The Evolution of Alice (16 page)

“How you doin’?” Gideon said.

His grandpa reached to the side of the bed and pulled out a yellow scribbler with a Bic pen stuck within the pages like a bookmark. He opened the scribbler, picked up the pen, and wrote down a few words. When he was finished, he passed the scribbler to Gideon and pointed at the words. Gideon was familiar with the routine. He’d been passed scribblers of all colours for a while now. He read the words.

“Pack any boxes this morn?” they spelled.

Gideon shook his head.

“I was kind of preoccupied,” he said, and motioned to his grandpa’s legs.

The old man grunted and grabbed the scribbler from Gideon. He aggressively wrote down more words then passed the scribbler back to his grandson.

“I want to know the work’s done.”

Gideon nodded.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said.

After the exchange, a silence fell between them, and, even after the time they’d spent together with the old man sick like he was, the quiet hadn’t become less frustrating. Gideon had found ways to cope with it the best way he could; he would imagine things they might say to each other if they could talk like they used to. And so he imagined what his grandpa would say to him now.

“How’s Alice doing?” he would ask.

“Oh, Alice, she’s doing about as good as you could expect. You know, it’s been about seven or eight months, but sometimes it feels like yesterday,” Gideon would say.

“And the girls?” his grandpa would say.

“The girls, they’re managing. Sometimes I think they go on like they always did, because kids are tough. But then, sometimes, you can tell how much they miss Grace,” Gideon would say.

“You getting work?” his grandpa would ask.

He was always concerned that Gideon was working hard. He always expected people to work as hard as he’d worked all his life. How could they not? Working hard was all he knew.

“I’ve been sandbaggin’, yeah,” Gideon would say.

“That’s good, Grandson, that’s real good,” his grandpa would say.

But his grandpa had not said anything, and the silence was still there, and it was torture. Gideon got a chair from the corner of the room and pulled it over to the side of the bed, and on its way it scraped against the floor, making the kind of nails-against-chalkboard sound that was typically unwanted but today welcomed. He wished the floor was longer and that the chair was louder. When he got to the side of his grandpa’s bed, he sat down and leaned forward against it, resting his chin against his crossed arms, now at eye level with the old man. They shared a look, and perhaps it was just the moment, but for the first time Gideon saw sadness. With so much quiet between them for so long, Gideon had seen an array of emotions from his grandpa—frustration, anger, regret, even fear—but never sadness. And of all the emotions that had painted themselves against the old man’s face, that was the most difficult to bear.

Gideon’s body began to shake as he tried to hold back tears, but they wouldn’t stay inside. He tried to hide them, even with his trembling body, as though his grandpa was blind, not speechless. He buried his head into his arms and let the tears dampen his forearms and the damn white sheets on which they rested. Then he felt a cool, thin hand rest against his, and the touch was familiar. He remembered it from the first time there was silence. Gideon was 11, and had been living with his grandpa for about a year. A violent storm had come and left their house without power. For a long time, Gideon stayed in his bedroom, hidden deep under the covers, trying to escape from flashes of lightning, the cracks of thunder, the wind pushing up against his window, howling like an angry ghost. But he couldn’t take it anymore. He got out of bed, crept across the house, went into his grandpa’s room, and sat down on the floor beside the old man’s bed. He pulled his legs into his chest, crossed his arms across his knees, and buried his head into his forearms. There was another flash of lighting and, instantly, a crack of thunder that sounded like it split the sky in two. The storm was right above them, bearing down on them. Gideon closed his eyes tighter, buried his face deeper, but his heart raced faster. Then he felt his grandpa’s hand rest against his, and the storm seemed to subside, the lightning was not as bright, nor the thunder as loud, nor the wind as strong. He felt safe.

Gideon lifted his head to find his grandpa looking at him. He wiped the tears away and sat up straight.

“Thanks,” he said.

His grandpa nodded.

“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this,” he said.

The old man took his hand away. He opened the scribbler, picked up his pen, and started to write a message. Gideon watched the old man’s face as he wrote. His eyes, thoughtful and intense, looked the same whether he was writing or speaking, and his brow was the slightest bit furrowed. Whenever the old man was thinking, his brow would be furrowed. Gideon smiled. His grandpa had done so much thinking in his life that even when his brow was relaxed there was a deep line between his two eyebrows that never went away, and faint lines across his forehead like roads on a map. His grandpa stopped writing and pushed the scribbler across the bed. Gideon picked it up and read the words.

“You may not like it. I don’t. But it is the way it is.”

He closed the scribbler. Was it the words, or was it how he spoke them? Was it the voice? He couldn’t help but think that, if his grandpa could talk, if he could hear the words, the old man would say something that would make everything okay. They would be like a cool, frail hand resting against his. Why couldn’t they be spoken? God, please. Gideon looked over at the Bic pen and wanted to snap it in half. It wasn’t the same and wouldn’t ever be.

“Say something wise, Grandpa. Tell me something like you always did,” he said, the tears coming again, and Gideon making no effort to stop them.

The old man opened his mouth, his eyes suddenly desperate, and let out an indecipherable grunt.

“Say something! Please!”

The old man tried again, but then shook his head and looked away, out the window. Gideon, tears soaking his cheeks, picked up the scribbler and threw it against the wall. The pages opened and it fluttered to the floor.

“Fuck you, then! Fuck you!” he screamed.

Roxie appeared instantly and stopped at the doorway to find Gideon staring at the scribbler on the ground near the foot of the bed and the old man staring at his grandson.

“Everything okay in here?” she said.

“Yeah,” Gideon said without looking up.

His grandpa nodded.

“You sure?” she said.

Gideon looked over to her.

“Yeah, everything’s fine. Sorry,” he said.

Roxie took one last look, then left.

Gideon walked over and picked up the scribbler, then returned to his chair and sat down, placing the scribbler flat against the bed in front of him. He began to straighten it out as though it was a wrinkled shirt and continued the motion as he said, “I’m sorry, Grandpa, I’m just mad, y’know? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

The old man sighed, and then, almost against his will, reached over and took the scribbler. He picked up the pen and wrote, his eyes deep and intense, his brow scrunched together in thought. It took him a long time. Even in the short time Gideon had been there, the act of writing seemed more difficult by the moment. This was how the disease worked; his grandpa got tired faster, and more easily. The old man passed the scribbler to Gideon.

“Life’s not fair or unfair, son. Life is life, and that’s all we get,” his grandpa had written.

The words were getting harder to make out, as though written by a child. Gideon thought about Jayne’s writing as he looked at his grandpa’s. There wasn’t much difference. He read the words over and over again, and then tried to imagine the old man saying them. They were there, like a whisper, but there. But would they always be?

“I’m going to forget your voice. I want to remember your voice,” he said.

For the last time, his grandpa reached over and took the scribbler. He wrote as slowly and as carefully as he could, fighting through the exhaustion he must have been feeling, the shaking hands and heavy arms. He needed rest. Gideon took the scribbler from his grandpa when he was finished.

“The words are my voice. The words are what matter.”

The passage was read once, and then the scribbler was shut. Gideon looked the thing over, the piss-yellow colouring, the cheap, already frayed edges of paper, and the black, fancy letters that spelled Hilroy. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it into his back pocket. By this time the sun had moved from its place outside the window, and the dream catcher’s shadow now spilled out across his grandpa’s body, the webbed black lines making the white bedding look like a sheet of broken glass. The old man lifted his arm, straightened his hand, and reached out to his grandson. Gideon took his grandpa’s hand and shook it, and, as he did, he remembered something the old man had said. He remembered it clear and crisp, as though his grandpa had spoken the words right then.

“You always shake hands, Grandson. It’s what gentlemen do. You shake hands to thank somebody, to agree with somebody, to say you’re sorry, to say hello, and, most of all, always, to say goodbye.”

Gideon didn’t get over to see his grandpa the next day, and couldn’t be blamed for it. His day was busy. He’d spent it over at Alice’s place, playing with the girls for the better part of the morning, and then, later, sandbagging homes, because the water kept rising and rising. But the truth was, he didn’t feel like he could, even though, as hard as it was, he wanted to. It had taken him the entire evening to steady himself after he’d left the hospital, and he hadn’t even felt right the next morning. He’d decided that he needed a break. Just for one day. So, he played with the girls as best he could, and sandbagged as hard as he could, even though, during both activities, his mind was elsewhere, either picturing his grandpa’s face or trying to hear his voice speaking to him, saying the words that were written in the scribbler Gideon had taken with him. Some kind of break, he thought as he arrived home that evening. He fell asleep on his futon watching television with plans to visit the old man in the morning.

He woke up to the sound of his cell phone ringing, which he answered with his eyes still closed.

“Hello?” he said.

“Gideon?” Roxie said.

Gideon’s eyes darted open.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s your grandpa,” she said. “He …”

“Did he lose something else? Can he not move his arms or something?” he said.

“Gideon, he died this morning,” she said.

Gideon sat up and ran his free hand through his hair. He pictured his grandpa’s face, sunken, thin, tired. Would that now be the picture he had of the old man? He tried desperately to picture his grandpa before the illness but failed. He stood up and began to pace back and forth. Roxie didn’t say anything for a little while, perhaps giving him time to process the news. Quiet was familiar. He’d learned to deal with it. In his mind, as he paced back and forth, lost in a world without his grandpa, the man who raised him, he flipped through the old man’s scribbler and recited the words within it. But there weren’t enough.

“You should come here. You should come to see him,” Roxie said.

Gideon stopped pacing.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’ll come by.”

Gideon got dressed and left his house with his grandpa’s scribbler carefully rolled up and placed in his back pocket. He got into his truck, turned on the engine, reversed out of the driveway, and started his way down the highway. Nothing seemed real. The houses at the side of the highway, the discarded items in the ditch, the waking sun, the rising waters, all felt distant and cloudy. He followed the highway’s yellow dotted line, trusted it to guide him, because he didn’t think he could get there on his own. If the old man were there with him, he would tell Gideon something wise, words that only he could say, and things would be clear, and he would know the way. But his grandpa wouldn’t be there, not ever again. He was gone, and with him, his voice, that soothing baritone. But what about the words? What had he written?

Gideon stopped his truck suddenly, pulled a U-turn in the middle of the highway, and headed in the opposite direction. He ended up at his grandpa’s place, where there were all the boxes waiting to be moved, and all the things that had yet to be boxed. He would pack them later, just as he had promised. The old man had wanted to know it was done, and it would be. The cutlery, the wood carvings, the bed sheets. But not the scribblers, piled up on the floor in the corner of the room. Gideon gathered them up and placed them on the coffee table in a neat stack, along with the one that had been in his back pocket. He didn’t get over to see his grandpa that day. Instead, he spent his time opening scribbler after scribbler and reading what the old man had written.

And the words were all that mattered. The words were enough.

Later that morning, still hiding in their secret place, the old man and the boy sat down together on a large rock and looked out over the calm waters, across the sky’s reflection, all the way to a small island cozied up against the horizon.

“Of course, Grandson, your daddy died well before your mom, and even before you were born. You know that. And you know, too, all the things I’ve told you about him over the years. When he was your age, he looked exactly like you. Talked like you, too. Anyway, I think you’re old enough to know an important story about your daddy. You see, that island out there, it wasn’t always called Widow’s Island. It used to be called Bald Head, on account of how the trees only grow by the shoreline, never on the hill in the middle of the land. People and things get named for a reason. Widow’s Island, it has a reason for its name too. Years ago, your mom and dad were out in the middle of the lake on their canoe—they always went canoeing around the area, and oftentimes all the way out to the island—when a storm came. It was a bad one, too. The rain was coming down real hard. Well, they were just about as far out as they were in, so they decided to keep on going to Bald Head because the trees out there, they’re enormous, and they figured they could find some shelter.