“‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,’” he parrots. “This was how Thomas got his reputation as, what did you call that? A gremlin? The pair of you were always up to something. And afterwards you would always be racked with guilt. You’d be full of apologies and making amends—I’ll be gut for a week, so gut!—and you were. Naturally, we all assumed everything naughty had been Thomas’s idea.”
“He keeps telling me everything was always my idea,” I complain. “Did you know it was his idea to come over this summer, not his mum’s?”
“Ha-ha,” Papa says, goblin-gleeful. “Not at first—I thought it was you, like the cat.”
“Papa,” I say carefully. “I didn’t bring Umlaut home.”
“Nein? Anyway, after the party, I call Thomas’s mum and she told me that he told her it was your idea.” He hands me his glass. “I’ve missing you.”
I take a sip—sour and vinegary—and say, “I’ve been here.”
“Have you?” His voice isn’t sharp, like the wine—but it stings. If everyone’s telling me I’m only half here, maybe they’re all right.
“I missed you too,” I tell him. Papa draws his knees up, looking out to the tangled garden. “And I miss Grey.” I gulp the wine again, to hide my embarrassment. We’ve never talked about this. We’ve snuck around, avoiding the subject.
“Ich auch.” Me too. “I don’t know—did I get it wrong? Letting you and Ned find your own way? When your mami died, Grey did this for me. Stepped back. Let me discover.” Papa trails off, plucking the wine from my hand. “Liebling. You’ve been reading his diaries. You know now he was ill, the radiation treatment?”
*R
*R
*R
Radiation? The wine and the second shock announcement of the day set me reeling in the twilight. I think of Grey’s thunderstorm moods last summer. His early nights. All the times I’d cycled past the Book Barn and the door had been locked. Getting me a book for my birthday. Thomas’s voice in the kitchen, saying, morphine.
And Grey, leaping over the fire. Shouting for a Viking’s death.
“No. I didn’t know.” All these secrets, shattering.
“Ja, Liebling,” says Papa. He gulps his wine, till there’s just a bit left, then he hands it back to me. “Go slowly. I already have Ned to deal with. Hodgkin lymphoma.” He tests the words on his tongue, unfamiliar. “Cancer. For a while. The stroke was always a possibility. But anyway, even so. There wasn’t much time, and he wanted you not to know. You and Ned had exams. You’d lost your mami. He liked when everything was happy, you know?”
And I thought we had all the time in the world. I’ve held on to a meaningless wish for a year. It stings a little, when I let it go. It had put down roots. Then I pour my wine onto the grass: a ritual. And at last, the guilt dissolves like smoke in the air.
Papa is watching me. “Ich liebe dich mit ganzem Herzen,” he says. I love you with my whole heart.
Ned chooses this touching moment to start pounding AC/DC through his open window.
“Ist your brother?” asks Papa, wincing.
“I’ll get him.” I unfold upright and stomp over to his window, taking out my feelings on the grass. Yellow tulips and wormholes and a wish. It’s haunted me for a year; now it’s gone.
“Ned!” I bang on the window. “We’re getting DRUNK.”
He pops his head out immediately. “What’s the occasion?”
“Grey.”
*
“Remember the slugs?” I ask.
“The sluuuuuuugs.” Ned stretches the word from here to the moon as he flops backwards on the grass. We’ve been out here since I banged on his window, the twilight slipping into dark, sharing our favorite Grey anecdotes. Tree laundry. The frozen orange story. Slugs.
They were Grey’s first test on the road to enlightenment. He read all these books, went temporarily vegetarian, started meditating. Fat Little Buddha statues sprang up all over the cottage, and bites sprang up all over Grey’s legs because he wouldn’t even swat a mosquito.
Summer and mosquitoes gave way to autumn and daddy longlegs. Around October, it started to rain. And rain begat slugs, and slugs begat more slugs, and slugs begat Grey slowly, softly, gradually, losing his temper. For a few weeks, he’d painstakingly pluck fat grey apostrophes off the pavement and tip them into the Althorpes’ vegetable patch.
Then one night, we were woken at two in the morning by a bellow of “Bugger enlightenment!” and Grey banging a hoe on the pavement. A massacre.
“Did I ever tell you about him and the bells? He just stood out there”—Papa waves in the direction of the church—“yelling they should shut up.”
There were bells after his funeral, ringing out through the afternoon. Everyone goes quiet. Ned wriggles upright.
“We should do something,” he says, breaking the silence.
“It’s late,” says Papa. “Bedtime. No more parties, no more drinking.”
“I meant”—Ned rolls his eyes—“about Grey. It’s nearly a year. Shouldn’t we ring bells or, okay, maybe not. Fireworks?”
“If you both wanted, we could scatter the ashes,” says Papa. “They’re in the shed.”
“The shed?” Ned hoots. “You can’t keep them in the shed! It’s—it’s—”
“Where else would you keep them, Liebling?” Papa asks, his face rumpled in confusion. “Anyway, Gottie put them there.”