Page 35

35

Blackout

Jake

The interior light of the car is the only point of illumination in the vast, dark night. Streetlights, house lights, everything else has winked out.

I shiver, as if somewhere in the future someone has stepped over my grave. When I get in the car the light flicks off, and I’m in a darkness so thick you could lie flat like a starfish and float on it. My eyes adjust. Stars materialize in the sky. Have I ever seen stars in the city? Then an eerie glow blooms in the window of the house nearest me. A gaunt face illuminated from below appears, and disappears after setting a candle on the sill.

Power outage. Of course.

In my head I see a space heater with no power to run it, in a dusty, cluttered room getting colder and colder. I start the car and pull a U-turn onto the road.

When I arrive, Bill’s neighborhood is full of dark-eyed houses too. The door swings open under my tenth knock and a flashlight shines in my face.

“Come back to kill me?” Bill says. “Good night for it, and just in time. I would have frozen to death before morning.”

It’s why I came. I follow him inside. It’s chilly, my breath clouding the air in front of me.

“Do you have a fireplace?”

He frowns. “Of course.”

“And firewood?”

He thinks. “I haven’t had a fire in years. There must be some in the garage.”

There is, and it’s dry as bone. Bill watches with suspicion as I kneel at the living room hearth.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he says. He can’t get down on his knees, so he starts poking and knocking my handiwork with his cane. “Balance that one on top, like that, or it won’t draw.”

He has a great, ancient box of matches, mostly gone. I strike one, and it gives a delicious schwick as a tongue of fire licks up. Bill and I watch the flames curl around the paper and set to work on the edges of the wood. The firelight peels back some of the darkness in the room, and when I examine Bill, I can see he’s still wearing his thin terry cloth robe. The idiot.

“Your dad never teach you to build a fire?”

“My dad’s dead,” I tell Bill. “So no.”

Bill peers at me. He looks even more confused when I settle him back into his easy chair and drape a blanket over him. I pull the ottoman close and sit on it. It’s time to confess. It’s time for an exchange of information held hostage. Sitting on Dodi’s sofa, I realized there are things I want to know from Bill. I want to know how this is going to go. I want to know how long from onset to game over. I want to know how long until that tipping point where loss of quality of life matters. I want to make the most of this.

“I’m not casing you out. I check your mailbox to make sure you came out. If you miss a couple of days, I look in the windows to make sure you’re not sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs or something.”

“Who are you?”

I’ve imagined many times how this might play out. It’s hard not to think of the way Aunt Laura looked when I suddenly appeared in her life: stricken, confused. Or Andrew’s immediate resentment, or the way his conservative family still looks at me like a slimy, disturbing secret slithered out from a crevice—the fatherless son of Laura’s estranged, unwed sister. It’s tempting to imagine Bill’s craggy face softening into surprise— joy , even—but how long would that last? He would see I’ve got my dad’s hazel eyes, the myopia; how many seconds would tick by before his mind went to the other goodies in my genetic grab bag?

I’m about to find out.

“My name is Jacob.”

He raises his eyebrows, face soft all of a sudden. “That was my son’s name.”

“I know.”

He frowns. “What is your last name?”

“Ripper.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Ripper” is being turned this way and that in his head, held up to the light, tapped against the heel of his palm while he thinks.

“My mother’s name was Elizabeth Ripper,” I add.

Something shifts deep in the sublayers of Bill’s memories, and his face collapses in shock.

—

I was eighteen when I got my hands on my birth certificate for the first time and saw for myself the blank line where my father’s name was supposed to go. It was a dead end until Laura smuggled me a small folder of my mother’s papers from Andrew’s office right before I moved out. Amongst them was a photo of a man—glasses, wide smile—and a letter. A breakup letter, to be precise, dated nine months before I was born and signed Love always, Jake. It was a project I picked away at, uncovering first his obituary, then a distant cousin or two on social media, and finally an old friend still living in the city. It was from him I learned about my father’s illness. He was the one who told me where to find my grandfather, Bill.

—

Bill’s range is gas, and it makes short work of boiling water. He sits in his armchair, cupping a mug of tea in his hands, warm water bottles wedged under his feet and in his lap.

“Elizabeth Ripper,” he says, and it has all the effect of someone unlocking the door to a dusty, forgotten room to hear my mother’s name said aloud after all these years. “Sweet, shy thing. I remember her. They were going to be married. And then he didn’t answer his phone for two weeks, and when I was good and worried, he showed up on my doorstep. He’d figured out he was dying. He’d decided to let her go—give her a chance to be happy. He didn’t even tell her why, the idiot. Didn’t want her to argue with him. The poor girl must have been so hurt.”

I nod, slowly. I think of Dodi holding my hand, asking me how much time I have, like maybe it almost matters to her.

“He was only thirty-one when it started,” Bill continues. “His decline was pretty quick after that. He turned into a hermit. He let his friendships go. He just gave up. He was housebound after about a year, and after that, things got really miserable. He was confused. Not himself anymore. It wasn’t pretty.”

“Did anyone else in the family have it?”

Bill’s face collapses. “His mother.”

My grandmother. I already knew this from my sleuthing.

“She went so quick—I felt like we didn’t know what hit us. And then Jacob, twenty years later—”

“Hereditary.”

He looks at me with an expression so anguished, my stomach twists. This right here is the reason I never introduced myself before. It seemed selfish to satisfy my curiosity at the expense of this lonely old man’s equilibrium.

But there’s no need for any of that. One year until I’ll want to check out. Less time than I thought, but I might outlive Bill, at any rate. I slip on a fake smile, as easy and habitual as tying my shoes.

“I hope you’re not worried about me. I’ve seen a neurologist. I’m going to live to a hundred,” I say.

—

The power flicks back on the next day, but I stay with Bill. I cook and bring his meals to his easy chair, and when he nods off sitting upright, I clean. I scrub grime out of crevices, I dust, I consolidate piles of trash, sort them, and dispose of them. I throw out hundreds of dollars of expired pantry items and replace them with food he can actually prepare himself. I run loads of laundry, I scrub toilets, I shampoo rugs. I organize the mess of pill bottles by the sink, then fill up his pill box for him. I make arrangements for the boiler to be fixed and fiddle with the ancient radiators until the whole house is warm.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Bill asks. “No. Don’t touch those glasses,” he says, one day after lunch. “I can do some dishes for once.”

What I’m doing is not thinking about Dodi on the sofa, asking me what I like. Dodi in the airport, telling me I need to figure out what makes me happy. Other people have lists, and it never occurred to me to compile my own. Every day I imagine going back to Dodi’s and buzzing her apartment. Every day, I think about my dad leaving my mom alone, trying to let her be happy.

I keep busy. There’s so much to do, and each job creates another. It’s like yanking on the loose thread of a sweater to snap it off, only to unravel an entire row of stitching and wind up with more thread to deal with. When Bill notices me wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row, he tells me to help myself to whatever I find in the bedroom closets. It’s the permission to snoop upstairs I was waiting for.

What I find is a bedroom. A man’s clothes hang in the closet: button-ups and slacks, a few silly ties. He was a teacher, like my mom. The bed is stripped, but an old-fashioned alarm clock still sits on the side table, and next to it a pair of thick-framed glasses. I remove my own and place them on the bridge of my nose. Our prescription is almost the same, his a little stronger. He was a bit older than me when he died, but only a bit.

I leave everything as I find it and close the door.

—

The morning of Christmas Eve, I find Bill watching TV in front of his fire—the fire is lit every day now, even with the power back on.

“…a citywide turkey shortage in grocery stores thanks to a turkey pileup on Highway 1…” a news reporter with reindeer earmuffs says on TV. Behind her is a semi rolled over onto its side, little white lumps of vacuum-wrapped Butterballs pimpling the highway.

Bill taps the mute on the remote control I uncovered under the sofa to give me his full attention. I hand him his mail: a hydro bill, a package from a law firm, and an envelope from a lab. Bill’s health is a full-time job to manage. I don’t know how he’s supposed to do it on his own. He rips open the envelope from the lab first and stares at the contents for a long minute. It can’t be good news, but he doesn’t share it with me. I understand the preference for privacy. He folds it up and stuffs it in his pocket without looking at me.

“I’m going to my aunt’s for Christmas,” I tell him.

He gazes at me long and hard. I feel like he’s looking at my eyes, my glasses, my hair. I don’t know what he’s looking for. He nods his head. “All right.”

I have the impulse to invite him, but I don’t. Andrew is a corrosive substance, and I wouldn’t inflict him on anyone.

“Will you be all right here?”

“I’ve been all right here on my own for almost thirty years,” he reminds me gruffly. “Is this it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you be coming back?”

I’ve been waiting for him to ask. I want to say yes. It’s not like there’s anywhere else for me to go. But there’s a change in the air, a difference in Bill’s mood all of a sudden.

“Do you want me to?”

Bill shrugs without looking at me, diffident. “I don’t see why you’d bother. You’re young. You have better things to do.”

The room is awkwardly silent apart from the babble of the TV. I’ve been carving out a little nook for myself in someone else’s life these past weeks, trying to be useful, essential, and once again it hasn’t worked. Bill and I have been dancing around our connection this whole time. He hasn’t uttered the word “grandson.” I haven’t called him anything other than “Bill.” Blood connection doesn’t equate a relationship, after all. He’s a tired old man who was grateful for some help, and that is all.

I leave him there by the fire with his stack of mail.