The Number 7 (9 page)

Later that night, Dad reluctantly cleared boxes and chests, searching for photographs. Searching for evidence of people and lives I never knew. For an hour, we'd been in the cold attic rummaging through stacks of old newspaper and photo albums filled with nothing but pictures of deserts, mountains, and open sky—the latter of which I bewilderingly held up for Dad to see. I'd kept my eye on the desk the entire time, but it stayed quiet. The phone sat dead.

“Sorry, kiddo. I know you're frustrated,” he said, blowing some dust off an old picture frame. “Here's a picture of me!” He held up an eight-by-ten of a baby boy in a red wagon.

“At last! A picture of a real human being!” I made my way over to him. “Dad, you're adorable, but I wanted to find pictures of Grandma and Grandpa. How is it that you've never shown us
any
? That painting down in the foyer is the first I've ever seen of Grandma. Do you realize how weird that is?”

It was a low blow, even I'll admit it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dad drop his shoulders in shame. I attempted some damage control.

“I just want to know what my grandparents looked like. That's all. Living in this house, I kind of sense them around. And I feel bad not knowing more about them—and what happened to them.” I shouldn't have asked for his help. He didn't want to help. He didn't want to dig up old memories. I was infringing on Pandora's territory, I could tell.

“What do you mean what happened to them? They died.”

“Forget it,” I shrugged. The old reliable shrug. Just like the deficients, I could rely on the shrug to get me out of a lot of unpleasant conversations.

And then Dad did something unexpected. He shut the box, sat back against part of the scaffolding, and relaxed his shoulders.

“Okay,” he whispered. He was finally ready. “Your grandfather was stoic, almost somber. It was his way. It was the Swede's way. He was a man of few words. He always tried to teach me to be like him, but I wasn't. I was loud and energetic, and I liked to express my opinion and debate. I think he saw my outspoken nature as a personal failure. He couldn't ever rein me in. He and I didn't have the relationship the three of
us
do . . . ” Dad's voice trailed off. He was struggling with the story. How much to tell? Where to start? “He died after we'd grown apart. You were eight—too young for a funeral.”

The irony! Three years later and I'd be sitting in a cold church staring down an urn of ashes. Staring at what was left of my mom.

“You've got some of his best qualities, I think,” Dad said, shifting the conversation, looking over at me. “You're a good listener, and you think before you act, Louisa. I've always admired that about you. Look at me? I'm a spontaneous, impulsive wreck. That's why we're here and not in North Carolina, right?”

“I always thought I was like you,” I whispered. How much did he know about Grandpa? Did he know he was a murderer?

“When I left for Lehigh, I saw it as an escape from my life here. Not that my life here was that bad, but I just always felt . . . contained. I never felt I was able to be a kid. Dad wanted me to grow up. He tried harnessing my energy with long walks through the forest. He'd write me letters warning me about the danger of zeal and leave them for me in my room. He'd reiterate the virtues of patience and solitude. It was as if he didn't know how to talk to me. ‘The day we fear hastens toward us, the day we long for creeps,' he'd write. But he'd never tell me about those things he feared or those he longed for. It didn't seem like he had any passions; there was just always this very serious man who never smiled, never laughed. I didn't want that life. I asked Mom about it, but she'd just shrug her shoulders and tell me that one day I'd maybe understand. ‘You remind him of a different life,' she'd say. But I didn't get it, and her answers were good enough for me. So after I left, I was hesitant to come back. I didn't want to get trapped back here. Maybe you'll know what I mean in a couple years. Those first couple years of freedom are irreplaceable.”

“But I don't feel trapped,” I protested.

“I know, and I'm glad. But at some point you're going to take off . . . see the world, spread your wings, all that Dr. Seuss stuff. Greta's about to do it. Hopefully you'll come back more often than I did. But you're both different than I was.” He gazed at the boxes in front of him. I could tell this conversation was difficult for him. But he knew he needed to tell it. He knew I needed to know.

Dad took a deep breath before continuing. “One weekend I came home to visit. Dad and I took one of our walks through the woods; he was quiet, as usual, but this time, I could tell something weighed on him. He almost seemed incapable of speaking. Many times he'd inhale deeply, as if about to say something, but then he'd just let it go. Finally, he stopped walking, turned to me, and asked, ‘Christian, what's the difference between the coward and the hero?' The question shocked me—it was as if this was some ideological test he'd been meaning to administer for a long time. I studied his face, searching for the answer. But there was nothing. What did he want me to say? His face was blank. It just stared back at me, and it almost felt as if his eyes were studying me, or looking at me for the first time. I don't know. I can't explain it the right way. It was as if he was surprised to see
me
standing there in front of him and not someone else.”

“What did you say?” I asked, eager for Dad to continue.

“We stood in silence for minutes—five, maybe ten?—until finally I realized what I wanted to say. All of my resentment and anger I felt toward him for never accepting me for who I was and for always making me feel like I was a disappointment, all of it came boiling to the surface. And I allowed myself to tell him what I really thought.”

“What did you say?” I repeated.

“I told him that he was the coward and I the hero,” Dad swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and tilted his face back toward the ceiling.

“What did he do?” My impatience betrayed me. The words came rushing out, interrupting Dad's memory.

“That's the thing. He hugged me and told me I was right. He said I'd always been right, asked me to forgive him, and then he turned and walked away. One week later he had his stroke. God intervened and took away my dad forever.”

“But I thought you said he died when I was eight?”

“He had his stroke when he was sixty, but it took sixteen years before he actually died. That's when you were eight. After the stroke, his body and mind buckled like a paper fan. Looking at him, you'd think he was closer to eighty. Mom said his mind was still there, but you'd never know it. He couldn't speak, couldn't walk, couldn't communicate in any way. I just thought it was her way of reassuring herself that not all of him was gone.

“It's the most selfish decision I ever made, but after the stroke I decided to leave. I was scared and young and stupid. But I was also mad. I never had the dad I thought I deserved, the dad who loved me for me. So I moved to North Carolina, married your mother in a courthouse, rented a nice little apartment, and then she got pregnant with Greta. I finished grad school, accepted a job teaching, and the rest is history.

“I finally reached out and invited them to come and visit when Greta was born, and then again when you were born, but Mom never forgave me for leaving. She accused me of abandoning Dad and said there was much I didn't understand. Needless to say, they didn't come. Eventually, I gave up trying to make amends for leaving. It was too hard. I felt too ashamed. My last phone call home was on the night your mother died, but I got the machine. And for whatever reason, I couldn't bring myself to say anything. And I vowed at that moment to stop trying to bridge my new life with my old. Because here's the thing: when given the opportunity,
I
ran. I ran away from home at twenty-one years of age. But I've often thought about what would have happened if Mom had been there to answer that last call . . .”

Dad closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Finally, after years of mystery, years of my guessing about my grandparents, he'd revealed to me the truth. The story of how he'd originally learned to plow through, to just keep moving forward. Somewhere along the way, he'd lost the ability to know when to look back. He did that with his parents and he did that with Mom.

“That's why you never met them. It's eerie that we're now combing through this stuff looking for them.” Dad sat up to get back to work. He opened a lid to a box and started digging through it. “It feels good, though. I need this.”

I watched him methodically pull out small items and place them in neat little piles.

Suddenly, I didn't just feel like I was looking for my grandparents—I was chasing them.

Gerhard never forgot the exact moment he rewrote his fate. Later, after it was all over, he'd often wonder if things would have been different had he simply turned down the old man's offer. He said it all began with a girl.

Agnes Landquist needed her bicycle repaired, and no one knew bicycle mechanics better than Gerhard. He fiddled with any bike he could get his hands on. He'd disassemble and then reassemble the spokes, the forks, and the chain. He saw each part in his mind, and he watched how the pieces fit together.

One day outside his school, Gerhard and Agnes sat in silence as he worked diligently greasing her bicycle gears. Agnes studied him with awe. Occasionally, he'd ask her to hand him his wrench or his pliers, and she'd slowly lean over and delicately place the tool in his hand. Their fingers touched once or twice, and Gerhard's stomach ached with adolescent love. He wanted to kiss her, but he didn't dare. She wanted him to kiss her, too, but isn't that the way of first love?

Before long, an old man with silver hair came searching for his delayed daughter. The man stood back, quietly watching Gerhard's hands. Gerhard knew him immediately. Kjell Landquist, Agnes's father and Trelleborg's station manager.

When Gerhard had finished, the man leaned in and asked, “Can you fix anything else, son?”

“Sir?” Gerhard shielded his eyes from the sun, staring up from where he crouched next to the bicycle.

“We're down a man at the station, and I could use someone whom I don't need to explain something to twice. Come see me this afternoon.”

Gerhard stood up slowly, closed the lid of the grease can, wiped his hand on an old rag, and wheeled the bicycle to the girl waiting next to her father.

“Thanks, Gerhard,” she whispered as her father started walking away.

The man turned and chuckled. “Come see me this afternoon and I'll give you some bigger toys to play with.”

Later that day, Kjell hired Gerhard as a train mechanic. It was Gerhard's sixteenth birthday. Gerhard had been working for Kjell exactly one month when he arrived at the station one day to find his father waiting for him. The tremendous man sat awkwardly on the small platform bench, smoking his bent pipe. Leif Magnusson was a ferryboat captain. He was used to the rock and sway of a choppy sea. The railroad, with its grounded station and defined tracks, was a world away from his own.

Gerhard took a seat next to his father and waited for him to speak. Leif was a man of few words, and Gerhard had learned to listen.

“Lasse has decided to join me on the ferry,” he began. Gerhard nodded; he'd always suspected his brother would follow in their father's footsteps.

“It's good for him to start work like me.”

“
Ja, javisst.
Of course.” Leif paused and puffed repeatedly on his pipe. “
Lyckliga Lasse och Gamla Gerhard,
” he chuckled remembering the nicknames. Gerhard frowned at his epithet, wishing he'd been the one they called lucky. He wanted to be the one with the fighting spirit.

“It's been hard for him . . . watching you come here every day. He wants so badly to be like you,” Leif coughed and crossed his arms.

Gerhard stared at his own feet, doubting his father's observation.
Had he come all the way to the station just to talk about Lasse?

“My boys are no longer boys,” the old man reached into his pocket and nonchalantly pulled out a small leather pouch.

“I'll give him something, too, don't worry. But I wanted to give this to you alone.” Leif slowly produced a gold chain as long as Gerhard's forearm. At the chain's end hung a worn, but polished, pocket watch. “Your grandfather's.”

It's magnificent
, Gerhard thought as he reached out and accepted the gift, letting his palm feel its weight. He popped open the case and inspected its round face. A small, loopy, antiquated inscription read,
Till min son
. “To my son.” Gerhard held it to his ear. Nothing.

“Here,” Leif took the chain and showed him how to lift the winding crown and spin it clockwise.

Gerhard inspected the watch with scrutiny. He shut his eyes, held the device to his ear, and visualized its gears. He imagined what its insides would look like once he stripped away its exterior. What were its inner workings? How did it run? He imagined tiny wheels, tight springs, and flattened screws. He envisioned how all the pieces fit together, how one wheel turned another, which turned another. All parts performing their proper functions. Everything in synchronicity.

“You have to wind it every day. But if you do, it will never fail you,” Leif advised, stroking his beard and taking a long puff on his black pipe.

Gerhard snapped the watch shut, securing the memory of the moment within the gold case forever. That's when Gerhard began measuring his life in minutes.

Dad and I took armfuls of albums and boxes of photographs downstairs to the kitchen. He continued searching through the photos for people while I fixed us some coffee and split pea soup.

“My father used to make us pea soup on the first Thursday of every month. It's how his mother, Åsa, made it,” Dad smiled as he thought back on the memory. I prodded him further trying to dig up older recollections.