My Name Is Not Easy (40 page)

M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

Bunna’s gone for the summer, which I don’t want to think about. So it’s just me and Sonny and Donna, eating dinner all alone in the big, echoing Sacred Heart cafeteria, with the sun making long, dark shadows and me knowing, all of a sudden.

Just knowing.

Some people could know things before they happen without even thinking about them, and I wish to heck I wasn’t one of those people, because what I know right now has to do with the way Sister Mary Kate and Father Flanagan are standing there at the door to the cafeteria, their heads bowed, watching me while they talk. Talking about me and about the news they don’t want to tell me, the news I don’t want to hear. I can feel it. Heck, anybody could feel it, because right now the whole room is heavy as cement with it.

I remember the dream I had, all of a sudden, in one bright fl ash. Was it last night? Last week? Last year? My mind feels like it’s stepped out of time into a place where everything is foggy. Everything except the dream: it’s old Uiñiq, clear as day, making arrows like he always used to when we were kids. Little kid arrows for me and Bunna, and we’re running along the beach, chasing birds late into the summer night. And every time we break an arrow, there’s a new one already made.

In my dream, Uiñiq is giving Bunna one last arrow, but when he sees me, he shakes his head slowly, and there’s a look on his face that chills me right through to the bone. Bunna has his back to me, too, and he won’t turn around. He knows I’m right there, all right, but he won’t turn. It’s like a door
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F O R E V E R / L u k e

shutting—Uiñiq with his last arrow and Bunna with his back turned. A door closed forever.

Suddenly I’m aware of Sister, still standing in the doorway to the cafeteria, still watching.

“Th

ere’s been an accident,” Sister’s going to say. Or maybe she doesn’t say it at all. Maybe she doesn’t even have to say it because I already know.

I know already.

Old Uiñiq is long dead, and now Bunna is with him.

I already know this. I know it now like I knew it a second ago, like I knew it last week. All of time—past and present and even future, all of it running together in my head like the gravy on my plate.

Th

at’s what I will remember
, I’m thinking, realizing it’s a crazy thought even as I think it: I will remember the gravy on my plate, running into the potatoes and peas with Father Flanagan and Sister Mary Kate standing by that door over there, watching me, and me refusing to even look at them, just like Bunna refused to look at me. And Uiñiq shaking his head and scowling and me staring down at the gravy on my plate like there’s gotta be some meaning there. Knowing there isn’t.

Th

at’s what I’ll remember.

“Th

e plane didn’t make it through the mountains,” Father is saying. Or maybe he isn’t really saying it. Maybe I just know that’s what he’s gonna say as I stand there in the door to the cafeteria not wanting to be there—not wanting to be anywhere.

Th

ere were a lot of other boarding-school kids on board
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

that plane, but only one of them was from Sacred Heart School, and only one of them was my brother.

Father and Sister stand with their shoulders sloped together, almost touching, and I stand right next to them, all alone, my shoulders square as rulers, not touching anything, pushing right past them before they can even reach out, pushing right out of the building, out into the woods. Away.

I have to get away from what I already know, from what I don’t ever want to have to know:
my brother Bunna is dead.

Th

ey don’t even have to say it. I can feel it in the slope of their shoulders, in the air itself, in the way my chest gets tight like a cage that won’t let me ever breathe deep again. I can feel Bunna’s absence like you feel a part of you that’s no longer there—a leg amputated, a lung gone.

Bunna is dead
.

I’m running through the woods, deep into the trees, where there are no trails. No way in. No way out. It’s getting dark, and I’m running blind. Maybe I’m running backward, watching the past wind away from me like a ruined fi lm of Roy Rogers and John Wayne spilling out of a projector onto a dusty fl oor in a dark, empty room.

Gone.

Or maybe I’m not even running at all, not even moving, just standing there, letting spruce branches slap me in the face, slash my skin raw. It’s a better kind of pain than the one I feel inside right now.

Inside there’s only one thing I know: I have to get away
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from everyone and everything because I’m like a dog with pain and I don’t want nobody talking at me about it. I don’t want nobody being sorry at me or following after me with some crap about the compassion of Christ. I just want to run and keep on running. Let them try to catch me. Th

ey can’t.

Th

ey can’t because my pain’s taking me places no one else can go. Places I gotta go all alone. Without Bunna. Me and Bunna who never in our whole lives have been apart. Not once. Me and Bunna who were spliced together from the day he was born, sliced apart forever now. Forever.

Nieces and nephews too numerous to count.
Th at’s what they

always put on peoples’ funeral papers, the ones they make at church. Funerals at the church back home are always packed full of people—nieces and nephews too numerous to count.

But not here at Sacred Heart School, where there’s no one to count family, no one counting me as left behind. No mom, no dad, no aunts, no uncles.
No brothers.

I’m not running anymore, but my heart is banging at my ribs like a rabid fox. A fox locked up in a too-tight cage.

No brothers at all.

All of a sudden, anger washes over me in icy waves, making me clench my fi sts again and again, my worthless fi sts. I wanna beat the shit out of Bunna once and for all, but he’s not there. I want to box him up so bad, he’s gonna refuse to ever leave me. Th

en I’m crying, remembering how the last night

we were together, that’s just exactly what I did do. Beat the shit out of him until he stopped me with those words, those stupid words: “I gotta go home,” he said
.
What in the hell
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