In a Dream

“They tell me I’ll forget all about him in four years. Like it wasn’t enough to have the junk removal people called up as soon as the autopsy report broke. They had to purge my mind too. Not thirty minutes and I’m already in your office.”

“Bo...:”

“I don’t really feel like anything has changed, either. I only ever saw him at night when he would leave his study and come read to me.”

“You know, it’s completely normal that you’re feeling this way. Often it takes some time for us to process things. My mentor always told me ‘our brains don’t work in real time, we force them to.’”

Unfortunately for both me and my parents, I have a painfully good memory which will neither let me forget grandpa nor the way Leslie straightens up before furrowing her brow and mocking her teacher in that awful raspy big bird voice.

“Your mom mentioned something…”

“The dream.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

“It wasn’t anything special. The lock turned, the stairs screamed, and the first six beats of the nutcracker rapped on my door. He came in, sat at the edge of my bed, but didn’t speak. I asked him what it was going to be tonight. Silence. I scooted up to a seat to look at him and he turned, handing me a black book. I took it in my hands, turning it over, and by the time I looked up he was gone. Sometimes he has those nights when his fingers hurt so much he can’t turn the pages. ‘The puppet master's taken control, he'd say’ and show me how furiously his hands were shaking.”

“But it was a dream, Bo. Nothing more than that lost boy's imagination trying to save the day, feel like he’s still here.”

She tried to reach over and scruff up my hair and it took all I had in me to scrunch my face into a look of playful annoyance, not fury, and take it for the sake of my parents.

I saw my mom’s face when she pulled up, so I casually opened the door and got into the front seat.

“So Bo, how was it?” No mention of the front seat. She was feeling bad for me.

“Fine.”

And just like that she turned on the radio and her sympathetic pout slipped into a melody that was far from fit for mourning — “Material Girl”.

Sometimes I wondered how she expected me to respect dad when it seemed like her and grandpa were more predator and prey than father and daughter, but I pushed that thought back. I didn’t want to say something snarky that could jeopardize my plan.

I waited until the song finished. “When are the junk people coming over?”

“They’re really backed up. Next Thursday at 9 was the best they could give me.”

We were turning into the driveway.

“Do you think I could go pick a book from grandpa’s study for tonight?”

“Why not. The old brute never let anyone up, but I bet you’re the first exception he would’ve made.” She booped my nose and that was a done deal.

I don’t think Ms. Simmons’ homework has ever been anything less than a chore, but it felt like minutes after getting home that I was sitting at my desk in my pajamas, homework in an orderly pile, teeth brushed, which I didn’t usually do anyways.

My mom told me she left the study unlocked and I could go wild. It didn’t matter to the junk people if things were in one piece or a hundred. She was joking, I was definitely not the type, but I think she wished she had the guts to.

I tiptoed up the first three steps until I realized this was completely allowed and the next three squeaked under my weight. The door was different than the other ones in the home. Apparently grandpa brought it with him, and it felt almost as out of place in our house as he did. I dropped my gaze and struggled to let myself turn the knob. It felt holy. All these years I imagined millions of incarnations of what was hidden behind the door, and what unfolded before me pretty much hit the nail on the head. All except one thing, it was boring.

The whole room was isolated. The walls were draped with so many layers of red velvet fabric that it seemed like an insane asylum for a retired Harvard professor.

Here’s where I got it wrong: the books.

I thought he would have a whole wall behind his desk filled with covers from Doyle and Christie and Poe, something intimidating, something to reflect the type of person he was — learned, proper, curious.

It's not until I sat in his chair, fighting to not slide off that I saw the books. It was a neat little shelf next to the door and I retreated to go over and see it.

All the books seemed to be there. All mysteries. The covers were leather, old and worn with gold lettering on the spines. Except one. I took it out, still leather, but no lettering, not as ancient, but just as well handled.

“The book”

I pinched myself, looking around. This wasn’t a dream.

I opened the cover. “To Bo, every story has a good mystery, you just have to find it”.

The next page was filled with ink. As I unfurled the next, and the next, all of them were filled all the way to the very end.

I quickly turned off the light and ran to wish my parents a good night, stuffing the book in my pants.

I got into bed, pulled the covers overhead and began.

It was about a boy, an orphan, who grew up in a boarding school mopping floors and making beds in exchange for an education. His life was devastating and bleak. In the mornings he’d blister his fingers writing, and in the evenings he’d rub his hands dry on the washboard. If anything, this tangible pain distracted him from the social wrath of his peers who sneered at him and alienated him, even occasionally adding a black eye to his ever growing list of ailments.

Thank goodness for winter vacation.

His only respite came in the form of an old professor who lived on the grounds and didn’t have any family to go to over the holidays. He probably felt the boy was a kindred spirit, or took pity, but he took him in during those cold weeks nonetheless.

They would read and talk and discuss, but only ever in theory. It seemed nice to forget about their lives for a little while and become different, infinitely more interesting people with a purpose other than bare minimum survival.

The professor introduced him to mysteries, a far cry from the rigid texts shoved down his throat in school. From then on the winter weeks passed in reading them, all of them, and poking holes in the plots of authors long since departed. Since the kid didn’t have a mom to tell him not to speak ill of the dead and the man was so close to dead himself, it didn’t matter.

The winter he turned thirteen was different. On the 25th, the professor handed him a little package tied in twine. The only gift he ever received. It was a book, but not the kind anyone could have. The professor had written it. But it wasn’t just a gift either. This was a mystery.

There were words underlined throughout the book which would create a clue that would lead —

I turned back to the first page. Nothing.

I swore there was something.

Next page. Nope.

Again.

Again.

Again.

“Old man.” I shook my head, but my fingers continued leafing through the pages and my eyes continued scouring until I caught it.

“We” underlined plain as day.

I grabbed a notebook and pen from my desk and got to work. By the morning I had it.

“We never know as much as we’d like to know.”

“Well thanks grandpa, how satisfying. I wanted to know what this was all about but I guess it just wasn’t in the cards.” I dropped the book to the floor and fell asleep.

Only it wasn’t satisfying. Even sarcastically. I sat up. It went beyond that. I was mad. Why bother? Who did he think would find the book? I was the only one who took the time to read anything in the house, but he wouldn’t even let me in his study, let alone touch his books. And on top of it all, I recognized it. It was a saying. Or a fortune in a cookie?

A quote. By whom?

There was no point in asking my parents. Neither of them ever humored my grandpa with his mysteries. I hardly remembered the last time they talked to him at all.

The phrase stayed at the back of my head the whole day. Until 6th period.

“Any questions?”

I raised my hand. “Ms. Simmons, I was wondering if you could help me with something?”

“Is it about homework?”

“No. There’s a quote I have stuck in my head but I forget who it's by. ‘We never know as much as we’d like to know.’” My classmates probably thought I was such a nerd for this but I didn’t care. I’d do anything to just let this go.

“Hmmm. Oh, of course! Agatha Christie. It was something about a Chimney?”

“The Secret of the Chimneys!” I ran out the door.

When we got home I grabbed a shovel and ran to the backyard. This was what it was all about. All of the mysteries, all of the reading. He wanted me to deserve whatever it was he got from his professor. He wanted me to prove I was worthy. As if he thought I’d forget the jewel was buried under the roses.

Except it wasn’t. Not this time.

“Ha.”

In the office I spun around in the chair, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the inevitable. My mom would look outside and scream. All those days spent on her hands and knees breathing in manure for a lopsided pile of green and red. Forget impressing the vicious PTA moms, she would somehow be worse off than when she started. At least it was settled. He was a weirdo. Nothing to show for it either, except a story and a bookshelf full of wasted time. The kicker was that I listened to everything he said, the fool I am. I deserved to be grounded.

Spinning around blurred my thoughts but I couldn’t add hurling in the study to my list of disappointments for the day. I had to face my thoughts and all I could think was that mom was right: grandpa was a loser who shouldn’t be listened to, and junk is junk. I got up.

The book shelf was a little shorter than me and seemed pretty well made. I dragged my finger across the books and toppled them to the floor one by one. Same with the next row. His whole life was sprawled on the stupid red carpet. Then I kicked it. Hard. My foot would hurt later but it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel it. What I felt was his eyes on mine. I kicked. His crooked smile telling me stories about how life is a mystery. I kicked. Filling my head with all of this garbage. I punched. Building me up to this stupid pivotal moment of nothing! I slouched over weeping.

The dumb thing wasn’t even well made. The side was pinned on so poorly I managed to kick it clean off. I stopped crying and propped my head up. There was an envelope.

I reached in and pulled out what looked to be a million dollars.

It was 20 thousand.