Only Child: A novel

by Rhiannon Navin

  People start to forget about you after you die and they can’t see you all the time anymore. It was already happening with Andy. I started to notice that at his funeral that was on the day after the wake. Everyone was talking about Andy, but they talked about him like they only remembered some parts of him, not all the parts.

  “Oh, Andy was just such a darling, such a pleasure to have in class.”

  “He was hilarious, wasn’t he? What a character!”

  “He was so bright, incredibly smart.”

  It was like they weren’t really talking about Andy or they were starting to forget about what he was like.

  At the funeral I sat in between Mommy and Daddy on the first bench in the front of the church. It wasn’t the church by McKinley or the one where we went to Uncle Chip’s funeral, but a different one we never went to before. Inside it didn’t really look like a church, more like a really big room with a lot of benches. It was freezing cold in the room. There was an altar table in the front, too, and Andy’s casket was in front of it with flowers on top. There wasn’t a Jesus hanging from a cross, only a cross and no Jesus, so that was good. I didn’t want to sit there again and look at Jesus with the nails in his hands and feet like when I was at the church by McKinley.

  The whole big room was full of people, and a lot of them couldn’t even sit down and were standing in the back. I turned around and I saw a lot of the people from the wake yesterday. I didn’t stay there for the whole time. I had to go home with Aunt Mary because of the poop. At the funeral it was our family and friends, our neighbors, and parents and kids from school and lacrosse and Daddy’s work and a lot of people I didn’t know, too. When I was just about to turn back around, I spotted Miss Russell on a bench in the back of the church, and she still looked very white with a lot of black around her eyes. When she saw me looking at her, she did a little smile and then she lifted up her arm. At first I thought she was waving at me, but then I realized she was shaking her charm bracelet. It made me think of the charm she gave me, and I thought about it laying in the corner of my hideout, and now I wished I brought it here with me. I smiled back at Miss Russell and turned back around.

  I didn’t like sitting all the way in the front. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me from behind. Mommy had her arm around me and she was holding me very tight, her fingers were grabbing my arm and the grabbing made her fingers look white. The sadness I could feel coming off her made my chest feel tight. And it was like the other people coming in the church room brought more sadness with them, and the room was too full with people and their sadness, and it squeezed my chest tighter and tighter until I could only take small, fast breaths.

  Andy’s casket was right in front of where we were sitting. I wondered if Andy up in heaven or wherever his soul went knew that right now was his funeral and people were saying their final good-byes to him, and then his body in the casket was going in a grave in the graveyard. Could he see us sitting on the bench in this freezing cold room, and could he feel the people’s sadness?

  First the man from the church who was wearing like a black dress or something and had a cross necklace on said a speech on a microphone, and it was long, and I didn’t understand everything he said, but some of it was about God. And he said things about Andy, and I didn’t know how he knew all those things about him, because we never saw him before. He also sang songs in between his speech that I didn’t know, and the people in the room sang the songs with him, except for Mommy and Daddy, they were very still and quiet. All three of us were sitting very close together, legs and arms touching.

  After the man from the church was done with his speech and songs, Daddy got up. He walked to the microphone very slow, and I guessed he was going to say a speech, too, and I didn’t know he was going to do that. My left side where Daddy was sitting close got cold.

  Everyone was staring at Daddy, only Mommy wasn’t. She was looking down at a tissue she was holding in her lap, and she was squeezing it with one hand and squeezing my arm with the other hand. It was very quiet in the church room, and Daddy didn’t say anything for a long time. I started to think he was just going to stand there and then people were going to get bored, but then he made a coughing sound in his throat like he had to make room for his words.

  Daddy took out a piece of paper from the pocket of his suit jacket and started to read what it said on it: “I want to thank everyone for coming today and helping us say good-bye to our son Andy.” The paper in his hands was shaking so much, I didn’t know how he was even reading it. His voice was shaking, too, like the paper. He made a long break, and maybe he was only saying thank you, but then he said more, the words coming out slowly and quietly: “A week ago my son’s life was cut short in the most horrific way I can imagine.” Break. “Never in a million years do you think something like this could ever happen to you…your family. Your child! And yet here we are. It’s hard to believe this is our reality now and we are supposed to continue on living our lives somehow, without him….” Daddy put the piece of paper down and made the sound again in his throat a few times.

  “I’m…I’m sorry, I’ll keep this short. There is now a big gaping hole in our lives where a week ago there was our smart, funny, outgoing boy with his big personality. Andy always made us laugh and he made us…so proud, every day. He was an amazing son and loving brother, the best we could have ever asked for. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around how to keep on living like this, without him, with that huge hole in our lives where my son is supposed to be. He was taken from us,…and I don’t know how anything will ever make sense again without him.”

  Daddy looked down at the piece of paper like he was trying to find the spot where he stopped reading earlier. I could see his chin was shaking. He kept looking at the paper and said: “I want to ask all of you to please keep Andy and the memories you have of him close and carry him with you always.”

  Mommy started shaking next to me. She let go of my arm and crossed her arms in front of her belly and leaned forward, so her head almost touched her legs, and her shoulders went up and down from crying. All around us people cried, and the sadness was like a big heavy blanket all around us and on top of us.

  I thought about Daddy’s speech, and I watched Mommy and everyone else cry, and it all didn’t feel like real life. Because Daddy did it, too: he didn’t talk about Andy like how he actually was. And so it was like everyone was crying and being sad, but not about the actual Andy, just a version of him that wasn’t the right one. It was like no one was saying good-bye properly to him. I felt like I wanted to stand up and yell at everyone to stop lying about my brother.

  The sadness blanket didn’t go away even after we left the church room, and it got more heavy when we went to the cemetery. We stood around Andy’s grave with our shoes in the mud and we got wet from the rain. I tried not to look at the deep, dark hole in the ground that Andy’s casket was going into, and I tried to keep my eyes on the big tree that was right next to his grave. It was full of yellow and orange leaves that were shiny from the rain. It looked like the whole tree was on fire. I thought it was the most beautiful tree I ever saw, and I was happy that it was going to be right there, next to Andy’s grave.

  After Andy’s casket went in the hole, it was like the sadness blanket got too heavy for Mommy and she couldn’t stand up anymore with it on top of her. Daddy and Mimi had to hold her up from the sides and put her in the car. And it stayed heavy on my shoulders, too, all the way home, and it made it hard for me to get up the stairs. I could only be upstairs for a little while, Grandma said, because people were coming over, and that was not good because all I wanted to do was be in my hideout.

  I sat crisscross applesauce on Andy’s sleeping bag and didn’t move and didn’t say anything. I just waited. I waited for the sadness blanket to come off my shoulders and for my chest to stop feeling so tight. I wanted to see if it was going to feel different now, if the funeral made it
so that Andy would feel more gone than before.

  I wondered again if Andy could see us from somewhere at his own funeral, and if he also noticed that people were talking about him like he was a different person—even Daddy didn’t say the real truth about him. Andy probably thought it was funny and now all the bad stuff he did didn’t matter anymore. But I thought that if it was me, I would be afraid that if people didn’t remember me right, my actual self, then it would be like I was really gone from earth forever.

  “Andy,” I said in a quiet voice. “It’s me, Zach.” I waited like he was going to answer me back, but of course that wasn’t going to happen. I was hoping that maybe I would know if he could hear me. “I’m in your closet. It’s my hideout now. It’s a secret, no one knows I’m in here. Well, Daddy knows now.” I was telling him things that if he was seeing me right now, he would know already, but I said them anyway. “I bet you’re mad I’m in your room and you can’t do anything about it. You would try to kill me if you were here right now and not dead.”

  I thought that that was mean to say to a person who’s dead, but it was saying the truth. Saying the truth to Andy felt good. “Anyway, you were really a jerk to me all the time.” Jerk. That’s a bad word. But Andy said it a lot, so now I was going to say it, too. I heard someone calling my name from downstairs, so I got up fast. Before I left the hideout I turned around and said, “I’m still mad at you about that.”

  [ 23 ]

  Death Stare

  “I HEARD HE HAD PROBLEMS for a long time and the family didn’t know how to deal with him.” Mrs. Gray, our neighbor, and Miss Carolyn, that’s Mrs. Gray’s daughter, were standing by the sink, washing dishes. Mrs. Gray handed a wet plate to Miss Carolyn and she took it to dry it off and put it away in our kitchen cabinet. From the back they looked exactly the same—same body, same way of moving around, same long hair with curls—you could only tell Mrs. Gray is the mom because her curls are gray and Miss Carolyn’s are brown.

  “Yeah, he never graduated, so he’s just been sitting in his parents’ basement for the last couple years doing who knows what on the computer. How could they have not known how sick he was?” Miss Carolyn took another plate from Mrs. Gray, and they both shook their long brown and gray curls no.

  “Right?” Mrs. Gray said, “It’s bizarre. I mean, this is Charlie we’re talking about! And Mary! They’re such nice people. Charlie is so great with kids, but his own son…What a horrible thing to happen to a parent.”

  “Yes, but, Ma, he shouldn’t have had access to guns. In his mental state? They didn’t know he had all those guns in the house?”

  I watched Mrs. Gray and Miss Carolyn clean the dishes, and I listened to them talk about Charlie and his son, the gunman, and they didn’t know I could hear them from where I was sitting on the yellow chair in the family room. The yellow chair was starting to be like my spy chair. People never realized I was sitting there, and I could hear everything that was going on in the kitchen and in the family room.

  After the funeral a lot of people came to our house, and they were staying for a long time. There was a lot of whispering and crying everywhere. I sat on the spy chair because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and Daddy said I wasn’t allowed to go back upstairs.

  “He bought guns on the Internet, too. Where the hell did he come up with the money for that? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Gray said. “I can’t get over the message he posted on Facebook. It gives me goose bumps every time I think about it.”

  Miss Carolyn said, “I heard that Mary found out about the message and tried to reach Charlie, but it was too late. Obviously.”

  I thought about how it was when Charlie let his son come in the school that day. He has a little TV by his desk, and when someone rings the bell at the front door, he can see who it is on the TV because there’s a camera outside. So probably his son rang the bell and Charlie thought, “Oh, my son is coming to visit me,” and he let him in, and so it was like it was his fault, too, what happened next.

  “Let me check if anyone else is done with their plate,” Miss Carolyn said, and she turned around to come in the family room. I didn’t want her to notice me in the spy chair, so I got up fast, and right then I heard the doorbell. I went to open the door and my belly did a super big flip, because standing right there on our porch was Charlie and next to him his wife, and just a minute ago Mrs. Gray and Miss Carolyn were talking about them.

  In all of kindergarten and on all the days I was in first grade so far, I saw Charlie every day and he always looked the same. Same glasses, same McKinley shirt with his CHARLIE RANALEZ name tag on it, and same face with the big smile. Charlie always talks a little bit loud and jokes around and right when you start kindergarten he learns all the names, and that’s a lot of names to remember. Every time I walk past his desk by the front door, he yells out: “Hey, Zach, my best buddy! How you doing today?” He calls the other kids “buddy” and “princess,” but not “my best buddy”—that was only for me.

  This Charlie standing in front of my house now wasn’t the same jokey Charlie. Everything about him was changed. He looked really old, and I could see all the bones in his face, and his smile was gone. His wife stood next to him, still holding an umbrella over their heads even though they were under the roof from the porch and no rain was coming down on them.

  For a long time I stared at Charlie and he stared at me. I didn’t know if I should say hi to him or what, because his son killed Andy and maybe it was Charlie’s fault, too, because he let him in the school.

  After a while his wife said, “Sweetheart, are your parents available?” and right then Grandma came up behind me and she put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me out on the porch. With the other hand she pulled the door almost all the way closed behind us.

  “What in God’s name…? How dare you…?” Grandma started her sentences and didn’t finish them, and her hand was holding my shoulder hard. Charlie and his wife looked like they were scared of Grandma, and they both went back a few steps on the porch, but they didn’t leave.

  Then Charlie talked, but in a voice that didn’t sound like his own voice, it was low and very quiet: “Ma’am, we are sorry to intrude….”

  “You are sorry to intrude?” Grandma’s voice went up and Charlie’s voice went down. “Yes, very sorry. We came to express our condolences to Melissa and…”

  “Oh, you came to express your condolences?”

  I was starting to feel annoyed at Grandma. All she was doing was copying Charlie, and that’s not a polite way of talking. Charlie’s wife was holding on to Charlie’s arm and trying to get him to leave, and I saw tears on her face.

  Behind us the door opened again, and this time Mommy and Daddy stepped out on the porch, and Grandma moved over to the side away from the door to make room for them. Out of the corner of my eye I could see she was giving Charlie and his wife a death stare. A death stare is when you look at someone like you want to kill them. Like your eyes are weapons, like invisible lasers or something. I know what a death stare looks like, because that’s what Mommy called it when Andy used to look at her like that a lot of times. When Andy had his bad temper and all the fighting and yelling was over, but Andy was still mad, he sometimes gave Mommy that stare. “Wow, if looks could kill,” Mommy said then, and tried to make a joke out of it.

  I was standing on the porch in between Mommy and Daddy and Charlie and his wife, and I could feel Mommy and Daddy close behind me. I got a feeling in my stomach like something bad was going to happen. There were tears on Charlie’s face, and he let them run down. He was looking at something over my head, Mommy maybe.

  Mommy used to be Charlie’s favorite student when she went to McKinley. Mommy told me that one time, when there was a father-daughter sack race at her field day, when she was in fifth grade, Charlie did it with her. Mommy’s dad died when she was in third grade, he had a car accident, and so Mommy had no one
to do the sack race with, except then Charlie did it, and Mommy was really happy about it. Now, when Mommy comes to school for something, Charlie always says to me, “Don’t tell anyone, but your mother was always my favorite when she went here. And you are like a mini version of her.” He always says that, and he gives Mommy a wink.

  Charlie lifted up his hands and took a step forward, and then he was really close to me and it looked like he was trying to give Mommy behind me a hug. “Oh, Melissa!” It sounded like Charlie had to press out Mommy’s name, and then right behind her name was like a volcano of sadness that started erupting, because Charlie started crying and not just in his face, but with his whole body. I’ve never seen anyone cry like that before. It looked like it was hard for him to keep standing up and his whole body was shaking and he cried really loud. It sounded like it came from somewhere all the way down inside of him.

  His hands dropped back down to his sides, and his wife grabbed his arm again. For a long time everyone stood there and watched Charlie’s whole body cry, and no one did anything about it. I could feel Charlie’s body shaking in front of me, and my throat hurt a lot. I wanted to take a step forward and hug Charlie’s body and make it stop shaking.

  When I was about to do that, Charlie’s wife started to say something: “We are sorry to intrude like this.” That’s what Charlie said earlier. I heard Grandma make a sound like a snort, but she didn’t interrupt or copy the words this time. “We…we wanted to come and see you in person to…We are so very sorry….” And then it was like she forgot what she wanted to say and she was quiet again.

  “Sorry?” That was Mommy’s voice behind me, and she said it very quiet. The way she said it made the back of my neck feel like it was getting goose bumps, and the bad feeling in my stomach was right. “You’re sorry? And you wanted to come here? To our house. Our home. To tell us that?” Mommy’s voice was still very quiet, but her words were like they were pointy. She was shooting them out like flying icicles, and Charlie and his wife flinched like real icicles were hitting them.