Never Land

“Remember when he said he buried 20,000 dollars on the property?”

We sat on the sagging porch in the breezeless midday heat. The air was soupy with humidity, but it was still cooler than in the house.

“What are you talking about?” I said. Casey was always more gullible than me, and therefore subject to more of Old Pat’s pranks.

“Where do you think he buried it?” she asked coyly.

“Casey there is no twenty grand buried in this swamp. When did Pat even have two dimes to rub together?”

She sighed, “He told me sitting out here one night.”

“If Pat had money why didn’t he fix the damn AC.”

“He was a dreamer, Clara. The last of the dreamers.”

I finished my beer and chose not to respond. It’s never worth it, Casey and Old Pat were always better at fighting than me.

Pat left the house to us when he died, and we used to come all the time. Perhaps a little trapped in the golden memories of our childhood, perhaps trying to escape the irredeemable drudge of our adult lives. Over the past few years our visits have lessened. I guess it’s inevitable for siblings to grow apart. But, I was more easily resigned to that than Casey, who, in a typical dramatic blowout, confessed to missing me terribly and begged me for a week to make up for lost time.

Casey picked the condensation damp beer label to shreds and was now throwing the wet balls of paper in between our bare feet.

I watched dully trying not to say anything. With Casey it’s best to pick your battles.

“God, is it hot,” she said.

I pressed the cold bottle to my neck and sighed.

“I was reading the notebooks again,” Casey said.

Pat was obsessed with these black leather-bound notebooks. He was never without one.

“Remember how he used to say Ernest Hemingway used the same kind of notebook?”

I laughed, doubting that was true.

“As if Pat ever read,” I said. “Let alone read Hemingway.”

Old Pat used the thin elastic band of his black notebooks to tie it to his upper arm when he waded across the river, and the leather back as a visor when the sun was too bright.

On humid summer evenings, he would play Django Rhinehart records loud, the music reaching the porch where Casey and I danced, snapping elastic band to the beat of the song, watching us and chuckling.

He was a storyteller, bouncing between imagination and truth so deftly they switched sides. The truths becoming legends and the lies honest-to-god-miracles. He drove us wild with tales of adventure, probably lifted from old movies long taken off syndication.

He was a leg puller, a grifter, a real son of a bitch.

We were devoted to him.

I’m sure he thought he was immortal. That if he built enough worlds out of words he would go on living forever in one of those realities, spinning yarns to keep himself breathing.

In some ways he had, whenever the old house settled it was him lumbering up the stairs, leaving scraps of paper lined with lists and limericks, math problems and mythologies. His menthol cough drops still collected in drawers and melted between couch cushions.

Old Pat made being a grown up seem like the best of all possible worlds. He did as he pleased, drinking himself to sleep every night and waking up roaring. But Pat wasn’t a grown up at all, and now that we were, we ached to be more like him. To find the mischievous delight in the ordinary.

Now that the house is my responsibility, I can see the limitations of a life spent in vice and pleasure. It was falling apart, the land was ill-maintained, and the AC has been broken for god knows how long.

None of this ever seemed to bother Pat.

“Well, I think we should look for it,” Casey said, pulling me away from my thoughts.

“What?”

“The treasure.”

I laughed, but she was serious.

“I’m not going,” I said, clarifying.

“Oh please Clara, it’ll be an adventure. Like the old days, we can be pirates or archeologists on a cursed dig.”

“You want me to play pretend with you?”

“Well,” she said slowly, embarrassed, but I knew she was faking. “Yeah.”

I rolled my eyes at her cartoonish frown, but I was already giving in. I was always giving in to Casey.

It’s hard to say what came between us. There wasn’t one specific incident that caused a falling out. I suppose in a way I was fed up, tired of having to be the grown up, of having to fund or detangle Casey from the various situations she wandered into without thinking of the consequences.

And she was tired of me “nagging her”, demanding that she start to take responsibility for her decisions. To me she was pathless, and to her I was trapped in a mundane life.

I was being eaten alive by mosquitos; Casey didn’t seem to mind the bugs.

“Enough with the twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “It’s just another one of his lies.”

“Why do you insist on being so negative all the time. Would it kill you to just

enjoy something for once?”

“Excuse me, I enjoy things all the time. I just don’t want to go on some delusional treasure hunt with you.”

“Delusional?” She scoffed, then continued on ignoring me. “I bet it’s up in the barn or the attic.”

“Well that’s too bad, let’s go swimming.”

“Are you kidding?”

“The barn is collapsing and the attic is gross.”

“You can’t just humor me?” Casey turned toward me on the stoop of the porch. “I mean what’s the harm? It’s the last of Old Pat’s mysteries, don’t you want to know?”

“I do know, he lied. He lied about everything.”

“Clara, I asked you up here this week because I wanted us to spend some time together and have an adventure like we used to. Let loose a little.”

“An adventure? Okay, like the time you made me climb the big tree and I fell and broke my arm? Or how about the time you wanted to go ice skating and I fell in the river and got pneumonia?”

“Clara—”

“No really, remind me of an adventure where I didn’t get injured or lose money, remind me of a time when it didn’t end in disaster.”

“Is that how you remember our childhood? Me getting you injured?”

I laughed dryly, avoiding her eyes, “And most of our adulthood so far.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Well it’s true.”

“Is that why you stopped coming up here?”

I didn’t say anything, the locusts were starting their drone and I was getting antsy. We were only one day in to this stay and I already wanted to go back to my air-conditioned apartment.

“I mean, yeah Casey. I had to take care of the house, I had to take care of you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What difference would it have made? It’s always been that way. The Casey Show, the Old Pat show, and I’m just the one dragging everyone down, trying to keep the barn from collapsing.”

“That is such bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know how I remember things? I remember we agreed to climb the big tree and you were going too fast, I couldn’t keep up. I begged you to slow down and wait so we could go up together. You turned around hollering at me, and you fell. Old Pat came running out there, and he said, ‘Clara if you don’t slow down someday I just don’t know.’”

“Please.”

“Same with the river, same with everything. You think I’m holding you back, but,” Casey turned her face away.

“Come on, are you crying?”

“All I wanted was for us to be together, I mean, I think of when we were kids and it was like we lived in this magical space. And now you’re purposely wiping all that away. You can call Old Pat a liar all day, but at least he really lived. He was happy. Why can’t we be like that?”

“Casey we can’t be kids forever, we had to grow up eventually.”

“Just because we’re adults doesn’t mean we have to lose that magic.”

“But I can’t. That’s what you don’t understand. I can’t enjoy myself while things are falling apart. I can’t build a world where everything is okay when I see all these problems. Maybe I didn’t inherit the imagination gene, okay? I’m just not like you.”

“But you are, remember the stories you would tell me before bed? You’d build worlds, and slay dragons, and travel the stars. And then you just stopped. ”

“I’m sorry I had to leave neverland and disappoint you, but that’s the way it is.”

Casey kicked her beer bottle to the ground and stormed into the house.

“Real mature!” I called after her.

I had never won an argument before and it felt terrible.

I went in and started slicing up tomatoes for dinner, Old Pat used to say that the best way to apologize was a cold beer and a good meal, it was too hot to make a good meal so Casey would have to accept my apology over salad. She was upstairs making an enormous ruckus, probably looking for that stupid treasure.

I wonder if she will ever learn. But then again, I would give anything to disappear into daydreams like a child again. Despite myself, I could certainly use some magic.

“Clara!” Casey called from upstairs. “I have a surprise for you! Go in the living room.”

I met her there, bracing myself for another scheme. But instead she just twirled around the room and held up her hands to the AC vent.

“Ta-da!”

“What?”

“Just wait, it should kick on in a minute, I think I fixed it.”

“How?”

“Not sure, I started twisting things and it began to hum.”

“You’re gonna blow up the house!”

Casey raised her eyebrows at me.

“Clara, this is a gesture. Try not to be a jerk. Any second now, we will feel the cool clean, air of functioning AC.”

We watched the vent in silence, shoulder to shoulder. A sound started to emit from the back, getting louder and louder, Casey leaned toward it.

“It sounds like, fluttering.”

“Is it a bird or something?”

Casey reached over the old record player and started prying on the vent.

“Don’t take it off!”

“Well if something is in there we have to get it out eventually,” she said. “Ready?”

I flinched away from the vent, preparing for the worst.

With a clang it popped off and clattered to the floor.

There was silence, the fluttering gone. We peered into the space, inspecting the darkness when with a sudden rush, paper burst onto our heads, coasting on a gust of cool air, never landing or letting up.

“Cash!” Casey screamed.

She leapt over the coffee table, knocking over the piles of notebooks, grabbing at the air.

“Twenty grand! In the vents!” Casey screamed. “He did it!”

She ran back to me, a handful of money in her hand. She smiled wide.

“He wasn’t lying Clara!”

I shook my head in disbelief. I let the cool air hit me, I let the money swoop and swing and shudder in the air. I felt Old Pat, just behind me, his raspy chuckle, snapping that elastic band of his notebook to the beat of my heart. Enjoying the prestige of his final magic act.

“I can’t believe it,” I said breathlessly. I grabbed a bill out of the air, it was real. It was all real.

I hopped over the table and started dancing with my little sister, laughing, stumbling, floating on air, as Old Pat’s treasure got pressed into the carpet beneath our feet.