The Hour I First Believed

On Monday morning, Miss Hogan makes an announcement. “We have to be extra tidy for the next several days,” she says. “Poor Mr. Zadzilko’s mother died over the weekend. He’s going to be absent all week.”

She shows us the sympathy card she’s going to pass around and says to make sure we sign in cursive, in pen not pencil, and neat not sloppy. When the card gets to me, I write “Caelum Quirk,” but Mr. Big Fat Glasses Face probably doesn’t even know my name. All’s he ever calls me is “Dirty Boy.”

All day, I keep thinking about Mr. Zadzilko being absent. And after school—after I empty our wastebasket and wash our board and I’m still waiting for Mother—I go up to Miss Hogan’s desk. “What is it, Caelum?” she says.

“I’ve got a secret.”

“You do, do you? Would you like to tell me what it is?”

“Miss Anderson smokes,” I say. “When she sits on the toilet. I seen her from Mr. Zadzilko’s peeking hole.”

For a long time she just looks at me—like I said it in Japanese or something. Then she gets up, takes my hand, and has me show her.

And you know what? The next morning, when I wake up? The egg case on my windowsill has hatched. There’s tiny little praying mantises scrambling all over the sill, and on the floor, and even in my bed.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

Millions, maybe.

Chapter Five

LOLLY’S CAT WAS CAUTIOUS AT first, watching me from doorways, scooting from the rooms I entered. But half an hour into my homecoming, she sidled up to me, brushing against my pant leg. My aunt had given her some goofy name I couldn’t remember. “Where is she, huh?” I said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

In the pantry, I found a litter box in need of emptying, an empty bag of Meow Mix, and a note in Lolly’s handwriting: “Get cat food.” There were a couple of tins of tuna in the cupboard. “Well, whatever your name is, you’re in luck,” I told the cat. With the first twist of the can opener, she began bellowing. We were probably going to be friends for life.

Thinking I should call Maureen, I flopped down on Lolly’s sofa and grabbed the remote. The Practice was on. Okay, I thought. Not my favorite, but watchable. I stood up and brushed the grit off the sofa, sending cat fur flying. My aunt had many talents, but housekeeping wasn’t one of them; that had always been Hennie’s department. I pried off my shoes and put my feet up. Lolly’s cat hopped aboard, walked up my leg, and nestled against my hipbone. Gotta call Maureen, I thought. Soon as the commercial comes on….

WHAT? WHERE…? I stumbled toward the ringing telephone, realizing where I was: back in Three Rivers, back at the farmhouse.

“Hey,” I said. “I was going to call you. I must have conked out.”

Except it wasn’t Maureen. It was some doctor, talking about my aunt’s stroke. Yeah, I know all this, I remember thinking. That’s why I’ve come back. But somewhere in the middle of his monologue, it dawned on me that he was talking about a second stroke. Lolly hadn’t survived this one, he said. They’d pronounced her dead ten minutes earlier.

I went outside. Sat on the cold stone porch step. The sun was rising, coral-colored, over the treeline. Higher in the sky, the moon was fading away.

I went back inside. Called Maureen and woke her out of a sound sleep.

“Caelum? What time is it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s sunrise here…. She died, Mo.”

I waited out the silence, the sigh. “How?”

“Another stroke.”

“Oh, Cae. I’m so sorry. Are you at the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The farmhouse. I sat with her for a couple of hours last night, but then I came back here. They said when they checked her at four, she was stable. But then, twenty minutes later…Maureen, I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel anything. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Cae,” she said. “You just haven’t been able to take it in yet. Absorb the shock of it.” She said she’d talked to Lolly’s doctor the day before, while I was en route to Connecticut. More of the test results had come back; the damage had been massive. “She might not have been able to walk, or talk, or even swallow food. Lolly would have hated living like that.”

“They asked me did I want to come in and view the body. I said no. Is that something I’m supposed to do?”

“It’s a personal decision, Cae. There’s no ‘supposed to.’”

“I should have stayed with her last night. Slept in the chair or whatever. God, I hate that she died alone.”

Mo said should-haves weren’t going to do Lolly or me any good.

“Last night? I got up and started combing her hair. More out of boredom than anything else, I guess. I’d just been sitting there, watching her sleep. And her hair was all smushed down and I found this comb in her drawer and…and when I stopped combing? She opened her eyes. Stared at me for a few seconds.”

“Then she knew you’d come back.”

“No. Uh-uh. Nothing registered.”

“Maybe it did, Cae. Maybe knowing you were there, she could let herself die. The hospice team at Rivercrest always used to say that the dying—”

“Yeah, okay. Stop. I doubt it, but thanks.”

“How did it feel?” she asked.

“What?”

“Touching her? Combing her hair?”

“It felt…it felt…” The question made my eyes sting and my throat constrict. Trying to stifle tears, I uttered a weird guttural noise that caught the cat’s attention.

“It’s okay to feel, Caelum,” Mo said. “Just let yourself—”

“What’s her cat’s name, anyway?” I said, cutting her off. “I fed her tuna fish last night and now she’s like my shadow.”

“The black and white? Nancy Tucker.”

“Oh, yeah. Nancy Tucker. Where’d that name come from?”

“Some folksinger Lolly likes,” Mo said.

I stood there, nodding at the cat. “Liked,” I said.

Maureen asked me if I’d thought about what I needed to do that day. Should we go over stuff? Make a list? I told her what the hospital had said: that I had to let them know ASAP which funeral home they should contact to arrange for the transfer of the body. “I guess I’ll tell them McKenna’s,” I said. “We used them when my mother died, and my grandfather. My father, too, I think. Or did we? Jesus, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“I can’t remember my father’s funeral.”

“Well, you were so young.”