Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  The place was so old, they didn’t have electronic scoreboards. My grandfather showed me how to keep score with a paper and pencil.

  “Your father loved to keep score,” he told me.

  “Dad used to bowl?”

  “Are you kidding me? Your father was a superb bowler.”

  “No way.”

  “I swear to you.”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Had his own bowling ball too. Wasn’t a candlepin ball, but he had a purple bowling ball.”

  “Purple?”

  “With his name engraved on it.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Mike, it said.”

  “Mike?” I screamed. “You’re totally making this up!”

  “I swear on my life,” my grandfather said and made some weird crossing sign in front of himself. “Not only that, but he was in a junior league for a few years. I think he was team captain one season.”

  “Captain? Did they wear those ridiculous shirts?”

  “I think they just had T-shirts, if memory serves me correct, which it does less and less these days.” He laughed. “Then he just grew out of it, or lost interest. One day it was done. That’s the way it was with your father. When he was done he was done.”

  My grandfather was quiet for a while. “Don’t know what the hell ever happened to that ball,” he said softly.

  “I can’t believe this, that’s crazy,” I said. “When he’s taken us a few times, or I’ve had to go bowling for some stupid birthday party, he has never mentioned he was on a bowling team.”

  For dinner we drove a few miles into Rockland, which was a much nicer town than Bennelton.

  “You ever eat sushi?” my grandfather asked. The three of us were walking past some fairly fancy shops on the very quaint Main Street.

  “My fave,” I said.

  “I knew I liked you for a reason,” Grandpa said.

  “You buying, old man?” Davis asked.

  My grandfather gave him a quick look out of the corner of his eye that I’m not sure he knew I saw. Davis smiled.

  The sushi place had a small Japanese flag hanging outside. Inside, big white ball-shaped paper lamps dangled from the ceiling. It was very Zen. I liked it right away.

  “You eat sushi often, Lucy?” Davis asked me as the waiter brought us hot towels to clean our hands. “I don’t think I ate sushi till a few years ago.”

  “My granddaughter is very sophisticated,” Grandpa said as he scrubbed his face with his towel.

  “Unlike her grandfather,” Davis said.

  “Very true.” Grandpa grinned his half-toothless grin and tossed his towel back on the little canoe-shaped woven tray.

  “It’s my father’s favorite thing to eat,” I told Davis, “so we get it pretty often.”

  “Really?” Grandpa said. “I wouldn’t think he’d be so adventurous. Good for him.”

  “Well,” I said, “he does order the same thing every time.”

  For some reason my grandfather thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard. He laughed so hard that people started to look around from nearby tables.

  After dinner we had some mint leaf ice cream, which I had never heard of before, but was pure delicious. The only person I have ever met who eats ice cream faster than me is my grandfather. Since I still had no clothes except what I came in and the borrowed Eiffel Tower shirt, my grandfather bought me a very cool T-shirt with crazy Japanese writing on it.

  Back home, the phone was ringing as we walked through the door.

  “Yello!” my grandfather shouted into the receiver. After a brief pause he said, “Hello, Michael. How are you?”

  He listened for a bit more, all the while looking right at me.

  “We’re doing great. Aren’t we, Lulu? Would you like to speak with her?”

  He held out the receiver. I took it from him.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  “Well, there you are,” my father said. His tone was really flat, like he was trying to be very normal.

  “Yup, I’m right here,” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m great. We just had sushi.” I was trying to sound very upbeat.

  “Uh-huh.” He couldn’t have cared less. “What was the idea of this stunt, Lucy? Your mother has been worried sick. So have I.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “We’ll talk about it when I come and get you.” He cut me off hard. “I have several open houses this weekend, but I’m planning to come up on Monday, as long as everything there is still okay.”

  “Things are great here.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said again. “Your mother wants to speak with you. Hold on.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hold on,” he repeated. Where exactly did he think I was going at this point?

  My mom was a bit gentler, asking how I was getting on and what we were doing. She was glad I was eating so well. But she didn’t totally give me a pass.

  “Your father and I are very, very upset, Lucy. Anything could have happened to you.” I explained to her that my father didn’t need to come up and get me. I was totally fine, and I could take the bus back down in a few days.

  “I know your father wants to go up to get you, but there is a lot going on at work, so we’ll see,” my mother said. “Hang on, your father wants to speak with you again.”

  My dad must have been standing right next to my mom.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes.”

  I could tell something was coming.

  “What could you have possibly been thinking, going over to Thomas’s house like that?”

  I wanted to scream, “What the hell did you expect me to do once I found out that I had a brother living a few blocks away? Just be a loser and ignore it, like you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t sleep as well that night as I had the night before—not after that call.

  I woke up just as it was getting light. Grandpa’s house was quiet, but a different quiet than my own house. I lay in bed for a long time. I really didn’t know what I was going to do about anything.

  I had closed the window before going to sleep since it was still chilly up here in the north at night, and so I got up to open it. The birds were singing again as I got back into bed. I remembered the cardinal and thought about getting back up to see if he was the one singing. Instead I tucked in deeper under the covers. After a little while I thought I could hear people talking outside. Then I definitely heard my grandfather’s laugh, so I got up and went to the window.

  Grandpa was by the edge of his property, talking over the shrubs with the woman next door. She was tending her garden, watering. Their conversation drifted up to me.

  “. . . he never knew we knew.” My grandfather was in the middle of a story, waving his hands around. “It was his mother who finally solved the mystery. She found out that the girl loved tomatoes.”

  The woman laughed. “How?”

  “We had a Fourth of July block party, and our cute little blond neighbor had her paper plate piled high with slices of only juicy red tomatoes.”

  The woman laughed again. “You are a stitch, Harold,” she said to him. I’d never heard anyone call someone a stitch before. My grandfather laughed.

  “It was like clockwork,” he went on. “Every time I’d pick one and put it on the windowsill to ripen, the next day it would be gone. We never suspected it might be Michael, since when we asked him about it he looked so confused and shook his head. He was normally such an honest kid.”

  “Honest, really? You sure he was your son?” They both laughed again. They were having a high old time at the crack of dawn.

  “Broke his teenage heart when they moved away. His daughter Lucy is up with me now, visiting for a while.” He sort of turned to gesture toward the house and I dove back from the window. I didn’t want him to see me eavesdropping.

  While I was taking a shower and trying not to get water all
over the giant taped-up crack, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that my father had been in love with a tomato-eating blond when he was a thieving teenage bowler who had harbored secret dreams. Would I ever be able to look at a tomato the same way again? Or a bowling ball? Or even listen to B. Springsteen for that matter?

  17

  Grandpa and I did the gutters on the back of the house after breakfast. It wasn’t as much fun as the day before. We left the lumps of glop on the ground where they lay. We didn’t even rake them into piles this time.

  “Do you know where I can send an email?” I asked my grandfather as he was putting the ladder back in the garage.

  “There’s the library just out of town or there’s a coffee shop down by the pier that has a couple of computers you can rent for a half hour at a time,” he said. “That’s where I usually go, not that I send too many emails.”

  We headed down the hill toward the water. There was no sidewalk so we walked along the edge of the road. Evergreen trees lined the street, so not much light got through, even though it was a sunny day. There was hardly any breeze, either. We were quiet as we walked, and I listened to our feet slapping the pavement.

  The water was three blocks away. The harbor wasn’t one of those picture-postcard places you might think it would be, with charming boats bobbing in a happy sea. This one was kind of scraggly, even in the bright light. There was a muddy beach, which my grandfather said was only that way because the tide was out and that it was under water most of the time. A few small sailboats sat on the mud, tipped over a little bit on their sides, like bathtub toys nobody put away after the plug was pulled. A small house stood at the end of a long wooden pier. Nobody lived in it, obviously, but I wasn’t sure what it was for. Maybe it was the fish-processing place where Davis worked. I didn’t ask. Other boats farther out in the harbor were all pretty small, and most needed a coat of paint. A giant rusted motor lay off to one side. I didn’t ask what that had been used for either. I didn’t feel like asking a lot of questions. With the excitement of arriving, and hanging out with my grandfather, and just the way life was up here, I hadn’t worried about much of anything at all, but since my father’s call, everything had come rushing back.

  “That’s it right over there, where you can send an email.” My grandfather pointed to a place called The Last Drop. “Come on, I could use a coffee anyway.”

  “Hello there, Harold,” the older woman behind the counter called out as we entered the small store. She had short gray hair and large glasses.

  “Hello, Eunice,” he called back. “This is my granddaughter Lulu.”

  “Lulu? That’s an unusual name,” she said.

  “Oh, cut it out. Her name is Lucy,” Grandpa said.

  “Well, how am I supposed to know that when you introduce her as Lulu?”

  “Because no one is named Lulu; it’s a nickname, for God’s sake.”

  Eunice shook her head. They both appeared to enjoy the bickering. My grandfather seemed well liked in these parts.

  Eunice finally turned to me. “Well hello, Lucy.”

  My grandfather ordered himself a coffee and a Coke for me, and Eunice gave me a slip of paper with the Internet login on it. The computers were in the back of the room, on a long table facing the wall. Grandpa took a seat by the window and sipped his coffee while I went to work.

  I’M SORRY, I wrote. I don’t know what’s wrong with me except that I’m a total idiot. You are the greatest person I have ever met on the planet and I just flipped out. This whole Thomas situation has made me nuts, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. Please please forgive me, Simon. I ran away up to Maine to see my grandfather, who you would actually like a lot. I’ll be back next week, I think. I will call you then (I left my phone at home) and hopefully you will still want to talk to me. Then I wrote, If you don’t I don’t know what I will do, but I deleted it because it sounded way too lame and desperate. I signed it, LOVE, ME

  Once that was done I felt a lot better. I wished there was something I could have done about Thomas to feel better too. I wished I could have written him an email and made him just disappear. At this point I would have settled for just rewinding the whole night on the back deck and never even knowing about him.

  Outside, a man was sitting on the edge of the pier mending a lobster trap on his lap. His feet were dangling over the edge. Beside him was a massive pile of traps. If he had to fix each and every one of those, he was in for a very long day.

  The coolest thing about the whole waterside was the lighthouse a little off to the left, at the end of a wall of giant stones. My grandfather said the wall was man-made.

  “How did they do that? Isn’t it deep?” I asked him.

  “Big cranes, bulldozers. I saw them repairing it last year.”

  “How far is it to the lighthouse?”

  “Want to go?”

  He could see the look on my face. He laughed.

  “It’s a half mile out, over some pretty uneven stones. If you’re up for it . . .”

  “No problem,” I said. I needed to clear my head anyway.

  The boulders that made the breakwater were unevenly spaced. It was fairly level, but some of the gaps were treacherous. You had to constantly look down at where you were walking. The wind was blowing nice and warm once we got away from land, the sun was reflecting off the water, and the boats were sailing around this way and that.

  “Do you know how to sail, Grandpa?”

  “I wish I did, Lulu.”

  “Me, too.”

  We had been picking our way out toward the lighthouse for about fifteen minutes when I asked my grandfather something I’d been thinking about before I got to Maine. With everything else going on since I got here, I’d forgotten it—until my father called.

  “Grandpa?” I said.

  “Yes, Lulu.”

  “How come you don’t like my father?”

  My grandfather stopped walking. That made me stop, too. He looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then he nodded slowly, in that way I’d seen him do a few times already, as if he was answering a question that only he could hear in his mind—not necessarily the question you had asked him.

  “Is that what he said to you?”

  “Well, he didn’t say it to me exactly, but I heard him say it.”

  A sailboat was cruising past very close to where we were standing. The people on board were laughing, holding drinks, their hair blowing in the breeze, as if they really didn’t have a care. I wondered if I’d die without ever having been to sea.

  Finally Grandpa started walking out toward the lighthouse again.

  “Did you know that when I was a kid my father owned a candy store?” he said.

  “Really?”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t as great as everyone thought it was. It’s not like he owned a candy store or anything.”

  “Wait, you just said—”

  “I know. What I’m saying is that we think we know what something is like, or would be like, or we think we know someone, but we don’t ever really know, unless we live it ourselves. That’s all. Mostly what I remember about growing up was not the free candy, but my father sitting on the couch drinking two six-packs of beer and passing out every night. And it’s not that it even seemed bad. It was just the way things were. We see things the way we see them. But other people might see the same things a different way.”

  I felt really bad for my grandfather, but he kept walking that jaunty walk he had, like a little terrier scampering over the rocks. Then he pointed toward the rocks a few feet in front of us.

  “You see that crab there?”

  “Where?” I screamed.

  He laughed. It was good to hear that laugh again, but I was not happy to hear about crabs.

  “He’s just living his crab life, he’s not meaning you any harm, but you have this reaction to him, like he’s going to get you. He’s just trying to not get eaten by some seagull, that’s all.

  “Now, you say your fathe
r believes I didn’t like him. That saddens me, of course, but he can never know what I felt, what I experienced. Look, we never see our parents as just people. They are our parents, and that ought to be enough for them, but I’ll let you in on a little secret, Lulu—it’s not enough.”

  I could now see all sorts of tiny crab-type shelled thingies scampering between the stones and all over the place.

  “Your father, he’s a pretty responsible guy.”

  “Well, you don’t know him very well,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t. And it’s a goddamn shame.”

  “He seems all responsible,” I said, “but you don’t know everything about a person like you think you do.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been saying,” my grandfather said.

  He had no way of knowing I was talking about Thomas.

  “My dad said you got mad a lot, all the time.”

  My grandfather just kept his eyes on the stones beneath us, picking his way out toward the lighthouse, which finally seemed to be getting closer. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft that I had to lean in closer to hear him through the wind. He told me about how he had been really in love with his wife when they were young.

  “She was the most exciting person I had ever met,” he said. “She made me feel the way I wanted to feel about myself. And for some reason that I’ll never understand, I did the same for her.” He was almost smiling at the memory of it, I could tell, but he didn’t allow it to show.

  “Then after a while we couldn’t seem to get along in the same way. Nothing had really happened that I could see, but somehow everything started to lead to a fight.” He looked out over the water.

  “It must have been all my fault, especially since she never fought with anybody else, and I fought with everyone.” He laughed a little at that and kept walking.

  “Then she had the idea that a baby would bring us closer. We know better about that kind of thing now, but back then, that’s what people thought.”

  We were moving quickly over the rocks at this point.