Paul Robertson: The Heir

“In my office… back home… in the desk.” I held up my fingers to show the size and thickness of the folding frame from Melvin’s bedroom. “A… picture frame.”

“I’ll get it.”

Pamela had been praying for me for twenty-five years. That seemed like something very valuable, even if I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought of the church where my mother was buried.

Something outside myself. That was what I wanted, even if it had been Nathan who’d said it. I knew one thing that was absolute, that there was nothing on earth that answered any of my questions. Money, power… even love, they had all failed.

Pamela thought I’d find what I was looking for. I was looking for a reason to live.

An hour later, Eric was back, and he brought me a reason, one that for a few minutes pushed aside my despair. He brought me a milkshake. A real one, made with real fast-food chemicals. Its purpose was simple and pure-to appeal to my most base instinct and appetites, with no nutritional value at all. I lost myself in it and for a moment again enjoyed living. If they’d left the IV in my arm, I would have sent that wise, brilliant, and golden-hearted young man out for a second one to pump directly into the artery.

I sat up. Transferred myself to a chair.

“I want… to walk.”

I’d been up a couple times, but now I wanted to walk… somewhere. Nurses came scurrying, somehow sensing I had moved. Eric forced them back to a discreet distance. They offered a wheelchair but I refused. I had regained a little dignity.

We rode the elevator to the ground floor, hobbled the length of a hallway, and then I was outside, walking, slowly but in the open air, with no one trying to kill me or injure me or put me in prison.

It was a garden, even. A courtyard, closed off and private. Eric and I were strolling through the end of October.

Dry, swirling leaves hurried past. Everything else was still and stiff, the last chrysanthemums, the empty branches. We had an hour or more until dusk.

Then I felt dizzy-all the muscles suggested that I sit, and I did. I just had my pajamas and robe, and a blanket over my shoulders, and the wind was gusty and chill. I pulled the blanket more tightly around me.

“I have that thing,” Eric said. He dug into the pocket of his jacket, a plaid and corduroy autumn coat Katie had picked as a start to his winter wardrobe. That was as far as they’d gotten.

A little fishing and he had the frame, and put it in my hands.

“Did you look at it?” I asked.

“Uh, no.”

There was a feeling of a holy relic about it as it rested between my fingers. The civilization that had owned it had fallen and was no more, but this object was clean and untainted and had passed unharmed through the Go tterda merung.

My left hand was very limited in its motion by the cast on my shoulder. I held the frame in that hand and opened it with my right. Two pictures-a man and a woman in one, and two little boys in the other.

“Wow,” said one of the boys.

“It was… in… his bedroom,” said the other boy. “In the drawer… by… his bed.”

There they were, Melvin and Ann, the two people I most fully did not know. Beneath Ann’s sad, tranquil eyes, she knew that she would never know her sons, and they would never know her. She held something that was deeper and greater than just life. It was there in her eyes, obvious to anyone who was looking.

His eyes were unknowable. Did his young wife’s coming death harden him and build those walls that shrouded his soul? I’d only known him hard.

Eric had her eyes. That was our biggest difference in appearance, even now. When Eric smiled, he looked so much like this picture of her. I looked at him now, beside me, and then at his own image in the frame. There he was a bright, untroubled toddler, his heart already open and supple as it would be for his whole life. Here in the garden with me he was Ann, but without that sorrow.

I was much more like Melvin, but with greater sorrow. I knew my own face well enough to see the similarities. Heavier brow, eyes deeper set, and empty. In my own picture I was five years old and I had the weight of the world on my shoulders because I knew my mother was dying. I was formed by that sorrow and the sorrow of an unloving father, and it had left me so incomplete.

“Let me see,” Eric said. We held it together and absorbed every meaning we could pull from those faces. A cloud had obscured the sun, and I was shivering.

“Is there anything on the backs?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

He took the frame and slid the glass off from the children’s side. It was tight. He had to force it, but he was still so careful. “There are papers behind the picture.”

Two folded sheets old enough to have yellowed a little. He teased one of them open.

“Eric,” it said at the top in a handwriting I’d only seen a few times before.

“It’s from her?” Eric said, his eyes about popping out of his head.

“Read it,” I said. “Eric Oh my Eric, oh my Eric, your little heart filled with joy,

Time to sleep now, time to sleep now, oh my dear little boy.

Come back home now, come back home now, you’ve been following your star,

Time to rest now, time to rest now, from your wanderings far.

Will you miss me, will you miss me, will you remember this night?

Come now kiss me, time to sleep now, until the first morning light.

Who will hold you, who will love you, when years pass and you’ve grown?

I am singing, I am praying, that you’ll never be alone.”

“She wrote it?” he said.

I nodded-I could hear her voice. “She sang it… It was her. .. lullaby for you.”

“I don’t remember any of it. And I’m always alone.”

“Did she say anything about me?” I’d asked Pamela.

“She asked me to look after you and Eric.”

“Have you been?”

“Every day.”

“No,” I said. “You… haven’t been. Open… that one.” “Jason Lay your tired head here on my shoulder,

Let me hold you in my arms my precious child,

You are growing, getting taller, getting older,

But I’ll still hold you in my arms a little while. The weight of the whole world is on your shoulders,

In your arms you carry burdens much too hard,

Face a world of troubles, brave young soldier,

But precious Jason, sleep awhile in my arms. Do questions weigh you down and make you wonder?

The world is hard and never gives you peace,

Lay your weary head here on my shoulder,

God will answer everything you seek.”

God knows all my answers. “I’ve been praying for you boys every day for twenty-five years,” Pamela had said. “I think you’re going to find what you’re looking for.”

“Other… picture,” I said. Eric tore his attention from the papers and slid the glass off the other picture. At first I thought there was nothing, but there was. Another folded paper, not yellow, but instead clean white. There was only one person who could have written on it. I took it from Eric and opened it myself.

“Jason-”

I almost couldn’t read it. There were just a few sentences, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even breathe.

I tried again. “Jason- I am at the end. Tonight I will sign my will and I will not return here. There is no one else to turn to. You have the strength that I no longer have. When everything is yours, you must destroy it all. You will see what must be done, and no one else will understand. They will fight you, but they will not stop you. Now I understand why you are my son, so that there is someone to right what I have done. Eric- Stand with your brother, whatever he does. Only you know how. My sons- You are my only achievement and my only hope.”