Brett McCarthy (16 page)

cru•el

“April is the cruelest month,” my father always says in…guess…April. He doesn’t just say it once. He says it all month, several times a day, no matter how many times you beg him to put a sock in it. But it’s a quote from a famous poem, and since he’s an English professor, that sort of stuff just pours out of him. Especially since we live in Maine, where April really stinks.

Cruel:
causing injury, grief, or pain; disposed to inflict suffering.

In other places April is a terrific month, or so I’ve heard. People wear shorts and play ball. Cook burgers on the grill. In those other places it’s called “spring,” but here we call it “mud season.” Daffodils may bloom in Jersey, but here grit-covered piles of dirty snow line the edges of driveways. They may be wearing Easter bonnets in Atlanta, but here little kids wrapped in parkas and mittens hunt for eggs.

I hate April almost as much as I hate poetry. Well…that might not be fair. I really don’t hate poetry. You can’t be a McCarthy and hate poetry. I just hate having it quoted at me all the time, especially when the weather is driving me bonkers.

Dad and I were spreading the last of the homemade strawberry jam on peanut butter sandwiches one rainy afternoon when he said it for, like, the fortieth time that week.

“This is the last jar of jam,” I said, scraping the sides of the Ball jar with a knife. “No more until we pick strawberries in July. One more thing I hate about April: the end of last summer’s jam.”

“April is the cruelest month,” Dad sighed.

I slammed the knife down in irritation. “Eliot is the cruelest poet,” I snapped.

Dad looked at me with pleased surprise. “How did you know he wrote that?” Dad asked.

Whoops, I thought. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said.

“Have you been reading poetry when no one was looking?” Dad continued. “Dare I say it…reading
good
poetry?”

“Alls I did was look it up, okay?” I said, purposely inserting the grammatically incorrect “alls.” It drives Dad up the wall when I use bad grammar. “I mean, if you’re going to keep saying it, I wanted to at least know where it came from.”

“And?” he said. I turned to face him.

“Dad. This ‘April is the cruelest month’ thing? It’s not a poem. I mean, it practically has
chapters.
It has languages I’ve never heard of. It makes no sense. I think it’s cruel you make your students read it.”

Dad laughed. “Bravo!” he exclaimed. “Could it be that you
are
my daughter, after all? And to think I’ve been worried for years that you were switched at birth with the child of professional athletes! But you have the McCarthy poetry gene after all!” He neatly sliced his sandwich in two, chuckling at his own joke.

I scowled at him. “Poetry obsession, more like,” I groused.

We carried our plates to the kitchen island, munching in silence, watching through the bay windows as cold rain spattered the deck. Mom had just gone across the backyard to bring lunch to Nonna. She’d worn her Gore-Tex rain jacket and a fleece, sloshing through the grassy puddles and carrying a pot of soup. The house had been dark when she’d set out, but Dad and I could see lights burning now in the Gnome Home kitchen.

“You inherited it from Nonna,” I said matter-of-factly. “This poetry thing.”

“Actually, my father,” he said. “That’s one of the few things I remember about him. He was always reading, and it was usually poetry. Mother likes it, but it wasn’t a passion for her the way it was for him.”

“She and Mr. Beady argue about poems,” I said.

“They argue about everything,” Dad said ruefully.

“But she quotes poems, like you,” I said. “You know that night I stayed with her? She was saying poems in her sleep.”

“Really?” Dad said. “Can you remember what she said?”

“I only heard a few words,” I said. “Something about poems melting. Or was it poems riding? But it was poetry, I could tell.”

“A poem rides on its own melt,” Dad said quietly.

“That’s it!” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”

“It’s Frost,” he said. “Robert Frost. And it’s not a poem, but how he described how you write one. It’s a very famous line, actually. For students of Frost. I’ll be darned, Mother.” He said this to himself, not me. I saw him stare through the cruel rain to the little house across the yard. The lights burned upstairs too, which should have been a signal to us. Nonna no longer slept upstairs but in a hospital bed on the first floor.

“You say she said this in her sleep?” he asked.

“Well…maybe right before she fell asleep,” I said carefully. Hallucinated to sleep, I thought. Drugged to sleep, by her own granddaughter. I had never confessed to my parents about that night. When I woke that morning, Nonna was still out. So out that I was able to gently push her to one side and peel off a patch. I wrapped it in paper towels and buried it at the bottom of the kitchen trash can.

Nonna and I never spoke of it. I wasn’t sure she even remembered.

“Well.” Dad smiled at me. “She may be more of a poetry lover than I realized.” Then the phone rang. It was Mom.

As he listened into the receiver, the calm look on my father’s face morphed from concern to confusion to panic. He and Mom were rapid-firing questions and answers.

“Did you call the home health nurse?” he asked. Pause. “Well,
when
did she leave? What’s the exact time?” Pause. “Did you call Beady?” Pause. “Are you sure you dialed the right number? He always leaves his answering machine on.” Pause. “Did you look—No, never mind. I’m coming over.” Dad hung up.

“Stay here,” he said shortly.

“What’s wrong?” I said, a sick, cold feeling spreading through my stomach.

“She’s not there,” Dad said. “At least your mom can’t find her. Stay right here, Brett. In case the phone rings.” He darted out the door, into the rain, without stopping for a jacket. I watched water splash with each footstep as he raced across the lawn.

Later I learned that he’d ordered me to stay because he didn’t want me there if his hunch about Nonna were true. That she’d fallen. That despite her inability to dress herself without help or get out of the high hospital bed without an arm to lean on, she’d somehow walked across the room and fallen.

As it turns out, he was wrong. Nonna wasn’t anywhere in or near the Gnome Home. She was simply gone. So were her hikers, her Michelin Man parka, and her raincoat. So were her island cap, her umbrella, and her fat-tired wheelchair. So were her pain patches. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nonna wasn’t simply missing. She had left.

And it didn’t take a genius to guess who had packed up her stuff and wheeled her away. Mr. Beady and Nonna were up to something.

I remember just feeling numb, while my parents clicked into search mode. Because I knew something that they didn’t.

I had never spoken a word to anyone about the Nalgene bottle. Partially because Nonna had wanted to keep it to herself. Partially because it was too hard for me to think about what it meant. I sat in the kitchen while my parents dashed madly about, and it occurred to me that Nonna might have decided to go out and make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. Maybe she’d decided to leave, spare us all—including herself—the full definition of “bad.”

And I thought, Of course. This would happen in April. The cruelest month.

e•mote

“Where do you think they went?” I asked him.

Michael sighed at the other end of the phone. He had just gotten an earful: a complete download of everything from Nonna and Mr. Beady’s Great Escape to the Nalgene and my thoughts about how cruel April can be. Serious emoting.

Emote:
to give expression to emotion.
Talk without interruption about something upsetting.

“Brett, first calm down. Take a deep breath. Things are never as bad as we imagine.”

“Michael, I’m imagining that my grandmother has left us and is trying to off herself. It’s pretty bad.”

“Brett, please.” He paused. When he spoke again, it was from
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
We’ve watched it together about three dozen times.

“What does your heart tell you?” I heard Aragorn say.

“I don’t know!” I wailed. I really didn’t. My heart pounded too loudly for me to hear anything but jungle drumming. I took a deep breath and tried. Something whispered.

“Frodo is alive,” I replied. I did a lousy Gandalf, but Michael got it.

“Good,” he said, back to Michael. “Now let’s use our heads.”

“Mine hurts,” I replied.

“Where have your parents already looked?”

“They’ve called the hospital and the hospice place. They’ve called a bunch of her friends. They’ve driven to the movie theater, the coffee shop, and the library. Michael, she’s disappeared.”

“No one just disappears,” he said. “Think. Where would she
like
to go? You have to figure Mr. Beady didn’t take her someplace awful. Any chance they went to the airport?”

“Dad’s on his way to Portland now. He tried telephoning the Jetport with her description, but they weren’t very helpful, so he’s going in person. I think he’ll end up cruising the parking lot looking for Mr. Beady’s pickup.”

Silence from the other end, as we thought. I stared out the kitchen window. The rain had finally let up, and it had gotten windy. Cold, windy, and raw. A great day to travel with an old, sick woman, I thought. What could be worse?

A totally wild thought crossed my mind. Something extraordinarily worse.

“Can you hang on for one minute?” I said, dropping the phone before Michael had a chance to answer. I ran to the mudroom, slipped into some boots, and darted outside in the direction of the Gnome Home garage.

The late-afternoon light filtered dully through the dusty windows. I knew exactly what to look for: a round wooden pallet covered in oilcloth. I switched on the overhead bulb. Light filled the room. Filled the empty space that told me exactly what I needed to know. I dashed back to the house.

“The light’s gone,” I panted into the receiver. No comment. “Michael! Are you there?”

“The light?” he said.

“Your project! The lanterns, the reflectors, the big round board you put them on! They’ve been in the garage all winter, and now they’re gone.”

“Geez, talk about a bad day,” he groaned. “First your grandmother takes off, now you get robbed!”

“Hello? I thought
you
were the smart one! Don’t you see? Nobody’s robbed anything. They took the lights
with
them.”

It was nuts. But why else would they have kept it so secret? Never in a zillion years would my parents have approved of this one. Garage sales, bazooka birthdays, lighthouse projects…all wacky but still within the safe part of the sanity meter. But a trip to the island this time of year?

“Whoa,” Michael said. “Not good.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Call your parents. Now,” he said. Urgency in his voice. His line clicked off.

I reached Dad on his cell phone. He’d driven as far as Yarmouth, about twenty minutes from the Jetport.

“I don’t think so, hon,” he replied when I finished spilling our theory. “To begin with, I know where the lights went. Beady moved them to Dwayne’s. Along with some lumber.” Dwayne Morin was a friend of Mr. Beady’s. He owned the boatyard where we docked the
Dolly
and where we always departed for Spruce Island.

“That just proves what I’ve said!” I exclaimed. “See? He can just stick everything in a boat and motor over.”

“I’ve talked to Beady about this,” Dad said, a little impatiently. “You may not believe it, but there’s a plan. A rational, reasonable plan that does not involve dangerous off-season trips. Now Brett, your grandmother is a smart woman. She wouldn’t do something foolish.”

“Daddy, please,” I continued. “There’s something you don’t know. I think…I think Nonna is afraid of losing us. And I think…she doesn’t want to die. So…”

“So she’s decided to basically kill herself by boating out to the island in the freezing cold?” he exclaimed angrily. “Don’t be ridiculous, Brett. Let me tell you something: You’re not the only one who loves her. Or knows her. She’s been my mother for many more years than she’s been your grandmother, and I think I know a little bit more about her. So please…let’s hang up the phone and keep the line clear in case we get any
real
news.” His phone went dead.

In my dictionary the definition of “alone” has no words. It has a picture. A picture of a girl, in a dark kitchen, stupidly holding a silent telephone receiver. She stares out the windows at a vacant, lifeless house across the lawn. And there is no sound except this rhythmic throbbing in her chest.

I pressed speed dial, then 1.

“Michael,” I said, then stopped, because I couldn’t choke out the rest.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

diss

At the deep, dark heart of every junior high kid’s soul lies fear of The Diss.

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as both a verb…
to treat with disrespect; insult, criticize
(as in “She’s dissed!”)…and a noun (as in “What a diss!”). Depending on who does the dissing, it might be funny or mean: a lighthearted comment tossed between friends or a wooden stake to the heart. It might hurt like a burn and scar forever, or it might simply evaporate, forgotten, with a smile.

Dad’s diss felt like the burning, wooden-stake variety. Which explains what followed.

Ten minutes after Michael hung up, I saw the lights of Aunt Lorena’s car pull into our driveway. I started for the door, but Michael burst into the kitchen without knocking. “What did your dad say?” he asked immediately.

I shook my head miserably.

“He doesn’t want to hear it,” I said. “Anything I say just pisses him off.”

He settled heavily into a kitchen chair, his rain slicker dripping on the tile floor.

“Same here,” he said in a grumpy voice. “Although my folks weren’t pissed. They just gave me the absentminded-professor treatment. Patted me on the head and suggested I find some nice Russian to play chess with online.” He kicked the leg of the chair, hard. “I’m their kid who understands the theory of relativity but can’t remember my shorts for gym class, you know?”

“Well, at least they brought you over,” I said. “Did you tell them I was freaking out?”

“They didn’t bring me over,” he said.

“Huh? I saw your car pull up.”

Michael looked at me intently. “I brought myself over,” he said carefully. His eyes locked on mine.

“Tell me this is
not
what I think it is,” I said nervously.

Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of car keys. He swung them, teasingly, before his grinning face.

“Are you out of your mind?” I gasped. “You drive…in a car…by yourself? You could get killed, or arrested. Or kill somebody else! Jeezum, Michael!”

“I once went as far as Portland and back,” he replied calmly. I stared at him. This was a side of Michael I’d never dreamed existed.

“Promise me you’ll stop,” I said, dead serious. “No joke. You could get in big, bad trouble. Trust me, I know trouble.”

I wondered, for one hopeful moment, if he was having a good laugh at me. If Aunt Lorena was outside, hiding in the car, and this was all just a ploy to help me lighten up.

No such luck.

“I think we should go to Morin’s Landing,” he said. “There’s this totally awesome boat there, and I know where the owners keep a key. You know where she is, Brett. We both know it.”

Morin’s Landing. Where our family docked the
Dolly Llama
and always set off for Spruce Island. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I didn’t want to consider this, any of it. Not Nonna missing, not Michael driving, not Brett stealing boats and taking off on crazy schemes. I wanted, for like the zillionth time, to turn back the clock, to get back to normal. In other words, the way things were before redefinition.

But an imaginary voice whispered in my ear: ain’t gonna happen, kid. Your grandmother isn’t going to magically appear at the door, cancer-free and carrying a pan of hot brownies. Your father isn’t going to believe a thing you say. Your former friends aren’t going to help you because they’ve moved on, to hot guys and pom-poms. And your new friends are home studying calculus.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked for the first time.

It wouldn’t be the last.