Crash (10 page)

I heard something outside. I looked out my window. Abby was slamming sticks into the wheelbarrow. The pile was shrinking.

My father had won.

That night, when the mouse thing started to wear off, my mind went back to the football game, to Scooter, to the tackle.

Why did I do it?

I was just being me, that’s all. The Crash Man.

I mean, it’s true I was a little mad at Scooter all week. It
was
his fault that he pressed the wrong button on the camcorder and none of the film turned out, so there was no movie of the day I broke the single-season scoring record.

Okay, so I was a little upset about it. Who wouldn’t be? But that’s not why I tackled him.

That night I heard him telling stories and Abby laughing in his room. They called for me. I said I was busy.

Real late, after midnight, I got out of bed and went down the hallway. The house was silent. All the bedroom doors were closed.

As quiet as I could, I turned his doorknob, pushed open the door. The edge of the hallway light rolled up the bedspread like some little sunrise. When it got to the head of the bed, I almost croaked—it wasn’t him. It was my sister.

I closed the door. I went back down the hall. It felt like the pictures on the wall were looking at me. I opened my sister’s door. There he was. Abby must have fallen asleep in his bed, so he just switched rooms with her.

I stood at the doorway, looking. He was sleeping on his back. He wore a tank-top undershirt. And he was old. I had never seen it before, not in the kitchen, not at the football games, not when he took us places. But now, sleeping in the bed of my ten-year-old sister, on her Sylvester sheets and Tweety pillowcase, he was just about as old as anybody I ever saw.

I didn’t like it. I closed the door and went back to bed. I hadn’t used my night-light for a long time. I turned it on. I had a hard time getting to sleep. I wanted them back in their right rooms.

The next day, when I checked the backyard, the woodpile was gone. Where it used to be was now Abby’s old dollhouse.

D
ECEMBER 19

Scooter is in the hospital.

D
ECEMBER 23

It happened last Saturday.

When I woke up that morning, I heard a hammer going. It was outside, but it sounded pretty close, so I leaned over to my window, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out. Scooter was in the cherry tree, hammering nails into boards. I figured he was making the observation post Abby had been pestering me about.

I lay back down. I went to sleep.

When I opened my eyes again, I had this funny feeling, like, I didn’t just wake up regular, but something had made me wake up. I looked at my door. It was shut. Nobody in my room. Everything was quiet… quiet…

No hammering.

I jumped to the window. He was sitting on the ground, his back up against the tree trunk, and the first thing I felt was, Great, he’s okay. But questions blew the relief away. Why was he sitting there? Why did he leave that board dangling from
one nail above his head? Why was the hammer five feet away in the grass? Why wasn’t he moving?

Downstairs Abby screamed. I heard the back door open, saw her race across the brown grass, stood there at my window as she raced back to the house, as the ambulance came and the men in white pants and the stretcher with gray straps and the flashing red lights and the siren that sounded like a kazoo going farther and farther away.

It was a stroke. That’s what they told my parents. My sister and I aren’t allowed to see him.

A stroke is when an artery in the brain breaks and blood pours out, my dad says. They don’t know how long he’s going to be in the hospital. They don’t know how messed up he’ll be. They don’t even know if he’s going to live.

They don’t know anything.

Like every year, the Christmas tree stands in a corner of the living room. Like every year, all it has on it are white lights and teddy bears. You believe it? “When you have a home of your own, you can decorate your tree any way you want,” my mother says, every year.

I got news for her. I’m gonna be outta here a lot quicker than she thinks. One minute after I graduate from high school I’ll be in my own apartment, me and Mike. And the lights on
our
tree will be all different colors, and there’ll be all kinds of balls and tons of tinsel, you’ll think the tree was silver. And on
top of the tinsel, popcorn, strings of it, ropes of it, wrapping around the tree like a mummy.

There’s lights strung across the street downtown, and Santa Clauses hanging from the lamp posts. At the mall they keep playing the same songs over and over. If I hear “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” one more time, I’m gonna do a Christmas barf. The stores in the mall have fake snow in the window corners, like I’m supposed to believe it snowed through the roof, right?

The Webbs came over one night, all three of them. With food—like, what, we can’t feed ourselves?

My mother invited them in and told them to sit down. She acted like the food was a big deal. She gave them cookies, Christmas cookies that Scooter had made, including chocolate macaroons that he made just for me.

For once, the Happy Little Surprise was not his usual cheery perky self. He sat on the sofa between his grandparent-looking parents. I didn’t talk to him except to grunt at some of his dumb questions. Mostly I glared while he ate my chocolate macaroons.

And I entertained myself by trying to picture what he might get for Christmas. Maybe a nice shirt from Second Time Around with only two holes in it. And a nice string bean from Aunt Mabel and an oatburger from Uncle Harvey. And a nice BAN ALL MALLS AND WARS decal to paste across his forehead.

I didn’t touch a crumb of food they brought over.

Christmas is the day after tomorrow. I woke up thinking: You didn’t buy him a present yet. That means you don’t expect him to live.

Then that same thought rolled over and showed me what was beneath it: Every minute that you don’t get him a present, he’s a minute closer to dying. You’re killing him.

I threw on my clothes—no socks, no underwear, no jacket—in nothing flat and was out the door. I hopped on my bike and tore up the street. I pedaled for blocks. I burst into the first store-looking place I came to.

There was a lady behind a computer. It didn’t look like a store on the inside. I gasped, “You got presents? Christmas presents?”

She looked at me funny. “I don’t think so. This is a law office—”

Two seconds later I was in the next place. This one was a store. I didn’t have time to shop around.
It doesn’t matter what you buy. Just buy now!
I grabbed the nearest thing off the counter. It was a pair of bright red high-heeled shoes with glitter all over and a red bow in front.

“How much?” I said.

The lady behind the counter just stared.

I shoved the shoes in her face and yelled: “How
much?”

She blinked. “Six dollars.”

I pulled out my ten and slammed it down. She took it. She pressed buttons on an old wooden cash register. The register pinged, and a sign saying ten dollars shot up. I took my first
breath of the morning. I took the bag from the lady. I closed my eyes, and I swear I saw, or felt, right at that moment something dark and ugly and bottomless back away from a certain hospital door in Springfield.

When nobody is in the house, I go to his room sometimes and sit on the bed.

D
ECEMBER 29

They moved him to a regular hospital room. Some doctor said he’s going to be okay. The more I hear, the more it sounds like “okay” means “not dead.”

My mom says he has to learn to walk again. She says he doesn’t talk too good, and he doesn’t remember stuff. I stopped asking her what else is wrong. I don’t want to know.

Christmas stunk.

We did all the usual things, but it was like, I don’t know, pizza without pepperoni. For the first time in my life I had to be woken up Christmas morning.

As usual, my parents had Christmas tapes playing when we came downstairs. For a minute there I thought I was at the mall. The songs are always by the same singers, like a couple of prehistoric baboons named Perry Como and Bing Crosby. Perry? Bing? Do you believe the names people had in the old days?

Our piles were bigger than ever. I got a Dan Marino football. I got my own VCR and two tapes to add to my collection:
Swamp Thing
and
Sports Bloopers.
I got a game for my Nintendo
and L.A. Raiders stuff: jacket, wristbands, and cap. And a bunch of other clothes.

It was weird. All day long there were times when I forgot, when it all seemed regular. But it never lasted. It was like there was this grinning, twisted little demon following me around, and whenever I started to feel good, it would go, “Ah-hah! You’re forgetting!” and it would whack me with a two-by-four.