Mom Says We Don’t Need To Worry About Roderick

FICTION Jill Witty

Last Saturday, Roderick practiced death by lying face-up in a waterless tub, dressed in his Spiderman pajama bottoms and misbuttoned flannel shirt, clutching his Dog Man book in one hand and Poppy’s old baseball trophy in the other. On Sunday, he placed the barrel of a water gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and slumped motionless in his chair, water dribbling from the corner of his lips, until Mom announced that water guns were for outside play only.

When we visited Poppy in the hospital, Roderick snuck him a vanilla milkshake, his favorite, and Poppy took one sip, smiled, and closed his eyes. He looked thinner and whiter than the old Poppy. Mom put the shake on the little table. I offered Roderick a sip but he shook his head no way. Mom held Poppy’s hand, but he didn’t open his eyes. There was a dish of pills like jellybeans, and maybe we should have woken Poppy to make him take them. Before we left, Mom threw the shake away, which seemed like a waste. I would have drunk it.

Mom’s always saying things aren’t as scary once you try them, so we should try, try, try. Try eating the roasted Brussels sprouts, even though their burnt edges looked like the leftovers of a bonfire in Poppy’s field. Try climbing the lowest level of the rope pyramid, which wobbled like the frame of Poppy’s old tobacco barn. Try playing baseball in the eights’ and nines’ league, even though Poppy once got hit by a baseball and said it was a Christmas miracle he didn’t die from it.

After the cancer got him, the funeral people dressed Poppy up in a white uniform with ribbons and a star and two medals around his neck and a Bible in one hand. He looked plastic, like they’d made a doll out of him. Poppy’s eyebrows moved around a lot in life but in death they looked like caterpillars, the prickly, poisonous kind. I wasn’t scared to see him but Roderick hid his eyes behind his fingers.

Yesterday, at Roderick’s first baseball practice, he swung and missed eleven times in a row. “Good try!” Mom said, every time. On the twelfth swing the ball struck him in the chest. It must have been harder and heavier than it looked because Mom sped all the way to the hospital, and next I saw him he was in a paper gown. He wondered out loud if he would be dead soon and thought maybe if he closed his eyes for a long time he would see Poppy. The doctor listened to his heart and Roderick asked if there’d been a Christmas miracle. The doctor said he was a scientist, and it was barely spring yet, but an inch to the right and Roderick would’ve been a goner. Roderick wasn’t hungry for a vanilla milkshake, and maybe for the first time ever, neither was I.

Tomorrow I’ll practice death with him. We’ll cover our heads with shower caps and turn the bedroom air conditioner to max, and we won’t eat all day except for a box of jellybeans. When Mom tucks us in, she’ll smooth our hair and wish us sweet dreams before kissing our frozen faces.

Engenheiro Dolabela