A Lite Too Bright Read online

  I made my way back to her room, the door groaning as I pushed it open. I tiptoed across the room, careful to avoid any loose floorboards, and snatched the napkin off the bedside table.

  What she had called a napkin wasn’t a napkin at all—it was a crumpled piece of thick notebook paper with ink markings on the inside of it.

  I turned to leave, but something caught my eye—the stack of paper, innocently set on the bedside table, wasn’t just paper: it was envelopes, small and stocky. I leaned closer; below them, barely visible, was a page of handwritten addresses. Halfway down, I recognized the Truckee address and recoiled, the wood beneath my heels grinding together in a slow creak.

  Sue Kopek rolled over in her bed and my heart flew upward into my throat: her eyes were wide-open.

  Her chest rose and fell steadily, as if she was asleep, and her face was expressionless, but her eyelids were pulled back as far as they’d go, leaving her eyes white and glowing. I gaped at her for a moment; it was impossible to look away from her terrifying stare. Quietly, she whispered, “You said you were coming back together.”

  Without thinking, I ran. I didn’t care about the door behind me slamming. I took off up the stairs. I didn’t stop until I reached the far bedroom and slammed that door as well. I hurled myself onto the mattress and froze, listening for signs that I had been followed.

  I did nothing but breathe and listen. But the house was silent, save the soft moan of old wood.

  One finger at a time, I opened my hand around the crumpled notebook paper and spread it in front of me. The moon lit the page—it was the same cursive, my grandfather’s writing.

  april 28, the 2010.

  pillar porch ceiling mattress singing all in baxes

  her castle

  & we were jasters

  moon through window, made of

  built on

  love

  arthur

  some days are cold nathingness

  i feel us moving through it

  speeches in your living room,

  dreaming on your floor

  songs with words that fill to the ceilings

  who were we then?

  where did

  cold window lite from moon

  i know cold

  i know leaving

  i know empty

  i know sickness & health

  i know temporary

  & she knows them too

  she waits here for us,

  in empty boxes broken bells

  in songs that still echo in the ceilings

  in ruins of

  a castle lite from the moon

  she waits,

  & we went

  & never returned

  but she knows the curious rush

  to smell

  see

  touch

  to know but not remember

  to love

  hurt

  cry out

  for history that doesn’t exist

  but for the lite from the moon

  felt but not seen

  held but not understood

  shrunk like threads

  of oft-worn cotton

  her head & mine,

  a diary of time forgotten.

  —arthur louis pullman

  8.

  IT WAS PAST midnight when I set my grandfather’s clue down on the floor next to the ripped shreds of paper and collapsed onto the mattress.

  I understood more and less. He’d been on this “mattress,” writing to the light from the “moon through window.” Was this the castle? He kept referring to Sue as “she”—if not her, who was he writing to? Why was she waiting, and who didn’t come back? Orlo and Jeffery? Or my grandfather?

  The date was April 28, the second day he was missing. I wondered how long he’d stayed before moving on. I needed to know where he’d gone next.

  The poem did make one thing clear: I was right about Sue’s brain. She was fighting the same battle my grandfather had fought at the end of his life, and even my grandfather could tell. I could understand her as I understood him: as a victim of the unstoppable march of age. My frustration with her was buried in pity.

  But it gave me an advantage: I knew how to speak to my grandfather. When he was stuck in a reset, or clearly reliving some other experience, we’d learned to play along, hoping that instead of confusing him more, we might jar loose new information. If Sue was stuck five years ago, waiting for him to show up, I had to feed her imagined reality. I had to become my grandfather.

  9.

  I TAKE MY last big breath at the same spot that I always take my last big breath.

  The nose of the Camaro breaks mile marker 29, and I inhale. The window’s down and air is rushing at me much faster than I can take it in, and I’m tasting every invisible piece of it. The air out here is sweeter, uncorrupted by the smell of San Francisco, and now my whole body is full of it. I’m 90 percent air and 10 percent right foot.

  Fourth gear.

  The crest of the mountain is ahead of me and the sun is breaking over it and I’m hurtling toward it. The wheels of the Camaro, the TSW Nurburgring five-hundred-dollar customs, are gripping the road and throwing it behind them. There are no cars on the road. There are no clouds in the sky. There are no spots on my window. There are no thoughts on my mind. There are no speed limits in Portola Valley.

  Fifth gear.

  I hit the top of the mountain, or it hits me, and the world opens below. It’s like the Land Before Time, with one single road guiding me slightly to the right, and I know it like I know how to wake up in the morning. Narrow slopes on either side of the asphalt disappear into darkness. I could close my eyes but I won’t because to miss this would be to miss heaven opening right in front of me. It’s the perfect curve for maximum velocity. It will throw me forward, downhill inertia meets centripetal-force inertia meets the engine of the Chevy Camaro. God-made energy multiplied by man-made acceleration, as I shift into—

  Sixth gear.

  I spin the wheel and the energy of the curve pulls me toward the center of the circle, toward the center of the Earth. The frame shakes as the air rushes in and the speed takes over and I’m no longer mortal, no longer bound by physics and reality, I am a creature of adrenaline. Adrenaline, pumping so fast that I can see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, feel it in my head and my heart, and my foot pushes farther, the curve behind me, nothing but downhill asphalt in front of me until—

  There’s someone in the road.

  Brown hair and pale skin, shining in the Portola Valley sun.

  I slam on the brake but the brake does nothing.

  The speedometer is broken. There are no speed limits in Portola Valley.

  There is no decision; I can’t hit her. Adrenaline jerks the wheel to the right. One inch. Two inches. Six inches.

  The Camaro crashes into the barrier. The frame of the vehicle crunches but the momentum is too much, the speed is too fast. I’m flying into darkness.

  My seat belt wraps and collapses my stomach. It forces out everything that was inside of me. All the precious air that I saved was gone.

  Five more belts wrap around me. The ring squeezes my finger tighter.

  I’m trapped to my seat, immovable beneath the belt and watching in real time as the front of the car connects with the side of the mountain and collapses the steering wheel to my throat.

  The back right bumper is next, then the left, the frame snapping and sending metal rods and black leather and bucket seats flying around me, circling my head.

  I’m still fully conscious as the car hits water.

  I didn’t know there was a lake here. For all the times I’d driven this road, I never looked far enough into the valley to see the water below. Immediately, I’m under the surface. It’s cold and lifeless and dark and empty and unending, extending infinitely in every direction. I’m trapped. I want to fight it but I don’t, my hands too pinned, the pressure too great, the belt too tight, my chest too empty. My eyes are stinging, but I
won’t close them, because to miss this would be to miss heaven opening right in front of me. There is no air under the water. There is no part of my body that I can move. All I can do is feel; adrenaline, rushing through every vein and vessel, begging me to jerk my arms, to twist my torso, to reach for the window, to shatter the glass, but I don’t.

  There’s a light coming from the surface. As I look up I can see her outline through the water; pale skin and brown hair, shimmering against the Portola Valley sky.

  10.

  I WOKE UP gasping for air. My eyes shot open but my torso remained still, paralyzed on the mattress. I wasn’t underwater. I wasn’t in my Camaro.

  Lifting my head, I pieced reality back together. The room was empty but for the mattress I was lying on, the shreds of paper on the floor, and the clue I clutched in my right hand. Light was finding its way through the enormous window, throwing shadows against the wall. I fell back and closed my eyes.

  From outside the door, I heard a crash and my brain revved to life—someone else was in Sue’s house. I rolled off the mattress and stumbled to my feet.

  “Hey!” I shouted, staggering out of the room. “Get out of—”

  I choked on the end of my sentence when I reached the top of the stairs.

  Sue Kopek, the night before too weak to even support herself on her own feet, was standing triumphantly in her living room like a statue in a storm, surrounded by a mess of folding chairs.

  “Arthur!” She looked up at me, almost excited. “You boys were supposed to be back last week.”

  I swallowed hard. Her physical strength had returned; her memory, of course, had not. “Sorry,” I said, taking small steps. “The train was late.”

  “Well, where’s Orlo? Or Jeffery?”

  “They’re coming, too. Just running a little behind.”

  “Isn’t that just like Jeffery? On our last day, of all days.”

  New information hit me like a blast of cold air to the face. It was her last day with Jeffery. It was a start.

  But she had already lost where we were, disappeared into a box of records and reemerged as a carbon copy of the Sue that I had first discovered.

  “Arthur!” she said. “You boys were supposed to be back last week.”

  This time, I was in character. “Well, we were running late. But Jeffery’ll be here any minute, probably just in time.”

  “Good,” she said.

  I inched closer. “What time does he need to be here for us to . . . uh . . .”

  She didn’t complete my sentence.

  “For the, uh . . .”

  She didn’t seem to hear me, instead mumbling to herself as she pushed chairs around.

  “Where is Jeffery going?” I asked again.

  She pulled her head back and blinked several times. “Arthur!” she exclaimed. “Don’t sneak around like that.”

  I slunk back toward the kitchen and tried again, but it was the same result. Again and again and again, I asked what was happening, and she refused to answer.

  The question became our brick wall. She just didn’t know the answer. Of course she didn’t. This was exactly what memory loss did to people: took away the most important parts.

  I helped her pack and unpack boxes, pushing and prodding as gently as I could for more information, but our conversation became more and more sparse, and eventually she stopped talking.

  I noticed that she seemed to move in practiced circles around the room, straightening the chairs, creating a narrow aisle through the center, then shifting them back into clusters. The scuffs on the floor beneath them were etched into the floor; these chairs had made the same movements hundreds of times over. Every time I brought a box forward from the tables, she carried it back, ensuring the chairs stayed unoccupied, mumbling something about keeping them out of the way. Occasionally she’d go upstairs, walk into one of the bedrooms, nod at all the walls, and then return to the living room. Her behavior was patterned, but the pattern was meaningless.

  I checked my phone constantly—the train that returned to Truckee left in two hours, the one that continued east in two and a half. I had no reason to be on either of them, and even less reason to stay.

  In the middle of the day, the doorbell rang and I hid, unsure of how to explain to the police what I was doing in an old woman’s house, but there was no one there, just three prepackaged meals left sitting on the porch for her. She stopped and ate in silence. In her kitchen, I found a few bags of nuts that became my late lunch.

  As the sun began to slant through the kitchen window, I found a small collection of photos buried beneath some records. There weren’t many, and the few in the box didn’t tell me much. They either contained people I didn’t recognize or were too old and yellowing to make out any faces at all.

  Underneath all the frames, stuck up against the cardboard, there was a single print. It was yellow, one of the oldest in the box, fraying at its edges.

  It featured a young woman, smiling, with thick brown curls and a beautiful, flowery dress. She stood in the middle of the street, next to a man with thin glasses and a plain face, wearing a polo shirt that looked about two sizes too small. In her hands, she held a small bundle of blankets—a child.

  My stomach lurched. There wasn’t a feature on her face that looked the same, but I knew it was Sue Kopek. And the man . . . he was familiar. He wore my grandfather’s glasses. But his chin was too round, his eyes too close. I flipped the photo over and on the back, in faded pencil, was written:

  Orlo and Susanne Kopek and baby Jeffery. Green River, UT.

  Underneath, in shaky block handwriting, with a black pen not yet old enough to begin fading, another hand has scribbled:

  the nite he was born

  home

  It was like I had reset, like I was looking at her world again for the first time.

  Orlo was her husband.

  They had a son, Jeffery.

  This was their home.

  And five years ago, my grandfather had come back with her husband and son. He said they were coming back together.

  All the details and circumstances surrounding her life and pieces of it that she was reliving felt somehow different and new. I studied the room again with fresh eyes, noting the details that had been too obvious to notice before: the living room packed full of boxes, the upstairs bedroom cleaned out, but her room perfectly intact.

  My heart leapt into my chest.

  For the first time, I looked past Sue Kopek, to the experience she was reliving. This wasn’t a house condemned, and it wasn’t a room full of trash. This was the result of five years of one woman reliving the same moment, waiting for the same thing.

  “Where is he moving?” I offered, and I extended the photo toward her.

  She dropped the book in her hands. Her expression went first to confusion, then to fear, toward me and toward the picture, then finally, it melted away into a smile that I hadn’t seen yet, free of uncertainty or frustration. She took it from me, her hands shaking, and held the photograph to her face, like she was trying to get closer to the people inside of it.

  “Home.” She pulled back, nodding toward her hands. “He’s moving home.”

  My eyes widened and I saw the full picture in front of me, spread across her living room.

  Orlo and Susanne Kopek and baby Jeffery . . .

  Green River, Utah.

  “To Green River?”

  For ten seconds, Sue didn’t move, her eyes glued to the photo. I feared I’d lost her, but slowly, she began to nod. “Green River,” she said.

  The picture became clear. Her son was moving, and for whatever reason, my grandfather had come to be a part of it. I felt a surge of excitement that I hadn’t in months, lighting up parts of my chest that I had forgotten existed. My search didn’t stop here. There was another city. My grandfather had continued on with her husband and son . . .

  I shuddered as I realized why she was stuck in this moment, what must have been so significant that it froze her in time, and
why she was alone in this enormous house. They’d gone to Green River, and never come back.

  Slowly, Sue cleared her throat and lifted her head back to me. “You boys were supposed to be back last week,” she said. “Where were you?”

  My brain flashed a bright white blank. “Oh, uh, we, we were, the train was—”

  “You said you were coming back.” She dropped the photo and began to move toward me, her hands shaking. Her face was unfamiliar, her eyebrows angled and lips pursed. “You said you’d be back in a week.”

  I clambered backward, knocking over a folding chair and a box full of encyclopedias, but Sue didn’t notice. She moved faster toward me, spitting words in my direction. Her eyes were white and glossy, just as they had been the night before, this time with anger.

  “I’m not, I, I didn’t—”

  “And I waited, and I waited, and I waited!” She was shrieking now, volume shredding her frail voice. “You were supposed to take care of him!” Desperately, I prayed for a reset, but she moved faster toward me. “You boys were supposed to be back last week!”

  I turned for the stairs and ran, hurdling them two at a time, around the corner and into the bedroom.

  “You boys were supposed to come back together!” she screamed after me. “You were supposed to take care of him!” and I slammed the door.

  My thumbs rushed around my iPhone screen—Green River, Utah, was three stops ahead on the California Zephyr and the train left at 7:45 p.m.—in forty-five minutes. I had to be on it. I flew around the room, putting on a fresh T-shirt and calling the cab from the night before.

  “Somebody was home, eh, boss?” he asked. “Or is it your house now?”

  With my bag repacked, the clue from the night before tucked in a side pocket, I inched slowly downstairs, checking around the corner for Sue. Several more boxes had been shoved over, and the contents were strewn across the floor. She sat in the middle, on her knees, surrounded by a small ocean of her possessions.

  I walked the stairs carefully, step by step, waiting for her to turn on me and begin shouting again, but her eyes were closed. She was shaking softly, fresh tears on her cheeks.

  I stopped as I reached the door. The pit in my stomach had returned, but this time, it was specific: guilt. Her sadness was like a weight in the room, a weight that I was responsible for.