A Sudden Light: A Novel (21 page)

I snuck upstairs to the third floor, which was more creaky, so my work was more difficult; it demanded patience. The transfer of weight was the key, as was a belief in weightlessness. It was to have no momentum. It was to be a tree, to grow without notice, but to grow. It was to be still, but always moving. I crept down the hall with the music playing, the footsteps dancing. It took me days. Weeks. I felt as if it took me years to move the fifty feet from the servants’ stairway to the doors to the ballroom, but I did it without disturbing a breath of air; the house had grown around me.

I reached the threshold and peered around the edge of the door and saw the record player and someone dancing like a ghost in the shadows. A woman, her dark dress flowing around her as she spun so elegantly across the ballroom floor. I slipped inside the room silently. The waning moon offered some light, but I couldn’t make out details. The music played and she danced and I saw my grandmother Isobel. It was her. The house was haunted by more ghosts than I thought. Benjamin, I knew—the man with the hat. But now? She spun and leapt as if in a ballet. Her muted footsteps echoed through the house down to her beloved
Samuel, two floors below. It was really her. I reached for the light button. I pushed it and it clicked; the lights did not light.

She stopped, alerted by the click. She breezed toward me with fluttering hands. I was frightened by her sudden approach, and I turned away. When I turned back, she had vanished.

I ran down the front stairs as quickly as I could. I didn’t worry about sound. I ran to my room and grabbed my flashlight. I sprinted back up the stairs to the ballroom and aimed my flashlight around the room. Nothing. The record player ticked at me, so I switched it off. I continued scanning the ballroom.

Against one wall was a row of doors. I opened one. A storage closet filled with chairs and banquet tables. I opened another. More storage, boxes of things, glasses, maybe. I opened a third. It was nearly empty, but smelled of recently disturbed air. Against the back wall, I saw something—a flash of light through a small hole. I made my way to the back of the storage room and shone my light. A finger hole. I slipped my finger into it and pulled. It took effort, but a small hatch door pulled free and came off in my hands.

On the backside of the hatch were two handles. I stuck my head into the newly discovered space. It was some kind of a shaft that plunged downward through the core of the house. It wasn’t big—three feet square, maybe. I could see ladder rungs attached to the wall opposite me. I shone my flashlight downward, but it couldn’t penetrate far into the darkness.

I considered investigating, but I’d need equipment. A better flashlight, for sure, or a headlight would be better. Definitely some rope. And a wooden stake, some garlic, and a Bible. Because I had no idea what exactly I’d find down there, though I was determined to find it.

I
wanted to get the equipment for my investigation as soon as I woke up the next day, but I saw my father hacking and slashing at the blackberries across the orchard, and I knew he needed to work things out, so I didn’t bother him right away. I was pretty sure it was our one-week anniversary at Riddell House, but, to be honest, it was hard to track time there. The days were long, and they blended together into a soup of experience that took effort to sort out in my head. I had come to understand the feeling of isolation Serena and Grandpa Samuel had lived with for so long. My father felt it, too, I knew; it was a natural reaction to pick up a machete and start slashing.

When it was close to lunchtime, I couldn’t wait any longer, so I walked down the hill and interrupted my father’s brutal battle with the vines.

“I need to get some stuff at the store,” I said. “Can you take me to town?”

“Ah, yes,” he said, wiping his sweaty brow with the disgusting T-shirt he had removed and tossed in the dead grass. He guzzled water. He was
naked from the waist up, and his leathery, lean torso was sweaty and speckled with dirt. “A mission to replenish supplies. Running low on staples. Orange juice, fruit, Ritz crackers. We must restock the canteen. Let’s go.”

We walked back up the hill to the house, and I waited in the kitchen while he got a fresh shirt. When he came back downstairs, I mentioned the ballroom light issue I had discovered the previous night.

“Did you try the fuse box?” he asked.

“Where is it?”

He led me outside the kitchen door to the porte cochere. He lifted an old, hinged cover and revealed rows of glass cylinders and a tangle of brown, filthy wires going in all directions.

“Why is the fuse box outside?” I asked. “Isn’t that dangerous? I mean, some ax murderer with night-vision goggles could turn off the power and then hunt you down in the dark and you couldn’t do anything to stop him.”

“That’s the way they did it in the old days,” he said. “I guess no one foresaw the danger of night-vision goggles falling into the wrong hands. Or maybe no one foresaw the invention of night-vision goggles at all.”

He poked around the fuses. A diagram explained which fuse controlled which circuit, but it was hardly legible.

“Ah, this must be it,” he said, screwing in one of the glass fuses. “It was loose. Probably lost the connection.”

“Probably,” I agreed, but the wheels in my head were spinning. Why would the fuse be loose?

We didn’t really go into town. Not into Seattle, at least. We drove to a strip mall shopping complex a few minutes away from The North Estate. The complex was anchored by a supermarket and an old Sears department store that looked like it had been there for a hundred years. A Chinese-Thai combo restaurant was sandwiched between a Radio Shack and a Laundromat, and my father suggested we get lunch before we went shopping, so we went in. Almost everything in Seattle—at least the narrow slice I had seen of it—was weird, and the Chinese-Thai restaurant was no exception. It was a shell of a place with no redeeming aesthetic
qualities: old Formica tables and plasticky chairs and bright fluorescent lighting. A page of the menu said: Vietnamese Specialty Soups. The people who seemed to own the restaurant didn’t really speak English; they just hung out at the empty tables like it was a living room—there were aunts and uncles and little kids—and a TV was playing a VHS tape of old news in an Asian language. The only word I could understand was George Bush, which, apparently, has no translation. So even though my father and I were in a suburban Seattle strip mall, it didn’t feel like it. We ordered off the Vietnamese side of the menu, even though Vietnamese food wasn’t advertised on the neon sign outside. We only spoke with one guy, and the only thing we said to him was “Two number fourteens,” and a few minutes later the guy shuffled out with bowls of soup. I tentatively sipped the broth and found that it was amazingly good: the smell and the steam and the taste. It took all five senses to taste it completely, and part of why it tasted so good, I thought, was that we were eating it in this strange place.

“All this stuff is new,” my father said, waving his soup spoon at the parking lot outside the window. “The Sears was here, but none of the other stores. There used to be an Ernst Hardware and a Pay ’n Pak over there . . . But I guess I haven’t been here in a while.”

I added garlic chili sauce to my soup. I added jalapeños and Thai basil. I added lime. I added bean sprouts. I wanted to add everything I could.

“I feel like I hardly see you anymore,” my father said as we ate.

“Same here,” I agreed.

“What have you been up to? Seeking the truth?”

“Always. I spend my life in the relentless pursuit of truth. Speaking of which . . .”

“Yes?”

“Why did you start building boats? You’ve never told me. Was it because the boatbuilding place was near the school? That’s what Mom said.”

“
Because it was there?
That’s why she said I did it?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “No. I went and found it. It wasn’t so close that I
tripped and fell through the front door. I searched for it and I found it. I wanted to do something with wood that was constructive, you know? I wanted to
build
something. When I was a kid and Grandpa Abe was still alive, all he talked about was destroy, destroy, cut down, clear-cut, sell off, develop, make money, money, money. At some point, my mother took me aside and said, ‘You don’t like that kind of talk, do you?’ I said no. And she said, ‘You are your own person. You can create your own future. You don’t have to live for him. He’s already made a mess of his life; he doesn’t get to make a mess of yours.’ ”

My father worked on his soup for a minute.

“So I thought if I could build something beautiful out of wood,” he said, “something
useful
and also beautiful—I thought somehow that would equalize things. I don’t know. I guess it’s karma. But that’s my mother’s talk. I don’t really believe in that.”

I shrugged, but I didn’t believe him. I thought he did believe in it. All of it.

“I still don’t understand why Grandpa Samuel sent you away to school after your mom died,” I said, leaning over the bowl to meet a chopsticks-load of noodles. Relentless pursuit.

“Things were hard for Grandpa. He had Serena to take care of.”

“Serena said
you
were taking care of her.”

My father shrugged again as he picked at his soup.

“If you were sixteen or whatever,” I pressed, “and you were taking care of Serena, why would Grandpa send you away? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to keep you around? It would be less work for him.”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“It doesn’t sound complicated,” I countered. “It sounds like you’re leaving something out.”

“Like what?”

I stopped eating and squinted at him.

“Grandma Isobel was sick, and then she died,” I said impatiently. “Grandpa Samuel sent you away after that, and you won’t talk about any
of it with me. Serena said your mother had Lou Gehrig’s disease. What exactly is that? I mean, I’ve heard of it, but . . .”

My father licked his lips and sighed. He set down his spoon and chopsticks, picked up his napkin.

“ALS,” he said. “It’s a degenerative nerve disease. It destroys everything in your body but your brain, so you’re completely aware of what’s happening—you feel all the pain, you see your body shutting down piece by piece, entombing you in a worthless shell—but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. There’s no cure; there’s no treatment. You just have to wait until enough of you shuts down that you die.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Eventually you can’t move,” he continued. “You can barely breathe. You can’t swallow. But you can see, and you can feel, and you can think, and you can know. At some point you can’t clear your lungs of phlegm anymore. Your lungs slowly fill with liquid, and you drown.”

He looked into his soup.

“My mother was terrified of drowning.”

I, too, looked into my soup. I filled my spoon with broth and lifted it to my lips. I drank the broth.

“I can’t imagine Mom ever dying at all, especially not when I’m sixteen,” I said. “So for your mom to die like that. It’s really sad.”

We both looked up. My father met my eyes for the first time, and I saw a sadness in him.

“Divorce isn’t quite as tragic as death,” he said.

He had never used the D-word before. Its use at that moment struck me with another wave of sadness.

“They’re kind of the same,” I said, clinging to my point. “Divorce and death.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“The ending of something,” I said, pushing ahead with my thesis. “Your mother left you. Now Mom is leaving you.”

“I’m here to get Grandpa to sell the house so we can have some cash.”

“I don’t think that’s why you’re here,” I blurted out almost involuntarily. And I said it loud enough that the Vietnamese people who ran the restaurant all stopped to look at us. My father set down his eating utensils again and got a cold look on his face. (When he was holding a piece of wood, his face was soft; when he was mad at me, his face was so hard.)

“You’re here for Isobel,” I said in a loud whisper. “You came to find her.”

“Is that so?” he asked flatly.

“You think she’s still here. I saw you waiting for her in the ballroom. Two nights ago.”

He was ice. He was carved stone. If he hadn’t blinked, I would have thought he had been frozen by Medusa.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

“You do,” I said. “I
know
you do. You haven’t lost your faith; you’re just trying to shove it down. I’m sure of it.”

“Why are you sure?”

“Because I’ve seen a lot of things in the past few days. A
lot
of things. And one of the things I saw was your mother dancing in the ballroom.”

He said nothing.

“She was dancing last night,” I went on. “I swear, she was so close I could have touched her. I saw her, Dad. And I don’t think you want Grandpa to sign over the house until you see her, too.”

He hesitated half a second at most, and then his hand flashed across the table and smacked my face. Not hard, but loud and startling. The older Vietnamese man turned down the volume on the TV. They were concerned, wondering if they needed to intervene.

I felt the sting, but I didn’t stop.

“You’re waiting for her,” I said. “That’s why you’re here. You’re waiting for her in the ballroom.”

He averted his eyes, stood, and went to the counter. He paid in cash, returned to the table, and dropped two dollars.

“Let’s go,” he said, grinding his molars until his jaw muscles bulged.

I looked at my soup. There was more goodness in my bowl. Steak
and brisket and onion slices. Noodles and Thai basil and cilantro and broth. I didn’t know what strange spices flavored it, but I could dive into that broth and swim for a very long time.

I was angry with my father for slapping me. Angry for his not seeing the truth that I saw. But maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Maybe I needed more information to convince him. I stood up dutifully and followed him outside; we crossed the parking lot toward the supermarket. I stopped when we reached the sidewalk, and it took my father two steps to realize I wasn’t next to him.