Following Grandpa Jess

by TJ Baer

  Another silence fell, and I couldn’t help noticing that for all that I could hear the rumble of a train approaching, David still wasn’t moving. Or looking at me. Or doing anything, really, except staring at the sidewalk with his hands buried in his jacket pockets.

  “Look,” he said finally, “I didn’t want to say anything, but...”

  Cold terror lanced through me.

  Oh, shit. Oh, shit, he knows. Shit, shit, shit...

  His gaze lifted from the sidewalk to meet mine, curious and a little concerned. “Is there something...weird between us lately?”

  Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

  “Weird?” I echoed, my voice skipping up a few octaves. “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I get. If there’s something bothering you, or if I did something...please, don’t feel weird about telling me.” He gave a brave little smile. “I can take it.”

  I sighed. “You didn’t do anything.” Except be really obnoxiously hot. “Honestly, it’s not you. Don’t worry. I’m just...kind of insane lately.”

  “With the family stuff?”

  “Among other things.” Although I usually tried to steer clear of any physical contact between us for obvious reasons, I found myself reaching out to grab his hand in a tight, reassuring grip. “We’re cool, I promise. Don’t worry about it.”

  He smiled at me. Beamed, actually. It damn near turned my insides to jelly. And then he squeezed my hand a little and said, “Okay. Just remember that you can come talk to me if you need to.”

  “Yes, Mr. Keagan,” I said teasingly.

  He grinned. “Sorry. I’m a kindergarten teacher and I can’t help it. If you’re having any trouble with the alphabet, I can help you with that, too.” His voice went a bit softer, and I couldn’t help noticing that he still hadn’t let go of my hand. “I mean it, though. If something is bothering you, you can talk to me. God knows you listened to my troubles enough last year.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, trying to keep my voice light, “divorces are tough.”

  “It meant a lot to me. It still does.”

  He was gazing into my eyes and holding my hand and it was all just a little too much for me. I gave a nervous laugh and carefully pulled my hand from his.

  “Well, I better get going,” I said too brightly. “Early day tomorrow and all.”

  David looked a little puzzled at the sudden shift, but still managed his usual warm smile. “See you tomorrow, then. Drive safely.”

  “Commute safely,” I said, already starting back toward the café parking lot.

  “Oh, and, Jess?”

  I skidded to a halt and glanced back. David was still standing there in front of the station doors, his skin looking all bronzed and smooth in the orange street lamps that made most people look washed out.

  “Don’t forget to let me know about that séance,” he said.

  I nodded and managed a smile that probably looked genuine from the distance separating us. “Sure thing.”

  And then I got the hell out of there.

  *

  The next morning, I swung by Mom and Dad’s house as usual to pick up Thomas, and managed to avoid my parents altogether by doing the ole Sit In the Driveway With the Motor Running and Honk the Horn maneuver. I knew I was being kind of childish about the whole thing—I mean, they had apologized (or Mom had, at least)—but the truth was that I just wasn’t ready to forgive them yet. Or speak to them. Or see them. So I sat out in my car in the chilly October morning, messing with the heater dials like that would actually warm the car up any faster, and waited patiently for Thomas to get his ass outside so I could put as much distance between myself and the house as possible.

  About thirty seconds passed before I heard a tap-tap-tap on the passenger’s side window; I glanced over to see Thomas standing there in his puffy green soccer jacket, giving me a lopsided smile and a cheery wave. Grumbling to myself about morning people, I reached over to unlock the passenger door, and he climbed in.

  “They let you out of the house like that?” I asked as I flipped the car into reverse, nodding toward the soaking strands of dark hair plastered to Thomas’s forehead. And even though I could practically hear my mother’s voice chanting an endless chorus of the very same line, I couldn’t help saying, “It’s cold out; you’ll get sick.”

  Thomas shrugged and plucked a piece of damp hair between his fingers to look at it speculatively. “You think it’s cold enough for it to freeze?” He gathered up a wet handful from the top of his head and spiked it up into the air, but it went into a sad little droop when he let go of it.

  “I’m gonna go with ‘no.’ Try again in a few weeks, maybe.”

  Thomas shrugged again and settled back into his seat, and we rode in silence for a bit. Not that we usually had much to talk about in the mornings, since I was generally brain-dead and Thomas tended to occupy himself with whatever it was that ran through his head at seven in the morning. Still, I got the feeling somehow that he was gearing up to say something, and sure enough, about thirty seconds later he glanced over at me.

  “I talked to Grandma about the séance.”

  My exhausted brain clicked immediately from the séance to David, presumably because he’d said he wanted to attend it, and then I was thinking about last night and the feel of his warm hand in mine and how I was going to be seeing him in about twenty minutes and he’d probably be wearing that distractingly snug white sweater he always wore on Tuesdays that made me want to grab him by the shoulders and—

  Dammit, stop that.

  I shifted a little in my seat and went with a neutral, “Oh?”

  “She said we could come over tomorrow night to do it.”

  “I didn’t say we were definitely going to do it.” I felt obligated to remind him, more for my pride than for Thomas’s benefit, since he and I both knew the matter was already settled. “I said I’d think about it.”

  Thomas gave a perfunctory nod but otherwise ignored me completely. “She let me look at that book she got the idea from, and it’s got some pretty cool stuff in it.” He started digging around in his book bag. “But it says that we need all sorts of weird supplies or the séance won’t work, so could you pick them up on your lunch hour or something?”

  Suddenly there was a folded up piece of notebook paper in my lap; I gave it a suspicious glance and wisely decided not to try to unwrap it while I was driving. “What kinds of weird supplies?” I asked warily.

  “Nothing too weird.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I don’t think Grandma read the instructions very well. She didn’t have any of the stuff it says you need.”

  “What could she have been thinking?”

  “Well, the book says that if you don’t have all the supplies, you might call up a hostile spirit or something by mistake. I think it’d be pretty cool to meet one, but Grandma said no. Though maybe after we call up Grandpa Jess, we could try again, maybe call up somebody else, like a king or a pharaoh or…or Freddie Mercury, maybe.”

  “Thomas, are you sure about doing this? You know we’re not really going to call anybody up from the grave, right?”

  He gave a secret little smile. “We might. Don’t you watch TV?”

  I opened my mouth to remind him that this was not TV, but remembered at the last second that AJ had said the same thing the other day, and no way in hell was I going to start echoing AJ. “Just don’t get too involved with this. It’s bad enough that Grandma believes in it; I’d kind of like it if the rest of us could stay sane during the whole ordeal.”

  Thomas went quiet, and when I glanced over at him, his jaw was tight and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “Grandma’s not crazy,” he said in a low voice. “She’s just lonely.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Lots of people believe in ghosts. They’re not all crazy.”

  “I know.”

  “Nobody can say for sure that there aren’t ghosts, o
r that you can’t talk to people after they’re dead.” His voice went a little quieter. “Or that they can’t talk to you.”

  We’d pulled into the high school driveway by now, but instead of pulling up by the front doors like usual, I circled around the building and eased us into a parking spot. I didn’t have a big grace period between dropping Thomas off and getting my own ass on to work, but I still shut off the car, unbuckled my seat belt, and turned to face him.

  “Okay, what’s this really about?”

  I had an inkling, but it wasn’t something I particularly wanted to think about, so I ignored it for the time being. Thomas, meanwhile, was sitting with his arms folded and his face turned away from me, his gaze fixed firmly out the passenger side window. It was a long time before he spoke.

  “It’s just…I keep thinking. If it worked, if it really worked, then you could do it again someday for me, if I…you know.”

  There was a violent clench of cold, angry grief in my chest, but then the steel doors slammed back down over it and I could breathe again. “Don’t be stupid,” I managed, and somehow my voice was steady. “You’re fine.”

  “I’m fine now.”

  “And you’ll keep being fine.”

  The words sounded all strained and desperate even to my own ears, and neither of us said anything for a while.

  “I better get inside,” Thomas said, giving me a weak little grin that made the skin around his eyes crinkle. He started to reach for the door handle, but stopped at the last minute and turned back around to face me. I thought he was going to say something, but instead he scooted over in the seat and leaned in to wrap his arms around me, pillowing his head on my shoulder like he used to when he was little. I gave a shaky sigh and wrapped my arm around his shoulders, skinny little bony things that they were.

  We didn’t say anything, because that’s just how it’s done. After a few seconds of his warm, comforting weight against me, Thomas sat up and opened the door, slung his book bag over his shoulder, and gave me a cheerful wave. I mirrored it as best I could and started the car back up, but didn’t pull out until I’d watched him disappear in through the school doors. Then I slid the car into drive and got out of there, pushing the ache away and reminding myself that for right now, everything was fine, and there was no point in getting upset about something that hadn’t happened yet and might never happen.

  And if it did, there’d be plenty of time to be miserable about it then, so why waste time feeling bad now? There were other things to think about, right? Like Grandma and this séance thing, and how I was going to get through another day of hanging around David, and whether I was ready to forgive Mom and Dad for the usual repertoire of parental sins. These were things I could deal with, things I could focus on, and maybe while I was working through them, I’d find enough strength to deal with other, bigger things, too.

  It was worth a shot, anyway.

  Chapter Three

  I was in kind of a daze by the time I got to the elementary school, lack of sleep and the early hour having apparently caught up with me at last. I didn’t really start waking up until I was sitting at my cluttered little desk in the music room, flipping through songbooks and slowly caffeinating myself with a cup of nasty coffee from the teacher’s lounge. The good news was, it was so bad that it kept making me do this violent wince-and-shudder thing, and as that seemed to wake me up better than plain old palatable coffee, I didn’t complain.

  Not that there was anyone to complain to, anyway, since I was all by my lonesome in the cave that was the music room. It was off in a wing all by itself, so it ended up being pretty peaceful most of the time. Unfortunately, that also tended to lull me into feeling like I was safely alone between classes, and this had resulted in some unfortunate incidences of janitors—or, in several cases, David—hearing me either talking to myself or—worse—singing to myself as I worked. David usually let me keep my dignity and pretended he hadn’t heard me doing an Ethyl Merman-ish rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but the janitors usually outright laughed at me. Bastards.

  I noticed that my mind was wandering and forced my attention back to the pile of songbooks, taking another quick chug of Liquid Nasty as I did so. Of course, David chose that moment to peek his head in through the door, giving him a front row seat to my wince-and-shudder routine.

  He stopped just short of the usual morning greeting and instead switched to an amused frown. “Something wrong?”

  “Coffee,” I said and did my best to keep my eyes on my work and not on David, whose hair was still a little damp, and who was indeed wearing that soft, form-fitting white sweater with a pair of dark gray slacks. I didn’t have much success with not staring, unfortunately. My eyes just sort of zinged back up to him every time I tried to look away. Dammit.

  David made a face. “From the teacher’s lounge? That stuff is toxic.”

  “But effective.”

  “Rough night?”

  I shrugged, wisely electing not to share the fact that I’d been tossing and turning half the night because I’d been thinking about him. And me. And the many interesting things we could do together, but probably never would. “Just didn’t sleep very well,” I said, Mr. Casual. “I probably look like hell, huh?”

  David smiled and wandered over to my desk to fiddle with the little dragon figurines lined up at the edge. “I wouldn’t say ‘hell,’ exactly, but maybe one of the lower levels of purgatory.”

  I glanced up at him with a wry smile and found him looking down at me in this speculative sort of way that made me want to start fidgeting. Or maybe make a break for the nearest window and hurl myself out through it, since this was exactly the kind of gaze that I’d think Meant Something if it were anyone but David, but it was David so it didn’t mean anything, right? Right.

  I took another gulp of coffee, and the vileness of it centered me a little. It also seemed to break David out of whatever weird spell he’d been under, because he stopped staring at me and took a little step backward.

  “Well,” he said, “I better get going. See you at lunch?”

  “Yep,” I said. I was already dreading it. Mainly because I was looking forward to it so pathetically.

  He gave me one last grin and vanished out into the hallway. I took advantage of my newfound solitude to lower my forehead to the desktop—thud.

  Finding this somewhat therapeutic, I continued: Thud. Thud. Thud.

  A chorus of high-pitched giggles brought me out of my soothing moment of meditation, and I sat up to see my first period class filing in through the double doors, most of them looking far too amused to find their girly-looking music teacher playing an impromptu drum solo with his head.

  “All right, all right, move it along,” I said, shooing them toward the rows of desks. “Nothing to see here.”

  “Do you have a hangover?” one of the kids asked me, while the rest headed dutifully toward their seats. It was the little Japanese kid, Juri, who I had infinite sympathy for since the more unpleasant of his classmates took great pleasure in calling him either “Julie” or “Judy.” Lack of sleep and questions like that made me feel a little less inclined to be sympathetic, though.

  “No, I don’t have a hangover. And I wouldn’t tell you even if I did, because that’s what we call ‘setting a bad example.’”

  Juri gave me a doubtful look. “You look like you have a hangover.”

  “And you,” I said calmly, “look like somebody who’s going to get marked as absent if you’re not in your seat by the time I get to my grade book.”

  There was a breathless moment when we stared at each other, Juri seeming to gauge whether I was serious, me assuring him silently that I was very serious indeed. Then I went lunging for my drawer, and he went lunging for his chair, and by the time I’d pulled out my grade book, Juri was sitting at his desk in the middle of the room, wrestling off his book bag while he gasped for breath.

  I grinned and flipped to the attendance sheet, and for a blissful couple of hou
rs didn’t think about anything except the challenge of retaining my hearing while a bunch of tone-deaf kids shouted along to “Hard Knock Life.” By the time lunch rolled around, I was feeling the usual contact high of being around a group of hyperactive grade school children, and lunch with David seemed like it might actually be doable, unresolved sexual tension and all the accompanying angst be damned.

  I made a quick stop in the men’s room before heading on to the cafeteria, and this unfortunately brought me face-to-face with a mirror.

  David, I saw, had been being pretty kind with the whole “lower level of purgatory” description. I looked like an escapee from a tuberculosis ward. My skin, usually on the pale side, was downright pasty, which of course only made the huge dark circles under my eyes stand out even more. To make matters worse, I’d tugged my hair back to keep it out of my face, and sadly, this had resulted in two unfortunate side effects: (1) I looked more like a woman than usual, albeit a woman who might be dying, and (2) my ears, my God, my ears.

  I somehow managed to keep forgetting just how enormous they were, probably because I’d been wearing my hair on the long side for most of my life in hopes of covering them. And then I’d pull my hair up or tuck it back or something and wham! I’d be flabbergasted all over again at the sheer ridiculous size of them.

  I sighed and splashed a little water on my face, and after some deliberation, let my hair fall back down to its usual chin-length so I looked like a regular old tuberculosis victim, not Dumbo as a tuberculosis victim.

  Man, that would’ve been a depressing Disney movie.

  I took a deep breath, gave my sad self a crooked grin in the mirror, and headed out into the hall...where I found David standing a few feet away, leaning against the opposite wall with his hands tucked into his pants pockets. I gave a spazzy little jump at the sight of him, because for a straight guy with no interest in me, the guy sure seemed to turn up in my vicinity a lot.

  “Sorry,” he said with an apologetic smile, apparently for having startled me and not for being a straight guy with no interest in me. “I stopped in the music room, but you weren’t there, so...”