My Name Is Not Easy (41 page)

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

does
home
mean to him now? To me without a brother? To anybody?

It’s hot and sticky in the middle of all these Sacred Heart trees, and there isn’t a drop of wind anywhere. I’m itching like crazy from spruce prickles and mosquito bites.

Back home there’s a breeze coming in off the ocean ice, and I wish I could feel its cool breath on my sweaty neck right now. Wish I was sitting in a boat with chunks of ocean ice just sort of hanging there in between the smooth water and the cloudless sky—drifting with their refl ections white and ghost-like against the glassy water.

I’ve got my eyes closed, imagining it, but when I open them, it’s like the terror of a nightmare, looking into the darkness of Sacred Heart, trees blotting out everything.

Gone. Everything’s gone.

Suddenly I realize I’m crying, crying so hard I can hardly breathe.

How can anybody even breathe in a place where there is no wind, no open sky, no ocean, no family? Nothing worth counting?

Ever.

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PART IV

The Earth Can’t Shake Us

1963–1964

We

were here.

We were always here,

hanging on where others couldn’t,

marking signs the others wouldn’t,

counting kin our own way. We

survived. Th

e earth

can’t shake

us.

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He’s My Brother

SEPTEMBER 1963

CHICKIE

—

When he came to pick us up in Fairbanks at the end of the summer, Father Flanagan was driving the new bus. But Bunna wasn’t on it. Bunna would never ever sit next to me on the bus again, old or new. I’d spent so much time refusing to believe the truth of this that I felt totally numb inside, all hollowed out like that old, dead piece of military trash of a bus we weren’t going to ride anymore. Only thing was, I wanted to ride it.

I wanted to get on that old bus and let it bounce everything to pieces. Shake things back to normal again. I did not want to have to
remember
Bunna. But I didn’t want to worry about forgetting him, either.

I was carrying my diary in my lap like an old assignment book with an assignment I couldn’t let go of. I wanted to read and reread every word I’d ever written about Bunna. As I leafed though the book, the fi rst words I ever wrote about him jumped off the page:

BUNNA A IS A DUMB ANIMAL!!

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

I was so mad when I wrote it that I pressed really hard and made little ridges on the paper. Now the words stand out on that page like Braille.

How can that be? Th

at’s what I want to know. Th

ose words

are still alive, but Bunna’s dead. How can a dumb old piece of paper with a girl’s silly writing outlive a boy with chocolatey brown eyes and a smile to die for?

It seemed like I was the only one on that whole bus thinking about Bunna. Everyone else was too excited about the new bus.
Bunna’s bus!
Part of me wanted to scream it out, and part of me wanted to hoard his memory to myself and totally ignore the bus. And another part wanted to blame the bus for everything, which didn’t make any sense at all.

We drove into the school grounds in full glory, Father honking the horn like he was the leader of a one-horned band.

Before we had even properly stopped, Amiq, who had spent the summer working in Fairbanks, jumped off , Eskimo dancing—stomping his foot and waving one arm at that big expanse of shiny new bus like he’d just invented it and had made up a brand-new dance to tell the story.

Th

e whole world could fall apart, and some things, like Amiq, would never ever change. Th

at made me feel better and

worse, both at the same time.

I could see Donna, Sonny, and the nuns standing by the door to the school, watching Amiq dance his bus dance. By this time Sister Mary Kate was so excited, she was practically dancing herself. I could hear her yelling right through the
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e
window of the bus. “Will you just look at that! It’s a miracle, a complete miracle!”

You probably could have heard her yelling all the way to Fairbanks. Th

at’s how excited she was. She turned to Sister

Sarah and hollered even louder, on account of Sister’s hearing,

“IT IS A MIRACLE, ISN’T IT, SISTER?”

Sister Sarah just scowled. She didn’t like all the racket any more than I did, but Father Flanagan kept right on honking, and the kids kept leaping off the bus with big smiles like they were rock stars on tour or something. I guess I should have been glad about the fact that Father Mullen wasn’t there to spread doom and gloom, like he always did. But I wasn’t. I didn’t care about any of it.

By the time it was my turn to climb down those new stairs, it felt like the din had turned my insides to mush and made my knees get as wobbly as day-old noodles. All I wanted to do was disappear.

Th

at’s when I saw Luke. He was standing way off to the side, like he wanted to disappear, too. When I looked at him, it felt like everyone else just melted away, and it was just us two, all alone, missing Bunna, together. I could tell, right then and there, that he knew about me and Bunna and how we’d kissed on the edge of the endless woods. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. I guess that’s how brothers are sometimes.

I don’t know if I imagined it or not, the sudden silence that came right then. My ears rang with it.

Luke took one little step toward me. It was a tentative
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