Chapter SEVENTEEN
Every now and then Bill’s head bumped up against the window as the tires hit a seam in the road, but for the most part the ride was smooth. The steady drone of the engine might have put him to sleep had he not been so terrified.
He knew that for some reason his granddaughter was nervous, too. She kept calling over to him to ask if they were going in the right direction. He’d nod, unable to find the energy to respond verbally. At one point he didn’t answer fast enough, apparently, for she poked him—to make sure, he supposed, that he was still breathing. Gradually, he felt himself become a little less agitated, and his panic slowly morphed to something more akin to curiosity. He wanted some time—and some peace and quiet, thank you—to work out everything that had just happened.
“I thought you were thirsty.”
Like a kid who’d finally realized the futility of arguing with his mother against eating his vegetables, Bill opened one of the bottles and took a sip.
“And here’s a news flash, Grandpa. Not everybody has change for a hundred.”
Bill wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I gave you a hundred?”
“Yes, you gave me a hundred! And let me tell you—that . . . jerk . . . was not pleased.”
Okay, Bill thought, so maybe she got a little grief for not having something smaller. Was that what she was all worked up about?
“It was not a pretty scene,” she said.
Bill took another sip. Did she want to compare pretty scenes? How about one with an old man in a gas station bathroom who, feeling pretty good about things for no particular reason—euphoric, actually—looks into the mirror, starts sweating profusely, and feels his legs giving way as he realizes that he suddenly has no idea where he is or what he’s doing.
“Strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
Bill was surprised that he’d said that out loud. “Oh, nothing really,” he said. Maybe talking about it would make it less strange and more logical. But Bill never did like talking about things unless he was pretty sure he knew where the conversation was headed—or, at least, where he wanted it to go. And there was simply no way to predict how his granddaughter would react if he told her that in those first few minutes after looking in the mirror, he felt the panic as if it were a living being hovering over his head, about to consume him. He’d taken a quick inventory to fight off the panic—something he’d learned to do but didn’t know where or when. He was Bill Warrington. He was in a dirty restroom somewhere. He was sweating. What else? Nothing joined together for him.
“You don’t want to talk, fine. I can live with that.”
Bill looked over. She talked just like Marcy. But, especially in profile, she looked like Clare. The thing he found most curious of all at this point—downright baffling, actually—was that he couldn’t remember her name.
He knew she was his granddaughter. He knew they were going somewhere together. But the name was playing games with him, staying just beyond his reach, teasing him.
That’s what was happening. He wasn’t losing his memory; he was letting his memories have full rein, and, as a result, they simply took over sometimes. Like at home, when he’d make up his mind to fix a squeaky door or clear off the kitchen table but something would remind him of one of the kids, and, next thing he knew, hours would have passed and he’d find himself sitting in front of the TV, staring at a show or at nothing at all. Or like a little while ago in the gas station bathroom, when he’d been leaning up against the door trying remember what was outside it, and he suddenly thought of Clare. The thought became a presence—so clear and so vivid that he was certain she was at that very moment waiting for him just outside. And everything seemed to return, even though it hadn’t. He was Bill Warrington. Clare Warrington was his wife. And Clare Warrington was standing just beyond that door and she would smile when she saw him and hold out her hand and he’d take it and slide his fingers between hers the way they always did it, the way they had done hundreds of times.
“No, thousands of times.”
Bill saw his granddaughter look over. He closed his eyes.
Memories could also turn on you, he thought, just as they had when he’d reached for that doorknob—he would have used a paper towel, but of course the bathroom didn’t have any—and he knew in that instant that Clare would not be outside, she would not be there for him, that she was gone and somehow, in some way, he was responsible.
He leaned his head against the window.
And there she was again, leaning against their new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. The kids loved that car. They sat transfixed, staring through the skylight over the second-row seat. They were about to go somewhere special, because Clare was wearing her flowered dress, the one that accented her slim waist. Bill loved being seen with the woman in the flowered dress. But, no, she wasn’t wearing the flowered dress. She was wearing tight black pants and no socks and a pair of sneakers and she was telling Nick to hurry up or they would miss warm-ups. And then Nick was in the backseat, wearing his baseball cap and his Woodlake Drugs T-shirt and reading a Hardy Boys mystery. We’re on our way to a baseball game, Bill called back to him. Think about the game. But Nick continued reading. Seemed it was all he did. Or write little stories that he liked to read to the family at dinner. He wasn’t like the other boys, or even his older brother. One day when Nick was younger, Bill had found him in their room, sitting at Clare’s vanity table, sitting next to his mom, putting on lipstick as his mother did. Clare had told him to relax after Nick ran out the door, crying as he always did. You’re going to turn him into a queer, doing stuff like that, he said, but Clare said Nick was just curious, a sensitive child, and Bill was going to make him neurotic. And now Bill was talking to a doctor and the doctor was saying nothing was wrong and Bill yelled that something was definitely wrong and Clare was in a hospital bed, her lips bright red, as if she had just applied lipstick, her face a jaundiced yellow. The doctor poked him in the arm and asked him if he was all right. But now Bill and Clare were running. They were running away from the hospital and Bill had brought the flowered dress and Clare was in it now, asking him if this was the right way, and her skin was yellow, her lips terribly chapped, and she sat in the stands at the baseball game alone, looking small. But then Bill was next to her and he was yelling at Nick, out there in left field, to stop daydreaming and pay attention to the batter. And Clare grabbed his hand and intertwined her fingers and told him to stop it, you’re going to embarrass him. Bill looked over and Clare smiled and her lips were still red but her skin was perfect now and he heard the crack of a bat and Nick had hit the ball over the head of the pitcher and it dribbled over second base and the short stop and second baseman were confused about who should field it but it was a clean hit, a base hit, no question about it, and after a moment’s hesitation, as if surprised he had actually hit the ball, the coach yelling at him to run, Nick scampered down to first base.
“Did you see that? Did you see him hit that ball?” Bill yelled. But now they were back in the car. He didn’t recognize the road. “Maybe he’s not a fruit, after all.” He sat back and stared ahead. He was afraid to look to his left. He was afraid he wouldn’t see anything familiar, anything at all. “Wasn’t that great, Clare?” he asked, but he knew it was not Clare sitting next to him.
He closed his eyes again. It was April. April! How could he have forgotten a screwy name like that? And with what felt like a breeze across the top of his head, everything came back to him: their trip to East Lansing; his children’s no-show; the doctor.
He heard April turn on the radio and then turn down the volume. A good kid. Considerate, the way her mother used to be. Still was, most times. April hummed along with the song. After a while, she started singing softly.
“Louder,” he said, opening his eyes.
April glanced over. “Did I wake you? Sorry.”
“Sing louder, April,” he said.
April shook her head. She pushed some of her hair behind her ear. Bill saw from her profile that she was smiling.
“Why not?”
“Feels weird, singing to just one person.”
“You want to be a whatchamacallit and you’re shy?”
“Singer-songwriter.”
“Huh?”
“I want to be a singer-songwriter.”
“Well, I know you write,” Bill said, nearly ecstatic over remembering how she loved to doodle in that little notepad she kept in her pocket. “So sing.”
April exhaled noisily, as if she’d been asked to weed the garden. She turned up the volume. “It has to be loud,” she explained.
Suddenly, a sound so loud and so ghoulish filled the car that he wondered if they’d crashed into the back of a semi and he was already dead and on his way to hell, the voices below reaching up for him.
“Meet the new boss,” April yelled, shaking her head violently as she drove. The scream, Bill realized, had been his granddaughter’s. “Same as the old boss.” A few noisy codas later, the song ended. April turned the volume down.
“Well?”
Bill worried about his eardrums. “I like Sinatra, Bennett, Peggy Lee . . . those guys,” he said. “What do I know?”
“C’mon, Grandpa. Tell me the truth. Remember our deal.”
Bill nodded. Yes, he remembered the deal. And he was very grateful that he remembered the deal. Things weren’t nearly as bad as they’d seemed just a few minutes earlier. In fact, the more he talked with April, the more he seemed to remember.
“Grandpa? You’re not falling asleep are you?”
“Are you kidding? After what I just heard, I may not be able to sleep for a week!”
April glanced over at him. Bill got ready to apologize.
“Now I know what my mom means when she says that you’re about as subtle as a kick in the crotch,” April said. “I sounded that bad?”
“Like a tomcat with his testicles caught in a fence.”
“Grandpa! Gross.”
“A grizzly in heat.”
“All right,” April said. She was laughing now.
“A dachshund in a foot of snow.”
April looked over at him.
“A male dachshund,” Bill said. “Think about it.”
“I get it,” April said. “My singing sucks.”
“I didn’t say that,” Bill replied. “I just told you how it sounded to me. And isn’t that how it’s supposed to sound to someone my age? Wouldn’t you be more worried if I actually liked it?”
April didn’t say anything for a half mile or so. “I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. Listen—your mother came home one day. She was about your age, maybe a couple of years younger. She ran upstairs and started playing this record full blast. She showed me the album cover and asked me, just like you did, how it sounded. I said they needed a haircut and they’d never convince a producer to make another of those records. Guess who.”
“The Beatles.”
“How’d you know? Aren’t they before your time?”
“My dad. Whenever one of their songs came on the radio, he’d get all serious and tell me the Beatles changed the world.”
“He blamed them, eh? Well, you get my point. Doesn’t matter what I think. You get up on that stage, sing your heart out, or your head off, or whatever.”
April drove a few more miles before saying, “I’m starting to think that all this is, you know, a mistake?” She waved her arm in front of her to include him, the car, the road.
He waited a while before he answered.
“Well, I guess this is where I tell you that chasing a dream is never a mistake, right?” he said. “That everything’s going to be all right. That you’ve got what it takes to be a huge—”
“Singer—”
“—Songwriter,but what do I know? All I can say is, we’ll see. And we won’t be able to see if you don’t give it a try, right?”
“Right.”
It was getting darker now. Bill suggested that maybe April would want to turn on the headlights. She did. A few minutes later, she asked, “Where are we going, Grandpa?”
Bill didn’t even need to think about the answer, for which he was grateful.
“You’ll see when we get there. You’re going to love it.”
“And then west?” April asked. “To San Francisco?”
“You bet, April. Definitely. Golden Gate, cable car to the stars, the whole bit.”
They drove on. It was almost completely dark now, and Bill could see that April was getting a little nervous about the headlights coming at them. He suggested they start looking for vacancy signs.
“Grandpa?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For remembering my name.”
Bill didn’t know how to respond. He stared into the darkness.
“Grandpa?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you tell me a story about my mother?”
“What kind of story?”
April shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe a story about when was she about my age.” She paused. “Maybe a time when she got in trouble.”
Bill laughed. “We could drive to California and back and I’d still be talking,” he said. “Your mother was a first-class pain in the ass.”