Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  And this is the surprising part: I was terrified of the ball. I was terrified of my dad. He was throwing the ball too hard on purpose. He wanted me to drop it.

  “It’s too hard!” I shouted. “I want to stop.”

  “No quitting,” he said. “You want to be a man, right?” I didn’t want to be a man. I wanted the balls to stop. So I threw them back so hard that my dad would be the one who couldn’t catch them. But I couldn’t win. The ball kept coming back at me.

  I opened my eyes and was looking up at Trip’s face. He’d made me feel powerful and strong right up until the moment when I’d slipped inside his head. Then I felt weak, angry, and scared. I didn’t like being Trip.

  I was afraid to close my eyes again, but I had to. This time, I saw something from Trip’s future. Trip was saying, “Shh, it’s okay.” He—or I—was holding a woman’s hand. I knew that I was calming her down, that I had the strength to control her feelings with my voice. Her hand was bloody. It was sticking out of the window of a car. The car was dented—no, it was crushed, and half flipped over, such that the side window was facing the sky, and I was holding the strange woman’s hand as an ambulance siren sounded from far away. “You’re going to be okay,” I was saying. “Shh, now. I’m not going to leave you here.” And I sounded like a girl, I was making my voice so high and soft. I asked the woman for her name. “Annie,” I said, after she’d told me. “Annie, you should see the desert out here. It’s like nothing else. When you get out of this car, I’m going to show you these purple mountains. You’ll see what I mean.”

  While I was inside this memory, I didn’t know where Trip was, or who this person in the car was, but I knew that the energy Trip was passing on to me as I climbed across him was also flowing into Annie. Trip was generous—I understood that now—and he was giving something from inside himself to a stranger.

  And then my eyes were open and I started to slide down his arm, really fast, as if he were pushing me away.

  “You go, dude,” Trip said. He did have the power to make me feel calm, just like he’d done with the woman in the crashed car. “You’re all good. Keep it up.”

  As soon as I latched on to Ewan, I immediately went into his mind, and I felt a shock so painful I nearly let go. What was happening inside Ewan wasn’t a vision or a memory. It was right now. I was running along that gray curve of road that he draws over and over in art class, the same road I saw when I was sitting next to him in assembly. I was alone, under the low sky.

  “Ewan,” I said, forcing my eyes open and looking up at his stringy hair and long eyelashes. He was screwing up his face, and I could feel his arm muscles tightening. “Move along,” he said. “I can’t stand this.”

  And then something happened on the road. I ran to the edge, looked over, and saw the red car. It was turned upside down at the bottom of a gully—it must have just crashed, because there was smoke coming from the smashed-up engine, and I heard a hissing sound of steam.

  Was this the same car that Trip had found? Did Trip rush down the side of the mountain and hold someone’s hand inside the car? Trip had said it was the desert, and this was not a desert. It was not the same car. But I remembered what Grandpa said about what memories he traveled to in the river—there were connections between them.

  The car I was seeing in Ewan’s head was much more badly smashed than the one in Trip’s. I knew no one could have survived. And yet, while I looked down from above, a man in a red jacket was standing next to it. He looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. When he saw me, he started to run up the cliff, scrambling on the rocks, and I scrambled down, and then we were standing together, and the man was holding me, and I was sobbing, and I was saying, “Is this real?” and he was saying, “It’s as real as it needs to be,” and I was saying, “Why are we here?” and he said, “To say good-bye.”

  But then he was sobbing too, and I was the one holding him, and he was saying, “I’m not ready to go.”

  “I’m not ready to have you go,” I said.

  “Ewan!” I shouted, opening my eyes, forcing myself out of his head, or at least trying to. “Keep going, Michael,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Just go!” he shouted. And I knew how strong he had to be to tell me to move, because by now I’d recognized the man in the red jacket from Ewan’s earth science report. He was Ewan’s dad, and Ewan was telling me to push past him. He was saying good-bye.

  And so I closed my eyes and squeezed Ewan as hard as I could, a big bear hug like the one Grandpa had meant to give me when we were swimming in the water. Good-bye, I thought. And inside Ewan’s mind I saw his dad feeling the strength of my hug to Ewan. I saw both of them taking deep breaths, and then his dad let go. “You go on,” he said. “Do not stay here with me.” And then Ewan said to him, “You are inside me. You are the best parts of me,” and his dad said, “I’ll be watching over you,” and I released my hug. I was hardly able to breathe through my sobs. I felt like Ewan was my best friend, like he was precious to me, like it was going to be my job now to take care of him and make sure he was okay.

  “Michael,” he muttered, and I knew how much strength he must be using to speak. “Go,” he said. “Go on.” And so I did.

  As I traveled down Ewan’s arm, I tried to lift my head to see who was waiting for me on Ewan’s other side, but a current of air knocked it back down. I didn’t see until I was actually crossing over. It was my dad.

  As soon as I touched his wrist, I knew I would be okay. I understood, just for a second, how much my dad loves me. He loves me as much as Ewan and his dad loved each other. He loves me with the strength of Trip’s grace. His love has the power of Julia’s beauty. He loves me with all of Gus’s brilliance, and his hope.

  For one second, in the first moment of touching him, I felt like I had when I was little and my dad was holding me and I was resting my head on his shoulder. I had never made this connection before, but it was the same feeling I had had sitting on Grandpa’s lap in the cabin, when we were watching him die, when he was whispering the list of everyone he loved, and I’d felt there was no difference between the hot breath coming from his body and the breath I held inside my own.

  But as I moved across my father, I felt the force of his energy rushing me. The feeling was like my body was being stretched. My stomach clenched with the effort, and I felt my jaw tightening. I couldn’t see any memories—my dad was not letting me in. But I had to rest, so I closed my eyes and must have gone back into my own mind. I was seeing my memories of Grandpa. Grandpa writing at his lonely table in the cabin. Grandpa watching Grandma at their school when Grandpa wasn’t brave enough to say hello or even smile. Grandpa on that open field before the battle, closing his mind to thoughts that could make him go soft.

  Dad tried to pull me past these memories, but I pulled the other way. It felt almost as if Grandpa was the one pulling back while my dad pushed me forward. I felt tiny against their force. We were all three of us locked together.

  “Michael,” my dad said.

  “Grandpa,” I said back.

  But as I held on to my dad, his pulling turned into a pulse. A giant, throbbing pulse that was highly invigorating. It gave me the energy to keep going. There was absolutely no way to see inside him, past the pulsing light of his demands. But at least I knew now what his number one demand was, and it was really simple. He wanted me to live. The pulse inside him wasn’t in his mind. It was in his chest. It was his heart. It was sending out a signal that was jump-starting mine. With each wave of electric reaction, I felt a cascade of sparks inside my body.

  “Michael, hold on,” my father was muttering over and over. “Two seconds more. Hold on. Hold on.” I remembered what Grandpa had said in the cabin. “I love you more than I love my life.” And I felt that in my father’s strength, even as I felt his grip weakening and my legs beginning to float behind me into the cold, rushing void.

  Then, with no warning, I landed hard
on the wooden cabin floor. I could see my own body—I was next to it. I was lying on the floor, and sitting around me in a circle were my dad, Ewan, Gus, Trip, and Julia. They all had their eyes closed.

  “I’m here!” I called, but they didn’t move. “I’m back!” Had they heard? Without knowing how, I knew what to do, I felt myself drawn toward my own body, looking down into it, seeing that it was really me. For the last time, I had the feeling of slipping. Except this time, instead of slipping into the cold river of the dead, I was slipping into the warmest, safest bed that I’d ever known.

  “Wake up,” I said into the circle as soon as I was in my body once more. No one moved. Ewan was squeezing his eyes shut, trembling, his freckles dark against his pale skin. Gus’s face was set in perfect stillness, the utterly blank look he sometimes gets when he is playing sports. Trip was sneering. Julia’s face was contorted in her perfect fake smile. Dad’s head was bowed, and he looked a way I had never seen him before. I can only describe it as wasted. His cheeks were hollowed, his hair starting to curl. Had he lost weight? I couldn’t believe a person could change like that in just a few—hours? Minutes? How long had I been gone?

  Ewan was the first to open his eyes. He closed them again as if he hadn’t even seen me, and gave a shake to his hands, which sent a ripple through everyone else in the group. One at a time they opened their eyes and dropped hands.

  “Michael,” Dad said, looking at me to see that I was awake. “Oh, Michael. Thank God.”

  Trip raised a fist in a gesture of triumph. “Yeah!” he shouted, and looked around the room, desperate for someone to high-five.

  Julia’s eyes popped open like someone had pushed her from behind. Tears started to stream down Ewan’s pinched little face.

  Gus opened his eyes just a crack, then collapsed forward onto his forearms, his face touching the floor. “Get him a blanket,” Ewan said, though he looked like he himself might go into shock, and Julia took off her coat and passed it over, though her teeth were chattering too.

  “What happened?” I said, but they were all just staring at me, as if they couldn’t believe I was there.

  Chapter 16

  After we recovered, my dad lit a fire in the woodstove and turned the gas on so we could boil water. He found mugs in one of the boxes of dishes he’d left for Goodwill, and he made us all drink a cup of hot tea—he’d found tea bags too. “I guess it’s good I’m so cheap I saved this,” he said about the tea, and it was weird to hear him admit to something like that.

  While we drank our tea, my dad kept asking all of us questions like, “What’s the date today?” and “Who is president?” and except for the fact that Gus had no idea what the date was—he never does—we all gave answers that satisfied my dad we didn’t have concussions, or whatever he was worried about.

  All of us were pretty exhausted. Or at least I know I was. I wanted to go to sleep, but I was still too cold, even with my parka zipped up to my chin, and the blankets my dad found in a box by the door wrapped around my legs. I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t know where to start and it was hard to get a word in edgewise with my dad asking everyone how many fingers he was holding up, and running around fetching things to make us feel better. Julia, Trip, Ewan, and Gus were staring into space a lot, like they were doing math problems in their heads. But my dad seemed full of efficiency. I would have said he seemed happy, if he also didn’t seem kind of zombielike. His eyes weren’t connecting with anyone’s, and sometimes he sort of slurred his words, he was talking so fast.

  Finally, he said, “Come on. We can’t spend the night here. We have to go home,” and without waiting for an answer, he went outside to shovel out the car.

  There was a minute of total silence when he was gone, and then I looked up from the floorboard I was staring at—it had a knot that looked a little bit like a silhouette of a rabbit—and said, “How did you guys even get up here?”

  I think they were all too exhausted to answer, and so they each waited for someone else to speak up. When no one did, Julia said, “I drove.” Speaking seemed to wake her up a bit, and she went on. “I thought you were sleeping, and I went to get you around nine. When I saw you weren’t there, I kind of freaked out. Mom told me what had happened. I texted Gus, who got everyone else together, and then I told Mom I was going to get something to eat in the kitchen, then snuck out of the service entrance and ran to the garage and got the car.”

  “But you don’t have a license,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “But it seemed like it might be an emergency. And it was.”

  “We got here just after you’d slipped,” Ewan continued. “Your dad must have been with you, because when he saw our car pulling up to the house he ran out screaming for help. He didn’t know it was us.”

  “I kind of panicked when I saw him and drove the car into a ditch,” Julia explained.

  “Which really made your dad go ballistic,” said Trip. “Because he couldn’t get his car out of the snow either, and so there was no way anyone could go for help.”

  “Did you explain to him?” I started. I could hardly figure out how to ask the question, it was so hard to imagine a scenario in which my dad would even listen to the story of what had been happening to me. “Did he understand?”

  “I tried,” Ewan said. “But he didn’t believe me.”

  “You did awesome,” Trip said to him. “Ewan made us all sit in a circle and hold hands, and he started to chant.”

  “Your dad was furious,” Gus said. “But there wasn’t anything he could do. He kept slapping his cell phone against the wall. Then he would stand over you, shouting, ‘Michael, wake up, I’m serious, you have to wake up.’ “

  “But after a while,” said Trip, “it wasn’t like before, when you were shaking and stuff? You were hardly breathing.”

  “I’d read about this technique for reaching people who have just died,” Ewan said. “You can go in after them by making a chain with people who know the person and who want to reach them.”

  “How did you convince my dad to help?”

  “We didn’t,” Ewan said. “We started the chain without him. After we had all gone into the trance, we couldn’t see what was happening here in the cabin. But it was good he joined on.”

  “How did the chain work?”

  “It was crazy,” said Gus. “It kind of reminds me of what you said it was like to slip. Or at least what it was like to be inside the river. Everyone held hands, except Ewan and I were each holding one of your hands. And then we started chanting this word Ewan told us to chant—”

  “It’s something Charlisse told me, just as we were leaving her house,” Ewan jumped in. “She said it really casually, as if it might be something I was mildly curious about. She said, when building river chains, chanting helps, and she likes to pick as her chant the word ‘fluvius,’ which is Latin for river. It doesn’t matter whether you chant or not, it’s just a way to focus your concentration. The most important thing is that you’re holding the person’s hand, and that you are focused on getting him back.” Ewan sounded a little bit like he was giving an oral report. It would have been annoying except I think I was done being annoyed with Ewan. It wasn’t that he had saved me. It’s that once you’ve seen all the way inside someone, you see them as they see themselves.

  “Fluvius, fluvius,” Gus said, and he shivered. “As we said it, I started to feel cold, and then kind of creepy, and then there was a pressure building on me, and then I wasn’t holding your hand anymore, I was smashed up against the wall of the cabin, trying to reach you. I knew you were inside, and I had to bang my hand against the wall, like, a million times before you opened the door.”

  “How did you even know where to go?” I said. “How did you get to me?”

  “We were holding on to your body. It was still connected to your soul.”

  “And did you know that Grandpa had left me alone?”

  “No,” Ewan said. “But I suspected it.”

  “We had co
me to the point in time where he died, and I watched him die,” I started to explain, but I couldn’t keep talking because I felt a lump forming in my throat.

  “Are you okay?” Ewan said, and I took a deep breath.

  I explained how alone Grandpa had felt, how he was scared, and how I held his head and talked to him. “When I looked up,” I finished, “the Grandpa who had been with me all along was gone.”

  “You gave him what he wanted,” Ewan said, as if I’d finally solved the riddle.

  “But I still don’t really know what that was.”

  “Don’t you see?” Julia said. I might have found her question show-offy before, but as with Ewan, I saw her differently now. She was trying to help me. “You gave him love. You showed him that someone did love him.”

  “That must have made it possible for his spirit to dematerialize,” Ewan continued. “He was able to die in peace. His soul was able to dissolve into the river instead of traveling through it, fighting against it all the while.”

  “Is that what happened with your dad?”

  Ewan blushed, something I’d never seen him do, and suddenly the oral report tone of voice was gone. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I think my dad might still be out there.”

  “What are you talking about?” Trip asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t want to make Ewan have to explain it to everybody.

  But Trip already knew. “Are you talking about saying good-bye to your dad?” he asked. Ewan nodded. “That was amazing,” Trip went on. “I’m so sorry, man.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Ewan muttered.

  “I remember seeing Ewan with his dad too,” Gus said. “When was that?”

  “It was in the chain,” I said.

  “I saw it,” said Julia. “It’s like I can hardly remember it, though. It’s like it was a dream.”

  “I guess everyone was seeing what I saw with everyone else,” I said. “I thought it was just me.”

  “You saw me in the car, right?” said Julia. And then her face kind of blanched. “And at assembly.”