Martin, I learned, had hidden the stranger in a kind of hole in the hostel basement, a bizarre crawlspace beneath the game room. I’d never seen it or even had an inkling it existed; it was accessible only by passing through the maze of the old root cellar and pushing aside some rotten boards that led to creaking steps, an airless room. The darkness there was absolute.
“What is this place?” I asked Martin as I followed the beam of his flashlight, taking in the damp earth of the floor, the moldering bricks of the walls.
“Underground Railroad,” he said shortly.
“Oh.” My eyes roamed over the dank, close space, the long cracks running through the ancient bricks. “Right.”
“Either that or an old icehouse that got filled in. At any rate, it’s nobody’s idea of a good time, but it’ll keep him out of sight until I can find a way to get him out of here.” He looked more closely at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. No. I’ll tell you later.”
Hearing us, the stranger emerged from the space in the wall, brushing dirt and cobwebs out of his hair.
“Welcome,” he joked feebly, blinking in the light. “It’s not the Ritz, as they say, but I suppose it will do. I’m afraid I’ve gotten spoiled by the first-class accommodations upstairs.”
I tried to answer, but the words caught in my throat. Standing in front of the crevice in the wall that led to the crawlspace, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, he looked like a hunted animal.
Quietly, Martin left us, handing me the flashlight.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is—it’s—”
“Don’t worry about me,” he interjected. “I’m fine.”
A hollow pain rose within me. “We’ll still go,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here as soon as I can.”
“Really. It’s all right.” There was a tension in his voice, an echo of the previous night’s fear, but he did his best to hide it, smiling. Even as I watched his face, I couldn’t bear to see it.
By the evening, there was no change. My grandmother seemed to be losing her shape, fading into the bed, but the doctor—a new one—talked about her “vitals” and said she was hanging on, if only by a thread. I pictured her unconscious form caught in a spider’s web, coming loose, dangling over space.
There was a cheap restaurant in the middle of town, the Greek place, and I took refuge there that night, hunching over oyster sandwiches and French fries I barely touched. The dining room was jammed, waitresses nearly running up and down the aisles, couples and families jabbering in the booths while the man at the grill sweated over rows of hot dogs and hamburgers. I watched them from my table in the corner, stupefied; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been around so many people, all of them talking at once. The laughter, the noise, the tumult wrapped themselves around me so densely I kept staring around and blinking. I must be getting strange, I thought, but couldn’t stop watching these unfamiliar people with their unfamiliar voices and gestures, finding myself astonished that the world still had so many other human beings in it.
Looking around at the booths and the rush of diners in and out, I thought of my grandfather, his loud laugh filled with false teeth. The last time I had seen him, a few months after the accident and just weeks before he died, he had taken me out for ice cream at a restaurant much like this one. Sitting upright had still been painful then, but I had tried not to show it, listening to his happy banter and doing my best to smile at his jokes. He had ordered a double cheeseburger while I’d asked for a scoop of vanilla. “You be sure and put a cherry on that,” he’d told the waitress, giving me a wink.
Halfway through the meal, he had reached across the Formica tabletop and patted my hand. “You’re gonna be all right, sweetie.”
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
“You will. I know it. After all, you’re just like me.”
I must have given him a wary look, because he’d laughed. “Not the bad parts. The good ones. You and me—” he had gestured at the other tables around us—“we’re not like these people here. We’ve got brains in our heads. At least, we’ve got the brains to know there’s something else out there, right?”
“I think everybody knows that,” I’d said.
“No, sweetheart.” He’d shaken his head ruefully. “They don’t. You might think they do, but they don’t.”
After that, he’d seemed to watch me for a long moment.
“I’m an old man, you know,” he’d said finally, then thrown his hands in the air. “God! Look how old I am. I look just like those old bastards who sit around bullshitting at the gas station all day. Somehow, I never thought this would happen.” He’d been smiling, and I’d managed to smile back, although rays of pain were beginning to spread through the bones on my left side.
“And yet it still seems like just the other day you were a little thing riding around on my back like I was a horse.” He’d picked up a cold French fry. “You remember that?”
“Yeah. Of course I do.”
“Your grandmother hated it. We’d keep knocking things over in her living room and it’d drive her nuts.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well. We had fun, didn’t we?”
There had been an odd note in his voice, and I’d looked up from my dish. His eyes had been almost too bright, his smile slightly uncertain.
“Sure, we did,” I had answered, thrown off-guard.
He had reached over and patted my hand again. “You’re a good girl,” he’d said.
He’d begun talking about something else then, a car he’d bought the week before, the first one he’d ever had that was foreign-made. When we were ready to leave, he’d held my jacket for me, helping me as I cautiously slid my arms through the sleeves.
“You all right, honey?” he’d asked when he dropped me off at the house I had until recently shared with Amos, and which I hadn’t yet relinquished. “Want me to walk you up to the porch?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks for taking me out, Grandpa.”
He had reached over and hugged me, kissing me roughly on the cheek the way he always did. “Sure thing, my girl. Like I said, you’re gonna be all right. You just remember that.”
I had walked into the house, pushing my way through the heavy door with its flaking paint. Inside, as I’d struggled to take off the jacket, I’d realized that the car’s engine was still running outside. Through the picture window in the living room, I’d caught sight of my grandfather slumped in his seat behind the wheel, his eyes closed and his hand over his mouth. He’d rocked forward, his shoulders seeming to shake. Just as I was about to go back outside, he had straightened, seeming to compose himself, and driven away.
I missed him. To this day, I regretted not having gone out to him, telling him that everything would be all right. That I loved him, which, in spite of everything, I did.
The nurses let me spend the night in my grandmother’s room, curled in the armchair in the corner. When the dawn came, her condition still had neither worsened nor improved.
“If she pulls through, she’s going to be in pretty rough shape,” one of the early-shift doctors said. “She’ll need somebody with her around the clock. You folks thought about how you’re going to take care of that?”
On the drive up the mountain, I kept hearing his voice. If she pulls through. You folks thought about that? Around the clock. If she pulls through. If.