SEVEN

I’ve never seen Dad drive so fast. We screech into the Emergency parking lot. Dad’s swearing as he tries to find his wallet to pay for parking. “Why do they make you pay for parking?” he shouts. “Isn’t it bad enough to have someone in Emergency?”

The woman at the front desk won’t let us see Uli right away. She says she’ll call us as soon as they’re ready for us. Dad paces back and forth in front of the blue vinyl chairs. I slump into mine, fists clenched in my pockets, staring down at the floor. Every two minutes Dad walks over to the counter, and finally the woman stands up and says the doctor will see us now, as if we’re in a clinic to see about a runny nose or an upset stomach.

She leads us through heavy doors with a sign saying No admittance beyond this point. We pass an old, old woman in a stretcher pushed up against one wall of the short hallway. A few feet farther along, a man with a short brown beard, a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck is waiting for us. “You’re Ulrich Becher’s son?”

Dad nods, and he grips my hand as if I’m a little kid again. Or maybe as if he’s a little kid again.

“I’m Dr. Yanofski.” The doctor takes Dad by the elbow and leads him to a chair. He brings another for me. “I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you. Your father had another stroke on the way to the hospital. A big one. I’m afraid he didn’t survive. But it was all over quite quickly. He didn’t suffer.”

I freeze. Then my heart starts pounding. Dad’s crying, sobbing as if he’s going to split in two.

Uli is dead.

It doesn’t make any sense. I just saw him an hour ago. We were talking, and he was serving ice cream, and…

“…take you to see him…”

Somewhere behind us, someone screams, and people are shouting, but I don’t even care.

“…sorry for your loss…”

My father stands up, then wipes my cheeks with the back of his fingers. I didn’t know they were wet.

“…see the body…” he says.

“I can’t,” I say.

“It’s important,” he says. “It’s part of saying goodbye.”

I shake my head.

A few steps away, the doctor has stopped, waiting next to a closed curtain. My dad takes a deep, shaky breath, squeezes both of my hands and talks to me quietly. “I understand, Chloë. I didn’t want to see my mom’s body either. I told Dad that I wanted to remember her healthy. But he insisted. He said everyone’s scared of death, but it’s part of life. If we face it head-on, we change our relationship with it.”

I don’t say anything. Please don’t make me do this.

“I’m not going to force you,” Dad says. “But I want you to know that it wasn’t scary. When my mom was sick, I saw her suffer every single day. But when I saw her body, I knew that the suffering was over. Her body was just…her body. She wasn’t in there anymore. That was important for me.” He looks at me, squeezes my hands again and turns to go.

I see him reach the curtain. He’s about to go in, leaving me back here, alone.

No way.

Curtains. Blankets. Uli’s mouth is open. His skin is yellowish gray.

And Dad’s right. There’s nothing more final than this.

My clock radio says 10:12 AM. My first thought is that my history report is due today. I haven’t even started it. I pull my pillow over my head. What seems like seconds later, Dad is knocking on my door. He comes in holding a paper bag from the Mexican place downtown, the one we used to go to with Uli. Yesterday comes crashing back in on me. The sirens. The emergency room. The doctor. Uli’s body. The horribly silent ride home.

“It’s after noon.” Dad’s eyes are red and puffy. “You should eat something.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it anyway.” His voice is gentle but firm, like when I was a kid and I was screaming because my knee was full of gravel and he had to wash it out. I take the bag from him, open it up and will myself not to gag as I eat one of the burritos Uli liked so much.

“I guess I’m not going to school today,” I say after my first bite. Suddenly I’m ravenous.

“I’ll send a note. Your teachers will understand.”

He sits on my bed. I eat in silence for a few minutes. I can’t think about the food because then I’ll think of Uli. I can’t think about my history report because not handing it in makes me think of Uli. I can’t think of anything, so I look at the floor and chew.

“Are you okay?” Dad asks.

Uli’s dead. My grandfather that I’d only started to get to know. One fifth of my family is dead. “Am I okay? What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just want you to be okay. I want a magic wand to wave so that nothing will ever hurt you again.” His eyes fill with tears.

I squeeze mine shut. The tears spill out anyway, but at least I can’t see Dad crying. The only thing worse than feeling like I’m going to shatter into a million pieces is knowing that Dad feels the same way.

The smooth stones on the beach remind me of the ones lining Uli’s garden beds. Maybe he collected them from right where I’m standing, years ago or maybe months ago, when his legs still obeyed him.

To think that only a few months ago, I barely thought about my grandfather at all. I was thousands of miles away, hanging out with Sofia, going to school, knitting and dreaming of weekends. All that time, he was here, growing a garden of foods that kept other people’s family memories alive. But what about our family memories? Why did I have to wait until I was thirteen to get to know Uli? Why did I have to wait so long to find out there was an apple tree that connects me, Dad and Uli to a tree that grew a long time ago in Poland, a tree that Uli used to swing in as a kid?

I toss a stone into the water. And then another. I think about the muscles in my arm that shoot each rock into the air, and about Uli’s good arm that will never throw a rock again. Then I’m running, sprinting flat out as if I could leave yesterday behind. I run up the stairs from the beach and along the path that follows the water. A few blocks later I pass the Stop sign wrapped in red, yellow and green wool that sparked the first real conversation I had with my grandfather. A driver slams on his brakes and yells something out the window, but I keep running until I’m back on our street under the cherry trees. I can hardly breathe anymore. I slow to a walk, through Uli’s front gate and into his garden. It’s the only place I want to be right now. I wish I’d gotten here years sooner.

I look across the rows of dirt at the greenhouse. I half expect him to stand up behind the potting table to pick up the ice-cream dishes that are still stacked there from yesterday. A museum, Nikko called it. To preserve memories. The last link I have with someone I wish I’d known my whole life.

I crouch down by the garden bed near the house and yank handfuls of weeds from the dirt. As if sticking to yesterday’s plan could somehow bring my grandfather back.

“Tell me something happy,” I tell Sofia. It’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting on my bed, knitting her a hat. Sofia’s sitting on her bed, designing a costume for a school play. Other than the laptop cameras and the thousands of miles between us, this is like Saturday mornings used to be. I knit, and she draws or sews.

“I’m not going to tell you something happy,” she says. “You tell me what happened.”

I knit mechanically, eyes on the yarn, and manage to tell her about Uli in fits and starts, with long moments of crying and sniffling in between. Sofia says my name. I look up, and she’s not drawing anymore. She’s staring right into the screen. She’s crying too. “I’m sorry, Chloë. I wish I was there.”

“Me too.” I take a few deep breaths and wipe my tears away. “I can’t decide if I wish we’d never moved here, or if I wish it had happened sooner.” I hope Sofia knows what I mean. I wish I’d had more time with Uli.

“I’m glad you got to meet him,” she says.

“Me too.” I pick up my knitting again. She looks at me for a few seconds longer, then reaches for her pencil. We don’t say anything for a while. I need to talk about something else, something lighter. “Remember Slater?”

“The kid across the street with the rat and the attitude problem?”

“Yeah, that one,” I say. “I found out why he tries to make everyone’s life miserable.”

“It’s not because he’s a loser?”

I shrug. “This kid in my math class says he used to go to the most expensive private school in the city. Then something happened, his parents sold their place, and they moved across town to a dumpy little house on this street. Now he’s going to public school like everyone else.”

“That’s so sweet!” she says. “You’ve got matching stories!”

“What?” I never would have seen it that way, but I guess she has a point. “I don’t try to get back at the world by bullying everyone around me though. And I’m sure he didn’t move here because his dad got fired for freaking out at a student. His dad’s an accountant or something.”

“Both of you were bitter about having to move though.”

“But it’s not so bad here.” The words are out of my mouth before I can think about them.

Sofia stops with her pencil midair and looks into the camera. “Did you just say what I think you said?”

“I mean, it’s not Montreal. That’s for sure. But it doesn’t pretend to be either. I can go to the beach here every day if I want.”

“We’ve got beaches here too,” she says. “And they’re sand, not rock.”

“Yeah, but here I can go all year-round, and sometimes I don’t see a soul.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Sometimes,” I say. “When I want to get away from it all.”

Sofia says nothing and goes back to drawing for a few seconds. “Do you think you’re going to stay there?” She’s not looking at me. I flash back to the night before I left. She was crying, convinced I’d never move back.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I say. “I like it here more than I did before, but it’s still not home. I haven’t had a decent bagel since I left Montreal.”

“Now that’s more like it.” She grins and holds up her sketch. “So what do you think I should do with this neckline?”

Uli didn’t leave any instructions, so Dad chooses cremation. The idea creeps me out until he reminds me that burial usually involves pumping the body full of chemicals and sticking it into the ground. Not a good option for an organic gardener.

“Tell me you’re not planning to keep the ashes in a vase on the bookshelf,” I say. I’ve heard of people doing this. It’s ten kinds of creepy. “Maybe we can mix them into the soil beneath the apple tree. Isn’t ash good for the soil?”

“No way,” Dad says.

“It’s not?”

“I don’t know. I’m saying, no, we’re not putting the ashes under the apple tree.”

“Why not? He loved that apple tree. Did you know he—?”

Dad shakes his head. “I know the whole story, believe me. But I don’t want his ashes there. Someday that house is going to be sold. How are we going to feel if they bulldoze the whole thing, rip out the tree and build something new?”

“Sold?” I hadn’t thought about that. “I guess you’re right.”

Dad doesn’t want a memorial service either. He says he’s up to his eyeballs with sorting through Uli’s stuff and talking to lawyers about the will. The last thing he wants is to organize a public event. “My father never went to church anyway. He’d hate the idea of some random preacher up there talking about him.”

“You’re wimping out,” I say.

Mom agrees, arguing through the laptop on the kitchen counter. She’s wearing a silvery blouse I don’t recognize and dangly earrings, as if she dressed up for this conversation. Behind her, our houseplants look as brown and droopy as ever. But Mom herself is different. She’s more focused than I’ve seen her in a long time. “Look, Darryl, yes, you had unfinished business with Uli, but this is your last chance. You need to do something to say goodbye.”

Dad keeps stirring the pot of spaghetti sauce. “But who do I invite? William on fourth? Did he have any other friends?”

“Dad! Uli lived here for fifty years! He had a garden full of seeds that people gave him. Of course he had other friends!”

“But I’ve never met any of those people.”

“You never asked to either,” I snap back. Dad keeps stirring. Mom watches from inside the screen.

“I bet he had an address book somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t know where to look,” says Dad. “If you saw his place, you’d know what I mean.”

“You’ve been in there?” I ask. “Recently?”

“Yesterday.”

I spin around, open the fridge and rummage inside so my parents won’t see me scrubbing the tears from my face. All these weeks, I only ever saw Uli’s garden and basement. I never went into his house to have tea with him or to sit around playing a board game. Or to do any of those normal grandparent-grandkid things.

My parents keep talking. Eventually Dad takes the spoon out of the sauce and puts the lid on the pot. “Okay, okay. We’ll find the address book. I’ll ask William for some ideas about who to invite too.”

“Let me know when you’ve got a date,” Mom says, “so I can book my flights.”

“Really?” I almost smile. Almost. It will be good to have Mom here. As if the three of us are a family again, for a few days anyway.

After that I guess the waiting will be over. It’s finally clear what will happen next—clear out the house, put it up for sale and move back to Montreal for good. It doesn’t make sense to stay now that Uli’s gone, right? I should feel relieved to be heading home. So why do I feel the opposite?