What Happened That Night

2 ~ o c e a n

It was the middle of July when I first met Griffin Tomlin, and I was wearing a sleeveless shirt with white and gold daisies overlaying a teal fabric background and a pair of neon yellow shorts with worn Disney Princess flip-flops adorning my feet, the dark impressions of my small toes almost concealing Jasmine, Cinderella, and Ariel with only a blue gloved hand waving to me. My lips were still purple from suckling on a grape popsicle until the joke about donkeys and piano keys became visible, and the popsicle stick was now neatly wrapped in its juice stained, papery sleeve. I was sitting on our front lawn, crouched in front of our sandbox that was in the shape of a dented, plastic, green turtle with weather-worn smiling eyes and lips. I was scooping the dry grains of sand with my cracked pink, plastic shovel and into a bucket that was shaped like the tower of a castle while simultaneously keeping an eye out for bugs that had buried into the sand or a piece of cat poop that my sister Nora had the misfortune of finding a few days ago while trying to dig a moat for her dead lady bug collection—when she was twelve, she thought she could be a lady bug doctor and save the shriveled, dead ones that she inevitably ended up burying after many unsuccessful attempts of reviving them—and I heard the rumbling roar of a moving truck as I watched each grain of sand fall over the plastic edge of my shovel, and I looked up just in time to see a white and orange U-Haul driving down the street of our cul-de-sac.

I slowly placed down my shovel into the half-empty pail of sand as I watched it park in front of one of the larger, newly renovated homes on our street, one of that had been vacant for nearly a year after Mr. and Mrs. Browning and their twins moved out and left for Arizona to be closer to Mrs. Browning’s ailing father. The “FOR SALE”sign had been pitched at the front of the lawn for months, with snowflakes collecting on the top and the wind of summer storms having knocked it down a few times but a few weeks ago, mysteriously, it was removed, much to my father’s curiosity. He noticed it one morning just as he had opened the driver’s side door to go to work, tossed his briefcase into the backseat, and just happened to glance over the warm rooftop of his car and saw the hole in the lawn and that that the FOR SALE sign had been taken down. He left the car door open and ran back into the house, his tie and the edge of his jacket flapping, and I saw my mother glancing over at the closed refrigerator door, as if wondering if he had forgotten his packed salad and granola bars, and he opened the door with a grin. “Hey, did you see this?” he said, pointing behind him, meaning the absence of the FOR SALE sign but technically pointing toward another neighbor’s house where the rocking swing of their swing set on their lawn nodded in agreement. “Someone bought their house!” He looked at me and my sister, sitting at the table, her eating her cereal nicely while I was trying to create a tower with my Cheerios successfully. “Hey, girls, maybe they’ll have some friends for you to play.”

And those friends came strolling down the street a moment after the U-Haul, in a black minivan that gleamed and sparkled, as if it were freshly washed and wanting to make a good impression on its fellow neighbor cars, and on the back window there were those white stick people families bumper stickers—a woman, a man, and two boys in baseball caps—and a Buffalo Bills bumper sticker that looked as pristine as the rest of the car. The windows were gleaming and un-smudged, and there wasn’t the yellow glimmer of a Wendy’s fast food burger wrapper on the dashboard smushed against the windshield, and it neatly parked in the paved driveway of the vacant house as the U-Haul not-so-neatly parked on the side of the road, near a drainage and their mailbox with their name TOMLIN engraved in cursive on both sides that I hadn’t noticed until then.

A moment later I heard the whoosh of the minivan’s side door opening, quickly, and then the abrupt stop of the door, and the smacking of the soles of sneakers hitting the beige pavement of the driveway, and the muffled sound of the radio in the car, forecasting the weather—sunny, it said, with highs likely in the eighties until tonight—and then the driver and passenger doors opened, more slowly than the sliding doors, and that was when I saw Griffin’s brother, Brandon, for the first time. He was older, maybe around Nora’s age, and he wore a Buffalo Bills shirt with a worn blue buffalo over his chest and the sleeves bunched around his biceps as it were too small for him, and there were wheelies on his Nike shoes. He was playing a game on his Nintendo DS when he emerged from the minivan, almost unsteadily as he almost lost his footing as he jumped from the car, never taking his eyes off of the small screen as he scratched the little stick across the screen, rapidly.  I remembered thinking how I had wanted a Nintendo DS as I watched him and then, as I wondered just how much allowance money one of those would cost, Griffin Tomlin jumped out from the inside of the minivan.