I put the phone to my ear as the eleven-year-old version of my mom sauntered away, doll in hand.
“Hello?” I said. I still had no idea who Roger was.
“Hey, dude. You alive?”
I didn’t recognize the voice. “Yeah, I think,” I said, glancing out at the living room where my mom was once again sitting on the couch in front of the television. “Should I be?”
“I dunno, man. After last night...maybe not.” He sounded impressed. “And you and that chick. It was pretty impressive.”
“What chick?” I scratched my head. I had no memory of doing anything that might have left me dead or with some chick.
“Jenny, dude. Wicked hot, my man.”
“I don’t know anyone named Jenny. What did we do?”
“I’m not sure--I was hoping you’d tell me,” Roger said. “You two disappeared before midnight and I was waiting for details today.”
“Sorry, wish I could help…” I was still confused enough about what was going on that I had no clue where I’d run off to with some girl named Jenny the night before.
“Maybe some hair of the dog would help jog your memory,” Roger suggested. “Wanna come over in a bit?”
“The hair of what dog?” I pulled the phone across the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to see what my grandma had inside.
“I dunno, man. You were drinking everything last night: vodka, tequila, beer...all of it!”
No wonder my stomach felt like I was at the crest of a hill on a giant roller coaster as I moved leftovers and cartons of milk around. Nothing looked good.
“Come over if your mom lets you, okay?” Roger said.
“Yeah, if my mom lets me…” I looked over at my mom sitting on the couch. Was I really supposed to ask her for permission to go over to some guy’s house? I didn’t even know where Roger lived.
“Okay, see you later.” Roger hung up the phone and I stood there for another second or two, staring at the phone on the wall.
“Honey?” my grandma called. She walked back into the kitchen with a stack of folded dish towels in her hands. “Are you going to go up and shower before breakfast?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But I thought there were pancakes.” I trailed her out into the living room.
“There are.” She stopped and turned, looking me up and down with an impatient frown. “But you know we don’t sit down to breakfast without showering.”
I definitely did not know that we didn’t sit down at the table without showering. This bizarre ritual was something that must have stopped with my grandma, as my mom almost never required that we actually sit down at the table together for a meal. And if we did, I doubt she would have cared whether I’d showered or not. In fact, most days she just left me a ten or a twenty on the kitchen counter before going out and assumed I’d walk to McDonald’s or order a pizza for myself.
“Okay, I guess I’ll go shower.” The words came out slowly as I tried to imagine where the nearest bathroom was, but then I remembered that I was actually in my own house. So of course my bathroom would still be my bathroom.
“Hurry up, dummy,” my mom said from the couch. “Or I’ll eat all your pancakes.”
Fifteen minutes later, I came back downstairs in the only decent outfit I could put together, but I still felt like an alien from another planet.
“Nice pants,” my mom said. I looked down at my clothes. The pile on the chair in my bedroom had yielded nothing but t-shirts with weird band names and strange looking plaid shorts, so I’d perused the closet and settled on a pair of red pants that looked a little like the joggers I was used to wearing, and a short-sleeved button up shirt with an alligator on the chest.
“What do you mean?” I shoved my hands in the pockets of the pants and they made a noise like a nylon windbreaker jacket.
“Um, you look like Michael Jackson,” my mom said. “And kind of like a Poindexter.”
I glanced down at my outfit. “Why?”
“Come here.” She stood up and tossed her Barbie aside like a world-weary woman throwing a magazine onto the couch so that she could straighten her man’s bow tie. I went to her and leaned forward. “This is ridiculous,” she said in her small, young girl’s voice. “Nobody but a total dweeb would button his shirt to the top.” Her eyes rolled back in her head theatrically. “And these pants make you look like you’re about to breakdance.”
“So,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the kitchen where my grandma was putting pancakes on plates, “this doesn’t work?”
“Red parachute pants and a shirt that’s buttoned up to your chin?” She shot me a dubious look. “It only works for a total geek.”
“Breakfast is on the table, kids,” my grandma said, coming out of the kitchen with a tray in her hands. She set the pancakes on the table. “Oh, Daniel.” My grandma looked at my pants. “I haven’t seen you wear those in a while.”
I was eager to change the topic away from my strange fashion choices, so I pulled out a chair and sat down, my pants making that weird swish-swish noise as I did. “Where’s Gra-” I had started to ask where my grandpa was, but then realized that in this dream--or scenario, or whatever the hell this was--my grandpa would actually be my dad. “Where’s...Dad?” My throat suddenly felt dry and I picked up a glass of juice.
Before she could even answer, the front door flew open and in walked my grandfather, a man I hadn’t seen standing upright in years. Following my grandma’s death, he’d ended up in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair after a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed. Seeing him now--tall, long-limbed, with dark hair and a full mustache--it took my breath away. I can’t even lie, more than seeing my mom as an innocent (if annoying) little girl, more than talking to the grandma who’d been gone for four years, seeing my grandpa on his feet looking full of life and vitality--that really got me.
“Hey, champ,” he said. “Nice of you to finally join us.”
I stared back at him, my fork speared through a pancake as I tried to move it from the platter to my plate. “Hey,” I said hoarsely. My grandpa was dressed in gray sweatpants and a zip-up sweatshirt. He even had a headband around his forehead like some crazed 80s jogger.
“Been out for a run,” he said, confirming my initial impression. “Nothing like a jog on a cold morning to get the blood pumping. Would have woken you up, but the word on the street was ‘Let Daniel sleep,’” he said with a wink. “Must’ve been some night you had.”
“Yeah...I was with Roger,” I said, reaching for the syrup. This was a lot of work, pretending that I knew what I was talking about and what was supposed to happen next. I felt like my brain was on overload, trying to process everything and connect the dots between the family members who were supposed to be the same but different to me, and trying to act like nothing out of the usual was happening.
“Yo, hold the door.” A guy stepped onto the porch behind my grandpa. “Lemme in out of the cold, will ya?”
I had the syrup bottle tipped over my pancakes, and the liquid slowly drowned my breakfast as I stared, open-mouthed. The guy on the porch was someone I’d seen in pictures. The guy on the porch was someone I’d never actually met. The guy on the porch was my uncle Andy.
Andy was The Guy. And by that, I mean he had everything going for him. He was tall, athletic, popular. Andy was the star of the track team and the quarterback of the football team. He had the kind of face that made girls love him and adults trust him: nice eyes, strong cheekbones, and a high forehead with a head of thick, dark hair. All the pictures I’d ever seen of him made him look like the quintessential All American guy. His death had traumatized my mom and changed the course of her life. She’d never wanted to talk much about the details, other than to say that Andy’s death had been an accident.
“Hi, Andy.” I set down the syrup and gave him an awkward wave. I was trying for nonchalance, but it was hard to pretend that I was just the kid brother of this uncle who--for my whole life--had cast a giant shadow over the family with both his greatness and his untimely death.
“Hey, dude,” Andy brushed past his father and tossed his jacket onto the couch. “You wanna have a few pancakes with all that syrup?”
My mom giggled uproariously. Her cheeky attitude towards me quickly morphed into that of a sweet, loving kid sister as she looked up at Andy with open adoration. No wonder his death had sent her into a tailspin that had lasted throughout her teenage years and over the course of my whole life. It was obvious to everyone in the room that she worshipped him.
“Oh.” I looked down at the three pancakes swimming in sticky, brown liquid on my plate. “Yeah. My bad.”
“Your what?”
“You know, like ‘I screwed up.’” I picked up my fork and dragged it through the syrup. “It’s my bad.”
“Kind of like with that outfit,” Andy teased, pulling out the chair next to me as he took in my red parachute pants. “You going on the Victory Tour?”
“Huh?” His nearness was throwing me. Seeing my dead grandma had been one thing; I’d at least known her when she was alive. But my uncle Andy had never been a living, breathing human being for me, and having his arm next to mine on the table was almost mind-blowing. He was so close that I could feel the heat off his skin.
“The Jackson Five, dude. You look like you’re going on the Victory Tour.”
My mom laughed again and slapped her knee for emphasis. I glared at her across the table. I should have known she was never going to be on my side. I’d been nothing more than a pain in her butt since the day I was born, so why would it be any different if I was her older brother instead of her son? My simple existence clearly annoyed the crap out of her.
“I couldn’t find any jeans that didn’t come up to my chin,” I said, taking a bite of my pancake. My grandpa put one foot up on the stairs and leaned forward to touch his toes like he was stretching his hamstrings.
“Well, the breakdancing pants were clearly a better choice then,” Andy said. My grandma passed him the platter of pancakes. “And buttoning that shirt all the way up to your Adam’s apple is really helping, too.”
I couldn’t understand what the big deal was about my outfit, but from Andy and my mom’s reactions it was clear that I’d messed up. While everyone focused on breakfast, I reached up slowly and undid the top button with one hand.
“Where were you last night, Andrew?” my grandma asked. She handed him the pot of coffee and watched as he poured it into a ceramic mug that was covered with flowers.
“Mom,” Andy said. “I was out.”
From the tension in my grandma’s look, I gathered that Andy’s whereabouts were a frequent and unpopular topic of conversation.
“I was at Roger’s,” I offered, trying to cover for Andy. Somehow, even though I didn’t know him, I desperately wanted to gain his approval.
“We know you were at Roger’s,” Andy said. “Where else would you be?”
“Yeah, it’s not like you have a girlfriend,” my mom said with an evil grin.
From the corner of my eye, I watched Andy eat his breakfast. I admired his strong biceps and the easy way he tossed his napkin across the table at his sister and made her laugh. The whole scene was like the perfect family having breakfast together, and I wondered how I never knew that my mom had grown up with a life like this. It was so different than the one she and I lived in this very same house.
“Your mom and I thought we’d drive into the city today for something to do. You kids want to come?” my grandpa asked, putting his other foot up on the stairs and stretching his hamstring again.
“I need to sleep,” Andy said around a mouthful of pancakes. “Last night was long.”
My grandma’s face twitched as she imagined what kind of mischief her son was up to on New Year’s Eve, but I watched as she wisely kept her thoughts and questions to herself.
“I want to go!” my mom shouted, jumping up from her chair.
“How about you, Daniel?” my grandma asked.
“I think I’m going to Roger’s. But I don’t know.”
“Well, decide what you’re doing, honey.” She stood up and started clearing away plates and dishes from the table. “We’ll probably leave around noon. We thought we might have a look at the tree in Rockefeller Center before they take it down. We could eat dinner in the city if you guys want to.”
I took my plate into the kitchen and then went back up to my bedroom to investigate a little more. I’d gotten as far as the closet and the poster and the Tears For Fears cassette, but I knew there had to be more clues about this Daniel and his life in 1986 just waiting to be discovered. My mom turned on the television again as I wandered up the stairs. The sound of some show on Nickelodeon trailed after me.
In the safety of the bedroom I dropped to my hands and knees and looked under the bed: nothing but game cartridges, a single red and white Jordan 1 basketball shoe, and a Westchester High School yearbook from 1984. A sense of unease washed over me as I slid the yearbook out and flipped through the pages. Everyone in the photos had seriously ugly hair: the girls wore fluffy bangs and perms, and the guys had loose waves falling over their foreheads.
I set the yearbook on the dresser and sank back onto the waterbed. Everything settled in around me for the first time since I’d opened my eyes: I was in my house, but it wasn’t 2016. My mom was in the house, but she wasn’t a grown woman--she was an 11-year-old girl named Lisa with a Barbie and a bad attitude. The room shrank around me as my field of vision narrowed. I laid back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and the frosted glass of the light fixture with its etched flowers. What the hell was going on? How was this even possible? My grandma was still alive, and my grandpa had come in from jogging like it was nothing for him to be up and out of a wheelchair.
And my uncle Andy! He’d breezed in and sat down next to me at the table like it was nothing. He had to be real, right? This had to be real--I’d tasted the pancakes drowned in syrup, and I’d felt the weight of the phone in my hand as I’d held it to my ear, listening to the voice of some kid named Roger. This wasn’t just some crazy dream--this felt real.
I focused on the things that were fixed around me: the poster on the wall; the light overhead; the mirror by the door. Those things weren’t moving or changing. My breath came short and fast as I tried to calm my racing mind. It seemed idiotic to pinch myself to see if it was all some elaborate hoax or a trick my mind was playing on me, but in the moment it seemed like the only way to wake myself up if this was just a dream. So I pinched my arm. Hard. And it fucking hurt.
“What the hell?” I sat up on the waterbed, sending waves out from my body like a pebble thrown into a pond as I watched my skin turn red where I’d pinched it. I guess this was real. All of it.
A shiny object at the foot of the bed caught my eye. Its slick, black, rectangular shape and size were as familiar as my own face. I stared at it, wondering if it could possibly be what I thought it was. My palm started to itch with the need to hold it, and I knew that it was precisely what I’d been missing. The extension to my arm that made me feel complete. The very thing that kept me from walking around feeling naked and awkward and lost in the world.
That shiny object on the floor was my lifeline to the world, my way of communicating, of not feeling bored or alone when I had no one to talk to. It was my box of pixels and aluminum and happiness.
It was my iPhone.