“You want to tell us what we’re looking for?” Marshall asks as we pass the grape Freezie back and forth, and I’m shocked that Hillary actually takes a sip too and doesn’t need her own germ-free straw, which I have in my pocket just in case.
“Nope.” And I mean it. “I’m on a secret mission.” And only Dabney St. Claire can truly appreciate the meaning of how secret missions need to be kept quiet, on a need-to-know basis. And right now no one needs to know anything but me.
It’s not that I’m trying to be sneaky or stuck-up or something. It’s just, how can I tell them what I’m looking for when I am not even sure what it is I need to find? I’m on a quest.
I’m just glad I’m not on my quest alone.
picking peas
PEOPLE WILL SELL ANYTHING THEY HAVE in their basements: the good, the bad, and the moldy.
It’s clear pretty fast that some yard sales are like gold mines, while others are like a garbage truck just pulled up and dumped a load of junk on the front lawn. More than once Hillary has simply taken a look at the way the tables are laid out in the driveway and said, “Movin’ on!”
I’m really happy I asked her to be our tour guide. It’s almost eleven thirty in the morning so you know we’re like pros by now. My knapsack is starting to fill up—not heavy, just bulky because when you’re scouring for memories, they come in different shapes and sizes. I’ve spent only $4.50 and I think I’m doing pretty good. Marshall and Hillary have given up trying to guess what I’m up to, and now they’re just off sorting through piles of one thing while I make my way through the musty boxes of something else.
“Hey, Milo,” Marshall calls out from two tables away. “Check it out. Broken light sabers.”
“Great,” is all I can say, and I’m a little sorry because there’s Marshall holding up two plastic Star Wars light sabers and I’d really love to run over and have a Jedi duel with him, but I have to stay focused. I walk past a teetering stack of old records and then take a quick scan of a table laid out with mismatched dishes when I see something that makes my feet stick to the driveway tar.
I can’t move forward—and I can’t take my eyes off of the thing that’s wedged between a trophy of a little guy fishing and a greasy popcorn popper. I finally move a little closer and see that, yes, it’s a blanket. To anyone else it probably looks like just another ratty thing, but to me it’s a time machine. Something inside me drops away like an out-of-control elevator and there’s a blurry feeling in my brain as the fog swirls tight inside.
Just walk to it. Pick it up. Hold it. That’s what I tell myself to do.
The touch is fuzzy and my body gets itchy with the memory of it. I pull it off the table and let the whole thing unfold until some of it is in my arms and the rest is on the driveway. The thing that floods me is that this blanket used to be in my house—sure, maybe it’s not this exact one, but all that matters is this one looks the same. Dark green squares cover it, and within each square bright green dots have been lined up in rows and they stick up from the squares so that when you touch them, it’s like how blind people read.
And as soon as I run my fingers along the straight rows of green dots, my whole body feels weird, and the next thing I know I have grabbed the blanket and run around the side of the house, where I hide beneath the weight of what used to be.
How many times had I seen this blanket on my mother’s bed? How many naps had I taken beneath it? How could my dad get rid of such a perfect thing? I stare at the rows of dots—and then no matter how much I don’t want it to happen, I cry.
I cry because I miss her. I cry because I can’t ever stop feeling bad. . . .
“Milo?” It’s Marshall and he’s standing over me holding a Slinky that has been twisted and tangled so much, it will never walk down the stairs again. “Are you, you know . . . okay?”
First off, I feel awful that my best friend is seeing me crying and I make it seem like I’m not, which makes me cry some more. The One-Eyed Jack would never break apart in front of me, and now I feel like the balance of our whole friendship is ruined—all because of some stupid blanket.
“Yeah. I’m fine, Marsh,” I barely say. “Just . . . allergies or something. The dust. You know.”
I can tell he doesn’t know.
So he does what I would do if the roles were reversed: He walks away.
Pull it together, I hear Dabney St. Claire’s voice say inside my head. No need to fall apart now.
And though I’m used to his advice being great and stuff, this time his voice makes me tighten because it feels wrong. I can’t be okay right now. I’m wrapped in a blanket that wants me to fall apart. This blanket was her blanket, and every other time I crawled into its warmth, she was there too, ready for me to let go of the nightmares or the bad days or just to be close. This blanket is her and now that I’ve found it (or one that is pretty much the same), the only thing I know to do is . . . let myself go.
Time is funny when you’re lost in the fog, so I don’t know if it’s ten minutes or an hour that goes by. All I know for sure is that Hillary and Marshall slowly enter into where I’m staring, and they take their time sitting down next to me in the backyard of the yard sale house.
It’s kind of like I sense their presence before I see them, and by the time I make eye contact, I see my two friends, who look at me without saying a word. And we just sit that way for a while—the three of us.
“That’s a cool blanket,” Hillary finally says, ignoring the part that I was just crying and there’s some snot on it.
I nod.
“I like the bumps,” Marshall adds. “Cool bumps.”
I swallow the leftover crying stuff in my nose and then say, “I call them pea patches.” Then I run a finger over the raised green dots. “See how each square is filled with exact rows of them? And they’re totally the same color as peas.”
“Actually . . .” I’m sure Hillary is about to say something about how peas aren’t really that color or how they don’t grow in patches, but I think the Dabney St. Claire in her head tells her to just keep quiet.
And even though it’s a perfectly warm spring Saturday, I sit there wrapped tight in someone’s tossed-out blanket surrounded by a knapsack of answers and two friends who keep their questions to themselves.
“In the hospital.” I hear the sound of my voice before it becomes real. “In the hospital she got to have a blanket from home.” Sitting there, I know I’m the one telling the story but I want to listen to it too, so I pay extra attention to my words as they spill out. “On her bed in the hospital. She had a blanket like this. Just like it.”
I pull the corners tighter around my shoulders. “I don’t remember how long she’d already been in the hospital. I just know my dad had us come with him, which we’d only done one time before, and it was actually a little fun because we got to order food from the cafeteria and watch a movie together sitting around her bed, and my mom was smiling a lot even when a nurse came in and asked us all to leave for five minutes so she could do something with a needle to her. . . . And I remember looking back as the nurse pulled the curtain that goes around the sickbed, and my mom made a goofy face at me right before the curtain cut off my view.”
“Your mom was pretty silly, huh?” Hillary says this soft, like she isn’t sure she should ask me anything.
But it’s okay and I like being able to say, “Oh yeah. She was totally silly.”
Still smiling, I stare down at all the peas on the blanket and then let the story out of me. “So it’s a week later, and my dad has my sister and me come with him and I don’t ask why, but right away this time it doesn’t feel fun at all. This time the hospital smells bad, and all I see everywhere are empty wheelchairs and sick people stuck in those weird-shaped beds.”
I close my eyes and picture that day, and it’s so clear that I think I get the smell too—a mixture of cleaning stuff and something that will never smell good. “And I brought some flowers I picked in the backyard, which the nurse said
she’d put inside some water for me but I’m not sure she ever did.”
The images are all in my brain and I’m narrating the movie just like I’d do the play-by-play on a video game with Marshall, only this time there are no car crashes or alien spaceships—just me, my dad, and my sister standing in a moment stuck forever.
“So right before we go into her room, my dad bends down on a knee and I think he’s going to comb back my hair or straighten my shirt, but he just gets down so he can look at my face and he says, ‘Let’s be brave, okay, little man?’ And two things flash in my brain about what he says: ‘be brave’—about what? Are we going to fight off zombie doctors to rescue Mom? And ‘little man’? He never called me that before, and I remember how weird those words sounded. I was just this freaked-out kid standing in a stinky hospital wishing he could just wait in the car and play the radio as loud as he wants.
“But I was brave and I tried so hard to be a man, and then we walked into the room and I saw her surrounded by the pea-patch blanket. And she didn’t see us yet and she wasn’t smiling. She looked so sick, and as soon as she realized we were there, she tried to smile but I could tell she was faking it for us.”
Marshall and Hillary just listen, and I’m listening too as I stare at the blanket—it’s all I can see, and I’m staring so hard that I can make out the stitching and the individual fibers that wrap around my voice as I tell them what happened next.
“‘Milo,’ my mom said to me as I looked up at her face. ‘Milo. I’m going to be okay.’ And I nodded, not sure what ‘okay’ really meant. ‘I love you. No matter what. You know that, right?’ And that’s when I stopped looking at her. I couldn’t look up and I couldn’t say anything, and that was the last time I saw the blanket because that’s when I found out she was going to have an operation to fix everything in her brain. And I guess we were there to wish her luck—but I felt stuck and frozen and didn’t know what to do.”
Right then I hear a car horn and then some kids laughing from the yard sale side of the house, which reminds me where I am. But I don’t dare look away from the blanket to see Hillary’s and Marshall’s faces. The lump in my throat is growing, and I don’t want to start crying again even though I can tell a few tears are already dripping down my face.
“If I knew that would be the last time I had to say anything to my mom, I would’ve said more. I would’ve said, ‘I miss you.’ I would’ve said, ‘I love you.’ I would’ve said, ‘Please come home and make me supper and I don’t care even if it’s fish—I’ll eat it and never complain again.’ I would’ve climbed into that hospital bed with her and pulled the pea-patch blanket over both our heads and hugged her so tight. . . . But I couldn’t do any of that. I just stood there silent and stared at the blanket that would always be hers.”
There’s total quiet for a full minute. I think I hear Hillary sniffle a little but don’t try to look. Finally, it’s Marshall who carefully speaks up.
“And then what happened?” he asks me—not to be a doofus, just because he cares.
But I don’t answer him, and the three of us just sit there, and it isn’t until later—when I’m home alone falling asleep on the couch—that I let the answer out of the tight little box I keep wrapped up in my gut. The answer is one I’ve kept hidden away, locked up and guarded so that I would never have to hear it or say it again.
I don’t say it to Marshall. I don’t say it to Hillary. I don’t even say it to my dad. I say it to the blanket that’s now wrapped around me.
“And then . . . ,” I say out loud, listening carefully to each word. “And then she died.”
things
MY DOOR IS CLOSED TIGHT.
I’ve spread all of my yard-sale treasures out on my bed on top of the pea-patch blanket.
These are the things I bought that remind me of her:
Half bottle of red nail polish
Glass swan with neck that’s been glued back on
Candy dish shaped like a leaf
Lobster-claw pot holder
Kitchen timer shaped like an egg
Spray bottle of perfume with squeeze-bulb thingy
Three plastic drink coasters with different seasons (Winter luckily is missing)
Jewelry box with mismatched earrings and a cracked mirror inside
Fuzzy blue bathrobe with one matching slipper
Shampoo bottle that smells like summer vacation
Sunglasses with big plastic frames
Cat pepper shaker (different from the one I broke)
I stare at the things. I touch them. I close my eyes and imagine that each one really was my mom’s.
With my eyes shut tight, I can hear her voice singing in the kitchen. Smells of the perfume she used to spray into the air drift toward me. And laughter—not just hers, but all of ours, plays like a song in the background. It’s like a window somewhere is open and the fog inside lifts as fresh air blows into my brain.
But then . . .
“Milo, I—” My dad walks into my room. My eyes pop open and the magic feeling inside disappears and is instantly replaced by the fog. Whoosh.
My dad stares at my bed and all of the things I’ve placed there. I stop breathing.
“What is all this?” he asks me in a tone that does not sound promising. I try to block his view with my body, which is just a silly attempt on my part.
“Stuff,” I say. “Just stuff.” I can’t tell him the truth. I’m so scared he’ll want to throw it all away like he did before.
But he is already walking around me and he kneels on my floor, and I am shocked to watch him reach out and touch the old blanket I found. He runs his fingers over the peas.
“Dad?”
He picks up the candy dish. He touches the swan. He touches the fabric of the ratty bathrobe.
“Milo, where did all of this come from?” He sounds worried somehow, and of course I assume I am in the biggest trouble ever.
Between a fabulous lie and the truth, I choose the true part because I can’t think of anything that would sound even a little believable. “Yard sales. With Hillary and Marshall. I bought stuff that made me think of her. Of Mom.” The words tumble out hard.
And a strange thing happens. He doesn’t ask why or pick up the phone and have me committed to a hospital where doctors will ask me questions about being crazy. My father, my dad, just nods his head, and I watch the slow way it bobs up and down—almost automatic like a robot. Then he opens his arms, and the next thing I know, I am buried in him and falling deep inside his shirt and I’m crying so hard I hardly notice his tears are making my head wet too.
The smallest breeze blows through my mind—a window somewhere is open just a crack, and the fog knows enough to leave us both alone.
the grin truth
IT’S AFTER SCHOOL AND IT’S NOT A MR. Shivnesky Monday or Thursday, but still I am waiting around outside because my dad is swinging by to pick me up so we can go to the orthodontist.
Apparently, my teeth, which no one was paying attention to while my mom was dead, have kind of gone their separate ways and finally it’s time to rein them in before they migrate into someone else’s mouth.
My friends keep me company while I wait, and both give me pep talks from their own personal experiences, which is way better than the lame advice my father (who has never had a cavity in his life) gave me: “Braces are cool, Milo. You’ll see.” Braces are cool? Where do parents learn to say such dumb stuff?
“Really, Milo, braces aren’t so bad,” Hillary says, showing off her wireless teeth without meaning to. “I mean, sure there’s the pain every time they get tightened and the constant brushing and flossing part. Oh, and you get used to not being able to have popcorn or gum or chewy candy. But in the end, when you see the difference they make, it is so worth the work!”
“Work? Braces are work?” Now I am totally bummed because I was picturing braces as being much more like some sort of accessory they simply attach to you, like a bionic arm that you just use without any f
uss.
Next up is Marshall. “First things first. Forget everything Miss Perfect just said. Here’s the real deal. You eat what you want. Brush when you can. And flossing? Like, that’s just not gonna happen.”
Marshall says all this as upbeat as ever, but as he talks, I notice a huge piece of some gross green food thing lodged in his wires, and I imagine it has probably been stuck there since the day I met him eight months ago! I strain to figure out what it is, which is maybe a piece of a lime jelly bean or perhaps lettuce from an ancient taco. His mouth keeps flapping away but I don’t hear him because I can’t stop staring at this thing, and even when I look away for a second, there it is staring back at me like some alien being living in his mouth and I get the thought that it’s possible that piece of food is controlling Marshall’s brain! And if you knew Marshall, you’d agree that maybe that would explain everything!
The car horn beeps. It’s my dad and I am so dreading this. Marshall stands and salutes me; Hillary just waves and mouths the word “bye,” and I can’t help but notice how nice her teeth look.
Dr. Veerlawn’s office is downtown inside one of those old office buildings that’s chock-full of other doctor types. It’s just a first visit to assess the dental damage, but still I’m a bit on the nervous side. I relax a little when I open the glass door with Dr. Veerlawn’s name on it because the first thing I see in the waiting room is a PlayStation so I know this guy is going to be cool—even if it’s his job to twist my teeth with huge pliers.
“Milo Cruikshank,” I announce to the lady behind the check-in desk, who I notice is wearing braces even though she is a grown-up. This kind of creeps me out, so I go play a video game and wait for my dad to finish parking the car.
Milo Page 10
