In an effort to address her obsession with worrying about people, ten-year-old Trina decides to invent an object she calls the Thing. Whenever Trina starts becoming overly concerned about someone, she opens the top of her magical box, peeks inside, and hopes that everything she sees will make her feel all right. But one night, everything is not all right. While looking in the Thing, Trina sees her older sister involved in a deadly car crash. Suddenly, Trina is left trying to make sense of events that are difficult for her to understand: her sister's death, her alcoholic father, her overworked mother, and her relationship with a God that would let bad things happen to good people. The tragedy that befalls her family teaches Trina how to survive disappointment and loss with humor, love, and a belief in second chances.
Seeing Things
By Alice McIntyreiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Alice McIntyre
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5828-0 Chapter One
Every Snowflake is Unique
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It's only a Thing. A little raggedy box Thing. But it's my Thing. And it's magic. It lets me watch people without them seeing me. And that's important cuz I need to watch people. The reason I need to watch people is cuz I worry a lot. And when I was younger than I am now, I had a lot of people I worried about. I had my mother, my father, all my sisters and brothers, my friends, my teachers, my cousins, the man who drove the number thirty-two city bus, the man who worked at the corner store, and the lady who lived alone at the end of the street. I needed to watch the lady down the street cuz she was really old and really old people die a lot. Sometimes, well, lots of times, I would walk out my front door, tiptoe down the front steps, and peak my head out from behind the tree to see if her blinds were up or down. If they were up, I sighed a big sigh of relief cuz I knew she was alive. If they were down, I stopped breathing for a minute. Then I would stand there and decide what to do: tell my mother that the blinds were down and she had to go to the old lady's apartment and make sure she was O.K. or run down to the apartment myself and do it (I knew that was a crazy idea. I could never do that. I'd be too scared. But I always put it in my mind as a choice just to see if I was as scared this time as I was the last time). Most of the time, I'd ask my mother to go see if the old lady was O.K. My mother always said, "Trina, I'm busy."
My mother is busy. She has lots of kids, and lots of clothes to wash, and lots of food to make, and lots of bottles to fill up with formula, and lots of floors to clean, and lots of tables and chairs and drawers and bureaus to dust with her dust cloth. She likes dust cloths and she thinks we should like dust cloths, too. She makes us dust things a lot. And we have to hold the dust cloth a certain way. You take it in your hand, flat like. Then you fold the right corner in a little, and then the left corner in a little, and then the other corner, and then the last corner and then you turn the whole thing over so that it looks kind of like a square with the corners cut off. My mother always says that if the corners are hanging off they'll spread the dust all over the place and then you defeat the purpose of dusting. So, according to my mother, you have to stick the corners inside so that you can get all the dust with the cloth and not have to chase the pieces of dust around cuz you're too lazy to fix the corners.
'Course my mother won't let us near a dust cloth until we dry mop the floors. You have to dry mop first cuz the dry mopping spreads the dust all over the room and the dust lands on the desks, and the bureaus, and the radiators, and well, I was going to say the night tables, but we don't have night tables in our rooms. We can barely fit the beds in our rooms, so I don't know where I got night tables. I must have read about them somewhere. But we do have bureaus and radiators and desks. Molly, one of my older sisters, had a different kind of desk than the rest of us. The rest of us have those little school-type desks that my mother got from the principal of the public school down the street. The school was closing cuz there weren't enough kids to fill up the classrooms. So the city decided to knock it down and put in a parking lot. The day before the school was razed (my mother told me that word), a bunch of people went to the school and got pencils and paper and crayons and old glue and some erasers and chalk and one mother even got a big huge blackboard. My mother got four little kids' desks that she scraped and cleaned and made sure we used only for our homework. She told us if she saw us using those desks as hampers for our clothes she'd take them away from us.
Molly was too big for a little kid's desk so she had a table-made-by-Dad desk. It was a long piece of wood on top of four wooden legs. My Dad made it for her. He wasn't a carpenter or anything so I don't know why or how he made it. But I think it was cuz my mother used her 10,000 Green Stamps to buy a high chair for my baby brother instead of buying a desk for Molly and so my father had to find some wood and make a homemade desk. Either that, or Molly would've had to do her homework at the kitchen table and my mother hates when anyone does anything at the kitchen table other than eat.
Even if it was a long piece of wood, it was a good desk. Molly liked it, even though only half of it was hers. She had to share her bedroom, and her table-desk, with my other sister, Jackie. But that was O.K. with Molly cuz she still had enough room to do her homework and if she didn't, she always pushed Jackie's stuff out of the way. Jackie never seemed to do homework. Maybe cuz she went to an easier school than Molly. Or maybe cuz I just never caught her in the act of doing homework.
You're probably wondering why any of this matters—why I care about desks and homework and dusting and whether my family ever had night tables. And you're probably wondering what any of that has to do with my Thing. Well, I haven't figured out the answer to the first part yet. My mother told me I was born with a tooth. The doctors were very surprised. When my mother asked them how that could have happened, they shrugged their shoulders and said, "We don't really know." So that's how I think about my mind and the way it works and the reasons why I do some of the things I do. I shrug my shoulders and I say, "I don't really know."
The answer to the second part—how I ended up with my Thing—is pretty simple. I'm only one person. I can't worry about everything. Well, I can. But when I do, I get sick to my stomach. I wish I didn't, but I do. So I decided I needed to stop worrying. Or at least slow my worrying down a little bit so I wouldn't get sick. I couldn't figure out how to do that all by myself. I decided that I needed help.
Then I thought about who could help me. I started with my family. I immediately decided that my mother and father would be no good at that job. Like I said before, my mother's really busy with lots of other things. And my father. Well he was never home enough when I was thinking about how much help I needed. Well, not never. He was home sometimes. But my mother always said he was never home, so that's how I thought of him. He was home in the middle of the night sometimes. I know that cuz occasionally I wake up in the middle of the night. Some nights I wake up like I'm wide awake. Like it's morning. But it never is. It's always pitch dark outside. I wake up in the middle of the night often enough that sometimes I just sleep in my clothes. I do that cuz as soon as I wake up in the middle of the night, I figure I might as well get up and start the day. I can never get back to sleep. Never. Except on the nights when my father was home. I could get back to sleep then.
I knew my father was home cuz I'd hear the TV. I was happy and not happy at the same time when I heard the TV. I don't know how that works in my mind—how I can feel two different feelings at the same time. Maybe I don't really feel two feelings at the same time though. Maybe I feel happy first and then, the very next second, I feel unhappy. Maybe the two feelings happen so fast, it only feels like I'm feeling happy and unhappy at the same time. Of course, I could feel unhappy first and then in the next second feel happy. I don't...
