A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  And then? Well, then it would be up to her to decide where her heart lay. A kid can only do so much.

  – 3 –

  DINNER IS SERVED

  I didn’t like Riddell House. Every moment it seemed to creak or groan or sigh, like it was alive. Like it was an old tree swaying in the wind, complaining about being pushed about.

  I snuck down the stairs—I didn’t want to bother my father, in case he was napping. I went out onto the front porch, which was blazingly hot. The sun was smashing the house with its solar rays, and in the glare of a late afternoon haze, I found it difficult to see anything. That’s why I didn’t notice him until I heard him speak.

  “Who are you?” a man asked.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. I raised my hand to shade my eyes and, squinting, looked over to where the voice came from. I saw an old man in a wooden rocking chair. Next to the man, on a side table, was a tray with a couple of glasses and a pitcher of what appeared to be lemonade. The old man looked remarkably like the portrait of Elijah Riddell in the front parlor. He had long stringy white hair, a tired face, and big ears and a big nose. For a second I thought he might be Elijah Riddell, but that was impossible. Logic and common sense—and the fact I knew I wasn’t in a horror film—told me the man was Grandpa Samuel.

  The man I assumed to be my grandfather made a pained face and adjusted himself in his chair. He mopped his brow with a kerchief. He must have been uncomfortably hot, because he was wearing black pants and a black T-shirt, and the sun loves to torture black clothes.

  “Who are you?” the man asked again.

  “I’m Trevor. You’re Samuel, right? My grandfather.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “I’m your son’s son. Jones Riddell. I’m his son. Nice to meet you.”

  I took a few steps toward him, and I noticed the words printed on his T-shirt: GOD was MY COPILOT . . . BUT WE CRASHED IN THE MOUNTAINS AND I HAD TO EAT HIM.

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your shirt. It’s funny.”

  “Do you know why we named him Jones?”

  “It was his mother’s maiden name,” I replied, thrown off a bit by the non sequitur, but knowing the story and wanting to prove myself. “Your wife, Isobel Jones. And also because it was different. People remember things that are different and she wanted people to remember him.”

  “Did you know her?” Grandpa Samuel asked.

  “No. I’m fourteen. I’ll be fourteen the day after tomorrow. She died before I was born.”

  “She loved him more than anything on this earth,” he said, after working his mouth for a bit, lost in thought. “I think he loved her even more than she loved him.”

  He fell into an old-person silence. Ruminating. Which has always been one of my favorite words. Goats and cows are ruminators: they chew their food and swallow it and then puke it back up into their mouths to chew it some more, and swallow it again, and so on. So if you think about stuff a lot, you’re kind of swallowing thoughts and then puking them back up into your mouth to think about them some more. I still like that image, even now.

  “I want a shirt like that,” I said, finally.

  Grandpa Samuel looked down and lifted the front of his shirt as if to read it, then let it go and shrugged.

  “Serena buys my clothes.”

  “Can I have some lemonade?”

  He considered my question at length; then he poured a glass and handed it to me. I sat down next to him and we didn’t say anything at all. We ruminated. It was very Zen. The sun beat down on us. We drank our lemonade until our glasses were empty, and then he refilled our glasses and we baked in the sun some more. And for a minute I thought that if I were at home—or, rather, if my parents still had a home I could be “at home” in—I would be watching baseball on TV or reading a book, and I would be killing time, but I wouldn’t be ruminating. And it occurred to me that I might have just met the wisest man on the planet. My grandfather didn’t pepper me with questions and then not listen to my answers, like most adults. He didn’t entertain me with playful anecdotes. He wasn’t concerned with whether or not I was occupying my time in a productive way. He didn’t tell me to put on sunscreen. We sat together. Together, we sat. That’s all we did for nearly an hour. Until Serena came out onto the porch through the grand double-door front entrance to Riddell House.

  I was surprised that I hadn’t heard her approach; the house was so creaky, surely I would have heard her walk down the hallway. I looked down and noticed she had removed her boots, which explained the mystery: bare feet make no noise. I meant to look away, but I couldn’t. Her feet were perfect. The gentle arc to her arches was graceful and her toes, exquisite. Her toenails were painted an azure blue that was mesmerizing. I tried not to stare, but I obviously failed, for she smiled at me and said, “I always walk about the house au naturel; it’s better for one’s posture.”

  “Sure,” I said, because I was almost fourteen and I had a boner, and that’s what almost-fourteen-year-olds with boners say.

  “It’s time to wash up for dinner. I see you’ve met your grandfather. Daddy, were you nice to Trevor?”

  “I gave him lemonade,” Grandpa Samuel said.

  “Did you? Well, isn’t that nice of you.”

  “He likes my shirt.”

  “Hmm. It’s a bit irreverent, don’t you think? God and cannibalism in the same thought?”

  “I’m not sure it would be cannibalism,” I said, hoping to impress Serena with my intellect. “You have to be the same species for it to be called cannibalism. So technically, it wouldn’t be considered cannibalism to eat a god. I mean, if there were a god nearby that you could eat.”

  “Aren’t you clever? Clever Trevor.”

  “Simply Serena,” I said without thinking.

  “It’s okay, you can make fun with me. Don’t be shy. Say it louder.”

  “Simply Serena,” I said louder, as she commanded.

  “Ha!” Grandpa Samuel shouted and slapped his thigh with a percussive smack. “Simply Serena!” he bellowed and tipped his head back and laughed and laughed.

  “How nice that you’ve bonded with your grandfather at my expense,” she said. “Now go wash up, boys,” she added after Grandpa Samuel had calmed down.

  Grandpa Samuel led the way. When it was my turn to pass through the front door, Serena held it closed a little so I had to stop.

  “I know you East Coast people have contempt for us out West,” she said with studied sweetness. “You think we’re not very bright.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh, you do,” she said. “And that’s fine with me. Provincialism cuts both ways. But be aware that we uncultured westerners play a little rough sometimes. So, if you get hurt, well, I apologize in advance. I certainly didn’t mean it.”

  She looked at me in a way that scared me a little.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Serena,” I said with genuine contrition. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “You didn’t, Young Trevor.” She beamed at me, and she hugged me to her so I could smell her citrus scent again. “You didn’t offend me at all.”

  * * *

  Serena. Blue toes and citrus scent and catlike eyes.

  The table was piled high with an enormous amount of food, certainly more than four people could eat at one sitting. There was fresh-baked bread that filled the kitchen with a steamy, yeasty smell, and homemade fried chicken, wedges of watermelon, a chopped salad and potato salad, steamed corn on the cob, sugar snap peas, and a pitcher of lemonade with rosemary sprigs in it—one of Serena’s specialties.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Just a little something I threw together.”

  Grandpa Samuel took his seat. Serena removed a medicine bottle from the cupboard.

  “Can you run upstairs and get your father?” she asked me as she took two pills from the container and placed them before Grandpa Samuel. “I told him dinner was ready, but he seems to be lagging.�
�

  “Take your medicine,” I heard her say as I left the room.

  I went upstairs, knocked briefly on my father’s door, and then let myself in. My father was sitting on the edge of his bed, curled forward with his face in his hands. He’d changed into clean khakis and he was wearing his boating shoes, because that’s all he ever wore unless he wore the one suit he owned, in which case he wore his plain black loafers. But I noticed he was wearing a crisply laundered man-tailored shirt. My mother must have packed that shirt, because my father was a slob and didn’t know what a creased sleeve was or why one should have one. He raised his head when I entered the room, and I recoiled comically. My father had shaved his beard. Just like that. Serena made one comment and my father shaved. Which proved my theory that my mother let my father keep his beard so she could feel physically repulsed when she looked at him, and that he never really cared about his beard and would have been happy to shave it off had she said something. My father had no idea he was complicit in his own demise.

  He looked years younger without his beard: his skin was pale where the bushy hair had been, yet his cheeks and forehead and ears were tan, creating something of a raccoon effect. Sitting there like that, with his starched white shirt and his hair combed and wet from the shower, he looked like a kid. I felt bad for him. I felt like I’d come to his room to bring him to the grown-up table. Or the gas chamber.

  I tried to make a joke out of it, so I said, “Any last words?” and he literally started trembling.

  He stood up and took a deep breath, put his arm around my shoulder, and walked us both out into the hall.

  “Promise you’ll make a lot of jokes at dinner,” he said. “Because I feel like I’m going to vomit.”

  I didn’t know anything about my father’s relationship with my grandfather. Grandpa Samuel had been so absent from my life up to that point, it was like he was dead. Rarely spoken about. Never spoken to. Not a single photo of him, or anybody else in my father’s family, for that matter. It never occurred to me to wonder. But then, my father was a mystery to me as well. We hardly did anything together in those days, and, when we did, we didn’t talk a lot. Sometimes he would start to tell me something about his childhood, but then he would stop in the middle of the story, as if he didn’t want to remember it. Like he had closed the door on that part of his life and didn’t want to open it again.

  I helped him down to the kitchen (I really thought his legs would have collapsed if I hadn’t been there to help him with the stairs), and Serena and Grandpa Samuel looked up.

  “Oh, don’t you look nice!” Serena said cheerfully. “I knew there was a face under that tangled mess. Daddy? Look who’s here. It’s Brother Jones!”

  Grandpa Samuel and my father regarded each other cautiously.

  “Hello, Dad,” my father said.

  “Hello, Son,” Grandpa Samuel said with a perfunctory nod, not even lifting his eyes.

  “I love these warm and fuzzy reunions!” Serena chirped. “Now try not to get all mushy, boys. There’s plenty of time to catch up! Sit, Jones. Join us.”

  We took our seats and food was passed around and nobody said a word. Dead silence. There was gesturing and smiling and nodding, all very polite. There was chewing and swallowing and drinking. Dabbing of napkins to corners of mouths. Otherwise, total silence except for the fan.

  Finally, Grandpa Samuel leaned over to me and whispered, “Pass me some of that watermelon.” When I handed over the platter, I realized my grandfather didn’t have all of his fingers on his left hand. He was missing his entire forefinger, as well as his middle finger above the second knuckle.

  “Dickie called to say he got caught up,” Serena announced abruptly, indicating the empty place setting I had noticed but was afraid to ask about.

  “Who’s Dickie?” my father asked.

  “My boyfriend, silly,” Serena said. “How do you think I survive these lonely nights?”

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend. Is it serious?”

  “At my age, Brother Jones, any relationship is serious.”

  “How old are you?” Grandpa Samuel blurted out, just when I thought he wasn’t tracking the conversation.

  “That’s not a polite question to ask a lady, Daddy. But since you don’t remember a thing about my arrival in this world, apparently, I’ll tell you. I’m five years younger than Brother Jones, and he is thirty-nine. Can you do the math, Daddy?”

  “I can do math,” Grandpa Samuel said, irritated.

  “You have to eat more than watermelon.”

  I looked over at Grandpa Samuel’s plate; it was piled high with watermelon and only watermelon.

  “But I love watermelon!” Grandpa cried.

  I found it difficult to keep from guffawing. Grandpa was like a comic book character. His hands were big and his head was big and his hair was everywhere, and when he said “love,” he threw up his arms—and I couldn’t help but stare at his missing fingers.

  “Do you see?” Serena said to my father and me. “This is what I have to deal with every day. Sometimes he’s here, sometimes he isn’t. He has to write things down to remember them, and even then—”

  “I love watermelon!” Grandpa cried, continuing his protest.

  Serena made a face at us, showing her exasperation.

  “Take some chicken,” she said.

  “I don’t like chicken,” he whined. “It has tendons.”

  “All animals have tendons, Daddy,” Serena said. “Tendons and ligaments. Sinews and gut. Fibers and connective tissues. Bones are connective tissue, did you know that, Trevor? I bet you’ve already learned that in biology class. We think of bones as steel rods in our bodies, but, in fact, they are pliable, entirely flexible organs that serve important functions beyond structural integrity, like producing both red and white blood cells.”

  We fell silent. All of us seemed stunned by Serena’s impromptu lecture on bones. And maybe that was her point. Maybe that was how she dealt with Grandpa Samuel’s outbursts about tendons.

  “Just as bones must be flexible,” she went on, “so we must be flexible in our relationships in order to achieve harmony. We must acknowledge that relationships are dynamic things—always changing—and sometimes they come to an end. You can speak to that, can’t you, Brother Jones, with your recent separation from Rachel?”

  “It’s not actually a separation,” he said.

  “No? What is it, then? She’s in England and you’re here. That seems awfully separate to me.”

  “I mean, legally we’re not separated,” my father said, glancing at me.

  “Laws are made to regulate the economy, Brother Jones,” Serena said, “not affairs of the heart. Legally or not, you are separate from your wife, am I not correct?”

  “But they’re getting back together,” I blurted out, causing Serena to look over at me.

  “It’s just a break,” I confirmed. “It’s not forever.”

  “As I said, relationships are dynamic things,” she said with a shrug, suggesting I had proven her point for her. “Please take some chicken, Daddy. You need your protein.”

  “I don’t like chicken—”

  “You have to eat something.”

  “Is this house haunted?” I asked, trying to steer the topic away from tendons.

  Serena continued eating for a moment before she replied, “Are you afraid of ghosts?”

  “No.”

  She took more potato salad and then pointed to the platter of fried chicken.

  “Chicken,” she said to Grandpa Samuel.

  “Tendons,” he replied, pouting.

  “Why do you ask of ghosts, my nephew?”

  “Because I heard something. I think I heard a voice.”

  “A house like this talks to you,” Serena said. “It has a lot of things to tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Riddell House is nearly a hundred years old,” Serena said with a shrug. She picked up her fork and took a bite. “Think of all the peo
ple who’ve walked across this floor. The floor knows them all; I don’t. Your grandfather hears dancing at night upstairs in the ballroom. But he suffers from dementia, so no one pays attention to him.”

  “So Riddell House is haunted?”

  “It depends on how you define the term ‘haunted.’ ”

  “Serena, please stop,” my father said.

  “Ben is nervous,” Grandpa Samuel muttered. He stood up and went to the telephone table, took a pen, and wrote something on a Post-it note. He wrote very deliberately and with much concentration.

  “What’s he doing?” I whispered to Serena. “Who’s Ben?”

  “He can’t remember anything, so he writes things down on Post-it notes. It’s all gibberish; none of it makes sense. They say in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease, your brain resembles a damp sponge. Dwell on that image for a moment or two.”

  “This is important,” Grandpa Samuel cried, lifting his face to the ceiling. He finished writing his note and returned to the table.

  “Where were we?” Serena asked, rolling her eyes. “Oh, yes. The question of haunting. Jones, haven’t you had the talk with Trevor?”

  “What is the talk?” I asked.

  “The talk about states of being, states of awareness. We had the talk around the dinner table nightly when your father and I were young. Our mother lectured us about it incessantly. I mean, there’s so much we don’t know, how can we consider ourselves to know anything at all? Daddy, I really must insist that you eat some chicken.”

  Serena picked up a piece of fried chicken with her tongs and placed it on Grandpa Samuel’s plate. He recoiled and shoved the thigh off his plate onto the tabletop.

  “Is there an entity in this house?” I asked.

  “Define ‘entity,’ ” Serena said. “We must use the proper nomenclature. Terminology can be confusing unless we’re agreed on the definitions.”