A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

“The truth, Trevor. Do you know what he said to me before he sent me away?”

  “ ‘You can take one bag’?”

  “Before that,” he said after scrutinizing me for assholery or snideness, of which there was no evidence. “He said: ‘Go away from here. You’re no good to me anymore.’ He might as well have killed me.”

  “Why did he say it, though?” I asked.

  “Because of what happened,” my father said.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I’d heard that before.

  “Isn’t that why you brought me here?” I asked. “To learn to talk about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s why you brought me here instead of letting me go with Mom, isn’t it? So I could look for things. So I could find things.”

  My father nodded to himself silently. “I’m not sure.”

  “I heard you,” I confessed. “You were fighting about it. She wanted me to go to England with her, but you said you needed me to go with you. You said you didn’t know why, but you felt it so powerfully, you couldn’t deny it. If she didn’t let you take me here, you would probably die. And with that kind of a threat, what was she supposed to do?”

  “Is that how it happened?” he asked. “I don’t remember.”

  “I remember,” I said. “That’s how it happened. Just because you don’t know the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

  “Then I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said softly, and he climbed the stairs for his room.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. I was going by instinct; I was following my intuition. I’d read enough fairy tales to know that, if my heart was true, I’d be able to do the right thing for all of us; I could save us all. And I’d read enough Kafka to know that, if I did it wrong, it might lead to the end of all things.

  – 18 –

  SERENA’S VISIT

  Later that night, I was writing down my thoughts about the wooden hand as well as why my father felt it was so necessary for me to accompany him on this trip, when I heard a soft knocking at my door. Serena opened the door without waiting for a reply.

  “May I come in?” she asked, poking her head into the room and then stepping inside.

  She was wearing a nightdress of thin, white cotton, held up by two narrow straps. It left her shoulders exposed, and her ankles and toes. She perched on the end of my bed. She had washed the makeup from her face, and her skin was scrubbed and vibrant. The oscillating fan that chirped like a bird as it turned left, but not when it turned right, blew a strand of auburn hair across her face. She tucked the hair behind her ear and smiled at me.

  “Do you have a moment?” she asked.

  No, I thought. I have no moments, because time has stopped with Aunt Serena.

  “Sure.”

  “I think it’s sweet that you’re bonding with your grandfather. I can see that he’s taken to you, and it’s important that he has this personal connection. But before you become too emotionally involved, I think it’s only fair to clarify what I’ve already mentioned to you: Grandpa Samuel is ill, and his prognosis is death.”

  “Isn’t everyone’s prognosis death?” I asked after a moment.

  “Hmm,” she agreed, smiling and nodding. “Clever. But your grandfather is going to die soon, and in a terrible way. He will lose sight of his immediate history first, and then his past. He won’t know who you are, and he may say mean things to you. You should know that.”

  “I know it,” I said. “It’s Alzheimer’s.”

  “You’re able to see him in a new light now, having met him for the first time. You see him freshly. You don’t know his past, his history. You haven’t seen what your father and I have seen. And so your little episode with the wooden hand tonight . . . Well, you don’t understand the implications. You don’t have a full understanding of the context.”

  “What is the context, then?” I asked quickly. I was already understanding Serena’s ways. Her twisted dialectic.

  “That’s what I’m here to tell you,” she said, again pushing the hair back from her face. “If you can spare a few moments.”

  “Sure,” I said, closing my journal and setting it down on the nightstand.

  She adjusted herself at the end of my bed, scooting back so she could lean against the wall, so her legs were straight before her and her blue toenails stared at me.

  “Are you listening?” she asked, waving her hand in front of me.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Grandpa Samuel wasn’t always as sweet as he is now; don’t be deceived by his easygoing nature. That’s his medication at work. Years ago, he was an angry, cruel man. Bitter and spiteful. After Grandpa Abe died and we realized how far in debt he really was, Grandpa Samuel fell into the bottle, as my mother would say. He became a heavy drinker, and it was not pleasant. He was angry all the time, flying into rage at the slightest provocation. He spent long hours in the barn, doing whatever it was he did there. I don’t know why Mother became ill then. I’m sure doctors would have an explanation for it, because that’s what they are paid to do—explain things within the context of their belief system. But, as the saying goes: If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

  “I’m not sure I get that,” I said.

  “Science bludgeons us with formulae and theories, but do the practitioners of science know more than anyone else? They say what they believe with great force—and they are sure to ridicule anyone who may hold an alternate opinion—but isn’t that a familiar defensive posture, which has been seen before in religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?”

  “You’re saying that science is a religion?” I asked.

  “I’m saying that sometimes there are triggers for disease that may be rooted in the metaphysical realm, and, when something like that occurs, medical science tends to dismiss the connection because it does not exist within the pages of their medical tomes. But let’s not get bogged down in such a debate this evening. My point—which is of some import to you, I believe—is that if one were to look for the source of Mother’s illness scientifically, one might say she had an entirely idiopathic disease and there is no accounting for its origin. But if one were to take a more holistic view, one might conjecture that Isobel grew ill because she took on the suffering of her husband, whom she loved very much.”

  “What was she sick with?”

  “Oh, ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. I’d assumed you knew—”

  “No,” I said. “And how do you make yourself sick with Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

  “She didn’t make herself sick,” Serena said patiently. “She allowed herself to become ill because she refused to resolve a psychic rift within her. Are you following me? You seem brighter than most, and that is the only reason I am confiding in you so. Mother’s need to save Daddy was so great that his decline and her desire to save him collided, like two oppositely bound freight trains on the same track. Eventually the truth will out.”

  “I see.”

  “Grandpa Samuel suffered mightily at the demise of the Empire. Your grandmother took on his suffering. Additionally, she protected your father and me. She held us. She shielded us from Daddy’s anger and rage and sickness. She kept us healthy and loving. And she always told us to thank those who were protecting us. It wasn’t only her, she told us. But the house. The Estate. Mother believed a spirit watched over the house and us, and that spirit’s energy was focused in the carved hand. She had us touch the hand—the one you and your father reinstalled this evening—each night before we went upstairs to bed. The three of us would pause before the hand. We would touch it and feel its warmth, and while we uttered no words, in our hearts we prayed for the hand to protect us.

  “As you can imagine, the system became symbiotic: the angrier Daddy grew, the more we depended upon the hand; the more we depended upon the hand, the angrier Daddy grew. We were together in our faith; he was left out. And so it we
nt until the system erupted. One night, Daddy could take no more. He was at his end, and surely his next step would have been to drink himself to death, which likely would have happened that very night, had he found no other outlet for his rage—I have a secret belief that, in an alternate universe, Daddy died that night of acute alcohol poisoning; a coward’s way to die, but effective nonetheless. But Daddy has always been more selfish than that; rather than take himself out, he destroyed the easiest target he could find. He fetched an ax from the barn, and, with great blows that shook the house, he chopped the hand from the newel in the foyer.

  “We heard the blows from the kitchen, and we ran in to investigate the commotion. He had a crazed look on his face, like he was possessed by the devil himself, as he swung the mighty ax—he swung his ax like a true logger would—until the hand broke free and flew into the air. Of course, Daddy was as drunk as a skunk, so, when the hand flew, so did he, spinning backward, falling and cracking his head open on the floor. The ax flew out of his hands and landed at our little bare feet, stabbing into the floor before us—you can see the scar of it to this day, if you don’t believe me. A terrible shudder echoed through the house. If you think we weren’t fearful for our lives, Trevor, you are sorely mistaken.”

  She paused for a moment and smoothed her dress, brushed back her hair. I was completely absorbed in her story and sat staring at her.

  “Daddy gathered himself and the severed wooden hand and left the house,” she continued after an appropriately dramatic pause. “Blood was trickling down the back of his neck from where he had hit his head. He left the ax, we don’t know why, and Brother Jones eventually took it downstairs into the basement so we wouldn’t have to see it again. We didn’t see Daddy for days after that. We went about our business, because that is what people do. But we all felt—Mother, Brother Jones, and I—that our hearts had been cleaved from our chests with the cleaving of the hand.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “When Daddy finally returned, we accepted him into the family as if nothing had happened, because that’s what Mother asked of us.”

  “But why? Why would she ask you to do that if he was so mean?”

  “Mother felt it was her duty to save him. It was her duty to cure him. That’s when her illness grew. And it grew quickly.”

  “She took on his illness.”

  “Her illness had been brewing, obviously,” Serena said. “But she had hidden her pain. After the hand was taken away, the illness spread very quickly. Soon she was bedridden. Soon after that, she was dead.”

  “That’s terrible,” I whispered. “For her to die like that.”

  “It was her path,” Serena told me. “It’s not for us to judge. No one knows why it was her path. One might argue that it was what she could do to save him; after she died, Daddy stopped drinking entirely. Since that day, he has refused to touch a drop.”

  I cocked my head at that, knowing about the “medicine.” Serena stopped speaking and raised her eyebrows, inviting my question, but I thought better of asking it.

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  “Of course. Even sober, Daddy saw his own guilt reflected in the eyes of his children—your father and me—and he couldn’t stand living with his shame. Your father was sixteen, I was only eleven. That was how Grandpa Samuel justified sending your father away. Brother Jones was old enough to go out on his own, he said. I was still young; I was a child. I didn’t come to the realization that he kept me with him because he needed a servant until much later—until I was already enslaved. And while Daddy still felt his shame about Mother’s death, at least he could resent me for my presence, which he always has.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried, Trevor. Believe me, I’ve tried. But I am my mother’s daughter, and so, on some level, I want to make him well, too. To honor her, I suppose. And I’ve stayed because I’ve always had faith that Brother Jones would return to save me, as he promised me he would.”

  After a long moment, she sighed and clapped her hands against her thighs. She scooted herself forward on the bed and stood up.

  “It is a dark history we share, my nephew,” she said, looking down upon me. She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “The hand has been returned, which is your doing, I know. Because the blood that flows through me, as well flows through you. So I know everything you do. You and I are Riddells, Clever Trevor, and nothing can separate us. No one knows what Daddy’s reaction will be to the returning of the hand; perhaps he won’t even notice. But you should be aware, as you pursue your investigations, that waking a sleeping giant is not always the best way of achieving one’s goals. Which leads me to wonder if you know what your goals are, Trevor. Do you?”

  She looked at me again, at length, to let me settle on the question and begin to contemplate the answer.

  “But I suppose that’s a topic for another conversation,” she said breezily. “Good night, my dear. Sleep tight.”

  She turned off the overhead light as she left the room. I tossed and turned but could not get comfortable. My mind was churning. Yes, I knew my goals. Of course I knew my goals. I wanted a father and a mother and at least a shot at having some kind of happiness in my life.

  – 19 –

  THE SEARCHERS

  When I was a boy, my mother told me that my father had a feel for wood. That was why he was so good at building wooden boats, she told me. Wood was in his blood. He was descended from a long line of loggers and timbermen, and so he knew the inner thoughts of trees.

  I believed her because I believed everything my mother said was true. But what did that mean to a seven-year-old kid? Your father has a feel for wood? When I imagined “loggers and timbermen,” I thought of plaid flannel shirts and bushy beards. But that wasn’t the Riddell family at all. It turns out I was descended from a long line of businessmen and deal makers and profiteers. Not a flannel shirt among them, except for Ben.

  But that night at Riddell House, when my father returned the carved hand to the newel where it was supposed to be, he did it in a way that was at once reverential and deliberate and confident. My father knew something. I could see it in his eyes. He knew what was right about the world he was in. He knew what was supposed to happen, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen my father with that look when he wasn’t holding a piece of wood. So I was pretty sure my mother had told me the truth: wood was in my father’s blood.

  I wasn’t sure what was in my own blood when I was fourteen. I hoped I was like my father, and that there was something—not wood, but something else; words, maybe; stories—something I could touch and, when I touched it, it was different than when other people touched it. I wanted very badly to have an affinity for something that would become transcendent when I held it in my hands. I don’t know that I’ve ever found that thing; sometimes I suspect I have, but then I doubt myself. Perhaps I’m looking for it still.

  Perhaps that’s what life is about—the search for such a connection. The search for magic. The search for the inexplicable. Not in order to explain it, or contain it. Simply in order to feel it. Because in that recognition of the sublime, we see for a moment the entire universe in the palm of our hand. And in that moment, we touch the face of God.

  * * *

  Walking down the hallway toward the foyer, I came upon Grandpa Samuel standing before the wooden hand. He looked perplexed, but not agitated or distressed. I stopped midstep and silently watched my grandfather.

  He stood for several minutes, not moving at all. And then he reached out and touched the carving with one hand, then with both hands. He ran his hands over the dark, smooth wood: the fingers, the wrist, the globe.

  He dropped his hands to his sides and turned to me. His T-shirt said: FREE NELSON MANDELA.

  “Who are you?” Grandpa Samuel asked calmly. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m Trevor. Your grandson. I’m here because it’s the only place we have to go.”

  Grandpa Samuel nodd
ed, then turned and left the house through the front door.

  After he had gone, I scanned the floor and I spotted it. The deep gouge of an ax. The scar. Darkened from the years, but unmistakably the scar about which Serena had spoken.

  * * *

  They say that, to a hummingbird, people seem like stone sculptures. The metabolism of hummingbirds is so fast that time is different for them. Their wings move too quickly to be seen by us; surely our hulking presence must make us look like trees to them: massive and rooted. So maybe hummingbirds are to humans as humans are to trees. We think of trees as static creatures, but they live for thousands of years, and so their scale of time is different than ours. Or, I should correct myself. Some trees live for thousands of years. Only a few, really. Many die of natural causes: landslides, fires, disease. The vast majority are chopped down by people and pulverized in gnarly chewing machines, their remains bound with formaldehyde-based glues and pressed into chipboards that will be used to build nurseries so our children can grow up in a toxic, outgassing environment and develop horrible health problems as they age, yet will be unable to sue anyone for damages because, well, there simply aren’t enough studies to prove anything conclusively.

  Riddell House and its eternal groaning. The old house sighed and groaned and shifted as if it were constantly moving, shrugging itself toward the bluff like an old man, mumbling and complaining with each step. I noticed it especially at night. Sometimes I lay awake and thought I could hear the house sinking into the ground—or the ground swallowing the house. I wasn’t sure which.

  The night after the wooden hand had been restored to the newel in the foyer, however, it wasn’t the house that made noise but one of its inhabitants. I heard footsteps in the hallway and on the stairs at nearly 4:00 A.M., so I went upstairs to the ballroom. I found my father standing in the middle of the dance floor wearing only pajama bottoms. He didn’t notice me.

  He was waiting for her to dance for him, like she danced for Grandpa Samuel. It was clear to me. We hadn’t come to sell off the place, or to reconcile with Grandpa Samuel. But to see if Isobel might still be there. And the footsteps Grandpa heard were the evidence my father needed to believe she was here. So he waited.