Grandma Always Said that Grandpa Wasn't Right

I’ve been taking care of my grandma lately.

She’s been doing pretty bad and she needs someone there to help her almost twenty-four-seven. She’s got some kind of bone disease, it's basically turning her bones into Swiss cheese, and I’ve had to carry her to the bathroom and room to room for the past two weeks. This might seem kind of tiresome to some people, but I’m glad to do it. My Grandma and I have always been close, she basically raised me since my mother was never at home. If I can give back to her now, I consider it fair.

She’s been alone since I was in high school, and those ten years have been the happiest I’ve ever seen her.

She and Grandpa had been married for decades, fifty years before Grandpa left, but they never seemed to get along. When I was young, Grandma would always come over and stay the night instead of having me come over there. Grandpa never came to our house. He mostly stayed close to home or went to work, but the few times I interacted with him, he seemed way off. Even as a kid, I didn’t think he looked right. That might sound a little mean, but over time he got paler and less coherent. He would mumble to himself, this odd whispering thing he did while he was watching TV, and Grandma usually kept him in the bedroom with the lights off and the TV on.

He disappeared suddenly when I was in the ninth grade, and it had been almost as much of a relief to me as Grandma.

So last week when I slid her into bed and told her we were going grocery shopping the next day so she better get some sleep, she shook her head and looked away.

“I doubt I will. I think this might be my last night in this bed.”

“Why?” I asked, thinking she was joking, “You eyeing my bed? I’ll swap with you, but yours is much more comfortable than the one in the,”

“No, son.” she cut me off, her voice thready and weak, “I think tonight's the night that I pass on.”

My eyes got big, “Do I need to call Ms. Sam? If you think you're about to pass then I should get the nurses out here to,”

“I don’t want them here. You’ve been good to me, kid. I just want you here with me at the end. Besides, I need to tell you something. I need to confess my sins before I take them to heaven with me.”

“I mean, I can call Pastor Farris over here if you need to talk to someone about matters spiritual.”

“No, not Bobby Farris either. I want to confess to you. It’s family business, and once I confess it to you, it’ll be your burden to carry after I’m gone.”

I hesitated, thinking that I might not want this secret as I looked at my Grandmother’s face. I had seen that face smile more than anything else, but the look she had now reminded me of something else I had seen when I was young. It was something I hadn’t noticed until I looked back through the lens of time, but Grandma had always seemed a little nervous whenever she stayed at our house. I caught her more than once checking the doors and windows, looking through the living room curtains as if expecting to see someone there, and it always made me think she was scared of someone.

It was a look that always made me think a stranger was trying to get in so they could take me.

The truth, it seemed, was darker than that.

I sat down on the bed, willing to listen as little as I wanted to, “I’m here, Grandma. If you need to tell me something, then I’ll listen.”

Grandma nodded, looking out the dark window of her bedroom like someone might be there.

“Your grandad didn’t disappear,” she said, wetting her lips with his wrinkled tongue, “I killed him.”

That was a shock, and my face must have said as much.

She smiled without much mirth, “Didn’t think your old Grandma was capable of something like that, huh?”

“No, it’s just surprising. You guys lived together for decades, I’m not sure why you would choose ten years ago to,”

“That wasn’t the first time,” she said, her voice as thin as a spiderweb, “I killed your Grandpa for the first time in nineteen seventy-three. Ten years ago was just the last time I had to kill him.”

I was confused and I said as much, but Grandma only nodded.

“Your Grandpa, your REAL Grandpa, died in nineteen seventy-two, but he didn’t stay dead.”

She laid it all out, something that took us nearly into the next day, but she never stopped looking out the window as she spoke.

I realize now that she was looking for Grandpa.

“When the call came, I was pregnant with your mother. Your Grandpa had avoided the draft by attending college and had managed to avoid it again with a waiver from the government. He was an engineer, working on bridges and sewer systems in DC, and I was looking forward to having him home in a few weeks. He had promised to come home before the baby was born, and he was excited to meet his daughter. We had wanted children for years, and when we talked you could hear the tears on the verge of coming out whenever we talked about our future.

The phone call that day, however, seemed to be the end of that dream.

They said he had been killed in a car accident and that it had been very quick. He had been driving to a job site when someone had run a red light and slammed into the driver-side door. They said he died instantly, hadn’t suffered a bit, and I suppose that should have been a mercy. They wanted to bury him in the capital, but I was adamant that he be buried here. I wanted his daughter to see him, to know her father, but I couldn’t have known how much she would know him.

A week later, before his body was even home, I heard someone in the kitchen late at night.”

Grandma’s voice got low, the husk making my skin crawl as she stared through the little window into the past.

“I must have looked a sight as I came out with the baseball bat, but he never saw me coming. It was a man in military fatigues, eating a sandwich and sitting at my kitchen table like he owned the place. He hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights, and the closer I got, the more I saw. He had left a duffel bag on the floor beside him and there was a glass of milk sweating on the table beside his plate. His fingers slipped into the white bread, and the lettuce and tomato looked wet against the roast beef poking out. I didn’t challenge him, I don’t think he ever even knew I was there, and when I hit him in the side of the head he went down like a sack of potatoes.

I killed him in one hit, hit him just right, but when I went to see who he was, I felt like I might have a heart attack.

It was your Grandad.

He was laid out on the floor, bleeding from the ears, his blood staining his fatigues. I looked up the pins he had been wearing years after the fact and realized he had been a corporal in the army. His paperwork said he was back on leave for the birth of his child, and he was on two weeks of leave before he had to return to Vietnam. I was confused, my husband had never been in the Army, and as I sat there trying to figure out what to do, I decided to just bury him in the backyard. My husband was dead and calling up the police to let them know that this man had broken in so he could eat a sandwich would only muddy the waters.

So I buried him in the backyard, no easy feat for a woman who's seven months pregnant.

Three days later I was sitting in the living room, folding laundry and just trying to get back to normal when I heard keys in the front door.

I heard someone come in, set their bag down on the end table, and then I heard the last voice I ever expected to hear.

“Sorry, I’m late, dear. There was something in the office I had to set up for tomorrow before coming home.”

It was your Grandpa, dressed in a crisp white button-up and pressed suit pants. His tie was blue and white, something I had never seen before and looked expensive. I had never seen any of these clothes before, and I was the one who did all the laundry. He spread his arms wide, waiting for a hug, but I couldn’t move. I had killed him three nights ago, I watched him die, and as I backed away from him I saw his face twisting in confusion.

It was a painful look, a look that hurt my heart.

“What's wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. It’s me, it's Windel, your lovin man.”

I was against the door frame, hyperventilating, clutching my stomach as your mother kicked inside me. She could sense my fear, feel my uncertainty, and she was responding in kind. He took a step towards me and I curled into a ball as I tried to protect myself from whatever he meant to do. I expected him to try to attack me, to turn into a vengeful spirit, and come after me, but instead, he just wrapped his arms around me and hugged me close.

“What's wrong, Darlin? Are you okay? Talk to me.”

It sounded just like him and when I wrapped my arms around him I realized it felt just like him too. The smell of his aftershave, the rasp of his 5 o’clock shadow on my cheek, the way his hair smelled like Selsun blue, it was all things that let me know it was him. When he hugged me to him, I gasped as I felt the lump on his inner arm where a birth defect had left a bone poking slightly out. It was him, it was your Grandad, and I just leaned into him and sobbed as he helped me to my feet and took me to the bedroom.

I checked the back of his head later that night as he slept, but there wasn’t a mark or anything to lead me to believe he had been the one I clobbered a few nights ago.

I lived with this version of your Grandpa for six months. He worked as a manager at a paper company, his degree in business instead of engineering, and he made a comfortable living for us. If I needed a reminder of the old times, however, I only had to look at the graduation photo hanging in the hallway. It was me and your Grandpa, him in his cap and gown and me in my best dress, smiling as his mom snapped a photo. I caught him looking at the picture sometimes, trying to rationalize it, before finally moving away to do whatever he had been heading out to do.

He was there for the birth of your mother, and I settled into a life of maternal bliss. Your Grandfather was much the same as he had always been, trading talk of bridges for talk stocks and paper sales, but he was still the same man he had always been. He loved your mother and me dearly, we never wanted for anything, but after a while, I suspected that something was off about him.

It started with the sleep talking.

He would mumble ceaselessly from the time his eyes closed till the time he opened them. Your Grandfather had always been a prolific snorer, even since he was little as his mother liked to say, but now he never seemed to breathe at all when he slept. He would mumble on and on about sewers and the war and stocks and paper and raising dogs and breeding horses and a million other things. Between your mother's nightly feedings and your grandfather's ceaseless muttering, I was becoming ragged. I couldn’t sleep with all that yammering, and no matter where I slept, it always seemed to find me.

I tolerated it until one night when I heard something familiar.

I came awake to the sound of someone chewing and mumbling.

“Where are they,” chew chew chew, “I can’t believe I had to make my own food. It’s not enough that I,” chew chew chew, “went and fought them for her, but now I have to make my own sandwich.”

I had been sleeping on the couch, trying to get some sleep away from the muttering, and as I crept up the hall, listening to him mumble, and even the squeak of the door didn’t rouse him from his nightmare.

“She couldn’t even bother to wait for me,” chew chew chew, “just because my bus was a little late. I’m a war hero, a soldier, and she can’t even,” chew chew, but he paused then before gasping harshly, “Ouch, my head. What the hell was that? It's Maggy. Oh my God, she’s killed me. She killed me. She bashed my head in with a bat. I’m dead on the floor. Dead right by my kitchen table, my bloods going everywhere, she killed me, she killed me, she,”

The pillow was over his face before I could stop myself. I was just so ragged, so mentally fried, that I knew he would tattle on me. He’d wake up and tell the police and they would find the body and he’d be here alone with your mother and who knew what would happen then? He wasn’t her father, couldn’t be her father, and he might hurt her or kill her or,”

She looked back at me and I could see her eyes swimming with tears.

“He only struggled a little and then I had another body to bury.”

She was quiet for a moment, her eyes returning to the window before continuing again.

“The next one was a car salesman, but he was less like your Grandfather than the one before. I read something about how if you photocopy a photocopy the quality will degrade until it's almost unrecognizable. That was how this was. The next one sounded less like your Grandfather, was paler than him, and seemed to get lost sometimes. I lived with this one for two years until he suddenly wandered into traffic outside our house. I told the police that this one was a cousin of my late husband and that was why he looked so similar.

The one after that bred horses and when one threw him, I buried him at the edge of the range where he worked and went home expecting another one.

I was becoming pretty good at losing husbands by now, and when the next one showed up, I hit him with a frying pan and left him in the backyard with the others.

By the time your mother came home from school, there was a new one in the living room reading the paper.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with how durable they are. I pushed one off the roof after asking him to help me fix something. He broke his neck and I added him to the growing mass grave out there. I poisoned one over the course of a year until he dropped dead one morning over his oatmeal. I pushed one off a mountain during a hike, only to return to the hotel and find a new one there waiting for us. The copies became paler and less coherent, their voices becoming softer and less substantial. It got to the point that he couldn’t hold a job, his mind was like that of a dementia patient, and I would look up sometimes to find him watching me through the window of wherever I was. Your mother had moved out of the house by now, a retirement check from somewhere showing up in the mailbox from a company that manufactured pipes. The money was good, the money kept us afloat, but I was tired of living with this pale ghost.

Then, eight years ago, he walked out of the house one morning and never came back.

In many ways it was a blessing. I had become responsible for him, I had taken care of him and led him around like a child, and now I was responsible for just me. I kept cashing those checks until they stopped coming about a year ago, and I kept waiting for the day when he might come back. I almost dreaded it, because it would mean that he had died and a new pale copy would take his place yet again.”

Grandma turned away from the window, locking eyes with me as the night slid by outside.

“Now, it's your secret. It’s your secret and your burden. The bodies in the back are still there, I checked periodically, and though they decompose, the bones remain. I don’t know if this version of your Grandfather will ever come back, but you will have to watch for him now. I’ve left everything here to you, the house, the accounts, everything. It’s yours now, and I pray it brings you joy.”

She lay down then, and I could almost watch the life slip out of her. By midnight she was dead, and when I turned to get the phone, I saw what she had been waiting for at the window. Gramps was paler than I remembered him, but he looked exactly the same, otherwise. He waved at me as he stood there before backing away and leaving the way he had come. I went to the backyard and looked, but there was no one there and no clues that anyone had been there in the first place.

We buried Grandma in a plot next to Grandpa’s original plot, and she lay peacefully there beside her husband.

The caretaker tells me that someone comes to see her though, leaving a single wildflower behind before moving on.

I don’t think he’ll be back again, but who’s to say what the future might bring.

In the meantime, I called the police and let them know about all the bodies in the backyard. The sheriff came and exhumed them, asking all kinds of questions that he didn’t seem to believe the answers to. He had them tested and, to his surprise, all of them came back as a match for my Grandfather. Dental records, DNA, hair samples, it all came back a match and they were all left scratching their heads. They couldn’t really charge my Grandmother with it, you can’t put a dead woman in prison, after all, and they were left with a mystery for the ages.

Either way, it's nice to have the bodies gone, and it was good that Grandma got to die at peace.

As for Grandpa, I guess I’ll just have to wait for the day when a new one shows up.

Hopefully, I won’t have a body of my own to bury when he does.