Chapter 24

1

The night of the storm changed Adam’s life. He would later reflect on how simple that analogy really was. How symbols worked to characterize and categorize one’s life. He watched those dark clouds roll into the Creek with the precipitous gust of swarthy locusts looking to feed, and maybe that’s what the storm was. Maybe it was some sort of pathogen that would reveal the Creek’s skeleton, its circuitry; maybe it’s what made those boys of summer, the Fenway Four, so special in the end. Transformation sometimes required an event. Like a werewolf watching the slow reveal of the pearly full moon skirted by silver clouds. Or a boy looking back at a summer for the ages as he grew to understand he was becoming a man.

            Adam’s life changed before the power went out. It started for him when he heard Patty crying.

            It’s the storm. Just the storm. What kid isn’t freaked out by thunder and lightning? But it wasn’t just that. Adam was sitting in his room, watching the light flash on the wall across from his windows as he mindlessly played Super Mario Bros. 2, the weird sequel that had nothing to do with the original beyond the names of the characters and the look of the mustachioed brothers and the usually ever-in-peril-pink-clad princess. Patty wasn’t just crying. He knew his brother’s cry. Every cry was distinct. At least he thought so. No, Patty was saying something through his cry.

            Adam tossed down the controller and went to his baby bro’s room. It was typical. Crib over by the window, because Patty liked to stand up over the bars and look out over the backyard, especially when the wind picked up and swayed the spruces. At night his mom just closed the blinds because the shadows could turn those trees into something else. They always did. The bedtime ritual with Patty followed a three-stage systematic checklist: close the closet door, check, close the blinds and window pane so the wind doesn’t shriek, check, and turn on the night light, a pretty nifty Adam West Batman number his mom picked up at a garage sale in Lewiston, check. And all three items had been checked when his mom put him to bed just as the storm was really rolling in, but even that process was underscored by the thunder. Because thunder didn’t care about your rituals; it did what it did and moved on. Apathy with a bad temper.

            The crib was empty. As if the stifle in Patty’s sobs should have proved to Adam that in his haste to finally settle his brother, to do his mom’s job, Patty found some semblance of peace knowing his protector was on his way. But even that sliver of bravado was only wishful thinking. The crying started again, but this time out in the hall. Maybe it had always been coming from that direction. Adam didn’t know. Patty was saying something. Repeating it. His little voice hoarse from sobbing but blatant. Bleating. The little shit had somehow climbed out of his crib, maneuvered down the vertical bars like some dwarfish firefighter in a diaper only to toddle to the staircase and stand at the top looking down, wavering on two chubby feet, back and forth, the lightning streaking his face from the window at the front entrance dotting the second story space where the stairs terminated in the foyer.

            “BAMPA, BAMPA, BAMPA.”

            Was he the only one who could hear Patty? It was a strange thought, but at the same time he was convinced it was true. Because the kid was loud. And his mom hadn’t come. Not even grampa, who he knew wasn’t that hard of hearing. Patty was screaming for grampa in his peculiar, mispronounced cadence.

            “Patty, bud, what’s going on?” He picked up his brother, scared he was just moments away from teetering over that top step and falling down. He didn’t want to think about it. “Patty?”

            The kid’s eyes were closed, glued shut by tears most likely, but even if that was the case Patty didn’t seem all there. He was just a fraction, a portion, some part of him trapped somewhere else, in that place the mind can sometimes wander to when the eyeballs roll beneath their lids in tidal rhythms. “BAMPA!” Adam nearly dropped him. Patty jerked his head, his eyes still closed, his nose runny with snot and his hair dishevelled; Adam stumbled backwards and nearly lost his footing. He supposed it was better than falling forward. Than taking them both in a stiff cartwheel down the stairs.

            “Patty.” He was a little louder this time. Not screaming, but enough to ensure he was heard. And now his brother did open his eyes, one at a time. Was he sleepwalking? Was that it? Do little kids even do that? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know how it was possible, especially since this little adventure required of Patty the dextrous applicability of fumbling, sleeping limbs to balance atop and jostle over a crib’s edge without breaking anything. No, what Patty had done was calculated.

            “Dam dam no,” Patty said, looking at his big brother strangely, not sure why he was being held, not caring about the thunder outside or the loud pattering rain on the window. Patty turned to look toward the stairs, his eyes strangely curious but knowing. Little kids freaked Adam out for that very reason: their superb understanding and acknowledgment of things unknown to most people, especially adults. He’d often wondered if Patty spoke to somebody in his room, somebody nobody else could see but Patty. It was indicative of childhood’s power, he supposed, and proved the very reality of those berms that separated kids from adults. Even he was on the outside looking in now. On the cusp of adolescence and suddenly unable to perceive what he once could. What his brother still could.

            “What is it? What’s wrong?”

            “Bampa.”

            There was a knock on the front door. It somehow existed outside the bubble he’d stepped into with Patty, the bubble into which the sounds his brother made disappeared into the vacuum of its space, and Adam realized he was looking out at a different world down there, down the stairs, marked by the chasm of one floor to another; he heard the rap on the door, and he knew Patty heard it too. They both looked down that way, could just see the door, and he knew something was wrong by the way Patty was trembling. “Bampa,” he whispered, one last time.

            Grampa Lew went to the door. Just as Adam was the only one who could hear Patty’s cries on this level, he thought it must have been true that grampa was the only one who could hear the door on the level below; that Adam and Patty could hear both things, could hear sounds transmuted from either level was proof they both hadn’t shed or occluded the ability to see beyond the shroud, that those levels were really the distinct separation between what you became as the years stacked. And even if that was a lot of hokum, or what his grampa would call gobble-di-do, Adam knew it was true. Childhood was magic. Adulthood was not.

            He and Patty watched grampa open that door. The door only he and them had heard. If that was possible. Anything’s possible. Think about what you already know about this town. About Reedy Creek.

            Patty only squirrelled his head away, tucking it into the crook of Adam’s arm. He could feel his little brother’s breath, its rapidity; he could feel the growing warmth in the poor boy’s diaper as he unloaded his bladder. Kids don’t sleepwalk, and they certainly don’t sleepclimb. The front door opened. He could hear the creak of its hinges, even up here, on the level above where the gears of accountability and responsibility hadn’t yet transformed them into cogs in the adult world. The rain struck the window with the force of the wind. He could hear the trees scraping the clapboard siding, could even hear the rustling leaves that would spirit off in verdant torrents as the thunder bade them farewell until next summer. But there was no rain when the front door opened.

            Only the visitor who stepped inside, dry as a bone. The visitor Adam couldn’t really see. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to see.  

2

It was the hum. Like plucking an incredibly thick guitar string connected circuitously underground by nodes and watching those vibrations flicker along the lines in endless loops. That’s what the world sounded like underground. But if Pug was aware of how one began to think as one got older, then the precocious questions would have to arise: like, why did a farming town have a series of tunnels? Who would have built these? The same people who put up the cameras, who wired them, who turned Reedy Creek into a limitless network of candid surveillance? The why and the how were the bifurcated base of any story, and the better their answers, the more involving the story. He knew that. But stories and real life were a lot different; in stories you could pretend you mattered more than you really did, and it took the real world to remind you that you were nothing special. Maybe that’s why people became writers. Not to tell stories, but to become something else, something more important, in worlds of their making. You could control any outcome with words. Words had that power. And control is a very particular sort of temptation.

            Pug was soaking wet. He was trembling. The stairway from the shed, whose door swung open during the storm, maybe after the lightning strike, was wide and steep, leading into an arcade where parts of the wall were stone and others plaster, creating the sort of stark contrast between modernity and history that would prove this place wasn’t new, that maybe it was always here and the Camera People were just re-appropriating it. He thought about his conversation with Grimwood; he thought about hearing his own voice on the radio after the power went out, the way Chels looked at his clock when she heard him there, and he knew it wasn’t just his imagination. The hallway was lit by a string of fluorescents, following him on his trek, the hum growing louder as he neared the Situation Room, and he understood he was in the shit now. That nothing would ever be the same. If the power was out above, in that reality he’d just left behind, it certainly roared with efficiency down here, in the basement of the world. In that place where the innocence borne above somehow dissipated. He wasn’t sure why he’d come, beyond the strangeness of the phone call, his voice on the radio, or Chels suddenly appearing where Robert Wilson would eat his last meal. But in boyhood you learned one thing: if somebody did you a solid, you paid him back in kind. You couldn’t welch on those bets because broken promises carried consequences.

            For Pug, you were only as good as your word. And Grimwood had given him Chels.

3

“Horace, so good of you to come.”

            Grimwood held out his hand and Pug remarked on his long fingers again, so grisly and knotted, but strong and assertive. The man’s toothsome grin was resoundingly prominent, and peeled his lips back in an arc over too many teeth in so small a space. The sound of Watchtower labored behind the man as he stood at the doorway into the tiered-bowl where Pug imagined men like Walter Cronkite sitting with their feet up watching the world unravel. He took Grimwood’s hand and pumped twice; he suddenly felt guilty about letting Danny write the break-up note on his back. But it didn’t seem like there were hard feelings. Not now.

            “I figured Bernard owed you an apology. He was awfully impolite last night. It’s why I don’t often allow him out of the confines. He has an astute eye, but he is peculiarly bad with people. I suppose his fondness for being rude is what’s impelled him to work with me. I fear he may not feel the same way. So I daresay, Horace, do not expect an apology from him. He leaves most feeling wary. That’s why I’ve left him with the cameras. The cameras, they do not feel.”

            Bernard and Steve both sat with their backs turned to Pug, the same way they had when he’d first come down here with his friends. Now this visitation was a secret from them. And the guilt about that was even stronger than what he might have written on his back to show the camera at the field. Above the long desk with the rattling Commodores and full ashtrays, Pug saw the wall of TV screens, all flickering images of the Creek above them; he saw in a few the interior frames of the General where his mom sometimes took him to buy treats, if she felt like indulging and using him as an excuse to shore up on sweets. Now the place was a crime scene.

            “How do you have power down here? My house went dark…so did my street.” He thought only of the loud lightning strike at the utility shed. The swift crack of that spliced fork and the cratered earth at the head of the cul-de-sac that turned the world above primitive.

            “We’re not a part of that system, Horace. Places like this, secret places, they can be built and entombed because the world requires it of them.”

            “I don’t understand.”

            “The Cold War is a license for inventive opportunities in surveillance. The federal government throws money at ideas and takes credit for what works; that has always been the battle plan against the Soviets. It’s not a war of weapons, Horace, but of ideas. And whoever wins that war of ideas has all the power. You would not believe how far we’ve gone to win over hearts and minds. When both sides understand their Doomsday Arsenal are only deterrents, the psychological implications of war shift. It is very interesting, to say the least. The CIA even funded Abstract Expressionist painting in the 60s. I see you cocking your brow. Perhaps you haven’t yet learned about the modernist aberrations of Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko, but the CIA wished to counter the intellectual draw of communism with a philosophical movement of our own. Funny, isn’t it? If an American artist can splatter paint on a canvas with all the randomness of dust blown in the wind, our culture will somehow win back some of the minds critical of our market-based model, turning the genius of Mozart into the trite musings of Prince or Madonna. I ramble. Yes, I can tell.” Grimwood laughed.

            “Is that why you’re here? Is that why this is here? This place?”

            “Because of the Soviets?”

            “Yes. I mean, I think.” Pug wasn’t sure. Grimwood could somehow draw conversation out of you even when you were afraid and curious; and the combination of the two could be dangerous, Pug figured. Because it brought him here. Brought him out into the raging storm and into a locked doorway that opened itself.

            “Maybe it’s how this place is here. But not why. Does that make sense, Horace?”

            Pug slowly nodded, still looking up at all of those screens, wondering which of them held the attention of the men sitting in billows of cigarette smoke. “The money’s there to make places like this if you say it’s because of the Soviets. But you don’t have to use the place for that reason.”

            “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it. Not many people your age could reason that. Not many people any age. But you’re a writer, aren’t you? A good writer, I’d reckon.”

            “I like to tell stories.”

            “Yes, and I imagine you tell very good ones. The imagination one would require to make sense of this place, to make sense of how it could be here versus why, that requires of the thinker an aptitude to understand plot, to understand story. Because not all is as it seems. Why do your friends call you Pug? If you are a storyteller, would not a better nickname be Author?”

            Pug smiled, thinking about his buds. They were his safe place. And down here that was a requirement. “Because friends are jerks. And they tap into what you’re insecure about.”

            “And that would be?”

            “I guess my weight. My face. I bet it’s something I grow into. My dad did. He was fat too, as a kid, I mean. He’s kind of chubby now, but he doesn’t really exercise much. I’ve seen pics of him from high school and college, and he was thin then. So I still have a chance. And it’s that chance that makes the name okay for me. Because they mean well.”

            “It seems mean spirited to me, Horace.”

            “Maybe it is. But it’s done with good intentions. Because it helps me own it, you know. I actually prefer Pug to Horace now. I wince when I hear Horace.”

            “So you’d prefer I call you Pug?”

            “That’s up to you. If you don’t agree with the, well, the sentiment, then you can call me what you want.” He wasn’t sure why he was feeling so conversational; he wasn’t feeling cold, and the tremors that had coursed through his body as he walked the corridor, following the hum, had disappeared. He was still wet, but not uncomfortable.

            “I would like to think I am a friend, Pug.”

            “That felt right, didn’t it?”

            “I guess it did,” Grimwood smiled. He wore a simple white shirt with dark slacks. It was something he might imagine grampa wearing, maybe a few years ago before age had caught up to him. “I suppose despite the intentions of the name, your friends are good to you. Childhood is a very special time. Some kids find that magic more than others, and you four made this strange place your own. You did. Four kids uprooted and brought here by destiny. Maybe it is that simple.”

            “I’ve always thought so. This summer, it was the greatest time of my life.”

            “Yes, to be twelve. To witness freedom as it truly exists. Freedom from everything that makes growing up sometimes so miserable. Because there are expectations of you. Year after year more is expected of you.”

            “Right, Mr Grimwood, I was just talking about that, I was. This summer, what we made of Reedy Creek, it did feel like, well, magic.”

            “Because it was, Pug. Magic comes in different forms. I wish I’d been a little more forthcoming about that when we first met. Maybe then you boys wouldn’t have made so quickly the decision you did. I was confident we would be friends. The five of us. I truly felt like I was one among you this summer, because I got to watch the magic you made. I saw what you did. You turned that little clearing beyond Woodvine into Fenway Park, didn’t you? The power of the imagination churns many gears, and sometimes those gears are invisible to those who’ve forgotten to look for them, but I have not. I never will.”

            “I’m sorry I said no, Mr Grimwood,” Pug said. “It was a group decision, and we didn’t take it lightly.”

            “I didn’t suspect you would. But you’re here now and that’s what counts. You’ve done the right thing.”

            “Because you saved Chels.”

            “No, Pug, I did the right thing. Friends don’t keep secrets, and friends don’t keep what doesn’t belong to them. What did the veterinarian say?”

            Pug realized two realities were merging here: the reality of the storm above, of the world that was progressing and continuously taking from him, taking his childhood, taking the innocence of all he kept dear, and the reality of the basement, of the underworld, where no storm raged but the shadows of the reality above were on full display, where the privacy and misdeeds of others would have to be taken into account. This was the world of magic, the world where electrical outages didn’t mean the radio couldn’t work, the world where he wanted to see beyond Main Street to the Disneyland of pirates and ghosts, of princesses and dragons.

            “The doc told my mom it might be something called lymphosarcoma. The Big C. Worst case scenario, but once the idea’s out there—”

            “The world accommodates it. Yes, I know.” Grimwood sighed. “I am so sorry, Pug.” He took Pug’s shoulder and kneaded it. His fingers were so strong, but the sensation was almost fatherly.

            “If you hadn’t found her…if you…” Pug stopped. He wanted to say a lot right now. Wanted to ask a lot. But he was making his own assumptions down here. About Grimwood. About the possibilities of this different reality, of this world below the real one. But maybe he was just clinging to childhood. Maybe he was clinging to the chance this place wouldn’t take from him the way Reedy Creek had.

            “She doesn’t want you to see her like this. Maybe so near the end.”

            Pug closed his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t cry. When he was at home, trying so hard to pretend the world wouldn’t take his girl, sitting at his desk to write a better outcome, where she and him would live forever together, he thought to ask a question if he ever returned to Watchtower to fulfill his promise. That was still up in the air then, even when he’d looked at that news clipping of Clayton Miller with the telephone number scribed across his forehead, looking at the crumpled paper in his room as the storm was beginning to grumble, wanting it to wink at him, wanting it to do something, anything, that might prove it wasn’t just his imagination, that there might actually be magic in this world. But there was nothing then. Not until the power went out.

            “Can you…can you save her?”

            Grimwood considered this. Pug could tell. The Situation Room was loud with the transmitting static of surveillance feeds and droning computers, of humming cords and the incredible power required to keep this operation running independent of the world above. To keep the place secret. Secret to so many except a few young boys. Because who would believe a handful of twelve-year-olds that a place like this would even exist? Especially out here, in the country where the Idea War fought against the Soviets was just something these people saw in the nightly news.

            The man got down on one knee in front of Pug. He appeared concerned. Or as concerned as he could be. Bernard and Steve just smoked, the TVs just bleared their endless streams of people as they lived behind closed doors, and Pug understood he’d allowed himself to be drawn in. That he’d insisted he be as a recourse to how much he disliked time, how much he hated watching his best year by way of the rear-view mirror. He wanted to hold onto something. And maybe that was Chels. Maybe she was the totem of his youth. The symbol of his nostalgia.

            “I’m not here to save any one thing, Pug. You must understand that. There is something very evil in Reedy Creek. Something dark.”

            Pug bit his lower lip. He could see the monitors just above Grimwood’s fedora, its brim tipped somewhat over his eyes as they glared at him from the dark. He saw the General’s interior on an entire row of the televisions, not as it looked now, covered in crime scene tape and busybodies investigating what might have happened, but as it looked before, before what happened happened and the world wasn’t yet as dark.

            “There are bad people in the world. You must know that, Pug. You’re a writer. You must know the villains.”

            “I do,” he whispered, still looking at those monitors, seeing what he was supposed to see. The images were somehow calculated. Bernard and Steve were eavesdropping on his conversation with Grimwood, and they wanted Pug to witness the filth, just as they did, day after day. He knew the villains because they were sometimes the most fun to write. Making up evil schemes was enough to prove one’s depraved thoughts could be fun to turn into words, because the perversion of good, those actions otherwise frowned upon, were an escape. He watched on those screens a lady and man, she behind the pharmacy’s counter and he approaching, both speaking, flirting. Yes. He could see that. And she, well, she wasn’t wearing anything beneath that white lab coat, and suddenly Pug grew excited. Because he wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. He wasn’t allowed.

            “The villains brought me here. And they think I work for them. They think I am in their employ. They think their secrets are safe. But they are not.”

            Pug watched the man walk around the counter, that same counter where his mom got his prescription cough syrup, and he’d watched then just as he watched now these mysterious figures disappear into the collectivized aisles of pills, of medicine, to somehow churn out those potions that made you better. He saw the lady’s nakedness under the white frock, saw her breasts, as white as milk, supple and projecting, and he saw the man’s trousers rumple around his ankles, watching from above, watching from the camera these people in this room installed to keep tabs on that reality above them, away from the magic, in that place where villains were real. Where villains were hungry.

            “If this was one of your stories, Pug, we’d be the good guys. What writers call protagonists. Every good guy has an opposite. Or what would be the point of telling the story? The bad guys run this town. The bad guys have a secret target list, Pug. A kill sheet. And they send me their names. Like those two behind me. Those two in the General. The past can be unkind for people like us, because we know what awaits them, don’t we?”

            Pug was silent. He just watched. He couldn’t look away. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to. He felt wrong watching this woman, this beautiful woman, reveal herself to him unknowingly, but the sexualisation of its candor, of its authenticity, reminded him just what happened as you got older, as you cared less about baseball and more about girls. The game changed.

            Pug watched the two turn toward the front of the store, the tall racks throwing shadows over the room. When the man turned Pug realized who it was; he was the man his mom took him to when he needed his medicine. Dr Halliburton. But here he stood, fumbling with pants that had fallen around his shoes in a puddle, standing in his underwear with an erection, so vulnerable. No longer that magical Potion Maker but a fool, and Pug could see, even from here, this vantage, the fear in the man’s eyes. The fear that was uncertainty. And then he saw the white flash from off the screen, quickly lighting the stacks of pills, the medicine, inscribing them with the flare of knowledge as they sat witness to the same act as Pug. He could only watch Halliburton’s eyes as they grew more and more aware; there was a very real understanding and cold clarity in them when he saw finality. When he comprehended finality. That’s what the flash was. And for a moment Pug only saw the man’s head buck back, his legs kicking out from under him; and then he saw the blackened ichor flowering on the wall behind him until the image froze with Halliburton slumping down, his eyes still open but empty, and the lady holding closed her lab coat looking down at the man as he died, likely scared she was next, likely unsure what her last moments would entail.

            “Adam’s dad…his council. They’re the bad guys, aren’t they?” Pug asked, his heart racing, his face flushed. He knew it was true the moment he said it.

            “I think we’re here to save Reedy Creek before it burns, Pug. Bad men do bad things. People watched the Manhattan Project from the sidelines and were witness to what could end all life. Oppenheimer’s Destroyer of Worlds. And bad men stole this idea and gave it to our enemies and now we’re living on eggshells. What if they are doing the same thing in that plant up north? What if you and I are witness to the Reedy Creek Project? How will future generations judge us if we do nothing?”

            “They’re building a bomb?”

            “We may not know until it is too late. And I fear the names they give me share the same suspicions. It would have to be a secret worth killing for. Or why would they do this? Why would they condone this?” Grimwood gestured to the monitors above where Halliburton lay dying, frozen in a squiggle marked across his face that snarled his mouth beyond the distortion the bullet had already carved. Grimwood finally stood up. “I asked that you boys help me for that reason. The council has its loyalists, and I mine. But you live outside their bubble, Pug. Children are immune from their world. Children still believe in magic. Adults have long since turned to science to make sense of the world. It’s their trade-off. You could navigate their world undetected.”

            “Like a spy?”

            “Like a spy,” Grimwood nodded, smiling. He picked up a package from the table by Bernard, who slowly reached for a new cigarette and flicked his lighter, never breaking his concentration from the surveillance feeds. The box was wrapped in brown paper, like a lunch bag he’d take to school, its ends folded neatly and scotch taped. “You’re doing me a solid, Pug. I helped your dog. You help me. That’s how friends operate. We’re square once you do this.” He handed Pug the box. It wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t labelled.

            “What is it?”

            “I want you to give this to a man named Allen Webster. He’s a police officer.”

            “And then what?”

            “And then he will know what to do.”

            Pug looked at that box as Grimwood escorted him out. The storm was mostly finished by the time he got home, the rain slowly tapering. Chels was waiting for him in his room. As if he’d only left to go to the bathroom. The power was back on and he just stared at that box as he fell asleep, wondering what might be in it. Wondering how it made him a spy.

            And that made him genuinely smile for the first time in what seemed like forever.

4

Grampa Lew took his guest away from the foyer down the hallway. Adam could hear them, just as he could hear two sets of footsteps distinctly; the heavy clomp of grampa’s trunks and the mechanical, precise footfalls of the one who’d come through the front door where there was no rain. And even up here, at the top of the stairs with Patty in his arms, he caught a waft of what he thought was perfume. It was somehow familiar, some scent he might have catalogued far back in his mind. He’d heard somewhere or other that smell was the most connected to memory. He thought the idea sounded silly, but maybe there was some truth to it. Because that smell, that floral smell, reached into an area of his mind that left him comfortable. Reaching past even the curiosity and the fear.

            Adam set Patty down on the floor and took him by the shoulders. “You be good, bud, okay? You stay here and be good and I promise you as much Coca-Cola as you want. Mom won’t ever find out.” He smiled and Patty, a bush of hair that looked more like a wig curling into his eyes, tested his own grin, still uncertain, his eyes still darting toward the stairway where he’d sleepwalked and cried out grampa’s name; his tongue flirted with the spaces where teeth had yet to grow.

            “Just Coke. No milk. No wa-wa.”

            Adam smiled. “You got it buddy.” He ruffled his brother’s hair, remembering how upset he’d been when he learned his mom was pregnant, that he’d be a big brother; it wasn’t so much the fact that he’d no longer be alone, that he’d have somebody constantly pestering him, tagging along with him, and most likely taking his stuff without asking, it was the undeniable and piteous reality that this young kid was being born to a father who didn’t give a shit, and even at that age, even when he was just at the tipping point of eight years old, he knew that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for him and it wouldn’t be fair for his new sibling. His parents didn’t get why he was so frustrated. But he figured his mom came closest. His mom tried very hard to protect his dad, to protect who he was and what he did from what he lacked as a father. He appreciated her efforts, but they were a lie. Just like having a second baby was a lie. A fabrication of something that wasn’t real. A family that wasn’t authentic.

            Patty was timid and hugged tight to the wall across from the stairs, watching the window above as the rain streaked in thick freshets down the pane. Adam only inhaled, holding in his breath, turning toward the stairs and slowly climbing down each tread, careful not to hit a creak. He could hear his grampa’s voice. Nobody else’s. You did see somebody come in. And you heard him…or her walk away from the door with grampa. Didn’t you?

            It wasn’t worth much to appear skeptical. Not yet. When he got near the bottom of the stairs, he could hear the rain outside the front door. Checking out the side window only confirmed it; whatever grampa opened the door to, it wasn’t their front stoop, now glistening under the porch lights and cascading the coruscated glow into streaming puddles down the steps and onto their path where the gutter was gushing and the lawn was dotted with lakes. Thunder rumbled, and he expected Patty to cry out but when he looked back upstairs his baby bro was still against the wall, holding steadfast, staring back down at him with a mouth ajar and hair still curlicued around his curious eyes.

            “Is it really you?”

            He heard his grampa say this, his voice suddenly choking on the words. There was no answer. Not that Adam heard. He knew there was more said. But he didn’t really hear it, or rather, he didn’t really comprehend it; there were just murmurings, all in grampa’s timbre but broken by the wall, marred by the distance to the door, as if the levels were extending apart, were separating, leaving Adam farther away and unable to observe. What he and Patty were privy to from the top of the stairs, the level below, it was murky now. Murkier than before. He thought, and he wasn’t sure why, that something was being hidden from him; that in the world there were things you could see and understand and things you couldn’t, and that line marking the two was the one you passed over once childhood was gone. He was starting to sound like Pug. But he figured, in part, that line between where he stood and where his grampa was, in the family room, would change everything. He wasn’t sure where this thought had come from, but soon a certain insanity would come over him that would require answers. That would fundamentally change him.

            “Will it hurt?”

            He heard the inflection in his grampa’s voice, and now he didn’t care about being quiet, about being secretive, about passing that demarcation he’d set between knowing and not knowing. Adam darted toward the kitchen, where the counter was cleaned and the dishes from dinner sat stacked on a towel drying; the overhead lights were off, but he thought the lamp might be on in the family room. A diffuse, yellow light lilted into the area. His socked feet skidded on the linoleum. He thought he might double over, maybe even slide right into the back door and crash out onto the deck. He corrected himself, tensing his quads, forcing a muscular inertia to break his stride. He was right. The lamp on the side table was on. The television was turned off. The room was silent, contrasted only by the metronomic tick of the clock over the fireplace. It was quarter after 9. And of course, the thunder. The storm was just above them, roiling like the pit of a fire, black clouds crashing in an electric tango. But he didn’t really notice it. Didn’t notice the rain, the flashes of light as the room eerily lit for brief moments, tattooing the wall by the TV with shadows.

            He saw the back of grampa’s head, his grey hair pulled up in ruffles where he might have been lying down before arousing at the sound of the door; he was on the couch across from the television, in his customary spot, the cushion no doubt showing the weathered grooves of his sagging ass as he became glued to the sectional since moving to the Creek. Well, that was before the guy put on his gumshoe cap to follow Lazarus. Adam supposed everybody spent time looking for something to do.

            There was nobody in the room with him. Nobody who might have come in when the door opened. Nobody who would have owned the footfalls he’d heard following his grampa as they trudged down the hall and into the kitchen. Now you are going crazy. But he didn’t think that was true. Because Patty heard the front door too.

            “Grampa?”

            It came out as a whisper. He wasn’t sure if he’d intended to be so hoarse. Grampa didn’t stir. There was just another guttural crack of thunder above and a brilliant light, effusing the world outside with a radiance that had Adam nearly shielding his eyes. He walked around the side of the couch, suddenly so afraid he thought his knees might buckle. Because questioning his own sanity about what he did or did not see, or did or did not hear, had him wondering if this was just a dream. A nightmare. That he was still in his room, his video game casting a flickering light on his sleeping body.

            Lew’s eyes were open, staring at the dark television ahead. His hands were clasped on his lap.

            “Grampa.” This time his voice was louder. More commanding.

            Lew did not blink. He did not turn to look at him. He just stared ahead. He was missing something. What he and his friends called the spark. His eyes are younger than his face, Danny once said. Because Lew had become all of their grand dads over the course of the summer.

            Adam moved around the coffee table and stood beside the man. He wanted to take his hand, to laugh and say, “okay, ol’ man, you got me. You did. Enough games now, let’s check the scores.”

            But with the last loud rip of thunder and glottal scrack of lightning, the lamp died and Adam was left standing in utter darkness with his grampa. His grampa whose eyes stared unblinkingly at nothing. And Adam finally found his voice. His true voice. And he screamed.

5

His dad called 911 and the ambulance showed up fifteen minutes later.

            Adam stood back against the window, just watching. Disbelieving. He understood reality could somehow appear distant when you detached yourself, when you found yourself floating away, untethered by shock. Flashlights and battery-operated halogens were set up in the room, giving the space a ghostly veneer. Everyone looked washed out. Ghoulish. His mom was in the kitchen, seated next to Patty’s high-chair. She clutched to a wad of Kleenex and cried. She cried the moment she ran downstairs after Adam screamed, as if the sound of his voice, his shrill voice, broke the paralysis of the moment, broke through whatever strange magic had kept the sound of the door knocking and the sound of Patty crying invisible. He watched the paramedics put his grampa on a gurney; they worked with a cold, mechanical precision. He overheard one of them say he suspected it was a heart attack. That it was usually the heart with old folk. Because that’s what Lewis was to these strangers: a slab of meat. Somebody had already closed Lew’s eyes with indifference, never having actually looked into them, having seen the spark that was once there, that made the man so incredible. And now he was under a sheet. He didn’t matter to these people. These strangers. And Adam was suddenly furious. He stood there with his fists clenched, his nails biting into his palms until he was certain he’d find blood; he ground his teeth into what felt like nubs and he could feel the veins in his head throbbing, his vision swimming through the blur of anger, of that distraught helplessness. But mostly disbelief

            He stood this way for a long time. He watched the world pass by without fluidity; he watched his mom cry as she touched the body under that sheet as the men wheeled the gurney out; he watched Patty cry as his dad took the boy in his arms, screaming Bampa the way he had at the top of the stairs, as if he’d known something no one else had, as if he had some incredible foresight. And he was warning them.

            When everybody was gone, when they’d left with grampa Lew, Adam sat at the kitchen table with his parents. Patty was finally asleep in his mom’s arms, all cried out. Even at three-years-old, he understood what Adam didn’t. What Adam couldn’t. There were still tears welling in his mom’s eyes, but she was attempting a modicum of composure. For him, he figured. He just sat with his arms crossed, his heart beating. Furious. The power was still out. They’d lit some candles and set them on the counter. The light danced on their faces.

            “Are you okay?”

            He looked at his mom. “How can you ask that?”

            “He was old, Adam.”

            “You didn’t hear the door? You didn’t hear Patty crying?”

            “What are you talking about?” his dad asked, studying Adam with those goddamn professorial eyes. Feigning interest.

            “Before all of this, somebody…somebody came to the door and grampa…let them in.” Saying that word, saying it out loud, it helped to usher in reality and he bit his lip. His vision swam and he could see the confusion in his mom’s eyes.

            “I…we didn’t hear anything, honey.” She wiped her eye with the back of her hand.

            “Grampa didn’t die cause he’s old, goddamnit, somebody came in and…somebody did this to him. I heard it. I heard it!” Now he was crying. Because he could see the disbelief in their eyes now. He could see his father judging him. And he was starting to wonder now if he was just a bit crazy. If this was just his way of dealing with things. “Why don’t you believe me?”

            “We didn’t say anything.” His mom watched Adam stand, throwing back his chair. It clattered on the floor and Patty muffled a cry. “Adam, please. We’re all hurting.”

            “Dad doesn’t give a shit. Do you dad? Do you?”

            “Adam…”

            He wasn’t having it. No. He’d had enough.

            “Grampa loved you, Adam. He loves you. He didn’t do this to spite you. To spite us. He was old, and sometimes…sometimes you just have to let go. He’s with grandma now. They’re together again.” His mom let out a long sob and finally closed her eyes, settling her nose in Patty’s hair.

            “No,” Adam said, shaking his head. “No…he didn’t let go. He didn’t. That’s bullshit! Somebody did this to him. I swear to God. I swear to God! And I am going to prove it. I am going to prove it!”