Vivian In Red (12 page)

I
spot Daniel from halfway around the pond. He moves with pacing energy, slicing along the path in his severe dark clothes. When he picks me out of the crowd he brightens, that look of “There you are! Happy to see you!” that was always one of my favorite things. Now this brief zing of happy comes with a fresh crack across my heart, and I am starting to believe this is not worth it. This generous emotional support, this thoughtfulness and consideration held out from a distance by an outstretched hand with no obligation or promise, with him only lingering at the doorway of my life—it’s worse than a Daniel-shaped absence. Perhaps that is only bravado. I haven’t been brave enough to test it.

“Hey.” He grips me around the shoulders in a brief hug before falling into step, matching my unambitious amble. Joggers trot past. Nannies, mothers, and children flow around us like leaves on a current.

“Going to see Grampa Milo today?”

“Yes,” I answer, patting my shoulder bag with its notebook and tape recorder, though why I’m bringing the tape recorder I’m not sure I could even explain, considering.

Packing my bag this way did feel more solid and believable, as if I’m a real reporter on the job and not just a kid following her uncle’s orders. My spurt of chutzpah in taking on this book has been thinning out by the day, and it’s only the humiliation of calling to change my mind that has prevented me from doing just that.

“I’m in over my head,” I tell Daniel.

He waves his hand over the empty space above my skull. “That’s not exactly hard, Shorty.”

I elbow him lightly. “I’m not that short. Just compared to you.”

“Anyway, it will all work out. It always does.”

I don’t even bother to reply to this. I used to waste my breath correcting him: me with the absent, rejecting mother and dead father. He’d counter with a heap of small disaster predictions that never came to pass. Maybe his point was that my orphaning was a weird outlier, an exception to his blithe “always.” Or maybe he thinks because I’m still walking and breathing, this too has “worked out.” Just now I’m tempted to ask if things “work out” for suicides, but that could alarm him uselessly. It’s not nihilism as much as scoring rhetorical points. Only in my head, though, which I suppose makes those points somewhat less than rhetorical.

“Ellie? You in there?”

He used to ask me this all the time. I reply with my usual answer: “No, but you can leave a message.”

“I really mean it. That you can do this book. I know you think it’s just me being glib, but it’s true.”

He’s answering as if he can read my mind. After two years together, I suppose he can.

He goes on, “You’re a great interviewer, and look, this is your grandfather. It’s not like it’s going to be all hardball and stuff.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I’m trying to be reassuring. I know the last time…”

I’d eventually told him about my freakout in front of the mother in Bed-Stuy. I’d edited the story to remove the exact reference to the timing. Not so much to protect his feelings. I just didn’t want to endure his agonizing apology that would churn up that whole day again.

“I know,” I say, letting him off the hook. He’s not even mine anymore, no reason he should be on that hook in the first place.

“It’s not like you were bad with tough interviews, anyway. You just needed strategies, is all. Eye contact, rehearsing how it would go mentally beforehand.”

“No more coaching, thanks. Anyway, that’s all over.”

“Why? I mean, after this book, your name will get back out there…”

I tug on his elbow to stop his walk so he will face me. “Didn’t I ever tell you how I got into this magazine thing in the first place? Eva did it. I was all set to do another summer making copies and answering phones at Short Productions, having a blast and staying out of the way. I used to tag along with Grampa when he went to check on shows in rehearsal, or at auditions, and that was the best, watching something creative get born right in front of my nose. But then Eva said I was ‘wasting my talent,’ and went and got me a magazine job with one of her college friends. It was the same thing, making coffee and such, but they gave me little writing assignments, too, about cosmetics and new romance novels. And then Naomi all but wrote my resume for me, did all the work preparing my clips on sheets of paper—I mean, she probably had Shelly do it at the office—and she got me my first freelance assignment after I graduated, interviewing some tech startup guy she dated once. All because Aunt Rebekah happened to read an essay I wrote for sociology and said I had a way with words. All because I didn’t want to be a little Junior Naomi in pinstripe suits sitting in human resource meetings, and I wasn’t sure what else I wanted to do. Don’t ever say you’re ‘not sure’ in front of my cousins. It’s like chumming the water.”

I turn toward a bench facing the glassy stillness of Conservatory Pond and flop down.

Daniel settles down on the bench next to me with a strange, unnecessary level of care. “All I’m saying is that you’ll be great at whatever you want to do, Ellie. Whenever you figure that out.”

I lack the energy to argue. It just ends up in this crazy loop where I say things about myself meant to be reality checks, and he keeps marshaling his ninny optimism, until I’m painting myself as a drooling nincompoop and he’s awarding me the Pulitzer. I suppose it’s meant to be nice, but you know what else would be nice? If someone listened to me.

I lean back on the bench and bump into Daniel’s arm, which had been stretched along the back. He lifts his arm out of the way, crosses his arms over his chest. Not so long ago he would have wrapped that arm around me, stroking my shoulder with his fingers.

I watch a mother pick up her crying toddler. She covers the child’s sore elbow with tiny kisses like bird pecks. My mother may have missed years of my falls and scrapes and mishaps, but I know who was there to pick me up, alongside my dad. My Grandma Bee, and Grampa Milo. I take in a deep, fortifying breath and then beam out a prayer of sorts to the memories of my grandmother, my dad.
I’ll be good to him, I promise. I’ll do my very best.

“Hi, Grampa.”

Grampa Milo looks up and waves at me, with his fingers opening and closing like a child who doesn’t quite know how to do it yet. He seems downcast and frail, even more than he’d been right after his collapse.

When Esme let me in, she warned that “Mr. Short is not feeling in spirits today,” and raised her dark eyebrows in an ominous look.

In the corner of the room sits one of the day nurses, reading a book. I’m hoping she’ll step out and give us privacy, but she doesn’t even seem to have noticed me.

I settle in the other embroidered chair, which remains in its new, closer position to Grampa’s chair. The rug still holds depressions from the chair’s former position, after all this time. “So, Grampa, did Uncle Paul explain to you about the book?”

His gaze appears to be on the floor ten inches in front of his feet, which are in slippers. He’s always worn shoes in the house, and nice ones, too, having often said that his first purchase for himself after his first big hit was a decent pair of shoes. I’m about to repeat my question, when I detect a slow nod.

“I hope it’s okay. I promise I’ll do a good job. People are interested, you know. Why should we keep all those great stories to ourselves?” I had already decided to leave Naomi and her less-sensitive plan out of the picture. Grampa loves her, too, I know. Every brash, ambitious inch of her.

He turns his head slowly to face me, then gestures to his face. He shrugs, and turns his gaze back to the same spot on the carpet.

“Oh, I know, Grampa, but your voice will come back. Meanwhile, we can do a lot with yes or no, and gestures, don’t you think? And Uncle Paul gave me a list of people to start with, you know, your friends who are still… I mean, those who… Oh hell, this is off to a flying start, isn’t it?”

I’m rewarded with a sly smile.

I hadn’t phrased it right, anyway. It wasn’t a list of not-dead-yet friends. It was a list of relatives of those friends. Nephews and sons and grandsons. Most of the primary sources had gone ahead of Grampa to whatever there is after death. Of course there were younger people who had worked with him, but everything about the far past, the parts of his life that Grampa Milo always waved away with a grimace and a shrug? All of those people are already pushing up the daisies.

“I know you weren’t always crazy about this idea, but I won’t do a bad job, honest I won’t. I’ll be respectful.”

No reaction. Maybe a nod, I can’t even really tell.

“Excuse me a minute, Grampa. I have to go get something I’ll be right back.”

When I hustle across the entry, I interrupt Esme in the kitchen. She startles and turns away from the window, and that’s when I notice a cigarette in her hand, near the cracked kitchen window. “I’m sorry, miss. I know I’m not supposed to. Just once in a while, when I feel worried… I felt so bad the other day when Mr. Paul said he smelled it. It must have been in my clothes.” She stubs it out in the sink and closes the window.

“What did you mean when you said he’s not in spirits?”

Esme sighs and bites her lip. “He had a burst of good mood last week, where he was working hard with the therapist on his words, and smiling at the nurses. He brightened up at Mrs. Linda’s plan to let him sleep in his old bed again. But one night he seemed to get frightened, then very agitated, and tried to … push something. But just the air. There was only air. I was bringing him a drink while the nurse was in the restroom, and I was glad it was just me.”

“Why is that?”

Esme looks over both shoulders, then leans across the kitchen island. “I’m afraid Mr. Short might be seeing things. And I’m afraid if Mr. Paul sees it, or the nurses, they will think he needs to be in the hospital. And I think that would suck the last of the life out of him, to be away from his home, from Mrs. Bee’s home.”

She straightens back up. “He has not done that again that I have seen, and no one else has noticed. But ever since, he has been sad and quiet and won’t work with the therapists anymore. It’s like something is vexing him, something even more than the not speaking.”

“And he can’t explain it to anyone. How terrible.”

A chill crawls across my neck, though the apartment is stuffy in the summer heat that creeps in each time someone opens a door. It’s more than terrible, it’s eerie. Like a curse.

“This is ridiculous to do a book now. I must be out of my mind.”

“What book, miss?”

“Oh, never mind, I’m just mumbling to myself. Thank you, Esme. For telling me this.”

“And miss, please don’t tell anyone what I saw Mr. Short do. With the pushing air. I’m worried for him to end up in the hospital, and of course Mrs. Linda would be upset with me if she knew I saw but did not say. I would speak of course if I thought the hospital would help. But I think… I think that it would not.”

“Well said. I think that it would not, indeed.”

“And I’m so sorry about the smoking. I promise I won’t do it in the house again.”

“Well, it’s not
my
house, so I don’t much care as far as that goes. But it’s probably wise, for the sake of your lungs if nothing else. I won’t tell, don’t worry.”

I step into the foyer, where I can see the back of Grampa Milo’s drooping white head. I’ll have to wait for the interviewing. Another day, when perhaps he is “in spirits.”

As I say goodbye to Grampa Milo—I can’t help but wonder each time if it will be the last—a worry squirms into the back of my mind. What if he was “pushing air” and pushed something else and was hurt? What if he became a danger to himself, if he’s getting agitated at nothing? Was he hallucinating?

What if a terrible thing happened, and I helped it happen with my silence? Though, if I told Aunt Linda, she might fire Esme for not saying anything earlier.

If I’ve learned nothing from my aborted career as a journalist, I know this: the way forward is only obvious if you blind yourself to half the facts. When you fully think through both sides of an issue as a reporter should, when you can actually understand and believe all of the arguments for going one way or another, decision-making becomes impossible. After all, either path could lead to disaster. Maybe half-ignorance is where bliss truly lies.

I let myself out and realize I’ve left my carefully packed bag behind, with its useless recorder and fresh clean pad of paper. It hardly matters; they are props for a charade, and I’ll have to resume the charade another day.