The Meaning of Maggie (13 page)

Actually, I'd kind of assumed before that the sleepiness was caused by doing the bad sort of things that I knew Dad had done. Like not doing his homework and dropping out of college and dodging the draft and lying
to the neighbors by telling them it was Tiffany blasting the loud music.

I thought it was a kind of punishment that he would eventually pay off. His time-out would end. He would come out of the corner and out of the chair and do good deeds for the rest of his life like save kittens from trees and bald eagles from extinction and we would live happily ever after in a tree house like the Swiss Family Robinson where I would get my own bamboo room and we would look back on the days of when his arms and legs were asleep and say, “Phew. Glad that's over.”

But now I knew that it would never be over. Now I knew there was no way to fix Dad.

And then I had a thought that almost made me choke on my Werther's Original. But I made myself stop thinking that thought. There was research to be done and I was going to do it.

I immediately dove into all kinds of scientific books.
⁴⁷
Before I knew it, I had burned through all but three note cards. I was so lost in research that I didn't even notice Mom standing right next to me.

She tugged on my scarf. “Hey Maggie, ready to go?”

I quickly made a guard with my arm so she couldn't see my notes and I piled every book into my backpack before she could see the titles. I gripped my note cards in my hands and kept my eyes on the door. All I had to do was make it to the car. Then the coast would be clear. Tiffany would tell me about her jeans and how a size zero is still too big on her and I would respond with some witty yet brilliant remark and Mom would tell us to quit it. But as soon as I walked through the door, the book alarm sounded.

The librarian lady juice-box-giver called me back to the desk and made me open my backpack. There it was: the M encyclopedia.

She shook her head. “Now, you know you can't check out reference materials.”

I was mortified. “Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry, it was an accident.” Since it was my first offense, she let me off without giving me a book felony or sending me to book jail.

“Aha!” Mom said. “So I know the topic starts with M. Machu Picchu? Um, macaroni and cheese?”

I threw my scarf over my shoulder. “No, Mom. I'll tell you later.”

I didn't know when later would actually be. I thought it would be much, much later, like maybe even after I had finished the report. But I just had so many little questions and one big question that couldn't wait. So later turned out to be: dinner.

Everyone was at the table. Mom was in her seat cutting up Dad's chicken. Dad was in his wheelchair waiting to eat. Tiffany and Layla were putting their rolls back in the basket because they ate carbs the day before and they only ate carbs every other day.

And I was pushing my carrots around my plate while Dad asked Layla if she'd finished her English paper. Layla said she hadn't because she still wasn't sure what to write about. Dad told her to just make something up because that's what
he
always did. Mom hit him on the leg even though I now knew he couldn't feel it and told Layla to write something from her heart. Tiffany batted her eyelashes and said, “Write about Bobby, he's in your heart.” And then Layla threw a roll at her and then Tiffany threw it back and then I blurted out, “IS DAD GONNA DIE?”

Dad dropped his fork, and not because it slipped. Layla was wide-eyed. Tiffany kicked me under the table. Mom said what I knew she'd say.

“Of course not, honey, why would you ask that?”

I unwrapped my scarf to let my neck breathe. “I'm researching Dad's disease for the science fair. . . . I read some things at the library today.”

“Ah, I was afraid that was the
M
,” Mom said. “But I was really pulling for macaroni and cheese.”

Dad kept his eyes on her as he pushed his chair back from the table. I thought they were going to disappear into the garage like they always did, but he stayed put.
“Who wants a cocktail? I want a cocktail.” He pointed at Mom. “Do you want a cocktail?”

Mom stood up. “I would LOVE a cocktail. I'll go fix us cocktails.”

Cocktails? REALLY? I didn't want to time travel. I didn't want to hear any stories or learn any lessons or talk about old hippie stuff. I wanted to know what was happening RIGHT NOW.

Tiffany called out to Mom. “I'll take a cocktail.”

Layla nodded. “Me too.”

I felt myself beginning to cave. I needed something to take the edge off. Sometimes on New Year's Eve, Dad let all of us have a sip of his champagne while Mom wasn't looking. And then Mom would yell from the kitchen, “I can see you.” And then we would get the giggles, which I thought meant we were tipsy, but Tiffany said that was impossible from one sip.

I raised my hand. “Make mine a double.”

Dad yelled back to Mom. “Honey, the girls want cocktails.”

“Okay. Two rum-and-Cokes and three Shirley Temples. Coming right up.”

Great. A mock-tail. She better give me two cherries. I needed two cherries.

I let Dad take a sip of his drink and then I made him give it to me straight. “Dad. Are you going to die?”

He took another big gulp. “No. Absolutely not. I'm not going anywhere. Maybe one day when I'm
a really old man. But look at me. I'm young and I still have great hair, which means I'm too good looking to die. Everyone knows good looking people don't die.”

Okay, fair enough. “Are you going to get sicker?”

Mom took her seat and answered for him. “Not necessarily. Your dad's really strong. Sure, we've had our setbacks, but what do we always do, Maggie?”

Ugh, the family motto? Now? “We pull up our bootstraps.”

Mom nodded. “Exactly.”

They asked if I had any more questions and I definitely did. I wanted to talk science. How would we find a cure? What could I have invented to help? Was there any truth to the whole “spoonful of sugar” thing from
Mary Poppins
? Because I'd be willing to eat sugar with him if it was true. You know, for moral support.

All this time Layla was super quiet, which wasn't necessarily unusual when Dad and I were dropping science. But when I looked over, tears were pooling her mascara into a black puddle and she was trying to keep it from spilling down her cheeks by staring at the ceiling. When she couldn't hold the dam any longer, she asked if she could be excused and got up from the table without waiting for an answer.

“What's wrong with Layla?” I asked.

“I think it's allergies,” Mom said. “You know, the dogwoods are blooming. I'll take her some medicine.”
Mom disappeared and then it was just Dad, Tiffany, and me at the table with all the questions.

I was getting out my note cards when Tiffany asked, “So what are all the pills for?” Aha! Maybe I wasn't the only one in the dark.

Dad ran through the pharmacy. “The oblong one keeps me from getting the shakes. The purple and white one keeps my spirits up. And I don't know what the red one does but it looks like one I took out in the desert in the seventies.”

GEEZ. I wrinkled my nose. “I don't think you're supposed to tell us that kind of stuff.”

He laughed. “I thought we were being honest?”

Mom came out of Layla's room and her eyes were red now too.
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She took her seat and sipped from her mostly empty glass. “Is there anything else you want to know about, Maggie?” She looked at me with the same look on her face that she had when she broke the news to me about the Easter Bunny.
⁴⁹

I hid my note cards. “No ma'am.”

“Well, that's all we know, Maggie. That's all anyone knows.”

I turned to Dad. “Are you scared?”

He shook his head and puffed up his chest. “Never.”

I believed him. Then I remembered I had one more question. “Should we be going to church?” I knew God wasn't a doctor and we never learned about him in science class, but maybe we should be covering all our bases. “Should we be praying for a miracle?”

Dad asked Mom for more ice and she disappeared again into the kitchen. “I think God's got his hands full right now, Maggie.”

Which was true. All that stuff with the rain forest alone must have been keeping Him pretty busy. But I couldn't let it go. “Maybe we should start going again. Why did we stop?”

Mom returned with Dad's drink, which was full, but not with ice.

He took a sip. “It's just too crowded.”

That made sense. Everyone in church was praying for their own miracles, which didn't leave any room for ours. Their prayers were crowding the path to heaven. If we went to church, our prayers would've circled for hours before ever landing. Our prayers needed a lot of room to be heard. We needed to be praying in open fields or in the backyard or at the very least, in our rooms at night.

“Do you pray, Dad?”

Dad looked at me. “Every night.”

That night I'm pretty sure we all prayed. I hadn't prayed in a while because honestly I had everything I ever wanted. Good books. Good hair. Great grades. But
that night I prayed with all my might. I asked God to save Dad, to cure him, and please for the love of Himself, do something about the dogwoods.

The next morning, Mom and Dad didn't make me pick a new topic. But they did make me promise to ask them questions along the way and let them read the report before I turned it in. We shook on it and I got back to work. After a couple days I was positive I had THE winning project. AGAIN.

For my big ta-da piece, I drew a picture of Dad and diagrammed where everything was happening. I drew arrows where the sleepiness was pulling him this way and that way. Then, with his help, I also put in some cool dude stuff. The arrow next to his eyes said, “Sometimes his eyes are blurry but they will never forget the sight of Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star Spangled Banner' on his electric guitar which these eyeballs saw in 1969.” The arrow next to his brain said, “Sometimes his brain does a lot of tricky things but it will never forget a single word to ‘Stairway to Heaven.' ”

We finished with a bunch more arrows and facts. I turned my project in and eagerly waited three days for my A.

But on day three, when I got my project back, it was a B.
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I was DEVASTATED. One catch to the science
fair was that only As could be entered, ensuring that only the very best projects competed for the top prize. Getting a B kept me from entering at all. I scrambled to the last page of my report and read Mrs. Hanebury's explanation.

“While I love the personal touches throughout the paper and the extensive research, science fair rules state that you have to propose a solution to your topic's problem, and Maggie, you presented no solution. Next year, pick a problem you can solve.”

SERIOUSLY lady? Read the report! There's no cure! What did she want from me? Even scientists couldn't solve this problem!

I stayed after class to challenge the grade, but Mrs. Hanebury wouldn't budge. She insisted she couldn't bend the science fair rules. My blue ribbon dreams were no more.

I went home and told Dad and he was so mad that he asked me to put him in the car and drive him down to the school.

“I can't drive, Dad! I can barely ride a bike!”

“Fine,” he said, and we waited for Mom to get home so she could drive us down there where we would raise h-e-double-hockey-sticks. At first I had the fight in me, but then I had to concede, because Mrs. Hanebury was right.

“I don't think there's anything she can do, Dad.”

Dad wheeled close to me. “But you worked so hard.
We both did. I've never worked so hard on a school project in my whole life!”

“But I didn't follow the rules. I didn't solve any problems.”

“Well, if that's how you really feel, then okay. But I still think you deserve to win.”

I didn't agree with him. The winner was supposed to have a clear solution. And all I had were more questions. The only thing I had confirmed was sometimes you end up learning things you wish you hadn't. And you can't unlearn them. I couldn't unknow that there was no cure. That there was no fixing Dad. I couldn't unthink that more scary stuff was going to happen. I couldn't unwonder if the worst was yet to come.

I could just hope that he was right about one thing: good looking people don't die.

Getting a B on my science fair project really wrecked me. Not only because Bs were for losers but because some idiot went on to win MY blue ribbon. Jeremy Smith did some boring report on windmills and how they would solve the energy crisis. Yeah right. The only thing that was going to solve the energy crisis was math and A LOT of it. The worst part? He didn't even have a ta-da moment. He just made a lame three-panel board covered in a bunch of pictures. I just didn't know what those judges were thinking. Didn't anyone have standards anymore? You think Albert Einstein ever made a three-panel board? Of course not! He had awesome hair and people with awesome hair only did awesome things, just like Dad and me.

Not only did that terrible B put me in a funk, it put my GPA in a funk too. I needed to do some major studying
and major extra credit to get it back up to my perfect 4.0. Luckily, spring break was coming up so I had a whole seven days to independently study until my eyeballs fell out.

I asked Mrs. Hanebury if there was anything I could do to get my science grade back on track. She said she'd give me bonus points on the final exam if I grew mold on bread and brought it in for our lesson on penicillin. I gladly accepted the challenge.

When I got home from school on Friday, I commandeered all of the bread from the kitchen. I stashed two loaves under my bed because mold grows in dark places, which I already knew even though I hadn't studied it yet. I pushed both loaves to the farthest, darkest corner, but then I realized it was probably going to smell really bad in a couple days, so I pulled them back out and put them under Tiffany's bed instead. What? She would have done the same thing to me.