Read Online The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano - Free Book Online

again. I couldn’t properly imagine him gone when he was making noise.
    When I opened the door, he fell out.
    My father’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at me. A joke, I thought. A Halloween trick. To scare me, to scare my mother.
    I heard the front door open, then close; my mother’s footsteps.
    â€œShe’s coming,” I whispered to him. “Get up—hurry.”
    My mother came up the stairs; I could hear her walking across the hallway to my room.
    â€œGet up , ” I said.
    â€œWhat are you two doing in there?”
    I flicked his ears, pulled his hair, pinched the skin on his hand.
    I stood, kicked my father gently. “Come on, ” I said.
    My mother tried to open the door, but he was in the way. “Let me in,” she said, and pushed.
    I pushed back, but could hear anger in her voice, so I gave my father up. “He’s teasing me,” I said.
    My mother pushed her way in.
    I expected her to say, Now you know how it feels to be teased . Or, Glen, will you please, once and for all, grow up .
    But as soon as she saw him, she got down on her knees beside him and shook him. “Glen,” she said. “Glen.” She shook him again, harder. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can get up now, you can get up,” she said.
    Then, to me: “What happened?”
    She didn’t wait for an answer. She shook him too hard. She slapped his face, his chest, got on top of him, looked into his eyes. She shook him some more and kept saying Glen until Glen sounded strange, a word I was hearing for the first time, a word in another language.
    â€œHe’s teasing,” I said.
    She ran down the stairs, then back up. She kneeled beside him, put her mouth against his ear. “I won’t leave you,” she said. “I won’t leave, don’t worry.” But as soon as she said this, she ran down the stairs again.
    I could hear her out on the street, calling for help. One of our neighbors was a nurse; she had saved a neighbor choking on a cherry pit in the middle of the night.
    I kept watching. Not his eyes—I couldn’t look into them—but just above them, near enough to see if they moved.
    A neighbor whose name I didn’t know—an older man who drove a brown Cadillac and smoked a cigar on his stoop every night—ran up the stairs with my mother. Other people came—strangers, the fathers of children I knew but weren’t my friends. The man who smelled like cigars got down on the floor with my father and kept saying Glen , that sound that was no longer a word. He slapped my father’s face; he pressed his finger to my father’s neck, his ear to my father’s chest.

 
    MY MOTHER DIDN’T want to leave.
    I stood facing a soda machine, turning over in my hand two quarters the nurse had given me. I could see the reflection of my mother and the doctor. He looked down at her, his hand on his chin. She was yelling, but in a whisper. They didn’t do enough, she said. He was too young for this to happen.
    I saw a nurse give my mother a pill and a small paper cup, the kind you use to rinse after having a cavity filled. My mother pushed it away. She wanted to speak with whoever was in charge. The nurse put her hand on my mother’s shoulder.
    When my mother stopped crying, she accepted the pill and the paper cup, then sat down.
    The machine swallowed one coin, then the other. I pressed a button that sent them back to me, and I kept doing this, even though long ago I’d decided orange. I didn’t want to have to turn around; I could look at my mother’s reflection, not at her. I inserted the coins and pressed the orange button. The can making its way down through the machine and into the receptacle was as loud as I believed my own heart was. I pulled off the tab and took my first sip; everything was too loud. I drank too quickly, and it was more than half gone. When it was all gone,