His hand opened, reaching for something I couldn’t see. “With people, I always felt… wrong. Like I was taking something… something they would never give. But the toys… the toys… they reminded me…”
“Of what?” I asked in a whisper.
“…of her… of me… of a better time…”
My own eyes were watering as he spoke, and I knew that this pitiful excuse for a man wasn’t any more to blame than Andy was. We were, in our own ways, all broken, as chipped around the edges as an old plate. His hand sank back to the edge of the bathtub, to the picture, which he picked up and clutched to his chest. Finally, those awful eyes closed one last time.
“Stay…” he whispered as he curled into the cold sides of the tub.
“I will.” I sat for a moment, watching him. Then I held out my hand and said, “I’ll be right back.” It was foolish, leaving him there like that, but I knew what I had to do. Besides, it only took a second to find the bear. It was still damp, but when I wound the metal clasp on the back, the familiar tune started tinkling. He smiled when I set it down on the edge of the tub, but the smile quickly faded into a look of uncertainty. A look of guilt.
“It’s okay,” I said as he stared at the bear. “I promise.”
He reached for it then, and I knew in that moment that everything he had told me was true. He wasn’t in the bathtub anymore, not really, not in the way that counted. I can’t say where exactly he was, but I remembered what he had told me. About how the toys soaked up all those feelings, all those good emotions. When his hand touched that bear, was he me? Was he lying in my bed, dreaming of my mother? Or was that glow off the toy just enough to make him remember his own bed and his own mother? I never knew the answer.
Over the next half-hour, I listened, as each breath grew a bit shorter than the last. I thought of Andy, of Dad, of my own mother, whom I’d never really met. Then, when the breathing stopped, I pulled back the curtain. No one used this bathroom but me and Andy, so I figured it would be okay, at least until morning. Either way, I was too tired to deal with it. I set an alarm to get up early, before anyone else, and I finally slipped into bed to quietly cry myself to sleep.
Chapter Twelve
Dad’s funeral was such a blur, that long, arching day that didn’t ever want to end, no matter how badly you wanted it to. There were friends, a smattering of relatives, passing faces that I barely noticed. He looked peaceful. It was odd that he was almost smiling.
People say that the pain goes away when you lose someone, that every day it hurts a little less. That’s only half true. The pain doesn’t actually change. Pain is just pain, but you build up an immunity to it, like an alcoholic. It doesn’t really hurt less; your heart just gets a bit more numb with each passing day.
It hurt, not just because of him, but because of Andy too. I tried to get them to give him some kind of provisional pass, a day out under supervision. They didn’t allow it, of course. I had to tell him face to face, a wall of glass between the two of us. I can still remember it like it was yesterday.
“Did anyone tell you?” I asked him, speaking into the old plastic phone.
“Tell me what?”
He had a beard. It had been a few months since I had come by to visit, and I was shocked by how old he looked, like an honest-to-God man, the years just piling up like dominoes. There were even patches of gray in his whiskers. How the hell had it come to this?
“Dad,” I said quietly, refusing to look at him.
“Dead?” he asked. If it had come from anyone else, it would have sounded cold, but from Andy, the single word spoke volumes. Apprehension. Fear. Pain. And most of all, the stark realization that he didn’t even have to ask the question to know the answer.
“Yes.”
Dad had never been to see Andy, not a single time. I never talked much about him when I visited, mainly because I didn’t want to flaunt my relationship with Dad in his face. It seemed too harsh to mention him, like Andy telling me how much fun he and Mom had. It might have been true, but that didn’t make it a good thing to say.
“How?”
“Heart,” I said, and Andy laughed a bit.
“Could have guessed that. Too many cheeseburgers.”
“He never was much of a chef.”
“He had his moments,” Andy said. “Grilled cheese.”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “Good grilled cheese.”
Andy rested his head against the glass, his eyes drifting closed. He looked like he had something he wanted to say, but it was hard to get it out. Finally, he lifted his eyes to mine. “Did he… ever say much about me?”
I stared at him. It was the first time he had ever asked me anything about Dad.
“Do you really want to know the answer to that?” I asked him.
He let that marinate for a minute.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
“He did. He talked about how much it hurt to think about you. About how he was never disappointed in you. Just in himself.”
“I wish I could have told him,” he said. “About what happened. About… everything from that summer. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so disappointed.”
“You won’t believe me,” I said, regret twisting my stomach, “but I almost did tell him. More than once, actually. I couldn’t stand it. The thought of you, stuck in here while I was out there. Living.”
He glanced down at my right hand. “Probably not the life you wanted.”
I stood up and gazed down at him. “It could be worse. We both know that. It could have been either of us in a cave. Any life I have, I owe it to you. I wish Dad had known that.”
“When’s the funeral?” he asked.
“Friday.”
He nodded, his face suddenly working into a grimace as he wrestled with the weight of what I had just told him. He didn’t say anything, so I started to lower the phone back onto the cradle. A light tap on the glass made me pick it up again.
“Do you still have my old stuff?” he asked.
“I got a couple of boxes.”
He nodded. “One of them’s got a tin lunchbox. It’s the Ghostbusters one Dad got me when I was, I dunno, five or six.”
“I remember that one,” I said with a grin.
“Inside it, I got a couple old things. Baseball cards and shit like that. Somewhere in there, wrapped up in a bandanna, is that Superman. You remember the one?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said, the words catching in my throat.
“Find it. Take it with you tomorrow, and if you get the chance, slip it into Dad’s pocket.”
He wiped a tear from the side of his nose before setting the receiver down. He walked away without another word.
I was up early on Tuesday morning, earlier than I could ever remember getting up on a weekday. Thankfully, Dad was caught in his own morning rush, too busy to notice much of anything we did. There had been times in the past when I looked at the live-and-let-live policy in our house as a negative thing, another symptom of our odd family, but on that morning, I saw it as a blessing. Regardless of all the forces moving against us, I had a more pragmatic problem to deal with. The Toy Thief was gone now, and all that remained was a body left to rot in our bathroom.
Dad never used the middle bathroom, but he did stop and check on me and Andy on his way out. Some days, he had to drag us out of bed himself, but we were pretty self-sufficient once our eyes were open. I knew that this problem wouldn’t wait, and that school had to be on the back burner today. With that in mind, I prepared myself mentally and stumbled into the kitchen. I heard the fridge open.
“There she is,” Dad said in his usual tone. Out of the three of us, he was the only morning person.