The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano Page B

bandages and not be there. Or be there, but have everyone believe I wasn’t.
    Before I left for school, I took a photograph from the album in my mother’s closet: me and my parents when I was five, my first day of school. I cut out my father, folded what remained, and put it in my pocket.
    During the day, I kept the photograph on my desk. I imagined his chair by the front door empty; I imagined morning without him leaning over the sink to shave; I imagined my mother in bed alone; I imagined a garbage truck coming down our street with a man who was not my father on the side of the truck, a man who was not my father emptying cans and whistling for the driver to move up; I imagined my father’s ashtray empty on the coffee table.
    My classmates kept saying I was the Mummy, even though I’d told them I was the Invisible Man.
    â€œBut we can see you,” they kept saying.
    Twins named Tara and Tina came as each other, but no one could tell if they’d really come as themselves.
    A boy with one arm—he’d been born that way—came as someone who’d survived a Jaws attack.
    The walk home took twice as long; I went out of my way, and out of my way again, to avoid kids with shaving cream that could have been Nair, but still got egged, my trench coat a too easy target.
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    I wouldn’t meet you for another twenty years, and eventually I told you most of these stories, but here’s one I never told you or anyone, not even my audiences or readers. Only my mother knows, and I’m not sure she has ever forgiven me. Sometimes, even now, I need to remind myself that it wasn’t my fault, that it had nothing to do with me. I try to convince myself the same about you, about everything.
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    We stood in my room, listening.
    My father kept coughing—so much that he put out his cigarette without finishing it, something I’d never seen him do. I told him to be quiet.
    My mother was on the stoop, a coffee can filled with pennies in her lap.
    I cared too much what other kids thought of me to go door to door with a sack. I didn’t even like candy; years ago my mother had killed that joy by cutting chocolate bars into pieces in case there were razor blades. My father, to tease her, would eat before she cut. “You’ll be sorry when your tongue falls out,” she’d say.
    My mother liked to shake the can, her attempt to entice, unaware that the last thing kids wanted was pennies, that they would make fun of her, would call her the penny lady.
    Silence would be our warning that she was coming, that she’d run out of pennies or that there were no more trick-or-treaters.
    She wouldn’t have liked what we were doing. She would have said, What did I say about magic, about putting silly ideas into your son’s head? She would have said, You’ll be sorry .
    It was difficult to concentrate while listening for the sound of pennies. If a minute passed in silence, we paused, waited for her to shake the can.
    I told my father to get in my closet.
    â€œSo that’s where I’m going to disappear from.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAs long as wherever I go, I can breathe.” My father coughed again, and for a moment I wondered if he would ever stop. “I’m really coming down with something,” he said.
    â€œTry to be quiet,” I said.
    He walked into the closet and stood with his back against my school shirts. Before I closed the door, he said, “So long. See you soon.”
    â€œLater,” I said.
    I closed the door, sat on my bed, shut my eyes tightly, and imagined the closet without my father.
    And then a sound: high-pitched, a girl just pinched. A sharp intake of breath.
    I was angry that he’d broken my concentration. “Be quiet in there,” I said.
    He made a sound like when he gargled in the morning, then banged—or seemed to have banged—on the closet door, as if asking to be let out.
    We’d have to begin