Save the Date(46)

“Danny!”

“Shh. We’re in a museum.”

We both stopped in front of a wall that seemed to be representing the period when I was finishing elementary school and Danny and Linnie were finishing college. “Oh man,” I said, pointing to five framed strips grouped together. “Remember that? The lake house?” These strips were out of a month’s worth my mother had done about our vacation in the Catskills, part of her collection Go Jump in a Lake, which had been one of her bestsellers. There were four dailies and a Sunday, and just looking at them, it was like I could practically hear the cicadas, see the fireflies and the orangey pink of the sunsets. “That was such a great trip.”

“Are you kidding?” Danny shook his head. “It was the worst trip ever.”

“No,” I said, looking back at the strips. Cassie and Mark were catching fireflies at dusk, Donny and A.J. were racing their kayaks around the lake, and everyone was sitting on a beach, watching Fourth of July fireworks. “It was really fun.”

“They had fun,” Danny said, gesturing toward the two-dimensional Grants. “We were miserable. It rained the whole time. Like the whole time. And the ceiling of my room leaked. And that was the month J.J. decided to be a vegan, and Linnie was furious Rodney couldn’t be there and spent the whole time calling him in Hawaii from the landline—because there was no reception—and ran up a nine-hundred-dollar phone bill.”

Suddenly, memories were starting to come back to me, crowding out the ones I would have sworn, only minutes before, had been actual and true. The room I’d been sharing with Linnie had been small and smelled musty. Our dad had insisted that a little rain wasn’t going to keep him from enjoying the outdoors, and he’d caught a terrible cold and had to stay in bed most of the trip. Mike had been allergic to something—we’d never been able to figure out what—and sneezed for two weeks straight.

“There was only one movie,” I said slowly, remembering. The other memories of the trip were starting to fade out. These memories, I was now realizing, had never been mine. They’d never been real, just ink and paper that I’d somehow folded into my real life, a revisionist history that I’d bought without a second thought. “Right?” I asked, looking up at Danny.

He laughed. “That’s right! The DVD player was jammed, and we couldn’t watch anything we’d brought with us. We were stuck watching Police Academy 4 all week.”

I laughed too, then clapped my hand over my mouth—the sound was louder than I’d expected in the quiet gallery. How could I have forgotten? Since it was all we’d had to watch, and we were stuck inside all day due to the rain, we watched it more times than anyone should reasonably watch any Police Academy movie, let alone the fourth one in the franchise. And how it was so bad that, with enough viewings, it came around to being good again, and then to somehow being deeply profound.

Danny led the way though the gallery, and I was still smiling as I caught up with him. But when I saw what was in front of me, I felt the smile slide off my face. I glanced at my brother and saw that he’d also realized what this was.

Anyone else here would have just thought it was a sampling of my mother’s art. You wouldn’t have known that this handful of strips was anything more than another misadventure in the Grant family. You wouldn’t have known that these were the strips that had wrecked so much and were the reason Mike hadn’t been home in eighteen months.

As I read these comics I knew by heart, I couldn’t help but feel the distance between what my mother was writing about and what had actually happened. Because it hadn’t started this way, the way she’d written in her version of things, where she got to make the decisions.

It had all started at midnight, with cookies.

*

“Are they done?”

I leaned over to peer into the oven, then straightened up and turned to Siobhan. “Almost.”

“Excellent.” Siobhan grinned as she pushed herself up to sit on the kitchen counter. It was after midnight, very early on a Sunday morning in January. Siobhan had slept over, and we’d been up watching movies and talking, and about the time we were starting to think about going to sleep, right on schedule, we both decided we wanted a snack.

We’d crept downstairs, trying not to wake either my parents or J.J., who’d come home for the weekend. Mike was still home too, since he was still on winter break from Northwestern, which seemed incredibly unfair, since I’d been back at school since the second of January. But I was pretty sure we didn’t have to worry about waking Mike up—he’d gone out earlier and I hadn’t heard him come back in.

“They smell like they’re ready,” Siobhan said, pushing herself up to sit on the counter.

She wasn’t wrong—the whole room was starting to smell like fresh-baked cookies—and I checked the timer just as the kitchen door swung open with gusto and J.J. strode in, wearing his monogrammed pajamas. “I smelled cookies,” he announced, looking around. His eyes lit up when he saw the oven. “Yes,” he said, starting over toward it.

“No,” I said, taking a step in front of him, blocking his view. “They’re not ready yet.”

“They smell ready,” he insisted.

“That’s what I just said.” Siobhan gave me an I told you so look.

“Charlie?” I looked over to see my dad standing in the doorway, squinting at me, then patting his head and pulling down his glasses. “What’s going on?”