Lester glanced over at me. “You okay?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“You’ve been on a plane before, haven’t you, Al?” he asked.
“When would I have been on a plane?” I squeaked. “You’ve lived with me practically my whole life. Did you ever see me get on a plane?”
“Guess not,” said Lester. He fastened his seat belt and opened his philosophy book again.
The attendants came down the aisle closing the doors to the overhead bins and checking seat belts. Then they took seats themselves up front. That meant the plane doors were closed and locked. It was too late to get off. Now I wanted the doors to be locked. Double locked! Had anyone checked the emergency door? I wondered. The plane started to move. It was backing away from the terminal and slowly turning itself around, like some huge prehistoric beast. Then it moved onto the runway.
I reached over and grabbed Lester’s hand. Surprisingly, he didn’t shake me off. It helped to connect with someone, but I felt my body shake.
“Lester,” I mewed pitifully, “if we crash and you live and I don’t, I want you to forgive every awful thing I ever said to you.”
“We’re not going to crash, Al.”
The pilot began to rev the engines. The sound grew louder and louder. The plane began to move, faster and faster. I pushed back stiffly against the seat and glanced sideways at the man by the window. He was still reading his newspaper. How could you read a newspaper when your body was hurtling down a runway at 150 miles an hour?
I felt the plane lifting off. What if we were too heavy? What if something fell off? What if we couldn’t get up enough speed and—?
Thunk
“Lester!” I yelped. “What was that?”
“The landing gear retracting, Al. Calm down, will you?” he whispered.
“What about birds?”
“What about them?”
“Fall’s coming, Lester! They’re migrating! What if a goose flies in our engine and—?”
“Al …”
“What if the emergency door flies open and I get sucked out of the plane and—?”
The man next to me couldn’t hold back any longer: “Then we will have a much more pleasant flight,” he said, and returned to his paper.
That shut me up. My fingernails were digging into Lester’s arm so hard that they were leaving marks. When I could see that the trees and houses were far below us, I released my grip and closed my eyes. Whatever was going to happen would happen. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t get off, and I resigned myself to my fate.
And strangely enough, I began to relax. I guess it was the choice that had bothered me—whether I should go or not. Now that it was out of my hands, I could feel my breathing slow.
I waited until the sound of the plane’s engines dropped to a constant hum, and after five minutes or so, the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light went off. I looked around. People were reading or sleeping or talking with each other. Nobody was panicky and plastered against his seat back. No one had his head buried in his lap. The attendants were smiling. The pilot was saying, “Good afternoon” and telling us what the weather was like in Nashville.
Les was reading his philosophy book again.
“Les,” I said, “what do you think is the matter with me?”
“Emotionally, mentally, or physically?” he asked.
“Any or all,” I said.
“I think you are emotionally overwrought, mentally challenged, and physically … uh …”
“Never mind,” I said, and jabbed him in the side.
“I think that you were having a mini panic attack about a new experience and that when the flight’s over, you’ll add it to your list of fun things to do.”
“Panic attacks?”
“No. Flying.”
“Were you ever afraid of something?” I asked him. “Really afraid?”
“Yeah, public speaking. When I had to give a report in class, I just about lost it. I’d be sick to my stomach a day or two before the big event. Wouldn’t sleep at all the night before.”
“What were you afraid would happen?”
“Oh … that I’d lose my voice or sweat a river or forget something.”
“Did it happen?”
“I mispronounced a word or two. Lost my place a couple of times. But after a while I noticed that almost everybody mispronounced something or got mixed up at some point, and it was no big deal.”
I finally took my history book out of my bag and read a chapter, or tried to. My mind kept drifting to Patrick, the way he and his parents had flown all over the whole world, practically. I wondered if he was maybe reading this same chapter at this exact moment. I was thinking about the way we usually sat together in class now. Wondering, I guess, if it meant anything.
“Les,” I said, “seeing as how Patrick and I met for the first time in sixth grade and then went out for more than two years, do you think it means anything that we’re sitting beside each other now in World History?”
“Yeah,” said Lester. “It means that all of the other seats were taken.”
I felt easier when the plane began to descend into the Nashville airport. It just seemed more natural for a plane to be coming down and landing than for it to be rising up in the air and trying to fly. But soon we were on the ground, and people were unfastening their seat belts and opening the overhead compartments.
“Welcome to Nashville,” the flight attendant said as we moved toward the door with our bags.
The cockpit door was open, and a pilot was standing there.
“Thank you for a great trip,” I gushed. “You got us up so smoothly, and we hardly had any turbulence! It was a very safe landing, and I—”
“Stifle it, Al,” Lester whispered behind me.
“Thank you, thank you,” the pilot said, smiling. “You’re welcome to ride with us anytime.”
Uncle Howard was waiting for us at the baggage claim. He and Dad embraced and held it for ten seconds or so without a word. Finally Dad asked, “How is he?”
“Still holding on,” Uncle Howard said.
“Is everyone there?”
“Yes.”
Uncle Howard looked a lot like Dad, an older version, of course. His hair was mostly gray, and the skin sagged a little on the cheeks and under the eyes, but he had the same smile. He turned toward me then and hugged me, and I thought what a fraud I was. I didn’t want to be there at all.
I hate sickness and pain and throwing up and getting dizzy. I’d been working in a hospital as a candy striper when my favorite teacher, Mrs. Plotkin, died. I’ve hated hospitals ever since, with their sounds and smells and stretchers and tubes and people running around in white coats and green scrubs with little flecks of blood on their running shoes. I hate seeing patients standing in hallways wearing cotton gowns that are supposed to be fastened in the back but aren’t. I hate seeing people cry. I hate hearing doctors’ names announced again and again over the speaker system, and you wonder if there’s a patient dying somewhere and his doctor’s down having coffee.
Most of all, I hate death, and don’t even want to think about it. I’ve always felt as though Grandpa McKinley was sort of the wall between my own dad and death. That I didn’t have to worry about Dad dying until his dad died. And now it was like Dad was next in line. Except maybe Uncle Harold and Uncle Howard, being older, would go first.
“It was nice of you to come,” Uncle Howard said, hugging Sylvia and shaking Lester’s hand. “I wish it were a different occasion.”
“We all do,” said Sylvia.
How can everything look gloomy even when the sun is shining? How can even smiling people look sad? I didn’t want to be in Nashville any more than I’d wanted to be on that plane, and yet … I looked at my dad sitting up there in the front seat beside Uncle Howard. How was it for him?
I was in the back between Les and Sylvia, and we didn’t say a word all the way back to the house. We listened to the quiet conversation between Dad and his brother—when
Grandpa had stopped eating, when he’d last had water, what the doctor had said… . “Resting comfortably” kept coming into the conversation.
We got out at Uncle Harold and Aunt Vivian’s yellow frame house and went inside. Uncle Harold looks a lot like his twin, of course, only thinner. He smiled and said each of our names as he gave us a hug: “Alice … Ben … Sylvia … Lester.” And finally, “Come on in.”
My three aunts hovered there in the living room, waiting their turn to hug us—Aunt Vivian, Aunt Linda, Howard’s wife, and Aunt Marge, who had been married to my uncle Charlie for only two days before he died. In the background a comedy show was playing on the TV, and I wondered how anyone could be laughing in a house where someone was dying. It seemed surreal. Finally somebody turned it off.
“So good to see you!” said Aunt Linda, hugging me hard in her big arms.
“We’re so glad you’re here,” said Aunt Vivian.
“So am I,” said Dad.
“Dad wakes up for a few minutes at a time, then slips off again,” Uncle Harold said. “Right now he’s napping, but you can go up if you like.”
“Yes, I’d like to see him,” said Dad.
So did I. To tell the truth, I wanted it over with.
When you’re somewhere you don’t want to be, I discovered, it’s like things are moving in slow motion. I found myself counting the number of steps upstairs, studying the grapevine pattern on the wallpaper, listening for sounds from the sick-room… .
Everything was quiet except for the raggedy sounds of Gramps’s breathing. There he was in bed, looking so much smaller than I had remembered him, like a twelve-year-old boy. His left hand, lying on top of the light blanket, looked so thin and withered, like a claw almost, and I heard Dad suck in his breath when he saw him.
We went to the bed. Dad leaned over and touched the side of Gramps’s face, smoothed the wisps of white hair on his forehead. I tried not to look at my dad’s face, but I couldn’t help myself. There were tears in his eyes, and then there were tears in mine.
Uncle Harold and Aunt Vivian had come upstairs with us. Lester and Sylvia, too.
“The doctor was by around one and said it’s probably a matter of hours—a day or two at most,” Uncle Harold whispered.
“I’ll stay as long as necessary,” said Dad. “Let me sit with him awhile—give you a break. I’ll come down and get you if he wakes up.”
“I’ll stay,” said Aunt Vivian. “Why don’t you men go talk?”
“No,” said Dad. “Let me.”
I figured Dad wanted time alone with his father, so I followed the others downstairs. I felt like a spectator, sitting in the living room while my uncles and aunts made small talk with Les and Sylvia.
“Probably hard for Ben to leave the store on short notice,” Uncle Howard said.
“Oh, he has capable help,” Sylvia told him. “It’s good for him to know he’s not indispensable. And I’m glad he got the chance to be here with his father.”
“A hundred and one years old!” said Aunt Marge. “Think of that! We should all be so lucky.”
“How’s the thesis coming, Lester?” Uncle Harold asked. “You’ll feel like a ten-ton weight is off your shoulders when it’s finished, I’ll bet.”
“I’ll feel like a weight’s off my shoulders after I get a job,” said Les. “You don’t see many want ads in the newspaper for a philosopher.”
We ate pound cake and drank cold sweetened tea.
“Could I take some up to Dad?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Aunt Marge, and fixed up a little tray.
Upstairs Dad was still sitting by Gramps’s bed, just watching.
“Dad,” I said softly. “This is for you.”
He turned. “Thanks,” he said. “Just put it there on the nightstand.”
I set the tray down. I wanted so much to say something comforting, but I didn’t know what. “This is awfully sad,” I said at last.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“Do you suppose he’s in pain?”
“No. The doctor doesn’t think so.”
“Do you want me to stay here with you?”
“I think it would be better if you go downstairs and chat with the others. We may give you a turn later, sitting up here.”
“Sure,” I said, but the thought of sitting alone with Gramps was even more unsettling than being on the plane.
Aunt Vivian let me help with dinner. There was a pot roast simmering on the stove, the aroma of potatoes and onions, and I set to work making the salad. It was good to have something to do, to feel useful.
“Go get your dad, Lester,” Aunt Linda said. “I’ll go up in a minute and sit with Gramps.”
Dad came down then, and we sat around the oval table in the big old-fashioned dining room with the dark woodwork and family pictures on the walls.
“It’s not often we get the chance to have dinner with you,” said Uncle Howard, beaming at me. “Alice, you’ve got your mother’s coloring, all right. Your hair and your eyes look just like Marie’s. What a fine young lady you’re getting to be, growing up there in Silver Sprangs.” It always comes out “Sprangs” when he says it. I smiled back.
They talked then about the kind of memorial service they had planned for Gramps.
“There are no friends of his left,” said Uncle Harold. “He’s outlived them all. So we thought we’d keep it simple—his favorite hymn, favorite scripture… .”
“What’s his favorite scripture?” asked Sylvia.
“First Corinthians, thirteen,” said Uncle Howard.
“That’s my favorite too,” Dad said.
The grown-ups sat at the table a long time talking then, so I got up and walked slowly around the dining room, studying each picture on the walls.
There was Grandma, who I’d never met, and Grandpa, standing stiffly out in the yard of a tall, narrow house, perhaps the first house they lived in after they were married. I knew it was Gramps because someone had written his name and his bride’s in ink in one corner.
Another photo of Howard and Harold posing for their high school graduation pictures. Of Howard in his barbershop with a son I don’t remember. Here was Dad playing the violin with Aunt Vivian at the piano. Dad and Mom’s wedding picture, just like the one at home—Mom in a simple ivory dress with a spray of baby’s breath in her hair.
I moved to the other side of the china cabinet to see the photos over there, many of cousins I’d never met. I smiled at a picture of Lester and me at some kind of fair. I couldn’t have been more than two years old, sitting on a pony, and Les, at ten, leading it around a pony ring, looking bored. I turned and looked at him, watching me from across the table. I pointed to the picture, and he rolled his eyes. I grinned.
There were photos of people I didn’t know, and one of Uncle Charlie and Aunt Marge leaving for their honeymoon. A picture of Dad and Sylvia dancing at their wedding reception. Gramps celebrating his ninetieth birthday—who would have thought he’d live another eleven years?
There was history here all over the walls. There were memories connecting us to these warm, loving people down in Tennessee, whether we saw them very often or not.
I went into the living room to check out the family Bible I’d seen on an end table. I looked in the front to find First Corinthians and turned to the passage that was Dad’s favorite:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing… .
Aunt Marge came in after a while and sat down beside me on the couch.
“Charity?” I asked.
“Love,” said Aunt Marge. She put one arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. After I had read the whole of the chapter and closed the Bible, Aunt Marge got out some scrapbooks and showed me more pictures of the family, inclu
ding snapshots of her and my uncle Charlie.
“How long were you sad after he died?” I asked. “Does it last forever?”
She thought about that a moment. “I’m sad whenever I think about his dying and all that we missed, but I don’t think about it all the time,” she answered. “Mostly I remember the good times we had before we married and how much I like being part of this family now. They just took me right in.”
I looked over at my relatives there at the big table in the dining room. I felt a lump growing larger in my throat. “My problem is that I don’t remember many happy days with my mother because I don’t remember her that well at all,” I said.
“I didn’t know you then, so I can’t help,” she said. “But this is what family is for. Lots of memories are stored in your other aunts and uncles, and you just ask them to tell you every single thing they remember about Marie. They’ll help you fill up those empty spaces in your head.”
I thought about my extended family, strung out all across the country—my familiar relatives in Tennessee and Chicago. My new not-so-familiar relatives in Albuquerque and Seattle. I liked that we could smile and laugh together, even with Gramps dying upstairs. That it didn’t mean the end of being happy.
Aunt Linda called down that Gramps was waking up—did we want to come and see him?
This time we all went up, and Dad sat down again in the chair beside the bed.
“Dad?” he said, leaning forward. “Do you know who I am?”
For fifteen seconds or so, Gramps stared at Dad and his lips moved a little. His fingers fluttered on his chest. Then he smiled just a little and looked excited. “B-B-Ben!” he said, his breath raggedy.
Dad put one hand over his father’s. “I came to see you, Dad. I just got here a little while ago.”
Gramps’s eyes grew wider. “Ben … Ben he said again, and smiled. Saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth. “How … how are … things?”
“Things are fine with me, Dad. Work is going well, and I’ve brought Sylvia and Lester and Alice with me.”
“Lester?” said Gramps, and moved his head slightly.
Lester stepped up to the bedside where Gramps could see him. He bent down and touched him on the shoulder. “Hi, Gramps,” he said.