Or maybe that was the second-worst part. I reclined my seat, lay back, crossed my arms, and waited for the car to get warm, or for the toothpaste coating my teeth to dissolve, or something. The one thing I can say about how gross I felt from having gotten out of bed without being fully awake was that at least I was too sleepy to be scared.
As the houses and shopping malls fell away, the sun began to rise. My dad turned on a rebroadcast of a basketball game. “If you know what happened, don’t tell me,” he said, and I shrugged. I didn’t know. The announcer’s voice crackled away above the station’s static. Ewan and Julia, even Trip or Gus, couldn’t help me now.
I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to find the car stopped. I pulled myself to a sitting position and looked out the window—we were at a gas station, and my dad was pumping gas. We weren’t on a major highway, just a two-lane road that was brown from road sand and dusty with snow blowing off the banks that had been made by a plow. Because there was so much snow blowing around, a thin line of it had been trapped on top of the pumps.
As I was thinking that the light on the snow reminded me of the light inside the river of the dead, my dad was coming back from the cashier’s window, where he’d just paid. A wind came up and he was engulfed by a swirl of white blowing between the pumps and the office. For a second, inside the swirling snow, my dad looked far away, and paler, like he’d faded into an old man with pink skin and white streaks in his hair.
We drove into a little town, with a wide main street on which all the houses were big and white, with porches deep enough for lots of green rocking chairs. Even though it was February, the doors were hung with wreathes and red bows, and Christmas tree lights were still strung from the trees in the town green. This looked like the kind of place where you could get warm, homemade bread in every restaurant. Or waffles with lots of syrup. “Are we going to get something to eat?” I said.
“No,” said Dad. He handed me a shrink-wrapped muffin from the glove compartment. “I got this in Massachusetts, when you were sleeping,” he said. He pulled over in front of a big stone house with neatly trimmed bushes, and a sign that read: HATTERLY FUNERAL HOME.
“Crumbs, Michael,” Dad warned, pointing to the leather upholstery. Julia and I were generally not allowed to eat in Dad’s car. As soon as he’d disappeared inside the stone house, I dropped the muffin on the dashboard, and started to tear the car apart looking for my dad’s cell phone to call Gus. I couldn’t find it, and before I would have had the chance to make a call anyway, Dad was back. In his hands, he had a small square box.
“What’s that?” I said, after watching him set it gently on the floor of the backseat.
“Ashes,” he answered. I didn’t need to ask whose. I couldn’t believe that all of one person could fit into a box so small.
• • •
After the town was behind us, we turned off the main road onto an unplowed track in the woods. The tires slipped and skidded on loose snow and ice, and the branches of pine trees brushed against the windshield of the car like we were in a car wash. Or at least, a car wash where you worry the whole time a big stick is going to come crashing through the glass.
“We should have brought the Jeep,” said my dad. “I forgot how terrible this road can be in winter.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No, just ridiculous. That anyone would choose to live out here in the winter.”
“He said he found other people irritating,” I said without thinking. “And he couldn’t stand to be around anyone anymore.”
The back wheels of the car slid out a little, and my dad followed the skid, gunning the engine to keep the car from sticking. “What?” he said, turning the wheel sharply to the left, then to the right as we slid downhill. I was holding the edge of my seat with both hands. The road leveled out, and the tires found traction on the snow. “Who said that? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s still a little early for me.”
We drove for a while more until my dad said, “Do you notice how it’s full-on daylight and it still feels kind of dark here?”
“Yeah,” I said, though what I really had noticed was that my dad was talking to me like I was a grown-up. “It’s a little depressing,” I said.
“Michael, this is the most depressing place on earth.”
• • •
We skidded and spun on the unplowed road for what felt like hours. Finally, the road forked—people had nailed up plywood signs with their names on them—half to the left, half to the right. One of the signs was labeled KIMMEL. It was strange to see a name I thought of as belonging to my family posted to a tree in the middle of the woods in Vermont. As much as I’d come to know Grandpa as a ghost, it was weird to think that he had been part of the same real-life family with the name Kimmel when he was alive.
But when we entered the clearing where the cabin stood, our visits here started coming back. The window trim was still painted bright red, and the cabin had a tin roof that was dark green, like the needles on the tall pines. It didn’t look like the cabin in Grandpa’s early memory—I think the roof then was black, and the woods had not grown up.
I’d never seen the cabin in the snow. Back when we used to come, it was always summer, though sometimes summer was so cold we had to wear sweaters and light the woodstove at night. I remember once being half awake when we got to the clearing. Grandpa had stepped out of the front door and looked at us without smiling or waving, like someone in an old-fashioned photograph where they had to hold the same expression for three minutes or else their face would look like a blur.
Now, because of the snow, my dad had to leave the car out on the road. Opening the door, he took his first step, and fell in up to his thigh. “Careful, Michael,” he said to me. I slid across the seat after him. I had to sort of jump down into the holes he’d made. I followed him one giant leap at a time to the porch, where wood was stacked all the way up to the ceiling, just as I remembered, and covered in a bright blue tarp tied down with ropes. Dad was wearing his weekend dress shoes, which were some kind of soft leather slip-on things my mom buys him. “Didn’t you bring boots?” I said to him.
“I forgot. It’s been a while since I left New York.”
“Yeah.” I showed him my sneakers. “Me too.”
We stomped our feet to shake off the snow, but a lot of it had already melted inside our shoes and along our legs. After trying the door and finding it locked, my dad pulled out a set of keys inside a yellowed envelope—I guess he must have been holding on to them all these years—and started to sort through them in his freezing hands. I stepped in front of him, jiggled the front door to the left, and it opened.
“How did you know to do that?” Dad asked.
I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
There wasn’t much light coming through the windows into the cabin, but there was enough to see that the one big room had not changed. A table with two chairs atop a braided rug filled the center of the room. Along a far wall lay a single bed. Behind me was the short countertop with a sink, fridge, and a small gas cooking range.
The cabin didn’t look like Grandpa was dead. It looked like he’d just stepped out. His bed was unmade, a thick wool blanket and a quilt pushed down to the bottom of the mattress. A pair of brown leather boots, well-creased at the toe, with black and red striped laces stood next to the door. Split wood was piled next to the woodstove. The only sign that he’d been gone awhile was a mug of coffee out on the table, the milk marbled, going bad.
My legs ached with cold, and I felt my teeth begin to chatter. “It looks like he just left,” I said. “Not like he died.”
“He’d been waiting half his life to die.” My dad lifted the envelopes in the pile of mail to see who they were from.
“Can you light a fire?” I asked. “I’m freezing.”
“I don’t want to have to wait for it to burn out,” Dad said. He found a box of trash bags under the sink. “We’ll get warme
r the faster we work.” He handed me a bag, and said, “Everything in the fridge. All the food in the cabinets that’s already opened.” I did what he told me to, dropping into the bag a half-full jug of the milk I remember him mixing from powder, an egg carton with three eggs in it, a container of tuna salad, two rotting oranges, a tub of butter, lettuce, a pale pink tomato. Soon the bag was too heavy to carry, and I dragged it across the floor.
“Let me have that,” said Dad, “it’s going to leak.”
I made a move to sit down on the bed. “Keep going,” Dad said. “It’s the only way to stay warm.”
He was right. After throwing out all the food, we filled garbage bags with clothing and old magazines. We filled boxes with dishes and pots and pans, pencils and china bowls. We packed up the dirty towels in the bathroom, and the worn-down bathroom rug. Anything not perishable got stacked by the door. My dad put all the garbage in the trunk of his car, and anything we wanted to keep in the backseat—he said Goodwill would come for everything else. Stepping gingerly in the holes in the snow, he dragged one bag after another behind him. Even being careful, his pant legs were white with snow when he came back in, and pretty soon, he showed me how his pants were growing stiff as the water logged in the fabric was turning to ice.
As we worked, I felt the air in the cabin beginning to change. It reminded me of how Grandpa said the air smelled sweeter when we were together, but it wasn’t sweet that I was smelling, it was sad, if you can call that a smell—it was a damp, musty odor tinged with a hint of rot.
With each breath, I felt like I was letting more and more sadness into my body, and the sadness was gathering there, squeezing at my heart, making me feel as if I was going to cry. I wasn’t crying. Not yet. But how was I supposed to be figuring out what Grandpa wanted from me when my dad was making me put everything that had belonged to Grandpa in the trash?
After a few hours, the cabin didn’t look like anyone lived in it anymore. The mattress was stripped of sheets, and we could see how it was stained and lumpy. The curtains had been so old, they ripped as we tried to pull them closed. My dad said, “My mom must have put these here,” in a tone that sounded halfway between disdain and wonder. With the curtains removed from the windows, we could see that they were dirty—hardly any light came through. We could hear the wind blowing outside. What had it been like to live here, winter after winter, all alone?
When I looked over at my dad, wondering if he was thinking the same thing, he was holding Grandpa’s toothbrush. It was a red toothbrush with bristles that were curled and worn, and I saw him look at it for a second. I thought, Maybe he’s going to feel sad, and just the idea of his feeling sad made me feel sad. But then my dad didn’t feel sad. Or at least, he didn’t look sad. He chucked the toothbrush into the garbage bag as if it were an animal that had bitten him. He swept Grandpa’s denture cleaning kit into the trash as well—I’d looked at it before but hadn’t wanted to go near it. Briskly, Dad tied a knot in the top of the bag and carried it out to the car.
He came back with the cardboard box holding my grandfather’s ashes. He put the box on the table, as if it would replace the salt and pepper shakers and sugar bowl we’d emptied and put in the box for Goodwill. It was getting dark, though it was still mid-afternoon. Dad hadn’t turned on any lights except the one over the sink, so the box was in shadow.
“Okay,” he said, clapping his hands together like a camp counselor. How could he sound so cheerful? “I think we’re done here. We’re going to turn off the fridge and the water and the gas. Did you know you could do that to a house?”
I could feel the first sob coming, so I watched him turn a dial in the back of the empty fridge without saying a word. He explained that you leave the door open to keep mildew from forming, and you shut off water under the sink, then run the water out of the taps in the kitchen and bathroom until they are dry to keep water from freezing inside the pipes.
Didn’t he care that Grandpa loved him? Didn’t he know how Grandpa had been watching him all those times and just couldn’t find the right words to break through? When Dad had been practicing diving off the float in the lake, Grandpa had been proud. When he’d been doing his homework in his room, Grandpa had wanted to touch his shoulder, had wanted to say to him, “That’s my boy.”
My fingers were aching and my nose was starting to run. I was so cold, all I wanted to do was get back in the car, turn the heater up to high, and put my hands and face directly down on a vent. But when Dad turned to leave without even looking back, I couldn’t follow. We’d taken apart Grandpa’s whole life in one afternoon, and we were leaving all that was left of his body alone in a cold, dark cabin where he had never once been happy all his life. We were leaving Grandpa behind without saying good-bye.
“Dad, wait,” I said. I could hear my voice beginning to crack. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want him to see I was sad. What I wanted him to see was that this was sad. What was this? I couldn’t say exactly. All I could come up with was, “You forgot Grandpa’s ashes.”
“Yes?” said my dad.
“Um, are you sure we shouldn’t bring the box back home with us?”
“No, we’ll leave it here.”
“Aren’t we going to bury him?”
“Not now.”
“What if the cabin gets broken into?”
“This is Vermont,” said my dad. “That’s not how it works up here.”
“What if it’s broken into by a bear?”
“Then I feel sorry for the bear.”
“This isn’t funny! You can’t just leave someone’s ashes in an empty cabin,” I said.
“Are you crying?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said, and then, “It’s your fault.”
“What? You’re mad at me?”
“No,” I said, but I was. “Why couldn’t you have been nicer to Grandpa? Why did you stop speaking to him? Why did you never come back?”
“You want me to have been nicer to him?” Dad sat down on a chair next to the table, as if this question were so shocking he had to steady himself. “Michael,” he said, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you since my father died, but let me make something absolutely clear to you right now. I know my father had a hard life in a lot of ways, growing up with money tight. I know he had a hard time in the war. But he was a horrible father. I don’t think he wanted to have a kid. My mother died when I was young, and after she was gone, I think he tried as much as he could to never speak to me. After I left home, he didn’t try to get me to come back. I visited him for years with almost no encouragement. He didn’t want me—he didn’t want us, do you understand? He didn’t want people. He didn’t want a family. He didn’t have those feelings.”
“What if he did?” I said.
“You didn’t know him,” my dad corrected. “You weren’t there. Maybe it’s hard for you to imagine because you don’t have a father like this, but I know. He was there with his body, but in other ways, he was always gone.” He stood up. “It’s freezing. We can talk about this more in the car, but we need to get going. If we don’t leave soon, we won’t be able to get home to night.”
“I’m not leaving him here,” I said.
“And I’m not taking him with me,” said my dad. “I don’t want him in my house. I don’t want him in my life.”
“I do,” I said.
My dad stood over me, towering. “Michael,” he said, in his sternest, most serious voice, pointing to the door. “Get in the car.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving.” I didn’t know what I wanted to say next, and I’m not sure where this came from, but “You’re just like him!” kind of poured out of me.
My dad’s face went white, and I felt a shiver of recognition. I was right. All those protein shakes instead of dinner. Grandpa standing outside my dad’s room trying to think of something to say. Dad and Grandpa were the same. Dad was pretending—he’d always been pretending—that he was different. Even the last few days—the family dinner, the basket
ball practice. He’d been forcing himself. “You try to act like you’re not like him,” I said, “like you’re this great dad, but you’re not. You don’t want me either. You don’t even like me. You don’t like my hair, you don’t think I try hard enough in school. You don’t like it when I play video games. You never want to talk to me. Grandpa talks to me. He’s the only one who ever listens to what I have to say.”
“What are you talking about?” Dad said.
If I’d been more rational, maybe I would have understood his confusion. But just then, what I was thinking was that it was my dad’s fault that I’d started slipping in the first place. I was thinking that Grandpa was really coming back to get my dad, but he couldn’t, because my dad didn’t feel anything—there hadn’t been a way to get in. So Grandpa had come to me.
“Get in the car, Michael,” my dad said. He was still standing over me, still pointing to the door. “The things you’re saying are hateful and rude. I’m telling you, I’m serious, there is going to be hell to pay if you do not walk out that door, get in the car, and shut up this exact minute.”
I was scared. My dad is a lot bigger than me. And he doesn’t ever say things like “shut up” or “hell.” But I didn’t move. “Look at me,” I said to my dad.
“What?” he said, but while he waited for me to answer his question, I locked into his eyes with my own, and stared as hard as I could.
“What are you doing?” he said.
I didn’t answer, just kept looking at him and concentrating. The first time I’d slipped, Grandpa had said something about my eyes, how he’d seen Grandma in them, and got to me that way. That’s what I was trying to do now.
My dad—what did I see there? His eyes were just like mine, brown on the outside, and yellow green near the pupil. As I held his gaze, they changed, his eyes, like he was thinking, and then they started to get wet, like they do when you try not to blink. Looking back, I wonder if I was doing something to him like Charlisse had done to me—making me feel like I was standing on solid ground, making me not want to look away, to be thirsty for what I was seeing in her eyes.
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