Slipping Read online

  SLIPPING

  Cathleen Davitt Bell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  Imprint

  For short young men past and future:

  Michael, Rick, and Max

  Chapter 1

  Let me start by saying that my grandpa had always been different. He didn’t do the things other kids’ grandfathers do. He didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Hanukkah. He didn’t decorate his living room with my sister’s and my school pictures. He didn’t send cards on my birthday. Once, I asked him why other grandparents did all these things, and Grandpa said he didn’t believe in commercial excess.

  I was only six then—I’m thirteen now—but I already knew “commercial excess” meant presents. We were sitting at the table in the one-room cabin next to a freezing lake where he lived all by himself in Vermont. He was peeling potatoes with a knife, because he didn’t believe in vegetable peelers, and I was watching him because there was nothing better to do. “But I believe,” I said.

  Grandpa laughed, put down the knife, and clapped his hands. His hair was so short you could see through to the red of his scalp. “Who am I,” he said, “Tinkerbell?”

  Not that he believed in Tinkerbell. Or white bread. Or fresh milk—he drank powdered. He didn’t believe in having a TV. When we visited the cabin, he and my dad listened to baseball games on the radio at night, and Mom, Julia, and I went straight to bed because we were so bored. During the day, after my lips turned blue from five minutes of swimming in Grandpa’s lake, the most exciting thing to do was watch Grandpa chop wood with an ax. He would raise the ax high and yell, “Michael, stand back!” even when I was really, really far away. He taught me to play checkers—that was pretty cool—but he never let me win, even when I was, like, seven. And after I was seven, we didn’t see Grandpa anymore.

  My dad never said why we stopped going to visit. Dad isn’t the kind of person who explains much. First of all, he works all the time, so I hardly ever see him. Second of all, he tends to turn questions around on you. Like, if I asked him, “How come we don’t get to go see Grandpa anymore?” he’d probably just end up saying something like, “Do you know that ‘get’ is one of the most overused words in the English language?”

  When I asked Mom why Grandpa stopped coming to see us, she sighed and said, “Oh, Grandpa,” as if I’d asked a question that was far too complicated for her to explain. I asked her again, another time, and she said Grandpa didn’t believe in New York. She said that he didn’t call because he didn’t believe in having a phone. I wondered if we had become one more thing not to believe in. I wondered if I believed in him either.

  Then he died.

  • • •

  It happened last month, February. I was taking a break from an earth science project, driving a Koenigsegg CC through the arches of the Musée d’Orsay—that’s a building in my Midtown Madness Xbox game. I’m pretty sure it’s in Paris. My video game privileges had been taken away after I got a C on my last earth science project, but my mom was too busy to notice. It was the week before one of Julia’s ballet concerts, and when these are going on, my mom gets really distracted, and eventually disappears into a backstage haze of stapled costumes and helping the little kids put on eye shadow. Julia dances through the foyer, saying things like, “I am far too nervous to eat,” which makes my mom too nervous to eat because it’s her greatest fear in life that Julia will become anorexic. I try to explain to my mom that someone who always takes the last piece of pepperoni pizza probably doesn’t have an eating disorder, but Mom worries anyway.

  My dad came home from work late, as usual. He stood in the doorway to the dining room, which in our apartment is not where we eat together sitting around a table—the table is shoved against one wall, and an old beat-up couch and the TV live in the other corner. We eat in front of the TV. One of my mom’s favorite jokes is to call our stack of take-out menus her cookbook.

  Dad sort of slumped against the door frame and looked over at my mom. Everything about my dad is skinny, and everything about him shines, from his shoes, which he gets polished once a week in a little store in the basement of his office building, to his hair, which lies perfectly straight and flat, every single glistening black strand. He hates anything messy, which means he hates my room, and especially hates my hair.

  He’s a litigator—that’s the kind of lawyer who argues with people all day. He works for himself, and Mom says he drives himself harder than any boss would, and that’s why he’s never home for dinner, and has to cancel vacations at the last minute. He’s afraid that one day there’ll be a big stock market crash and all the companies he protects when they get sued will go out of business and stop hiring him, and we’ll have to sell our apartment, and Julia and I will have to stop going to private school. Dad is big into reminding us that private school is very, very expensive, and my mom is big into reminding Dad that we can totally, totally afford it.

  He’s always saying to me, “You have to pay attention. To things in the world. Something besides video games.”

  I’m not like my dad. He was a straight-A student who played three varsity sports and was president of the model UN. I’m the shortest kid in the eighth grade, including the girls. I’m bad at sports—everyone at Selden, my school, has to play, but when I hold a basketball up over my head to make a shot, I can feel it wobbling, while Mr. Ball, my coach, yells, “Pass it off. Pass it off.” When Mr. Ball’s picking the next sub during games, he looks right over my head.

  My dad hates Mr. Ball. He’ll say things like, “Don Ball’s biggest fault as a coach is a lack of imagination. He’ll never coach varsity.” Of course, Don Ball’s biggest fault as a coach is the fact that his last name is Ball, but whatever. I guess I should feel good that it makes my dad angry that Coach Ball doesn’t play me. But it doesn’t exactly feel like my dad’s on my side. When he comes to my games—which is, like, once a year—he always comes up behind me and covers my eyes. “What’s the score, Michael?” he’ll say. I never know.

  I guess I take after my mom. She’s really short like me, and she’s always losing her house keys, and she never does the dishes until it’s time to actually use the plates that are in the sink. One time I heard another mom ask mine how she managed with my dad working such long hours. My mom shrugged and said, “If I saw him more, maybe we’d find out we have nothing in common.” My mom’s like that—she talks about divorce, something my dad would never joke about. Or if he did, he’d say, “God forbid,” even though he doesn’t believe in God.

  Now, while my dad was slumped in the doorway, Mom was talking on the phone and collating programs for Julia’s ballet performance. She lifted her eyebrows to him, her sign that she was talking to a client. My mom is a freelance publicist specializing in consumer products, which she’s always making us try, from the organic cinnamon-flavored toothpaste that actually tastes like sand to the body gel for girls that she tried to convince me could cross over.

  My mom always laughs and gossips with clients like they’re her friends, but never tells them to hold on, or asks if she can call them back. “Of course,” she said now. “Naturally. Exactly.” There are about five hundred ways to say “You’re right,” and my mom knows them all. She mouthed “Sorry�
� to my dad, then looked back down at the programs in a pile on her left, counting.

  Instead of going into the kitchen to make himself a protein shake, which is what he usually has for dinner, Dad kept watching her from the dining room doorway. My dad is someone who is never late, who is never wrong, who is never sad. But just then, he looked like he was maybe all three. He took a big breath in through his nose, and at the same time opened his eyes wide and lifted his eyebrows as far as they could go. Without waiting for my mom to hang up, he said, “My father died yesterday. It was a heart attack.”

  “Let me call you back,” Mom said into the phone.

  She stood still for a minute, staring. It was just a second that she paused before crossing the room to Dad. She put her arms around him even though he kept his at his sides. I wish I could say I felt sad hearing the news about Grandpa. But mostly I think I was curious, kind of waiting to see if I would feel sad. I had never known anyone who was dead before except my dad’s mom, and she died before I was born, so that doesn’t really count. Having Grandpa be dead was kind of like finding out he was famous.

  The whole time Mom was hugging Dad, he never hugged her back. Mom’s always making him kiss her hello or hold her hand in public. What’s amazing to me is that not only will Dad kiss Mom back, he’ll usually say something like, “Thanks for that,” or laugh, like he’s remembering a joke. Now, though, he didn’t move, and when she finally let go, he said, “I have to review some files. I’ll be in the kitchen,” and left the room. He wasn’t crying or anything.

  My mom looked like she was the one who was going to cry, but instead, she pushed her hair up off her forehead and took a deep breath. She talks about how she should dye her hair back to brown, but then she just keeps letting it go grayer and grayer, and cuts it shorter and shorter. She’s so short, and with her short gray hair, she kind of looks like a boy.

  Watching my mom try not to cry, I lost control of the Koenigsegg. It spun out in the Place de la Concorde and crashed into the Seine River. Mom winced at the noise. “You,” she said, “should be in bed. Turn that garbage off.”

  “First of all,” I said, “video games are not garbage. This is teaching me about France. And second, if I go to bed, does that mean I don’t have to finish earth science?”

  “Yes. Whatever. No,” Mom said.

  “Which is it?”

  “Bed!”

  I climbed under my covers with my Game Boy, but before I turned it on, I heard Julia making goo-goo noises with our cat, Speckles. Julia’s almost old enough to be getting a driver’s license—that’s seventeen in New York State—but most of the time she acts like she’s nine.

  “Julia,” I called out, when I heard the water running in the bathroom that connects our two rooms.

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  “Why?” She popped her head around the door. Julia has brown hair that’s always brushed and shiny, and her nose is as straight as her perfect grades, perfect pink sweaters, perfect brown suede boots. Right now, the skin around her eyes was red from scrubbing. She’s terrified of zits, even though she doesn’t have any. Last year, she made Mom take her to the dermatologist to get a special anti-zit cream, and he said, “You have nothing to put it on.” My dad loves to tell that story.

  “Did you know Grandpa is dead?” I said. I expected she would. Mom and Dad treat her like a grown-up. They gave her her own American Express card. Next year, she’ll be applying to college.

  “Grandpa Kimmel?” she said. I don’t know who else she could have thought I was talking about. We call our other grandfather Grands. Grands and Gaggy live on the sort-of farm where my mom grew up in Connecticut. They treat me like I’m five years old, it takes them about two hours to make pancakes, and they say things like “Okey-dokey” and “Jiminy Crickets.” Last Christmas, after we visited them, Mom turned around in the driver’s seat—Dad had gone back early, on the train—and said, “See, kids? I grew up in paradise and I chose to live in a place where you pay with your blood and sweat for a three-bedroom apartment. Who knows how you’ll rebel.”

  “Yes, Grandpa Kimmel,” I said to Julia now. There was something cool-feeling about finally knowing something before she did. “Dad just told Mom.”

  “Wow,” Julia said. She pointed her toe, sliding her left leg out and tracing semicircles on the floor.

  “Do you feel sad?” I asked.

  “I guess he was pretty old,” she said.

  “Dad wasn’t crying or anything.”

  “So?” she said.

  “Do you think we’ll go to a funeral? Shouldn’t we be skipping school?”

  “Why would we go to his funeral when we didn’t go see him when he was alive?”

  “But isn’t that weird?” I said. “Can you imagine one of us not speaking to Mom or Dad forever? Can you imagine Mom not speaking to Grands and Gaggy?”

  Julia started flipping through my CDs and video games, making sure I didn’t have any of hers. “Grands and Gaggy are different,” she said. “They love us. They’re a part of our lives.”

  “Grandpa used to be part of ours,” I said.

  “You remember him?”

  “He smelled like cigars and old magazines,” I said. “He had a funny accent.”

  “He talked like a cabdriver.” Julia giggled.

  “He was kind of mean.”

  “He slept in long underwear and then wore it under his clothes the next day,” Julia said.

  “That’s what you remember?”

  “Well,” she said. “It was pretty gross.”

  • • •

  I fell asleep playing Game Boy, and the next thing I knew it was morning. “Time to wake up,” Dad was saying in his fake-cheerful voice. My pillow was so warm and soft on my cheek that in spite of his voice, I couldn’t move.

  “Come on, Michael,” Dad said. “Mom has an early meeting. I have court, and I can’t be late. And Mom says not to forget you’re bringing the cello.”

  I rolled over and buried my head. When I was little, I used to wake up early and go find my parents in their room. Mom would roll over and say, “TV. Is. Now. Allowed.” But Dad always got out of bed in his T-shirt and boxers and brought me into the dining room to read Harry Potter.

  This is kind of embarrassing, but I sat in my dad’s lap when we read together in the mornings until, like, fifth grade. On Friday nights when I was little, I’d wait for Dad to come back from the office, and he would pick me up and throw me in the air when he got home. He would make me an ice cream version of a protein shake, using combinations I could never believe, like strawberries and cornflakes, or bananas and carrots.

  We don’t do those things together anymore. “Whose jacket is this balled up in the corner of your room?” Dad said now. “Isn’t this your school blazer that your mother spent three hundred dollars on? Why is it wet?”

  I was going to explain about the water fight, but he’d already moved on to the corner of my room that back before winter vacation, my best friend Gus and I had turned into a prisoner of war camp for all of Julia’s old American Girl dolls—Gus was taking pictures with his digital camera for a kind of photo-comic book he was making.

  “This is sick,” Dad said.

  “It’s been there for months,” I started. “Me and Gus—”

  “Gus and I!”

  By the time he found my unfinished earth science report, I was sitting up. Dad lifted the poster board, and all the markers went sliding to the floor.

  “Is this due today?” he said.

  “Mom told me to go to bed. I was going to stay up and finish it, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  “Honestly, Michael, you go to private school. You know how much that costs.”

  “But Grandpa died,” I said. “That’s why Mom said I should go to bed.”

  “Grandpa?” he said, as if he had no idea who I was talking about.

  He was standing by the door to the bathroom, and I remembered how Julia had stood there last night whil
e we talked about Grandpa. How she hadn’t felt sad. How I hadn’t felt sad either.

  “You don’t care about him,” I spat out. I don’t quite know what made me say that. I was surprised at how angry I sounded. I wasn’t angry—not exactly. But what if Dad died? Would I feel sad? What if I was glad because then he wouldn’t yell at me anymore? Or what if I died and Dad was like, “Michael died of a heart attack last night. I’m going to make myself a shake now.”

  My dad was staring at me, like he was still trying to figure out who I meant by “Grandpa.” At that moment, I probably could have pretended that I hadn’t said anything at all, and he would have gone along with it. But I didn’t pretend. I said, “You don’t even care that your own father died.”

  My dad’s face turned white, then red.

  Usually my dad has this way of not being surprised by anything I do. He reacts without missing a beat when he’s mad. “Apologize to your mother.” “Put that back!” “Sit down!” And, when he’s really mad, “Go to your room.” But now my dad didn’t have anything ready to say. It wasn’t that he looked puzzled. It was that he didn’t look like anything. His face kind of froze.

  And then, before he could unfreeze, something happened to the air between us.

  By happened, I mean shimmered.

  And by shimmered, I mean moved. The air between my dad and me actually twisted a little, the way air twists over pavement on a really hot day. My dad’s long face blurred, his tie pushed itself into an S-curve, his knees moved several inches to the left of his legs.

  At the same time, something touched me on the back of my neck. It felt like a needle. I slapped at it, but the feeling didn’t go away. It was like getting a Novocain shot at the dentist. At first you’re thinking, This isn’t so bad, and then you’ve got tears in your eyes, and you’re thinking, Stop! Stop!

  “Ow!” I said. It was like my speaking broke the spell.

  “What?” said my dad. “What was that?”

  “There was something cold on my neck,” I said. “And didn’t you see the air move?”