The Guncle

by Steven Rowley

Patrick fluttered his feet, as if miming timid steps into an uncertain future. “We’ll see.” He was acutely concerned with the kids’ ghostly presence in his own house after they returned to Connecticut. The warmth of a snuggle at bedtime. The faint echo of a laugh from the pool. He refocused his attention on the sky and tried hard to nudge such thoughts from his mind. “You know who will be there? Your dad.” Nice pivot, he thought.

  Maisie interrupted him. “Grant, you look this way, and I’ll look that way.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “GUP!” Maisie bellowed. She didn’t want to miss a single flash in the sky.

  “Let him do as he will, upside-down cake.” All summer he had failed to find the right nickname for Maisie; her preference for the pineapple float provided the only inspiration.

  “I don’t like it when you call me that.”

  “Really?” The name was growing on Patrick, but he was also happy to let it go. “Is there anything you want to do for your dad when he comes home?”

  Grant rocked back and forth on the Pegasus. “We could draw him pictures. Or make a thign.”

  “A what? A sign?” Patrick scratched his chin. His skin felt tight, dry from too much time in the pool. In the heat it reminded him of how he felt as a child after a day in the ocean, the salt tightening his skin just enough to imagine he was trapped inside someone else’s body. “‘Welcome Home’? That sort of thing? That’s not a bad idea.” A few bars of Ace of Base ran through his brain. I thaw the thign.

  “We still have the Christmas tree up. Maybe we could have Christmas again!”

  Patrick smiled; Christmas was in danger of becoming a year-round event. “Welcome-home presents are fun, Maisie. We could put them under the tree without having it be a full-blown holiday.”

  “But then we don’t get presents!” Grant was not falling for this.

  “You just got presents! You both got presents all summer. Bikes, swim attire, pool floats, wisdom, time with me. A DOG. You must be so sick of presents by now.”

  “MORE PRESENTS!” Grant hollered, and Marlene looked up from her nap and yipped, as if she understood the suggestion that she was herself not enough.

  “If you get any more gifts you won’t be able to take them all home with you,” Patrick argued, hoping reason would win out. “You’ll have to leave them here with me, and then they’ll be mine.”

  Grant took his hand. “No, mine. For when we come visit you.” The accompanying look he gave his uncle was so sincere, Patrick felt his heart swell three sizes, smashing some invisible Grinch-like box that had kept him stunted until now.

  “We could get a cake,” Maisie suggested. “And make a wish for Dad.”

  “Jeez, you kids like all the greatest hits.” Yet, cake was a celebration food—it set a positive tone. And it was a whole lot easier than another round of presents. Sometimes the greatest hits are great for a reason. “Okay. But your father likes pie.”

  Maisie’s face soured. Even with her unorthodox taste in desserts, pie seemed like a bridge too far. “Pie is hot. Too hot for summer.”

  “Not key lime.”

  “Chocolate!” Grant yelled.

  “Okay, good grief. One of every cold pie we can find and then everyone will have a choice. Satisfied?”

  “Thnowman pie.”

  “Snowman pie? What’s that?”

  Grant shrugged, it just sounded good.

  “Here’s what I was thinking,” Patrick offered. “We could do a number.”

  “What number?” Grant asked. “Eleven?”

  “An eleven o’clock number, bravo!”

  “I don’t underthtand.”

  “A musical number. You know, a song that we choreograph. And sing. Something up-tempo to perform for your dad.”

  “Like what?” Maisie asked, with the slight disgust she usually reserved for girl’s clothing.

  Patrick thought about bribing them with an offer to film it and put it on YouTube, but this was the end of his reign. Their father was coming home, and it would no longer be up to him. He shouldn’t insert himself so heavily in their reunion; now was time for him to step back. As much as he delighted in the image of the kids belting, “I’m Still Here” from Follies, wearing oversized oxfords like Elaine Stritch, it probably wasn’t in the cards. “Remember you asked me once, when is the last day you’re a child?”

  “No,” Grant said, unconcerned. The kid asked so many questions Patrick wondered if he even tracked them as they came out of his mouth.

  “You asked me the first week you were here. I was just curious if you thought you were still kids. After this summer.” Patrick swept his hair back from his forehead.

  “Oh, yeth,” Grant replied without so much as thinking. “I’m only in firtht grade and I like to sleep with a night-light.”

  “Some adults like to sleep with night-lights.”

  “They do?”

  “Sure,” Patrick offered.

  “But they’re not in firtht grade.”

  “No. I’ll give you that. Maisie? What about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  “Do you think you’re still a kid?”

  Maisie stared at the sky as if the answer would pour out of the Big Dipper. “I think so,” she said. “But not a little one.”

  “I couldn’t agree with that more.” Even he had noticed a marked change in her over the past couple of weeks, a fearlessness. The way she spoke out. How she jumped in the pool. It was hard to pinpoint, but she had faced the very worst and Patrick saw in her a glimmer of recognition: she was a survivor.

  “What about you?” Maisie asked.

  “Am I still a kid?”

  “You don’t look like a kid,” Grant offered.

  “Gee, thanks.” He didn’t know how to answer Maisie’s question exactly. Kid as a word is open to interpretation; there were, for example, kids at heart. “I’m not a kid. But I’m not like most grown-ups, am I?”

  Maisie took her uncle’s hand, the two of them now connected as if they were in danger of floating apart. “What are you going to do after we leave?” she asked.

  Grant gazed up at his uncle as if he were the sky full of stars.

  “Oh. Well. Go back to doing whatever it was I used to do before you showed up.”

  “What wath that?” Grant asked. “What did you do before we got here?”

  “You know, in this moment I’m not really sure.”

  “I’m scared,” Maisie said.

  Patrick was taken aback. “To go home?”

  “A little.”

  “Me too,” Grant added, floundering on his float. “Do you have any rules? Guncle Rules. We haven’t had any of those in a while.”

  “Yeah,” Maisie agreed. “How come?”

  Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve taught you the important ones. At a certain point you have to make up the rules on your own.”

  And just then they saw it—a ball of fire light up the sky. This was no mere shooting star, this was something trying to penetrate the atmosphere. To get to earth. To get to them. Even Patrick scrambled to a seated position, pulling himself up by inflatable claws. Maisie screamed in startled delight, but it was gone before they could do much more.

  Patrick’s heart pounded in his chest. “Did you see that, Grant?”

  Grant yawned as he nodded, and the way he leaned against the Pegasus’s neck, its head bobbed up and down, too. “That was Mommy.”

  Maisie sat up on her float. “Do you think?”

  Grant expressed certitude, even though to Patrick he seemed half-asleep. “It was.”

  “GUP?” Maisie was desperate for confirmation.

  Patrick was still stunned by what he’d seen. “I think it was. I think it was her saying hello.”

  Maisie’s excitement melted into skepticism. “H
ow?”

  Patrick rolled onto his side, propping himself up on a claw; the lobster float was more like an armchair, the tail curled under him like it had already been cooked. “Trying to say how much your mom loved you is like trying to describe the size of the universe. It can’t be quantified. Can’t be done. I’ll bet she finds a million ways to say hello. Your eyes just have to be open to seeing them.”

  For a fleeting moment, Sara had punched a hole in the sky. Or perhaps it was Sara and Joe both—maybe it took two spirits, and that’s why it was so bright.

  The night fell quiet again, until Grant started to snore. Maisie chuckled. She reached an arm out for her uncle again, and he reached back. They clasped hands, neither willing to tear their eyes from the heavens. With a hiss and a click that startled them both, water rained down on them like tears.

  “What the . . .” Patrick began, but it was simply the lawn sprinklers set to go off late at night, when the sun wouldn’t evaporate the water before it could seep into the ground. “RUN!” They charged across the slippery grass, the sprinklers finding new ways to twist and spit. Grant pulled a croquet wicket out with his foot from a game they had played the day before as Marlene shot through his legs.

  “It’th like the toilet!” Grant squealed with unyielding delight.

  “IT’S A WASHLET!” Patrick protested.

  He grabbed the day’s pool towels hanging over the outdoor furniture to dry. He wrapped both kids in a single giant towel and pulled them close. They quivered, but more from profound excitement than being cold.

  “You know you are loved here, too. Right? Your dad loves you and he’ll be back soon. Your grandparents love you. Marlene loves you. Aunt Clara loves you.”

  “And you love uth,” Grant said.

  Bundled like this in an enormous towel, they looked like fragile, conjoined twins. “Yeah, I love you, too.”

  The children shivered and smiled.

  “But don’t tell anyone,” Patrick instructed. “It’ll be our secret.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Maisie and Grant crouched beneath the window, sparks of energy, each igniting reactions in the other while stifling nervous screams. They crawled to the door to avoid detection as Greg exited his cab and made his way up the walk, then shrieked as they opened it, Grant stumbling backward, forgetting to let go of the knob. “WELCOME HOME!”

  Patrick scooped up Marlene as the kids threw their arms and legs around their father, squirming tentacles searching for a place to attach and never again let go. Patrick hung back, already displaced, a substitute without a classroom now that the teacher had returned. Guncles may rule, but fathers know best, as evidenced by the deep, heaving sobs the three of them shared, Greg burying his face into their tight huddle. Patrick held back his own tears. He thought perhaps things were better, that he had done some good this summer, but their pain was raw, visceral, and had this whole time been lurking, a mantle just under the crust. Perhaps he hadn’t accomplished much at all.

  When Greg looked up from their hug, his eyes were drawn to the center of the room. “You have a Christmas tree!” he exclaimed, wiping tears from his eyes as they darted from the tree to his brother and back to the tree again. “And it’s pink.”

  “We left it up for you!” Grant explained, raising just as many questions as it answered.

  “Thank you?” Greg turned to Patrick for further explanation, but his brother simply shrugged as he set the dog on the floor. Marlene cartoonishly charged in place until her legs gained traction, and then plowed forward to be part of the hug, jumping three times on her hind legs for permission to enter the scrum. “Who’s this?”

  “That’s Marlene!” Maisie said excitedly. “Her name was something else, but GUP changed it.”

  “I see.” Greg patted the dog on her head, with a formality that struck Patrick as amusing. His brother had always carried a slight fear of dogs, even smaller ones like Marlene. “Did he change your names, too?”

  “I’m Grantelope,” Grant said, and he growled. What he was imitating was anyone’s guess, although who’s to say what noise an antelope (or cantaloupe) makes when no one’s around?

  “It’s nice to meet you, Marlene.”

  Maisie hugged Marlene tight and said, “This is our dad.” Marlene squirmed and wiggled until she was free, but instead of running for safety, stayed right in the thick of their embrace.

  “Did you get us any presents?” Grant hung on to his father’s arm as he tried to stand.

  “It wasn’t the kind of place where I could really shop. But I’ll tell you what . . . We’ll get presents when we get home.”

  Maisie jumped in. “We have presents for you!”

  “And cake!” Grant added.

  “Pie, silly,” Maisie corrected.

  “Oh, yeah. PIE!”

  “You do? Boy, am I lucky. Were you kids always this nice?”

  “YETH!” Grant hollered.

  “It was our idea! And GUP’s,” Maisie declared, running over to Patrick. “His idea, too.”

  Greg gave his brother a gentle wave. Patrick waved back, cupping his hand slightly, like the queen.

  “Dad, the toilets here have remote controls.”

  “Washlets,” Maisie remembered.

  “They do?” Greg asked.

  “Yeah! They thpit at your butt.”

  At least he’d be remembered for something.

  Maisie grabbed her father by one arm while Grant grabbed the other, and they dragged Greg slowly toward the kitchen for pie.

  * * *

  The kids fell asleep before they were even in bed, secure in having their father back under the same roof; it was like they’d been holding their breath for three months and were finally able to exhale. Greg carried Grant to his room while Patrick carried Maisie to hers. It made him queasy, the idea that neither Maisie nor Grant had slept well the entire time they were in his care. Maisie in particular, with one eye on protecting her brother. But then Maisie started snoring shallow, gentle breaths, like a kitten might, and Patrick’s worry dissipated. He’d made it through. He had delivered these kids alive. Over dinner, as the kids had recounted the summer for their father, Patrick even softened his own harsh self-criticism. Perhaps he’d accomplished something after all. With them. Alongside them. For them. For him, even. And now his job was through and he could sleep, too, really sleep, perhaps for the first time in years.

  Patrick and Greg collapsed on the sectional, splayed across the couch like two stoned teenagers overwhelmed by the size of the world. “How was your time in the paddy wagon?”

  Greg groaned. He looked at the plates on the coffee table with the remains of pie-a-palooza; the sugar crash would come, but now he was riding the only high left available to him.

  “What does that mean?” Patrick asked. He pushed a plate with crust and whipped crème to the center of the coffee table with his toe to keep it from tempting Marlene. “You’ve got to give me something more than a groan.”

  Greg propped himself up on his elbows. “Do you want the real answer? Or the bullshit one?”

  Patrick gave this actual thought. Did he want to know if this was indeed behind his brother? Was it going to require a second stint to take? Would the kids be his again next summer, and perhaps the one after that? He fixated on the ceiling, as if the answer might reveal itself there. Instead he only saw a recessed bulb that needed replacing. “Real answer.”

  “It was hell. At least at first. I know in reality, it was a long time coming. Sara had been sick for years. But inside it felt like one day I had a happy family—a wife and two kids—and then the next day I had nothing.”

  “Not nothing.”

  “They gave me slippers,” Greg offered. “But otherwise, it felt like nothing. It was like a reverse Wizard of Oz. I was living a full Technicolor life, and then woke up trapped in a nightmare that was devoid of all color
, with a cyclone bearing down.” He smirked. “You have a lot of time to think. It’s easy to get maudlin.”

  Patrick placed both palms against his eyes and pressed hard. “That’s because everything in there was beige.”

  “It was so confusing. I was there against my will, even though it was my will that I was there. I don’t know how to make that make sense. It had this smell.”

  “I was there. I smelled it.”

  “I’m not sure that you did. It creeps inside you, slowly, over time, until you feel like you can’t take it. Your nose is burning, and your lungs are on fire, and you’re screaming, but no one can hear you because it’s all on the inside.”

  Greg reached behind his head to fluff a pillow. Patrick was grateful he’d tossed the sequined pill-ow at Christmas so that Greg wasn’t confronted with its tackiness. “And then?”

  “I don’t know. Around day nineteen it clicked. It was like for eighteen days everyone was speaking a foreign language. I was determined to keep my head down and just power through, convinced I could go back to my old habits afterward and just handle it better this time.”

  “That’s addiction talking.” Patrick writhed to reach an itch between his shoulder blades. “So what happened?”

  “On day nineteen I woke up fluent. Everything people said just started making sense. I didn’t understand every word, not at first. But certainly enough to get by. To have it mean something. I started to listen. And I recognized myself in everything they confessed. The lying, the hiding, the excuses. The shame.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Everyone there was an addict of some kind, and I mean everyone. The receptionist, the cooks, the janitors. There wasn’t a single person on the inside I didn’t have everything in common with. They all had crazy stories. I mean some things that would make your eyes pop. But I listened to them all. And if I hadn’t done it, or experienced it, I would have done it. I would have gotten there the way things were going. There was no question in my mind.”

  Patrick listened, but didn’t have anything to add that didn’t take something away. He could point out something about Joe, about Sara, and how he was fluent in the language of grief. But why do what he’d always done—pull focus from somebody else?