Denis Ever After Read online

  “That’s quite beautiful, son. But holding on to someone might simply be holding that person back, if you know what I mean. Now, how old was she, this GeeGee? Dark hair? Tall, yes?”

  “Not tall, Russell, not tall. She was little. A little white-faced wrinkled old lady.”

  He opens the notebook to the placeholder at his finger and flips several pages. He pauses, blinks at the wiry scribbles. “You tell me if this is anything. I wrote ‘The boy told the old woman he has just seen a silver lake, and snow—’”

  My heart stops dead. “A silver lake? Really? I remember silver, I told everybody silver, but I said lake? I said silver lake? This is so important, Russell.”

  “It says so right here. I even have the first line of your story.”

  It snowed at Silver Lake the day I died.

  “I didn’t get too far, I suppose,” he says. “Just one line. But you see? I found inspiration in what you told this person. GeeGee, is it?”

  And another piece of the puzzle falls into its place.

  “Russell, a guy said I was drowned in a lake. If I told GeeGee ‘silver lake’ when I got here, a silver lake is where I must have died—”

  “Oh, for all the love in China!”

  The playing cards fly up in the air as that man with pink hair bolts to his feet. “What on earth is that silly woman doing!” He points toward the beach even as he hustles down from the veranda.

  I jump up to see an elderly white-haired woman stumbling down from the foothills. “That’s GeeGee! It’s her! GeeGee! GeeGee, stop!”

  I beat everyone to her. “GeeGee? GeeGee, wait! What are you doing? Did you go through the razor?”

  She quivers, turning her face to me. Her face. The skin is translucent, almost clear. Her mouth is slack, her eyes red. “I have to tell them! Tell them . . . tell him . . .”

  “GeeGee, who? Me?” I wrap my arms around her shoulders. “I’m here now. I came back.”

  Pink Hair bustles up. “You sure gave junior a fright, young lady! You all right?”

  GeeGee wobbles on her legs, blinking into our eyes for what seems like minutes, before life seeps back to them. “You look alike to me. Which one of you is Denton?”

  “It’s Denis, GeeGee,” I tell her. “You’re my great-grandmother.”

  “Oh? Well, I have something to tell you. It’s . . . it’s . . . oh, dear . . .”

  “Let’s get you home,” I say. “GeeGee. You can stay at my house.”

  “That does sound lovely. Do you have tea?”

  “Yes. Tea. So much tea!”

  Pink Hair pats her hand, then kisses her old cheek, and heads back to the beach club while we work slowly through the neighborhoods to my house. GeeGee is soon chuckling softly to herself. Somehow, like last time, I revive her. She seems a bit bewildered by it all, but once we’re settled in my living room, she is happy. The room smells faintly of oranges now, and together we calm down. Telling her what Russell read to me from his book, I remind her what I said when I first came here.

  “Maybe you don’t remember, but he wrote that I told you silver lake.”

  Her face goes blank. “Silver Lake does sound familiar. Is it nearby?”

  “Maybe. We’ll solve this thing after all, thanks to you. Do you remember what you wanted to tell me?”

  Her eyelids flicker, as if she’s tired. “Something about . . . about . . . oh, I don’t know.” She looks confused again. “I’ll remember, I’m sure. But Silver Lake sounds important. You’d better see to it. Then come home. And watch those stairs. They’re very steep!”

  34

  October

  Watch those stairs. They’re very steep!

  I still don’t know what she means, but I have only myself to blame. It’s not just the people down there. I started to forget her, too. Ashamed of myself, I leave her in my house and trudge back to the cold room and hurl myself into the razor. When I push out I steam like a hot carcass.

  It couldn’t be more than a few minutes after leaving GeeGee in Port Haven before I’m back on the street in front of my house. The sky is gray and frosty over Buckwood. The trees are skeletal. There’s a crunch when I move that wasn’t here when I left.

  It couldn’t be more than minutes, except it’s not minutes.

  It’s not the day I left, or even the same week. Despite the dark I can tell that the leaves are on fire, yellow and red, some layering the ground. The air is clear as glass, chill and biting. It’s deep into October, two weeks at least since I left Matt and Dad in Evanton.

  “How did this happen?” I whisper to myself. I wrestle to understand, but there’s no understanding what I’m doing. No template or game plan. I’m breaking new ground.

  Matt will be livid—is livid, which I can tell, because his sparks arc down at me from our bedroom like flaming arrows. I feel stupid not to have predicted this. Which he will tell me if he speaks to me at all. But I have to tell him about the lake, maybe the final piece of the puzzle.

  I float into his room, ready for his anger, and I’m stunned. It looks like Matt’s barely eaten since I left. His clothes are wrinkled and loose. He hasn’t cut his hair, and it’s dangling in even greasier strands down the sides of his face. The tracers he’s shooting off slice and burn me.

  I try to be casual. “Hey—”

  He throws me an ugly face. “You! You dumbbell! How could you leave me here! You promised to be back for my therapy! It was gross, first alone, then with my parents. So much bawling and groaning. About you, you know! You said you would be back. But no. Liar! Jerk!” He unloads on me for minutes, and I just take it. He’s mad, but as furious as his sparks are, there are enough orange ones to tell me he’s glad I’m back. Like his good teacher, I nod and wait until he exhausts himself.

  “Matt, look, I’m sorry. I have no idea how this happens. Time is weird between the places—”

  “You’re weird!” he snaps. “Dumbo.”

  “All right, all right. But look, I found something big. It could bust this thing wide open.”

  “I’d like to bust you wide open—”

  And I’m thinking how that is exactly what will happen someday, when there’s a soft tap on the door.

  “What is it?” Matt growls, and I hope it’s not Mom because his tone won’t make anything better, but it isn’t Mom. The door opens a few inches, and Trey’s face beams into the room.

  “You come here,” Matt says, raising his arms weepily, and Trey flies onto the bed, and they huddle like that, a tight single person for minutes.

  Trey dries Matt’s face, pushes his hair back behind his ears. With one hand, Trey tugs a cellophane-wrapped snack from a pocket—it’s a Drake’s Cake—teethes it open, and glides it back and forth under Matt’s nose, almost comically, to entice him. Matt snortles a sloppy laugh and bites half the thing off. The crumble-top crumbles down his chin, his shirt, onto the bed.

  “Ha! Good thing I brought another one.” Trey slips out a second cake and, with a kind of flourish, rips it open and bites into it. Crumbs on crumbs.

  “Eyebrow is back,” Matt says, swallowing and nodding his chin toward me. “The jerk.”

  Trey swings around and searches the window. “Denis is here? You can see him right now?”

  “Unfortunately. The dope.”

  “Hey, Denis,” Trey says between bites. “Dang, I wish I could see you. You’re all he ever talks about. Matt loves having you here. I’d be jealous, of course, except you’re his brother and you’re dead. Seriously, this is so cool.”

  Sitting on the bed in the rainy light from the window, Trey is so full of life and light, the perfect kind of light. It would be so easy to show myself to Trey, but I know I have to hold off.

  “I wish I could talk to Trey,” I tell Matt, “but I think you have to speak for me. Tell Trey it’s nice to see Trey, too. Say I’m sorry.”

  Matt’s listening, half listening, half digging in Trey’s pockets for more food, then repeats generally what I said. “He’s sorry, the jerkface.”
>
  “Don’t say that,” Trey says softly. “It’s really amazing. Your own personal ghost. Or is ghost, like, offensive? I don’t mean it that way.”

  “Tell Trey it’s all fine. Spirit, soul, ghost, unliving one—”

  “Moron is another useful term,” Matt says, “which he totally is, for being away so long.”

  Over the next minutes things calm down because of beautiful Trey and the Drake’s Cakes, and I realize there’s such a complex weave of threads and sparks zinging around and so much life in this room between the two of them that I wonder when any sane person would possibly have time to remember someone who has gone on. Sure, you might love that person, or the memory of him or her. But life is so short and shaky, you have to be here for all of it.

  Here is what matters. The love, the life, the fabric, the sparks.

  And tonight, this little room is the center of the universe.

  I move over to my bed and flop down, which Matt has to tell Trey, so Trey doesn’t keep staring at the window.

  “Here’s the thing,” I say. “GeeGee was in a really bad way when I got back, nearly gone, because I started to forget her, too. She has a secret, but can’t remember it, probably because I didn’t remember her enough. It’s mixed up, except I did find out that the first thing I said when I got to Port Haven was, are you ready, ‘silver lake.’ Silver lake. I know all this because there’s a man in Port Haven who writes down stuff, a man called . . .”

  And the name of the white-haired writer escapes me for a second. And a second more. And when I expect it to finally roll off my tongue, it isn’t there at all. The longer I wait, the more I can’t retrieve it. Electricity shoots across my chest.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Matt says excitedly. “Silver Lake. That sounds so familiar. Like it’s a place. That’s awesome!”

  Trey raises a meek hand in the middle of this. “Sorry, I’m only getting half the conversation.”

  It’s so strange—and wonderful—to have a second person knowing about me, not judging, not afraid of a dead kid, liking me because of who I was, and being another person I can trust. Trey is a real soul, a good one.

  Matt repeats what I told him, while I try to remember the white-haired man’s name. I remember his words, though. It snowed at Silver Lake the day I died. . . .

  “Silver Lake is very good,” Trey says, scooping up Matt’s laptop, “exceptional, even. There have to be a bunch of Silver Lakes in Pennsylvania, but we’ll go to the right one. Well, you will.” Trey clicks for a few seconds, then grins. “There are three in Pennsylvania, but the detective in me is guessing that since two are near New Jersey, the one we want is the one near . . . Lyndora.”

  And I’m back in the game. “Lyndora! Where the Tibbses used to live. That’s got to be it!”

  “We have to go there, we have to,” Matt says, as if planning a secret mission. He pops up and peeks around the door, listening. “It’s so tense around here. Dad is hanging by a thread. I don’t know how to get anywhere without kick-starting the apocalypse. Or the end of the world.”

  Trey snorts a laugh. “Putting aside for a second that the apocalypse literally is the end of the world, why not say you want to go for a weekend trip. Say I told you about this cool place. Your mom doesn’t even know that a lake is a Denis thing. Neither does your dad, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So tell them you want to forget all this craziness and just hang at this lake, and make it sound like you want to bring the family together. You can’t actually say that, of course. They’ll know something is up. They don’t think kids are that smart. But make them think it.”

  Trey is a little bit of a genius.

  “Plus,” Trey adds breezily, “you could invite me on your holiday weekend, and then it would obviously be a vacationy thing and all happy-like, because I spread joy wherever I go.”

  Matt and I look at each other. We grin.

  Trey picks up on this and adds a great big smile to ours. “What should I pack?”

  35

  The Lake That Is Silver

  Before he breathes so much as a syllable of Trey’s plan, Matt chews up nearly a week, worrying the idea over in his brain.

  “Are we there yet?” I prod him from my bed.

  He turns from his homework. “I have to get Mom at the right time or she’ll freeze up. Or worse.”

  “Worse? What would that look like?”

  “She loves you, you know,” he says. “Don’t be snotty.”

  When Matt finally sucks it up and asks, it’s by floating the idea casually at breakfast before school on Friday. It’s touch and go for several very long, gnarly minutes before our parents agree it might actually be all right. Matt smartly throws out that “the therapist did say that a change of scene might be good for all of us. There’s too much history in our house. Denis, and all.”

  He flicks his eyes at me with a look of apology, which I accept because I’m so gracious.

  As soon as Mom wags her head, as if she’s really considering it, Dad’s on his phone, swiping away. “Silver Lake in Lyndora, huh? This weekend? If Mommy’s okay with it, why not? And why not ask Trey to come with us, yeah?”

  Matt’s standing over his chair, half frozen, his eyes big. “Really? Are you serious?”

  Mom gives a quick nod. And it’s done.

  “You did it!” I say when we’re safely back in Matt’s room. I even slap him a high five, as much as a ghost can slap anything. “You got Mom and Dad to drive us to where I was killed. Nice work.”

  He throws me a face. “When you put it that way . . .”

  “No, seriously, this is good. Silver Lake. Silver Lake. It has a kind of pull, doesn’t it? ‘It snowed at Silver Lake the day I died.’ I heard that somewhere. It could be the first line of my story. Aren’t you glad I stepped aside and let you work your magic on the parentals?”

  He frowns. “The trick will be how to poke around for clues without her suspecting we tricked her. Apocalypse, here we come.”

  He’s right. The more excited Mom gets about his plan to give the family a break from me, the more she’s going to crash when she realizes it’s all about me.

  We agree to cross that bridge later.

  It turns out there is a choice of rooms, and Dad reserves the “Silver Lake Lodge Master Suite Family Weekend Package,” a sitting room and bedrooms, one for them, one for Matt, with an extra cot in the sitting room for Trey. An hour after school’s out Friday afternoon, Trey’s mom rings the kitchen doorbell, and Trey bounces in, beduffeled and ready for fun.

  We’re in the car before supper. I’m in the back with Matt and Trey, tucked invisibly across the shelf under the back window. Mom and Dad are tenser than you would think, as if they knew what was coming. But then everything is tense since I screwed it all up and got myself killed.

  Matt and Trey play that back seat game we used to—I still forget the name and he does too—where you spell words using the first letter of things you see. Like when you spot a car, an airplane, and a tractor—in that order—you can spell C-A-T and get three points. Longer words take more time, but obviously give you more points, and the name of the game itself is the toughest word of all. My recollection is that I usually won, but right now Trey is whupping both our butts.

  Trey is smart about Silver Lake, too. Trey recounts what sounds like one genuine family story after another. “How we saw a bear in the woods” and “I went tubing and the instructor said I held on the longest” and “the morning we found a dead snake on the rug.” The beautiful part is that they aren’t exactly lies because Trey never actually claims these things happened at Silver Lake, which Trey has never been to.

  Dad is set to experience all those things. “Except the snake. That I can do without.”

  It’s a pathetically short drive, after all, barely an hour from home to Silver Lake Lodge, a big old wooden structure that might have been built the same year and with the same hoard of logs as the Big Dipper and the Four Pines cabins. It’s all r
ailings and porches and peaks of white wood perched on a rise overlooking the lake, which is crystal clear and still, but not as small as any of us believed. I begin to worry that we may not find what we need to here.

  “This is big,” Mom says. “Great suggestion, Trey. And the woods go on forever. I love the woods. And it’s so chilly!” Even as she shivers, she seems to relax. “There are paths all around the lake. I want to hike as soon as we unpack. Kids?”

  Matt appears to actually jump. “You bet! Dad?”

  “You know, I wish I could,” he says mock sadly, “but I have to test out the chairs on the porches.” He pauses to wink at Mom, which seems almost odd. “There are three porches and half a dozen chairs on each. I predict it’ll take me quite a while.”

  Odd or not, suddenly there is a spark of light, pale orange, tinged with gold that graces the air. It’s not directed at anyone in particular, it just hangs there. Dad’s hardly old Dad, and Mom is still a refrigerator, but there is something going on. I think about what they used to be to each other and wonder if they can ever be that again.

  Then a sudden cool wind crosses the lake, and I remember why we’re here. The mystery of my death could be solved a few hours from now, and I’ll slice back to Port Haven to wait out my final, real death. No matter how the idea terrifies me, that’s the purpose of all this, right?

  To go away?

  The air is cold, as clear as glass, and tangy with the smell of evergreens. I scan for the yellow leaves of birch trees, but don’t see any. I smell a whiff of woodsmoke pouring from the fireplaces in the lodge, which sends me looking for a looming dark column. There isn’t one.

  While Mom and Dad run in to register and unpack, Matt, Trey, and I take a short walk down the narrow strip of sand and pebbles that passes for Silver Lake’s beach.

  Three empty kayaks are pulled up onto the sand. We pause near them, listening to the wind in the treetops. Soon after, a motorboat we can’t see crosses the lake, and we watch its ripples wag the kayaks back and forth in the sand.