Chapter 5: Later Wednesday Afternoon November 24th

The thing about guns is that they have only one purpose – to shoot people. That’s why they were invented. People got bored with shooting each other with bows and arrows so they invented something better. Mikael says that more people in America die each year because of cars than because of guns. That might be true, but cars were invented so that people could travel around. It’s terrible when people die in a car accident. I think that usually when someone dies in a car accident, it’s a side effect of people not using cars the way they were supposed to be used. When people die because of guns, most of the time it’s because the gun was used exactly the way it was designed to be used.

That’s not always a bad thing, I guess. People should be allowed to defend themselves, for instance. Guns are sometimes good for that – not always, but sometimes. But you can’t defend yourself by telling someone you have a gun hidden in a box in the bedroom closet. To defend yourself, you have to actually hold the gun in your hand and shoot the person attacking you. At the very least, you have to point the gun at them and convince them that you’re prepared to shoot.

That isn’t what upsets me most about guns. I saw a thing on TV that said every year in America, about 150 children die because of an accident involving a gun. Mikael says 150 aren’t that many in a country with a population of 300 million. It might not be many but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s still 150 more than it should be. And what do they say to the mothers of those 150 children? “We’re sorry, Mrs Freeman, but don’t feel bad that Rebecca is dead from an accident with a gun because only a small number of children die that way.” Somehow, I don’t think Mrs Freeman would be very happy to have someone say that to her.

There has to be a way to make sure fewer children die because of guns. One option would be to make sure any guns in the house are securely locked up and hidden away where the children can’t get at them. Well I guess my parents had done that – more or less. An even better way would be not to have any guns in the house in the first place. Before this instant, I could have sworn that this was the option my parents would’ve chosen.

Maybe that was what scared me the most. It wasn’t so much that the gun was there – hidden away in Dad’s closet. It was more that I had so completely misread my parents. I was convinced they wouldn’t allow a gun in the house. Well, maybe Mum might want one if she felt threatened, but I would have thought Dad wouldn’t allow her to have it because of her condition. And Dad certainly wouldn’t want a gun. Not unless he thought there was some extreme danger that he needed to protect us from.

The sort of extreme danger, for instance, that might make him pack up his family and move us to a different country and change our name so that whatever it was couldn’t find us!

That’s the other thing that was scary. If that’s true, then the gun means that whatever we’re hiding from is dangerous enough for Dad to completely go against everything he believes about guns.

And Nana said the reasons haven’t gone away!

There was another possibility, of course, and that was even scarier. Guns aren’t just for defending yourself. They’re for attacking people too. The same show I mentioned before, said that each year in America 12,000 people are murdered with guns – including 900 children. That’s a terribly big number. Melissa says that quite a few of those are probably drug dealers and the like. Mikael says it’s not important that they were killed with guns. He says if you want to kill someone, you kill them – if you don’t have a gun, you use a knife, or whatever. I think that the problem with guns is that it’s easier to kill someone with a gun than with a knife – maybe too easy. As you might have gathered, we had a big discussion about this around the lunch table after the TV show had been on.

So anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes, the gun in Dad’s closet.

The even scarier thought was that maybe Dad was the sort of person who secretly took a gun with him to go places where he might have to kill people – and that he’d hidden that part of his life from us, hidden it from me. Maybe he does that as a part of some secret job that he hasn’t told us about, or maybe it’s part of, I don’t know, something he does – something else.

So there I was, standing there staring down at a gun. A gun I’d found in a box in Dad’s closet. Various bits of my brain were having this enormous argument in my head about what the gun meant. In the meantime, another bit of my brain was looking curiously at the gun.

It’s small – well smallish. By that I mean that it’s not a machinegun or a bazooka or anything like that. I suppose you would call it a hand gun, except that it’s bigger than my hands. It is probably eight inches long along the top of it, and maybe five or six inches from the top down the length of its handle. It’s a dark gray color, nearly black. There were two of those slidey-things that the bullets get packed into – I don’t know what they’re called – sitting beside the gun, inside the metal box. I could see the top bullet in one of them because it was facing towards me. I could see the empty space in the bottom of the handle of the gun. That would be the hole where the slidey-thing would slide up inside to make the gun loaded. There were also two boxes of bullets. One of them was closed up and looked new. The other one had the lid open and there were a handful of bullets lying in the bottom of the box. I’m positive that the number of bullets missing from the box was way more than the number of bullets that would fit into the two slidey-things.

That told me something important. Not only does Dad own a gun – he’s been using it.

I could see one last bit of paper under the gun. It looked like a legal form of some sort or other – maybe it’s a gun permit, I’m not sure. I wasn’t going to pick up the gun to check. A little bit of my brain panicked when I even thought about picking up the gun. “I don’t want to die,” it screamed. “I don’t want to be one of those 150 accidents.”

Most of my brain knew that just touching the gun wasn’t going to make it go off. Most of my brain knew that as long as the thing was pointing away from me, even if it did go off, I wouldn’t get hurt. Apparently the scaredy-cat bit of my brain was in charge of my heart, though, because I could feel it thumping in my chest like a drum machine on steroids.

Then the drumming faded away into the distance. The panicked gibbering of scaredy-pants Bec dissolved into silence. I stood inside a bubble, isolated from the world. Alone in that bubble, I felt in control, confident. All the doubts and fears were locked outside.

I grasped the gun firmly around its handle and lifted it out of the box. It felt heavy in my hands. Not just heavy with the weight of the metal, but also heavy with the weight of possibilities. I wrapped my two hands around the handle, copying the grip I’d seen in countless police shows on TV. I braced my feet firmly on the floor and pointed the gun away from me and down. I could feel my back straighten and my shoulders pull back and my head lift. Without conscious thought, I had slid into that confident, almost arrogant, pose that Mum had painted on my bedroom wall. My small hands could barely reach around the handle of the gun but that didn’t matter. With the gun in my hands, I felt powerful, strong, unbeatable. Most of all, I felt dangerous.

In that moment, with dangerous-Bec fully in control, I finally understood about guns.

There was a little lever near my thumb that I’m fairly sure was the safety catch. I was very careful not to touch it. I was also very careful to keep the gun pointed at the floor. The two things for bullets were still sitting in the metal box but that didn’t mean there was no bullet in the gun. The smart bit of my brain somehow retained enough control to make sure I didn’t kill myself.

The weight of the gun dragged my hands down. I had to strain to keep from pointing the gun directly down at my toes. That would have been embarrassing – the first time I ever hold a gun and I shoot myself in the foot. I never realized guns could be so heavy.

Putting the gun back in the box was almost painful. Dangerous-Bec wanted to keep holding it. Dangerous-Bec wanted to know what it felt like to pull the trigger. I couldn’t afford to let dangerous-Bec have what she wanted. The battle for control left my hands shaking, but the gun ended up safely back in its box. Quickly I returned the papers and passports to their place, hiding the gun from sight below a reassuring weight of papers. As if maybe, if I covered the gun with enough fake documentation, the gun would become fake as well.

I closed and locked the metal box and then replaced the shoe box lid over the top of it. It now looked like an ordinary shoe box surrounded by shoes – a perfect disguise.

I pulled open the drawer to the bedside table where I’d found the key and had a close look. After a bit of searching, I found an old bit of tape on the underneath of the table top, inside the drawer. The key was obviously supposed to go there. I wouldn’t have found the key in my earlier search if the tape hadn’t given out. I replaced the old bit of tape with some new tape and stuck the key up out of sight where it belonged.

I scanned around the room, checking for evidence that I’d been in there. That was pretty easy to do. I just had to compare what I was seeing in front of me with the image I had in my head of what the room had looked like when I first came through the door. I straightened up the covers on the bed, pushed a closet door closed that I had left open and I was satisfied.

The house was quiet – really quiet. A chill raced up my spine. It circled around the inside of my skull and chased dangerous-Bec completely back into her little metal box. Something was wrong. I hurried into the living room to check on Nana. I saw immediately that she was sitting up and organizing herself – obviously having just woken up. I breathed a sigh of relief to see that she was okay.

I looked out through the front window but Mum’s car was still missing. I rushed into the kitchen and checked the clock. It was way after Mum was due home. Something was definitely wrong.

“What is it, Bec?” Nana was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Mum’s not back from the shops. She should have been back over an hour and a half ago.”

“Shops these days...” Nana raised her eyes to the roof. “Always so busy! I’m sure she’s been held up. There’s no need to get in a panic.”

Nana’s voice was calm and reassuring.

“Why don’t we make a start on the stuffing? She’ll be home soon.”

I let Nana boss me into getting busy with the food preparations. Every so often a car would drive past and I would jump up, but none of them stopped. I glared at the phone, trying to use my magic powers to make it ring and have Mum say everything was okay.

Apparently my magic powers were on the fritz because the phone refused to ring. For five – ten – fifteen long minutes the tension inside of me built and built. It was only the calm confidence of Nana that kept me from running around and screaming in sheer panic.

Finally all that focus on the phone had some effect. It rang. Maybe my magic powers weren’t on the fritz after all – but they were working slower than I would’ve liked.

I think the phone only had a chance to ring once before I picked it up.

“Hello?” I was breathless from a combination of worry and the speed I’d moved to answer the phone.

“It’s Mum, sweetie. I’m at the hospital.”

“What? Why? What happened? Is everyone okay?”

I have to admit, “Is everyone okay?” has to be one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever asked. Obviously something was wrong. My brain was going wild with possibilities.

“It isn’t serious, sweetie, relax. Angie fell and hurt her arm. I want a doctor to check it before I bring her home. We’re sitting in emergency and it looks like it will take a while. I think half the city is here in the waiting room.”

“Oh!”

The idea of Angie being hurt sent shivers through me.

I told Nana that Mum was at the hospital because Angie had hurt her arm. She nodded at me and calmly went back to chopping up onions.

I could hear Mum chortling to herself over the phone. “What is it, Mum?”

“Oh, love! I just worked out how you know when I’ve been talking to Nana. You sound like a proper Lancashire lass right now. Does my accent get as broad as that when I’ve been talking to her?”

“Aye! Tha’s a Lanky yer’sen, reet’nuff.”

I deliberately exaggerated the accent which made Mum laugh.

(In case you’re wondering, Dr K, I said, “Yes! You’re a Lancastrian yourself, right enough.” See? It’s not that hard to understand. Don’t ask me to write out everything Nana says like that. It’s easier to translate what she says into proper English.)

Speaking of Nana, she was glaring at me. “Spayk proper, tha cheeky git!”

(I’m not going to translate that. You can work it out on your own if you need to.)

I grinned at Nana and she raised her eyes to the roof.

“I’ve spoken to your dad. He’s going to come via here on his way home and collect Tara – she doesn’t need to wait here. Also he can bring all my shopping home so that anything that needs it can be put in the fridge before it spoils.”

“Ah, Mum! There isn’t any space in the fridge. It’s already so full that I’m amazed the door will close. I fully expect the fridge to give up the ghost any second from being worked too hard.”

“Wait a minute, I need to think.” I listened to her breathing for about twenty seconds. In the background I could hear a constant hum of hospital-type activity.

“We can’t use the cool box in the laundry – that already has drinks in it. But there’s an old one up in the roof. I’ll try to contact Dan and get him to pick up some ice on his way home. If I don’t catch Dan, Dad will have to get some, but that means he’ll take even longer. Be careful climbing up in the roof, sweetie, it isn’t safe. Or maybe you should wait until Dan gets home and let him climb up and get it.”

“Mum, last time Dan went up into the roof, he hit his head so much that he swore never to go up there again. He’s bigger than the space is. I’ll be careful. I’m not a total klutz. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll need to sort out dinner. There are some hamburger patties in the fridge that I pulled out of the freezer this morning. They should be thawed by now. There are fresh hamburger buns and also some cheese in the shopping Dad will bring home. We made extra salad this morning so you can have some of that with the hamburgers. Dan’s going out so he’ll say he doesn’t want to eat but cook a couple for him anyway. As soon as he smells the cooking he’ll change his mind and want a snack before he goes out. Leave one patty out for me and I’ll cook it when I get home. Angie ate something before and I doubt if she’ll want to eat again when she gets home. Oh...”

Mum’s voice trailed off into silence and I could hear her breathing over the background noise.

“What is it, Mum?”

“It’s nothing, sweetie. They wheeled the cutest little boy past me with ... well, never mind.”

I decided that if it was bad enough to freak my mother out, then I really didn’t want to know about it.

“Okay, Mum. Give my love to Angie. Do you want to speak to Nana?”

“No, I better get off the phone and look after Angie. Tell Nana I’ll see her tomorrow. See you later, Bec. Take care.”

“Will do, Mum. Later!”

I hung up the phone and went to the fridge to take out the hamburger patties. The fridge groaned in protest. I patted it and told it that it was doing a good job.

Then I relayed Mum’s comments to Nana while the two of us got back to work. I also said I was sorry for taking the mickey and she pretended to be cross at me but she couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

Dr K, you probably don’t know what that means. “Taking the mickey” means making fun of someone, but in a friendly sort of way by imitating them but exaggerating it to make them look silly. Kind of like what I did with Nana, except that I didn’t really do it to make fun of her. I was making fun of myself more than anything.

We finished preparing the stuffing and tidied that up. Nana took out some biscuit mix which had been settling in the fridge since the morning and started rolling it out and cutting it ready for baking. The biscuits that Nana was making are what you would probably call cookies. But I can’t call them cookies when Nana makes them. It would be a kind of sacrilege or something.

While she was doing that, I changed into some old jeans and an old long-sleeved top. Then I set up the ladder in the laundry so that I could climb up into the roof. It’s not really a proper attic up there. Soon after we moved into the house, Dad and Dan put some floorboards down over a section of the ceiling so it could be used as a storage area.

There’s no proper lighting so I had to use a torch – I mean a flashlight. We always keep a torch in the kitchen in case the lights go out. I discovered that the batteries were getting a bit old and would need to be replaced, so I wrote that on the list that lives on the fridge door. The fridge grumbled about me doing that, so I patted it again.