Monday after school I met Seth outside. We usually walked home from school if it was nice outside. It was a little trek, but if it’s April in Minnesota and not snowing, you better take advantage of it. Plus, we liked walking down Cedar Avenue next to Lake Nokomis. Our houses were both on the east side of the lake, so we would take Cedar to the trail that wrapped around the water. Although in early April I didn’t know if the lake could legitimately be called water—a lot of it was still ice. Seth dared me to stick my feet in the lake last April, and of course, I did. I still can’t feel my toes sometimes.
As we were walking, Seth was blabbering about how he had talked Mrs. Donaldson into letting him retake some test he’d failed even though she specifically told his class that there would be no retakes. Only Seth. I had tuned out right around the time he said, “So, guess what I did today?” I had heard this story before. We were walking along one of the parks next to the lake. The big, open fields dominated by softball diamonds reminded me of the first time Seth and I met five years earlier.
My parents, Jenna, and I were hanging out there one day. I was eight maybe. I remembered that it was a crappy, cloudy day. The ground was wet and muddy because it had been raining off and on, but our parents had planned for us to have this family barbecue all week, so nothing was going to stop that from happening. After we ate the burgers, Dad had charred to perfection, Jenna lay down on the damp blanket and took a nap, and Mom broke out one of her many travel books—this one was about South America. She was always reading about far-off places. That was when Dad asked me if I wanted to play catch.
“Sure,” I said. “Can you throw me some grounders too?”
“Yeah, no problem,” he said. We both grabbed our gloves, and I sprinted to a good ball-catching spot, out of the reach of tree branches that might have kept me from seeing the ball. Dad threw a few soft, bumpy grounders, and I was able to gather them up, but as soon as he picked up the pace, they started bouncing all over, and I found myself running after them time after time. Dad continued throwing me the tough balls with no apologies.
“Come on Dad! Those are too tough!” I complained.
“You can get those,” he said. “Keep working at it. Just watch it into your glove.” I was getting frustrated. As I ran after what seemed like the fiftieth ball, I noticed a kid playing catch with his dad not too far away. He pushed his baseball cap up a little bit so he could get a good look at me. I heard him say, “Hey, Dad, I bet he wants to play with us!” Before his dad even had a chance to reply, I saw him running toward me like a bull. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back a little nervously.
“I’m Seth,” he bragged. He was taller than I was. Not by much, but just enough so that I could feel him looking down at me. I was immediately impressed with him. He was confident and outgoing. He seemed so at ease with me, a stranger. I wanted to be his friend from the start.
“I’m Tim.”
“Wanna play with us?” As he asked, I turned back to my dad and saw him nod his head with an approving smile on his face. That was the first time Seth and I played baseball together.
I had a good time playing with him. We found out that we lived a couple of blocks from each other, and we decided we should hang out some more. My parents came over and introduced themselves to his parents. My mom was so good in situations like that. She could always start a conversation with anyone.
Baseball was always it for Seth and me. Sometimes he really drove me crazy, but when we were on the baseball field together everything seemed to be right. He put his mask away when we played baseball, and I appreciated that.
As we continued to walk home, I could still faintly hear Seth’s voice going on about a new video game he’d bought and how he was going to “destroy” it. I was still staring out at the fields when I told him. “My mom never called last night.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Umm, well, my mom always calls on Sunday night, but we never heard from her. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sure she’s fine. You’ll probably hear from her soon.” I was still staring out at the baseball fields. “Do you wanna come over and play this new game I got? It’s pretty tight.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m gonna head home.”
“All right.” He rolled his eyes a little.
“I’ll see you later.”
“Okay, see ya.”
I walked up the driveway to my house. We had these windows on our house that looked like eyes to me. I always felt like I was being watched when I walked up the driveway. The two windows on the second floor were the eyes and the front door was like a mouth that was not centered on the face. It was just off to the left a little. My friends always told me that I had a deformed house because it looked like it had a birth defect or something. But I still loved that house. It was pretty old. I think my dad said it had been built in the 1920s. I could tell because a lot of the bricks were pretty worn out and changing colors. Deformed or not, it had a lot of character.
I used to hear my mom say that when she would clean. “It may be old, but it’s got character,” she would blurt out as a new crack in the hardwood would show itself. I definitely agreed with her. It was a great house.
I went directly up the stairs and into my dad’s office. I turned on the computer and clicked on the Internet. Then I Googled: “nurse deaths in Iraq.” A long list of “hits” came up. As I browsed, I looked closely for my mom’s name, Jessica Hansen. To my relief, I never saw it. I felt relieved that there wasn’t anything about my mom, but one of the sites did bug me a little. An eleven-year-old Iraqi boy was hurt pretty bad and American nurses had to treat him. I had never thought about that—American nurses treating Americans and Iraqis. But the most unbelievable thing was that he han’t been someone who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had actually attacked U.S. soldiers. He was shooting at them. Eleven years old. I tried to picture myself holding a gun and shooting at real people. I mean, Seth did it all the time on his video games, but this kid was doing it for real. I couldn’t understand it.
I changed my search words. This time I typed “Baghdad deaths.” That list of sites was practically endless. I scanned the first few pages of some sites, but didn’t see Mom’s name. I never clicked on any of them. I was satisfied that Mom was still alive and I wanted to keep it that way.
I wandered downstairs. Even though I hadn’t looked very closely at most of the sites, I created some of the images in my head that I might have seen—destroyed buildings, frantic nurses, bloody soldiers—they were clear in my mind. I was curious about them and even more curious about Mom.
I wished Mom would be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs ready to greet me after a long hard day at school, but she wasn’t. Not that Mom was always there when I got home before she left for Iraq—sometimes she worked the day shifts at the hospital, but other times she worked at night, which meant it was just Jenna and me until Dad got home. That was just the way it was. But it didn’t matter because I never felt alone when I got home. I knew that at some point Mom would make up for the times she wasn’t there. She made sure she talked to me as soon as she could. She would ask me how my day had been. What had I learned? Were there any cute girls I had my eye on? Things like that.
That day I wanted to ask her how she was doing. I wanted to ask her how her day had been. I wanted to ask her about those images in my head. I stared at the phone for a minute, hoping it would ring, but it didn’t