“It’s okay, Anthony,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay.” He called me Anthony instead of Antsy, and for some reason that just made me cry even more.
Finally my eyes cleared, and I was looking down at the little drops of tears on the polished wood table.
“I should have used a coaster,” I said. We both laughed a tiny bit.
“Wanna tell me what that was about?”
I sighed the truth sigh. “I thought you were gonna tell us that you guys were splitting up. You know? Getting divorced.” It hurt to say the word aloud. Almost got me crying again.
Dad raised his eyebrows then folded his arms and looked at his reflection in the shiny wooden table. “Not today, Antsy.”
“So what about tomorrow?”
He offered me the slimmest of grins. “Tomorrow we eat French.”
The next morning I woke up with the nagging feeling that there was something I was supposed to remember, but I had no idea what it was. It was like Lexie’s sight—a memory of a memory.
It was Sunday. Had Lexie and I made plans to do something before yesterday’s disaster? Was that what I was supposed to remember?
Mom was out early that morning and came back from the supermarket with a strange collection of groceries that included a bag of snails.
“Those French!” she said. “They can figure out ways of making anything edible.”
The sight of the snails absolutely terrified Christina. I helped Mom unpack, just so that I might have some early warning as to what else was in store for us come dinnertime.
I moved a bunch of recipe cards she had clipped together so I could unpack the last bag, and the clip fell off. The clip bounced on the linoleum floor with a tiny little clatter that I could barely hear over the refrigerator hum.
A paper clip.
I stood there with the recipes in one hand and half a pound of pig brains in the other, staring down at the clip like an idiot. I suppose only something that small, that unnoticeable, could remind me of the Schwa.
“Antsy, what’s wrong?” I handed her the pig brains. “Gotta go!” I hurried to the door, but before I left I grabbed a pen and wrote on my palm in big blue letters: Schwa’s House, just in case the Schwa Effect kicked in and I forgot where I was going.
14. More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About the Schwa’s Childhood
I rode my bike at top speed and got to the Schwa’s house in just a few minutes. As I ran up to the door, I could hear Mr. Schwa playing guitar inside. I rang the bell three or four times until he finally came, answering the door with a friendly grin.
“Hi, is Calvin home? I have to talk to him.”
He looked at me strangely, and for a single, terrifying moment, I thought he’d say, Calvin who?
But instead he said, “Sure, he’s in the bedroom.”
I went in to find he wasn’t in his bedroom at all.
“Hmm,” said his father brightly. “Maybe he’s not home after all.”
“Don’t you even know when your own son is home?!”
“Yes,” he said, not so brightly this time. “Mostly.”
I looked in every room, trying to figure out where he might have gone. Then the guitar started up again, and that was the last straw. I went to the living room, to see Mr. Schwa playing and humming to himself like he didn’t have a care in the world. Well, he needed to have some cares.
“Do you even know if Calvin came home last night?”
He looked at me confused. “Calvin always comes home. Why wouldn’t he come home?”
“For all you know, he could be floating facedown in Sheepshead Bay!”
He stopped playing, but didn’t look at me.
“Or maybe he’s with his mother,” I said. “What do you think? You think maybe that’s where he is?”
“That’s enough, Antsy,” said the Schwa. “Leave him alone.”
He stood in front of the brick fireplace, wearing a dark red sweater. Blending in. Always blending in.
“There’s Calvin,” said Mr. Schwa. “He’s standing over there. No worries.”
“Where’ve you been?” I asked.
“Here and there,” he said. “Mostly here.”
His father returned to playing guitar.
“Dad,” said the Schwa, “Marco and Sam will be here at noon to pick you up. You have a painting job in Mill Basin.”
“Okay,” he said.
I went with the Schwa into his room, and he closed the door. The curtains were drawn, and the only light was what little spilled over the edges of the closed blinds.
“It looks like you’re turning into Old Man Crawley.”
“I quit yesterday,” the Schwa said. “Crawley made a big stink, threatened to get my dad fired and all, but I didn’t care. My dad’s friends would never fire him anyway.”
“I thought you might quit,” I said.
“I’m quitting you, too, Antsy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you can stop pretending to be my friend now. You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t! Well . . . actually I do, but only because I’m your friend. I’m not pretending about that.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry about what happened with Lexie. I thought you should know I’m not going out with her anymore.”
“That doesn’t matter either. You can go now. Really.”
He sat there, waiting for me to leave, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything else back to him either. They say action speaks louder than words, but so does inaction. Sitting there like a rock was the strongest statement I could make about our friendship.
The Schwa watched how I didn’t move. I think it made him uncomfortable because he looked away. “You shouldn’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “You know, Buddhists believe the state of nonbeing is the perfect place to be.”
“You’re not a Buddhist.”
He looked at me, thinking for a moment. “I’ll tell you something, Antsy. I’ll tell you something you’ve always wanted to know—but if I tell you, you have to promise to believe it.”
“If that’s what you want, Schwa, sure. I promise.”
“Okay, then I’ll tell you a story ...”
. . . And there, in that darkened room, where I couldn’t see the color of the sky or anything else in his eyes, the Schwa told me his deepest, darkest memory.
“I learned about the Schwa Effect when I was five,” he said, “although I didn’t have a name for it then. I didn’t have a name for it until you gave it one, Antsy. But I was five when I first realized that something was wrong.
“I can’t remember what my mother looked like, but I do remember the last time I saw her. We had gone to Kings Plaza, and she bought me clothes. I was about to start kindergarten, and she wanted me to be the best-dressed kid in school. She wanted me noticed.
“I remember she was sad. She had been sad for a long time, so I didn’t think it was anything unusual. On the way home we stopped at the supermarket to pick up something for dinner. I sat in the little kiddie seat of the shopping cart, and we went down all the aisles. It was this game we played—even when she just had to pick up a few things, she would take me down all the aisles, and I would try to name all the food. Ketchup. Pickles. Spaghetti.
“We got to the frozen-food aisle. Outside it was a summer day, but in there it felt like winter. I can still feel that chill. Then she took her hands off of the cart. ’I’ll be right back,’ she said. ’I forgot the beef.’ She left, and I waited. Peas, corn, broccoli. I started naming all the frozen vegetables. String beans, spinach, carrots—and for a moment—just the tiniest moment, I forgot why I was there. I forgot who I was waiting for. I forgot her. Just for a moment—that’s all. And by the time I remembered, it was too late.