Only Child: A novel

by Rhiannon Navin

  I never saw a sad face on Andy before when he was still alive, only the funny faces he made and the mad faces, always the mad faces. But maybe I never looked at his face for a long time, like now.

  I liked the ending of Dragon of the Red Dawn and how Jack and Annie are feeling in the end. In this book, Jack and Annie go on a quest to find one of the secrets of happiness, the first one—there are four secrets in total—to help the magician Merlin. Merlin doesn’t feel good and doesn’t eat and sleep, and he’s tired a lot. The secrets of happiness are going to make him feel better. Jack and Annie travel in the Magic Tree House to a place called Japan, and they meet a famous poet named Matsuo Basho. Matsuo Basho invented a type of short poem called haiku, and Jack and Annie learn how to make haikus, too.

  And they learn what the first secret of happiness is: “Paying attention to small things around you, like in nature.”

  I said it a few times so I would remember it: “Paying attention to small things around you, like in nature.” I didn’t know that was something that you could do to get happy, but when Jack and Annie came back from their adventure, they were feeling very happy, so it must have worked.

  “I really wish we could have done adventures, too, like Jack and Annie,” I said to Andy in the picture. “Before you died. Like do more fun stuff.”

  I tried to look for small things around us in the beach picture. I couldn’t see any, but I remembered some things that are at a beach: sand and rocks and seashells—those are all pretty. And the grass that grows on the sand hills that gets really tall and it’s sharp, so you have to be careful when you try to rip a piece off because you can get a cut, but it still looks pretty.

  Right next to where we were sitting, I noticed patterns in the sand, maybe from the wind or the ocean, and they looked cool. I didn’t see those when we were at the beach to take pictures. So maybe then if we could have tried to notice those things around us, everyone would have felt happier, and then we would have had no fighting. Maybe then Andy’s face wouldn’t be sad in the picture.

  I wanted to go try out the first secret of happiness with Mommy and Daddy. I could tell them about it and we could try it out together, and then maybe we could feel happier again. “I’ll be back later,” I said into the closet before I went out.

  Every time when I first come out of the hideout, it hurts my eyes because it’s dark in the closet with just the light from Buzz. When you first come back out, it’s too bright and it takes a while to see things right.

  I didn’t hear any sounds anywhere, and our house was like the Magic Tree House after it spins and lands in a new place. It’s always the same in every book: “Then everything was still. Absolutely still.” When I went downstairs to look for Mommy and Daddy, I thought that our house did kind of spin and it landed in a new place after the gunman came, except we didn’t land somewhere to start a fun adventure. We just landed somewhere and it was absolutely still. And everyone was sad or mad. And we weren’t doing stuff together, like Jack and Annie when they go someplace new, but we all did separate things most of the time.

  I walked past Daddy’s office, but he wasn’t in there, and I heard Mommy’s voice in the kitchen: “I think this will be good, to start with this interview….Yes, let people see my family and what this…what they did to us. I just want to start the conversation,…raise the questions, you know? Exactly…It can’t just be like, oh, what a horrible thing that happened and everyone will be upset about this for a while and then people will move on and nothing changes….I want to at least start the conversation about them, how they could let this happen. Put things in motion to…Exactly…” Then Mommy was quiet for a while and listened to someone talking on the phone.

  “All right…that sounds good….Exactly,” she said in between listening, and then she said, “Oh, Zach?” I went to her because I thought she was talking to me. “Mommy?” I said. But Mommy was still talking on the phone, and when I said her name, she got up fast from where she was sitting and walked in the family room and stayed with her back to me like she didn’t want me to hear her, but she wasn’t even standing far away from me, so I still could.

  “Oh, I’m not sure. I don’t know if we should involve him…” Mommy turned back around and looked annoyed when she saw I was looking at her.

  “Mommy?”

  “I…I need to go. But OK, we can give it a try, see how it goes. Thank you, see you then.” Mommy hung up the phone. “Zach, what’s up? Didn’t you see me talking on the phone? Why are you interrupting?”

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked.

  “At work. He…went to work.”

  “But he didn’t say good-bye to me.” I could feel tears coming into my eyes.

  “Sorry, Zach. Why are you looking for him?” Mommy said.

  “Do you remember in Dragon of the Red Dawn, the first secret of happiness?” I asked.

  Mommy made wrinkles between her eyes. “What?”

  “The first secret of happiness that Jack and Annie learn from the man in Japan, and it’s to make Merlin feel better. It’s that you have to pay attention to the small things around you in nature.”

  “OK, Zach, sweetie? I don’t know what you’re talking about right now, but I have a lot of things on my mind. Can we talk about this later?” Mommy said, and then she walked past me back into the kitchen, and it looked like she was going to make a new phone call.

  I could feel a hot wave come up from my belly up to my head, a mad wave. “NO!” I said, and it was loud like yelling. It surprised me, and Mommy, too, because she turned around fast and looked at me. “I want me and you and Daddy to try out the first secret. We have to try it out so we can feel better again. Maybe in the backyard we could do it, and we have to pay attention to all the small things there, and then we can feel happier. If we do it later, it will be dark and then we can’t see anything. I want to do it NOW. It has to be NOW.”

  I didn’t know why my words were coming out so loud, but the hot mad wave came flying out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t want to stop it because it felt good to yell.

  Mommy made her eyes really small and she stared at me and she made her voice very quiet: “Zach, Mommy needs you to stop yelling like that right now. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you can’t talk to Mommy like that.”

  My heart was beating fast. I stared back at Mommy, and I could feel the tears starting to spill over from my eyes, so I tried not to blink.

  “Front door!” the lady robot voice said on the alarm box, and we both jumped. Then Mimi came in the kitchen and put grocery bags on the counter and a ginormous pile of mail. She looked at us. “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “Everyone’s losing it in this house,” Mommy said, and she looked at me again with small eyes. Then she went back in the family room with the phone.

  I went out on the deck and slammed the door behind me, and that felt good, too. I walked down the steps to the backyard. I tried to stop feeling so mad, because you probably can’t try out the secret of happiness when you’re in a mad mood. I tried to pay attention to everything around me, but it was hard to see with more stupid tears coming in my eyes. And the stupid rain was making me wet and cold all over.

  I put my hands inside my sleeves and looked all around. I saw leaves on the ground everywhere, brown and red and yellow, and some green ones still, too. I saw shells from some nuts that squirrels cracked open, they ate the insides but left the shells. There was the skin of the big tree that’s in the middle of our yard, and it had patterns that looked a little bit like the patterns in the sand in the beach picture. I looked for all the small things, but the mad feeling didn’t go away and I didn’t start to feel happy.

  “Sweetie, if you want to be out here, you need to put a coat on, OK? You’re getting all wet,” I heard Mimi calling, so I went back inside and slammed the door again on my way in. The first secret of happines
s didn’t work.

  [ 26 ]

  Making News

  YESTERDAY DADDY TOLD ME that the news people were coming today. Yesterday was Tuesday, and it was day number two that Daddy drove me to school before he went to work. Not McKinley, because McKinley was going to stay closed longer, but the school where I was supposed to go for now, Warden Elementary.

  On the first day when Daddy said we were driving to school, Monday, I got really upset because I didn’t want to go. Everyone else already went back to school, except me. They were all going to have their eyes on me because I was coming back after them and also because of what happened to Andy.

  “You don’t have to,” Daddy said, and he made me a promise that I didn’t have to go in until I felt ready. “Let’s just take a drive over there.”

  So we did, and when we pulled up in front of the school it looked like McKinley, except it was brown, not greenish beige like McKinley, and there was a playground on the right side of it that looked fun. The front door looked the same like at McKinley’s, with little windows in it, and I thought about how the gunman came in through the door because Charlie let him in, and maybe a gunman, not Charlie’s son because he was dead, but a different one, could come in through that door, too.

  Daddy asked, “Do you want to go in?” and I said, “No.”

  “OK, maybe tomorrow,” Daddy said, and we drove home again and Daddy dropped me off and went to work.

  On our drive yesterday he told me we weren’t going to drive to school today because the news people were coming to our house. They were coming to give us an interview. An interview is when the news lady, her name was Miss Wanda, asks you questions and you have to answer them. It was going to be about what happened to Andy, and they were going to make a video out of it and then show it on the news.

  “So everyone is going to see us there, on the news?” I asked Daddy, and that was not good because I didn’t want that, to be in the video so everyone could look at me on TV.

  “Well, not everyone. Look, this is important to Mommy, so…but let’s not get worked up about this right now, OK? I just wanted to give you the heads-up that that’s what’s happening tomorrow. We can talk about it later. Hey, maybe it will be exciting to see how they make the news!”

  We got to the school and Daddy parked the car in front but didn’t turn it off.

  “OK, but, Daddy?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “What are the things the news lady’s going to ask us on the interview? About Andy?”

  “Um, well, I think she’s going to ask us to talk about your brother and how we feel after he got…after he died. I think Mommy is going to answer most of the questions and do most of the talking. And maybe Miss Wanda will ask you a question or two. Why don’t we wait and see, OK?” Daddy turned sideways in his seat and looked at me. “Are you going in today?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Didn’t think so,” Daddy said, and pulled away from the school.

  “On the interview, are we supposed to say the truth?” I asked.

  “The truth? The truth about what?”

  “About Andy.”

  Daddy looked at me quickly and then back at the road. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean like at the funeral you said Andy made us laugh and that he made you proud every day, but that wasn’t the truth.”

  Daddy stared straight ahead at the road and didn’t say anything for a long time. We got to our house. “Go ahead and go inside, OK?” That was all he said, and his voice sounded like something was stuck in his throat.

  Today after breakfast I went upstairs to put on a handsome shirt like Mommy said, and I was about to go in my room when I heard Daddy talking in his and Mommy’s room. I went closer to the door because it was a little bit open. I saw Daddy standing by the window, talking on his phone: “…I know that. I don’t think it’s right either. I tried to talk her out of it, but there’s no reasoning with her right now…No…Yes, I know that, Mom. Look, I already told you that I agree, Zach shouldn’t be included in this interview. I’ll see what I can do. Listen, I should go. They will probably be here soon.”

  I could tell Daddy was about to hang up, so I backed up from the door and went in my room with very quiet steps. I put on the shirt and then I sat by my window to be on the lookout for the news van. The sky was still gray and the rain was still pouring down, making rivers on the side of the road. In all the days since the gunman came, every time I looked out the window or went outside it rained.

  I kept an eye out for the news van and watched the raindrops coming down, down, down and that made me think about a story I heard one time about when it rained for a really long time and it never stopped. The whole earth was going to get a big flood, and all the people and animals were going to drown. A man decided to build a big boat, and it fit only two of every type of animal on it, a boy and a girl, so they could have a new life with a new family after the flood and not be extinct. I looked at the rivers running down our road and I wondered how much more it had to rain before it got so much that maybe we were all going to drown. Or maybe we could build a boat and then start a new life after the flood.

  The news van was supposed to come right after breakfast, but it didn’t. I had to wait for a long time and I started to hope that maybe it wasn’t going to come, but then it did. I could see it coming up our road, and I knew it was the news van right away because it had that big standing-up bowl on the roof. It stopped in front of our house and it said LOCAL 4 on the side of it in big red letters, and some other cars pulled up behind the van. I watched two doors on the side of the van pop open, and some people came out and walked to the house, and a second later the doorbell rang.

  I wanted to stay upstairs and hide so I wouldn’t have to be on the interview, but I also wanted to see how they make the news. Daddy said maybe it was going to be exciting. I had a curious feeling—that’s when you want to find out more about things—and it was funny that I was having a curious feeling today, because I just read about that a couple of days ago. In Magic Tree House #38, Monday with a Mad Genius, at the end Jack and Annie find out that to be curious is the second secret of happiness for Merlin.

  Earlier on the phone Daddy said that maybe I wouldn’t get included in the interview and my curious feeling told me to go downstairs to see what the news people were going to do in our house. Downstairs, Daddy made me do handshakes with a woman with short, really red hair. Her name was Tina, and she had headphones around her neck like a big necklace. Daddy said Tina was the producer, and I didn’t know what that meant, but she acted like the boss and told everyone where to put things. I stood by the living room door and watched.

  “Dude, this shit’s heavy.” A man with all black clothes on and long black hair in a ponytail and a long skinny beard on his chin was trying to push our coffee table to the end of the living room. The table really is heavy, it has a big rectangle stone on the top. I can’t even move it a tiny bit. Tina waved her hand over to me where I was standing by the door. “Dexter, could you…?”

  “Oh, sorry, man, sorry,” the man gave me a wink and went back to pushing. “Son of a bitch!” I heard him say very quiet, and that made me smile.

  Other news people were walking in and out of the house, to the news van and back, bringing in big black boxes that had little wheels at the bottom and tables that also had wheels and a bunch of stuff on them. They brought everything in our living room, and the wheels made wet lines on our floor. All our furniture had to get pushed to the side—that was Dexter’s job.

  “Hey, man, wanna come check this out?” After he got the coffee table moved, Dexter started putting up cameras in front of the couch that was still where it was supposed to be, and he waved me over. There were two cameras, and Dexter was putting them on stands that had three legs.

  “Look, you put the camera on sideways like this and then turn until it clicks i
n. You try.” He took the camera back off and handed it to me. It was a big camera, much bigger than our picture camera, and I’m not really allowed to hold our camera, only when the strap is around my neck. This camera had a long thing on the front and tons of buttons on the side. I tried to lift it up on the stand, but it was too heavy. I could feel it falling out of my hands, but Dexter grabbed it quickly. “Ooookay, let me help you!”

  Dexter was nice. He said I was his setup assistant, and he told me what all the things were for. There were high stands with microphones, and the microphones looked like furry squirrels at the end. We put up lights, there were three different kinds, and Dexter said you had to put them in the right spots for the interview so the light looks perfect. There were a ton of cables everywhere. I was in charge of taping them to the floor so no one would trip over them. Dexter sat next to me on the floor and ripped off pieces of black tape and gave them to me.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about your brother, man,” Dexter said. He kept ripping off tape pieces, and I kept sticking them on the cables.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “That really sucks, huh?” Dexter said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Then we were done and stood up and looked at the living room. It looked totally different now.

  “What do you think?” Dexter asked.

  “Looks cool.”

  “Very cool,” Dexter said, and he slapped his hand on my back.

  Then Tina came in and Mommy and the lady from the news, Miss Wanda, and I knew it was her because I saw her on TV before and it was the first time I ever saw a person in real life that I saw on TV. Mommy was wearing one of her old fancy outfits, and she had on a lot of makeup and lipstick and usually she doesn’t wear lipstick because she knows I don’t like it when people have lipstick on, like Grandma. Mommy sat down on the couch.

  Dexter changed the lights around a little bit, and some of the other people did stuff on the cameras and microphones that me and Dexter set up. Miss Wanda sat down on a chair in front of the couch, close by the one camera.