CHAPTER ONE.

Ice Cubes

Ice cubes (noun)-small blocks of frozen water you can add to a drink or use when you get hot and need to cool off. (Allen Cobourn’s Book of Confusing Words)

            The ice cubes in my hands are melting. They drip onto the wooden floor with little plopping sounds. Plop, plop, plop. I squeeze my fists really tight, feeling the cold on my hands, and hearing the drips of water onto the floor. I don’t want to hear or feel anything else. I sit as still as I can in the hard wooden chair next to Dad’s bed. If I move a little, it will squeak and then they will hear me. If I sit here in this wooden chair and don’t make it squeak, if I only listen to the drips of water on the floor, if I don’t think about what is happening in the next room, everything will be okay. It HAS to be okay.

            The men in the next room will pack up their big black bags and go away. They will say it was all a mistake or maybe it was all a joke.  Dad likes to play jokes on people. The men will get into the ambulance with the flashing red and blue lights, and they will drive away. Then things will be the way they always are. It will be me, and Mom, and Dad, and our orange cat Butterscotch.

Except Butterscotch isn’t really our cat. I forgot that. He’s my sister’s cat but he lives with us because her husband is allergic to cats. He’s a nice cat. Sometimes when Dad isn’t feeling well, Butterscotch sits on his lap and purrs. I guess he thinks it helps Dad feel better. Maybe it does. I don’t know a lot about cats. He’s probably hiding from the men with the black bags now because he’s sort of a scaredy cat.

            I wish I could be a cat and hide.

            I wish they would all go away.

            Not my mom, though. She’s really, really nice and she takes good care of Dad. She’s in the other room now, talking to the men with the big black bags. They came in the house a while ago—maybe half an hour?—with their big black bags. They got out those ear things doctors use to listen to your heart. They took out some kind of machine and hooked it to my dad’s chest. It looked like they were hurting Dad. I don’t trust them. One of them told me something that can’t be true.

            I’m sorry, son. Your father is gone.

            Gone? How could Dad be gone when he was sitting right there in his chair, watching a baseball game? But I guess someone turned the television off because the screen was dark. Or maybe Dad turned it off. Things get confused in my head sometimes. It took me a minute to know that they didn’t mean he was gone, as in not there.

            They meant he was dead.

            But he can’t be dead. I told them that. I said, “He’s not dead! He’s only asleep! He sleeps a lot because he’s sick!”

            But the men just shook their heads and frowned. They started putting their stupid things into their big black bags and someone took a sheet and put it over my dad’s face.

            And I got mad. Really mad. I try not to get mad because Mom says it can scare people because I’m a big guy, like Dad. I shouted, “He’s not dead!” and I ran into the kitchen to get ice cubes from the freezer. Sometimes, if it’s hard to wake Dad up, I put ice cubes on his feet. That wakes him up right away! I ran back into the living room to put them on Dad’s feet, but Mom said it was too late.