2

Dead Parents Society

Lottica dodged away from the eyepiece when Nick kicked the leg of the telescope tripod.

“Hey! Watch the equipment. I just got Venus into focus,” she snapped.

“Sorry,” Nick grunted trying to squeeze into the desk chair in the cramped room they’d been sharing for two months since the fire. He switched on his laptop without another glance at his sister.

Lottica put her forehead against the cool metal of the telescope and took a deep breath. Her brother, dark hair hanging ever lower over his pale brow, had become eerily quiet and withdrawn in the two months since their parents' grisly deaths.

Never much of a talker to begin with, Nick had basically shut down. At fourteen, he was already adept communicating with frowns and sneers, but with the sudden death of their parents, he had become almost mute, answering most questions with a maddening "I dunno."

Not that Lottica blamed her brother. Together they'd witnessed the terrible aftermath of the natural gas explosion that had killed their parents. They'd been forced to move to a part of town that neither of them knew in order to live with their grandparents.

Grandparents?

Were these really her grandparents? Her friends had grandparents who doted on their grandchildren, bought them treats, praised them and laughed with them. Laughter? Lottica couldn’t ever remember seeing her grandparents laugh.

She wondered why her father’s parents had even moved to America from Europe a few years ago. It had been torture for her and Nick to endure their short visits on Sunday afternoons and holidays. And now they were living with them.

Lottica couldn’t figure out how her father, who had been so relaxed and ready with a joke, could have such cold and humorless parents. And if that weren't enough to bear, her grandparents lived in a small over-furnished house, so she and Nick had to learn to share a room. A room much too small for either of their tastes.

Lottica refocused attention on her telescope. It was one of the few treasures that had been spared in the fire. She had left it outside on the back deck the night before the explosion, and, miraculously, it had been undamaged.

It was not just a small something to have her telescope. All her young life, she’d been fascinated with stars. Her parents had often told the story of her first word. On the night of the summer solstice when Lottica was barely one she was cuddled in her mother's arms in a lawn chair in the backyard. A light flitted across the sky. Her mother sat up to track the shooting star’s progress. At that very moment, tiny Lottica’s chubby fingers reached out toward the trailing light as she murmured, “daar.”

From that night on, Lottica had been her parents’ precious little daarling. They fostered her interest in the stars. At bedtime, snuggled in warm blankets, they read her myths on the constellations and filled her shelves with lively books on astronomy. To her tickled delight, they gave her a telescope for her eighth birthday.

Lottica bonded with her telescope. From then on, she had to endure the accusations, often painfully correct, that she seemed to prefer the stars to her own family and friends. Nick teased that when she grew up, she wouldn't need to find a hubby to marry, she'd need a Hubble. As in the orbiting space telescope. Lottica unapologetically agreed that she’d prefer the latter.

Now, she felt fortunate just to have her telescope. It was one of the few distractions that kept her mind from replaying the disturbing images of her broken-doll mother and father's somber last salute. Lottica needed her telescope. She needed to look beyond the immediate. The stress of all the loss and change had chipped away at her positive nature.

She could feel herself simmering, just waiting for her emotions to boil over. Some days being an outsider at a new school depressed her. Other days, her grandparents’ cool demeanor pushed her to the edge of an angry outburst.

And Nick wasn’t helping much. His silence was driving her buggy. He’d shut down. Except for his computer. Like now, he was focused on his laptop dissecting a virtual brain.

Vintage Nick. He loved biology, especially human anatomy. He was a freshman and already taking Advanced Placement Biology. That was Nick. Coolly dissecting those around him with clinical precision.

Lottica wondered if Nick ever dissected his own thoughts and motives. Because, right now, he seemed to be suffering deeply from the loss of their parents. She wished he'd talk to her about it. Not only for himself, but for her as well. She wanted to feel as if they could grieve together normally.

But, what was normal anymore?

She turned the telescope from the window and looked through the eyepiece at her brother entrenched if front of the computer. There was no way to focus him in at this close range, so she swung the cylinder around and peered backward through the front aperture. And there Nick appeared, a hundred times smaller, tiny, vulnerable, losable.

A strange sensation surged in Lottica's heart. She didn't know if it was compassion or pity for that small, distant figure, her brother, who had lost as she had lost. She felt a swell of understanding that they needed to reconnect. They were flesh and blood—the flesh and blood of their parents. They owed it to their parents to work together to make the best of what was becoming an increasingly nasty business of living under the same roof.

She gathered herself. She knew about all kinds of star power: the thermonuclear kind and the charming, celebrity kind. She pushed her sandy blonde hair off her forehead, dropped her often-raised eyebrows, opened her blue eyes wide and grinned the half grin her dad said made her look like Bugs Bunny lighting a dynamite-stick cigar for Elmer Fudd.

She went and peered over her brother's shoulder. He did not acknowledge her. The web page Nick was viewing showed a life-like cut away of the human cranium from a top-down perspective. Anatomical terms indicated the various parts of the brain revealed in the cross section.

Lottica's hand pushed past her brother's sharp nose and pointed to the term frontal lobe on the screen. "So, Nick, science wizard that you are. Do you suppose that this is the part of dad's brain I saw oozing from his eye when they carried him out of the house two moths ago?"

She froze. Had she really meant to say that? Is that the kind of thing that really would start to heal the pain they shared? She stood at her brother's side, mortified. This is the moment right before the bomb explodes, she thought. That split second magnified in time and space before the reality of disaster flattens you. I guess I deserve it. What is wrong with me?

She closed her eyes and steeled herself for Nick’s angry retaliation.

Nothing.

Still nothing.

Willing an eyelid open, Lottica squinted through the crosshatched fuzziness of her eyelashes. Nick’s focus was still fixed on the computer screen. Impassive. It was if she hadn't spoken, hadn't tried to jar him into a fight, goad him into grieving with her.

Lottica made herself breathe slowly. She needed to reach her brother, but she didn't know how. Again, the words that flew from her mouth took her by surprise.

"Come on, Nick. You know the stories. Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, The Boxcar Children, Harry Potter. Dead dads. Dead moms. Dead dads and moms. And yeah, the kids go through misery, soul searching, and all kinds of danger and disappointment, but they end up okay in the end. That's you and that's me. We're just new members of the Dead Parents Society.”

Nick still did not respond and Lottica almost pleaded. "No one is going to write a book about our little lives, but we've got to live them. And I'd sure appreciate having someone to talk to about mom and dad. Because even though there's a million billion stars in the universe to keep me distracted, I miss them. I miss them so much.”

The computer screen went dark, and Lottica was startled at the faint reflection in it of her and Nick side by side. Nick had put the laptop into sleep mode. He turned towards her, and she could see his eyes glassy with tears. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

"And you worry about my people skills," he said. And forced a smiled.

He met her eyes. Not as if she were some composite science diagram, or simply one of seven billion other humans milling about the planet, or just his precocious twelve-year-old little sister. Nick looked at Lottica as if she was actually a part of him, a part he’d failed to appreciate for some time.

His smile became more relaxed, friendly. He stood up and gave his sister a hug. "Dead Parents Society? So, should I start stockpiling breadcrumbs or prepare for a visit from our fairy godmother?"

Then he gave her an awkward squeeze and sat back down, hitting the spacebar and waking up the laptop, which revealed an all-too realistic cross section of the cerebellum. Nick looked back at Lottica and explained with deadpan precision, "You know, by the way, that brains don't ooze, they fragment, kind of like scrambled eggs."

Lottica laughed.

Yet still she wondered if she really knew what made Nick tick. And if, deep in her heart, she really wanted to.