Outside In (5 page)

“This is the easiest book in the world,” Aimée said, embarrassed at being caught with an I Can Read book in her hand.

“Yes, but it’s the best.” I settled down to listen to the story about Little Bear’s mother making him warm clothes to wear and daydreamed about the things I would make for the elves.

That night, when Aimée was asleep, Mom and Dad had their first loud argument about the house. Up until then I hadn’t thought about what having a new baby would mean, other than that Mom might be throwing up at odd times.

“What if we added on?” Dad was asking. He had graph paper spread across the dining room table and was drawing plans, using the mechanical pencil he used at work. I could
see his hairy hand going over the paper when I craned my neck around the corner of the landing.

I couldn’t resist: I went downstairs to say one more good night. Dad stopped and showed me the plans: There was an addition out the back, where the swing set stood, that would be a den downstairs. There was an addition out the side, a little sunroom for Mom (it included a shelf for an aquarium). My favorite was a plan for the attic that involved splitting the whole space into three equal-size bedrooms for Aimée and the new baby and me.

I trudged back upstairs, wishing my elf house drawings looked like Dad’s design, which sat on the paper looking solid, like something that really could be built. Not much like mine, which were more real in my head. Dad drew, and he and Mom talked and discussed until suddenly it got so loud I came out of my room and stood on the stairs to hear what they were saying. If Aimée woke up, this would be a rotten way for her to find out about the baby. Things being what they were with Aimée, Mom and Dad weren’t going to tell her, “until they had to.” Somehow she stayed asleep, but I didn’t even try.

“Why does it have to be this house?” Mom yelled.

“Because this is our house,” Dad exploded right back. “There’s plenty of space to work with, right under this roof.”

“The attic would be too hot for bedrooms,” Mom protested. “Have you been up there lately? It’s June, and the place is already a steam bath.”

“So we’ll go to plan B,” Dad said calmly.

“It takes up the whole yard! The kids need more space, not less.”

“They’ve got the whole circle to play in,” Dad said.

“That’s not our property, Pat. And I can’t take the baby over there every day. He needs his own backyard to play in.”

“There’ll be enough space for one baby.”

Mom was silent.

“Then plan C is the answer,” said Dad.

“It’s too close to the fence. It’ll never get approved, and you know it.”

“There’s something else I know, Mitchie. You’re not going to find anything right with any of these plans.”

Mom said something I couldn’t hear.

“Michelle, we’re not going to put it on the market. And we’re not going to paint it. Not until we’ve thoroughly explored the possibilities of what we can do here.”

“I don’t want to do anything here!” Mom yelled.

I heard the thud and flutter of the pad of paper being flung down, Dad’s steps pounding down the basement stairs, a record going on in the distant basement. Sound vibrations came up through the walls as I crept back to bed.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE ARGUMENT,
I got dressed for school before eating, backward from my usual routine, because I wanted to delay going to the kitchen. When I finally got there, things were as I had feared. Dad was nowhere in sight. Mom sat hunched over her toast on a stool at the counter. Was she crying or just trying to stop herself from throwing up? The dry toast was supposed to help. Poor Mom.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and waited for something to change. Nothing did, until Aimée came down the stairs behind me and said loudly, “What are you doing, Chérie?”

Mom turned and saw us. It was worse than I’d feared. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying all night.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Aimée’s voice was almost panicked. This wasn’t the way Mom was going to tell her about the baby, I hoped.

Mom didn’t seem to focus on either of us. She put her hands to her eyes, wiped tears into her palms, held her
hands out from her head to dry them. “Bobby Kennedy has been shot,” she said.

“Who’s Bobby Kennedy?” Aimée asked.

At the same time, I said, “Is he dead?”

The basement door opened just then, and Dad said, “JFK’s brother. He was running for president.”

“Is he dead?” I asked again, louder this time.

“They haven’t said yet,” Dad said.

Mom looked from Aimée to me with such a tired face. She couldn’t begin to explain. She said to Dad, “When does it end?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said tenderly. Not mad, then?

“JFK was John F. Kennedy,” Mom told Aimée. “He’s the president who got killed.”

“Shot?”

“Of course, stupid,” I said. Aimée never paid attention to anything except what was right in front of her or in her own head. Scared of tickling and open sewer drains and riding a bike, but not of all the bad news. Why, ever since Dr. King had been killed, people had done nothing but talk about him and JFK. Shot, like Bobby. And dead.

“The world is a wicked place,” said Dad in a voice that gave me a twinge like a pinch in my stomach.

“Pat,” said Mom, to stop him.

Aimée and I noticed the clock and ran for the door. Halfway down the steps I realized I still had the hairbrush in my hand. I ran back up and into the living room to drop it on the couch. I heard Dad say, “Nobody’s safe, Mitch. Nobody.”

I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything or brushed my teeth, but I spun around and sped off to school. Since I’d heard Mom say the word
shot,
my stomach had been getting
smaller and smaller, and I knew nothing would fit inside it.

In English our class was reading “The Raven.” Well. You couldn’t grow up in Michelle Witkowski’s house without knowing more than a few lines of that scary poem about a creepy bird that came to the poet’s door one night. I had always loved the delicious way it made my skin crawl. I knew the whole thing practically by heart. But I stuck my hand in the air when Mr. Bergstrom hadn’t even finished telling us what page to turn to. “Are we reading this poem because of Bobby Kennedy?”

Mr. Bergstrom blinked at me. “Not intentionally,” he said. “It’s on the schedule, see?” Behind him on the board, it read: “Tuesday, poem.”

“It could be any poem!”

“It’s a poem by Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. He’s a poe-et. Get it?”

Oh. I realized that the word on the board wasn’t
poem,
but
poe-m.
Har-de-har-har.

“I already know it,” I said.

“Well, whoopedy-doo for you,” said Dave Asconti from three rows over.

“I know it by heart,” I insisted. “Couldn’t I just go to the library while you read it?”

“Are you serious, Chérie?” Mr. Bergstrom studied me with anxious blue eyes behind his glasses.

I looked straight ahead, and recited quickly, clearly:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“Tis some visitor!’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.’”

Mr. Bergstrom watched me, shrugged, then nodded. “Go.”

I went to the school library and found a book on machines. It was full of careful drawings of pulleys, levers, gears, and seesaws with arrows showing which way the motion went. I hung over the book, using a fingertip to figure which way an elf that was standing on each piece would move when the piece moved. But there was a little shiver in my bones as I stood there, and I couldn’t not think of what was happening to Senator Kennedy—if he was already dead even now, and where the man was who’d shot him.

Once, when Mom’s voice had made shudders run all the way up my back, I had asked, “What does the raven want, Ma?”

“He’s Death,” Dad had said grimly, in a voice like the one he’d used today when he said, “Nobody’s safe.”

“Lord, Pat,” Mom had said, and laughed.

I shivered and tried to concentrate over the sounds of the first-grade class coming into the library for story time.

That night the headline on the
Bridgefield Bell
wrapped all the way across the front page, fat and black:
KENNEDY IN ‘EXTREMELY CRITICAL CONDITION.’
He was still alive, with a bullet in his head. I rolled the headline quickly out of
sight and into a red rubber band and folded the other twenty-eight papers without reading.

Up Marvin to Chauncey, around the corner to Onion Lane, and back up the other side of Marvin and then the other side of Chauncey, and a sprint back home. I thought I could avoid the news, but somehow I needed to know. Back home I sat next to Mom and read about the man who had walked up to Kennedy and shot him.

“I got out of English today,” I said. “We were reading ‘The Raven.’”

“Oh?” Mom said. “‘Once upon a midnight dreary’?”

“Right,” I said. “I didn’t want to hear it today, Mom. Do you understand?”

Mom looked into my eyes and ran a hand across my braids, squeezing them on the back of my neck. I leaned my head on Mom’s shoulder and felt her hand slide under my chin. I dreaded going to school the next day. I wanted to stay home, where it was safe.

The next morning the news was still grim, but he was still alive. I went to the library for the second half of the “Raven” lesson. The school librarian, Mrs. Pease, picked up the library phone and said something about Robert Kennedy, then got up and walked out of the library, leaving us kids to tear up the encyclopedia or climb the walls if we wanted to. I chased her down the hall, my sketch pad and my drawing of a Popsicle stick stairway flapping in my hand. “Mrs. Pease!” I said. “What about Bobby Kennedy?”

Mrs. Pease seemed to think twice, said my name and grade and age to herself before saying quietly, “He died this morning.”

I knew it before she said it. Mrs. Pease looked dazed. She
said, “Sorry, dear,” and turned toward the office, then: “You get back to your class now.”

I waited till she was gone, then walked away from the library, past classrooms, past the band room, past the art room. When I got to the playground door, I walked right out.

I crossed the playground and headed toward home.

All the way across the playground I expected to hear voices behind me, noise at my back, angry, indignant, bossy, stopping me from making my escape. I was astonished when none came. Was I invisible? I felt mixed, a glow of accomplishment and the stomachache-nervous knowledge that I hadn’t been missed.

I couldn’t go home a whole hour and a half early. As it was, Mom was going to wonder what had happened to my book bag and my lunch box. I hurried to the maze of stairways and balconies that was Cherry Square, the shopping center across the street. I walked as fast as I could without running, until I got to the stairs that ran down the back of the building. I sat there, drew in my sketchbook, and waited to hear school bells and kids’ voices.

It was Dave Asconti whom I heard, his voice like a donkey’s—loud, clear, and sudden—braying. “I know what you did, Chérie. Wait till Mr. Bergstrom finds out!”

I stood up when I heard Dave’s voice and dropped my book onto the cement step. He was upstairs, one flight above me.

“I saw you skip out of school.” You would think Dave Asconti had never done anything wrong all his life, to hear him.

“So?”

“You won’t get away with it.”

“What do
you
care?”

I turned away from him, my arms across my chest.

“I’m just warning you, Chérie,” he called down at me.

“I’m going home,” I said.

“Let’s go downtown,” he said. He was hanging over the rail, looking at me, his eyes like night.

I looked around. There wasn’t a clock. “I can’t. I—”

“It’s still early,” he said.

“How early?”

He glanced over his shoulder, embarrassed. “When I saw you leave, I decided to skip out, too. It’s ridiculous in there, Chérie. All the teachers are blubbering about the Kennedys.”

“And Martin, too,” I said.

“Martin!” He imitated me. “Dr. King to you.”

“My mother calls him Martin,” I said.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t call him Martine.” He jumped over the rail and landed beside me.

That wasn’t how Martin would sound in French, even if Mom did say it Frenchly. “How did you get out?” I asked. I could smell him sweating, not as cool as he thought.

“Went to the lav, then just left,” he said, acting as if it didn’t matter.

I took off my glasses, pulled the tail of my shirt out of the waist of my skirt, and wiped the glasses clear. I tried not to let Dave hear me sniff, keeping the tears inside.

I said, “I just want to go home.”

When I stood up straight, Dave’s face was close. “Come on then,” he said. “Race you.”

We ran down Marvin Road, Dave in his brown lace-up school shoes, his legs pumping. It was slower going for me in my slippery saddle shoes and flying plaid skirt.