I slipped into another memory. I was leaning in a doorway watching a teenage boy work on math from a book lying open on his desk. The boy—my own dad, but in the memory he was my son—did not look up or act like he noticed I was there. I wanted to speak to him. I wanted him to notice me and look up. But “How’s the homework going?” or “What are you working on?”—it sounded trumped up. It sounded too little. And too late.
I floated up now, up, up into the cold of the river. My feet were kicking behind me as I almost swam. The rushing was deafening, and I felt the cold cracking in my elbows and my poor, sore knee.
Chapter 10
When the cold inside my bones and the sound of rushing wind began to recede, I heard Grandpa’s now-familiar voice. “You’re here, Buckaroo.” It was him—his voice—that was making me warm up. The heat started inside my body, behind my ears, and was working down to my rib cage, up my neck, down my legs, and into my arms. My fingertips and nose were still numb with cold.
To my great relief, Grandpa wasn’t young anymore. He wasn’t in the war. He was back to the same cut-short white hair, the same wool shirt. We were safe.
I sat up and took a look around. We were on the porch of a house. I followed Grandpa’s gaze out beyond the porch and saw a lawn stretching about a hundred yards or so down to a lake that was dotted with sailboats and a few white-capped waves. I could just barely see across the water to a far shore that was nothing but a thin blue line. “Where are we?” I asked. “What is this?”
“You mean the lake?” he said. I did mean the lake, but I also meant all of it—his being dead, my being able to talk to him, to feel him, to see inside his memories.
“My friend Ewan says that what’s happening to me is called slipping.”
“That’s a good word for it,” said Grandpa. “As I told you before, I don’t really understand any more than you do. I only know that when you are with me, I can breathe again. I feel warm. I smell lemon meringue pie.”
“I hate the cold parts,” I said. “And some of the memories—” I didn’t know how to describe them. “Some of the memories hurt.”
Grandpa’s face lost a little of the pink glow it had taken on, and I felt bad. But he had to know. “They hurt me too,” he said.
“But you’re a grown-up. They’re your memories,” I said. “I’m a kid. Aren’t you supposed to protect me from the really bad stuff?”
“Yes,” he said, and he sounded sad. “But I don’t seem to be able to. I’m not sure protecting you is the way to keep you safe.”
That didn’t make any sense, so I moved on to another question. “When I was inside your memory of the battle, I saw my own self in the gym at my school. I was reflected in that canteen. Was that what you saw when you were in the war for real?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You saw me playing basketball? For real? Me?”
“Yes,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t know who you were until now. I’ve always thought that was a hallucination.”
“Weird,” I said.
“Indeed,” Grandpa answered. “I’d have said impossible. But now a great deal more feels possible than I used to believe.”
“I have one more question,” I said. I was kind of embarrassed to ask it, but I did anyway. “My dad said you played basketball. Was that me playing in the gym just now? Or were you playing through my body, the way you made me eat spinach?”
“What made you think it was me?”
“Well, I could catch. And shoot. And get open when I needed to be.”
“It’s fun, isn’t it? Basketball. God, I loved it.”
“It was fun this time. Usually I hate it. I feel like people are watching me and I can’t do anything right.”
“Hmm,” said Grandpa. “I never felt like anyone was watching—I’m pretty sure no one ever was. I loved the concentration it took to play well. I loved how it could make me forget everything else. I would see only the ball, and the other players.”
“Oh,” I said. I remembered how cool it had felt when Grandpa told me he’d had really curly, crazy hair like mine. I’d felt like, wow, someone really understands me. This wasn’t another moment like that. “I guess it was you, then. I guess I’ll just go back to being bad.”
“I don’t know if it was me. I saw you play, but I don’t know if I was playing. I don’t know how any of this works. But think about oatmeal right now. Think about spinach.”
“They both sound kind of good.”
“I think you’ll like them now. For the rest of your life. And I think you’ll be able to play basketball now too. Don’t ask whether it was you on the court or if it was me. There is no me. There is only you. Whatever part of me that’s inside you is yours to keep.
“We’re connected now, Michael,” he went on. “I thought I had control of it, but I don’t. You pulled me in today. When you felt that pain, the energy of your response brought me to you. I don’t quite know the extent of it, but it seems that this connection is more flexible than I’d thought.”
I wasn’t really listening to him. I could feel myself smiling. That was me on the court! I could play basketball.
“Wow,” I said. I hadn’t realized how much I’d even wanted to be good at basketball. I’d been so busy hating basketball that I hadn’t paid attention to how fun it is when you can actually play. “Wow,” I said again. I felt like the happy feeling was expanding now, outside my body, into the floorboards of the porch, out into the air.
“Hey,” I said aloud. “Is this the lake?” I looked behind me. “Is this your cabin? Your cabin that you lived in in Vermont where we would visit you?”
“The very same,” Grandpa said.
“But it looks so different,” I said. “There were woods here, where this grass is. You couldn’t see the lake at all from the cabin. It looked farther away.”
“It did,” said Grandpa.
“It’s nicer this way.”
Grandpa narrowed his eyes just a bit.
“Sorry,” I added.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “The way it looked when you used to visit me is very different from how it looked when I first came here. When Stella—your grandmother—was alive, everything was different.”
“How did she die?” I asked him.
“She had cancer.” He paused as if he was going to leave it at that, then thought better of it and kept talking. “She lost weight one summer, but we didn’t think too much about it. And then she went to the doctor, and four months later she was gone.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“It was very hard on your dad. She loved him, and he loved her. When she died, he was left alone with me, and we didn’t know each other. And I didn’t want to be alone with him. I wanted Stella back. Stella had been the glue between us. I think he was marking time from when she died to when he could go away to school. He finished high school early.”
“And you came up here.”
“Yes, just as soon as he went to school, I sold our house and moved up here for good.” He sighed, and I started to put my own memories of Grandpa’s cabin together with the place we were seeing now. It was strange to think that the lawn I was looking at would be so grown up with trees that by the time I was a little kid, I would think of it as the woods. We’d never sat on the porch when we’d visited—Grandpa used it to store the huge amounts of firewood he split from trees he chopped down by himself. But the porch was actually really nice, perched up high above the water.
“The woods are what happens if you don’t take care of a lawn,” said Grandpa. “After Stella, I stopped mowing. It turned into a meadow, and then it turned into brush, and after a few decades, it was woods.”
“This is what it looked like the other day,” I said, thinking about the memory I’d had of my dad diving off the dock. “Was that when you were remembering it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Grandpa, sighing. “I was thinking about your dad. I was thinking about how proud I was of him for learning that dive. Or how p
roud I am, seeing him this time. Back then—I don’t know what I felt. Fear, I guess. I lived in fear.”
“What were you afraid of? That he’d drown?”
“No,” Grandpa said. “Nothing like that. I was afraid I’d drown. Drown in feeling.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either,” he said. “But that summer…” He paused. “That summer your father spent days and days in the water. There were kids up and down the shore, New Yorkers mostly, people who rented, people who came every year. He was a part of it, and I was not. I wish—” He stopped again, and waved a hand, as if to say, “Forget it.”
“What?” I pressed. He looked so sad, I wanted to help him feel better.
“During the summers Stella and your dad spent here, I was working hard in the city. I came up on the weekends, but many times I would call at the last minute to say I had to work. The truth was, the work wasn’t always urgent. My problem was I didn’t know how to be up here. Stella and your dad, they got up in the mornings, got dressed in their bathing suits, went to the water. They dove in, and then your dad splashed around while Stella made breakfast, took care of the cabin, and gardened. There was nothing for me here. I didn’t want to slow down enough to actually absorb any of it. I didn’t like to swim. My favorite summer up here, I painted the whole cabin. When I sat still, I felt so…” He had to take a minute to find the right word. “Lonely.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“But there’s nothing to do about it now,” Grandpa added. “So come on, let’s go for a swim!” His voice strained with the effort of changing the subject, but he ran down to the water and jumped in, drawing his knees to his chest to make a cannonball. He broke the surface with a splash, and the water rose in giant sparkling drops. Grandpa ducked his head under. He started to tread water. He waved, but I didn’t wave back because my mouth was hanging open.
Grandpa’s hair wasn’t wet. He was still wearing all his clothes. I walked closer to see more, and noticed that water was beading up on his shirtsleeves.
To see what would happen, I dove in too, and found that the water felt warm and soft, and yet it was not like regular swimming because I wasn’t getting wet and neither were my clothes.
“Is this what it’s like?” I asked, treading water next to Grandpa.
“Is this what what’s like?” Grandpa was looking at me with wide eyes, as if he had no idea what I could possibly mean. Suddenly, I was embarrassed, as if I was going to tell Grandpa something he wouldn’t want to hear, like his fly was down. But I was too curious not to finish the question. “Is this what it’s like being a ghost?” I said.
“Oh, that.” He sounded so sad, I knew I’d been right to hesitate before asking the question. “Yes. You want to get wet, to get cold, to feel the touch of another person on your body. That’s how it feels when I’m watching you. And when I’m watching myself. I can’t change anything. I know so much more, but I’m powerless to fix what I did. It makes me hungry. There’s so much I wish was different!
“But you’re helping me, Michael,” he went on. “With you, I feel stronger. I feel filled up.”
“You do?” I said. “But when you were alive, you never sent me presents. You never visited. I didn’t even know you before.”
“Oh, Michael,” he said, and I could see the tears building in his eyes. “I loved you since before you were born. You understand that now, right? Only… the fear. It kept me from knowing and feeling love. I was strong—I saved myself in the war, but the strength also froze me. Do you understand how that could happen?”
“Yes,” I said, because I did. “Sometimes, with Gus—,” I began. But I didn’t want to talk about Gus. “Sometimes that’s what it’s like playing video games. There’s this invisible shield around your brain. Nothing else can get in. It makes me feel like nothing can get to me. I like that feeling.”
“Don’t like it,” Grandpa said. “It starts as something you can control. But the problem is, once you grow a shell around your brain—or, you might even say, your heart—it’s almost impossible to shed it. After Stella died, living alone in that cabin, my shell grew even thicker. It was all I had. I found myself irritated with other people, even though I was seeing them less and less. I stopped being able to feel anything for other people at all, besides irritation. I wanted to be alone all the time, but even when I was alone, I felt unhappy. I kept thinking I’d feel better if I reduced the sources of my irritation—if I reduced the changes in my routine, interactions with other people, anything that put pressure on me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, because I felt like I almost did, like if I went home and thought about it, it would start to make sense.
“That’s my boy,” he said, and still in the water, he reached over to give me a bear hug, which of course, I felt only as cold. He pulled away quickly, and I wondered what the touch felt like to him. Was it heat, as he’d told me before?
As if he’d read my mind, he explained. “I don’t want to take you back into the tunnels,” he said. “If I hold you too long, that’s where we’ll end up.”
I was glad that he’d let go.
• • •
After swimming, Grandpa and I sat on the porch of the house. We watched a young version of him and my grandmother come through, looking at the dusty insides of the house, and standing on the lawn. “This was the day we bought this place,” Grandpa said, as if recognizing an old photograph. “I wonder what brought me to this memory right now. I must have been thinking about all the lost days up here and brought myself to the beginning, to the time when I still had the chance to make it all different.”
“Could you have?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Grandpa. “I don’t know how much choice we have in our lives.”
I saw Grandma take the younger Grandpa’s hand. She looked the same, but rounder, and she was carrying a really enormous purse. She let go of Grandpa to go to my dad, who looked like he was maybe nine years old. She wouldn’t let him get too close to the water, as if she were afraid he could drown just by being next to it.
“She looks different,” I said.
“She looks beautiful,” Grandpa answered. “They both do.”
Seeing my dad as a boy was even stranger than swimming in water that didn’t get me wet. His socks were pulled up to his knees—what a dork! When he finally was able to squirm away from Grandma, I followed him up onto the porch, where he started to arrange the rocking chairs into a perfect line, facing out to the water. Then he pressed his face up against the dirty window and peered into the house. I wondered what he was thinking.
The younger version of Grandpa came up behind my dad and tousled his hair. “Thinking of all the fun we’ll have up here?” Grandpa said, but he wasn’t really looking at my dad when he said it. He was looking at a spot just over his head.
My dad pulled away from Grandpa’s hand. “I guess,” he said, sounding sullen. “But when will we see you if we come up here? You’ll be living at home, and Mommy and I will be up here. I don’t want to come up here by ourselves.”
Grandpa was watching his younger self intently. I could almost feel him holding whatever it was he had instead of breath. He flinched as his young version cuffed my dad on the ear, kind of playful, kind of hard.
“Don’t be ungrateful,” he said. “Do you know how lucky you are to have a lake house like this one?” He rubbed his temple like he had a headache. My dad turned away from him. Next to me, Ghost Grandpa’s eyes were full.
“Are you going to cry?” I said.
“Ghosts can’t cry,” Grandpa said. “It’s like we can’t get wet. And we can’t touch.”
“Why weren’t you nicer to him?” I said.
“I think I thought I was protecting him.”
“Protecting him from what?”
“From his own sadness,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t want him to be sad. I didn’t want him to see that I wasn’t a good father. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t go
od to him.”
I felt so sorry for Grandpa, I forgot for a second about slipping, and I put my hand on his shoulder. I wanted to pat him on the arm, or try to hug him or something—anything. But all I felt was cold.
At first. Then, after I’d held my hand there a minute, there was something else, something warm, a little bit of a tingle.
“Do you feel that?” I whispered, afraid that if I spoke, it would stop.
“No, Michael, don’t do that,” said Grandpa. “You don’t want to have to go in the river yet.”
“But do you feel it?” I said. “I can feel you.” I had to see what would happen if I left my hand there a second more. I thought I’d still be able to pull it away in time.
“Michael—,” Grandpa started again, but I didn’t hear what he said next because the rushing sound had returned. The warm tingle of my hand touching his shoulder turned to the sharp bitter cold of the river of the dead, and I saw the red lights spinning, so cold they were hot, the wind pushing tears out of my eyes. “Stop, stop,” I begged, trying hard to turn my head against the current of air. Grandpa said he loved me. How could he leave me alone in such painful cold? He was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 11
As the cold inside the river of the dead froze deeper into my body, I pushed through more of Grandpa’s memories. I was sitting in an office, at night, with a deli sandwich, unwrapped and half-eaten, pushed off to the side. In a circle of light made by a small desk lamp, I was checking columns of numbers to make sure they’d been added correctly. I could feel the numbers clicking together like I was stacking dominoes inside a case.
Slipping Page 9
