8. North America

Return. The pilot told us that we are about to descend and that everyone should return their seats to the full and upright position. All electronic devices should be turned off, and all the window shades should be pulled up. I looked out the window, my eyes adjusting to the light, and I waited for the flight attendant to take away my cup of water and ice. The plane banked hard to the left, and my eyes were drawn to the ground. It seemed like the first time I had ever truly seen the colors of this city, the same city that I had flown into countless times before. But I felt that a real change had occurred on this approach. The buildings, standing tall between rows of parallel gridded roads, once seemingly mountainous, exciting my senses, looked dull in contrast to the rows of houses all painted differently, squat in the morning sun. This would not be the last time I made this approach, not even close, but I felt finality in this procedure, like an actor watching his performance on screen for the first time. This experience was etched in stone, this chapter of life was finally behind us. 

            I looked back in the row behind me, and I spotted Ginny looking intently out the window as well, her eyes scanning the horizon for clues pointing her in the direction of her house, which Vick and the kids were undoubtedly leaving right now to welcome her at the gate. I no longer saw Ginny as a soul in search of a safe harbor, but as the captain of the ship, steering into a familiar port of call. I felt unsure if she would ever leave again, but I hoped so.

            Check sat next to me in the aisle seat, eyes closed and mouth agape, the same way that Dad did in his chair watching the news late at night. I felt unsure about him as well. Had Check actually begun to enjoy himself on the last leg of the trip? He had begun to carry a wistful look like a person at the end of a long journey, already hoping to prolong it for just one more day. He was, after all, but in the end, he had even cracked a smile, putting his arm around others around him, not once complaining that things were taking too long.

            Hale sat across the aisle asleep as well, at peace in her own way, her head tilted against her neck. Hale, once of a different world, now had crossed the barrier into the forefront of our consciousness, and it seemed unlikely that we would ever go back to being unfamiliar again.

            The ground inched closer and closer to the plane, and I began to make out the forms of people, on the sidewalk, in their cars, on the sides of houses, and on the ground, all of them following their own stories, carrying their burdens, charting their paths in the worlds that they had created, and for a moment I felt a tinge of sadness for them, for their lives that ticked on and on without a second thought about what was coming next or what had come before, completely absorbed in the minutiae of daily life.

And then, when the ground was right under the plane and the cabin assumed that quiet peacefulness that comes over it right before landing, I closed my eyes and looked forward, ready for impact. And it came, softly at first, then roaring as the plane assumed a slower speed, and my head came off the headrest for a brief moment, and then the return to peace as the plane transitioned to a coasting speed down the runway and its long return to the airport gate. As I opened my eyes, absurdly, an instrumental version of “I Can See Clearly Now” began playing from the airplane’s loudspeakers as we taxied across the runway towards the terminal. I looked around and saw that both Check and Hale were awake, both of them yawning widely, then looking out the window to confirm that we had finally made it back home.

It felt like we had been gone for a long time, when in fact it had only been about two weeks, a normal length of time for a vacation. It had also been about the same amount of time as the trip at Christmas, and although we had traveled to fewer places, it seemed like we were arriving from a different planet. The desolate images of glaciers, white and imposing, stuck on the insides of my eyelids like the temporary scar left behind after looking into the light for too long. After over 30 hours of flying, I wasn’t sure what was real anymore, That amount of time either in or transitioning between a cramped cabin or a crowded airport messed with my sense of time and reality, and I longed to just stretch out for an extended amount of time.

I had already booked the old business hotel near the house, now as much my home as my flat in Boston, the place that I have returned to again and again while on this strange mission. While I dreaded walking back into that clone of a hotel room again, I also longed for the consistency and familiarity that I knew was awaiting me when I slid that key card into the door.

We waited for our baggage to arrive in silence, all of us seemingly sleeping, dreamwalking through the airport as if the journey around the world was the new normal while returning home was something that happened unconsciously, with our eyes closed, and at any Moment we could wake up again somewhere on the other side of the world, Tahiti perhaps, ready to scatter more of Dad’s ashes into a new and exotic and unlikely place. But now, here we were, on solid ground, a Starbucks glowing behind us, and an endless stream of identical bags moving lazily around the baggage carousel in front of us. It felt like the end of a grand story. It felt like a return to the real world. 

I wondered if what we had just done had actually happened, and when I tried to picture it, it came back to me in fits and starts, a fleeting series of uncontrollable images rather than a cohesive narrative. But I remembered that I had the narrative, all of it ordered in my mind and by my own hands moving across the keyboard, the story unfolding before my eyes, as close to my memory of each day as possible. I knew that the articles had already run, and feedback had already been given, both by my boss and by the public, and that so many readers found the story as unbelievable as I found it, standing here after having completed it. We four knew the truth of what happened, if only in some strange haunted place in the back of our memories. 

“God it feels good to be back,” Check said as he lifted his bag off the carousel. Hale agreed, “You know I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad to be back here as well. It feels right.” Ginny chipped in, “I’m just ready to see who’s waiting for me behind those doors.” She pointed to the automatic doors just beyond the customs checkpoint. It was a tradition of which she had grown fond, her husband and kids greeting her at the airport with signs and hugs, and it had become as much an anticipated part of our routine of return as hers, even though we had only experienced this three times so far. It made me feel that no matter where we were in the world, no matter which port we found ourselves leaving from, there would always be a piece of solid land we could expect on the other side. 

I sometimes thought that Noah and Eli simply liked the gifts we brought back, but Vick was a genuine guy, and a fervent supporter of Ginny, no matter where she went. I had hoped that at some time I could have someone like that waiting for me on the other side of the airport door. It opened, and we dragged our baggage out from the fluorescent-lit room and into the arrivals hall where we heard the screams and shouts go up right away. It was Noah and Eli and they ran from one side of the hall straight at Ginny. She knelt with open arms, and they jumped into her big embrace, and for the first time that I’ve seen, she didn’t cry. Instead, a big smile had spread across her face, not just a happiness to return, but also a visible sense of security in her familial love no matter where she might be in the world.

Vick shook our hands and congratulated us on completing our quest, and then planted a huge kiss on Ginny’s cheek. She returned it unexpectedly with an extended kiss on Vick’s mouth. Hale looked over while giving Noah and Eli a hug of her own. “OK Ginny!” she said.

“Let’s see if we can’t get you all back home - need a ride?” Vick offered, slapping Check on the back. “And Hale, you don’t need to sleep in that little apartment tonight, come on over with us, we’ll clear out a spot for you.” “You know we’re just going to collapse on the bed when we get back, right?” Hale laughed. “And that’s just fine with us,” he said.

The boys kept us awake on the long ride back, asking us questions about the last legs of the journey. Did we see penguins? Did we see macaws? Was it cold the whole time? Is it a different season there? What did you do on the plane? And in a way, it was nice to have their incessant questioning to prevent us from falling asleep and staying asleep for an undetermined amount of time.

I needed to stay up just for a little while longer when we pulled into Vick and Ginny’s house. My car was still parked out on the street next to Check’s, and I wished for a moment that I didn’t have to climb into it and turn the key in the ignition and head back to the hotel. 

The air outside was cold, but not unbearable since there was no wind. The kids ran inside. I had enjoyed getting to know them a little bit better since starting this journey. Each time we came home it was question and answer time, then a couple of token gifts. Ginny seemed to think that Noah was the more well-behaved one, and she might have been right, but I tended to think that Eli had more spirit and a taste for adventure, more interest in the random sights that we had seen, rather than the quieter Noah who was more cautious, perhaps becoming self-aware of the sound of his questioning, perhaps feeling the need to assert his intelligence rather than being open to asking.

We stood outside in the cold air on the porch, not sure if we should offer to go home yet. Vick proposed another idea. He brought out a bottle of scotch and a round of glasses, a big surprise to me, and it looked like it was a surprise to the rest of us gathered there on the porch as well. He said, “You know, I’ve given a lot of thought to what you guys have been doing, and I really respect that you all have made a huge effort despite everything to honor your Dad’s wishes and all. Harrison, I remember what you had said at the memorial about the toast with your Dad, and how you used it to remember the good times you shared with your Mom. I bought this while you were out on this last leg to celebrate the end of this big… project that you all just finished for your Dad. Seven continents! Hell, that’s more than most people do in several lifetimes. I don’t even know if I’ll get to two!”

He poured out a finger of scotch from the glass bottle into the five glasses laid out on the porch railing. It was a blend, not like the single malts that Dad and I traded on our visits, but the gesture was just as warm. I was touched. We picked up the glasses. Hale looked in the window and noticed that the boys had already gone upstairs. “Don’t worry about them,” said Ginny. She also had a glass in her hand, maybe even more surprising than the gesture itself. “This is definitely going to be something that I won’t - I cannot - forget,” she said. “You all have taken me to places that I couldn’t have even dreamed of going before, and more than that, you gave me the strength to plan trips to places that I thought were off-limits to a person like me. I just wanted to thank you all so much. Here’s to Dad.” We all shared the feeling. It was a little over-sentimental, but that was her style, and we had all crossed the boundary from pretension to full-on acceptance of this kind of thing long ago. 

We raised our glasses and clinked them together. The night air was chilled, and the alcohol warmed my mouth and slid slowly down my throat, burning all the way down. Hale and Ginny had both taken theirs as a shot, and Check and I laughed at the sight of their grimaces while sipping the rest down more slowly. Vick gathered the glasses back together and took them inside, leaving the four of us standing out there on the porch, looking out together into the quiet suburban night. Our laughter died down slowly and at that moment I felt a connection between the four of us that I hadn’t felt in years - the connection that only family can provide, the feeling that anything is possible because all of us felt each others’ support. We had finally found a way to trust each other once again.

With no other words being shared, Check nodded to the rest of us and walked down to the car. I called out and said, “Wait. So when are we heading to the lawyer’s office?” Check turned around and said, “We got time, let’s get some rest.” Hale and Ginny went into the front door of the house and I waved to them as they went in, the warm air from inside the house briefly leaking out onto the porch. I shivered for a moment, looked out onto the suburban street one more time, walked to my car, and drove back to the hotel, where the same bed awaited me.

Was I ready to head back to Boston? Could I stay here with my family forever? The thought stuck with me for a moment, until I realized that Hale was going to leave for the other side of the world again soon. Hadn’t we just established that we don’t need to be with family to be part of it? I felt sure that I had broken through with Hale and Ginny and Check, but the fact remained that I could be part of this family from anywhere in the world - perhaps especially now. So the question remained, what was tying me to this particular location? I scanned the rows of sleepy homes lined up on the side of the road, each of them with a well-manicured lawn and an attached garage, and suddenly I got a nauseating feeling like I couldn’t find my way out of these winding roads. Ginny had found her dream and I was truly happy for her, but mine was not here. Hale’s was not here. We would continue to bring each other to fulfillment from our own corners of the world, and perhaps eventually our circles would widen enough to make it feel like no matter where we were in the world, we had a home. 

I got a distinct pang in my chest like something was missing from this equation. What tied me to Boston? What anchored me there instead of any other place in the world? It wasn’t the food or the architecture or the sports teams or the weather. It was Sammie. I suddenly missed him more than anything I had missed in my life. I put my foot on the brake right in the middle of the road, and I felt my jacket pocket where my phone was sitting. I held my hand there for a moment. It had been months. Had he moved on? I couldn’t call him, not yet, not until this whole situation was finished. I put my foot on the gas and continued to the hotel. When I got there, I went to sleep and I didn’t wake up until the next afternoon. 

 

-

 

We ate breakfast in an old diner across the street from the lawyer’s office. “So what do you think will be in there?” Ginny asked us over coffee. “I don’t think the old man had anything. I think it was all a ploy,” Check remarked, shaking his head and looking out the window. I thought about it, “Maybe there was something, like a lifetime of savings. Like, maybe Mom and Dad had been stocking up for the right moment, and then it never came,” I suggested. Hale said, “You know, it doesn’t matter.” “Just fun to think about,” Ginny said. “If there really is something there, what will you do with it?” she asked. 

Check began, “Well I have some old bills I’d like to settle. Got a lot of updates to the house. Who knows, depends on what it is.” I said, “yeah, I think I’d like to take some time off and really do some writing, not articles like normal, but to get in there and have the time to crank out a novel or something.” Ginny nodded, “I’d like to read that someday. But if you write anything about me, make sure I don’t sound like too much of a wuss.” I laughed, “Oh don’t worry, in my story, you’ll be a champion.” Hale said, “And what about your special someone? Did you make the call yet?” I said simply, “No, it’s not the right time yet. I still need this to be closed up. Besides, Hale, you never said what you would do with the money.” “Oh I don’t know,” she started, “Probably do some travel. I can’t do much more of this in and out business.” Check laughed, “Jeez, you haven’t had enough of this yet?” “I feel like you never really got to see how I do it, it was all too fast. Whatever happens with the money, you guys can all come visit me in my next place. I’m thinking Spain. I’ll fly you out.” Ginny put her coffee down. She looked at Hale and said, “You’re kidding. Vick and I are thinking about doing a cruise over there when the kids have a summer break.” “Well the more the merrier,” Hale exclaimed. 

When we finished at the diner, we walked across to the squat brick building where the lawyer was waiting. We opened the door and strode inside triumphantly. “They said it couldn’t be done, but here we are,” Check preemptively announced before any of us could say hello. The lawyer extended his hand, and he said, “You know I’m impressed at everything that you’ve done here so far. I’ve been keeping up with your articles, Harrison �" really first-rate. By any measure, what you’ve done is extraordinary. However, I’m afraid I can’t congratulate you and unseal the rest of the will just yet.”

Check was still the only one who had spoken a word since we walked into the office. He ran his hand through his hair and fumed, “What kind of bullshit lawyer-ese are you trying to pull on us here?” 

The lawyer smiled and said, “You know it’s a minor detail in a way, but a quite important one. You see, one of the points explicitly outlined in the will was that the benefits cannot be disbursed until ‘the complete contents of the ashes have been spread onto each continent.” In a way, you are right, Mr. Cook. It’s a bit of… lawyerese as you say, but the wording here is important - the keywords here being complete and spread. As I said, what you have done so far is extraordinary - you have spread the ashes out onto six of the seven continents, but you’ve neglected one. Your father’s ashes have not been spread here in North America, so the spreading has not been completed, as the will clearly states.”

It all felt so defeating. Here we were, after having circumnavigated the entire globe, still empty-handed, seemingly no closer to seeing this mission through than when we started, all on some little technicality. I actually agreed with Check here, it all seemed ludicrous. Hale sat on a chair next to the massive conference table in the main conference room of the office. “There isn’t any more,” she said. “We went all the way around the world but we failed because we didn’t put any of the ashes here, in the same place where we came from, where he died and was cremated in the first place?” “The ashes must be directly spread by each of you,” the lawyer gently reminded. 

“I knew this would happen,” Check grumbled. “We went through all this effort. We spent a lot of money. Do you know how much money we spent? How much money it takes to fly, to float to every single continent? How much time? No, you don’t. You sit here in your little office, trying to find the one word that makes it all worthless.” “Is there anything that we can do? We don’t want for this whole thing to just be for nothing.”

“I’m sorry. Unless there are more ashes, then I’m afraid that you can’t fulfill the requirements outlined in the will,” the lawyer said. “There’s nothing more I can tell you.” Hale was crying, “It’s already spread out all over the world. How will we get any more?”

Ginny lifted her head. “There are more,” she said softly. “There’s more ashes. In the urn on the mantel. There’s more. I have the rest of them. We can finish the mission.” Hale said, “No Ginny, you can’t do that. We’ve come as far as we can - we aren’t going to get rid of the last little bit of the ashes. It’s all we have left. We wouldn’t, no we can’t do that to you. We’ve gotten the true benefit of this journey - we’ve found each other. We’ve helped each other reach the ends of the earth together. We got exactly what Dad wanted us to get.”

Ginny got up and looked out the window. “No. I’m not going to do that to you all. We can do this. We can finish it.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ginny, a woman who would build a museum to house every family artifact known if she could, was now calling for the rest of the final physical remainder of our father to disappear forever. “If we don’t do it right now then we never will.” Check asked, “Well, where will we do it then? We’re not going anywhere big and crazy, all of us are getting to the end of our budget here.”

I spoke up, “You know, I think I have an idea.”

-

 

It took longer than I remember to drive down the interstate, and when we reached the exit, everything seemed unfamiliar to me. We traveled sixty miles an hour down a back road that we hadn’t been on together all at the same time in over a decade. Farmland, rundown houses - it seemed that this area of the world wasn’t just stuck in time; it was actively regressing. The sun shone through a patch of gathering clouds onto the ruins of a lost civilization. The signs of life that we could see along the way were slowly being reclaimed by the earth, kudzu crawling fungus-like up the sides of old wooden shacks, their roofs long caved in not by any structural damage, but by the sheer weight of time bearing down on them. An entire school was boarded up and spray-painted with graffiti, a tree growing from one of the classroom windows. A collapsed shed advertising Roebuck’s Barber Shop, “Open for business.” Earnhardt’s Gas and Food Mart - now shattered glass and rotted logs. Houses with no doors were left to face the ravages of weather alone. Everyone had flocked to the city. 

“Man, it looks rough out here,” Hale remarked. “We used to have doctors and lawyers coming out of Madison,” Check said with a sigh. There was a short Moment of silence that I used to look out of the window. I spotted another house, this one with its front porch falling off like a car’s bumper after an accident. The image struck me as particularly sad, though it didn’t make sense to me why this scene made me feel different from the rest of the carnage we had passed.

We stopped at a gas station on the edge of town. I got out of the car and a cold wind was blowing leaves down a long dirt road filled with holes and scattered with old gravel. Inside the small convenience store, a woman greeted me without a glance from behind the counter, “What can I get you, sugar?” “Fill up over on 4 please.” The woman looked up and her eyes widened, “The Cooks! Haven’t seen you all around here in a little while.” I nodded and smiled, “Just dropped by to take care of a little bit of business.” I had no idea who this woman was, and already I felt like I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. I took a breath and handed her my card. “Oh sorry hon, cash only here.” I ran out, and luckily Ginny had enough cash to cover the fill-up. When I ran back inside, the clerk was cleaning up in the back of the store. She yelled out, “Just leave it on the counter there, sugar, and stick around a tick won’t you?” I laid the cash on the counter, not sure if I should put it next to the cash register, but then thinking better of it, I yelled back to the clerk, “Thank you; it was good to see you.”

While I was filling up the car, the others sat bundled inside, quietly looking out at the scene in their own way. None of us lived in this place anymore, but it felt like we never lived here in the first place, like we were visiting for the first time. It was a different place now. I looked past the gas station down the road, and I noticed an old familiar sign that had collapsed onto the ground. It too had been taken over by dirt and weeds, but I could tell that it had once been covered with medals and proud civic symbols. At the bottom, I could barely make out names from a time long passed. There were teachers and merchants, families and children, doctors and lawyers, strangers and friends all saying the same thing: “Welcome to Madison County.”

For a long time, I had wondered how I came from a place like this, way out on the fringes of anything of interest to me. Even from a young age, I was always attracted to the places where life happened. Here was a place where life stagnated at best, and most frequently disappeared in the wind, frigid in the winter and scorching in the summer. It was already dying when we were growing up, and I never saw myself staying out there for longer than I had to. I was the valedictorian of the high school the next town over because the high school in town had already shut down. By then, even Check and Ginny had moved closer to the city, into the same area where we eventually moved Dad into the White House. The last days of high school seemed like a marathon. Mom and Dad were planning to get out. They were looking to travel, but only when the time was right. It was just plain cheap to live in the old country house. Taxes stayed low. Business in town was cheap. It was just that there wasn’t much of it. Of course, the time never came. Mom died a couple of years later, and we never had much reason to return.

We passed through what we once called downtown. It too was boarded up, a fast food joint and a furniture repair shop the last remaining hold-outs. We left it in the blink of an eye and kept on passing through. In a couple of minutes, we arrived at our first destination for the day. Our old house was on the edge of a town that was already on the edge of the map. There, in that old sagging house overlooking a vast field lined with trees in the distance, is where we all somehow grew up, not together, but all of us individually coming into our own, with just the guidance of our Mom and Dad in their different ways. There was a For Sale sign posted on the front porch, and one of the front windows was broken. I parked the car on the crunchy gravel. A rusty basketball hoop still hung over the driveway, and when we got out of the car, Hale immediately walked towards the set of handprints beneath the porch steps. They were still there somehow, a little bit cracked and weathered, but visible. She ran her hand over the grooves in the pavement as Check wandered around in the driveway. Ginny asked, “Should we be here doing this?” “Nobody’s here,” Check said. “The property was bought up by investors, but nobody wants a piece of this, not anymore. Nobody will come around and bother us here.”

I remembered those long summer days, starting on the steps and wandering further and further out into the fields around the house. Dad used to tell me, “Go out there and get some fresh air. Nobody will come around and bother you out here.” I eventually made my way down to the tall grass near the trees at the edge of the field, and there I would take my magnifying glass and look at crickets holding on to the tall blades as they swung in the breeze. Check was out with friends somewhere or at football practice, and Ginny watched over Hale closer to the house. Sometimes, she would sneak further out with me, but looking closely at the details never much interested her. The edge of that field was the only place around there that held my attention. 

I looked out there, squinting into the sky, oddly bright even though it was full of clouds, and wondered if those crickets were still out there, holding on for life to the tall grass, bent close to the ground by the wind, or if they too had gone. I couldn’t hear them; the only sounds were the crunch of gravel on the driveway and a slight whistle from the broken glass in the porch window. I looked inside, my eyes cupped onto the light, into the old dining room near the front of the house. There was still a slight outline of the old china cabinet on the floor, and for a quick moment I thought I heard the clinking of silverware on plates, but when I looked back it was just the sound of feet idly kicking around the glass. Yes, this was a place that we had left a long time ago, and it felt like it.

Ginny wanted a picture of our hands over the handprints beneath the steps, and we all squatted down and put our hands over the faded handprints in the concrete. I wasn’t sure when we did this; the prints just always seemed to be there. My hand felt immense against the small impression in the concrete, and I realized that this might have been the first time that I had ever compared the two sizes. When everyone got up after the picture was taken, I lingered a little while longer, caught up in a moment that I never expected to have there in front of a house I wanted to leave as quickly as I could for the longest time. 

Hale walked back to the car and asked, “So should we put some here? Kind of like a full circle thing?” Ginny said, “Seems like the right thing to do.” Check asked, “Was it always this quiet out here?” Hale said, “No, there was always something going on, some sort of sound. At least that’s how I remember it.” “Not since Mom passed,” Ginny said. “I remember when I would come out here and visit Dad. It took all day just to visit for a little bit, and when I did, the quiet was the most noticeable thing.” I said, “The White House was a much better move when it was just him.” Ginny nodded to herself. 

Check said, “Well let’s get on with it then.” Ginny took the urn out from the backseat and slowly opened the top. “Welcome home, Dad,” she said, and she sprinkled some ashes by the front step. “Does anyone else want to say anything here?” she asked. “Goodbye house,” Hale said. 

We climbed back into the car. I turned on the ignition, and we sat parked in the driveway, looking out at the old house that we hadn’t been inside in years. “Should we try to go inside?” I suggested. “There’s nothing in there for us anymore,” Ginny said. I had never been so surprised. She hadn’t taken a single thing from the house, from the yard, from the driveway, just the single picture of our hands on the pavement in front of the house. With that, we buckled our seatbelts and pulled out. Hale stole one more look back at the house, as the wheels kicked up a cloud of dust behind the car, causing the house to fade from view as we rumbled down the hill and back onto the highway. “Next stop, coming right up,” I announced to nobody. 

Not only had we not traveled here together since Mom’s funeral, I hadn’t come back here at all in the years following Mom’s death. It wasn’t out of avoidance or even inconvenience. Some people felt comfortable sitting under a tree, talking to a stone marker under which their loved one’s remains were buried. I always felt it awkward and forced. The burial felt final and I preferred to think of my Mom as alive in my memories rather than underneath the ground out in the country, in a place that I loathed and had always wanted to get away from. I preferred to keep my mother with me, to let her see the life I was meant to live, the life that she helped me establish when she encouraged me to move away to college instead of sticking around nearby. But now, here we were again, the route conjuring up images of the procession behind the hearse the day of Mom’s funeral, back through the center of town out into another clearing in the woods. I slowed down the speed of the car as we drove up the driveway to the cemetery gates, our pace a dirge in the cold spring afternoon. 

Return. I maneuvered the car along the too-small gravel drive winding through the tombstones, all of them gray and white, blending with the overcast sky. The trees still had not sprouted the buds that I expected from April. Ginny navigated, telling me the ways to turn, as I couldn’t quite remember the route through the cemetery. There were more branches to turn off than I remembered. I wondered how this cemetery on the outskirts of a small town could have grown so large. Finny, at the top of a small hill near a cluster of barren trees, I made the final turn and parked the car. 

We all got out of the car and crunched our way away from the gravel road and then eventually onto the damp grass close to the plot where Mom was buried. When we bought it, nobody in our family knew how to buy a burial plot. Nobody expected to have to buy one for a long time, and Dad least of all. He was still in shock, and Check took on a lot of the responsibility for buying the plot, and the image of him and Wendy there off to the side at the funeral stuck out in my mind. After the funeral, he was the last to leave, knelt on the grass, feeling the plot, the grass growing around it, the reality of it, the soft spongy ground staining his suit. Today, he squatted down on the grass and felt it again. We didn’t buy another one after the funeral, and we didn’t need to. Dad said it wasn’t necessary, and he wouldn’t talk about it, so the topic naturally lapsed.

Hale took up a place next to the headstone and ran her hand across the top of it. It was smooth and clean, still somewhat shiny, almost in the same condition that I left it over a decade ago. I thought at that moment that it takes a long time for a stone to wear down, and felt sad looking out over the sea of granite all around us.

Ginny was the last one to come up the hill, clutching the urn to her chest. She greeted the stone, “Hi Mom, we brought you a special gift today.” She spoke in a conversational tone that felt familiar and accustomed to not receiving much of a response. I knew that she regularly visited the cemetery, Check less so, and I wasn’t sure about Hale. I assumed that, like me, she hadn’t visited, not out of discomfort but because it was just so geographically far from her. “Well,” I said, “What a reunion. The first time all of us were back in the same place in how many years?” “Too many,” said Hale. 

“Anyone else want to say anything?” Ginny asked. She was still clutching the urn to her chest, just as she had the rest of the day, along the drive, at the old house, walking up the hill. “Oh I have a feeling she won’t have much to say,” said Check, still not looking up from the grass. Hale said, “It’s me, Mom. How are you doing? It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? There’s been a lot on my mind lately Mom, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot. We’ll need to catch up soon, but today we are here for a different reason. I’m sure you’ve been waiting for this for a long time.” It was the most I had seen her hesitate while speaking, unsure of the direction of her words. 

I spoke up, but not directly to Mom. I said, “This is our last stop, the final piece of our mission. The final piece of Dad’s mission for us. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mom put him up to this, just like they had some contingency plan all along.” I laughed and then closed my eyes. “I can see her now, even as we’re standing here way out in the middle of nowhere, here smiling and watching us all here together.” I opened my eyes and the others were standing and watching, expectantly waiting for me to continue. I felt suddenly self-conscious, as though I remembered what we were doing here. “So Ginny, let’s finish this thing. Let’s do this right.” 

Ginny hesitated and then opened the urn. There was a thin layer of ashes left in the bottom of the urn now, a little over a handful. She nodded, and I picked out a small amount and sprinkled it on the ground in front of Mom’s grave. “I don’t usually talk at things like this. But Mom and Dad, you can finally be together. You can finally go on that trip you were always talking about and so much more. I have so much more to say. You can see it all in my writing, you know. There’s a little piece of you in everything I write. Of both of you. I hope you can see that.” I stepped back, feeling like there was more to say. Feeling for the first time that I wanted to continue a conversation here in this particular spot. But that would have to wait for another time. I motioned to the space in front of the headstone. 

Check reached into the urn and took out a small amount and said, “I hope that this really finishes it this time. I’ve said my peace before, but if you really can travel in the afterlife, I would just suggest not to let Hale do any of the planning for you.” Hale rolled her eyes, but she had a smile on her face. Check winked back at her and gave her a playful push toward the headstone. 

Hale reached inside and slowly pulled her hand out. She felt the ashes in her hand and rubbed her fingers together a little bit. She said to the ashes in her hand, “I don’t need to say any goodbyes because this isn’t another departure. I’ve made my peace with both of you already and I carry both of you in my heart always. What I say to you now is not final, it’s just another beginning in a long string of new beginnings stretching back to when you died, Dad - to when you got cancer, to when you moved from the old house, and to when Mom died, and to when we were born, and even before that, each new beginning a new turn in a conversation that has been going on and on and will continue on and on no matter where I am, and no matter where we are in the world.” She turned her hand over and let go of the ashes releasing them onto the ground. “No this is not goodbye,” she repeated, and wiped her hands on each other, and turned around and said, “Alright, just one more thing to do.” 

Ginny stayed on the edge of a makeshift half-circle that we had formed around Mom’s headstone. The cold breeze had strengthened into a wet wind, and the gray clouds in the sky darkened. The bare trees rattled in the wind, and we all huddled inside of our jackets, waiting for Ginny to make her move, to finish the journey that we had come here to finish, once and for all. She looked down into the urn, and she shook her head. I hadn’t seen Ginny cry since we had come home, and she still wasn’t, but she had a look of consternation on her face. She was muttering something to herself, and when I listed a little bit harder I could hear her whispering into the urn. She was saying, “I can’t leave you now Dad. This is all I have left of you.” She looked up and looked into the distance and said to us, “I can’t do it.” The wind was heavy. She covered the top of the urn with her forearm and clutched it to her chest with the other. “This is our Dad - letting him go like this would be crazy. We can’t do this.” “Come on Ginny, it’s what he wanted,” Check encouraged. 

Ginny said, “You don’t understand. My whole life I’ve been saying goodbye over and over again to the people I love, to the places I loved, to the things I’ve loved. When does it stop? I don’t want to have to say goodbye anymore. I want Dad to stay with me, with my family.” Hale repeated part of her message but to Ginny this time. “It’s not a goodbye, Ginny.” Ginny turned to her and said, “Maybe for you, but you’re stronger than me Hale, always have been. I need a piece of him here with me. I need to know that he is here.”

The wind softened a little bit, and Ginny brought her hand down from the top of the urn and looked inside of it again. I stepped forward and I put my hand on Ginny’s shoulder. I’m usually not touchy, but I felt an urge to make a physical connection there. “Dad was never in that urn,” I said plainly. “He wasn’t even in the ashes, Ginny.” “What are you talking about?” Ginny asked. “What have we been doing this whole time? Spreading Dad’s ashes all around the world. That’s the whole point; so that a small piece of him can be in every part of the world.” 

I looked into the urn, and looked down at the headstone, “Dad is in those ashes as much as Mom is in the ground here.” Ginny was shocked, “Don’t say that, Harrison, how can you say that?” I continued, “Ginny, Dad didn’t want us to spread his ashes around the world just so that he could be on every continent. He did it so that no matter where we go in the world, we will be close to him. It doesn’t even matter where the ashes are, don’t you see? Dad is all around us. In the waters flowing from Sydney Harbor into the oceans, and in the African soil that is still on our shoes. He’s in the air, dancing in the northern lights, and in our souls, peaceful as an Asian temple. He is looking down from the mountains, and even at the very ends of the earth, frozen and far away, and he’s with us here right now. But he’s not in that urn, or in the ashes, or on the ground there or anywhere. Everything in the world is imbued with his memory. I see him in Check and Hale and I see him in you, Ginny. And when we are together we are with him, and Mom too. And when we’re apart, well, he’s in the trees, in the water, in the sky. When you spread those ashes, you’re not commemorating Dad’s death, but bringing his final wish to life. That he and Mom will watch over us together, no matter where we go, no matter who we become.”

Ginny nodded and stepped forward. She reached her hand into the urn and pulled out the final bit of ash from deep inside. She held it in her hand and clutched it in her fist. She opened her fist and looked at the ashes, gray and white, like a pile of sand in the hand of a child. Ginny nodded again, looked down at Mom’s headstone, and walked forward a step. She closed her hand again and looked around, and opened it again. And when she opened it, a strong gust of wind picked up, blowing in from behind, and blew the ashes into the air, away from her hand, away from us all as we stood there standing in a half-circle in Mom’s cemetery plot. And Ginny didn’t gasp or cry out. She laughed. She raised her hand into the air like she was releasing a bird back into the wild. And the wind continued to blow. We all laughed sensing a feeling like a weight being lifted off our shoulders as if we had finally finished what we set out to do. Ginny turned back around and hugged me, and Hale came into the side and hugged us both, and she motioned with one hand for Check to come over. We were surprised when he did. Hale said, “And now we’re finished.” A drizzle of rain came down and we ran back into the car, all of us together, using our arms to cover our heads from the rain and the wind.

            When we were all in the car and had our seat belts fastened, we looked out at the cemetery plot, at our final, unplanned destination, and Ginny said, “That was meant to happen all along, wasn’t it?” Check replied, “I’m not sure Ginny, but it feels like that could have been a whole lot quicker than it was.” “Give her a break,” Hale said, “That was really big, you know.” “That’s true. I’m honestly really surprised you were able to let go,” said Check, her hand on Ginny’s shoulder from the backseat. “It just finally felt right,” said Ginny. She smiled and said, “I’m keeping the urn though.”

 

            -

 

            Check unsealed the remainder of the will. When he did, he laughed out loud. There was a short hand-written note saying:

            I guess you’ve done it. Thanks for making an old couple’s wish come true. We’ll be with you always. Love, Mom and Dad.

Attached to that was a printout showing a fifty thousand dollar life insurance policy and a little over fifty thousand dollars in savings to split amongst the four of us. When it was all said and done, after the fee for the lawyer and all the practical matters, the total amount was enough to cover the cost of the traveling and then some - about twenty-five thousand dollars each. The probate lawyer gave a little bit of a chuckle as well. “Never seen anything like that before, and I don’t think I will again.” “That’s Dad,” said Ginny, “None like him.” 

The lawyer continued, “You know, I really thought after all of that it would be some huge amount. I thought it would blow you all away, set you up for life.” Hale smiled. Check shook his head, “I knew it all along.” Hale said, “In a way, it did set us up for life. It was an adventure I’ll never forget. None of us could ever forget.” Check said, “Now don’t get all sappy on us here.” Ginny asked, “What are you going to do with the White House? Sell it too?” Check said, “I’m thinking about moving in there myself and stopping renting if it’s OK with you all.”

It was. Hale elbowed him and said, “As long as you let me crash in there when I come and visit. I think my friends are a little bit tired of having me.” Ginny said, “But all the stuff is gone, what are you going to put in there? Doesn’t it need a lot of work?” Check rolled his eyes playfully, “You sure ask a lot of questions. I have my own furniture you know. I’m older than you.” I was looking out of the window. It was raining pretty hard at this point. “Check, if you need any help with anything over there just give us a ring.” “I know,” he said. “I will. I just need a little time for this all to settle down.” “Well with the extra money left after the trip expenses you could take a little vacation for yourself, right?” I asked. “Something like that,” he said with a smile, shaking his head.

Hale said, “Come over to Spain and visit. I’m sure I’ll know my way around by then.” “I’m sure you will, Hale,” Check said. He had a wistful look on his face that I wasn’t sure I had seen him carry before, not for a long time. “Listen, I’m going to head home,” he said abruptly. “I’ve got some errands to take care of. Since we’ve been back I’ve barely had any time to myself. I’ll talk to you guys a little bit later.” He left the room, and we watched as he got into his truck, looked down at the note that was still in his hands, and drove off.

“You guys want some food?” Hale asked, perking up. Ginny said, “I could eat. You coming, Harrison?” I said, “No I can’t right now, I have to write the last bit of my last article now.” “Don’t tell me you’re bailing on us again, Harrison.” I said, “I’ll come by and catch up with you later, I promise. How about your house tonight for drinks Ginny?” “The door is open any time,” Ginny said with a smile. They left the office together, Hale climbing into the passenger seat of Ginny’s car. And as they pulled out of the parking lot, I stood there, looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the conference room, out onto the suburban street, where the rain was still falling. A secretary came into the room to tidy up and was startled to find me there standing by the window. “Is everything OK, sir?” she asked. “Oh yes,” I said. “I’m just waiting a little while longer for the rain to clear.”

Later that day, I returned to the hotel room and sat by the desk, and opened up my laptop. I stared at the screen for a little while, looking at the unfinished article, the final one in what had been a successful series so far. The editors agreed that the series had struck a balance between travel article and personal interest, and it seemed that readers were responding to them every time I put one out. I had written six of these articles so far, really keying in on the fact that travel to exotic places was possible for the average reader, listing logistical details alongside personal thoughts and revelations. It was enough to get an anonymous donor to fund Hale’s last leg of the trip.

My final article was originally going to be a thank you note, not only to that anonymous donor but to the readership for keeping up with our journey and for their kind words and support as our family finished it together. A blinking line appeared at the end of the paragraph I had written on the plane. I deleted much of it. There was another article to be written here, and I wasn’t sure if it would go over as well as the others. This was not a travel article. After all, we had only been to the next county this time, just over an hour away. Nobody was really going to be interested in the sights and sounds and sensations of Madison County, nor the tired suburbs in between there and civilization. My assignment had grown from an article about cancer, which I avoided because I thought it was a cliché topic, and it grew to be one about family, the most cliché topic of all. I didn’t expect people to engage with it because the topic seemed overdone like there was nothing left to discover.

But then again, I hadn’t much expected people to be interested in me and my siblings - of the far-fetched attempt to pull ourselves together to achieve a goal that was as unlikely as the rekindling of our relationship. I didn’t expect people to respond to the descriptions of these people, all of us ordinary in our own way, going to extraordinary places under the strangest of circumstances. But I should have because perhaps it wasn’t so unlikely for us to find our way back to each other as it seemed from the outset. I was blinded by what I thought family was, which was sameness and similarity of place, of interests, of belongings. 

One of the things that I found throughout this whole experience was that, as wildly different as we are, we remain bound together, deep within our core, anchored deeply at the same point even as our routes through life diverged. Because family isn’t forged from proximity, time spent, or inherited objects. It’s not the traditions or the pictures or even the physical togetherness that connects us as family. It’s a commonality of vision built on a foundation of our shared memory, regardless of if we agree with it or not. It’s the understanding that we have the same touchstones, intangible, deep within us somewhere, the roots from which we have sprouted and grown, all of us in different directions, forward and outward, on and on into the future. 

In the end, I discovered more about family than I did about cancer, or even about travel. And I was able to do it because of the connection that I share with my ridiculous three siblings, from the words that my Mom encouraged me with from childhood up through my college years away from home. I learned from my father over glasses of scotch when he was alive and after he died. And the more I think about my family - the more I track the invisible threads connecting us in odd and unexpected ways back through time, the stronger the connection feels.

I guess the main thing about family is the same as most other things in life - you get as much out of it as you put in. And I hadn’t been putting in as much as I should have been because I didn’t see the point. It’s no coincidence that when all was said and done we got our money back and then some. Early on I realized that no matter where in the world we all end up after this, we hit the jackpot either way. We rediscovered the thing that makes us - us, the place at which we all connect, and it’s not any of the places that we traveled to or any other physical place for that matter.

            I had been typing in a long stream of thought, constant like Hale’s pace of speaking, like Check’s drive, like Ginny’s kindness. I didn’t quite know what I was typing as I wrote it, but I knew that what I was writing would be the last words of the series, and I was discovering the words I was writing at almost the same time as my readers. I finally came to a stopping point. I thought about it for a minute and decided that there was as good a place as any to end the article. Perhaps there was a book to be written from this story. I didn’t know where to go from there. I sent in my draft of the article, unsure of how the editors would respond. Perhaps they would change it. Perhaps they would say enough is enough and tell me to move on. I didn’t know, and for the first time, I didn’t care.

I closed the laptop and called Ginny’s house. Vick answered the phone, his smile audible through the speaker. “Still coming by for a celebration?” I heard the shouts of the boys in the background, and Hale loudly saying, “Get over here, you!” I said, “Yes, I’ll be right over.”

Before I left the room, I looked out the window, down at the strip mall and the expanse of trees stretching into the last fading colors of the evening. I closed the curtain, took my jacket off of the chair next to the desk, and put it on, looking at myself in the mirror. I turned back to the bed and sat on it, taking my phone from my pocket, and I laid it on the corner of the bed. I took a deep breath.

I picked up the phone from the corner of the bed, and I found the familiar number, and I pressed Call, and I waited: one ring, two rings, three rings, four.

I heard a loud sigh on the other end of the phone. “Samuel,” I said, my voice quivering slightly. There was no reply but his soft breathing on the line, waiting. 

“Sammie. I’m ready.”

END

Reviews

[Richard Knox]

Well Greg,
This was a wonderful story. I hesitated to read the final chapters because I didn’t want to face the end of the story of these four people. Antarctica finally gave me hope for Check. I picture him reuniting with the woman he met on the boat and actually having a life. The events, emotions and resolutions of the character arcs in the last chapter brought tears to my eyes. I have to say that the siblings reconnecting as a family, understanding and accepting each other despite their differences, and each one of them resolving or overcoming their own issues is what I expected when I started reading this book. But you presented it in an interesting and unconventional way, and had me invested and caring about your characters, so that the ending was moving and emotionally satisfying. Bravo!
You might want to proofread a bit to correct a few minor typos and grammatical slips, but overall this is very well-written. Thank you for the journey!

[Greg Herb]

Hello again Richard,
I have been away for a little while, but it was a joy to come back and see this wonderful review here. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my story. I appreciated the feedback and am thrilled that it impacted you. I will certainly proofread a bit more. Hopefully I can do something more with it in the future.
Thanks again!
Greg