Mockingbird (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

DAD SAYS IT’S TIME TO GO BACK to school so here I am.

Back in Mrs. Brook’s room.

Sitting at the little round table.

I look at the walls and not much has changed except that the mad face on the Facial Expressions Chart now has a mustache. I know because I have looked at that chart about a million times to try to figure out which emotion goes with each face. I’m not very good at it. I have to use the chart because when I look at real faces I don’t Get It. Mrs. Brook says people have a hard time understanding me because I have Asperger’s so I have to try extra hard to understand them and that means working on emotions.

I’d rather work on drawing.

Hi Caitlin,
Mrs. Brook says softly. She still smells like Dial Body Wash.

I look at the chart and nod. This means I’m listening even if there’s no eye contact.

I suck on my sleeve and stare at the chart.

I stare at the chart some more and hear myself sigh. My stomach feels all yucky like it’s at recess which is my worst subject but I take a deep breath and try to Deal With It. Finally I say,
I feel like TiVo.

She leans across the table toward me. Not too close to my Personal Space because I’ll use my words to tell her to back off if she gets too close.
Say again?

She scratches the part in her hair with her forefinger. The rest of her fingers stick up in the air and move like they’re waving. Then she stops.
I see,
she says.

I look around the room.
What do you see?
I ask.

I want to tell her that I prefer TiVo on mute and I wish she’d cooperate. But if I do it’ll start a whole Let’s Talk About It discussion so I say nothing.

The funeral must have been very difficult,
she says.

I wonder what she means. We sat in church. It was not very difficult. It was like TiVo on mute. Everyone spoke so quietly I could barely hear them and almost no one talked to me. They looked at me which I did not like and some of them even touched me which I hate but no one tried to Start a Conversation with me and no one laughed like crashing glass and there was no lightning movement and no one appeared out of nowhere and nothing happened suddenly.

Let’s Talk About It,
she says.

I turn around in my chair so I can’t see her anymore.

I know it’s difficult but you can’t keep it all inside.
She stops talking but not for long.
Did you cry at the funeral?

I shake my head. At the funeral a lot of grown-ups cried but I don’t know why. Most of them had never even met Devon. I think about how much Dad has been crying and the words jump out of my mouth.
Dad cried.

I grip the back of my chair.
I didn’t like it.

I try to think of a different answer than I don’t know because Devon says people don’t like I don’t know all that much. I don’t know why. So I try hard to focus on her question.
Did it make you uncomfortable?
I think about what is comfortable. Being completely covered by my purple fleece blanket under my bed or putting my head under the sofa cushion or reading my Dictionary. I did not have any of those things at the funeral.
Yes. I was uncomfortable.

I turn back toward the Facial Expressions Chart. I wonder how Mrs. Brook knows what he’s feeling right now. And I wonder if I’ve done something wrong.
Why?

Her head pokes forward like a turtle before she pulls it back in and says in her Nice Voice,
He misses Devon.

Oh. MISS is a strange word,
I tell her.
Have you ever looked it up in the Dictionary? There is MISS like MISS Harper the principal. There is MISS like you will MISS your bus if you don’t hurry because you have to step on every crack. And there is MISS like dead.

She does the turtle head jerk again—just barely but I see it.

He’s not completely gone anyway,
I tell her. I think about his bedroom even though the door is shut and his bike leaning against the back of the house and his chest in the corner of the living room.

Her face squishes up like she’s trying to Get It.
That’s true,
she says slowly.
A part of Devon will always be with you.

Which part, I wonder. No parts of his body are left because he was cremated. That means burned up into ashes.

I look around the air. I look down at my hands. Are parts of Devon scraping me? Is that what I’m supposed to feel? The heat is blowing from the vent in the ceiling and I feel that. But that’s only air from the furnace. Or does it have Devon in it? Where do you go when you get burned up and turn into smoke in the air? Maybe you get sucked into furnace systems and blown out through the vents. I shrug.

Can’t you still feel Devon?
Mrs. Brook asks again.

Maybe
.
I’m not sure it’s really him though. It could be anyone. What would he feel like?

I don’t want him around in a different way. I want him around in the same way. The way he was before. When he makes me popcorn and hot chocolate. And he tells me what to say and what clothes to wear and how not to be weird so kids won’t laugh at me. And he plays basketball with me. He always gives me a chance to win by tripping or moving slowly or going the wrong way when I do a fake. I can tell when he’s doing something on purpose by looking at his mouth. His lips move a certain way when he’s thinking. When he’s being sneaky his lips move a different way. But when he’s being sneaky he’s doing it to be nice to me.

That’s the Devon I want. Not the one who is floating around in the air.

A loud country music song starts playing.

It’s Mrs. Brook’s cell phone.

She doesn’t answer.

She’s using her Look At The Person behavior to look at me and I don’t like it. Also she’s not answering the phone. I can’t stand the cowboy song noise.

If you don’t answer the phone you will MISS your call,
I tell her.

She answers but her eyes still Look At The Person while she talks on the phone.

I get under the table to get away from her eyes. Mrs. Brook always wants me to look in her eyes. She says we can see emotion in people’s eyes. I can’t. Eyes always look the same to me. People’s lips move all the time though. That’s where the words come out. I can tell what people say by looking at their lips even though Mrs. Brook says that’s not the only way to find out because you can’t get a complete picture of what someone means just by looking at their lips. I can. I can read lips.

I look up at the wood on the bottom side of the table.

It’s not finished wood.

It’s raw wood.

Like Devon’s chest.

I touch it. It’s rough. I rub my finger across the wood back and forth harder and harder until a splinter cuts me. I hit the splinter back.

There is a drop of blood on the wood now. It is red and it spreads . . . seeping into a crack and bleeding across the unfinished wood.

Like Devon’s chest.

No!
I rub the wood harder and harder to try to erase the blood but it won’t go away.

I press my finger against the raw wood and rub faster and faster and it hurts but I don’t care because I want to stop the blood but it’s still there and I can’t make it stop!

Caitlin!
It’s Mrs. Brook calling from somewhere and I feel pulling on my arm but I yank my hand free.
No!
I have to erase the blood! I have to. I have to! I HAVE TO!

I can’t see or feel or hear anything except for some screaming far away.

CHAPTER 4

LIFE

I HEARD YOU HAD A TRM AT school today,
Dad says.

I stare at the covered chest in the corner.
TRM,
I say,
hmm. That Reminds Me.
I know he doesn’t mean that kind of TRM. He means the Tantrum Rage Meltdown kind. But I don’t want to talk about it.

He sighs.
Caitlin honey—

My finger hurt,
I say.
That’s why.

Also I bumped my head on the table during the TR—when my finger hurt. So it was my finger and my head. Both. That’s two things.
I continue counting in my head. Three, four, five, six.

I hear Dad’s voice but I focus on counting. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. And thinking about stuffed animals. And I want Red Dog so I get up and walk down the hall to my room which is thirteen and a half steps—more if you take little tiptoe steps so you don’t step on any of the seams in the wood. I look across at Devon’s room and wish wish wish I could go in but I know I can’t.

I hear Dad saying my name but he is in another world right now.

Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

I push my door open and wade through the clothes and books and papers and pencils and yarn and stickers on my floor and go to my bed where there are one hundred and fifty-three stuffed animals including key chains and Mc-Donald’s Happy Meal toys but the one I want is Red Dog and he is sleeping under the bed with my purple fleece blanket because Dad is too loud—thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—and I get under the blanket with Red Dog and we go to sleep while I am still counting.

 

 

When I wake up I’m hungry. I look at my Elmo clock. Elmo says it’s almost six thirty. I step out into the hall and look at the door across from mine. It’s Devon’s. Dad keeps it closed since The Day Our Life Fell Apart. I can’t open it because Dad always says when the bathroom door is closed you don’t open it and when a desk drawer is closed you don’t open it and when an envelope is closed you don’t open it unless it has your name on it. So I don’t open Devon’s door.

I wish I could go in though. I wish I could go in and say,
Devon I’m hungry,
and he’d grin so his dimples show and he’d say,
You and me both,
and we’d go find Dad and order pizza because it’s Thursday and we’d eat warm drippy extra-cheese pizza in front of
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy.
That reminds me how hungry I am so I go find Dad.

He’s sitting on the sofa staring at my charcoal pencil stain on the carpet.

It’s six thirty,
I say.

Dad doesn’t say anything.

It’s six thirty. Time to eat,
I tell him, in case he has forgotten what six thirty means.

He still doesn’t say anything.

He stares at the stain but at least he says something.
I’m not hungry.

It doesn’t matter,
I tell him.
It’s six thirty.

He sighs.
Okay. I’m glad you’re feeling better now. I’ll get dinner ready.

He shakes his head.

I cross my arms.
I don’t want that yucky spaghetti casserole again.

Okay.
He gets up slowly like he is a very old toy running out of batteries.
I’ll see what we have.

His lips turn down at the ends.
I don’t like salad. And we don’t have any dressing.

So we eat Pop-Tarts and salad with applesauce. Only I pick the salad stuff out of my applesauce and make a pile of green leaves on my napkin. And I keep my applesauce and Pop-Tart totally separate because I don’t like food mixing together or colors running into each other. It’s too hard to see what you have to Deal With if things start blurring together and getting mushy and turning into each other.

We sit at the kitchen table where I can’t see the TV which isn’t on anyway. It’s too quiet without Devon. Right now I wouldn’t even mind watching Fox Five News with the lady who talks so fast and so loud you can’t hear what she’s saying. All you can do is watch her really big hair moving around and wonder how many spiders make their nests in that thing.

Dad sniffs and I don’t want to hear him crying again so I have to be like the Fox Five News lady and fill up the silence.
I wish we could have pizza with Devon,
I say.
It’s even Thursday. Pizza day.

Dad stops eating.
Me too.
He puts his hands together and his fingers grip the backs of his hands hard. He looks at the picture on the wall between the kitchen and living room and stares at it for a while. It’s Devon in his Scout uniform at a moving-up ceremony.

Dad tilts his head at me. This means he doesn’t Get It.