All That I Can Fix Read online

  “No problem,” she said. But something in her voice changed.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. Then she smiled. “Whenever you’re going to do it, let me know.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “And you have chocolate on your cheek.”

  She wiped the smudge off with the back of her hand. “Gone?”

  I nodded. “Gone.”

  We both knew I wouldn’t try to help her take it off myself.

  • • •

  Jello had texted me while George was over.

  The hyena was found circling the blood-drive-mobile.

  Smart hyena. A blood drive is a flashing neon sign, you know.

  It got away. There’ll be more opportunities.

  Lovely. Just what I was hoping for.

  I hadn’t mentioned Jello’s safari to George because I didn’t want her to worry. But the truth was, it was sounding better and better the more I tossed it around in my mind. I mean, okay, so we’ll carry some meat along with us, just in case, to distract whatever animals we encounter. In case they’re hungry. I mean, if you were hungry and someone threw you a heavy slab of fresh, glistening meat that wasn’t going to run away, and then there were these living, crazy humans with flashlights and sticks and shit, which one would you go after? These animals didn’t survive for millions of years by being stupid. Also, there were still a lot of animals out there—by some reporters’ estimates about twenty—so the chances were good that if we went looking, we’d find something.

  After George went home, I heard Dad moving around. “Ronney?” he called.

  I was still tinkering with the cookie house. I exhaled slowly, closed my eyes, then shouted back, “Yeah?”

  “You’re here?” Dad called back.

  “And my answer implies?”

  Silence.

  “Is Mina home?” he called.

  “Not yet.”

  Silence.

  “Mom’s picking her up from school today, so they’ll both be late,” I said. Our voices carried from one end of our house to the other.

  “Do you know what’s for dinner?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I shouted. “Not unless you actually do something and make it.”

  Dad appeared in the bedroom hallway, still in his pajamas, holding his arm. He watched me add another cookie wall to the cookie house, and I ignored him watching me. I was making a little sunroom off the back; that would be George’s favorite room. My hands smelled of butter and sugar. Who thinks of building a house out of cookies instead of just eating them? George. Of course. I’ll surprise her with a monster cookie house when I’m done tomorrow, I thought. I’ll give it to her after school.

  “What’d the roofers say?” Dad finally asked.

  “You didn’t hear them?”

  Dad shook his head. I wasn’t sure if he really hadn’t heard them or if he just didn’t have the energy to respond.

  “Seven hundred,” I said.

  Dad ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Better now than later. Storm’s coming,” I said. I wadded a cookie into a cookie ball, then popped it into my mouth.

  Dad sighed and came into the kitchen, started poking around in the refrigerator. He eventually went into the pantry and grabbed a bag of chips but struggled to open them with one hand. I watched him struggle for a while, debating whether to help him or not. Finally I asked, “Got it?”

  Dad ignored me, which was nothing new, but it still made me feel like a piece of shit. There was no way I was going to ask him a second time, so I put a bemused expression on my face, and after what seemed like twenty minutes, Dad swore, used his teeth to open the bag, then propped it in the crook of his bad arm. “Visa or Mastercard?” he asked.

  “Mastercard,” I said. “You get double points on home repair purchases.”

  “Oh.” Dad looked impressed. “Thanks.”

  I gave a small nod. “We’re one-thirtieth of our way toward getting a family trip to Cancún. It’s something like a million points. Pack your bags—we’re getting close.”

  I thought Dad would smile at that, but he didn’t. “Anyway,” I continued, “I want to work on the living room wall. The one with the water damage from last year. The paint’s peeled, and there’s probably rot behind it.”

  “You just spent seven hundred dollars, Ronney.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing with all the new clients you’ve been signing on,” I said.

  Dad cleared his throat.

  I shot him a look. “That’s what you do all day in your bedroom, right? Build up your business?”

  Dad stared at me with a blank expression on his face. “It’s not that easy, Ronney.”

  “Nothing is. But some things are easier than others. Like typing.” I formed a little cookie chimney with my fingers.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Typing with two hands is easier than typing with one.” I nodded at his shoulder. “Too bad you didn’t think about that before—”

  “Stop it.”

  “They actually quoted me nine hundred dollars, but I worked it down to seven.”

  Dad muttered something and headed back to his room.

  “That mathematical equation means I just saved you two hundred dollars,” I called out after him.

  He closed his door.

  “You’re welcome,” I said quietly.

  It’s hard to talk to someone who isn’t really there. In this house, we’ve all wrapped ourselves with such thick metal, it’s just one robot talking to another robot. Except for Mina. But she’ll learn. I guess that’ll be a good day when she does.

  I guess.

  6

  AT THE HOSPITAL THE DOCTORS told us that clinical depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain; sometimes it gets better and sometimes it gets worse, but it always was there and always will be. That didn’t stop us, however, from wondering why it started when Dad was forty-two, if there was anything that triggered it, and if it was us.

  However it started, the day after that infamous Thursday—six months ago now, while Mom was at the hospital with him—I put in a call and replaced the living room carpet. The smell of blood still clung to the walls like a ghost, and it mixed with that new-carpet smell until the stench was so thick I hopped into my bedroom through my window the whole next week just to avoid it. Mom said I was overreacting. I busted out laughing when she said that, which made her cry and get her pills.

  He couldn’t even do it right. If his word is worth anything, according to Dad, he fucked up when he was handling the gun: It went off before he intended, and he mistakenly shot himself in the shoulder.

  In the shoulder, for chrissake.

  Maybe I should have figured it out, because he was nervous as hell the weeks before. For instance, he broke four glasses washing dishes from dinner one night. That’s right: four. How the hell do you break four glasses? I’ll never find out, because the only thing I heard was the four rapid sounds of glasses shattering on the floor, and when we got to Dad, there he was in the middle of the kitchen, with soapy hands and a blank look on his face, surrounded by a sea of glass.

  Or when he jumped a mile high when Mina slammed the kitchen door coming home from school. Come on; it’s Mina. Doors slam behind her all the time. Well, like I said, he jumped to the ceiling and then started screaming at her for slamming the door and she started to cry and then Mom came in to see what was wrong and Dad was running his hands through his hair and his arms were shaking and Mina launched herself onto Mom, sobbing. All for a slammed door.

  The day before the attempt, though, Dad suddenly calmed down, even joked with us a little bit. I found myself hoping he had gotten over it and was pulling through.

  Fuck, I was wrong. Hope is crap, and I learned that the hard way.

  It’s not that he didn’t try to get better. For most of my life Dad’s done nothing but complain about his insurance job. Two years ago, after he got fired and started sitting around the house, he
mumbled something about starting his own business. Online marketing. Something that can utilize his skill set. Where he’s in control, for once. That’s how he put it. And in the beginning, his new business was all he talked about, read about, dreamed about. Maybe he realized it was harder than he thought, or that he didn’t have the skill set he thought he had, or whatever, because after he couldn’t get any clients—well, there were the two clients he did have who decided to “terminate the relationship”—he talked less and less of his dreams and started to sit around all day in front of the computer. That was funny since, new job or old job, he was still sitting around looking at a screen—but with his old job, he’d sit around wearing actual clothing, like jeans. And he’d talk to us: Sometimes we’d watch soccer together or those cop shows. With his new job, he took his laptop into my parents’ room and, well, lived there.

  Until he tried to die in the living room. That’s ironic—isn’t it? Dying in the living room? I called it the dying room while Dad was in the hospital until Mina saw Mom cry and begged me not to call it that again, which I begrudgingly promised, for her.

  Mina has never seen me cry; I make a point of that. It was after Dad’s depression started that I began to lock my bedroom door because I didn’t want anyone to walk in on me when I was crying, not even the chance. There is this small, white, stuffed-animal gorilla that Dad had won for me when I was a kid—it was at Makersville’s Fourth of July carnival, on the pop-the-balloon game—and the gorilla always sat on my bed. Holding it made me feel better on the days when I got my report card, which showed me failing my classes, or when Mom would tell Dad that the neighbors were complaining that our grass was too long and he would walk away from her as if she didn’t exist. Those were the times that I would lock my door and hold that little gorilla, and its white fur would grow damp as I held it. I thought this was my secret—that is, until one night, when Dad had been particularly heartless, I was holding my gorilla when there was a small tap-tap-tap at the door. It was Mina. I guess all this time she had heard me crying through the wall that our bedrooms share. I opened the door and let her crawl into my bed with me. That was when she started to cry, and to make her feel better, I took the closest object that I had at hand, an orange bouncy ball on my nightstand, and gave it to her. It’s special, I said. Why? she asked. Because now it’s not alone, now that it’s with you, I said. I guess what I said really stuck with her, because the next day she held it in her left hand from sunup to sundown and did her schoolwork with her right. That had been the first time that she climbed into bed with me, and after that night, I made sure to cry silently.

  • • •

  The Tuesday after the guys fixed the roof, the storm was bad, just like they had predicted. Heavy rains, lightning, more winds whipping around, and whatever debris people hadn’t yet picked up was flying around again. Good thing I got those roofers to come when they did, I thought. If I’d waited for Mom to do anything about it, we’d be drenched right now. It looked like the storm freaked out some of the animals, too, because the newscasters reported that the ostrich had run out into oncoming traffic, and, well, that was the end of the ostrich.

  I tossed my work jeans in the corner of my room, the jeans I was wearing when that stalker kid came to visit last week. I had picked the jeans up at the secondhand store because they had these question marks painted all over them. It seemed pretty apt in the moment. I don’t know why. I just liked them, and I even started wearing them on Thursdays, which was a big switch for me.

  Anyway, those jeans made that kid hunt me down. A part of me wanted to wait for him to come back so I could throw them in his face and tell him to leave me the fuck alone, but another part wanted to keep those jeans just to make him miserable. In a way I’d be doing that kid a favor: At some point you gotta learn that you can’t do shit about most things in life. That’s how it is. The earlier you learn that the better.

  My phone buzzed.

  What you doing?

  Nothing much, just admiring a cookie house.

  Help me with my safari.

  This is the third time.

  I know.

  A couple moments later he texted me again.

  You still there?

  Yeah.

  Well?

  A surge of anger coursed through me. I felt so fucking old right then. Maybe eighty. And here was Jello, enjoying it all.

  I’m in. Tell me when and I’ll be over.

  Later tonight?

  I was in the middle of texting him back when Mina bounded through the door, her orange raincoat dripping. “Ron-Ron!” she shouted, throwing her wet-dog body into my arms. “I have a new study buddy!”

  I looked to the door, and goddammit, who did I see next to her? Yes. The stalker kid. With a shit-eating smirk on his face. All words choked in my throat as Mina introduced the two of us.

  His name was Sam.

  • • •

  It turned out that Mina and Sam Caldwell were in the same class and that he was the only boy who didn’t pull Mina’s hair. Therefore, Sam was the only boy Mina would speak to. It also turned out that somehow, within, oh, the last handful of days, Sam happened to realize that he was failing his math class and, under great and mysterious ties of coincidence, specifically asked his teacher if Mina could help him study.

  Mina, in gratitude to her non-hair-pulling classmate, said yes. Obviously. And in return for that, Sam would help Mina practice her spelling words to perfection. Their fourth-grade teacher thought this was all quite splendid.

  Mina gave me a guilty shrug. “I thought you might be busy some nights—maybe you wouldn’t have time to help me out with my spelling list. I know every night is a lot.” Her eyes pleaded with mine. “But now with both you and Sam, it’s better.”

  Sam smiled.

  My jaw suddenly hurt, it was so tight. “And you chose to study here? Why not at Sam’s house?”

  “My parents don’t get home until late,” Sam said smugly. “Mina said her dad is always around.”

  “And there’s lots of grown-ups here. Because you’re sometimes around too, Ron-Ron,” Mina chimed in.

  I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, and the two kids jumped. “Don’t you ever call me that in front of him,” I said slowly.

  Mina froze.

  Dad must have heard his name, because he showed up from the bedroom hallway. “They’re study partners, Ronney,” Dad said. “Leave Sam alone.”

  I swear to God, I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. Instead, I towered over Sam. “One wrong move, asshole, and I’ll finish kicking the crap out of you.”

  For an instant Sam’s eyes widened. Then a determined look came over him, and he met my gaze, challenging.

  I knew Mina’s face was starting to crumple up, so I didn’t look at her. I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. I don’t like going out in the rain, and I was early to head to Jello’s, but I had to get out of there. I had one more reason to hate my house.

  7

  THERE’S A LOT OF SHIT in the rain. That’s what the Internet says. Acid and soot and whatever the hell we put in the sky, well, it comes raining back down on us. The Statue of Liberty’s color green is starting to streak because of the acid in the rain. And if that’s what rain’ll do to metal, think what it does to flesh and blood.

  But rain or no rain, there was no way I was going to watch that Sam kid in my kitchen just then. I mean, what the hell? I thwack him with a tree, and he decides he’s going to come to my place and get all over my kid sister? For what, my lousy jeans? Who does that?

  Suddenly stalker kids listed higher than government-sponsored UFOs. Stalker kids now ranked number two, just below Thursdays. Which was in three days, I might add.

  I was biking to Jello’s in the full fall of the rain when a white van with huge lettering, ACTION 2 NEWS TV, pulled up beside me, windshield wipers swiping away. The passenger window rolled down, and a clean-cut guy stuck his head out the window and stared at me. “Hey, kid! You speak English? In
gles?”

  I stopped and pointed to my coarse black hair, thin lips, and high cheekbones. “I’m not Mexican, you jackass.”

  “Oh. I’m Dan. I’m from Action 2 News.”

  “I figured that out.”

  “Where’s Maricopa Drive? I know I’m close.”

  “You got an animal?”

  Dan could barely contain his excitement. “A couple of reports about a gray wolf. I’ve been circling around here for twenty minutes, can’t find the street.”

  “Yeah. They design neighborhoods like this for people like you.”

  He scowled. “Come on, kid.”

  So I gave him the best directions I could, even though they were kind of shit, since the place is a labyrinth. A part of me wanted to give him shit directions—intentionally, I mean—but then I realized that if I could get tight with the news crew, maybe we could get a heads-up on the locations of these animals so two teenage guys wouldn’t have to wander around the county asking people where the nearest saber-tooth was. The news guy looked relieved, and I made sure he knew my name as he pulled away.

  Maybe this safari wouldn’t be so hard after all.

  • • •

  The only bad thing about using Jello’s basement window as an entry is when it rains. His window is two feet from the bottom of the window well, but when it rains and the water is up to my ankles, it gets annoying. If your feet stay wet for too long, then you can get athlete’s foot or a parasitic skin disease from Malaysia. Some headline said that. George says that I read the wrong headlines, but whatever.

  Jello wasn’t in his room when I dropped in, but I could hear footsteps parading above me on the first floor. I slid into his computer chair, and of course he had been watching his falling-squirrel hit count, which was now around a million. I shook my head, but really I couldn’t help getting a little excited. If he could do this with a squirrel, what the hell could he do with that wolf? Or a tiger?

  My phone buzzed. It was George.

  What are you doing?

  I’m at Jello’s, watching his squirrel hit count. You?

  Oh, how funny! I’m doing the same thing. Right around a million, right? Minus 182?