Ms. Bixby's Last Day (9 page)

“Probably because nobody ever uses it,” Steve mutters.

I guess it would be a little disconcerting, sitting there, picturing those teeth right below you, that long snout reaching up to take a big bite out of your you-know-what. “Didn't you?”

“Are you kidding? In that? Even if I
had
to I wouldn't.”

I look down again at the great white.

It makes me think of Dad.

I point to the door.

“If you'll excuse me,” I say.

Who paints a shark in their toilet?

My father would. Or at least it seems like something he would do. Or would have done. Before.

Dad was a prankster. A gag master. He used to play practical jokes all the time on his buddies at work. Not on actual construction sites, of course—that would be stupid dangerous. But back at the office or right after work. Whipped cream in the desk drawers. Shaken cans of beer. Switching the contents of sack lunches. It was the same at home for a while, except at home, I was the only target. And they were always sneak attacks. Except for one day out of the year. The one day I could see it coming. April 1st.

Next to Christmas, April Fool's Day was the best holiday at our house. We even made up a mascot for it: the April Fool's Jackass, a magical donkey who would sneak through your window on March 31st and dump a basket of goodies in your bed. Old-school stuff. Joy buzzers and whoopee cushions and fake parking tickets. Flies for your ice cubes and dollars on retractable string. And rubber dog poop. You always woke up with a big pile of dog doo, there on the pillow, right under your nose.

Of course he always played a prank on you as well, that clever little donkey. One time he replaced my toothpaste with Elmer's glue. Not as bad as it sounds—I'd tasted it before—but hard to brush with. Another time he pasted a fake mustache to my face in my sleep that I had to wear to school all the next day, earning me the temporary nickname Luigi (my fault for also wearing green). If you've ever taken a bite out of a caramel-coated onion that you expected to be an apple, you might have had a visit from the April Fool's Jackass.

“It's all in good fun,” Dad would say, and then he'd laugh while you picked the fake maggots out of your cereal bowl. You'd vow to get him back, of course, but he would suddenly look innocent and claim it was the donkey that did it. And you wouldn't eat, even though it was kind of funny, because maggots, fake or not, will make you lose your appetite.

But I did get him back. Sometimes. Not on April Fool's, of course. Not when his guard was up, but later. Put a rotten banana in the toe of his work boots. Stuck a fake roach in his grilled cheese. Sprinkled hot sauce on his french fries. He never got angry. Not once. “Well played, son,” he'd say, wrapping his arms around me, halfway between a hug and a wrestler's hold. Then he'd give me a grin full of wickedness and the promise of retaliation, and I'd spend the next three days opening every door slowly, inch by inch, and sniffing all my food before taking a bite.

That was all before. Before the accident and the surgeries, the disability checks and the medications. The hours spent at home, in his chair or on the couch, cemented in place, like a nickel superglued to the sidewalk. After a while it just wasn't funny anymore. Any of it. There were no more pranks. No more gags. He would still make jokes sometimes, tell me something he heard on late-night TV. And I would laugh, not wanting to disappoint him. But it wasn't the same.

I said a prayer not long ago. On April Fool's Eve. It's not something I do often, praying, because I feel like if you do it too much, it loses its effect. Like building up a tolerance—God just starts to tune you out. But on March 31st I prayed that the April Fool's Jackass would appear and leave a big basket of gags on my bed and a pile of dog poop on my pillow. Not because I wanted to play a prank on anyone, though it would have been fun to see the look on Steve's face when he bit into a piece of hot pepper gum. Just because I didn't want to stop believing in him yet.

The next morning there was no basket. No poop. No joke.

Nothing to get him back for. Nothing to look forward to.

Dad would really have loved this toilet.

Sitting there, thinking of the great white about to take a bite out of my skinny white bottom, I think of a new word, or at least a new way of thinking about an old one.
Squaring.
As in
“I just squared one.” Pretty much the same as “going number two” or “dropping a deuce” except even more scientific. It's going potty to the power of two. Plus it's more appropriate for dinner conversation than “making fudge nuggets” or “birthing a Baby Ruth.”

I finish and flush and wash my hands, and then I step out to see Steve and Topher huddled over the checkout counter, which is really not much more than another rickety wooden bookshelf with a cash register balanced precariously on top of it. The old man with the bushy eyebrows is standing behind it, one eyebrow raised. Topher and Steve have concerned looks on their faces too, and I wonder if something's happened. Wonder what trouble they've gotten themselves into, wonder if the old man and his owl have caught them stealing, though I can't imagine either of them doing such a thing. Buyer beware. It's not till I get closer that I see that they aren't worried—they are deep in thought.

“Seven seconds,” the old man says.

“Hang on,” Topher shouts. “I've almost got it. ‘Put me in a bucket, and I'll make it
lighter.
'”

“Four.”

“No. Wait.”

“Two.”

Topher snaps his fingers repeatedly. “A hole. A hole. You're a hole.”

“Exactly,” the old man says, his eyes brightening. Topher throws his arms up in triumph.

“Boo-ya. Who da man? I'm the man.” Leave it to Topher to talk trash over solving a riddle. Steve shakes his head.

“All right, ‘da man.' Try this one, then. ‘You use a knife to slice my head and weep beside me when I am dead.'”

“I don't know,” Steve says in his mopey voice. “I told you. I suck at riddles. Why can't we do sudoku or something?”

“Seven seconds.”

“It can't be that hard.”

“Five.”

“I'd like to cut my sister's head off sometimes,” Steve says.

“Three.”

“I don't know!” Topher shouts as I step up behind him.

“You're an onion,” I say, with one second to spare.

The old man points at me and grins. “Excellent.”

“I was just about to say that,” Topher huffs.

So that's what they were doing while I was in the restroom. Playing a riddle game. “Come on, Mr. Alexander. One more,” Topher pleads.

His name really is Alexander. He seems a lot less frightening than before, when he was shouting about the jaws of death and eating bodies down in his basement. In fact, he looks completely harmless now, standing behind his cash register with his cup of
tea and biscuit crumbs caught in his sweater. In the time it took me to square, Steve and Topher have made a new friend.

“Aren't you going to miss your bus?” Mr. Alexander asks.

“Yes. Probably,” Steve says.

“Just one more,” Topher insists. “And make it a tough one.”

I step up so I'm standing in between Topher and Steve now. I see Topher's already found the book he was looking for, and I almost hit myself for not thinking of it. It's a brilliant addition to the plan. It's perfect, actually. A great finishing touch, even if it's not one of the things she asked for. The copy he's found is well loved, cover torn, pages yellowed and warped, but she won't care. Knowing her, she will probably like it better that way.

“All right,” Mr. Alexander says. “But after this you need to either buy more books or get out of my shop. Scout can't abide loiterers.” The old man puts a finger to his chin, then grins mischievously. “‘You can run from me, but you can never escape. You can beg for me, but I don't always listen. To most I am a thing worth waiting the longest for.'”

“You can run from me . . . ,” Steve echoes.

“Eight seconds.”

“The sun?” Topher guesses.

“I don't always listen?” Steve says.

“Five seconds.”

“Maybe it's time. Is it time?” Topher asks.

“Three.”

“Don't look at me!” Steve shouts. Topher is hopping up and down. He looks at me instead, desperate.

I know the answer, but I don't say it. The old man fixes me with his cloudy blue eyes and I suddenly feel transparent, like he's staring right through me. He knows I know. Topher bangs his hands on the counter. “C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!”

“Time's up,” Mr. Alexander says triumphantly. Topher growls in disgust.

“Well, tell us then,” Steve says.

“Yeah, Mr. Alexander,” Topher adds. “You can't just leave us hanging like that. What's the answer?”

The bookseller smiles at me. It's a lonely smile. I know because I see that same smile every day. I open my mouth, start to say something, when the growl of an engine grumbles by, shaking the windows, knocking a couple of books over, rattling Scout on the shelf where she's perched.

Mr. Alexander frowns, and we all run to the door and look out just in time to see our bus shoot by.

The April Fool's Jackass disappeared on a cloudy day in mid-October, well over two years ago.

He was working along a scaffold three stories up. Something snapped or slipped or just popped loose, and the scaffolding
collapsed, folding in on itself. He collapsed with it, folding in on himself too.

He only fell thirty feet, which isn't that much, if you think about it. Steve tells me that a flight attendant in Europe once fell out of an exploding jetliner, miraculously surviving a fall of thirty-three thousand feet. She became a hero. But it's not always how far you fall. Sometimes it's just how you land.

Dad landed badly. Broke his arm in two places, a compound fracture tearing a gash through his forearm that looked like something out of a slasher movie. He chipped a shoulder blade and cut his ear, too, but those were nothing. The real damage was done to L2 and L3, otherwise known as Lilo and Stitch. That was what the neurologist called them, the two vertebrae that had fractured and dislocated in my father's spine, causing untold damage to the cord inside. Lilo and Stitch did a number on my father, gnawing and pinching through the fabric of nervous tissue that give marching orders to his lower half. They didn't rip off his legs, but they might as well have.

There were surgeries, of course. Procedures. Medications. Tirades. Prayers. An extended hospital stay. I missed a lot of school—my old school, not the Ridge. I spent a lot of time with my great-
aunt
Tracy, who had flown in from Oregon, the only relative on my mother's side who still kept in touch after she died. Aunt Tracy promised to take care of me until Dad got out
of the hospital, but she couldn't stay forever. Within a month she was gone and my dad came home, transferred from ambulance to wheelchair and from wheelchair to couch.

The surgeons did what they could. Now it was all up to him. With enough physical therapy, they said, he would probably walk again, but it was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. He said he was up for the challenge. He had lost my mom when I was only two and raised me all by himself. He taught me how to ride a bike. He could teach himself how to walk.

He made it to his first nine physical therapy appointments and didn't make much progress.

On the tenth one he said he wasn't feeling well and would reschedule.

On the eleventh he said he just forgot.

After that he stopped picking up the phone.

Thankfully, we didn't want for money. The company my father worked for ponied up. They didn't really have a choice. They covered his medical bills and kicked in a sort of workers' compensation package that would probably support us for the rest of his life, provided we pinched our pennies. Then they turned around and sued the company that made the scaffolding materials. The scaffold makers sued some company in China that produced the bolts used to hold the scaffolding together.
Which means somehow or another there is a big manufacturing corporation in China that pays my father to sit on his butt all day and watch
Ice Road Truckers
. There's a joke there, somewhere, about a screw loose probably, but it's not funny anymore. The whole story is this: My father fell and he doesn't have the heart to stand back up.

There are days he just comes out and says it. That thirty feet wasn't far enough. That it would be better if he had fallen farther. Thirty thousand feet. A million feet. Clear off the face of the earth. He says, then it would be better for both of us. I never know what to say when he says that, so I just go hide out in my room or sit on the back porch and watch the fireflies blink on and off. Later he always says he's sorry, that he didn't mean it. He was just feeling down.

I never know what to say to that either. So instead I just tell him I'm going to go make us dinner.

We run as fast as we can, but it's pointless; the bus is already half a mile away. So we walk slowly back to the bus stop, Steve shifting under the weight of his shoulder straps, Topher with his new used book under his arm. It's not the end of the world. There will be another bus, but it does set us back on the schedule. Another kink in the plan. I kick at the curb and stare down the road.

“Make it a
tough
one?” I say.

“Hey. I wasn't the one dropping anchor in the back,” Topher replies.

“It's called ‘squaring.' And it's not every day you get to go inside a shark's mouth.”

There is a splintering bench by the bus stop, advertising the latest extra-value menu item, and the three of us sit next to an old lady and her lapdog, a little yappy thing that looks like a dirty Muppet and snarls at Topher when he plops down beside it. Steve immediately takes out his phone to check the bus schedule and see when the next one is due. I'm surprised he doesn't have it memorized. I fiddle with the zipper on my backpack and think about the wineglass wrapped up in the blanket inside, think about nerves encased in bone, wrapped in muscle and sinew and skin, think about the walls of room 213, layered with watercolor paintings and science reports. Safe things. Secure things. All wrapped up. All enclosed. Until they're not. Until they are out in the open, exposed and fragile.