A Sudden Light

by Garth Stein

  She did neither. She took her seat and looked down her nose, somewhat satisfied.

  “Trevor,” she said softly, almost inaudibly.

  And the heat from the fire engulfed us all.

  “I remember!” Grandpa Samuel blurted out, startling everyone.

  “What do you not remember now, Daddy?” Serena asked with an obvious roll of her eyes. “And please make it good.”

  “I remember a fire,” he said.

  “A fire. There were so many fires, how do you know which was which? How do you know you’re remembering the fire you think you remember and not another one?”

  Grandpa Samuel looked at her, baffled, and I wondered if he would succumb to her deliberate attempt to confuse him. I hoped he wouldn’t.

  “I think I remember,” he ventured.

  He said it feebly enough that Serena cast it aside and began collecting garbage and bottles. Richard and my father helped her, and, soon, they had collected all the things and placed them back in the bags.

  “Are you coming?” Serena asked Grandpa Samuel and me.

  We looked at each other, then we looked at Serena.

  “We’ll stay for a while,” I said. “To watch the fire.”

  “Ah,” Serena said, her face dawning with recognition. “An excellent idea. I see, Trevor, that you are more clever than I thought. Yes. Alone time, so you can attend to your mission. Be sure to scuttle the coals before you leave; we don’t need to start a wildfire tonight.”

  She gathered the remaining bags and followed my father and Richard, who had already started back to the house. I picked up a long stick and poked at the fire. The darkness was nearly complete, though some of the spilled sun still clung to the mountains.

  “When I was a boy,” Grandpa Samuel said after a time.

  I was relieved that he seemed to really remember something. I wanted to hear it.

  “What happened when you were a boy?” I asked.

  “My father took me to a logging site, up north, near Chuckanut,” he said, and the embers glowed. “I was six years old, I think. He wanted me to see the world of men. I had only lived here at Riddell House. I had been raised by my mother and the nannies, alongside my sisters, as if I were another girl like them.”

  “You had sisters?” I asked.

  “Two. Daisy and Alexandra.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. My mother left with them, and we never heard from them again. When my father died, the lawyers tried to find them; they never could.”

  “So they weren’t there when your father took you to the logging site?”

  “They were at home. They left after that. They left because of that.”

  “What happened at the logging site?”

  “The hills had been clear-cut. My father left me with the other boys while he went to attend to things, and, at the end of the day, they lit fires. All over the mountain. They burned the stumps and branches and scraps of wood left behind; they piled them into giant piles and they lit the piles on fire. It was gray and cold and almost raining. It smelled of burning wood.”

  Grandpa Samuel fell silent in the glow; I smelled the smoke on myself.

  “What else?” I prodded.

  “The boys had hatchets. The older boys. They took out their hatchets and chopped on a chopping block. Small pieces of wood. They took turns holding the wood and chopping, always with the grain so a sliver curled off. I was fascinated by it. I’d seen loggers chop down trees, but these were boys like me, but bigger, and they were chopping things, too. So my father told one of them to show me how to do it. ‘He’s awfully little,’ the boy said. ‘And he’s never held a hatchet before.’ My father yelled at the boy until he was almost in tears—that’s how my father was; he was mean. The boy stood behind me and held my hand with the hatchet in it. ‘Never cut with a dull ax,’ he said, and my father said, ‘That’s right!’ The boy held my hand and guided it down so I cut a sliver of wood off the split of firewood. The boy was relieved and smiled like he had been spared his life.”

  Grandpa Samuel looked over at me and nodded.

  “Was your father proud of you?” I asked.

  “My father told the boy to let me do it myself. He made the boy step away from me; he wanted to see me do it. So I held the wood steady and I lifted the hatchet over my head. The boy was afraid, but I wasn’t. ‘Let it drop straight,’ he said. ‘It’ll cut all right; it’s sharp.’ But I knew what my father wanted, so I did it.”

  He paused as if he’d run out of steam, his eyes fixed on the fire.

  “What did your father want?” I asked.

  “He wanted me to show them I was tough. That I was a man. The other boys made fun of me and called me names because I was raised with money and my mother let my hair grow long. They said I would never be a logger. I wasn’t one of them.”

  “But you were rich and they weren’t,” I said. “You were never supposed to be a logger. That’s the way the economic system works, isn’t it?”

  “My father told me you can always tell a real logger. A real logger is always missing a finger or two. I lifted the hatchet and brought it down.”

  I felt a quickening of my heart; I anticipated the end of the story already.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, lifting his left hand into the air and looking at his missing fingers. “But there was nothing I could do to stop it; it had already happened.”

  My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t breathe. He was telling me the truth.

  “I didn’t cry,” he said. “I held out my hand to show him. To show them all. A real logger is always missing a finger or two. I was a real logger.”

  “You said you fell through a window,” I protested weakly.

  “My mother told me that. She took me to a window in the house and she broke it out with her fist and she said, ‘Remember that sound. That’s what it sounded like when you fell through the window.’ She pointed at the glass lying on the hedge outside the window, and she said, ‘Look at that glass. That’s what it looked like.’ She reached out her hand and sliced herself open on the jagged pane. She didn’t cry out. She squeezed her hand and blood poured out of her wound and onto the rug. ‘That’s what your blood looked like when you lost your fingers,’ she said. ‘This is what you will tell people when they ask. This is what you will remember.’ ”

  Neither of us spoke. We looked down at our hands, we looked into the fire. The sky was black then, and the orange of the embers illuminated our faces.

  “When we got home, he handed me to her,” Grandpa Samuel said. “ ‘Call the doctor,’ he told her. I was feverish and weak, but I remember it so clearly. ‘You raise him now,’ my father said to her. ‘He’s no good to me anymore.’ He handed my mother a handkerchief with my fingers inside. ‘These are no good to anyone, such as they are.’ My mother wailed. She demanded to know what had happened. ‘This is timberland,’ my father said. ‘Men lose fingers.’ And he walked away.”

  I slid over a little bit on the bench, and then I slid over a little more until I was up against Grandpa Samuel. I reached for his hand, the left hand with the missing fingers, and I took it in my own.

  “But you weren’t a man,” I said. “You were a little boy.”

  He shrugged, and I held his hand tightly as we watched the fire die.

  – 33 –

  QUID PRO QUO

  I awoke to another day. The entire morning, I moped around the house feeling lost to the point of despair. The damage was so deep, the wound so profound, I couldn’t imagine the world ever healing. I felt such sorrow for my grandfather, who, as a young boy, felt compelled to prove his mettle to his father by chopping off his own fingers on a chopping block. And then, to be so disregarded. He’s no good to me anymore. Words that hurt him so much, he used them against his own son. “You’re no good to me anymore,” Grandpa Samuel said to my father before he sent him away.

  That afternoon, I went down to the barn with Grandpa Samuel, st
ill feeling upset. So much so that I reached out to him. I took his hand, so he looked down at me as we sat at the workbench.

  “I love you, Grandpa,” I said out of the blue, and, when I was a kid, I never said “love” if I wasn’t forced to. But I felt love then, and I felt it so strongly—in my gut—that I had to say it out loud.

  Grandpa Samuel looked over at me and smiled, his old-man eyes watery as always.

  “I love you, Jones,” he replied. But I didn’t mind that he didn’t know who I was.

  We walked together back up to the house, which was still empty from the day. My father and Serena had gone to Seattle for business meetings and had not yet returned. I found a bag of pretzels, which Grandpa Samuel and I ate as we sat at the kitchen table and waited for the feeders to come and feed us. Such were our lives. I was fourteen and Grandpa Samuel was seventy-three. We both depended upon the kindness of our feeders. But the feeders did not come.

  At half past six, the phone rang, startling us both. The image of my mother flashed into my head because she was the only one who had ever called. How quickly we are trained. Pavlov’s dog.

  “Pick it up,” Grandpa Samuel prompted. So I did.

  “Hello?” I asked hesitantly. “Riddell House.”

  “Trevor? It’s Serena. How are things there?”

  “Fine,” I said, relieved at the familiarity of her voice.

  “Listen, we got caught up,” she said. “Meetings and meetings. So we’re going to get some dinner downtown. Can you make something up for you and Grandpa Samuel?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But what?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Do you cook?”

  “Some.”

  “There are eggs,” she suggested. “Oh, you know what? In the freezer in the basement there are burritos. Grandpa loves those burritos. You can use the microwave to cook them.”

  “But there aren’t any stairs,” I said, remembering my last adventure in the basement. “The staircase is broken.”

  “What?” she asked. “Oh, you mean? . . . How on earth did you? . . . No, that door has been boarded up for years. Tell Grandpa to show you the way down. It’s in the hallway behind the butler’s pantry. The back stairs are fine. How on earth did you find the front stairs to the basement? It’s a wonder you didn’t kill yourself!”

  “I just noticed the door,” I said, lost in her barrage of words.

  “But if you’re not starving and you want to make it easy, order a pizza from Pizza Pete’s. They’re very close and they know us. There’s a menu in the drawer next to the stove. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Grandpa knows where we keep the pizza money. Call them and order what you like. If you get a salad, get it without olives; Grandpa won’t eat olives. And don’t listen to him if he asks for a pizza with green peppers. They give him terrible gas. No green peppers.”

  “Got it.”

  “Can I depend on you?” Serena said after a moment.

  “You can depend on me,” I replied.

  “Then your father and I might have a bit of a nice dinner to celebrate. Everything is in order, Trevor. We only need your piece of the puzzle, which I know you will deliver. Have you called the notary? Have you gotten Grandpa Samuel to acquiesce?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Hmm. But you’ll work on him now, won’t you? You can’t say I haven’t allowed you ample opportunity. I’ve arranged for you to be alone with him for an extended period. I should think—”

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  “Good. And when you accomplish it? Well, that’s when the fun will really begin, yes? If we don’t make it home before ten, be a good boy and put Grandpa to bed, will you?”

  “Yes, Aunt Serena.”

  “Don’t call me Aunt Serena,” she said. “I really detest it. Please call me simply Serena.”

  “Yes, Simply Serena.”

  “See you soon, Clever Trevor,” she said. “I love you. More than that, I respect you. I consider you a peer, and that is the greatest respect one person can have for another.”

  I hung up and did as I was told; soon a teenager not much older than I brought food to our back door.

  Grandpa Samuel picked at his pizza but seemed to get enough to eat. He leaned back in his chair looking contented and rested in a way I hadn’t seen before.

  “You look happy,” I observed.

  He smiled at me.

  “I didn’t take my pills,” he said. “The pills give me an upset stomach, but I need to take them for my disease. Serena makes me take them before dinner, but I forgot and she’s not here.”

  “Should you take them now?” I asked, slightly alarmed that I had been derelict in my duties; had Serena instructed me to dispense medicine? I didn’t think so.

  Grandpa Samuel leaned in. “They don’t help,” he whispered to me. “They keep me awake at night so I have to have the other medicine to help me sleep.”

  “But I feel bad,” I said. “If you need your medicine, you should take your medicine. It’s important.”

  Disappointment swept over his face, and he pouted.

  “They’re in the cupboard,” he mumbled, pointing.

  I rose from the table and opened the cupboard door. I removed the medicine bottle inside.

  “How many do you take?” I asked, glancing at the label for instructions. It was an amber bottle with a safety cap, but the label was worn away.

  “Two,” he said. “Unless I’ve been bad today.”

  “You’ve been good,” I confirmed, shaking two oblong tablets into my palm. I noticed writing on the tablets, stamped into the coating. I looked more closely. “I don’t think this is the right bottle.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No,” I said. “Is there another?”

  “That’s the one!” Grandpa Samuel blurted.

  I felt a terrible sinking in my stomach. It wasn’t medicine Serena had been giving Grandpa Samuel. Stamped on the tablets was the word NōDōz.

  “How many pills did you say she gives you at night?”

  “Two, I said. Before dinner. Unless I’ve been bad. Then she gives me more.”

  “And this medicine keeps you up at night, so she gives you the other medicine to help you sleep? The medicine we make with the milk?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I’m sick, so I need to do it even if I don’t like it.”

  It was almost beyond belief. Serena would jack him up on caffeine in order to sedate him with alcohol? The only reason to do such a thing was to drive him mad. Or to make him seem forgetful and incoherent, like he had Alzheimer’s.

  “You don’t have to take the pills tonight,” I said definitively, putting the bottle back in the cupboard.

  “Serena will be mad.”

  “I’ll lie. I’ll tell her that you took them, okay? Sometimes it’s good to have a break and get a good night’s sleep. It won’t hurt for you to miss one day.”

  I closed the cupboard and resumed my seat at the table. Grandpa Samuel smiled at me kindly and placed his good hand on mine.

  “You’ll always take care of me,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise, Grandpa.”

  “Then I want to give you Riddell House,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I want to give it to you so you can take care of it. Call the man to come and sign the papers.”

  I swallowed hard. A wonderful gesture, but . . .

  “You can’t give it to me,” I said. “I’m not an adult.”

  Grandpa Samuel furrowed his brow.

  “Grandpa—”

  “Elijah sent me a letter,” he said. “I was going to sell the house, like my father wanted. But Elijah sent me a letter, and Isobel said I couldn’t do it. She read the letter and said I couldn’t. She made me promise.”

  “What letter?”

  “The lawyers gave it to me. They said they couldn’t take the house, but
they could take everything else. And there was the letter, and Isobel made me promise.”

  He had a tired, perplexed look on his face, as if this were a dilemma that had haunted him for a long time.

  “I can sign the papers,” he said. “And then you can decide.”

  “I can’t decide,” I said. “I’m a minor. I’m not really a person. If you sign the papers, then Serena and Dad get to decide.”

  He thought for a bit.

  “But you’ll take care of me,” he said confidently.

  “I’ll always take care of you, Grandpa. I told you that. But—”

  “Then I’ll sign the papers.”

  I remember feeling paralyzed by his words. Suddenly the fate of Riddell House had been thrust into my hands. What was I supposed to do? How could I make such a decision? I certainly didn’t have the life experience to justify such power. And yet, there it was. I could choose my own fate. I could decide between my parents or my history. There was no guarantee that turning over the house would assure that my parents even stayed together, I knew, but it was right there, hanging like a ripe fruit on a vine. I remember briefly thinking about Ben’s wishes to return the estate to the forest, but I thought more deliberately about Grandpa Samuel. A little boy and his missing fingers. An old man with a dark past and a dim future, eating tomato soup and saltine crackers in a crumbling mansion, being fed caffeine pills by his daughter. Didn’t he deserve proper treatment as well? Kensington House, a warm place with a meal plan, social activities, proper medical care. Sure, he wanted to stay at Riddell House, but it didn’t seem like the best place for him. And if Serena wanted to develop the land in order to pay for Kensington House, was that really so wrong?

  “Call the man,” Grandpa Samuel said again. “I want to sign the papers.”

  And so I did. I called the man. Thirty minutes later, the papers were notarized. The deed was done.

  – 34 –

  HOUSE OF STONES

  Riddell House was old and decaying. Anyone could see it. Listing to one side as if sinking into the soft earth. Downspouts broken, misguided rainwater seeping into the timbers and around the window frames until they bulged outward, swollen with moisture. It was falling down without any help from me, so what did it matter? And shouldn’t Serena be able to get something for it? Shouldn’t we all be allowed some of the wealth we had missed out on?