Ms. Bixby's Last Day (13 page)

“Hold up. Where are you going?” Steve calls out, but Brand doesn't answer. And he doesn't stop either. I try to stand, still holding my left shoe in my hand. I make it three hobbling steps before Steve is beside me, propping me up.

“Brand, hold on,” I call after him. “Seriously. Where
are
you going?”

“I'm going home,” Brand calls back angrily.

I start to limp after him, using Steve as my crutch. Then Steve mutters a “Christ,” which he almost never does, and says something about the cake and leaves me hopping on one foot and I feel like I'm about to topple over. I put my weight down on the swollen ankle, take a tentative step, though it's more of a skip. Another bolt of pain shoots up my shin. Behind me Steve is grabbing his pack with the mutilated cake. I call out for Brand to stop again, except I have to yell this time—that's how far he's gotten already. “Seriously, man, hold up!”

Brand freezes, his back still to us, and I gingerly take a few more steps. Steve once again is beside me, pulling one of my arms around his shoulders. When we are only a few feet away, Brand turns around and I can see that his cheeks are smeared wet with tears. I don't think I've ever seen him cry before.

“You don't get it,” he says, nearly shouting back at us. “It's over. We screwed up.”

“It's just a cake,” I say under my breath. It's the only thing I can think of to
say.

Brand shakes his head. “No. Not just the cake. It was a stupid idea. All of it. It was stupid and pointless and a complete waste of time, because there was nothing—
nothing
we could do
that would make the slightest bit of difference. Not this!” he says, reaching over and practically wrenching the backpack off Steve's shoulders. “Not the wine or the stupid music or your stupid book. You can't cure cancer with a freakin' cheesecake!”

He stands there for a moment facing us, daring us, it seems, to come up with something, anything to prove him wrong. I open my mouth, but my throat is dry and nothing comes out. Brand turns and continues down the sidewalk. I totter after him.

“Brand, wait.”

“For what?” he says, spinning to face us. “For things to get better? Because they don't. Ever. They just get worse. The guy took our money. It's gone. You're limping. The cake is ruined. We barely have enough cash to get back. The plan is shot. If you two want to go, go. But I can't do it. I'm done. I'm going home.”

Steve and I look at each other.

“So that's it?” I ask. “All that talk about
doing
something? About how she deserved something better?”

“She does deserve something better,” Brand shouts.

“And now you just want to quit?”

Brand's eyes narrow and I know I've pushed him too far. He points to me. “You can't say that. You don't understand. This was the
one
day, my one chance, and now . . .” He doesn't finish the thought, though, just wipes his nose on his sleeve
and repeats, “You don't understand,” before turning and walking away again.

“What about Ms. Bixby?” I call out to his back. “What about Ms. Bixby?” I call again, even louder.

But I get no answer.

About Ms. Bixby.

She always wanted to be a magician. She told me that once.

She told the whole class, in fact. We had just started reading
The Hobbit
and asked her who her favorite character was. She said, “Are you kidding? Gandalf. Who else
could
it be?”

And then she told us the story of how her grandmother almost murdered her gerbil.

She wanted to be a magician, but not just some street magician pulling cards from sleeves or making a little red ball disappear. She wanted to be a master illusionist, like David Copperfield or Lance Burton. The kind who can make anything vanish before your very eyes—people, buildings, you name it. As a kid she pored over dog-eared magic books checked out of the library. She kept a deck of cards in her backpack, put on nickel shows for her parents and friends, and dazzled the lunch ladies by pulling pennies from their hairnets. Then one day she decided she was ready to try one of the classics: the pull-a-rabbit-from-a-hat trick.

She had an oversize top hat made of thin plastic and lined with black felt, a Christmas present that was much too big to fit on her head but plenty large enough to tuck a rabbit into, complete with a false bottom good for stashing anything from colorful scarfs to cottontails. What she didn't have was the rabbit. So she asked her parents.

What she got was gerbils. Two of them. She named them Siegfried and Roy. She practiced with them daily, stuffing them in the hat and waving her plastic wand, then reaching in and grabbing hold of the two gerbils to imaginary applause. When she felt she had the trick down, she invited her friends and family, directed them to the living room, and charged them each a quarter admission.

All was going well. She ran through her gamut of card and coin tricks and even managed to pull a ribbon out of her mother's nose. Then it was time for the grand finale. Twenty minutes before, she had done all the prep work, choosing Roy because he was the least jittery of the pair. She secreted him away in the hat's trick bottom, complete with small holes for air and cushioned with extra black cloth so that he wouldn't get jostled during the performance. Now, with the crowd enthralled and her father videotaping, young Maggie Bixby pulled out her hat, quickly showed that there was nothing in it, and reached inside.

Except, as she told our class, there was
really
nothing in it.

In the time it had taken her to do three card tricks and pull a ribbon from her mom's nostril, Roy had chewed a hole through both the felt lining and the outer plastic shell. The moment she reached into the hat, Roy launched himself from the table and belly flopped onto the carpet, where he proceeded to terrorize the audience, particularly Ms. Bixby's grandmother, who shrieked, “Rat!” and tried to stomp the life out of him. The young magician barely managed to save her furry assistant, throwing herself into the fray and grabbing him by his tail.

It was, as she told the class, a disaster. She was devastated. Ten-year-old Maggie Bixby took one look into her father's camera and then ran to her room, hot tears on her cheeks.

“Roy was okay, though, right?” Allison Sydner asked after Ms. Bixby told the story. “I mean, he didn't get hurt, did he?”

Roy was fine, Ms. Bixby said, but she never tried the trick again. In fact, from that point on, she said, she more or less gave up on her dream of being a professional magician. Then, in typical Bixby fashion, she asked us what the moral of the story was.

“A gerbil is not a rabbit,” Rebecca Roudabush guessed, earning her a “True” from Ms. B.

“Don't save your best trick till the very end,” Mason Foster offered.

“People shouldn't pull
anything
out of other people's noses,” Steve said, looking right at Brand. But Brand had a different moral.

“There's no such thing as magic,” he said without even being called on.

At this Ms. Bixby frowned. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe I should have tried harder. ‘The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.'”

Ms. B. smiled at the class then, though I had a feeling the smile was meant mostly for Brand. Sometimes when Ms. Bixby smiled at you, you had the feeling she'd been saving it just for you, that the smile actually had your name on it, that she could read your mind and knew you needed that smile more than anyone else in the room. Then she closed
The Hobbit
, promising we'd get back to it later, stood up, and set it in her empty chair.

HE FELL. AND IT RUINED EVERYTHING.

The second fall was worse than the first. The first wasn't his fault. The first was an accident. Blame the scaffold. Blame the faulty bolts holding it together. Blame God, maybe, if that's your thing, but I couldn't blame Dad. Not for that one.

The second fall was much slower, but somehow, to me at least, it hurt a whole lot more. Unlike the first fall that broke his spine, my dad's other fall—the downward spiral that came after—was harder to measure, but I sensed it happening, every day.

The first few months back at home were right out of daytime talk shows or reality TV. Inspirational moments with Oprah or whatever. There were interviews with the paper, Dad and me on the local news, even a visit from last year's Miss Decatur County,
who kissed my father on the cheek for the cameras. Neighbors we'd never bothered to get to know left casseroles on our doorstep, like peace offerings. The phone rang off the hook with well-wishers. Reverend Galbraeth of the local Methodist church stopped by for a visit, which was funny, since my father hadn't stepped foot in a church since he was baptized. The construction company my father worked for sent fresh flowers every day for a week. A local auto body shop volunteered to put a hand-controlled accelerator/braking system in our car so that Dad could still drive even without the use of his legs. The insurance company consoled us with warm smiles and promises of monthly direct deposits.

The medicine chest was stuffed.

Dad took it all in stride (ba-da-bum-
chi
). He was pretty gracious. He forgave the construction company for making him a paraplegic (though not legally, of course—legally they were still very much to blame). He ate the casseroles and took all the medicines in their proper dosages, and did his physical therapy. He made progress, recovering a little function in his legs. The doctors were pleased, full of cautious smiles and hearty handshakes. There was a good chance, with a lot more physical therapy and rehabilitation, that Abe Walker would get the use of his legs back.

It would have made a great headline for the local section of the paper: Walker Walks Again.

Then it all started to slide. The casseroles dwindled. The news reporters found something else to talk about—the women who rescued the drowning puppies, the couple with sextuplets. Appointments were missed. Some of the medications were ignored. Others were taken a little more regularly than they should have been. The voice mail filled up with doctor's office reminders.

My father adapted to his new life. We put a minifridge next to the recliner, itself sitting next to the wheelchair. Our cable plan was upgraded to add more channels. The medicine chest got moved to a big white plastic basket by the fridge.

Days passed. Then weeks. Then months. The bills got paid through direct withdrawals. The television stayed on for twenty-four hours. I started doing everything around the house. I learned how to use the stove, burning myself only once, bad enough to leave a scar on my hand. I learned how to do laundry, folding the sheets the best I could, though I only changed them on my bed—Dad slept in his chair most nights. Some weeks things didn't get done: scrubbing the toilets, taking out the recycling, writing my school science report. I changed the lightbulbs in the three rooms we used. The insurance company deposited the checks. I did the dishes. Dad sat and watched the History channel. Deposit, wash, sit, watch, withdrawal. Repeat.

For a while I tried. I asked him if he wanted to go out. I told
him I would help him with the walker or even push him in the chair. We could drive to the movies or just go to the pond and let the fish steal our worms. We wouldn't have to go far. Wouldn't even have to see anyone if he didn't want to—Dad wasn't exactly comfortable around people, the way they kept looking at his legs, like they were afraid they'd leap up and bite them or something. It could just be the two of us.

“Maybe later,” he said.

Maybe later came and went.

On Meet the Teacher Night this year I walked myself to school. I sat with Topher and his parents, and they bought me a Fox Ridge Wildcats bumper sticker to put on our car that never moved. We ate cheap hot dogs and cookies in the cafeteria. That night Ms. Bixby introduced herself to me for the first time. She was wearing a crimpy yellow dress that sounded like sandpaper scratching when she walked, and her band of pink hair had been tamed with a clip. She shook my hand and asked me if I was there by myself. I said yes.

She said that was all right. That she would help me. That if I needed anything at all, to just ask her.

For the record, I never did. Ask her, that is. She volunteered.

For the record, it was all her idea.

I should have come alone.

That's all I can think as we board the bus. That if I had just come by myself, it wouldn't matter whether I went through with it or not. Nobody would know. Not even Ms. Bixby. But the truth is, I was scared. Afraid of what she would think if it was just me. That she would get the wrong idea. Scared of what she would look like. Scared that she might be hooked up to all those machines, tubes in her arms, snaked up to her nostrils, pulsing, beeping, wheezing. Scared that she would look like my father right after the accident, practically bolted to his bed, unable to move for fear of damaging his spine any further, drinking ice water through chapped lips, blinking at me through scared, swollen eyes, wanting to know
what happened
.

Then I remembered what she told us. About how she would spend her last day. And I thought: This is it. This will be perfect. We can
make it
perfect
.
But I couldn't do it by myself.

I knew as soon as I told them my idea that Topher would go for it. It was an adventure, and even if it wasn't, he would turn it into one. And if he was in, Steve was in, because if I had learned anything about the two of them, it was that Steve worshipped Topher the same way Topher worshipped every comic book hero he'd ever met. Besides, I knew Ms. Bixby meant something to them too, though it wasn't the same. It couldn't
possibly be the same.

They didn't understand why I needed to go, but that wasn't their fault. I never bothered to explain. Not just about Ms. Bixby, but all of it. Why I'm always asking if I can come over to their houses on the weekends instead of the other way around. Why I always need a ride if we go somewhere. Why I sometimes punch the walls at school hard enough to skin my knuckles. I never bothered to explain why I needed to see her so bad.

Of course it doesn't matter now.

We get on the bus that will take us back to school, Steve helping Topher up the steps. It's hard to tell how much his ankle hurts him—he can be pretty melodramatic—but I can tell it's swollen. He could probably use an ice pack and some painkillers. If he were at my house, he'd be set. One oxycodone would do it. My father wouldn't miss it; he's got a three-month supply. Topher takes an empty seat and motions for Steve to sit next to him. He's mad at me. Topher. For yelling at him. For giving up. Maybe even about the sketchbook still. Steve doesn't seem angry. He just looks worried, like always. I sit in the empty seat across from them but scoot all the way over, leaving room for an imaginary fourth person between us. The fourth musketeer maybe, but really I just need some space.

Steve gets on his phone, mutters something about the battery nearly being dead, then shuts it off and stuffs it back in his
pocket. Without it, his hands don't seem to know what to do, so they start fiddling with the zipper on his backpack. I shift and look out the window, press my face up against it. My cheeks are hot and wet and the glass is cool, and I can feel the vibrations of the bus's engines rattle my teeth. It's quiet, save for the bus's rumble. Nobody on the bus is talking. That's absolutely fine. I'm used to the quiet. I've learned to cope without conversation. Even on those Friday evenings with Ms. Bixby there would sometimes be stretches of silence, riding in her car, watching the sky change colors and thinking that I wasn't ready to go home, even though I knew I had to.

Those days with her just felt different. They felt better. It felt like I was in some magical space where time stood still, where nothing bad could happen. They were almost perfect.

That's what today was supposed to be. That's what hurts so much.

Across the aisle by the opposite window, Topher leans his head back. He glances over at me, as if confirming that I'm still there, then looks straight ahead. “Who do you think would win in a fight? Wolverine or Captain America?” he says.

He's not talking to either of us in particular. He's just throwing it out there. Cutting the silence. Filling the space. I keep my head pressed to the window, making wishes on passing cars.

“I mean Wolverine's claws could probably just cut right
through Cap's shield, wouldn't you think?” he adds.

I don't respond. I
won't
respond. But naturally, Steve takes the bait. “Doubtful. Wolverine's claws are made out of adamantium. Captain America's shield is made out of
proto
-adamantium, which is better than regular adamantium.”

This is the reason you will never have a girlfriend,
I think, but I wouldn't say that to Steve. He doesn't seem all that interested in girls anyways.

“Yes,” Topher says, still looking at the seat in front of him, “but you're forgetting the awesome factor. Captain America's a goody-two-shoes dweeb with goofy little wings on his head that don't even let him fly. Wolverine has killer sideburns
and
a better backstory. Wolvie beats him on coolness alone.”

“Superheroes are not traditionally rated on their coolness,” Steve says.

“Everyone is rated on their coolness,” Topher replies. “What about Thor versus Cap?”

“Thor's a god,” Steve replies. “He can beat up anybody.”

“So does that mean he could beat up Jesus?” Topher presses.

I laugh. Okay, I don't really laugh, but I sort of snort at least. Enough that Topher knows I'm listening. He doesn't look at me still, but he smiles. “I don't think Jesus and Thor would even fight,” Steve says. “That's not Jesus's style.” Topher nods, conceding the point.

Part of me wants to ignore them, to keep looking out the window, to shut myself out and be alone, but I can't help it. Topher has somehow suckered me in too. “What if Jesus had Thor's hammer? He was a carpenter, right.”

Both of them twist around to look at me, a little surprised that I joined the conversation after storming off and shouting at them before. Steve shakes his head.

“Theologically speaking, billions of people currently believe in Jesus, and probably only a handful still worship Thor. Advantage Jesus.”

I don't argue. Steve goes to Mass every Sunday, so he probably knows better. Dad had an entire church come to the house once, the whole congregation showing up in a long white bus. It was right after the accident. They stood on our front lawn and sang a song called “Rise Up!” I don't think they were being ironic. They really thought he might do it.

“All right. I've got one,” Steve says. “Legolas versus Hawkeye.”

“Unfair comparison,” Topher says. “Legolas is immortal.”

“Not if you stick him full of arrows, he isn't,” Steve counters. “Especially those ones Hawkeye has that explode. You'd have little elf chunks flying everywhere.”

“Elf chunks.” For some reason I find this funny too.

“Doesn't matter,” Topher says. “Legolas is eternal. He
doesn't get old. He doesn't get sick. Even if you kill him, his spirit comes back, like Obi-Wan Kenobi. He will live forever, no matter what.”

As soon as he says it, Topher frowns. Steve pushes his glasses back up his nose.

A long silence follows, and I look back out the window and up at the sky. The clouds have cleared out now, making room for endless waves of blue. I wonder what it is about clouds that makes people think of heaven. Maybe just they are in the way, so there must be something else up there.

Suddenly there is a gurgled growl coming from Steve, loud enough for me to hear from across the aisle. “Dude. Was that you?” Topher asks.

“I haven't eaten since breakfast. It's already past noon,” Steve says, holding his stomach with both hands like he's afraid it's going to pop out and go looking for food on its own.

“I guess we didn't think about lunch,” Topher says. Then he turns and looks down at the floorboards, and I realize what he's looking at. Steve's backpack and the bent white box stuffed inside.

“Twenty-five dollars is a lot to waste,” Steve says. “I mean—if nobody else is going to eat it.” He means Ms. Bixby.

They both look at me. Because I paid the most for it. Or because the whole thing was my idea. The whole cake. The whole everything.

“She wouldn't want it to go to waste,” Topher says.

That's true. She was a firm believer in making the most of things. I don't say yes, but I don't say no either. I just shrug. I already feel sick to my stomach. I can't bear the thought of eating anything. The bus pulls up to the next stop and Steve starts to unzip his pack, shimmying the dilapidated box free. Topher starts to dig in his pack for the plates he brought. We have nothing to wash it down with. Just one empty wineglass. I figure I'll try a bite though. For Ms. Bixby's sake. Just to see if Eduardo was right.

I look over at Steve, who has his hands on either side of the box, but he's not opening it. Instead he's looking up at the front of the bus. His eyebrows shoot skyward.

He drops, slinking behind the brown vinyl seat in front of him, pulling Topher alongside and hissing at me to do the same. “Get down!”

“What? What is it?” I duck behind my seat, wondering what in the name of Michelle's white-chocolate raspberry supreme cheesecake he saw. Someone from school? A teacher? Mr. Mack? Or maybe it's his parents; they found out he's skipping and are hunting him down. Or maybe the cashier from the liquor store called the cops and
they
are looking for us. Or maybe it's just Steve's turn to be melodramatic. I peek over the top of the seat in front of me.