A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  “Isn’t there some kind of therapy?”

  “There’s no treatment. There’s no cure. There is only death. But let’s not dwell on such talk. I have instructed my attorney to draw up my will. It will name you as my sole heir. Everything I have, everything I own, will pass directly to you when I die. Not to your father or anyone else. To you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not quite fathoming the implications of her declaration.

  “I want you to have the life I never had,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “I want to give it to you. But I need something in return. We call that quid pro quo. Do you know what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s Latin for ‘if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ Do you like getting your back scratched, Trevor?”

  “Sure,” I said hesitantly.

  “So do I. What do you say to me scratching your back if you scratch mine?”

  “It sounds kind of creepy, honestly,” I said, picturing her and my father dancing to Billie Holiday.

  She laughed and stood up. She took the folder, returned it to the safe, closed the door, and spun the dial. She returned the painting to the wall.

  “Then I guess we’re done here,” she said, turning back to me. “You are dismissed.”

  I sat for a moment, unmoving. Promises to dead men. Lots of money. Parents falling back in love once the burden of their financial stress was lifted. My lack of life experience.

  Serena didn’t move, either, she just smiled at me. Finally, she cocked her head and raised an eyebrow.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh,” she said innocently, returning to the leather chair. “So you want to play. I was under the impression . . .”

  “What do you want?” I asked again.

  “I want to fulfill my destiny,” she said. “I want to sell the house and land, as my grandfather instructed. And then I want to travel the world. My world has been so narrow; I want to broaden it before I die a horrible death. I’ve been a workhorse, tied to a grinding wheel, walking in circles my entire life; I want to be free of it so, when I walk, I find myself in a different land. Dickie has put together a very smart proposal, which will bring in many dollars. Your father was supposed to get Daddy to sign the power of attorney by now, but he has failed. I need you to do it.”

  “Why would Grandpa Samuel sign it for me if he won’t sign it for you or Dad?”

  “In our family, fathers hate and distrust their sons, but they adore and revere their grandsons. Your grandfather hates your father. He banished him from the family twenty-three long years ago, as you know. I’ve tried to soften the hatred over the years, but, apparently, it hasn’t worked. So you need to get Grandpa Samuel to do it . . . for you.”

  “Does my father hate me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Does he?”

  I wondered if he did. Or if he didn’t outright hate me as a person, did he hate me as a concept? The fear that my father might hate me struck me as very real in that moment. Maybe he wanted to be rid of me; I was just a burden to him. I was trying to force him to stay with my mother when maybe that’s not what he wanted at all.

  “What’s more important to you?” Serena asked after giving me plenty of time to worry about my relationship with my father. “Your aunt, who is sitting before you, and the few final years of her tragically shortened life? Or a ghost? A promise to a dead man.”

  “Why don’t you sell things?” I asked in a final attempt to discover a logical reason to go against Serena’s plan. “The furniture, the rare books, the silver service, the painting of Elijah. I bet someone would pay a lot of money for that; it’s history.”

  “But that’s not really the point, is it?” she asked coldly. “That’s not the point at all.”

  “But it’s a question,” I said firmly.

  Serena smiled tightly at me and leaned forward, her elbows on the desk.

  “Check the music room,” she said. “There’s a rug with nothing on it. If you look closely, you’ll see three indentations—wear marks. That’s where the Bösendorfer stood, a valuable grand piano that was purchased by Elijah Riddell in 1903. I sold it so we could have little things like food and electricity and gas for the stove. Creature comforts. Grandpa threw such a fit, I cannot describe it to you. He refused to eat for six days. Were you here for that?”

  “No,” I admitted reluctantly.

  “Then you’ll have to trust me when I tell you I can’t ‘sell things’ until we can get him out of the house. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. Do we have an agreement?”

  After a moment, I nodded, admitting to myself that the immediate needs of the living probably did outweigh the wishes of the dead, though not necessarily in every situation.

  Serena opened a desk drawer and removed a thin folder. She stood up, circled around to the front of the desk, and handed the folder to me.

  “This is a power of attorney document,” she said, standing before my chair. “It needs to be signed by Grandpa Samuel. But it must be signed in the presence of a notary public.”

  She then handed me a business card.

  “This is the number of a mobile notary service. They guarantee to be on-site within thirty minutes of your call. His passport is in the folder as well.”

  “Didn’t Dad have that?” I asked.

  “I told you,” Serena replied. “He didn’t get the job done, so he’s been relieved of his duties.”

  She looked at me and smiled a bit.

  “I think you can do the math on this, am I right?” she asked.

  I looked from her to the folder and back.

  “You’d have to promise to put him in the nice place,” I said. “Kensington House. Not the bad place next to the Taco Bell.”

  She laughed.

  “Whatever gave you the idea I would put him in a below-average facility?” she asked. “You’ve been reading too much Eugene O’Neill.”

  Eugene O’Neill? I knew he was a famous playwright, but that was all I knew.

  “I’ve never read any Eugene O’Neill,” I said.

  “One day you will, and then you will know. Nevertheless, I give you my word that Kensington House will be Grandpa Samuel’s new home. It’s a graduated facility, so, as his condition deteriorates, they can accommodate his changing needs—as you know, his brain is like an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water: it is rapidly dissolving. I am touched that you’re so concerned about his welfare, even though you hadn’t met him until two weeks ago. You have a refreshing level of empathy and compassion that is quite uncommon.”

  She leaned forward and braced herself by placing her hand on my thigh; she kissed my cheek. Since I was sitting and she was standing, her cleavage was in my face again, and the scent of citrus oil filled my nose. I wondered if she really had the ALS gene, or if that was another of her tactics. Serena’s brazen manipulations.

  “Everyone loves a good back scratching,” she whispered, and then she brushed my cheek lightly with her fingers. “Sorry,” she said. “You are too cute to resist.”

  I felt nothing as she went off, except that I knew I was over her. My first crush, gone already. And then my thoughts turned to the task I had been given, and whether or not it was something I could—or should—attempt to accomplish. Sure, it would be better for the living people, Grandpa Samuel included. And maybe, if I did it, I could end the Riddell cycle of a father hating his son. Maybe my father wouldn’t hate me if I delivered him his house.

  – 32 –

  BONFIRE OF THE MEMORIES

  My father had prevailed over the blackberry bushes, which were not bushes at all but snarling ropes of vicious, razor-sharp thorns that engulfed anything they came up against, swallowing trees and structures alike, evidencing the forest’s relentless desire to take back what was rightly hers. In a heroic display of his own relentless nature, my father had whipp
ed back those vines—beaten them down with a machete, a pickax, and a shovel. He tore up the roots, and with a power washer from Aurora Rents, he blasted clean an outdoor cooking structure known as the fire pit. It was a matter of principle for him. The fire pit was a piece of his childhood that he refused to allow to be forgotten. The house could go to hell, as far as he was concerned. The fire pit was important to save.

  And so, the day after I had gone to the dark side and pledged to help Serena, I helped the others carry bags of supplies down the hill and across the orchard. My father had already prepared a fire, which was truly a piece of architecture, and I was duly impressed. It was like a ceremonial funeral pyre or something. My father had never built fires when I was growing up. We never went camping, and we didn’t have a fire pit at the farmhouse, so I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen my father build a fire outside before. But this one was magnificent—the kindling sticks and the wedges of dried wood and the crumpled newspapers beneath, all bracing each other, leaning together to form a perfect cone of combustible material.

  “The design of a fire is important, Trevor,” Serena said to me as my father struck a match and lit a few corners of newspaper. “Air circulation is crucial. A fire needs to draw cold air in from the bottom to feed its insatiable hunger for fuel.”

  The fuel was extremely dry; it hadn’t rained since I had been there, and there was no telling how long before that. So the crackling began and the flames leapt, and soon, as Serena said, the kindling created a chimney; cool air was sucked in from below and rushed up to the top and, like magic—we had a bonfire.

  Stone benches encircled the fire pit, and we all took our places. Even Dickie was with us that evening, sitting next to Serena on a bench; Grandpa Samuel and I sat on another bench; my father sat by himself on the far side of the crescent. My father reached into the cooler, which rested on the bench next to him. He pulled out a beer and passed it to Dickie, and another for Serena. He looked at me.

  “What do you want? We have Coke in here,” he said of the cooler.

  “I’ll take a beer,” I said.

  My father looked at me hard, and then, much to my surprise, he twisted off the top of a beer and handed it over. I realized, then, that being an adult was just about bullshitting everyone around you. Just do things until someone stops you from doing those things, and then say, “Oh, that isn’t allowed?” I took a swig and didn’t like it. It was bitter, and not at all what I thought a beer would taste like. Bitter bread. I set the bottle down by my foot, and I must have made a funny face because my father didn’t look at me, but he said, again, “We have Coke in here.” I sheepishly handed him the beer in exchange for a Coke, and I felt like a dumb kid, but my father didn’t make a fuss about it, so neither did I.

  The fire was raging and loud. We sat, our faces and hands and arms baked by the inferno, and our backs and necks left to cool. It was after nine, but still light out, because Seattle was practically South Alaska in terms of latitude. For a long time we were silent, staring into the flames.

  “Mother loved a fire, Trevor,” Serena said eventually. “We built fires every weekend night, winter or summer, as long as it wasn’t raining, and sometimes even when it was raining, if it was only a drizzle.”

  “She liked a hot fire in the winter,” Grandpa Samuel echoed.

  “She did. She said fires were transformative. She told us fires provided light to lead souls through the darkness of our universe. Everything in this world begins with fire and will end with fire, and so it is through fire that we can find the answers to the riddles. Didn’t she say that, Brother Jones?”

  “She did,” my father agreed.

  “She was a very forgiving woman,” Serena said. “Mother was very forgiving, Trevor. I believe I inherited that trait from her. Your father inherited her impulsiveness and passion. I inherited her generosity of spirit, her forgiveness.”

  She looked at my father significantly. He avoided her gaze for a moment, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, but when she didn’t continue speaking, he grew impatient and looked up at her and nodded as if to say he understood that he had been forgiven for his transgressions, whatever they were. I knew. She was talking about their fight in the kitchen.

  “Daddy couldn’t start a fire with a blowtorch, but Mother?” Serena said. “She was very good at building fires. She taught your father how to do it. Isn’t this a magnificent fire, Dickie?”

  “Indeed, my love.”

  “I remember . . .” Grandpa Samuel said.

  “You don’t remember much, Daddy,” Serena said. “What is it you don’t remember this time?”

  Grandpa Samuel was silent for a bit, then he said: “I don’t remember.”

  “No, you don’t remember, and sometimes it’s best that way. Sometimes it’s best to start fresh. Every day, fresh. Living always in the present, unburdened by the pain of the past. Most of us drag around our misdeeds like giant dead birds tied to our necks; we condemn ourselves to telling every stranger we meet the story of our anguish and inadequacies, hoping that one day we will be forgiven, hoping that we will find a person who will look at us and pretend to ignore the ridiculous dead birds hanging from our sunburned and weather-beaten necks. And if we find that person, and if we don’t hate him for not hating us, if we don’t hold him in contempt for not treating us contemptuously, as we expect to be treated—nay, as we demand to be treated—well, that person will be something of a soul mate, I imagine. That’s got to be in the definition somewhere, don’t you agree, Trevor, my fellow bibliophile and reader of fine poetry? But not you, Daddy. Because you can’t remember. Sometimes I envy you, Daddy. I really do.”

  “No. . . .”

  “No, I suppose you’re right; I will never envy you. Did you remember what it was you wanted to say?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. It’s fine, Daddy. There are more terrible ways to die.”

  Silence again, and then Serena stood up and gathered the willow sticks that had been stripped down to green wood. She gathered the marshmallows.

  “The fire is still too hot,” my father said.

  “Oh, poo,” Serena said. “So we burn a few. It will take forever for the fire to burn down to embers.”

  “Fine.”

  He took a stick and poked the tip through a marshmallow, then another. He handed the stick to me, and I aimed it toward the fire.

  “Tell us about your wedding day, Brother Jones,” Serena said. “Sing to us, as we gather around the fire. Weave us a story from your memories.”

  “I don’t think that’s very interesting to anyone,” my father grumbled.

  “It is to me,” she replied. “And I don’t think anyone else minds.”

  “I really don’t want to.”

  “It’s important for you to reveal yourself to your son,” Serena said significantly. She turned to Richard and instructed him to pass me the chocolate bars and the graham crackers. “And now tell us what it was like, Brother Jones. It was in England, we know that much. Tell us.”

  It was clear that my father felt uncomfortable, but it was also clear that he couldn’t resist Serena’s urging.

  “It was in an old stone manor house,” he said. “In an old, rolling country club.”

  “A magical place!” Serena said. “A place that will last forever.”

  “Frayed around the edges,” my father clarified. “There were seams showing.”

  “Like this house.”

  “Not nearly as bad, but . . .”

  “Tell us.”

  “The day started with rain showers, but then it got very beautiful, sunny and warm. Then it cooled off again.”

  “The service was outside?”

  “No, in the chapel. The reception was outside, while it was clear. We ate dinner in the dining hall as the fog rolled in.”

  “Oh, the fog!”

  “Drama,” Richard observed.

  “Yes, drama!” Serena exclaimed. “Magic!”

  She nodded, satisf
ied, and passed napkins to me, since I was struggling with my melted chocolate and gooey marshmallow concoction.

  “She wore a white dress,” my father said without prompting. “I wore a suit; it was the first suit I ever owned. She was so beautiful. She had her hair put up, which I always liked because it showed off her smooth, sloping neck. Even still, when I see her from across the room and she has her hair up, I feel something. Happy. I don’t know. Contented.”

  “I think we call that love, Jones,” Serena said. “That feeling we can’t quite describe but thirst to possess.”

  “Her family was . . . funny, you know. They’re a very caustic family, and I hadn’t met many of them before the wedding. It’s all about dry British humor with them, like you’d see in a movie. But they love each other, you can tell. There’s a connection between them that’s deeper than all that.”

  “Like you had with Mother.”

  “Something like that, I guess,” he said. “I liked being with her family.”

  My father stopped talking and stared into the fire, and I could have sworn I saw tears pooling in his eyes. I was moved by it.

  “Where is she now?” Richard asked loudly, breaking the moment.

  Serena glared at him.

  “Your wife,” Richard clarified in a more suitable tone. “I’m afraid I don’t know her name.”

  “Rachel,” my father answered.

  “Yes, Rachel. Where is she now? Why isn’t she here, sharing this seminal moment with us?”

  “She’s in England,” Serena explained. “She and Jones are taking a bit of a break. There have been many changes recently, so it only seemed right to accommodate Rachel’s request for space. Isn’t that right, Jones?”

  “Magic doesn’t last forever,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid,” Serena said soothingly.

  “I’m not, I don’t think. Afraid of what?”

  Serena stood up and circled around the far side of the fire, behind the flames, to the cooler, which she opened to remove a bottle of beer.

  “It’s okay to want things,” she said, kneeling next to the cooler, in front of my father; she put her hand on his knee. “It’s okay to change. We’re always so afraid. We live our lives in fear, like we’re children afraid of going to our first day of school. There is nothing to fear about the unknown. Tomorrow is not going to be the same as yesterday, so why do we need it to be?”