by Alex George
On the third floor we discovered a series of offices, home to old chairs and empty filing cabinets. There was a small laboratory, too, where we found ancient measuring scales, Bunsen burners, rubber tubes, and glass flasks of various shapes and sizes. I wondered which of these rooms Willa Cavich had worked in.
One thing I knew: ghost or no ghost, I did not want to be in the mill after the sun had gone down. We hurried through the rooms as darkness approached. When it was almost too dark to see, I stepped back out through the door Nathan had opened for me earlier. Nathan pulled the bolts back across and made his way up to the third floor. We had agreed that we wouldn’t leave the place unlocked.
We wanted to keep our secret to ourselves.
—
NATHAN AND I BEGAN to visit the mill most evenings after the park had closed. Each night I watched him climb up the iron ladder to the broken window. Nathan never seemed to consider the possibility that he might miss his footing and fall as he stretched his leg across the void and stepped onto the ledge. The further away from the ground he was, the more carefree he appeared. He would whistle and fool about and pretend to slip on a rung or lose his grip, and then laugh at my terror-stricken face.
After the hurried thrill of that first night, we began to explore the place more thoroughly. Soon we couldn’t wait to jump on our bikes and cycle to Bridge Lane at the end of each day. The summer stretched out ahead of us, and each evening now held the intoxicating promise of fresh discoveries.
It felt as if we had all the time in the world.
We even managed to stop worrying quite so much about Willa Cavich. For the first few nights the sour twist of fear lingered inside me as we moved between the massive fixtures on the ground floor. A lifetime of stories can take some shifting. I was still waiting to see the pale figure of a young woman standing in silence where her body had been pulverized.
One evening as we were nosing around on the second floor, Nathan gave a squawk of glee. “Robert!” he yelled. “Come and see this!” He was holding a long plastic paddle that was attached to the wall by a thick electric cord.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Watch,” he said. He pressed a button on the paddle. A large iron hook that was suspended from the ceiling began to edge toward us, clanking noisily as it went. Nathan pressed another button. The pulley above the hook started to turn, unspooling a thick wire cable. We watched as the hook disappeared through the hole in the floor until it was almost touching the ground in the loading bay below. Nathan pressed another button and the cable stopped its descent. He ran downstairs and jumped onto the dangling hook, wedging a foot into its huge claw. “Make me fly, Robert!” he called.
For the next hour, Nathan flew across the second floor and through the hole between the warehouse and the loading bay. I sent him up and down and back and forth across the mill’s vast, empty spaces. Nathan balanced on the hook and cackled with delight.
These flights became a regular part of our trips. Halfway through his second expedition, Nathan began to sing “Teenage Lust” by MC5 and followed this with a selection of other favorites from Liam’s record collection. None of these songs lent themselves very well to a cappella vocal performance, being more or less devoid of anything that might be called a melody—besides, it was the loud, muddy guitar riffs that made the tunes memorable, not their nuanced and thoughtful lyrics. Still, Nathan kept belting out those songs. His voice echoed off the walls as he sang about drug overdoses, suicide, manic depression, and lousy sex. It was the purest expression of joy he could muster.
Nathan never asked me if I wanted to have a go on the hook, but that was fine with me. I enjoyed being the pilot. He couldn’t operate the controls himself while he was flying. Just as I needed him to clamber up the iron ladder and let me into the building, now he needed me, too.
The old mill was every boy’s dream. As we roamed its enormous rooms, we were confined only by our imaginations. Our games were grander, our ideas bigger, our sense of adventure never more joyfully fulfilled. There we found a refuge from all that plagued us. I could escape Liam’s illness and the desperate heartbreak of my parents, and Nathan was able to forget about his father’s death and his mother’s slow unraveling behind her study door.
But no matter how much we relished our escape, the sanctuary offered by those redbrick walls wouldn’t last forever.
FIFTEEN
Liam went back into the hospital over Labor Day weekend.
It had been several months since he’d been admitted with pneumonia, and I had begun to hope that the worst might be over. Maybe, I told myself, his body had become more resistant to the threat of infection.
Then there was my father’s hand on my shoulder in the middle of the night, shaking me out of my sleep. The blue flash of the waiting ambulance lit up my bedroom wall. I stumbled downstairs in time to see my brother being carried out of the front door on a stretcher, my mother leaning over him. She climbed into the back of the ambulance with Liam, not looking back at us once. We followed behind in the station wagon. My father drove in silence, his face a mask of fear.
This time it took Liam five days to recover. I had been wrong, of course. His body wasn’t getting stronger. It was weaker than ever. Doctors flocked around his bed more urgently than before. They took my mother and father to one side and talked to them in low voices. Liam lay there, his face obscured by the respirator mask, and pretended to be asleep. The moment the doctors bustled out of the room, he opened his eyes and gave us a tired smile. And I thought: My brother is too good for this.
Nathan came to the hospital every afternoon. He sat on the end of Liam’s bed and the two of them talked about music. Sometimes Nathan performed his a cappella versions of their favorite punk songs, which always made Liam laugh so much that he ended up coughing into his respirator mask. I could feel my mother stiffen each time this happened, but she never said a word. Nathan told Liam all about Faye. We were about to start high school, and Nathan was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her every day. To my disbelief, Liam offered advice about how Nathan should behave when he and Faye started dating. Then he told Nathan about his college applications. Together they discussed different courses and debated the merits of various universities.
I listened to these conversations with increasing frustration. Liam and Nathan were both immersed in their own fantasies, speculating about futures that would never happen. Each of them was egging the other on.
Every night my father and I drove home while my mother stayed by Liam’s bedside, holding his hand while he slept. By the time Liam was well enough to leave, she was so tired that she could barely speak. Our departure from the hospital looked like a victory parade. As we made our way toward the parking lot, doctors smiled their congratulations, nurses applauded, orderlies gave us high fives. We stumbled numbly on.
We all knew that we would be back before long.
—
LIAM’S HOSPITAL STAY eclipsed both the end of my first summer season at Fun-A-Lot and the start of my career at Haverford High School. I was apprehensive about starting somewhere new, with different rules and rituals to learn. Worse still, I would have Hollis Calhoun to worry about again. I had kept out of his way all summer at the park, but there would be no avoiding him when the new term started. The prospect of creeping up and down school corridors once again made my stomach twist with bilious dread. I spent the first few days keeping a watchful eye on the crowds milling around ahead of me, on the lookout for Hollis’s lumbering gait. When I finally saw him heading in my direction, I stopped and braced myself. But there was no slap on the head, no sly punch to the gut. Hollis walked right past me. When the same thing happened again, and then again, I cautiously allowed myself to believe that he really had decided to leave me alone. Gone was the cruel delight on his face whenever he saw me; now he seemed utterly indifferent to my existence.
I still had other things to worry about, of
course. Within a couple of weeks of the start of school, Nathan’s infatuation with Faye had mutated into a full-blown obsession. The knowledge that he was spending all day in the same building as her seemed to untether him. Thanks to an illegal raid of the school secretary’s filing cabinets (which she unwisely left unlocked when she went to the staff room for her lunch), Nathan had acquired Faye’s class schedule. He knew exactly where she was every minute of every day. At the end of each class I would see him checking his watch, calculating whether he had time to scamper halfway across the school to catch a glimpse of her as she walked from one classroom to the next. He always cut it perilously close, and collected a handful of tardy slips each week, but he didn’t care. He became a poor lunchtime companion, distractedly scanning the lines in the cafeteria for Faye rather than listening to whatever it was I had to say. After school he would sit high up on the football bleachers with a dog-eared copy of an Albert Camus novel that he pretended to read while the cheerleading squad practiced. Faye danced and shook her pom-poms on the field below him, unaware of his surveillance. For all that his entire existence was now arranged around Faye’s schedule, Nathan showed no desire to talk to her, and for that, at least, I was grateful.
I became nostalgic for the summer just gone, missing those long evenings that Nathan and I had spent at the mill. Things had seemed so much simpler back then. We had been inseparable, kings of the world, unconquerable heroes of our private domain. Now the rest of the world was crowding in, deftly picking apart everything that had bound us together.
—
MY BROTHER’S ILLNESS WAS a reality that no amount of hopeful fantasy could avoid for very long, anyway. Moira tended to him every morning, and my mother kept the house as warm as an oven, but it was a battle that they would never win. In October Liam was admitted to the hospital again. We spent three days in the ICU, sitting around his bed, gazing down at this boy we loved. None of us had any words, so it was left to Liam to supply his own entertainment, and he always roped me in. Every so often he propped himself up on the pillows and raised a frail finger toward me. Leaving his respirator in place, he would start rasping and wheezing alarmingly, and then intone, “I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last.” Star Wars had been released that May. Over the course of the summer Liam had seen it eleven times. “The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.”
I knew my line. “Only a master of evil, Darth,” I replied.
At this my brother settled back, satisfied. “The force is strong with this one,” he declared.
My parents looked on, utterly baffled.
After that hospital stay, Liam’s condition continued to deteriorate. Moira’s visits took longer and longer. My mother lurked outside the bedroom door, glancing constantly at her watch. Every minute that she was kept outside was a minute with Liam that she would never have. Things were strictly finite now.
The Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, Moira came into the kitchen after she had performed her daily ministrations. My mother and I were sitting at the table.
“All done,” she said. “He’s in fine form today. Looking forward to the holiday.”
My mother said nothing. Usually by then the house would have been a riot of Thanksgiving cheer, but the boxes of turkey decorations had not been taken down from the attic this year.
“I know you’ll have a wonderful time,” continued Moira. “Lots of memories to cherish.”
“I don’t want memories,” said my mother.
“No, of course you don’t. I understand.”
“How can you possibly understand?”
“Mary,” said Moira softly. “Do you mind if I tell you a little story?” She sat down at the table. “I left my family in Dublin during the war, when I was twenty-two years old. I went to train as a medical orderly in a military hospital about forty miles outside London. That was where I met Ted, my husband. He was an American infantryman. He’d been shot in the leg during the Normandy landings. He was lucky to survive. A lot of his friends didn’t make it. He was so charming. All that American sass! And I never could resist a man in uniform.” Moira smiled. “We got married while he was still on crutches. His war was over—he was given an honorable discharge. We came to America, newlyweds. More than thirty years later, and here we both still are. Ted went back to college on the GI Bill. He’s a manager at a factory in South Portland. We’ve had a wonderful life together, but we were never blessed with children.”
My mother looked up at her then.
“Ted’s injury had made him sterile, you see. There was nothing to be done about it. It was just one of those things.” Moira was silent for a moment. “There are still days when the sadness of it makes me want to curl up into a ball.” She tucked a loose strand of gray hair behind her ear and smiled at my mother. “He’s a good boy, your Liam. Brave as anything, that one. My point is, I would have given anything to have someone like that to love. Not for a lifetime. Just for five minutes.”
“Not for a lifetime,” echoed my mother.
“We only get the life we’re given, Mary. Ted could have bled to death on that beach in Normandy and I would have had a different life—one far away from here, I don’t doubt. Maybe one filled with children and grandchildren for me to adore. But that wasn’t how it worked out.” She was quiet for a moment. “So, if you can, be thankful for all the love in your heart.”
“Even after Liam’s gone?” whispered my mother.
“Especially after he’s gone. You’ll go on loving Liam just as much as you always have, and that will be a gift, believe me. That love will see you through an awful lot. It will give you such strength.”
My mother had started to cry. “Even as it kills me?”
“But it won’t kill you, not really,” said Moira. “There’ll be times when you might want to run out into the traffic and end it all. But love and pain are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Sometimes that’s how we know we’re alive.”
We sat in silence for some time then.
“I’m not ready,” said my mother eventually.
“Of course you’re not, dear. Nobody ever is.”
“How am I supposed to let him go? How am I supposed to say good-bye?”
The nurse reached out across the table and took my mother’s hand in hers. I waited for her to respond—I had been wondering the same thing for years. But Moira knew there was no answer to that question. She just squeezed my mother’s hand. “Five minutes,” she said softly. “Five minutes of love. That was all I ever wanted.”
I thought a lot about what Moira had said, but she never sat down at our kitchen table again. When we saw her the following week at St. Mary’s she smiled at us and then looked away. Still, now there was a softness in my mother’s eyes when she saw her. One day I heard her whisper something under her breath as she waved good-bye to Moira.
“That poor woman,” she said.
—
ONE DAY IN EARLY DECEMBER, the school principal put his head around the classroom door and called my name during our weekly history quiz. I looked up in relief, and then I saw his face.
I packed away my books and scuttled past my classmates. In the principal’s office I stared numbly at the backpack between my feet. I heard my father’s hurried footsteps before I saw him.
In the ICU Liam was lying motionless in bed, half-hidden behind a jungle of machines. Two nurses were moving efficiently around him while my mother stood as close as she could. I recognized the nurses from our previous visits. One of them winked at me as she left the room.
As the door closed my mother turned to us. “The doctors say it’s pneumonia again.”
I heard the air escape from my father’s mouth. It was the sound of hope dying.
“They want to do a tracheotomy,” she said. “It will help him breathe.” She looked at her sl
eeping son. His wasted body barely took up any of the bed. The respirator covered his nose and mouth. He seemed peaceful enough.
My father gazed down at him. “If that’s what they say we should do, shouldn’t we do it?”
“A hole in his throat,” said my mother. “Once the tube goes in, it never comes out.”
“But if it will make him more comfortable—”
My parents looked at each other in silence for a few moments.
“Mary, please,” said my father.
I saw the agony on my mother’s face. Her ruined son, punctured still further. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
“No hole,” came a voice from the bed. As one we turned toward Liam.
“We thought you were asleep,” said my father.
My brother reached up and pulled the mask away from his mouth. “I don’t want them to put a hole in my neck,” he said, quite loudly.
“But it’ll be much easier for you to breathe,” said my father.
“I don’t want it,” said Liam again. “No hole, okay? No hole.”
“All right.” My mother put her hand over his. “We’ll tell the doctor.”
Liam slumped back on the bed. My parents just stared at each other.
There was only room for one plastic chair on either side of the bed. There was a more comfortable armchair by the window. My mother never left Liam’s side, but every so often my father and I swapped positions. We sometimes talked, but mostly we just watched my brother sleep. My mother gazed unblinkingly down at him, thirstily drinking him in. Sometimes my father had to look away. He spent a long time staring out of the window.
For the rest of the day my parents and I performed our sad minuet around the hospital bed. From time to time Liam would wake up, and then we all moved toward the bed, hungry for a piece of him. He lay propped up against the pillows and spoke haltingly, his words half-swallowed by the mask on his face.
