It’s nearly 500 miles from Lansingsburg,
New York, to our home back in northeastern Ohio. Father and I didn’t talk much,
but both of us, I knew, were thinking—a lot. Father suggested it would
be a good idea to drive on, late into the night, and arrive home at a time when
most everyone else was sleeping. We didn’t want to make a production out of our
return. Just get home. Quietly.
I couldn’t disagree with that, so off we
drove, and I was grateful when I saw no more signs for Niagara Falls. I was
still tormented by that vision of poor Gil—if it had been a vision. But
if not, what else could it have been?
***
We stopped once for gas—and a couple of
other quick stops for refreshment—and pulled into our driveway just before
dawn. No police tape was around the yard—no indications that anything unusual had occurred
there.
What did really happen? I wondered.
I soon found out. Very soon.
***
The next morning, Father told me he’d
called the school to let them know I wouldn’t be there for a few days. I was, he’d
told the secretary, “feeling poorly.”
The understatement of the year.
During the early part of the day, while
Father worked on some articles to publish online, I went up to my
laboratory/study, sat down, and did a lot of thinking—about what had happened,
about what I must have thought had happened, about what I’d seen—or thought
I’d seen.
When my mind felt flooded (as it did a
few times), I took out that paperback book I’d bought from that drugstore rack
back in New York—Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. I
loved it.
It begins with some very weird family
history (not as weird as mine, though!). At one point the narrator
recalls how, as a small child, she decided she would teach herself how to read.
And she does it, crying out, “I am powerful! I have now the key to the Temple
of Knowledge and there’s no longer stopping me ….”[i]
I laid down the book and smiled,
Atkinson’s words reminding me so clearly of how I had felt throughout my life
when I “broke the code” to whatever I was working on. Doing so does indeed make
you feel as if you are powerful—as if you have acquired a passcode
admitting you to a cavern full of new wonders—the way Bilbo Baggins must have
felt when he saw the dragon Smaug’s lair, a cave full of gold and jewels.
I heard Father’s voice calling me from
downstairs—how long had he been doing so? I opened the door. “Yes?” I cried.
“You have a visitor,” he said.
Puzzled, I hurried down, moved to the
front door.
And saw, standing there, John Howard, my
talented classmate who had played Dracula in our school production, a
production that seemed to have occurred years ago—if ever.
This is going to be awkward, I thought.
***
“John!” I said, trying my best to sound
friendly and cheerful.
“You’re back,” he said.
“Have I been somewhere?”
“I came by the house a couple of times,”
he said. “Didn’t see any activity. No one answered the phone.”
“You’ve called?”
“Only a couple of hundred times.”
“Something must be wrong with the phone,”
I said.
We looked at each other for what seemed
like a week.
“Can I come in?”
“I don’t know—can you?” I asked,
trying to sound like Mr. W., our English teacher, when he was trying to
emphasize the difference between may and can.[ii]
We both sort of laughed. “Well, I
definitely may,” he said, “but can I?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
And opened the door.
***
Again, we just stood there. I had no idea
what he was thinking, but my mind was flying through recent events like a
nervous chickadee. What does he know? How much have I hallucinated? How much
actually happened?
John blushed and said, “May I sit
down?
“You can,” I joked, “but may
you?”
The tension was relaxing.
“How did Dracula, Baby! go on
Saturday night?” I asked.
“About like Friday,” he said, “though we
were all a lot more relaxed about it.”
“I’ll bet you were wonderful again,” I
said before I’d even realized what I was saying.
John looked shocked, then quickly
concealed it. “That’s kind,” he said.
“But true.”
“Well, thank you,” he said. Another
awkward pause. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here?”
“To practice the difference between may
and can?”
He smiled—but more seriously so this
time. “You’re very good at distractions,” he said.
“I hope so.”
He took a deep breath. “Some of us were
wondering if you were all right … absent from school …”
“Of course I’m all right,” I lied.
“Father had an unexpected … business trip … to New York and decided to take me
along at the last minute.”
“New York,” mumbled John. “The city?”
“No. Upstate. Glens Falls. Albany.”
“Glens Falls!” he said. “Setting for that
classic scene in The Last of the Mohicans.”
“You’ve read that book?”
“Read all five of those Cooper books,” he
said.
“You’re a bundle of surprises,” I said.
“I hope so.” He then asked, “Did you
visit Cooper’s Cave there?”
“We did.”
“Doesn’t look much now the way it looked
in Cooper’s day.”
I stared at him. This was getting too
weird. In my drug-dream, of course, he had been there.
“No,” was all I managed.
“And near Albany, you know, is the house
where Melville wrote his first two books.”
I stared again. Then said, “You’ve seen
the house in Lansingburgh, too?”
“Yes—though, if you were there, you know
that it’s not open to the public.”
“No, not to the public,” I said softly.
“You’ve been inside?” he asked.
I said nothing. My brain felt like
scrambled eggs.
***
And then it all spilled out like an upset
bag of popcorn. I watched John carefully as he rambled on and on, and I did not
detect—not in the slightest—any doubt. Or even surprise. He just listened.
Focused on what I was saying.
When I finally finished dumping each
popcorn kernel of the story, I said, “I know it all sounds crazy.”
“Well, perhaps,” he said. “But what if I
told you I saw all of it in dreams the past few nights?”
“You did?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I thought I
was going crazy.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
And then Father came into the room. “I
don’t think we’ve had the pleasure,” he said to John.
“Oh, he’s my … friend John Howard.”
Father looked at me. “From school,” I added.
“Nice to meet you,” said Father,
extending his hand. Which John, who seemed embarrassed, shook.
“We were just talking about the show he
was in. Dracula, Baby! I saw it
the first night. He said the second went well, too,”
“Well, good, good,” said Father. “Plays
are tough to do,” he added.
“Not as much as confronting monsters in Cooper’s
Cave,” said John.
Father quickly looked at me in shock.
“How does John know—?”
“Beats me,” I said.
***
We all sat down. We talked awhile.
“I feel odd,” said Father, “talking this over
with two eighth graders!”
“At least you can trust us,” said John—which
was the precise thing I was thinking.
“We can’t just sit around,” said Father.
“Dr. Eastbrook has certainly been looking for us. He probably just can’t imagine we’d be
somewhere so … obvious.”
And then the doorbell rang.
We looked at one another. Do we answer
it?
Father seemed to have decided, stood up,
and headed to the door. Only he didn’t make it quite there.
The door came crashing down, and in
stepped three Blue Boyles—and, of course, Dr. Eastbrook. Who said: “You
and your daughter are getting to be more than I can stand. I think it’s time we
did something a little more … persuasive.”
I saw a brief fog fill the room, and when
it quickly lifted, once again, a bunch of other people had arrived. A
bunch of impossible people.
Mary Shelley, William Godwin,
Frankenstein’s creature, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Aunt Claire,
and a number of other writers and characters from the many books I’d read and
loved. And from my imagination. Dr. Eastbrook and the Blue Boyles stood there,
frozen. In fear? Surprise? Or was it, well, magic?
William Godwin (Mary’s father) stepped
forward and spoke: “We will take these four with us,” he said. “To a
different—but not necessarily better place.”
Mary Shelley—slender and with glowing red
hair—slid silently toward me. She placed her small hand on my shoulder, said,
“We have a kinship,” then stepped back into the group.
As they were leaving, I stopped Herman
Melville and whispered something to him.
And then they were gone, the door was
back on its hinges, and Father and John, who had been frozen the entire time,
too, thawed and continued their conversation as if nothing had happened.
And Father said, “And what do you think,
Vickie? About this problem.”
I smiled, “I think we should move
somewhere a little more remote. For a little while.”
John looked unhappy.
I smiled at him. “Until it’s safe to come
back.” I added, “We’ll stay in touch
online.”
John then smiled at me.
***
Father and I spent a long couple of days
preparing the move—again. He went to get a rental truck to carry our things. No
one in the neighborhood seemed to notice.
The last day—as we were carrying the last
load of things to the truck—John came by.
He took me aside. “I had the strangest
dream last night.”
“Oh?”
“You were whispering something to Herman
Melville.”
“Oh?”
“And I could hear it.”
“So what did you hear?” I asked.
“‘You should start your whaling book with
this: Call me Ishmael.’”
He smiled and said. “That’s odd.”
He squeezed my hand, and then we drove
off. In my hand I clutched his email address—as if I would forget it. And
swooping over the truck as we left town was Aunt Claire, who cried some kind
of farewell. We hadn’t driven long before a massive snowstorm began, but it
diminished as we drove farther and farther south.[iii]
***
We headed back down I-71, back to Franconia,
the town we had lived before. I had asked Father where we were going, but he
played it cool, holding me off. We pulled onto the street where we used to
live—but not into our former driveway. But next door. Where Mrs. Eastbook and
Harriet (her daughter, my best friend—my sister) lived. In their front
yard was a FOR SALE sign—with another sign hanging over it: SOLD,
“Father—?”
And out the front door came Mrs.
Eastbrook and Harriet—with suitcases.
I leapt out of the car and hugged
Harriet. Father did the same with Mrs.
Eastbook.
They were going with us—wherever we were
going.
I don’t think I’d ever been so happy.
As we pulled out of their driveway, I saw
Mr. Leon sitting on the front porch where we used to live—where he had lived
long, long before. He was smiling and gave us the tiniest wave.
***
I’ll not tell you where we went. Well,
not specifically. We bought a house somewhere in north central Oklahoma, a
place foreign to all of us. I guess we just wanted to disappear into geography.
Father continued his online journalism, and my new mother, who, months before,
had been granted a divorce from Dr. Eastbrook, found a job at a local
library—an old Carnegie library that had somehow survived nearly 100 years
after its construction. She loved it there.
John and I kept in touch via email, and
in one of them he told me that Irv Washington had left Wisbech and was now
attending a boys’ school somewhere in Canada, where his parents had moved. I
thought about how I had once felt about him—and realized I no longer did. The
changeable human heart …
***
At home, we all talked—a lot—and the
adults cleared up some mysteries for me—and for Harriet, who, I learned, was
fed up with her eighth-grade life—and had wanted a change. And had missed me as
much as I had missed her—or so we told each other.
Harriet learned that our parents (my
father, her mother) had been lovers years before—and separated before he knew
that she was pregnant. With Harriet. We really were sisters—born less
than a year apart, explaining how we could be in the same grade at school.
And Dr. Eastbook? What had he been
doing?
For that information, they had to rely on
me.
From
Blue Boyle
We found your house. We smashed your
door. The house was empty. Where did you go?
[i] This quotation
indeed appears on page 113 in Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
[ii] I have no memory
of saying this.
[iii] This really
happened, that snowstorm in northeastern Ohio in early November, 1996.
