by Tony Abbott
Gabby waves to Joseph too. It’s like that here. One of the very best things about getting pure is losing the anger you might have learned in life. It’s a pretty good feeling.
More cheers float across the dock, as the passengers rush down the gangplank to us.
How long my grandfather will stay in Port Haven, I don’t know.
There’s Matt and Trey and Mom and Dad to remember him, of course, and maybe that’ll be enough for a while. I’ll find him later and tell him what he’s missed, as much as I remember.
Me? I’ll visit Matt for a little while, then I’ll stop visiting and look from the grotto, then I’ll stop doing that, too. They’ll cope. More than cope, they’ll move on. There’s so much for them down there, and not enough for me.
And I’ll see them eventually, anyway, right? Like Uncle Richard waited for his brother for years, I’ll wait for Matt. I’ll try. And I’ll keep GeeGee here for as long as I can, too. I don’t know, of course, how soon I’ll really start to fade. I could be in Port Haven for a while yet. I mean, what if Matt grows up and names one of his kids after me and explains all about me?
That would be cool.
It seems like the least he can do.
46
One Last Thing
A thousand, thousand threads! Patterns woven and repeated, subtly or accidentally, over the years. One thing I’ve figured out, though. Those threads aren’t just lines connecting and reconnecting. They’re more like arteries, pumping life from one thing to another, creating not simply patterns in a fabric, but a living connection from person to place to thing. I like that I know this. Of course, one of those living patterns is how, after everything that’s happened, after all the secrets they no longer have, Dad and Mom decide to tough it out.
Sure, Dad’s coming to terms with who his father really was and who he became at the end, but the ghosts that haunted Dad for years are finally at peace. He’s put his father’s picture back on the mantel, along with Richard’s, GeeGee’s, and the crinkly silver one of her grandfather Byatt, posing in his uniform. Some bunch, huh?
And Mom?
She’ll have to untangle the whole business about the man Dad fought and who she thought died because of what she’d said, who later picked me up and stopped my crying, who tried to save me and failed, who then saved Matt and died. What a weave that is!
It’s not going to be easy for either of them. They still have lots of silences between them, junk that darkens the room, even when Matt’s there with them. So far that’s kept them from seeing and hearing any trace of me.
Still, they’re beginning to feel something sparkly moving between each other that wasn’t there before. I guess I can take credit for a little of that. The light’s not always there, but when it is, it’s blue and yellow and even a kind of pale gold. Maybe sparks are part of the weave, too—opposite colors that make a surprising new pattern. Maybe they’ll make something beautiful with them. Only living people can.
For Matt, I have to believe he and Trey are going in a whole different direction, their own. Maybe I’ll hear about it someday, if I’m still here.
One evening at supper, a week or so after Zelienople, I’m aching over how to leave them all, when Matt tells our parents completely out of the blue that I’m at the table with them.
“He’s standing right here, and he loves us.”
After all that’s happened, Mom and Dad think they understand, but they don’t believe in me that way, and that’s okay for now.
“Denis,” he says to me in front of them, “you gotta say something or do something so they believe. I know you can.”
They search not where I’m standing but Matt’s face. They’re half hopeful, half worried about him, but without any trace of disapproval. If Matt wants to believe in me, maybe it’s all right that he does. This is all said silently between them, with their eyes, and I sense light coming into them as it never has. The zinging at the table pops like a little firework display.
“Denis brought me through this.” Matt turns to me. “You did, Denis.”
“Somebody had to.”
“Come on. Show them. Please.”
“Let me think of something. Hold the fort.”
“Hold your own farts,” Matt snaps, then he relaxes. “Okay, so never mind tonight. Maybe later. He’s not magic. Just a ghost.”
A minute later he asks, “Mom, do you think we can put Denis’s chair back out? So he can sit?”
I look to see if Mom reacts as she has in the past, with big gray defensive shields going up. But there’s none of that here. “I guess so. Wouldn’t want him to have to stand all day.”
Matt smiles. “Cool.”
Mom hugs him tight and long. When he’s free, he turns to Dad. Apparently, this is a night of meaningful words, a big deal for Matt, but he’s working it.
“Dad . . . I want to thank you.”
“Me? For what?”
“For coming from that place you did, and being different. You were. You love us, I know you do. You didn’t grow up in a great place, but you’re a good man—” He suddenly puts his face on Dad’s shoulder and breaks down. My face streams with tears too.
“I love you, Matt. I love you, I love you!” Dad is all over him, wrapping him tight and keeping him there for minutes.
A few days later I do think of a thing. Maybe one of my very last things, after all.
Matt’s been quiet and attentive in school. He’s thoughtful at home, not cranky or sullen with Mom or Dad. He helps with stuff, and he’s present when he needs to be. He’s at peace with himself. As much as a twelve-year-old with a serious crush can be at peace. For me, aside from the occasional jokey haunt, I’ve been hanging off, not interfering, just watching. Matt seems fine with that. He knows I’m not far away.
Then a moment comes.
After that early snow across the state, the temperature climbed, and though the leaves are long down, the air is crisp and the sun stretching low across the yards. Then late one afternoon, without anyone saying much, like a troupe of players getting ready to go onstage, first Dad, then Mom, and finally Matt hop quietly into the car.
I breeze in next to him. “Where we going?”
Matt smiles a flat smile. “Road trip. You’ll pee.”
“I hope that means ‘I’ll see.’”
He gives me a grin that tells me he knows exactly what he’s saying and probably has for a while.
Mom drives to the corner, says a few words to Dad, but nobody’s really talking, just looking out the windows at the neighborhoods in the last of the light before cold settles in. Dad’s the first to mention that this is the first time they’ve been in the car together, just them, for weeks.
“It is,” Mom agrees. “Wow. It’s nice.”
Matt recalls things we used to do together as a family, and I sense him thinking about that game he and I used to play in the back seat on long drives, the same spelling game he and Trey played on the way to Silver Lake. I think I’ll probably be gone before either of us remember what it’s called. But that’s okay. I love being in the back with him, our parents in front, all of us being quiet. It’s that way for a few miles, when Mom slows down and stops the car.
I look out my window at a scattering of small upright stones on a hillside.
I turn to Matt for an explanation.
“It’s today,” he says, and I realize it’s Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Somewhere far away in my mind, I hear GeeGee saying Five years, in that musical voice I need to hear more of.
We get out together and walk up the brown grass. I’m suddenly filled with something as clear and invisible as it is heavy and dense. My throat thickens, and I want to cry.
We’ve stopped at a small stone. Simple. No extra words.
DENIS RICHARD EGAN
SEPT 14 2006–NOV 20 2013
The marker is mine and not mine. I see my name graven into the stone and want to trace my fingers in it, like Dad did the stone at Gettysburg, but I know it’s just a signpost,
and not where I am, a road sign with an arrow, telling people to look for me in another place.
“Nice,” I whisper to Matt, trying not to choke on my tears. “Thank them for me.”
I know there isn’t much time left. I have to get back. It’s where I belong. But looking at Matt now, his crumpled face, his eyes red and wet, I only want to make him laugh. I only want to remember his smiling face forever.
Then, all at once, the name of that old back seat road game pops into my mind. I’m about to tell him when Mom gasps through her tears.
“Oh, the light is so perfect on the stone. I want a picture of all my boys. Stand on each side of Denis. You look so handsome!”
A photograph? Thank you, Mom!
Matt and Dad turn and lean their heads close over the stone, and when I squirrel between them, Dad moves a little away, as if to make room. For what, he’s not sure.
I choose my moment. With orange light streaming over her shoulder and out of her fingers, Mom taps her phone and I shout in Matt’s head, for one of the last times.
“Montezuma!”
“That’s it!” he cries as snot bursts from his nose.
Mom groans. “Oh, Matt! You ruined it. Your face!”
But when she taps her phone to see the photo, she lets out a cry. “Oh . . . oh, look! Gary, look!”
And there I am, amid a shower of golden sparks—my own handsome face, laughing between Dad and Matt, my brother, my twin forever.
Egan Family Tree
Acknowledgments
From the original one-sentence idea that spent some time kicking around in my brain, this story has evolved into something quite unexpected and thrilling. I want to thank my editor, Claudia Gabel, for seeing in that first gauzy notion a unique way forward. To all my friends at Katherine Tegen Books, my gratitude for being part of the ongoing fun of creating books for young readers. As always, to my children and my wife I owe countless loving debts, for simply being you, and for allowing me the space and time and calm to keep doing what I so love.
One other, probably very minor thing. Readers will likely not consider important the short bit about sidewalks in chapter 11, but the mere mention of the word means a lot to a person of a certain age for whom that concrete river along our yards was not just a cracked place to run and sit and play, but a thoroughfare leading, left or right, to the huge reckless world beyond. Reading those couple of sentences during my last pass at these pages, I was reminded of the great homage to sidewalks in the opening of Bruce Brooks’s brilliant Everywhere. And here is the power of writing from the heart: I’ve realized I can’t separate, nor do I ever want to, neighborhood sidewalks from Bruce’s words. He has done them. The music of his attention to them is there, and will continue to be there, in every sidewalk I write and in every sidewalk I use. To me, this is the indissoluble bond between writing and the world we live in.
About the Author
Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis
TONY ABBOTT is the author of over a hundred books for young readers, including the bestselling series the Secrets of Droon and the Copernicus Legacy and the novels Firegirl and The Summer of Owen Todd. Tony has worked in libraries, in bookstores, and in a publishing company and has taught creative writing. He has two grown daughters and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two dogs. You can visit him online at www.tonyabbottbooks.com.
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Books by Tony Abbott
The Summer of Owen Todd
The Copernicus Legacy series
The Secrets of Droon series
Lunch-Box Dream
The Postcard
Firegirl
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
DENIS EVER AFTER. Text copyright © 2018 by Tony Abbott. Interior illustrations by Oamul Lu. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art by Oamul Lu
Cover design by Katie Fitch
* * *
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951444
Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-249124-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-249122-0
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1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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