Pack of Dorks (3 page)

Grandma puffed up her chest and squinted her smudgy eyes at me and then peered at her cell phone, cupped in her hand. It vibrated and beeped with a text message. She sighed and didn’t look at me again. “Lucy, I’ll be right back.”

“What do you mean?” I jumped up. “You’re supposed to take me home.”

Grandma still didn’t look at me. She put a heavy hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back onto the sticky couch. “Something happened. I need to see your mom. Be back soon.”

The security guard pushed a little button and the double doors opened. “Can I come?” I yelled after her, but the doors closed behind her. I stuck out my tongue at the security guard, but he didn’t even look up from his crossword puzzle.

A nurse must’ve given me a blanket, because when I woke up a few hours later I was covered in the thin white cloth. Grandma stood over me, her glasses clasped in her hand and her eyes red. She rubbed them with the heel of her other hand. “Come on,” she said. “Come meet your little sister.”

“She was born!” I jumped up, the blanket falling to the floor. “She’s here?”

Grandma nodded, but didn’t smile.

“Is Mom all right?” My stomach gurgled, but I don’t think it was because no one remembered to give me dinner.

Grandma nodded but still didn’t smile. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”

The guard pushed the button and the double doors opened. This time, I got to go through.

Thousands of questions—does she look like me? how big is she? what’s her name? what color is her hair? does she have hair?—trickled up to my throat, but I didn’t let any of them out. Grandma was moving so slowly, like she was suddenly old, and I found I couldn’t speak. The hall was so bright, so white, and the nurses rushed all over the place even though most of the patient rooms were dark. At the end of the hall, light spilled out from a room. I heard a cry; it reminded me of kittens that squeaked all day long for milk.
That’s our sister
, I thought.
We’re a big sister now!

And suddenly I was running. First I saw Dad, sitting in a corner, arms folded and eyes shut. Mom sat on a bed, her arms rocking slowly with a wrapped-up white-blanketed lump in her arms.

“Is that her?” I asked and my hands clapped. There was a monster bottle of instant hand wash on the wall, so I slipped off my diamond ring, put it on top of the bottle, and scrubbed my hands with the smelly sauce. See how mature being a big sister made me? No one even had to tell me to wash my hands.

“Can I see her?” I asked when no one spoke, even to congratulate me on making a good decision of disinfecting my hands.

Mom’s bottom lip shook, and she nodded. Way too slowly she lowered the lump on to her legs. She pulled back a corner of the blanket. And there she was! My sister, her face like a squashed-up tomato, her lips quivering just like Mom’s, and her hair messy brown fluff like mine.

“Hello there,” I whispered. “I’m your big sister.” I kissed the top of her forehead, and it was so much sweeter than kissing Tom. I thought only of how soft her head was, like pressing my lips to a stack of clean tissues, and how she smelled like baby wash. Clean and new.

“She’s perfect,” I whispered. “My perfect little sister. Can I hold her?”

Mom let out a weird noise, a crashy sound like stack of books dropping inside of her. Her shoulders shook, and her face crumpled. Dad rushed forward and grabbed the baby lump from her lap, putting it gently into a bassinet.

“What is it?” I asked, crying, too, even though I didn’t know why. “What did I do?”

Grandma’s heavy hand was on my shoulder again. “Nothing,” she whispered. “You did everything right. Your mom just needs some time.” Grandma squared her shoulders and spoke loudly over Mom’s sobbing. “I’m taking Lucy home. We’ll see you in the morning.” She gently touched the baby lump and turned back to the door.

“But wait!” I cried. “I don’t even know her name. What’s her name?”

Dad looked over at me, Mom’s head stayed buried in his shoulder. “We were thinking Molly.”

“Molly,” I repeated. I touched her soft head again. “Perfect.”

Grandma tugged softly on my shoulder, and we left.

“There’s something wrong with the baby.” Grandma lowered herself onto the chair across from me at the breakfast table the next morning.

“Molly.” I licked some jam off my finger. Grandma burnt the toast, so I was smearing about an inch of marmalade over the blackened top. My heart thumped a little, but mostly I felt relieved. Finally, she was talking. The whole way home from the hospital, she barely spoke and then turned on the TV as soon as we got back to her apartment. I watched
SpongeBob
until I fell asleep while she stayed out on the fire escape with her cigarettes and cell phone. “Is that why Mom wouldn’t let me hold her?”

“No, that wasn’t why.” Grandma put both elbows on the table and leaned in toward me. “I’m not sure if your parents want me to be the one to tell you, but it’s obvious that something’s up and you’re not an idiot . . .” For some reason, Grandma’s face flushed almost purple when she said idiot. Believe me, I’ve heard her say much worse.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Did you notice how her face looks a little different than yours?” asked Grandma, her eyes squarely on mine.

“She’s just squished looking from being crammed up inside Mom for a couple months.”

Grandma nodded. “But that’s not all. It looks like Molly was born with something called Down syndrome. Have you heard of it?”

I nodded, thinking of a girl in the grade ahead of me. She smiled all the time, and her face was round. Her nose was flat against her face. She didn’t talk much and spent recess on the swings. “She’s . . .” I couldn’t think of the word for it. Grandma couldn’t seem to, either.

“It’s a form of mental retardation. It means it’s going to be harder for Molly to do things, to understand and learn things, than most people. She’s going to have some other . . . issues, too, probably,” Grandma said after a long time of being quiet again. “Like her heart. It was built differently.”

“Retardation? Like retarded? But she’s okay, right? I mean, she’s going to be okay?”

Grandma nodded. “She’s okay. She’s fine. She’s just . . .”

“Different,” I finished.

Everything was different. Mom and Molly were ready to come home on Monday, and Dad said I had to skip school so we could have a day as a whole “family unit” (which made me think of robots). But, of course, Dad only said I had to skip school when I came out of my bedroom at 8:12 a.m. The bus picks me up at 8:15. He was asleep on the couch, the TV blaring away. I don’t think he moved since we got home late Sunday night. We went to the hospital to pick Mom and Molly up at 9 a.m. It was really hard not to stick my tongue out at the security guard again.

The hospital was the first time I got to see Molly since Grandma told me about her being different. She had kept me at her apartment until Dad picked me up that night. We went through the McDonald’s drive through and Dad seemed to chew more on his words than his fries.

“It’s cool, Dad,” I finally told him after he said “Molly . . .” and “the baby . . .” and “your mom and I . . .” about thirteen different times. “Grandma told me all about it. It’s cool.”

He smiled, but it was a tight, really-working-on-the-pulling-back-of-lips smile. “It’s not
cool
, but it is what it is.”

We didn’t talk any more about it and I, for once, couldn’t think of anything to say. But I was sure that once we picked up Mom and Molly from the hospital and we were all home, things would be normal again.

But I must be an idiot after all, because nothing was normal.

For starters, Mom wasn’t at all Mom-ish. Like, her eyes were puffier than her stomach, which I thought would’ve been a lot smaller now that the baby was on the outside. (But Dad said that takes time and not to mention it to Mom that I noticed.) She sat on the couch with a blanket wrapped around her and Molly in a bassinet beside her. Every time Molly made a noise, Mom pulled her close and whispered to her or fed her until she stopped whimpering. Then Dad would change her diaper. Then Mom would cry again.

There is something very, very wrong about seeing a mom cry. They aren’t supposed to do that.

Plus, the whole thing was very boring. I knew babies stay like big lumps for a few days. But I thought I’d at least get to play a little bit with her. Yet every time I came anywhere close to Molly with a rattle or a stuffed animal, Mom would tell me to back off. “She’s resting,” or “Molly is content right now.” Dad was looking up stuff on the Internet. Every time I went into his office, he closed the laptop and said he needed time “to research.”

I couldn’t watch TV because Mom and Molly needed to rest. I had left my library book at school and had nothing to read. The phone was disconnected after it rang nonstop for the first few hours we got back from the hospital. I was bored with a capital B.

A billboard-sized B.

Finally I just sat in the chair across from the couch and stared at Mom and Molly. After a few minutes of this, Mom seemed to realize that one of her daughters was, in fact, not resting or content. She cleared her throat, pulled her frizzy hair back into an ugly ponytail, and said, “So. Someone kissed you.”

Somehow I totally forgot about telling her that. I forgot about The Kiss entirely! Friday seemed like a really long time ago. I quickly pulled down my sleeve to cover my left hand, not feeling up to showing that while one kid was just being born, the other had been both kissed and given a diamond. Only my ring wasn’t on my finger. In fact, the only thing on my finger was a thin green band of skin where the ring had been.

The ring was gone.

My life was over.

Chapter Three

Dad wouldn’t take me back to the hospital for my ring. “No way in the world am I heading back there. Not for anything, especially a plastic ring from a fourth-grade boy.”

My face burned. “It’s. A. Diamond!”

“Diamond rings don’t make girls’ fingers turn green.”

I stomped my foot and growled. Dad laughed, which made me growl even louder. “Are you farting lollipops again?”

Oh, now I was really mad. Once when I was three years old and in the middle of a huge tantrum, Mom asked me if I was farting lollipops. I was so stunned by the question I had stopped mid-scream. She said the only excuse a person had for an all-out screaming fit was either having a leg fall off or farting a lollipop. Now, whenever she and Dad think I’m acting ridiculous, they ask me if one of those things is happening.