AFTERMATH

The nurses peeked into the mausoleum to check whether we had broken anything, then chained the doors.

Grandpa Dykhouse was still inside. When Zeke had spotted the nurses headed for the mausoleum, Grandpa Dykhouse had said that he wasn’t going back to the rest home, that he wouldn’t live like that again. Then Grandpa Dykhouse had crawled into XAVIER’s casket.

The next seven hours of his life were probably his scariest—hiding in a casket with XAVIER’s bones, and then crawling out of the casket, but still trapped with skeletons piled from the floor to the ceiling.

Or maybe he wasn’t scared. Maybe he had seen enough dying and death and dead that bones couldn’t scare him anymore.

In the morning we snuck into the graveyard and unlocked the mausoleum. Grandpa Dykhouse was huddled shivering on the trunk.

“Where’s Monte?” he (piano)said, his voice rasping.

“Rest home,” I (forte)said. “Now even if they catch you, they can’t send you back. Grandpa Rose is living in your room. The rest home is full again.”

Grandpa Dykhouse spent his last months in the ghosthouse, playing chess with Jordan, building fires, reading books. His lungs flooded with phlegm from the weather, but he refused to live anywhere else.

It was winter, when all of Michigan turns white, everything like a ghost of itself—snow piled on the roads, on the roofs of houses, on the hoods of everyone’s parkas. The lake’s shallows had frozen, the waves dead now, ice—you could walk from the beach onto the water, even beyond the lighthouse across the frozen waves, before the ice met the black of the unfrozen water. It’s freshwater, but most of the lake never freezes. The math tells it to freeze—the temperature drops to 19°, 13°, 2°, into the negatives—but the lake is the size of a sea. It’s beyond the math of it.

During winter the lighthouse keeper kept his rowboat in a boathouse along the lighthouse. After having worked for the lighthouse keeper, Zeke knew where the boat was kept. He also knew when the lighthouse keeper napped, a fire crackling in his stove, drowning out the other noise.

Jordan was getting better with the crowbar—broke the padlock with a single swing.

We carried the rowboat to the dunes, hid the rowboat in the trees.

We ripped rafters from the attic of the ghosthouse, took hammers and nails from the shed.

Zeke stole everything else we needed—a white sail, a wooden rudder.

It took all winter to build it. Below us, high schoolers warmed the smugglers’ tunnels with the heat from their cigarettes, the heat from their fireworks, the heat from their breath. On other lakes, anglers built icehouses, fished through holes sawed into the ice.

We never told anyone the truth about Grandpa Rose. We told my mom we had spotted him that night walking along the road, had run after him into the graveyard, had caught him breaking into the mausoleum. I felt bad^criminal for lying to her. But she never would have forgiven me if she had known the truth.

I wanted to tell her, “I spent so many days with him and while we were together we were friends.” I wanted to tell her, “Even if he wasn’t a good father, he was a better grandfather, because he came back for us and taught me chess and told me stories and had my eyes and slept on a floor in a house with no windows for night after night after night just to save you, and your house, and your son the tree.”

My mom said I was a hero for finding Grandpa Rose. But I was < a hero. I had always been < a hero. I was a thief and a liar. I knew where skeletons were buried, the skeletons of missing people, and I hadn’t said a word.

At school we turned into an us, a Nicholas + Jordan + Zeke.

We sat together in the cafeteria. Jordan and Zeke got detention together for drawing anti-Isaacs graffiti in the locker room. Zeke and I got detention together for setting loose hundreds of fireflies during a school dance. Jordan gave me a new nickname, one like Skulltooth—instead of Calculator, now I was Mastermind.

The Geluso twins didn’t hate Jordan anymore. Mark Huff still hated Jordan, but he hated him < he had hated him before. Emma Dirge didn’t. Leah Keen didn’t. But they didn’t hate the Isaacs, either. All of them had read what the Isaacs had written. But, even then, none of them hated the Isaacs.

There would always be Isaacs.

My mom took the Yorks’ offer. Our FOR SALE sign went down.

But before the closing, the Yorks called my mom again. They had found another house, an empty one owned by a bank. They liked it better. Bigger windows, newer floors. A pool in the backyard.

Our FOR SALE sign went up again.

Jordan’s dad hit Genevieve one night during dinner—split her lip and made her cry.

“It had been months since he had hit any of us,” Jordan (piano)said. “I thought it was over, but then the meanness just came back out.”

I could see Jordan thinking, that meanness might come out again.

“You aren’t the only one with a mean father,” Zeke (forte)said.

“At least your grandfathers weren’t killers,” I (forte)said.

“Grandpa Rose wasn’t a killer,” Zeke (forte)said.

“He hid the bodies,” I (forte)said.

Then Jordan was thinking, what if when I have kids I hit them too?, and Zeke was thinking, what if after I fall in love with a man someday I leave him and move to a new country and never come back again?, and I was thinking, what if I become something like Grandpa Rose became, what if that’s what happens when my pod splits open, what if I become a criminal?

Zeke uncapped his silver marker.

“We will not become our grandfathers. We will not become our fathers. We will take only their best parts, take none of their worst,” Zeke (piano)said.

He made us swear it. He wrote it on our arms.

Kayley Schreiber taught me new things. With her hands she taught me THESE ARE YOUR HANDS. With her tongue she taught me THIS IS YOUR TONGUE. She would sit across from me, her knees touching my knees, and when our knees touched I would remember THESE ARE MY KNEES. I had forgotten I had them, until then. She gave me my hands, my tongue, my knees, everything that needed giving back.

Zeke already had sold enough instruments and backpacks and high-tops that he had the money he needed to fly himself to his father.

When he tried to buy a ticket, though, he couldn’t. No one would let a thirteen-year-old fly alone. At least not unless he had his mother’s permission.

He did not have his mother’s permission.

“Some things you can’t have until you’re older,” Zeke (forte)said.

Zeke wrote each of his brothers a letter. He drew a silver wolf over the seal of each envelope. He mailed each of the letters the same day.

After school, I would ride with my mom to the rest home. While she mopped floors, I sat with Grandpa Rose. None of him remained. He didn’t remember where he was, didn’t remember when he was, didn’t remember who he was, even. He was dead, but kept living.

Every day I brought his leather notebooks and read from his diary aloud. “This is who you were,” I would (piano)say, then read the memories he had written. Sometimes he would smile, like he remembered. But he didn’t remember. I would show him the photograph of Grandma Rose, and he would stare at her the same way he stared at anyone now—like at a stranger.

In the notebooks, he wrote about having sold our heirlooms, one after another, to pay for things he never needed. Hotel rooms, poker games, luxury cigarettes. That was the truth about the heirlooms. Even he had underestimated just how selfish he had been. Everything that had been ours—the ivory revolver, the bellows clock, the golden hammer—he had pawned while my mom was still a girl. He had spent everything on himself.

During breaks between mopping, my mom would perch on his bed with him, and listen to me read.

“So there really were heirlooms,” my mom (forte)said, leafing through a notebook.

“Once,” I (forte)said.

My mom (piano)laughed, shaking her head. She leaned in to adjust the cardigan Grandpa Rose was wearing—straightening the shoulders, smoothing the chest.

“Is that what you ran away looking for?” my mom (forte)said, creasing her eyebrows. “You’d be so embarrassed, if you knew you’d gone off searching for something that wasn’t even there.”

Grandpa Rose stared blankly at a murky patch of sunlight on the wall. My mom blew some hair out of her eyes, then reached for the photograph of Grandma Rose. She had bought a gold wooden picture frame for the photograph with money we didn’t have.

“He always did love making trouble,” my mom (forte)said. “At the very least, he got to cause one last giant uproar.”

What he liked most was to have his hands held. Sometimes, if you squeezed them, they would squeeze you back.

Afterward, Jordan and Zeke would come for me, and all of us would hike out to the dunes, where we would work on the boat.

In band class, everyone learned new terms. Everyone learned that grave means “play grimly.” Everyone learned that vivo means “play lively.” We played songs that were grave. We played songs that were vivo. Most of them, they were both.

When the trees grew leaves again, we hauled our boat down the dunes and into the water. Grandpa Dykhouse stood with us there, his glasses hooked to his sweater, his jeans rolled to his ankles, the skin of his feet as pale as the insides of apples from a winter without sun.

“It’s a bit smaller than my old boat,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

“It was the biggest we could get,” Jordan (forte)said.

“It’s perfect,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

Foamy waves (piano)slid onto the beach, to our ankles, then (piano)slid out again. The boat’s sail was (piano)snapping in the wind. The boat’s rudder was (piano)knocking against the hull. With thick lines of white paint we had named the boat PAWPAW.

“Where will you go?” I (forte)said.

“Somewhere I’ve never been,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

“But you’re coming back?” Jordan (forte)said.

“I’ll find you then,” Grandpa Dykhouse (forte)said.

Zeke gave Grandpa Dykhouse $3,889 (prime).

“Eat well,” Zeke (forte)said.

Letters with Italian stamps arrived at Zeke’s mailbox—an envelope from a NICO, an envelope from a DINO. Then, weeks later, a crumpled envelope with dirty thumbprints from a GIORGIO.

The letters were written in a language he couldn’t understand.

“I guess I’ll have to steal some books about Italian,” Zeke (forte)said.

He carried the letters with him everywhere.

Grandpa Rose’s blood pressure was 140/90, then 150/100, then 160/110. The math was telling him to die. But he was beyond the math of it.

I read his memories to him every day.

But, next to my brother, I planted an acorn.

Grandpa Rose’s self had died already—that was the black spot that I had been given. When the next one came for me, Grandpa Rose’s body would die too.

By then his tree would already be growing.