The Book of Why (5 page)

We stood in my room, listening.

My father kept coughing—so much that he put out his cigarette without finishing it, something I'd never seen him do. I told him to be quiet.

My mother was on the stoop, a coffee can filled with pennies in her lap.

I cared too much what other kids thought of me to go door to door with a sack. I didn't even like candy; years ago my mother had killed that joy by cutting chocolate bars into pieces in case there were razor blades. My father, to tease her, would eat before she cut. “You'll be sorry when your tongue falls out,” she'd say.

My mother liked to shake the can, her attempt to entice, unaware that the last thing kids wanted was pennies, that they would make fun of her, would call her the penny lady.

Silence would be our warning that she was coming, that she'd run out of pennies or that there were no more trick-or-treaters.

She wouldn't have liked what we were doing. She would have said,
What did I say about magic, about putting silly ideas into your son's head?
She would have said,
You'll be sorry
.

It was difficult to concentrate while listening for the sound of pennies. If a minute passed in silence, we paused, waited for her to shake the can.

I told my father to get in my closet.

“So that's where I'm going to disappear from.”

“Yes.”

“As long as wherever I go, I can breathe.” My father coughed again, and for a moment I wondered if he would ever stop. “I'm really coming down with something,” he said.

“Try to be quiet,” I said.

He walked into the closet and stood with his back against my school shirts. Before I closed the door, he said, “So long. See you soon.”

“Later,” I said.

I closed the door, sat on my bed, shut my eyes tightly, and imagined the closet without my father.

And then a sound: high-pitched, a girl just pinched. A sharp intake of breath.

I was angry that he'd broken my concentration. “Be quiet in there,” I said.

He made a sound like when he gargled in the morning, then banged—or seemed to have banged—on the closet door, as if asking to be let out.

We'd have to begin again. I couldn't properly imagine him gone when he was making noise.

When I opened the door, he fell out.

My father's eyes were open, but he wasn't looking at me. A joke, I thought. A Halloween trick. To scare me, to scare my mother.

I heard the front door open, then close; my mother's footsteps.

“She's coming,” I whispered to him. “Get up—hurry.”

My mother came up the stairs; I could hear her walking across the hallway to my room.

“Get
up
,
” I said.

“What are you two doing in there?”

I flicked his ears, pulled his hair, pinched the skin on his hand.

I stood, kicked my father gently. “Come
on,
” I said.

My mother tried to open the door, but he was in the way. “Let me in,” she said, and pushed.

I pushed back, but could hear anger in her voice, so I gave my father up. “He's teasing me,” I said.

My mother pushed her way in.

I expected her to say,
Now you know how it feels to be teased
. Or,
Glen, will you please, once and for all, grow up
.

But as soon as she saw him, she got down on her knees beside him and shook him. “Glen,” she said. “Glen.” She shook him again, harder. “It's okay,” she said. “You can get up now, you can get up,” she said.

Then, to me: “What happened?”

She didn't wait for an answer. She shook him
too
hard. She slapped his face, his chest, got on top of him, looked into his eyes. She shook him some more and kept saying Glen until
Glen
sounded strange, a word I was hearing for the first time, a word in another language.

“He's teasing,” I said.

She ran down the stairs, then back up. She kneeled beside him, put her mouth against his ear. “I won't leave you,” she said. “I won't leave, don't worry.” But as soon as she said this, she ran down the stairs again.

I could hear her out on the street, calling for help. One of our neighbors was a nurse; she had saved a neighbor choking on a cherry pit in the middle of the night.

I kept watching. Not his eyes—I couldn't look into them—but just above them, near enough to see if they moved.

A neighbor whose name I didn't know—an older man who drove a brown Cadillac and smoked a cigar on his stoop every night—ran up the stairs with my mother. Other people came—strangers, the fathers of children I knew but weren't my friends. The man who smelled like cigars got down on the floor with my father and kept saying
Glen
,
that sound that was no longer a word. He slapped my father's face; he pressed his finger to my father's neck, his ear to my father's chest.

MY MOTHER DIDN'T
want to leave.

I stood facing a soda machine, turning over in my hand two quarters the nurse had given me. I could see the reflection of my mother and the doctor. He looked down at her, his hand on his chin. She was yelling, but in a whisper. They didn't do enough, she said. He was too young for this to happen.

I saw a nurse give my mother a pill and a small paper cup, the kind you use to rinse after having a cavity filled. My mother pushed it away. She wanted to speak with whoever was in charge. The nurse put her hand on my mother's shoulder.

When my mother stopped crying, she accepted the pill and the paper cup, then sat down.

The machine swallowed one coin, then the other. I pressed a button that sent them back to me, and I kept doing this, even though long ago I'd decided orange. I didn't want to have to turn around; I could look at my mother's reflection, not at her. I inserted the coins and pressed the orange button. The can making its way down through the machine and into the receptacle was as loud as I believed my own heart was. I pulled off the tab and took my first sip; everything was too loud. I drank too quickly, and it was more than half gone. When it was all gone, I'd have to face her, I'd have to say something or nothing, and then she might say it—that it had been my fault, how many times had she told me, this was God punishing me for not doing what I'd been told, for doing what I'd been told not to do, this was my cross, hers too, this was permanent, irreversible, did I know what that word meant, it meant the rest of our lives.

The cab ride home, the two of us without him. My mother beside me on the backseat.

Two boys threw eggs at the cab. One boy was shirtless and had tiny nipples; the other boy wore a red bandana, which was something I'd asked for the previous Christmas because it looked like you had a wound under it and I thought it was romantic to have a wound, people would consider you tragic and brave, but instead my mother got me a herringbone-tweed cap other kids made fun of.

The eggs hit the window where I was sitting, but I didn't flinch. The streets were dark but for jack-o'-lanterns still lit in windows and on stoops. Then streets I recognized, streets close to ours, houses I knew. Our house. The brown car my father drove,
had driven
,
which my mother didn't know how to drive, which would sit in front of our house for five years; I would start it once a week, twice a week in winter, until I was old enough to drive.

A magic wand was stuck in our tree. Wind blew candy wrappers along the sidewalk. In the street were a glittery princess slipper and a cracked vampire mask. On our front door was a shaving-cream smiley face and below it the words,
I'll be back.

The dark house, the click of a lamp turned on. A closet opened, my mother's coat hung on a hanger, the smell of mothballs. Her footsteps, then mine, up the creaking stairs. My mother in her room, what had been their room, and me in mine, where it had happened.

Even in the dark I could see the outline of the closet door. I got out of bed, turned on the light, and put my hand on the knob.

It was all a trick, I realized—the ultimate illusion. My father was
that
good. Better than anyone, even Houdini. A trick to make the heart stop. A trick so good that it fooled the men who'd come to the house and breathed into his mouth and pushed on his chest and put a mask over his face and pressed a plastic ball that sent air into his body; so good that it fooled the doctors and nurses at the hospital.

I imagined him laughing as he stood up from the operating table, where they must have pronounced him dead. I imagined him tiptoeing into the hallway, down the stairs, and outside to a cab. He could have gotten home before us. He'd disappeared, and now, if I focused my thoughts, he would reappear.

I stood with my hand on the knob, listening for his breathing.

He might wait until morning, I thought.

He might wait until the wake or the burial—a knock from inside the coffin as it's lowered.

He might wait years.

Until then, he would be the voice in the static between stations; the creak on the attic steps; the rain against my bedroom window; the wind that blew leaves across the backyard; a blue jay on our clothesline; footsteps, shadows, silence; any sound that broke silence.

IT WAS THE
year of rules.

So was the next year, and the next. With every year came more and more rules, refinements of old rules.

You couldn't break one, or else.

The first rule, the most important, was
Think positive
.

Every thought was positive, negative, or neutral, and you had to be careful.

With practice negative could become neutral and neutral positive, and with more practice, negative could bypass neutral and become positive.

The negative
I
t's cold and snowing and someone will throw ice at my face
became the neutral
It's cold and snowing,
became the positive
Thank you for morning sunlight reflecting off the white world
,
became a mantra you could repeat all day, became a song,
Thank you for sunlight, thank you for the white world
,
all day to keep out the negative.

Negative made my lips tingle, made my arms and legs weak, made me fear falling.

That was how I knew I needed to change my thoughts or else.

The first time I felt my lips tingle: Rockaway Beach, an August morning, my tenth birthday. The steady sound of waves breaking, a lifeguard's whistle, the cries of seagulls as they swooped down to scavenge bread crusts, crumbs clinging to muffin wrappers. The ripe smell of seaweed. Sea wind blew sand onto my legs. Waves, louder and closer, sprayed my face with ocean dew.

I opened my eyes: skywriters wrote words that faded before I could read them. A fat boy ran past with a jellyfish impaled on a stick.

My mother covered her pale legs with a towel. But the towel didn't cover her feet; they were starting to burn.

She'd had a severe sunburn once, had stayed in bed three days. The way she'd moaned, I'd been afraid she might die. My father had made a game of peeling her skin—whoever peeled the biggest piece won.

Now my father dozed with a hat over his eyes. My mother suggested we move our beach chairs away from the water; my father told her to stop worrying so much. My mother said,
The water's rough, it's coming closer,
and I felt the tingling in my lips as if I'd tried to eat that jellyfish. My mother moved her chair and told me to do the same. My father didn't move; he said nothing when the water reached his feet, not when it rose to his ankles, not when a wave knocked him from his chair. He lay on his back on the sand, and the water rolled over his head, back out, over him again, and I wanted to speak, but my mouth didn't work, and the water rolled in and out, my father could have been a body washed ashore.

You could make a negative memory positive by revising it: we all moved our chairs back; the water never reached my father.

Thank you for morning sunlight. Thank you for the sound fall leaves make when I walk through them. Thank you for the sight of my breath in cold morning air. Thank you for the long eyelashes of the girl sitting across from me on the bus, so long they look fake. Thank you for when she blinks.

She pulled the bell cord and stood: the other side of her face was pink with burn scars; only one eye had lashes.

Years later, in Atlanta, a woman with facial burns asked me to sign her copy of my third book,
There Are No Accidents
. She had lost her house in a fire. Within a year, she had lost her job and her marriage.

I wasn't thinking the right thoughts, it was nothing but negativity and anger and self-pity, and your book got me back on the right path. I feel beautiful again, I really do. Thank you, thank you for everything
.

I signed her book,
For Sharon, with best wishes and admiration
.

I wrote in my notebook about the girl on the bus. I described her eyelashes and tried to think of them from time to time, especially when I was trying to turn a negative positive.

But it was impossible to think of her eyelashes without thinking of her burns, you couldn't have one half of her face without the other, and eventually I tore that sheet from my notebook and decided it was best not to think about her at all.

I slept with the notebook under my pillow. I brought it to school. I hid it in my closet with my father's ashtray and his last pack of cigarettes.

There were four sections: Rules, Signs, Proof, and Positive Thoughts.

I didn't want my mother to find it.

Composition, not spiral, which could unwind over time and cut you. Pencil, not pen, in case I made a mistake.

I pressed hard, and sometimes it was impossible to erase a mistake completely; sometimes the eraser was dirty and made things worse, and I had to buy a new notebook and copy everything from the old one.

A week after the day it had been a year, a windy November morning, my mother tied a yellow ribbon around the tree in front of our house. Many of our neighbors did the same—dozens of yellow ribbons, their long strings flapping in the wind. I knew why—I'd seen the headlines in the papers I delivered—but I liked to pretend the ribbons were for my father, so that he'd return.

I walked to the bus stop, and it was yellow and more yellow, and I thought how nice it would be to be kidnapped and held hostage, to be taken away for a while, to be feared dead, to have so many people missing you, and then to return. It would be the closest one could come to coming back from the dead. It would be like dying without dying.

Four hundred forty-four days later, two hundred twenty-two times two, the hostages came home.

One by one they walked down the airplane steps waving. Some of the men had long beards, and I decided then—I was in high school—that when I was able, I would grow a beard. A beard meant you'd been away for a long time; a beard meant you weren't allowed to shave; a beard—and Jesus was proof of this, too—meant you had suffered.

One by one they emerged from the plane, but it was never him.

Another rule was, don't step on a crack while delivering newspapers, don't allow the shopping cart's wheels to touch a crack because
electricity counted
.

I had to push down on the cart's handle to wheelie the front wheels over each crack, then lift the handle so that the back wheels cleared the crack, then step over the crack. If I touched a crack, I had to back up—clearing the crack in reverse—and try again.

It was slow going, but the time saved not having to do a do-over was worth the time it took not to make a mistake in the first place.

I had to get up earlier than the birds. There were dark circles beneath my eyes, which were almost as tragic as a beard.

Eventually it became muscle memory. I almost never stepped on a crack.

This wasn't about not breaking my mother's back; it was much bigger than that. It was about keeping the earth in its orbit around the sun and the galaxy in its trajectory through the universe; it was about everything that could go wrong not going wrong, disasters large and small I tried not to think about.

Another rule was, don't read headlines. Headlines were almost never positive and more likely negative than neutral.

Another rule was, if you make a mistake and read a negative headline, rewrite it positive.

Woman Saves Children, Self. Three Rescued from Brooklyn Fire. Plane Crash Kills No One. Headless Body Not Found in Topless Bar.

Thank you for morning sunlight. Thank you for the sight of my breath in cold morning air. Thank you for everything this day and every day forward going well for me and for everyone. Thank you for the license plate that just passed with my father's initials and his date of birth—GDN 519—thank you for that wink, just when my body was tingling and a wave was just about to take me under.

There were signs, winks from the universe that I wasn't alone, that I was following the rules, thinking positive thoughts.

One morning a garbage truck passed as I pushed my cart beside the cemetery gate, not more than a hundred yards from my father's grave. Fat-lettered graffiti on the side of the truck read:
It's all in your head
.

Later the same day, I sat in a bathroom stall at school, not because I had to go, but because I had to get out, had to leave class: the boy sitting next to me was picking his nose, and his desk was touching the floor, and the floor was touching my desk, and my desk was touching me. My lips tingled and my arms went weak, and when I raised my hand to ask to use the lavatory—for years I'd thought it was
laboratory
—it was as if I held a medicine ball—we'd tried that in gym that week—and the teacher said
fine
. I could tell it wasn't fine—I asked to be excused more than any other student—but went anyway. I sat on the toilet seat, but then I realized that the other boy's desk touched the floor, and the floor touched the toilet, and even when I stood on the toilet, I might as well have been touching that boy, and I looked to the side and saw written on the wall,
It's all in your head, dude.

That night, in bed, I heard the cop from the cop show my mother watched:
Snap out of it! It's all in your head!

Some days—I still remember them—it seemed as if the world heard my every thought. I wanted a seat on the bus—I didn't like to touch the hanging straps—and there was a seat. I wanted someone else to pull the bell cord—I didn't want to touch it—and someone did. I wanted the clouds to part and they parted. I didn't want to go to gym and the teacher was out sick. I thought of a song and the song came on the radio. I thought of a bluebird and a bluebird alighted on a low-
​hanging
branch on our tree.

One day, on my way home from high school, a squat man wearing an army jacket was walking toward me. His jeans were baggy and too long. He was talking to himself, but was looking at me.

An image in my mind of the man hitting me—just a flash. I had to pass him to reach the subway. I didn't want to cross the street, only to have to cross back, even though that's what my mother had told me to do to avoid
people who don't look right
.

As I walked past the man, he came at me as if that had been his intention all along. He punched my face, then pulled my jacket over my head so I couldn't see. He threw me to the ground and kicked me, then took my jacket and walked away talking to himself.

People stopped to look, but no one went after the man.

An older man with a gray broom-handle mustache—he was hosing the sidewalk in front of a florist—asked me if I was all right. He reached into the pocket of his apron and gave me a handkerchief.

The taste of blood running from my nose; the lovely smell of flowers.

Another rule was,
Don't be afraid
.

Another was,
Whatever you're afraid of will find you
.