We have to get to work on the scrapbook right away, because I’m already forgetting stuff. Today when Dad opened the door and shouted “Charlemagne!” I thought he’d gone insane. Like more than usual. I forgot that’s our cat Charlie’s full name. I don’t know why Mom named him that. The real Charlemagne changed the face of Europe and conquered a whole empire. Our cat hasn’t even conquered the yard—there’s a bigger cat who pees on our porch regularly, and Charlie just runs inside when he comes around.
Our other cat is named after Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt. She killed herself with an asp, which is a poisonous snake. That would have been the most horrible death Mom could have imagined. If Mom were Cleopatra, she’d have drowned herself in the Nile.
Other people name a cat “Boots” because it has white feet, or “Ginger” because it’s orange. Mom felt the need to name Cleo and Charlie after great historical leaders, even though all they do is sleep and eat and roll around all day biting each other’s heads.
I miss talking to Mom about history. She would tell me about things she learned at work, or she’d ask what I was reading or which empire I was playing in Civilization. Then she’d tell me something cool about it or listen to me tell her something. Now there’s no one to talk to.
There’s no point in talking to Dad. Sam and I tried to interview him for the Mom Book, but he said that if he talked about Mom too much, he wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. That’s a great thing to tell your four-year-old.
Dad’s mental health must be seriously diving, because he asked if I want to go to church with him on Sunday. I’ve never been to church in my life, and I’ve never seen Dad go either. I told him the joke, “Why do you have to be quiet in church? Because people are sleeping.” He said, all seriously, “That’s disrespectful, Josh.” Like he’s a priest or something, when really he hasn’t been in a church since the day he got married. Mom laughed her head off when I told her that joke.
Maybe Dad heard me teaching Sammy how to pray, so he thinks I’m dying to go to church. I’m working on a step-by-step plan to get Sam ready for kindergarten. Step One is, “Don’t let Power Rangers talk out loud, especially not in a girly voice.” Sam said Step One would be impossible to tackle at this point in his life. We moved on to Step Two, “Don’t talk out loud to Mom, with or without the Ranger.” Sam started to cry over the thought of Step Two.
I told him he could talk to Mom at the cemetery or in a church or praying by his bedside. I showed him how to pray. He thought it was the greatest thing. I told him he wasn’t allowed to kneel down and pray wherever he happened to be, like in the mall or somewhere. I could totally see him doing that, and even if people think he’s talking to God instead of his dead mother, it’s still weird. He asked if he could talk to Mom just in his head, and I said okay. Maybe that’ll be Step Six or something, but he’s not ready for it yet. He’s still in mourning.
Japanese Buddhists mourn for forty-nine days. If there’s something unsolved about the person’s death, like, say you don’t know how a snake got in their car, the mourners say, “My forty-nine days are not over.” That’s exactly how I feel. My forty-nine days are not over. I feel like my forty-nine days will go on forever.
Sammy’s beside me now, drawing in his journal. His profile looks like Mom’s. She had long eyelashes and a round happy face. She was a happy person, like Sam. That’s why it’s so sad with her gone. She made up a large percentage of our family’s happiness.
Sammy just let me see his journal, and I made him cry again. I skimmed the most recent pages. They’re full of snakes scratched out. First he draws a snake, then he scratches it out. The one he’s working on now is a snake attacking a person. I asked him if it was supposed to be Mom. He said, “No, it’s Daddy.” Then he asked if I would write in his journal that Daddy was killed in the car crash and snakes must be eliminated. Except Sammy called it “lemonated,” which sounds like he wants to make them into a beverage.
I got mad and told him he was demented, and if Dad heard him it would break his heart. So of course Sammy bawled his eyes out. I got a grip and told him I was sorry. I said, “You’re the best boy ever.” He asked, “Better than you?” And I said, “Yeah, you’re way better than me.”
There’s one drawing in Sam’s journal that isn’t scratched out. It shows the blue Power Ranger fighting a giant green snake. It looks like he put a lot of effort into it. I told him Mom would have loved that drawing, and he should be proud of it. He said Mom will be proud of him when he starts soccer and scores a hundred goals. I felt terrible because I’d forgotten all about that. I better talk to our neighbor about getting Sam on the team. Dr. Tierney said this is a bad time for disappointments and betrayals.
Speaking of disappointment, I got a letter back from Karen this morning. It was weird, like she was writing to a total stranger. It was only one page long. She said she’d heard from Simpson that I was back in soccer, but the rest of it was stuff about her camp. She said they heard an owl hoot in the night, and they tried to identify which species it was. She thought it was a great horned owl. Why would she write me about that? My mother just died. I couldn’t care less which owl she heard. She didn’t even ask how I’m doing. I think she doesn’t like me anymore and she wishes she’d never kissed me. I’m not writing to her again. She comes home in a week anyway. I hope she still likes me, because it would be something to look forward to, but I wish she’d never written, because now I’m just depressed.
Sammy’s bouncing on my bed right now, and the girl Power Ranger is laughing in a high-pitched hysterical scream. He’s staring at her and laughing so hard I almost believe she’s a real person instead of an eight-inch plastic doll. It’s freakish, the sound he has her making. Like he has a split personality. He sure looks happy, in a demented sort of way.
There was a university student in Singapore who was bouncing on his bed listening to music and bounced himself right out the window. He fell three stories to his death and won a Darwin Award. I figure Mom’s death was stupider than that guy’s, so she’ll probably get an award too. What’s stupid about bouncing on a bed? I could use a good bounce right now. If I fell out the window, it wouldn’t be stupid. It would just be an accident.
I was reading about evolution for my computer game, and I read a good monkey joke that Mom would have liked. It goes like this: A woman walks into a restaurant with her baby in a carriage. The waiter says to her, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” The woman complains to the manager that the waiter insulted her. The manager apologizes. He tells her to choose something from the dessert counter for free to make up for being insulted. He says, “You go on up and see what we have. I’ll stay here and watch your monkey.”
That cracked me up. It would have cracked Mom up too. I told Dad, but he didn’t even get it. He asked, “So was it really a monkey?” Duh. I don’t know how Mom put up with his total lack of humor.
I tried the joke on Sammy just now, and he laughed his head off in two voices, which totally freaked me out. And he doesn’t have a clue what the joke means.