The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance Read Online Free PDF Page B

purpose. I don't think. I didn't answer because I didn't want him to hear that it had been important. I just took a long swig of beer.
    Zack said, “I had a feeling that story would mean something to you.”
    “How did you know?”
    “Because we're alike, you and me.”
    Then, before I could even ask how, he got up and walked back into the kitchen. But I knew he was coming back, because he left half his beer, and a cigarette burning on the edgeof the porch. I snagged another couple of gulps of his beer. All of a sudden I realized I could hear crickets. And that I'd been hearing them all along. Maybe I always heard them. Maybe that's why I never really heard them anymore.
    Zack came back with two beers, with the tops already off, and handed one to me. The bottle was cold and wet and sweaty in my hand, and just for a split second I thought I liked being alive. I mean, it was okay. Maybe this is what people meant when they used that word. “Happy.”
    “How are we alike?” I said, even though I knew he was right.
    “Because we're broken people,” he said. “We walk and we talk and we act like we know what to do, but deep down we know it's different with us. That's why we do crazy shit sometimes. Make sure we feel alive. Like we're whole, just for a minute. You know?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I thought on that for a bit. “But I think the world is full of broken people. Way I see it, anyway. I look around and practically everybody I see is.”
    “Yeah, but they don't know it. We know what we are. They think they're okay.”
    I thought about my mom. Wondered if she thought she was okay.
    We sat in the dark and the quiet a while longer, and the beer was making my muscles unkink. I was probably drinking it too fast, but I was thinking if I finished it right up he might get me another. I wondered if he was listening to the crickets, too.
    “What makes you feel whole for just a minute?” I asked him. “Driving my motorcycle really fast. A good beer buzz.” He paused like he was thinking. Not like he was trying to think of another one. More like he was trying to decide whether to say it. “Love. What about you?”
    “Bill,” I said, and almost blew it by crying.
    “Oh. Sorry.” He got up to go. Like he thought the right thing to do was to leave me alone to feel this thing, and that was the last thing I wanted. But I couldn't think what to say to stop him.
    He slid his unfinished beer over to me. “See you in the morning.”
    And I couldn't even say good night. I couldn't say anything.
    After he left I picked up his beer instead of mine and put it up to my mouth, right where his mouth had just been. I wasn't that anxious to go back inside, so I just sat.
    When I finally went to bed I found Zack out cold on the floor in front of my mom's bedroom door. Next to his head were two neat rows of beer bottles. Thirteen. I counted.
    I think it was the next morning that I got it in my head about the pictures. I started looking around the house at all the pictures. There was Kiki as a little kid, and graduating high school. There was one of me on Trudy, my uncle Jim's horse, and a wedding picture of my mom and dad. A picture of my dad with a big bass he caught, about a month before he died.
    But no Bill.
    My mom was in the kitchen making coffee. Squinting, like her head hurt. Zack was already at work, I guess. Anyway, he was gone.
    “Why are there no pictures of Bill?”
    “We have pictures of Bill.”
    “Where?”
    “Um … on the refrigerator.”
    “That's just a picture I drew of him.”
    “Well, that's a picture.”
    “I meant a photograph.”
    “Oh. Well, why doesn't a drawing count? It's such a nice picture.”
    “It is not. It sucks. And it doesn't count because you put it up on the refrigerator because you were proud of me for drawing it. Not because you're proud of Bill. It could've been a drawing of a tree for all you care.”
    She looked at me like I had asked her to do a complicated math problem