Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  And that’s when it happened. If I hadn’t been looking for Grandpa, I would never have known what I was seeing. First, it was a fleck of white—the tip of Grandpa’s white hair. Then there was a tiny something that might have been the pink of his skin. Just those two hints of Grandpa, and I started to feel cold. Or colder. I was already a regular kind of cold. My legs were getting heavy, and I must have sat down hard on the floor. I felt a shock of pain on my butt, but it was really far away. I wasn’t ready. But I was going in.

  “Michael!” Dad said. “Are you all right?” His voice came from far away, and he looked tiny but totally clear, like the gym lockers I’d seen at the end of the tunnel before. I tried not to hold on against the slip, I tried not to grab at the edge of the cliff.

  I could see out of my half-closed eyes that my father was trying to make a call into his cell phone, even though there wasn’t service.

  “Michael!” he shouted, and I remembered the way Grandpa used to shout “Michael!” when he was chopping wood and wanted me to stand back. I felt his alarm, his worry. I saw the image that he’d seen in his mind, of the ax falling on a little boy’s arm, the terrible act that cannot be taken back. The Grandpa I knew then was different from the Grandpa of now, and yet the way he had shouted was just like my dad, and like himself too.

  The last thing I remember was my dad standing at the window. “I think I see a car,” he said. “I’m going out to stop it. Michael, hold on!”

  But I was already gone.

  Chapter 14

  This time I didn’t travel through any of Grandpa’s memories as I tunneled through the river of the dead. I think it might have been because I was moving faster, so fast I didn’t have time to see what I was passing through. And my guess is that I was moving faster because the tunnel was now wider. Ewan had said that as the slips happened the connection expands. Whatever it was I was tunneling through, it was still cold, but I didn’t feel it squeezing against my body. As I slipped this time, I could still breathe.

  I woke up on Grandpa’s bed in the cabin, with Grandpa sitting next to me. The cabin looked the way Dad and I had found it when we came in earlier, and there was a fire burning in the woodstove. Grandpa was holding a mug of something that was steaming, which he handed to me when he saw that I was awake.

  “It’s cocoa,” he said. I took a sip, and there was something warm about the drink even though I couldn’t exactly feel or taste it. The tingling at the roof of my mouth reminded me of the feeling I’d had when I touched Grandpa’s shoulder back at the lake.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “I’ve figured out what’s wrong. I think I know what you’re looking for.”

  I was expecting him to raise his eyebrows and look eager for my news, but instead his face kind of collapsed. Grandpa shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come back here,” he said. “It’s dangerous for you. I’ve been trying not to reach you. It’s like holding your breath, you know, it’s horrible, but I’ve been doing it. You found me this time.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people who know all about what’s happening and they told me how to fix it. It’s like a video game. You have to figure out what you need to get to the next level. And I know now. I know what you need.” This should have been good news for him. Why was he still looking sad?

  “You see,” I started in again, “you told me about the shell around your heart. Well, my dad has one too. That’s why he doesn’t cry. And doesn’t feel hungry—that’s why he can eat protein shakes instead of actual food. It’s why he works all the time like you did.” My voice trailed off. Why wasn’t this making the kind of sense out loud that it had made inside my head?

  Grandpa was watching the door. “I’m sorry, Michael,” he said. “It’s too late. Last time…” He shifted off the bed to standing. He looked at the door.

  “Last time what?” I said.

  “Last time, when you touched my shoulder,” he began. He turned to look at me, and I saw that even though he was a ghost and couldn’t produce real tears, his eyes were full and shining. “I felt your hand. And just now, you could taste the cocoa, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “A little.”

  “I don’t think that’s good,” he said. “I think maybe it means you’re beginning to do more than visit this place.”

  I put the mug down. Suddenly, I didn’t want to know if it might be getting warmer, which indeed it was. “I just thought,” I said. Grandpa furrowed his brow. “I thought I’d figured it out. I thought I was finally paying attention to things. I thought I had a chance. I wasn’t supposed to get stuck. Not yet.”

  Grandpa took a step toward me and tousled my hair. A feeling of dread settled into my stomach at the knowledge that I could more than kind of feel his hand on my head. It was also weird to think that all during the time that he was alive, I don’t remember his touching me.

  “Michael,” he said, “let’s try to get you out of here. Right now.”

  “But what about you? I’m supposed to try to help you.”

  “Don’t worry about me. The longer you stay, the worse this will be.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling small.

  “Give me your hands,” Grandpa said. Together, we sat down on the edge of the bed. But just then, the door to the cabin opened, and a version of Grandpa who looked almost exactly the same as Ghost Grandpa walked into the room. Covered in a dusting of snow, he carried a piece of firewood in each hand.

  “Oh, no,” said Grandpa. “Oh dear,” he said, and then, “Oh dear me. I don’t think you should see this.”

  “See what?” I said. It didn’t look like we were seeing anything particularly exciting. The still-alive version of Grandpa closed the door to shut out the swirling snow. He tossed the firewood he was carrying onto a pile next to the stove. He bent over to undo the red and black striped laces on the brown boots and left them in the spot where my dad and I would find them later. He was wearing a string around his neck, and there was a piece of plastic the size of a quarter hanging off it, with a red button in the center. I recognized the necklace from a TV ad showing old people falling out of their recliners and using the button to call an ambulance.

  “This is the oldest I’ve ever seen you. Was this after we stopped coming to visit?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Grandpa. “It was morning. I’d just finished bringing in the last load of firewood. I had enough piled up to get me through to the end of the day.” He sighed and put a hand on my shoulder. This time, instead of tingling, I felt something solid behind his touch. Not fingers, not a palm, but something.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “I can feel you really well.”

  “Look how tired I was,” he said. The still-alive Grandpa sat down in a chair at the table. “My body was ready to go, but the idea of dying still scared me. It was as close then as it was during the war. Back in the war—phew!—it was all any of us thought about. No one talked about it, but I couldn’t eat because of how scared I was. Of course, eventually, the idea of dying stopped feeling as important as the idea of getting something hot into my stomach. That was because I’d started to build up the shell. I needed a nice thick shell, and boy, oh, boy did I get it. And kept it with me.”

  Grandpa talking about dying was giving me an uncomfortable suspicion. “Grandpa,” I said, “didn’t you say you wanted to take me back? We were touching before—shouldn’t that have started it?”

  “Yes,” he said, snapping back to attention. “It should have. Maybe we weren’t touching for long enough. We’ll try it right now.” He placed both hands on my shoulders.

  “Shouldn’t we say good-bye?” I said.

  He lifted his hands and held them in his lap for a moment. He took a breath as if he was about to speak, and then he closed his lips tight.

  “No,” he said. “We can’t. I can’t bear to. Is that too horrible?” He looked so anxious and so pained, I couldn’t tell him that yes, I thought it was weird.

  “It’s okay,” I said. �
�Let’s go.”

  He put his hands back on my shoulders. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the cold.

  But as I sat there waiting, and waiting some more, I realized that I wasn’t getting colder at all. “What’s wrong?” I said, opening my eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, shaking out his arms before laying them on my shoulders again. “I’ll try again.” He closed his eyes again, and again, I braced myself for the cold. Nothing happened. “Usually, I just let go,” Grandpa said. “Usually, slipping back into the river is easy, even if it’s a little hot each time. It feels like I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Hot?” I said. “It’s freezing!”

  “Shh,” he said, and started taking shallow breaths through his nose, closing his eyes this time.

  But his concentration was broken by the whistle of a kettle on the stove. We both watched the other Grandpa rise from the table and move slowly to lift the kettle off the flame. We smelled the coffee as the hot water hit the grounds, and Ghost Grandpa breathed in through his nose. “Delicious,” he said. We watched the Alive Grandpa shuffle back to the table and set the mug down.

  He pulled a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer in the table and sat over them, taking a small sip from the coffee cup, lifting the pen, and then putting it down again.

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “Writing a letter.”

  “Who were you writing to?”

  “To your dad. I tried writing to him nearly every day.”

  “Did he ever write back?”

  “He never got the letters. I never sent them.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Grandpa laughed, a dry little cough, and it was so full of sadness I realized I had been feeling sad myself. I was learning that feeling sad and feeling cold have a lot in common, and just as I was thinking that, I understood what I was going to see.

  Charlisse had told me to pay attention, and I had. I knew the coffee Grandpa wasn’t drinking would stay right where it was on the table, in the same chipped blue mug. The fire that was crackling now would die out, and Dad and I would sweep those ashes into the tin bucket sitting next to the woodstove.

  The boots with the well-creased toe, the red and black laces that looked like someone had just taken them off—they would look just that way when I found them. And the unmade bed I was sitting on right now, these were the sheets and blankets Dad and I would fold.

  “Grandpa,” I said, hardly able to make a sound.

  Grandpa couldn’t look at me. “I’ll get you out of here,” he said. “I promise. I don’t know why it isn’t working. You shouldn’t see this!”

  “Keep trying,” I said, because now that I knew what was ahead, I wanted to get out of there more than he wanted me to go. I gave him my hands and breathed like him, trying to will myself into another place.

  It didn’t work. We tried again. We tried and tried until I started to feel Grandpa’s hands shake.

  “No,” I said. “We can’t be stuck here. Come on!” I grabbed Grandpa’s hand, pulling for the door. So strange that I could touch him for real now. He didn’t feel cold to me at all.

  But he wouldn’t move. “Michael, stop,” he said. “It’s no good.”

  “The porch!” I shouted, letting go of his stubborn hand to cross the room, passing the still-alive Grandpa, with his pen and paper and cup of coffee. “Come on.” Why didn’t he understand that if we were on the porch, we wouldn’t have to see?

  When I opened the door, I saw why. For outside, there wasn’t the snowy day that we’d been watching out the window. The air was black. And it wasn’t really air. It felt like what happens when you hold two magnets up against each other. It was a great pushing, a force against me. It was too stiff for me to put an arm or even a finger out into it, and I wondered if, like a magnet, some things might get sucked into it hard and fast. I couldn’t see into the blackness, but I could feel that it went on and on—and down and down. I was afraid of the air that wasn’t air. I’d been standing in front of it just a second before I felt a burning inside my nose from the cold, and a stinging on the skin of my arms. There was wind too. I could hear it.

  I had to lean against the door with my whole body before it would close. “What was that?” I said to Grandpa. He looked up at me and swallowed hard.

  “Tell me,” I said, because I knew he didn’t want to.

  “It’s the river,” he said, his voice small. “Or the light. The darkness. Whatever you want to call it. But it’s changed.”

  “Can’t we just push through it?” I said. “Like we usually do?”

  “No,” Grandpa said. “If we can’t get into the river, it must mean that the energy is gone, or is fading.” His face twisted with sadness. “Michael,” he said. “Come here. Be with me. It’s about to start.”

  I took a few steps back across the cabin toward him. There was a noise behind me, and I turned to see Alive Grandpa pushing back in his chair. Half standing, he was grabbing his left arm, and then he was stumbling across the room. I had to step out of his way, and I felt Ghost Grandpa’s hands pulling me back toward the bed. Alive Grandpa was leaning on the kitchen counter. With one shaking hand, he pressed the button on the string around his neck. Then he struggled across the room, bracing himself against the backs of chairs, just missing putting his hand on the hot woodstove. He half made it to the bed but fell to the floor before he could reach it. Ghost Grandpa and I had to move backward quickly to avoid him.

  The old man lay on the floor, his arms to his sides, his clear brown eyes open and staring into the cabin’s rafters.

  I was so scared, I let Ghost Grandpa pull me onto his lap, like I was a little boy. His touch was as definite as if we were both alive and real in the world.

  While Alive Grandpa lay on the floor in front of us, Ghost Grandpa started talking very fast, like he had a lot to say to me in a very short amount of time. “I want you to know,” he whispered into my ear, “I love you more than I loved my life. I love you the way I loved your father, I loved Stella, I loved my own mother, my father, your sister, Julia. I built that shell around my heart to protect myself from the love. When you’ve lived much of your life in fear, it’s hard to feel love without also feeling fear—fear that you’ll become a slave to the love, fear that love will ruin or desert you, fear that you will have to one day live without love again. But now I’m afraid my love for you is hurting not me, but you. I’ve dragged you in here with me and you’re going to have to share my pain—oh, Michael, I’m so sorry!”

  “No,” I breathed, because even though I felt a sour black taste come into my mouth, I could feel Grandpa’s hot whisper in my ear, and I could feel his arms around mine. Gone was the cold of his touch. There were times when he was talking when I couldn’t separate his breath and voice in my ear from my own living thoughts. He was so close to me, we were the same.

  “Michael,” Grandpa said, “I think when I was dying, something happened to me. Time went very slowly. While I was waiting to go, I saw everything. Stella. Daniel—your father. The war. My years up here. The shell I’d built up around my heart cracked open, and all the memories came flooding back. I lay there and I couldn’t move, and I was so, so sorry.” Grandpa was squeezing me hard. “There was nothing I could do. There wasn’t anything that could save me. It wasn’t like the time in the war—when I saw you playing basketball—or maybe it was myself I saw then? Repeating, we’re all repeating ourselves, aren’t we? This time, I didn’t see anyone to help me. I couldn’t reach. I couldn’t change a thing.”

  “This was how you died?” I asked. It couldn’t be like this, I thought. That you could be sitting at a table, perfectly normal, and then the next second lying on the floor, and then not too long after that, be gone. I didn’t want Grandpa to go. “You were just lying there, all alone?”

  The man on the floor groaned. “Oh, Stella, I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “Oh, Daniel.” His voice had so much pain and sadness in it, I thought something insid
e me might break.

  “I was remembering all my chances,” Grandpa explained. “I remembered things I hadn’t thought of in decades. Things about my own mother. Her smell. The feel of her hand holding mine.”

  “Where am I going?” the Grandpa on the floor said, and I heard the sadness ringing in his voice like the toll of a bell. “I am alone.”

  “Everything was dark,” Grandpa whispered.

  “We have to help him,” I said.

  “No,” Grandpa said. “We can’t. I don’t know what will happen. We’ve come too far already.”

  On the floor, Grandpa groaned. And I felt the groan trigger a feeling deep in my own insides. I felt a tugging, as if something that belonged inside was being pulled out. I broke away from Grandpa to get to the man on the floor.

  I picked his head up and laid it in my lap. It was surprisingly heavy. “I feel him!” I shouted.

  Grandpa rushed over to my side. “I can’t see,” mumbled the man on the floor. I touched his hand. I curled my fingers around his palm, and even though he could no longer get his hand to move, I knew he felt mine.

  “He can feel me!” I said.

  “Oh, Michael,” Grandpa cried. “This is not good. You don’t want him to feel you.”

  I didn’t care. I leaned down close to Grandpa’s ear, where I thought he could hear me best. “It’s me, Michael,” I said.

  At first, I didn’t think he heard. But then, his cheek muscles twitched. “An angel?”

  “Your grandson.”

  “Ahh.” He was able to move his hand just a little now. It felt like he was trying to squeeze mine. “Where am I going?” he said. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Let go of that wretched man,” Grandpa cried. “Oh, Michael! You have to let him be.”

  “But he’s dying,” I protested. “Can’t you feel how this is better?”

  “It’s not better,” he said.