“Not even close,” I said. “She’s just Linnie Vaughn. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world!”
Apparently, that was the right answer.
Nobody is around to take these pictures: They exist only in the mind of one young man, who sees them projected, over nights stretching into weeks, on the insides of his eyelids.
The first captures the loneliness of a snowy evening stretch of road. There are storefronts all along the far side of the street, shuttered now in advance of the dark and the snow that has already begun to fall in thick, side-blown sheets. Of course, a photo can’t show the wind, but you know it is there in the bend of the scraggly roadside trees, the way the flakes seem to form slanted lines in the glow of the streetlight.
The next shows the same street, hours later. Now, the snow blankets everything, and falls in waves that are, if anything, drifting harder than before. You can see the patterns quite clearly as they are stabbed through by twin beams from the headlights of an unseen, approaching vehicle.
Frame three is all SUV. Blurred by snow, dark, and speed, the truck still shows up clearly enough that one can see its direction. If the painted lines on the road weren’t buried, the car would be sliding across them at a slight angle. A fan of snow kicks up from behind one rear tire; the driver must have gunned the gas in an attempt to whipsaw his vehicle back in line.
That never works.
In frame four, the SUV is jammed up against what one assumes must be the curb. The driver, bathed in the glow of unseen red and blue lights, sits with his legs halfway out the door, staring straight into the lens without recognition.
I was hanging out at my house with Angelika when the call came. It was the first week in February, right after exams ended. We were playing around on the couch, the snow was falling thickly outside, and Mom and Dad had both already called to say they were stuck in horrible snowstorm traffic on the highway. It was the kind of situation that’s perfectly set up to make a guy ignore the phone.
In fact, a confession: I did ignore the phone, at first. Until the answering machine clicked in, and I heard Grampa saying, “Pick up the phone! I don’t know who I am!”
Even in the panicky disentanglement of limbs that followed, I was already thinking: Oh, God. He didn’t say, “I don’t know where I am”; he said, “I don’t know who I am.” I lunged for the phone, and amid the horrible squeals of feedback from talking with the handset too close to the machine, I said, “Don’t hang up, Grampa! I’m here!”
The connection was terrible. It sounded like my grandfather was talking in some kind of distant, underground train tunnel. “Is Joan there?” he asked. Joan is the name of my dead grandmother.
“No, Grampa. She’s, uh, well — she’s not around. This is Peter.”
“Who?”
“Your grandson. Peter!”
“Are you a helping person, Peter?” A helping person? I thought. What the heck is a helping person? There really ought to be a manual for these situations, but there isn’t. Anyway, I made the lightning decision to be a helping person, whatever that was.
“Yes, Grampa, I am your helping person. Where are you?”
“I don’t know. They moved the shoe store.”
Holy cow. He was out in the storm. “Grampa, are you driving?”
“Yes. How else would I get to the shoe store?”
“Grampa, listen to me. Can you please pull over? Right now?”
“I can’t. I need snowshoes. I couldn’t find my snowshoes, so I … I don’t know where I am. But I need the shoes.”
Angelika could tell from my side of the convo that this was not a happy call. She squeezed my arm, and whispered, “Can I do something?”
I couldn’t think. My grampa was out there in the dark, driving. “Listen to me,” I said. “Just pull over, OK? I promise we’ll get you some shoes tomorrow. All right?”
“Thank you. But I can’t stop. I don’t have any shoes. My feet are cold!”
Goose bumps rose all over my body. He was barefoot? Well, this was rapidly crossing over from “Grampa being Grampa,” through “Please don’t tell Mom,” to “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” I covered the phone with my free hand, and mouthed, “Call 9-1-1!” to Angelika. She dove for her purse and started fishing through it for her cell.
“All right,” I said. “If you won’t pull over, can you at least tell me where you are?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “Everything looks so … different. But I might be near the interstate.”
My heart skipped again. “Grampa, whatever you do, DON’T get on the highway, OK?”
“No highway,” he said. “Got it. But why in the world would I get on the highway, young man? It’s not like they sell shoes there.”
“That’s an excellent point, Gramp,” I said.
Meanwhile, Angelika had dialed the police, and I heard her say, “We don’t know where he is, but he’s very confused. And he must be freezing. I don’t think he has any shoes on.”
“Oh, wait,” Grampa said. “I just passed a sign.”
I squeezed the handset so hard I thought it might crumble in my hand. “What did it say, Gramp? This is really important.”
“It said STOP!” he whined. “But I’m not there yet.”
“Gramp, I know you want to get some shoes, but can you slow down? Maybe if you can figure out what road you’re on, I can help you figure out where the, uh, nice, warm shoes are.”
Angelika whispered, “Can you find out where he is? Hurry! They want to send out a car!”
“Slow down? Really?” he said. “OK, if you say so. Ooh, look! That sign said ‘bank.’ I wonder if I go to that bank.”
“I don’t know. Can you tell me the name of the bank?”
“It’s not one I’ve heard of, Pete. Pete, right? Anyway, it’s … whoa, I skidded a little bit there. I think it’s snowing. What were you saying?”
I could feel myself starting to cry. “The bank, Gramp. Tell me the name of the bank.”
“It doesn’t make sense. It’s in some foreign language or something. Un-eye-vest? Uni-vest, maybe? What kind of name is that for a bank, anyway?”
“Univest?” I asked shakily. I knew where he was! “Grampa, is there a store with a big red picture of a target on your left?”
He didn’t respond.
“Grampa, are you still there?”
“I’m having trouble controlling this thing. But yes, there’s a big red target. Is that a shoe store? Because my feet are really —”
I dropped the house phone, grabbed Angelika’s cell phone, and talked into it as fast as I could. When I thought back on it later, I realized I’d probably been shouting by that point. “He’s in Quakertown, on Route 309. By the Target. In a gray Chevy. Please hurry!”
Angelika took back her cell, and I picked up our phone off the floor. Grampa was still babbling about shoes. I cut him off. “Grampa, are you cold all over?”
“Yes.”
“Are you wearing a jacket?”
“I’m wearing a nice, warm robe. But it’s snowing in here, and I can’t close the window.”
Well, that explained all the background noise. “What do you mean, you can’t close the window?” I asked.
“There’s no crank on it. I can’t —”
“Grampa, listen. You need to pull over. Then we can work on getting the window shut. I can even help you turn up the heat in the car. Wouldn’t that be good?” I felt like I was talking to a little kid. What was I going to do next, offer him a Fruit Roll-Up?
“Really? Are you sure I should? I still don’t have shoes or anything.”
“Trust me.”
“What?”
“TRUST ME!”
“I can’t hear you! There’s a big noise here!” I heard it over my grandfather’s voice, and even over the wind whistling through the open car window: a siren.
“PULL OVER!” I screamed.
“I — am — PULLING — OVER!” he screamed back. I looked at Angelika, who had clearly heard
that outburst. I nodded in relief. She smiled, reached out, and squeezed my shoulder. But then, as the siren got louder, I heard a strange whistling and whooshing that sounded like an engine racing way too fast, followed by a long, long squeal of brakes and a surprisingly soft crunch.
“Grampa!” I yelped. “Grampa? Are you there? Are you OK?”
The wind sounds had stopped, but the siren was still wailing away, so I knew the phone was still working. I waited for what felt like minutes and minutes, with my heart pounding, my head resting on my hand, Angelika standing there not knowing what to do. Was my grandfather unconscious? Or, God forbid, dead? Was a police officer going to pick up the phone and ask me whether I was the next of kin? I heard some rustling, and realized my grandfather must have dropped the phone, then picked it up. “Hello?” he said. “Guess what? I think I pulled over!”
That was when I started to sob.
They took Grampa to the hospital. I called both of my parents. My mom, who worked close to there, changed course to go meet the ambulance. Dad was coming from the opposite direction, so he came home and picked me up. After we dropped Angelika off at her house — she kissed me right in front of my father and made me promise to text when I knew anything — Dad and I were basically silent all the way to the emergency room.
The trip had seemed to take about a year and a half, especially in the snow, but when we arrived, Mom said my grandfather was still in the back area, getting X-rays. The doctors had said his body seemed to be perfectly fine, but that his ribs had whacked into the steering wheel, so they weren’t taking any chances. As for his head, a neurologist had been called down, but Mom hadn’t heard anything from her yet.
As soon as Mom had told us what little she knew, she asked me to tell her everything about Grampa’s little excursion. I did, and then she surprised me. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “You did everything exactly right! The police officers told me how calm you and Angelika were, how you figured out where he was — all of it. My brave boy!”
Mom grabbed me around the waist, buried her head in my shoulder — I was startled to realize I was tall enough for that — and cried. Dad stood there awkwardly, alternately patting my shoulder and stroking Mom’s hair. After a while, he said, “Yes, uh, great work, Peter.” Which had to be the most enthusiastic thing he’d said to me in at least a year.
Too bad I didn’t feel like I deserved the praise. “Mom, Dad,” I said. A massive lump was forming somewhere behind my tonsils. I swallowed. “I have to tell you something. I … I … um, Grampa fell in October. And he’s been forgetting more and more stuff. He keeps sticky notes posted all over his house to remind him of everything he has to do every day. I knew he was getting worse, and I …” Tears flowed down my face. “I didn’t tell you. I mean, I tried last summer, but when Mom didn’t believe me, I just gave up. But I should have said something. If Grampa dies, it’s my fault!”
“Oh, Pete,” Mom said between sniffles of her own, “this is not your fault. None of it’s your fault.”
She buried her face against my neck again and started weeping even harder. Dad started speaking: “Son, your mother is right. This is our responsibility. We knew your grandfather was having problems. We even made a deliberate decision to try and keep you from knowing how bad he was getting.”
“Why, Dad? Why would you do that? I mean, Grampa’s my —”
“I know, buddy. He’s your favorite person. And we felt that, after all you’d been through with your arm, and starting high school on top of that … well, we thought you didn’t need any additional stress.”
Swell. That plan had worked out just perfectly — not.
Mom had gotten herself under control again, which was good, because if she had cried much more on me, I was pretty sure my shirt would have actually dissolved. “And, Pete,” she said, “you have to understand. We knew things weren’t right with your grampa, but we kept thinking we’d have more time before it got really bad. And if we need to move Grampa into an assisted living place … It’s really expensive, so your father has been working overtime every chance he gets this whole year to try to save up some money for when the day comes that your grandfather can’t live on his own anymore. But we should have told you a long time ago that this was going on. I’m so sorry you’re finding out this way, Pete. I’m so sorry! But please believe me: We thought we were doing what was best for everyone.”
Hmm, there had been a lot of that going around.
As things turned out, Grampa didn’t have anything broken, but the neurologist wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight for a bunch of tests. They were transferring Grampa to a private room, so Mom decided to stay there and sleep in the chair. Dad and I would drive home through the storm before the roads became completely impassable. As we were getting ready to leave, the neurologist popped her head into the waiting room again, and it was almost like she could read our minds. She said, “By the way, I’d imagine you might be telling yourselves this was your fault, that you could have acted sooner and prevented it, yada yada. But dementia is a tricky thing, and it can seem pretty gradual until — boom! — the elderly person slips really, really quickly. We see this all the time, especially in close-knit families where the elderly person is very well loved. The hardest thing in the world for most of us is admitting when it’s the end of an era.”
Geez, AJ had been right again: Secrets do suck, and you do have to let go of them. If you don’t, you can paralyze your whole life. Maybe somehow, underneath his Neanderthal exterior, he was more sensitive than I thought.
Grampa stayed in the hospital for two more days. The neurologist diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s disease, and said it was probably time to move him into an assisted living place as soon as possible. Truthfully, I wasn’t super-involved with the move, because I couldn’t stand to see Grampa so unhappy, and because I was spending all my free time working with AJ, getting him ready for baseball tryouts. But Mom was telling me all about it, and I knew Grampa was pretty crushed.
With my usual luck, the tryouts for pitchers and Grampa’s first day at the Gracewood Acres Assisted Living Community were only a day apart. The tryouts came first. I had come up with what I thought was the best possible plan for telling AJ I could never play again. It allowed me to keep working with him right up to the last minute, and it even gave me an excuse to be there for him during the actual event. I assigned myself to photograph the session for the school newspaper.
The tryouts were held in the gym right after school. I got there first, carrying my fastest long lens and my best camera body, all slung over my shoulder in Grampa’s oldest leather camera bag — he had always called it his lucky bag, and I needed all the luck I could get. AJ came bounding into the locker room with his bat bag, sat next to me, and started putting on his cleats. “Oh, man, I am so pumped up, Pete! I feel great. I feel like I could throw ninety-five out there today. Whoever’s catching better have, like, a steel-reinforced glove. Speaking of which, where’s your equipment?”
I took a long, deep breath, and reached into my camera bag. I held up Numero Uno, and said, “Here’s my equipment.”
He just looked at me. And looked at me. And looked some more. Finally, he said, “You’re not trying out?”
“AJ,” I said, “I can’t try out.” Hoo boy, this was the hardest thing to say. “I, umm … well, the doctors didn’t just say I might never pitch again. They said I would never pitch again. I wanted to tell you a million times, but I …” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. Or look AJ in the eye.
“It’s about freaking time you told me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Pete, I know I don’t get straight As like you do, without even trying or anything. And I know I’m not always, like, all serious and solemn like you. But I’m not a moron. And I know when my best friend is full of crap about something. I’ve known it since we started throwing in December. Really, I think I’ve known it since the day you, um — the day you fell. But I kept waiting for
you to tell me yourself.”
I looked at AJ. He looked at me. “Um, AJ,” I said, “I’m sorry. I really am. I was a complete moron.”
AJ stood up and said, “Pete, I’m sorry, too. I know how much you wanted to play high school ball. Listen, if you want, I won’t try out.”
What? I thought. Did he really just say that?
“I’m serious. Just say the word. I mean, you’re my catcher. You’ll always be my catcher. I don’t even know how to pitch with anybody else behind the plate. It probably wouldn’t be any fun without you anyway.”
I thought of everything I had overheard on the night of Linnie Vaughn’s party: How lucky I was. How I had everything going for me except baseball. How much AJ needed to pitch. I stood up and grabbed AJ by the shirt. “Get your stuff on and get out there, AJ.”
“Are you sure?”
“Dude, if you don’t, I am going to give you such a beat-down.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “All right, Pete. If that’s what you want.” He reached down and started getting his other equipment out of his bag. “Hey, uh, are you still going to go out and watch? I mean, take pictures and stuff?” I nodded. “OK,” he said. “Because I have one request.”
“What is it?”
He struck a Linnie Vaughn pose and pointed at Numero Uno. “Make me look beautiful. Can you do that?”
“Dude,” I said. “It’s a camera, not a freaking magic wand!” He punched me in the good shoulder. Then he laughed, we grabbed our bags, and it was action time.
Not that I had any doubts, but AJ makes the team. Actually, if you want to know the truth, AJ is the team. All through the spring, I go to every single game. I’m really proud of my best friend. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I never feel a stab of jealousy. But by the end of the season, I’m mostly just happy for him. It really hits me in the sixth inning of the last game of the playoffs. AJ is at bat, with guys on second and third. God, I wish I could be standing there on second base, waiting for AJ to drive me home like he’s done a million times before. But I’m getting used to this, too.