by Chris Lynch
“I think they’ll be okay with this,” I said.
I handed him the bag to do the honors. He had a much better arm than me.
He nodded, held the bag up. I was supposed to say something.
I found myself shrugging again. I looked at the bag, I tilted my head sideways. I shook my head no, even though no was not quite what I meant.
I just didn’t have anything. I was tapped out on animal funerals.
“We are very sorry, fish,” I said. “Sorry you swam into the path of the McLuckies. If there is an afterlife, I hope you have better luck next time. I’m sure you will.”
We stood a couple more seconds. It was a weak, outgoing tide so the beating of the waves was only a minor background accompaniment, and the job of sending Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria out to sea wouldn’t be too difficult.
“Throw it,” I said.
Walter pulled back, heaved ho, and the three unfortunate fish in their brown paper bag were out there, bobbing on the surface of a rolling gray ocean. Drifting.
“How’s Lloyd doing?” Walter asked then.
“He’s good. I think. You can’t see him most of the time, you know? So…I haven’t seen him for a few days actually. But he’s fine. I know he is. I’m sure he is…He’s very shy. He’s cautious, always hiding. He’s doing fine though, I’m certain.”
“Mmm,” Walter said. “Okay.”
“You really believe it was a rat?” I said as we stood watching.
Drifting.
“Could have been,” Walter answered unconvincingly.
Drifting.
“Could have been. But you think it was?”
Drifting.
“No,” he said. That was my boy.
“Well, maybe it was,” I said.
This caused him to stop watching the last few bobs of the fish bag and turn to me.
“What? Sylvia, what? After all this time, after all the things you said about the rat, about the not rat. Now you tell me there is maybe a rat? I hate this. I’m all confused, and I hate it. I never thought I’d say this, but I cannot wait to get back to school.”
I made sure I watched the bag still, watched the last bit, before it was out of view.
Drifting.
“I can’t wait either,” I said. “But before we do, we have to have one more funeral.”
Gone.
My Walter
WHEN MY SECOND MOM died, Walter’s first mom died. There’s nothing much to remember because we were not invited to any of the stuff, and I wouldn’t have gone if I had been.
I could have imagined how it all went anyway if I wanted to. I chose not to imagine one minute of it.
So I stayed home. I stayed with Walter. There was probably a baby-sitter of some kind involved.
But I was with Walter. He was my Walter then, and that was that. He didn’t know what was going on, not when Mom died, not when Dad left the house in his black suit and his gray face, and not when he squeezed us so hard we were very lucky not to be dead, the whole bunch of us.
Maybe that was his plan. If it were his plan, I would not have objected then.
But instead, I had Walter, and he had me, and that was the way it always would be.
He had a head like an orange. He had a normal-size baby body and a big round head covered with a carpet of yellow velvet. He was at the point where he walked everywhere, but he still usually fell down along the way. He made a click-click sound with his tongue whenever he was busy doing something like playing with his toys or throwing stuff down the toilet. If you played certain songs on the stereo, he would do a dance where he pointed with the index fingers of both hands in unison, left, right, up, down, then at himself.
I played all of those songs, very loudly, all day long. When he danced, I had to go over and grab him and pick him up until he shrieked and kicked and squirmed away.
When he fell asleep that day for each of his two daily naps, morning and afternoon, I went to his crib and sat there. I had my own little orange molded-plastic chair that I favored for TV and for mothering my dolls and I brought it over by his crib and I sat there for the entire hour and a half of each nap, and I didn’t care no matter what any baby-sitter had to offer or suggest. I was where I needed and wanted to be, and I never for a second got bored sitting by the side of my Walter’s crib.
Walter always woke up a grouch from his naps and even in winter he woke up with a big sweaty head and you did not want to disturb him before it was time. So I sat quietly each time as he emerged back into the world we lived in, back into the world that was missing something so wrong to be missing that he couldn’t even imagine it. I sat and watched as he flopped himself over and lay still, blinking and blinking and staring up out his window readjusting, and refiguring, and just staring.
Finally, after just enough time, he turned in my direction, he looked at me, and he said, “Vee.”
Because that was me. He gave me that name, my Walter did.
We all slept in my dad’s bed that night. Just the three of us. Dad was very tired, the tiredest person I ever saw. He couldn’t talk, and I didn’t even want to. Only Walter talked, and that was just fantastic nonsense. He talked and talked fantastic nonsense until everyone fell asleep, clutching each other like a scared family of possums.
Lloyd
HE BEAT ME TO it. Or he thought exactly what I thought exactly when I thought it.
When we pushed through the gate by the garage at the back of our yard, we saw what we had not expected to see.
Dad, outside.
But just like when I had left him earlier, I was greeted by the sight of his back.
He was down on his hands and knees, underneath the cherry tree. Patting the ground down over a small, freshly dug mound of sandy earth.
When he heard the gate latch snap, he rolled around, sitting down on the ground.
“What’s going on, Dad?” I asked, walking right up and standing over him. Walter and I were standing over Dad.
“I know what I said,” he said, “but I was wrong. I know I said this was all behind us…you think you can put it all behind you…you want to think that, people want to think that…but…” He sat there shaking his head. Shaking his head at himself, with force, not like he was confused. “You can’t do that. You, Sylvia, were right. You can’t do that. I should always know to listen to you.”
I was peering around him, at the mound and at what else he had behind him, when I said, “Yes, you should.”
“I wished I had gone with you to the beach,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t wasted the end of our summer on home repairs. I wish I hadn’t wasted the first weeks of our new life in our new house…on home repairs.”
He shook his head vigorously at himself.
“I hate doing stuff,” he said.
At that moment, he bore a delightful resemblance to my dad. I could only hope.
“So,” Walter said suspiciously, “what are you doing?”
Dad got to his feet, revealing behind him the unmistakable-to-this-family sight of an animal grave. An animal grave, in the new yard that was never supposed to see one of those ever. And right next to it lay Walter’s gun.
“The rat is gone,” Dad said. “The rat is gone, dead, and he won’t be a problem for us again. I promise.”
Walter was suitably impressed. Not to mention relieved.
“No fooling, Dad? That is so good. That is so good, it’s great.” Walter picked up the rat gun off the ground. He was starry-eyed as he turned the thing over and over again in his hands. It was long, thin, and black, cold looking and scary. Looked like it could hurt you just as bad if you were poked with it as if you were shot with it.
“I was afraid I wasn’t old enough to get one of these,” Walter said.
“You’re not,” Dad said.
“Come on, it is just an air gun,” Walter protested.
“So, it’s just for shooting air, is it?” I said.
“No,” Dad said grimly. “It’s not just for shooting air. That’s w
hy I had a change of heart. I’m sorry, son. I owe you a new present. We need to go out anyway. We need to go places and buy things. We have to buy clothes and food and things. And we need to go out to a nice restaurant…before summer is over and it’s too late. Or even a not-so-good restaurant if necessary. And I’ll buy you something to make it up to you.” He grabbed Walter in a jarring neck lock as he said it, causing him to drop the gun. “And I’ll buy you something,” he said, grabbing me in the same way but much, much gentler.
He led us into the house, wrapped in two headlocks the whole way. Once inside, Walter ran right upstairs to get ready.
“So, you going to work?” I asked Dad.
He shrugged. “I have new shoes.”
“This is true,” I said.
“If you have new shoes and no rats, you have to at least try.”
“You do,” I said. “You have to try. You can’t not try.”
“So we’ll try,” he said.
“What will you do, though, if the rat comes back, Dad?”
He grinned a cheeky grin. He liked it when I was challenging. He always liked that.
“If he comes back,” he said, “I’ll just have to kill him again.”
I nodded. I eased past Dad as I headed up to get ready. The back of his hand brushed lightly against the back of mine, and I felt in there—in the touch, in the heat, and texture of that hand—my dad.
“You know,” Walter said, coming down the stairs as I was going up, “I checked all over, and no Lloyd anywhere. Aren’t you worried?”
“No,” I said. “Lloyd is fine. He is doing fine. He’s here, you just can’t see him. I know he’s fine. I am certain.”
A Biography of Chris Lynch
Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.
Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”
In 1989, Lynch married, and later had two children, Sophia and Walker. The family moved to Roslindale, Massachusetts, where they lived for seven years. In 1996, Lynch moved his family to Ireland, his father’s birthplace, where Lynch has dual citizenship. After a few years in Ireland, he separated from his wife and met his current partner, Jules. In 1998, Jules and her son, Dylan, joined in the adventure when Lynch, Sophia, and Walker sailed to southwest Scotland, which remains the family’s base to this day. In 2010, Sophia had a son, Jackson, Lynch’s first grandchild.
When his children were very young, Lynch would work at home, catching odd bits of available time to write. Now that his children are grown, he leaves the house to work, often writing in local libraries and “acting more like I have a regular nine-to-five(ish) job.”
Lynch has written more than twenty-five books for young readers, including Inexcusable (2005), a National Book Award finalist; Freewill (2001), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor; and several novels cited as ALA Best Books for Young Adults, including Gold Dust (2000) and Slot Machine (1995).
Lynch’s books are known for capturing the reality of teen life and experiences, and often center on adolescent male protagonists. “In voice and outlook,” Lynch says, “Elvin Bishop [in the novels Slot Machine; Extreme Elvin; and Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz] is the closest I have come to representing myself in a character.” Many of Lynch’s stories deal with intense, coming-of-age subject matters. The Blue-Eyed Son trilogy was particularly hard for him to write, because it explores an urban world riddled with race, fear, hate, violence, and small-mindedness. He describes the series as “critical of humanity in a lot of ways that I’m still not terribly comfortable thinking about. But that’s what novelists are supposed to do: get uncomfortable and still be able to find hope. I think the books do that. I hope they do.”
Lynch’s He-Man Women Haters Club series takes a more lighthearted tone. These books were inspired by the club of the same name in the Little Rascals film and TV show. Just as in the Little Rascals’ club, says Lynch, “membership is really about classic male lunkheadedness, inadequacy in dealing with girls, and with many subjects almost always hiding behind the more macho word hate when we cannot admit that it’s fear.”
Today, Lynch splits his time between Scotland and the US, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His life motto continues to be “shut up and write.”
Lynch, age twenty, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he played with while living in Jamaica Plain, Boston.
Lynch with his daughter, Sophia, and son, Walker, in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 2002.
Lynch at the National Book Awards in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s brother Brian; his mother, Dot; Lynch; and his brother E.J.
Lynch with his family at Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags at Hollyrood Park in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s daughter, Sophia; niece Kim; Lynch; his son, Walker; his partner, Jules, and her son, Dylan; and Lynch’s brother E.J.
In 2009, Lynch spoke at a Massachusetts grade school and told the story of Sister Elizabeth of Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plain, the only teacher he had who would “encourage a proper, liberating, creative approach to writing.” A serious boy came up to Lynch after his talk, handed him this paper origami nun, and said, “I thought you should have a nun. Her name is Sister Elizabeth.” Sister Elizabeth hangs in Lynch’s car to this day.
Lynch and his “champion mystery multibreed knuckleheaded hound,” Dexter, at home in Scotland in 2011. Says Lynch, “Dexter and I often put our heads together to try and fathom an unfathomable world.” Though Dexter lives with him, Lynch is allergic to dogs, and survives by petting Dexter with his feet and washing his hands multiple times a day!
Lynch never makes a move without first consulting with his trusted advisor and grandson, Jackson. This photo was taken in 2012, when Jackson was two years old, in Lynch’s home in Coylton, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Lynch later discovered his house was locally known as “the Hangman’s Cottage” because of the occupation of one of its earliest residents. One of his novels, The Gravedigger’s Cottage, is loosely based on this house.
Lynch dressed up as Wolverine for Halloween in 2012.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by Chris Lynch
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-0460-1
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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