Every day, Taylor’s alarm clock rang at a quarter after six. During the week, he usually got up then, but not on Saturdays and Sundays. He didn’t have to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays because that was the weekend, and on the weekend he didn’t have to go to school. Today, of course, was Tuesday. And Tuesday was a school day.
The alarm clock rang and he lay there in bed for a few minutes, wondering what he was so happy about. Then he remembered. He’d gotten that scholarship to Anderson. That was why. And now he wouldn’t have to worry that Mrs. Lucas would think he was a slacker.
If you got up first, you got to take a shower first. Also, his school started earlier than Isaac’s or Zac’s, and so he had to be out of the house sooner. Zac usually got up around the time Taylor did, though. He needed a long time to wake up before he left the house to go to school. Characteristically, Isaac slept in until the last possible moment. Because his school started an hour later than Taylor’s anyway, Isaac and Taylor seldom crossed paths in the morning.
Which wasn’t a terribly bad thing. Just because Isaac was dashing around the house getting ready, one could not necessarily infer that he was awake or in any way oriented. If you asked him a question, he would stare at you blankly for a long, long time, then wander away. If you did not encounter Isaac before ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, you weren’t really missing much.
“Will it never snow?” Zac was lying on his stomach on the couch when Taylor went through the TV room and into the laundry room to throw his clothes in the drier before he put them on. The nice thing about the Conway family’s laundry room was that it was also a third bathroom. Taylor was in the habit of putting his towel and a change of clothes in the drier to warm up while he took a shower. That way, he could pretend that he was getting back in bed while he was getting dressed.
“It’s not gonna snow,” Taylor told Zac. “Get over it.”
Zac was not going to get over it. If it wasn’t going to snow by itself, he was going to help the weather along. “Look,” he said, pointing to the collection of snowglobes he’d lined up along the windowsill. “And look.”
“What?” Taylor was a little surprised that his younger brother had dragged a plastic Fisher Price house he used to play with in preschool out of the basement, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it before. “You taped cotton balls all over it. So what?”
“So what?” Zac was astonished. “Tay, you don’t get it, do you? This is our house, covered in snow.”
“It’s a plastic toy house covered in cotton,” Taylor protested.
Zac sighed, wearily. “Taylor,” he said. “If I wanted something to happen to you, I would cut some of your hair off or steal some toenail clippings or something and make a voodoo doll of you. Right?”
Taylor swallowed, a little scared. “I. . . I hope not.”
Zac rolled his eyes. “Of course I would. Anyway, I peeled some paint off the real house and taped it to the to toy house. Then I covered it in snow. Our house, Tay. Covered in snow.”
Taylor was shaking his head as he backed into the bathroom. “It’s not gonna snow, Zac. Not until it starts getting a lot colder than it is.” He closed the door behind him.
Zac folded his arms. What a stupid brother he had. “Snow,” he whispered, lifting one of the snowglobes off of the windowsill and turning it upside down over his voodoo house. “Snow, snow!” Unable to think of a suitable rhyming voodoo snow curse, he’d decided just to chant the word “snow” over and over. “Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow. Snow!” He thought for a moment. “Now,” he added. “Please.” He paused again. “Thank you.”
The phone rang a little while later. Zac still hadn’t gotten dressed yet, but Taylor was out of the shower and Nora had come downstairs and started making coffee. Zac was waiting for Conan the Barbarian to be over. That was his cue to finish his cereal and start getting ready for school.
“Hello?” Nora asked. “Oh, hi, how are you?” There was a long pause. “Oh, that’s terrible. Is he all right?”
“Is who all right?” Taylor asked. He was making a mess on the counter with toast, butter and raspberry jelly. “What happened?”
“Shh,” Nora told him. “The poor thing. Yes, I have seen a lot of cases, actually. More people get them at this time of year. Uh huh. No, he’s had them, I think. Or maybe the shot. Yeah, he had the shot, but somebody did have. . . I don’t remember which one of them. . . Oh, well. It was a while ago. Yeah, those oatmeal bath things are good.”
“Snow,” Taylor heard Zac chanting to himself. “Snowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnow.”
“You’re definitely right,” Nora agreed. “How about Grace and Kenny? Oh, that’s good. Well, tell him we hope he feels better. Yeah, if you do want to make an appointment, I could probably see him this morning. If you call the office, they’ll set aside a block of time for you-”
“Is this your orange juice?” Taylor called to Zac. He’d discovered a glass of orange juice on the counter, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember whether or not he had been the one to pour it.
“Don’t touch that!” Zac yelled, lunging out of the TV room. “It’s sacrificial!”
“What?” Taylor blurted, as Zac sandwiched himself between his older brother and the glass of orange juice on the counter.
“To tempt the gods,” Zac explained. “And make it snow.”
“You’re only supposed to believe in one God,” Taylor pointed out.
Zac shrugged. “He can have some, too.”
“Zac.” Taylor shook his head. “Aren’t you carrying this whole voodoo thing a little far?”
Zac would not dignify that inquiry with an answer. He narrowed his eyes at Taylor.
“Fine.” Taylor sighed. “Do whatever you want. But why orange juice?”
“I like orange juice,” Zac pointed out.
“Well, put it in the refrigerator or something so it won’t spoil,” Taylor told Zac. “If that’s even an issue.”
“I already thought of that,” Zac agreed. “I’ll change it to something nonperishable when I have to leave for school.”
Taylor rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you on top of things.”
“Tay,” said Nora, hanging up the phone after what seemed like an eternity of inane conversation, “you’re busy after school today, right?”
Taylor nodded. “Right. Until about five or so.”
Nora nodded, sighing. “And Ike has detention or something, he told me.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Hugh has the chicken pox.”
Zac started laughing. “He does?”
“It really isn’t funny,” Nora told him. “Anyway, you never even had the chicken pox.” She paused. “Were you the one I made get the chicken pox vaccine in front of that screaming kid, to show him it really wasn’t so bad?”
Zac nodded. “That was me.”
“Okay, right!” Nora grinned. The pieces of her life were falling magically into place. “So, Tay, you must be the one who passed out after you got the MMR, and Ike. . . he always makes that face where you feel guilty for hurting him.”
Taylor winced at the memory of fainting during a bad reaction to a childhood immunization. “I told you I felt really dizzy and you said I was fine. You said I was being hyperdramatic. And I wasn’t.”
Nora rolled her eyes. “Taylor, it was six years ago. I told you I was sorry.”
“Anyway, Tay,” Zac pointed out, rationally, “what do you think is worse? That our mother neglected the fact that you were about to faint or that she has no idea which one of us is which? And who got what shot? And who was sacrificed so that other children might not suffer so terribly.” He nodded. “That, naturally, was me.”
Taylor nodded. “That’s true.”
Nora closed her eyes. “My God! The two of you! I know which one of you is which, even if I don’t remember every single detail of everything that ever happened to you right off the top of my head.”
“Even what are names are,” Taylor added.
“When I was growing up, my mother called me Carlos more than she called me Nora,” Nora informed her sons. “And I don’t even have a brother. So don’t complain.”
Zac and Taylor exchanged a glance. Zac looked quizzically at his mother. “That’s really weird, Mom.”
Nora poured herself a cup of coffee. “Isn’t it, though?” she asked, drily, turning so they wouldn’t see her smirk. Actually, her mother had only called her ‘Carlos’ once, and it was on a day that her cousin Carlos was visiting. After seven years with her sons, however, Nora was not above stretching the truth every now and again.
“That really is weird,” Zac repeated. “Why, Mom? Why did your mother do that? Did you ever find out?”
Nora shrugged. “It’s a mystery to this day.” She sighed. “Zac, I’m either going to have to find somewhere for you to go after school, or call someone to come over here, because no one’s going to be home and you can’t go to Hugh’s. . .”
“Why?” Zac asked. “I can stay by myself.”
Nora looked at him. Taylor looked at him.
“No,” Nora said. “I don’t really like that idea. If it was just for an hour or so, maybe, but it’ll be dark by the time anyone gets home.”
“So?” Zac asked. “It gets dark, like, about four o’clock now. If this were the summer, it wouldn’t get dark until maybe about eight. So why does whether or not it’s dark make a difference?”
“Honey, it does,” Nora assured him, even though she wasn’t entirely sure why. Bad things just seemed more likely to happen in the dark.
“I can stay by myself,” Zac assured her. “You wouldn’t even have to be worried. I even know all the rules already. Don’t use the stove, lock all the doors-”
“Mom, you let me stay by myself when I was eleven,” Taylor pointed out. “You let Ike.” He thought for a moment. “But not very often.”
Nora thought for a moment. That was true. But she was still adjusting to the facts that Zac went to school every day, poured his own milk and no longer sucked his thumb. She wondered, not for the first time, if it had been easier to allow Taylor and Isaac to do things because she hadn’t known them back when they were really, really little.
Actually, Nora realized, the issue of Zac’s spending prolonged periods of time at home by himself had never come up because she could always coerce Taylor or Isaac into staying home with him, or, alternately, taking him with them when they went somewhere. (She had no idea that Isaac’s method of taking Zac out of the house with him involved handing his younger brother a handful of quarters and telling him to “go find some video games or something.” Isaac had long ago discovered that both he and Zac were happier this way.)
“Will you come straight home after school?” Nora asked. “Will you lock all the doors?”
Zac nodded. “Yep. I already told you I knew all the rules.”
“And don’t use the stove,” Nora added. “And don’t let any strange people into the house. And go get dressed now.”
“Okay.” Zac didn’t even look to see if Conan the Barbarian was over before he ran upstairs. He was intent on remaining in his mother’s good favor.