Chapter 12
The Randomness of Life and Death
The days pass monotonously, then Thursday comes, and it’s time for group therapy again.
Adrian is better now, almost optimistic, and tips his lemonade back as Donna tells of all the losses that have left their mark on her, starting with her sister, who died of an infection when she was a baby, then going through her best friend’s murder before ending with the car crash that killed her husband and daughter.
Thirty-two years have passed, but anyone who heard the story would think it had happened yesterday.
“I must be cursed,” she concludes.
“We already talked about this, Donna.” Faith, sitting next to her, takes the old woman’s hand gently. “It isn’t your fault.”
“It’s impossible not to try to find a reason, though,” Matilda assures her. She’s a widow, and she’s taking care of her four-year-old son. “I’m not talking about curses or anything, just that you want a logical explanation, something you can hold on to, some consolation.”
“The Lord works in strange and mysterious ways,” Jane butts in.
“I never found that argument too convincing,” I remark, to Jane’s horror. She’s got a cross hanging from her neck that she likes to toy with—she must think I’m the devil now. She’s probably not alone there, but in this moment, I don’t care. “Every person sees it differently, though.”
I’ve read the Bible, obviously. That was another of my passing obsessions.
It was when I was seventeen and naive and still believed there was somewhere I could find answers about Lucy’s fate and our family.
I learned about myths, rituals, values, doctrines, beliefs, but I didn’t find what I was looking for in any religion, and the subject stopped interesting me.
“Same,” Adrian says, to my relief. “I don’t believe a supreme being takes away our loved ones because it forms part of some grand plan we can’t understand.” He scratches his chin and looks at me in agreement.
“Life and death are random, but for some of us, that’s just too hard to accept,” I say.
“All of our beliefs are valid,” Donna concludes, calming the waters.
Faith takes the floor for a few minutes before the meeting is over.
As everyone stands and lines up the chairs against the wall, I start to realize I felt comfortable with the group this afternoon, even like a participant at times.
It’s strange to share something as deep as the pain of loss with a bunch of strangers, but it really is comforting.
I take my time leaving the coffee cup on the table in the back, and Faith and I find ourselves alone there. She smiles as she comes over.
“How are things?” she asks.
“Not bad, I guess.”
“I’m happy you’re here, Greta. It’s funny, your sister predicted this exact thing would happen.” Her cheeks are round and pink as apples.
“How do you mean?”
“She asked me to be patient with you. She said at first you’d think the group was stupid, then you’d wind up staying. And slowly, you’d join us. By the end, we might have to throw you out by force.”
“Lucy had a funny sense of humor.”
“She was a great girl.” Faith sighs. “If you need anything from me, don’t hesitate to ask.”
It’s one of my routines now, a pleasant one, strolling down the street with my thoughts to the café where Will is waiting for me.
When I get there, I like to stop awhile to watch him through the glass.
He’s always so absorbed, he never looks up, and that gives me time to think up what all the knots inside him must be and how I might untie them.
Eventually, I force myself to stop because I’m afraid he’ll catch me and think I’m weird, and I go in and sit down in front of him in the booth and try to catch a glimpse of the cover of his book.
“Chuck Palahniuk,” I say. “That suits you.”
“Have you read him?” He dog-ears a page and closes the book.
“Yeah, but not that one, I read Choke.” I turn to get the waitress, but there’s not a trace of her. She must be in the back. “I’m dying for a piece of that carrot cake they serve here.”
“I’m sorry to tell you, but it’ll have to be another day.”
“Are you in a hurry?” I ask, disappointed.
“We both are.” He gets up and drops a few bills on the table. “Let’s hit the road, Greta. We’re running behind on the game. You gotta adapt, you understand.”
“Actually, I don’t understand. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I follow him out to the car.
He starts it, and we get on the highway to Ink Lake.
“Let’s say we should have gotten a few spaces ahead, but you’re stubborn as an ox, the skating rink shut down, and these past few weeks I’ve been busy.”
He lets the phrase hang in the air, and I catch it in flight, asking, “Busy with what? Work?” I know it’s not that—he works in a bar, it’s not rocket science, and I hope he’ll grab the ring and tell me more about himself. But instead, he glances over and replies, “Yeah. Exactly.”
“What’s the game look like?”
“It’s a regular gameboard. Made of wood.”
I didn’t expect a response, let alone a literal one, but now that I know, I realize Lucy and Grandpa must have made it side by side.
When my sister was little, he carved her a set of dominos.
And a chess set. And a beautiful mancala game with a polished lid that almost glowed, and that she would always run her hand across before taking it off to play. “Can I see it one day?”
Will sighs. “I don’t know. The letters haven’t told me you can. Not yet.”
“You haven’t looked at them all?”
“No. I’m going in order.”
The thought of the game so absorbs me that at first I don’t realize we’ve changed routes. We’re on a swampy side road, unpaved, surrounded by endless cornfields that stretch out farther than the eye can see.
He stops in the middle of nowhere, gets out, and comes around to open my door.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“It’s your turn to drive,” he says.
“Um, no it’s not.”
“Let me remind you: This isn’t my idea.”
We stare each other down for a moment, and then I get out, but even then, I’m not yet sure I’ll go along. My apathy carries me to the driver’s seat, where I sit down and look at the winding road through the glass.
“Turn the key,” he says.
“No.”
“Greta.”
“I can’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I hate driving.”
“Why?” Will’s sitting there next to me, waiting for an explanation. Around us is a heavy silence only broken by the chirping of birds and the whispering of corn stalks.
“Because I tried it once and it turned out bad.”
“What happened?”
“It was my last day of driver’s ed. I got distracted. I always have too many things on my mind. And driving seemed easy. But then…”
“Then…?” He encourages me to continue.
“I killed a cat.”
“You ran over it?”
“No. I mean, like, I didn’t kill it exactly. But in my head, I did.”
“Huh?”
“I almost killed it. One more inch, just one, and I would have flattened it. And I saw it in my mind, all those guts squashed on the road like an abstract painting, and I realized that driving is dangerous, and the next day, I didn’t show up for my test. It’s way harder to kill someone or something on a bike.
Plus, I’m not polluting the air. Those are two big advantages. ”
I thought Will would laugh it off, but he’s taking this seriously. I realize this is important to him as he drops his usual sarcastic act and says softly, “We’ll go one step at a time. Anyway, no one’s ever on this road. Trust me.”
“Okay.”
“Turn the key.”
The motor roars.
“You remember the basics?” I shake my head, and he reaches across me. “The easiest thing to do is try to forget your left foot exists and use the right one to accelerate and brake. It’s safer that way. You want to try?”
“Aren’t you scared I might scratch the undercarriage?”
“It’s just a car.”
I have to say, I like how little he cares about material things. “Fine, here I go.”
I step on the pedal slowly, and the car starts to move. The corn turns blurry as I speed up.
“You’re doing it, Greta.” He sounds happy. Almost proud.
“Faster?”
“Yeah, and then stop afterward.”
I obey but too suddenly, and Will has to put a hand on the dashboard to keep from hitting his head. I think I see reproach in his eyes, but then he smiles. He’s having fun. “Try again, but softer this time.”
We lurch down the road until I finally get the hang of it, and the drive is smooth until we wind up at an abandoned farm. The gate is open, part of the roof is gone over what must have once been the stables. Weeds are growing all around.
I’m about to ask him where I should turn around when I realize he can’t take his eyes off the desolate landscape. But there’s something else in his stare too—something unwavering. Longing? Melancholy? Or is it just a mirage that looks like curiosity?
“Should we go in?” His voice is hoarse.
Someone’s already forced the lock, and all it takes is a slight shove to open the front door.
I follow Will inside. It must be an eternity since anyone’s been here.
The place is full of cobwebs and dust, and the windows are shattered.
If there was ever anything valuable in here, someone took it all years ago.
But there are still some personal objects: a red sock on the floor, old books swollen from the damp of many winters, some furnishings.
The kitchen floor is covered in splintery boards that have fallen from the ceiling in piles.
“Be careful,” Will says softly.
I thought he’d smile, but he’s serious as he opens the cabinets. There’s nothing inside but empty jars. He twists a knob on the stove, digs around in the drawers…
“Don’t get me wrong, I love entering abandoned homes, but what is it you like about this place? You don’t seem like someone who…you know.”
Will looks back at me over his shoulder. “No, I don’t know. What kind of person don’t I seem like?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s go upstairs.”
I leave him in the kitchen and climb the steps, and he follows me.
I can tell because the floor’s creaking beneath his feet.
But even if it weren’t, even if he were silent as a cat, I could feel his presence, his aura.
There’s nothing much in the bedroom, some dirty mattresses and box springs with holes in them.
Probably kids from town used to break in here and spend the night.
In what must be the main bedroom, Will opens the closets, which are eaten up by woodworms. In the back of one, he finds something.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just a photo.”
“So it’s not nothing. Let me see.”
I take it and look at it. It’s a color Polaroid, wrinkled in the corners, blurry from exposure to moisture.
Still, you can see a family in it smiling for the camera.
They’re sitting in a field. The dad has on a hat, the mother’s hair is braided and she’s wearing denim overalls, on her lap is a baby with chubby legs.
Farther right is an older woman, a grandmother, maybe, grinning as though being there at that moment was everything in the world that she wanted.
“It’s creepy, looking at stuff like that, but at the same time, it sort of draws you in,” I say.
“How so?”
It’s strange to me that Will doesn’t get this, but I want him to, so I keep trying. “We have no idea what happened to this family, and we’re invading their privacy in a way by looking at this scene from their private life. Imagine, maybe the dad went crazy and picked up a chainsaw, and, you know…”
“No, I don’t know, Greta.”
“What if he killed them! Or what if he went out to cut wood for winter and a bear attacked him? There are so many possibilities if you let your imagination run free. Anyway, what I said before is true: I love abandoned houses, but they make me think too much, and that’s not always a good thing.”
Will follows me downstairs. “What are you thinking about?”
“You’re like an FBI agent with all these questions today,” I joke, but back downstairs, standing in the middle of the crumbling living room, I get the creeps again, and that makes me chatty, so I go on.
“Sometimes I feel nostalgia for things I never lived. Tonight, when I get in bed and I can’t sleep, I’ll probably start asking myself a bunch of stupid questions I don’t have answers to, like what happened to this family, if the grandmother in the photo died, and if so, from what, or if the couple’s still together or if they were only happy just a couple of years and split up.
And why did they leave the house, and where are they now. ”
Will smiles.
It’s not a tense smile. And it’s not obligatory or mischievous or sarcastic. It’s a warm, tender smile, a real one, the kind that could give solace to a wounded animal. “You want to drive back?” he asks.
“You trust me too much.”
“You don’t trust yourself enough, Greta.”
He walks past me out the door. A minute later, I follow behind him.
I see him through the window, looking out at the cornfields as the sky begins to darken.
If I could choose a superpower right now, I’d want to read people’s thoughts.
Well, not just people’s—specifically, Will Tucker’s.
More and more, I need to know what’s inside him.
He gets in. On the driver’s side.
On the way to Ink Lake, he gets me to agree that I’ll practice more next week to prepare for my driver’s test. When we’ve arrived, I ask him why he cares so much, and he exhales a deep breath. “It mattered to Lucy, okay?”
“There’s nothing wrong with riding a bike.”
“No. But it limits you with certain things. Don’t look at me like that.” I can feel him wavering before he decides to tell me the real reason. “Lucy wants you to take your mother to group therapy.”
“No way. That’s like asking me to become a rock star next month and sell a million albums the month after. Or climb Everest. It’ll never work. My mother barely leaves the house and refuses to let anyone help her.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yeah, I did at first. But eventually I got tired of her hating me for it.”
He seems upset by that, and it irritates me that I’m supposed to care what he thinks now when I’m the one who’s just been given an impossible task. At the same time, I like that he cares. “I don’t think she hates you, Greta,” he says.
“Just drop it.” I look away from him with a knot in my throat and take out the notebook where I wrote all the things that I like the other night. “Here. I did my homework.”
Will hands me a piece of purple paper.
“Me too.”
“Thanks.”
I don’t want to get out of the car and go inside.
I don’t want to stand there like a silent witness to two people who raised me and are now vanishing.
And I don’t want to say goodbye to Will, even if the game makes him keep testing me, because being with him is easy and it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in an eternity.
“Good night, Greta.”
“Good night, Will.”
I open the car door.