The Fiancé (It's Just Us Here Book 6)

by Christopher X Sullivan

  My dad already had a small eighteen footer and had rebuilt a twenty-three foot Chris-Craft which he used to cart Mom, my sister and eventually baby me around the Lake. Grandpa had to one up him and get a nearly thirty foot family-sized behemoth. My grandpa cruised around Lake Michigan on that boat, with Grandma by his side for every nautical mile.

  Every mile except that last ride.

  In their lifetime, my grandparents had gone up Lake Michigan, through the Sal St Marie locks and into Lake Huron. They went all the way to Lake Ontario one year, which involved a cruise through Lake Erie and bypassing the Niagara Falls. They even went the back way into the Mississippi by going up the man-made diverted Chicago River.

  They went everywhere a boat of that size could possibly go. I don’t know if they made it all the way to the Saint Lawrence Seaway on that trip, I will have to consult their many, many ship logs if I’m ever motivated to know the answer to that question (of course I looked it up and they didn’t make it that far).

  Mark’s grandfather offered to buy the boat. Grandpa had lowered his price so significantly and the economy was so anemic after the recession following 2008 that I probably could have bought the boat from him. Hell! I’d put in enough unpaid man hours fixing rotten laps, replacing the transom, painting (and scraping) the bottom of the lead-coated boat and all manner of other shit that my tab was probably far in excess of what the boat finally sold for.

  Grandpa and I had a running commentary where he would say to put such and such a cost ‘on his tab’. “Rich-Joe-Aaron... Chris! Chris, I’ll pay you for your work. I’ll pay you. Put it on my tab.”

  Sure Grandpa. Just like you paid me to put the siding on your house and install the breezeway door and for buying you a computer and for a million other things.

  I didn’t want to go on that last ride to the Wolff’s Lakehouse with him. Had the rest of the family known we were taking Grandpa on the Lake, they would’ve thrown a fit. His health was rapidly deteriorating. Grandpa wasn’t allowed to do anything taxing—and selling his boat was the definition of stressful.

  He asked me to go with him. He had basically begged. I was going up to the Lakehouse anyway, so it all worked out in the end. Mark wanted to go on the boat with me, but I told him it was Sullivan time. He understood and backed off, saying he would travel with my mom instead.

  “Unless you want to bike back, you should drive separately. Mom’s going to take the SUV with room for the wheelchair.”

  So they drove separately.

  And that’s how I got stranded on the Lake with my dad driving an antique wooden boat and my Grandpa throwing fists of his wife’s ashes into Lake Michigan. He didn’t explain what he had planned on doing until he asked me to retrieve a cloth bag from the cabin. It was one of Grandma’s bags, the kind she used to fill with beach towels and spare clothes for when they went on boat trips.

  Her urn was inside.

  I handed the bag to him without question and watched as he unsealed the urn with shaking hands. I backed away, not wanting to take part in it. I knew those ashes weren’t my grandma—she had a headstone and a place for the family to gather. She lived in my memories and the memories of those that knew her. She wasn’t those ashes. That’s all that remained of her body, sure, but she was more than that.

  I did not want to be there. I couldn’t watch him do it. It was the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. My heart broke into a million pieces and it’s breaking as I write this.

  My grandpa’s face was so wrinkled and his body so weak that it was as if he was collapsing in upon himself. His mind was clear on some days, but then on other days he would ask where Grandma was.

  I watched as he tossed small handfuls of ashes over the side, some of them blowing back into the boat. Dad refused to come to a standstill, so we gently plowed through the water and Grandpa tossed the ashes into the wake. I wondered if he would even remember doing this... tomorrow, the next day, the next week? Would he even live another week?

  He looked like death had already taken him. His face was weathered from a hard life. He had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of his spare time tuning the motors on this boat. He had his old cars that he tinkered with. He had always been a motorhead and anything I knew about engines came from helping my grandpa.

  I had to go into the cabin and sit facing forward where I wiped my eyes and cried. I didn’t want to be there—I really, really didn’t want to be there.

  The weather was beautiful and warm with the sun directly overhead. I stayed in the shadows undercover and left my grandpa in the sun as the wind whipped by. I couldn’t leave him there forever because he needed to sit in a more sheltered spot. I had told him at least five times that we had to move him away from the edge of the boat, but he wouldn’t budge.

  Another thing Grandpa loved was taking photos. When I was younger and still in college, I made a deal with my grandpa: you pick out the slides and I’ll figure out how to digitize them and then I’ll print a book for you with all your favorite pictures. And then you can write an inscription beneath each one. And then your story will be there forever, to pass down to my kids, whenever I have them.

  “So you have a girlfriend?” Grandpa had asked.

  “Be serious,” I’d answered. And he did get serious. He looked at his mountain of slides and negatives and he got overwhelmed. Grandpa was prone to anxiety attacks (and you, Dear Reader, can probably say to yourself: ah, now I understand so much more about you, Chris). Those pictures caused him a great deal of stress. It was too big of a project—all he could see was the tremendous amount of organization that had to happen before he could single out his favorites. He got it in his head that he had to go through every single slide before he could give me any.

  Therefore, he went through none.

  His anxiety blocked him. Just like my anxiety blocked me from finishing this self-portrait. The only reason I got my butt kicked into high gear was because I received a cancer diagnosis and all I could think about was leaving this mess of memories and half-told stories. How could Mark ever pull this together? He isn’t a writer. These stories would just sit on the shelf and rot, never to be read, never to be shared. No one would ever know how much I loved Mark, or my friends or family. We would all fade away.

  This idea, fading from the lives of my loved ones, caused me great, paralyzing anxiety. But unlike my grandpa, I pushed through (with some helpful shoves from Mark along the way).

  Grandpa didn’t give me a single picture. At the time I asked, he was eighty-three. One year later his garage caught fire, which spread through his house and melted everything made of plastic.

  The slides, pictures, negatives... everything was gone.

  You’d think I would have learned my lesson from watching his agony and the way he grew so anxious about those lost memories. But I didn’t. Even with all my health problems, I still felt as though things were going to work out fine—my health would even out. So what if I had an autoimmune disorder... it wasn’t a death sentence. I could survive with it and I would still have plenty of time to write down the story of my life, the love of my life.

  And then the cancer came.

  I WALKED OUT OF THE cabin after Grandpa was done spreading the ashes. I glanced at my dad behind the wheel. His eyes were red and swollen, probably just like mine. He had already wiped his tears. That was probably the third time I had ever seen him cry. Once when my sister was in the hospital in a coma. Once when Grandma was in the coffin in the funeral home. And now this... the third time. He hadn’t even cried when my grandparents lost their house and they had to do a complete rebuild.... My dad had immediately gone into ‘general contractor mode’ and started laying out a plan for their new home.

  I placed an arm across his shoulders. “Slow down,” I said, my voice stuffy. “He’s done.” Did you know this was going to happen? I wanted to accuse him of deceiving me—of forcing me to be there! Why would anyone want to see this! The memory will haunt me for the rest of my life!

&n
bsp; My dad cut the twin engines and the boat coasted to a stop. Then we gently rocked in the short waves. We were a mile off shore and the trees were like a bank of clouds on the horizon.

  Dad pulled up a folding chair and set it beside Grandpa. Then he gave my grandpa a wordless hug. “Pull up a chair, Chris,” my grandpa commanded in that jovial way of his. “Let’s watch the waves, one last time.”

  Fuck it. I cried silently as I turned to find another folding chair. My grandpa could be so melodramatic. One last time. I inherited a lot of personality traits from this man. He was neurotic and anxious and he could become absolutely haunted by every little mistake, which left him bitter and paralyzed. That was me, too. I became a writer, in part, to deal with the paralysis. If I got my worries out on the page, then I could control my anxieties.

  If I hadn’t spent so much time with my grandpa, I never would have been handy around cars, or known how to build a boat, or known what it meant to love a person for their entire life.

  My grandpa had been devoted to his wife. De-vote-ed. She put up with a lot of his crap, but she never once turned on him. My grandpa could get mean and nasty and grumpy... while my grandma somehow let the bad things roll off her. She was the sunniest person you would ever meet. She was the lightness in his life and she often picked him up out of his dark moods.

  I wiped my face and cleared my nose of snot. It felt like my contacts were going to pop out with all the tears and how I kept rubbing my face. I placed the chair beside my father. He handed me a beer as we sat down—a Miller Lite, which I couldn’t drink. Did I really have a gluten allergy? No. I had an autoimmune disorder and if I controlled my diet, then I felt like I could control the symptoms.

  I took a quick sip of the disgusting piss-water after all three of us clinked bottles. I set mine in the cup holder along the edge of the boat.

  “You never were a drinker,” Grandpa accused. “You never tried my wine.”

  “I did so, Grandpa. Weren’t most of them twenty-proof?”

  “Yeah,” he rumbled. He took a drink from his beer, probably thinking of all the things that had changed in his life and all the things he was no longer able to do... and about the one person he was no longer able to do them with. “Never get old,” he said to me.

  Grandpa was almost ninety years old. He had seen over half of his friends develop some form of dementia and shuttled into a nursing facility (an old folks home, as he used to call it, even though he was many years older than the average resident in such a facility).

  My grandpa started working in the local mechanics shop when he was twelve because all the men were gone for the war effort in Europe. He was deferred from joining the military because he was the only male in the family after his dad ran back to Hungary when Grandpa was just a little boy and then his uncle with no children died in the service.

  He started dating my grandma when he was nineteen and she was seventeen. They got married the year after my grandma graduated high school—on Christmas because her family owned the general store in town and that was the only day of the year that it closed. My grandpa moved from working in that local mechanic’s shop to the local car manufacturer where he would work for the next forty years. He gave his life to that auto manufacturer. He was proud of the work he did and proud of the family his wife had raised while he worked long hours. He loved all his kids, especially the ones that were around the least. He took many of us for granted—if we were always around, he wouldn’t worry about us. His mind often traveled to the son and daughter who had slowly and definitely separated their lives from the rest of the family.

  But when it came time to spread the ashes... he didn’t invite the family. He didn’t tell anyone—maybe only my father. And we sat there with him as he regaled us with some of his fondest memories. The trip out West when my dad was just a baby and he had to be left with an uncle for a month, for which my grandma always felt guilty. That time she won a couple thousand dollars on a scratch-off ticket and got to be on TV for a lottery show and how she had always dreamed of getting on that show again.

  All these memories were going to die. That’s all I could think about. Gone, dead, forever lost. These two people were probably the two most important people in my life at that point. My mother was up there, as was my father, but Grandpa and Grandma were in a class of their own. When my sister died and my dad turned mean, my grandpa was there for me. He took me under his wing for a few years, telling me tales of how he had started his life as a mechanic when he was my age. I followed him around. I didn’t want to see my angry father. I didn’t want to see him drink. I didn’t want to see the way he was so mean to my mother, which made me yell at him.

  My grandpa was there for me and helped me through that trying time. We all have definitive moments—things that happen to us when we’re young that might seem insignificant to other people, but which set the course of our lives forever. Mine was pretty obvious and I think everyone could see how much it changed me. I’d always wanted to be an architect—that’s what I told everyone who asked. My dad was a contractor and he took me on the job site. The biggest, most respected guy I had ever seen was an architect. I wanted the best that I could see.

  After my sister died, I wanted to become an engineer and design safer cars. By the time I got to college, I had become obsessed with computer-assisted driving. But the loss of my sister also changed my personality—I became reserved and shy. Believe it or not, but I used to bounce around and smile at people and laugh and not care what they thought. After I lost my sister—my anchor, my confidant, my life... it was all different after that. I was twelve when she passed away. Before puberty. Would I have been non-sexual if life hadn’t happened that way? I was clinically depressed from a young age and had other worries that I kept bottled up and locked away. Would I have been more open to relationships? Would I have tried a relationship with a guy? Would I have realized the difference between depression and any other option?

  There’s no way to know. There was only one person in my whole life that I would have felt remotely comfortable talking about my desires (or lack of desire). And that person was my sister Rynne. She probably would have coached me through my first relationship, and then my second and then my third and then however many it would have taken. Also, I probably would have followed her lead, even if it made me extremely uncomfortable. If she had settled down with someone serious, I probably would have, too.

  And, in all honesty, it would have been with a woman. I have no doubt about the sex of the partner from my alternate history.

  I would’ve tried to date some of my close friends and then eventually chosen one, getting closer and closer as the years went by. We might have even had sex, and I might have even grown to enjoy it. As long as she got pleasure out of it, I probably could have done it. It would’ve been more exhausting than the way Mark did it because keeping an erection was harder for me than sitting there and passively taking it. I needed to form elaborate, granular fantasies in order to be the ‘top’ and the minute that fantasy broke and I realized I was with a real person doing the real thing... snap. Erection gone.

  But I could have done it. For kids—for a family—I could have done it. Maybe. With the right person and maybe through adoption. And then I never would have worried about fitting in with society. I never would have worried about my son hearing people call me a fag or otherwise singling me out.

  My entire life would’ve been different. My father wouldn’t have gone crazy for so many years. My mom wouldn’t have had to put up with so much crap—like a saint. I wouldn’t have gotten to know my grandfather or seen the way he was so... himself. The way he was with his wife... that’s what I wanted more than anything. I wanted someone by my side to laugh with and to laugh at me and to make me feel better when I got low.

  SNAP.

  Splash.

  I watched, horrified, as my grandpa opened the urn one last time and threw both pieces over the side of the boat—with a flick of the wrist as if they disgusted him. Th
e pieces splashed with a solid-sounding thunk.

  I didn’t get up from my seat and neither did my father. I looked off the other side of the boat. The city was in the distance, but mostly just in my mind’s eye. I pretended as if Mark was sitting beside me, offering comfort. I felt raw.

  I really needed him.

  I remembered my own experience throwing the necklace into the Lake and how I had let it tumble from my fingers as we roared over the waves during a spring boat ride. I had laid my fingers over the side and dipped down towards the water.

  As I relived that moment, I could almost feel the memory of that chain in my fingers... and the weight as it slipped away.

  Grandpa had the same impulse... to let the Lake take it all. All three of us had grown up on Lake Michigan. I was at my most calm when near water—and always had been. I would never feel comfortable living in Iowa or some landlocked place. If I needed a good long think, then I needed to sit and watch the waves, or lie down on the motor boxes and curl up for a nap. That’s how I dealt with stress... by letting the waves wash it all away. That’s why I loved that Mark lived so close to the Lake and I could simply walk out of the building and down through the park to the shore. It was perfect.

  “I WANT YOU BOYS TO do this for me when it’s my turn,” Grandpa said. He didn’t beg. My grandpa was a proud man. The Red Cross gave him $480 within two hours of his house burning to the ground. He donated double that amount back to the Red Cross at Christmas the next year.

  My dad promised that he would spread Grandpa’s ashes across the Lake. I didn’t say a thing.

  “Looks like you know the people I’m selling my boat to,” Grandpa said. “Maybe they’ll let you use it to spread me around.” That is exactly how he made his proposal... spread me around.