Only Child: A novel

by Rhiannon Navin

  More and more people came in, and everyone talked in quiet voices like whispering, like maybe they were afraid to wake Andy up in his casket. All the whispering together sounded loud in my ears.

  “Let’s go and stand with your mom and dad in the front,” Grandma said. She pushed me with her hand, and her fingernails were digging in my back a little. We all made a line in the front, very close to the casket: me, Mommy, Daddy, Grandma and Mimi and Aunt Mary. I didn’t want to be there, so close.

  All the other people came in the front to talk to us. The sleeves of my suit started to bother me again, and my right hand got stuck every time I tried to put it up to do handshakes. At the top of the shirt by my throat where Daddy made a knot with the tie, it felt tight. I swallowed a lot of times, and every time I could feel the swallowing get stuck on my tie knot. More people came and said, “My condolences,” more hugs, more handshakes with my hand getting stuck in the sleeve.

  My stomach did a growl like I was hungry, but I didn’t feel hungry. I tried to pull on the tie knot with my fingers to make it not so tight. It didn’t move, and now it started to feel hard to breathe. I got hot all over and no air was going in when I tried to breathe, and my stomach started to feel worse.

  I left our line in the front and I walked to the lobby room. I wanted to run because I felt like poop was going to come, but I didn’t run, there were too many people and they were all looking at me, and the red juice spill was starting to happen. When I got to the lobby room I spotted the bathroom sign, and it was all the way at the other end of the room. I tried to get there fast, and I was sweating a lot and breathing a lot, but no air was coming in. I finally got in the bathroom. I could feel the poop coming, and I tried to open the pants from my suit, but it had a slidey button that was stuck and I couldn’t get it open.

  The poop came. It came and came, and I could feel it hot in my underwear. I think it was diarrhea, because I could also feel something hot on my left leg, running down all the way to my sock.

  I tried to stand very still because everything felt wet and sticky and I didn’t want to feel it. The smell was making me feel sick, it smelled really bad. I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck in the bathroom with poop all in my pants, and outside the bathroom were all those people and everyone was going to know.

  There was a sign on the toilet paper thing: JUMBO TWIN ROLL TISSUE DISPENSER. I read it over and over again.

  JUMBO TWIN ROLL TISSUE DISPENSER.

  JUMBO TWIN ROLL TISSUE DISPENSER.

  JUMBO TWIN ROLL TISSUE DISPENSER.

  I traced the words with my finger.

  JUMBO TWIN ROLL TISSUE DISPENSER.

  It helped me calm down a little bit to read it a lot of times. I knew which word was coming next, and when I was done, I started all over again.

  I stood in the toilet stall for a long time and nothing changed. It smelled worse, so I had to do something about it, except I didn’t know what and we didn’t bring any extra pants. No one came in, and I didn’t hear any voices from outside, so I tried to take my pants off again and this time the button opened right away, and that was really unfair that it opened now but not earlier when the poop was coming.

  I slowly pulled the pants down. The smell got worse, and I felt like I had to dry-heave. Dry-heaving is when you feel like you have to throw up and your mouth moves like you are throwing up, but nothing comes out. When I get carsick when Daddy is driving and I throw up in a bag that Mommy holds for me, right away Daddy and Andy start dry-heaving and they act all dramatic. Then Daddy opens all the windows, and he should have opened them before I got carsick.

  I dry-heaved and took off my shoes and socks, and there really was poop in my left sock and all the way down on my left leg. I took my pants and underwear all the way off and poop fell out and landed on the floor and it was so gross I started to cry.

  All this time I didn’t cry. When the gunman came and I had to hide in the closet with my class I didn’t cry. When Daddy told me Andy was dead and Mommy acted crazy at the hospital and we had to leave her there I didn’t cry, and all the times after that when tears were coming in my eyes, I never cried. But now I did. And now it was like all the tears that didn’t come out before all came out together, and it was a lot. I didn’t try to do the squeeze-away trick, I didn’t even want to. I just let the tears come out, out, out, and it felt good.

  I tried to get some toilet paper and wipe the poop off the floor, but I made it get spread all around. I tried to clean off my leg and butt, and I used a lot of toilet paper from the Jumbo Twin Roll Tissue Dispenser. I cried and I wiped and I ripped off more toilet paper and then I tried to flush, but it didn’t go down, probably from too much paper.

  Then the door opened and a man walked in that I didn’t know, and he saw me without my pants on because I never closed the door from my stall, so he saw me right away. He covered his mouth with his hand and went right back outside. I locked the door to the stall. A little while later someone came in again and I heard Daddy’s voice.

  “Zach? Jesus Christ. Oh my God. What’s going on in here?”

  I didn’t answer him because I didn’t want him to know.

  “Open the door, Zach!”

  So I opened the door and Daddy saw my whole mess, and he pulled his suit jacket over his nose, and I could tell he was trying really hard not to dry-heave.

  I was supposed to be a big boy today, and now it was the exact opposite. I was being a baby. Mommy came in the bathroom, too, even though it was a bathroom for boys, and girls are not supposed to go in the boys’ room, she could get into trouble for that. When she saw me, she made a loud “OH” sound, and she pushed Daddy out of the way and hugged me tight. She didn’t even care that poop probably got on her dress. She hugged me tight and rocked me and cried and cried, and I cried and cried, and my head was starting to hurt from all the crying. Daddy stood there with his suit jacket over his nose and just stared at us.

  [ 21 ]

  Battle Cry

  “FINE, WHATEVER, YOU CAN STAY if you’re not annoying,” Andy called to me from the top of the rock, and I started to climb up to him before he changed his mind. The rock was very high and the side was smooth and I kept sliding down.

  “Take your Crocs off, then it’s easier,” Liza said. She was climbing up behind me.

  I kicked off my Crocs and they bounced down the rock and halfway down Liza’s yard that was like a small hill down to her house. Liza put her hand on my back and pushed me up.

  From up here, I could see right into Liza’s bedroom—that’s how high the hill and the rock are in her backyard. The rock was hot under my feet and it hurt a little, but I got used to it. The air was very hot, too, and the back of my T-shirt was wet from sweat. It was like you could see the hotness in the air, coming off the rock. It looked blurry, and the sun made little crystals in the rock very sparkly.

  I could hear the hotness, too—it was making a “zzzzzzzzz” sound. Crickets were all around us. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them: zeep-zeep-zeep, all singing together, but starting and stopping at different times.

  First Andy said I wasn’t allowed to play with him and Liza and the others, but then he said OK. Maybe because Aiden was there, too, and he was six, like me, he’s James and June’s cousin, and their mom said they had to play with him. And probably because of Liza: she is nice to me, and when she’s there, Andy acts nicer, too. That’s probably because Andy has a crush on Liza and wants her to have a crush on him. When she asks him to stop doing something, like calling me a loser or telling me to get lost, he does it and he doesn’t get his bad temper.

  “You can be on the tribe,” Andy said to me when I sat down on the rock next to him. I watched him make a bow out of a stick with the pocketknife. It was Daddy’s pocketknife, and Mommy didn’t want Andy to use it because it’s too dangerous and he could get hurt from it. But Daddy said, “I’ve had this knife s
ince I was younger than Zach, for God’s sake! Let the boy do regular boy things. Always being so overprotective, right?” and he slapped Aiden’s dad on the back, and then Mommy didn’t say anything else about it.

  The game we were playing was Indian tribe. Andy was the chief and he was sitting in the middle of the rock, crisscross applesauce, like how Indian chiefs sit. Around his head was a blue headband with different-colored feathers glued on it. The headband pushed his hair up on the side so it looked messy.

  “It’s important that all the little branches get cut off on the sides and the stick is really smooth, see?” Andy said to me. I knew we were pretending, but it felt real, and I had an excited feeling in my belly.

  “Can I try?” I asked.

  “No, you can’t use the knife, it’s way too dangerous for you. That’s only for me,” Andy said.

  I could feel the rock making my butt hot through my shorts.

  “It’s a good lookout up here,” Aiden said.

  “Yeah, and the wall behind us is good protection for our camp,” Andy said.

  Liza pointed at the left and right side of her house. “That way enemies can only come from there and there and we can see them coming.” On the right side of her house was their patio, where Mommy and Daddy were hanging out with Liza’s parents and the other grown-ups for the barbecue.

  “We still need a name for our tribe,” James said. He was working on making a long spear for hunting.

  “Maybe Lost Boys like in Peter Pan when they start to be friends with the Indians,” I said. “Well, Lost Boys and Girls,” I said, because of Liza and June.

  “OK, that’s dumb,” Andy said. “We’ll use the names of all the tribe members, or maybe the first two letters of all the names.” For a while we tried out how we could put the first two letters of everyone’s names together. In the end, we decided on “JaZaJuLiAnAi.” It sounded Indian, and we practiced saying it fast: “JaZaJuLiAnAi, JaZaJuLiAnAi, JaZaJuLiAnAi.”

  “That’s also going to be our battle cry for when we go into battle with enemy tribes,” Andy told us, and he hollered, “JAZAJULIANAI!”

  “JaZaJuLiAnAi!” It came back to us like a little echo from Liza’s house.

  All our supplies were spread out on the rock: sticks and different-colored strings for making bows and arrows and spears, and feathers and beads. We also had two little bags with arrowheads inside, they were mine and Andy’s and we got them when we went to a park with camp a couple weeks ago and we did mining. Mining is when you get a big bag and it looks like only sand is in it. You get a board that has a net in the middle with little holes, and then you go to the river. When you put the board with the net in the water and pour the sand in, all the sand gets washed away through the holes, and then you see fancy rocks that were hiding in the sand. And arrowheads if you got lucky. They were real arrowheads that the Indians made out of black shiny rocks, and they were very sharp on the sides and pointy at the top. Me and Andy both brought a whole bag home from mining, full of rocks and arrowheads.

  The strings and feathers were from Liza and June, they had them at home in their art supplies. They kept remembering other supplies we could use for decorating the arrows and spears and ran off to get them.

  “Zach, we need more perfect sticks for bows. Go look in our yard, too,” Andy said, and I did. The sticks for the bows had to be long and thin, so you could bend them. Andy did a cut at the ends of the sticks, and we tied string on both ends. You had to tie it to one end first and then pull that end down with the string and tie it to the other end so it looked like a big D. The sticks for arrows had to be shorter and not so thin, and Andy did a cut on only one end. He made an X with two cuts so we could put feathers on that end, and then we tied the arrowheads to the other end with string. Spears were longer and thicker sticks. We didn’t have enough arrowheads for those, and they weren’t big enough anyway for spears, so we made fake arrowheads out of cardboard.

  We worked on our weapons for a long time, and we talked about what the battles with the enemies were going to be like. We worked like a real tribe team. There was no fighting and I never played with Andy like this before. We laughed because our feet were really dirty and black, but that’s how you know you’re real Indians, Andy said. We had mosquito bites all over us, especially me because mosquitos love me, but we didn’t care.

  Finally, when all the weapons were done, it was time to go into battle. We split up into two teams. I thought we were all going to be in the same tribe, but Andy said he changed his mind about it and it wouldn’t be so much fun to go into battle against an invisible enemy, so he changed it to two teams, and they were going to be enemy tribes. I wanted to be with Andy, but he picked Aiden first, not me, and he didn’t want two six-year-olds on his team. So now we were going to be enemies again.

  Andy’s tribe disappeared around the left side of Liza’s house, and I saw Andy, the chief, run ahead and June and Aiden follow him. Me and James and Liza spread out in the bushes to be on the lookout for them. We carried our bows and arrows and spears, and we ran behind the bushes and trees for cover, from Liza’s backyard, around her house, across the street into our backyard, and into the yards of our other neighbors.

  “Can you see them?” Liza whispered, and her voice sounded like she was scared, so then I started to get a scared feeling in my stomach. My heart was beating fast. It was like we were hunting for a real enemy. But then I thought about when Andy disappeared in the darkness he didn’t look scared, he looked brave. I decided that I was going to do that, too, be brave.

  “Take cover,” I said with a loud whispering voice, and I ducked behind a tree. James and Liza ducked behind the tree next to me. “Don’t make a sound,” I said.

  My breath was going in and out fast, and I tried to make it go slower. Then I heard a loud “JAZAJULIANAI!” coming from somewhere in front of us, and I couldn’t see where it was coming from, but I jumped out from behind the tree and I yelled, “ATTACK!” It was like I was a real Indian who was brave and going into battle.

  I heard another loud “JAZAJULIANAI!” that sounded like Andy’s voice coming from somewhere in front of us. All of a sudden, James was next to me, and he threw his spear in the direction from where Andy’s battle cry was coming. I got my bow and arrow ready.

  “JAZAJULIANAI!” I heard again, and it sounded closer this time. I fired an arrow and it disappeared into the darkness. A second later I heard a loud scream: “Aaaaaahhhh!”

  “You guys, stop. Andy got hurt,” I heard June call.

  I ran to where her voice came from, and then I saw Andy. He was lying on the road between our yard and Liza’s house. My arrow was sticking out of his chest. He didn’t move, his eyes were closed, and in the light from the streetlamp I saw the blood. There was blood on his T-shirt, and there was a puddle of blood around him on the road that was getting bigger and bigger, like all the blood from his whole body was running out of him onto the road.

  I sat down next to Andy on the road and started screaming: “Andy! Andy! Wake up, Andy! Wake up, wake up, wake up! Andy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” I screamed and screamed, and then someone touched my shoulders from behind and started shaking me. I kept screaming and screaming, and someone kept shaking me and shaking me.

  “Zach! Zach! You have to wake up, Zach. You have to wake up!” I saw Daddy in the darkness, and he was the one who was shaking me.

  “Daddy, I shot Andy with my arrow, Daddy. I think I killed Andy. I think he’s dead! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. We were playing, it was just pretend!”

  “What? No, you were dreaming. You had a bad dream again. Look,” Daddy said, and he put his hand up and pushed something to the side. Then it wasn’t so dark anymore, and I could see we weren’t on the road behind our yard. We were in my hideout.

  I was blinking my eyes because of the light that was coming in the hideout now, and because of the tears
, and I didn’t know why I was in here all of a sudden and why Daddy was in here with me. “But…but…it happened. It really happened. I saw him with all the blood. From my arrow, I killed him.”

  “No, buddy, that didn’t happen. You didn’t kill Andy. My God, did you scare me just now,” Daddy said. “Come here.” He pulled me out of the closet and we sat on Andy’s rug, me on Daddy’s lap. I put my head on his chest, and I could hear his heart pounding loud.

  “I heard you scream, but I didn’t know where you were. I looked everywhere for you, but I couldn’t figure out where the screaming was coming from. Took me forever to find you in there. What are you even doing in Andy’s closet, bud?” Daddy petted my back when he was talking. I started to calm down a little, and the pounding in Daddy’s chest got quieter, too.

  “I guess I was sleeping maybe,” I said.

  “But why in Andy’s closet?”

  “It’s my hideout now,” I said, and Daddy answered, “I see.”

  “I was dreaming about when we played Indians on Liza’s rock at the barbecue,” I told Daddy, and it still felt like it happened like a minute ago.

  “That was a great time you guys had, I remember that.”

  “It was like an actual adventure,” I said.

  “Sure was.”

  “But I didn’t kill Andy.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “But he’s dead,” I said, and it sounded like a question.

  “Yes, buddy, he’s dead.”

  [ 22 ]

  Good-bye

  WHEN YOU DIE and it’s time for your funeral, that’s when people say good-bye to you. At the wake you’re kind of still with your family and friends, and they can look at you in the casket if the lid is open or at least in the pictures that get hung up everywhere. But at the funeral everyone says good-bye and it’s forever. Final good-byes, that’s what Mommy called it when it was time for Uncle Chip’s funeral.