Anything Could Happen

by Will Walton

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Every year, on Christmas Eve, we watch It’s a Wonderful Life as a family—Mom, Dad, Joe, Grandma, Granddad, and me—and every year, when it’s over, Grandma winds up telling the story about how she met Jimmy Stewart once, while she was a tour guide on the Compton.

  This year is no different.

  “It was the funniest thing,” Grandma says. “I kept saying, ‘Daddy, I think that’s Jimmy Stewart, the man from It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ and he just looked at me and shook his head—‘Naaah, couldn’t be’—but it sure was! And I got the signature to prove it.”

  “Where is the signature, Grandma?” Joe asks. “I’d like to look at it.”

  It’s funny. Now that Joe mentions it, I realize, as much as we’ve heard about it, neither of us has ever actually seen the Jimmy Stewart autograph.

  Granddad starts cackling, and Grandma shoots him a look through squinty eyes.

  “What?” I ask. “Why are you laughing, Granddad?”

  Granddad shakes his head. “She lost it,” he says. “She cain’t find it nowhere.”

  Grandma slaps him on the arm. “Now, wait a second. Just because I haven’t seen it in a while doesn’t mean it’s lost,” she says. “Probably just somewhere in that cedar chest with all the rest of that old stuff.”

  “Oh, boy,” Dad says. “That thing would take years to riffle through.”

  “Oh, phooey.” Grandma waves her hand. “I bet I could find it tonight if I wanted to.”

  “I’ll help you look, Grandma,” I volunteer.

  “Let’s do it, Junior Junior.” The couch sighs as Grandma stands. I follow her down the hall, a few steps past the dark kitchen, into the bedroom.

  In all these years, I’ve never seen the inside of the old cedar chest. It sits at the foot of Grandma and Granddad’s bed and, as far back as I can remember, has always been locked.

  When I was a kid, I used to climb on top of it and get in trouble. You weren’t supposed to climb on top of the cedar chest because some of the wood was chipped, and every scuff from my little-kid shoes only chipped away at it more. Now it’s missing some pretty clean strips, the gold-brown cedar sheen scratched off to reveal its inner bark. I give it a soft rub with my forefinger, risking splinters.

  Grandma rummages in the drawer of her nightstand and pulls out the key. She sticks it in the tiny silver lock and turns. I imagine the sensation of gold light rising from some kind of locked-away treasure. But it’s all imagination. All I can really see when Grandma lifts up the hood is paper. Notebook-paper scraps, newspaper pieces, some clippings with pictures, envelopes with stamps in the corners. Chaos. Grandma plunges her hands into it, scooping through, then looks up.

  “Tretch, will you get the light?” she asks.

  “Sure thing.” I go to the wall and flip the light switch. The room brightens, and the walls turn a soft peach color. The heaps of paper inside the chest reflect a kind of glow, and I’m less scared to dip my hands in. I kneel down by Grandma’s side then, and together we drag our hands through the dry muck. I can’t help but picture dumping a pitcher full of wet glue into the mix and making a gigantic vat of papier-mâché.

  I look at the scrap I’m holding in my hand. It’s a newspaper article: The King Dies, it reads. Underneath the headline, Elvis stands with legs splayed and hip cocked, holding a microphone, his mouth stretched wide. “Whoa,” I remark. Grandma nods.

  “Not a day goes by,” she says, “when I don’t think about him.”

  I find several articles on the integration of schools, and one article on another death. The death of another King, actually. He looks somber in his picture. The headline reads A Nation in Tears. I hold it out to her. Again, she nods.

  “You know, my daddy couldn’t stand Martin Luther King. Hated what he stood for. Of course, Daddy was a racist most of his life.” She pauses. “Dr. King died a week before he himself passed.” Grandma pushes past a jumble of opened letters and torn envelopes. My own hands have reached something hard below a thick stack of metal-ringed notebooks. I knock my knuckles against it. Grandma sighs. “But, you know, I was sitting with him while he died—Daddy, that is, not Dr. King—and somehow he got to talking about it all. About how unfortunate it was that he had died. I said, ‘Daddy, what made you change your mind so sudden?’ and he smiled. He said, ‘I guess I’ve been realizing we’re all just people, Teeney. We all gotta raise our kids, watch our loved ones get old and go. We all been made by the same God, ain’t we?’ ”

  I look over at Grandma as she remembers everything. I know her father died of a stroke. He’d had several of them, one after the other, really quickly, and he died in the hospital. I search for some tears in her eyes, but I don’t even see one tiny speck.

  “And I told him I agreed.” She slides the fragile newspaper from my hand. “Between you and me, I think Daddy might have had a talk with God sitting there in the hospital.” A smile spreads across Grandma’s face. She places the article back in the chest, and I watch her stir it into the mix. It becomes just another sheet of paper, floating around in there with Elvis, clippings of my dad, photos of me and Joe, marriage announcements, restaurant menus, everything of some kind of value to Grandma. And somewhere in there, maybe, is a signed piece of paper from Jimmy Stewart.

  “Do you remember what he signed it on, Grandma?” I ask.

  She laughs. “Hell if I know, JJ.”

  After a little while, Grandma is ready to give up. I’m still searching beneath the stacks of spiral-bound notebooks. They’re now forming a big pile at my side.

  “What are all these?” I flip one open and stare at a scrawl in blue pen that covers an entire lined page. The handwriting is small but neat.

  “Oh,” Grandma says. She picks one up. “These belonged to your great-uncle. Journals he kept. It was something the doctor asked him to do.” She weighs it in her hand, and for a second acts as though she might flip open the cover. “Your granddad read them all, after Dennis passed away. I don’t know why. At the end of the day, it just tortured him. In a way, I guess, it was like keeping him around, like we might be able to ask him why he did what he did, you know? Why he chose to end it.”

  She places the notebook back on top of the stack.

  “I don’t think he ever got any answers, though.” Grandma braces herself against the corner of the chest and stands slowly. “Better put those back at the bottom where you found ’em, JJ. Your granddad told me to never throw them away, but if it had been up to me, I would’ve.” She straightens her back.

  “Can I look through the chest some more?” I ask. I’m not sure if she’ll mind or not.

  “Well sure, sweetheart,” she says. “But don’t be too long. We still got gingerbread houses to make.”

  I slide the topmost notebook off the stack and stick it under my shirt.

  “Oh, I won’t be long,” I say.

  Joe and I win the gingerbread-house-building contest as always.

  We’re awarded two homemade candy canes, about which Grandma whoops, “Now those were an adventure to make!” Granddad slaps his forehead. “I just hope they taste all right,” he admits.

  Joe and I take one lick of our candy canes each when we get upstairs and fly straight to the bathroom.

  “Blech!” I spit. “Sour!” We toss them into the wastebasket.

  Joe gargles with some water from the sink. “I guess it’s the thought that counts,” he says, water still pooled at the back of his throat.

  I make sure the candy canes head to the bottom of the wastebasket while Joe spits. When I stand up, he’s leaning against the sink, texting.

  “I think I’m gonna take my shower now,” I say.

  “All riiight,” Joe replies. His head is somewhere else. He slides outside the door, his thumbs still moving along the iPhone’s tiny keypad.

  I shut the door and reach into my overnight bag, where I’ve stowed Uncle Dennis’s journal for the time being. Then I p
ull open the shower curtain and turn on the water. I can’t take too long, I know, but I’ve bought myself some time.

  The journal sits flat in my hands. I don’t know whether to start from the beginning or to select a page at random. Its bright red cover gleams from the overhead lighting. I’m paranoid about getting it wet.

  I open the journal to the first page. The entry is dated August 12, 1976.

  Well, home from the doctor. He didn’t help much, like I expected, but that’s okay …

  This feels wrong. It feels wrong to be reading this.

  He did say something that kind of made me think. About living and being alive. He said, “You know, Mr. Farm …” and I told him he could just call me Dennis. “You know, Dennis,” he said. “You don’t have to feel guilty for being alive through all this. Some people feel guilty for surviving. Some people actually feel so guilty about surviving that, ultimately, they make sure they don’t.” I thought he was going to start talking to me about suicide, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “They force themselves to go through life like zombies. They never let themselves feel again. They don’t accept love or kindness. Nothing except anger and fear. Is that how you want to go through life, Dennis?” I answered like I knew he wanted me to, said, “No, Doctor.” Then he nodded and said, “Well, then, you have to forgive yourself.” I said, “Forgive myself for what?” And he said, “Surviving.” That’s when the time ran out and I had to leave …

  I thumb a couple pages over, skimming them as I go. Most of the entries look like reports from Uncle Dennis’s psychiatrist visits. A couple times he mentions medicines they’re giving him. In one passage, a word catches my eye, an unusual word.

  Bear.

  So I told Doc about a good memory I have of Bear.

  I back up and read the whole page.

  I mentioned Bear to the doctor today for the first time. He said he’d heard mention of him from Richard. Apparently Richard said something to him about me losing a friend in battle and how that was part of the reason I’m having some trouble. I didn’t talk about Bear’s death, though. I won’t write about it, either. Doc says don’t rush thinking about those kind of things. All that, all the grief and everything, just takes time to process. It’ll happen on its own, he says. So I told Doc about a good memory I have of Bear. The time he and I left camp to go on that hike to the top of Sound Mountain and ended up in a little trouble. We didn’t realize how long it would take to get to the top, and by the time we got back it was dark and rainy. Sarge was pretty pissed off, too. “Y’all want to go off and hold hands, do it a little closer to camp next time,” he said. That embarrassed us both pretty bad. We didn’t go on another adventure for a while, but that had been a good one. My best memory from that hike is when Bear’s boot slid off a rock he was propped on and got stuck in some deep mud. The mud was so deep. It nearly swallowed him up to his calf. When he finally pulled it out it made a sound like a suction cup, and we both laughed. Bear was mad because he said he was probably going to chafe on the way back.

  I flip a couple pages over. There’s a good bit on this Bear guy, though Uncle Dennis never brought up anything specific about his friend’s death—other than to point out again that Bear was dead and that he was sad because of it.

  Today Doc said to me, “Dennis, Bear died, and there’s nothing you can do about it now, and there was nothing you could do about it then.” I said, “I know, I’m not stupid, Doc,” and he said, “But that doesn’t mean you won’t see him ever again.” I said I hoped he was right, but that I wasn’t gonna rely on it.

  In a couple entries, he leaves out any mention of Bear.

  Tonight, I am supposed to write about something I would love to do that I’ve never done. Doc’s orders.

  I’ve been thinking about how, since it’s cold now and the pond is iced over, I’d like to go down through the woods on a clear night, sit on top of that ice and look up at the stars. I think about how perfect that would be. That would make everything feel okay, I think. Even if it was just right in that second, everything would feel all right. Maybe some night I’ll do it if I get the chance.

  It’s a weird entry.

  But, in a way, they’re all weird entries.

  This one just seems especially weird because Uncle Dennis sounds happy. Every time I’ve heard about him, the little bit Dad shared, or even the very little bit Grandma shared (Granddad never talks about him), it was enough to make me think he couldn’t even imagine happiness. He was that far gone. But here he is, imagining it. Here, it looks like there’s some hope.

  But Uncle Dennis is already dead, just like that kid from Samsanuk is already dead. Even if there was hope at one point, it’s all gone now.

  I close the notebook and hop in the shower, thinking maybe I’ve done a bad thing.

  That night, we all go to bed happy. Just like every Christmas Eve night I can remember. Dad calls up the stairs to me and Joe and says, “G’night, guys!” Mom says, “Night, boys. I love y’all!”

  “Night!”

  “Night!”

  Grandma and Granddad have long gone to bed. Last, I say good night to Joe. I’m lying on the pullout mattress that sits below my dad’s old bed. Joe and I used to wrestle over who got the bed. But Joe always won, so now I guess it’s just tradition that I get the pullout and he gets the bed. I like the pullout, anyway.

  “Mer-ry Christmas, Mr. Potter!” Joe calls down to me.

  “Ha,” I laugh. “Merry Christmas, Joe.”

  The next day, we all sit inside the Christmas-tree room and open presents. I get some jeans and a new polo shirt from Grandma, which is the exact same thing Joe gets except that Joe’s is a deep green and mine is a bright pink with some white lines on it.

  “Ooh, Grandma!” I say. “I love it!”

  I also get a new drawing from Granddad. This one is of a woman in a frilly short skirt with a big feather hat, walking a tightrope. She is holding an umbrella high over her head as she sticks out one leg, demonstrating her impeccable balance to the circus-going crowd. Joe gets a drawing, too, of an elephant carrying a woman (the same woman, I think, as the one who’s walking the tightrope in my drawing). They’re both framed and behind glass where nothing can tarnish them. When I open mine, I hold it tightly to my chest.

  From Joe, I get a little leather-bound journal.

  “Wow, Joe,” I tell him, fanning the blank pages. “Thank you.”

  Joe shrugs. “You read so much. You should try your hand at writing, Tretch-o.”

  I know the kind of writing he means isn’t the same as the kind of writing Uncle Dennis put in his own blank book. But I can’t help but think of our great-uncle, and how he got his journal under such a different circumstance. I’m the lucky one here.

  Then comes the big present—from Mom and Dad—an iPod. I slide it out of its case and hold it delicately, scared I might crush it in my excitement. “Oh my gosh,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “Merry Christmas, Tretch,” Mom says, smiling.

  I look at Dad, and he winks.

  When it comes time for Grandma to open her present from Granddad, I hold my breath. The scrapbook with its leather binding emerges from beneath newspaper wrapping. I think she might cry out and say, “Oh, Richard!” or something but she doesn’t. She’s silent. She holds it in her hands for a few seconds and doesn’t look up. But when she does look up, her eyes meet with Granddad’s, and they swap a smile. It makes me so happy and so sad at the same time, because I want it to always be like this. But it won’t be, it can’t be, and I know this.

  I feel the thought of an end tugging at me, yanking me out of what is now. Hold fast to that which is good, Tretch. Hold fast to that which is now.

  Right now, Grandma is looking up. “Well, how ’bout that?” she says. “Pretty neat, Rich.”

  Granddad laughs. “Mhmm.” He probably figured she wouldn’t show much emotion. That wouldn’t be the Grandma thing to do. He probably knew she would take it just like she took every other present she rece
ived—with a kind remark and a smile. But he also has to know it means the world to her. He understands it, and she understands it, and they just smile at each other and laugh, and say things like “That’s pretty neat” and “Mhmm.”

  I think that must be what it’s like to be in love and to have been in love for a long time.

  We eat our Christmas Eve leftovers, marking the end of the Christmas Feast Marathon, and leave the gift wrapping scattered around the Christmas-tree room. We’ll clean up later, once the buzz has died, and Grandma will finalize it all by saying, “Well, that’s that. All the preparation and it’s over before you know it.”

  But for now we’re eating and laughing and talking, and nobody watching us could tell Granddad is sick, or that anyone is worried, because right now we aren’t feeling anything bad. It’s all good, really, just perfectly all good.

  Granddad even surprises us by telling a story about Uncle Dennis that makes us all smile. One about how one time when they were kids they went exploring in the woods behind their house. Granddad had taken his BB gun and Uncle Dennis hadn’t taken anything. “I thought I might be able to shoot me some squirrel or something,” Granddad says to us now. “But Dennis, he had something else in mind. He had been lookin’ through one of those View-Master things all morning. Richard, you remember you had one of those?”

  “I did.” Dad nods. “So did the boys.”

  “The binocular-looking thing where you click the switch and the pictures change?” Joe asks.

  “Yes!” Granddad says. “Dennis had been clicking through it and looking at all those sliding pictures. There was this one that he loved—a picture of a waterfall. And Dennis was just dying to see something like it, something that wasn’t a picture, you know? He wanted to see the real thing, a real live waterfall. And normally, you know, he wouldn’t have gone out into the woods with me. He hated to see me shoot anything, even if it was just a little squirrel or something. But it had rained the day before, and Dennis thought we might be able to see a real live waterfall if we looked in the right spot. Dennis said, ‘I bet the trench is filled up, Rich. If it is, it’s gotta flow out to somewhere.’