A Sudden Light: A Novel (24 page)

“Two parts milk—”

“One part medicine,” I said. “I know.”

“The medicine keeps me awake.”

“The medicine makes you sleep,” I corrected.

“
This
medicine makes me sleep,” he agreed. “The other medicine—the pills—they make it so I can’t sleep.”

When the bubbles came, I turned off the heat and poured the warmed milk into a tall glass. I filled the rest of the glass with medicine and set it before Grandpa Samuel; then I sat down across from him. He cupped his hands around his glass, closed his eyes, and smiled.

“You warmed it for me,” he said. “Sometimes Serena warms it, but not usually. I like it warm.”

He took a sip, and I could hear him swallow loudly. My forehead throbbed a bit, but I’d been sleeping, so I felt rested. I reached for the pile of Post-it notes.

“Can I look at what you’ve been working on?” I asked.

“What have I been working on?” Grandpa Samuel wondered in reply.

“Your notes.”

I took them and assessed the pile. It was pretty clear that they were in reverse order, top to bottom. I started to lay them out. Each one had a few words on it, but some had more. Some were small printing and intense; others were only one or two words. I quickly realized that they were not random scribbling. The more I unstuck them and laid them out, the larger the story grew, until the table was covered with Post-it notes.

“Can I borrow your pen?” I asked him.

I numbered each note in the upper-right-hand corner, so I could keep track. I had forty-seven canary-colored Post-it notes laid out. I studied them from above, helicopter view.

“What made you write this?” I asked.

“Write what?”

“Your notes.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head and sipping his medicine.

I remembered the note about John Muir.
The Mountains of California
. It seemed to come from nowhere. Even Grandpa Samuel didn’t know what it meant. And Serena said Grandpa Samuel did that all the time: jotted down nonsensical notes. Maybe they weren’t nonsensical. Maybe they just hadn’t been deciphered properly.

“You told me you hated Ben,” I said. “Remember that? When I asked about him before, you said he gave away the Riddell fortune or something.”

Grandpa Samuel took a long drink of his medicine.

“I ran into him today in the basement,” I continued. “Well, I ran into a pipe. But he came to help me. Does he ever help you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When does he help you?”

“He keeps me company,” Grandpa Samuel said. “He sits with me when I can’t sleep and he tells me stories, and he keeps me company in the barn when I’m working.”

“What kind of stories does he tell?”

“He would climb the tallest trees. Not to cut them down, just to climb them. They’d use gaffs to get into the canopy, and then they would climb barefooted and bare-handed, up to the very top. No ropes or anything. It was very dangerous, but also very exciting.”

“They?” I asked.

“Harry,” he said. “Ben and Harry. They climbed together.”

“You said bad things about Ben,” I reminded him. “But I didn’t believe them.”

“Was Serena here?” Grandpa Samuel asked.

“Yes. It was the three of us. It was on my birthday.”

“Whenever I talk about Ben, Serena reminds me that I hate him,” he said. “Serena tells me the real truth.”

“That he ruined our lives,” I said.

“Yes. He ruined our lives.”

“But he didn’t, did he?”

Grandpa Samuel leaned in toward me conspiratorially. He glanced this way and that, and then he said: “He was just here. Didn’t you see him?”

I shook my head because I was thinking too many things. Some of the notes were out of order. I rearranged them and studied them for syntax, and then I leaned back to see the big picture again.

“Serena usually gives me more medicine,” he said.

I looked up and saw that his glass was almost empty.

“And then she sends me to bed,” he added.

“I’ll give you some more.”

“Will you heat it up? It’s better when it’s warm.”

“But then you have to go to bed,” I said.

When the milk was ready, I poured it into a glass and added medicine. I handed the warm glass to him.

“He gets nervous when Serena talks about the house,” Grandpa Samuel whispered to me.

“Who does? Ben?”

Grandpa Samuel nodded. “I don’t think he likes what she’s doing.”

I helped him up and started him toward the kitchen door, but then I thought of something.

“Have you seen Isobel since she died?” I asked. “I know you’ve heard her, but have you ever
seen
her?”

“I hear her dancing. Serena says it’s the rain. You hear the dancing, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Grandpa Samuel smiled sheepishly and went off to his room; I turned my attention to the puzzle on the table. The Post-its, written out, were a letter. And it was addressed to me. The note at the bottom of the pile—which was the first one Grandpa Samuel had written—said: “Dear Trevor.” I ran upstairs to get my notebook; when I returned, I transcribed the series of messages. Some of them made no sense. Some weren’t even words, but doodles or markings. I did my best to make sense of the ideas:

Dear Trevor,

They say a child—a baby—doesn’t understand that his mother is distinct from him. A baby believes that he is connected to his mother on a fundamental level and that she is a part of him, an extension of her body as he pulls her hair and tugs on her breasts. Though he doesn’t understand how to control her, neither does he understand how to control his own fingers and toes, and so the mystery does
not concern him. In his innocence, the baby understands the truth of this universe: we are all connected to all things.

Fundamental

a part of him

An Extension

As he grows, others impress upon him [best guess—hard to decipher] the limitations of being human. He is not connected to his mother at all, they say, and she might leave him at any moment. In fact, they say, she most definitely will. None of us are connected, they tell him. It is the sad truth of our existence.

They say: “We live alone, and so, we die.”

They tell him and they tell him and they tell him until he finally believes.

And why?

In exchange for all we have been provided in our temporal lives, all the advantages and skills and clever tricks packed into our bodies and minds, we have had to sublimate our inherent understanding; the truth is masked from us, to be returned when we have rejoined the larger aspect of nature. Only then will we remember. Until then, we will wonder where we end and others begin. We will feel a desperate need to connect with others because we do not see our connectedness, we only see our lack. We are the sad creatures of Aristophanes’ imagination: born with four arms, four legs, two heads, and then split in half, jumbled about, and condemned to spending the rest of our lives in search of our other halves. We will spend our lives in a furious quest to satisfy a thirst that is a phantom of our own imagination. It is not a thirst but a curse.

We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)

Of no significance . . . [I have no idea what this means. I think he was trying to say something that didn’t get through the static of Grandpa Samuel’s mind.]

We must honor the [unintelligible—my guess, based on context, is “connections,” possibly “commitments”]. For the things we do have a consequence, whether or not we see it. Because we close our eyes to our obligations does not mean we are not obligated.

Deliver The North Estate to the place from which it came. Return this place to Nature. I know that is what you have come here to do. When it is done, I will go on to my future and you will go on to yours. Until then, I will stay.

May the Pacific live [unintelligible. Maybe “ever in you.” Maybe “upward in you.”]

Ben

I saw this scrawling of notes on the table and was amazed that Grandpa Samuel could have created it. I didn’t believe it was part of his imagination. No. He was acting as a conduit. Ben was speaking through Grandpa Samuel.
The Mountains of California
. All the other Post-it notes Serena said Grandpa Samuel had written. They didn’t quite make sense, and Grandpa Samuel didn’t know why he’d written them. They were all communications from Ben.

I was so excited, I picked up the phone and dialed England. Three in the morning was the only time I could have a private call, and I needed to tell my mom about this.

“Do you have a father?” she asked when she heard my voice. “Is anyone responsible for you?”

“I’ll sleep late tomorrow, I promise,” I said. “Night is the best time in this house. At night, Grandpa channels my great-granduncle Benjamin.”

“Is that so?”

“And he hears Isobel, dancing in the ballroom. I heard her—I
saw
her, too. And the record player was playing on its own.”

“Slow down, Trevor—”

“Grandpa just wrote me a long letter on Post-it notes. But it wasn’t from him. It was signed Ben. Grandpa didn’t even know he’d written it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Was he in a trance or something?”

“Yeah. He was scribbling and scribbling and then he finished. I asked him what he’d written, and he said he hadn’t written anything.”

“Automatic writing,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“It was popular in the days of Spiritualism. Around the turn of the twentieth century, people believed in many things like this. They had séances, read tarot cards, conjured spirits. Respectable people. Presidents, even. People hoped their loved ones could speak to them again, and mediums could provide this service, or at least pretend to. The mediums would claim to channel a spirit, and the spirit would write through them. It was called automatic writing. Didn’t you have a Ouija board when you were little?”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“It’s a parlor game. Silly stuff.”

I considered her logic.

“Gifford Pinchot married his dead wife,” I said.

“What?”

“Just because people say it isn’t true, does that mean it really isn’t true?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Dad lost his wedding ring,” I said. “I lost my watch. Serena lost her pie thing. I found them all in the basement, in a little cubby.
And
I found an old locket, too, with pictures of Dad and Serena when they were little. I think it belonged to Isobel.”

“People drop things.”

“And I saw a ghost. I saw Ben. He helped me after I hit my head.”

“You hit your head?”

“On a pipe in the basement. But I’m okay.”

“Do you need to get it looked at?”

“Serena says I’m okay. She used to be a nurse.”

“Did she? I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t know, actually,” I said. “It’s hard to tell when she’s lying and when she’s telling the truth.”

“Trevor,” she said, exasperated. “I’m very concerned about this. These middle-of-the-night phone calls. Your safety in that house. These ghosts you’re fabricating—”

“I’m not fabricating.”

“Do you need me to come out there? Do you need me to come save you?”

Those words. That phrase. “You’ve come to save us.” That’s what Serena said to my father when we first arrived. My mother echoing her words stopped me dead. I realized she didn’t get what I was saying. She was trying to fix me; she wasn’t trying to understand me.

“I don’t need to be saved,” I said. “Dad brought me here because I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing the saving.”

A long silence hissed on the phone.

“Trevor,” my mother finally said, “your father loved his mother very, very much. When she died, it crushed him. And then when your grandfather sent your father away, it broke your father’s spirit entirely. Your father doesn’t talk about what happened, you know that. But he told me once that his mother promised she would reach out to him after she died, if it were possible. We know that’s not possible, Trevor. But maybe your father and Serena have told you some stories, and maybe you’re getting swept up into something, some sort of mass hysteria of Riddell House. Don’t be swept up. You’re the smartest boy I’ve ever met. Use your intelligence to prevent yourself from being drawn into this world of spirit fantasy. Will you do that for me?”

It was my turn to pause.

“You don’t believe me,” I said.

“I don’t believe you’re lying,” she replied. “I believe you believe it. But that doesn’t make it true.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was so disappointed.

“I should go to sleep,” I said.

“You should. I love you, Trevor. More than you can possibly imagine.”

I hung up the phone, gathered Grandpa’s Post-it notes, and went upstairs, unable to put my mother’s skepticism out of my mind. I felt the rift between us had grown with our conversation.

As I climbed the stairs, I pondered the letter from Ben, especially the question of when my mother and I first grew apart. The things Ben wrote about children and their mothers sounded almost biblical. At what point did I realize that my mother’s breasts were not my own? At what point did I understand that my inability to control her wasn’t because of my own incompetence, but because she was a different person than I? Was that my moment of original sin? Was it the same moment I realized that I could die, and that death meant I would cease to exist entirely? Not that I would still be here, just invisible, which is what I figured all kids thought about death. But that I would be absent in a more substantive way. And was that belief an artificial construct of my culture? Was the pre-self-conscious child actually the
correct
child? Was it really like Ben explained: the membrane is thinner than we think; all things are connected in all directions in all time?

We are all connected—I believed it then and believe it still now—at least in an energetic sense. And who’s to say this energy is not real? We can’t see gravity, either, yet we don’t deny it. We can’t see magnetism, yet we don’t question its forcefulness. So why, then, when people—spiritual people—talk about a force or a substance that binds us all, that unites us all—when these people talk about souls—why do we dismiss them as charlatans?