Second Fiddle (6 page)

“I don’t care. Salad? Peas and carrots? How was your day?”

“Surprisingly quiet,” Mom said. She slid the skillet onto
the stove and turned on the heat. “They must have been expecting something that didn’t happen. They staffed up the emergency room today and even had the Life Flight helicopter ready to go.”

“I wonder what’s up,” I said. When the base went on alert, Dad always worked a ton of overtime like he’d done last night, but they didn’t always put people on extra shifts at the hospital. I opened the fridge and set a head of lettuce and a cucumber on the counter.

“Where’s the colander?” I said after I’d checked in all the usual places.

“Sorry, honey. I packed it already.”

Mom was an early packer. We weren’t moving for two and a half weeks, but she already had a stack of sealed and labeled boxes in the dining room. I could always tell when Dad got PCS orders, because the house smelled like moving boxes. I hated that smell.

“Hey, Mom, some of these oranges are rotten. Do you want me to run them out to the garbage before the boys get into them?”

“Thanks, honey.”

I bagged up four perfectly good oranges and took them outside. I set them in a corner of the boot box Mom always kept on the right side of our front door so Dad wouldn’t track his muddy boots into the house. I thought about my soldier sitting alone in the dark eating our chocolate bars for dinner. I wondered what the officers who’d tried to kill him
were doing. Did they feel guilty? Were they afraid of being caught? They hadn’t even posted a lookout or acted very sneaky on the bridge. What made a person so hard-hearted that they just threw a human being away like he was garbage? I hugged my arms across my chest and headed back inside, making a mental list of the things my soldier would need.

“So is it the usual no-Dad routine tonight?” I said when I got back to the kitchen.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Mom turned away from the skillet to pop hamburger buns into the toaster.

“Well, what kind of cake did you get?”

“They were all out of chocolate Sachertortes and the kind with cherries, so I got the Mozartkuchen instead.”

“With the hazelnuts?”

“And whipped cream.” Mom smiled.

She ate sweets when Dad was gone. It was her thing, sweets and reading grocery-store novels in bed. The boys got a story from me instead of Dad, and they got to fall asleep on the sofa. I got to stay up late and listen to any radio station I liked.

Here’s the secret I never told anyone: I liked it better when Dad was gone.

After supper, Mom ran a tub and tortured the boys with hot water and soap. I didn’t know exactly what went on in there, but it involved four towels, a bucket of toy whales, and a lot of yelling. But at least when I got them on the sofa,
they smelled like toothpaste, and they were wearing clean pajamas.

Kyle was first out of the bath, and he always picked
Green Eggs and Ham
. I hated Dr. Seuss! Would it kill the man to use a two-syllable word? But Kyle was the snuggler in the family, and I could put up with the doctor for ten minutes of babybrother snuggles. Kyle dragged along his old blanky from back when he loved bears more than anything. He was too big for a blanky now, but last Thanksgiving, Dad was in the field and Kyle was missing him really bad. So I sewed an extra set of Dad’s name and rank patches to the corner of his blanket. Whenever Dad worked past his bedtime, Kyle got out the blanket, tucked it tight around his body, and carefully traced our name and the three stripes up and three stripes down with a star in the middle for Dad’s rank.

I opened up Dr. Seuss, and Kyle wiggled his bony shoulders under my arm and rested his head under my chin. I read and pointed to the words and made him say the last word in each line. I stopped the story to yawn a couple of times toward the end, because it made him sleepy, and then after the story, we prayed. But I secretly changed the words, because what idiot put in the part about dying? Somebody who hates kids, I bet. So we ended the prayer, “If I should sneeze before I wake, oh, what a goopy mess I’d make.” Much better. Kyle settled deeper into my lap and twirled his fingers in the ends of my hair. A minute or two later he was making little-boy snores.

Meanwhile, Tyler was at the bookshelf worrying over which of his five hundred volumes of Encyclopedia Brown we should read tonight. Tyler was not a snuggler. When Dad was gone, he slept with Dad’s compass hung around his neck on a green bootlace. Tyler handed me
Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man
and sat at the far end of the sofa. He flipped open the compass and lined it up with true north. He stretched his legs out straight and pressed the bottoms of his bare feet up against mine, because we were secretly sole mates. I would totally not do this, but it was kind of sweet, and he had just had a bath. I read him a mystery, and he told me the solution and every fact in the story that had a clue in it.

When the story was done, Tyler tucked himself in with one of those green army blankets that everyone has a hundred of. He cradled the compass in his hands and took bearings on the TV, the dinner table, the desk, the stack of clean laundry in the corner, and the painting Dad got for Mom in Venice. Sometimes Tyler took forever to fall asleep. Tonight I had to get him out of the way before Dad got home, or I’d never get anything packed. I picked up my science book and read out loud in my sleepiest voice about igneous and metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. In just over ten minutes the magic of science had done its work.

“Did we win?” Mom walked into the living room with another basket of laundry to fold.

I smiled and slid Kyle off my lap. “Victory is ours.”

Mom had let her hair down and was wearing her favorite sweats and fluffy socks. “Tea and cake?”

She was in a mood to chat; I could tell.

“Gee, Mom, I’m sorry, but I’ve got stuff to do for science, and I need to practice tonight, too. Can you just wrap up my half? I’ll have it at lunch tomorrow.”

“Sure, sweetie.” Mom went over to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the row of romance novels. She pulled a paperback from the shelf and set it on the coffee table. She scooped Kyle up off the couch and carried him into the boys’ room.

I opened the door to my room, tossed my science book on my desk, and unlatched my violin case. I plucked each of the strings. Figures, Kyle knocked my E string out of tune. I spun the fine tuner to the right, plucking until I heard it hit the right pitch. I tucked the violin under my chin and started in on Pachelbel’s Canon. I loved the sound of the piece. In my mind’s ear I could hear all three of us playing, Vivian four measures ahead and Giselle an octave lower and four measures behind. I stopped before my favorite part with all the runs of sixteenth notes, because I didn’t want to think about never playing that piece together again.

I switched over to the canon I had composed for Giselle and Vivian. I ran through the first violin part thinking of the soldier and why his officers would try to kill him. Dad’s known a few mean officers, and one or two lieutenants who weren’t very smart, but murder? There had to be something behind it.

I played my canon again a little bit faster. Maybe he’d done something wrong or committed a crime? Or maybe he’d witnessed a crime, and they were covering it up. That’s how it would go if this were a movie. I glanced up at my notebook on the music stand. The trickiest part of the composition was coming up. When it was done, I rosined my bow again and flipped pages to the second violin part. Was it against the law for an American to help a Soviet soldier? Could it be like treason or aiding and comforting an enemy? Or maybe it was a crime not to help. Germans had a Good Samaritan law that said you had to stop and give aid if you saw an accident on the road. I couldn’t just let him drown, but now what?

When I came to the slow part of my piece, I worked on my vibrato. Maybe tomorrow we could get his side of the story—if he made it through the night. I had to find a few minutes at least to get together some food, but what if Mom decided to stay up for Dad? Then they’d get to talking about whatever was on her mind. They might stay up late and watch the news and the Johnny Carson show. I’d never get anything done.

I switched back to the opening of Pachelbel’s Canon and practiced it even slower than the music called for. I projected my sleepiest thoughts into the living room. It worked. After ten minutes, Mom tapped on my door and said, “I’m going to turn in now, Jody. Your cake is in the fridge. Don’t stay up too late, sweetie.”

“Okay, Mom, good night.”

Mission accomplished! I wrapped my violin and bow in a spare pillowcase and slid them under my bed. I tiptoed down the hall and got the box of MREs that we kept in the bottom cupboard for emergencies. There was room for maybe six ready-to-eat meals plus the oranges in my violin case.

What else would he need? I went into the bathroom and rolled up half a roll of toilet paper as small as possible. There was a spare toothbrush in the back of the drawer, and Mom bought Band-Aids in bulk for my brothers, so I snagged a handful plus the sliver of soap that was in the soap dish. I set out a fresh bar so no one would miss it.

What else would a guy with a broken leg want? Duh, something for pain. I got out the bottle of Tylenol, but what he really needed was the Tylenol with codeine that Mom kept locked up. I got the key out of the hiding place in the kitchen and unlocked her rolltop desk. The pain medicine was in the drawer on the right, but my hand froze over a stack of house ads.

Mom must have picked them up from the base housing office. I turned on the desk lamp. Houses, real houses, with yards. I flipped through pages and pages of ads. They were all colors, three bedrooms mostly, with garages and gardens. One of them had four bedrooms, and toward the end of the stack there was one with a tree house in the backyard. I would have committed murder to have a tree house of my
own when I was seven. That one was in Killeen, Texas. It sounded familiar; there must be an army base nearby.

I took the ad with the tree house over to the bookshelf and got out our American road atlas. I had just found the Texas page when I heard Dad’s boots in the stairwell outside. Rats! I dropped the atlas, yanked open the drawer, and grabbed the prescription bottle with the painkillers. I twisted off the cap and dumped the pills into my hand. There were more than a dozen left. I’d better only take seven.

Dad put his key in the lock. I dropped the pills into the top of my left sock, put the rest back into the bottle, and slid the drawer shut just as Dad came in. Shoot, he’d hear me close the rolltop desk. I grabbed a handful of the house pages and ran to sit on the sofa.

“Hey, Jo, thanks for waiting up for me.” Dad set his briefcase on the coffee table and collapsed onto the other end of the sofa. He looked terrible. He groaned as he bent over to unlace his boots. “What a long day. Is your mom asleep?”

I nodded. Dad tugged off his polished black boots and pushed them under the coffee table instead of taking them back outside to the boot box. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. His hands were three-pots-of-coffee jumpy.

“Hungry?”

Dad shook his head. He never ate when he was worried. “How was your day?”

I could have told him about the wounded soldier then. I should have. Dad would have fixed everything. He’d
saved lives before, twice in Vietnam and once in a training accident last year. It could have all been different. Later, in a room full of very unhappy grown-ups, I said I didn’t tell him about the body in the river because he was tired and distracted. That was a lie. I didn’t want Dad to fix this for me. I wanted to save that soldier all by myself. I wanted to matter.

“Busy day,” I said, which was not technically a lie.

“What have you got there, homework?”

“Um, no, it’s houses.”

“Hey,” Dad said, looking from me to Mom’s desk and back. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Gee, Dad, I was totally thinking we were going to move into an igloo when you retire. I’m so disappointed now.”

I got the look from Dad. Sass was not on the list of things I was allowed to do at home. But actually, so long as I wasn’t setting a bad example for the boys or hurting Mom’s feelings, Dad kind of liked a snappy answer.

“I never promised no igloos,” he said, putting his feet up on the coffee table and closing his eyes.

“Come on, Dad, where is your sense of adventure? None of us has had frostbite yet. You never know, it might be fun.”

This was what Dad always said right before all our family catastrophes. He said it before our trip to Seoul, the vomiting capital of South Korea. He said it before we moved to Georgia, the cockroach state. He said it when we moved to Fort Drum and all my clothes and all of my brothers’ LEGOs
got shipped to Fort Huachuca more than two thousand miles away.

“It is going to be fun,” Dad said. “Our own house; we can paint the walls whatever color we want, and Mom can have her garden, and I can have a real workshop in the garage, and the boys can have a dog and a tree house, and …” Dad stopped like he was frozen.

He didn’t know what I wanted in my life.

I looked at the real estate ad for the tree-house house in Killeen. Halfway down the page it said Bluebonnet Elementary, Meadowlark Middle School, and South Killeen High School. “I want an orchestra,” I blurted out. “Is there an orchestra at the high school?”

“I don’t know, Jody, probably. Don’t most civilian schools have one?”

“I want to be sure before we pick a house that there’s an orchestra.”

“I’m sure there will be, and if there isn’t, we can find you another music teacher like Herr Müller. That I can promise. You’ve been happy with him.”

“No, I’ve been happy with my trio. I don’t want private lessons anymore, Dad. I want to belong to a real orchestra.”

Gee whiz, what got into me? You save one little life and you think you deserve to ask for anything you want.

“Okay, Jody, we’ll put orchestra on the list, but you know Tyler wants to move somewhere with dinosaurs, so you’ve got competition.”

“Great.” Second fiddle again.

“We have to find a place where I can get a job, Jody. Everything else comes second.”