I kiss Corrina on the cheek just before we get to the front steps. “I’m glad you’re here,” I tell her. “I couldn’t be here right now without you.”
“I’m glad I’m here too,” she says.
Gpa walks up the steps, and I follow, but when we get to the door he hesitates. I ring the bell when I realize he isn’t going to do it.
At first there’s nothing. We hear only the noises from outside the house, but then there’s something like the sound of voices, and the curtain in the window beside the door parts and a girl a few years younger than me looks out onto the porch. She steps back when the front door opens, and she leans into the embrace of the woman who stares at us.
When she looks at me she smiles and there is so much sadness in her eyes I can’t help but feel wrecked myself. “Charlie?” she asks. “Ted?” She nods to us. “I guess we’ve been expecting you.”
They must be mother and daughter, standing there in their matching jeans and flannel shirts, cuffs rolled to the elbows like they were just at work, hair pulled into ponytails the color of the rails of the wooden fence along the road. They are a unit and they move as one, same tilt in their heads as they look at us, same knowing pity in the hooks of their sad smiles. Yet there’s something more about the girl that bothers me, but in that moment of silence I only hear Gpa’s words in my head.
“Ted Hendrix,” I say. I introduce Corrina and Gpa. “Can we come in?”
CC leads us to the living room, introduces us to her daughter, Rose, and stares at Corrina. “They didn’t say anything about her. Although they wondered if there’d be a driver.”
“They?” Corrina asks.
“Who?” But I already know the answer before I ask.
“The police. They called here earlier this evening. They had a hunch you were heading out this way.”
“Ithaca,” I say.
CC nods. She and Rose sit together in an armchair. CC sits leaning forward, and Rose perches on the cushioned arm. They remain huddled close, watching us.
“I’m sorry the cops called.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I think I need to know a few things.” I can see the fear in her and in Rose, too. “We’re not crazy,” I add.
But then I tell her a crazy story. I tell her about how on a hillside just five days ago, Corrina and I decided to make this trip together, and about how Gpa’s Alzheimer’s eats away at his brain and his memories and how I want to get him back to Ithaca one last time to see the church in which he got married before the disease takes it and his memory of Gma away from him forever, and how it isn’t fair that in a world that takes our loved ones away so easily, this can happen too, that not only do you lose the ones you love, but you can lose all memory of them too, as if they never existed at all. And I pull the HFB from the pocket of my cargo shorts and I hold it in the air above my head like some biblical scroll and I tell her how I have to get it all down, because when disease and death come to take it all away, at least we’ll have a record of how we lived and who lived with us while we were here.
I tell her the book has a hole in it and I need to fill it and she’s the only person left in the world who can do that, but as I’m talking like a madman I’m looking at Rose and wondering what about her looks so damn familiar, until it finally dawns on me.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Ten,” she says, looking back at me with those same ocean-blue eyes of mine and Gpa’s and also Dead Dad’s, and I think about how the world that seemed so impossibly large an hour ago seems so much smaller in an instant.
“She’s your half sister,” CC says. “But I never thought the two of you would meet.”
I look from Rose to CC. “No secrets here,” CC says.
“You live in LA,” Rose says. “Where my dad was from.” And in her shy voice, I again feel all that distance between here and there.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I point at Gpa. “This is your grandfather.” She doesn’t leave the chair; she presses closer to her mother, instead. I put my hand on Gpa’s knee. “Did you know?” I ask.
He squints at me and pushes my hand off his knee. “I don’t understand,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“Gpa,” I say.
“Don’t Gpa me,” he says, raising his voice.
“No, Gpa, please. Please.” I glance at Rose and CC. “It’s okay,” I tell them.
“I just don’t understand,” Gpa says again. “What am I doing here?”
Corrina gets up and kneels beside him. She rubs his back gently, and although he looks at her like he’s never seen her before, he accepts her comfort. She starts to hum softly. “Maybe we should go out to the car?” she asks me.
“But . . .” I say without being able to finish, because I don’t know what I want to say.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’d like to take him outside. This is all making me a little sad anyway.”
I want to help her, not because I want to make sure Gpa calms down—I trust her with that more than myself now—but because I want to help her. I want us to arrive at answers together, but we can’t because we’re two separate people with two very different lives, and the best I can do is to promise to do for her what she has done for me.
Corrina walks Gpa outside and I know she’s helping him back down the stairs and down the slope to the Blue Bomber, where she’ll talk with him a bit and then pull out her guitar and play the same songs she sings to the ex-hippies back in LA, songs that were sung in a time when people still thought they could change the world.
In the living room I explain how this happens with Gpa, especially at night, and when he’s confronted with too many conflicting emotions or decisions. I sound like Dr. Hannaway, but younger and so much dumber.
“You need to get him back in the right care,” CC says. “You can’t do this all on your own, Ted.”
I like that she calls me Ted. I do feel like a new man, in some way. “I will,” I say. “I will.” I lean forward on the couch. “But isn’t there anything else you can tell me about my father? I mean, our father?” I say, looking at Rose. “When he died, was he coming to say good-bye to you or was he coming to stay with you?”
“I don’t know,” CC says. She lets go of Rose and stands. She moves to the fireplace and leans on the mantel, looking into the empty hearth. “I don’t think he wanted to choose.”
She and my mom are as different as Troy and LA. Where Mom is all angles and frantic gestures, CC is soft and slow. She isn’t wearing makeup. There’s muscle in her arms and legs, not just bone. And yet, even with all these miles between them, I think about how much they are alike.
I think about CC raising Rose on her own and I think about Mom raising me. All those years she could have gone on dates, but instead sat on the couch with me, reading aloud, or later, asking me to read aloud to her—date night with her ten-year-old son standing on the ottoman, shouting lines from an old, worn copy of The Hobbit. Mom worked her ass off, and mostly for my sake, and she might have been a pain in the ass back home, but in the real world, out where the armies of moms and dads marched on through the boredom and sadness of discarded dreams, she was one of the heroes. I think: I came all this way to find him, but maybe I just found her—my mom, Penny Weaver, someone else whose story should be remembered, the mother who’s been struggling to keep it all together and has.
“The last time he came to see me,” CC says, “I told him I was pregnant. I told him I wanted to keep her. He was happy. He was terrified. We sat on the back steps of the old café where I used to work and he kissed me. He was always too afraid to kiss me in public.” Tears slip down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she says. She’s speaking to Rose, not me, and Rose gets out of the chair she’s now slumped in and goes over to her mother. She puts her arms around her mother and sighs, I can see it in her shoulders, and I wonder how many times she’s been the one to comfort her mother, how many times she’s said, in something as simple as
a hug, This is why we go on, this is why we wake to another day.
“But after your grandfather saw us,” CC continues, “your dad said we’d talk about it more. He said he had to go back to LA because your grandfather would do exactly what he said he would do, and call your mother.” She sniffles. “So I don’t know, Ted. I don’t know. I don’t know if he was going back to LA to stay with your mother, or if he was going back to LA to break it off with your mother. He died, and he left you and your mother, and he left me and my little jelly bean. That’s what I called her when I told your father about her, the little jelly bean, because at that point she was no bigger than one.”
“Or if he was going to try to make it all work out for everyone, even though he couldn’t,” I say.
“Yes, Ted. That was your father. He was stupid, but he wasn’t heartless.” Then she turned to me. “Ted? The police called me. They know you’re somewhere out around here. I don’t know anything about Corrina, but think about your grandfather. Think about your mother.”
“I know,” I say. I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman says, and in so many ways Gpa, Dead Dad, and I are three versions of the same man. We are one dead, one dying, and one alive with the choice of what to make of the rest of his life. We are dead so much longer than we are alive, dead for nearly all of eternity, really, and life, then, is a flash of light, a rebellion against the tyranny of dark nothingness, like one of Corrina’s solar flares leaping off the surface, burning bright but briefly, before falling again into the fire—life itself is a poem, and what we make of it is our poetry.
CHAPTER 25
“WE FIGHT FOR WHAT WE LOVE, NOT ARE”
It’s much later and CC has offered the living room as a place for us to crash for the night. Corrina and Gpa are back, and he’s stretched out on the couch, barely awake. He was mostly frightened, not angry, when we brought him back in, and I think I understand. I’m too tired for anger too. Anger takes so much out of us. As I sit on the floor, with my back against the couch and Old Humper’s head in my lap, and I listen to Corrina sing and play another tune for us all, I feel warm and calm. I’m grateful to be here now.
“You have the loveliest voice,” CC tells Corrina when she’s finished. “Is that your own song?”
“Yes.”
“It’s beautiful,” CC says.
Corrina shakes her head. There’s something like sadness in her smile. “Nah.”
“Hey,” CC says. “I’m serious. You need to keep this up.”
“Yeah,” Corrina says softly, but she stares down into her lap. “Thing is—” She stops. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Corrina really cry before, and now, here, of all places, she’s on the verge of it.
“Would you mind if Corrina and I take Skipper out for a short walk?” I ask CC. “Want to let him stretch his legs and whatnot before we’re down for the night. We won’t be gone long.”
“Can I come?” Rose asks.
“No,” CC tells Rose. She gives me a knowing mom smile—one I can appreciate right now. “We’re going to stay here and make sure your grandfather doesn’t wake up alone.” And when she says that, I realize she’s talking to me and Rose. He’s our grandfather. Rose has never known any of her Dead Dad’s family.
“When we get back,” I say to Rose, “I’ll tell you all about him.”
“Who?”
“Your grandfather.”
But first: Corrina. Old Humper’s on a leash, but as soon as we’re down the steps and the slope and standing behind the Blue Bomber and looking into the darkened meadow beyond the end of the road, I drop the leash and let him run. Old Humper needs to get his freak on. I can see it in the way his legs shake as he stretches on the grass. He doesn’t get far. He heads back up the road to a stump by the hedges. While he’s going at it, I put my arm around Corrina. She’s remained quiet since we walked out the door. She’s still not speaking.
“Hey,” I say.
She turns her head into the crook of my shoulder. “I’ll never have this,” she says. “Not even in New York.”
I’m trying to find words, but what can I say that won’t sound cheap and painful? I hold her.
She turns away, looks into the field, but remains in my arm, up against me. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re not going to make it to New York.”
“No,” I say. “We’re not.”
“I hate LA. I just want one shot somewhere else. I just wanted to get to New York with a clean slate, where nobody knew me. I just wanted one shot to wow someone.”
“You still can.”
“What, with Aiko? She texted back. Look me up, she said. It could be real. It might just be casual chitchat. Doesn’t matter. We’re never going to make it there.”
I rub her shoulder and hold her tight. I lean us back against the Blue Bomber’s trunk. “If you knock on her door, she’s not going to turn you away.”
“Yeah, well, it’s over anyway” She nestles her head against me, still gazing out in front of us. “I just didn’t want this all to end.”
“It doesn’t have to,” I say. It is an absolutely clear night and the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Pegasus all glitter and glow in a perfectly painted still life on the underside of the umbrella of the sky that hovers above us, but I think there is a way to tear through that fabric and find something greater. And yet, as if the sky has dropped right down into the field, or we have floated right up into those stars, as I look out across the field I see fireflies flickering in the darkness. They’re innumerable, but if I draw a line between one here and there, I can make my own constellation of the two of us—Corrina & Hendrix—just one new design woven into the oldest cloth there is.
I can feel Corrina’s heart hammering in her chest against my body, and there is nothing more I want to do than keep alive the music of her desire, and it is something more than me. Because if you love someone, and you’ve heard her say Hey, this is who I want to be, again and again, your job is to stand up and give a hand to get her there.
I’ve spent so much time trying to get down all the stories, thinking that the stories that feel the truest are the ones during which we learn who we are—and sometimes those are the stories about where we’re from, but sometimes they’re the ones we write ourselves. The ones about where we’re going.
“You don’t have to stop here,” I say. “You should go on without us.”
Corrina pulls away and looks up at me.
“Get a ticket to New York. The rest of the money we have—we’ll pool it. It should be enough to get you there and let you kick around a bit.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. Someone has to make it.”
“But we started this together. I can’t go alone.”
“You won’t be alone. Not forever. You just have to get there and see what happens. It’s not about the money,” I add. “I promised you I’d help you get somewhere, and one thing I can do is keep a promise. Especially one I made to you. Go to Brooklyn. See what happens. I believe in you.”
Because here is something else I now know about love. You have to see the person who is there, not the person who is not. You have to believe in the person who is there, not the person who is not. You have to love the person who is there, and not the person who is not.
She looks out to the field and I can see the excitement in her eyes. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
And then, leaning against the curve of the Blue Bomber, we are kissing. Why do we say we’re falling for someone when the feeling sings and swirls so much more like flying? We kiss and kiss, and not like before, it is something more, like the kisses themselves are new words in a new language, and the way she holds my lip with hers, the way I hold hers with mine, I’m sure I’ve sailed right home into the uncertain I was always looking to find.
We have to call Old Humper from his business and head back into CC’s house, and when we do, we find her and Rose in the living room agai
n. They’ve thrown a blanket over Gpa and arranged some blankets and pillows and sleeping bags on the floor.
“Rose wants to know if she can camp in here with you tonight,” CC says to me when we’ve taken off our shoes and tucked ourselves back against the couch again.
“Of course,” Corrina and I both say.
“And I owe you a story,” I tell Rose.
Rose smiles and wraps one of the blankets around her shoulders. She snuggles herself into a ball in the armchair and rests her head on the wide arm she sat on earlier as I pull the HFB from the pocket of my cargo shorts and open it to the very beginning, ready to read just the parts about Gpa and Gma, so Rose can hear what I’ve tried to piece together: The Last True Love Story in the Hendrix Family Book.
“I always wanted a little sister,” Corrina says. “I wanted someone to protect, or at least to give some advice to. About everything I had to face.”
“Well,” I say, “please help me, because I guess I have a sister.”
“I will,” Corrina says. “I will.”
CC stands in the doorway, leaning against the dark wooden frame. Behind me, Gpa’s asleep beneath a thick plaid blanket. Rose’s eyes are wide and waiting. Corrina’s squeezed herself under my arm, so I have to hug her while I hold the book open with my other hand. Old Humper’s curled up on the other side of me with his head on my knee. A red lamp burns in the corner of the room and it’s all the light I need. But before I begin reading the HFB aloud, I scribble an epigraph on the front cover. It’s a line from a Frank O’Hara poem that’s been floating in the mist just beyond my memory for the entire trip and finally emerges now: “We fight for what we love, not are.”
CHAPTER 26
ITHACA
In the morning, CC shakes me awake, and even though my eyes are open, I’m taking in the room around me. I don’t remember falling asleep, but someone kindly put the HFB on the coffee table nearby with my pen resting right on top. CC puts her finger to her lips and beckons me to follow her to the kitchen. The local news plays on low volume.
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