Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  “You think if you let me get to know you, it’ll change who you are.”

  “That’s a big part of it, yeah.”

  I didn’t ask what the other part was, because I figured I’d already pushed things as hard as I could. But then, because I just couldn’t seem to resist being an opinionated jerk, I said, “I have to say, though, it doesn’t speak much for the strength of your convictions if you think you might change them because of what I say.”

  She shoved her hands back into her pockets. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

  For some reason, I was pretty sure I’d just lost something with that. “I wish I could take that back.”

  “You can’t. And you’re right, but so am I. So there we are. You can like me on my terms or not, but that’s all I can do. You want to know me, but this is part of who I am, and I don’t want to change that for you, or for anyone else. I mean, everyone knows who you are. Even people you hate. You go around turning out your secrets for everyone, and you never hold anything back for yourself. And you think that makes you better than me, but it doesn’t.”

  I imagined all my ideas like little birds inside my head, and wondered if Willow really thought they would all fly away because I let other people see them. I didn’t think so; in fact, I knew it wasn’t true, at least for me. But my truth wasn’t her truth, and I couldn’t change that.

  Tell me what you’re afraid of. It had been one of my favorite interview questions, even though I never felt like I was getting a straight answer. Losing myself, Willow was saying in her roundabout way. That was an honest answer. She was telling me something real.

  I rocked back and forth on the soles of my shoes. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Just, okay. I get it.”

  “And?”

  “There’s no and.”

  She took a step back. “Oh. Well. Okay, then. I guess.” She turned around.

  “Willow, wait.” I followed her to where she stood in front of her mailbox. “See, there’s this problem. I still like you. The thing is, you think you can keep everything private, but some of it’s still leaking out, and I like it. You,” I corrected. “I like you. And maybe, if we stay friends, more of it will leak out. And I’ll like that part of you, too.”

  She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, she was looking at me the way she’d looked at me that day in my bedroom, when she’d climbed into my lap and there’d been nothing between us but a few breaths and an infinity of bare skin.

  Then she grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me a step closer, and I laced my fingers through her belt loops and pulled her a step closer.

  I said, “I don’t have a right to know you. I know that. It’s your choice. But I want to.”

  And I’m not really sure if she kissed me or I kissed her, but there were lips on lips, and her blood-orange hair was tickling my face.

  All the petals peeled away from us; there were no pranks, no friends or brothers or dogs barking in the woods. There was only this: the careful press of two people who felt warmer together.

  Afterward, she leaned back an inch and whispered, “Green. My favorite color is green.”

  I whispered back, “Mine too.”

  She whispered, “Really?”

  And I whispered, “No. It’s blue.”

  And she laughed.

  And we both smiled at each other like that, with our faces an inch apart, so I couldn’t really see any of her but her eyes, which did this great crinkly thing when she smiled. And she was smiling.

  She was still smiling an inch from me when she said, “I have to go now, Tom Grendel.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll call you when I get settled in my new place. Maybe you can come buy me dinner.”

  “I would like that,” I said. “I look forward to maybe hearing what kind of food you like.”

  “Great,” she said, and then added, “Maybe.”

  She ran a hand down my arm, and turned, and went.

  After Zip came home with a new interview outfit (and a new wig: long, dark, and curly), she came and found me in my room. I was lying on my bed, spinning the CD of Mom’s artwork between my hands and wondering what to do with it.

  “You should keep that,” Zip said. “You might want it later.”

  I put the CD down on my nightstand and sat up. “I’m keeping it,” I said. “I just…I was just thinking. I still wish I knew what happened to that painting. I don’t know if it got left at the college and thrown out, or left behind in our last move, or what.”

  I didn’t exactly know why I wanted it so much, since I’d seen that it stank and everything. But it was something that she’d touched and made. The brushstrokes were her brushstrokes, and it was a real, honest reminder that my mom had lived and breathed and made things. Besides Zip and me, I mean.

  Zip leaned against the doorframe. “How well did you check the attic?”

  “Probably not all that well,” I said. “It’s kind of a mess up there. It’s, like, the one part of the house that Dad’s OCD housekeeping never got to.”

  “Well,” said Zip. “Everybody has cobwebs in the attic, don’t they?”

  I smiled. “I guess so.”

  “Do you want to go check again? Now that you remember what it looks like and how big it is, maybe we’ll have a better idea what size box to look for.”

  I shrugged. I’d never found anything in our attic except a mouse nest and enough dust to choke a horse, but it seemed like it was worth one more try.

  We pulled the trapdoor down from the ceiling outside Dad’s room and pulled the folding staircase down to the floor. I had the lantern that we use when the power goes out and Zip had a flashlight, and I let her go up first so she could fall on me if the stairs broke. I’m a real gentleman like that.

  “Oh my God,” she said as I set down the lantern. “It’s awful up here.”

  “I tried to organize it last winter,” I said, “but I gave up.”

  There were about a dozen boxes stacked on top of each other, all covered with a thick layer of dust. Some dilapidated furniture was pushed against one wall. I recognized my mom’s old dresser, the one she’d used for her sweaters, with one drawer brokenly hanging out. Our old tent was wrapped up in the corner. It made me a little sad to see it again.

  “Did you ever go through the boxes?” she asked.

  “I went through the big ones,” I said, gesturing at the ones on the bottom. “The ones on top are too small for a big canvas, I think.”

  “They could have taken the canvas off the stretchers and rolled it up to save space in the move or something,” she said.

  “So we have to look through all of them?”

  “If you want to be totally sure it’s not here, then yeah.”

  I sighed and took the top box off the stack, setting it on the floor and sitting myself down in front of it. “Let’s go.”

  It took hours, going through the dusty mess. One box of Zip’s old toys had been infested with mice, and we set it aside to throw out later. I found a carton of old Matchbox cars and Transformers, and a lot of old baby clothes, still covered with stains.

  “Why do you suppose Dad kept all this?” I asked.

  “I read somewhere that sometimes you need a trigger to pull up a memory. Maybe he kept this stuff because he didn’t want to forget everything.”

  “He never looks at any of it, though.”

  “Well, he hasn’t so far.”

  I opened another box. There were only two left. “Zip,” I said. “Look at this.” She put down her pile of old school papers and crouched opposite me.

  It was Mom’s clothes. Dresses, some moth-eaten sweaters. I didn’t recognize any of them.

  Zip pulled out a red sundress. “I remember this one,” she said. “She used to wear it out to dinner. She said I could borrow it, when I got to be tall enough.”

  “Do you want to take it?”

  She held it up to the light. “Where
would I keep it?” she said. “No, I’ll put it back. It’s not like I could wear it, anyway. What if I spilled something on it?”

  I rifled through and felt something solid at the bottom. “There’s another box in here.” I pulled it out. It was an old size 8 shoebox. I shook it a little, and it rustled.

  “Old papers?” Zip asked. I took the lid off.

  It was full of letters, maybe forty or fifty, which had all been carefully folded and replaced in their original envelopes before being filed away. I pulled out the one on the top and carefully opened it while Zip flipped through the rest.

  “This is one that Mom wrote Dad,” I said.

  “There are some from him to her, too. Postmarked from all kinds of places. This must have been from his first deployment.”

  “ ‘My darling,’ ” I read, and then stopped. “This is a love letter. From before they got married.”

  I refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope. “You don’t want to read it?” Zip said.

  I shook my head. “Do you think Dad knows they’re up here?”

  “I think they’ve probably been in that box since right after she died.”

  I put the lid back on. “Do you think he would want them?”

  “Of course he would want them. Wouldn’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure. It took us all a long time to get over Mom, and I think it was worse for Dad than he let on. Especially after he came home the last time with his mind all torn up and no wife to help him figure out how to glue all his brain cells back together.

  The last box contained nothing but worn-out shoes. Zip fished out a tiny ballet slipper and examined its worn sole before tossing it back into the box. She sat back in the dust and wiped her hands on her pants. “I don’t think the painting’s here, Tom.”

  “No,” I agreed quietly. “It’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well. At least now I know for sure.”

  After we’d stacked all the boxes back against the wall, we agreed that the next time she was in town, we’d get a broom or something and clean this place up, even though we both knew that would never happen. We closed up the attic and went downstairs.

  “Well,” she said. “My train to Williamsburg leaves at seven tomorrow morning. I should probably call ahead for a cab.”

  “I’ll drive you,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “ ’Course,” I said. In my head, I was adding up the hours until Dad came home. I wondered why Zip didn’t want to stay one extra day so she could see him, but I wasn’t totally sure when her interview was. Anyway, asking her to stay was kind of pointless. If she’d wanted to, she would have.

  Zip packed the few articles of clothing that had survived Wolf’s raid, her new interview suit, her wig, and a peanut butter sandwich to eat on the train. The next morning, we got up at the crack of dawn and I drove her to the station.

  It was cool outside, almost like a random fall day in the middle of summer, and the wind was blowing the leaves so hard it was difficult to hear anything else as we sat on a bench outside the Amtrak station waiting for Zip’s train to Williamsburg.

  “What are you going to do when you get there? Apart from the interview.”

  She unwrapped a candy bar from the vending machine and gave me half. “My friend Sheila’s in grad school down there. She said I could stay with her a few days. And if I get the job, then I need to find a place to live and stuff.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She put her arm around me. “You’ll come and visit me, Tommy-Tom, as soon as I’ve got a place.”

  “So you think you’ll get the job?”

  She shrugged. “I have to think that. If I stop thinking it, I’ll give up. So I keep telling myself every interview is the one.”

  I had melted chocolate on my hands, which I wiped on my sock since I didn’t want to wreck my shorts. Zip watched me and then cleared her throat.

  “You know,” she said, “this isn’t like the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the annoying middle daughter gets on a train and never comes back. I’m not going to Siberia.”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “This is a good thing, Tom.”

  “Of course it’s a good thing. I’m glad you’re going.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Yeah.”

  I stayed until the train left in a gust of wind.

  When I got back, my dad was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking a glass of Ovaltine.

  He looked, I thought, really tired. His uniform was rumpled from traveling, and he gave the impression of a man who’d spent way too many nights in an uncomfortable hotel bed. I hoped it had been quiet there, at least. I felt a tiny measure of triumph that I’d fixed things for him. And I hoped he’d never find out how.

  “You’re home early,” I said.

  He smiled at me over his glass, just enough to let me know he was pleased to see that I hadn’t died in his absence. “Caught an earlier flight,” he said. He gestured around the kitchen. “You seem to have made out okay. Lawn business still going well?”

  I smiled faintly. “Um, yeah. It’s fine.”

  “Mrs. Coffey bring you some nice casseroles?”

  I considered mentioning that she’d completely forgotten about me after day two, but changed my mind. “She is a wizard with cream of chicken soup.”

  “Good,” he said. He nodded toward the window. “Mrs. Lee said there was a moving truck at Minnie and Allison’s yesterday.”

  “Yeah. Ellen Rothgar’s heading back to Chambliss.”

  “That so?” he said. “Wonder what they’ll end up doing with the house. Sell it, I guess.”

  “I guess so.” I looked over at the house, which was silent.

  I thought of all the things I’d like to talk about with my dad: that Zip had come home, that she’d left again for a job interview, that I’d gone to Patuxent State to look for missing pieces of Mom. Instead, I coughed a few times to get his attention. “I found something,” I said. “It’s in my room.”

  He looked up. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go get it.”

  I pushed the shoebox across the table to my dad, who put down his newspaper and stared at it.

  “I found this. In the attic.”

  He folded his paper and set it on the chair next to him, then took the lid off the box.

  “Ah,” he said, a breath of recognition that was either sad or nostalgic or both. “I haven’t seen these in twenty years.” He glanced up. “Did you read them?”

  It wasn’t an accusation as much as a guess, because honestly it was the kind of thing I was likely to do. “No,” I said. “They seemed private. I mean, I looked at them. They’re the letters you and Mom wrote to each other. Right? I didn’t read them, though. I just…I just looked enough to see what was in the box.”

  “It’s fine, Tom,” he said. He pulled the stack out and ran his finger over a postmark. “Nineteen ninety-three. I thought they’d been lost. Where did you find them?”

  “They were inside a box of Mom’s old clothes.”

  He smiled a small smile. “I should have given those away. I meant to. I just thought that Zipora might want them someday. I could never go through them.”

  “I don’t think Zip wanted to, either.”

  “Well, no. I suppose not. Thank you for these, Tom.” He flipped through the letters, and I got the sense he might like to be alone with them, so I stood up. “You know,” he said, “when you’re older, a lot older, you might want to read these. There’s a lot of your mother in here.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t mind? I know they’re, like, love letters.”

  He laughed. “Not when you’re seventeen. But later, yes, I think you should read them. I think your mother would want you to.” His fingers traced along his own name on the front of an envelope: the lines she’d written with her pen, back when she was alive and young and in love with a soldier. “I’ll make
you copies,” he said. “For Zip, too.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

  But he was already opening the first envelope, his hands shakier than I’d seen them in months, but I didn’t think it was the PTSD…at least not the PTSD from Iraq. I didn’t know if remembering Mom would make things better or worse. But feeling something had to be better than feeling nothing. At least I hoped so.

  Before he started reading, before I left him alone with his memories, I said, “Dad. Don’t go again.”

  “What? Go where?” He was already half gone, in a memory I didn’t share with him. Going someplace I couldn’t follow, but at least this time I hoped it was someplace good.

  I was aware that this was a dangerous thing I was asking. I was asking him not to run away again, because running away from the things in his head meant running away from me. The two were linked. I didn’t know if he could do what I was asking, if it was safe for him, or even safe for me. Still, I said, “Just, don’t go away again.”

  “To Tampa?”

  “Or wherever. Just stay here. Please.”

  He set down the letter. “Tom, sometimes I can’t help it.”

  “But sometimes you can.”

  He looked at me, and then out the window, and then at the letters.

  He said, “Okay.”

  There was one of those silences that are almost palpable, as real as a table or a chair, as me or my father. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and that was as much as either of us could do, but that silence, it was real.

  “Okay,” he said again, and it wasn’t so much a promise as an acknowledgment. I saw him, and he saw me, and that was a lot. Not everything, and not enough, but a lot.

  I left him alone with his letters. I went back to my room, where I had a text waiting from Ed, and a slew of them from Zip. The one from Ed said:

  Wine flights at two?

  How are you not grounded? I replied.

  I was, but my brother’s home so all is forgiven. Let’s celebrate our victory and my status as second-class sibling.