This is part of Litverse’s Summer Shorts Collection. Read the previous story here.
Walter held the brochure at arm's length. Bring your family. Bring your friends. Vegas has something for everyone! Children, parents, and grandparents will all have the times of their lives as they explore the infinite sights and sounds of the living, breathing city. Kids can watch performances, parents can dine, and grandparents can play the night away.
The centerfold showed a silver-haired couple rolling dice and smiling with big square teeth. Walter shut his eyes. A drizzle tapped the roof. Rain traced diamonds on the living room windows. The grandfather clock from his in-laws clacked like bones from the kitchen, waiting for something.
Someone knocked. Walter wrestled himself halfway from his chair before Matt let himself into the house. He shook his umbrella on the welcome mat.
"Ready to go?" he asked in the flippant manner of kids who had outgrown their parents. Glanced at the brochures on the table. "Reading those things I sent you? Doesn't it look like a great place for the family to get together again? Aren’t you excited, Dad?"
“Yes,” Walter said, like a tire losing air. He followed his youngest son to the driveway and heard the brochure in the background:
Rollercoasters, water parks, circuses, helicopter rides, casinos, dinners, bars, night clubs, comedians, plays, magic shows, jousting tournaments- everything you want and more.
Matt had rented a minivan with screens in the back of the headrest of every seat. The rain dropped on the windshield and spotted sidewalks as Matt turned onto the interstate.
"Everyone's real excited to see you," Matt said, spinning the wheel with his palm.
Walter looked at the blue veins his hands. "Never use only one hand," he had told Matt when he had just gotten his license. "You can't control yourself if you get too casual."
Now, he held his breath.
Had he been right?
Wrong?
Remembered?
Out the window, a playground swam blurry and bright under the gray sky.
*
The airport sparkled with lights. People swaggered facefirst in phones. Machines beeped. A man with a drooping mustache pawed Walter's socks, shirts, and pants with gloved hands. He removed the picture of Vanessa and him and the kids in front of Old Faithful. The man frowned and tipped the picture left, then right, then clockwise.
"I always liked that picture," Matt said by the screening machine as the man with the dropping mustache zipped Walter's swollen travel bag closed. Matt thumbed his phone for a few furious seconds. Big Skye, right?"
Walter winced, that something so precious could be so nameless. We were staying at the lodge in Yellowstone, this was in front of Old Faithful," Walter said slowly.
"That's right." Matt finished typing. His phone vibrated. He started typing.
"We found the problem," the man with the drooping mustache said victoriously. He waved a tube of toothpaste in Walter's face. "You can't bring these on planes anymore."
"Sorry," Walter said. "It's been a while since I've gone anywhere."
The guard nodded. "Have a nice flight."
*
In the row second closest to the bathroom, Walter shut his eyes as the airplane's vents shot cold air at him. Matt sat next to him in the aisle seat, wedged earphones into his ears, and leaned back with his eyes closed.
Walter stared out the window past the hooded teenager hunched in the window seat sliding her finger on her phone. Fog crept through the Bozeman airport. The plane rumbled forward through jeweled clouds. Walter saw his reflection in the ghost gray window and suddenly he saw himself sitting with Vanessa on the porch at the house by the river again. The plane roared and rose through the depths, but Walter’s face stayed frozen in the glass. Leaving Montana behind since losing Vanessa, he felt like something was being torn from him, something unwilling to leave the ground, that something that was more of a being than a feeling, that something that filled him as he remembered in the clouds outside the window what it meant to still have someone who had seen you, really seen you, all those years now lost in the clouds.
In the shallows of Radiance River, Matt, Terry, and John scrambled over rocks. John led the way, dancing from rock to rock. He jumped for the other side of the river and missed with a splash.
“Almost got it, Superman!” Terry had called as John got to dry land on the river bank.
“Stupid kids, following him as usual,” Walter grunted, getting up as he watched Terry and Matt get drenched up to the waist trying to cross the river to be with their brother.
Vanessa pulled him back into his seat. Her fingers were cold like icicles.
"You can't always keep them dry,” she said.
"What did the doctors say?" he asked.
Silence like a glacier. Vanessa and Walter pressed their hands together. He felt that, if he let her go, she might slip away. And then he blinked his eyes open, awake, and saw that he was clutching the armrest of the middle seat. Somewhere during the past and the present, the plane had left the earth hidden below. Matt had fallen asleep. Walter wondered what he was dreaming. The teenager pulled the window shade shut.
*
"Excited to see everyone, Dad?" Matt asked as he started the rental car.
Make every night a night to remember, a billboard claimed, sizzling outside the airport. Two young people smiled wide and open-mouthed. The woman had a red dress and had just thrown a pair of dice. From the passenger seat, he looked at his hands and didn’t recognize them because he didn’t remember when they had become what he saw instead of what he remembered. He had been the driver. Matt had been in the backseat with John and Terry. Vanessa had been next to him. Forever.
When had forever ended? What came after?
The casino sunshine fried the night sky to a pale purple. Shadows of spotlights searched the undersides of the clouds.
"The family will be so glad to see you,” Matt said at a red light. “Have you talked to anyone lately?"
"John. We were talking about Jake's college search."
"Jake's going to college?" Matt whistled. “Time flies.”
Walter remembered the children's searches for colleges:
John had never been interested in higher education. His focus had been cars and now he owned an auto repair shop in Colorado, but was forceful about Jake going to college. Walter wasn't sure whether it was time or life that changed people more. He just knew that there was a difference.
Terry had been diligent about college. She had wanted to go somewhere on the East Coast, so Walter and she had traveled through New England before she settled on Bennington. The best part of the trip had been going home and telling Vanessa about it. Terry and he had taken turns, showering her with brochures and pamphlets and mocking the tour guides and administrative officials. "Our school is unique because.... We are a special institution because...."
Vanessa laughed a tiny, distant laugh translated by the oxygen machine. Walter remembered her face, back then: a bright light shaded by a heavy curtain.
She didn't make it for Matt's graduation from college. It had been January, just after the children had come back for Christmas and left again with the New Year. Matt had been in his senior year at Bryant. Walter woke up to the cold morning and found her in her bed, the oxygen machine still pumping into her crumpled frame. He had walked out to the porch and looked at the river. The sky had been low and quiet. A snow had been falling, spinning into the water and dissolving. He knew that, in a few more weeks, the water would be frozen. Sealed from the air, still and silent. Moving unseen to somewhere unknown.
He didn’t call the kids to tell them the news for days.
*
They parked the car in front of a hotel shaped like a pyramid. Brightly dressed boys in buttoned uniforms ran over as he stepped out into the furnace of the Las Vegas night. "Take your bag, sir?" "Park your car, sir?" Walter wearily handed them his luggage and walked toward the gleaming entrance. Matt called people, one after the other, to tell them that Walter had arrived. "I'm with him right now," he kept saying to the phone. Someone opened the door for him and Walter had no choice but to enter.
Red-gold carpet wriggled in different directions with no direction, leading the way through dinging machines, rattling tables, hooting people. The air smelled hollow and old, like the belly of a cave. He stared up at the rooms. Balconies hung from the inside of the building, rising to the apex of the pyramid so you could walk outside of your room and peer down at the pit of people at the bottom.
Matt came in through the revolving doors, breathing heavily and looking worried. "Oh," he said, sighing in relief. "There you are."
Where else? Walter wondered.
"Let's check in." Matt walked up to the desk, holding a thumb under the strap of his laptop bag. Walter stared after his son, trying to remember him. Matt had been a sick kid, someone whose very existence had been regulated by strict allergic reactions, skin conditions, and colds that lasted too long. But here he was, this broad-shouldered man with sunglasses hooked on the collar of his shirt walking with the weight of purpose and authority.
Walter saw Jake come through the casino doors first, a sun-haired boy who loped across the carpet with long arms noodling at his side. "Grandpa!" His hug was gentle, careful.
"Jake, my God. Look at you. Last time I saw you... how old were you? Five? Six?"
Jake shrugged and blushed. "Dunno, Grandpa. I barely remember."
Walter’s smile stayed pinned to his face. Of course Jake would barely remember. A glimmering golden child running from rock to rock at the house by the river, just as his father had done before him. Walter had watched from the porch, a little older, a little weaker, but no different. Jake had left the house by the river and lived an entire life while Walter sat in the same chair losing himself to time. Losing Vanessa to time.
“Dad!” John pulled him into a hug. His beard scratched dry on Walter's cheek. "God, it's good to see you. How's Bozeman? Is Matt stopping by a lot? He's got all those travel miles with that job of his, doesn't he?"
"He's stopping by," Walter said. Matt and he looked at each other.
"Hi, Dad," Mary, John’s wife, softly gripped his wrist and pecked him on the cheek.
"Hello, Mary." This sugary nonsense from the woman who hadn't gone to Vanessa's funeral. What had her excuse been? Work? Travel?
"Looking forward to the reunion, Dad?" Mary asked.
"Of course," he snapped. He saw the slight twitch in her forehead. No, it was wrong to still think about Mary missing the funeral. It had been years. He tried to recover: "Are you?"
"Looking forward to the reunion? Absolutely. It'll be great to see Terry and it's always good to see Matt. The last time I saw Terry was when she got married to Rob."
The wedding had been all white. White dresses and white tents at a Cape Cod mansion in a green yard crowded by yellow marsh. He had stayed with Vanessa by the bed, white in the face listening to the white oxygen machine. Not playing with grandchildren, not talking to daughter or sons, not seeing family. Hovering over her like a guardian angel.
Someone called his name from the lobby where the revolving doors turned like gears. Terry emerged, holding Teresa's hand. Rob came behind them with Ben. Walter was amazed by how fast Teresa hop-skipped on the casino carpet to keep up with her mother. She had been crawling only four Christmases before, bubbling words and nonsense. Vanessa’s last Christmas. Four years. A lifetime for some, a blink of an eye for others.
Ben stared up at Jake with glowing eyes. Terry was all smiles and sunlight, beaming with the same iridescent vitality that had made Vanessa shine. "Dad, how are you?" She hugged him and he hugged back.
"Grandpa!" Teresa exclaimed, hugging his knee. She couldn't have remembered him. She had been told about him, maybe, decided who he was. Other people's ideas had become her memories.
Ben offered Walter a shy look and a mumbled hello. Rob shook his hand before wiping at his nose. Matt chatted with Jake. He was closer in age to Jake than to John. Walter thought about this so intently that, when he finally managed to push it away, everyone had moved back to the doors. The conversation ended. There was a moment of silence before John said, "Oh, he's over there."
"Dad!" Matt waved at him. "It's time to go to dinner!"
He followed them, all of them, at the end of the group.
*
They passed through chaos without leaving the hotel. The carpets led them between metal machines dinging like alarms. Walter startled at the ugly, piercing noises. The noises chased them into the restaurant. A waiter with glistening hair waved them into a private room. Each wall showed faded paintings of Las Vegas casinos and neon signs.
Walter sat at the head of the table, Matt across from him. Jake, Mary, and John sat on one side, Terry, Rob, Teresa, Ben on the other. Walter could see, from the tight smiles and flicking eyes, that their families hadn't seen one another too often. Terry lived in Massachusetts, John in Colorado. They were like strangers to each other. How strange it was that, out of one family, other families were born.
Jake talked to Terry and Rob with the teenage tone of someone just getting used to talking to adults as equals. Mary acted as interpreter, elaborating and exaggerating his contributions. Ben watched Jake with deer eyes. Matt talked to John with the inflection of someone who brags with the truth, sending city names drifting lazily down the table: Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, London, Berlin. Clients, managers, regional managers, area vice-presidents, Matt's unique relatives. John looked fascinated and jealous and proud.
"Grandpa, look!" Teresa called.
She, alone, saw him.
"Hi honey, what is it?"
She leaned over to him with a half-wrapped straw in her mouth and, with a puff of her cheeks, shot the wrapper into his face. She giggled as it floated onto his plate. "Fell for it! Mom and Dad fall for it all the time."
He rubbed his cheek and smiled at her. "Well, aren't you tricky?" It was easier, more natural to talk to someone who didn't think they already knew who he was. To her, he was a novelty, not a relic. "Here, give me that, I'll show you a better trick."
She handed him her straw and he twisted it, coiling it tightly.
He looked at her as he tightened the straw. A knot of pressure formed in the middle. She watched it eagerly, her little hands gripping the sides of her chair. "Now, flick your finger right where it's all bunched up here," he said.
Teresa licked her lips and leaned forward, inching closer. She flicked the knot and it snapped, popping loudly. She cried out with delight and surprise. The sound made him feel a warmth in his heart that made him realize just how cold it had been.
“Goodness!” Mary threw a hand over her heart. "Walter, are you all right?"
"Teresa, what did you do?" Rob asked sternly.
Everyone saw him now. He had raised them, fought for them, and now they treated him like a burden. For a moment, he smoldered under their eyes. But he saw Teresa looking at him expectantly. He waggled his eyebrows at her.
"Teresa! What do you say to poor Grandpa?" Rob asked.
She looked up at him and he looked at her. They both broke out laughing, because there were no answers. It was an old and unfamiliar feeling, Walter thought, to be new to someone.
Matt made a toast when the drinks arrived. Something about how good it was to have the family together again. No one mentioned Vanessa. Not even a whimsical speculation about her happiness, if she could see them together at the table. Together, but separate. Walter's life had been his children's lives. They had moved beyond him, into their future, and he stood in the past with Vanessa, holding his memories while the years carried them out to some other horizon.
He looked at Jake, the child who had transformed into an adult overnight. "Mary just had the baby," Walter had said into the quiet room, seventeen years ago. "Our first grandchild," he said with a smile. The words had hung like cobwebs, billowing in the rhythmic throb of the oxygen machine. It had been new, then. She hadn't needed to bring it everywhere, but doctors had said that it was too risky to travel to Colorado. Walter had to hear about his grandson from John, static stories mumbled into the phone.
It had happened again when Ben and Teresa were born. It had happened on holidays and it had happened for Terry's graduation from college. Too risky to leave the house. Walter would proclaim the events, Vanessa and he would watch each other, and then the news dissolved to the dust of quiet unvoiced understanding. "Marriage is difficult," Walter remembered telling John when he was having problems with Mary, "because you get so used to things and you get so used to each other. You can end up feeling like you're betraying your wife if you try to change even a little."
This was the first family reunion they had ever had and it was only possible because a Vanessa was gone. And at this table, she was gone - not living on in memory. The younger grandchildren didn’t remember her. Matt hadn't even remembered to mention her. How long would they remember him? A waiter glided toward them, wielding plates. Teresa got her meal, placed a single pea onto the edge of her fork, and flicked it at him.
*
They had to go to a musical afterward. Walter dragged behind the rest of the family, trying to keep up in the glowering heat, the choking dry desert air. He walked on top the long shadows they left behind, watching his feet. John fell back to join him. He had his hands in his pockets. "Dad... how are you doing?"
Walter coughed. His throat felt like cardboard. "It's just a little overwhelming to be here." The lights glittered all around him. People made way around them. A fountain shot up into the sky in the distance.
"It'll be better when we get to the thing," John said. "Mary said it's world-famous."
They paced each other, listening to the family chatter ahead of them. "Your new place is good, though?" John asked, throwing a glance at him.
Walter nodded. New place. He had lived there for nearly three years. “The suburbs in Bozeman are real quiet. I miss the river from our old place, though."
"You and Mom loved that stupid river," John snorted. "All you did was look at it. Did you ever even swim with us?"
"I kept your mother company. Someone had to."
John bit his lip. "She wouldn't have minded if you had gone in with us, Dad. Christ, I don't remember you swimming once."
A droplet of stinging sweat slipped down into Walter’s eye. "You kids didn't understand. Your mother wouldn’t have liked it if I had just.... you know...."
"What?"
The air made his eyes too dry for tears. "She couldn't swim, so I didn't want to."
John blew out a long breath. They waited at a crosswalk, crossed the street. Jake called for John and John melted back into the group. Walter watched as they all moved on again. He had forgotten all the times that the children had urged him to swim with them. He had always wanted to stay close to Vanessa after she had gotten sick. He had watched the river, listened to it, but he had never wanted to touch the water.
"Hi, Dad," Terry said, slowing down for him.
Teresa pranced beside her. A billboard for an escort service glimmered in her brown eyes. "Grandpa! Why are you walking back here?"
He coughed. "You're all going so fast. I feel like I'm in a race."
"If we were in a race, you would be losing," Teresa said.
"Teresa!" Terry tugged at her daughter's arm. "Sorry, Dad. She's a little mouthy."
He smiled. "It keeps me on my toes. She's right, anyway."
Terry glowered at Teresa, then smiled back at him. "Luckily, it's not a race. How are you, Dad? I barely got a chance to talk to you during dinner." Walter chewed on the question. He wondered what the kids wanted to hear when they asked it.
“Dad?”
Walter watched as Teresa looked up at the crowds crossing the Strip with her face turned up to the sky. Walter tried to imagine what the world looked like to her, a stampede of feet, a whirlwind of color. The sensation of looking up at everything important from a long way down.
"I'm great," he said. He squinted at a blazing neon sign as they rounded a corner. "Don't worry about me, Terry. I've just got myself to look after now."
"Sorry if I'm being annoying. We're all just a little worried about you. Matt says that you don't really go outside much-"
"How would he know? Since when do I need to justify myself to my children?
She chewed on her cheek. "Right. We just love you, we want to be sure that you're doing okay. I wish that one of us lived closer. I wish.... I wish we could have stayed longer after Mom’s funeral. That's all."
Walter grimaced. The funeral that Mary hadn't even attended. He remembered the guilty look on John's face. It had taken almost two weeks to find a date when everyone could actually fly to Bozeman. They had to find the perfect spot on the calendar, a day and a night at the house on the river. Halfway through, it had started snowing. The sky hung heavy, a cotton-gray above people in bright jackets.
"It's a little weird to be here again," John said, blowing into his hands. "All I remember from this house is that river, listening to it every night. I don't really remember the months where it was frozen." He shivered. A ripple of wind bloomed with snowflakes. And he had whispered: "Everything just seems so quiet now." Walter remembered watching Matt kicking at rocks by the frozen river and talking on his phone, remembered listening to Rob and Terry talk about Ben’s trouble adjusting to school.
He had been attending Vanessa's funeral for years and years. How could you stop grieving for someone who you had spent the past decade grieving? The kids had come and gone, safely burying half of their past. Walter stayed, putting things into boxes, unsure whether he would ever open them again, feeling the frost seep through the house, listening for a river that wasn't moving.
"Dad!" A voice from far away. He realized he was leaning against a lamppost. Terry's face loomed. The lights circled her, keeping her in focus. Teresa ran to him and gently tugged on his finger. "Grandpa, come on. We'll be late for the show."
He nodded. The show. Always, another performance.
*
To Walter's dismay, he was seated next to Mary in an aisle seat. She looked at him with a pinched face. "Walter, great, are you excited for the show?"
"What is it?" Walter asked, settling into the seat, melting into it.
"A modern version of Macbeth, but with songs," she said. Her hand fluttered onto his. "Are you enjoying yourself?"
He stared at her hand, resting on his like a spider. "I am, it's great to see everybody."
She looked at him and her eyes dropped to her lap.
Walter cleared his throat. "Something wrong, Mary?"
"Oh.... oh...." She said quietly. "Well."
He waited.
"I've always wondered, Walter, Dad," she said to her hands, "why we don't see you more. When I try to think of what you see Jake as, well, you must just see him as a little boy and now he's almost a man." She paused with the weight of her words. "Why.... well.... hm."
Walter blinked.
"Why don't you visit us more? I want Jake to know you. You're an extraordinary person, Walter. Maybe you can visit us a little more?"
He squeezed his eyes shut. Why didn't he visit more? He felt a bitterness in his mouth. John should have divorced when he had the chance. He opened his eyes again. "I.... I couldn't visit, Mary. I was taking care of Vanessa."
"But...." Mary ran her lip through her teeth. "I remember Vanessa saying that you should visit. Didn't she want you to be there for.... when Jake was born? I talked to her on the phone, I remember. She thought that one of you-"
"No."
Mary stared at him.
"Mary, Vanessa never wanted me to leave her side. Think of how she would have felt if I had left her with some nurse. I couldn't just leave her like that."
Mary wrapped a crooked finger around her golden necklace. "Oh, funny. I could have sworn...."
Walter tugged his hand out from under hers. "Sometimes," he said, "people don't remember things the way they happened. It's easier." Why hadn't she come to Vanessa's funeral?
The curtain fell and Walter's chin sank to his sternum. Lights winked off, fluttering into darkness like moths. He drifted. Mary hadn't come to Vanessa's funeral because her father had passed away in the same month. He swallowed against a strange sorrow as it welled up within him. Resenting her for no reason, even now. Unable to fully forgive her for something that hadn't been her choice. Something he only remembered in the darkness, after the reminder.
"The time has been, that when the brains were out, the man would die, and there was an end," a voice said, undulating in his ears. "But now they rise again with-"
Something bumped his knee.
"Grandpa!" Teresa said from the other seat.
"Teresa, sh!" Mary said. "Where's your mother?"
"Here, Mary, I just.... Dad, sorry. We're trying to get through. Teresa can't sit still any longer."
Mary sighed a sharp sigh and made an exaggerated gesture of looking around Terry's shoulder as they passed.
"Oh," Walter said. "Why don't you let me take her?" He didn't want to sit next to the woman he so unjustly disliked, this false memory bringing on a real feeling.
"You make me strange, even to the disposition that I owe!" a voice proclaimed.
"Don't you want to see the rest of the play?" Terry asked.
He smiled weakly at her. "Your mother and you were - are the literary ones in the family. You'll appreciate it more. And I'd like to spend some time with my granddaughter." Teresa beamed at him.
"Okay, Dad. Do you need my- don't- Do you...."
"Sh!" Someone said behind them.
Terry glared at the shadows and retreated to her seat. With a great effort, Walter parted from the seat and staggered out into the aisle, letting Teresa guide him by the finger until they were safely out of the foggy darkness.
*
Teresa hopped up and down by his side. "Grandpa, what should we do? Where should we go?" She looked up at him expectantly.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "What do you want to do?"
"Anything! Everything!" She led him along, weaving between the crowd.
They stopped at a bench in front of an artificial pond. A hotel rose beyond it. Walter watched in a daze. How long had he been sitting here? Where was Teresa?
She walked the edge of a cement wall surrounding the pond, balancing with seesawing arms. Vanessa had seen Teresa. They had both been so fragile, one crawling, one in bed, both able to talk but unable to communicate. But Vanessa had talked then, hadn't she?
"Why...." she asked him, "why didn't you see her when she was born? Or Ben or Jake? Look how beautiful it is, to see the very beginning of life." No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember what he had said to her. Just her soft, white face. You're only protecting me to protect yourself. Had she said that or thought it? Had he thought it?
"Teresa," he said. She balanced on the ledge with her arms stretched out, walking too close to the water. He pictured her falling beyond his reach. He could see her there already, rippling in the waves.
"Grandpa, come here!" she said.
He got up and went to go and grab her, to take her away from the water and put her back on the sidewalk, but she smiled at him with all the radiant hope of something pure, something new, and so he stopped next to her. And then wearily, in wonder at himself, climbed onto the ledge next to her.
Teresa clapped her hands and giggled. "Grandpa!"
He held her around the shoulders as geysers burst purple and pink from the pond. The water scattered over them and Walter put his head back and watched the lights sparkle through the water. Teresa and he started laughing and reaching for the shining bulbs breaking to nothing in the air, the colors they couldn’t catch and couldn’t keep, and he wondered if she would remember this moment like he would remember it, this sudden flash of truth that made him feel new because it made him see something new, and if she would remember and the way the water went back down to the depths, sinking back into the promise of motion again, the way the lights followed the sounds.
He heard Teresa giggling like it was yesterday, tomorrow, last year, next year, and wiped a dry tear from his eye.
A perfectly realized effort 👌 Loved the water motif, the narrative angle of reunion post-funeral, the way you drew Montana and Vegas in tight portraits - and the Teresa/Walter dynamic was authentic and affecting. You plumbed a lot of depth with this premise: damn fine work 👏👏👏