Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  Gus looked a little stricken too. I wondered if he was thinking about how his older face in the mirror had looked so sad.

  “Oh, God,” said Trip, and I wondered what bothered him more, seeing himself in the future, or being afraid of the ball.

  “I can’t believe I’m back here,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m actually alive.” It’s kind of like the first few days of summer vacation, when every few minutes you forget it’s not just a weekend, and you remember, and it totally makes you happy every time. “I’m just so glad to be back.”

  “But Michael,” Ewan said, “are you ready for it to be over?”

  And that’s the thing. Happy as I was to feel safe again, I wasn’t done. I was scared and exhausted, but I had questions. I missed Grandpa.

  “In the end,” I said, “I was all alone. Grandpa left me alone. To die. How could he have done that?”

  “He probably didn’t know,” said Ewan. “Most of what was happening to you was out of his control. His energy came from his loneliness and his fear, which were released into the world when he was dying. But as soon as you changed the way he died, you dissolved that energy. He probably didn’t want to leave you. But you made him so warm and comfortable, he was able to just slip away.”

  “I heard the door close,” I said.

  “But maybe it wasn’t the cabin door,” Ewan suggested. “Maybe it was a door inside your mind. Maybe it was as much the door to the river that your grandfather walked through as it was a door that you passed through yourself.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “You’re stronger now,” Ewan went on. “Your grandfather left a lot of himself behind in you.”

  “Wow,” I said again. “But where did he go? Did he definitely dissolve? Or is there another place?”

  “I don’t know,” Ewan said.

  “Is there any way to find out?”

  “Charlisse said you just have to think about it hard enough until you feel you know the truth.”

  “So he might come back? There’s a chance?”

  “Michael,” Ewan said, “it’s important that you let him go. You have to let him rest.”

  “Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t okay. I wanted Grandpa back.

  “You know,” said Gus, “it was really your dad who saved you. When you started to climb, that must have been when your dad grabbed on to Ewan’s hand. I felt a change. I didn’t think I could hold on another second, banging on that door, and then suddenly, I felt the whole chain grow stronger.”

  “Really?” I said. “He was definitely the strongest one of all of you when I was climbing. It was kind of painful how much he was pushing me along.”

  Trip looked out the window and said, “He doesn’t look so strong now,” and when we all joined him, we saw that my dad was trying to shovel, but every time he set the shovel into the snow, he kind of collapsed over it, and he could hardly lift it out when it was loaded.

  “We should help him,” said Julia, and everyone started to stand.

  “Not you,” said Ewan, to me. “You need to rest.”

  And that’s how, after they sent my dad inside to drink a cup of tea, I ended up alone with him in the cabin.

  He was sitting on the edge of Grandpa’s bed, wrapped in Grandpa’s quilt.

  “What made you join the chain?” I asked him. He looked too exhausted to speak, but I couldn’t look at him another second, or say anything else to him, before I knew the answer to that question.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I was just scared, Michael. I was watching you die, and there was nothing I could do. So I took your hand from your friend Ewan and I held it and I said your name over and over again, and I called for you to come back, and you did.”

  “Dad, I was with Grandpa,” I said, not because I thought he was going to believe me, but because I needed him to know. “I saw him die. I made it okay for him.”

  “Michael,” he said, “Ewan said some of that to me already, and I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Grandpa did love you,” I said. “I mean, he does.”

  “That’s just great,” he said bitterly. “It’s too bad he had such a poor way of showing it.”

  “He tried,” I started to say, and just as I was thinking that there was no way I could make him believe me, I remembered something. “Here,” I said, opening the drawer to the table. The letter I had written was there, folded into triangles like notes girls pass in school. My father’s name was written on the outside. The handwriting was Grandpa’s, not mine. “This is for you.”

  “For me?” said my dad. It took him a few minutes to untangle the complicated folding job. His hands were unsteady. Brow furrowed, he ran the bottom of his fist over the creases in the page, which is something he does when he reads magazines, as if he’ll be so bothered by the folds in the page he won’t be able to read the words.

  Once the paper lay flat, he read the letter through all the way, then started reading it again. I saw him grimace, and then turn red, and then cover his nose with his fist as if he was holding back a sneeze. After a long time, he crumpled the letter into a ball, shoved it deep inside his pocket, sat on the bed, and covered his face with his hands.

  Here is what the letter said:

  Dear Daniel,

  I want you to know that I was once a boy. A boy who polished red shoes and tugged at his mother’s legs while she worried over pennies. I was a boy who laughed at the movies, who cried over broken toys, who learned to walk quietly in apartments crowded with relatives.

  For me, becoming a man was a lesson in protection. I protected myself from feelings of all kinds—fear, mostly, but in the end, also love. I know now that it’s impossible to protect yourself from some feelings without protecting yourself from them all. I am sorry for the love that I took from you, but I am more sorry for the lessons you learned from watching me.

  I want to protect you still—from my pride, my love, my envy, as it will awake in you feelings of loss and pain. But I know now that to protect you is to steal from you your right. This is my last will. This is what I leave to you. That I am your father. That you are my son. That every day since you were born I have loved you. That I love you now, in silence and from a great distance away.

  Respectfully,

  Your father

  I wanted to explain to Dad how Grandpa tried to write the letter every day but hadn’t been able to. I wanted to explain to him that when I wrote it, I hadn’t been me, that I had been Grandpa. In my memory, I heard the scratching on the paper over the wind, and yet I don’t remember writing those words.

  I ended up not saying anything at all.

  • • •

  After the others came in from shoveling out the Jeep, Dad left his Mercedes behind and drove us down to New York, where my mom met us in the lobby. She is the kind of person who can sense when it’s better not to ask a lot of questions, and she didn’t say anything about Julia’s skipping a Sleeping Beauty rehearsal, or taking her car. What she did say was one word, “Soup.” After a shower, we changed into our pajamas, and Julia and I watched her put carrots, celery, and bouillon cubes into a pot. I had no idea she knew how to do that. My dad locked himself in the bedroom. He didn’t come out until the next morning when he went to work, even though it was Sunday.

  I haven’t seen much of him since. I think the letter from Grandpa—and the things he saw inside me when we were in the river of the dead—they might have backfired. It’s like now that Grandpa admitted to him that he wasn’t a very good dad, it’s possible for my dad to admit the same thing—but not to do anything about it. The letter didn’t make him want to be closer to me—or even Julia. I think it just freaked him out. Julia says she thinks it embarrassed him.

  He isn’t rushing me off to school, screaming and yelling the whole time. He isn’t telling me to stop playing video games. He isn’t going through the stuff in my room. He isn’t making plans and canceling them. He isn’t even showing up for let’s-pretend-we-do-this-every-night fami
ly dinners.

  Mom isn’t happy with the mystery, or the silence. One night when I was playing NBA Street and she was checking e-mail on her laptop next to me, my dad came in from work and walked straight into the kitchen, grunting instead of saying hi. Mom waited a few minutes, then opened the swinging door that connects the dining room to the kitchen and watched him at the blender. “Daniel?” she said, but I don’t think he heard. She went back to the computer, but she didn’t type anything more.

  On one of the rare Sundays he was around at breakfast time, my mom said she wanted to call a travel agent about a spring break trip to the Bahamas, and my dad shrugged. “You know we never go on the trips we plan,” he said. They were talking in the kitchen while Julia and I were watching TV, but we heard them. “Why do we go through this charade?”

  “Julia and Michael will be disappointed,” my mom said.

  “They’re already disappointed,” said my dad. “So what’s the point of pretending?” I wanted to run into the room and tell him it wasn’t true, but at the same time, it kind of was.

  Chapter 17

  The last day of school before March vacation was shockingly warm. Kids peeled off their neckties, rolled up their sleeves, and we didn’t even bother carrying our balled-up tweed blazers from one class to another. By lunchtime the lacrosse guys were walking around in shorts.

  “Please let us have class in the park,” whined annoying Tori Lublin in history, in art, in ethics. “We’ll concentrate,” she said. “We promise we will.” But in the fall, one of Selden’s seniors had eaten a vendor hot dog in the park during an outdoor English seminar, got food poisoning, and missed her interview at Princeton. None of the teachers budged.

  It was the last day before the break, so there were no sports, and we were free to go when the bell rang at the end of eighth period. Usually, on the day before vacation, my mom makes us rush right home from school to help her pack. My mom hates packing, and the suitcases are always still open at ten o’clock when my dad comes home with the bad news that he can’t go away, by which point we’re all kind of relieved, since it’s better to know for sure than to be guessing—guessing is why we hadn’t been able to pack in the first place. But Julia and I hadn’t heard any updates about travel plans. As far as we knew, we weren’t traveling at all.

  Gus found Ewan and me at my locker. Gus’s parka was stuffed into the straps of his book bag, and he was holding a soccer ball under his arm. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his oxford in honor of the fact that he was flying to Hawaii with his dad, Buffy, and his stepsisters the next day.

  “Want to kick the ball around in the park?” he said.

  Ewan shot me a look, like he was checking to see if Gus meant both of us or just me. Ewan was carrying an extra-heavy duffel bag, full of books he was planning to bring home and read over the break.

  Gus hadn’t seen Ewan’s look, but he said, “Yeah, you too, Greer. Bring your inhaler.”

  Since Vermont, Julia’s, Trip’s, Gus’s, Ewan’s, and my thoughts had been connected. We slipped in and out of one another’s minds, feeling when we were there the traces of one another’s steps. When Julia emerged from the tutu-wearing corps in Sleeping Beauty, I’d felt sick to my stomach with her fear. I’d felt her pride when she took her bows, and had to hide my tears by booting up the Game Boy before the applause had died down. But Julia had known how I felt, just as Ewan knew when Trip hit a home run in baseball, and Ewan knew when any of us were stuck for an answer on a test (unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of connection where he could feed us the answers). It wasn’t that we had psychic powers. Ewan made us all go back to Charlisse’s dining room, but she just clapped her hands emphatically and said, “You’re children, not mystics.” It was more that we’d found a way to all be friends.

  We walked down Fifth Avenue, Gus’s ski jacket strapped to his back like he was carrying a giant pillow, mine flapping open. Ewan pushed his off his shoulders, trying to let in some air.

  “Hey, wait up!” we heard, and saw Trip coming down Ninety-first Street. He was eating a slice of pizza folded in half inside a paper plate. For spring break, Trip was spending a week at his brother’s college in Colorado. His brother went to the kind of college where your dorm room sits on a ski slope and there were boot dryers in the lounges.

  “Did you finish the essay on the history final?” Trip asked Ewan when he’d caught up. In addition to eighth-grade history, Ewan was also taking the tenth-grade class with Trip. “I screwed up the multiple choice so bad that when I got to the essay, I was like, ‘Oh, well.’ And then the bell rang.”

  “I hated that stupid test,” Ewan said. “He tried to fool us with that obvious citation from the Treaty of Versailles. If you’re going to be tricky, fine, but he was just wasting our time, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” said Trip, his voice emptying. “I guess I missed that one.”

  After we got back from Vermont, Trip had asked his mom—who served on Selden’s board of trustees—to get Ewan out of work study for the spring so that he could play on the tennis team. It turned out Ewan was really good at tennis, as long as he used the inhaler. And now Ewan was helping Trip keep up a B average so that he could play baseball.

  When we got to the park entrance just above the Met, Gus let the ball roll down his legs and started dribbling up a hill. We were next to a playground, where little kids were running from swings to sandbox, their hair sweaty, their nannies making them keep their winter coats on even though it was warm. Gus kicked the ball against the high iron playground fence, and it bounced to the other side of the path. My backpack banging against my body, I ran into the woods after the ball, kicking it ahead of Gus so he had to run too. Trip cut him off, lifting the ball on his toe and catching it in his hands.

  “Ewan, think fast,” he said, and threw the ball right at Ewan’s chest. Ewan caught it, a little shakily, then kicked it over to me. Trip was always doing things like that to Ewan, but Ewan was starting to get used to it.

  The four of us kicked the ball back and forth, jogging around the reservoir and down the bridle path. Just below Ninetieth Street, we cut over to the Great Lawn, which is a huge open area where you can play softball or just lie on the grass. Today it was surrounded by a temporary plastic fence, but Gus pushed a section of the fence down and we crossed over. The lawn was immense and glowing, like a lake, while the woods that we had passed through were already dark.

  Ever since Gus and I got knocked off our bikes by kids from a different school when we were in fifth grade, I’d been afraid of coming to the park after dark. But now I’m not afraid of things the way I used to be. Maybe it’s because I’ve started to grow. My mom took me to Dr. Horowitz just to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with me after I grew an inch in a month and had shooting pains in the bones of my ankles. “What exactly are you worried about?” Dr. Horowitz said. “Would you be happier if he were shrinking?” I can now stand up straight and carry the cello case on the stairs at school. When the upperclassmen pass me on the way to the lounge and laugh, I look them straight in the eye. But I don’t really think I’ve stopped being afraid because I’m taller. I guess after Vermont, it’s going to be a while before I’m afraid of anything again in ordinary ways.

  When we reached the middle of the Great Lawn, Gus threw down his bag and jacket, picked up the soccer ball, and ran halfway across the field shouting in a fake English accent, “Keeper Edwardson with an amazing save! And he’s running. He’s running down the field. Wait! This is incredible! Do I believe my eyes? He’s got Euro football confused with American, and no one’s touching him.”

  “Criiiiikey,” Trip chirped. “One of the Italian defenders spots him! And he’s chasing after him with amazing speed. It looks like he’s going to use the full body tackle!”

  I stood where I was, letting my bag slide down to the grass as well. I didn’t know if I should run like Gus and Trip. I decided to run, but not toward the ball. I ran away from it, feeling the sponginess of the grou
nd that was stiff from being still half frozen. As I gained speed, I lost the sensation that Trip and Gus were watching me. I ran and ran, and felt like I could go forever without ever reaching the other side of the plastic fence, without ever coming upon another path, another person, a tree.

  Eventually, I circled back toward Trip and Gus. Gus saw me coming, and with Trip closing in on him, he threw the ball down onto the grass and kicked up a chip shot. I jumped harder and higher than I thought I could and felt a stinging in my palms as I pulled the ball to my chest. The ball felt like it was electrified.

  Trip tackled me, hitting hard so that we both fell back onto the grass. “You dork!” I shouted, but I knew that it wasn’t me he’d tackled, it was the ball. He would always—as long as he lived—go for the ball. I rolled on top of it now, and tried to keep it underneath me. Gus had taught me that if you want to break someone’s grip you should go limp for a second before pulling away.

  Finally I rolled clear of Trip, struggled to stand, and threw the ball up in the air as hard as I could, thinking that it was the only way to protect the ball and keep it safe. Gus, Trip, and I stopped, watching it twist into the dark and almost disappear before it reversed. Ewan was watching too. Time seemed to stop while the ball hung in the air, and with the four of us together, in the dark, I had a tiny electric memory of climbing across their bodies in the great dark they had saved me from.

  When Gus caught the ball, he called out, “Spud!” I laughed and so did Trip, who was leaning over to catch his breath, his hands resting on his knees. I looked over my shoulder at Ewan to see if he got the joke, and that’s when I saw the figure at the edge of the lawn.

  It was a smudge against the woods, and I shuddered. I looked to either side. There was no one else around.

  By now, all four of us were looking over at the figure—they’d seen him without my having to say a word. It wasn’t that Gus, Trip, and Ewan were reading my mind. It was just that something made them look up and see the figure watching us from the other side of the fence. They knew without my having to say anything that I was worried. And maybe, without really knowing that they knew, they understood that we should all be worried because this man looked exactly like Grandpa.