Five Minutes More (8 page)

I can hear myself breathing, in and out, in and out, fast, like I'm trying to run away from someone. I concentrate on that sound, on each breath, and after a few minutes the room stops spinning and my stomach stops lurching, for the most part.

I sit up. My T-shirt is crumpled and damp and twisted half sideways. One leg of my pajama pants is hiked up past my knee. I push my hair out of my face. It's a frenzy of curls.

Just then the door eases open and my mother looks in. “You're awake. Hi,” she says.

She's wearing jeans and a dark green sweater, not work clothes. Is it Saturday? No.

“What...what time is it?” I ask. My voice sounds like I've been shouting too much.

“It's a bit after ten.”

“I'm late.” I swing my feet over the side of the bed and try to get up, but I can't seem to get my arms and legs to work together.

“Stay there. I already called the school,” Mom says.

“Brendan is going to pick me up.” I try to lick my lips. They're rough with flakes of chapped skin.

Mom looks away from me. “I told him you're not going to school today.” She clears her throat. “I said you had the stomach flu.”

“Oh.” The room's cold. I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them.

“Take your time.”

“Umm, all right,” I say.

She turns to go, then stops in the doorway. “I'm sorry, D'Arcy,” she says.

Her voice is so quiet I have to lean forward to hear her. For a second it feels as though the walls are coming in at me. I grab the mattress with both hands and the feeling passes as quickly as it came.

Mom still has her back to me. One hand grips the door-knob. The other is squeezed into a fist. “I'm sorry you had to find that...note. I'm sorry your father...did...what...he did.”

“What do you mean? You really think he...? Because of some torn-up paper?”

She turns back around. “D'Arcy, honey,” she starts, but I cut her off.

“It doesn't mean anything.” I shake my head, keep shaking it like a little kid would. “He didn't. It was an accident.”

“Your father was sick.” She says each word carefully, like I'm too stupid to know what she means.

“You mean crazy? You think he was crazy?” My voice is getting louder.

“No. I found out...” She stops. Takes a couple of breaths. “I talked to the police and the doctor...this morning. He...he had...he had ALS.”

“What do you mean? What's ALS?”

Her mouth moves before the words come out. “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Sometimes people call it Lou Gehrig's disease.”

“Sclerosis? You mean like multiple sclerosis? Like Brendan's aunt has?”

“No.” She keeps running her hands down the sides of her jeans. “ALS is a lot worse.”

I pull at the neck of my T-shirt. It's too tight. It's hard to breathe and my voice sounds funny. “What do you mean by worse?” I ask.

“It...people with ALS...their muscles get weaker. They fall, they drop things. Eventually they can't walk or talk. Some can't even breathe without help.”

“So what do you do for it? Physio? That's not so bad. Brendan went last year. Remember?” I can't seem to stop talking. “Are there pills? Pills would be better because you know Dad's kind of wussy about needles.”

Mom just shakes her head.

“There must be some way to fix it. Right?”

“There's no...” She takes a couple of shaky breaths. “There's no cure for ALS. I don't think he could...live with what was going to happen to him.” She takes a couple of steps closer to me and touches my cheek. I twist my head away.

“No. You're wrong.” I scramble off the bed, around to the foot, and grab hold of a bedpost. Blood is starting to soak through the bandage on my hand. I stick out an arm to keep her back. “Don't touch me,” I warn her. My face is hot and I feel like I'm going to heave. “He would have said if he was sick. The doctor made a mistake, mixed him up with someone else.”

“Your dad and Dr. Marshall went to school together. He didn't make a mistake. He's been in Haiti for the last month with Hospitals Without Walls. He didn't even know your father had died.”

I get an image of my dad, driving down the road, coming to the turn, hitting the gas, twisting the wheel—No. No. No.

“He wouldn't do something like that,” I scream at her. “Maybe, maybe...” I'm shaking. “Maybe he didn't love you enough, but he loved me and he wouldn't...he wouldn't just leave me!”

Her body sags. “He was sick,” she says softly. She reaches out as if she's going to touch me, but she doesn't. Her hand
hovers in the air for a moment and then drops. “He wasn't—,” she begins.

I press both hands over my ears and start to hum the way I did last time she tried to say things I didn't want to hear. Finally she turns and goes out, closing my door behind her. I lie on the bed with my palms tight against my head and keep on humming.

When I wake up, it's dark except for a rectangle of light reaching across the floor from the bedroom window. I'm clammy with sweat, and my shirt is sticking to the middle of my back. For a moment I can't figure out what time it is and why I woke up. Then I remember. My father killed himself. It can't be true, but it is.

I'm shaking so hard it feels like the bed is moving. I don't want to go back to sleep. I grab the quilt, wrap it around me and drop into my rocking chair.

Dad found the chair, mostly in pieces, in a corner of the basement. My mother thought it was junk, but he said it had potential. He sanded all the pieces, glued them back together and then painted it a pale, creamy yellow, the color of butter. Only he called it the color of “a heart-healthy, polyunsaturated, trans-fat–free margarine.” Even Mom laughed at that.

I don't want to think about that. I don't want to think about my dad at all.

The two little beanbags Seth gave me are on my dresser. I pick one up and toss it from one hand to another. My left hand hurts and there's dried blood on the gauze bandage, but I throw the bag again, and again. I concentrate on throwing the bag in a smooth arc about as high as my eyebrows. And I don't think about anything else.

At all.

One by one I type the letters, all in caps, into the search engine:
A
,
L
,
S
. I click on
Search
and look away quickly. I want to know, and I don't. It's late. The house is dark and silent. Through the window I can see the moon, a thin sliver hanging high in the night sky.

I have to look. Four hundred and nineteen thousand, one hundred and eighty-one hits. I click on the first link and watch the site load.

I don't even know what I'm looking for. An explanation? A reason? Some way of figuring out what was in my father's head, maybe?

...when a person has
ALS
something goes wrong with the nerves that carry instructions from the brain to the muscles... muscles in the legs, arms and throat....difficulty walking...may need a cane...a wheelchair...difficulty holding things...

It's everything my mother said. His legs would have stopped working. His arms. How could he have taken
pictures? How could he have crossed a glacier in a wheel-chair? Or bargained in a market with no voice? How could he have pointed a camera? Or even picked it up? How could he have been himself anymore? Is that what he thought? Is that why he...?

I can't see the screen anymore. I hear someone crying, and I realize it's me.

I'm late and my stupid-ass locker won't open. It's Monday and I'm back at school. If I stay away too long, people will start asking questions I don't want to answer right now.

I do the combination again and pull at the lock. It won't open.

I start yanking at it, harder and harder, my fist smashing back against the door. It won't open. It still won't open.

A hand comes over my shoulder and grabs my hand. “What's the combination?”

Seth.

I can feel the heat of his warm hand sinking into my icy one. I pull my hand away and tell him the numbers. He turns the dial slowly, and when he pulls the lock, it lets go.

I start grabbing books.

Seth holds out a bunch of paper. “Here. I hope you're feeling better. This is everything you missed. If it doesn't make
sense, let me know.” He sets the lock inside my locker and walks away.

“Thanks,” I say quietly.

He lifts one arm so I know he heard me, but he doesn't look back.

I'm running on a gravel path that's hard and lumpy underneath my feet. I stumble over a hollow spot and almost fall. My legs ache and the cold bites my chest with each breath. Silence wraps around me as though I'm the only person in the world.

I'm in the cemetery. Ahead I see what I've been looking for: a stake with a red cardboard tag, lifting on a wisp of wind I can't even feel. It marks the place where the stone will be. I start across the grass to it and remember what my grandmother used to say when she had that goose-bumps-up-the-back, half-déjà vu, half-spooked feeling: Someone just walked over my grave. I veer to the right and try to stay between the markers.

There's a large rectangle of dirt in front of the stake. I squat down and lay my hand on the rough ground. It's so cold. What made me think I would find answers here?

Why didn't he tell us he was sick? How could he not say anything? Did he think I wouldn't love him if I knew? How could he just get in his car and—?

I feel like hitting someone, or smashing something. I want someone else to hurt as much as I do. I need to ask him why he thought that driving into the river was the only thing to do.
I scrape frantically at the ground but my fingers can't dig into the frozen dirt.

I don't know why I came. My dad isn't here.

He isn't anywhere.

Mom is sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. She has one hand snaked around a cup of coffee. She doesn't even pretend that she's drinking herbal tea anymore. The packages are gone. There's a box of coffee filters in their place. She looks up as I walk in and slides a folded piece of paper across the table at me.

“What's this?” I say.

“A note for your teacher so you won't have to spend the rest of the week in detention for cutting your last class yesterday,” Mom says. “They called. The school notices things like that.”

“It wasn't a class. It was study hall,” I say. That much is true. “I felt crappy. I just came home.” Eventually.

She looks at me as though she's trying to decide if I'm telling the truth. “D'Arcy, is everything all right?”

“Yeah, I've got cramps, that's all.” I slide the note for Mr. Keating off the table and slip it into my pocket. Mom turns back to her magazine.