Catalyst (15 page)

Ms. Cummings and Mikey walk down the hill bearing leftover tuna casserole. Some volunteers use the arrival of dinner as their cue to head home, but a good dozen stay to chow down.

Before the pizza is dished out, Dad asks us all hold hands and bow our heads for grace. Mikey drags Teri over to me so he can stand between us. When we take his hands, he pulls his feet up off the ground and swings back and forth, his eyes squeezed shut. Dad blesses the house, the food, the families and friends gathered around the pizza boxes. Then he grins and blesses the pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, onions, and extra cheese.

“Amen. Dig in.”

Teri carries a plate to her mother, sitting in the best folding chair on the porch, then she sits down beside her to wolf down a slice of pepperoni. Teri’s face has gotten tanned this week, and I swear her biceps are even bigger.

Mikey is wired. He climbs into Mrs. Litch’s lap and eats a few bites of her pizza, then slides to the floor and rolls his toy fire truck around, scooting the length of the porch on his knees. When he gets to me, he drives the truck up my back and into my hair. I pretend to growl. He giggles and crawls away.

Travis takes his boom box out of Mitch’s car and turns it on. My father listens to the mildly obscene hip-hop for a minute, then fiddles with the dial until he finds a jazz station. Mrs. Litch unexpectedly pipes up and tells us about going to a jazz festival in Central Park in New York City when she was fifteen, “before I met Charlie, of course.” She says that when she squeezed her eyes, she could see the notes like colors splashing in front of her.

It is hard to imagine Mrs. Litch was ever fifteen years old.

Mikey steals a few noodles from the casserole dish, stuffs them in his mouth, and runs inside.

“Is everything cleaned up in there?” Teri asks.

“He’s fine. All the tools are put away,” Dad says. “I closed the paint cans myself. The place is as clean as a whistle.”

I stretch across Sara’s legs and take another slice of extra cheese and onion. The conversation drifts back to jazz, to paint colors, to the sunset. After a few minutes, Mikey comes back out, his hands covered with thick yellow paint.

“Ucky,” he says.

Everybody breaks up in laughter.

“What? What’s that?” Mrs. Litch asks, squinting. “What happened?”

Teri picks up her brother. “Picasso here was decorating, Ma. I’ll clean him up.”

As she washes him off in the downstairs bathroom, Mikey babbles about his big trucks and his big-boy room. “Big boy” is the phrase of the day. Through the window, I can see Teri close and lock the door to the future playroom, where the paint cans are. She puts Mikey down to play with his trucks on the smooth living room floor and comes back out, sits next to me, and steals my pizza crust.

I lean my head against the side of the house. We’re done for the night. Everyone is beat, happy and beat. The old people talk about jazz some more, trumpets, saxophones, drums. Mitchell collects the dirty plates and napkins and puts them in a trash bag, then he sits down on the other side of me. He showered just before he picked up the pizza. I can smell the soap on his neck. I am too tired to move away, almost too tired to be irritated at him anymore. I’m just going to pretend that a very good-smelling, incredibly warm stranger is sitting next to me, a harmless stranger.

The sun is setting. A few months ago, it would have been dark by now. Mr. Lockheart flicks a switch and the feeble porch light flickers on. A moth bangs into the dirty glass. We should put that on the to-do list: clean porch light.

My dad tells a dumb joke and Mrs. Litch laughs. Mitchell chuckles. I am on the edge of dropping off; I could actually fall asleep here. Someone else tells a joke. People laugh harder and I open my eyes. The porch light goes out, fades away without a flicker. It must have been an old bulb. The confused moth flutters away.

“Did you hear that?” Teri asks.

“It’s crickets, Theresa,” Mrs. Litch says. “Spring is here to stay.”

“I think the power went out,” Dad says.

Teri twists around and looks through the open door to the living room. She stands and walks down the steps, peers at the side yard, then jogs around the house. I stand up and look through the door. The living room is empty.

Mr. Lockheart frowns. “Power can’t be out.” He pulls a flashlight from his belt and turns it on. “Of course, if something caused a short, a mouse or—”

“Mikey’s gone.” Teri leaps up the porch steps and runs in the house. “Mikey! Mii-key!” She thuds through the house like a giant, the floors shaking under the urgent weight of her boots.

“He’s probably in front of the television,” says Mrs. Litch.

“They packed the television away, dear,” Betty says quietly.

“Mii-keeey!”

The air crackles.

“I’ll check the road,” Sara says.

“The pond,” Mitch says. He jumps off the porch and sprints to the backyard.

I follow Teri into the house. “Mikey? Mikey?”

“MIIIIII-KEEEEEEYYYY!” bellows Teri.

I meet her at the foot of the stairs.

The safety gate has been ripped down.

Teri bolts up the stairs, fear trailing her like thunder.

0.0.0

Quantum Shift

Mikey lies in his room, in his big-boy room. He lies on the bare floor. He lies on the bare floor, his fingertips stretched to the snakes in the electrical outlet. His red fire truck, the one with the metal ladder that moves up and down, is blackened. The wall around the electrical outlet is charred. As I watch, a wisp of smoke escapes out the open window.

Time screeches to a halt, reeking of burnt rubber.

Outside someone turns down the radio, draining away Mrs. Litch’s jazz. I can hear doors closing, the sound of someone running.

“It doesn’t look like he’s been near the pond,” Travis tells my father.

“None of the weeds have been stepped on. He’s not there,” says Mitch.

They sound like men, grown men far away at the other end of a metal tube.

Mikey Litch lies on the bare floor of his big-boy room, his eyes open and empty.

Children don’t die. Not really, not really, they don’t die. They can’t. They are wound up, charged with enough energy, enough juice, to carry them for seventy, seventy-five years. But a bottled bolt of lightning came from the electrical outlet and poured across the red fire truck. It crackled through Mikey’s fingertips and stole him away, even though we were all watching him and doors were locked and the gate was up.

Teri screams.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodoh

Time speeds up again.

Teri sits on the floor, her legs stuck out in front of her like a broken doll, her dead Mikey in her arms. I am a shrieking ghost, seeing everything, unseen.

Daddy runs up the steps, Ms. Cummings runs up the steps, the hard hats run up the steps. They peel Teri away from her Mikey, pry the baby from her hands. They lay him out on the hard floor, his arms thrown carelessly over his head like he wants to be picked up and swung around, spun until he’s dizzy.

Check his pulse, breathe into his mouth, pizza breath, grape-juice stained. Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe.

Broken-doll Teri lies forgotten in the corner. I float across the room and settle next to her. Her hands are frozen into the holy shape of Mikey’s head and his chin. I touch her elbow. I pet her shoulder. Her body feels empty. Neither of us is really here. We left when time stopped.

Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe. My father and my teacher trade positions; you push, I’ll breathe. Their hands are so big for the little body, their shoulders touch, a frantic dance. They read each other, finger Braille on the boy’s dirty skin. He looks at her. She looks at him. Eye talk. Push on his chest, one-two-three, one-two-three, knead-the-bread, back-from-the-dead. Breathe. Breathe.

Faces hover in the doorway: Sara, Mitchell, Travis. Nameless adults. Pete performs crowd control, sweeps them back down the stairs. Nothing you can do, nothing to see here, out of the way, we’ll let you know.

A fat pearl of sweat rolls down the side of my father’s face, slips past the lines around his mouth, his Sunday night stubble, and falls—splash—onto Mikey’s glass forehead.

Red lights chase the shadows around the walls. An ambulance howls and skids into the driveway. My father’s mouth moves, moves, but I can’t hear him. The noise inside Teri has stopped. I hold on to her elbow tighter to keep her from floating out the window.

The heroes run up the steps,
thump-thump-thump
, snapping on filmy plastic gloves. The emergency rituals begin. They check Mikey’s pupils and listen to Mikey’s heart. It’s not talking to us, not even a whisper. Scissors
riiiiiip
. . . his shirt is gone . . . the air so cold for a tiny chest, count his ribs, one-two-three, grease the paddles—

“Clear.”

Electricity rips through the little bones, the pint boxes of blood, the Mikey.

Teri howls.

Nothing, no line, no pulse, no spike.

“Clear!”

We can’t catch him. Mikey’s heart is gone, shut down and cold. Teri rocks from side to side, a boulder teetering on the edge of the cliff. I hold her shoulders, slippery, desperate, to keep her from crashing. She howls louder than an ambulance, louder than a thousand screaming crows, eyes rolled back in her head so she doesn’t have to watch the worst of everything, this end.

They inject something in the soft skin inside her elbow, the crook of her arm where she balanced her son’s sweaty head. I understand now. She keeps telling me: “He’s my son, my son, my baby, my boy.”

Part 3

Gas

“Organic substances exist as molecules with covalent bonds holding the individual atoms together.”

—ARCO Everything You Need to Score
High on AP Chemistry,
3rd Edition

8.0

Photoelectrons

SAFETY TIP: Some chemicals deserve special attention because of potential instability.

The TV news crews arrive as Mikey is being carried out of the house. The lights from the cameras give me a sunburn. Teri is escorted to the back of the ambulance and helped up the step by two EMTs. They want her to lie down, but she refuses. She lifts Mikey’s body from the second stretcher and cradles him in her lap. The camera operators adjust their lenses for the close-up and I think I have to scream. Someone is grabbing my arms, but the light is so bright, I can’t tell who it is.

Teri turns slightly and her hair falls forward, shielding her face and Mikey from the eyes and the lenses and the lights. The EMTs hop in the back and the ambulance driver closes the door. The cameras turn and follow the ambulance as it rolls down the driveway, then pulls out onto the road, red lights flashing. There is no siren.

“Are you okay?” Mitch whispers in my ear. “Do you want to go home?”

The camera operators cut the lights and the night jumps back into photo negative relief.

“Not yet,” I say.

My father and Ms. Cummings help Mrs. Litch into the back of the Godmobile. Ms. Cummings buckles the seat belt over Mrs. Litch’s lap. Dad gets in the driver’s seat and backs down the driveway to follow the ambulance. Mrs. Litch stares dead ahead.

The police take notes and photos, their flashes bouncing back and forth in time, measuring and recording until they finally put away their pencils. They murmur into their mikes. The other volunteers, the hard hats, the adults, wander offstage like actors who have forgotten their lines. They head for their cars and they drive to their houses, where they will check to make sure their own children are breathing.

“Do you want to go home?” Mitch asks me.

“Not yet,” I say.

We stay. My friends and Toby and me, we stay. Sara unearths a handful of candles. We light every single one of them and stick them on the floor of what was going to be the playroom, directly below the big-boy room, because it is very dark in Teri Litch’s house. We sit on the floor, between the candles and the wall, five monkeys in a line: Toby, me, Mitch, Sara, Travis. The light licks the yellow handprints Mikey left on the wall.

God.

Toby leans against me. I sag against Mitch. Sara moves, Travis shifts, and the five of us dissolve into a pool, one heart beating. Toby is warm. I’m shivering. He clutches my waist. I press my cheek against Mitch’s shoulder. Mitch grabs the back of my neck. In our shadows, Sara’s hair flows from Travis’s head, his legs grow out of her body. Travis reaches out and drapes an arm across my brother’s shaking shoulders. We take turns breathing.

They cry and their tears roll on the wood floor. My eyes are dry, frozen behind my contacts. I crawl into a candle flame until it becomes a whiteout, the color of hospital walls and bandages and wax bodies. It feels as if my contacts are peeling off. I close my eyes and rub them with my fists. The light explodes like a broken kaleidoscope with all the gritty bits draining away. I untangle myself from the circle and wrap my arms around my knees.

“It’s our fault. We let him go,” I say. “We weren’t watching.”

Mitch’s head snaps up. “Don’t say that, Kate. Don’t even think it.”

“She can’t help what she thinks,” Sara says.

Mitch stands up. “It wasn’t our fault. Don’t feel guilty.”

Toby wipes his face on his shirt and slides closer to the line of candles. “You know what the worst part was?” he whispers.

“What, Tobe?” I ask.

“The way his arms flopped when she picked him up, like he was made of rags.”

The candle flames blow another whiteout across my eyes.

“If anyone is at fault, it’s that inspector.” Mitch crosses his arms over his chest. “He left the job site with a dangerous hazard out in the open. He could be arrested. At the very least, he should be fired.”

“What?” I ask.