𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐘𝐏𝐒𝐎 | ᴍɪʟʟᴀʀᴅ ɴᴜʟʟɪɴɢꜱ

𝟒] 𝐈 𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐄 𝐌𝐘 𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐑... 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍

CHAPTER FOUR ˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ I LOSE MY TEMPER... AGAIN

     THE LAST STRAW CAME A FEW DAYS LATER.

     Our family decided it was time to sell Grandpa Portman's house. Before prospective buyers could be allowed inside, though, the place had to be cleaned out.

     On the advice of Dr. Golan, who thought it would be good for us to "confront the scene of our trauma," We were enlisted to help our dad and Aunt Susie sort through the scene.

     For a while after we got to the house our dad kept taking me aside to make sure I was okay. Surprisingly, I seemed to be, despite the scraps of police tape clinging to the shrubs and the torn screen on the lanai flapping in the breeze; these things--like the rented Dumpster that stood on the curb, waiting to swallow what remained of my grandfather's life—made me sad, not scared.

     Once it became clear I wasn't about to suffer a mouth-frothing freak-out, we got down to business. Armed with garbage bags we proceeded grimly through the house, emptying shelves and cabinets and crawl spaces, discovering centuries of dust beneath objects unmoved for years.

     We built pyramids of things that could be saved or salvaged and pyramids of things destined for the Dumpster. My aunt and father were not sentimental people, and the Dumpster pile was always the largest.

     Jacob lobbied hard to keep certain things, like the eight foot stack of water-damaged National Geographic magazines teetering in a corner of the garage—how many afternoons had we spent poring over them, imagining ourselves among the mud men of New Guinea or discovering a cliff-top castle in the kingdom of Bhutan?

     But he was always overruled. Neither was I allowed to keep my grandfather's collection of vintage bowling shirts ("They're embarrassing," my dad claimed), his big band and swing 78s ("Someone will pay good money for those"), or the contents of his massive, still-locked weapons cabinet ("You're kidding, right? I hope you're kidding").

     I told Dad he was being heartless. My aunt fled the scene, leaving us alone in the study, where we'd been sorting through a mountain of old financial records.

     "I'm just being practical. This is what happens when people die, Calypso."

     "Yeah? How about when you die? Should I burn all your old manuscripts?"

     My dad volunteered part-time at the bird rescue, where he helped rehabilitate snowy egrets hit by cars and pelicans that had swallowed fishhooks. He was an amateur ornithologist and a wannabe nature writer--with a stack of unpublished manuscripts to prove it--which are real jobs only if you happen to be married to a woman whose family owns a hundred and fifteen drugstores.

     He flushed. I shouldn't have said it; mentioning his half-finished book projects was definitely below the belt.

     Instead of yelling at me, though, he was quiet. "I brought you along today because I thought you were mature enough to handle it. I guess I was wrong."

     "You are wrong. You think getting rid of all Grandpa's stuff will make us forget him. But it won't."

     He threw up his hands. "You know what? I'm sick of fighting about it. Keep whatever you want." He tossed a sheaf of yellowed papers at my teet. "Here's an itemized schedule of deductions from the year Kennedy was assassinated. Go have it framed!"

     I kicked away the papers and walked out, slamming the door behind me, and then waited in the living room for him to come all and apologize. When I heard the shredder roar to life, I knew he wasn't going to, so I stomped across the house and locked myself in the bedroom with Jacob.

     It smelled of stale air and shoe leather and my grandfather's slightly sour cologne. I leaned against the wall, my eyes following a trail worn into the carpet between the door and the bed, where a rectangle of muted sun caught the edge of a box that poked out from beneath the bedspread.

     I went over and knelt down and pulled it out. It was the old cigar box, enveloped in dust--as if he'd left it there just for me to find. Inside were the photos we knew so well: the invisible boy, the levitating girl, the boulder lifter, the man with a face painted on the back of his head.

     They were brittle and peeling--smaller than I remembered, too-and looking at them now, as an almost adult, it struck me how blatant the fakery was. A little burning and dodging was probably all it took to make the "invisible" boy's head disappear.

     The giant rock being hoisted by that suspiciously scrawny kid could have easily been made out of plaster or foam. But these observations were too subtle for a six-year-old, especially one who wanted to believe.

     Beneath those photos were five more that Grandpa Portman had never shown me. I wondered why, until I looked closer.

     Three were so obviously manipulated that even a kid would've seen through them: one was a laughable double exposure of a girl "trapped" in a bottle; another showed a "levitating" child, suspended by something hidden in the dark doorway behind her; the third was a dog with a boy's face pasted crudely onto it. As if these weren't bizarre enough, the last two were like something out of David Lynch's nightmares.

     One was an unhappy young contortionist doing a frightening backbend; in the other a pair of freakish twins were dressed in the weirdest costumes I'd ever seen. Even our grandfather, who'd filled our heads with stories of tentacle-tongued monsters, had realized images like these would give any kid bad dreams.

     Kneeling there on my grandfather's dusty floor with those photos in my hands, I remembered how betrayed we had felt the day we realized his stories weren't true. Now the truth seemed obvious: his last words had been just another sleight of hand, and his last act was to infect us with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.

     I closed the box and brought it into the living room, where my dad and Aunt Susie were emptying a drawer full of coupons, clipped but never used, into a ten-gallon trash bag. I offered up the box.

     They didn't ask what was inside.