Long Night of Leo and Bree

Chapter One:8:00 p.m. Leo She's screaming at me again, like I'm deaf, like I'm stupid, like I don't know what day this is. I knew she'd be crazier than usual today -- that's why I got up early and went to work at the garage before she woke up this morning. I figured there was no sense taking a chance -- the more I'm around her today, the more likely I'll start seeing those pictures flashing in my mind again.After work I stopped at the store to get some hamburg and a jar of pickles for dinner because she likes that. I thought maybe I could get her off the subject, get her quieted down with a full stomach. I'm not a great cook, but I can make decent hamburgers. Gramma showed me how. She usually does our cooking, but she's down to Quincy this week with my Aunt Suzanne, who just had another baby. Ma calls Suzanne a frigging baby machine, unless she calls her something worse.It's bad timing that Gramma's gone this week because sometimes she can get Ma to calm down. I can't. I just make things worse. Which is what she always tells me I do. But I don't think that's fair because I have tried to help out. I quit school this year to work at the garage because she said we couldn't all live on what Gramma made answering the phones at that doctor's office. She said I was eating too much and we couldn't afford it. She bitches at me all the time, even though I help out around here more than she does.But I know she can't really do anything. She's pretty much nuts most of the time. It didn't used to be like this. Before my sister Michelle died four years ago (four years ago tonight), we didn't live at Gramma's apartment. We still lived in Fenton, but in a regular house with my dad. He worked over at the power plant and Ma worked at a fabric store down on Russell Avenue. We weren't rich or anything, but we were all alive and nobody was insane.After Michelle died, Dad turned into stone. The rest of us were more like glass, but he was stone. Just sat around the house all day, staring at the wallpaper like he could see down through all the layers. Pretty soon he got fired from the plant and he didn't even seem to care. Then he packed up a duffel bag and told us he was moving down to Kentucky."Why? Where?" Ma yelled at him. "You don't know anybody in Kentucky!""That's the point," he said. "I can't stand knowin' anybody anymore. I have to disappear." And that's what he did. Although he did send me a birthday card last year with fifty dollars in it, and the post office mark said Louisville, so I guess that's a clue. Maybe someday I'll drive down there and disappear too.When I was a kid, Dad would take me down to the power plant and show it off to me and me off to the guys he worked with. He was proud of his whole life, it seemed like. But after Michelle died, the rest of us just turned into some broken-down mess. I can't even remember what any of us looked like without a picture."Leo! Where are you?" She's still screaming, but I'm downstairs in the basement storage room where she won't find me. I come down here lately when I need to get away -- it's a great hiding place. Somebody left an old couch sitting here and some dining room-type chairs. Stuff people aren't using anymore they put down here -- there's all kinds of crap: garden tools and suitcases and boxes of old clothes. There's a light in the corner so you can see to do stuff, although usually I don't have much to do, maybe read one of these old magazines people got piled up. It's hard to read, though, when I get Ma's crazy voice stuck in my head, noisy as a chain saw, slicing through my brains.There's even a toilet behind this door in the back -- kind of filthy -- but I use it if I don't feel like going back upstairs yet. I bought some toilet paper and some root beer and saltines at the store this afternoon and brought them down here like this was my home. It's kind of cold in the basement, so the root beer doesnWittlinger, Ellen is the author of 'Long Night of Leo and Bree', published 2002 under ISBN 9780689835643 and ISBN 0689835647.