One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “What?” I whispered. He shook his head and said, “I thought I heard someone sighing! I’m probably just imagining it—imagining how my mom would respond to this. You know. Sighingly.”

  But honestly? I’d heard it too—or I thought I had.

  When we were finished with the mopping up (or at least we had done our best), we had a ginormous pile of wet towels. “Does Ikea sell appliances?” Walter asked, and I shook my head. “They sell kitchen stuff, but not, like, washers and dryers. If you’re picturing tossing this stuff in a dryer.” Instead, we found a package of TORKIS clothespins and hung the wet towels from our rigged-up fabric zip line. Once they were all clipped on, we stood back to admire the wet towels hanging like flags. It looked like a really awful party decoration, put up by giants. Giants who weren’t feeling especially festive.

  “Do you think we can just go relax somewhere?” I said, and Walter nodded.

  “Maybe where the kids’ stuff is?” he said. “Without the actual kids in it, it seems like it would be very relaxing.” I laughed.

  That area had been especially overstimulating for Zeke. When we’d walked through it earlier in the day, he’d fallen in love with one of the stylish pretend kitchens. He’d stood at the little stove for ages, rattling mini pots and pans, and every time we’d tried to lure him away, he’d said, in his little-kid yelling voice, “Guys! Guys! I can’t go yet. I’m cooking! Guys! I’m COOKING!” “Okay, Zekey,” we’d said. “As soon as you’re done.” But what with the felt cauliflower that needed frying and the pretend kiwi and cupcakes that needed getting turned into a salad, he was never done, and we finally had to pick him up and carry him out. He was still talking about it in the checkout line. I was holding him and he stuck his bottom lip out. “Guys!” he yelled, his mouth, like, an inch away from me. “Guys! I was COOKING! Remember? When I was cooking? GUYS! REMEMBER?”

  We did! We remembered.

  “Zeke, honey,” Alice had said, laughing. “Frankie is right there! You really don’t need to yell into her face like that.”

  “I’M SORRY, FRANKIE!” Zeke yelled into my face, and then he’d flung his little arms around my neck and squeezed. It’s so straightforward for little kids. What they’re feeling is not, like, a big puzzle you have to solve. It’s all just right out there. It seems like kind of a shame that we’re supposed to grow out of that style of expressing ourselves. I mean, it would definitely save a lot of time if you could just shout your feelings into somebody’s face. “I hear you,” they could say. And they would mean it literally.

  Now the kids’ section was illuminated in the prettiest way with all the lighting that was on display there, everything aglow: strings of heart-shaped lights and strings of miniature white globes; nightlights shaped like moons and stars, lightning bugs and flowers. There was a hanging blue lamp with white clouds on it and a clear lit-up box and colorful rubbery animals—like bears or mice or maybe Japanese comic-book creatures—shining softly all in a row. When I think about it now, I wonder why we weren’t suspicious. I mean, why would all the kids’ lighting have been left on like that, so enticingly? Plasticky, colorful lights: we were drawn to them like fish to a worm—fish to a worm on a hook. We had no idea.

  “Why would you make a nightlight shaped like a banana?” Walter asked.

  “Crescent moon,” I said, and he said, “Ah.”

  It was so much fun to look at everything—all the stuff we’d kind of outgrown but still half wanted: the tea sets and stuffed mice and felt cupcake sets; the sidewalk chalk and rolls of white art paper; the tool sets and doll beds and wooden trucks.

  Walter held up a set of watercolors. “ ‘Watercolor cakes,’ ” he read. “That’s so not what kids think it’s going to be. You really picture, you know, cakes. Maybe in kind of swirly colors, but definitely with frosting and everything. Not just dried-up little disks of paint.”

  “It’s mean,” I agreed.

  “Ooooh,” he said. “Want to play the picking game? With the actual things?” I couldn’t resist. My head was quieting down. Being here with Walter, everything calm now and softly lit, was like our night’s intermission. I loved it.

  Walter picked the DUKTIG 8-Piece Salmon Set, which was a little pretend serving dish with a fabric fish and stuffed lemon wedges and felt parsley sprigs. “It’s just so awesomely twisted!” Walter said, studying it. “On one side, look, it’s a live fish, with scales and fins and an eye and stuff, but then flip it over and it looks like lox. How super creepy for a little kid to play with—Now it’s a living creature, now it’s food!—but maybe I’m just thinking like a vegetarian.”

  I picked the miniature dollhouse-size set of Ikea furniture. It was so cool and perfect that I kind of couldn’t stand it. There was a little pink couch, and a KALLAX bookcase, and a molded plastic chair, and even a tiny version of the classic Ikea red heart pillow with the arms outstretched. You could play Ikea right in Ikea, and thinking of it gave me a brain-twisting fun-house feeling. In a good way.

  We walked around, looking at the play tents and bunk beds and art supplies. A lot of the kids’ stuff was not as nice, in our opinion, as the adults’ stuff: too many primary colors, too much plastic and busyness. We were more about sleek and stylish. But I still wanted to sit inside a play tent (which we did), and Walter wanted to make a huge rainbow with the MÅLA glitter paints (which we did). There was an open package of those melty beads that turn into a kind of plastic version of a drawing when you heat them. I arranged a portrait of Walter that made him look like a squared-off robot, and I tried to melt it in the cafeteria microwave, but it smoked in a bad way, and I was worried about setting off the smoke alarm or, worse, the sprinkler system. Anyway, in my haste to grab the melty-bead thing out of the microwave, I burned my fingers, and Walter produced a Band-Aid from his first-aid kit with a triumphant “Ta-da!”

  We were getting tired, even though neither of us said this out loud. You could just tell. There was a real window, and I could see the real moon shining outside, a slivery little crescent. It gave me such a lonely feeling. Walter and I climbed into the castle-themed bunk bed to rest awhile. It had a heavy velvety curtain around it, and we clicked on our headlamps so we could see better. It was quiet, and I could smell Walter’s Walter smell—soap or shampoo, skin, and washed T-shirt—as comfortingly familiar to me as anything I know.

  There was a little shelf running alongside the mattress, showing you all the nice things you could keep near your bed: the picture books and a stuffed hedgehog, the ladybug nightlight and a super-classic alarm clock with the double bell on top. There was also a framed photo of a smiling family.

  I picked up the frame to look more closely, and Walter said, “That’s kind of weird.”

  “What’s kind of weird?”

  “I don’t know.” Walter took the frame out of my hands and squinted at the picture. “It just kind of weirdly looks like your family. More than just the fact of it being a mom, a dad, and a girl about our age.”

  He was right. It was kind of uncanny. The dad had black-and-silver hair, like my dad, and the same squarish chin and big glasses. The mom was super smiley, like my mom, with her same curly reddish hair and even, I think, the exact same turquoise-and-red-striped cardigan my mom wears all the time. And the kid? I can’t even explain it, but she was just so me. Not just the curly blond hair and the freckles. Not just the gray hoodie and jeans. And not just the exact same brown-and-green eyes as mine, but that was part of it. The eyes. Because this girl was looking out at me, I swear. She sat on a green velvet couch in between her parents, and they each had an arm slung around her shoulder, everyone smiling and happy, and she looked me in the eyes, and I felt all the excitement hiss out of me, like I was an inflatable raft that had gotten unstoppered.

  It’s true that I was also extremely tired. It was, I’m guessing based on what happened next, past three in the morning by this point—maybe even later. Walter was still looking at the photo, talking about how in the book we’d write this would
be the creepy moment when the girl realizes that there’s a magic photo of her family right there in the store. “It’d be like the Titanic movie, with the murder plot. Remember? How we were like, ‘Seriously? They had to add a murder plot? Because the sinking of the world’s most ginormous ship wasn’t enough of a story?’ People will be like, ‘It wasn’t enough that the kids spent the night in Ikea—there had to be a haunted snapshot?’ ”

  But honestly? I was barely listening. I was still holding the picture, thinking about my parents. My parents, who I loved and trusted—and who loved me and trusted me back. I pictured them warm in their bed, asleep and dreaming, certain that I was safe and sound at Walter’s house. And I was suddenly more homesick than I’d ever been in my life. Like, if you took all the homesickness in the entire world and boiled it down into a teaspoon and gave it to me to swallow—that’s how homesick I was. Homesick and tired and worried and sad. I didn’t want to hurt them, not at all. I just had so badly wanted to do something apart from them—to do this thing that we were doing, that we’d already done, on our own. To be free, in a way. Just Walter and me with our secret plan.

  There’s this place near my house where you can rent mini garages to keep your stuff in. The sign says SELF-STORAGE, and it confused me so much when I was little. We were driving past it one day when I was probably six or seven, and I asked my dad, “Why do people want to store their selves?” and my dad said, “What?” “Self-storage,” I said. “Do you just, like, sit inside a bin or a box or what?” My dad had laughed and laughed and interrupted himself only long enough to say, “I’m not laughing at you!” before laughing some more and then, finally, wiping his eyes and explaining that it was just a place where you could store your own stuff. I was offended, the way little kids can be when they’re confused about something. “Maybe they should call it stuff storage, then,” I said, mad, and my dad said, serious again, “Maybe they should.” But every now and then that phrase floated back into my head. Self-storage. Sometimes it felt like that’s what people were doing. What I was doing, even.

  There’s a sign all over Ikea, one that encourages you to think and rethink your purchases—to get more or different stuff than what you planned—and it’s a picture of a red heart with open arms. There was one on the wall above the bed where we were. The heart sign. And what it actually said was, IT’S OKAY TO CHANGE YOUR MIND.

  I climbed out of the bunk bed and stood on the floor with my elbows on the bed frame, my head just inside the curtain. I was thinking about how to tell Walter that I really didn’t want to be there anymore—that I wanted to call it a night, go home, see my parents—but then I looked at him and he was smiling. Actually, he was squinting too, putting his arm up to block the glare of my headlamp, which was shining right into his eyes. I clicked it off.

  I could still see his goofy smile, even in the dark. And I couldn’t say anything. I was too happy to be reunited with this version of my old friend. I didn’t want it to end.

  “What?” he said. “You had your Frankie-about-to-say-something eyebrows. What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “Were you going to say, ‘Let’s plug in a DANSA disco ball and light some candles and have a serious dance par-tay?’ ” Walter grabbed my hands and wiggled around crazily. Dancing was not so much his area of expertise—or mine.

  I laughed. “I was going to say that exact thing, Walter. How did you know?”

  The disco ball was easy. It has its own little lights that shine when you plug it in, and it spun around so prettily, silver and shiny and scattering its little squares of brightness all over the room. We really didn’t even need the candles. Oh, but we couldn’t stop ourselves! Ikea sells a lot of candles. Like, a million kinds of candles (not literally). We set up giant beeswax pillars and a ton of little votive candles in colored glass holders and some gorgeous long tapers in a big kind of glamorous candelabra, which looks like a menorah but from an elegant haunted house. (We knew all the proper candle terminology from—you guessed it—studying the catalog.) We hung up the pretty patio lantern I’d seen earlier, put some flower-shaped floating candles in a glass bowl of water and filled canning jars with candles. And then we lit them all.

  At some point, my dad had hacked my Swiss Army knife for me. He removed the toothpick (“If you are ever really dying to pick your teeth, you can always whittle down a twig,” he explained) and replaced it with a skinny magnesium fire steel. When you strike the steel sharply with the back of the knife, you make a nice, big spark that will catch a pile of wood shavings. Or that’s the idea—but it’s finicky and hard to use. You need to make a little pile of tinder and blow on it, and I was just starting to tear up a tissue into a pile of fluff when Walter said, “Seriously, Frank?” and pulled a pack of matches from his backpack.

  “Or that,” I said, and Walter laughed.

  We lit two candles, then used them to light all the others. Then we unplugged the rest of the lights except for the disco ball.

  “Wow,” we both whispered, stepping back to look, and then, “Jinx.”

  It felt less like a dance party and more like a really cool silent film or a bad music video with the sound off. Walter, swaying around in the quiet candlelight, looked like a weird dancing mime.

  “I think I’d feel more like dancing if there were, you know, music,” I said.

  So we looked for some. We found a tambourine, which Walter banged on exuberantly for a minute before shaking his head and grimacing, putting it back on the shelf. We found something called a MUSIK wall lamp, but there didn’t appear to be anything musical about it. We found stereo wall units with no stereos in them. In fact, the only thing that seemed at all promising was a LEKA musical sheep—the kind of baby toy where you pull its tail and it plays a tinkly little lullaby. Walter and I sat on the floor, taking turns pulling its tail. I think—or I should say I thought—we were feeling the same thing: sleepy and little and done with adventure. Everything winding down. I could have closed my eyes. I did close my eyes.

  “Woozy?” Walter asked, and I smiled.

  Before he died, Walter’s dad had been losing language like a snake shedding its skin. Meanings fell away from words, and sometimes he would latch onto a single word for an hour or half a day, use it for everything, like it was a kind of all-purpose part of speech. As long as you rolled with it—without pressuring him to find the right word—he didn’t get too frustrated. One day a new word started when he was resting on the couch with his usual mug of tea, the late-afternoon sun slanting in through the window. Walter and I were sitting at the coffee table, designing a board game that involved dice and salted peanuts, and that we were calling the Hunger Game.

  “Sweetie,” Walter’s dad said to Walter, “would you mind…could you please…” He gestured with his hand. “…woozy that…woozy?” Walter touched the bottle of fizzy water on the table. “Woozy this woozy, Dad?” “No, no,” his dad said patiently, and shook his head, tried pointing again, squinted. “That woozy.” “This woozy?” Walter said, standing up to touch the window shade, and his dad nodded and laughed. “That woozy,” he said, and shook his head while Walter lowered the shade. “Perfect. But it’s not the woozy, I know,” he said. “Woozy,” he said again, and raised his eyebrows, and we laughed.

  A little later, he leaned forward to shake the can of peanuts, then sighed and said, “It would have been nice to have some more woozies, right?” “Nuts?” I said. And he shook his head and said, “Cousins.” Walter and I had started to use the word woozy when we couldn’t think of exactly what we wanted to say.

  I opened my eyes. “It’s better now, right?” I asked hopefully. I can remember when it felt like grief was radiating out from Walter. Like if he’d been a cartoon, you would have seen wavy lines coming off him. It didn’t feel like that now. Or not as much, at least.

  Walter was quiet for a bit, then he nodded. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The only t
hing it’s kind of like is this poem I read. It’s about a person you love dying? And the poem compares it to a house burning down—how at first you’re like, ‘Oh no! I really loved that house!’ And then you start to realize that the house was also full of all this other stuff you loved, only now it’s all gone. All your favorite pictures and dishes and books. All burnt up in the burnt-down house. Does that make sense?”

  “Kind of,” I said carefully, even though it didn’t really.

  “Like, at first, it’s the idea that this person you love is gone—that’s what’s so terrible. He’s never coming back. My father is dead. And it’s the worst, or you think it is. Because then the actual missing him is the actual worst—not the simple fact of his goneness. Like, I miss him when he doesn’t make pancakes on the weekend. I miss him when he doesn’t tell stories to me and Zeke at bedtime. I miss him when I can’t put my arms around his neck and dangle down his back. I miss his shaving smell, and his voice, and his laugh. And all those things are gone, and where they were there are just these giant holes instead, and all you can do is kind of…fall into them and break your leg every five minutes.”

  Walter turned toward me then—he’d been staring into his lap while he was talking—and I must have looked terrified or heartbroken, because he was quick to reassure me. “It’s okay, Frankie,” he said. “It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound.”

  “I don’t know if I should pretend to believe you,” I said. And Walter said, “You totally should.”

  I stretched out onto my back to look up at the little squares of light that were still moving around the walls of our silent disco. I wanted to say something deep to Walter, something that would make him feel understood by me, but instead I said, “Remember when my mom did all that recipe testing that was just about toast?”