When Mom came home that afternoon, I was dozing in my chair. She insisted I get up and follow her into the kitchen, a glass of Coke the carrot at the end of the stick. She detoured in the dining room, circling the table that was primarily used for homework, card games, and the stacking of clean laundry piles, and stopped in front of the basement door. She asked why it was latched. My don’t-know shrug cost me a jagged lightning strike of pain down the middle of my back. She must’ve seen my wince, or maybe she didn’t like how zoned out I was because she asked me to walk the length of the room and back. She asked me to do it again. I obeyed.

“You have to stop walking like that.”

“Walking like how?” I asked.

“Walking like you’re going to break.”

Powered by indignation of the exposed, of the found-out, I said, “You want me to do cartwheels?”

“I’m not saying it to hurt you, Art. I want you to get better. For one, you’re holding your head tilted to the side, and you need to hold it up, high, regular, to strengthen the muscles, or—”

“It’ll get stuck like that?” I was pissed because she was right.

“You aren’t swinging your arms when you walk, not even letting them hang loosely. Do you notice you’re cradling them? I know your back hurts and it’s going to hurt for a while but it’s two weeks after surgery and the doctor says he wants you up and about and walking as normally as possible.” As she spoke, there were creaks descending on the basement stairs, and I think Mom heard it too because she flashed her eyes to the door, which she unlatched with a flick of a finger, as though on a dare. “And you have to eat more too. Way more.” She walked into the kitchen, opened a can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli with our clunky, mercurial electric can opener, and warmed it briefly in a small, squat saucepan. The preservatives-filled ravs left a radioactive orange stain around my mouth that didn’t so much wash away as melt under my skin.

The next day, I left the family stereo on, playing a stack of records one after the other; the monolith cabinet speakers sentineled in the dining room, their backs stiff against the wall only a few feet from the basement door. I didn’t want to hear the noises in the house I wasn’t supposed to hear, and I wanted the whatever it was (critter, settling house, Pennywise, or you-know-who) making the noises to hear the music.

Santa? Oscar the Grouch?