Free The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano

same—dozens of yellow ribbons, their long strings flapping in the wind. I knew why—I’d seen the headlines in the papers I delivered—but I liked to pretend the ribbons were for my father, so that he’d return.
    I walked to the bus stop, and it was yellow and more yellow, and I thought how nice it would be to be kidnapped and held hostage, to be taken away for a while, to be feared dead, to have so many people missing you, and then to return. It would be the closest one could come to coming back from the dead. It would be like dying without dying.
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    Four hundred forty-four days later, two hundred twenty-two times two, the hostages came home.
    One by one they walked down the airplane steps waving. Some of the men had long beards, and I decided then—I was in high school—that when I was able, I would grow a beard. A beard meant you’d been away for a long time; a beard meant you weren’t allowed to shave; a beard—and Jesus was proof of this, too—meant you had suffered.
    One by one they emerged from the plane, but it was never him.
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    Another rule was, don’t step on a crack while delivering newspapers, don’t allow the shopping cart’s wheels to touch a crack because electricity counted .
    I had to push down on the cart’s handle to wheelie the front wheels over each crack, then lift the handle so that the back wheels cleared the crack, then step over the crack. If I touched a crack, I had to back up—clearing the crack in reverse—and try again.
    It was slow going, but the time saved not having to do a do-over was worth the time it took not to make a mistake in the first place.
    I had to get up earlier than the birds. There were dark circles beneath my eyes, which were almost as tragic as a beard.
    Eventually it became muscle memory. I almost never stepped on a crack.
    This wasn’t about not breaking my mother’s back; it was much bigger than that. It was about keeping the earth in its orbit around the sun and the galaxy in its trajectory through the universe; it was about everything that could go wrong not going wrong, disasters large and small I tried not to think about.
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    Another rule was, don’t read headlines. Headlines were almost never positive and more likely negative than neutral.
    Another rule was, if you make a mistake and read a negative headline, rewrite it positive.
    Woman Saves Children, Self. Three Rescued from Brooklyn Fire. Plane Crash Kills No One. Headless Body Not Found in Topless Bar.
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    Thank you for morning sunlight. Thank you for the sight of my breath in cold morning air. Thank you for everything this day and every day forward going well for me and for everyone. Thank you for the license plate that just passed with my father’s initials and his date of birth—GDN 519—thank you for that wink, just when my body was tingling and a wave was just about to take me under.
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    There were signs, winks from the universe that I wasn’t alone, that I was following the rules, thinking positive thoughts.
    One morning a garbage truck passed as I pushed my cart beside the cemetery gate, not more than a hundred yards from my father’s grave. Fat-lettered graffiti on the side of the truck read: It’s all in your head .
    Later the same day, I sat in a bathroom stall at school, not because I had to go, but because I had to get out, had to leave class: the boy sitting next to me was picking his nose, and his desk was touching the floor, and the floor was touching my desk, and my desk was touching me. My lips tingled and my arms went weak, and when I raised my hand to ask to use the lavatory—for years I’d thought it was laboratory —it was as if I held a medicine ball—we’d tried that in gym that week—and the teacher said fine . I could tell it wasn’t fine—I asked to be excused more than any other student—but went anyway. I sat on the toilet seat,