Monday

Monday

     I did not sleep all that well last night. The coyotes were howling and so the neighbourhood dogs started up too. Also Dad is not cooking us meals like Mama does so I am hungry when I wake up.  I am going to figure out how to make pancakes today. They will not be as good as Mama’s but that’s okay. She says the secret ingredient is love but I think that it is cinnamon. Anyway, a full stomach will help me think. Also I do not have to go to school today because it is a holiday so that’s good. I don’t think that I could deal with that today too.

     I walked Red again and there is still no sign of Joe. That is really strange. He is homeless and doesn't own a car so where could he be? He sometimes borrows one of Dad’s old clunkers though. The story is that in three years he spent one hundred and seventy thousand dollars he received as an inheritance from his mother. That’s a lot of money to spend on cigarettes and coffee and lottery tickets. I would never waste my money like that. I am saving for my own place. I have a lot of money and I never hardly spend it. I am too smart for that.

I am going to make a list of what I know for sure:

1. Mama is missing.

2. There is blood (or something like it) on the stairs. Or there was.

3. The only thing she has is her purse.

4. Joe is missing. 

5. Dad is not himself but he is not very concerned.

6. Mama would never leave me.

7. I will find out what happened. 

     Seven is my lucky number. It is also my birth number. I was born on July 7. I'm not sure what time but it was probably seven o’clock too. My mother had a hard time when I was born. She was in labour for about 20 hours and then had to have a c-section at the last minute. They said I was in distress. Maybe that's what caused my learning disorder. It probably is. That sucks doesn't it?

Anyway this is what I need to find out:

1. Where is Mama?

2. Whose blood is on the stairs?

3. Where is Joe? 

4. What else does Dad know?

5.  Should I call the police?

6. Who else should I call?

7. Why hasn't Mama called me? 

     Change the subject. There was a possum in Mama’s chicken coop today. I had to get Dad’s help to get rid of it. It was kind of small and sad and gray, eating out of the chicken feeders and not bothering anyone but I had to tell Dad. Possums could eat all the eggs and that would make Mama upset. Also we’d have no eggs to sell. So I hit the possum with a shovel but it wouldn’t die so Dad hit him with a shovel until he did die. I felt kind of sorry for both of them. Dad and the possum. It was an impossible situation as Mama would say.

     I just wish that I had someone to share this with besides the dog. Red is a good dog but she has a short attention span. Like some of the boys in my BASES class. BASES means Basic And Special Educational Support. Allan is okay but he swears a lot and Mama says maybe he has Tourette’s and so he can’t help it. Anyway he is always in trouble and saying rude things to the SEA. That’s a Student Educational Aide. She’s mean to all of us so I get it. I wish Allan would eat with me at lunchtime but he says he wants to hang out in the library and go on the computers so I wander around looking for a place to eat lunch. It’s the worst. There are 2500 kids at a school that should only have around 1500 so when it’s lunchtime the place is what Mama would call a zoo. There are no wild animals but a lot of noise and eating and moving around. You’re not allowed to eat in front of your locker but the BASES teacher wants to know where I am in case I have a seizure so I am the only one sitting in front of my locker like a retard eating my lunch. You’re not supposed to say retard but no one will see this except me and maybe my family, so I don’t care. 

     Some boys in elementary school called me a retard and got in trouble but so what? It was said and everybody was thinking it so no big deal right? The problem is that I have Nonverbal Learning Disorder. Some people call it NLD and others call it NVLD but either way it sucks.  The way Mama explains it to people is that I don’t understand non-verbal communication like facial expressions, body language, social cues, spatial aspects and a whole lot of stuff that I find overwhelming to talk about. Basically I’m like a kid with Asperger’s except a kid with Asperger’s doesn’t care if he has no friends ‘cause he’s got his thing that he’s obsessed with like sports scores or dinosaurs or garbage trucks but I do care that I have no friends and that’s the difference. Having no friends really sucks. Everyone thinks I’m annoying because I talk so much, I stand too close to people and I don’t have a filter for the things that I say. I just say whatever is in my head. And that is a lot of stuff and it is honest but it makes things awkward and so I am alone mostly. Except for Mama.

     Having a brother and a sister makes life easier sometimes but my brother lives three thousand miles away and he has his own family now and his own stuff to deal with. My sister Mia went away to a Buddhist retreat in India for a while and I don’t know how to get a hold of her. All our family lives far away. Mama lost all the other babies that she and Dad started; it’s called miscarriages but the doctors call it spontaneous abortions. That makes it sound horrible. And it is horrible. Mama and Dad stopped telling me about it after a while because it was so sad. Mama would be really happy for a few months and then really sad again for a few more months. She tried to hide it but I could see. And Dad just works and works and works. Mama said that's how he grieves but it just seems to be how he is, period. Anyway now Mama is too old to have any more babies or that’s what she told me. She said that she was old when she had me but was blessed and so there I was. But now she is even older so it won’t happen now.

     I decided to look in her room and see if any of her stuff was gone like her suitcase and clothes and toiletries, stuff like that. I never go into Mama's room except when she is in there so it felt weird to be opening all her drawers and looking in her closet and bathroom. It was hard to tell but I don’t think anything is missing. Mama buys all her stuff at thrift stores and she is also working on getting rid of a lot of stuff because of a book she read about tidying up so it is not easy to see if everything is there or not. I looked in her bathroom though and there was a bottle of pills that I had not seen before.  I looked up the name on Google and it is a drug for depression. I did not know that Mama was depressed. Maybe because of me. Or Dad. Or all the dead babies. I don’t know.