Hitchers (20 page)

The woman frowned. She was staring at Grandpa's hands. “I don't think I can help you. Please come back some other time.” The croak in his voice and tremors in his hands were definitely less severe; in another week or two he might pass for one of the living. But not yet.

Grandpa froze. “What do you mean? I want to buy a car. You sell cars, don't you? Isn't that what you do here?”

She took a step back. “Please go.” She was clutching her phone. My guess is she was debating whether to dial 911.

Grandpa threw his hands in the air. “For God's sake, I won't bite. I just want to buy a car. Here—” He pulled my bank card from my wallet, held it out. “I can pay cash. Ten minutes and I'll be out of your hair.”

“I'm sorry. Just, please leave me alone.” She looked terrified.

Grandpa lunged at her, clutched her jacket sleeve where it was hanging under the wrist. In a low voice he said, “I want a God damned Maserati. Now get your little ass in gear and sell me a car, and we'll get along just fine.”

It took Grandpa five minutes to pick out a wheat-colored four-door Quattroporte from their inventory. He didn't want to look at the interior, only under the hood. When the saleswoman popped the hood and quickly stepped back, Grandpa peered at it, scowling with concentration before nodding once and saying, “That's a beaut.”

I groaned inwardly. My grandfather knew nothing about engines. He used to take a rag and a spray bottle of Formula 409 and clean the parts of his engine he could reach from his wheelchair, because he liked the idea of working under the hood of a car. Cleaning it was all he knew how to do.

After strong-arming the terrified saleswoman into forgoing all of the usual paperwork, he headed to Grandma's house, the Maserati growling in a low, unfamiliar rumble.

Grandpa rapped on the locked front door, then peered in the window to be sure Grandma wasn't hiding inside; he pushed behind the overgrown bushes in front of the house and retrieved a key hidden in one of those fake rocks.

He headed straight to his studio, where his drafting table still sat, empty of pens, ink, paper. Cursing, he went to the empty shelves lining the far wall, where there had been tens of thousands of original strips, stacked floor-to-ceiling.

“You sold them all, didn't you?” He traced the grain of the wood with his fingers. “You rotten stinkers. All you care about is money. You're a pair of God damned profiteers, I'm telling you.”

Yes, I had sold them. Except for the really important ones, and the ones I'd kept as models for drawing new strips. I'd given the proceeds—over sixty grand—to Grandma. I felt a little guilty about it now, but when you dispose of dead people's possessions it's with the assumption that they're going to stay dead, so there is no one to hurt, no one who'll miss those things. Sure, you keep sentimental things, but not ten thousand original comic strips. Besides, he'd only kept them out of spite. He had no use for them, and certainly could have used the cash I could have raised selling them, but when I'd told him they'd bring maybe forty dollars each for the dailies,
seventy-five for the Sundays, he'd scowled and asked what I got for a
Peanuts
original.
Peanuts
originals sell for twenty thousand and up. He knew that. He'd curled his lip in disgust, said if I couldn't sell his strips for what they were worth, he'd keep them.

He sat at his drafting table and opened the bottom drawer. It was empty, except for a tattered brown photo album.

“Did you throw everything out?” Grandpa asked. “How long did you wait? A week?” He set the album on the table and flipped it open.

“Hm.” He pinched his nose. “Hello, Mother dear.” His mother was a bland woman who looked like she was sucking on a sourball. He sighed heavily, flipped to the next page, muttering softly to himself. There was a photo of two ruddy boys standing in the mud, each holding a pail. Milking time. One of them must have been Grandpa, the other probably his brother, who died in World War II. He turned the page and grunted. There he was, singing in a pub. My mom once told me Grandpa wanted to become a singer, but once he married Grandma she put an end to that foolishness.

This was a side of him I never got to see, because he'd been angry at me since the day I was born. It was strange that he'd hated me so much, yet loved my twin sister. How many times had I walked past his studio as a child and seen Kayleigh sitting in his lap while he drew?
Come here, ya little monkey, ya
, he'd say, intercepting Kayleigh as she passed, to comb her hair with a black fifty-cent comb he bought at the barber. That Grandpa was kind to her was one of the few things I'd hated about Kayleigh.

Grandpa rose from the desk, stretched to open the door on a cabinet built above his book shelf. He cursed when he saw it was empty, grabbed the key to the Maserati from the desk and headed for the door.

He'd had a bottle stashed in that cabinet; I remembered coming across it while helping Grandma clean out the room. He was losing his buzz. The life of a closet alcoholic must be tedious—all those trips to procure booze, afraid if you buy a case at a time it will be too obvious.

Grandpa hadn't checked my watch in a while, but he'd been in control for a long time—it seemed much longer than the last. I was getting anxious. Maybe I wasn't going to return this time.

My phone rang before he reached the Maserati. He fished it from his pocket and held it up to see who was calling. “It's your new girlfriend. She's probably still standing on the street corner where I unloaded her.”

He opened the phone, pressed it to his ear. “What can I do for you, girlie?”

“Finn?” The voice was a swamp creature with no tongue.

“Who's this?” Grandpa snapped.

“I waited for you. On the bank. But you didn't come.”

Inside, I wailed. I thrashed and cried.

“Jesus,” Grandpa muttered. “I know that lousy accent, even fresh from the grave.”

“Finn?”

“Welcome to the party, senorita burrito,” Grandpa said. “You're late, as usual.”

She was here, right here on the phone, and I couldn't speak to her.

“Grandfather-in-law,” Lorena croaked. Rough and unformed as the words were, the contempt was unmistakable.

“Ahh, I don't have time for you.” He snapped the phone closed as inside I screamed “no.” She was back. My Lorena.

Instead of returning my phone to his pocket, he examined it in his quavering hands. Poking buttons, he found my phone book and scrolled down the names until he reached
Mom.

Again, I was screaming “no,” but I couldn't reach him as he dialed Mom and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hey,” Mom answered, expecting me.

“Hello, Jenny, me gal.”

Mom laughed tentatively. “That's not funny.”

“It's not Finn, Jenny. It's your father.”

There was a long pause. “Finn, you told me you were better.
You're not, are you?”

Grandpa exhaled into the phone. “Finn doesn't have no disease, Jenny. He's got me. I don't know how it happened, but it did and there's nothing any of us can do about it.”

This was intolerable. I was torn apart by the dual horrors of what he was putting Mom through while simultaneously being kept from Lorena.

I heard computer keys ticking through the phone. “I'm coming up there right now. I'm going to take care of you, sweetie.” She was probably looking up flights. What was he doing? I'd worked so hard to save my mother the agony of witnessing this, now here he was, ruining everything.

“I'll say it again. This is not Finn. This is your father, who used to sing you ‘Wild Irish Rose' and ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty' when you went to bed, who took you to the top of the Empire State Building and put a quarter in the viewer and held you up so you could see.”

“I'm coming, Finn.” She was crying now. “I know you can't help it.”

“Jenny, don't you even know your own father? Listen, remember when I used to sing you ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty'?”

“No.”

“Oh yes you do,” Grandpa said. “I know you do. Listen.”

He sang it, carrying a tune like I never could, his resonant Irish brogue coming through despite the graveyard croak, spewing convoluted lyrics I'd never heard from an obscure song that only a man who was Irish and alive seventy-five years ago could possibly know. Mom kept telling him to stop, but he pushed on until she screamed it, prompting Grandpa to pull the phone away from his ear.

“Now Jenny,” Grandpa said in a soothing voice. “Everything's all right—”

“This isn't happening. Where is Finn? I want to talk to Finn.”

“He's safe.”

The connection went dead.

Grandpa cursed, snapped the phone shut. He dragged his hand across his mouth, sighed. “Jenny, Jenny. What are we going to do?”

Finally, finally, I felt tingling in the tips of my fingers, a rush of warmth. I inhaled gratefully. I dialed Lorena while I raced for the car.

She answered on the fourth ring, crying into the phone, unable to speak.

“Lorena?”

“No,” Summer managed.

“Are you all right?”

“No.” She was nearly whispering.

No, she wouldn't be all right. “I'm on my way. Where are you?”

“At the High Museum. The French Impressionist exhibit.”

I couldn't stifle a laugh. “You got dumped on a corner by my grandfather and hopped a bus to the High?”

“This is where I go when I feel like I'm drowning.”

I pictured her sitting on one of those incredibly solid wood benches, surrounded by Monets and Gauguins. “I'm going to remember that,” I said. “When everything seems darkest, go to the French Impressionist room at the High.”

“Don't make fun of me, Finn. I'm hanging by a thread right now.”

“Sorry. I'm on my way.”

As soon as I hung up I called my mother. There were honks and rumbles of traffic in the background

“I'm on my way to the airport.”

“Mom, for God's sake, don't come here. This place is a nightmare. They're all coming out, the voices are coming out. The whole city is going to be filled with dead people.”

I managed to scare the shit out of myself, imagining the city brimming with hitchers, their hands shaking, those horrible voices fouling the air.

“I'm not losing you,” Mom said. “He'll listen to me. I'll make him listen.”

She had a point. As far as I knew she was the only person alive
Grandpa didn't hate. If anyone could talk him out of me, it was Mom.

“Where is Grandma?” I asked.

“She's staying with Aunt Julia.” That didn't surprise me. She probably started packing the moment Grandpa and I left her house.

“It's probably best if you stay with her, too.”

“Why is that?” Mom asked.

“Because I'm not home much. I'm spending all of my time trying to figure this out with help from some friends.”

I told her to call when she arrived, tried to assure her that I was okay.

I found Summer sitting cross-legged on a bench, her coat draped across her shoulders, gazing at Monet's water lilies but clearly not seeing them. She was rocking slightly.

“Hey,” I said softly, putting my hand on her back.

Her eyes lost some of their thousand-yard stare and fixed on me. She made a vague sound that was mostly vowel.

I sat next to her, looked up at the Monet. It was the one with the green rainbow-shaped bridge. “My twin sister Kayleigh had a print of this in her room. She kept bugging Mom to take us to France so she could see the real bridge.”

“I'd like to see France,” Summer said listlessly. “I've never been anywhere. Except Disney World.” After a moment she added, “And Nashville. I saw Graceland.” Abruptly she turned and looked at me. “Can I ask you something personal? I won't be offended if you don't want to answer.”

“Sure, anything.” Anything to get her mind off what she'd just been through.

“What happened to Kayleigh? I asked Mick, but he said you haven't told him, except to say she drowned.”

My eyes filled with tears. It surprised me that the question could stir up such emotions with everything else going on, but thinking about her now filled me with such a profound sense of loss and shame. “I try not to think about it. But I'll tell you if you want me to.”

Summer turned to face me more directly, waited. I realized that, painful as it was, I wanted to tell her my story. I wanted her to know. I started in a low voice, though there was no one else in the room at the moment.

“The summer Kayleigh died had been the best of our lives. Grandma and Grandpa had invested in this rooming house on Tybee Beach, sort of a downscale B and B, with the idea that Grandma would run it (making the beds, cleaning, running clean towels up and down four flights of stairs with her bad hip) while Grandpa drew his strip. Tybee was a blue-collar place back then—t-shirt shops, beer joints, lots of chipped paint—but Kayleigh and I fell in love with it. Bare feet all day, dark tans, hunting for shells in the dunes, begging quarters from Mom to play the games on the boardwalk. We won this big stuffed tiger we were dying to have, always playing the number twelve, because we were twelve.

“The shift from magical summer to the blackest despair I'd ever known was so quick it nearly snapped me in half. One minute I was with my folks, wolfing down fried clams dipped in tartar sauce from a paper plate, on top of the world. The next, my sister was dead.

“Grandma was the one who called. I can still hear seagulls screeching in the background, fighting over French fries when Mom answered her cell, the way she stopped chewing, the way her face suddenly
shifted
to an expression I'd never seen before, one that made my heart start hammering. It's an expression I became very familiar with, because Mom wore it every day for the next three or four years, and still wears it sometimes, nineteen years later.