by Various Orca
But what was inside the package? What was this final message?
NINETEEN
A SIMPLE SECRET
I sat in the departure lounge, staring down at the package. It felt light. But I could tell that there was something inside. This wasn’t another empty envelope. Mom and Dad kept pestering me to open it. For some reason, I didn’t want to. I had had enough drama and fear. Even though I still wasn’t sure that I was absolutely out of danger, my heartbeat had finally slowed a little and I was enjoying that. I just wanted to put this whole thing behind me. I also didn’t want my parents to be involved in any way. I wasn’t looking forward to explaining what had happened, to outlining my grandfather’s failures and, more importantly, my own. This adventure, these catastrophes, were my thing, mine alone. So we sat there, them prodding me, me refusing, putting them off and telling them that I’d deal with it on the plane or when we got home.
Finally, they both went off to find the washrooms, hand in hand. Alone, I became restless and started arguing with myself. Shouldn’t I open the package? Wouldn’t now be a good time, while Mom and Dad weren’t here? With nothing else to do, I kept mulling over the situation, glancing down at the package, wondering if I should just get it over with. If I opened it now, I wouldn’t even need to tell my parents that I’d peeked inside. I looked down at my grandfather’s handwriting, the way he’d elegantly written my name, his hand still steady when he wrote it. I thought of what he had said about me. “He’ll never amount to much.” I knew I couldn’t leave the package sitting on my lap all the way to Buffalo.
So I opened it. I felt around inside. It was a book, a small one. I pulled it out—a battered copy of The Little Prince.
And it was just a copy of Saint-Exupéry’s little novel, nothing else. No big deal. I knew the story. I didn’t even need to read it again. When I showed Mom and Dad, they kind of took the same approach. They tried to look interested in it, but I could tell they were disappointed. The great revelation of the contents of the mysterious package from beyond the grave was an anticlimax. And since they knew nothing at this point about Grandpa’s connection to the author, that made the book even less interesting to them. They talked about how Grandpa had read it to me when I was a kid, and Mom said he’d even read it to her when she was little, but she didn’t seem too excited. She said it was “nice” of him to give it to me and went back to holding hands with Dad, talking about how good it would be to get home.
On the flight over the Atlantic, with The Little Prince on my knee, I was surprised to find myself reasonably comfortable in the air, not exactly completely at ease, but not terrified either. I was in a window seat, my favorite on planes, since it helped me to look outside when turbulence started and understand that the wings weren’t coming off. Dad was fast asleep in an aisle seat. Mom was beside me, smiling away, glowing at him and at me, glancing down at the book on my lap every now and then.
Able to turn my mind away from a fiery crash into the ocean from 50,000 feet, I tried to think of something positive. And when I did, I thought of Vanessa. She looked great in my head, wearing one of those sweaters and her tight jeans, her blond hair tossing in the imaginary breeze next to her locker. Wow. Then I imagined what I would say to her. It wouldn’t be that hard, really. She would never know exactly what happened. All she’d know was that I went away and came back. I could tell her that it all went well. I could do that, if I were careful, without telling a single lie. The story—another of my perfect stories—began to build in my head. I could simply tell her that I found the painting and told the Noels about it, that I found the Saint-Exupéry rock and that I actually got inside the Chauvet Cave. Yes, that would work. I would impress her as someone special, a worthy son and grandson. I imagined the look in her sky-blue eyes. Would she kiss me? Would she invite me to her house? Would we become more than friends?
But Shirley kept intruding into the story. Her kind eyes, her shy smile, what she had said about liking me for who I really am. Leon Worth’s comments about her came back to me again. I remembered that I still hadn’t written her the postcard I’d purchased for her (or the one for Leon either), that I’d only sent her two short texts all the time I’d been away, and I felt awfully guilty. When I thought of her, I thought of Rose too. In fact, they seemed interchangeable in my mind. I didn’t know whether to feel guilty or good about that. But it was Shirley’s face that stayed with me, smiling at me. I was surprised at how pretty she was. In fact, there was something about her that was even more attractive than Vanessa. It came from somewhere on the other side of her beautiful eyes, somewhere inside her.
I tried to keep my mind on her and other good things and not dwell on what had happened back in France. Mom and Dad had stopped asking me questions, though I knew they’d want to know more eventually. I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to tell them exactly what Grandpa had asked me to do and exactly what I had done.
But my thoughts kept returning to Arles and the Noels and the Van Gogh, to the rock and the Cave. I couldn’t stop them. And then a funny feeling started coming over me. I kept getting this sense, a sort of happiness inside me, like I used to get on Christmas Eve as a kid when I went to bed. I couldn’t explain it. Hadn’t I failed miserably? But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I had actually succeeded. I started to think that maybe the whole trip was about one single thing: telling the Noels what my grandfather had done and having the courage to give them back the painting. Everything else—the search for the rock, the attempt to find the meaning of life (I almost laughed out loud at that for some reason), didn’t matter, or at least was just a part of my grandfather’s plan to get me to do what was right, both for him and for me. I wondered, for a fleeting second, if maybe he was wrong about me never amounting to much, if maybe now I had amounted to at least a little.
I hadn’t won anything in France, I hadn’t made any money, and I wasn’t coming back a conquering hero. I was beginning to think that I didn’t really want Vanessa anymore. It was Shirley I kept thinking about. Sweet Shirley, who really liked me and wanted to be not just my girlfriend but my best friend too.
I thought about all the things I valued back in America, the same things that my friends cared about: the best-looking girls, money, cars and winning at every freakin’ thing we did.
I wanted to get something off my chest. I set The Little Prince in the pouch in the seat in front of me.
“Mom,” I said, turning to her. “Grandpa once said a terrible thing about me.”
She looked a little startled. But I didn’t stop there. I had to tell her. I let it all out: about the last day I’d seen Grandpa, when I had overheard them talking in our house in Buffalo, when he had said that he was certain that I “would never amount to much.”
She laughed.
I felt like strangling her.
“I remember that too,” she finally said.
“You do?”
“Yes, quite clearly. It was a horrible thing to say.”
“So, how can you laugh?”
“I’m sorry, honey, but it’s kind of funny when you know the whole story.”
“What do you mean? It was a horrible thing to say. It’s bothered me ever since…a whole lot.”
“But it wasn’t horrible at all.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No, it was very sweet.”
“Sweet?”
“Yes, that’s another reason I remember it. He could be awfully tough on the exterior, my dad, but inside, he had a wonderful heart. He knew what mattered. And he knew what you were going through, and so do I.”
“You do?”
“Yes, he knew you’d have lots of pressures on you, that you’d always strive to be everything to everybody, that that was what you were like. He knew you worried about being a worthy McLean.”
“So why did he say what he said?”
“Because he understood. He loved you. He knew you would figure out what mattered in the end.”
“What do you
mean?”
“When he said you’d never amount to much, I gave him a very hard look. You are my little boy, you know.”
I felt my face going red.
She put her hand on my knee. “He’ll never amount to much. I actually gasped when he said that.”
“So did I, Mom.” I felt like I was going to cry. It was good to get this off my chest but it was awfully hard too. The memory was so horrible. “I’d just come in the door and when he said it I ran back outside.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because that wasn’t all he said. He looked at me when I gasped, as if he couldn’t understand my reaction, and just kept on talking.”
“He did?”
“I remember it very clearly.” She smiled and tears came to her eyes. Then she imitated her amazing father speaking of me, Adam McLean Murphy, that day in Buffalo, after I ran from the house and missed every word:
“He’ll never amount to much. That might be the world’s judgment of my grandson right now, but it will never be mine. The world is often wrong. He will amount to a great deal. Someday this boy will prove it.”
I sat there, stunned. Then I had to really fight to hold back the tears. I couldn’t cry, not in front of my mother. That’s not what guys do.
A few minutes later, as I gazed out the window at the ocean far below, I realized that I was now totally and completely unafraid of being in the air. An absolute calm came over me. I hadn’t needed to go into that cave to understand what mattered in life. It had been inside me all along, and Grandpa had known it.
I noticed The Little Prince in the pocket of the seat in front of me. I pulled it out and turned to the first page. But before I could begin, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. One of the pages was folded down. I turned to it. At the very top, someone had written something in a black marker. It was Grandpa’s handwriting. From D.M., with love, it said. Farther down on that page he had highlighted a sentence. It came from the mouth of the Little Prince, from far up in the heavens.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
If your soul can smile, then mine did, all the way home to Buffalo.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks goes to Eric Walters, whose teeming mind came up with the concept for Seven (the series), of which Last Message is a proud member, and for placing me among such stellar company as fellow authors John Wilson, Norah McClintock, Richard Scrimger, Sigmund Brouwer and Ted Staunton. Thanks, of course, also goes to the team at Orca Book Publishers, including Andrew Wooldridge, Sarah Harvey, Dayle Sutherland, Leslie Bootle, Teresa Bubela and Kelly Laycock. I am grateful for the inspiration of some great art and artists: Vincent Van Gogh, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the creators of the Chauvet Cave drawings. Philip Callow’s Vincent Van Gogh: A Life; Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life; Stacy Schiff’s Saint-Exupéry: A Biography; and Werner Herzog’s beautiful film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, were all essential reading and viewing.
SHANE PEACOCK is a novelist, playwright, journalist and television screenwriter. His bestselling series for young adults, The Boy Sherlock Holmes, has been published in ten countries in twelve languages and has found its way onto more than forty shortlists. To learn more about Shane and his books, go to www.shanepeacock.ca.
