“Are you dead?” I whispered. She didn’t answer, just sniffed. “You can’t sniff if you’re dead, so you must not be dead,” I said, and went back upstairs. I lay on my bed, thinking I would hear her moving around soon, but the house stayed quiet. I tried to go to sleep. I closed my eyes and thought my going-to-sleep thoughts, the imagining ones I saved for bedtime. I imagined winning New Faces. I imagined the Queen visiting Class Three and telling Miss Ingham I was the best kid in the class so she had better stop telling me off so much. I imagined Mam and Da coming to pick me up from school together, the way Betty’s mammy and da always came to pick her up together, walking down the street with my hands in their hands the way she did. I imagined getting all the right numbers on the lottery and being so rich I could build towers of money notes that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.
When I had thought all my going-to-sleep thoughts and still hadn’t gone to sleep, I listened for Mam again. She still wasn’t making any noise. I went back downstairs and got a blanket from the cupboard. She had closed her eyes, and she didn’t move when I put the blanket over her, so she could have been dead, but I didn’t think so. She wasn’t the sort to die.
In the morning I checked the couch, but Da wasn’t there. Mam was in the kitchen, shuffling around with her head so far down I couldn’t see all of her face. On the table there was a glass of yellow-brown stuff that looked like apple juice. I had only ever had apple juice once before, at Betty’s birthday party, and I still remembered the taste—syrupy, like melted sweets—so I went to drink it. Mam moved so fast I barely saw her. She snatched the glass.
“Leave it,” she said. I saw her face properly. Half of it was purple-blue and puffy, like the split skin of a rotten plum. I reached up to touch it but she slapped my hand away. “Go to school,” she said.
“Where’s Da?” I asked.
“Not here,” she said.
“When’s he coming back?” I asked.
“He’s not,” she said.
“Not until when?”
“Not ever.”
I felt a creeping hotness starting in my neck, crawling up to my ears. I touched my face, but it didn’t feel hot; it felt like cold clay. So cold it got pins and needles. So cold I had to sit down on the floor.
“Is he dead?” I asked. Mam made a snorting sound at the back of her throat and drank all the apple juice in one gulp.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s dead.”
All day I had the same words in my ears. Da is dead, Da is dead, Da is dead. I didn’t cry because I never cried, but at school I was even badder than usual.
“What has got into you today, Chrissie Banks?” said Miss Ingham.
“Nothing’s got into me. Something’s got out of me,” I said.
“Stop talking nonsense,” she said.
“It’s not nonsense,” I said.
“Don’t argue, Chrissie,” she said.
“Don’t arg me, Miss Ingham,” I said.
She went to her desk and took a headache pill.
After school I went out to play with Stacey and Shannon. Shannon said she didn’t want to play Stars in Their Eyes, so I kicked her in the stomach. Stacey said she was going to tell their mammy, so I kicked her too. Hard. She fell over. I left them in a crying heap. I didn’t care if they told on me. You had to hurt people when they annoyed you, to teach them a lesson. There wouldn’t be anyone to teach Mam her lessons now that Da was dead. That was a very serious problem indeed.
Da was dead for lots of weeks, but then I got back from school one day and he was in the kitchen, drinking a can of beer. He waved when I came through the door.
“All right, Chris?” he said.
“Da?” I said.
“How are you doing?”
“You came back.”
“Yep.”
“You came back from being dead.”
He laughed and took a big gulp of beer. “Yep,” he said. “That’s right.”
“How?” I asked.
He reached into his pocket and took out a marble the size of a gobstopper. “Here—got you this,” he said. He put it in my hand. There was a tongue of light coming through the kitchen window, and when it licked the marble I saw it had all the colors in the world inside. Threads of pink and blue and yellow and green and bright, sparkly white, all pressing their faces up to the surface. I curled my fingers around it one by one, and squeezed so tight I could feel my bones bending. It was the best thing anyone had ever given me.
Da died a lot more times after that, but I didn’t mind as much because I had my marble to remind me it wasn’t forever. I squeezed it tight in my fist, or rolled it between my palms, or put it in my mouth so it stretched out the skin of my cheek. I never, ever let anyone else play with it or even touch it. Da always came back alive again in the end, and as soon as he was alive again he always came to find me, before
