Setting Free the Kites

by Alex George

  We drove in silence out to Sebbanquik Point. I heard the urn rolling around in the trunk as Mrs. Tilly took some of the sharper corners. When we pulled up outside the house, she wound down her window and stared up at the sky for several minutes. I sat there, thinking about my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulder. Finally Mrs. Tilly turned to me. “Why don’t you take your jacket off?” she said.

  I climbed out of the car and did as I was told. The ocean breeze felt good. I loosened my tie and undid the top button of my shirt.

  Mrs. Tilly opened the trunk. “Get that for me, would you?” she said. I picked up the urn and followed her down the wooden staircase that led to the beach. I stumbled slightly as small pebbles gave way under my shoes. The ocean lapped peacefully across a dark ribbon of sand.

  “I always liked it down here,” said Mrs. Tilly. “It was peaceful. Just me and the ocean.”

  I looked up and down the shoreline. The columns of stones had disappeared. There was no more ghostly army scanning the horizon to the east. Now there were just small, uneven hillocks of tide-tossed rocks.

  “Where are the statues?” I asked.

  Nathan’s mother looked out across the dark water. “Each day I came down here and built a new column,” she said. “I liked walking along the beach, looking for stones. The shape and size of each one had to be just right. It was my own little ritual, a way of marking time. I built one for each day here.”

  “Did you knock them all down?”

  She nodded. “They’d served their purpose.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Why did you change your mind, Mrs. Tilly?” I said. “Why did you have Nathan cremated after all?”

  She turned toward me. “I’ve been angry for a long time, Robert,” she said. “I couldn’t forgive my husband for the stupid way he died. Falling off the roof of your own house! It was ridiculous and selfish. That was what I thought, anyway, until you told me what he was doing up there. I realized then things are always more complicated than they seem. Nobody’s entirely innocent. We’re all responsible, one way or another. We’re all to blame.” She paused. “I was angry with Nathan, too, but I realized that whatever happened, it would have been wrong to punish him for it by burying him in the ground.”

  I offered her the tin. She shook her head.

  “You do it,” she said. “He would like that.”

  Nathan and I used to run along the water’s edge as we tried to coax his father’s kites into the air before setting them free. We would splash through the waves, holding the line above our heads, waiting for an upward gust. I took off my shoes and socks. I unscrewed the lid of the urn and walked down to the ocean. Then I raised my arm above my head and started to run. Every few steps I gave the tin an ecstatic shake. Each time, a cloud of gray ash flew into the air and was taken up by the wind.

  When the urn was empty, I came to a halt, my chest heaving. Nathan was gone, swept into the sky at last—just as he had always wanted.

  I looked back down the beach. My footsteps had been washed away by the ocean.

  2016

  EPILOGUE

  I drive away from the mill, the crash of the wrecking ball still ringing in my ears. I head out of town toward Sebbanquik Point. The road north was widened twenty years ago. The hedgerow on the east side of the lane was pulled up to make the extra room. It gives a better view of the ocean now.

  When I reach the Tillys’ old house, I pull over and lower the window. Crisp morning air fills the car. The place looks much the same as on that first afternoon I walked there with Nathan, although now there is a child’s swing set in the yard, and a yellow plastic tricycle is tipped over on its side in the grass. The shed where Mr. Tilly built his kites still nestles in the shadows behind the house. I wonder what happens in there now, what adorns those whitewashed walls.

  After ten minutes I put up the window and switch on the ignition. Then I put the car in drive and head back through forty years.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER Nathan’s funeral, my father left the couch in his office and came home.

  His station wagon pulled into the driveway just after my mother and I had finished supper, and he appeared at the kitchen doorway carrying two bags, one full of clothes, the other full of V. V. St. Cloud novels. My mother looked up at him and smiled. She had known he was coming.

  I ran over to him and hugged him as hard as I could. After a moment, he put down his bags and wrapped his arms around me.

  I’ve never asked my father why he chose to return then. I like to think that Nathan’s death reminded him that life is precious and we shouldn’t waste a single day of it. The alternative explanation—that it was the cocktail of humiliation and remorse after his night in the dragon suit that sent him running for the comforts of home—is less palatable.

  One thing I knew as I clung to my father: now that he was back, I would do anything to keep him there. I understood instinctively that the empty bottle of bourbon I had found in the dragon suit could destroy us in any number of ways. Neither my mother nor my father could ever know that I had found it.

  I never told anyone.

  My silence has not been such a burden, if I’m being honest. I wanted to forget what had happened that night as much as my father did. My joy at his return had to be filtered through the prism of what I now knew. It was sobering to discover that my father wasn’t the man I’d believed him to be. Our worlds are always at risk of these unexpected fracturings that require small—and sometimes not-so-small—readjustments of hope and expectation.

  —

  THERE WERE STILL several weeks of summer to get through.

  The day after Nathan’s funeral I reluctantly put on my monk’s costume and returned to work. I watched the crowds as they waited in line, happily unaware of everything that had happened. All I could think of was how much Nathan had loved his nights alone on the Ferris wheel, how he had kept his nocturnal vigil from its summit, watching over Faye’s fire crackling on the beach far below.

  To my relief my father retired the dragon suit for the rest of the summer, although it wasn’t clear if this was done as a mark of respect or for more practical considerations. Nathan’s performances had pushed the costume to its breaking point. The wings were tattered and limp. The tail was close to falling off completely. My father boxed the thing up and sent it away to be cleaned and repaired—a process that would also conveniently eradicate all evidence of his own recent occupation of it.

  I’d hoped that once the season was over and I wasn’t spending every day at the park I might miss Nathan a little less, but things were no better when the new school year began. I’d sat next to him in every class, eaten lunch with him every day. If anything, I missed him more than ever. Each night I went home and cried myself to sleep.

  My parents did their best to buck me up. They took me out of school for a week in October and we drove down to Orlando to visit Disney World. The trip was a disaster. My father spent every minute being lacerated by professional jealousy so acute that sometimes he actually lost the ability to speak. There was not so much as a kernel of spilled popcorn anywhere in the place. The rides were thrilling and smooth, without even a nick of paint that needed retouching. Every employee was cheerful and polite and professional. My father prowled through the Magic Kingdom like a maiden aunt at a family wedding, hunting for something to complain about. But there was nothing. I slouched through the attractions, listening to my father’s anguished admiration and remembering all the adventures Nathan and I had had in our little park in Maine.

  While I continued to drift in the flotsam of my loss, however, everybody else moved on. The town soon turned its attention elsewhere. Sometime during the following winter the iron rungs that had been hammered into the mill’s brickwork were removed. If you knew where to look, you could still see a series of holes where the ladder had once been. That was all there was to r
emember Nathan Tilly by—a ghostly absence of something that was once there, long ago. Now, thanks to the wrecking ball, that has gone, too.

  —

  ON WEEKENDS I helped my father with the annual maintenance at the park. I found solace in that sea of greasy axles and high-gloss paint. I felt a small but significant shift within me that winter. I suppose, in retrospect, you might call it peace. It came, at least in part, from the understanding that, almost without realizing it, I had chosen to make the park my life. Looking back, I’m sure my decision was a subconscious attempt to ensure my father would not leave again. With every hour that we spent together in the park, I was trying to lash him closer to me, making it harder for him to slip free. After all, Liam was still dead, and whatever demons had driven him away once might yet return.

  I committed myself to mastering every aspect of the park’s operations. My father patiently answered all my questions and did a poor job of concealing his delight. I pretended not to notice when he turned away to hide his smiles, but I registered every one. During the rest of high school I spent most of my evenings and weekends working with him. I was acutely aware of the fragile impermanence of everything I loved, and I was happy to spend all my free time at the park, if that was what it took to keep what was left of my world in one piece.

  The aftershocks of Liam’s death abated over the years. My parents and I slowly found our way back to one another. It was a cautious process of forgiveness and forgetting, of recalibration and reimagination. It wasn’t always easy. I tried not to think too much about my father’s doomed pursuit of Faye in the dragon suit. That was when I would silently, determinedly incant my favorite line from The Great Gatsby: Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

  Gatsby left another legacy, too. After that bewitching summer of F. Scott Fitzgerald and V. V. St. Cloud, I began to work my way through the rest of my mother’s library. I read hungrily and without discrimination, which was just as well, because her literary tastes were decidedly lowbrow, although I didn’t know it at the time. There were no slim volumes of gorgeous prose for her, no plotless peregrinations about the bleakness of the human condition. Blockbuster thrillers and romances were her thing. The bookshelves groaned beneath the collected works of Sidney Sheldon, Rosemary Rogers, and Jackie Collins. I gobbled them all up. There was nothing I loved more than falling under the spell of a good story. Those fat, brick-size novels were counterfeit passports that gave me a new identity and sent me on unlikely journeys into the unknown. Whole worlds opened up to me within their pages. I soon began cycling to the Haverford library every week in search of more adventures and new authors. I haven’t stopped reading since.

  And so we muddled on. When I graduated high school I began working at the park full-time. We agreed (my mother somewhat reluctantly) that a university education wouldn’t help me much. We squeezed a second desk into my father’s office. Sometimes I would look up and catch him watching me. I imagine that in those moments he was remembering Grandpa Ronald and wondering what it would have been like to have worked with him. I’m sure he was thinking about Liam, too—his firstborn, the rightful heir to the empire. But whatever wistfulness those ghosts might have caused, my father seemed happy I was there, not least because my presence meant he could take a vacation every now and then. He purchased a secondhand Winnebago, which was so enormous he had to keep it in the far corner of the parking lot. Every spring and fall he and my mother would take off on a road trip to a different part of the country. My father drove every mile of those epic journeys across America. In the weeks leading up to each trip he pored over the road atlas, tracing his finger along the freeways. My mother sat in the passenger seat and read novels aloud to him as he drove. When they arrived at their destination, they spent one night there before climbing back into the Winnebago and heading home again. The journey was the thing—barreling along unfamiliar highways, just the two of them. They could have been going anywhere, as long as they were together.

  My parents sold the Winnebago a few years ago, much to my relief. They’re both in their eighties now. They still enjoy their road trips, but my father likes to drive his regular car these days, and they stay in motels along the way. The open road is all very well, my mother tells me, but when you get to be our age, you want a little less freedom, and a little more of the hot showers and all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets.

  —

  WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE my parents held a Christmas party at their home. This was something they had never done before, so I knew at once that something was afoot. My suspicions were confirmed when my mother casually mentioned that the daughter of a friend of hers would be attending.

  Susan was a vet and worked in a small practice in a western suburb of Boston. She and I were the youngest people at the party by a decade or two. I monopolized her all evening, pouring her fruit punch and trying to make her laugh. All I got that first night was a few polite smiles, but that was enough encouragement for me. I called her a few days later. The following Saturday I drove down to Boston and took her out to dinner. It was a long drive back to Maine that night, but I barely noticed. The next weekend I drove down again, and the weekend after that. At some point, I stopped driving home at the end of the evening.

  The following year, when the lease on her apartment came up for renewal, Susan packed her bags and moved in with me. There are sick animals everywhere, she told me, but that park of yours isn’t moving. She opened her own veterinary clinic in Haverford.

  Two years after that we were married, and three years later our daughter was born. Nathalie is in college now. She’s also training to become a vet, but she’s made it clear that she won’t be joining Susan at the clinic. She wants to work on farms: no cute kittens or family dogs for her. Susan has accepted her decision with rueful pride.

  I’ve always been proud of my wife’s expertise, but it’s a whole other experience to watch your child conquer vast territories of knowledge whose borders will be forever closed to you. Nathalie and her mother sometimes fall into professional discussions at the dinner table that might as well be in Swedish. On these occasions I am visited by a twinge of remorse that Nathalie was never interested in taking over Fun-A-Lot. I sometimes imagine the park continuing under her, and it’s fun to think of the things she might have done with the place. But that’s all right. She’s pursuing her own dreams, not mine.

  Nathan would have approved.

  —

  I STILL SEE Hollis Calhoun most days. In the mornings he can be found in the only coffee shop in Haverford that is open all year round, yukking it up with his cronies. He’s still an imposing presence physically, although over the years all that hard muscle has morphed into something softer. Still, everything Hollis does is designed to remind you he’s more of a man than you are. His handshake is firmer, his shoulders are broader, his laugh is louder.

  After Hollis left school he started his own business, doing lawn care in the summer and snow removal in the winter. I would sometimes see him driving around town in a pickup with a ride-on mower in the back. For all his boneheadedness, Hollis Calhoun could work harder than a dog when he put his mind to it. He built that business over the years until he’d saved enough to buy a hardware store, and then another. Now he drives a Lexus and is president of the country club.

  But once a bully, always a bully. Every morning in the coffee shop Hollis mocks me for the double soy skinny macchiato I order. Is that even coffee at all? he demands, brandishing his personalized mug, which the owner reluctantly keeps behind the counter for him. What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned cup of regular joe? I smile politely and turn away. One problem with a double soy skinny macchiato is that it takes time to make, and I have to endure his boorishness while I wait. I amuse myself by remembering the sight of the teenage Hollis stumbling around the sixth hole of the miniature golf course with his trousers around his ankles. He and I never spoke of the Pocahontas incident again, but I like to think
that from time to time he still lies awake in bed, staring into the darkness, wondering what the hell happened.

  There is one other small source of satisfaction that consoles me during those waits for my morning coffee: the lie that I told outside the church after Nathan’s funeral ended Hollis’s pursuit of Faye for good. The next day she accused him of trying to grope her. He protested his innocence, but Faye was adamant that it had been him. Hollis was furious, but what he failed to understand was that Faye needed to believe that it hadn’t been Nathan inside the dragon suit, that his jump from the mill chimney was nothing to do with her. And so when I fingered Hollis for the crime, she gratefully embraced my theory. The two of them never spoke to each other again.

  —

  I DIDN’T SPEAK TO Faye again after that summer, either.

  She didn’t return to work at Fun-A-Lot the following season, and I was grateful for that. There were already too many memories: everywhere I turned I saw Nathan Tilly dancing in the dragon suit, basking in the applause of strangers.

  I watched from a cautious distance as Faye floated through her final two years of high school. Boys and girls still flocked to her, unable to resist her. Stories were whispered up and down the hallways: she was dating the quarterback, the new science teacher, her best friend’s dad. I was glad Nathan wasn’t around to hear any of it.

  After graduation Faye left for New York City. New York, we agreed, yes, of course—as if there were anywhere else that she could possibly go. She was a model, we heard. She was an actress. She had done lines of cocaine with Andy Warhol at Studio 54. All of it was true. None of it was true.

  I always liked to remember Faye at the beach, strumming her guitar and filling the air with her low, warm voice, and so I chose to imagine her as a modern-day troubadour, playing quiet songs of longing and regret in the coffee shops of the West Village. I pictured her in an attic, windows open to the warm Manhattan night, writing an elegy to Nathan Tilly by the light of a single, brightly burning bulb. I knew that every time she sang that song, all those world-weary New York sophisticates would weep into their drinks.