Save the Date

by Morgan Matson

  “Hey.” I turned to see Danny at my elbow. He nodded toward the gallery where the exhibit was. “Want to get a private showing?”

  I looked over at it, at the official-looking ribbon still stretched across the entrance. “Are we allowed?”

  Danny just gave me a smile. “Follow me.” He started across the marble lobby toward the exhibit. “Now,” he said, lowering his voice as we passed a guard in a museum blazer who seemed more interested in his phone than in paying attention to what was happening to the priceless art around him. “What did I always tell you about sneaking into places?”

  “Frown and walk fast,” I said automatically.

  “Exactly.” We picked up our pace, and with a great deal of authority, Danny walked right up to the rope and lifted it for me to duck under, then followed behind.

  I took a few steps into the gallery, letting my eyes adjust—it was a little darker in here than in the sun-filled lobby, lights positioned at intervals and shining on the artwork. Danny had walked ahead to where the exhibit started, and I hurried to catch up with him.

  “Look,” he said quietly to me, and I turned to face the wall in front of me, feeling my breath catch in my throat. Covering the whole wall, much more than life-size, was a picture of the Grants. It was the most famous picture of the fictional family, the one that still ran as the strip’s header, from when my oldest siblings were teenagers and I was six. It was a family portrait gone wrong—my character tipping nearly upside down over Donny’s arm while Lindsay shoved A.J., and Mark secretly fed cookies to Waffles. Geoff, the character based on my dad, was the only one who didn’t seem to notice the chaos around him and was smiling broadly at the camera.

  MEET THE GRANTS, read the sign on the wall, THE FAMILY YOU NEVER HAD.

  “Wow,” I said, looking around. There was text on the wall—going through the history of the strip, how my mom had started it when she was still working as a librarian, drawing pictures to entertain toddlers Danny and Linnie. How it had grown in popularity over the years, finding a global readership.

  I walked farther into the gallery, looking around, trying to take it all in, even though I knew it wasn’t possible on a first viewing. The whole thing was overwhelming. Because on every wall, there we all were. The exhibit looked like it was presented in chronological order, starting with my mom’s early sketches, the first comics, and then the strip throughout the years, interspersed with other exhibits showing the rise of GCS—the magazine profiles and mentions in pop culture, pictures from late-night hosts’ monologues, the T-shirts and lunch boxes and stuffed Waffles toys, the stills from the very short-lived Grant Central Station cartoon, which had only ever aired in Canada.

  As I looked around, at the finished art next to my mom’s concept sketches, at the characters that never quite took off, at the cover of Time with the fictional Grants on it, I felt myself start to breathe easier for the first time all day.

  Because looking at these strips, I was home. This was the very best of us, up on the walls of this gallery. The strip, with its four panels and the versions of us my mother had conjured, was the most familiar sight in the world to me. I was back—back in our kitchen, all of us still at home, in the chaos and laughter and busyness that had always been part of our lives when we were all together.

  Siobhan had asked me once if it was weird, seeing things that had happened to me in my life translated and fictionalized and presented to strangers for entertainment while they ate their cereal. But Cassie Grant was a character millions of readers had known about before I could even talk, much less understand what a newspaper comic was. Maybe because I’d never known a world without it, it had never seemed strange to me.

  We turned the corner and saw a group of comics practically taking over a whole wall, with the reproduced image of Donny, Lindsay, and A.J. climbing a street sign, Donny with a screwdriver clenched between his teeth and A.J. doing a very poor job of being a lookout. SIGN OF CHANGE was printed on the wall above a description of the comics.

  “Whoa,” Danny said, looking at the wall of strips depicting highlights of the story that had gone on for nearly two months. “I . . . didn’t realize they’d be featuring these,” he said, sounding a little nervous.

  I smiled. “I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out by now.”

  Hanging next to the comics were the newspaper articles from the Sentinel that covered the hearings and court proceedings with breathless intensity, next to write-ups from Time, Newsweek, and the Times. I turned to Danny to tell him that I’d actually been on Grant Avenue that afternoon, but he’d already wandered away, and I hurried to catch up with him.

  “That’s when she was having trouble with Dad’s nose,” Danny said as I joined him, pointing to a comic from when I was in middle school and Cassie Grant had much better hair than I’d had in real life. I looked closer at it and laughed—sure enough, my dad’s nose was completely out of proportion to the rest of him. Danny shrugged as he moved down the gallery, passing a picture of the Eisner Awards, my mother smiling as Mort Walker handed it to her and Bill Amend looked on. “I think she was mad at him for some reason and that’s why she did it.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  Danny raised an eyebrow as I fell into step next to him. “Why do you think she gave Donny that bad perm when I was in college?”

  “What did you do to deserve that?”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

  “Danny!”

  “Shh. We’re in a museum.”

  We both stopped in front of a wall that seemed to be representing the period when I was finishing elementary school and Danny and Linnie were finishing college. “Oh man,” I said, pointing to five framed strips grouped together. “Remember that? The lake house?” These strips were out of a month’s worth my mother had done about our vacation in the Catskills, part of her collection Go Jump in a Lake, which had been one of her bestsellers. There were four dailies and a Sunday, and just looking at them, it was like I could practically hear the cicadas, see the fireflies and the orangey pink of the sunsets. “That was such a great trip.”

  “Are you kidding?” Danny shook his head. “It was the worst trip ever.”

  “No,” I said, looking back at the strips. Cassie and Mark were catching fireflies at dusk, Donny and A.J. were racing their kayaks around the lake, and everyone was sitting on a beach, watching Fourth of July fireworks. “It was really fun.”

  “They had fun,” Danny said, gesturing toward the two-dimensional Grants. “We were miserable. It rained the whole time. Like the whole time. And the ceiling of my room leaked. And that was the month J.J. decided to be a vegan, and Linnie was furious Rodney couldn’t be there and spent the whole time calling him in Hawaii from the landline—because there was no reception—and ran up a nine-hundred-dollar phone bill.”

  Suddenly, memories were starting to come back to me, crowding out the ones I would have sworn, only minutes before, had been actual and true. The room I’d been sharing with Linnie had been small and smelled musty. Our dad had insisted that a little rain wasn’t going to keep him from enjoying the outdoors, and he’d caught a terrible cold and had to stay in bed most of the trip. Mike had been allergic to something—we’d never been able to figure out what—and sneezed for two weeks straight.

  “There was only one movie,” I said slowly, remembering. The other memories of the trip were starting to fade out. These memories, I was now realizing, had never been mine. They’d never been real, just ink and paper that I’d somehow folded into my real life, a revisionist history that I’d bought without a second thought. “Right?” I asked, looking up at Danny.

  He laughed. “That’s right! The DVD player was jammed, and we couldn’t watch anything we’d brought with us. We were stuck watching Police Academy 4 all week.”

  I laughed too, then clapped my hand over my mouth—the sound was louder than I’d expected in the quiet gallery. How could I have forgotten? Since it was all we’d had to
watch, and we were stuck inside all day due to the rain, we watched it more times than anyone should reasonably watch any Police Academy movie, let alone the fourth one in the franchise. And how it was so bad that, with enough viewings, it came around to being good again, and then to somehow being deeply profound.

  Danny led the way though the gallery, and I was still smiling as I caught up with him. But when I saw what was in front of me, I felt the smile slide off my face. I glanced at my brother and saw that he’d also realized what this was.

  Anyone else here would have just thought it was a sampling of my mother’s art. You wouldn’t have known that this handful of strips was anything more than another misadventure in the Grant family. You wouldn’t have known that these were the strips that had wrecked so much and were the reason Mike hadn’t been home in eighteen months.

  As I read these comics I knew by heart, I couldn’t help but feel the distance between what my mother was writing about and what had actually happened. Because it hadn’t started this way, the way she’d written in her version of things, where she got to make the decisions.

  It had all started at midnight, with cookies.

  * * *

  “Are they done?”

  I leaned over to peer into the oven, then straightened up and turned to Siobhan. “Almost.”

  “Excellent.” Siobhan grinned as she pushed herself up to sit on the kitchen counter. It was after midnight, very early on a Sunday morning in January. Siobhan had slept over, and we’d been up watching movies and talking, and about the time we were starting to think about going to sleep, right on schedule, we both decided we wanted a snack.

  We’d crept downstairs, trying not to wake either my parents or J.J., who’d come home for the weekend. Mike was still home too, since he was still on winter break from Northwestern, which seemed incredibly unfair, since I’d been back at school since the second of January. But I was pretty sure we didn’t have to worry about waking Mike up—he’d gone out earlier and I hadn’t heard him come back in.

  “They smell like they’re ready,” Siobhan said, pushing herself up to sit on the counter.

  She wasn’t wrong—the whole room was starting to smell like fresh-baked cookies—and I checked the timer just as the kitchen door swung open with gusto and J.J. strode in, wearing his monogrammed pajamas. “I smelled cookies,” he announced, looking around. His eyes lit up when he saw the oven. “Yes,” he said, starting over toward it.

  “No,” I said, taking a step in front of him, blocking his view. “They’re not ready yet.”

  “They smell ready,” he insisted.

  “That’s what I just said.” Siobhan gave me an I told you so look.

  “Charlie?” I looked over to see my dad standing in the doorway, squinting at me, then patting his head and pulling down his glasses. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re baking cookies,” I said, glancing at the clock and starting to feel guilty. “Did we wake you?”

  “Not the cooking,” he said with a yawn as he knotted the tie on his plaid robe, the one he’d had forever. “It was someone running down the stairs outside our room.” I pointed at J.J., and my dad sighed.

  “How is it that you are still waking me up at night?”

  “I think you should be happy,” J.J. said. “I mean, other people’s children leave and never come back again. Aren’t you happy we stick around?”

  “Not right now,” my dad muttered, rubbing his eyes.

  “What is happening?” I turned to the kitchen doorway and saw my mom, in her pink fluffy robe, the one Danny had bought her for Christmas last year. “Jeff?”

  “J.J. woke me up,” my dad said, pointing at my brother.

  “Charlie was baking cookies, and the smell woke me up,” he insisted, pointing at me.

  My mother just shook her head, then paused. “I think they’re ready,” she said, just as the kitchen timer went off.

  “That was very cool,” Siobhan said, her eyes wide. “How did you do that?” My mom just winked at her, and I headed over to the oven.

  Which was how, ten minutes later, we were all sitting around the kitchen table in our pajamas, with still-warm cookies in front of us. “I feel like I’m living in your comic strip,” Siobhan said as she broke off a piece of her cookie. “Like, this is something that would totally happen.”

  My mother smiled. “We’d need to get the dog involved, though.”

  I took a breath to agree just as the kitchen door slammed open. I jumped and looked over—and froze. Mike was standing in the doorway, totally naked except for a car floor mat pressed in front of his crotch.

  “Uh . . . ,” Mike said, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them as he looked around and clutched the floor mat with both hands. “What—what are you guys all doing up?”

  “Hey, Mike,” Siobhan said, waving cheerfully, not even trying to hide the fact that she was checking him out.

  Mike saw her and turned even redder. “Hi, Siobhan,” he muttered. He edged over to the staircase, apparently trying to move as fast as possible without showing us anything.

  “What are you—” J.J. said, then started laughing so hard he had to stop and take a breath. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing!” Mike yelled as he made a run for the stairs and we all started laughing.

  “Son,” my dad yelled after him. “Put some clothes on and then come down and give us an explanation, hm?”

  “We have cookies,” I yelled after him, then turned to Siobhan, who was giggling. “Oh my god.”

  “Of all the times to not have my phone to take pictures,” J.J. said, shaking his head. “Do you know what kind of blackmail shots I could have gotten?”

  “Think he’ll come back?” my mom asked. “Or is he going to sneak out the front door and never return?”

  “I’d call it even odds,” my dad said as I picked up my phone and pressed the button to FaceTime Linnie.

  “What?” she asked as she answered, squinting at me blearily. “It’s after midnight.”

  “Yeah,” J.J. said, leaning over to look at the screen. “And you guys are still youngish! Why aren’t you out clubbing?”

  “What?” Rodney appeared next to Linnie, looking just as sleepy and confused—and somehow unfinished, without his glasses on. “Why is J.J. talking about clubbing?”

  “I have no idea,” Linnie said. “Charlie, why did you call?”

  “Because Mike just streaked across the kitchen wearing nothing but a floor mat,” I said gleefully.

  “What?”

  “Did your sister really need to know about this?” my mother asked.

  “Is everyone awake?” Linnie asked, and I turned the camera around.

  “Pretty much,” my dad said. “Nice pj’s, Rodney.”

  “Thanks,” Rodney muttered, putting on his glasses.

  “Ah!” J.J. said, smiling, and I looked over to see Mike standing by the kitchen stairs, now wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, his face still bright red. “He returns.”

  “I have so many questions,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You were wearing clothing when you left earlier tonight, weren’t you?”

  “Do we really need to go into this?” Mike asked, shooting my dad a desperate look.

  “Yes,” we all said—even Linnie, over the phone.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Why are we talking to Linnie?”

  “I FaceTimed them,” I explained, and Mike closed his eyes for a second.

  “You didn’t want to call Danny? Get the whole family involved?”

  “There’s an idea.” I looked around. “Anyone else have a phone?”

  “That’s okay,” my dad said, leaning back in his chair. “I’m sure we’ll fill him in later. Michael, do you want to . . . uh . . . enlighten us?”

  Mike looked like he would have rather done almost anything else at the moment, but he took a step toward us anyway. “Okay. So, um . . . I was over at Corrine’s. . . .”

  J.J. and
I groaned, and over the phone, I heard Linnie do the same. “Can we not do this now?” Mike asked.

  “Well, I think it’s nice when people stay together from high school into college,” my mother said, even though I knew for a fact she felt the exact opposite. “It shows an impressive level of commitment.”

  “So you were at Corrine’s,” J.J. prompted, taking a bite of his cookie. “Proceed.”

  “Well. Um. So we were . . . hanging out . . .” There was a long pause, and then we all seemed to realize what he meant at the same moment.

  “God,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I really didn’t need to hear this,” my dad said.

  “Anyway,” Mike said, his face going a duller and duller red, like he was slowly morphing into a brick, “Corrine’s parents are really strict, so when they came home early, I kind of . . . climbed out the window.”

  “Naked,” Siobhan clarified helpfully, and Mike looked down at the floor like he was hoping it might swallow him up.

  “So Corrine tossed my phone and keys and clothes out after me,” Mike said, speaking very fast now, like he was just hoping to get to the end of this. “And I got the keys and the phone. But my clothes ended up . . . stuck in a tree?”

  My mother made a kind of snorting sound, and I looked over and saw that her chin was trembling, like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “Well. Michael. You are an adult now and can make your own choices. But we still don’t approve.” She looked at my dad, who nodded, even though I could see he was fighting a smile.

  “Yes,” he said, then cleared his throat. “You shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t . . .”

  “Shouldn’t jump out of windows without your clothes on?” Linnie finished, then started giggling.

  “It’s not funny,” Mike said, shaking his head, and that was enough to set me off.

  “Oh my god,” I said, laughing, “what—what did you do on the drive home? Were you just driving around naked? What if you’d gotten pulled over?”

  “Have a cookie,” Siobhan said, pushing the plate over to him.

  “Yeah,” J.J. said. “You deserve it.”