The Gingerbread Boy

by Lori Lapekes

  The thought of sending it to Daniel’s mother’s house, with a little note about needing his own head shrunken back to size had nudged at her mind, but she hadn’t been able to do it. She was above that. She’d force herself to remember only the good times. She wiped a tear from her cheek with a dirt-smudged finger, and, with a heavy heart, laid the doll face down in the hole. Then she felt around her neck for the stretch of scratchy red fabric she had worn all day and night like a crazed bag lady.

  There was room the hole for the scarf, too.

  She snatched the scarf and slowly pulled it down. It slithered behind her neck, itching slightly as it came free and sagged across her hand. She gazed from it, then into the hole. Something inside of her also sagged. She began to wonder if burying it, too, was a good idea. The scarf did represent good times. Maybe she wasn’t quite ready to do this yet, bury the good memories along with the bad.

  Maybe it was the scarf she should mail back to Daniel, not the shrunken head.

  Time passed. The mid-day sun burned hot across the top of her scalp. Two sparrows chattered in the tall hedge next to her, darting back and forth, ruffling the leaves. Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower hummed, calling to mind the scent of grass and soil.

  No. She wouldn’t bury the scarf. She put it back around her neck.

  At last she stood, blinking back the tears. She pushed the soil back into the hole with a bare foot. She began by pushing it in slowly, then faster and faster until the dirt lay in a loose pile above the grass. Then she stomped it flat.

  “Bury a dead cat or something?” came a voice behind the hedge.

  Catherine leaped backward, grabbing each end of the scarf with her hands. Heart pounding, she stared deeply into the dark tangle of leaves. “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  “I asked who is there?”

  “It’s the ghost of whatever it was that you just buried.” The voice replied eerily.

  “Come out.” Catherine demanded.

  “I can’t. The dirt’s too heavy to push.” There was a pause, then a chuckle. “I should know. I’ve been dead long enough.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Catherine cried. “It’s you, isn’t it, Calvin? Get out of my yard before I stuff you down a hole, too.”

  “Getting nasty in your old age? Did you find a nest full of long, slimy worms down in the hole? You know, slimy long earthworms like you love so much?”

  A faint recognition of the voice tapped at the back of Catherine’s mind, making her uneasy. Yet it wasn’t Calvin’s voice, so how would this man know of her revulsion of worms? She bent down, snatched the spade, and raised it menacingly in the air.

  “Get off of this property!”

  The voice moved along the hedge. “You going to spade me to death?”

  Catherine’s eyes followed the voice along the hedge, the spade still raised in her hand. Through a few thinner sections in the foliage she could see brief glimpses of a tall man wearing a yellow shirt, then the leaves filled in again. She looked ahead. In another twenty feet, the hedge ended. Her heart hammered against her chest.

  “You’d better be leaving,” she warned as the distance to the end of the hedge steadily decreased.

  “I think not.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “Not if I catch you first, and steal your little green spade.”

  Catherine froze. This was the kind of fear she’d felt months ago when she thought Daniel was Cave Pig following her down the sidewalk on campus, the stranger who’d been concealed by the scarf she now wore around her neck. She grasped the scarf with her left hand, praying for strength. She could see the stranger’s form through the leaves as he walked to the edge of the shrubbery. She braced herself to run, or to fight if she had to.

  “Come on Cath,” the voice said, stopping just before the man revealed himself. “I wouldn’t fight you. You always were a tough little scrapper. I’d be yelling ”uncle” in ten seconds.”

  The man rounded the hedge and came into view.

  The hair was much shorter than she remembered, the face fuller. A beard covered his chin. But as he moved toward her, the same mischievous, sarcastic glint shone in his eyes… the eyes she had known in childhood. And had never expected to see again.

  He stopped. “Mom and Dad produced two great lookin’ kids regardless of how dysfunctional they were. Good to see you again, sis.”

  Catherine could not move. Her feet planted into the lawn

  “T-ony?”

  He moved closer. “Give your brother a hug.”

  It was Tony.

  She sprang backward and flung down the spade. “Hug you? I haven’t seen or heard from you in years! I thought you were dead! Mom is gone, you know. Heart attack at only fifty-five. I thought she joined you last year!”

  “I know she’s gone,” he said, “and judging from the murderous look on your face it seems I might be seeing her sooner than expected, too.”

  “You’re darned right!” Catherine bellowed. Her hands balled into fists. “You’re darned right!”

  He came forward slowly, hands raised. “Please, Catherine. I’ve got a long story to tell. Please give me a chance.” His voice broke as his tough-man image withered. He looked down at his feet. “I’d understand if you hated me, and, if you really want me to, I’ll leave.”

  No response.

  “Okay. I’ll go. But I love you, sis. I always will.”

  Eyeing her one last moment, he turned to leave.

  Catherine’s knees went limp. “Tone?” she said weakly.

  He stopped, did not turn around.

  “Come give your sister a hug.”

  The distance between them vanished, and suddenly they were in each others arms.

  Tony’s barrel-like waist was rock solid. The tall man openly sobbed and trembled in her hold. He smelled of perspiration and cheap cologne. He was not a ghost.

  Suddenly an ugly thought pierced Catherine’s mind. What if he’d heard of her inheritance from Mrs. Vanhoofstryver? What if all he wanted was to take it from her and squander it? What if…?

  But, no. That couldn’t be. Only she, Joanne, Daniel, Joey, Stewart and a pot-bellied lawyer named Hank Smith knew she actually owned the VanHoofstryver mansion.

  She pulled away from Tony enough to study his face. “How did you find me?”

  “I asked around town. Somebody remembered seeing you here and figured you and some friends were renting this joint on summer vacation.”

  They held each other again.

  Catherine didn’t know how much time passed before Tony began to speak quietly in her ear. “I’m not proud of the things I’ve done in my life. I wasn’t only obnoxious back then, I was bad. Totally screwed up. I had to move to Maine because I was in trouble with the law. I think I’ve broken every one of the Ten Commandments except ‘thou shalt not kill,’ and I even came close to knocking that one off. It eventually caught up with me.”

  He paused for a long time. Catherine stiffened anxiously in his arms.

  “I’ve been in prison. I didn’t want anyone to know. No one. Not until I could get out and prove, first to myself, that I wasn’t a bad person. That I wasn’t like Dad. I wasn’t like Mom. I was different. I was more like you, the little sister I’d always respected and resented at the same time because you always seemed so perfect and did all the right things.” He pulled away from her, stared into her eyes.

  “I’m going to college. I’m going to own a landscaping business of my own one day. I am. I know it.”

  Catherine swallowed hard. “I actually think I believe you.”

  Tony smiled “I’ve changed a lot just in this past year. I’m a new man.” He lifted a shaggy eyebrow. “I’m still probably always going to be rather rude, crude, and sociably unacceptable in my own way, but that’s just my nature.”

  Catherine gazed into her brother’s eyes, and searched them for any sign of deception, even self-deception. But all she could see was the soft, forlorn look of honest r
epentance for a life lived badly. Her heart melted. “I wouldn’t have you any other way,” she finally said. “You know, I haven’t been all that perfect, either. I made some pretty awful choices these past few years. Things I wanted to work out so badly have just blown up in my face.” Her voice began to quiver. “But maybe I can deal with things better now. Now, anyway, that you’re here. We’re family. All we have left.”

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Tony whispered.

  Suddenly the world seemed to come to life again. Birdsong filled the trees, the shrubbery rustled in the breeze. The lawn-mower sound came back and children’s laughter sounded in the distance.

  “You really do need me, don’t you?” Tony finally said. “Because, dear sister,” he added, stepping away from her to gently yank on the ends of her scarf, “No one in their right mind would wear something like this on an eighty-three-degree afternoon in June without a good reason.”

  Catherine nodded sheepishly. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time after doing time.”

  They turned and walked arm in arm toward the VanHoofstryver mansion.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “A loss of self” said Joey, lounging sideways in the recliner, his right leg dangling on the floor as he stared at Daniel.

  “All legs stuck,” Daniel said, his voice weak and unsteady, as he looked at his old friend sitting in the chair facing him. “A lotta strangeness. Another lousy situation. A loss of sanity.”

  There was a period of silence as the old friends stared at each other. The total silence in the house was nearly unnerving; the ticking of a clock on the mantle above the fireplace was the only sound. A ticking that seemed to be solemnly counting down the weeks… days… and minutes for Daniel.

  “A loada—” came a female voice from behind them, suddenly dropping the nasty last word as if in horror.

  Both Daniel and Joey turned, round-eyed, as Mrs. LaMont stopped to gape at them, appalled at the alternate acronym for ALS that nearly came out of her mouth. The laundry basket in her arms dropped to the floor as she covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes round in horror. The woman had rarely, if ever in her life, even come close to swearing.

  Joey cocked an eyebrow. “Good one, Mrs. L. Should have thought of it myself!”

  “And, it’s true,” said Daniel, a grim smile on his face as Joey chuckled sadly.

  Mrs. LaMont started to smile, then the smile began to wiggle, then falter, as she crouched to pick up the basket. She began to say something, then shook her head, giggling oddly. As she grasped the corners of the basket, her shoulders began to heave up and down in what seemed bemused laughter, then she dropped the basket again, folding over it on her knees.

  It took several moments before Daniel and Joey could tell that the elegant woman in the bright yellow blouse was actually crying.

  ****

  He awoke in a cold sweat, again.

  Creeping paralysis.

  He would become increasingly paralyzed, but still able to feel the wretched pain of shriveling, cramping muscles. What kind of deal was that? Tears leaked down Daniel’s cheeks in the lonely morning hours. He’d promised himself that, although accepting his fate, he would go down fighting. He would go down courageously. And he would go down with his faith intact. He had to. He was all the immediate family his mother had left.

  “God didn’t point a finger and smite me with this,” he told her. “It’s just not a perfect world. Not yet. But faith will help us endure it.”

  He knew he sounded more confident than he felt.

  His attitude toward this, he told himself, was a choice. He could wake each morning and decide to be happy or decide to be miserable. He could decide to be strong, or decide to be weak. He could decide to be calm, or decide to be terrified.

  Right now he was terrified

  “I can deal with this,” he whispered to himself. “Day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute, if necessary.”

  He could deal with his body slowly turning to stone, as his mind and senses remained intact.

  Sure he could.

  As he had been doing for some weeks now, Daniel awoke keenly aware of the position of his limbs. His right arm was sprawled across the bed, his hand cupped over the edge. He moved his fingers. They were stiff, and a sudden cramp between his thumb and forefinger caused him to wince. Yet he could still feel the coolness of the air, and the lump of a crumpled sheet beneath his palm. Good. His left arm was bent over his head. He moved it slightly, and felt his hand touching his hair. He scratched his head, toyed with the strands of hair across the pillow.

  What would he do when he could no longer scratch an itch, or pull a stray hair out of his eye?

  He’d have to have his hair cut one day. Short. Manageable. That seemed, ironically, one of the cruelest things to him. He pushed the thought out of his mind, then mentally searched for his legs. His left… yes… there it was. He wiggled a toe. He tried to wiggle a toe.

  Nothing happened. He tried harder.

  Still nothing.

  In calm detachment, he guessed toe-wiggling was all over for him now.

  He tried to move his foot, to pull it upward, and was unsure if he was successful. His ankles were weak. He stumbled often. Foot drop was becoming a real problem. An ankle-foot orthosis was next on the list of ”equipment” for him… along with the cane which leaned against the wall next to his guitar by the nightstand… and the walker he knew his mother kept hidden in her closet.

  As he thought of his left leg, a twitching began in his right calf. Years ago he remembered sitting in the shallow water of a small, sandy lake. His uncle Paul had told him to sit as still as he could, and small fish would eventually swim up to him and nibble on his legs. It was a strange sensation to have a tiny fish nibbling on your skin, kind of a neat feeling, really. He’d laughed.

  That’s what some of the twitches felt like now. But it was no longer so neat. Some of the ‘nibbles’ seemed to be coming from barracudas. It became harder and harder to laugh.

  Yesterday, he recalled, he’d awoken with a hand staring him right in the face. He’d panicked, thinking it wouldn’t be his, because he couldn’t move it. It lay like an alien blob at his forehead. But then he recognized a small scar on the inside of his thumb he’d acquired when he was about ten and had broken a glass.

  That made him panic even more.

  It’d happened. His arm was totally paralyzed!

  Then, slowly, the pins and needles feeling began to worm into the flesh of his hand and arm, and he actually did laugh. His arm had only been asleep. Just asleep, as it had been dozens of times over the years. Just like it happened to everyone. His horror had subsided.

  Daniel grinned to himself now as he recalled the incident, but realized full well that one day that heavy, dead feeling would remain, and his arm would no longer tingle and come back to life.

  He sighed and gazed at the ceiling. From the corner of his eye he could see a faint light coming in through the curtains. The dawn birds were beginning to twitter. A neighbor’s dog barked. The sound of a truck rumbled faintly in the distance. It was all so ordinary, yet nothing was ordinary. Daniel slowly scanned the room. It’d been unfamiliar to him at first, almost hostile. His mother’s guest room downstairs was supposed to be for guests, and he’d never considered himself a guest.

  Family wasn’t a guest.

  But he could no longer use the room upstairs he’d had as a teenager.

  It took him ten minutes to make it up the steps. And going down those same steps was horrifying.

  He’d stumbled once, going down those tall, tall stairs, because his foot hadn’t done what he’d told it to. Bad foot. It hadn’t lifted when it should lift as the rest of his body kept going, and going he went, head first, only managing at the last second to flop over the banister and hang limply from the rail like a loose scarecrow on a pole.

  Thank goodness his mother hadn’t seen that.

  Th
at’s when he knew he had to quit driving. Bruiser was parked in the garage, permanently now, next to his mother’s red van. Give old Bruiser some companionship, Daniel thought. Maybe a little mechanical thrill for the beat-up old vehicle. He’d had to say goodbye to the vehicle because he was no longer sure he’d always feel the brake when he needed to.

  Daniel’s heart sank — so many things he’d given up or would soon have to. So many things…

  The picture of a slight, dark-haired girl with Cleopatra-like eyes began to form in his mind, and he thrashed his head to dissolve it…

  …couldn’t go there.

  “You’re an epitome,” a voice suddenly squawked near the end of his bed.

  A wry smile formed on Daniel’s lips. “Of what?” he mumbled.

  “Of charm and grace,” said the parrot.

  “Of charm and grace,” Daniel repeated quietly, lifting a wooden-feeling arm and covering his face. “Of charm and grace. What a joke. How about… how about of harm and waste? That sounds more like it. That’s more realistic. ”He squinted at the shadowy form of his beloved pet.

  “Who should I will you to for after I’m gone?” he thought out loud. “Mom or Joey?” He thought to himself for a few more moments, then, “Probably Mom. Joey might try to hook you up to an amplifier.”

  Yoo-hoo bristled his feathers, then lifted a scaly foot and scrubbed the feathers on his head. It was hard to imagine… the bird would probably live for eighty years. Daniel would be lucky to see thirty.

  He was feeling sorry for himself…

  He grew tired of chasing depressing thoughts around in his mind and pushed away the blankets. He rose to a sitting position, and the effort winded him. Ignoring it, he pulled his legs, legs that felt more like logs, to the side of the bed. Before him, his guitar leaned against the wall. Next to that, his cane.

  Which to choose…

  Taking a deep breath, Daniel lumbered to his feet, steadied himself, and rested against the windowsill.