“What now?” I said when we were standing on the bright wide sidewalk in front of Charlisse’s building.
“Starbucks,” Julia answered. “I need a latte, and we all need to talk.” I guess I must have looked pretty freaked out, because after she’d met my eye, she said, “No one ever got sucked into a river of the dead in Starbucks.”
But as soon as we were all sitting at a table by the window, I realized it was a mistake to come. Gus was doing what he always does at restaurants, folding his straw paper into an accordion and then suctioning liquid from his drink and releasing it onto the paper to make it wriggle on the table like a snake. Trip and Ewan were stirring their vente-whatevers with foot-long green straws. No one was talking. They were all waiting for me to come up with something to say.
What was I supposed to tell them? I just sat there. To be honest, I was wondering if I was going to burn my mouth on my hot chocolate or if it was safe to take a sip.
Ewan leaned forward, picked up a napkin, and began to fold it—in half, in quarters, in sixteenths, and thirty-seconds, until it was a wad. Holding it in his palm and watching it unfold on itself, he said, “So.”
“Michael needs to think,” said Trip. Was there anything he could say that wouldn’t come out sounding like a threat? “About what his grandpa wants.”
“Yes, Michael,” said Julia. But then she made me feel really stupid by leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs, as if she knew this was going to be a while.
“Think,” I repeated, as if by saying the word, I’d convince them I was doing it.
“You need to relax,” said Gus. “If you try too hard, you’ll never figure it out.”
“Okay,” I said, and repeated that word too: “Relax.” Then I closed my eyes so they would at least think I was trying.
And I did try. I tried to block out of my mind how weird it was that I was here with Gus and Trip. Not to mention the weirdness of Julia and Ewan, and that we’d just met a real live psychic, and that she actually seemed to know what she was doing. I tried to block out the weirdness of not being able to talk to my mom, and the scariness of being away from Charlisse—I’d felt so safe there, and now I kind of felt like I was floating in space. I tipped back in my chair, balancing my hands on the slab of table in front of me. “What am I supposed to be thinking about again?” I said.
“Don’t try to think about anything,” said Gus. “Empty your mind.”
“What are you, some kind of hypnotist?” said Trip. No one laughed.
“Try to remember Grandpa,” prompted Julia. “What makes him happy? What makes him sad?”
Oh, yeah, I thought. Grandpa. Where was Grandpa? I didn’t feel him with me anymore. Was he gone? I hadn’t eaten any strange food in a while. The thought of the strange food—the spinach, the oatmeal—made me hungry. Grandpa had said I was going to like those foods for the rest of my life. Although maybe I wouldn’t even have a rest of my life. How could Grandpa let something that bad happen to me? I knew he wouldn’t. But even as I thought this, I was remembering how miserable it was in the tunnels in the river of the dead. He’d led me there, hadn’t he? Still, I didn’t think he would let me drown.
But even as I was thinking this, I was starting to feel just a little bit cold. It wasn’t a river of the dead kind of cold feeling. It was just a little tingle of understanding, kind of like a shiver. It was enough, though, to make me feel Grandpa. I’m not sure how to explain this, but suddenly, I had him in my head, the way when you’re trying so hard to remember a joke, and then you stop trying and the punch line comes to you.
I felt the front legs of my chair hit the floor, and then I was back in the memory of the time with Grandpa—just for a flash. The memory was of watching the girls laughing in the hallway of his college. That was happy, right? Except he’d seemed sad to be separated from them. And the way he talked about how he would stay in the city and work when my dad and Stella were up at the cabin? That was sad. All of it was kind of sad. “He’s always sad, in a way,” I said.
Everyone must have given up on me, because suddenly they all snapped back to attention.
“Sad how?” said Ewan.
“What do you mean, in a way?” asked Gus.
“Was he ever happy?” This last was Julia, and I decided to answer her first.
“Yes,” I said. “He was almost always a little happy too.”
“How could he be both?” asked Gus.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like he was enjoying seeing everything but wishing it had been different. I think he didn’t like the way the story came out.” That sounded pretty smart, I thought. I was thinking: that should hold them awhile. But they didn’t stop.
“What story?” Ewan asked.
“The story of his life,” I said. “The war, Grandma’s dying when she was young.”
Julia cleared her throat. When she spoke, her voice was small. “Was he sad about you?”
“He didn’t even know me,” I said.
Before Julia could answer, Trip blurted out, “My therapist says men always trace things back to their fathers.”
“Your therapist?” I said. Trip went red in the face, from his neck right up through his forehead.
“My mom… my brothers…,” he stammered. “Look. My mom said no allowance until my brothers and I go. Ever since my dad, you know—”
“Went to jail?” Julia finished.
“Yeah,” said Trip. He started cracking his knuckles. “Good old Dr. Chinois.” He was fiddling with the lid from his frappucino, and suddenly he tore it in half. No one knew what to say.
Except Ewan. “I go to Dr. Chinois,” he piped up. Trip looked over at him, and I could see his face relaxing, the eyebrows settling back down to their normal position. Ewan was smaller and weaker than Trip, but I was starting to see that he was also braver.
“You do?” Trip said.
“He’s an expert on kids with father issues,” said Ewan. “It’s the basis for his practice, taking the focus off mothers in the therapy of boys.”
“But Grandpa never talks about his father,” I said.
Julia cleared her throat and took a sip of her latte—she’s such a grown up, she doesn’t even use sugar. “You know the big fight he and Dad had?” she said. “Do you know what it was about?”
“No,” I said.
“It was about you.”
“They were both mad at me?” I said.
“Dad wasn’t mad at you,” Julia said. “He was trying to protect you. The last time we went up there, when Mom and Dad were out somewhere, you told Grandpa it was really boring at his house and that you didn’t want to visit anymore.”
“It was boring,” I said, mumbling because now that I knew Grandpa, I wished I hadn’t said that.
“Grandpa got really mad,” Julia said. “He gave us a giant lecture about how when he was a child he would have been grateful to be able to play in the woods, how he grew up in the city, where no one got to swim in lakes or play on the grass. And he wouldn’t let you play outside all afternoon to teach you what it was like to live in an apartment.”
“But we already lived in an apartment,” I said.
“I know,” Julia said. “When Mom and Dad came back, Dad made that point. He was even more mad than Grandpa. I guess you don’t remember this, but he and Grandpa—there was always some big yelling when we were up there. About the littlest things, like Dad wanting to cook steak and Grandpa saying it was too expensive even though Dad said he would pay for it.”
“Really?” I said. I didn’t remember that at all.
“One time,” she went on, “I remember hiding in the sleeping loft, listening to them shouting about Dad’s work. Grandpa was making it sound like Dad’s clients were a bunch of criminals, and Dad was trying to make a fire in the woodstove, and it wasn’t lighting, and the whole time he was running through a list of all his clients, saying why they deserved to be defended, and the fire still wasn’t lighting, and Grandpa was just sitting there, not saying anything, and Dad was getting madder and madder. I don’t know where you were then. Maybe you were with Mom.
“But the last time—the time Grandpa locked you in the cabin for the afternoon—Dad didn’t just storm around. He made Mom pack up our stuff and put you and me in the car. I could hear him, he was yelling at Grandpa, saying, ‘You don’t have the right to teach my children any lessons!’ and Grandpa said, ‘How dare you!’ They were both bellowing. After a few minutes, Mom came out to the car and sat with us, and what I remember most is that she was crying.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” I said.
“Yeah, I think you fell asleep,” Julia said.
“I fell asleep?” I said. “During a fight that was so bad Dad and Grandpa stopped speaking to each other forever?”
“You were just as oblivious then as you are now.”
“What do you mean, oblivious?” I said. That made me sound like such a loser. “I’m not oblivious. You’re just trying to make yourself seem smarter than me. You’re just jealous.”
“Oh, please,” said Julia. “I’m not jealous of you. I’m just trying to tell you. It’s like what Dad’s always saying. You just don’t look around you. When Mom’s super-busy, or Dad’s in a bad mood, you just sit there playing video games.”
“You’re the one who’s oblivious,” I said. “All you do is ballet.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not.”
Gus jumped in. “Guys, cut it out. Julia, finish the story.”
Julia folded her hands primly in her lap. I thought she was only pretending she wasn’t still mad. “When Dad got in the car, we drove home,” she said. “He wouldn’t talk, even to Mom.”
“And that’s it?” said Trip. “He stopped talking to his own father because Michael got punished?”
“Generally, Dad loves for me to be punished,” I said.
“What do you think he wants?” Ewan asked Julia.
“I don’t know,” she said, resting her chin in her hands. She wasn’t mad anymore. When people are mad, I’ve noticed, they have a hard time relaxing their bodies into thinking positions. That was so typical of her—to say something mean about me but not even mean to be mean. To not even realize what it feels like not to be exactly perfect.
“Are you even listening, Michael?” she said. “All this time, you’re kind of spacing out. It’s like you don’t even care that you’re in danger.”
“I care,” I said.
“Then try to figure out what’s happening,” she said. “Grandpa picked you. Remember that. Charlisse said it was important. He didn’t pick Ewan, Trip, or Gus, and he didn’t pick me. I’m not jealous, Michael. I’m worried. You have to start paying attention.”
“He should have picked you,” I said, because she was right. I wasn’t going to be able to do this. “You would have figured this whole thing out by now.”
I could see in her eyes that she agreed with me, but at least she didn’t say that out loud. She just sat back in her chair and let Ewan keep taking us through the story of what had happened, looking for clues as to what Grandpa wanted. We went around in circles, and didn’t solve anything.
At six o’clock, we knew we had to leave Starbucks or Mom would start to really worry. Before we left, we made a plan. Julia had a dress rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty. Julia and I would go home. I would cover the mirrors and windows in my room, and not leave. Ewan, Gus, and Trip would tell their mothers they were working on a report, and go to Gus’s apartment, where Gus had high-speed Internet and Ewan could do more research. We’d meet the next morning at Gus’s house at ten.
I told my mom I wasn’t feeling well, and she ordered a pizza and I ate it in my room while she and Julia were out at rehearsal. It was really boring to have no TV (it’s a reflective surface), no Xbox (again, reflective), or even a Game Boy to play with (it’s like a pocket mirror—I’d never noticed that before). But it was kind of a cool feeling to have the windows covered with sheets. In New York, light comes in at night from the streetlights and the apartments across the way. With the windows covered up, I could have been anywhere. I skipped brushing my teeth to avoid the bathroom mirror, and kept my eyes closed when I peed (sorry, rug).
As I was going to sleep—insanely early, like, nine!—I remembered that I was supposed to figure out stuff about my grandpa. But I was too tired to think. I wondered how long I was going to have to go without playing video games. Maybe Ewan would have something new figured out by morning. Or Julia. The strange thing about slipping was that even though I was scared a lot of the time, there was something kind of cool about having all these people helping me. I was sure that tomorrow they’d work together to figure something out.
This is what actually happened:
I woke up to my dad saying, “Start brushing.” He was sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my toothbrush, already smeared with Crest. I remembered this trick from the few times we’d actually gone on vacation as a family—lame road trips meant to take the place of longer, more exciting vacations far away. My dad hated to wait around in the mornings. He made us stay in those hotels where you park right outside the door to your room because it meant he could pack up while everyone was still sleeping and we wouldn’t get in his way.
“What time is it?” I said now. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s five thirty,” he said. “I’m going to Vermont today. I’m taking you with me.”
“To Vermont?” I said. I was still half asleep.
“We have to deal with Grandpa,” he said. “And the cabin.”
“What about school?”
“Good point, except it’s Saturday.”
“Julia!” I called, because by now I was awake enough to know that she was the only person in shouting distance who knew what the danger was.
“Shhh.” My dad clapped a hand over my mouth. “She was up until all hours last night. She and Mom are staying for Sleeping Beauty rehearsals. Don’t wake her up.”
I stared at him. I had no idea what to do.
“This feels like you’re kidnapping me,” I said.
“Start brushing,” he replied. I did.
An hour later, I was locked in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mercedes. The sun had not yet come up. As the bumpy expressways that run right up next to apartment buildings widened into the well-lit highways of the suburbs, I ran through all the things I should have said back in the apartment—that I was sick, that I would stay with Gus. I even wished I’d told my dad the truth, because the worst part about sitting on the slippery leather seat of my dad’s car was that I was alone with the knowledge of what might happen to me.
Or maybe that was the second-worst part. I reclined my seat, lay back, crossed my arms, and waited for the car to get warm, or for the toothpaste coating my teeth to dissolve, or something. The one thing I can say about how gross I felt from having gotten out of bed without being fully awake was that at least I was too sleepy to be scared.
As the houses and shopping malls fell away, the sun began to rise. My dad turned on a rebroadcast of a basketball game. “If you know what happened, don’t tell me,” he said, and I shrugged. I didn’t know. The announcer’s voice crackled away above the station’s static. Ewan and Julia, even Trip or Gus, couldn’t help me now.
I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to find the car stopped. I pulled myself to a sitting position and looked out the window—we were at a gas station, and my dad was pumping gas. We weren’t on a major highway, just a two-lane road that was brown from road sand and dusty with snow blowing off the banks that had been made by a plow. Because there was so much snow blowing around, a thin line of it had been trapped on top of the pumps.
As I was thinking that the light on the snow reminded me of the light inside the river of the dead, my dad was coming back from the cashier’s window, where he’d just paid. A wind came up and he was engulfed by a swirl of white blowing between the pumps and the office. For a second, inside the swirling snow, my dad looked far away, and paler, like he’d faded into an old man with pink skin and white streaks in his hair.
We drove into a little town, with a wide main street on which all the houses were big and white, with porches deep enough for lots of green rocking chairs. Even though it was February, the doors were hung with wreathes and red bows, and Christmas tree lights were still strung from the trees in the town green. This looked like the kind of place where you could get warm, homemade bread in every restaurant. Or waffles with lots of syrup. “Are we going to get something to eat?” I said.
“No,” said Dad. He handed me a shrink-wrapped muffin from the glove compartment. “I got this in Massachusetts, when you were sleeping,” he said. He pulled over in front of a big stone house with neatly trimmed bushes, and a sign that read: HATTERLY FUNERAL HOME.
“Crumbs, Michael,” Dad warned, pointing to the leather upholstery. Julia and I were generally not allowed to eat in Dad’s car. As soon as he’d disappeared inside the stone house, I dropped the muffin on the dashboard, and started to tear the car apart looking for my dad’s cell phone to call Gus. I couldn’t find it, and before I would have had the chance to make a call anyway, Dad was back. In his hands, he had a small square box.
“What’s that?” I said, after watching him set it gently on the floor of the backseat.
“Ashes,” he answered. I didn’t need to ask whose. I couldn’t believe that all of one person could fit into a box so small.
• • •
After the town was behind us, we turned off the main road onto an unplowed track in the woods. The tires slipped and skidded on loose snow and ice, and the branches of pine trees brushed against the windshield of the car like we were in a car wash. Or at least, a car wash where you worry the whole time a big stick is going to come crashing through the glass.
“We should have brought the Jeep,” said my dad. “I forgot how terrible this road can be in winter.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No, just ridiculous. That anyone would choose to live out here in the winter.”
“He said he found other people irritating,” I said without thinking. “And he couldn’t stand to be around anyone anymore.”
The back wheels of the car slid out a little, and my dad followed the skid, gunning the engine to keep the car from sticking. “What?” he said, turning the wheel sharply to the left, then to the right as we slid downhill. I was holding the edge of my seat with both hands. The road leveled out, and the tires found traction on the snow. “Who said that? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s still a little early for me.”
We drove for a while more until my dad said, “Do you notice how it’s full-on daylight and it still feels kind of dark here?”
“Yeah,” I said, though what I really had noticed was that my dad was talking to me like I was a grown-up. “It’s a little depressing,” I said.
“Michael, this is the most depressing place on earth.”
• • •
We skidded and spun on the unplowed road for what felt like hours. Finally, the road forked—people had nailed up plywood signs with their names on them—half to the left, half to the right. One of the signs was labeled KIMMEL. It was strange to see a name I thought of as belonging to my family posted to a tree in the middle of the woods in Vermont. As much as I’d come to know Grandpa as a ghost, it was weird to think that he had been part of the same real-life family with the name Kimmel when he was alive.
But when we entered the clearing where the cabin stood, our visits here started coming back. The window trim was still painted bright red, and the cabin had a tin roof that was dark green, like the needles on the tall pines. It didn’t look like the cabin in Grandpa’s early memory—I think the roof then was black, and the woods had not grown up.
I’d never seen the cabin in the snow. Back when we used to come, it was always summer, though sometimes summer was so cold we had to wear sweaters and light the woodstove at night. I remember once being half awake when we got to the clearing. Grandpa had stepped out of the front door and looked at us without smiling or waving, like someone in an old-fashioned photograph where they had to hold the same expression for three minutes or else their face would look like a blur.
Now, because of the snow, my dad had to leave the car out on the road. Opening the door, he took his first step, and fell in up to his thigh. “Careful, Michael,” he said to me. I slid across the seat after him. I had to sort of jump down into the holes he’d made. I followed him one giant leap at a time to the porch, where wood was stacked all the way up to the ceiling, just as I remembered, and covered in a bright blue tarp tied down with ropes. Dad was wearing his weekend dress shoes, which were some kind of soft leather slip-on things my mom buys him. “Didn’t you bring boots?” I said to him.
“I forgot. It’s been a while since I left New York.”
“Yeah.” I showed him my sneakers. “Me too.”
We stomped our feet to shake off the snow, but a lot of it had already melted inside our shoes and along our legs. After trying the door and finding it locked, my dad pulled out a set of keys inside a yellowed envelope—I guess he must have been holding on to them all these years—and started to sort through them in his freezing hands. I stepped in front of him, jiggled the front door to the left, and it opened.
“How did you know to do that?” Dad asked.
I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
There wasn’t much light coming through the windows into the cabin, but there was enough to see that the one big room had not changed. A table with two chairs atop a braided rug filled the center of the room. Along a far wall lay a single bed. Behind me was the short countertop with a sink, fridge, and a small gas cooking range.
The cabin didn’t look like Grandpa was dead. It looked like he’d just stepped out. His bed was unmade, a thick wool blanket and a quilt pushed down to the bottom of the mattress. A pair of brown leather boots, well-creased at the toe, with black and red striped laces stood next to the door. Split wood was piled next to the woodstove. The only sign that he’d been gone awhile was a mug of coffee out on the table, the milk marbled, going bad.
My legs ached with cold, and I felt my teeth begin to chatter. “It looks like he just left,” I said. “Not like he died.”
“He’d been waiting half his life to die.” My dad lifted the envelopes in the pile of mail to see who they were from.
“Can you light a fire?” I asked. “I’m freezing.”
“I don’t want to have to wait for it to burn out,” Dad said. He found a box of trash bags under the sink. “We’ll get warmer the faster we work.” He handed me a bag, and said, “Everything in the fridge. All the food in the cabinets that’s already opened.” I did what he told me to, dropping into the bag a half-full jug of the milk I remember him mixing from powder, an egg carton with three eggs in it, a container of tuna salad, two rotting oranges, a tub of butter, lettuce, a pale pink tomato. Soon the bag was too heavy to carry, and I dragged it across the floor.
“Let me have that,” said Dad, “it’s going to leak.”
I made a move to sit down on the bed. “Keep going,” Dad said. “It’s the only way to stay warm.”
He was right. After throwing out all the food, we filled garbage bags with clothing and old magazines. We filled boxes with dishes and pots and pans, pencils and china bowls. We packed up the dirty towels in the bathroom, and the worn-down bathroom rug. Anything not perishable got stacked by the door. My dad put all the garbage in the trunk of his car, and anything we wanted to keep in the backseat—he said Goodwill would come for everything else. Stepping gingerly in the holes in the snow, he dragged one bag after another behind him. Even being careful, his pant legs were white with snow when he came back in, and pretty soon, he showed me how his pants were growing stiff as the water logged in the fabric was turning to ice.
As we worked, I felt the air in the cabin beginning to change. It reminded me of how Grandpa said the air smelled sweeter when we were together, but it wasn’t sweet that I was smelling, it was sad, if you can call that a smell—it was a damp, musty odor tinged with a hint of rot.
With each breath, I felt like I was letting more and more sadness into my body, and the sadness was gathering there, squeezing at my heart, making me feel as if I was going to cry. I wasn’t crying. Not yet. But how was I supposed to be figuring out what Grandpa wanted from me when my dad was making me put everything that had belonged to Grandpa in the trash?
After a few hours, the cabin didn’t look like anyone lived in it anymore. The mattress was stripped of sheets, and we could see how it was stained and lumpy. The curtains had been so old, they ripped as we tried to pull them closed. My dad said, “My mom must have put these here,” in a tone that sounded halfway between disdain and wonder. With the curtains removed from the windows, we could see that they were dirty—hardly any light came through. We could hear the wind blowing outside. What had it been like to live here, winter after winter, all alone?
When I looked over at my dad, wondering if he was thinking the same thing, he was holding Grandpa’s toothbrush. It was a red toothbrush with bristles that were curled and worn, and I saw him look at it for a second. I thought, Maybe he’s going to feel sad, and just the idea of his feeling sad made me feel sad. But then my dad didn’t feel sad. Or at least, he didn’t look sad. He chucked the toothbrush into the garbage bag as if it were an animal that had bitten him. He swept Grandpa’s denture cleaning kit into the trash as well—I’d looked at it before but hadn’t wanted to go near it. Briskly, Dad tied a knot in the top of the bag and carried it out to the car.
He came back with the cardboard box holding my grandfather’s ashes. He put the box on the table, as if it would replace the salt and pepper shakers and sugar bowl we’d emptied and put in the box for Goodwill. It was getting dark, though it was still mid-afternoon. Dad hadn’t turned on any lights except the one over the sink, so the box was in shadow.
“Okay,” he said, clapping his hands together like a camp counselor. How could he sound so cheerful? “I think we’re done here. We’re going to turn off the fridge and the water and the gas. Did you know you could do that to a house?”
I could feel the first sob coming, so I watched him turn a dial in the back of the empty fridge without saying a word. He explained that you leave the door open to keep mildew from forming, and you shut off water under the sink, then run the water out of the taps in the kitchen and bathroom until they are dry to keep water from freezing inside the pipes.
Didn’t he care that Grandpa loved him? Didn’t he know how Grandpa had been watching him all those times and just couldn’t find the right words to break through? When Dad had been practicing diving off the float in the lake, Grandpa had been proud. When he’d been doing his homework in his room, Grandpa had wanted to touch his shoulder, had wanted to say to him, “That’s my boy.”
My fingers were aching and my nose was starting to run. I was so cold, all I wanted to do was get back in the car, turn the heater up to high, and put my hands and face directly down on a vent. But when Dad turned to leave without even looking back, I couldn’t follow. We’d taken apart Grandpa’s whole life in one afternoon, and we were leaving all that was left of his body alone in a cold, dark cabin where he had never once been happy all his life. We were leaving Grandpa behind without saying good-bye.
“Dad, wait,” I said. I could hear my voice beginning to crack. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want him to see I was sad. What I wanted him to see was that this was sad. What was this? I couldn’t say exactly. All I could come up with was, “You forgot Grandpa’s ashes.”
“Yes?” said my dad.
“Um, are you sure we shouldn’t bring the box back home with us?”
“No, we’ll leave it here.”
“Aren’t we going to bury him?”
“Not now.”
“What if the cabin gets broken into?”
“This is Vermont,” said my dad. “That’s not how it works up here.”
“What if it’s broken into by a bear?”
“Then I feel sorry for the bear.”
“This isn’t funny! You can’t just leave someone’s ashes in an empty cabin,” I said.
“Are you crying?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said, and then, “It’s your fault.”
“What? You’re mad at me?”
“No,” I said, but I was. “Why couldn’t you have been nicer to Grandpa? Why did you stop speaking to him? Why did you never come back?”
“You want me to have been nicer to him?” Dad sat down on a chair next to the table, as if this question were so shocking he had to steady himself. “Michael,” he said, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you since my father died, but let me make something absolutely clear to you right now. I know my father had a hard life in a lot of ways, growing up with money tight. I know he had a hard time in the war. But he was a horrible father. I don’t think he wanted to have a kid. My mother died when I was young, and after she was gone, I think he tried as much as he could to never speak to me. After I left home, he didn’t try to get me to come back. I visited him for years with almost no encouragement. He didn’t want me—he didn’t want us, do you understand? He didn’t want people. He didn’t want a family. He didn’t have those feelings.”
“What if he did?” I said.
“You didn’t know him,” my dad corrected. “You weren’t there. Maybe it’s hard for you to imagine because you don’t have a father like this, but I know. He was there with his body, but in other ways, he was always gone.” He stood up. “It’s freezing. We can talk about this more in the car, but we need to get going. If we don’t leave soon, we won’t be able to get home to night.”
“I’m not leaving him here,” I said.
“And I’m not taking him with me,” said my dad. “I don’t want him in my house. I don’t want him in my life.”
“I do,” I said.
My dad stood over me, towering. “Michael,” he said, in his sternest, most serious voice, pointing to the door. “Get in the car.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving.” I didn’t know what I wanted to say next, and I’m not sure where this came from, but “You’re just like him!” kind of poured out of me.
My dad’s face went white, and I felt a shiver of recognition. I was right. All those protein shakes instead of dinner. Grandpa standing outside my dad’s room trying to think of something to say. Dad and Grandpa were the same. Dad was pretending—he’d always been pretending—that he was different. Even the last few days—the family dinner, the basketball practice. He’d been forcing himself. “You try to act like you’re not like him,” I said, “like you’re this great dad, but you’re not. You don’t want me either. You don’t even like me. You don’t like my hair, you don’t think I try hard enough in school. You don’t like it when I play video games. You never want to talk to me. Grandpa talks to me. He’s the only one who ever listens to what I have to say.”
“What are you talking about?” Dad said.
If I’d been more rational, maybe I would have understood his confusion. But just then, what I was thinking was that it was my dad’s fault that I’d started slipping in the first place. I was thinking that Grandpa was really coming back to get my dad, but he couldn’t, because my dad didn’t feel anything—there hadn’t been a way to get in. So Grandpa had come to me.
“Get in the car, Michael,” my dad said. He was still standing over me, still pointing to the door. “The things you’re saying are hateful and rude. I’m telling you, I’m serious, there is going to be hell to pay if you do not walk out that door, get in the car, and shut up this exact minute.”
I was scared. My dad is a lot bigger than me. And he doesn’t ever say things like “shut up” or “hell.” But I didn’t move. “Look at me,” I said to my dad.
“What?” he said, but while he waited for me to answer his question, I locked into his eyes with my own, and stared as hard as I could.
“What are you doing?” he said.
I didn’t answer, just kept looking at him and concentrating. The first time I’d slipped, Grandpa had said something about my eyes, how he’d seen Grandma in them, and got to me that way. That’s what I was trying to do now.
My dad—what did I see there? His eyes were just like mine, brown on the outside, and yellow green near the pupil. As I held his gaze, they changed, his eyes, like he was thinking, and then they started to get wet, like they do when you try not to blink. Looking back, I wonder if I was doing something to him like Charlisse had done to me—making me feel like I was standing on solid ground, making me not want to look away, to be thirsty for what I was seeing in her eyes.
And that’s when it happened. If I hadn’t been looking for Grandpa, I would never have known what I was seeing. First, it was a fleck of white—the tip of Grandpa’s white hair. Then there was a tiny something that might have been the pink of his skin. Just those two hints of Grandpa, and I started to feel cold. Or colder. I was already a regular kind of cold. My legs were getting heavy, and I must have sat down hard on the floor. I felt a shock of pain on my butt, but it was really far away. I wasn’t ready. But I was going in.
“Michael!” Dad said. “Are you all right?” His voice came from far away, and he looked tiny but totally clear, like the gym lockers I’d seen at the end of the tunnel before. I tried not to hold on against the slip, I tried not to grab at the edge of the cliff.
I could see out of my half-closed eyes that my father was trying to make a call into his cell phone, even though there wasn’t service.
“Michael!” he shouted, and I remembered the way Grandpa used to shout “Michael!” when he was chopping wood and wanted me to stand back. I felt his alarm, his worry. I saw the image that he’d seen in his mind, of the ax falling on a little boy’s arm, the terrible act that cannot be taken back. The Grandpa I knew then was different from the Grandpa of now, and yet the way he had shouted was just like my dad, and like himself too.
The last thing I remember was my dad standing at the window. “I think I see a car,” he said. “I’m going out to stop it. Michael, hold on!”
But I was already gone.