Five Minutes More

by Darlene Ryan

  I’m waiting for her to ask me how I know it’s all gone, but she doesn’t. She straightens up and turns to face me.

  “I gave his clothes to the Salvation Army and his books and other things to the shelter.”

  “So some old drunk on the street is walking around puking on Dad’s clothes?” My hands are twisting the cardboard lid, crushing it. I drop it on the floor.

  “I gave your father’s things to people who could use them.” She speaks slowly like I’ve suddenly gone stupid.

  “You threw them away!” The words burst out.

  She flinches and closes her eyes for a second. “None of those things were doing any good here.”

  “You don’t even care. You want to make it look like he was never here,” I shout. “Are you going to take me to the Salvation Army next, Mom?”

  “Don’t do this,” Mom says, shaking her head. Her whole body sags. The refrigerator door hangs open.

  “Why? You keep doing things and you don’t even ask me.”

  “None of it was good for anything.”

  “You didn’t even ask me!” I scream the words.

  I don’t want to be in the same room as her anymore. As I shove past her, my elbow bangs the refrigerator door. The bottles inside rattle like chattering teeth. I kick the door, putting all my anger into it. The door bangs shut, and I am out of the room. Behind me I hear my mother calling my name, but I don’t answer.

  twelve

  We’re working on quadratic equations in groups of three or four with our desks pulled together when Ms. Henry from the office comes to the classroom door. “D’Arcy, you’re wanted in the office,” Mr. Kelly says from the doorway.

  I stand up and try to swallow past the huge lump that’s suddenly in my throat. Ms. Henry says something else to him. He nods and closes the door. “Take your things,” he says to me.

  I fumble with my notebook, trying to get it closed. My pencil hits the floor and rolls away. Seth snags it with his foot. I jam my stuff into my backpack and head for the door. It seems to get farther away every step I take. Everyone’s looking at me.

  The hallway’s deserted. I start down the stairs to the main floor. My mind is jumping all over the place—anything to avoid thinking about what’s going to happen when I get to the office. I can see my mother talking to Mr. Connell as I get to the bottom step, and I have to grab the banister because suddenly I have spaghetti knees. She turns, sees me and turns back to Mr. Connell to offer her hand.

  I stay where I am, clutching the railing with one hand and my backpack with the other, until she walks over to me. “Get whatever books you need,” she says. “We have to go home.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “We’ll talk about it when we get home.”

  “Tell me now.”

  She shakes her head and doesn’t look at me. “When we get home.”

  We don’t talk in the car. I wrap my arms around my backpack. I don’t know what’s wrong, so I make a list in my head of what I know it can’t be. No one else I care about is dead. The house hasn’t burned down. I don’t have a terminal disease. Then I remember a joke my dad liked to tell. What happens when you play a country song backwards? Your wife comes back. Your dog’s alive. And your truck works.

  As soon as I’m inside the door, I drop my stuff and turn to her. “Okay, what is it?”

  She takes off her jacket. “Come sit down.”

  “No,” I say. “You’re stalling. Whatever it is, tell me or I’m going back to school.” I back up to the door.

  “All right.” She’s still looking everywhere but at me. “The police have officially...they’re ruling your father’s death a suicide.”

  The room begins to spin around me. I slide down the door until I hit the floor. “All because the car went off the road? That doesn’t mean anything.” My voice sounds garbled, like I’m talking underwater.

  “It’s more than that.”

  “What?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Tell me.”

  She stays silent.

  “Fine. I’ll go to the police station and someone there will tell me.” But I don’t get up because I can’t.

  “He wasn’t himself,” Mom whispers.

  “Tell me,” I say louder.

  “He’d been drinking. There weren’t any skid...the mark from...from the gas pedal was...his shoe...he didn’t have his seat belt on.”

  “No. He didn’t...he didn’t drive into the river on purpose. People who do...who do that, they’re depressed. He was fine. He was happy.”

  She reaches for me. I jerk away and bolt for the den. There are papers on the desk—bills and cards left over from the funeral. I sweep them all onto the floor. “D’Arcy, what the hell are you doing?” Mom is in the doorway.

  “People that...they leave notes. If he did that, where’s the note?”

  Mom closes her eyes for a second. “Not always,” she says softly.

  I’m breathing fast and hard and it’s making me dizzy. I grab a desk drawer, drop a handful of pens onto the carpet and then dump the drawer on the floor. “There’s nothing here. You see? Nothing.”

  I pull out another drawer, push pens and post-its around and then drop it too.

  “D’Arcy, stop. There’s nothing here,” Mom says.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” I’m shouting now. “There’s nothing because you’re wrong.” I open the cupboard under the window where she keeps paper and envelopes and a roll of Bubble Wrap. I yank the shelf inside off the little plastic pins, and everything spills down onto the floor.

  Mom tries to reach for me but I pull away and push past her.

  I have to show her. Where? The living room? The dining room? My dad’s books fill up most of the shelves on one whole wall in the living room. I grab a big hardcover book from the middle shelf, hold on to the front and back covers and shake. “Look,” I shout. “Nothing.” I drop it and pull another down. “Nothing.” Then another.

  Behind me I hear my mother yelling, “D’Arcy! Stop it. Stop it!”

  I start to hum, as loud as I can, to drown her out. I have to show her she’s wrong.

  A small, brown pottery pig that my dad brought back from Mexico squats in the center of the shelf. With one long sweep I shove the rest of the books onto the floor. My mother grabs one of my arms from behind.

  The pig smashes into dozens of pieces on the hardwood floor, all except for one pointed shard that flies up and sticks in the side of my free hand. I hold out my arm, watch the blood well up and trickle down around my wrist. But I don’t feel anything.

  I hear my mother’s voice and the sound of bits of pottery crunching under my feet as she pulls me away, down onto my knees. Mom squats beside me and tries to put her arms around me. I twist away and curl into a tight ball. The only sound I hear is my breathing as the tears slide down my face and drip onto my hand.

  But I don’t feel anything.

  It takes four stitches to close the gash in the side of my hand. A nurse gives me a needle in my hip that makes me feel slow and fuzzy. An intern who smells like pizza and doesn’t look any older than me does the stitching. I guess the cut isn’t bad enough for me to get a real doctor.

  I wonder if this is where they brought my dad after the accident. Did he get a real doctor or just some guy with hair flopping in his eyes and pepperoni breath?

  The nurse gives my mother a little tube of cream and instructions about changing the bandage around my hand, like I’m too stupid to do it myself. I don’t even look at them. Instead I stare at a poster on the wall about the misuse of antibiotics. Finally Mom says, “Okay, we can go.”

  She doesn’t even try to talk to me on the way home. I stare silently out the passenger window. A couple of times I glance at my mother out of the corner of my eye, but she never looks away from the road. Finally she pulls into the driveway and shuts off the car. I hear her shift in her seat.

  Don’t touch me.

  She clears her throa
t. “D’Arcy, I know how you feel,” she says.

  No, you don’t, because I don’t feel anything.

  “Your father wasn’t thinking clearly. Because he never would have...” She clears her throat again. “He loved you very much. More than anything in the world.”

  In my mind I turn down the volume so her voice sounds like it’s coming through the radio from a station hundreds of miles away. I’m not listening. I don’t hear anything. I just stare out the car window. After a minute my mother gets out of the car. I stay, stiff and still, in my seat.

  I don’t hear anything.

  I don’t feel anything.

  thirteen

  The den looks like a hurricane’s blown through it. I’ve seen rooms, houses, that look like this on the news after a storm. I step over the stuff on the floor, find one of the drawers and slide it back into the desk. I don’t know what to do next.

  I drop into the chair. I can hear my mother in the living room, putting books back on the bookshelf. She’s wrong. I know she is. I knew my father better than anyone.

  A wadded-up ball of paper sits in the middle of the broken shelf from the cupboard.

  For a moment I forget how to breathe. Then somehow I suck in air with a gurgle that sounds like I’m choking. I slide out of the chair onto my knees. A wadded-up ball of paper... with my father’s writing on it.

  No.

  My hand reaches out and jerks back. I try again and pick it up this time: a couple of sheets of ripped-up, crumpled white paper, covered with my dad’s sharp-edged writing. My fingers shake so much the paper falls to the floor.

  “Mom,” I croak. My breath starts coming faster because, Oh my God, oh God, I know what it is. My hands are scrambling to smooth out the pieces, and I hear my voice screaming for my mother as though it’s someone else’s. And then she’s behind me. “Daddy,” I manage to choke out, but she’s seen the jagged words on the scraps of paper.

  “No,” she whispers, closing her eyes for less than a second. She pushes me into the chair. “I’m going to do it, baby. Sit. Sit.”

  My knees buckle. Every part of me is shaking now. Mom kneels, pulls apart the last of the wadded paper and begins fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. She fumbles around on the floor and grabs half a roll of duct tape. Tearing pieces of tape with her teeth, she fits the bits of paper together.

  I am so cold, and I feel as though I’m sliding down, down into a dark tight tunnel. Mom’s repeating something, almost under her breath. My father’s name: David, David, David, David.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” she says, smoothing the paper flat. I don’t have any answer. I don’t think she’s looking for one. I can’t even make out most of the words on the patched pages, the writing is all scratchy lines. Only one scrawl of letters near the bottom even looks like a word—Nothing. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s too cold, and I’m too tired.

  I hear Mom say my name as though she were a long way away. She peels off her sweater and pulls it over my head without even slipping my arms through the armholes. Then she pushes into the chair beside me and pulls me into her lap. “It’s okay,” she says, stroking my hair.

  I pull my arms in against my chest under her sweater and let my mother’s warmth soak into me. She turns us in the chair and pulls the phone closer. My mind holds pieces of the conversations, lets others go. “...it’s an emergency. Find him. Mark—we...David left a note...okay. I can do that.” She hangs up and dials again. “Detective Ridley, please. It’s Leah Patterson. It’s important.”

  I can only focus on fragments of what comes next. Mark’s a lawyer, my dad’s friend. He comes. And a police officer. “She needs to go to the hospital,” somebody says. But we were already there. Then Mark folds my fingers around a cup. It’s warm and smells like chocolate. I take small sips and watch the tropical fish swim across the screen of the computer that no one thought to turn off.

  I don’t even know I’m crying until Mom wipes my face with the heel of her hand. We’re alone. I’ve lost some chunk of time.

  “I don’t...understand,” I say.

  “Neither do I,” she says, her voice raspy, like it hurts her throat for the words to come out. “I’m sorry.” A tear gets away and runs down her cheek. She leans over the back of the chair and wraps her arms around my shoulders. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says against my hair.

  I don’t say anything. The fish glide through the make-believe water. Sorry, sorry, sorry, echoes inside my brain.

  Something cool brushes my cheek. My mother’s hand. I smell cherries—that hand lotion she uses.

  Where am I? I want a drink. My lips are cracking and stuck to my teeth.

  I’m in that place between asleep and awake. I try to open my eyes, make words, but it’s so fuzzy and warm and...fuzzy, and I feel myself falling back down...

  My mouth tastes like metal. I licked a penny once, trying to make it spit shiny. The taste in my mouth is like that. Under the gauze my hand throbs like a bass string thrumming. I open my eyes, and for a second the room swirls around the bed. It’s like watching the Twirl-a-Whirl at Spruce Point go whipping by.

  How did I get here? I don’t remember coming up the stairs, taking off my jeans and sweater, finding these pajamas. The last thing I remember is...no...

  I clutch my stomach with one hand, roll over and hang my head over the side of the bed. I keep my eyes closed and press the side of my face against the cold metal rail of the bed frame. In my head I can see that wadded-up ball of paper and the almost unreadable words. It doesn’t prove anything. I push the back of my hand against my eyes until all I can see is blackness shot with little flashes of light, like a star-filled sky on a moonless night.

  I can hear myself breathing, in and out, in and out, fast, like I’m trying to run away from someone. I concentrate on that sound, on each breath, and after a few minutes the room stops spinning and my stomach stops lurching, for the most part.

  I sit up. My T-shirt is crumpled and damp and twisted half sideways. One leg of my pajama pants is hiked up past my knee. I push my hair out of my face. It’s a frenzy of curls.

  Just then the door eases open and my mother looks in. “You’re awake. Hi,” she says.

  She’s wearing jeans and a dark green sweater, not work clothes. Is it Saturday? No.

  “What...what time is it?” I ask. My voice sounds like I’ve been shouting too much.

  “It’s a bit after ten.”

  “I’m late.” I swing my feet over the side of the bed and try to get up, but I can’t seem to get my arms and legs to work together.

  “Stay there. I already called the school,” Mom says.

  “Brendan is going to pick me up.” I try to lick my lips. They’re rough with flakes of chapped skin.

  Mom looks away from me. “I told him you’re not going to school today.” She clears her throat. “I said you had the stomach flu.”

  “Oh.” The room’s cold. I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them.

  “Take your time.”

  “Umm, all right,” I say.

  She turns to go, then stops in the doorway. “I’m sorry, D’Arcy,” she says.

  Her voice is so quiet I have to lean forward to hear her. For a second it feels as though the walls are coming in at me. I grab the mattress with both hands and the feeling passes as quickly as it came.

  Mom still has her back to me. One hand grips the door-knob. The other is squeezed into a fist. “I’m sorry you had to find that...note. I’m sorry your father...did...what...he did.”

  “What do you mean? You really think he...? Because of some torn-up paper?”

  She turns back around. “D’Arcy, honey,” she starts, but I cut her off.

  “It doesn’t mean anything.” I shake my head, keep shaking it like a little kid would. “He didn’t. It was an accident.”

  “Your father was sick.” She says each word carefully, like I’m too stupid to know what she means.

  “You mean c
razy? You think he was crazy?” My voice is getting louder.

  “No. I found out...” She stops. Takes a couple of breaths. “I talked to the police and the doctor...this morning. He...he had...he had ALS.”

  “What do you mean? What’s ALS?”

  Her mouth moves before the words come out. “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Sometimes people call it Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  “Sclerosis? You mean like multiple sclerosis? Like Brendan’s aunt has?”

  “No.” She keeps running her hands down the sides of her jeans. “ALS is a lot worse.”

  I pull at the neck of my T-shirt. It’s too tight. It’s hard to breathe and my voice sounds funny. “What do you mean by worse?” I ask.

  “It...people with ALS...their muscles get weaker. They fall, they drop things. Eventually they can’t walk or talk. Some can’t even breathe without help.”

  “So what do you do for it? Physio? That’s not so bad. Brendan went last year. Remember?” I can’t seem to stop talking. “Are there pills? Pills would be better because you know Dad’s kind of wussy about needles.”

  Mom just shakes her head.

  “There must be some way to fix it. Right?”

  “There’s no...” She takes a couple of shaky breaths. “There’s no cure for ALS. I don’t think he could...live with what was going to happen to him.” She takes a couple of steps closer to me and touches my cheek. I twist my head away.

  “No. You’re wrong.” I scramble off the bed, around to the foot, and grab hold of a bedpost. Blood is starting to soak through the bandage on my hand. I stick out an arm to keep her back. “Don’t touch me,” I warn her. My face is hot and I feel like I’m going to heave. “He would have said if he was sick. The doctor made a mistake, mixed him up with someone else.”

  “Your dad and Dr. Marshall went to school together. He didn’t make a mistake. He’s been in Haiti for the last month with Hospitals Without Walls. He didn’t even know your father had died.”

  I get an image of my dad, driving down the road, coming to the turn, hitting the gas, twisting the wheel—No. No. No.