MY FATHER LEFT almost immediately after dinner. He tried to apologize. He told me he was trying his best, and that he still wasn’t sure how to be a parent sometimes, and I told him it was okay, because I didn’t care anymore.
As soon as he was out the door, my uncle led me to a ladder in the far corner of the room, up to the loft attic. “Here’s where you’re setting up camp. We’ve just taken to calling it ‘the Arthur Room.’ You know the family’s had this cabin since the—”
“Gold rush, yeah, I know.”
“Well, they used to tell us your grandfather was born up here. That’s why it was his favorite spot, back when he owned the place. Then your father used to stay up there all the time when he’d come visit, and now you’re receiving the torch. Next in a long line of Arthurs.”
I examined the room at the top of the ladder. It didn’t take long—it was about the size of my bedroom at home, but the slanted roof meant most of the ceiling was too low even for walking. Cut out of the slanted roof was a large, circular window that looked west over the lake. The remaining light from the sun was painting the water purple as it set behind us.
“Best view of Donner you’ll find in any of these cabins,” he told me. “We’d know. We’ve checked.”
The only furniture was a nightstand next to the bed and a desk underneath the window, facing out. There was a single book in the room, on the nightstand: Birds of Tahoe. Next to it, a pamphlet for weekly church activities.
“Sorry,” Tim said. “Your auntie is, well, you know.”
I dropped it into the trash bin next to the desk and scanned the photos: mostly my aunt and uncle at various spots around Truckee, skiing, boating, drinking wine. On the far end was a small, rectangular frame. As soon as I picked it up, I felt a lump in my throat.
Uncle Tim saw it in my hands. “It’s, uh . . . that’s the last picture we got of him, actually.”
It was my whole family, squinting into the sun, most of us half smiling at whatever stranger had been asked to take the photo. My face looked excited, although I can’t imagine I had any reason to be. We were standing on the Truckee platform where my auntie had picked me up earlier that day. Somehow lost in the middle, surrounded by the family he had built and wearing what had become his signature confused squint, was my grandfather, Arthur Louis Pullman the First.
“When did we take this?” I asked.
“It was the morning you all rode up here to drop him off. Five years ago, the day he . . . took off.”
I looked closer at the photo, to the digital clock on the platform behind us. It read April 27. It was the last day I’d ever seen my grandfather.
I ran my thumb over it. “I don’t, uh, I don’t remember taking it. I feel bad, I wish I would have—”
“Don’t.” He cut me off. “There was no way to know.” He swallowed. “We all feel bad, but there was no way to know.”
I didn’t say anything. It didn’t sound like he was really talking to me.
It was strange, looking at my grandfather in the last moment of his life ever captured. He was a calm person, expressionless and almost cold. But in this photo, he was the opposite. His face was alive; he looked scared and intense. He looked like there was someone, or something, he was trying to avoid.
“He hated most photos, but God, he loved that one,” my uncle said. “We got it developed right away, and he just stared at it. For hours, sitting right there.” He nodded to the small folding chair where I sat. “Sometimes I would think he was trying to remember who we were, then sometimes I think he knew and . . . and I guess it was just his way of spending a little more time with us.”
I nodded. “During those last few months, I hardly . . . I mean—”
“He wasn’t well, Arthur. You know what they call Alzheimer’s? ‘The long good-bye.’ We get to remember them how we choose.” He waited a moment while I stared at the photo. “You’ve gotta go easy on your dad, kid,” he said finally, nodding to the frame in my hands. “He’s still not right with all of this. He misses him, he does. It’s just . . . it was a complicated relationship.”
“Yeah.” I flipped the photo over, and taped to the back was a newspaper clipping cut from the Chicago Tribune. My grandfather’s photo was enormous, a smiling black-and-white portrait from long before I was born.
“What’s this?”
“His obituary,” my uncle said. “The best one, at least. Fit for a king. Actually, I’m pretty sure even kings don’t get this many column inches when they die.”
“Who was Sal Hamilton?” I asked, reading the byline.
“Closest thing Dad had to a biographer. As in, he actually knew this guy. This’s gotta be one of the best articles anybody ever wrote about him.”
“How’d he know him?”
Uncle Tim shrugged. “I don’t know. I doubt Dad even remembered. One of his many mysteries.”