Denis Ever After Read online

  Mom mentions the thunderstorm forecast for tonight and wonders if “we should run and close all the windows after supper,” and Matt says, “I will,” then there’s a sudden gap in the talk, and he puts down his fork.

  “I was thinking . . . ,” he starts, but stops when Mom flicks her eyebrows up at him. The way she does it—so instantly—shows she’s been waiting for a challenge, and here it is, as if she’s saying, Now what? Mom is on such a short fuse, Matt considers bailing out, but he sees me lurking in the doorway and goes on. “I was thinking I’d like to go to Gettysburg.”

  “Good for you,” I tell him. “Throw it right out there.”

  Mom flinches and springs back in her chair. “What? Oh no, Matt. You don’t want to do that. It’s so sad there. It’s a terrible place. For us. No. Please, no.”

  “I get it, but—”

  “They’re all terrible, battlefields. You think they’re beautiful, rolling hills and trees, then you learn how many people died so horribly there. No, Matt. No.”

  “But it’s almost five years and I’ve never been.” Matt says this without emotion, trying to keep a lid on what he must know will happen next.

  “No, no.” Mom sounds almost strangled. “Gary, you don’t think it’s a good idea, do you?” She looks at Dad. No, she glares at him. Matt has just conjured a thicket of tension in the kitchen, and everything stops.

  Dad doesn’t answer.

  “Do you? Gary?”

  He keeps his head down over his plate, breathing in and out, his broad shoulders moving, his hands not moving, one of which is holding his knife just above his plate. Mom must know he’s been there by himself, often, since I died. She shifts her weight in her chair and dares him again.

  “Gary, do you?”

  “You know what, I’m fine,” Matt says, as if he’s been told there’s no more soup. “It’s just an idea. No big deal.”

  Mom and Dad both relax a fraction, but only a fraction. Mom hovers over her food again, pokes it around, starts picking slowly.

  “But I was interested in, you know, Georgia,” Matt says. “Dad, I know you’re from there, but we’ve never gone.”

  “Holy cow, Matt!” Mom’s cutlery clicks on her plate.

  “Georgia,” Dad says, his first word for minutes.

  “Yeah,” Matt gulps. “There’s a boy from Savannah in our class. I think he’s from there. He told us, well, he did a report, that it’s really nice there. Beaches and stuff. You were born in Georgia, right? Your folks?” He wants this to hang in the air for a little bit, but Mom won’t let it.

  “Really, Matt?” she says. “First Gettysburg, now Valdosta? From bad to worse? Or, I don’t know which is worse. For crying out loud, that was another war, wasn’t it? And nobody won that one! Matt, please don’t ask Daddy about his fa—family. Can we talk about something else?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Dad says.

  “Is it?” Mom shoves her chair back a few inches. “Is it okay? Really? You’re going to tell your son about your father and the bus and the leg? It’s closed. Gary, please.”

  The leg? What the heck?

  Dad shakes his head. “Not about that—”

  “Well, I can’t hear any of it again.” She kicks back from the table again and stands. “Gary, you moan about it at night at least once a week. Reliving it all at the table is not going to do any good, certainly not for me. I love you, Gary, and you, Matt, of course I do, I just can’t hear it. Go ahead. Tell him. Tell your son every bloody detail. Excuse me.”

  Mom reels away from the table and storms out of the kitchen. Seconds later, you can hear the jingle of keys, a door slam, and the car start. She backs out of the driveway. Somebody honks. She honks back. Two engines roar away in different directions. I look out. Was it the pickup? I’m too late to see. The kitchen is now a cauldron. Dad hangs his head, bobbing it as fast as his heart is beating.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt says, his eyes tearing up. “I didn’t know. . . . I’m really sorry, Dad. We don’t have to—”

  “When we get to the battlefield, okay? I’ll go with you, I’ll take you to Gettysburg.” Dad’s face is gray as stone, cracking as he tries to make it smile. “We’ll go soon. If you still want to know about me growing up, I’ll tell you there.”

  19

  Dragging Away

  Leaving Mom turns out uglier than ugly.

  Matt hasn’t breathed the G word for two days, when Dad finally texts him from work Friday morning to say that the two of them will leave Saturday at dawn and maybe stay overnight somewhere. But if Mom asks, Matt’s to tell her they’ll be back that night.

  “We’re taking off early,” he tells me when I return to his room Friday night. I had been scouting the neighborhood, trying to spot the pickup, but it began to sprinkle. Rain can give me form, and I can’t risk being seen.

  “Good.” I slouch on my bed, not ruffling the covers. “Phase One of the Mystery of Me.”

  “We stopped taking road trips after you,” he says. “And I can’t remember ever just being me and Dad together”—his phone rings—“You’ll be in the back, I guess, right? Hey, Trey . . .”

  In the back. The words jangle. I don’t know why they do, but a second later, they’re gone. It doesn’t go anywhere.

  “I’m putting it on speaker so Denis can hear.”

  Trey whispers from the phone. “D-Denis? Are you really there? In Matt’s room?”

  I realize that this is the first time Trey knows I’m there. “Tell Trey, hey.”

  Matt says, “He says ‘hey.’ Which gives you an idea of his vocab.”

  “Wow. I have chills,” Trey says. “Seriously, chills.”

  “Calm your jets. He’s not all that cool,” Matt says, grinning at me. “So what’d you find?”

  Trey adjusts. “Okay. So. Kittanning, where you got your two-year-old vaccinations, is east of us about an hour. I searched Egan, but no census results in your family. One of the first things that pops up is the county jail nearby. I hope that’s not why you were there.”

  Matt manages a laugh. “I don’t think they lock up two-year-olds—”

  “I mean, that you were there to be close to the jail.”

  “Because . . . Dad was inside?” I say.

  Matt shakes his head. “I’m pretty sure we’d know that.”

  “Know what?” Trey asks.

  “If our dad was in jail. They keep secrets, but they couldn’t keep that secret, could they? Still, they are a secret society, them. Georgia. The bus. Vaccinations. Some leg.”

  Trey goes on. “Otherwise, it’s just a place people live, like anywhere. Oh, except there was a big coal miners’ strike in 1910. Sixteen miners and police died. There are folk songs about it.”

  Matt squints into the air. “Relevance?”

  “Probably none. Still searching. Bye, Denis!”

  After Trey hangs up, I try to digest this. “It’s not much, but the jail might explain the guy following us. You know, Dad’s cellmate.”

  “What, after ten years? You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  “We don’t have TVs in Port Haven. Although, we’d make a great show. The characters we have! Anyway, are you all ready to slip out the door before Mom gets up?”

  He groans. “She’s not happy. Be grateful you don’t have to live with the fallout.”

  I give him the eye. “Is that a dead-brother joke?”

  “No. It’s an Egan joke. She hates that we’re going in the first place. She’ll explode if we take more than a day.”

  As it happens, the plan to leave early misfires. It pours buckets during the small hours of Saturday morning—the third stormy night this week. Mom wakes Dad to run and close the windows so the rain won’t come in. Except that jumping from window to window agitates him so much, when he finally nods off an hour later, he oversleeps.

  When Matt hears Dad moving around in the morning, he tiptoes downstairs with his bag, only to find Mom in the kitchen, brewing coffee and cooking breakfast.
/>   He guesses right away that this is to get them back for going to Gettysburg.

  “Hi, Mom.” He drops his bag in the back hall. “Crazy rain, huh?”

  She slides his plate down at an angle, pulls her hand away, doesn’t meet his look, doesn’t speak.

  “It woke me up twice,” Matt adds quietly.

  Dad comes down a few minutes later and gets his plate delivered the same way. Mom doesn’t sit at the table herself, but goes into the bathroom off the kitchen, and puts the fan on. I’m thinking she can’t bring herself to simply bolt back upstairs, leaving them alone, but she doesn’t want to talk to them either.

  “You all set?” Dad asks Matt.

  Matt nods. “I have my stuff, maps, and books. The battle was the turning point of the war. The first three days of July 1863 were so hot . . .”

  He stops when Mom opens the bathroom door abruptly. She shoots a look, not at either of them, but at the plates, then whips the messy table clean, before they’ve finished eating. Dad storms out and throws his gear into the car, not saying two words to Mom because she won’t say two words to him.

  “Bye, Mom,” Matt says at the door.

  Seeing her like that, not hugging him good-bye, not touching him, not even looking at him, Matt chokes. Just when you’d think she’d melt and pull him into her arms, she doesn’t. She faces the counter and stares out the window to the backyard. She’s shaking, but she won’t turn.

  “Bye, Mom,” Matt repeats.

  No response.

  “Mom, go to him!”

  Matt hears what I say, but she doesn’t.

  Then, as he goes to close the door behind him, she quickly whirls around, and in two steps is holding him. “Be careful, be careful, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom. Just . . . I want to see it, that’s all. We’ll be back tonight.”

  She doesn’t sense that this is two lies in one. He doesn’t just want to see Gettysburg, and he might not be back tonight.

  “Come on, Matt!” Dad yells from the car. “We have to roll to have any time at the battlefield before heading home.”

  And seconds later, just before seven o’clock, we pull out of the driveway, with me tucked invisibly into the back seat.

  20

  The Unfinal Resting Place

  Gettysburg is a long, low scoop east across the state from Buckwood. It’s quiet in the car. I leave Matt alone with his hot, churning thoughts, his spurts of sparks. Somewhere in midstate, I whisper in his head that I’m sorry again about the mess I made when I died, but he doesn’t answer.

  About an hour outside Gettysburg we start seeing signs for the “military park,” the tourist way of saying “battlefield.” Matt drags his messenger bag from the floor behind his seat. Maps, books, brochures—not the newspapers or photos of me from the police file of course, though that’s what he wishes he could look at. He unfolds the battlefield map against the dashboard.

  “It was near a monument?” Matt says quietly, pretending to be searching the location symbols. “Where they found Denis?”

  Dad glances over and taps the spot Matt knows so well. “Georgia.”

  “Right.” Matt pulls out a guide he downloaded and printed from the net. We are streaming along, there’s not a lot of traffic. Just when I wonder how he’ll play what he already knows against what he needs to hear from Dad, he blurts it out, pretending to have just thought of it.

  “Georgia must mean something, right? That Denis was found at the monument of your state? There are so many states here.”

  Dad keeps his eyes on the road, narrows them, chews the inside of his mouth for a while. He finally shakes his head. “I left there so long ago. I mean, yeah, I trained back at Fort Benning, but those were good guys, all of them. Some were still around five years ago, a few weren’t.”

  Matt shifts his eyes to the back, which is where I am, sitting behind Dad, who’s just gone dark, like a connection has been severed.

  “We need to know way more than that,” I whisper.

  But Dad’s clammed up and Matt backs off from asking more. Miles of silence. All told, after a couple of stops, including one for a fast-food lunch, we pull into town around eleven thirty.

  The Gettysburg National Military Park is vast, over four hundred acres of green meadow, trimmed grass, countless wooden fences and stone walls, stands of tall trees that may or may not have been there during the battle in early July 1863, and winding paved roads that have certainly been laid since. There are tour buses, cars, vans on the battlefield roads, and hikers on paths. Sun shines squarely on the monuments and signs. According to the map that Matt has spread on his knees, the park encircles the town of Gettysburg on three sides like an invading army, mimicking the actual way the armies were deployed in 1863.

  We drive east along a rising, angled road called Millerstown Road. At a point that looks like any other, Dad pulls the car onto the grass by a white picket fence and cuts the engine. We overlook a long rising field. Dad gets out. We do too.

  “Is this where the Honda was seen?” I ask.

  Matt has to wait for Dad to say it. “Dad?”

  “The car.” Dad sets his hands on his hips. “The stolen car that the police think Denis was . . . brought here in. It was seen parked around this spot, give or take. The monument’s over there.” Dad points up across the field toward a block of stone sprouting near some cannons.

  “I keep imagining someone climbing this fence and carrying Denis and laying him at the monument,” Dad says, “and never mind who it was, why did he do it. Just why? What was the point of it? I mean, sorry, Matt, but I know you’ve seen enough TV to know that bodies are . . . bodies aren’t placed around. They’re hidden or buried or dumped, and most of the time you never find them. The police told me. So why was Denis left out in such a public place, and why that way? Somebody cleaned the wounds on his foot, for God’s sake. . . .”

  Dad says this last part in a bare whisper.

  I wonder why too. Why all of it.

  Matt wipes his nose. His eyes are damp. They found his twin brother’s lifeless body so near to where he’s standing, and he’s struggling not to cry.

  “I want to see the place,” he says softly. “The monument.”

  “Do you think you’re ready?”

  Matt nods once.

  After one last quiet look, we drive up the gentle incline to the corner of West Confederate Avenue. There are signs for the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, where GeeGee said her grandfather fought—places that might sound peaceful but whose ground is soaked in blood. We don’t follow those signs, but turn right at the corner, past an observation building that Dad calls Longstreet Tower. A parking lot sits below it on the left.

  We back in and sit in the car.

  Matt cracks his window to let air in. The monument is across the road not two hundred paces from where we sit. Some yards beyond is a low, wandering wall of piled stones above a dip in the sloping land. Seeing the memorial, my gravestone at the top of a wide field, I feel sick.

  I didn’t die here, but I was placed to rest here. I was posed with the care of an undertaker, against the memorial’s base in a sitting position, waiting for someone to find and decode me.

  We get out and walk over. The air is cool on the crest of the field.

  It’s not large, the monument to Georgia troops who fought at Gettysburg—maybe fifteen feet from ground to top—but it’s more stark and thick and imposing than I would have thought from Matt’s newspapers, photos, or from the police file. It matches for a second the dark vertical presence on the edge of my vision. But it’s not right. Too short, maybe, or too stout. And it’s sunny now, which doesn’t help it fit either.

  The granite stone overlooks a declining meadow with a row of trees and that picket fence flanking it on either side. There are scattered saplings in the middle distance, and blue hills rolling away to what Dad says is the west. The stone is light gray except where it’s in shadow. There it seems black. A pair of cannons flank either
side, pointing east, marking the Confederate artillery line, guarding the dead and the bloodied fields they fought for.

  I have no memory of seeing this place. I couldn’t have. I was already dead when I was brought here. And once again I wonder, Why?

  The monument itself consists of a thick flat rectangular base of stone, planted like a tabletop in the ground. Centered on top of this is a great square chunk of stone close to five feet wide and four feet tall. Each side of this has three shallow flutes cut into it. Above that is a smaller tier, a little less than a foot tall. Sitting atop that is a squared-off, eight- or nine-foot-tall column of gray stone that must weigh tons.

  The whole thing breathes with a heavy sadness that crushes my chest.

  “GEORGIA” is cut in block letters at the very top, and its state seal is below that. Etched into the stone around eye level are the weather-stained words:

  GEORGIA CONFEDERATE

  SOLDIERS

  WE SLEEP HERE IN OBEDIENCE TO LAW;

  WHEN DUTY CALLED, WE CAME,

  WHEN COUNTRY CALLED, WE DIED.

  I try to imagine someone placing my small body against the fluted cutouts on the front side of the base, the movements of arms and hands needed to set me there just so. I want to know more, I want to know all of it, but all I can really do is conjure the scene from Matt’s lifeless photos, maps, reports, and diagrams.

  Had the stone behind my back retained the cold of the night before? It was November, so you’d think it would have, but the weather that year had been up and down, and the last days had been dry in the eastern part of the state, though not the west.

  And since the police aren’t certain of the hour I was put there, how long had it been before I was spotted, sitting calmly with my neck turned at an impossible angle?

  Did birds spy me before anyone else? Did rabbits or deer wander up out of the woods and sniff at me? Early morning foxes running across the crisp November grass? Was the sky I might have seen if I were alive truly as blue as sapphire, as one newspaper said?