A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  “You told me you hated Ben,” I said. “Remember that? When I asked about him before, you said he gave away the Riddell fortune or something.”

  Grandpa Samuel took a long drink of his medicine.

  “I ran into him today in the basement,” I continued. “Well, I ran into a pipe. But he came to help me. Does he ever help you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When does he help you?”

  “He keeps me company,” Grandpa Samuel said. “He sits with me when I can’t sleep and he tells me stories, and he keeps me company in the barn when I’m working.”

  “What kind of stories does he tell?”

  “He would climb the tallest trees. Not to cut them down, just to climb them. They’d use gaffs to get into the canopy, and then they would climb barefooted and bare-handed, up to the very top. No ropes or anything. It was very dangerous, but also very exciting.”

  “They?” I asked.

  “Harry,” he said. “Ben and Harry. They climbed together.”

  “You said bad things about Ben,” I reminded him. “But I didn’t believe them.”

  “Was Serena here?” Grandpa Samuel asked.

  “Yes. It was the three of us. It was on my birthday.”

  “Whenever I talk about Ben, Serena reminds me that I hate him,” he said. “Serena tells me the real truth.”

  “That he ruined our lives,” I said.

  “Yes. He ruined our lives.”

  “But he didn’t, did he?”

  Grandpa Samuel leaned in toward me conspiratorially. He glanced this way and that, and then he said: “He was just here. Didn’t you see him?”

  I shook my head because I was thinking too many things. Some of the notes were out of order. I rearranged them and studied them for syntax, and then I leaned back to see the big picture again.

  “Serena usually gives me more medicine,” he said.

  I looked up and saw that his glass was almost empty.

  “And then she sends me to bed,” he added.

  “I’ll give you some more.”

  “Will you heat it up? It’s better when it’s warm.”

  “But then you have to go to bed,” I said.

  When the milk was ready, I poured it into a glass and added medicine. I handed the warm glass to him.

  “He gets nervous when Serena talks about the house,” Grandpa Samuel whispered to me.

  “Who does? Ben?”

  Grandpa Samuel nodded. “I don’t think he likes what she’s doing.”

  I helped him up and started him toward the kitchen door, but then I thought of something.

  “Have you seen Isobel since she died?” I asked. “I know you’ve heard her, but have you ever seen her?”

  “I hear her dancing. Serena says it’s the rain. You hear the dancing, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  Grandpa Samuel smiled sheepishly and went off to his room; I turned my attention to the puzzle on the table. The Post-its, written out, were a letter. And it was addressed to me. The note at the bottom of the pile—which was the first one Grandpa Samuel had written—said: “Dear Trevor.” I ran upstairs to get my notebook; when I returned, I transcribed the series of messages. Some of them made no sense. Some weren’t even words, but doodles or markings. I did my best to make sense of the ideas:

  Dear Trevor,

  They say a child—a baby—doesn’t understand that his mother is distinct from him. A baby believes that he is connected to his mother on a fundamental level and that she is a part of him, an extension of her body as he pulls her hair and tugs on her breasts. Though he doesn’t understand how to control her, neither does he understand how to control his own fingers and toes, and so the mystery does not concern him. In his innocence, the baby understands the truth of this universe: we are all connected to all things.

  Fundamental

  a part of him

  An Extension

  As he grows, others impress upon him [best guess—hard to decipher] the limitations of being human. He is not connected to his mother at all, they say, and she might leave him at any moment. In fact, they say, she most definitely will. None of us are connected, they tell him. It is the sad truth of our existence.

  They say: “We live alone, and so, we die.”

  They tell him and they tell him and they tell him until he finally believes.

  And why?

  In exchange for all we have been provided in our temporal lives, all the advantages and skills and clever tricks packed into our bodies and minds, we have had to sublimate our inherent understanding; the truth is masked from us, to be returned when we have rejoined the larger aspect of nature. Only then will we remember. Until then, we will wonder where we end and others begin. We will feel a desperate need to connect with others because we do not see our connectedness, we only see our lack. We are the sad creatures of Aristophanes’ imagination: born with four arms, four legs, two heads, and then split in half, jumbled about, and condemned to spending the rest of our lives in search of our other halves. We will spend our lives in a furious quest to satisfy a thirst that is a phantom of our own imagination. It is not a thirst but a curse.

  We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)

  Of no significance . . . [I have no idea what this means. I think he was trying to say something that didn’t get through the static of Grandpa Samuel’s mind.]

  We must honor the [unintelligible—my guess, based on context, is “connections,” possibly “commitments”]. For the things we do have a consequence, whether or not we see it. Because we close our eyes to our obligations does not mean we are not obligated.

  Deliver The North Estate to the place from which it came. Return this place to Nature. I know that is what you have come here to do. When it is done, I will go on to my future and you will go on to yours. Until then, I will stay.

  May the Pacific live [unintelligible. Maybe “ever in you.” Maybe “upward in you.”]

  Ben

  I saw this scrawling of notes on the table and was amazed that Grandpa Samuel could have created it. I didn’t believe it was part of his imagination. No. He was acting as a conduit. Ben was speaking through Grandpa Samuel. The Mountains of California. All the other Post-it notes Serena said Grandpa Samuel had written. They didn’t quite make sense, and Grandpa Samuel didn’t know why he’d written them. They were all communications from Ben.

  I was so excited, I picked up the phone and dialed England. Three in the morning was the only time I could have a private call, and I needed to tell my mom about this.

  “Do you have a father?” she asked when she heard my voice. “Is anyone responsible for you?”

  “I’ll sleep late tomorrow, I promise,” I said. “Night is the best time in this house. At night, Grandpa channels my great-granduncle Benjamin.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And he hears Isobel, dancing in the ballroom. I heard her—I saw her, too. And the record player was playing on its own.”

  “Slow down, Trevor—”

  “Grandpa just wrote me a long letter on Post-it notes. But it wasn’t from him. It was signed Ben. Grandpa didn’t even know he’d written it.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “Was he in a trance or something?”

  “Yeah. He was scribbling and scribbling and then he finished. I asked him what he’d written, and he said he hadn’t written anything.”

  “Automatic writing,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It was popular in the days of Spiritualism. Around the turn of the twentieth century, people believed in many things like this. They had séances, read tarot cards, conjured spirits. Respectable people. Presidents, even. People hoped their loved ones could speak to them again, and mediums could provide this service, or at least pretend to. The mediums would claim to channe
l a spirit, and the spirit would write through them. It was called automatic writing. Didn’t you have a Ouija board when you were little?”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “It’s a parlor game. Silly stuff.”

  I considered her logic.

  “Gifford Pinchot married his dead wife,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Just because people say it isn’t true, does that mean it really isn’t true?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Dad lost his wedding ring,” I said. “I lost my watch. Serena lost her pie thing. I found them all in the basement, in a little cubby. And I found an old locket, too, with pictures of Dad and Serena when they were little. I think it belonged to Isobel.”

  “People drop things.”

  “And I saw a ghost. I saw Ben. He helped me after I hit my head.”

  “You hit your head?”

  “On a pipe in the basement. But I’m okay.”

  “Do you need to get it looked at?”

  “Serena says I’m okay. She used to be a nurse.”

  “Did she? I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t know, actually,” I said. “It’s hard to tell when she’s lying and when she’s telling the truth.”

  “Trevor,” she said, exasperated. “I’m very concerned about this. These middle-of-the-night phone calls. Your safety in that house. These ghosts you’re fabricating—”

  “I’m not fabricating.”

  “Do you need me to come out there? Do you need me to come save you?”

  Those words. That phrase. “You’ve come to save us.” That’s what Serena said to my father when we first arrived. My mother echoing her words stopped me dead. I realized she didn’t get what I was saying. She was trying to fix me; she wasn’t trying to understand me.

  “I don’t need to be saved,” I said. “Dad brought me here because I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing the saving.”

  A long silence hissed on the phone.

  “Trevor,” my mother finally said, “your father loved his mother very, very much. When she died, it crushed him. And then when your grandfather sent your father away, it broke your father’s spirit entirely. Your father doesn’t talk about what happened, you know that. But he told me once that his mother promised she would reach out to him after she died, if it were possible. We know that’s not possible, Trevor. But maybe your father and Serena have told you some stories, and maybe you’re getting swept up into something, some sort of mass hysteria of Riddell House. Don’t be swept up. You’re the smartest boy I’ve ever met. Use your intelligence to prevent yourself from being drawn into this world of spirit fantasy. Will you do that for me?”

  It was my turn to pause.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you’re lying,” she replied. “I believe you believe it. But that doesn’t make it true.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was so disappointed.

  “I should go to sleep,” I said.

  “You should. I love you, Trevor. More than you can possibly imagine.”

  I hung up the phone, gathered Grandpa’s Post-it notes, and went upstairs, unable to put my mother’s skepticism out of my mind. I felt the rift between us had grown with our conversation.

  As I climbed the stairs, I pondered the letter from Ben, especially the question of when my mother and I first grew apart. The things Ben wrote about children and their mothers sounded almost biblical. At what point did I realize that my mother’s breasts were not my own? At what point did I understand that my inability to control her wasn’t because of my own incompetence, but because she was a different person than I? Was that my moment of original sin? Was it the same moment I realized that I could die, and that death meant I would cease to exist entirely? Not that I would still be here, just invisible, which is what I figured all kids thought about death. But that I would be absent in a more substantive way. And was that belief an artificial construct of my culture? Was the pre-self-conscious child actually the correct child? Was it really like Ben explained: the membrane is thinner than we think; all things are connected in all directions in all time?

  We are all connected—I believed it then and believe it still now—at least in an energetic sense. And who’s to say this energy is not real? We can’t see gravity, either, yet we don’t deny it. We can’t see magnetism, yet we don’t question its forcefulness. So why, then, when people—spiritual people—talk about a force or a substance that binds us all, that unites us all—when these people talk about souls—why do we dismiss them as charlatans?

  The more I considered those ideas that night, the more I was swayed by fatigue, and I felt my eyes needed to close. I turned off the lights and climbed into bed and pulled up my sheets. As I swooned into the depth of sleep, I heard the door to my room open and then close. I heard footsteps across the floor, and then I heard someone settle his weight onto the desk chair. I tried to lift my head, but I couldn’t. I tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn’t open. So I relaxed. Because Ben was in the room with me, watching over me. And Ben would protect me.

  – 25 –

  THE DILEMMA

  I awoke the next morning, feverish with a need to know more about Ben and Harry. I understood who they were and why they loved each other so much, but I needed to understand why The North Estate was so important to Ben. Why of all places did he want this place returned to the forest? Why not any of millions of other acres owned by his father? I understood the idealism. I understood that his gesture was symbolic, as Serena said. But symbolic of what? Simply of the destruction his father had wreaked on the environment? Or was there something deeper?

  Before I even got out of bed, I picked up one of Harry’s journals . . .

  April 21, 1904

  Ben and I had been called to his father’s city house on Minor Avenue in Seattle, in a neighborhood where only the richest families lived. It was a grand mansion, with columns and flutes and decorative moldings in the Greek revival style so common among Seattle’s transplanted wealthy citizens. The finer details of the house’s architecture were lost on me, I admit, since I have no education in such things; so while the scene was nearly overwhelming, I fixated on something else entirely. Like a child, I was most impressed by the fire: gaslights—seemingly everywhere—glowing so brightly that the house looked like it was aflame inside. I was mesmerized by the dancing flames.

  We were three for dinner. Dish after dish was served, a bisque made with Dungeness crab, followed by salmon gravlax on toast points, followed by a chunky duck pâté, a salad, and then a loin of lamb with braised fiddlehead ferns and blackberry compote. The food was rich and decadent, and new bottles of wine were opened with each new flavor, so that I could barely look at the food when it came, wondering how much I would have to eat to seem convincing, while Ben pushed away a plate entirely untouched for every plate he scraped clean, and he drained every glass of its wine. In contrast, Elijah delicately sampled all food in moderation, sipped his wine, and dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. And no one said a word; a silent tension lingered in the air. When the meal was finished, we adjourned to the gentlemen’s lounge for digestifs; Elijah lit a cigar and cleared his throat.

  “I think Mr. Lindsey should get some experience at the mill,” Elijah announced, not looking at Ben or me. “He’s a bright boy and we should consider moving him into administration so as not to squander his natural intelligence. He’s learned enough in the field—God knows, the field can only teach so much! It’s time to bring him into the fold. Of course, his salary will be commensurate with that of our other managers, so he should do quite well for himself. And at such a young age, with no family to look after. Good for you, lad!”

  He sipped his drink, a grappa imported from Italy, Mr. Thomas noted upon pouring.

  “What do you think, Harry?” Ben asked sardonically, his leg looped over the arm of a club chair, swilling a glass of rye in a tumbler. “The old man appears to have
made you quite an offer.”

  I stumbled, uncomfortable with the dynamic; the undercurrents were thick. But I said nothing.

  “You need to know more in order to come to a well-informed decision, don’t you, Harry?” Ben suggested to me while smirking at his father. “There are pertinent details which need considering if you are to arrive at the naturally intelligent decision.”

  “Yes, I think,” I agreed. “I’m not sure I’m suited to mill work.”

  “Tell us more, then, Elijah Riddell!” Ben chirped. “Which mill are you thinking? Surely the Columbia City mill is too small to take on an inexperienced manager for this purpose. And I daresay, you would never tinker with Tacoma—O’Brien has that place running top-notch, the clever Mick! Same with Everett and Shelton, too. I suspect you’re thinking of putting Harry down in Oregon City! Tell me I’m wrong, old man!”

  “You are not wrong, Ben,” Elijah admitted, looking irritated.

  “And I suppose there’s a need for him immediately?” Ben asked.

  “In fact, there is.”

  “Because, if I’m not wrong, I believe our good friend Johnny McDermott retired quite suddenly last week.”

  “You are well abreast of the workings of our companies, Ben,” Elijah said levelly. “I am impressed that you take such an interest.”

  “I am my father’s son,” Ben observed, standing and refilling his glass.

  “Indeed.” Elijah turned to me. “Here is my offer. You will be associate manager for six months, and made full manager after that. If you stay at the mill for two years, you will become elevated to general manager. After five years, we will bring you up to headquarters in Seattle for grooming as a regional manager, with Southeast Alaska in our sights. The financials are quite good, performance bonuses included, housing allowance, et cetera. You’ll make more money in your first six months than you’ve made in your previous . . . how old are you?”

  “Twenty,” I said.

  “Twenty,” Elijah echoed, shaking his head sadly. “That’s my offer. What will you do?”