All Good Children - Catherine Austen [56]
I sit on her bed and feel her absence like a ghost. There’s a thin layer of dust on her night table, with bare spots where picture frames might have stood.
She’s gone. I lie back on the pillow and think those two words over and over.
Before I leave, I peek behind her bedroom door in hope of a flimsy nightgown I could fantasize with. Instead I find a thin strip of wood—sawn-off window trim—that holds the tiniest painting I ever made. It shows Pepper in a skimpy elf costume up on her toes beside a stack of presents, one leg high in the air behind her, her pointed shoe sparkling like a star. I sketched it at the Christmas production last year, worked on it through the holidays, gave it to her on New Year’s Day.
I’m happy that she hung it here. Every time she closed her door, she was reminded of me. But then she packed her frames and panties and left my painting behind.
I lift it off its mount. It’s not really stealing. She’s never coming back for it.
Someone’s crying in the tent on Sunday morning when I get back from cross-country. I pull apart the front flaps and find my mother on the couch bawling like a baby, her face twisted and stained, soggy tissues in her fist. She looks up at me and hides her face in her hands.
She won’t tell me what’s wrong. She shakes her head every time I ask, swats at me when I try to pry her fingers off her face.
“It’s Xavier’s sixteenth birthday,” I say, but she just cries harder.
I head to the kitchen and butter some toast, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar overtop. I sit at the table and scroll through Freakshow’s “behind the scenes” clips. Zipperhead and his girlfriend just got engaged.
Eventually Mom comes out and sits beside me. I dissolve my screen and offer her my last triangle of toast. She shakes her head, clears her throat, takes my hand. She stares at the table and says, “Tyler Wilkins died last night from heart failure because of the shot I gave him.”
The bread wads up on my tongue. I’m silent, disbelieving. I don’t say, “You killed him.” I don’t say, “You didn’t kill him.” I don’t say anything.
I feel all ripped up inside, as if Tyler was my friend. I try to remember him busting my ribs, slapping Ally’s face, kicking Xavier, all the reeking moments he inflicted over the years, but every image gets pushed away by the memory of him storing my painting in his RIG and calling me an asshole because I thought I had him pegged.
I get up and go inside the tent. I can’t sit down. I turn in circles and watch the walls blur by. I know exactly what I’m going to paint for the exhibit.
I’ll paint children, dozens of them, real ones-Tyler and Pepper and Xavier, me and Dallas, Bay and Brennan, Montgomery and Kayla, Saffron and Chicago, the baby on the sidewalk yesterday, Zachary and Melbourne from the park, Lucas from downstairs, the high school kids on skateboards, the throwaways on skates. I’ll paint all of us doing what we used to—dancing and running and fighting and playing and laughing and being kids. I’ll paint us on the walls inside the tent where I’m hiding now, in dazzling hues and luminance. I’ll leave the walls outside dull gray, stenciled with a single word. I’ll call the whole thing Withstanding on a Perilous Planet. And I’ll give it to Xavier as a belated birthday present. I’ll tell him it’s a metaphor.
ELEVEN
There’s a meeting at the high school to talk about concerns with the New Education Support Treatment, but only my mother has any.
“I expected you to be thankful for the treatment,” Mr. Graham tells her. “Your son is an obvious troublemaker— and I don’t mind using that word now that it’s a thing of the past. Maxwell is bright enough to waste hours of class time with his antics yet still complete his work and earn As. But in exercising