Chapter 13 #3
“We’re seeing each other,” Theo answered, and then I repeated it.
I also felt the need to further explain that it didn’t have anything to do with my improved vision with my new glasses, but that we were going out to dinner, taking in movies, and watching some sporting events like hockey games where he spotted lots of tripping penalties that the refs inexplicably missed.
That was the extent of our relationship and as far as I was concerned, it was enough.
The list on my phone was really long—really, really long, and I also had the additional list in my head.
I could definitely put my used floss directly into the garbage every day, but other issues were harder to face.
How did you become a person who stuck with a job, one job, forever?
How did you stop yourself from being selfish?
How did you get through life without the help of others to pull you along, sometimes literally like in the case of a culvert I’d gotten trapped in?
When we arrived at the cabin, I parked in what seemed like a good spot just off the driveway and before we’d gone around the final turn.
Theo stepped out of the truck as I reached for my boots.
“Wait for me to help you down. The ground is really bad,” he told me, and I watched him squelch to my side.
“Holy hell, it’s a mess. Ready?” When I nodded, he picked me up and swung me over to a patch of earth that looked a little dryer.
“Ready?” he asked again, and held out his hand.
According to him, this was part of seeing each other.
It wasn’t anything that he included in the group chat when asked about our relationship, but it was true that we were doing a lot more hand-holding, arm-around, standing-close kinds of activities.
I definitely enjoyed them but also found them odd.
He’d certainly had the opportunity for more.
I had fallen asleep in his bed all those months ago when I’d first come here, and I had woken up fully clothed with him next to me.
Then, for weeks after that, I had been just down the hall in his cabin and perfectly willing—
We both stopped walking, because…holy Mary. We’d come around the bend in the driveway and I saw that there had been a big change since I’d left here on Friday morning. “Theo,” I breathed.
“It’s beautiful,” he said reverently. “I never thought I’d get so emotional about roof sheathing.”
“It’s such a step,” I told him. “Now there’s so much more that can go under the sheathing, and I don’t mean the rats that used to live in and maybe dine on the insulation.”
“No, rats are no longer allowed.” He carefully led me up the plywood ramp to the front door.
The sheathing had been a step, but there were no actual steps quite yet.
We walked just as carefully through what was clearly becoming a house, with the same layout of the walls but with new wires snaking through them and new pipes, too.
I took a picture of some of those and sent it to Nicola, since they were the type that she liked the best, the kind that could have water running through them and not just clogs of rust.
We stopped in the kitchen and looked around. “Remember how it used to be?” he asked, and I nodded. I remembered the piles of random things, like all the ping pong paddles and ax heads, the collection of onion skins and the large number of angle grinders.
“I had cleared a little space on the table, but every time I came in, I felt so terrible that I walked right back out,” he continued. “I felt like I was letting everyone down.”
“Who?” I asked. “The only people that saw the mess in here were the rats and the dust mites, and I don’t count them as people.”
“No, me neither. I meant my grandfather, for one. He had left me this house and I was watching it fall apart, but I also didn’t want to mess up his legacy.
I was thinking of my mom, too, who would have been so thrilled to have him give this to her.
Even with the rats and the mites,” he confirmed.
“It would have meant that her father still cared about her.”
“That’s hard,” I said. “It’s hard to think that your parents don’t care. You know that he did, though.”
“What? Are you talking about my grandfather?”
“Yes, him. The guy who gave you this cabin,” I added, in case there was any confusion. “He really loved your mom a lot.”
“How do you know that?”
“The bins,” I said, but Theo still didn’t understand.
“Didn’t you ever look in them? Come on.” This time, I took his hand and led him through the house where there wasn’t a finished wall separating it from the back so the yard was very easy to access.
We slogged through the mud, which one day could have been a very nice grass area but not quite yet, and also past the place where I had been setting up the oven to make the Christmas cake.
I would finish that later, I decided, and I would add “complete all projects” to my phone list.
We went to the biggest outbuilding, one that had been used as a barn in the past. I had used it to store all the plastic totes from his grandpa’s secret room, the one that wasn’t so secret because it was just behind a door off his bedroom.
Keon had a lot of ideas about how to remodel this barn but for now, it was mostly empty and mostly watertight.
Again, it was only mostly watertight, so I had protected the contents of the big containers with three or four heavy-duty tarps.
Those were covered in dirt and dust and both of us sneezed as we removed them, due to the Dermatophagoides farinae and Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus.
They were wet, too, and that made me think of Regina and her fear of me contracting Pontiac fever after I fell into the fake lake at their medical office.
“No, you don’t need to worry, and I won’t tell Regina anyway,” Theo assured me when I asked him about a risk of that. Then he started to work on the lid of one of the bins. “There’s a lot of tape on this.”
“I know. I put it there,” I said, and took out my tool.
“Holy hell, Grace! Why do you have a knife that big?”
“This?” I looked at it. It was nowhere near the size of the one that my friend Arcaris carried. “I figured out that a long time ago that it was better to have something to protect myself.”
“From what? Lions and bears? That’s huge and..” He carefully touched the blade. “It’s very sharp.”
It was, and I would hone it again after using it to slice through all the tape that I’d put around the lids.
“The stuff in here will show you,” I remarked.
I carefully stored the knife and I watched his eyes go to where I had secured it in my bra.
That was why it was a good idea to wear one, because they made knives easier to carry.
Then I wiped off some of the dirt from the side of a bin to read what I’d written there. “Number three,” I said, pointing.
“I don’t understand.” But he helped to peel back the rest of the tape and pulled open the lid, and I sneezed again as he looked at the contents. “What is all this?”
“Let me check.” Now I wiped off my hand on my jeans, since I hadn’t been wearing shorts for a while now, and I looked at my phone to confirm what the number corresponded to. “Number three is the bin that I called ‘Fool,’” I said, and showed him where I’d typed “3=Fool.”
“What does that mean?”
“This is full of school stuff. Because ‘fool’ rhymes with ‘school,’ but I didn’t use the real word to confuse anyone who was trying to get information on you,” I explained further. “It’s like a code.”
“Who’s trying to get into these totes in the barn? Why do we need a code?”
“You never know. Anyway, all of them are filled with documents and papers. There are no munitions, and that was why I looked inside. It was about safety and not sneakiness.” I was often accused of sneaking and I couldn’t deny that.
Stopping that behavior was on the list but in this case, I really had wanted to make sure that Theo wouldn’t get hurt so I’d carefully checked the contents of all the bins before I’d brought them to this somewhat watertight barn.
“Munitions?” he repeated. “Why would there be munitions?”
I hadn’t wanted to scare him before by explaining that I’d found quite a lot of those, but the bomb squad had been great.
“Just in case,” I said vaguely. “Look, your grandpa was very neat and organized. Funny for someone who also kept piles of empty potato chip bags, but people are funny in general.”
He did look. This bin held school stuff, as I’d explained, and it started with fingerpainting and crayon drawings from preschool and kindergarten.
We carefully moved through the contents, all the way to the last folder, which held records from the University of Michigan.
The final document was a letter confirming the student’s decision to withdraw from classes there.
“I can’t believe he saved all this stuff about my mom,” Theo said slowly. He stared at the paper in his hand and shook his head. “All of it, for so many years and even after they were totally estranged.”
“No, that’s wrong.”
“A lot of it dates from after my grandmother died, so Grandpa Theodore must have been the person who stored a large part of it,” he answered, but I still shook my head.
“I mean that they weren’t totally estranged.” I stood up from the bin I’d been using as a stool, the one marked with a “4” which corresponded to the word “Glove,” according to what I’d written in my phone. “I’m going to take out my knife again but there’s no reason to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, and it sounded a little huffy to me. “What’s in this one? More about my mom?”
It was from her, not about her. Just like his grandpa had saved all the Valentine cards from his wife, he had also saved all the communication from his daughter.
It started with short notes saying “I love you” and “Happy Birthday,” which must have been written by another adult but were carefully signed in big, block letters by a kid.
There were postcards from vacations, printouts of emails, and then the correspondence became only mailed letters.
According to the postmarks, those were the most recent.
He read everything, and it took a while with the letters because a lot of them were long.
I knew about their length only by the heft of the envelopes and not because I had read them myself.
I had wanted to, but I hadn’t opened anything because it was private, like medical records.
I had guessed that these were the emotional records of his family, so I had left them closed.
He put the last letter back into its envelope and returned it to its spot. “That was dated just before he died. She wrote that she blamed him for how her life had gone and for losing my sister.”
“It was your grandfather’s fault?”
“No,” Theo said quietly. “It was due to a series of events that a lot of people contributed to. He did, she did, I did. My sister is gone, that’s the conclusion.”
“It’s easier to blame other people.”
“It’s much harder to see the blame in yourself. Why would he have kept all this? My mom was so angry and punitive.”
“Maybe he wanted proof that she was wrong, or maybe he thought that she was right. It’s hard to say, except for this.” I pointed at the number I’d written in marker on the side of the bin. “Four.”
“What does ‘four’ mean?”
“It stands for glove,” I explained, showing him my phone. “And that rhymes with ‘love.’ Your mother was really mad but she kept communicating and he kept saving everything. They might have been furious, but I would guess that they still loved each other.”
“What a dumb thing to do,” he said, and he sounded angry now himself.
“What idiots! Both of them were exactly the same, stubborn and self-righteous. Look where it got them. He died in a mess of papers and broken flowerpots, and she took her own life in the house she had lost to foreclosure, next to the empty barn because she’d had to sell the horses. They were both alone.”
I nodded, because I had thought the same thing. It was so easy to go the wrong way, though, and often so hard to turn things back.
“Did he ever answer any of these letters?” he asked, but neither of us knew.
“They were all opened and he saved them, so at least he read them. She talks about her kids suffering. Did he send money? He could have sent food. He could have asked us to come up here for the summer. He didn’t do any of that.
” Theo took the lid of the bin and slammed it back on.
“Then he wrote to me and I stepped into being his grandson. I didn’t think that he’d known about our problems, but he had.
He ignored them so he could keep being angry. ”
“I probably shouldn’t have cut the tape,” I said. Another mistake. I stood and started to pull the tarps back over everything, just to get them out of his sight.
“No, you did the right thing.” He stood up too and helped me until the plastic totes were covered again.
“I shouldn’t have remained in ignorance about my past. I had asked him about my mom, and he never told me that she’d tried to stay in contact.
Vengeful, bitter contact. Why did they act like that? ” he asked me.
I didn’t know, but I did understand what I always needed when I felt confused and lost like Theo probably did. “I’ll just hug you,” I suggested. It was as good as I’d expected.
“Families are terrible,” he said. His arms went around me, too.
“Sometimes. If you love them, sometimes you have to accept what they can give you, even if it’s not what you really need. Maybe they’re just not capable of more.”
He hugged me closer and we stayed like that for a while, even as it started to rain and I realized that the barn wasn’t even slightly watertight. And then I got a text and suddenly, we had to run through the mud to the truck. We needed to get to Detroit, to a hospital there.
Juliet and Beckett’s baby was on the way, and I remembered again that even when things were hard, there was also joy. Our joy weighed eight pounds and three ounces, and his name was Nicholas.