Нил Шустерман: The Schwa Was Here

The Schwa gets home to find his father sitting up, feeling help­less. He’s too much of a wreck even to play guitar, because for once, he’s actually noticed that his son wasn’t home. Maybe he’s even been crying, because the Schwa is more like the father, and he’s more like the kid.

The Schwa comes in, sees him there, and offers no explanation. He waits for his father to talk first.

“Where were you, do you have any idea how worried, blah blah blah—”

He lets his dad rant, and when his dad is done, the Schwa, still keeping his hands calmly in his pockets, asks, “Where’s Mom?”

His father is thrown. He hesitates, then says, “Never mind that, where were you?”

“Where are Mom’s pictures?” the Schwa asks. “I know there must have been pictures. Where are they?”

Now his father’s getting scared. Not the same kind of fear he had as he waited for the Schwa to get home, but in its own way just as bad. The Schwa’s afraid, too. It’s the fear you feel when you’re off the bus, standing in front of that beautiful/horrible girl.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” the Schwa says. “Tell me why there aren’t any pictures.”

“There are pictures,” his father finally says. “They’re just put away, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because she left us!” he yells.

“She left you!” the Schwa screams back.

“No,” his father says, more softly this time. “She left us.”

And Calvin, no matter how much he tightens his jaw, he can’t deny the ugly green-toothed truth. She left him, too.

They look at each other for a moment. The Schwa knows if it goes on too long, it will end right here. His father will clam up, and everything would go back to the way it was. But Mr. Schwa, to his credit, doesn’t wait long enough for that to happen. “Come on,” he says, and he leads his son out to the garage.

In the corner of the garage, hidden beneath other junk, is a suitcase. He pulls it out, opens it up, and takes out a shoe box, handing it to the Schwa.

The Schwa is almost afraid to open it, but in the end he does. He has to. Inside he finds envelopes—at least fifty of them. Every one of them is addressed in the same feminine handwriting. None of them have been opened, and all are addressed to the same person.

“These were written to me,” he says.

“If she wanted to talk to you, she could have come herself. I told her that.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She used to call.”

“And you never told me?”

His father’s face gets hard. “If she wanted to talk to you,” he says again, “she could have come herself.”

The Schwa doesn’t know which is worse—what his mother did, or what his father had done. She left, yes, but he made her disap­pear.

“When did the letters start coming?” the Schwa asks.

His father doesn’t hold back anything anymore. He couldn’t if he tried. “A few weeks after she left.”

“And when did the last one come?”

His father doesn’t answer right away. It’s hard for him to say. Finally he tells him, “I can’t remember.”

He can’t look his son in the face, but the Schwa, he can stare straight at his father, right through him. “I spent our savings to rent a billboard,” he tells his father. “A big picture of my face.”

The man doesn’t understand. “Why?”

“To prove I’m not invisible.”

The Schwa does not cry—he is past tears—but his father isn’t. The tears roll down the man’s face. “You’re not invisible, Calvin.”

“I wish I had known sooner.”

Then the Schwa goes into his room, closes the door, and goes through the letters one by one. Some have return addresses, some don’t, but it doesn’t matter because the return address is never the same. It’s the postmark that tells the best story. Fifty letters at least. .. and almost every postmark is from a different state.

The Schwa came to school on Monday with the shoe box of letters. He showed it to me as I stood at my locker before class, but I couldn’t read his emotions. He seemed changed in a basic way. You know—it’s like how when an egg is boiled it looks the same on the outside, but it’s differ­ent on the inside. I didn’t know what I was looking at now—Schwa, or hard-boiled Schwa.

“Can I read the letters?” I asked.

He held them back. “They were written to me.”

“Well, will you at least tell me what she said?”

He thought about the question and shrugged, without look­ing at me. “Mostly she writes about the places she’s been. ‛Wish you were here’ kind of stuff.”

“But... did she say why she did it? Why she left?”

The Schwa did that weird not-looking-at-me shrug again. “She talked about it in her early letters. Said she was sorry a lot, and that it had nothing to do with me.” But he didn’t explain any further. Then he held out an envelope. “This is the most re­cent one. It’s about six months old.” I looked at it. The envelope had no return address. “It’s from Key West, Florida—see the postmark?”

I tried to peek at the letter, but he pulled it away from me. “I’m going to write back.”

“How can you without an address?”

The Schwa shrugged yet again. “Key West isn’t all that big. Maybe the post office knows her. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll find her some other way.”

I could have argued how unlikely that was, but who was I to shoot down his dream? If he was able to get himself a paper clip from the Titanic, and get his face slapped up on a bill­board, maybe he could find his mother. The Schwa was tena­cious—a word that I, for once, got right on my vocabulary test.

He took a long look at the handwriting on the letter. “Some­day I want to tell her to her face what a lousy thing she did. And I want her to tell me to my face that she’s sorry.”

I closed my locker and spun the lock. “Good luck. Schwa. I really hope you find her.” But when I looked at where he was standing, he had already vanished.

When I got home that afternoon, the house was empty. Or so I thought. I passed by my father twice in the living room without even noticing he was there. On the third pass, I noticed him sit­ting in an armchair, blending into the shadows of the room, staring kind of blankly into space.

“Dad?”

“Hi, Antsy,” he said quietly.

“You’re home early.”

He didn’t answer for a while. “Yeah, well, thought I’d take some time off.”

There was something off about this. “Work okay?” I asked. “Are you building a better Bullpucky? Manny, I mean.”

“Work couldn’t be better,” he said. “I got fired today.”

I chuckled at first, thinking he was making some kind of joke, but he didn’t laugh.

“What? You can’t be serious!”

“They called it an ‛executive offload.’”

“They fired a bunch of you?” I still couldn’t believe it. Dad had worked for Pisher since before I could remember.

He shook his head. “Just me.”

“Those creeps.”

He raised his eyebrows. “They gave me a nice parachute, though.”

“Huh?”

“Severance package. Money enough to hold me until I get another job. If I get one.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“No!” he said sharply. “And you don’t tell her either. I’ll tell her when I’m good and ready.”