“It’s okay,” he said softly. “I understand.”
His voice had deepened—he was older now, and was no longer the shy boy I knew those months on Elsinore Lane—and there was something in him that suggested forgiveness. His secret life made him seem less brooding, less sullen. Something had been solved for him. The actor was gone.
I had to keep turning away from him because I was breaking down.
“Why did you leave?” I managed to ask in a hoarse voice. “Why did you leave us?”
“Dad,” he sighed. The word sounded different from how he had said it in the past. He placed his hand on mine. It was real. I could feel it. “It’s okay.”
I reached over and touched his face with the palm of my other hand, and then his shyness returned and he looked down.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said. “I’m not lost.”
He said it again, “I’m not lost anymore.”
I wanted another chance but I was too ashamed to hear his answer. I asked anyway. “Robby,” I choked, my face wet. “Please come back.”
But all he eventually saw was the flowering smile of acceptance.
He was standing outside, staring through the window at me for one last time.
He was looking at this story with affection.
I noticed my son had left a drawing behind: a landscape of the moon. It was so detailed that I had to linger over it, wondering about the patience required of my son to draw this particular moonscape. Where did this burning, ceaseless intention come from?
I also saw that one word was written on it, and I touched the word with a finger.
I didn’t know what brought him here. I didn’t know what called him away.
He was returning to the land where every boy forced into bravery and quickness retreats: a new life. Wherever he was going, he was not afraid.
The cream-colored 450 SL pulled out of the lot and turned right onto Ventura Boulevard, merging with the traffic until it was lost from sight and then the story ended.
The meeting lasted only minutes but when I limped back to my car it was twilight.
Across the street from the McDonald’s was the Bank of America where my father’s ashes were stored. What I hadn’t told anyone was what happened on the eighth of November when I had gone to retrieve the ashes. When I opened the safe-deposit box that day, its interior was grayed with ash. The box containing what remained of my father had burst apart and the ashes now lined the sides of the oblong safe. And in the ash someone had written, perhaps with a finger, the same word my son had written on the moonscape he had left for me.
In a fishing boat that took us out beyond the wave line of the Pacific we finally put my father to rest. As the ashes rose up into the salted air they opened themselves to the wind and began moving backwards, falling into the past and coating the faces that lingered there, dusting everything, and then the ashes ignited into a prism and began forming patterns and started reflecting the men and women who had created him and me and Robby. They drifted over a mother’s smile and shaded a sister’s outstretched hand and shifted past all the things you wanted to share with everyone. I want to show you something, the ashes whispered.
You watched as the ashes kept rising and danced across a multitude of images from the past, dipping down and then flying back into the air, and the ashes rose over a young couple looking upward and then the woman was staring at the man and he was holding out a flower and their hearts were pounding as they slowly opened and the ashes fell across their first kiss and then over a young couple pushing a baby in a stroller at the Farmer’s Market and finally the ashes wheeled across a yard and swept themselves toward the pink stucco of the first—and only—house they bought as a family, on a street called Valley Vista, and then the ashes swirled down a hallway and behind the doors were children, and the ashes flew across the balloons and gently extinguished the candles burning delicately on the store-bought cake on the kitchen table on your birthday, and they twirled around a Christmas tree that stood in the center of the living room and dimmed the colored lights stringing the tree, and the ashes followed the racing bike you pedaled along a sidewalk when you were five, and then drifted onto the wet yellow Slip ’n’ Slide you and your sisters played on, and they floated in the air and landed in the palm fronds surrounding the house and a glass of milk you held as a child and your mother in a robe watching you swim in a clear, lit pool and a film of ash sprawled itself over the surface of the water, and your father was pitching you into the pool and you landed joyfully with a splash, and there was a song playing as a family drove out to the desert (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” the writer says) and the ashes dotted the Polaroids of your mother and father as young parents and all the places we went as a family and the lit pool kept steaming behind them with the scent of gardenia flowers rising up into the night air, wavering in the heat, and there was a small golden retriever, a puppy, bounding around the sides of the pool, ecstatic, chasing a Frisbee, and the ashes dusted the Legos that were spilled in front of you and in the morning there was your mother waving goodbye and calling softly and the ashes kept spinning into space with children running after them, and they dusted the keys of the piano you played and the backgammon board your father and you battled over, and they landed on the shore in Hawaii in a photograph of mountains partially blocked by lens flare and darkened an orange sunset above the rippling dunes of Monterey and rained over the pink tents of a circus and a Ferris wheel in Topanga Canyon and blackened a white cross that stood on a hillside in Cabo San Lucas, and they hid themselves within the rooms of the house on Valley Vista and the row of family portraits, drifting over all the promises canceled and the connections missed, the desires left unfulfilled and the disappointments met and the fears confirmed and every slammed door and reconciliation never made, and soon they were covering all the mirrors in every room we lived in, hiding our imperfections from ourselves even as the ashes flew through our blood, and they followed the brooding boy who ran away, the son who discovered what you are, and everyone was too young to grasp that our life was folding in on itself—it was so foolish and touching to think at one point that somehow we would all be spared, but the ashes pushed forward and covered an entire city with a departing cloud that was driven by the wind and kept ascending and the images began getting smaller and I could see the town where he was born as the ashes flew over the Nevada mountains mingling with the snow that fell there and crossed a river, and then I saw my father walking toward me—he was a child again and smiling and he was offering me an orange he held out with both hands as my grandfather’s hunting dogs were chasing the ashes across the train tracks, dousing their coats, and the ashes began bleeding into the images and drifted over his mother as she slept and dusted the face of my son who was dreaming about the moon and in his dream they darkened its surface as they flew across it but once they passed by the moon was brighter than it had ever been, and the ashes rained down earthward and swirling, glittering now, were soon overtaken by a vision of light in which the images began to crumble.