This was a side of him I never got to see, because he’d been angry at me since the day I was born. It was strange that he’d hated me so much, yet loved my twin sister. How many times had I walked past his studio as a child and seen Kayleigh sitting in his lap while he drew? Come here, ya little monkey, ya, he’d say, intercepting Kayleigh as she passed, to comb her hair with a black fifty-cent comb he bought at the barber. That Grandpa was kind to her was one of the few things I’d hated about Kayleigh.
Grandpa rose from the desk, stretched to open the door on a cabinet built above his book shelf. He cursed when he saw it was empty, grabbed the key to the Maserati from the desk and headed for the door.
He’d had a bottle stashed in that cabinet; I remembered coming across it while helping Grandma clean out the room. He was losing his buzz. The life of a closet alcoholic must be tedious—all those trips to procure booze, afraid if you buy a case at a time it will be too obvious.
Grandpa hadn’t checked my watch in a while, but he’d been in control for a long time—it seemed much longer than the last. I was getting anxious. Maybe I wasn’t going to return this time.
My phone rang before he reached the Maserati. He fished it from his pocket and held it up to see who was calling. “It’s your new girlfriend. She’s probably still standing on the street corner where I unloaded her.”
He opened the phone, pressed it to his ear. “What can I do for you, girlie?”
“Finn?” The voice was a swamp creature with no tongue.
“Who’s this?” Grandpa snapped.
“I waited for you. On the bank. But you didn’t come.”
Inside, I wailed. I thrashed and cried.
“Jesus,” Grandpa muttered. “I know that lousy accent, even fresh from the grave.”
“Finn?”
“Welcome to the party, senorita burrito,” Grandpa said. “You’re late, as usual.”
She was here, right here on the phone, and I couldn’t speak to her.
“Grandfather-in-law,” Lorena croaked. Rough and unformed as the words were, the contempt was unmistakable.
“Ahh, I don’t have time for you.” He snapped the phone closed as inside I screamed “no.” She was back. My Lorena.
Instead of returning my phone to his pocket, he examined it in his quavering hands. Poking buttons, he found my phone book and scrolled down the names until he reached Mom.
Again, I was screaming “no,” but I couldn’t reach him as he dialed Mom and brought the phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Mom answered, expecting me.
“Hello, Jenny, me gal.”
Mom laughed tentatively. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s not Finn, Jenny. It’s your father.”
There was a long pause. “Finn, you told me you were better. You’re not, are you?”
Grandpa exhaled into the phone. “Finn doesn’t have no disease, Jenny. He’s got me. I don’t know how it happened, but it did and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
This was intolerable. I was torn apart by the dual horrors of what he was putting Mom through while simultaneously being kept from Lorena.
I heard computer keys ticking through the phone. “I’m coming up there right now. I’m going to take care of you, sweetie.” She was probably looking up flights. What was he doing? I’d worked so hard to save my mother the agony of witnessing this, now here he was, ruining everything.
“I’ll say it again. This is not Finn. This is your father, who used to sing you ‘Wild Irish Rose’ and ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ when you went to bed, who took you to the top of the Empire State Building and put a quarter in the viewer and held you up so you could see.”
“I’m coming, Finn.” She was crying now. “I know you can’t help it.”
“Jenny, don’t you even know your own father? Listen, remember when I used to sing you ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’?”
“No.”
“Oh yes you do,” Grandpa said. “I know you do. Listen.”
He sang it, carrying a tune like I never could, his resonant Irish brogue coming through despite the graveyard croak, spewing convoluted lyrics I’d never heard from an obscure song that only a man who was Irish and alive seventy-five years ago could possibly know. Mom kept telling him to stop, but he pushed on until she screamed it, prompting Grandpa to pull the phone away from his ear.
“Now Jenny,” Grandpa said in a soothing voice. “Everything’s all right—”
“This isn’t happening. Where is Finn? I want to talk to Finn.”
“He’s safe.”
The connection went dead.
Grandpa cursed, snapped the phone shut. He dragged his hand across his mouth, sighed. “Jenny, Jenny. What are we going to do?”
Finally, finally, I felt tingling in the tips of my fingers, a rush of warmth. I inhaled gratefully. I dialed Lorena while I raced for the car.
She answered on the fourth ring, crying into the phone, unable to speak.
“Lorena?”
“No,” Summer managed.
“Are you all right?”
“No.” She was nearly whispering.
No, she wouldn’t be all right. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”
“At the High Museum. The French Impressionist exhibit.”
I couldn’t stifle a laugh. “You got dumped on a corner by my grandfather and hopped a bus to the High?”
“This is where I go when I feel like I’m drowning.”
I pictured her sitting on one of those incredibly solid wood benches, surrounded by Monets and Gauguins. “I’m going to remember that,” I said. “When everything seems darkest, go to the French Impressionist room at the High.”
“Don’t make fun of me, Finn. I’m hanging by a thread right now.”
“Sorry. I’m on my way.”
As soon as I hung up I called my mother. There were honks and rumbles of traffic in the background
“I’m on my way to the airport.”
“Mom, for God’s sake, don’t come here. This place is a nightmare. They’re all coming out, the voices are coming out. The whole city is going to be filled with dead people.”
I managed to scare the shit out of myself, imagining the city brimming with hitchers, their hands shaking, those horrible voices fouling the air.
“I’m not losing you,” Mom said. “He’ll listen to me. I’ll make him listen.”
She had a point. As far as I knew she was the only person alive Grandpa didn’t hate. If anyone could talk him out of me, it was Mom.
“Where is Grandma?” I asked.
“She’s staying with Aunt Julia.” That didn’t surprise me. She probably started packing the moment Grandpa and I left her house.
“It’s probably best if you stay with her, too.”
“Why is that?” Mom asked.
“Because I’m not home much. I’m spending all of my time trying to figure this out with help from some friends.”
I told her to call when she arrived, tried to assure her that I was okay.
I found Summer sitting cross-legged on a bench, her coat draped across her shoulders, gazing at Monet’s water lilies but clearly not seeing them. She was rocking slightly.
“Hey,” I said softly, putting my hand on her back.
Her eyes lost some of their thousand-yard stare and fixed on me. She made a vague sound that was mostly vowel.
I sat next to her, looked up at the Monet. It was the one with the green rainbow-shaped bridge. “My twin sister Kayleigh had a print of this in her room. She kept bugging Mom to take us to France so she could see the real bridge.”
“I’d like to see France,” Summer said listlessly. “I’ve never been anywhere. Except Disney World.” After a moment she added, “And Nashville. I saw Graceland.” Abruptly she turned and looked at me. “Can I ask you something personal? I won’t be offended if you don’t want to answer.”
“Sure, anything.” Anything to get her mind off what she’d just been through
.
“What happened to Kayleigh? I asked Mick, but he said you haven’t told him, except to say she drowned.”
My eyes filled with tears. It surprised me that the question could stir up such emotions with everything else going on, but thinking about her now filled me with such a profound sense of loss and shame. “I try not to think about it. But I’ll tell you if you want me to.”
Summer turned to face me more directly, waited. I realized that, painful as it was, I wanted to tell her my story. I wanted her to know. I started in a low voice, though there was no one else in the room at the moment.
“The summer Kayleigh died had been the best of our lives. Grandma and Grandpa had invested in this rooming house on Tybee Beach, sort of a downscale B and B, with the idea that Grandma would run it (making the beds, cleaning, running clean towels up and down four flights of stairs with her bad hip) while Grandpa drew his strip. Tybee was a blue-collar place back then—t-shirt shops, beer joints, lots of chipped paint—but Kayleigh and I fell in love with it. Bare feet all day, dark tans, hunting for shells in the dunes, begging quarters from Mom to play the games on the boardwalk. We won this big stuffed tiger we were dying to have, always playing the number twelve, because we were twelve.
“The shift from magical summer to the blackest despair I’d ever known was so quick it nearly snapped me in half. One minute I was with my folks, wolfing down fried clams dipped in tartar sauce from a paper plate, on top of the world. The next, my sister was dead.
“Grandma was the one who called. I can still hear seagulls screeching in the background, fighting over French fries when Mom answered her cell, the way she stopped chewing, the way her face suddenly shifted to an expression I’d never seen before, one that made my heart start hammering. It’s an expression I became very familiar with, because Mom wore it every day for the next three or four years, and still wears it sometimes, nineteen years later.
“I can still see Mom’s phone clatter to the boardwalk. She was saying “No” over and over. “No. No. No. No.” Dad picked up the phone, and after talking for a minute he started crying. That’s when I knew something awful had happened, something that meant summer was over, that my life would never be the same.
“It just kept getting worse. First, I learned Kayleigh was at the hospital, then I learned she was dead. Then I realized it was my fault.”
A couple of elderly women entered the room and I stopped. We sat in silence as they circled the room and eventually slipped out into the next.
“Why was it your fault?” Summer prompted.
“Kayleigh jumped off the pier because I did,” I said. “It was Kayleigh’s idea to begin with. She dared me to jump, and said she would if I would. But she didn’t think I’d really do it; it was a thirty-foot drop, and you had to jump out away from the pier to clear the wooden pilings.” I shook my head. “She was just talking. Sitting on the pier pretending we were going to jump was just something to do.
“So we squatted with our toes curled around the edge of the wood planks, and the longer we stayed, the more I thought maybe I could actually do it. I thought about how impressed everyone would be, maybe even Grandpa. I was as surprised as Kayleigh when I launched myself off that pier. The fall seemed to go on and on, and when I hit the water I hit hard. The soles of my feet stung and my balls ached. But I was ecstatic. I felt strong, and brave, and I didn’t often feel that as a kid. I was a shy, anxious kid. When we were younger I used to whisper things to Kayleigh when we were around other people, and she would say them for me.
“Kayleigh admitted she couldn’t do it. I didn’t taunt her. I didn’t tuck my fists under my arms and flap them and go buck-buck-buck. We didn’t do that stuff to each other. But I did strut. I told everyone how I had jumped off that pier.”
I was getting to the hard part. I put my hand over my mouth, tried to calm my pounding heart.
“It must have eaten at her, that she agreed to jump and then backed down, and after dinner when Mom and Dad decided to go to the Shoppies—that’s what we called the outlet mall out by the interstate—Kayleigh stayed behind with Grandma and Grandpa.
“I jumped off the pier on a calm sunny day, the waves just bumps with occasional slivers of white at the crest. Kayleigh jumped just after sundown, into big, black, crashing waves.”
I stared down between my feet, at the swirling grain in the polished wood.
“Mom and Dad’s marriage lasted a year to the day from Kayleigh’s fatal jump, and we moved in with Grandpa. Dad disappeared for a while after that, only to reappear long enough to convince Grandpa to invest in his insane Toy Shop Village idea. When it was clear the village was failing, he disappeared again for good.
“It was all my fault, and everyone blamed me. At least, that’s how it felt to me. That’s when I started drawing. I’d come home from school and go straight to my room and draw my comics until dinner. And when I wasn’t drawing I was reading comics; I had hundreds of compilations—Peanuts, Ziggy, Nancy, Dilbert. You name it. While most guys my age were playing baseball and sneaking peeks at Playboy, I was obsessing over Pogo.”
I looked at the Monet. How hard it must have been for Mom to take that print down from Kayleigh’s wall, to pack all of her stickers and clothes and stuffed animals in boxes.
“I’m sorry,” Summer said. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re to blame. You didn’t put her up to it. You jumped for your own reasons. You didn’t push her to follow you. It doesn’t sound like you really cared whether she jumped or not.”
“Honestly? I didn’t want her to. I wanted it to be my thing.” I studied the bridge, the calm, shallow, comforting water beneath. “Next time Grandpa called me a sissy, I could remind him of how I jumped off that pier.”
Was that really what I’d thought? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was adding it after the fact because Grandpa was so much on my mind.
“I appreciate you telling me. Thanks,” Summer said.
“Sure.”
We sat side by side, each seeking solace in Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies.
As Summer wrestled with her demons, I fantasized about making my grandfather dead again.
Or, barring that, hurting him.
By the time I left the High I thought I knew how to do it.
CHAPTER 25
My pencil seemed to draw Little Joe by itself, leading my shaking hand. For a change it was shaking in anger, not because
Grandpa was coming.
“You want to play? Let’s play,” I said. Fuming, my breath rushing through nostrils that suddenly felt too small, I drew Little Joe, the tired old standard, the center of Grandpa’s universe.
I drew him for the last time.
“How do you like that? Little Joe is dead.” I dipped my shading brush, watched plumes of black ink leach into the clear water. “Dead, dead, dead. Croaked. Deceased. Pushing up daisies.” I could run with this plot line for weeks. I didn’t understand why no one was calling the government on such a transparent lie. No one who was actually in the city still believed this was a mental illness. There were dead people running around; there was no debating it. Yet the national press still led with the mental illness take.
I packed the strips and arranged for a UPS pickup that day. They needed to be out before Grandpa returned, so he couldn’t cut them up.
The thought of Grandpa’s return sent a wave of dread through my belly. I went to the living room and turned on MSNBC.
Tamron Hall was interviewing a hitcher, standing in the sea of shoes in Chastain Park.
“Do you remember where your mother bought them?” Tamron asked. The shot switched to a close-up on a pair of tiny, white, girl’s dress shoes, the size a six-year-old might wear.
“Yes. Stride Rite in the Lenox mall.” The woman who answered was fiftyish, with long black hair streaked with grey and a little girl zombie voice.
Tamron looked off-camera. “Mom, would you?” She reached to draw another woman into the shot, a heavyset woman in her thirties.
I turned it off, then hurled the remote across the room for good measure. This was so messed up.
“Why was it so hard to act like a decent human being?” I shouted at Grandpa. I went back into my studio, stared up at those two framed strips hung side-by-side. “A normal grandfather would have taken me under his wing. He would have been proud to have me follow in his footsteps. You were never there for any of us.” I grunted a humorless laugh. “You weren’t there for Kayleigh, that’s for sure.” I’d never had the guts to say that to him when he was alive. It felt good. Sure, I was the one most responsible for her death, I could admit that, but there was plenty of excess blame to go around. “How could you let her go out to a pier alone, at night? You knew she’d been trying to get up the nerve to jump off that pier. How could you let her go out there alone? Where were you?” He’d probably snuck out to a bar.
Maybe I’d get my answers when Grandpa took over again, maybe not. Either way it felt good to ask questions I’d been swallowing for years.
It occurred to me that I could look for Kayleigh. After sixteen years she was probably gone, but I could drive down to Tybee Beach and check. She would have hung on to the world with both hands, the way Lorena had.
If there was anything left of her, though, it couldn’t be much. And she’d still be eleven. I didn’t think I could bear to see that.
The doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Mick would just let himself in, and Summer wouldn’t be along for another hour or so. That left my mother. Maybe she’d changed her mind about going to Aunt Julia’s house. It was awfully quick for a flight from Phoenix, though, not to mention the ride from the airport.
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