Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “I thought I was dying,” I said. “Before.”

  “Are you comfortable now? You’re not afraid?”

  “A little,” I said. “But I don’t know. There’s something about your voice that makes me feel all right.”

  “Ah, Michael,” he said. “That’s important to me to hear you say. Thank you for saying that. Now, look!” he said. “Look at what a coward I was.”

  In front of us, the young version of Grandpa stopped at the end of the lockers, looking over at the girls as if he wanted to join them. “Are you watching?” Grandpa whispered.

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  The young version of Grandpa took a step closer to the girls. The one with long hair—Grandma—turned around and caught his eye. “Watch her smile,” Grandpa said. “It’s the brightest smile you’ll ever see.”

  Sure enough, Grandma gave Grandpa a smile that made her whole face change. She looked like the kind of girl who would build forts out of bedsheets and let you eat ice cream when she babysat.

  The young version of Grandpa stared at her a second, then looked down at his shoes, and turned away, scowling. “Coward, coward,” the Ghost Grandpa muttered. “I thought my memory of it was worse than it actually was, but I see now I was as cowardly then as I remained always.”

  “You’re not so bad,” I said, thinking, What’s the big deal? He’s just shy.

  But already, he’d said, “Let’s go.” He put his hands on my shoulders, and it wasn’t a gesture of reassurance, the way sometimes people will touch each other without thinking about it. He was clearly grabbing on to me for a reason. He closed his grip, closed his eyes, braced himself, and said, “Hold on.”

  “But I thought you said you couldn’t control it,” I said. “I thought you said you went through the memories without knowing where you were going to end up.”

  “Except with you,” he said. “There’s something about our combined energy that lets me choose a little bit. It’s like being in a boat in a storm. You get tossed wherever the storm wants you to go, unless you have a motor and can push the boat against the storm. I don’t know where we’re going now, but I do know I want to get away. You will help me do that. There’s something about the connection we have. Together we make a motor.”

  Where his hands were touching me, I started to grow cold—I imagined his hand leaving a frozen print on my skin, like a burn. I didn’t want to be his motor. I wanted to be warm.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t do this to me. I’m not ready.” But I heard the rushing wind again, and the cold intensified, spreading through my body. I tried to draw away, but he wouldn’t let me go. When I twisted around, I caught a glimpse of Grandpa’s face. His eyes were closed, and he had a fierce look to his mouth, like he was trying to open a jar. “Let go of me!” I shouted. “Stop.” But he didn’t let go.

  The river of the dead felt like water, but as I said before, water that was so cold it was about to freeze—it felt thicker, almost like a jelly. It was heavy on my body, and I felt kind of like I was drowning, like the cold jelly-water was being pushed down my throat.

  And then, over the wind, I heard a sound like someone sobbing. Someone was sobbing. I could swear it was me—it felt like it was coming from inside my head. It took me a minute to realize that I must have been inside one of the memories Grandpa told me he traveled through.

  I was a little boy sitting on a twin bed, holding one of those gliders made out of wood thinner than a Popsicle stick. It was broken. A grown-up voice said, “That will teach you to be more careful.”

  Just as I felt how miserable that little boy was—I felt his disappointment as if he were me—the space I was inside started to move. I pushed down through the mattress, tunneling away from the boy with his dark red shoes, watching him fade above me.

  I stopped in a dark movie theater, leaning forward in my seat, my stomach twisted into knots of laughter. The laughing was hurting me. I could hear the music of the kind of stupid cartoon that’s on TV at six in the morning. It was black and white, and it was loud—too loud. I thought it might explode my head. What was so funny? I wanted to know, but I was rushing, moving through the memory, tunneling through the back of the theater seats.

  On the way, I saw the red leather shoes laid out on newspaper—I remembered staring at them. The toes were creased, and the soles were worn. I remembered how much I hated to polish them, how I was told to do it every single night.

  With my next push forward, I was leaning against a woman’s leg, and I knew that it was my mother’s leg, except it wasn’t my own mother, it was a much bigger leg, inside a dress, and there was a hand pushing at my head. “Move along, Saulie,” she said. Saul was my grandpa’s name. “Can’t you see that Mommy’s counting?” And sure enough, there she was at the kitchen table with piles of pennies and nickels laid out before her, and she was scratching notes on a column of newspaper. This time, I pushed right through the kitchen cabinets, and even though it should have hurt, the only pain came from the bitter cold and pressure all around me.

  I saw Stella. I was looking at her face. And I loved her—her eyes blinking, her freckles, the bend in her nose I knew so well, the places I knew how they felt under my hands. One of her eyes grew larger, grew and grew until it was a lake, and I was standing at the side of it, watching my own dad dive off a float into the water, except I wasn’t thinking, There goes my dad, I was thinking, There goes my son. And I hadn’t known he could make a jackknife, and I was proud of him.

  I spun in the dark. I remembered what Grandpa had said about a boat in a storm. The cold burning in my shoulders spread down my arms and into my hands. I closed my eyes and felt the tears that were pushed out of them freeze into bullets of ice.

  Every point where bones connected in my body ached. And then the cold slowly began to recede, and in a few minutes, I felt first my toes, then my fingers, and finally my face begin to warm. I was lying on the floor of our foyer, just as if I’d fainted. I opened my eyes when I heard the elevator beeping. I saw my mother stepping out into the apartment. I hadn’t been that happy to see my mom since—I don’t know—kindergarten.

  “Michael?” she said. “What are you doing lying in here on the floor? You look horrible.”

  For a second, I thought I would see Grandpa next to me, or at least back in the mirror. But he wasn’t there.

  I stood. My knees were wobbly. My head was spinning. I felt like I’d just gotten off a roller coaster, the kind that is really old and made of wood, and probably ought to be shut down. I stuck a stiff arm out to brace myself on the mail table.

  “I’m fine,” I said to my mom. “I was just resting.” Though in fact, it was a few minutes before I could really move, I was still so numb with cold. Fortunately my mom’s cell phone rang, and it was a client—by the time she was off the call, and back to find out what was going on with me, I was playing video games on the couch and looking like nothing was wrong.

  Chapter 6

  After school, Gus came by to give me the homework. I was lying in bed, reading the book we’d been slogging through in English, Great Expectations. Up until then, I’d been hating Great Expectations. I’d been stuck on page ten for a week. But now I was turning page after page, laughing out loud at some of the funny parts. Was it me reading? Or was Great Expectations like spinach—something Grandpa was enjoying through me? I didn’t know. The big news as far as I was concerned was that I was warm. Grandpa and the cold feeling that came with him were completely gone. It was a coincidence that Great Expectations had started to get easier to read. Or maybe I was still in shock.

  “You’re reading?” Gus said, tossing the list of assignments on my knees. “You must really be sick.”

  “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone on the basketball team, especially Trip?”

  “Okay,” Gus said.

  I took a deep breath. Before Gus came by, I’d decided I wouldn’t tell him. What if he told Trip Hall, and suddenly Trip was coming up behind
me in school, saying, “I see dead people” in some really creepy voice?

  But now that I was alone with Gus, all I wanted to do was have him be my friend, have him be the one I would tell something like this right away.

  I put the book down on the floor and sat up. “This is going to sound strange,” I warned him. “But something happened to me. Something connected to my grandfather who I told you about this morning, the one who died.”

  “The one you didn’t know?” Gus shook back his straight black hair and narrowed his eyes.

  “I sort of did know him,” I said. “Just not since I was seven.” How did I tell him the next part? “Okay,” I started. “I think Grandpa came back to life inside me today.”

  I felt so stupid during Gus’s silence. “I saw him in the mirror,” I went on, as if details were going to help. “Standing where I should be. It took me a long time to figure it out. But he was my reflection. And remember when I was yelling at my dad this morning?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That wasn’t me talking, that was him.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Gus said. “This is a game.”

  “No, it’s not,” I insisted. Though I realized as soon as he said it that this sounded like the kind of game we used to play—pretend for a day you were blind and walk around with your eyes closed. Or try to get all the way through a meal speaking only in Pig Latin.

  “You know how Ewan lives with his mom? Well, his parents aren’t divorced. His dad’s dead, and my grandpa passed me a message for Ewan from his dead father during assembly today.” Did this make sense?

  “Is Ewan’s dad really dead?” Gus said. “Or is that part of the game?”

  “It’s not a game,” I said again.

  Gus was knocking Julia’s old American Girl doll Felicity off the chair she was tied to in the prisoner of war camp. “You saved this?” he said.

  “It was your idea,” I said.

  “Look, Michael,” Gus said, turning from the dolls to me. It sounded like he was about to explain something big, except he stopped talking.

  And just then, for that exact moment, I was tired of pretending. “Do you believe me?” I asked him, point-blank, and I think we both knew that I was asking him more than that. I was asking him if he still wanted to be my friend.

  “I don’t know,” he said. His answer sat there between us, making me feel a little sick, even though I was already thinking that it was my fault, maybe there was something I could do to change his mind.

  “I don’t even get you anymore,” he went on. He looked around the room, as if he’d left something of his in my exploding dresser drawers, or on the half-taken-apart prisoner of war camp. I thought about saying, “Do you realize ‘get’ is one of the most overused words in the English language?” Three months ago, he would have laughed.

  But now he didn’t look like he would. “I’ve got to go.”

  “No,” I said, and I don’t know what made me so brave. “Either you’re my friend or you’re not. And if you’re not, then you should say it.”

  “Michael, don’t make it like that.”

  “You’re making it like that. You only want to hang out with me outside school.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t know. Why do you have to make this a big deal? Why can’t you just let it go?”

  “Then you’re not my friend,” I said. “Go home.”

  For a second I thought he was as lost as I felt. Then he drew his lips into a line, and he turned around and he left.

  I sat on my bed, stunned. I had never believed he would go. Here’s what I was thinking: If I were taller… If I were good at basketball… If I were funny…

  I remembered Grandpa as a little boy sitting on his bed. A little boy who had to polish the shoes that were so worn my mom would have put them in the trash, a little boy who cried over his broken airplane.

  I jumped up and stood in front of the mirror a long time, staring into my own eyes. “Come on,” I said aloud to the mirror. “You’re real, aren’t you?” But Grandpa wasn’t there.

  • • •

  What happened next was so strange I forgot all about Gus and Grandpa. At least for a little while.

  It started with a smell. A good smell. Coming from the kitchen. When I went to investigate, I saw that my mom was standing over the stove, stirring something inside a pot. When I got closer, it looked like spaghetti sauce. Laid out on the counter were packages of chicken breasts.

  “What’s going on here?” I said.

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s going on’?” she said. “I’m cooking.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “What kind of an occasion do you need there to be for your mother to cook dinner?” This was my mom being funny. She caught a glimpse of herself in the microwave. “I hate this gray.”

  I opened the pantry. “Don’t you dare snack,” she said. I withdrew my hand from a bag of chips. I heard the elevator beeping and I ran out to the hall to tell Julia about Mom’s cooking. I found myself face-to-face with Dad instead.

  I know this is kind of a weird thing to say, but he looked a little embarrassed to see me. Maybe because I have so much personal experience with being embarrassed, I know the signs. He didn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t put his briefcase on the hall table at an exact right angle to the mail tray, the way he usually does. He didn’t put it down at all. It was as if my body were surrounded by a force field—he couldn’t come all the way into the apartment because he’d have to pass by me.

  Or maybe it wasn’t so much that he looked embarrassed as that he looked different. His hair was perfectly combed and polished looking as always, but he must have forgotten his second shave, the one he does at the office. The stubble on his chin and jaw made his cheeks seem hollow. His shirt was wrinkled, his tie was loosened, and he was carrying his suit jacket instead of wearing it. “Are you okay?” I said. “Why are you home?”

  He was able to walk past me now. He laid his briefcase on the table and spoke with his back to me, as he took his cell phone out of his pocket and plugged it into the charger. “It’s so strange I should be with my family at dinnertime?” he said.

  “Yes,” I wanted to answer. “Yes, it really is.”

  Instead I ran back into the kitchen to find Mom. “Is there something I’m missing?” I asked. “Dad’s home. You’re cooking. Is it Thanksgiving?”

  “Dad called and told me he was canceling a meeting and were we free for dinner? So I bought groceries on my way home.”

  “But we’re always free,” I said. “And that’s never made him want to have dinner with us before.”

  “How about you set the table,” Mom said in her that’s-enough tone.

  When Julia came home from ballet and saw my dad in the dining room pouring water into glasses, she ran up to him, threw her arms around his neck, and shouted, “Daddy!” I guess that was more the reaction he’d been looking for, because he kissed her on top of her head. “Hello, princess.”

  Casually, as if it were no big deal, she asked him, “How come you’re home?”

  And he answered her just as easily, “You know I always want to be home with you guys, don’t you?”

  I don’t know how I know this, but I do: he was lying, and it made me so mad that I wanted to shout, “You don’t. You’re a fake.” But instead I said, “Can we watch TV while we eat?” and my dad gave me a look and said, “You don’t expect me to dignify that with an answer, do you?” This was my family in a nutshell: Julia gets “Hello, princess,” I get, “You don’t expect me to dignify that with an answer.”

  Twenty minutes later, there we were, all four of us sitting down at the table my mom had to pull out from the wall. With place mats. With knives, forks, and even spoons, which I’d originally left off because who ever uses spoons to eat dinner? Mom made me add them in.

  It was like we were trapped inside an ad for Chef Boyardee. Dad said, “This is delicious.” Julia “mm’d” her agreement. Mom smiled at them and reminded me not
to hold my fork like a pencil.

  I had had about enough. “How come we stopped going to see Grandpa?” I asked. I might as well have set off a stink bomb under the table. My mom put down her knife. My dad looked over at her and said, “See?” Julia glared at me, like she was an honorary grown-up and her special grown-up job was to keep me in line.

  “What?” I said to all three of them, though I guess I knew what. “Can’t I ask a simple question?”

  “Michael—,” my mom started, but my dad cut her off.

  “It’s okay,” he said, enunciating carefully, which is what he does when he’s mad. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this since you asked me about it this morning.”

  “Fake, fake, fake,” I wanted to say, because I hadn’t asked him about it. I’d told him.

  “Your grandfather did everything he could not to have to see or talk to or have anything to do with other people. He chopped his own wood and lived on groceries he brought into the cabin once a month. He had no friends, except the occasional army buddy who still sent Christmas cards and would make the mistake of traveling through Vermont and looking your grandfather up. And he didn’t want to have a family. When we came to visit him, it was like pulling teeth to get him to step out of his routine—he did the same chores, the same meals without thinking about what we were eating and when. He didn’t want us there, and I didn’t want to be there.”

  Dad picked up his fork, as if he was going to show how not upset he was by taking a bite of Mom’s actually-pretty-tasty chicken Parmesan. But he couldn’t do it, and he put the fork down.

  “He didn’t want you to come?” I said. “He actually said that?”

  My mom cleared her throat. “He wasn’t a bad man,” she started, but my father cut her off again.

  “He wasn’t a man at all.” My dad was talking faster now, though he was still pretending to be calm. “A man takes care of his family. A man is there for his children. A man welcomes grandchildren. Your grandfather—” Now Dad was looking at me and Julia, and I knew this would drive her crazy, that she was getting in trouble for something I had done. “Just be glad that you have a father who loves you. I come home for dinner. I am a part of your life.”