Say That To My Face. David Prete
sister smiled. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”
WHEN I ASKED my mother how Mrs. Gallagher died, she told me she was sick with cancer. I was in the second grade; Rory was in the fifth. It happened in April, only a month after the fifth Son of Sam attack.
After the funeral, family, friends and people from the neighborhood went over to the Gallaghers’ house. It was the only time I ever saw it from the inside. For us kids, having to sit quietly in their strange house with a group of adults, in our nice clothes, with no game going on outside was the most disorienting part of the whole day. What I really wanted to do was poke around in their kitchen and bathroom and definitely get a look at Rory’s room.
I think I was the only one who noticed Rory walk up the stairs. I followed her. All the doors that lined the long hallway were closed; the daylight couldn’t get in. Rory opened the last door on the right and went in. I knew I was in a place I probably shouldn’t have been, but curiosity coupled with my crush kept me going. The power to turn invisible would have come in handy. I peeked in after her. The room had a huge canopy bed and two layers of curtains on the windows. Against the wall was a vanity covered with makeup cases and bottles of perfume like my mother had in her room. Also, there were bottles just like the ones my stepfather kept his asthma medicine in.
Rory opened a dresser drawer and was kneeling in front of it, her hands kneading through the clothes. She looked confused. She searched through the drawer as if what she wanted was there last time she checked. She took a green sweater out and held it up by the sleeves, but still wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Maybe Rory believed that she couldn’t have been brought to a scary place such as this earth only to be left unattended, and was convinced that folded up in that sweater she would find a perfect explanation for all this. She examined the whole thing, then reached inside and carefully read the label.
I forgot I was trying to be unnoticed and said, “What’s it say?”
My voice or my presence didn’t startle her. She seemed to know I was there the whole time. She turned her head to me; the sweater was draped over her lap.
“It says you can’t wash it.”
BETWEEN THE FIVE children in mourning and parents who were afraid to let their children out of the house, our kickball games really slowed down. A few of us would still gather in front of the Gallaghers’ house but felt we didn’t have the right to the playing field unless one of the Gallagher kids joined us. When they didn’t come out, we just stood around, bounced the ball around for a while, then reluctantly went back home way before the sun went down. And when one of them did come out to start the game, it was never Rory. She stopped playing altogether, and without her around there wasn’t much crime for me to fight.
From the street I would look up, trying to figure out which window was hers. I had visions of flying into their house, swooping down, grabbing Rory off her bed and taking her to a safe distance above all the lunacy. If I really was a superhero I could’ve gotten Rory out of the house, caught the Son of Sam and somehow saved Mrs. Gallagher’s life. I didn’t even know what a .44-caliber revolver or a cancer cell looked like, but they were the same—two invisible monsters that snuck up on people and killed them. Surely Batman must have had some kind of weapon that could beat both of them. But, pretend as I did, I couldn’t stop either one of them.
RORY HAD A kid sister named Kerri who was in my grade. To me, the most interesting thing about Kerri was that she had a sister named Rory. Kerri only waited a week to come back to school after her mother died and right off the bat there was an incident. I walked by her and accidentally bumped into her desk. Her crayon slipped out of the lines and she lost it.
“Look what you did! You ruined my picture! I’m sick of this! First my brothers and now you! I’m sick of it! Do you hear me? I’m sick of it!”
It was like I had accidentally knocked a knife off a table and didn’t catch it for fear of getting cut. I jumped out of the way and let it fall. I had a feeling it wasn’t about her picture, but I didn’t know what else to do. Mrs. Johnson said, “OK, Kerri that’s enough. Why don’t you sit down now.”
She didn’t even wipe her nose or her eyes until a drop landed on her picture.
Outbursts weren’t Kerri’s only form of grieving. A few times she just got really quiet and said she wasn’t feeling well. She’d go to the school nurse and her father got called at work to come pick her up. Mrs. Johnson explained to us that she thought Kerri wasn’t sick, but rather she was upset about her mom. That I understood.
The thing that didn’t make sense was the water fountain.
The class was silently staring into workbooks, trying to solve three-digit subtraction problems, when I went to get a drink. Bent over with my mouth near the faucet, I felt someone come up behind me. I turned around; it was Kerri. She was standing uncomfortably close but wasn’t looking at me. She had her eyes on the fountain. I wiped my mouth and stepped around her cautiously, not sure if she was done throwing tantrums.
Two days later, same thing again. Got up right behind me, stood close and still didn’t look at me.
I couldn’t see why the girl who, weeks before, chewed me out in front of everyone now needed to stand so close and put her mouth to the same faucet right after mine.
The third time I wasn’t even thirsty. I only wanted to see if it would happen again. By the time I had my face over the faucet, Kerri was behind me. Mrs. Johnson announced—so everyone could hear—how she’d noticed that every time Joseph got up for a drink, Kerri did also. When all the heads and giggles pointed in Kerri’s direction, Mrs. Johnson asked if Kerri was really thirsty. Kerri answered her question by sitting down.
In the second grade, we didn’t expect to have to deal with adults who couldn’t see it was uncool to publicly embarrass a kid who lost her mother a month ago. Nor did we expect in the summer ahead of us there would be a citywide blackout, that Elvis Presley would die so young, that a bomb threat would evacuate thirty-five thousand people from the World Trade Center or that the Son of Sam would turn out to be a twenty-four-year-old guy named David who lived in our neighborhood a few blocks from where we played. How could we have conceptualized evil as a quiet guy who worked at the post office, rented the studio apartment down the street and lived among us? Fifteen years earlier he attended our elementary school, was taught by the same teachers, sat at our desks and drank out of the same water fountain. As grade school children, we had no idea that we were months away from those kinds of thoughts.
WE THOUGHT IT was him.
Kerri and I tried to play as if the water fountain incidents never happened. Catherine and I pushed our curfew. The sun was setting. We stopped the game for the car coming down the street. When it got close, we saw it was cream-colored, then we saw there was one guy in it.
Some kids took off and ran through front yards, between houses. Some screamed. I couldn’t run. I fell backward, put my forearms in front of my face, not wanting to see or be seen. When I peeked out from behind my arms, he was halfway down the block; my sister was through our front door. It was time to run home, but not without my ball. I ran to Kerri, who was on the sidewalk, her whole body wrapped around the kickball.
I said, “Give me the ball,” and tried to pry it from her. She rolled over and wouldn’t let me grab it.
“Come on!” I said.
She wasn’t giving it up. On top of her, I tried to get my hands between her stomach and the ball. She was fighting me. I rolled her on her back—she was laughing. Not a good time for a game of keep-away, I thought. I tried to punch the ball loose but never meant to knock the wind out of her. She held her ribs and cried. I said I was sorry, but she didn’t even look back as she ran to her house. Someone had been yelling for her to get the hell inside. The screen door slammed behind her, then Rory appeared behind it. Her hair was gone, cut straggly, close to her head; it looked like she’d done it herself. She yelled at me, “Get out of here! Go home!”
My mother grabbed me by the back of my shirt and didn’t let go until we were in our house.