The first words out of his mouth, when he finally saw me, would be: “You see that thing on your wrist? That’s a watch.”
At least, that’s what he’d start to say. But the Major is excellent at his job. When lesser CFNIS members talk shop over brewskis at the end of the day, they talk about the legendary Major Charbonneau. He never misses a thing. Also, he’s used to giving orders. Used to having them obeyed. Used to interrogating people. Used to getting answers. Used to winning.
The Major would notice right away that my watch, the one he gave me when I turned thirteen, the one that was supposed to guarantee that I was never late, wasn’t on my wrist. He’d switch his priorities from chewing me out for being late to demanding, “Where’s your watch, mister?” He called me mister whenever he was revving himself up on the pissed-off-o-meter. He only used my real name, which he insisted on pronouncing as if it were French—René, instead of Rennie—when he was in a good mood. For the Major, that meant when he wasn’t preoccupied, overworked, exhausted, impatient, annoyed, or any combination thereof. In other words, hardly ever. My name, like everything else between my mom and the Major, was a compromise. The Major’s dad’s name had been René. Mom said no one would ever pronounce it right in Alberta, where the Major was stationed at the time, so why not make life easier on me? According to the Major, on those rare—as in, once-in-a-blue-moon—occasions when he was feeling mellow, my mom was the only nonmilitary person on the planet who consistently got her way with him. She must have used up the Major’s entire compromise quota, because I had never won an argument with him in my life. Not that I didn’t try.
I didn’t turn on the speed, because the faster I ran, the sooner the Major would get fixated on my bare wrist—bare, that is, except for the rattlesnake tattoo that he hated—and the sooner he’d third-degree me until I’d finally have to tell him (just to get him off my back) that I’d traded my watch to a guy for a first-generation iPod. I could save him a lot of misery by telling him right away what I’d done. But—you probably don’t know this—jazzing an army cop when you’re not in the army can be a lot of fun. At least, it can if you’re me.
I hadn’t set out to be late, although I’m sure the shrink I used to see would have disagreed. He would have said that, subconsciously, I was going for that edgy thrill you get when you purposely fly up the nose of a guy who’s twice as strong as you are and has a short fuse. The Major would have said that, subconsciously, I was late because I loved to piss him off. But that wasn’t true. There was nothing subconscious about it.
Surprise number one: the Major wasn’t standing on the front walk when I finally rounded the corner onto our street.
Surprise number two: he didn’t start hollering at me the moment I came through the front door.
Surprise number three: he wasn’t alone. There was some old guy with him. He had gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard, and he was wearing a dark suit. He smiled when he saw me.
“You must be Rennie,” he said, thrusting out a hand.
“The late Rennie.” The Major scowled disapprovingly at me. His eyes went to my wrist—See what I mean?—and his scowl deepened. “I told you four o’clock, mister.”
I mumbled an insincere-sounding sorry and turned to look at the old guy.
“I’m John Devine,” he said. “I was your grandfather’s lawyer.”
I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the grandfather I’d sort-of been named after. He had died right before I was born. He had to mean the other one, the one I only found out about after my mom died.
“Was his lawyer?” I said.
“He passed away. I’m sorry.”
“When?”
“A little over two months ago.”
“Two months ago?” I turned furiously to the Major.
“I didn’t know, Rennie,” he said. “The first I heard of it was fifteen minutes ago when Mr. Devine arrived.”
I believed him. One thing the Major never did was lie, not even to me.
“Perhaps we can all sit down,” Mr. Devine said.
We went into the living room. Mr. Devine sat on the couch. I sat on an armchair. The Major grabbed the remote from the top of the TV and took another armchair.
“What happened?” I asked. “How did he die?”
“Natural causes,” Mr. Devine said. “At his age, things just give out.” I guessed that was true. The old guy had been pretty slow by the time I’d met him.
Mr. Devine set his briefcase in his lap and clicked open the hasps. He took out an envelope, closed the case again and put the envelope facedown on the coffee table. “I’ll answer all of your questions in due course,” he said. “Major, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we could watch that DVD now.”
The Major held out the remote and pressed one button to turn on the TV and another to start the DVD. Suddenly, there was my grandfather on the screen, looking pretty much the same as he had the last—and first—time I’d seen him.
“I’m not sure why I have to be wearing makeup,” he said, turning to face somebody off camera. “This is my will, not some late-night talk show… and it’s certainly not a live taping.”
A couple of people laughed offscreen. My grandfather turned to the camera.
“Good morning…or afternoon, boys,” he began.
Boys? Who was he talking to?
“If you’re watching this, I must be dead, although on this fine afternoon I feel very much alive.”
I peered at the face on the screen. It was impossible to tell when he’d made the recording. For all I knew, it could have been a year ago or even longer. Or—I swallowed hard—it could have been just before I met him back in early spring. Or just after. Had he known then that he wouldn’t be around now? Had he been sick, had things been giving out, and I’d been too stupid or too self-absorbed to notice?
“I want to start off by saying that I don’t want you to be too sad,” he said, as if he was right there in front of me, reading my mind the way he’d seemed to during my unexpected stay with him. “I had a good life and I wouldn’t change a minute of it. That said, I still hope that you are at least a little sad and that you miss having me around. After all, I was one spectacular grandpa!”
He wasn’t kidding! Five minutes after I’d met him, I’d found myself wishing I’d known him my whole life.
“And you were simply the best grandsons a man could ever have.”
Oh, he was talking to my cousins. And to me, I guess, which was why Mr. Devine was here.
Maybe the others had been fantastic grandsons—I didn’t know them, so I couldn’t say. If he was including me, it wasn’t because of anything I had done. It was because that’s the kind of guy he was. At least, it was the kind of guy he had seemed like to me, a guy who treats a garbageman the same way he’d treat Bill Gates—with warmth and dignity.
“I want you to know that of all the joys in my life, you were among my greatest. From the first time I met each of you to the last moments I spent with you—and of course I don’t know what those last moments were, but I know they were wonderful—I want to thank you all for being part of my life. A very big, special, wonderful, warm part of my life.”
Okay, that didn’t refer to me.
His hand shook as he took a sip from a glass of water.
“I wanted to record this rather than just have my lawyer read it out to you. Hello, Johnnie.”
I glanced at Mr. Devine. He was smiling fondly at the image on the screen.
“Johnnie, I hope you appreciate that twenty-year-old bottle of Scotch I left you,” he said. “And you better not have had more than one snort of it before the reading of my will! But knowing you the way I do, I suspect you would have had two.”
Mr. Devine chuckled.
“I just wanted—needed—to say goodbye to all of you in person, or at least as in person as this allows.” His hand was still shaking as he took another sip from his glass.
“Life is an interesting journey, one that seldom takes you where you thi
nk you might be going. Certainly I never expected that I was going to become an old man. In fact, there were more than a few times when I was a boy that I didn’t believe I was going to live to see another day, never mind live long enough to grow old.”
I knew what he meant. He’d told me a lot about his life. He’d been a pilot during World War II and traveled a lot after that. He’d been in more than a few scrapes, and the way he’d described them, most of them had been more serious than any mess I’d ever been in.
“But I did live a long and wonderful life. I was blessed to meet the love of my life, your grandmother Vera. It’s so sad that she passed on before any of you had a chance to meet her.”
He didn’t mean my grandmother. He meant the woman he’d actually been married to. That was okay too. He’d been pretty upfront with me about her. He’d told me how much he’d loved her. He’d met my grandmother after his wife died, and he’d loved her too. But she didn’t want to get married, not then anyway, and she’d never told him that she was already pregnant when she left him. He didn’t know about my mom at all until he read about her death in the national newspaper and saw my grandma’s name. Then he’d done the math.
I zoned out after that because he wasn’t talking about my grandma; he was talking about his wife. I didn’t tune back in until he said, “You boys, you wonderful, incredible, lovely boys, have been such a blessing…seven blessings. Some blessings come later than others.”
Did he mean me? So now my cousins knew about me too. Interesting.
“I’ve done a lot, but it doesn’t seem that time is going to permit me the luxury of doing everything I wished for. So, I have some requests, some last requests. In the possession of my lawyer are some envelopes. One for each of you.”
I glanced at Mr. Devine. He nodded. There was one for me too.
“Each of these requests, these tasks, has been specifically selected for you to fulfill. All of the things you will need to complete your task will be provided—money, tickets, guides. Everything.”
Guides? What would I need a guide for?
“I am not asking any of you to do anything stupid or unnecessarily reckless—certainly nothing as stupid or reckless as I did at your ages. Your parents may be worried, but I have no doubts. Just as I have no doubts that you will all become fine young men. I am sad that I will not be there to watch you all grow into the incredible men I know you will become. But I don’t need to be there to know that will happen. I am so certain of that. As certain as I am that I will be there with you as you complete my last requests, as you continue your life journeys.”
Grandfather lifted up his glass.
“A final toast. To the best grandsons a man could ever have. I love you all so much. Good luck.”
The screen went black.
I felt like I had been encased in concrete. I could see. I could breathe, but just barely. But I couldn’t move.
The old man was dead.
He’d died over two months ago, and no one told me.
“Was there a funeral?” I asked.
Mr. Devine nodded.
“And?” I said. Anger and resentment collided inside me, the two emotions that caused me the most trouble. “They didn’t want me there, is that it?”
“No, that’s not it,” Mr. Devine said. “As soon as I got the news, I made every attempt to contact you. But you had moved, and ever since the nine-eleven attacks…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t have to explain. I’d been hearing that phrase for practically my whole life. It was as if the whole world had been turned upside down on that one day. Nine-eleven explained a lot of the stupid rules the Major had to follow. It explained the ridiculous level of security on every base I had ever been on. It even explained why I’d been hauled out of line in front of all the other airline passengers once, ordered to remove my shoes and stick my arms out so I could be wanded like some kind of wannabe jihadist. “Let’s just say that I had to jump through a few hoops before I could locate you and your father, and by the then it was too late for the funeral. As for my mission at this time—your grandfather specified a meeting in person, and since you were, uh, unavailable…” He paused. He was referring to the wilderness boot camp the Major forced me to go to. “Your grandfather thought highly of you, Rennie.”
“He did?” I’d thought highly of him too, once I’d met him. I’d been thinking it would be nice if he felt the same way about me. After all, we’d sure seemed to hit it off. “Really? He said that?”
“He did indeed,” Mr. Devine said. “And he directed me to give you this.” He picked up the envelope and handed it to me.
I stared at it. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to open it in front of the Major.
“You have to read it now, Rennie,” Mr. Devine said. “That way, I can answer any questions you might have.”
My hand actually shook when I ripped it open. I pulled out a typewritten letter and read it silently.
Dear Rennie,
One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I never knew your mother. That makes me feel all the more fortunate that I was able to get to know you before it was too late.
I know you have been through a lot, blamed yourself for things that are not your fault and punished yourself when no punishment was called for. Believe it or not, you aren’t the only person to have done this. There are times in everyone’s life when we confuse sorrow with blame, when being powerless makes us lash out in anger and when we do things that we regret. Often this happens when a loved one dies, leaving us to wonder why this had to happen to them, why it didn’t happen to us instead.
Now I will tell you another of my regrets.
A long time ago, a plane I was flying had engine trouble. If it hadn’t happened in the middle of a blizzard and if I hadn’t been a bit hungover, I might have been able to save the day. But that isn’t what happened. The plane crashed in the interior of Iceland. I was the only person who walked away—and then only after my best friend died in my arms.
I was near death when an angel appeared and guided me to a sheltered spot. I have never forgotten her face, as you will see. When she faded from sight, I thought she had abandoned me to the afterlife. But when I opened my eyes again, a young doctor named Sigurdur was standing over me. I believed it was a miracle that he had found me. It was only a few days later that I recalled seeing a red scarf marking the spot where I lay.
When Sigurdur came to visit me in the hospital, he said I had imagined the scarf. He grew uncomfortable at my talk of the angel. And so I let it be. It was only recently, as I went through my belongings, that I found a letter in the pack I carried that day. The letter convinced me that the angel was real. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Sigurdur knew this all along. I do not know why he denied it. The letter also stirred up new regrets.
It is perhaps foolish to dwell on something that happened so long ago. I owe Sigurdur as much as I owe my angel. But he is gone now, and, though I never knew her name, I suspect she is too.
Mr. Devine will give you something. I want you to take it to the interior of Iceland—he will tell you exactly where—and bury it, for my angel and for my friend. I can never make up for that day, but with your help I can acknowledge it and memorialize it.
Sincerely,
Your grandfather, David McLean
When I had finished, both the Major and Mr. Devine were looking at me.
“He says you have something that he wants me to deliver,” I said to Mr. Devine.
He nodded, opened his briefcase again and pulled out a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I opened it and stared at the small journal inside. I flipped it open. Dozens of its browned pages were filled with sketches of a woman—the same woman. There was something else—a sheet of pale-blue paper tightly folded and brittle with age. I unfolded it carefully and scanned the writing, but it was old-fashioned, spidery writing and hard to read.
“What does his letter say?” the Major asked.
“He wants me to do something.”
“What?”
FOUR
“No,” the Major said when I told him, making the decision the way he makes all his decisions, without hesitation.
“Mr. McLean made provision for all expenses to be covered and for a guide to take Rennie on this journey, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” Mr. Devine said. In contrast to the Major, he was almost Zenlike.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” the Major said. “He’s not going.”
The old me would have been in his face before he finished talking. The old me would have told him where to get off, right after daring him to try to stop me. But I wasn’t the old me anymore. At least, I was trying hard not to be.
Instead, I counted to ten slowly—twice. Only then did I say, in a reasonable tone, “But it’s what Grandpa wanted.”
“Grandpa!” the Major snorted. “Eight months ago, you didn’t know the man, and now you call him Grandpa?”
My cheeks started to burn. My hands started to curl into fists. Those were my warning signs. If I didn’t do something right away, my temper would get away from me.
I drew in a deep breath. I forced myself to think of my long-term objective—to get the Major to agree to let me go—and to strategize the best way of achieving that. It sure wouldn’t be by yelling and screaming.
“But he was my grandfather,” I said in a quiet voice.
“I don’t care if he was Père Noël,” the Major said. “You are not going and that’s that.”
Mr. Devine gazed evenly at the Major for a moment.
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