But then one of those fears comes true as if I’ve called it right into the car. My phone buzzes and it’s Dr. Hannaway. I let it ring, the phone just buzzing and bouncing in the plastic cup holder between the front seats, and Corrina glances at me, and neither of us says anything, because we both know we don’t want to alert Gpa to it. I pick the phone up and listen to the message, keeping the volume low so only I can hear it: Where are you and where is your grandfather? We’re communicating with your mother, and we know the truth. There was no reunion. Contact us immediately.
But she’s wrong. She doesn’t know the truth. It is a reunion, sort of, and it’s just taking us longer than I thought to get there.
I know the road points east again when the sun sets the rearview mirror ablaze as it sinks into the prairie land behind us. I miss the name of the river, but as we cross it, a flock of small birds shoot out from beneath the bridge, rise, and fall again like dark stars in the dusk. Corrina uses her phone to find a duplex where the guy rents out the bottom apartment. Cash up front and it’s ours.
It takes a while to actually find it, but we do, block after block after block of brown, slat-sided, look-alike two-story apartment buildings all corralled behind a black iron fence that runs around the entire complex. The owner has a lumberjack’s beard and boots with the laces loose, but he’s wearing shorts. He meets us in front of his building. We swap cash for the key.
“Any rules I should know about?” I ask him.
“Rules? Why? Do you need any?”
Corrina laughs. “No,” she tells him.
He looks at me. His eyes are set deep in his head and are almost black beneath the crow’s wings of his eyebrows. “Where are you from?”
“LA.”
“Where are you going?”
“Ithaca.”
“That’s one hell of a road trip.”
“It’s true,” I tell him. “And everybody respects the road trip, right?”
“Kick ass, man,” he says, and slaps my palm and twists and clenches my hand in a shake way too cool and hip for me to understand.
“Badass,” I say.
He nods in agreement. “Just strip the sheets, dump them in the washing machine, and be gone by ten,” he says, and then flashes us the peace sign before climbing the stairs to his own apartment. Corrina-like power chords reverberate into the parking lot when he opens his door and are gone again when he closes it.
We get Gpa inside, and I find SportsCenter on the TV, hoping to get him some baseball highlights. The ceiling’s low, the kitchen and living room are really one room with a see-through bookshelf dividing them, and there’s only one bedroom, but the couch is a futon, the bathroom is spotlessly clean, and the place is cheap and ours. There’s even a washer and dryer in the kitchen closet, and Corrina asks me if I’ll take care of our clothes while she makes a run to a store for some food.
“Just don’t get locked out for the night,” I tell her. “Looks like this place has some serious curfew.”
“Are you worried about me, or worried about breaking the rules?” Corrina says, and yes, I’m a dumbass, because I don’t realize she’s teasing until she closes the door behind her, but I know I’ll be counting the minutes until she returns.
As I get the laundry together, Gpa comes alive watching the sports highlights. It’s all baseball, and Gpa has a complicated matrix of teams he roots for, including the Dodgers because they’re previously from Brooklyn, transplanted from New York to LA, just like him, and he’s happy because they won yesterday.
“Gpa,” I say behind him. “I’m going to put your bag in the bedroom.”
“No.” He speaks to me while still watching the TV. “The room goes to the girl.”
“I think Corrina would rather you have the bedroom.”
“Me? Where do you think you’re sleeping?”
“Uh . . .”
“We’ll camp out here,” he says, gesturing to the room around us.
I have no idea what Gpa thinks is going on between me and Corrina, or even what he thinks about dating and hooking up or any of this. We’ve never discussed it in depth. Who talks about sex with his grandfather? But that is what I’m thinking about. That’s all I’m thinking about: Corrina will walk back in the door, we’ll make dinner, we’ll put Gpa to bed, like a child, and the two of us will finally be alone again.
“Why don’t we talk about that after dinner,” I say.
He lets out a mocking laugh. “Right.”
“Hey, Gpa,” I say, trying to change the subject. “There’s something else on my mind.” And it’s true, it’s been sitting there like a grenade, and once I release the handle I won’t have to wait long for the boom. “What’s her name?”
“Your friend? Corrina? Don’t test me like that.”
“No, the woman in St. Louis. The woman from Ithaca.”
Gpa sighs. He switches the TV to mute and turns in his chair, away from the TV, to look back at me. I’m sitting at the little round dining table, and the only light in the room, other than the TV, is the flat UFO globe that hangs above me. He probably doesn’t know what he has said and what he hasn’t said to me. I feel bad for him, I don’t want to play with him, but I can’t stop.
“The whole story, Gpa. I need the whole story.”
“Teddy, I’m sorry. I don’t know the whole story.”
“No,” I say. “Not good enough anymore. I need more than the usual script, Gpa.” I know it’s mean, but there’s something like a wave breaking in me, the crest of it finally falling and foaming. “Why did you say that to Dad? What was he doing there?”
Gpa gets up and joins me under the UFO. He’s slow, and he wears the day like a wet coat on his shoulders. “CC,” he says. “Cecelia Devons, but everyone called her CC. I knew her.” He rubs his face. “Listen,” he says. “This is what I know.”
THE STORY OF DEAD DAD’S FINAL DAYS
Cancer snuck up on Gma, and when she was diagnosed she wasn’t given more than a year to live. I was in school, so Mom stayed home with me, but Dad started making trips back to Ithaca to spend time with his parents. At first it was once a month, but then, sometime in the spring, he started going out almost every week. That was what he told Mom—he was going to see Gpa and Gma. Most of the time he was, but, as it turned out, not always.
Sometimes, if he was only coming out for the weekend, he didn’t tell Gpa, and on one of those trips, one evening, when Gpa was walking down Mulberry to the hardware store, he took the shortcut, the alley behind CC’s Café. He wasn’t looking ahead, only down at his feet, lost in thought about Gma and how little time she had left, when he stopped a few feet from the steps out back behind the café’s kitchen. He didn’t believe it at first, but there, under the pale back-door light, his son, my dad, sat on the steps kissing CC herself—the woman Gpa used to buy coffee from before he and Gma had given up coffee, a woman he knew because she’d gone to high school with Dad.
There, under the dim, one-bulb light, it wasn’t difficult to guess what was going on. CC and Dad were both wet with tears. They were kissing with the passion of people who knew each other well, one of Dad’s hands holding CC’s, the other gently resting against CC’s cheek. Gpa had had no idea Dad was in town. A friend had said he’d seen Dad in town two weeks earlier, but Gpa hadn’t believed him. Dad hadn’t visited Gma then, either.
“How dare you,” he said to Dad.
Dad jumped to his feet and tried to explain, but Gpa cut him off. “Your mother is dying, and this is how you treat her? Your wife is at home with your son, and this is how you treat her?”
Dad stepped forward, but Gpa pushed him back, and Dad tripped on the steps. “I’m calling your wife, Jake. I’m calling her to tell her why you are no son of mine.”
He stormed off, not to the hardware store, but back home. Where he called Mom and told her what he’d seen, and what he knew now was an affair Dad was having with CC Devons.
Dad’s car broke through the railing and sank to the bottom of the ri
ver that night.
“Your grandmother died six weeks later, and your mother invited me out to LA to help her raise you. ‘None of us need to be alone,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll take care of everything.’ She’s a remarkable woman, Teddy. Your mother. She reminded me of your grandmother.”
When Gpa finishes he’s quiet, and I am too, because the features in the ghost of Dead Dad’s face have become clearer. The crinkles by his eyes and the lines in his forehead come into focus, like he really was alive once. This is not a man I’m proud of, not one I want to boast about, but he seems more knowable, and I’m glad. When he died, I was robbed of a kind of future—but what would it have been? Gpa, I realize, was robbed of a past—a whole story wiped out by guilt, not the disease, and I wonder what this has done to him.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Does it hurt to remember?”
“Yes,” he says. “But I’m glad. I’m glad to remember him.”
I get up and give Gpa a hug.
When Corrina gets back, she finds us hugging, Gpa in the chair, me down on one knee on the rug, and she doesn’t say anything. She closes the door behind her with her foot and carries in the bags. I jump up to help her, and we unpack in silence. Grapes, bananas, milk and cereal for the morning. Road snacks. Three microwave dinners. A pint of ice cream to split for dessert. I warm up the dinners, while Corrina sets the table and Gpa hangs haggard in his chair. When she’s close to me she asks what’s the deal.
“I’ll tell you later,” I say.
We sit down to eat. The TV’s still on, and I think about taking it off mute, just to give us something other than our thoughts to hear, but Corrina beats me to the punch. She finds the remote and the three of us sit there quietly while the sportscasters do everything they can to muster our enthusiasm.
Instead, after dinner, we do dishes. We take care of the laundry. In the quiet, easy pace of the night, I think about the poem, and lines begin to form in my head: Anyone can fall in love, it’s the staying in that matters. This is important. I don’t want to half-ass it. I want this poem for Gpa.
After we unfold the couch into a bed, Gpa declares again that the bedroom is for Corrina and says he and I will share the couch. I protest again, but Corrina doesn’t battle with him. Instead, she rests her hand on my back and says, “I’ll take the bed.” She rubs my back as she says it, and I agree, because I’m a numbskull and only now understand why Corrina has been smiling at me as we’ve been doing all these silly house chores. Actually, not so silly. They felt real and somehow meaningful, as I stood next to Corrina while doing them.
Corrina heads to the bedroom to put her clean clothes back in her bag, and shortly after, Gpa’s finally asleep, passed out on the futon. I pull the cover up over him. I lock the front door, lock the deadbolt, too, knowing I’ve been waiting for this moment all night, and wondering if Corrina has too. I turn off the TV, and the only light now comes from the bedroom door, which is only slightly open, and even that light’s not much, it’s only what comes from the lamp on the bedside table.
I walk over to the door and whisper her name. She whispers mine back, speaking into the narrow space left by the door standing ajar, and although I can’t see her, she’s right there on the other side of the wall, as if she’s been waiting for me.
“I’m not tired.”
“Me neither.”
“Neither.”
“Neither.”
“Neither.”
Her hand appears and floats slowly out from the room. It finds my face, her fingers on my cheek, her thumb on my nose, and then she drags one finger and places it on my lips to silence me. “Shhh,” she whispers. “Get in here.”
I step in and she closes the door behind me quietly. She’s changed her clothes. She’s wearing a pair of my boxer shorts and one of her own faded gray T-shirts, and there is a lump in my throat so tight I’m sure it’s going to make me cry, and what kind of a miserable, pathetic dumbass cries in front of the most beautiful girl he has ever known just before he asks her what he needs to ask her.
“I can’t talk,” I frog-whisper.
“Then don’t.”
“But can I kiss you?”
She rolls her eyes and waits before she answers. “Well, yes, Hendrix. Yes you can. Please do.”
Then we’re really at it, standing at first, but I feel so weak-kneed and nervous, I have to sit on the edge of the bed, which makes her taller than me for a bit, as we continue to kiss, but then she pushes me back and she’s on top of me and her hair’s down on my chest, and I find with my fingers the soft groove behind her ears, and when we need air, we roll on the bed and laugh, and suddenly both look toward the door. We listen. Nothing. We return to each other, quietly and softly.
“Slowly,” she says.
“Okay.”
We fumble with clothes, and the sheets are cool on my shoulders and back. “Can I kiss you here?”
“Yes.”
“Can I kiss you here?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
It’s all whispers, but I listen. I listen with ears, I listen with my hands, I listen with my body, and I lose track of time as I listen to the language of her drawn-up knee, the space she makes for my hand behind her back.
“Do you have a condom?”
My eyes are closed when she asks, and I keep them that way as I answer. I feel so stupid. “No.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I got some at the store.”
My eyes are still closed as she pulls out the drawer beside the bed, but I have to open them when she places the foil square in my hand.
“Have you ever had sex before, Hendrix?”
Doesn’t every boy want to lie when he’s asked this question? Doesn’t every boy want to be more the man he wishes he was than who he actually is? Camp. Doesn’t everybody find a story to tell about how they had sex at camp or somewhere like that? There was a girl at camp, yeah, you can’t know her because you weren’t there. Yeah, foolproof. Camp. Yeah, I got laid at camp.
But no, not with Corrina. The most important truths aren’t the ones you learn but the ones you tell so the person you care about most knows too.
“No.”
“Can we?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“I just thought I’d ask.”
She smiles and it breaks open the night like moonlight on the water, one source bursting into a million little brights, and my body feels like the long side of an iron bell struck by her breath so close.
CHAPTER 22
BONNIE AND CLYDE
I wake in the morning from a nightmare, or rather, I feel as if I haven’t slept but dreamed awake, floated right on top of sleep, aware of dawn and the brightening morning in the pale blue line of light around the window shade in the bedroom.
In the nightmare, Dead Dad is alive in a house in St. Louis. He watches me approach from a distance, his face a blur behind the window screen. It is a dream, and the screen has elasticity, and he presses forward, first his nose, then his chin, the mesh outlines of his face like an ancient death mask. Then I am on the porch. I am beside the window. I am hiding. I don’t want him to see me, but the gray face turns, there are no eyes, but even without them he sees me. I run but his voice follows me like smoke.
It’s so early Gpa isn’t even up yet. I still lie under the sheets beside Corrina, and I don’t think either of us has really slept much. I can hear her breathing. I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay in bed with Corrina and find a way to slow time and pretend the rest of the world isn’t moving around us, but it is, and Gpa’s right there on the other side of the wall, and like all Gpas he’s an early riser, and I can’t stand the guilt that has crept up on me so quickly.
“I should get back out there,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, and despite how I feel about Gpa in the next room, and how that makes me feel wrong, I also can’t help feeling like I’ve done something r
ight. Yes, she said last night. Yes, I said too. Yes. Yes. I feel like I’m actually living.
Once we’re all up and showered, we have breakfast together, and although Corrina and I don’t talk about the night, we can’t help but dodge, catch, and run from each other’s glances, and I do everything I can to keep another conversation going.
“It’s Wednesday,” I say. “We need to make it to Ithaca by tomorrow. Nine and a half hours today and nine and half hours tomorrow, and we’re there.”
Corrina studies the map on her phone. “Indianapolis today, Ithaca tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she says, looking up at me, and neither of us can keep the smiles from rising on our faces.
Gpa watches us.
We’re on the road again by eight thirty, but getting out of Tulsa without taking a toll road is tricky, and we’re forced to take the narrow, two-lane Route 66 again, and this time with much less enthusiasm. We move so much slower today, as if we can’t stay apace with the world around us, as if the Blue Bomber remains motionless and the world spins and spins beneath our tires. I want to get there. I feel close, and yet still so very far away, and our pace makes everything worse.
It takes three and a half hours just to get to Joplin, Missouri, which should have taken less than two, and at this rate we’ll never make it in time. I’ve turned all the notifications off on my phone, so I don’t know when any messages come in, but I check after we pass underneath the 44 yet again, and I shake my fist at the concrete bypass overhead, the damn toll road and its cameras. They haven’t caught us yet, but as I check messages, there’s one from Dr. Hannaway at Calypso: Teddy. Please call. I just want to know that your grandfather is safe. He’s going to be frightened, Teddy. He’s going to be confused. Please go to a hospital. Go somewhere safe to turn yourselves in. There are other branches of Calypso. Are you near one? Go to it. Don’t wait. The police know. We’re talking about the police here, Teddy. This isn’t a game.
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