“There is someone I very much don’t want to see in there.”
“What if you’re wrong?” he said.
“Take me back.”
“Can’t do it.” He held up his empty hands. “I checked you out just now. You are no longer a guest at Eagle River Memorial Hospital.”
I had the strangest sensation that I had left something there. Or—somewhere. But there was nothing. The clothes on my back, not even mine but bad castoffs from the hospital’s lost and found. Everything else left behind or dunked into Midnight Lake. Everything— “I brought along the ashes,” he said.
“Take me—take me to Parks.”
He came to the door and held out his arm. “I would gladly do that, if that’s where I thought you needed to be. Please.”
I hadn’t known I could still have my mind changed for me. More of his hocus-pocus. Or did that even make any sense, now that I knew that the day I’d seen him moving Bea Ransey like a chess piece, Bea Ransey was the one who’d been leading the game? Maybe I gave people too much credit for always being on the make. Or not enough credit for wanting to do what was right.
“Fine,” I said.
I let him tuck me into the wheelchair and roll me past the elderly women in theirs. “Morning, ladies,” he said, taking off his uniform hat. His hair was red-gold in the sun.
“Running for office?” I said.
“Spreading my charm around,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s too much.”
Inside, the woman at the front desk nodded at him and stared at me. He rolled me up to the desk and took a pen from the counter. He looked at the pen and then at me.
“Sign away. I can’t see anything from down here.”
He searched my face. “Which name are we going by these days?”
“Anna. For now.”
He whisked me down a long, sterile hallway into a bright atrium. I’d never been to Riverdale, but it seemed like the hospital I’d just left. Clean. Bland, except for a palm tree growing in the middle of the atrium, its canopy crowding a large skylight.
“Even the old folks’ homes in Wisconsin have more trees than Parks,” I said.
“You don’t remember seeing any trees? Near a barn?”
I held on as we sped through the atrium and down another hallway. The chair stopped in front of a door. A door like all the other doors, except that my blood pumped so hard I wondered if I could pop the stitches in my scalp. “I really don’t think I can do this.”
“I’ll be right here.”
“I’m not sure how much I believe in forgiveness.”
He reached over me for the door handle. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
The door swung open. Across the room, Joshua rose to his feet.
“Hi, Mom.”
I didn’t trust any of it. “Joshua?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Joshua?”
Russ rolled my chair to meet him. Joshua leaned awkwardly into me for a hug but I grabbed him and pulled him into my lap. My whole body shook.
“Mom, don’t hurt yourself.”
“I don’t hurt. Anymore.”
Russ backed away and closed the door.
I gasped for breath, taking in the smell of his neck, his hair. “I was so worried.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know how worried I was.”
“I’m sorry.”
I pushed him up, holding him by the shoulders so I could feast on the sight of him. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to know how much I love you.”
He shrugged.
He was still thirteen. I couldn’t expect him to be anything else.
But it wasn’t just that. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
All this. All this, and I’m still going to lose him. Which boy would I bring home?
I said, “I’m sorry, too.”
He glanced at me, away.
“I messed up. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wasn’t.”
He picked at the ugly shirt I wore. “So,” he said finally, “what now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do we—what do we do now?”
“I’m not sure.” And I wasn’t. The old fears had left me, but the weightlessness didn’t feel safe, either. “I’ve been a mess since you’ve been gone.”
He studied my face, the bandage around my head. “You look really bad.”
“That—I’ll have to explain.”
“Sheriff Keller told us about it.”
“Us?” For the first time, I tore my eyes from him and saw that there were beds in the room. One was empty, the sheets rumpled and slept in. Joshua was looking toward the other bed, which was not empty. I didn’t want to see the thin figure there, the way the sheet revealed the bony knee underneath.
“Oh, no.”
“Grandpa,” Joshua said.
“Is he—”
“He doesn’t talk,” Joshua said. “Or eat. Or look at you.”
“This is why? You ran away to see—”
He shrugged.
“You ran away from me, but you had nowhere to go.”
“Grandparents always like to see their grandkids.” He frowned at the figure in the bed. “That’s what I heard.”
I squeezed his shoulders. “Oh, Josh. All this? Just for—”
He loosened himself from me and stood up straight. “I didn’t know anything about him. Everything was such a big, dumb secret.”
“Couldn’t you have asked me?”
“You said he was dead.”
I glanced toward the bed. Wasn’t he? “I thought he was. I thought you came to find your—father.”
His shrug was small this time. “I tried.”
“But?”
“I think I saw him once,” he said. “He didn’t look—real.”
“What did you do?”
He lifted a hand to his mouth and gnawed at a hangnail. He’d chewed his fingernails to nubs. “Nothing. He didn’t see me.”
No, he wouldn’t have. He was much too selfish to notice anyone else.
I gestured for Joshua to roll me closer to the bed. My father lay on his side, eyes staring past me. He was skin and bone, an empty shell.
“I think he can hear us,” Joshua said.
“I don’t think he can.” The old man didn’t so much as blink at the sound of my voice.
I felt self-consciousness creep over the scene. I wasn’t sure what I would say, even if he could hear me. I felt as though I’d said the things that needed to be said, in action, in my departure, in my absence. He’d spoken with gestures, and so had I.
I would never forgive him. He’d never given me a reason. But I wondered about those ashes in Keller’s truck, if I wouldn’t feel differently about them if I’d had a little more time to forgive my mother. I understood a little better now. She was scared. No one had ever taught her that she didn’t have to be. But she had somehow taught me, and that was a lot.
I pushed back a few inches. “Your . . . grandfather and I have already said everything to each other we need to. Can you understand that?”
Joshua turned to the prone figure on the bed. He nodded.
“Joshua, I’m so sorry. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You haven’t even heard all the mistakes I’ve made yet. And—I can’t change them.”
The door opened a crack and Russ peeked in. “OK in there?” he asked.