by Alex George
The season the sign went up was the wettest summer in Maine on record. My father looked out of his office window at the deserted park, trying not to think about all the money he was losing and wondering if he would be able to open again the following year. He was, just, but that one ruinous summer had scuppered his dreams of ever building those tree houses. He decided to leave the sign where it was, a reminder to himself of the perils of betting on the Maine weather.
My father had had plenty of practice at making the best of a bad situation, and he realized that the newly cleared hill made a perfect outdoor amphitheater. From that year on, after the close of normal business on the Fourth of July, the gates of Fun-A-Lot reopened and welcomed the public for a giant fireworks display, free of charge. Rockets were launched into the sky from the top of the hill at a safe distance from the spectators watching below.
My father loved to plan the fireworks. He spent hours looking at catalogs, choosing rockets. During the show he scurried around in the darkness, clipboard in one hand and stopwatch in the other, moving between the marked and numbered fireworks. Lewis followed him with a huge box of matches, waiting for my father’s nod before lighting each fuse.
Liam rarely visited the park after he became too sick to work there, but he always came to see the fireworks. July 4, 1978, was his birthday, and he liked to joke that the display was all for him. He sat in his wheelchair, his face turned upward to the night sky, an expression of pure joy on his face. I knew that when my father sat down to plan each year’s fireworks, he had only one spectator in mind. But without Liam to delight, he had lost his appetite for the job. That summer he asked Lewis to arrange the display, and Lewis had co-opted me as his assistant.
July 4 dawned bright and beautiful. When I woke, I lay in my bed and watched the morning sun stream through the window. As a million tiny dust motes tangoed restlessly above me, I thought about my brother. Like Christmas, our Independence Day celebrations had always been freighted with unspoken grief as we all privately wondered if this birthday would be Liam’s last. Now that he was gone, I discovered that the pain had not diminished; there was just a change in the flavor of my sorrow, a sideways shift from fearful speculation to numb regret.
Liam loved his birthdays more than anything. He savored every minute of the day, exulting in his own specialness. Such self-obsession in anyone else would have been insufferable, but Liam’s enthusiasm was so good-natured, so infectious, that it was impossible not to go along with his idea that, actually, for those twenty-four hours he really was the most important person on the planet. Every birthday morning that I could remember had begun with a shockingly loud blast of something fast and fractious from Liam’s bedroom. Last year it had been “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones. My mother had stood at the top of the stairs, wincing as she listened to Joey Ramone sing. She turned to look at my father. “Well,” she had sighed, “at least that’s finally one of Liam’s songs I can agree with.”
I glanced at my alarm clock. Usually by now we would have been watching Liam open his presents—which he always did with unabashed glee, loving everything. But today the house was silent and still, and the absence of joy was absolute and heartbreaking. There was nothing I would have liked more than to vaporize my regret with a few blasts of demented, thrashing guitar, but there would be no more early-morning punk anthems, no more hoots of delight at unexpected gifts. Last year there had been four of us in the house; now it was just my mother and me. I climbed out of bed and tiptoed along the hall. I reached out and twisted the handle of my parents’ bedroom door, but it was locked.
“Mom?” I whispered.
There was no answer.
I went downstairs and fixed myself breakfast. Soon after that I climbed on my bike and set off for work.
My father had rearranged the work roster so that I could spend the day helping Lewis get ready for the fireworks display. An hour before the gates opened, Lewis pulled into the parking lot in his battered pickup. There was a mountain of unmarked cardboard boxes piled up high in the back.
“Those are the fireworks?” I asked.
“Those are the fireworks,” grunted Lewis as he hauled one of the boxes off the bed of the pickup.
“Shouldn’t they be in proper packaging? With instructions and everything?”
“Most likely,” agreed Lewis. “Here, take that one, will you?”
As I picked up the box he was pointing at, the smell of cordite hit the back of my nostrils. “Are you sure these are safe?” I said, wrinkling my nose.
“The only thing dangerous about these,” said Lewis, “is that they might give me a heart attack carrying them to the top of that damn hill. Come on.”
By ten o’clock the park was bathed in sunshine, as if the weather were trying to do the patriotic thing by us all. Lewis and I spent the day hauling the fireworks up to the launching site and arranging them for that night’s show. Lewis had sketched out diagrams and made a timetable for when each rocket should be lit. By the time we had finished, the top of the hill was carpeted with multicolored warheads. Lewis was going to light the fuses while I carried the clipboard and the stopwatch. It was also my job to wield the flashlight, so Lewis had both hands free.
As the day went on I found myself thinking about my family, what was left of it. I wished, more than anything in the world, that my father would quit the couch in his office and come home. It was my bad luck that he couldn’t be thankful for his one remaining son. Instead I was just a reminder to him of the future that Liam would never have.
Every year on Liam’s birthday my mother had given me a small gift—“something to open,” she called it, a little treat to cheer me up in case I was despondent about all the attention that my brother was getting. (It had apparently never occurred to her that my feelings of fraternal insignificance might not be limited to Liam’s birthday.) There had been no gift this year, of course, so I felt more invisible than ever. My mother had not answered my knock on her bedroom door, and my father was nowhere to be seen. But it was Liam’s birthday, and I needed to talk about him, to remember him. Once Lewis and I had finished setting up the fireworks, I walked down the hill to my father’s office and pushed open the door.
My father was sitting at his desk, staring into space. His fingers were resting on the rim of an empty glass. Even though he had been living there for several weeks, the office looked just the same as it always did. There was a large fortification of filing cabinets along one side of the room. (My father was a born bureaucrat, a meticulous keeper of records. Every piece of paper that passed across his desk was date-stamped, Xeroxed several times, and then filed in different places in a complex data-retrieval system of his own devising.) The walls were adorned with dusty plaques from the local chamber of commerce. The insincerity of those abbreviated, price-per-word tributes was obvious even to me. Pressed behind a sheet of glass on the wall above the desk there was a yellowing, two-page profile of my father that had run in the Haverford Gazette in June 1960 to mark his first year in charge. There was a photograph of my parents standing proudly in front of the park gates. My father was holding a plastic sword above his head, a goofy grin on his face. My mother was wearing a short dress with a large floral-print design. She looked pretty and was smiling, her hands resting contentedly on her extravagantly swollen belly. Liam was born a month later.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
My father took his hand away from the glass. “Robert,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s Liam’s birthday,” I said. “So I wanted to see you.”
He gave a short nod but said nothing.
I looked out of the window. “Quiet today.”
“Ah, yes. People prefer to celebrate their independence at home, being driven crazy by their families. But we’ll be busy tonight.”
“Lewis has enough explosives to blow up half of Maine.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,�
� said my father.
“Are you going to be there?”
“I don’t know, Robert,” he sighed. “I don’t know if I can.”
“Liam always loved the fireworks,” I said. “He’d want you to be there.”
“It doesn’t much matter what Liam wants anymore, does it?”
I stared at him. “Of course it matters. That’s how we’ll keep his memory alive.”
“Oh, Robert, you and your memories.”
“Today is still his birthday,” I said stubbornly.
My father sighed and reached for the glass in front of him. He spun it around his index finger, caught it, and then twirled it again. Each time the glass landed back on the desk with a heavy thump. “You want a memory?” he said. “I’ll give you a memory. The day Liam was born was the happiest and most terrifying day of my life. Your mother was two weeks overdue. She was as big as a barn, and miserable. She made me drive her to the hospital. She marched into the maternity ward and demanded that they take that baby out, right there and then. And the doctors did what they were told. They found her a bed and induced labor. But Liam wasn’t budging without a fight.” He paused. “We went in on July second. By the time the doctors finally got him out, it was Independence Day. I should have known then that he was going to be trouble. To be honest, I’m not sure your mother ever quite forgave him for it.” He paused. “She was amazing, though. She was in a world of pain, Robert, but you never would have known it. I was by her side all the way through, and she never complained once. Just squeezed my hand a little harder when it really hurt. She was so brave and so beautiful.”
I closed my eyes. So come home, I wanted to say.
“And when Liam finally appeared—well. He was furious. He yelled so loud that he got a bubble on his lung. They kept him in the intensive care unit for three days, just to keep an eye on him. They put him in a plastic box. There were all these tubes going in and out of him, a machine that monitored his heartbeat, the works. He was so tightly wrapped up in blankets that you could hardly see him.” My father smiled. “The nurses kept waking him up every couple of hours to check he was all right and to stick another needle into his leg. Your mother was about ready to kill them all by the end. But Liam was strong. The other babies in the ICU had all been born prematurely. Your brother was twice as big as they were. He was just there as a precaution, but the rest of them were fighting for their lives.” He paused. “It taught me that there are always people worse off than you. I remember looking at those other parents and seeing the terror on their faces. I felt guilty that Liam was so healthy. But grateful, too, of course.” He looked away. “It all came back to me when we were in the hospital last winter. I tried to be thankful that at least he didn’t die when he was a newborn, in the ICU, before we could get to know him.”
“Did it work?”
“The being thankful?” My father sighed. “Not really.”
When I closed the office door a few moments later, he was still sitting at his desk, staring into space, remembering his baby boy.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lewis had put me in charge of keeping watch over the fireworks until that night. I patrolled my turf diligently, went over the checklist, and made sure each rocket was correctly numbered and in the right place. I checked the batteries in my flashlight five or six times.
On the far side of the park, the highest point of the roller coaster was visible above the treetops. The contours of its vast, lopsided parabola reminded me of a giant, landlocked whale. Every eight minutes I watched the convoy of carriages trundle slowly up to the crest of the ride, pause for the briefest moment, and then plummet toward the ground. The screams of the riders marked the passing of the day as regularly as any clock.
As the evening approached, people began to congregate around the picnic tables at the bottom of the hill. Multicolored coolers were lugged onto the grass and prodigious quantities of food and drink were produced. By the time the sky had begun to darken, every square inch of grass was covered by tarpaulins. There was laughter from somewhere below me. I looked down to see the dragon dancing through the maze of picnicking families, waving an American flag. People cheered as he made his way through the crowd.
“That boy sure loves his job.”
Lewis was standing beside me. We watched as Nathan borrowed a guest’s rolled-up umbrella and pretended that it was a rifle. He marched up and down in front of the crowd, goose-stepping crazily and saluting as he went.
“He does,” I agreed.
“Go grab something to eat,” said Lewis. “I’ll man the fort here.”
I set off gratefully down the hill. There was a relaxed atmosphere in the park, quite different from the usual frenetic daytime pace. I kept my eyes open for my father as I walked through the crowds. Usually on these evenings he liked to stand by the front gate and welcome guests as they arrived, enjoying his role as generous host, but tonight he was nowhere to be seen. I tried not to feel too disappointed.
As always, the concession stand was doing excellent business. My stomach rumbled as I waited in line to order food. I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day. When I got to the window, Faye was looking down at me. It was the first time I’d come face-to-face with her since the night on the beach.
“How’s it going, Faye?” I asked. “Remember me?”
“Sure, Robert Carter, I remember you,” she said.
“Could I get a hot dog? With extra onions?”
“Ah, the famous onions.” As I handed over my money, she said, “Can I ask you something about your friend Nathan?”
“Sure,” I said.
She gave me my change. “What’s his deal?” she asked. “He’s been hanging around here more than ever.”
“The thing about Nathan,” I said, “is that he’s a very optimistic person.”
Those pretty blue eyes looked down at me appraisingly. “Uh-huh.”
“This may sound crazy,” I said, “but he thinks you like him.”
“He’s a funny little guy, huh,” said Faye after a moment.
I took a deep breath. “Will you tell him he’s wrong? Please? I’ve tried, but he won’t listen to me.”
Faye gave me a small smile. “My shift ends when the fireworks start. Tell him to come and find me then.”
“Only please be kind,” I said.
Her eyes softened. “Here’s your hot dog. With extra onions.”
I walked through the park. I didn’t taste a bite of my hot dog. Guilt had left me dry-mouthed. I told myself that I’d done Nathan a favor. I told myself that now there would be no more humiliating encounters on the beach, no more dunkings in the freezing ocean. But it was a lie. I hadn’t done it for Nathan. I’d done it for me. I wanted my friend back.
Just then I saw Nathan ambling toward me. He was still carrying the American flag I’d seen him with earlier.
“There you are,” I said, hoping that I didn’t look as guilty as I felt. “How’s it going?”
The dragon gave me two thumbs up.
“You’re having a busy night.”
This time I got a happy nod and a small dance step.
“Nobody’s listening, Nathan,” I said. “You can talk to me, you know.”
The dragon shook its head and wagged a finger at me.
“Just for the record,” I said stiffly, “you’re being incredibly annoying.”
Nathan put his fists up to his eyes and pretended to cry, swaying from side to side. Behind him, his tail swung back and forth.
“If you’re finished, I have a message for you. From Faye.”
Nathan went very still.
“She wants you to go and find her at the concession stand when the fireworks begin. She has something she wants to talk to you about.” I clapped him on the back. “You’ll go and see her?”
The dragon nodded vigorously.
“All right,
then,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I have to get back to Lewis.”
Nathan nodded again, and then turned and took off down the path, a spring of excitement in his step. I hurried up the hill, hoping that Faye would be gentle with him.
—
A HALF HOUR LATER we were ready to begin. Lewis took a box of extra-long matches from his overalls and checked his watch. “Right,” he said. “Let’s give these folks a fireworks display we can all be proud of. God bless America, and all that jazz.” With that he squatted down and struck the first match. His face was illuminated briefly in its sulfuric glow. Then he touched the match to the base of the first rocket and scuttled backward as the fuse caught. The flame hissed up the dangling string, and then the firework launched into the night air with a satisfying whoosh. After a couple of seconds there was a loud bang over our heads, and the night sky exploded into a thousand glittering pinpoints of light. The crowd at the bottom of the hill broke into excited applause. Almost at once, the firework faded away into nothingness. I was still staring into the sky when Lewis snapped at me.
“Robert! Flashlight!”
He was squatting down by the adjacent rocket, ready with the next match. As soon as I pointed the beam of light at him, he lit the fuse. I stopped looking upward after that. We soon developed a rhythm as we worked our way along the lines of fireworks. I ticked the rockets off my checklist and called out the seconds between each launch. Lewis inched his way along, igniting fuses and then retreating to a safe distance, leaving a trail of spent matches in his wake. The sky was a rainbow of color. Beneath us, the watching crowd gasped as each new rocket exploded overhead.