Free The Opposite of Music by Janet Ruth Young

voice down, please?”
    â€œHey, I know.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou could get her a little nurse’s uniform. Wouldn’t she look adorable in it?”
    â€œWhat is the matter with you? This isn’t the time.”
    What is the precisely calibrated bored look that says Mom’s judgment is so obviously wrong that everyone realizes it except her?
    â€œWhat if I want to do something after school?”
    â€œYou have important plans?”
    â€œThat’s neither here nor there. What if I did have them?”
    â€œThis isn’t forever. It’s just for a few weeks. Until he’s over it.”
    â€œWhat if I say no?”
    â€œI’m not giving you a choice.”
    â€œAll right, then, I guess I won’t say no.”
    â€œIt’s only for a few weeks.”
    â€œA few weeks. All right.”
    After Mom leaves, I take her spot at the desk. Inside the desk is a Hohner Special 20 harmonica Grandma Pearl got me. I had asked for it, in fact, but it’s still sealed in the package with the instruction book. Had I ever learned to play it, I would create an ugly sound at a special decibel level only Mom could hear, letting her know I will never be her orderly.

BATTLESHIP
    I’ve been playing Battleship with Dad. Somehow, he always ends up looking for my Destroyer last.
    The Destroyer is the very smallest of five boats—it occupies only two spaces on the game board—and so it can be hidden anywhere. Dad seems to have guessed a hundred times, systematically, all over the board. In fact, he seems to be creating a scientific net of guesses to throw over the grid and ensnare my Destroyer. I can see his web of guesses spreading over the grid, from A1 way up in the lefthand corner, seeping downward and outward over the transparent green plastic of my ocean and covering the four boats of mine that he has already sunk.
    Yet somehow he’s missed D9.
    In the meantime I’m just as systematically trying to avoid sinking his last boat, the massive, five-space Aircraft Carrier. I’m doing a kind of hot-coals dance around the perimeter of the only five spaces where his Aircraft Carrier can possibly be. I waste guesses. I guess some spaces twice, although Dad doesn’t seem to notice. But what I’m most occupied with is telepathic bulletins. As his guesses get quieter, more discouraged, and further apart, I stare down at the dinky little Destroyer stationed on D9 and 10 and I chant to myself, D9, D9.
    And Dad looks up and says, “C7?”
    Earlier we played Thousand Rummy. And just as on the previous days, Dad was the one to draw the ace of spades. If it was Gin, Thousand Rummy, or even Concentration, Dad would sit there in his pajamas (he sometimes wears his pajamas all day now), press his lips together decisively, and flip over a card…and there it would be.
    The ace of spades, the Death Card.
    How can this keep happening? It’s getting so that we wait for the ace of spades. It seems to look for Dad. Since we stopped seeing Fritz and ended the medicines, a sense of doom sits over Dad like a mist.
    So there it is, Dad seems to say. He looks at the card like he’s been expecting it. He drops his head into his hands like a condemned man. The writing on the card, which seemed innocent before he got sick, seems to have turned into an ominous message.

    D EBONNAIRE, O LEET P LAYING C ARD C O.,
    M OUNT V ERNON, N.Y. “S UPERKOTED” ™

    What does this mean to Dad?
    The ace of spades stands on its unipod and stares my father down. It’s a heart upside down. It’s the opposite of a heart.

POUNDS OF CURE
    Mom and I return to the house after a Saturday afternoon in the library.
    â€œWhatcha got there?” Marty asks. Dad trails him into the dining room.
    Each of us dumps a double armload of reading material on the table. I have nine books, including Affirmations in the Key of Health by Lillian Drakava; Make Up Your Mind: