at me. “She may be more of a poetry lover than I realized.” Then the phone rang. It was Mom.

  As he listened into the receiver, the calm look on my father’s face morphed from concern to confusion to panic. He and Mom were rapid-firing questions and answers.

  “Did you call the home health nurse?” he asked. Pause. “Well, when did she leave? What’s the exact time?” Pause. “Did you call Beady?” Pause. “Are you sure you dialed the right number? He always leaves his answering machine on.” Pause. “Did you look—No, never mind. I’m coming over.” Dad hung up.

  “Stay here,” he said shortly.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, a sick, cold feeling spreading through my stomach.

  “She’s not there,” Dad said. “At least your mom can’t find her. Stay right here, Brett. In case the phone rings.” He darted out the door, into the rain, without stopping for a jacket. I watched water splash with each footstep as he raced across the lawn.

  Later I learned that he’d ordered me to stay because he didn’t want me there if his hunch about Nonna were true. That she’d fallen. That despite her inability to dress herself without help or get out of the high hospital bed without an arm to lean on, she’d somehow walked across the room and fallen.

  As it turns out, he was wrong. Nonna wasn’t anywhere in or near the Gnome Home. She was simply gone. So were her hikers, her Michelin Man parka, and her raincoat. So were her island cap, her umbrella, and her fat-tired wheelchair. So were her pain patches. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nonna wasn’t simply missing. She had left.

  And it didn’t take a genius to guess who had packed up her stuff and wheeled her away. Mr. Beady and Nonna were up to something.

  I remember just feeling numb, while my parents clicked into search mode. Because I knew something that they didn’t.

  I had never spoken a word to anyone about the Nalgene bottle. Partially because Nonna had wanted to keep it to herself. Partially because it was too hard for me to think about what it meant. I sat in the kitchen while my parents dashed madly about, and it occurred to me that Nonna might have decided to go out and make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. Maybe she’d decided to leave, spare us all—including herself—the full definition of “bad.”

  And I thought, Of course. This would happen in April. The cruelest month.

  e•mote

  “Where do you think they went?” I asked him.

  Michael sighed at the other end of the phone. He had just gotten an earful: a complete download of everything from Nonna and Mr. Beady’s Great Escape to the Nalgene and my thoughts about how cruel April can be. Serious emoting.

  Emote: to give expression to emotion. Talk without interruption about something upsetting.

  “Brett, first calm down. Take a deep breath. Things are never as bad as we imagine.”

  “Michael, I’m imagining that my grandmother has left us and is trying to off herself. It’s pretty bad.”

  “Brett, please.” He paused. When he spoke again, it was from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. We’ve watched it together about three dozen times.

  “What does your heart tell you?” I heard Aragorn say.

  “I don’t know!” I wailed. I really didn’t. My heart pounded too loudly for me to hear anything but jungle drumming. I took a deep breath and tried. Something whispered.

  “Frodo is alive,” I replied. I did a lousy Gandalf, but Michael got it.

  “Good,” he said, back to Michael. “Now let’s use our heads.”

  “Mine hurts,” I replied.

  “Where have your parents already looked?”

  “They’ve called the hospital and the hospice place. They’ve called a bunch of her friends. They’ve driven to the movie theater, the coffee shop, and the library. Michael, she’s disappeared.”

  “No one just disappears,” he said. “Think. Where would she like to go? You have to figure Mr. Beady didn’t take her someplace awful. Any chance they went to the airport?”

  “Dad’s on his way to Portland now. He tried telephoning the Jetport with her description, but they weren’t very helpful, so he’s going in person. I think he’ll end up cruising the parking lot looking for Mr. Beady’s pickup.”

  Silence from the other end, as we thought. I stared out the kitchen window. The rain had finally let up, and it had gotten windy. Cold, windy, and raw. A great day to travel with an old, sick woman, I thought. What could be worse?

  A totally wild thought crossed my mind. Something extraordinarily worse.

  “Can you hang on for one minute?” I said, dropping the phone before Michael had a chance to answer. I ran to the mudroom, slipped into some boots, and darted outside in the direction of the Gnome Home garage.

  The late-afternoon light filtered dully through the dusty windows. I knew exactly what to look for: a round wooden pallet covered in oilcloth. I switched on the overhead bulb. Light filled the room. Filled the empty space that told me exactly what I needed to know. I dashed back to the house.

  “The light’s gone,” I panted into the receiver. No comment. “Michael! Are you there?”

  “The light?” he said.

  “Your project! The lanterns, the reflectors, the big round board you put them on! They’ve been in the garage all winter, and now they’re gone.”

  “Geez, talk about a bad day,” he groaned. “First your grandmother takes off, now you get robbed!”

  “Hello? I thought you were the smart one! Don’t you see? Nobody’s robbed anything. They took the lights with them.”

  It was nuts. But why else would they have kept it so secret? Never in a zillion years would my parents have approved of this one. Garage sales, bazooka birthdays, lighthouse projects…all wacky but still within the safe part of the sanity meter. But a trip to the island this time of year?

  “Whoa,” Michael said. “Not good.”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Call your parents. Now,” he said. Urgency in his voice. His line clicked off.

  I reached Dad on his cell phone. He’d driven as far as Yarmouth, about twenty minutes from the Jetport.

  “I don’t think so, hon,” he replied when I finished spilling our theory. “To begin w
ith, I know where the lights went. Beady moved them to Dwayne’s. Along with some lumber.” Dwayne Morin was a friend of Mr. Beady’s. He owned the boatyard where we docked the Dolly and where we always departed for Spruce Island.

  “That just proves what I’ve said!” I exclaimed. “See? He can just stick everything in a boat and motor over.”

  “I’ve talked to Beady about this,” Dad said, a little impatiently. “You may not believe it, but there’s a plan. A rational, reasonable plan that does not involve dangerous off-season trips. Now Brett, your grandmother is a smart woman. She wouldn’t do something foolish.”

  “Daddy, please,” I continued. “There’s something you don’t know. I think…I think Nonna is afraid of losing us. And I think…she doesn’t want to die. So…”

  “So she’s decided to basically kill herself by boating out to the island in the freezing cold?” he exclaimed angrily. “Don’t be ridiculous, Brett. Let me tell you something: You’re not the only one who loves her. Or knows her. She’s been my mother for many more years than she’s been your grandmother, and I think I know a little bit more about her. So please…let’s hang up the phone and keep the line clear in case we get any real news.” His phone went dead.

  In my dictionary the definition of “alone” has no words. It has a picture. A picture of a girl, in a dark kitchen, stupidly holding a silent telephone receiver. She stares out the windows at a vacant, lifeless house across the lawn. And there is no sound except this rhythmic throbbing in her chest.

  I pressed speed dial, then 1.

  “Michael,” I said, then stopped, because I couldn’t choke out the rest.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  diss

  At the deep, dark heart of every junior high kid’s soul lies fear of The Diss.

  Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as both a verb…to treat with disrespect; insult, criticize (as in “She’s dissed!”)…and a noun (as in “What a diss!”). Depending on who does the dissing, it might be funny or mean: a lighthearted comment tossed between friends or a wooden stake to the heart. It might hurt like a burn and scar forever, or it might simply evaporate, forgotten, with a smile.