The Withdrawal Method (9 page)

Granny's coming tomorrow to make us Easter dinner. At 5:14 she calls and says, Happy Easter! and tells me about the great ham she got. Ham? Grody. But I don't say that. I say, Yum. I say, Sounds good Granny. I tell her my dad Greg is out on his bike but should be back soon and she asks if we're okay. I say, Sure. Then she wants to talk to Brian. He gets all excited and takes the phone and yells, Hi! and Yes! and then just laughs a lot.

When Brian hangs up I notice something sort of smells so I get down and sniff his bum. Yup. He crapped himself. This is one thing I can't handle: crap. So I tell him to just stand in the middle of the kitchen until our dad Greg gets home, not to touch anything. I open the window and sit there watching him, glad he's wearing pants with elastic ankles.

My dad Greg gets home at 5:58 and smells Brian right away and goes, Woo-wee buddy! He picks Brian up over one shoulder like a fireman and carries him upstairs. The tub goes on. I can hear them both laughing from my spot at the kitchen table and the water splashing around while my dad Greg washes the crap off my brother.

After dinner (fried baloney, Tater Tots, hot V8) we watch a movie on satellite. My dad Greg tries to get us to all sit on the couch together with the blanket overtop like usual. I tell him I'm okay and sit on the floor. The opening credits come on and I can feel someone like nudging me in the back with their toe. I just stare at the TV as if I don't notice but it's hard to focus on the TV, it's like I can see the pictures but my brain can't figure out what they are.

The movie we watch is The Parent Trap. My dad Greg is all excited because it's a movie that was out when he was a kid. At dinner he told me, It's more for girls than boys - you'll like it, BG. When he said the name I thought, Cool, a parent trap, what an awesome idea. You'd dig a hole and cover it with sticks and leaves, maybe put a case of beer on the other side for dads. Something else for moms? Then dads would come along and be like, Oh great, beer! and when they went to go for it they'd fall through and into the hole. A parent trap. Then you could study them and stuff, poke them with sticks, do experiments and tests.

But it turns out to be Disney! The worst! There's this girl and she's got a twin sister but she doesn't know or something, and then they try to get their parents married. There's no trap really, just a plan, and not even a good one. I squirm around on the floor a lot and my dad Greg keeps going, You want to come up here with us? But I don't say anything to that.

The movie gets done at 8:58, kind of late, so my dad Greg hustles us off to bed. And then goes back downstairs, so I'm left lying there wide awake, thinking about what he's maybe doing down there under the blanket with the groaning ladies on the Tv. But I guess I'm tired from the night before so after not too long I forget about my dad Greg King of the Perverts and start to get really sleepy and before I can even check out the window to see the moon I fall asleep.

I WAKE up and I feel swampy and slow but I have this idea there's something I should be doing. It's - 4:17 a.m. There's something, but everything feels cloudy and my brain is only just winding up, still maybe half asleep. I roll over and then I'm drifting off to sleep again, when it hits me.

Easter.

The egg hunt.

In like three hours Brian is going to get up and go hunting for eggs and I forgot to even finish my list, let alone hide any eggs. I wait until 4:20 (which isn't perfect, but this is an emergency) and swing my legs over the side, get out of bed and it's like slow motion, all heavy and weird, and in the dark my room is sort of blue from the moonlight through the window.

Moving out into the hall I still feel underwater, swimming, looking around, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. Wait. There's an egg on the floor outside Brian's room, a little dark lump against the carpet. I lean down and it's like I can't believe it and for a second I think maybe the Easter Bunny really did come. But then I realize who would have put it there, who knew it was my job and went and did it himself anyway.

I pick up the egg. The foil around the chocolate is starting to peel so I smooth it down and put it in the pocket of my pajamas. I look at my dad Greg's bedroom door which is closed with only black showing from the crack underneath, and then I start to tiptoe down the stairs, slow.

Guess what? There are eggs lined up in the corners of each stair JUST LIKE I WROTE ON MY SECRET LIST. The eggs go into my pockets and it's like I'm doing a weird kind of front crawl or something, down one step and reaching, then the next, eggs into my pockets, but feeling I'm maybe sinking, maybe drowning, and the house is dark and still with only the hum of the fridge from the kitchen to prove the world is even alive.

I move around the house, silent, leaving the lights off, looking in all the spots I wrote down, taking the eggs and loading up. Between the cereal boxes: check. On top of the vcR: check. All of them. He's put them in other places too, stupid places like lined up on the kitchen counter. Way too easy. But even finding eggs in places I didn't have on my list makes me feel weird - my hands go prickly for a second, I feel my face hot. Once the egg disappears into my pocket the feeling goes away.

Around 4:50 my pockets start to get heavy - they're sagging and bulging with eggs. I look around one more time but I'm pretty sure I've got all of them. So I go to the back door and put on my shoes.

Outside it's still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds left over from yesterday's rain. There's no stars. Only the moon glowing in a little white fingernail behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pajamas, and it's hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides. I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I close the back door quietly and drop a single egg there. The porch light shines off the silver wrapper. It twinkles.

I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain, soaking the bottoms of my pants and cold on my ankles, and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap in my runners on the pavement. Every twenty steps exactly I drop an egg. I count twenty and duck and put one down, then twenty and duck and put one down, again and again all along the curb of the street. I put one right in front of Jared Wein's house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no, this is something I have to do on my own. Then at the end where there's the path I look back and there they are, all in a line lit up by the streetlights.

Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. Eggs dropped all the way. It's dark because tonight the moon's not enough but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. I've only got two eggs left, but I made it. From way up above, Mom the moon is looking down. She's faint and out of focus, just the corner of her face like she's turning away and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big murky sea but she shines out of it far away and watching, up there.

I haven't brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There's a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet too and my hands - dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and can feel the earth cool and wet through my pajamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I'm sweating even though it's cold out and I'm shivering and digging and covered in muck.

As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter and once I'm a ways down there's water at the bottom collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second and think maybe it's from the ocean, that this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world and I've tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet.

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you've got inside you - Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang - depending on what you've got. And right then, right when I'm thinking that - I swear - the clouds break up a bit and even though she's gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

From my pocket I take the two last eggs and open my fingers to plop them one at a time into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. But I don't. I look down and the water's gone black again. The hole's not big enough for a parent. It's barely big enough to trap a cat. I'd need like a digger and a crew of a thousand Jared Weins to make a Parent Trap big enough for my dad Greg, to trap him there and keep him for a while and teach him a lesson.

So I put the eggs back in my pocket and I squat there beside the stupid useless hole in my pajamas in the mud, kind of cold and it's five in the morning and for other people tomorrow will be Easter but not us. This year there won't be any Easter. There's nothing that makes my dad Greg sadder than seeing Brian sad, and if there's no chocolate for Easter Brian'll be the saddest he's ever been ever, and my dad Greg will be even sadder. But I'll have saved two eggs. Later I'll give my brother one in secret and I'll have one too and no one will ever know.

Right then I hear a voice go, Hey, and nearly fall over. I have to put my hands down in the mud to stop myself.

It's my dad Greg. He's standing at the entrance to The Inner Sanctum. The branches are low so he has to duck and it's still dark so he's like a black hunched-up shadow but it's definitely him. Hey, he says again. But he doesn't come in.

My heart's going crazy. I wait for it to slow squatting there in the mud, seeing what my dad Greg's going to do. He doesn't move and I don't either. We both just wait for something to happen. It's like in Trouble when you've got one guy left and Brian's got one guy left but they're both in their homes and you're just popping the popper and popping, trying to get out.

We wait for a long time, me and my dad Greg. Both our breath comes in clouds. He sits down after a while in the mud but still doesn't say anything. I don't either. My hands are covered in mud, and I can feel mud stuck up under my nails and drying in streaks up my arms but I don't really care. I'm tired.

After a while the sky starts to lighten a little, going greyish up through the branches of the trees. The moon's fading. Soon it'll be morning and the moon will be gone for the day, and then the next night she probably won't be there at all.

I start thinking maybe if the world is like a person and underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it's like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. It's a big thought like the kind you have to say out loud when you think them and it kind of makes me go whoa a little bit. But I can't tell my dad Greg about it, about periods and stuff. Not him. Even though he's over there just waiting for something, I'm not sure what.

So then he goes, Hey, in a weird sad tired voice.

By now the light is morning light. It came so quick, it's pale and thin but it's washing over the night, erasing the night.

And my dad Greg goes, Hey, again, and that's when I realize he's showing me something. He's holding out his hands, cupped together. I can't see so I have to get up and take a step closer. It's the eggs. They're all there in his big hands, like twenty of them, maybe thirty. I found them, he tells me, like he's proud.

And I say, Yeah. I look at his hands, my trail of chocolate eggs collected in there together like grapes. I put my hand in my pocket to make sure I've still got the two extras.

You found them, I tell my dad Greg. You found them all, I say.

LONG SHORT
SHORT LONG

IN A SCHOOL in London, Canada, there was a classroom. In it: a teacher, Miss, weary in her skirt but standing, and twentyeight fourth graders silent as the sky in rows at their desks. Miss clapped her hands four times and said, "Ta, tee-tee, ta," one clap to each syllable. Then a translation: "Long, shortshort, long." And the students all died.

With laughter, like a cloudburst.

Why so funny? Miss didn't understand, fresh from Althouse and already of waning hope, B.A. History with a minor in Music also. She held up her hand in a gesture that meant: silence. It took a while; the laughs were a downpour, a drizzle, the occasional drip from a drainpipe. "Shhh," the one named Trish encouraged them, though Miss was sure she had been the first to laugh. Then, okay, quiet enough.

Miss tried again. Clap, clap-clap, clap. "Long, short-short, long."

Boom. Down rained hilarity.

Miss threw up her hands and retreated behind her desk. When her students had settled she decreed, "Work period," and from her book bag got out some marking, set to it, trying not to think about the basement bachelor apartment she rented with the towels for drapes, her life.

IF MISS HAD been watching Bogdan, the pale boy by the door, when the words short and long had come from her mouth, she would have seen him tense. And after, if she had looked up from her marking, she would have seen him sitting there staring straight ahead, paralytic, while the rest of the class lifted the lids on their desks and went rustling around inside for work.

But Miss didn't notice Bogdan, the thin one with the dark, sunken eyes and hair cut short on top and left long in the back, the one who huddled with that tiny first grader, Farid, in quiet corners of the playground, the one Trish had run by one day pointing and screamed, "Short-Long!" And Miss didn't know that "Short-Long" was what they all called Bogdan now. What she did know was that the week before during lunch hour she had discovered Farid lashed to the baseball backstop with his own belt, Bogdan commanding him, "Talk, you filthy cur!" and smacking him in the face with a catcher's mitt. Miss freed Farid, who went bounding so happily off across the playground that she didn't feel the need to punish Bogdan. Besides, he had such a cute accent and sang so sweetly.