The 6th Power (8 page)

I never… I only wanted to… He wouldn’t stop…

I needed more data. Following Dad into the kitchen, I asked, “So… when is Chet coming home?”

Dad was tying on an apron. “Probably sometime tomorrow. They want to make sure he hasn’t torn his esophagus. If…”

“What?” I shrilled.

Dad stopped reaching for something in the pantry and looked at me. “Hey, it’ll be okay,” he said. “That can happen sometimes if you…,” he made sure that Kiki was oblivious, “puke enough. Happened to your grandma once when she had the stomach flu.”

My lungs didn’t want to work. I encouraged them to do their in and out routine, but they got all wheezy. Fortunately, there was a kitchen chair underneath me when I sank down again. Did I… tear… my brother? I mean, Chet was a creep and he’d done a lot of stuff to me over the years, but I never wanted to… I shook my head. “What, uh, what do they do if his, uh, you know?” I pointed to my throat.

Dad was chopping an onion into large, irregular pieces. “I don’t think they do anything unless it’s really bad. It should just heal on its own. Not a big deal, usually.”

I didn’t think I had the strength to ask what would happen if it was, in fact, “a big deal.” A subject change was pretty much a necessity. “What about Robert?”

Dad pulled a large saucepan out of a cupboard. “He seems to be doing okay. Claims he just threw up because he saw Chet do it. Should be home tonight. They just want to make sure that he doesn’t have whatever Chet has.”

Robert would be coming home. I put him and his twin in the hospital. I’d be extremely lucky if he let me live through the night. I should have been concerned about that, but the word “esophagus” kept blinking in my mind like a computer error message, interrupting all other functions. I went back into the living room, sat on the couch, and listened to Mozart.

And to top it all off, Dad was making goulash. I knew this because that’s what he always makes when he was stuck cooking dinner. He had learned the recipe in college and claimed that his roommates had loved it. That meant that Dad’s roommates 1) were either born without taste buds, 2) were extremely polite or 3) just didn’t want to do the cooking themselves.

I had once seen someone on public television extolling the virtues of goulash, saying that it was a wonderful dish of beef simmered in a rich tomato sauce, laden with paprika and other spices, served over warm noodles. A dish that would warm you to the marrow on a cold Hungarian night. The television lady’s words, not mine.

The goulash that Dad made consisted of ground beef, onions, stewed tomatoes and soggy elbow macaroni. Occasionally, Dad added salt and pepper. When he remembered. His version of goulash tasted like underwear, and yes, thanks to my brothers, I know what underwear tastes like.

That night, though, I could have made it taste like anything. Pizza, ice cream, filet minion, sushi, drywall, salamanders, whatever. Instead, I sat there at the table and ate every bite without complaint. I ate every overcooked piece of pasta, every tasteless hunk of steamed burger, every gagging glob of stewed tomato, and I thought about my brothers. I tried to think more about what they had done to me, what they were about to do to me, and what they would have done to Hannah.

But my thoughts kept coming back to the words “hospital” and “esophagus.” I sat at my family’s mostly empty dinner table and ate bad goulash until my plate was empty.

Chapter 10

I
went to bed after dinner. Dad, who was facing the prospect of getting Kiki to sleep without Mom’s help, had no objections. I lay in bed for a long time, staring at my ceiling. Eventually, fortunately, the pill wore off and the memories of the day diminished in intensity. Still, though my memory was bad on its own, it wasn’t like I was going to forget what had happened, about the mess that I had made. In more ways than one.

Around about midnight, the minivan pulled back into the driveway. I peeked out the window in time to see Mom and Robert get out. Robert was wearing a set of hospital scrubs and was holding his stomach. He didn’t make much noise coming upstairs or going to his room.

But at some point that night, he’d be coming to pound me. There was a part of me that felt that maybe, after what I’d done to my brothers, I deserved a pounding. Fortunately, my self-preservation outweighed my guilt. I pulled the little envelope out of my pants pocket and placed another pill under my tongue.

There. When Robert came in, I’d be ready with some kind of power to defend myself. I got back in bed and waited. The memories of the mess I’d made of things came back, along with a desire to just clean it all up.

Didn’t know how I could do that, of course. Mom was always cleaning stuff up. Cleaning the house. Cleaning the kids. Wash my face. Wash my hands. Use soap. Soap bubbles. Bubble bath. Kinda missed bubble baths. Purple soap, smelled like grapes. Purple bubble beard. Mom and I laughing. “Down the drain,” she’d sing as she’d dry me off. Jingle she’d written for work. “Use Bubble-Bubble and the dirt goes down the drain.”

I flipped my pillow over, enjoying the cool side. It was getting warm at night. Warm. Hot. Fire. Fire cleanses things. Magellan’s yard was so bad, might just have to burn the place down. Get Human Torch over there. Flame on. Human Torch. Human Bubble. Use Human Bubble and the puke goes down the drain.

I faded away with the warmth that spread through my body.

Sometime later, I sneezed. The world around me rippled. I didn’t think I’d ever sneezed in a dream before. But surely I wasn’t awake, because I was surrounded on all sides by mountains of soap bubbles. The bubbles covered every surface of my room, stacked high, almost to the ceiling, glowing as they filtered the sunlight streaming in my windows. It was morning. It was morning and I wasn’t dead. It was morning and I was covered in bubbles. This dream was completely ridiculous. I didn’t know what Dad had put in that goulash, but something had set off my subconscious. I mean, even if this was real, if there had been some tragic accident with the washing machine in the basement and the house was flooded with suds, even if that could be true, there was no way in reality that the bubbles would be a deep shade of purple.

Yeah. I wasn’t waking up.

This wasn’t good. Not good at all. If my mother walked in and saw this… purple bubble-mountains majesty, she’d either kill me, ground me or have a heart attack. Probably all three. I had to get rid of it. Figure out how it got there later, get rid of it now. I leapt out of bed.

Funny thing about soapy floors. They’re kinda slippery.

I fell and was instantly buried under the ocean of purple foam. Unfortunately, despite their grape appearance, the bubbles tasted just like regular non-purple bubbles. What in the name of Irish Spring was going on? Did I make all of these bubbles? If so, how? I shook my head, spitting foam out of my mouth without much success. I needed water, not questions.

I managed to get my feet underneath me and half-shuffled, half-slid my way to the door and eased it opened. All was clear. I heard Mom down in the kitchen with Kiki. Robert’s door was closed, which was good as the last thing I needed was for my brother to see me and let Mom know that a shampoo bomb had exploded in my room. Was that what this was? Did Robert somehow do this?

Again, there wasn’t time for questions. I shuffled into the bathroom, trailing bubbles behind me. I looked in the mirror and saw a bizarre hybrid clone of Barney the Dinosaur and Mr. Bubble. I rinsed my mouth out and tried to scoop the foam off of my face, but whatever the bubbles were made of, they were resilient. Nothing was making them pop.

“Robert! Nathaniel! Breakfast!”

And that was the two minute warning. I grabbed a towel and frantically tried to wipe the foam off of me. My super memory was still working, and my pre-sleepy-time thoughts came back to me: grape bubble bath, foam beard, Mom drying me off, singing that jingle.

Frenzied, half crazed with desperation to clean this mess up, I opened my mouth and sang. “Use Bubble-Bubble and the dirt goes down the drain.”

With a crackling, hissing noise, the foam vanished.

I was de-bubbled! I was me again! Well, that wasn’t quite true. As I looked in the mirror, checking myself for any permanent damage, I saw that the bubbles had left me clean. Really clean. Like, action figure just out of the packaging kind of clean. My pajamas looked like they were fresh off the rack. Even the fruit punch stain on the collar, which had been there for over a year and had withstood countless trips through the washing machine, had disappeared. There was no dirt under my fingernails, no sleep goop in the corners of my eyes, no morning grease in my hair. My teeth looked like they had gone through that extensive chemical whitening thing that my dentist was always recommending to my mom at my checkups.

I pointed at the mirror and clucked my tongue. Lookin’ good! A stream of purple foam shot out of the tip of my finger, covering the glass.

Oh. Okay. I guess the bubbles did come from me. Huh. I sang the jingle again. The foam disappeared, leaving the mirror free of streaks and grime. Cause and effect. I squirted some more bubbles into the bathtub, and with a jingle, I was practically blinded by the shine.

Cool! I could make bubbles that clean stuff!

I thought about that for a moment, and the smile fell off of my face. I took the pill the night before so that I could have a superpower in case Robert tried to attack me and the best that my memory could come up with was the scrubbing-bubble power? Lame! How was I going to defend myself with purple foam?

I sighed and left the bathroom, creeping back to my room. I was just about to open my door when the door across the hall was thrown open. I turned, shrieked in a completely non-manly way, and squirted out gallons of purple suds.

Chet and Robert’s room, neat and orderly on Chet’s side, somewhat messy on Robert’s side, was now covered in bubbles, floor to ceiling. Robert stood there in the doorway. He, too, was covered, head to toe.

We stared at each other. I couldn’t make out the look on Robert’s face because it was, you know, obscured. I still had my hands raised, ready to give him more of the same if he took a step towards me. We might have stood there all day, but Mom broke the spell.

“What was that?” she bellowed, her footfalls heavy on the stairs. Robert blinked, retreated, and slammed his door shut.

Suddenly, the very near future was very clear to me. Mom would come upstairs. She’d yell at me for yelling. She’d hammer on Robert’s door. He’d open it. There would be the suds. He might tell Mom that the bubbles were my fault. She wouldn’t believe him and Robert would get in trouble. I could even say that I’d yelled because I saw the foam in Robert’s room. Another opportunity to pay my brother back for all of the times he’d gotten me into trouble…

No.

Mom was almost to the landing. I cupped my hands around my mouth, pressed them to Robert’s door and sang as loud as I could, practically willed the jingle into his room. “Use Bubble-Bubble and the dirt goes down the drain!”

Mom turned the corner, all red-face and hands-on-hips. “What in the world are you doing?”

I stepped back, dropping my hands. “Nothing,” I said, clearly lying. I had obviously been doing something, but I had no explanation that I was willing to give to her.

“Was that you yelling?” she demanded.

“Yeeeeah.” I ran a hand through my hair, which felt silky and wavy, and struggled for a plausible story. “Sorry about that. I was walking to my room and Robert surprised me when he opened his door. I guess, uh, I’m just a little jumpy this morning.”

She scowled at me, then leaned forward and squinted. “Did you take a shower?”

“No! Uh, but I washed my face.” Sort of.

“Hmm. Well, that happens so infrequently, I guess you look totally different when you do it.”

I had a flare of righteous indignation, but decided not to express it. Mom looked really tired and on edge, and I remembered that she’d been up late the night before. 

She sighed. “Go. Get dressed. I’m going to take a shower, so I want you to go down and take care of Kiki. And clean the kitchen. Without yelling.”

“I… think I can handle that.”

“We’ll see,” she said, turning to Robert’s door and knocking. I quickly slipped into my bedroom. A quick, quiet jingle and the bubbles I’d dreamed up were gone, leaving cleanliness behind. Years and years’ worth of dust and dirt vanished with the evaporating purple. The windows sparkled, the sheets were clean and pressed. I barely noticed. Instead, I pressed my ear against the door, waiting to hear if Mom would shriek when she saw Robert, waiting to hear whether the bubbles had heard the music and dissolved..

She knocked again and called his name.

His door opened.

She gasped. I winced and waited for the yelling to start.

Instead, Mom said, “Robert…. you… you’re clean!”

Chapter 11

W
hen your mother bursts into tears because she thinks you’ve done something for her, it’s embarrassing, but it’s a good kind of embarrassing.

It was only natural for her to think that, while she was showering, I’d not only kept Kiki alive, but I’d slaved away until the kitchen was spotless. I mean, the change was pretty dramatic. The walls of the kitchen looked freshly painted. The floors gleamed like new linoleum had been put down. The plates in the sink sparkled like they’d just come straight out of a box from Macys. The black circle that I’d drawn on the kitchen table with a permanent marker when I was four-years old (Chet had actually done it, but I got the blame) had vanished. The spider webs and grease that had formed a fuzzy layer around the blades of the ceiling fan were gone. Seriously, the place looked like a picture out of a magazine.

So she stood there, Kiki in her arms, tears streaming down her face. To be honest, it freaked me out a little, because my mother is not a crier. Guess she was really tired. I reached out and hesitantly patted her arm. She pulled me into a hug, kissed the top of my head, and whispered, “Thank you.”

She wasn’t a hugger, either, so that freaked me out even more. Probably why my eyes teared up a little and why there was a quaver in my voice when I said, “Welcome.”