After we recovered, my dad lit a fire in the woodstove and turned the gas on so we could boil water. He found mugs in one of the boxes of dishes he’d left for Goodwill, and he made us all drink a cup of hot tea—he’d found tea bags too. “I guess it’s good I’m so cheap I saved this,” he said about the tea, and it was weird to hear him admit to something like that.
While we drank our tea, my dad kept asking all of us questions like, “What’s the date today?” and “Who is president?” and except for the fact that Gus had no idea what the date was—he never does—we all gave answers that satisfied my dad we didn’t have concussions, or whatever he was worried about.
All of us were pretty exhausted. Or at least I know I was. I wanted to go to sleep, but I was still too cold, even with my parka zipped up to my chin, and the blankets my dad found in a box by the door wrapped around my legs. I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t know where to start and it was hard to get a word in edgewise with my dad asking everyone how many fingers he was holding up, and running around fetching things to make us feel better. Julia, Trip, Ewan, and Gus were staring into space a lot, like they were doing math problems in their heads. But my dad seemed full of efficiency. I would have said he seemed happy, if he also didn’t seem kind of zombielike. His eyes weren’t connecting with anyone’s, and sometimes he sort of slurred his words, he was talking so fast.
Finally, he said, “Come on. We can’t spend the night here. We have to go home,” and without waiting for an answer, he went outside to shovel out the car.
There was a minute of total silence when he was gone, and then I looked up from the floorboard I was staring at—it had a knot that looked a little bit like a silhouette of a rabbit—and said, “How did you guys even get up here?”
I think they were all too exhausted to answer, and so they each waited for someone else to speak up. When no one did, Julia said, “I drove.” Speaking seemed to wake her up a bit, and she went on. “I thought you were sleeping, and I went to get you around nine. When I saw you weren’t there, I kind of freaked out. Mom told me what had happened. I texted Gus, who got everyone else together, and then I told Mom I was going to get something to eat in the kitchen, then snuck out of the service entrance and ran to the garage and got the car.”
“But you don’t have a license,” I said.
“No,” she said. “But it seemed like it might be an emergency. And it was.”
“We got here just after you’d slipped,” Ewan continued. “Your dad must have been with you, because when he saw our car pulling up to the house he ran out screaming for help. He didn’t know it was us.”
“I kind of panicked when I saw him and drove the car into a ditch,” Julia explained.
“Which really made your dad go ballistic,” said Trip. “Because he couldn’t get his car out of the snow either, and so there was no way anyone could go for help.”
“Did you explain to him?” I started. I could hardly figure out how to ask the question, it was so hard to imagine a scenario in which my dad would even listen to the story of what had been happening to me. “Did he understand?”
“I tried,” Ewan said. “But he didn’t believe me.”
“You did awesome,” Trip said to him. “Ewan made us all sit in a circle and hold hands, and he started to chant.”
“Your dad was furious,” Gus said. “But there wasn’t anything he could do. He kept slapping his cell phone against the wall. Then he would stand over you, shouting, ‘Michael, wake up, I’m serious, you have to wake up.’ “
“But after a while,” said Trip, “it wasn’t like before, when you were shaking and stuff? You were hardly breathing.”
“I’d read about this technique for reaching people who have just died,” Ewan said. “You can go in after them by making a chain with people who know the person and who want to reach them.”
“How did you convince my dad to help?”
“We didn’t,” Ewan said. “We started the chain without him. After we had all gone into the trance, we couldn’t see what was happening here in the cabin. But it was good he joined on.”
“How did the chain work?”
“It was crazy,” said Gus. “It kind of reminds me of what you said it was like to slip. Or at least what it was like to be inside the river. Everyone held hands, except Ewan and I were each holding one of your hands. And then we started chanting this word Ewan told us to chant—”
“It’s something Charlisse told me, just as we were leaving her house,” Ewan jumped in. “She said it really casually, as if it might be something I was mildly curious about. She said, when building river chains, chanting helps, and she likes to pick as her chant the word ‘fluvius,’ which is Latin for river. It doesn’t matter whether you chant or not, it’s just a way to focus your concentration. The most important thing is that you’re holding the person’s hand, and that you are focused on getting him back.” Ewan sounded a little bit like he was giving an oral report. It would have been annoying except I think I was done being annoyed with Ewan. It wasn’t that he had saved me. It’s that once you’ve seen all the way inside someone, you see them as they see themselves.
“Fluvius, fluvius,” Gus said, and he shivered. “As we said it, I started to feel cold, and then kind of creepy, and then there was a pressure building on me, and then I wasn’t holding your hand anymore, I was smashed up against the wall of the cabin, trying to reach you. I knew you were inside, and I had to bang my hand against the wall, like, a million times before you opened the door.”
“How did you even know where to go?” I said. “How did you get to me?”
“We were holding on to your body. It was still connected to your soul.”
“And did you know that Grandpa had left me alone?”
“No,” Ewan said. “But I suspected it.”
“We had come to the point in time where he died, and I watched him die,” I started to explain, but I couldn’t keep talking because I felt a lump forming in my throat.
“Are you okay?” Ewan said, and I took a deep breath.
I explained how alone Grandpa had felt, how he was scared, and how I held his head and talked to him. “When I looked up,” I finished, “the Grandpa who had been with me all along was gone.”
“You gave him what he wanted,” Ewan said, as if I’d finally solved the riddle.
“But I still don’t really know what that was.”
“Don’t you see?” Julia said. I might have found her question show-offy before, but as with Ewan, I saw her differently now. She was trying to help me. “You gave him love. You showed him that someone did love him.”
“That must have made it possible for his spirit to dematerialize,” Ewan continued. “He was able to die in peace. His soul was able to dissolve into the river instead of traveling through it, fighting against it all the while.”
“Is that what happened with your dad?”
Ewan blushed, something I’d never seen him do, and suddenly the oral report tone of voice was gone. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I think my dad might still be out there.”
“What are you talking about?” Trip asked.
“Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t want to make Ewan have to explain it to everybody.
But Trip already knew. “Are you talking about saying good-bye to your dad?” he asked. Ewan nodded. “That was amazing,” Trip went on. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Ewan muttered.
“I remember seeing Ewan with his dad too,” Gus said. “When was that?”
“It was in the chain,” I said.
“I saw it,” said Julia. “It’s like I can hardly remember it, though. It’s like it was a dream.”
“I guess everyone was seeing what I saw with everyone else,” I said. “I thought it was just me.”
“You saw me in the car, right?” said Julia. And then her face kind of blanched. “And at assembly.”
Gus looked a little stricken too. I wondered if he was thinking about how his older face in the mirror had looked so sad.
“Oh, God,” said Trip, and I wondered what bothered him more, seeing himself in the future, or being afraid of the ball.
“I can’t believe I’m back here,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m actually alive.” It’s kind of like the first few days of summer vacation, when every few minutes you forget it’s not just a weekend, and you remember, and it totally makes you happy every time. “I’m just so glad to be back.”
“But Michael,” Ewan said, “are you ready for it to be over?”
And that’s the thing. Happy as I was to feel safe again, I wasn’t done. I was scared and exhausted, but I had questions. I missed Grandpa.
“In the end,” I said, “I was all alone. Grandpa left me alone. To die. How could he have done that?”
“He probably didn’t know,” said Ewan. “Most of what was happening to you was out of his control. His energy came from his loneliness and his fear, which were released into the world when he was dying. But as soon as you changed the way he died, you dissolved that energy. He probably didn’t want to leave you. But you made him so warm and comfortable, he was able to just slip away.”
“I heard the door close,” I said.
“But maybe it wasn’t the cabin door,” Ewan suggested. “Maybe it was a door inside your mind. Maybe it was as much the door to the river that your grandfather walked through as it was a door that you passed through yourself.”
“Wow,” I said.
“You’re stronger now,” Ewan went on. “Your grandfather left a lot of himself behind in you.”
“Wow,” I said again. “But where did he go? Did he definitely dissolve? Or is there another place?”
“I don’t know,” Ewan said.
“Is there any way to find out?”
“Charlisse said you just have to think about it hard enough until you feel you know the truth.”
“So he might come back? There’s a chance?”
“Michael,” Ewan said, “it’s important that you let him go. You have to let him rest.”
“Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t okay. I wanted Grandpa back.
“You know,” said Gus, “it was really your dad who saved you. When you started to climb, that must have been when your dad grabbed on to Ewan’s hand. I felt a change. I didn’t think I could hold on another second, banging on that door, and then suddenly, I felt the whole chain grow stronger.”
“Really?” I said. “He was definitely the strongest one of all of you when I was climbing. It was kind of painful how much he was pushing me along.”
Trip looked out the window and said, “He doesn’t look so strong now,” and when we all joined him, we saw that my dad was trying to shovel, but every time he set the shovel into the snow, he kind of collapsed over it, and he could hardly lift it out when it was loaded.
“We should help him,” said Julia, and everyone started to stand.
“Not you,” said Ewan, to me. “You need to rest.”
And that’s how, after they sent my dad inside to drink a cup of tea, I ended up alone with him in the cabin.
He was sitting on the edge of Grandpa’s bed, wrapped in Grandpa’s quilt.
“What made you join the chain?” I asked him. He looked too exhausted to speak, but I couldn’t look at him another second, or say anything else to him, before I knew the answer to that question.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I was just scared, Michael. I was watching you die, and there was nothing I could do. So I took your hand from your friend Ewan and I held it and I said your name over and over again, and I called for you to come back, and you did.”
“Dad, I was with Grandpa,” I said, not because I thought he was going to believe me, but because I needed him to know. “I saw him die. I made it okay for him.”
“Michael,” he said, “Ewan said some of that to me already, and I don’t know what to believe.”
“Grandpa did love you,” I said. “I mean, he does.”
“That’s just great,” he said bitterly. “It’s too bad he had such a poor way of showing it.”
“He tried,” I started to say, and just as I was thinking that there was no way I could make him believe me, I remembered something. “Here,” I said, opening the drawer to the table. The letter I had written was there, folded into triangles like notes girls pass in school. My father’s name was written on the outside. The handwriting was Grandpa’s, not mine. “This is for you.”
“For me?” said my dad. It took him a few minutes to untangle the complicated folding job. His hands were unsteady. Brow furrowed, he ran the bottom of his fist over the creases in the page, which is something he does when he reads magazines, as if he’ll be so bothered by the folds in the page he won’t be able to read the words.
Once the paper lay flat, he read the letter through all the way, then started reading it again. I saw him grimace, and then turn red, and then cover his nose with his fist as if he was holding back a sneeze. After a long time, he crumpled the letter into a ball, shoved it deep inside his pocket, sat on the bed, and covered his face with his hands.
Dear Daniel,
I want you to know that I was once a boy. A boy who polished red shoes and tugged at his mother’s legs while she worried over pennies. I was a boy who laughed at the movies, who cried over broken toys, who learned to walk quietly in apartments crowded with relatives.
For me, becoming a man was a lesson in protection. I protected myself from feelings of all kinds—fear, mostly, but in the end, also love. I know now that it’s impossible to protect yourself from some feelings without protecting yourself from them all. I am sorry for the love that I took from you, but I am more sorry for the lessons you learned from watching me.
I want to protect you still—from my pride, my love, my envy, as it will awake in you feelings of loss and pain. But I know now that to protect you is to steal from you your right. This is my last will. This is what I leave to you. That I am your father. That you are my son. That every day since you were born I have loved you. That I love you now, in silence and from a great distance away.
Respectfully,
Your father
I wanted to explain to Dad how Grandpa tried to write the letter every day but hadn’t been able to. I wanted to explain to him that when I wrote it, I hadn’t been me, that I had been Grandpa. In my memory, I heard the scratching on the paper over the wind, and yet I don’t remember writing those words.
I ended up not saying anything at all.
• • •
After the others came in from shoveling out the Jeep, Dad left his Mercedes behind and drove us down to New York, where my mom met us in the lobby. She is the kind of person who can sense when it’s better not to ask a lot of questions, and she didn’t say anything about Julia’s skipping a Sleeping Beauty rehearsal, or taking her car. What she did say was one word, “Soup.” After a shower, we changed into our pajamas, and Julia and I watched her put carrots, celery, and bouillon cubes into a pot. I had no idea she knew how to do that. My dad locked himself in the bedroom. He didn’t come out until the next morning when he went to work, even though it was Sunday.
I haven’t seen much of him since. I think the letter from Grandpa—and the things he saw inside me when we were in the river of the dead—they might have backfired. It’s like now that Grandpa admitted to him that he wasn’t a very good dad, it’s possible for my dad to admit the same thing—but not to do anything about it. The letter didn’t make him want to be closer to me—or even Julia. I think it just freaked him out. Julia says she thinks it embarrassed him.
He isn’t rushing me off to school, screaming and yelling the whole time. He isn’t telling me to stop playing video games. He isn’t going through the stuff in my room. He isn’t making plans and canceling them. He isn’t even showing up for let’s-pretend-we-do-this-every-night family dinners.
Mom isn’t happy with the mystery, or the silence. One night when I was playing NBA Street and she was checking e-mail on her laptop next to me, my dad came in from work and walked straight into the kitchen, grunting instead of saying hi. Mom waited a few minutes, then opened the swinging door that connects the dining room to the kitchen and watched him at the blender. “Daniel?” she said, but I don’t think he heard. She went back to the computer, but she didn’t type anything more.
On one of the rare Sundays he was around at breakfast time, my mom said she wanted to call a travel agent about a spring break trip to the Bahamas, and my dad shrugged. “You know we never go on the trips we plan,” he said. They were talking in the kitchen while Julia and I were watching TV, but we heard them. “Why do we go through this charade?”
“Julia and Michael will be disappointed,” my mom said.
“They’re already disappointed,” said my dad. “So what’s the point of pretending?” I wanted to run into the room and tell him it wasn’t true, but at the same time, it kind of was.