I'd Give Anything(25)

CJ thumped his chest with his child-size fist, then raised the fist to the ceiling. “This is my domain!”

“Ooh boy,” said Kirsten, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut.

“Down here, I feel like we’re in a whole different world. And the longer we’re here, the more I realize I’m forgetting the real world,” I said.

“What real world?” said CJ.

“Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore!” I said. “You never know.”

Kirsten shivered. “It’d better exist.”

For a few seconds, no one said anything. CJ swung his head around, surveying his domain, and we watched his beam of light slide around the walls and ceiling. Then, Gray said, “Maybe we should just stay down here. Never go back up.”

He wasn’t joking. His voice was as dusty as the room we stood in. And something else. Dispirited. Hopeless. Sad.

Gray has been sad for weeks. Not crying-sad. And not all the time. But even when he’s laughing or kissing me or making jokes, the sadness is there, dulling the colors, muting the sounds. Every time I ask him about it, he teases me or kisses me or puts me off. Gray is so good. People with hearts like his should never be sad. It is a cosmic wrong.

“I’ll stay down here with you any day,” I said, winking at him. But the smile he gave me was just his lips moving.

Later, on the phone tonight, in a colorless voice, he told me that now that he was eighteen, he’s decided to go from being a junior firefighter to an actual full-fledged volunteer. Gray’s father is a career firefighter, but Gray always says he doesn’t like it, that he only does it because he thinks his dad wants him to.

“You have one more year of high school,” I said. “Why not stop? Life’s too short to spend so much time on something you don’t like.”

“I guess I just want to get close to my dad,” said Gray.

“But you are close to your dad.”

It’s true. Gray’s dad is crazy about him, goes to all his games, tells him all the time how proud he is of his football, his grades. He’s crazy about me, too. He pulls my ponytail and laughs at my jokes and says he can’t wait till I’m officially his daughter-in-law.

There was a long hesitation, and I heard Gray start to say something a couple of times. I could feel his nervousness, a nervousness I couldn’t understand, thrumming through the phone line.

Finally, he said, “Stay close. I want to make sure I stay close to him. No matter what.”

I am going to write Gray a story about a boy so nice he gets elected King of Everything. I’ll give him a chapter every day, complete with illustrations. I’ll leave the chapters in his car, his locker, his backpack, his football bag to surprise him, and I’ll keep writing, the story won’t end, until Gray is happy again.

I’m starting it now.





Chapter Eight





Ginny


I found out that my mother was dead on the precise morning—if not at the precise moment—that fall gave way to winter. I was walking to the dog park in the just-before-dawn dark. Little creatures of light that they were, Dobbsey and Walt didn’t love darkness; they were moving in the straight-ahead, sandpiper-legs way they did when they were unnerved and just wanted to get wherever they were going. And then, as I was stepping from the curb to the street, as my foot dropped, I swear the temperature did, too. The crystalline air went from brisk to cold. I shivered inside my too-light quilted jacket and thought about the dogs, the chill seizing their tiny shiver-prone bodies, and I was about to turn around to go home and get us all coats when my phone rang, scaring me nearly out of my skin.

It was Agnes, our long-suffering nurse. Lately, since my mother’s decline had begun, precipitously, to gather speed, Agnes or another nurse, a new one named Lomy, whom my mother viewed with keen disapproval the way she did most things she hadn’t handpicked, had been spending nights at my mother’s house. I had a meeting scheduled for the following day with Agnes and our family doctor, Godwin DeGray, who was overseeing my mother’s palliative care, to discuss increasing her pain medication. Goddy was my mother’s childhood friend, a man so kind he was my best evidence—maybe my only evidence—that my mother had once been something other than the woman I’d known. My mother was not particularly nice to Goddy and seemed to regard him from the same cool distance that she did the rest of us. But Goddy never stopped being nice to her, nice and unfailingly loyal. He was—had been for a long time—as he liked to say, “on the blessed verge of retirement,” and I wasn’t sure, but it seemed possible that my mother was his only remaining patient. When she was finished, he would be, too.

I stood very still and stared at Agnes’s name on my phone screen, the notes of my ringtone pinballing into the darkness. I filled my lungs with cold air and said, “Hi, Agnes.”

“Ginny,” she said, her voice tinny and strained. “Last night, she sent me home. She said you were staying with her. Are you in there?”

“What? No. I mean I offer to stay overnight all the time, but she flat out refuses. I’m walking to the dog park.”

I heard Agnes groan. “Oh God.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have left last night. And she locked the dead bolt. I don’t have a key to that. I can’t get in.”