The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano

“She doesn’t ever want to be without Him.”
    Â * * *
    My father was teaching me how to make things disappear that year, but I wasn’t very good at it, not at first. Whatever he made disappear, I made him make reappear. Marbles, pens, paper clips, bottle caps, anything I asked him to.
    He closed his hand around a matchbook, blew on his hand, and showed me his empty palm.
    â€œWhere did it go?”
    â€œBack where it came from,” he said.
    â€œWhere did it come from?”
    â€œWhere everything comes from.”
    â€œBut where?  ”
    â€œNowhere,” he said.
    â€œHow can something be nowhere?”
    He shrugged.
    â€œFine,” I said. “Make it come back.”
    He closed his hand, blew on his fist. When he opened his hand, the matchbook was there, as if it had never been gone. I opened it and counted the matches; there were eight where there had been nine.
    â€œThere’s a match missing,” I said.
    â€œI guess it didn’t want to come back.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œMaybe it was burned out,” he said.
    â€œNot funny,” I said.
    He struck a match to light his cigarette. Seven where there had been eight.
    â€œCan you make bigger things disappear?”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œPeople.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe Son of Sam.”
    He breathed smoke out of his nose. “I can work on that, see what I can do.”
    Â 
    He was the man in my dreams who took me away, who took away my mother and father; he was the voice I’d hear faintly in the static between stations; he was the creak I’d hear on the attic steps; he was the wind rattling my bedroom window; he was a shadow in the basement when my mother sent me down to fold laundry; he was dead leaves blowing in the backyard; he was the crow cawing on the clothesline; he was the man who walked by our house three times one night, then rooted through our trash; he was the man sitting in a black car across the street from the cemetery when I walked past in the early-morning dark to deliver the News ; he was the front-page headline I promised myself I wouldn’t read but kept reading; he was the man in my closet; he was the man sitting alone in the back of church who kept looking at me; he was the man talking to himself while feeding pigeons in the park near school; he was footsteps in the school bathroom as I sat in a stall between classes; he was silence and any sound that broke it; he was why my teacher’s husband came to school each day to pick her up; he was why women were cutting their hair and dyeing it blond; he was why my mother pushed her dresser against her bedroom door each night; he was why I had nightmares about my father pushed into a trash compactor; he was why I waited by the window for my father to come home from work; he was why I kept asking my father, kept pestering him, could he make a person disappear.
    Â * * *
    One hot night in July, as I was about to go to bed, I asked my father if he could make the whole world disappear.
    â€œWhy would you want to do that?”
    â€œJust asking.”
    He put out his cigarette in an ashtray about to overflow. “I suppose,” he said, “if you put your mind to it.”
    And then the world did disappear.
    My father was gone; the couch he was sitting on was gone; the coffee table on which he’d been resting his feet was gone; the entire room was gone. I couldn’t see my hands when I waved them in front of my face; I couldn’t see anything. My mother cried out from the basement, where she had been folding laundry. “Glen,” she said, “I’m down here in the dark!”
    â€œWe’re all in the dark,” my father said.
    I was relieved to hear their voices, was relieved to feel the floor beneath my feet. I was still there; my mother and father were still there; the world was still there, even if I couldn’t see it.
    My father opened the front door, and it