Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Your father didn’t sleep well as a child. He got sick a lot—whooping cough and pneumonia, all sorts of things. I was either working all the time or trying to find work. I don’t know which one was worse.”

  I was looking over at him as he spoke—at least, I was as much as I could, considering I had to keep lookout for the huge crevices between the rocks.

  “I just think at some point she kind of gave up on me. Which, looking back on it, I can’t really blame her. And she just put all the love she used to have for me onto her baby.” He shrugged. “It was easier, believe me.”

  He was saying these things as if he was talking about going to the grocery store or something—as if it didn’t have much import. The only thing that gave him away was how softly he was talking. In the brief time I had known my grandfather, soft-spoken was not a word that I would have used in referring to him. Then he whispered something, but I wasn’t sure I heard correctly.

  “What, Grandpa?” I said to him.

  “I said I was jealous.” His voice rang out over the sea on the breeze. “Plain and simple.” He turned to me. “Crazy, huh? For a grown-up to be jealous of a little kid.”

  “Not so crazy, I guess.”

  He smiled. I think he appreciated that I said that. He went on to say that he knew his wife was busy with the new baby and had to take care of him and that she didn’t really have time for my grandfather anymore and all that normal stuff—but it was something else, something more. He felt that the baby had taken his wife’s love from him.

  “It doesn’t speak very well of me, I know,” he said.

  Then he stopped walking; his feet were balanced between two large rocks, and he looked at me.

  “But of course, I loved your father very much. Very much. He was our only child.”

  He held my look for a long time. Then he started walking again. I loved my grandfather a lot right then.

  “But it is true that I kicked the dog fairly often,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I had a temper when I was younger. Which I still do at times. When your father was a little kid he was easy to take things out on. Since he was young and couldn’t fight back, and his mother always took his side of things, and I suppose that made me even angrier.”

  We were getting close to the lighthouse. “Almost there.” My grandfather read my mind. Then he smiled that smile that lets you see he only has teeth on the left side of his mouth.

  “What happened to your teeth, Grandpa?” I asked without thinking.

  He threw back his head and laughed, really hard. I thought he might give himself whiplash or something.

  “I didn’t brush. So let that be a lesson to you.” He wagged his finger at me. “No, actually, I got in a fight and this guy punched me and knocked out a few. He was a southpaw, caught me off guard. Once those teeth were gone, the ones in the area seemed to miss them and fell out, too, in solidarity. That was a long time ago. I just never got them fixed, which, I have to admit, was not very smart. I think I figured I was just going to get in another fight, so what was the point?”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Get in another fight?”

  Grandpa smiled that toothless grin. “Lots of ’em,” he said. I was getting used to that smile.

  The lighthouse was behind a fence, and the gate was locked. It seemed unfair after our long walk. But there was not a soul besides us out there, and there was nothing we could do about it. After shaking the big lock a few times, we turned and started back.

  The wind was blowing pretty hard this far out into the water, but it felt good against my face. As we started walking, my grandfather began to slow down. It looked as if he was picking his way along the breakwater, so that he wouldn’t trip or slip between the irregularly spaced rocks. He had zipped out to the end so briskly, it had been all I could do to keep up with him, so these slow, methodical movements seemed weird. As we kept walking, he started pushing out his chest, or maybe he was arching his back. It looked strange, like an old man pretending to be a soldier or something. Then he fell backwards.

  Sometimes when accidents happen everything goes in slow motion and you just watch it. Not this time. We were walking, his back was arching, and then he was down. I heard his head smack on the rocks, hard. He grunted. I heard myself gasp. He must have lost consciousness for a second or two, but then he shook himself and grabbed the back of his head. He looked around as if he didn’t know how he had gotten on the ground.

  “Help me up, Lucy,” he said.

  It was the first time he had called me by my real name the whole trip.

  “Maybe you ought to just sit there a second, Grandpa,” I said, crouching by his side. I was breathing hard.

  “No, I’m fine,” he said, trying to push himself up.

  Once he was sitting he stopped moving, as if rushing to get up was not such a good idea.

  “I must have slipped on the wet rocks,” he said.

  The section of the breakwater we had been walking over was dry. In fact, the whole thing was surprisingly absent of seawater.

  “Yeah,” I said to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. The fall was scary, but till that moment I’d been telling myself that old people fall down, right? Then his comment made me think that perhaps something more serious than him just losing his balance was going on. I plopped down next to him. Seagulls flew overhead, squawking at us. The wind was still blowing hard, lifting my grandfather’s thin hair. We sat there on the rocks with our breath going in and out, the both of us.

  Eventually my grandfather rolled over onto one hip and started to push himself up. I helped him till we both were standing.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He was trying to sound confident, but his voice was shaky.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Let’s move,” he snapped. It was the first time I ever saw a flash of his anger.

  We stared toward the land, which looked very far off. Right away I could see that he was still arching and leaning back. I put my arm around his waist. I thought he’d yell at me not to, but he didn’t say anything. I slowed down our pace.

  As he started to arch back farther, I slid my arm between his shoulder blades, as if to prop him up, but there was no way that I was going to be able to keep him vertical if he continued to push back as strongly as he was.

  “Are you okay, Grandpa?”

  “Fine, Lulu,” he said. I was Lulu again. “Just slippery back there.” He didn’t seem aware at all that he was pressing back into my arm. We were walking forward, but it was as if he was pushing back against our progress at the same time. I wished Simon were there.

  Then my grandfather fell back like a tree. Since I was trying to hold him up, I went down with him. My arm was beneath him as we hit. I smacked my elbow. His body hit hard.

  “Shit,” my grandfather said, trying to roll over as soon as we hit the stones. There was panic in his movement. Pain was shooting down my arm.

  Once we were both sitting, we didn’t make much more of an effort to move. I was rubbing my elbow; my grandfather stared straight ahead.

  “You okay, Grandpa?”

  He nodded. He was definitely more than just shaky now.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” he managed to ask, without looking at me.

  “No, I’m tip-top,” I said.

  I saw a man and a boy walking out along the breakwater in our direction. They were far away, still pretty close to land, carrying what seemed to be fishing rods.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “I’m going to run up and get some help. I want you to stay right here and not move till I get back. Okay?”

  I expected him to tell me that I was going to do no such thing. He didn’t. He simply nodded and said, “All right.”

  I bolted down that breakwater. Because of the crazy way the rocks were spaced out, my strides were really uneven. I almost went down several times, but didn’t slow my pace.

  This was my fault�
��if we hadn’t been out there, it wouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t pushed Grandpa about my father, he wouldn’t have gotten upset and fallen. If I hadn’t flipped out about Thomas in the first place, I wouldn’t have taken off from home and come up here and caused all this trouble. I kept running.

  When I was about fifty yards from the man and kid I called out.

  “Help,” I yelled. “I need some help!”

  They looked up right away. After a second the father laid down his fishing rod and started toward me.

  “My grandfather fell back there and we need help,” I shouted as I came up to them.

  “Do you need an ambulance?” the man asked. He was very calm.

  “I think so, yes,” I said. I could hear myself panting hard.

  “Okay.” He pulled out his phone. “Oliver, you run back and wait by the shore for the ambulance.”

  The kid took off without a word.

  “Show me,” the man said.

  We didn’t run, but we moved very quickly. He called 911 as we went and told them we needed an ambulance and where we were. His voice was very clear and he was super deliberate in the way he spoke.

  “What happened?” he asked me when he hung up.

  I explained as best I could and he kept nodding his head as we walked. When we got to my grandfather, he was still sitting on the rocks. He didn’t look any worse than when I left him, but he didn’t look too sure of anything anymore either.

  “Who’s this?” he said as the man and I arrived.

  “Hi there. I’m Edward,” the man said. “Can I give you a hand?”

  “If you want to,” my grandfather said. Then he tried to push himself up.

  “You sure you want to stand up?” Edward asked.

  “Of course I’m sure,” my grandfather said.

  Edward reached out his hand. “Maybe we should just sit tight for a few minutes.”

  “Maybe you should mind your own business,” Grandpa snapped at him.

  “Grandpa, this man is just trying to help us,” I said softly.

  The wind picked up for a few seconds and everyone’s hair was blowing.

  “All right, all right,” my grandfather said, and tried to push himself up again. “But I’m fine.”

  Edward went around behind my grandfather and put his hands under Grandpa’s armpits and hoisted him to his feet.

  “How’s that?” Edward asked. “Okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  We started walking back toward land. I was on one side and Edward was on the other, each of us with an arm around my grandfather’s back. Right away Grandpa began arching again, leaning back hard. If Edward hadn’t been there, nothing I could have done would have kept Grandpa on his feet. Then my grandfather’s knees started to lock and he began walking stiff legged. He seemed to have no idea that at this point he looked like a windup toy soldier gone wrong.

  Out of the blue, he began asking Edward all sorts of questions: Where was he from? What did he do for a living? What kind of car did he drive? If you didn’t know what was happening and only heard a recording of the conversation, you might have thought they were having a friendly chat on the street corner, or over coffee.

  Up on land, the ambulance arrived. Edward must have seen it too, because he slowed and we lowered my grandfather to the ground to wait for the paramedics to come out to us.

  When they arrived, they asked my grandfather how he was feeling. “Great,” he said.

  “What happened?” the taller paramedic asked.

  “I don’t know. I must have slipped back there on the wet stones.”

  My grandfather said he didn’t want to go to the hospital and insisted that he was fine. Once the paramedics got him to his feet and explained that he was doing this strange backward-leaning thing, he looked confused. He turned to me. I shrugged. I hated betraying him.

  “I think the hospital is a good idea, Grandpa,” I said finally.

  18

  I’d never ridden in an ambulance before, and if you want to know the truth, I don’t ever need to again. At the hospital, they placed my grandfather in a small room with a curtain surrounding the bed, even though there was no other bed in the room. He seemed to relax a bit, and then within an hour it was basically as if nothing had happened.

  My grandfather had apparently suffered something called a TIA, a transient ischemic attack—kind of a “ministroke.” The doctor at the tiny medical center where they had taken us reminded me of the young guy who had X-rayed my ankle. He was very sincere; he looked directly into my eyes whenever he spoke to me. They couldn’t be sure it was this ministroke thing, he said, but all signs pointed that way. They decided to keep my grandfather overnight for observation. Grandpa gave me a number and I called Davis to come and get me.

  “He’s had two TIAs before,” Davis told them when he arrived.

  The doctor and nurses nodded their heads and seemed pleased with themselves over this latest news.

  “Unconfirmed,” my grandfather barked from his hospital bed. “Unconfirmed.” We were all standing around him staring down, like he was a fish in a bowl.

  “It’s okay, Grandpa,” I said to him. “They’re here to help you.”

  “Don’t believe it,” my grandfather said. He was definitely getting grumpier.

  Later, after he came back from some other test, when I went to say goodbye, I swung the curtain open and he popped up in the bed. He had his big half-toothless grin back on his face, like a crazy carved pumpkin. I almost burst into tears when I saw him smile like that. I hugged him around the neck and told him I’d see him the next day.

  Davis and I didn’t speak in the car. The house felt super quiet. When I walked into the kitchen, I realized I was about to pass out from hunger. We’d been at the hospital for hours, and it was past dinnertime.

  “I’ll order a pizza, okay?” Davis said.

  Davis said he had some things to do, so he went back to his room above the garage while we waited for the food. I sat on the front steps so I didn’t have to be in the house alone.

  The pizza delivery guy was young, with a lot of acne. He was kind of awkward, but his pizza was super cheesy with a nice spicy sauce. Delish. I felt a lot better as I ate. Davis said he had to work in the morning but would take me to the medical center when he got off after lunch and we’d bring Grandpa home.

  After I tossed the last crust into the box, I wanted nothing more than to just head upstairs. I wasn’t tired at all but it was dark, and enough was enough for one day. If I got into bed, then nothing else could happen. But first there was one more thing that had to be done.

  I was surprised that my parents hadn’t called, but there was no blinking light on Grandpa’s answering machine when I picked up the phone to call my house back in New Jersey.

  My mother answered. “How’s everything there today?” she asked. Her voice was calm, so I couldn’t really tell how mad she was at me at this point.

  I didn’t especially want to launch right in with the bad news, but I figured if I waited, when I finally did tell them, they would wonder why I had been holding back.

  “Oh, my God, Lucy. Is he okay? Are you okay, sweetheart?” All of a sudden, my mother was a super sweet, loving, concerned parent again.

  My father was not so gentle. It’s not that he sounded angry at me so much as he was trying to get a handle on what was going on. I described twice what had happened and what the doctor had said. Then I told him that Davis had driven me home. Then I had to explain who Davis was. I could hear my father breathing hard on the phone.

  “Who is at the house with you now?”

  “No one. Davis is in his apartment over the garage, but that’s all.”

  The only thing he said was my name—“Lucy”—but I could tell he was now extremely stressed.

  “Dad,” I said, trying to sound very nonchalant, “I’m totally fine.” I think that made it even worse.

  Now my father had made me nervous about being in the house alone—and
about Davis. Davis hadn’t seemed like a psycho rapist or murderer, but now I wasn’t so sure. After my father said they’d call in the morning and we hung up, I locked the front door, went upstairs, and climbed into bed. I didn’t think I would get any sleep, but I must have passed out in self-defense. The next thing I knew it was another bright morning, and the birds were singing again. I wondered about that cardinal, if he was out there again, if that was his spot. Did birds even have spots?

  While I was considering this, I heard someone moving around downstairs. That must have been what had woken me. I figured it was Davis; he must have had a key. If it had still been dark I would have assumed he had come to kill me, but if he hadn’t done it during the night, it didn’t make much sense that he’d decide to attack in the cold light of day.

  Then I heard footsteps on the creaky stairs. I sat up fast and looked around for something to defend myself with. The old telescope stood on its tripod by the window. It was better than nothing. I leapt up and grabbed it.

  The footsteps outside my room were coming closer. The bedroom door began to slowly swing open, creaking as it went. I pulled back the telescope and was about to throw it full force at Davis’s head when my dad stepped in from the hallway.

  “Lucy,” he said.

  “Dad!” I nearly dropped the telescope. “You scared me to death.”

  My father walked across the room, took the telescope out of my hands, and set it back on the ground. He just looked at me.

  “Are you all right? What are you doing?”

  “I’m totally fine. You just freaked me out, sneaking up on me like that.”

  “I didn’t sneak up on you. I drove all night to get up here.”

  My dad had apparently hung up the phone last night and then gotten in his car and driven eight hours while I was asleep, just to see if I was still alive. I suppose that should have touched me. Now that I got a good look at him, he did look pretty tired. We went down to the kitchen where he started to make coffee.

  “How did you get in?” I asked him after I had taken a seat on one of the counter stools.

  “The back door was open.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I left that open on purpose. I figured something like this might happen.” Granted, I might have been killed by some psycho pervert strolling by the house overnight, but I didn’t want my father to take any satisfaction in the fact that I forgot to lock up, fueling his belief that I couldn’t deal with the situation properly.