Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  I tried to remember what Grandpa had told me before, the first time he had taken me into the river of the dead. “Where you’re going doesn’t hurt,” I told him. “And you don’t just disappear. You’ll see me, and you’ll see Grandma—Stella. You’ll see my dad.”

  “Ahh,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at me. His eyes were the same brown as Ghost Grandpa’s but dimmer. His lids hung heavy like he was about to fall asleep. “Thank you,” he said, though he was more mouthing the words than saying anything I could hear. Then he said, “I’m letting go,” and closed his eyes back down.

  That’s when—I think—he died. I felt a shiver of cold, and I remembered later that I heard a sound like a door opening quietly and clicking closed.

  But at the time, I was just staring at Grandpa’s face. It was a different face from the ghost of Grandpa I’d gotten to know. It was thinner, somehow, older looking. It looked like he was sleeping, except he was too still for that.

  I turned, to tell Grandpa that he really was gone. But Grandpa was no longer there.

  Letting go of the dead man’s hands, I stood. I tried not to panic. “Grandpa?” I called out. Where was he? “Grandpa?” I looked in the bathroom. I checked underneath the bed. I even climbed the ladder into the sleeping loft, which was filled with the dusty magazines Dad and I would drag down later. I took two steps to the front door but shivered even contemplating the black abyss out there.

  That’s when I remembered the sound of the door opening and closing. “No,” I said aloud. “Oh, no.” How could Grandpa have left me alone?

  Just then the door opened again, seemingly on its own. Grandpa! I thought. Boy, was I going to yell at him. How could he have given me such a scare?

  But it wasn’t Grandpa. It was paramedics, two of them, running. As soon as they saw the body on the floor, they dropped their kits and knelt down by Grandpa’s side. A tall paramedic with a handlebar mustache felt for a pulse in Grandpa’s neck. The other one, who was blond, with freckles, laid his hands one on top of another on Grandpa’s chest and started to pump. “No,” the tall one said. “He’s got a Do Not Resuscitate order on file. He doesn’t want us to pull him back.”

  The tall one pushed a button on the radio that was clipped to his belt. “He’s passed,” he said into the radio, nodding at the blond guy, who was catching his breath. “And he’s got a DNR. We’re going to load him up and bring him into the hospital to get it certified.”

  “Hey,” I said to them when they started unpacking a duffel bag of equipment. They didn’t look up. I tried tapping one of them on the shoulder, then the other, but my finger felt nothing but air. The short blond one shivered. “It’s cold in here,” he said.

  “Let’s damp down the stove,” said the tall one, closing the vent on the fire, which had burned down to almost nothing anyway.

  I went to the light switch and flicked the lights on and off. “What was that?” said the blond.

  “What was what?” said the tall one.

  “You didn’t see the lights just flicker?”

  “Oh, you,” he said. “You and your ghosts.” The short guy went red in the face. I concentrated really, really hard, and got him to look at my reflection in the dark window, but he pretended he hadn’t seen it. I remembered something Ewan had said. Most people don’t see ghosts, and the ones who do pretend they don’t, because they’re scared.

  But was I a ghost? To become a ghost, you need to die.

  In a flurry of motion, the paramedics zippered Grandpa’s body into a bag and strapped him to a neon yellow stretcher. They checked the cabin to make sure it was empty, turned out the lights, and closed the door.

  After they left, the silence was enormous. It wasn’t the dark that scared me as much as it was the sound of the wind in the trees, and the rattling of something out on the porch. Most people alone in a dark cabin would be afraid of ghosts. No one ever thinks how scary it is to be a ghost. Or to think you might be one.

  Where was Grandpa? How could he leave me here all by myself? I started to get really, really cold. I sat down on the bed and pulled the blanket up to my chin. With a sense of sureness I never felt before, I knew I was stuck. I was stuck, and I was alone.

  Grandpa had said that when he’d been lying on the floor, dying, the shell over his heart had cracked. I closed my eyes. Waiting for something that I knew very well wasn’t going to come, something cracked around my heart as well.

  I must have been lying there an hour, not moving, feeling tired the way you do when you have a high fever. I started to think about Grandpa’s memories of the war, and soon I felt like I was inside them again, alone on the hillside with the burning pain in my knee. I saw myself playing basketball in the gym at Selden, winning. It didn’t matter. Soon, I couldn’t tell if I was me playing, or Grandpa watching me while he was in the war. I didn’t know if I was going to make it off the hill. None of my balls were going into the basket. Grandpa had had to keep moving to stay alive in the war, to pull himself off the field and into the woods. And what had my dad said when we were packing up the cabin in the cold? Keep moving, it’s the only way to stay warm.

  So I stood. I walked one circle around the cabin. I walked it again, making laps, circling over and over until eventually I noticed the letter Grandpa had been writing to my dad. The paper still lay on the table, glowing in the moonlight that came through the window, though I knew that there was really no moon—just the black night of the river.

  What was it Grandpa wanted to say? I stepped closer to the table and lifted the paper. I was hoping for a secret, something that would release me. A map. Or a key. A message that could give me a clue as to how to get out. Or a message like the one I’d sent Ewan from his father before I knew what I was talking about.

  But the paper said “Dear Daniel,” and nothing more.

  All those years, this was all Grandpa could say? He sat down every day to try to unlock his heart, and every single day he failed?

  I wondered how Grandpa had felt, sitting at the table. What did he want to say so badly he tried over and over again, and still he could not?

  Thinking about the possibilities, I felt my right hand twitch. It was nearly frozen, but I thought I might be able to grip the pen. I sat down at the table, and picked it up in a shaky, clawlike grasp. I started to write.

  Chapter 15

  I’d been writing at the table in the cabin for what felt like hours when I began to hear a noise. It was an uneven knocking. I laid the pen down on the table, and the noise stopped.

  I lifted my pen to keep writing, and heard the knocking again. Maybe one of the ropes tying the tarp down over the pile of firewood had come loose and was blowing against the cabin wall? Mostly, I was trying to convince myself that it wasn’t anything alive. I was afraid. If I opened the door again, what would happen to me? Was there some kind of monster of darkness that would suck me into the river?

  Of course, I thought, the rapping might be Grandpa trying to get back in. The idea cheered me. If he were here, I wouldn’t be lonely or scared. But still, I didn’t know. Sometimes in video games, if you open a locked door, you walk right through. Other times, you fall off a cliff. Was the knocking just a test?

  I stood. I waited. I listened. I waited some more, then took six steps across the room and put my hand on the knob. Again, I heard the noise. It was too solid to be anything but an intentional knock—someone was definitely out there. I started to twist the knob, then stopped. I prepared myself. I was hoping that if I opened the door, I’d find Grandpa. But, maybe, instead, the cabin walls would dissolve, leaving me alone in the river, without Grandpa to protect me, without a tunnel to lead me back into the world where I belonged. My heart was beating so quickly I felt I could hear the rushing of the blood through its valves. Finally, I closed my eyes and flung open the door.

  There was nothing but the cold dark force pushing against me.

  Then I heard a slapping sound and saw four fingers wrapped around the door frame. The fingers
looked red from the cold and they were straining to hold on to the edge of the door. I jumped back. There was something familiar about the fingers.

  I had an idea. I stood with my back against the wall next to the door and moved sideways toward the fingers. The force of the blackness was coming through the door, but when I came from the side, I was able to touch the ends of the red, freezing fingers with my own. As soon as I touched them, I felt the cold push of the river fade. The air began to feel warm and light, like it might inside a helium balloon. I felt myself beginning to lift off the ground. I smelled lemon pie—hot, sweet, and delicious. I looked down to check—I was definitely floating. I tried to put my feet on the floor, but I couldn’t do it.

  I began to float out the door, and I grasped the red, chapped hand even harder. I was feeling gentle and happy and full of light, but still, I knew there was danger. Whose hand was I holding? Where was I going?

  As soon as I was out the door, I could see. The hand belonged to Gus. His body was plastered against the wall of the cabin, like he was inside one of those g-force spinning cylinder rides at an amusement park where people’s hair sticks up, and some people can climb the wall, and eventually the floor drops out, and someone pukes and the puke goes flying onto the person next to them, and it is the grossest thing you’ve ever seen.

  “Michael,” Gus said. It was hard to understand him because the air was pushing his cheeks back toward his ears. It looked like he was baring his teeth. How come I wasn’t feeling it? “Look!” he shouted, and gestured by moving his eyes away from me. The space inside the river was shaped very strangely—Gus’s body looked like stretched-out Silly Putty. His other hand and even his face seemed very far away.

  I followed his gaze to see who was holding his other hand. She looked as small as if she were standing on the other side of a football field, but I could still see who it was—Julia. She was floating out in the space beyond the porch, her toes pointed into a perfect second position, her eyes closed, her ponytail sticking straight up in the air as if she’d just stuck a knife into a toaster.

  Beyond Julia, even smaller, was Trip. And beyond Trip was Ewan—a tiny Ewan. They were holding hands, making a chain. A chain of people. My friends. Against the impenetrable dark of the river, they looked like they were glowing yellow and pink.

  “You guys are inside the river!” I shouted to Gus, half triumphant that they’d come to rescue me, half terrified that they were all stuck now in the same place I was.

  “You have to come home now!” Gus shouted. “You have to hurry. Ewan said just to tell you to climb onto me.”

  “What are you even doing here? How did you get into the river?”

  “Shut up, Michael,” said Gus. “Start climbing.”

  But I was scared, and Gus did not look like he was safe. I knew what the cold felt like. I didn’t want to go. “I’m not as strong as you guys,” I said.

  “Michael,” Gus said, “don’t you see? You have to try.”

  “It’s warm where I am right now.” I took a deep breath. “The air smells good all of a sudden. This is so comfortable. You go back. I’ll stay here.”

  “You’re not feeling comfortable!” Gus shouted. “You’re feeling life. You’re breathing in my life. And Julia’s and Trip’s and Ewan’s. Ewan said to tell you how this is working. That you are stuck in the river right now and you don’t have enough life force left to get out of it on your own. If you feel good right now, it’s because you’re sucking off the life force of all of us making this chain. Do you feel like the air is sweet? That’s how your grandpa felt when he was with you.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. He was right. Lemon. He’d said lemon pie.

  “Michael, don’t you see?” Gus went on. “You’re drowning. You’re dying. And if you don’t come right away, you’re going to take the rest of us with you.”

  “I told you, I can’t!” I shouted, but I looked at him as I said it, and he looked back at me, hard, and held my gaze. I remembered sitting at the top of the jungle gym at the elementary school with him, jumping off farther than I thought I could go. I remembered running down the stairs of our building, pretending we were in a fire. I remembered the time we went to East Hampton with his dad and he let us ride to the Dairy Queen in the trunk of his Saab—it was so dark we couldn’t see our own knees, and we held hands, like we were doing now.

  And in that moment of feeling Gus’s strength, I borrowed some of it, and I let go of his hand. A cold rush swept the warm floaty air away, but there was a split second when I had the chance to move. I kind of hurled myself at Gus’s body, grabbing him. As the cold rushed in I felt its full impact and I knew I could no sooner have moved through it as I could have lifted a car. My body was being squeezed by the air around me.

  “Climb across me,” Gus said. “Climb right down the chain.”

  “I can’t,” I said again, but I started to move. Working my way across him was slow, and it reminded me of rock climbing. You find a place to put your hand, and then another place to put your foot. Each time I shifted, I felt like I was lifting a heavy stone. It took a lot of concentration, and it was exhausting. I didn’t think I could make it to the end of Gus’s body, much less down the rest of the chain.

  I closed my eyes to rest, and without warning, I found myself inside Gus’s mind, totally oblivious to what was happening with my body. It was a new kind of slipping. I saw Gus’s mom, or at least her knees, from under a table. I was Gus, crawling and rolling on the floor under a table, with shoes everywhere. There were brown oxfords, and strappy, jeweled sandals, bare toes. The grown-ups were laughing loudly, and I could hear the clinking of forks on plates. I was remembering how I was laughing with them, almost like someone was tickling me. Colors inside this memory appeared brighter and the edges of things crisper and more tightly drawn. Happy! No wonder Gus is so good at everything he does.

  Reinvigorated, I pulled myself all the way across Gus’s body and was getting ready to cross over to Julia when I slipped inside Gus’s mind again. This time, it didn’t feel so happy. I was looking into a mirror and seeing an older Gus looking back at me. He had grown jowly around the jawline, and he had a full growth of beard, but his eyes were the same. Or rather, they were Gus’s same black eyes, but they were sad. The bright light from earlier was gone. There were shadows in the mirror, and his eyelids were half lowered like he was trying not to fall asleep.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, without even thinking, and as I spoke, the vision changed. He caught his reflection in the mirror and I knew that part of what he was seeing there was me. And I wondered for the first time—I’d always thought that Gus had everything he needed, but maybe he needed me also?

  And then I felt Julia’s skinny-minny wrist between my ankles and I couldn’t believe she would be strong enough to support me.

  “Michael!” she shouted. I looked up at her face. She was crying, the tears traveling back toward her hairline like raindrops on the windshield of a moving car. “Michael, come on. You have to keep climbing.”

  “Are you okay?” I said, but she just shook her head.

  I climbed along her body just as I had Gus’s. The muscles in my arms and legs were starting to burn, and when I stopped, I found myself slipping into Julia’s mind, just as I’d done with Gus. When Julia was little, she had a mirror in the car, in front of her seat, and she would talk to herself in it. I was her now, talking to the mirror, pretending I was a fancy lady who worked in a jewelry store, drawing my pretend long, painted fingernails across a pretend glass counter, saying, “Here are the diamonds. Here are the rubies.” I opened my eyes ready to keep going, as energized by the idea of those imaginary diamonds and rubies as Julia had been as a kid.

  It wasn’t long before I was exhausted again, and again I slipped into her mind. This time, I was Julia standing at the back of Selden’s auditorium. The seats were filled for assembly and I scanned through group after group, looking for a place to sit, a friend, or someone who might become a friend. Each e
mpty seat was all wrong. And then Julia was inside the dance studio, a room where everything was either painted white or covered in mirrors, and she was spinning, her eyes fixed on her face in the mirror as she spun, and the light on the mirror was splitting into thousands of shards reflected off thousands of shiny, angled surfaces, and it hurt, but she had to keep making the pirouettes—there was a number she was counting, and her body was trained to follow her mind. I felt like something was going to crack, maybe one of my bones, and I wondered how Julia could keep spinning, could keep going with the light breaking apart inside her eyes.

  And then I opened my eyes and looked up at the real Julia, and I understood that there were things I knew about her that she did not. I slept thirty feet from Julia every single night. We shared a bathroom, for Pete’s sake. And yet, I hadn’t bothered to pay attention. Julia was just as freaked out finding a seat in assembly as I was. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t perfect. She was a mess. She was like me.

  I wanted to say something to her, the kind of thing you say if you’re worried this may be the last thing you ever say. “You’re the one who is beautiful,” I said, and Julia nodded. I think she was doing everything she could to hold on and couldn’t really take in what I was trying to say. I kept looking at her, though, and finally she nodded again, and I moved on.

  Holding on to Trip I felt an instant rush of strength. With Gus, I’d felt the power of his happiness. With Julia, I’d felt energized by her quest for perfection. With Trip, I felt strong, traveling with the kind of athletic grace that belonged only to him.

  But even so, climbing was hard work, and I had to rest. I slipped right inside his head, where I was standing in an open field, and there was a ball coming toward me. I caught it and threw it back to a man who looked like an older version of Trip. Was that Trip’s dad? He was throwing the ball hard. “ ’Atta boy,” he’d say when I caught it. “Get ’em,” and “Yeah.” With each catch, I heard myself grunting, but I never let a single ball drop.