Just My Luck

by Cammie McGovern

  I stop reading when I see the expression on his face. “I just talked to your mom,” he says. “There’s some news about your dad.”

  NINETEEN

  I THINK: This is what people look like when they tell you that your dad is dead. His face is white and his eyes don’t blink. He looks like he isn’t even breathing.

  I think: If I hear it from him, I’ll always remember it this way. That I got to know him better and then he had to tell me my dad is dead.

  It’s too big for me to take it all in. The first thing I think is: Dad dying just ruined this great thing I did, getting Aaron to talk. The second thing is: Dad dying means I can’t like Mr. Norris anymore, I’ll have to hate him now.

  I start to cry. A loud, terrible, stupid cry that makes me feel worse because I don’t even know if I’m crying for Dad or because of Mr. Norris.

  Mr. Norris rushes over and sits down next to me. He puts an arm around my shoulder and tells me he’s sorry, this must be so hard for me. He says he had no idea my dad was back in the hospital. “You should have told me,” he says. “I wish I’d known. I would have understood what George was talking about at recess today.”

  I calm down enough to breathe and wipe my face and ask, “What did George say?”

  “He asked if he could come over to my house after school. He said he couldn’t go home.”

  I look over at where George is now standing, staring up at a vent fan over the stove in the kitchen. I should remember what Mom said. George always surprises us. He might think every object in the world is three inches long, but he understands some things better than we think. He doesn’t want to go back to a house without Dad. That’s why he didn’t get on the bus. He felt the same way I did. He even made a plan.

  Just imagining it starts me crying all over again. Mr. Norris squeezes my shoulder and pats my back. “Hey, buddy, your dad’s okay. The news is he woke up. He hasn’t said anything yet, but he squeezed your mom’s hand and blinked to answer questions. All good signs. She sounded pretty happy just now.”

  I can’t believe it. “You talked to her?”

  “Yes. That’s why I was taking so long. I’m sorry about that. She’s also worried about both of you. She’s at the hospital, but a friend already drove Martin home to meet you off the bus and tell you what’s going on.”

  I roll my eyes so he knows: one of us might be autistic but we know how to walk home from the bus stop.

  We’re not little kids anymore.

  TWENTY

  THE HOSPITAL IS WEIRD BUT LESS scary than last time. At least we know it now. We know where the bathrooms are and the elevators and the cafeteria. We know the nurses will mostly smile at us and usually make a fuss. Mom says this is because they work twelve-hour shifts and don’t get to see their own kids enough so they’re happy to see other people’s.

  Five days after his surgery, though, Dad still isn’t talking. Except for that part, he seems more like his old self than I would have expected. He makes pantomime jokes and funny faces about the food. He’s on a restricted diet, so nothing has salt or any flavor. “It’s all Jell-O and clear soups,” Mom says. “Poor Dad.”

  To help him out, we think of a plan. On our second visit to the hospital, Martin puts a box of saltine crackers in George’s backpack. Ordinarily backpacks aren’t allowed on the floor Dad’s on. We also have to wear masks and gloves because I guess the patients on this floor are one germ away from dying. It seems strange to wear a surgical mask when we’re still wearing our dirty shoes and regular clothes. Mom says technically it’s not required, it’s an extra precaution, like how everyone in China wears face masks on the subway.

  George, who loves coming to the hospital, bounces all the way to Dad’s room, still wearing his backpack. All the nurses smile and say hello. No one stops him. No one points to the backpack and says, “Remember? That goes in the locker downstairs.” It’s one of the pluses to having George. He’s already breaking a lot of rules, so who’s going to notice one more?

  When Dad sees the saltines box, his whole face smiles and then he lets out this new croaky laugh he has. It makes Mom laugh, too, to see him so happy over something we did without telling her. George is so happy he forgets the rule about not playing with Dad’s bed and presses the button to raise his feet.

  Dad’s face goes red with laughing. Finally Mom says, “Take it easy, Brian.”

  Mom says this whole business with Dad reminds her of when George was little. “You don’t think you could ever, in a million years, handle it, and then it happens and you do. You just go one day at a time and suddenly you realize, here I am. I’m handling it.”

  Dad comes home two weeks later. He’s going to spend days in a rehab center and nights and weekends at home with us. It’s an experimental program. They think some patients get better faster if they don’t live at a rehab center. It’s more work on Mom but she says it’s fine as long as we don’t mind getting ourselves ready for school in the morning. Now Martin and I make all three lunches, which definitely has its pluses. Mom is too busy, I guess, to notice the jumbo jar of marshmallow fluff Martin bought for us.

  Seeing Dad at home, though, makes me realize how different he is now. He still can’t talk, but he can write a few words and communicate in other ways. It takes a while, but he does it. Strangely, George is the person who usually understands what he’s trying to say first. Of course sometimes he’s completely wrong. Once Dad was on the sofa with one hand up in the air. “Ehh . . . tahe,” he kept saying. “Ehh . . . tahe.”

  “Dad wants E.T.!” George screamed, which was totally wrong. We never figured out what he wanted that time. When we got him paper and a pen he scribbled only SORRY.

  Sometimes George is exactly right though. Dad will be on the sofa, touching his ears first, then his chest, and George will run and put on a CD of classical music. And Dad will smile, close his eyes, and lean back happily.

  There was another time when Mom had moved the TV up from the basement into the living room so we could all watch together with Dad on the sofa. It was nice of her except then she kept saying we had to find something on the Discovery or History Channel. Which would have been okay except the Discovery Channel was a show on coral reefs and the History Channel was about the development of the printing press. We begged Mom to let us watch something good. She said if we hung in there, the shows would get more interesting and if they didn’t, then we should just eat our pizza and be quiet. She was kind of kidding (I think), but still it made us mad. Then Dad dropped his pizza on his plate and said something that sounded like “Fang goo . . .”

  He was obviously trying to say something, we just couldn’t tell what. “Fang goo, Brian?” Mom said. “What’s fang goo?”

  Martin nodded and held his hand up like he understood. “It’s the stuff vampires use to put their teeth on in the morning, right Dad? It’s cool. We understand. Maybe we won’t run out tonight, but we’ll get some for you tomorrow. Fang goo, Mom. Put it on your shopping list.”

  “Martin, stop,” Mom said. “What do you want, Brian?”

  Dad tried again. “Fang goo!” he screamed, except this time he smiled like he was making a joke. He didn’t look at Mom though. He looked at each of us. I kept thinking, This is a joke. He’s trying to make an old Dad joke, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  And then George did.

  “Family Guy,” George said, rocking back and forth. “Family Guy is on.”

  Dad held up his hand to high-five George. Mom rolled her eyes and then laughed. In the old days Family Guy was the cause of some terrible fights between them. We were too young, Mom always said, especially me. Mom would really yell at him, “We agree on this and then I come home and George is quoting lines from it! I mean it! I really don’t want them watching that show. I’m not just saying this!”

  We can all remember the fights, which made it seem funnier now that we’ve got bigger problems to worry about. Mom stood up with her hands on her hips. “Is that really going to be your
first sentence, Brian? Really? Family Guy?”

  He was laughing like a kid then, so Martin filled in with what Dad used to say. “The humor is sophisticated, Mom. It’s teaching us about satire.”

  “Oh please,” Mom said and went to the kitchen to make popcorn.

  Now it’s been like this for a while and we’ve gotten into a routine. School is going okay. There’s one week left in the footprint contest and I’ve changed my strategy. In the cafetorium at lunch I don’t crawl around on the floor to pick up trash. Instead of trying to be perfect, I’m trying to be myself. Which means after lunch I go over to the computer room, where I can sign up for fifteen minutes of computer time to work on my Lego movie. I think I have a pretty good idea for how to end my movie. I got it from a scene in The Indian in the Cupboard where Omri is having an argument with his friend Patrick, who wanted to bring all his toys to life. Omri only lets him do it to one toy, the funny cowboy named Boone. Omri keeps telling Patrick to remember that they have to be taken care of when they come to life. “These are people, not toys.”

  That’s what I have Yoda say to my guys. “People you still are, though look different you do.”

  I can’t have them go back to the scenes from their old movies, because I can’t find any clips of those characters waking up or looking around and saying, “Wait—what happened?” If I could, maybe it would work, but since I can’t, I have to forget it. These guys have to stay Lego for this four-minute movie. They have no choice, really, which means they have to adapt.

  So here’s my idea: the last scene of the movie, they’re eating dinner (all plastic food they don’t like much from my Medieval Village set: little green apples, brown chicken legs, a whole silver fish). They’re all pretty depressed until the door opens and they see Lego Chewbacca standing there. He comes in grunting, pulls up a chair, and starts eating. Then the door opens again. There’s Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. Same thing only they can talk. “Oh good!” she says. “You’ve got apples! And chicken! My favorites!”

  It keeps going like that—the door opens, new people walk in—until they’ve got a room full of every recognizable minifig I could find. Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob, everyone’s there, set up in funny poses, talking to one another. Everyone’s pretty happy with the plastic food laid out. The point is: it’s happened to all of them. They’ve all turned plastic, they’ve all got no elbows, they’re all a little sick of the stupid holes in their feet, but they’ve all adjusted.

  “You get used to it,” SpongeBob tells Count Dooku. “And there’s some plus sides. I don’t have to act so stupid. When you’re not in your old show, you can act however you want.”

  A few more of them say things like this. In the last thirty seconds of the movie, the party gets a little wacky and a few minifigs start dancing on the table. Senator Palpatine goes to dip Princess Leia and they both end up falling off the table. “Oh, pardon me. Excuse me,” they say to each other. (I admit I stole a few bits from Shrek.) Also I’ll need Olga to dub in Princess Leia’s voice. I can do the others but not that one. Otherwise I think it might just be my best movie yet.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’VE DECIDED THERE’S THREE MAIN REASONS that school is going okay. One reason is that a few days after we went to Mr. Norris’s apartment, I came to school and found a footprint with my name on it in Mr. Norris’s handwriting:

  Benny Barrows read my son’s favorite book aloud and helped him calm down. Thank you, Benny.

  After I told my mom the whole story about going to Mr. Norris’s apartment, she told me that Mr. Norris and his wife might have had a hard time staying married with the stress of taking care of Aaron, too. “That’s not so uncommon. It didn’t happen to us, thank heavens, but it happens a lot. Mr. Norris probably feels isolated. It sounds like they haven’t gotten to know many other families with autistic kids.”

  I wonder if we’ll become friends with Mr. Norris.

  “Not yet,” my mother says when I ask. “We shouldn’t try to be friends with him until after this year is over. When you’re not in his class, maybe we can invite him and Aaron over.”

  I nod and feel a little goose-bumpy at the thought. And then I remember one detail I haven’t told her. “You want to hear something weird? Aaron likes Santa, too. And he’s memorized The Night Before Christmas just like George. Isn’t that funny?”

  “That is funny,” Mom says.

  “Why do you think autistic kids like Santa so much?” I ask.

  She thinks about it. “I don’t think they all do. It’s probably just a coincidence. Or else they like him because he’s a friendly man who does one very predictable, nice thing a year and doesn’t talk too much about it in the process.”

  It’s true that George doesn’t like people who talk too much. His favorite people at school—the nurse, the janitor—hardly talk at all. Their friendships are all high fives and whistles and little phrases like “Go for the gold!” which George said a lot during the Winter Olympics. He liked the sound of it, I guess, the same way he likes Santa. Not because of the presents, which George doesn’t care about that much. He likes him because he laughs at nothing, which is sort of like George. They both don’t make too much sense, but that’s okay.

  Another reason school is okay now is that a few days after George and I went to Mr. Norris’s apartment, Jeremy came up to me and asked if it was true. “Did you really go inside his apartment?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So what’s it like? Weird, I bet, right?”

  I didn’t know what he was hoping I’d say. I definitely wasn’t going to tell him about Aaron. “No. It was a pretty normal apartment.”

  “Weren’t you scared though?”

  “Not really, why?”

  “Because you’re not allowed inside a teacher’s house. It’s against the law.”

  It is?

  “That’s what my mom and dad said. They said you could get in big trouble for that.”

  Then I had a very strange thought: Jeremy’s jealous of me. He’s mad that I know things about Mr. Norris he doesn’t know. It made me think about next year when we can invite Mr. Norris and Aaron over to our house and be (sort of) family friends.

  Then spelling tests won’t matter. Neither will progress reports or footprints. Mr. Norris will like my parents and maybe he’ll even say it’s nice bringing Aaron someplace where he doesn’t have to explain everything he does. Mom always says one of the best parts about having George in our family is that no one expects us to be perfect anymore so we don’t have to bother pretending. “You can’t imagine what a relief that is,” she once told me. Maybe, when Martin was her only baby, she tried to be perfect. I don’t know. It’s hard to picture. Maybe Jeremy’s parents are still trying for that.

  There’s one last big reason I feel better, though I’d never in a million years tell Jeremy this one. A few days after George and I were in Mr. Norris’s apartment, I got a card in the mail with his handwriting on the envelope. It was addressed to me and had flowers on the front. Inside he said,

  Dear Benny,

  Just found this poem. I think it’s a lovely one but I don’t think I’ll share it with the whole class. It might be a little hard for them to understand. Still, I thought you should have it. It’s by a woman named Naomi Shihab Nye. This is only part of the poem:

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

  you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

  You must wake up with sorrow.

  You must speak to it till your voice

  catches the thread of all sorrows

  and you see the size of the cloth.

  Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.

  At the bottom, he signed it Sincerely, Mr. Norris.

  I showed it to Mom because I didn’t understand it and I wanted her to help me. She read it out loud and started to cry, which made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have showed it to her. Then she explained: “It’s about how hard times make yo
u appreciate kindness and also make you a kinder person, I think.”

  Oh, I thought. Okay.

  And that made me feel better, too.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’VE ONLY SEEN MOM CRY a few times since Dad came home from the hospital. The first time was reading Mr. Norris’s card. The second time she was filling out insurance papers, sitting at Dad’s desk. When I walked in, her eyes were red and her cheeks wet. There was no way either one of us could pretend she wasn’t crying.

  She held out her arms. “Come here, Benny,” she said. Hugging someone who’s sitting while you’re standing is awkward, so we didn’t do it for too long. “I’m thinking about how Dad might not work again and I just have to get used to that. Maybe it helps to say it out loud.”

  Now I want to cry, too. Except for a few years when George was young and I was a baby, both my parents have always worked. My mom as a landscape designer, my dad as an architect. A couple of times they’ve worked together on projects and we went to visit them afterward. I know that’s what Mom is thinking about now. Never standing again in a space they’ve both had a hand in designing. That plus money.

  I know she’s thinking about money, too.

  When we stop hugging, she picks up a hospital bill and shakes her head. “Can we pay it?” I ask and I can guess the answer because she doesn’t say anything.

  In some ways, Dad is better than he was after the first operation. He doesn’t nap all the time. His balance is better now. He walks around without a cane or too much help. He reads a little and writes, too. He just can’t talk. At all. Which means Mom is right. He won’t be able to work. She doesn’t want to cry in front of me, so she blows her nose and says, “We just have to get used to it, that’s all.”

  I wonder if having George in our lives will help this happen faster. Or if we’ll feel the other way: Like why are we the family that everything bad happens to?