We were on.
When I got home, Mom wanted to know all about work and Miles wanted to play Life again and I really needed to make sure I knew where my black T-shirt and jeans were and if I’d even brought them from our other house but I couldn’t tell my mom and Miles that. So I played a game of Life with Miles (he won, again) and then I started to lie to my mom so that I could leave in the morning to meet Leo without her freaking out if she found me gone.
I told her that I was going to go running in the morning sometimes. This was the story Leo and I had come up with.
“Alone?” she asked.
“With my new friend, Leo,” I said. “The one from work. He wants to do the junior high cross-country team next year.”
“You’re spending a lot of time with him,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “I’m glad I found a friend so fast. It makes everything more fun.”
She smiled. “What’s his last name?”
“Bishop,” I said.
“His mom brought us a lasagna a few days ago,” Mom said. “She seemed nice.”
“Where’s the lasagna?” Miles asked.
“I put it in the freezer,” my mom said. “I’d already started dinner that night. We can eat it tomorrow.”
“Or we could eat it now,” Miles said.
We were getting away from the topic. “So you’ll let me do it?”
“All right,” she said. “It’s light outside by then, so you should be safe. But don’t go running by yourself. If Leo’s alarm doesn’t go off or something, come back home.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
When I went upstairs to go to bed and turned on the light in my room, the diamond panes reflected back at me. I found my T-shirt and jeans. I opened the window and looked out. No bird.
Then I saw something on the windowsill. A small screwdriver, the kind of thing Ben would have liked. He never really played with toys but he liked other random things, stuff that was pretty or had a certain weight to it or interested him in some way. A few of his favorites included a wire kitchen whisk, a bracelet with a round, smooth piece of turquoise in it that he’d taken from my mom’s jewelry box, and a folded-up pamphlet from the mountain resort where he did special-needs ski lessons in the winter.
We called the random stuff he liked fidgets. He carried them around and flipped them back and forth in his hands to calm himself when he felt nervous. He took fidgets with him everywhere. I knew he’d probably had some with him in the car when they’d had the accident, but I’d never asked. I didn’t go in his room after to see which ones were missing.
I held the screwdriver for a minute. It had a black handle and a silvery point. How did it get there? Had my mom been fixing my window?
But there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with my window. Not earlier when I’d opened it, and not now.
I climbed into bed and put the screwdriver under the pillow. Outside I heard the wind in the trees and the rasping sound of my mom sanding boards for the deck. I thought about Lisette Chamberlain and the secret tunnels. I tried not to think about Ben but of course I did. For years I had been Ben Lee’s older sister. People always thought they knew Ben but they never really did. That didn’t stop them from talking about him.
“He’s special,” they’d say. “One of those special souls that don’t need to worry about anything they do here on earth, they’re going straight to heaven!”
Or, “He’s here to teach us to be more like him.”
Someone told me that they used to take away people like Ben. “My grandma’s sister was like that,” my friend Casey from church said once, “and they took her sister to this place. Like a hospital. My grandma hardly ever saw her after that. My mom says you guys are so lucky that we live now.”
And I guess that was right, but it also seemed to me like people who said Ben was special and had no worries were as wrong as the people long ago, but in a different way.
Because that’s crappy. What if this life was all Ben got? People said he was sweet and special—and he was—but he was also sad and angry. More than most people. He cried. His own body seemed to feel weird to him sometimes—he would jump and move like he wanted to be free of his skin. I could see him looking at us like Get me out of here and we were never sure where to take him. You can’t take someone away from their own body. And that seemed unfair. Would God really do that to someone so other people could feel like they were learning important lessons in the few minutes they spent with him?
“He’s healed now,” they said at the funeral. “He has his perfect body. Think of how happy he must be in heaven.”
I hated the funeral so much.
They were so sure and I was so not sure.