by TJ Baer
I broke off as the back door swung open and Dad slid into view in my rearview mirror. He settled himself in the backseat and shut the door behind him.
“Dad,” I said, “I don’t think you should—”
“Just drive.”
I gave up. “Fine. Buckle up.”
*
I expected Grandma’s house to look different somehow now that she was no longer living there, but it looked exactly the same, with the small exception of there being a yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway. It was, unmistakably, a teenaged girl’s car—the already terminal cuteness of the car itself was being assisted by a mountain of stuffed animals pressed against the back windshield, and a sparkly pink sticker that proclaimed, Daddy’s Little Girl.
The license plate, in the interest of making the car as conspicuous and obvious as possible, read, DAPHNE97.
“Daphne?” AJ choked. “Isn’t that the girl Thomas—”
I cut him off with a look, which Dad probably would’ve commented on had he not been busy launching himself from the car with the velocity of a small fighter plane. Within seconds, he was at the front door and pounding an angry rhythm on the wood, but I just shook my head.
“They’re not in there,” I said. “They’ll be outside, as high up as they can get.” I nodded at the wooded hills behind the house, where we’d spent a lifetime of summer evenings playing hide-and-seek, capture the flag, and the usual repertoire of games to be played in wooded areas on summer evenings.
I could practically hear AJ’s brain clicking through the information to its conclusion. “They’re—” He got this one word out, then leveled a disbelieving look at me. “They’re not…?”
“Off in the woods doing a séance? I kind of think they are.”
“Huh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll keep Dad busy; you go track them down.”
I blinked at him in surprise. “What?”
“You’re the only one in the whole damned world who can get any sense out of Thomas, and Thomas is the only one who can talk to Grandma. Dad being there is just going to mess things up. Plus, he’ll be even more convinced that Grandma can’t be left on her own. Go on. I’ll keep him away as long as I can.”
I just stared at him for a second, wondering how I could ever have thought he was stupid (although he’d never tried very hard to dissuade me in the past, to be fair), then clapped him quickly on the shoulder and got out of the car. Dad had given up pounding on the door and was wrestling with an overly crowded key chain in search of the key to the front door. AJ jogged up the walk after him, and as the key clicked in the lock, I darted around the side of the house and headed through the yard to the woods.
It’s funny how the entire world can change around you, but smells always seem to stay the same. The smell of the grass and the trees and the soggy brown leaves underfoot—it was all the same as it had been on every other fall day I’d spent at Grandma’s house in my entire life, and I found my steps getting faster and faster until, at last, I was running hell-bent toward the edge of the woods. I covered the last few feet of browning lawn at a sprint that sent the wind roaring past my ears, and by the time I staggered to a halt just at the edge of the trees, I was grinning and breathing hard with a silly, childlike exhilaration.
It’s amazing how the years can just fall away sometimes.
I went more slowly once I got past the tree line, not particularly wanting to have either of my eyes poked out by low-hanging branches. The woods smelled good, earthy and leafy and just a bit damp, and as I made my way up the hillside, I felt some of my tension draining away at the familiar feel of soft, uneven earth under my feet, trees all around, the air chilly and fresh and perfect.
I’d made it halfway up the hill when I heard voices.
I couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but it wasn’t hard to pick them out as Thomas and Grandma, discussing something in calm, serious voices. Every now and then, a slightly higher voice chimed in with something, until eventually the discussion faded into silence.
I reached the hilltop a minute or two later, and found myself staying hidden at the edge of the trees for several moments, catching my breath and just watching them. Thomas and a pretty girl with long brown hair were helping Grandma into a lawn chair, which Grandma settled into with her usual regalness, hands folded neatly in the lap of her good blue dress. A gray shawl was wrapped around her thin shoulders, which Thomas gently adjusted before stepping away from the chair and grabbing the séance book from a nearby rock.
“Okay,” he said, flipping through it and settling on a bookmarked page toward the middle, “we’re supposed to sit in a circle and light the candles.”
The girl—Daphne—gave Thomas a quirk of a smile. “A circle of three people is more like a triangle, isn’t it?”
Thomas grinned at her, and they shared a gaze so meltingly full of mutual besottedness that I couldn’t help smiling.
As I watched, the two of them darted around the clearing arranging candles and other bits of the supplies David and I had gathered, until at last there was a circle of stones and twigs, with a candle pressed into the ground every few inches. It was a forest fire waiting to happen, but I saw that they’d thought of that, too, and had a few jugs of water sitting on an old tree stump nearby.
Thomas and Daphne bent over the book together then, and after a few seconds of studying the page, they went to arrange their own lawn chairs around the circle. The fact that the chairs were neon yellow and pink disrupted the somber séance mood just a tad, but neither of them seemed to mind much.
It was around this time that I realized I had no idea what I was going to do. I hadn’t come here to stop them, exactly, but if I didn’t stop them, what precisely was I planning to do? Stay hidden in the trees? Go out and assist in the madness? Head back down the hill and keep Dad away until they were done?
I was deep in the midst of a vast, monologuing inner argument when I heard Grandma clear her throat.
“Jessie,” she said a bit irritably, “were you planning to lurk in the trees all day, or were you going to come join us at some point?”
Thomas and Daphne both whirled around at that, and for a long moment, the three of us stared at one another while Grandma idly picked some fluff off her dress.
“Err,” I said, stepping out into the clearing, “hi.”
Thomas stared at me with wide eyes for a second, then frowned in a cautious, suspicious sort of way. “How’d you know we were here?”
The question centered me a bit more, reminding me of just what was at stake, and I gave him a grim look. “I’m here with AJ, and… and Dad. The nursing home called him when you guys took Grandma.”
Thomas glanced back at Daphne, then turned to face me with a look of fierce determination on his face. “Are you gonna try to stop us?”
At which point I realized that I’d already made my decision. “No,” I said. “But AJ can only keep Dad occupied down at the house for so long. If we’re going to do this, we’d better do it fast.”
Thomas smiled a slow, adult kind of smile, and he and Daphne went back to setting up. As I stepped forward, I heard Daphne murmur a question to Thomas that sounded suspiciously like, “Is that your sister?” but I decided to ignore it in favor of joining them in the circle.
“We don’t have any extra chairs,” Thomas said, while he and Daphne lit the candles with two matching lighters that I hoped didn’t imply any sort of mutual nicotine addiction.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’ll manage without.” A quick inspection of the clearing showed a not-too-enormous fallen branch sitting near the edge of the tree line. I managed to drag it over to the circle without causing myself too much irrevocable nerve damage, and soon was sitting comfortably on a seat of filthy, prickly bark. “There. Just like the pioneers used to do when they had séances.”
Daphne grinned at me at that, and I noticed a handful of random things about her all at once: she had a nose full of freckles, her eyes were a dark, dark blue,
and she was wearing a thin gold necklace over her green turtleneck, the charm of which looked a hell of a lot like the letter T.
I decided to forestall the inevitable Is she good enough for him? line of thought, however, in favor of looking at Grandma.
“Dad’s really worried about you, you know.”
Grandma looked slightly pleased. “Well, it’s good to know he hasn’t lost all feeling toward me.”
“Okay,” said Thomas, before I could figure out what to say in response to that, “now we all have to join hands and picture Grandpa Jess in our minds, and I have to say some stuff to bring him here.”
“Some stuff?”
“You know,” Thomas said with a knowing nod, “mystic stuff.”
“Ah.”
Thomas was sitting across from me on his pink and yellow lawn chair, which meant I had Grandma on my left and Daphne on my right. We all joined hands as per Thomas’s instructions, and for a moment there was silence as he studied the book. The candles at our feet wavered a bit in a breeze, and I felt Grandma shiver a little, her hand tightening in mine just slightly.
And then Thomas took a breath and launched into the “mystic stuff.”
It was pretty mystic. It sounded a bit like Latin—or was Latin for all I knew—very dramatic and old-world-sounding, and Thomas made sure to give every word the appropriate feeling of grandeur and weight, speaking in low, solemn tones that seemed to fill the clearing. I tried my best to keep the skepticism off my face, as Grandma and Daphne were both sitting there with their eyes closed and looks of deep concentration on their faces, but it was tough. I mean, seriously. Our circle of lawn chairs plus some mystic mumbling was supposed to bring Grandpa Jess back from the dead for a chat?
I started wondering, suddenly, if maybe I’d made a big mistake, not stopping this when I’d had the chance. What was going to happen when Thomas finished his mystic mumbo jumbo and nothing happened? I imagined the silence stretching out in front of us, empty and cold, and wondered how Grandma would feel—how Thomas would feel, when everything he’d been banking on suddenly amounted to nothing.
But then again, maybe it didn’t matter if it worked or not. Maybe what mattered was that the three of us were here, together, all wanting to achieve the same thing—wanting to talk to this one wonderful man we all loved and missed. Maybe…
The flow of words faded, finally, and we sat in silence.
The seconds ticked on, and as they did, I felt Grandma’s hand trembling, just a little, in my own. And then, just when I was wondering if I should say something, we heard the heavy thud of footsteps behind us, and Dad came sprinting out into the clearing, red-faced and furious.
“Thomas Eugene,” he snapped when his eyes fell on Thomas, “you have a hell of a lot of—”
But we never found out what Thomas had a hell of a lot of, because Dad never finished his sentence.
To this day, I’m still not really sure what happened. I was focused on what was going on, Dad being rather difficult to ignore, but suddenly I just…stopped attending, and found myself retreating into my own mind instead. Into my memories.
*
Memories are usually a bit grainy, like dreams, but this one was clear. Real.
I was about eight years old, and I was sitting cross-legged on the faded green carpet of Grandma’s living room, carefully folding pieces of notebook paper so they looked like envelopes. It was a warm summer night; both living room windows were open, and I could hear the usual nighttime chorus of crickets and cicadas even over the buzz of Grandpa Jess’s boxy old fan.
I glanced up from my work to track down my pencil, and saw that it had somehow rolled halfway across the room and lodged itself under AJ’s leg. As he was deeply entranced in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie—and thus not bugging me for once—I gave the pencil up as lost and instead padded out into the kitchen to find another one.
Grandpa Jess was standing at the kitchen sink when I went in, scrubbing motor oil from his hands with the help of Grandma’s bottle of Palmolive. He glanced back over his shoulder when he heard my footsteps, and the usual slow smile came to his lips.
“Hey, Jessie,” he said, offering me a one-man-to-another kind of nod as the scrubbing continued. “Whatcha up to?”
I couldn’t help a little thrill at the fact that Grandpa Jess actually wanted to know, but I managed to tamp it down in favor of giving him a solemn look as I proceeded to the pencil drawer. “I’m getting the mail ready,” I said gravely. “It has to go out before bedtime tonight, or…” I faltered, not having had time to think of a suitable doom should I fail in my postal duties. So I finished with a pointed, “Or else.”
Grandpa Jess turned away from me in favor of shutting off the faucet, then spent a few seconds drying his hands on a dish towel that left the encounter a bit blacker than it had been beforehand. “Well,” he said, bending over so he could look me straight in the eye, “that’s a pretty big responsibility, then. Do you want some help?”
I opened my mouth to accept, then snapped it closed again and shook my head. “I have to do it myself, Grandpa. It’s my duty.” Then, not wanting him to feel left out, I went on in a rush, “But you can help me with the spelling if you want to. I have to do the writing, but you could, you know, tell me how to spell stuff and…stuff.”
Grandpa Jess clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get to it, then.”
By the time I’d addressed all the letters, pausing every now and then to check the spelling with Grandpa Jess, I Dream of Jeannie had segued into an episode of Bewitched, AJ had gone to rummage through Grandma’s freezer in search of a Popsicle, and Thomas had crawled over to the edge of his playpen and was staring out at Grandpa Jess and me with a look of awe and curiosity on his pale little face.
I took a few seconds to flip through the pile of envelopes, making sure I hadn’t missed any—or forgotten to pencil in the stamp in the corner—then tucked them into a blue Yu-Gi-Oh! backpack and got to my feet.
Grandpa Jess, sitting on the couch with a bottle of root beer resting on his knee, grinned at me as I stood. “All ready to go, Mr. Postman?”
My chest puffed up a little, and I gave him a firm nod.
He returned the nod and reached out to shake my hand; his fingers swallowed mine easily, warm and strong and still smelling faintly like a gas station. “Good luck, Postman Jessie.”
Feeling proud and grown-up, I swung the backpack onto my shoulder and headed for the stairs.
My first stop was the bathroom upstairs, as Grandma was inside performing whatever mysterious ritual she did every night from eight to nine p.m. I knocked on the door with three quick, smart raps like our mailman always did, and in response to the irritated, “What is it?” from within, I called out, “United States Postal Service!” in my most adult, professional voice. “Delivery!”
Grandma was silent for a long moment, and I heard the sound of bath water sloshing around inside. “Your grandfather’s been encouraging you,” she said finally. I heard her let out a long sigh. “Oh, very well. Slide it under the door, if you must.”
I grinned and, with a thrill of excitement I could barely contain, I bent over and slid the handmade envelope marked “GRANDMA” under the door, loving the fluttery rustle the paper made as it slid across the tile.
“Thank you,” came Grandma’s flat voice from within, and with a tip of my baseball cap—a substitute until I could find an actual mailman’s hat—I turned from the door and headed down the hall.
I found Mom sprawled out across the bed she and Dad shared when we visited Grandma and Grandpa Jess’s house; she was lying on her stomach on the bedspread, cold cream on her face and a novel spread open in her hands. For some reason, she gave a yelp when she saw me and shoved the book—which, I noticed with some curiosity, featured a shirtless man with huge, gleaming chest muscles—under the nearest pillow.
“What is it, sweetheart?” she asked, smoothing at her pale blue nightgown as she sat up.
The question recalled
me to my duties, and I pushed away my book-related curiosity in favor of digging through the mailbag for the envelope addressed, “MOM.”
“Delivery,” I said solemnly, and held out the letter.
Mom stared at it for a few seconds, then gave a small smile and took it. “Thank you.”
I nodded, and with one last curious glance toward the pillows, I dashed back out into the hall to finish my route.
I found Dad out on the back porch, sipping from a can of Cherry Coke and staring out into the shadows of the yard. Despite the summer heat, he was wearing long pants and a polo shirt, and there was something about the way he was sitting that made me feel like he didn’t particularly want to be bothered. My heart sped up a little as I peered at him from the safety of the doorway, the usual mix of awe and nerves hitting me when I thought about presenting something for his approval. I tried to go over to him, but my legs stayed stubbornly where they were, and I started wondering if maybe it would still count as delivering the letter if I gave it to Mom to give to him.
While I wrestled with the dilemma of fear versus my sacred postal duty, Dad took a slow sip from his Coke and, without turning around, said, “Did you want something, Jess?”
I jumped a little, but screwed up my courage and walked out onto the porch so I stood level with his chair. He didn’t look at me, but I could see a faint smile on his face, and it gave me enough courage to reach into my bag and pull out the letter marked “DAD.”
“I…I’m delivering the mail. This one’s for you.”
Dad lifted his eyebrows at that, but to my immense relief, he reached out and took the letter from my fingers. I stood silently by as he looked at the envelope, his fingers tracing over the large, slightly wobbly letters of his name and address that I’d carefully penciled in on the front. The stamp I’d drawn in the corner—a dog holding a bone in its mouth—was hands down the best I’d done, and I found myself hoping he’d notice and say something about it.
He didn’t, though, and after a few seconds, he flipped the envelope over, tore it open, and peered inside. “There’s nothing in it.”