Mick Harte Was Here (5 page)

The boy started backing out of the doorway. I followed him out to the porch.

“They vomit on your bread, you know.”

The kid ended up running back to his truck. It was pretty funny, actually. In a gruesome sort of way.

That afternoon, I told our mail carrier about the time Mick put a rubber snake in the mailbox.

“You should have been there,” I told her. “The guy screamed the
s
word and threw our mail all over the sidewalk.”

Our mail carrier didn’t even crack a smile.
Instead, she informed me that putting a snake in a mailbox was a federal offense, and she wrote my name down.

“You know, you people take your jobs way too serious,” I said.

When I shut the door, my mother was standing there looking at me. There were tears streaming down her face.

“Why are you doing this?” Her voice sounded like a little kid’s.

“Doing what? What am I doing?” I tried to be cool as anything. But inside I was filling up with this awful kind of shame I’d never even felt before.

I left her standing there and went straight to my room.

Then I curled up on my bed and my stomach tied itself up in a million knots as I thought about what I had done. There was no getting around it—I had flat out spent my entire day
taunting
my mother with her dead son’s name.

What’s next, Phoebe? Want to try imitating his voice or running into her bedroom dressed in his clothes? Boy, that’d really get her, wouldn’t it?

I stared hard at the ceiling.
God
, how I hated this. All of it. Myself. My life. My new “family of three.”

Mick was dead, and in just a few days we had
all turned into people I didn’t even know. My mother was a zombie. My father was some slob in slipper socks. And I was a jolly little monster who got my kicks by tormenting Mom with my brother’s name.

I clenched my fist.

“Damn
you, Mick.
Damn
you for doing this to us,” I whispered, and then the tears started streaming down my face, too.

I
WAS STILL CRYING
when I finally reached for the phone and called Zo.

“Oh Jesus, Zoe, what’s happening to me? I swear to God, I just don’t know what’s happening.”

On the other end of the line you could practically hear Zo rolling up her sleeves to get right to work.

We started talking then. Really talking for the first time since Mick had died. Talking about my parents. And the accident. And how horrible and confused I felt inside.

And missing Mick, of course. The conversation always came back to missing Mick. And loving him. And worrying about him.

Mostly Zo just listened. Even when I started saying the same stuff over and over again, she acted like she was hearing it for the first time.

I could always talk to her after that too. Always. No matter what I was feeling.

T
HE INTERMENT
of Mick’s ashes was at four-thirty that same afternoon. We were home by five.

At midnight, I got out of bed and dialed Zoe’s number again.

I knew it would wake up her parents, but I didn’t much care. After you’ve been to your brother’s interment, waking people in the middle of the night doesn’t bother you a bit.

Zo picked up on the first ring. “H’lo?”

I didn’t say anything. She knew it was me, though. Me and Zoe sort of have a psychic thing going, sometimes.

“Phoebe?”

I nodded.

“You okay?” she asked.

I took a shaky breath.

“No.”

She came right over.

W
E GOT BLANKETS
from my bedroom and covered up on the living room couch so my parents wouldn’t hear us. But even before we were settled in, I had already started to tell her about it.

“It only took about ten minutes,” I said. “It was just a few prayers at the grave. And there were only four of us there. Just my parents and me and the minister…

“And, well, you know. The urn was there too. It was box-shaped. Except it was made out of marble or granite or something. Small, though. Like about the size of a shoe box, I’d say. Which is why it wasn’t as sad as a regular funeral, I think. ’Cause it was almost like he wasn’t even there, you know? Like there wasn’t a trace of him left, hardly.

“Only see, that’s what’s starting to get to me. I mean where
is
he, Zoe? Right now. Right at this very minute.”

She looked a little confused. “He’s in
heaven
, Phoeb. We talked about all that this afternoon, remember?”

“Yeah, but what does that even
mean …
heaven? Because see, I need to be able to
put
him somewhere, Zo. In my head, I mean. I need to be able to close my eyes and picture him and know he’s okay. And just saying the word heaven doesn’t help that much. Because like what is heaven, exactly? And where is it? And what do you do there?”

Zoe shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I always
just figured it was up. Like in the clouds or something.”

I stared at her curiously. “That’s what you actually
think
, Zo? You actually think that after you die, you float up to the clouds? And do what? Sprout a halo and play the harp?”

She frowned. “Don’t make fun of me, Phoebe. It’s just that I’ve never thought much about heaven’s specific location, okay? And anyway, the important thing is that heaven is where God is.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, but that still doesn’t
tell
me anything, Zoe. I mean what does it look like there? And what in the world do you do all day?”

Things didn’t get better. Zoe said, “You do God stuff.”

My mouth practically dropped open with that one.
“God stuff?
What the heck is God stuff? You mean like right now you think Mick is reading Bible stories, and going around saying ‘Peace be with you,’ and junk? Because that’s a little hard to believe, don’t you think? Especially considering he got suspended from choir practice last year for tap dancing on the piano.”

Zoe flopped back on her pillow. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll say it. That way, you won’t have to keep mocking me …”

We didn’t talk for a while after that.

“I’m sorry, okay?” I said finally. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you. It’s just that everyone seems to have all these easy answers. Only none of them make any sense to me.

“Like my nana from Florida keeps saying this is all part of God’s plan for Mick. And we’re not allowed to question the plan, or think that maybe the plan stinks. We just have to accept it. Period. The end.

“And my other grandmother says that God must have needed Mick more than we did. Only what kind of a selfish God is that? To just snatch somebody away from the people who love him? Not to mention the fact that it’s a little hard to believe that the most powerful being in the entire universe needs a seventh-grader who can’t even program a VCR without screwing up the TV.”

Zoe frowned in thought. “So maybe your grandmothers are wrong,” she said. “Maybe Mick’s accident wasn’t planned at all. Maybe it was a real, honest-to-goodness accident, and God is just as sad about it as everybody else.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Well, that’s sort of what I’ve been thinking too. Only that would mean that God had no control over it. And if God has no control, then he can’t be all that powerful, can he?
Unless, of course, he makes it a rule not to interfere in our lives or something. Or who knows? Maybe there isn’t a God at all. Only I don’t even want to
consider
that option right now.

“The point is, there’s no way to know any of this stuff for absolute, positive sure. Just like there’s no way to know what Mick’s doing right now. Or who he’s with. Or if he’s lonely. Or scared.”

I stopped for a second. “You don’t think he’s scared, do you, Zo? ’Cause I hate it when I think about that. But the idea keeps coming into my head. And I can’t get it to stay away.”

Just then my throat began to ache the way it does when you’re trying not to cry. “Or maybe he’s not even out there at all. I mean maybe he’s just gone, period.”

I swallowed hard. “Oh God, Zo. I want so bad to know he’s okay. But I keep trying to picture him in my head. And I can’t. ’Cause I just don’t know where to put him anymore.”

Zoe reached out her arms to me. And when she did, I caved in. Totally, I mean. Sobbing out of control.

She rubbed my back and waited for the worst of it to be over. And then, out of thin air, these magical words came out of her mouth.

“Put him everywhere, why don’t you?”

It stunned me when she said that. I don’t know why, exactly. But when I looked at Zoe’s face, I could tell that she was almost as surprised as I was.

She shrugged. “It just sort of came to me,” she said. “But it makes sense, don’t you think, Phoeb? Because like if God is everywhere the way they say he is, and Mick is with God, then Mick could be everywhere too.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Couldn’t he?”

For a second I couldn’t even answer. I was still just so amazed, you know? At how
right
it felt.

“Then he could
hear
me, Zoe,” I whispered. My stomach filled with butterflies.

Slowly, I leaned back on the couch and tried to let it all sink in.

At the other end, Zo pulled the blankets up around her chin. And for a long time neither of us said a word.

I thought she had fallen asleep, when I felt her tap me on the foot.

“Phoeb?”

“Yeah?”

“I could be wrong, you know. He could just be up in the clouds tap dancing on God’s piano.”

I hit her with my pillow.

T
HE MEMORIAL SERVICE
was on Saturday.

Like I said, there was never any doubt that Mick had wanted to be cremated. He’d made up his mind about it last year when my Great-grandmother Harte died.

He and I weren’t really that close to our great-grandmother. She’d been in a nursing home for most of our lives, and she was over ninety when she died. So I can’t say that I grieved that much. Or at all, actually.

Mick was more upset than I was. As soon as she was gone, he started feeling guilty that he hadn’t spent more time with her.

“I should have gotten you to take me out there more often,” he told Pop. “I could have taught her how to play Pictionary or something.”

But even though Mick felt bad that she had died, the thought of going to her funeral gave him the creeps. The morning of the service, he told my father that Great-grandmother had appeared to him in the bathroom mirror and told him she didn’t want him to come.

Pop put his hands on Mick’s shoulders, and said a bunch of stuff about “looking life’s difficult moments squarely in the face and coming out a better man.”

Then he gave Mick a hearty squeeze and said, “In other words … go put on your suit.”

The funeral was at the chapel in the nursing home. The casket was open. So you could see the body. That’s what they call you after you die, by the way. They call you “the body.”

When Mick first saw it from the hall, he actually gasped.

“Oh God, she’s … she’s
there!”
he said.

The next thing I knew, he was squatting down by the entrance, taking these real deep breaths like he had just run a marathon or something.

“Ho boy, ho boy,” he said. He was sweating like a pig.

Pop tried to pick him up. But Mick stayed frozen in his squatting position, so my father was forced to set him back down.

“Don’t make me go in there, Pop,” he begged. “I mean I realize a lot of people are okay with this sort of thing. But I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not handling this with the dignity we had both hoped for.”

My father told him to get a grip. “The only way to conquer your fears is to face them head-on,” he said.

Then he picked Mick up again and shook him a little bit till his legs unfolded. After that, he took him by the hand and led him inside.

Big mistake.

By then Mick had worked himself into such a state of panic that when he saw the body up close in her curly wig and red hat, he became sort of mesmerized, you know? He couldn’t take his eyes off her. But it wasn’t until he spotted the lace hankie in her hand that the pressure really got to him.

I felt him tap me on the shoulder.

“Do you think she’ll be blowing her nose anytime soon?” he blurted.

Then he busted out in this wild hysterical laughter that I knew he had no hope of controlling.

My father snapped his fingers at him. So loud you wouldn’t believe. And since Mick couldn’t quit laughing, Pop just kept snapping and snapping, until it sounded like he was keeping time to the funeral music that was being piped in over the loudspeaker.

Finally, my mother grabbed my father’s hand to stop him, and told Mick to please wait outside until the ceremony was over.

On the way home, my father started a lecture on humiliating your family in public.

Mom told him to knock it off. “This isn’t Mick’s fault, Ed. He told you he couldn’t handle it and you insisted on dragging him in there anyway.” Then she rolled her eyes and added, “And ye gods … that
snapping.”