IF YOU FIND THIS

I’m going to keep these notes in the ghosthouse, under the floorboards, in a cardboard box. If you find these, you’re standing where everything happened. And I want you to understand everything. I want you to understand that I am not dead. I want you to understand that I am alive. I want you to understand that I live somewhere not too far from where you’re standing, in the house where I’ve always lived.

We are not losing our house. And we will not lose our house. Because, in the end, Grandpa Rose left us an heirloom—an heirloom Grandpa Rose had forgotten how to use.

It was after Grandpa Dykhouse had sailed away, after Jordan and Zeke and I had sat on the dunes chewing beach grass together, after I had walked home to be alone, that I spotted everything sitting there on my dresser. The passport with stamped pages. The rusted metal cog. The photograph of my grandmother. The broken music box. Everything Grandpa Rose had left us. Then I realized it was an equation.

I simplified it—subtracted the passport, subtracted the photograph.

I studied what was left.

Rusted metal cog + broken music box = ?

I put them together. I wound the music box. A song came tinkling out of it, grave, then vivo, then grave again.

Then I ran outside, leaping from the deck and tearing across the backyard, and the birds were (forte)shrieking and the wind was (forte)rattling through the leaves of the trees and the squirrels were (piano)crunching through the dead leaves below, and I shoved a lock of hair out of my eyes and dropped to my knees at my brother’s roots and before my brother could even speak I wound the music box again and the song came (grave)tinkling out of it and I held it toward my brother, saying with it, again and again and again and again, LISTEN TO THIS SONG, BROTHER, LISTEN TO THIS SONG—THIS IS THE SONG THAT WILL SAVE YOU.