“Huh,” Greg said, so that he would not say Take it off.
“Bye, Mom,” GJ said, and hugged her, a quick one-armed hug, not the two-armed crusher he’d given Greg, and it made Greg want to hug the boy all over again. They walked down the hallway together toward the parking lot, Marie trailing behind.
“Hey,” she whispered. Greg slowed so he was walking beside her.
“He just got home. Like an hour ago.” Her eyes were red; there were black gashes under them. Greg often finished reading her e-mails or listening to her phone calls feeling skeptical; Marie was an overreactor, an overthinker. But in the hallway looking at her exhausted face he wondered if maybe she had been protecting him, if maybe she hadn’t told him enough.
“Where was he?” he whispered.
She shrugged, keeping her eyes on GJ, who was standing in the parking lot now, looking back at them, his body as thin and curved as a sail.
“It’s the blue one,” Greg called. He pushed the button on the small remote to unlock the doors.
“I think he’s still messed up,” Marie said. “He’s too happy. Sometimes when he comes down he gets sick. He doesn’t think I know but of course I know. I just thought you should be prepared.”
“Marie,” Greg said, louder than he wanted to. He waited for GJ to get into the passenger seat and shut the door. “Maybe we shouldn’t be going on this trip at all.”
“No, you still should,” she said. She backed away from him, moving down the hallway to her door. “You have to. He needs this.” She was barefoot, and when she turned to walk the rest of the way he saw that the soles of her feet were dirty, almost black, like she’d been pacing the hallway all night. She locked the door behind her; Greg heard the dead bolt clunk into place.
GJ was resting his head against the window when Greg got into the car, his thumbs tapping his legs, one-one, one-one. Greg had imagined a kind of speech he’d give GJ before they set off, something about how GJ was nearly a man and should be able to find his way in the world and to get there on time, and then hand the watch over in a small front-seat ceremony before suggesting McDonald’s or Beefy King. But that could wait, all of it could wait. The main thing was to get them there, to point the SUV north and set up camp.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet; he knew all too well what a hangover felt like. “We could get egg sandwiches.”
“Hey, Dad?” GJ unbuckled himself and pulled the door handle. “Just hold on one sec, okay?” One sec. Classic GJ. He’d started using the phrase as a child, maybe four or five, after hearing Marie or Greg use it. It had become a family joke. Just one sec! Greg started to laugh, started to feel grateful to his son for invoking such a treasure, but he stopped when GJ bent over, his spine jutting through his T-shirt, and vomited onto the asphalt. Greg heard it splash as it landed, GJ burping and coughing in an oddly businesslike way, like it was something he just had to get through, spitting and sighing when he was done.
“Sorry about that, Dad,” he said. He opened the flap of his bag and pulled out a pack of gum, holding it out to Greg first. “I don’t know what it is. Something must be going around. But I feel better now.”
Again Greg fought the urge to stop the entire trip, to lead GJ by his elbow back into Marie’s condo, fly back to Greensboro, and return everything he’d bought, even the watch.
“Hey,” Greg said. He grabbed GJ by the arm, squeezing hard. “It’s enough of this shit, okay? Your mom and I, we’re done putting up with this.” Tough love, he just needs a little tough love. That’s what Deb was always saying. “It’s time for you to grow up.”
GJ looked at him, right into his eyes. His whole life he’d had eyes that looked heartbroken, searching, as innocent as a child’s. “I know,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I just need to get it together.” Later Greg would be able to see how expertly GJ would take what he’d just said and repeat it in a new way, making it seem like he was truly listening, that it was all sinking in. But that day in the car, with the camping gear practically radiating newness, a fresh start from the backseat, his son’s pale gaunt face and his sick wet mouth, Greg felt like he’d done something right. He’d gotten through.
“I just want to have a good weekend with you,” GJ said. “It’s all out of my system now. McDonald’s sounds great.” But he didn’t eat the sandwich Greg got him; he held it, half-open, in his lap and threw it away at a rest stop fifty miles down the road.
GJ slept for most of the drive, waking up when he needed to pee and then falling back into a heavy, head-lolling sleep. It felt like a mercy to Greg, no need to make small talk, no way he could ask the same question he’d asked already, or the wrong question, no way to trigger a batch of awkward silence he’d been dreading since the day he bought the tent.
He pulled into the campground a little past eight in the evening. At the entrance a woman in a wide-brimmed hat took Greg’s credit card, handed it back to him with a complimentary brick of soap. “We make it ourselves,” she said, but Greg couldn’t tell who we was; she was alone in the small guard’s cabin that looked like all it housed was a lopsided office chair and a desk the size of a Bible. He placed the soap in the glove compartment and only remembered it was in there on the plane back to Greensboro.
He and GJ made camp in a clearing about a mile in and went to bed immediately, GJ zipped all the way into his sleeping bag, just the angular planes of his face showing. Greg pulled open the flap to the skylight, cringing at the loud scrape of the Velcro, though GJ didn’t stir. Greg lay back and looked up. Soon, despite the sour smell coming off his son, despite his twitching, despite the fact that Greg had no idea who this skeletal being was, had maybe never known, had taken it for granted that he had time to get to know him, that he wouldn’t change into someone else, shape-shift into an other, bury his true self in a sleeping bag, despite Greg knowing that after the weekend, after the hiking and the brief plunge into the icy lake and the twenty minutes GJ wandered into the trees and came back smiling and the twenty minutes after that when he was vomiting again and the cold stew and cold chili and cold tuna sandwiches and cold coffee and cold hot dogs, everything cold, the whole trip so freezing that they ground their jaws when they spoke to stop the chattering, the warm tent and warm sleeping bags and the way GJ said, This was fun, Dad, in as sincere a voice as Greg had ever heard, despite Greg knowing that after all that GJ would still be in trouble and that it was likely his fault, he’d fucked the boy up, he wasn’t his mother but he’d fucked the boy up regardless, despite all of that, when he thought back on it on the plane home and in the days afterward, it all felt worth it. His son asleep next to him. The cocoon of his sleeping bag, both of them safe and warm. The papering of stars glowing down from the tent skylight. How they twinkled like jewels. Like burst glass, tumbling across the tar.
The highway heading to his dad,s felt cozy, intimate, walled in by the trees on each side, a neatly mown median dividing the four lanes, the sky like a fuzzy gray lid. He’d showered, the RV tank’s water puttering meekly down onto his head and shoulders, and then drove out of the parking lot at Marie’s condo with wet hair and wet feet and the soap he hadn’t had enough water to wash off sliming his balls. It itched him now, and it felt good to be alone so he could scratch and scratch without a disappointed, sighing Oh, honey coming from Deb. He’d eaten three egg biscuits, and now he was nursing the last of his sweet tea, which got sweeter and sweeter the more he drank.
He had power of attorney for his dad; he knew the man’s finances as well as his own. Why he chose to live in a shithole in his declining years was a mystery. He could afford at-home care and he could afford to live in one of those swanky high-rises where people start at the top floors and move toward the bottom the less able they become. Greg had explained both options to him thoroughly when it became obvious his father needed help. But he’d chosen to be in an assisted-living community set back off a busy road in what felt like a dorm room to Greg, though he’d only visite
d twice. Thin walls, thin carpeting. Dingy mini-blinds. Food people had been encouraged to stop eating since the ’80s. It would have made his mother ill, a place like that; Greg could picture her clutching one of her crystal ashtrays and shaking her head no no no the way she did at the end. She had ruled with an iron fist when she was alive, Greg’s father silently going along. In fact, that was his legacy, in Greg’s eyes. A long trail of silence. All he could think was that it was some final act of defiance on his dad’s part, this betrayal of what his wife would have wanted if she’d lived to die with him. That or the old man had become even stingier in his waning years.
He pulled off the highway and coasted onto the main road. BP, Chevron, Popeye’s, Subway, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s on each side and one farther up ahead if his eyes weren’t playing tricks. He wasn’t hungry but he could eat. He could bring his father lunch. He stopped for a sack of tacos at the Taco Bell and a quick shit in what ended up being a surprisingly clean bathroom. Not a stray wing of toilet paper to be seen. The smell of bubble gum and soap. The achingly white clean bowl. It felt like a gift, a good omen.
He rang the buzzer outside his dad’s door, a featureless wood plank that had been painted brown to match the brown shutters nailed outside each window. There was a wreath hanging on the door that said Friends Welcome. Not something his father would have purchased for himself. It was likely something each resident had been given at Christmas or something, though he didn’t see one on any of the other doors. His dad opened the door, looked up at Greg through the shrubs of hair above each eye. He was more stooped than he had been the last time Greg saw him, but the old man had a clean shirt tucked into pressed gray pants and fresh white sneakers. His usual handkerchief poking a corner out of his breast pocket: turquoise, today, an odd vividness that Greg wanted to shake his head no no no at.
Greg held up the tacos. “Hey, Dad,” he said.
“I can’t eat that,” his father said, stepping aside so Greg could pass. “Ulcers.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Greg said. “I’m sorry—I can go out and get something else?”
“I already ate. They make us eat at noon like kindergartners.” His father closed the door, the darkness in the apartment closing around them. It had been so bright outside, and Greg blinked, looking around, waiting for everything to take shape. Finally the small round dining table appeared, and then the rest of the kitchen. He set his lunch on the table, suddenly feeling self-conscious about eating it. He knew his father couldn’t eat fast food. He knew that. He’d purchased eight tacos anyway. The bag hummed, whispered, pulled at him. He turned his back on it.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” his dad said. He lowered himself into a worn blue easy chair, crossed one knee over the other. Greg sat on the small sofa across from him, a card table between them with the day’s newspaper scattered across it.
“It was sort of last minute,” Greg said. “We’re not sure where GJ has gone off to.” He heard himself trying to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal, nothing to worry about. Over the years he hadn’t told his dad much about GJ’s troubles. What was the point? His father couldn’t do anything; he didn’t want to be disturbed during the twilight years of his life. Greg also didn’t want his father to have anything over him. To know he’d messed up, botched it, made a mockery of fatherhood when it was all so simple: just go to work and come home. Hugs on birthdays and graduation. Back into the shadows when there are tears or raised voices. Don’t divorce; that is an option only for the weak. His father knew enough. Did he really need to know about all the times GJ fell off the wagon? About the two times he’d been arrested? About the fourteen months he spent in jail? No. He didn’t need to know any of it.
“You’re not sure where your son is?” His father uncrossed his leg, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His face was Greg’s face minus one million beers, minus all those cream cakes and pizzas and whiskey. The same pummeled nose, though: that swollen purple blossom with its tiny infrastructure of capillaries. His wrists poked out of his shirt cuffs as white as cream.
“That’s about the extent of it,” Greg said. He felt the need to keep the conversation concise, businesslike. His father’s attention span had always been short, shorter still for anything that bored or potentially overwhelmed him. Best to state the facts and be done with it. “I dropped by to see you and to see if maybe you’d seen him. Or heard from him.”
“I haven’t seen him in years. But he did call me, not too long ago. I’ll have to check my log.” Greg’s father gripped the arms of the chair and pushed himself up, stumbling a bit. Greg reached up and caught him, the man’s arm as delicate as a wing in Greg’s hand. “Thank you. I’ll just be a minute.”
His log. Greg’s father recorded the details of his day in a lined journal and had done so for as far back as Greg could remember. He stored the logs in bookshelves, and then boxes, and now they lived in the storage unit Greg paid for via an auto-deduction from his account every six months, along with his mother’s things. Greg flipped through them from time to time, looking for anything interesting, some clue as to the kind of man his father truly was, but they said things like Ate egg for breakfast with a bit of black pepper. Saw bird at park. Had tire inspected. Volume after volume of the basic facts of a man’s life. The sparser, the better. Greg counted and divided and catalogued. His father listed what he knew to be true. Today is Tuesday.
“Here it is,” his father said. His journal looked like a sheath of lined paper kids used in school, with three staples binding it on the left side. “He called me just last week, on Wednesday.”
“Are you sure?” Greg asked. His heart felt like someone had attached a tire pump to it. Inflated and buoyant. Terrified. Last Wednesday was only two days before he’d left to find GJ, and now it was Sunday.
“It’s what I wrote down,” his father said, pointing at the page. He handed the journal over to Greg. It felt damp and he could see that some of the ink was smeared, his father likely having spilled the glass of water he put his teeth in across the pages. The entry read Hot outside today. Took a nap in the afternoon. Greg Junior called, and we talked for nearly eight minutes.
“What did you talk about?” Greg asked. Eight minutes was a lifetime.
“It doesn’t say,” his father said.
“Yes, but can you try to remember?”
His father sat in the chair again, closed his eyes as he thought. “We talked about how hot it has been.” He kept his eyes closed, like a medium channeling a spirit. “Hotter than usual. He said he was somewhere even hotter, or he’d been somewhere like that recently. He asked me for money and I said he’d have to come by and get it, but he never did. It’s still in that envelope on the table.”
Greg went over to the envelope. Inside were twenties and a couple fifties. Probably a thousand dollars in there. Maybe fifteen hundred.
“You have to stop keeping cash around the apartment like this,” Greg said. “And giving GJ this kind of money won’t help him.” The sharp, comforting smell of onions wafted from the bag on the table. Greg unwrapped a taco and took a bite, catching what dribbled onto his chin with his knuckles. It smelled better than it tasted, the cheese going cold, the meat flabby in its own stale juices, the shell worn through with grease.
“Have you called his friends? Or Marie?” His father often ignored the financial advice Greg gave him; if he hadn’t had power of attorney his father would have withdrawn all the money he could and shoved it, bill by bill, under his bed.
“I just came from Marie’s. We went downtown and asked around. No dice.”
“Maybe he’s still on his way here.”
“Maybe,” Greg said. Wednesday. Wednesday. What had happened since that day? Why had he called his grandfather and not Greg? He heard a toilet flush. He thought it was from the resident next door and was about to lament to his father for the hundredth time how thin the walls were when an old woman walked out of his father’s room wearing a pale pink robe.
�
��This is Lydia,” his father said.
“Hello,” the woman said. She walked toward Greg with her small, tan hand out.
“Lyd, this is my son, Greg.”
“Greg! Another Greg,” she said. She grasped his hand in hers, the small claw of a bird. “We have four Gregs in this community.”
She was younger than his dad, maybe even a decade younger. Her hair looked more silver than white, loosely curled and windblown. Bedhead, Greg realized. It was bedhead because she’d slept in his father’s bed, his bony old dad with his paper-thin flesh and watery eyes and wet mouth. She pressed his hand between her thumb and fingers and released him.
“Your father never mentioned me, I’m presuming?” She arched her eyebrows at Greg’s dad and then at him, mock scolding. She had no idea that Greg’s dad hadn’t mentioned her because Greg’s dad never mentioned anything, and because Greg did not call him. “Is that food I smell?” She drifted past Greg, over to the table where the sack lay in a lump. She unwrapped a taco halfway and took a bite, working the food in her mouth in the complicated, cudlike way of people with dentures.
“Greg’s son—my grandson—has gone missing,” his father said.
Greg had not put it that way, had in fact gone out of his way to not put it that way.
“Are you shitting me?” the woman asked. She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her robe. She was alternately graceful and unmannered, Greg was gathering. She had pale violet eyes and a small queen’s face. “We have to find him.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Greg said. Had she been the one to put up the wreath? Did she live here? He looked around for further evidence of her, but there was none that he could see. “He’s an adult with past … issues, so involving the police isn’t really an option. He might just be somewhere we can’t reach him.” He had meant that to sound like good news, but the woman looked at him with her eyebrows up like he’d just offered the possibility that GJ was dead.
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