A Sudden Light by Garth Stein
Maybe that man would be God.
“Take it off the spindle,” Grandpa Samuel said to me.
I removed the chair leg from the lathe.
“Feel it,” he said.
The wood was warm and fragrant. I felt like Harry must have felt when he carved Ben’s hand. The soul of the wood braiding with my spirit, with the spirits who lived in the Post-it notes, and the playing cards stashed in the walls. Riddell House breathed. It moved. It slunk along so slowly we didn’t notice.
At lunchtime, I took Grandpa Samuel up the hill to the house and made sandwiches. Serena was at work, but there was plenty of roasted turkey in the refrigerator, and Serena had baked bread earlier, so it was nice and soft. My father had been in a closed-door session all morning with Richard in the library. I didn’t know what they were talking about—check that—I knew exactly what they were talking about; I didn’t know what they were saying. I finished making the sandwiches, got a bag of potato chips from the pantry, and a couple of Cokes from the icebox.
Grandpa Samuel’s T-shirt had a red and blue logo on it, and it read:
WE DON’T HAVE TO CARE
WE’RE EXXON
AT EXXON WE’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM
He smiled at me and squinted his eyes. He had a big mouthful of food and he was chewing and chewing. He took a long drink of Coke.
“Tendons,” he said.
He stopped chewing and got a strange look on his face. He reached into his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and fished about. He withdrew a piece of turkey and placed it on his plate.
“I don’t like tendons,” he said.
I didn’t think Grandpa Samuel was crazy. I wasn’t even sure he was demented. But I knew that he was very strange.
“Do you want me to check your turkey for tendons?” I asked. “I tried to get them all—”
He cut me off with a confident shake of his head.
“Good sandwich,” he said, evidently pleased enough to continue eating.
As we were finishing up lunch, I heard the library door crack open, and soon Richard and my father came into the kitchen. Richard was unburdened; my father was carrying the big blue binder and some other folders, which he set on the table. Richard said hello briefly, nodded to my father, and then left. My father sat down at the table.
“That looks good,” he said, eyeing our sandwiches.
“I don’t like onions,” Grandpa Samuel said.
“Can’t you take them out if you don’t like them?” my father asked him.
“I didn’t put any in his,” I interjected. “He’s not complaining about something or needing to fix something. He’s making a statement of fact. That’s what he does. He’s like a living Magic 8 Ball. You shake him up and turn him over and he’ll say something. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn’t.”
“Wow,” my father said. “Where have I been?”
“Mount Sovern Academy!” Grandpa Samuel blurted out. “A decent education.”
My father laughed and looked at me.
“Think about that for a second,” he said. “There are ten thousand schools out there that provide a ‘superlative’ education, or an ‘excellent’ education, or a ‘fabulous’ education. My father sent me away to a school that provided a ‘decent’ education.”
I did not indulge my father in his self-pity.
“Do you want me to make you a sandwich?” I asked.
“I’d love it if you did,” he replied. “But I sense it may fuel resentment, so I can make my own.”
“I’ll do it.”
So I made him a sandwich—with onions—while he shuffled through his papers and Grandpa chewed his tendons. When I returned to the table with a plate for my father—including a pickle spear—I saw that he had unrolled some drawings—a survey of some kind—and opened the binder to lay out an array of colorful brochures. He thanked me for the sandwich and took a bite, while admiring his display.
I picked up a brochure for a retirement community. Kensington House. It sounded positively regal. It was located in Bothell, near the northern end of Lake Washington. The brochure was full of photos of old people smiling and laughing, playing bridge and croquet, visiting museums and attending concerts in parks. It looked pretty good. If I were old, I’d want to live there. They had a book club on Tuesday nights. They did yoga, and they had three restaurants plus a café on the grounds.
“I apologize for getting upset the last time we broached this topic,” my father said to Grandpa Samuel.
“Topic?” Grandpa Samuel asked.
“The future of Riddell House,” my father said.
Grandpa Samuel got a sour look on his face. He leaned back and stared at his plate and chewed the inside of his cheek. His eyes got cloudy, as if he’d turned off his mind.
“Or not,” my father added.
I felt a twisting in my gut: a pang of guilt or inner conflict. Again, I was forced to confront my dilemma. Of course I wanted my father to succeed, to get some money, and then to fly to England with me so he, my mother, and I could live happily ever after as a family. But, at the same time, I didn’t want my father to succeed by destroying what was left of Ben’s legacy. I wanted to come through for Ben. As much as I wanted my father to succeed, so I wanted my father to fail. I wondered what would have happened if I’d gone with my mother to England for the summer and had never seen Riddell House. Oh, the whimsy of fate.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” I suggested helpfully after a moment.
“Forget it,” my father groaned, disgusted.
“No,” I persisted. “Seriously. Tell me about the plan. This Kensington House place looks pretty nice. Have you visited it?”
“No,” my father grumbled, “I haven’t.”
“Maybe we should go check it out. See what it looks like in person. Look, Grandpa,” I said, holding the brochure out for him. “Look at all these old people having a good time.”
Grandpa Samuel raised an eyelid and peered at the brochure without moving, like a lizard basking on a rock in the sun; he couldn’t be bothered to actually move.
“I don’t like people,” he said.
“Sure you do,” I said cheerfully. “You just don’t know many people.”
“The people I do know, I don’t like.”
“You need to meet these people. These people are super nice. And once you get to know them . . . You didn’t know me a couple of weeks ago and you like me, don’t you?”
“The only one,” he admitted reluctantly.
“So it’s possible. Friday nights are movie nights. They show the classics. Movies you haven’t seen in years.”
“I don’t like the movies,” he croaked.
“Forget it,” my father said, shaking his head. “Let him die and be buried in this house for all I care. This is the only thing I’ve ever asked him for. I never asked him for money or trust or love, and he certainly never offered any on his own.”
My father gathered the folders and reached for the drawings, but I got to them first and rolled them out.
“What’s this?” I asked. “Is that Riddell House?”
My father sighed, resigned himself to participating in the presentation, and pointed to the middle of the top drawing.
“That’s Riddell House,” he said. “There’s the cottage. And see the wheelhouse down by the creek?”
“Fascinating,” I said. “So this is like a— What do they call it?”
“It’s a survey. And underneath is a topographical, so you can see the hills and the bluff.”
I set the top drawing aside on the kitchen table and it started to curl up, so I motioned for my father to use sandwich plates to keep it flat. Then I studied the topographical map. It had a lot of curvy thin lines on it.
“The closer the lines are to each other, the faster the elevation change,” my father explained. “Each line denotes a different elevation, see? Look here, by the bluff. The lines are so close together, it’s almost one thick line. That’s the
“Ah,” I said, rubbing my chin, pretending I had never seen a topographical map before. “I see. And what’s this other drawing?”
My father staked out the topographical map, and I held the third drawing open. Riddell House wasn’t on it. Neither was the cottage. But the wheelhouse was.
“This is the proposed replat. The lots are all very big, as you can see. High-value real estate. Plenty of setback. The current drive would have to be moved, so this is a new road, and there has to be a turnaround at the end of it, here, for fire trucks. It’s part of the code.”
“So how many lots would there be?”
“Twenty lots,” he said. “Ten acres each. It’s the law of diminishing returns. If we try to pack more lots in, the value per acre will drop. The threshold seems to be twenty lots of ten acres.”
“What about Observatory Hill?” I asked, pointing to a part on the map that had been cordoned off.
“That would be part of a reserve. The family graveyard would be left intact with a small fence around it. And there would be a plaque about the history of The North Estate. Two acres will be set aside for that.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to sound impressed. But I thought: Two acres out of two hundred? Benjamin Riddell’s legacy reduced to two acres? “You guys thought of everything.”
My father winked at me, which pissed me off. I was being forced to pitch a ridiculous proposal to Grandpa Samuel, and now I was a coconspirator?
Everybody was talking about this sort of thing back in 1990. Even as a kid I knew about it. They called them McMansions. People with money—not the super rich, with their multiple homes and their private jets; just the regular rich people, who had a big house and maybe a time-share at a ski resort in Montana—wanted their space, and their extra bedrooms, and their walk-in closets, their four-car garages, and their hot tubs and saunas and wine cellars and lap pools and sprinkler systems and invisible dog fences, and they wanted their hardwood floors and their stainless-steel appliances and TVs in every room and alarm systems to keep others out. They wanted gates that opened with garage door clickers, and their house numbers on brass plaques. They wanted well-lit, even pathways so children and elders wouldn’t trip and skin a knee or break a hip. And they didn’t realize they were raising a generation of children who could only walk on level ground. The pathfinders of the world, henceforth, would be confined to the pre-paved paths.
But I remember very clearly, standing in the kitchen that afternoon, feeling a flash of rage against my father. I had half a mind to grill him on the impact those twenty soulless McMansions would have on the local environment: the sewage, the toxic fertilizer seeping into the water table, the emissions of dozens of gas-guzzling cars neatly tucked away in their multicar garages, to say nothing of the aesthetic decimation of the last few acres of old-growth forest in an urban setting.
But what good would that have done? I swallowed my lecture of righteousness and winked back at him. And I nearly gagged at my own wretchedness.
(Ben was teaching me, and I was learning. But was I learning quickly enough?)
One of the dark gray folders on the table had “Riddell House Inspection Report” printed across the front of it in silver letters. I picked it up and paged through it while my father busied himself with the drawings. The report was full of information and photos and a narrative analysis. It explained what the house was made of—no surprises there: it was all wood—but visual inspection of the exterior logs suggested that rot was likely present and the inspectors recommended bore testing, especially of the load-bearing logs. And there was stuff about drainage and the foundation and the systems and the fire safety—or lack thereof. Basically, it was like living in a box of kindling. The fact that we hadn’t burned to death already was shocking.
“It doesn’t look good,” I said, and then I casually passed the report to Grandpa Samuel, who actually took it and looked through it.
“So it would take a lot to stay here, then,” I said to my father. “I mean, if you wanted to be safe.”
“An awful lot,” my father said.
“I mean, to bring it up to code—”
“Oh, I don’t think you could bring it up to code,” my father jumped in. “That would be cost-prohibitive. And you don’t have to do anything like that; an existing house is grandfathered. I mean addressing the electrical issues, and— But it would be smart to replumb the place. You’ve tasted the water.”
“It tastes like rust,” I said.
“Galvanized pipes. They’re so full of rust and gunk, the flow is restricted. The water pressure on the third floor is practically nonexistent.”
“But the water pressure down here is okay,” I said.
“Right,” my father agreed. “Because they’ve cranked up the pressure so it works on the top floor, but now it’s around one twenty or one thirty psi coming in from the meter, and if anything blows, it’s serious flood time. No. If anyone intended to live here for the long term—or the short term, for that matter—he would be wise to think about the plumbing and doing something about the rot in the timbers that hold up the ground floor. Those are two crucial things just to keep the house standing. It would be smart to install French drains at the corners to try to direct some of the rainwater away from the foundation. And I don’t know when was the last time the timbers were treated for wood-eating insects. There’s evidence all over the basement—”
“Termites?”
“Wood beetles.”
“Wood beetles,” I echoed seriously, and then I turned to Grandpa Samuel, who was deep into the report. “What do you think, Grandpa?”
He looked up, and for a second I thought he was crying. But his eyes always looked like that. They seeped and looked glassy. I figured it was an old person’s thing. Or maybe I was wrong; maybe he was crying.
“I can’t leave,” he said quietly.
“Sure you can, Dad,” my father said, sounding very gentle. I didn’t think I’d ever heard my father address Grandpa Samuel as Dad before, except that very first day. My father slipped into a chair at the table. “Think of how easy it would be. Movers come and do all the work. There’s a brochure right here on downsizing. Think of how comfortable we’d all be after. But most of all, think of Trevor.”
My father reached out and pulled me toward him like we were making a commercial for the Church of the Latter-day Saints or something.
“Think of Trevor’s college education. Think of him getting a good start in life. You know? He’ll want to start a family of his own one day, and wouldn’t it be nice for him to have a little nest egg that you could provide him? You’ve always said that Grandpa Abe didn’t leave you with anything. Wouldn’t you like to correct that? Wouldn’t you like to provide for your grandson the way you wish your father had provided for you? You can fix the wrongdoing of Grandpa Abe. You can fix it right now! Wouldn’t that feel good?”
“I can’t leave,” Grandpa Samuel said again.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s still here.”
My father recoiled slightly.
“She’s not here, Dad.”
“Yes, she is. She’s here.”
“She isn’t here, Dad. She’s dead.”
“She dances for me at night.”
“She really doesn’t,” my father said tightly, and I could see that the infinite kindness and patience he had been showcasing for us was not so infinite after all.
“Serena says she can’t hear her, but I can. At night. I hear her dancing.”
“That isn’t her, Dad,” my father said, his voice rising, his anger getting the best of him. “It’s what Serena says: squirrels dancing on the roof. It’s rain. It’s woodpeckers pecking this place apart.”
“Sometimes I hear music.”
“Goddamn it, Dad!” my father barked. He stood so quickly, he knocked over his chair. “There is no music! There is no dancing! She’s dead, Dad. She’s been dead for a very long time. And she’s not coming back, and her
I was disturbed by my father’s anger, because I knew—or I believed—that my father did believe it was Isobel. His anger meant Serena had gotten her hooks into him.
Grandpa Samuel looked down at the report and shook his head.
“No,” he whispered.
My father gathered himself. He shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. And then he put his hands on the kitchen table and leaned over Grandpa Samuel.
“You still can’t step up and be a man, can you? You can’t do the right thing for your children and grandson. You have a chance to be a man, but you won’t step up and do it.”
My father raised himself to his full height, gathered his papers and documents. He slowly rolled his drawings. He moved to the kitchen door before looking back one last time.
“I don’t particularly care,” he said. “I have plenty of time. One day you’ll die and this nightmare will be over. But I’d be concerned about Serena, if I were you. She’s extremely anxious. If you drag this out with doctors and competency hearings and all that, I have a feeling she’ll make your life very difficult. And when she wins—which she will, by the way—you can kiss Kensington House good-bye. Serena is not above revenge. As a matter of fact, she showed me the place she really wants to put you. It’s next to the Taco Bell on Aurora Avenue. You know, behind the strip mall with the 7-Eleven and the paintball store? Apparently they’ve been moved up Medicare’s rating scale from ‘much below average’ to ‘below average.’ Good luck with that one, Dad. I’m pretty sure Mom won’t be dancing on the roof of that place.”
He left.
Grandpa Samuel began rubbing his stumps hard, like he was trying to get something out.