THE LIGHT CAME back, just as it always does.
They told me I’d been in shock, which was why I’d just lain out-of-body in the dark. They gave me a jumbo Snickers bar and a can of regular Coke to get my blood sugar up.
We watched as Jack was loaded into an ambulance, the monitor attached to his heart letting us know that he was still breathing, and then followed in Sal Hamilton’s Camaro to the hospital, stretching ourselves across the blue-green chairs of the half-lit waiting room. After a loose explanation of what had happened, Mara and I were both silent. Instead, I focused on walking, and breathing, and avoiding my father’s mournful glances.
“The protest,” I said finally, and all three heads looked up. “At Kent State. Jeffery, he was . . .”
I couldn’t finish the sentence, but Sal shook his head. “I don’t know how I didn’t realize it. I mean, we heard what happened, everybody did, but I didn’t know Jeffery Kopek was . . . No wonder we never heard from them again.”
I leaned back in my chair. “My grandpa blocked it all out.”
Sal nodded sadly. “Trauma’s a hell of a drug.”
“I found the article,” my father said quietly, unfolding a newspaper from his back pocket. “While we were waiting for you.” He slowly pulled himself across the room to drop it on the table in front of me. “It’s called ‘OHIO: Our Final Stand.’ He sent all those kids to Ohio. He organized the protest. That’s how we knew about the monument.”
I nodded. “I figured something else out, too.” I closed my eyes, hiding from the dim light of the room.
“What?”
“I’ve spent this entire time thinking that Sue Kopek was reliving my grandfather’s trip to see her five years ago. But she kept asking about Orlo, and Orlo would have been long dead by then.”
“Why would that—” Mara started.
“It’s the same reason she kept calling me ‘Arthur’ and my grandpa ‘him.’ She didn’t think I was my grandpa in his old age, she thought I was Arthur in his twenties. She wasn’t reliving what happened in 2010, she was reliving when my grandpa and Jeffery and Orlo left in 1970. They were supposed to come back after the protest in Kent. And that matters, because she’d set up the placement of the chairs, sent those invitations . . .”
Mara solved the mystery before I could finish. “They were getting married. Arthur and Jeffery.”
The information hung in the silence of the room, too sad to be touched. I closed my eyes, deciding I wasn’t quite ready to face the world yet.
“He was gay?” Sal asked, too loud for the room.
I looked to my father. His head shook slowly, involuntary, as he stumbled, “I . . . yeah, I . . . I didn’t know if he ever really loved her.” He paused. “Us.”
In the empty space, I thought about Kaitlin, and the moments when I’d loved her, needed her, the most; then I thought about losing her. It had been three weeks and I still felt it every time I breathed. My grandfather had buried his love, and his pain, for forty years, and built a new life on top of it. It was no wonder he’d become detached. It was no wonder he’d rushed to forget.
“He did love you guys,” Sal said unconvincingly. “I just know he did.”
I remembered the letter in my backpack, the one he’d written Henry on the night of my birth. “He did,” I told my dad, and when I said it, I think he believed me.
“Excuse me,” a nurse said, hovering in the doorway. “Are you Arthur Louis Pullman?”
“Yes,” I said in unison with my father. He had returned to the corner, as far from everyone else as possible.
“We’re both Arthur Louis Pullman,” I said. “Do you know if . . .” I nodded toward the hallway where the ambulance had raced Jack.
“Yes,” she said. “He’ll be fine, it just caught his stomach. Relatively minor, considering. If you’d like to press charges, we’re sending someone—”
“No,” I said immediately.
“Arthur.” My father sat up. “He pointed a gun at you.” Sal leaned in behind him, the wounds on his face still visible.
“He doesn’t need to get arrested.”
“Sure he does.” Sal snorted. “He should be in jail.”
“Sometimes, people need to be punished,” my father said. “It’s good for them. It’ll teach him to think twice about using a gun like that in the future. Sometimes”—he lowered his voice, below where Mara could hear it—“the only way to make people appreciate what they have is to take it away.”
He was talking about Kaitlin. He was talking about the restraining order.
I thought about where I was sitting, upright and unwounded, in a hospital with my father. I wasn’t in a jail cell in Chicago or Palo Alto or Albuquerque, serving time for disorderly conduct or assaulting a police officer. I thought about the closure I got to have with my grandfather, and the years I’d gotten to know him. I’d been lucky. My whole life, my whole week, I’d been lucky.
Then I thought about Jack, lying one room over in a hospital bed, without any of that. From the moment I met him, he’d been under attack. It was the police, it was corporations, it was Mara, it was me—the world challenged, and he stood his ground, fearless in his belief.
But now I didn’t even know if he’d have that. He’d probably have to force himself to unlearn everything he thought he knew about his father, his path, and his place in the world. He’d probably have to create an image for his actual father, not a literary icon at all, but just a man; a man who never showed up for his son.
Jack’s stamp, his symbol, was still permanently pressed to the top of the journals. Without his stamp, I realized, none of this would have been possible. The Melbourne Hostel would’ve closed before I could get there. The back room of the Omaha Library would’ve fallen into disrepair. Without the stamp, there would’ve been no reason for Mara to cross my path. Without Jack, most of my grandfather’s life would still be a mystery.
“No,” I said again, more resolutely. “No, he’s . . . He should get a second chance.”
Sal sat back down, unsure.
I heard the nurse swallow. “I actually came to talk to you about something else.”
Everyone around the room shifted uncomfortably.
“My name is Mary, and I—I think I’ve seen you. On the news, right?” She was speaking to me quickly, as if someone might be listening. “You’re the one searching for his dead grandfather?”
I nodded again, too tired to feel pride or shame or worry. “Look, if you think I stole—”
“No, not that,” Mary said, and nodded several times. There wasn’t enough light to read her expression, and she hovered by the door. “I—I was here, the night the ambulance brought him in. Your grandfather. I was the attending nurse. I was there when he died.”
I sat up against the back of my chair. “You were? What, uh, what did he say?” I noticed she was holding a small plastic box in front of her.
She shook her head. “Almost nothing. We get a lot of people like him, you know, people who were there, at the shooting. On the anniversaries, especially. It was a traumatic event.”
I nodded, and she didn’t say anything, just stood swaying several feet inside of the doorway.
“Well, thank you for . . . for taking care of—”
“Arthur?” she interrupted me.
“Yeah?”
“I know it’s strange to say. But I wasn’t surprised when I saw you on the news.”
Everyone in the room sat forward, listening.
She closed her eyes. “I always knew someone was going to come for him. He told me someone would. He said someone was waiting for him.”
We didn’t say anything, surrendering to the soft beeps of the hospital around us.
“Anyway, I just wanted to leave his personal effects with you. No one ever came to collect them after he died, so they’ve just been sitting here, waiting for you.”
She set the plastic box on the coffee table in front of me and quickly left the room without a good-bye.
I smiled.
There was only one item, a single possession that he’d carried straight through until he died. I’d seen it in his hands a million times, everywhere he went. I’d seen him constantly poring back over its pages, flipping forward and backward, never sharing it, always keeping it close to his heart. Its soft, red jacket was so faded it was barely readable anymore:
King James Bible, 6th Edition, 1962.
I held it up to my dad. “Well,” I said, “at least he died with what he loved.”
Mara stood up, gently touching my leg. “I’m getting coffee. Take a minute with it, will you?”
Sal patted me on the shoulder as he followed. “You should read it, you know,” he said of the Bible. “Might learn a thing or two.”
I smirked back and watched them leave, holding up the Bible and running my hands over it. I felt close to him, as if he’d just reached through time and space to hand it to me. I thumbed the pages, feeling the creases and the surprisingly thick paper.
My dad sat down next to me and put an arm on my shoulder and smiled down at the Bible. For as important as it was to me, it must have been more important to my father.
Finding the middle, I closed my eyes and opened it, hoping it would fall perfectly on the fourth and fifth chapters of Corinthians, so I would know that my grandpa was watching.
But I didn’t land on Corinthians. There was no typed text on the page; just lines and lines of scribbled cursive.
“What is that?” my father asked. “Did he . . . did he write in the Bible?”
I flipped backward, and it was more of the same. I tore through page after page of hesitant cursive, occasionally falling on ripped pages. The number of them overwhelmed me; page after page, some completely full and others with only a few lines. I opened it to the very first page . . . april 29, the 1970.
“It’s not a Bible.” I ran my hand over it. “It’s a journal.”
My dad looked back and forth from the Bible to me and back again, his eyes widening.
“It goes all the way back to 1970,” I told him. “This trip, the one he was reliving, the one that ended in . . . He wrote the whole thing.”
“He brought that Bible everywhere,” my dad breathed. “He was carrying around a journal. And reading it—”
“He was rereading his own story,” I said. “He was reliving the parts he forgot.”
I set it on the table in front of us, closed. My dad was holding his breath, staring nervously, unsure if he wanted to open it or not, and I could understand why. It was almost too much: all the answers we’d wanted tucked neatly between two faded covers and now presented to us. What if he wasn’t who we thought he was? What if we were in there? What if this changed things?
But my dad had a different question. “Where do we start?”
I swallowed and nodded and flipped it open to the last page. The final entry was dated may 4, the 2010 . . . the day that he died.
I imagined him sitting alone at Kent State, under the bell where I’d just been, and writing for the last time.