Read Online A Safe Place for Joey by Mary MacCracken - Free Book Online

He was on the bed.”
    I willed myself to tune to Joey, to understand what he was saying.
    I repeated, “He was on the bed.” I took a chance, adding a little more. “He was lying on the bed.”
    Joey continued nodding, almost frenzied now. “Lying on the bed. Lying on the bed. Grandpa.”
    Grandpa?
    Suddenly Joey turned his body so that he faced me squarely. His voice was flat and cold, but he was talking directly to me, not to himself or the book. “Grandpa was on my bed when he died. I killed him.”
    “No,” I said. “No, of course not. You didn’t kill him.”
    “Yes,” Joey insisted. “Yes, I did. I even listened to him die.”
    My eyes stayed locked with Joey’s, and he went ontalking in the same flat voice.
    “See, he chased me,” Joey said. “I didn’t know he was going to. I just ran out of the TV room ’cause he got so mad when I imitated the way he yells. I ran up to my room and hid under my bed so he couldn’t get me.
    “But then I heard him coming after me, running all the way up the stairs and sort of bumping along the wall. Then all of a sudden he came crashinginto my room and fell down on my bed real hard and began making these choking noises.”
    The way Joey told it made it so clear. Joey’s facility for imitating and dramatizing must have infuriated Grandpa. No wonder he’d charged after the boy, forgetting his own high blood pressure.
    “Then after a while he stopped and it was real quiet … and that was even worse,” Joey went on, “becausethen it began to get dark and I knew I had to get out of there before Rich and Bill got home and found me under that bed. If they found me there, they’d know for sure I’d done it.”
    There were three loud knocks on my office door. My next child had arrived. “Just a minute,” I called as softly as I could, never moving my eyes from Joey’s. “Go on, Joey. Don’t stop.”
    “I got out,” he said,his voice just above a whisper, “but it was hard ’cause the bed was way on top of me ’cause Grandpa was so fat, but I squeezed out and ran downstairs and turned on all the lights. The TV was already on, and so I just stayed there in front of it, real quiet.
    “When Mom found him … see, Grandpa didn’t come to supper like usual, so they started calling him and then they went looking for him,and after a while Mom found him in my room. And she began to scream and cry and yell that he was dead. That’s when I knew I’d killed him for sure. I’d been thinking he was maybe just sick. But he wasn’t, he was dead.”
    The knocks sounded on the door again. “One more minute,” I called back.
    “Don’t tell,” Joey said, panicking, pulling at my sleeve. “I didn’t mean to tell you.”
    “Joey, listen. Grandpa was very old and very sick. He had a heart attack. Your mom told me he did. That happens to lots of old people.”
    “I don’t even know when he died,” Joey said. “Maybe he was still alive when I left. Maybe if I’d called a doctor, he would’ve been all right. Besides, I wanted him to die. Sometimes I even prayed that he would. Maybe my praying made it come true.”
    No wonder Joey hadn’t told anyone. He must have been terrified, lying there alone trapped underneath Grandpa while he died, later convinced that he had killed him.
    Joey put his head down on the desk. I put my arms around him for a second and then I phoned his mother.
    Joey stayed in my office through my next two appointments. He lay curled under a woolen afghan on the couch and eitherslept or pretended to, until his mother arrived.
    In the waiting room, I asked Gail Stone if it was true that she had found Grandpa in Joey’s room.
    She nodded. “Why?”
    “Why didn’t you say something at the time?” I asked in return.
    Tears gathered in Mrs. Stone’s eyes. “I don’t know. Joey was taking it so hard I thought it would just make it worse if he realized that I’d foundGrandpa in his bed. Joey was downstairs watching TV the whole time it was