In the dark that night Lily hung upside down from her top bunk. “We gotta tell Poppy.”
I knew what she was talking about, but I pretended I didn’t. “Tell him what?”
“You know. About us. Us. Goombla.”
“It’s a secret,” I said. “We don’t even tell our parents.”
“Poppy’s different. You can tell a grandparent anything.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
She punched me in the arm. “I’m telling him. I have to. I have to tell somebody.”
I wasn’t surprised. Besides cheating and lying and confessing, she’s also the world’s worst secret keeper. “You better not,” I said, and went to sleep. What I didn’t say was that I actually didn’t care that much. In fact, I had kind of been wanting to tell somebody too.
But we weren’t the only ones with something to tell. Poppy surprised us in the morning. He was at the kitchen table with our parents when we came down for breakfast.
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked him.
“Eating an English muffin with jelly,” he said. I guess you could say that was the truth but not the whole truth.
Mom and Dad grabbed their tool belts and headed out the door for work. And Poppy dropped the bomb. He told us he was leaving next day.
Lily squawked, “You said you’re staying till we kick you out!”
“I know,” he said. “I guess I lied.”
Lily threw an English muffin at him. “I don’t like you, Poppy.”
She didn’t stop grumping until Poppy hauled her onto his lap and made her laugh with funny faces. He told us that because he was leaving next day, Mom and Dad said we could stay home from school. And that’s when we told him. We told him about the first sleepwalk to the train station and all the birthday-night sleepwalks since then. We told him about the day at the beach and Neverlost, and about The Great Snow-Fort War and The Bruise That Moved.
We told him about the time Lily yelled, “I’m stuck!” only it was me who was stuck in the backyard. And the time I yelled, “Stop!” when Lily was ready to chase a ball into the street five miles away.
We told him—well, Lily told him—her idea that “the rest of us” was born during that first sleepwalk to the station. We told him we know who we are now, but we can’t put it into words. We know we have a special thing, we told him, but we can’t even describe it to ourselves, so we call it goombla.
Poppy nodded and smiled. The only thing he said was, “Wow,” now and then. By the time we were done telling him, it was almost lunchtime. The breakfast dishes were still on the table and we hadn’t brushed our teeth.
We told Poppy he was the only one who knew besides us. We made him promise not to tell Mom and Dad. We asked him what he thought about all the stuff we told him. He grinned. “Well, as your grandma would have said a long time ago: far out.”
Poppy had recently gotten his driver’s license in California, so that night he borrowed Dad’s car and drove Lily and me to French Creek State Park. He didn’t tell us why. He did tell us there were two places where he finally found himself, and he was driving us to one of them. “French Creek State Park is where you found yourself?” I said. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and refused to say any more. This drove Lily crazy, of course, because besides being a cheater, liar, confessor, secret-spiller, and pumpkin seed–stealer, she can’t stand waiting. She bugged him all the way: Poppy this and Poppy that, until he growled, “Lily, zip it.” She did. Poppy is the only person who can make her shut up.
When we got there, Poppy drove through a parking lot and past some log cabins and down a skinny, winding road. He pulled off to the side, onto the grass. “Wait here a sec,” he said. He got out, looked at the sky, came back. “I think we’re good. Clear but no moon. Let’s go.”
It was really dark. No streetlights here. Poppy took each of us by the hand. It seemed like we were walking onto a big flat field. Snow crunched under our boots.
After a while we stopped. Poppy said, “This looks good. Time to lie down, kiddos.” He made us lie down with him in the snow, one on either side. “Okay,” he said, “all you need to do now is open your eyes and let the universe pour in.” While we looked at the stars, Poppy started talking. His voice didn’t need to be loud. It was the only sound in the night.
“I was in Chile,” he said. “I hired onto a boat bringing fruit up to the US, but it wasn’t leaving for a week. So I rented a car and drove out to the Atacama. The Atacama is a desert in northern Chile. It’s the driest place on earth. Sometimes they find mummified people and animals there. It’s a natural mummy maker.” That made us laugh. We didn’t laugh again. From then on it was some of the fiercest listening I ever did.
“When I got there, I think maybe I finally felt like I was where I belonged. Like, without Grandma, my life was a match for the Atacama. Ha! Together at last, the two driest deserts in the world.
“So I got out of the car and just started walking. The sun was setting and next thing I knew it was night. I don’t know how long I walked with my eyes to the dry, parched earth. Ha.” He kind of laughed, but we both knew it wasn’t a laughy laugh so we didn’t join in. “Yeah, I guess I do know—about ten years. Anyway, I don’t know what it was. Maybe when you’re completely dry and empty, up is the only way to look. So I looked up.
“And I wish I could tell you how I felt. That’s why I understand when you say you can’t explain your special thing, your goombla. I looked up and for the first time in my life I wasn’t just looking—I was seeing. Suddenly the word sky seemed so flimsy. Useless. For one thing, I had never known there were so many stars up there. There’s no light pollution from cities out there in the Atacama, and just like tonight, no moon to wash out the starlight.
“But that was only the beginning, the wonder of that blizzard of stars. Something else was happening. With Grandma, my world was the earth. The earth of trees and oceans and people and sockeye salmon. Now the night in the Atacama seemed to be telling me something: look…look…there is more. I saw a gusher of stars from one end to the other and I thought, It’s the Milky Way! My galaxy! I was filled with a sense that I belonged to something way bigger than I ever imagined. Than I ever could imagine. The ends of it were unreachable. I could travel at light speed for a million lifetimes and I would barely get out of the driveway.
“But you know what got to me most?” We were both too mesmerized to ask. “It wasn’t the sense of the vast endlessness of it all. It was just the opposite. It wasn’t that it was all too much for me to comprehend. It was that no matter how big and unimaginable it was, it was my home. My ultimate neighborhood. My hometown. It was where I belonged. And—here was the best part—so did everybody else belong. Everybody who is and everybody who ever was. I wasn’t alone after all. I was connected to it all. That star there”—he pointed—“it’s my neighbor…and that one…and that one…. And Grandma. For the first time in ten years I sensed her presence in something that wasn’t a picture or a memory. She was out there too—but not really there, because everything is here. And that’s where”—he took my hand, and I knew on the other side he was taking Lily’s—“that’s where I found myself. There.” He brought our hands to his heart. “Here.”