I miss talking to Mom about history. She would tell me about things she learned at work, or she’d ask what I was reading or which empire I was playing in Civilization. Then she’d tell me something cool about it or listen to me tell her something. Now there’s no one to talk to.
There’s no point in talking to Dad. Sam and I tried to interview him for the Mom Book, but he said that if he talked about Mom too much, he wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. That’s a great thing to tell your four-year-old.
Dad’s mental health must be seriously diving, because he asked if I want to go to church with him on Sunday. I’ve never been to church in my life, and I’ve never seen Dad go either. I told him the joke, “Why do you have to be quiet in church? Because people are sleeping.” He said, all seriously, “That’s disrespectful, Josh.” Like he’s a priest or something, when really he hasn’t been in a church since the day he got married. Mom laughed her head off when I told her that joke.
Maybe Dad heard me teaching Sammy how to pray, so he thinks I’m dying to go to church. I’m working on a step-by-step plan to get Sam ready for kindergarten. Step One is, “Don’t let Power Rangers talk out loud, especially not in a girly voice.” Sam said Step One would be impossible to tackle at this point in his life. We moved on to Step Two, “Don’t talk out loud to Mom, with or without the Ranger.” Sam started to cry over the thought of Step Two.
I told him he could talk to Mom at the cemetery or in a church or praying by his bedside. I showed him how to pray. He thought it was the greatest thing. I told him he wasn’t allowed to kneel down and pray wherever he happened to be, like in the mall or somewhere. I could totally see him doing that, and even if people think he’s talking to God instead of his dead mother, it’s still weird. He asked if he could talk to Mom just in his head, and I said okay. Maybe that’ll be Step Six or something, but he’s not ready for it yet. He’s still in mourning.
Japanese Buddhists mourn for forty-nine days. If there’s something unsolved about the person’s death, like, say you don’t know how a snake got in their car, the mourners say, “My forty-nine days are not over.” That’s exactly how I feel. My forty-nine days are not over. I feel like my forty-nine days will go on forever.
Sammy’s beside me now, drawing in his journal. His profile looks like Mom’s. She had long eyelashes and a round happy face. She was a happy person, like Sam. That’s why it’s so sad with her gone. She made up a large percentage of our family’s happiness.
Sammy just let me see his journal, and I made him cry again. I skimmed the most recent pages. They’re full of snakes scratched out. First he draws a snake, then he scratches it out. The one he’s working on now is a snake attacking a person. I asked him if it was supposed to be Mom. He said, “No, it’s Daddy.” Then he asked if I would write in his journal that Daddy was killed in the car crash and snakes must be eliminated. Except Sammy called it “lemonated,” which sounds like he wants to make them into a beverage.
I got mad and told him he was demented, and if Dad heard him it would break his heart. So of course Sammy bawled his eyes out. I got a grip and told him I was sorry. I said, “You’re the best boy ever.” He asked, “Better than you?” And I said, “Yeah, you’re way better than me.”
There’s one drawing in Sam’s journal that isn’t scratched out. It shows the blue Power Ranger fighting a giant green snake. It looks like he put a lot of effort into it. I told him Mom would have loved that drawing, and he should be proud of it. He said Mom will be proud of him when he starts soccer and scores a hundred goals. I felt terrible because I’d forgotten all about that. I better talk to our neighbor about getting Sam on the team. Dr. Tierney said this is a bad time for disappointments and betrayals.
Speaking of disappointment, I got a letter back from Karen this morning. It was weird, like she was writing to a total stranger. It was only one page long. She said she’d heard from Simpson that I was back in soccer, but the rest of it was stuff about her camp. She said they heard an owl hoot in the night, and they tried to identify which species it was. She thought it was a great horned owl. Why would she write me about that? My mother just died. I couldn’t care less which owl she heard. She didn’t even ask how I’m doing. I think she doesn’t like me anymore and she wishes she’d never kissed me. I’m not writing to her again. She comes home in a week anyway. I hope she still likes me, because it would be something to look forward to, but I wish she’d never written, because now I’m just depressed.
Sammy’s bouncing on my bed right now, and the girl Power Ranger is laughing in a high-pitched hysterical scream. He’s staring at her and laughing so hard I almost believe she’s a real person instead of an eight-inch plastic doll. It’s freakish, the sound he has her making. Like he has a split personality. He sure looks happy, in a demented sort of way.
There was a university student in Singapore who was bouncing on his bed listening to music and bounced himself right out the window. He fell three stories to his death and won a Darwin Award. I figure Mom’s death was stupider than that guy’s, so she’ll probably get an award too. What’s stupid about bouncing on a bed? I could use a good bounce right now. If I fell out the window, it wouldn’t be stupid. It would just be an accident.
I was reading about evolution for my computer game, and I read a good monkey joke that Mom would have liked. It goes like this: A woman walks into a restaurant with her baby in a carriage. The waiter says to her, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” The woman complains to the manager that the waiter insulted her. The manager apologizes. He tells her to choose something from the dessert counter for free to make up for being insulted. He says, “You go on up and see what we have. I’ll stay here and watch your monkey.”
That cracked me up. It would have cracked Mom up too. I told Dad, but he didn’t even get it. He asked, “So was it really a monkey?” Duh. I don’t know how Mom put up with his total lack of humor.
I tried the joke on Sammy just now, and he laughed his head off in two voices, which totally freaked me out. And he doesn’t have a clue what the joke means.
Monday, August 20th
Sammy and I went around the neighborhood looking for scrapbook stories this weekend, and we introduced ourselves to the coach of five-year-old soccer. His daughter immediately fell in love with Sammy. They’ve never played together before— Sam never plays with girls because he’s scared of them—but apparently Sam’s insanity makes him more exciting than normal boys. They walked backward down the hallway about thirty-seven times, giggling. All three of them—Sammy and the girl and the Power Ranger.
Her name is Chloe. I told her that was almost the same as our cat’s name, Cleo. She said, “My name’s Chloe, not Cleo.” Her dad laid his hand on my shoulder and said very politely, “It’s not quite the same name.” As if I were mentally retarded and needed to have that pointed out. He looked like he was about to explain the differences in vowel order, so I stepped away and asked if he had any cats. He seems like the kind of guy who’d own the big cat that scares Charlie and pees on our porch. But he said, “No, we don’t have any pets.” I find that suspicious.
He knew all about Mom dying. The first thing he said when he opened the door was, “Oh, boys, I’m so sorry about your mother.” We’ve never spoken to the guy before in our lives. Maybe it’s the kind of thing people talk about when they take out the garbage. “Did you hear? That nice lady across the street freaked out and drove into a tree.”
I asked him if Sammy could join his soccer team. He laughed as if it were a joke, because registration was in April and there are only two games left in the season. The championship games are on Labor Day weekend, and we’ll be away camping. We go to the same campsite every year—Mom books it in advance. I was honest about that. I told the coach that Sam would have to miss the tournament, which would only leave two games for him to play. He laughed and looked around like maybe he was on Prank Patrol. Then Sammy said, “Mommy likes soccer and she’ll be proud of me when I score some
goals.” And the coach said, “Sure, you can join.” Just like that.
He said he hopes the team welcomes Sammy. I don’t think there’ll be a problem. I’ve seen five-year-olds play soccer. Half of them look for worms in the dirt and the other half do handstands. They won’t even notice Sammy joining the team. They’ll probably think he played all season.
The coach said they play Tuesday evenings— which is tomorrow—but there are no more uniforms. Sammy was way disappointed at that, like it didn’t count if he didn’t have a uniform. So the coach said he’d find Sam a shirt with a number on it. Chloe said, “You better not give him my shirt.” Her dad gave her a mean look and said, “It’s the coach’s decision.” She said, “Then I won’t have a shirt!” He said, “You have a mother.” And that was the end of that conversation.
Sammy thought that was fair, that he should get the shirt since Chloe gets to have her mother. He was so happy he jumped up and down and hugged the coach, whose name is Carl Simpson, and who is not the sort of person you jump up and hug. I told him my best friend’s first name was Simpson. He smiled politely and said, “Simpson is my last name.” Like I might not know the difference between first names and last names because I’m mentally retarded. I just said “thanks” and left.
Sammy hugged Chloe good-bye, but then he practically had to break her fingers to get his Power Ranger back. After that, they waved and smiled like they just loved each other. Little kids are so weird.
After that, we interviewed the neighbors about Mom. When I told Karen’s mom we were making a scrapbook, she went into her house and brought out a box full of colored paper and stencils. Some of the papers are plain, but most have stripes or flowers or patterns on them. Karen’s mom said we could use them for our scrapbook. She said she took classes on scrapbooking—it’s an actual class you can take—and if we cut borders and titles out of different colored paper, our book would look more exciting.
I told her I never took classes in scrapbooking, but I took classes in computer programming. She said maybe she’ll try that next time. Then she laughed like the idea was just ridiculous.
You’d think only kindergarteners would need a class in scrapbooking. But it was nice of her to give us the stuff. She said it was two hundred dollars’ worth of paper. I find that hard to believe.
She didn’t have many stories about Mom. She said Mom was pretty, and she made a face when she said it, like being pretty was just ridiculous. She only had two stories. Once, when I was in grade one, someone’s mother was in an accident, so some of the other moms brought over food for the family. Karen’s mom said my mom baked a couple of lasagnas. I don’t remember Mom ever baking lasagna in her life, so I said maybe she just bought them. Karen’s mom said no, they were homemade. Whatever. I doubt it.
Her other story was about watching Mom do laps at the pool. She said she couldn’t believe Mom was such a good swimmer. Mom looked like an Olympian, cutting through the water. Karen’s mom stood by the wall for five minutes, just staring, because it was so beautiful to watch someone swim so well. I thought that was a way better story than the lasagna story. I’m going to include it in the scrapbook.
Mom used to swim all the way across the lake when we went camping. She’d move across the water with long slow strokes, like there was absolutely no chance she’d get tired or frightened in the middle of the lake with nothing to hold onto. She’d be in the sunshine on the very top of the water, getting smaller as she swam farther away, and I’d imagine the hundred feet of darkness underneath her, and all the creatures swimming in the dark. Mom would flip onto her back and wave at me from the middle of the lake. She knew I was a bit afraid of water.
But I never had a phobia. Our neighbor Mr. Smitts said he has a heights phobia so he knows what it’s like to be too afraid to think straight. He said he wasn’t afraid of heights until thirty years ago, when he took his daughter on a tiny Ferris wheel and freaked out. He’d been up the CN tower before, and in airplanes and on big Ferris wheels, and he’d always liked it. But suddenly that day on the kiddie Ferris wheel, he was overwhelmed with fear. He screamed to get off. The guy running the machine thought it was funny, so he stopped them at the very top. Mr. Smitts tried to climb out of his seat until the guy brought them down again.
I said, “If you were afraid of heights, how could you be brave enough to climb down?” Mr. Smitts said, “I wasn’t going to climb down. I was going to jump off. Just to get it over with.” If he’d jumped, he’d have won a Darwin Award for sure, because how stupid is that? Mr. Smitts said no one can understand what a phobia is like until they feel it. He said you’re not responsible when you’re in that state of mind.
I told him about the university student who bounced out the window. He laughed and said that was a good way to die. I also told him about a guy who swallowed a fish on a dare and choked to death. Mr. Smitts said he almost chokes at every meal. I told him to have that checked out by a doctor, because that’s just not normal.
Mr. Smitts had a lot of stories about Mom. He had so many stories, I think he’s a stalker. He talked all day long about my mother. And all his stories were totally boring. He said when we first moved in, our dog would bark and make me cry. I told him the dog died before I was born, but he said no. Mom used to walk me and the dog at the same time, and I’d fall asleep in my stroller but the dog would bark and make me cry. That was one of his more exciting stories. He had other stories about Mom cleaning the windows. How dull is that?
He did have one really good story. Once, when I was little, Mom took me to Irene’s Ice Cream shop along the bike path. There were three boys on bikes in the lineup in front of us who bought Freezies for fifty cents. Mr. Smitts said they’d spent the whole time in line talking about ice cream and drooling over all the flavors, so when they just bought little Freezies everyone felt sorry for them. They sat at a table outside and ate their Freezies, but they were still talking about the ice-cream flavors other people were buying. So Mom bought them all double-scoop cones, in chocolate and cotton-candy flavors. She asked the girl behind the counter to tell the boys they won them for being the hundredth customers that day. Those kids never even knew that it was my mom who bought them ice cream.
That story definitely belongs in the scrapbook. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. The other day Sammy and I were in the mall and I was drooling over the bikes, but nobody came up and said, “Here, Josh, this bike’s for you.” I know ice cream is cheaper than bicycles but still, it was a very nice thing to do.
Interviewing Mr. Smitts took up most of Saturday and Sunday, and I’m not joking. This morning, Sammy and I took the bus to Mom’s office, which is now the crying guy’s office. He didn’t cry this time, or even look like he might cry, so I should stop calling him that. He said I should call him Mitchell. I told him about our scrapbook, and how important it is because Sammy won’t remember Mom when he’s older. Mitchell said he would gather stories from the professors and students who knew Mom. He gave Sammy some highlighters for no good reason. Sam played with them while we were visiting, and Mitchell said he could take them home. Then he looked around and added a pen you can click to change the color of ink from black to red. I thought the pen was pretty cool, and maybe he should have given it to me, since Sammy only knows how to write one letter. But you can’t compete with a four-year-old. I learned that a long time ago.
I might have been a little ticked off about the pen, because I blurted out the question, “Were you having an affair with our mom?” Mitchell looked surprised. I asked, “Did you put the snake in her car?” He looked even more surprised. He said, “No.”
Then he said he loved my mom, and he would have asked her to marry him if she wasn’t already married. I told him I didn’t need to hear that. He said my mom loved my dad. I told him they did a lot of dancing in the kitchen. Then I asked, “So who put the snake in her car?” He grimaced like he was having stomach cramps, and he said we may never know.
Right about then, Sammy started talking
to Mom through the Power Ranger, and I said we had to go see our psychiatrist. Mitchell asked, “Can I give you a lift?” I told him we were meeting Dad at his office two blocks away. Mitchell said, “Oh, that’s right.” Like he already knew where Dad worked, which is suspicious.
I talked to Dr. Tierney about how I’m tired of messing up the laundry—I now have ten socks that don’t match, and my undershirts are pink. I talked about Sammy and how he can’t be weird when school starts or his whole life will be ruined. Dr. Tierney said we shouldn’t be parenting ourselves. I told him it’ll be easier to find another mother than to get Dad to parent us properly. I don’t want another mother, but Sam could use one.
Last night I found Dad in the basement watching home movies and crying. I didn’t know we had any home movies, so I stayed and watched a few. There were some from before I was born and when I was a baby, and when Sammy was born, and every year of our lives. They didn’t make me cry at all. They made me really happy. We all looked happy in them. Not just one time, but over and over through all the years, we looked happy together. And that’s a really good thing, even if one of us is dead now.
Before I saw the movies, I thought maybe we weren’t happy together. Or at least maybe Mom wasn’t happy, because she went and died. I thought someone as happy as she was in those movies wouldn’t ram their car into a tree, even if they had a snake phobia. But now I think she just accidentally hit the tree. She didn’t really want to leave us.
After the movies were over, I made fun of Dad’s time machine, but he said, “I can do it, Josh.” He was absolutely sure he could go back in time and change our whole lives. I left him there and came upstairs.
I looked around at our messy house. The recycling is overflowing. The garden is full of bugs, and the lawn is two feet tall—which Mr. Smitts mentioned, but not in a mean way. I opened some mail, and the bills haven’t been paid, even though Dad still works. I know that for sure, because I’d thought maybe he was leaving the house every morning to hang out at the cemetery—which wouldn’t have been a big surprise—so when we met him at work this morning, I asked the lady in the next office if Dad really worked every day. She said, “Yes, of course.” So he should be able to pay the bills.
Walking Backward Page 6
