The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano Read Free Book Online Page A

bow tie, his hair parted down the middle.
    â€œYou were named for him,” my father said. “But don’t tell your mother—she doesn’t know.”
    My mother had wanted to name me Cary, after Cary Grant. My father said kids would make fun of me for having a girl’s name, and besides, Cary Grant’s real name was Archie. My mother said Archie would remind people of the comic book. My father suggested Harry, but my mother knew it was for Houdini, so my father said what about Eric, and my mother liked it.
    â€œShe still doesn’t know it was his real name,” he said.
    We sat on the steps, and my father showed me a trick. He never would have called it a trick; that’s the word most people would use.
    He told me to empty my mind, close my eyes, and stare into the darkness beneath my eyelids. Then he told me to think of a number between one and ten, and to concentrate on the number, to visualize it, to tell him the number with my mind, to want him to know.
    â€œReady?” he said.
    I tried to think of nothing but the number. I wrote it over and over on the blackboard in my mind. “Ready,” I said.
    He closed his eyes, touched my head with his, took a few deep breaths.
    â€œGot it,” he said. “Seven.”
    â€œHow did you do that?”
    â€œI didn’t— you did.”
    â€œTry again,” I said. “This time, any number.”
    â€œEasy,” he said. “Just do the same thing. See the number. Want me to see it. Really concentrate.”
    I closed my eyes tightly and in the dark saw three 2’s blink brightly in white and red lights.
    Then my father said the number.
    Â 
    I liked numbers, equations, problems. I believed—and was comforted by the belief—that every problem was solvable, that every question had an answer. I spent much of my time solving math problems, then checking my answers in an answer key. It was satisfying to be able to make a check next to the questions I’d answered correctly, and to see how many I could get right in a row, and to see by how many right outnumbered wrong, and to be able to understand, when I’d erred, where my thinking had gone wrong, and to remember my mistakes so that I wouldn’t make them again.
    When I ran out of math problems—when I’d finished all the workbooks in the house, even those for grades I was years away from reaching, I’d grow restless; my mind would form, in the absence of answerable questions, unanswerable ones. Why questions, my mother called them. Why would a good person go to hell if he missed Mass and was struck by a bus on his way to Confession? If God was God, why did He need to send His only Son to earth to suffer a painful death just to save the rest of us from our sins? Why not an easier way? She’d answer up to a point—the point at which she couldn’t, or had grown weary of my asking—and then she’d give me chores to do—fold the laundry, sweep the yard. My father would indulge me as long as I wanted, but rarely gave me answers. More likely he’d say, “That’s a great question” or “Beats me” or “What do you think?”

 
    HAD I NAMED years then, twenty years before you started that tradition, I might have named it the year of the blackout or the year of the Son of Sam or the year of making things disappear. I might have named it the year of hearing voices. I might have chosen any number of names had the year’s name, in retrospect, not been so painfully obvious.
    I might have called it the year I had to start a second, then a third box to hold all the objects my father brought me. Little gifts, little nothings, other people’s junk.
    He brought me discarded postcards I’d read and reread before sleep, trying to imagine the lives of the people who had written them. At least once a week he brought me a postcard from San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, small towns with the