I READ EVERY word on the page, then read them again, more slowly. By the third time through, I could hear my grandfather speaking behind me.
His voice rolled slowly out of his chest to fill every corner of the room, deciding every word as he went, placing each one carefully on top of the last. I imagined him sitting at the desk, eyes fixed out the window, but he wasn’t with me; he was out there, with the waves and mountains and burning orange light.
“We’re together,” he tells me. “And we always have been.”
I caught my breath, and the gravity of what I held in my hands found me.
My grandfather had written again.
The diary or poem or whatever it was had been dated five years ago, April 27, 2010. It was the day of that final photo, the day he had disappeared, the first night of the last week of his life. It was the closest thing we’d ever found to an answer or an explanation.
I closed my eyes and clutched the pages, remembering the most important detail of all: he hadn’t left this out to be found. He had tucked it into a specific book, on a specific page, regarding a specific story he once told his grandson, about a boy who receives a sign from the divine and sets out after it.
My grandfather had wanted me to read this. He had left a clue.
He was next to me, hunched over, looking out across the desk and the photos and over the lake. I could hear him breathing, the wood bending every time he shifted his frame. I could see his old, trembling hand pushing to apply enough pressure to form the cursive on the page. Getting lost, getting confused, repeating himself, starting sentences and abandoning them. With Alzheimer’s, clarity came in waves. Waves that lasted long enough for him to write, but not long enough to make any sense.
What did he want me to find?
I flipped the page over, remembering the faded letters on the other side.
S E KOPEK
17 C H ST
E, DA
“It’s a name,” I said. S something E. She? Or see? Or Sue? That had to be it. Sue Kopek.
The line below it looked like an address. 17 C something H Street . . .
The sanctuaries of Church Street, I heard him write, and I smiled to myself. It was almost too obvious to notice. 17 Church Street. Sue Kopek at 17 Church Street.
The smile only lasted ten seconds. It was still nothing: a name, a street address, and an obscure poem that did nothing for me if I didn’t understand it. The address was meaningless without a city. The clue was meaningless without any context.
I read it again, heard my grandfather’s voice louder.
Dask wooden cold. He was sitting where I sat.
Jagged line burning orange lite. He was staring out the window, looking at the same horizon that I was, cut along the tops of the mountains, the color of the sun exploding behind them.
You and me and them. Who was he talking about?
On chevys and greyhounds and zephyrs; forests of elko, safety in mecca. Those were all proper nouns; places and things that sounded almost fictional, and in a small way, familiar.
chaos in cold, wet veins of ch. It was an incomplete word; he’d lost the thought halfway through.
We’re together & we have always been. Who’s together?
Lite too bright to see its source. My excitement slowly eroded into frustration.
It was nonsense. It read like the poetic insanity of a man lost inside of his own brain for too many years. The harder I tried to put the pieces together, the fewer pieces I found.
I saw him again, sitting next to me, the pen frozen in his hand, and this time, I remembered the look that had likely been on his face as he wrote: blank, warped with permanent confusion, squinting as if staring into a “light too bright to see its source.” No one in my family had seen him write in forty years, and this was why. With his illness, it was impossible; not to form the words, but to make them mean anything. I could read along with his train of thought as he lost it, distracted by the world around him—the light outside on the lake, the crucifix-shaped bars across the window, the photograph of our family . . .
Photograph of family, he had written. He had been looking at the framed photo on the desk, the photo that my uncle said he’d spent hours with.
I picked it up, the only photo on the desk. My breathing slowed as I ran my thumb over it, studying it once more. Why this picture? What was he looking for?
I realized where I’d seen the words before.
One was plastered along the side of the train behind us. The 6 train, the California Zephyr. It was the name of the train.
And next to it, reflected in the train’s window, was the digital screen at the station, displaying its next three destinations:
Reno.
Winnemucca.
And Elko, Nevada.