“Doc’s dead,” Gramps interrupts. “Couple months ago.”
That stops Dad for a second. Then he collects himself and goes on. “All right, then. How about you come home with Emma and me? And if anything happens between now and whenever we can get in to see a heart guy and find out what’s wrong with you—if you have another one of those … spells—you’ll let me call an ambulance.”
“I said—” Gramps begins.
“I’ll spring you,” Dad says. “You go to the hospital if it’s an emergency, but you don’t stay. All right? I swear to God, I’ll spring you. I’ll get you out and take you home with me.”
“No matter what the docs say?”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “No matter what.”
Gramps concentrates a long moment on putting the carburetor in place. Then he turns to me again. “You heard him, Emma—”
I nod. I can’t speak.
“You won’t let him back out on me.”
“No.” It comes out in a whisper.
“Okay, then. If you swear you’ll spring me.”
“I’ll spring you,” Dad says.
“Okay, but I’m not going anyplace till I get this goddamn snowmobile running.”
Dad groans. “Fine. But would you give me the fucking manual, so we can do it right?”
They spend the next few hours doing what they’ve always done together. Tear the engine down completely and bicker about how to get it back together again. Drink beer, laugh a lot. At one point Dad says, like he always ends up saying, “Goddamn it, Dutch, you can’t fix a thing by beating the shit out of it.” Gramps gets mad and bounces a wrench off the garage wall.
As the afternoon unfolds, I’m utterly present in each moment. It’s a little like shunyata, I think. And for the first time, I can think of Harp without feeling foolish or mad. He’d understand how I can feel so completely happy watching Dad and Gramps the way I always have—and at the same time know, absolutely, deep inside me, that Gramps is going to die. And soon. He’s not going to Arizona in the Chieftain, or anywhere else. Ever. I’m pretty sure Dad and Gramps know it, too. Yet it’s as if this time together lengthens instead of shortens because of it. The familiar seems more familiar, more secure. The jokes bouncing among us seem funnier than usual, the moment the engine finally starts more satisfying, more dear.
It’s about five o’clock when they finish. Gramps goes inside to throw a change of clothes into his duffel bag. Margaret comes out of her back door and waves Dad and me over.
“I hope you convinced him he needs to see a doctor,” she says. “Lord, he was white as a sheet when I got to him in the driveway. And so cold. I turned the thermostat up to eighty degrees and he still couldn’t get warm.”
“He’s going home with us,” Dad says. “He promised to see a doctor, though he’s still dead set against going to the hospital.”
“It’s what he kept saying to me the other night.” Margaret pulls out the linen handkerchief tucked into the cuff of her gray cardigan sweater, dabs at her eyes. “And it wasn’t that I couldn’t sympathize with him. Mercy, I’ve seen all I want of hospitals myself. But I was so frightened.”
“Well, he seems okay now,” Dad says. “He seems better. Margaret, listen, I can’t thank you enough for taking care of him—”
“My goodness, it’s the least I could do,” she says. “He bought me a brand new car, for heaven’s sakes! And he’s been such a help to me since Ernie died. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
She blinks back tears, puts her hand on mine. “He’s not mad at me, is he, honey? He explicitly told me not to call you.”
“Gramps?” I say. “Mad?”
That makes her laugh.
“He knows you did the right thing,” Dad says. “Of course, don’t ever expect him to tell you that.”
“Well, I know Dutch pretty well,” she says. “He doesn’t have to tell me every second how he feels.”
She walks over with us to say goodbye to him and he hugs her, patting her on the back a few times, the way you’d pat an anxious child.
“Keep an eye on the Chieftain,” he says.
Margaret assures him she will.
And as we pull away I think, I swear, if it could make Gramps well, I’d let him drive me down to Bloomington in that stupid RV right now—to the Phi Delt house, if that’s where he wanted to go. I really, truly would.
Twenty–two
We’re quiet, driving home. Gramps dozes off and Dad and I listen to NPR on the radio: All Things Considered. Arabs and Israelis killing each other, genocide in Africa. Politics as usual in Washington. A lengthy feature about keeping bees.
Maybe it’s the weirdness of nature that reminds me of driving through Kansas on the way home the day before, Mom rapturous at the sight of the prairie. It was beautiful, the rolling hills buttery yellow in the morning light. The sky as blue as a plate. We stopped once, to stretch our legs, and walked out into it. The dried grasses were knee-high; they crackled beneath our feet. Beyond us, a vast herd of buffalo grazed.
Mom said, “Do you realize we’re seeing what the pioneers saw, coming across the prairie more than a hundred years ago?” She stopped short, and Dad and I, following, crashed into her.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What?” Dad said.
But I heard it: a low rushing sound, like the inside of a seashell.
Mom listened, perfectly still, then she turned to us, her face lit with joy. “It’s the buffalo,” she said. “A thousand buffalo munching on that dry grass! And not a mountain in sight.” As if those two pieces of information were, in fact, one thing.
Who knows? Maybe they are. Maybe that’s all life is: a bunch of stuff sitting side-by-side in the universe, not really meaning anything at all. Emma, I say to myself. This is no time to be thinking like that. I can’t help it, though. Just like I can’t help thinking about how strange and sad our own little universe would be without Gramps in it.
He’s slumped over in the front seat, fast asleep. He looks pale. I’m so thankful when we pull into the driveway, and he wakes up, grumbling.
“Christ, I hope there’s something to eat inside,” he says. “I’m starving.”
Of course, there’s not. Mom spent the day doing what she always does when she’s been away: wandering through the house, as if reacquainting herself with it, with all the objects she loves. So we order out for pizza. But Gramps doesn’t eat much when it comes.
“You okay?” Dad asks. “Are you sure we shouldn’t try to talk to a doctor tonight?”
“Nah.” Gramps shakes his head. “Just tired, buddy. Think I’ll turn in early. Get some rest so I’ll be in good shape to get the shit beat out of me tomorrow. You know how those docs love to give you every goddamn test ever invented.”
We set him up in Jules’ room—the guest room now—and leave him there, surrounded by her dance posters and all her worn-out pointe shoes tied by their faded pink ribbons to a grid beside her dressing table. The last thing I say to him is, “So, Gramps, if you get it in your mind to get up and dance—”
Then, in the morning, he’s dead.
I know it instantly, by the sound of Dad’s voice.
“Dutch?” he says. “Dutch?”
But it’s the long quiet that comes afterwards that makes me get up and go to the doorway of Jules’ room, where I see him sitting next to Gramps on the bed. He touches Gramps’ forehead, his hands. Pulls the blanket up to his chin and smooths it, as if that could make a difference now.
The floor creaks behind me, and there’s Mom, her hair sticking out every which way,
“Mac? Oh, no. Mac—” She goes past me, bends to put her arms around Dad.
I’m watching again, which it seems I’m destined to do. I can’t move, can’t speak. I just look at th
e two of them, and Gramps so still on the bed. Dust dances in the shafts of sun streaming through the window. Sun puddles on the carpet. I can hear birds chattering outside. The sky is offensively blue.
Quietly as I can, I retreat to my room, get back into bed and wait for Mom and Dad to come in and tell me Gramps is gone. I’m not crying, exactly. It’s more like tears are just leaking from my eyes.
Right now, they’re talking in low voices. I can’t hear what they’re saying, only the rhythm of their words. Slow, halting. In time, they come to me. They look tired, sad. Older.
“Emma.” Dad sits down on the bed beside me.
In a small voice I say, “I know.”
While Mom and Dad make arrangements, I pace around the house in figure eights. Living room, dining room, kitchen, hallway. I pass by the closed door of Jules’ room, where Gramps lies, on my way to the den. Then through Mom and Dad’s bedroom, Mom’s studio, my own bedroom, and back through the hallway to the living room to do it all over again. I remember how Jules and I used to do the same figure eights when we were little, how we’d get out of control—running, yelling, inevitably ending up hurting ourselves or breaking something. It was Gramps, half the time, who got us whipped up into those frenzies, got all three of us in trouble with Mom before it was all over.
It’s not fair that he’s dead. He was such a good-hearted person, he loved life so much. Why couldn’t some cranky, couch-potato old person have died instead? And why did he have to die now, just when he was getting such a kick out of being rich? The only one of us purely enjoying it. I think of him heading up the snowy hill in the Chieftain on his way to Florida and it makes me so sad I have to go outside and shock myself in the cold air to keep from crying.
I feel a little better when they’ve come to take Gramps away and there’s not that presence of him in Jules’ room. So wrong. Nothing like the real Gramps ever was. Dad retreats to the garage, Mom to her studio. Pretty soon, neighbors will start showing up with those casseroles that always appear at traumatic moments. They’ll say how sorry they are; we’ll have to tell the whole story of what happened again and again. The very thought makes me tired, and I go back to bed and sleep until I hear Jules’ voice—at which point I drag myself out of bed and into the living room.
“Oh, Emma,” Jules says, and hugs me. She looks bad. Pale, her eyes red-rimmed. She doesn’t seem to notice my drastic hair. Just sighs, and heads for her room to put her stuff away.
Uh-oh, I think when she opens the door and I see the tangled sheets and the pillow still hollowed out where Gramps’ head had been.
“Oh, God,” Mom says. “Oh, no. I completely forgot—”
“He died in my room?” Jules asks.
Then before anyone can answer her, she sets her suitcase just inside the door, goes back into the living room, and sits down on the couch like a zombie. When Mom finishes changing the sheets, she comes in and fusses over her. Does she want some tea? Is she hungry?
“No, no,” Jules says to everything.
“I’m so sorry,” Mom says about ten times.
About Jules’ room, she means. About not thinking to change the sheets before Jules got home. About Gramps dying there—as if she’s responsible for that.
“So,” I say. “How’s Will?”
“He’s fine.”
That’s all. Nothing about why he didn’t come with her, which seems kind of strange to me, since at Christmas they were so lovey-dovey they couldn’t stand to be out of each other’s sight. When, just a few weeks ago, she told me they were talking about moving in together. But I know better than to press her.
We’re all a wreck. It doesn’t help a bit to know that Gramps died of a massive heart attack. It was inevitable, the coroner told Dad when he called. If Gramps had let Margaret call the ambulance that first night, he’d have been at the hospital when he died, that’s all. Instead of at our house, where he had always loved to be.
Dad keeps repeating this, like it’s supposed to make all of us feel better about Gramps being dead. Mom sits down on the arm of his chair and puts her hand on his shoulder, as if to ground him. As if she’s half-afraid he might fly up and disappear to wherever Gramps has gone.
After a while, Dad speaks in a wondering tone. “You know something? All the time Dutch was in the world, I never really thought anything could hurt me. Jesus, I knew he was a klutz. I knew that. But he was my dad. Some part of me never quit believing that he could do anything.”
“Oh, Mac,” Mom says, and puts her arms around him.
I want to go and put my arms around him, too. I want to say, “Dad, I know what you mean. I feel the same way about you.” But I can’t move or speak. I just keep thinking about how, some day, I’ll lose him just like he’s lost Gramps now.
We’re quiet for a while. Then we start telling stories. Dad remembers the first time Gramps went skiing and got going so fast that he took out all the people in the lift line when he got to the bottom. “Sorry,” he said, brushing the snow from some fat guy’s jacket, grinning that shit-eating grin. “Haven’t had Lesson Two yet: How to Stop.”
Mom remembers the time he put on Grandma Hammond’s sweater by mistake and Dad had to cut him out of it. “He was in the shower,” she says. “The doorbell rang and he got out and put on the first thing he saw. You know how Grandma always left his clothes out on the bed when they were going out. It was right there by his trousers, he said afterwards. As if that explained perfectly why he’d put on a lady’s sweater, size small.”
It seems strange to be laughing, knowing Gramps is dead. Wrong. But Gramps, of all people, wouldn’t be upset with us for that. If he were here, he’d be laughing himself, trying to one-up our stories.
I can just hear him. “Did I ever tell you about the time my Uncle Vernie took me water skiing at Lake Celina?” That was one of his favorites. “Drunk as a skunk,” he’d say. “Truth is, the liquor probably saved his life, since the first thing he does is step off the goddamn pier and fall ten feet into the boat. He isn’t moving. Christ, I think he’s broken his neck. I’m about to yell for help when he sits up. ‘Watch that first step,’ he says. ‘It’s a pisser.’” He’d wait for everyone to laugh, then go on. “Then, like a fool, I put the water skis on and let him take me out. The lake is low, a whole line of dead trees sticking up above the water, and Vernie starts weaving in and out of them like they’re a goddamn obstacle course.” He’d shake his head. “I’ll tell you something,” he’d say. “I’m goddamn lucky to be here to tell you this story.”
He always told stories exactly the same way. I can actually hear his voice inside my head, which makes me feel a little better. I’ll always be able to hear it. Remembering those goofy stories, I can make him come alive again inside me.
“Well.” Mom stands up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t think I can stay awake another second. I’m going to bed.”
“I’m with you.” Dad follows her into their bedroom.
Jules looks stricken. Clean sheets have made absolutely no difference to her, I can tell. She’s totally freaked out by the prospect of sleeping in the bed where Gramps died.
So I say, “Hey, would you sleep in my room tonight? I know I’m being a big baby, but I’m way too weirded out to be alone.”
She agrees, casting me a grateful glance.
She falls asleep quickly beside me, but I lie awake a long time. I think about how I used to climb into bed with Jules sometimes when I was little and had a bad dream. How, still sleeping, she’d turn and wrap her arms around me. I always felt so safe when I was with her.
Tonight, it’s enough just to have her breathing, not two feet away from me. The sound of the radio turned down low: WTLC, the soul station we’ve both listened to since Jules started high school. The hip, whispery voice of the late-night deejay takes me back to that different time, and the house settles in around
me, utterly familiar. Our house, alive with the thousands of nights we’ve all spent in it, together.
Twenty–three
Apparently Jules is feeling better the next morning, because we get to the subject of my hair. Mom and Dad have gone to make the funeral arrangements; Jules and I are eating breakfast at a little café in the Village. I’m making my usual mess, sprinkling sugar all over the table while attempting to get some in my oatmeal, getting jam on the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“I see some things never change,” Jules observes. Then, of course, she has to remind me how I never failed to spill something in a restaurant when we were little. “You’d be reaching for the menu or the ketchup, or one of those comment cards.” She laughs. “Remember how you always insisted on filling those out? Your spelling was always so creative.” She makes her voice like a child’s. “The habuger wutz gud, but I donut lik the bens.”
“Ha, ha,” I say.
“Speaking of creative.” Jules raises an eyebrow. “Your hair?”
“I decided to simplify my life,” I say, attempting nonchalance.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thank God. You aren’t enlisting in the Marines then.”
“Screw you,” I say.
Jules grins. “Hey, it’s—dramatic, I like it. But what do you mean, simplify your life?”
“It’s a long story,” I say. “Remember, I told you I met that guy—Harp—at the ski area? Well, he sort of got me into thinking about Buddhism—”
“And you got a crew cut?”
“More or less,” I say.
Jules takes a bite of fruit. “A love interest?” she asks. “This—Harp?”
I blush, which pisses me off. “Hardly,” I say, then turn the tables on her. “Speaking of which, where’s Will?”
She looks at me with an odd, caught expression.
“Are things okay?” I ask. “I mean, with you and Will?”
“Of course,” she says shortly. “He has a job, you know. He can’t just drop everything and go someplace at the drop of a hat.”
Everything You Want Page 15