#3
“Granddad?” I say, shaking him, gently. “Granddad?”
His face is halfway in the mud of the riverbank, but as I pull him away from it, he breathes, a long painful exhale.
“He’s alive!” I call over to Pop.
“And not yet deaf,” Granddad grunts. “Max?”
“Don’t move,” I say, putting his head in my lap. “There’s probably stuff broken.”
“There’s certainly that.” He grunts again. Then his Noise rises across the river to Pop.
“Max?” Pop yells over to me. “He wants you to move his legs out of the water. But one is definitely broken, so as gently as you can!”
Keeping Granddad’s head in my lap, I reach over and take first one knee and then the other out of the water. On the second leg, he stifles a cry of pain so serious it scares me. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say. He doesn’t say anything to that. “Granddad?”
“He’s passed out,” Pop says. “I can tell by his Noise.”
“What do we do?” I yell back. “He’s injured really bad.”
“There might be medipaks in the stuff the Land had,” he says, thinking. “I’ll go back and see if I can find them.”
“And leave me here?” I say. “What if there are more crocs?”
“Then you punch them in the effing nose like the tough guy I know you are,” he says, and it’s half-kidding but it’s half-true, and I see what Pop is asking of me. His Noise doesn’t want to do it, but there’s no choice. And I can’t be a kid here. There’s no choice about that either.
And so I choose not to be a kid.
“I’ll knock their teeth out!” I call back.
He grins, worried, but nods. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
He leaves. And I’m alone with Granddad.
···
His breathing is harsh in my lap, short little breaths I can only imagine are an attempt to block out whatever pain he’s feeling. I keep looking around for crocs, but that fireball and the smell of croc meat will probably keep any others at bay for awhile. I hope.
“Granddad?” I say softly. “Granddad, don’t die, okay? Please, don’t.”
I know it’s stupid, but there’s that little feeling like, what if I didn’t say it and he dies? You know?
I remember you, he says in his Noise, his eyes still closed, and I don’t know if he’s speaking to me or dreaming or what. It’s all scarily faint, and I feel a terror of it fading altogether.
“What did you say, Granddad?”
“I remember you,” he says again, this time out loud. “As a little girl.”
A pang in my stomach, a heat on my face. They’ve been so good, my family, great really. I’ve never had to deal with sentences like this from them, only strangers, only dickheads.
“Granddad?” I say.
“But we were wrong about that,” he says, eyes still closed. “Weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say, breathing a little easier. “Yeah, we were.”
“You would’ve had Noise, you know. If you hadn’t had the cure.”
“I was born with Noise.”
He opens his eyes slightly. “It happens in the Land, too.”
“It does?”
“Not the Noise part. They all have Noise. The other.”
“The other.”
“There are Land who cross the boundary. Land who were born one way but are actually another. And everything along that spectrum.”
I swallow. “I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you? No one in that city knows a goddamn thing about the Land.”
“Pop does.”
“Yeah, he does. I don’t know if he knows this, though. The Land don’t really talk about it in the Conversation.”
I grow a little red again. “Because they’re ashamed?”
He frowns at me. “Because it’s so normal, what is there to say?”
My eyes fill up at this. I don’t like it, but they do.
Granddad says gently, “Even men cry, Max. The good ones do, anyway.”
I blink and let the tracks run down my face.
“Good,” Granddad says, “good.” He coughs, moaning at the pain, but unable to stop at what must be lungs full of water.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say.
“I don’t think it is, Max,” he says when the cough finally settles. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry it’s just you. You shouldn’t have anything like the responsibility for this.”
“You just said I was a man.”
“So I did,” he says. “So you are.”
“I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
He slowly, clumsily, moves one of his arms, putting his hand on my elbow. That’s about as far as he seems able to reach, but it’s enough. “Tell your father,” he says, but then he doesn’t finish.
“Granddad?” I say. “Granddad?”
His eyes are closed again, but this time he doesn’t answer me. I start to cry some more, but then his Noise speaks.
Tell him, Granddad says. Tell him a father couldn’t be prouder.
“You tell him yourself. He’s getting a medipak. It’ll help.”
I’m beyond that now.
“Then the Land can save you. They did it before.”
Max, Granddad says. Every story has to end.
“But sometimes stories seem like the end but really aren’t.”
He laughs at this, wincing again at the pain. You can’t argue me out of death, Max.
“Wanna bet?”
He laughs again.
And that’s actually it. That’s the moment. That one laugh.
Because then his Noise fades, all the way to nothing.
And there’s the emptiest silence I’ve ever heard.
I’m still holding him, still crying when Pop returns.
“Max?” I hear from across the river.
I can’t lift my head, but even without seeing his Noise, I know Pop knows.
It takes Pop about an hour to find a way across, but he does, walking a long way back up this side of the riverbank to get to me and Granddad.
Who I’m still holding.
A croc could’ve come up and bit me right on the face, and I wonder if I would’ve noticed.
Fortunately, none did. I hear Pop coming before I see him, fighting through underbrush.
I can tell how worried he is by how loud his Noise is, and I want to call out to him and tell him I’m okay, but somehow I can’t.
Maybe I’m not okay.
“Max?” he says, finally reaching our little part of the river, the part that, yeah, feels like mine and Granddad’s now.
Pop kneels next to me and puts a hand on my shoulder, speaking so gently it aches my heart.
“Max, let me take him now, okay? You’ve done brilliantly.
You’ve done so well. Let me help you now, all right? ”
I nod a little and lean back. He reaches underneath Granddad and lifts him so I can scoot out.
When I properly look up, I see Pop holding Granddad to his chest in a hug, his own eyes closed, his mouth in the saddest frown I’ve ever seen.
His Noise is filled with pictures of Granddad, mostly much younger, mostly with Pop much younger, too.
It’s so sad, I start crying again, just watching my pop hold his pop and remember him.
After a while, I take one of the bandages from the kit Pop brought and wrap it around my ankle.
I feel the little injections it makes in my skin, looking for bone and muscle and tendon to repair.
It hurts, the process, but I barely feel it this time.
Much less than after the rine attack. I feel almost totally numb.
I’m not sure what we’re gonna do next. The entire party we were traveling with is dead.
I don’t even know where we are, and I hope Pop does without needing Granddad or the Land to guide us.
I also don’t know what we’re going to do about Granddad or the others who died.
We can’t just leave them, but how can we carry them?
I watch as Pop lays Granddad’s body back down, gently as he would a baby’s. He kisses Granddad on the forehead and just as gently uses his thumbs to close Granddad’s eyes all the way.
“Pop?” I say, quietly. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Max,” he says, his voice thick. “But we’re going to get out of this. Don’t you worry.”
“I’m sorry, Pop.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I’m sorry you lost your father.”
He bites his lips together at this, and his Noise longs in sadness again. He wipes his cheeks, but he nods and says, “Thank you, Max. I loved him very much.”
“He said to tell you no father could be prouder.”
His sadness frown comes back, but then he says, “He’s actually wrong there. No father could be prouder than me right now. You did amazing, son. Just amazing. Granddad didn’t die alone.”
He comes to me, and we finally hug. He smells like sweat and the river smell that was on Granddad, but mostly he just smells like Pop. My Pop.
“I lost my bag somewhere,” I say, when we finish the hug.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I found mine.”
“I was the one carrying the communicator.”
This stops him. “Oh.”
“We can’t call Mom and Ben. Tell them about Granddad.”
He sighs. “There’s nothing we can do about that right now. We’ll get to them soon enough.”
“Pop,” I say. “What happened? What was that rock and the hole and the fire? And the god this time was Land-shaped.”
“I know. I saw it, too.”
“What’s going on?”
“I wish I could tell you.” He’s still standing over Granddad. “Can you help me here?”
The bandage and its injections are working on my ankle now, so I test it.
It seems good enough, if a little tender, so I get up and I go to Granddad’s feet.
Pop lifts him by his shoulders, and we carry him to a flatter, grassier part of the riverbank.
He’s heavier than I expected, but also somehow lighter, too, which I know makes no sense, so just take my word for it.
We set him down, as gently as if he was alive. Pop takes a moment to stroke Granddad’s hair, just a little touch that breaks my heart. Then he blows out a long breath.
“I’m going to start a campfire,” he says. “Should keep the crocs away, if the bushfire goes out.”