Prologue
The mountain stretched skyward, blocking the dying rays of the late afternoon sun. Its base cut a broad swathe like an oozing river of lava as it threatened to swallow everything in its path. Nothing could resist its inexorable outward creep.
Holy cow, Rachel marveled as she gaped at this impossibly large pile of odds and ends, Dad sure was a packrat.
Her younger brother stuck his head into the open doorway of the study. “Hey, Rach," Brandon said, "how you making-yikes! Is this all the old man’s?”
Rachel Donovan collapsed into the rickety chair set next to a computer desk, careful not to dislodge the lopsided pile of graphic comics which perched perilously on its edge. Luckily, though, the keyboard prevented a full-scale paperwork collapse onto the floor.
She turned and said, “Kind of a dumb question, don’t you think? I mean, whose else do you think it could it be?”
Brandon whistled. "Yeah, I know, but look at all this stuff! I mean, how ya gonna be able to figure out what stays and what goes?”
“You got me,” she answered, dragging a carton of books to her feet, “but I’m going to have to. How are you making out in the bedroom?”
“Just about done. When I’m finished, I’ll come give you a hand.”
Left to herself, Rachel wearily studied the huge stack of her father’s possessions. Even though it loomed menacingly over her head, she felt some comfort by its presence. As strange as it seemed, it drew her closer to the man who was unfairly taken from her a couple of days earlier...
Stopping off at Cumberland Farms, one of those ubiquitous New England convenience stores which never closes, all Michael Donovan, Jr. wanted to do was gas up his beat-up Ranger and get home. Since he had to be at his job at the Zoning and Codes Office early the next morning, he figured it would be much better to top off his tank now than at the freezing crack of dawn.
Even though fifty-one was still pretty young (except in dog years), he hated how the cold seeped into every joint of his body and twisted them like fairground pretzels. Winters were only for kids, he grumped.
On the opposite side of the fuel island, an equally frazzled commuter was intent on doing the same. Wearing a rumpled khaki overcoat, scuffed brown shoes, and a florid expression, the man resembled a sweaty pear, in spite of the cold. Slapping his hands together to keep the blood flowing, he retreated to the warmth of his monstrous, running SUV while the pump chugged merrily away.
Mike craned his neck around the island to see his neighbor pull a cell phone from his coat. He shook his head. It never failed to amaze him that so many people thought they were so indispensable that they had to be on all the time.
Plus, warning signs on the island clearly indicated that devices such as cell phones weren’t to be used while fueling. And to shut off your car while gassing up.
Idiot.
Mike glanced at the shimmering vapors dancing around the nozzle feeding into his truck’s tank. He caught a few whiffs of the sweet-smelling fumes, but most slowly coalesced before sinking to the ground.
He looked up to see the other man toss his phone onto the dashboard. Even though Mike knew there was virtually no danger of a cell phone sparking any sort of explosion, he was still relieved the call was finished.
He felt a sharp click as his tank filled. He squeezed the handle a couple times to force a few more drops in before yanking it free. Retrieving his receipt from the self-serve keypad, he turned to go.
At the same time, he heard a snap from the other side of the island as his neighbor finished fueling.
Anxious to be on his way, the man in the sport utility vehicle jumped from the warmth of his front seat. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips.
Glad I never picked up that habit, Mike thought. I’d hate to go through life always needing one of those goofy things hanging off my face.
He laughed quietly as the man, while trying to force a few more drops into his tank, squeezed the handle one time too many. Forced to the rim, a quick spurt of gasoline splashed from the tank and onto his wingtips.
Chuckling, Mike pulled his door open and hoisted himself into the driver’s seat.
He twisted the key in the ignition and, after several balky coughs, the engine rumbled to life. As he pulled the gear shift, he frowned when he saw his neighbor pat himself down.
What was he looking for?
Reaching into his front pants pocket, the man gave a smile of triumph and pulled out one of those Bic disposable lighters you could pick up at, well, any Cumberland Farms.
With alarm, Mike watched him thumb the lighter’s little metal wheel.
“Oh, you gotta be friggin’ kidding me,” he said to the driver’s window. He squeezed his eyes shut and steeled himself for the inevitable "whoompf" followed by the fueling island's collapse into an orange fireball.
Unfortunately, neither he nor Mr. SUV saw the delivery tanker bearing down on them as it left the turnpike. Reaching the base of the exit ramp, it roared through the intersection after its brakes failed. Pushing aside a city bus as if it were a toy, it bounced like a thunderclap across a median littered with frozen weeds and torn signs advertising a "Free cup of coffee with every fill-up!"
They never knew what hit them...
Carefully sifting through piles of doodads, knickknacks, and bric-a-brac, Rachel cobbled together three piles: Gotta Go, Gotta Keep, and Gotta Think About It.
Most of the things which her father hung onto seemed pretty ridiculous. An empty matchbook celebrating a wedding for people she never heard of and a tattered playbill for some off-off-off Broadway show were typical of the memorabilia packed away in cluttered boxes. She was amazed that he had kept any of these things.
She looked at the three mounds, half expecting little paper prairie dogs to leap from the piles to scold her, and reconsidered. As silly as some of it was, this stuff evidently had meant something to him.
As soon as they'd gotten the call following the accident, Rachel and Brandon rushed back home to Stratford. It was a much easier trip for her than her brother. All she had to do was drive a few hours from Philadelphia while Brandon had to fly cross country from San Diego.
While their aunt took care of the funeral arrangements with the Hajzus-Fox Funeral Home, it fell on Rachel and Brandon to clean out Dad’s little apartment on Canaan Road. Initially deemed a kindness, Rachel thought otherwise as they struggled through their father’s possessions.
Still, she realized it had to be done, as she added yet another contribution to the Gotta Go pile. The three-room dwelling had to be cleared out by the end of the month so another tenant could move in. As much as it pained them to consign his many belongings to cardboard boxes or, worse, the trash, they knew they weren’t rich enough to open the Mike Donovan Memorial Museum.
Although, she smiled as she placed a Bullwinkle the Moose baseball cap on her head, there was plenty of stuff to open a museum.
“That is so you.”
Rachel turned to see Brandon standing in the doorway. “I’m finished with the bedroom,” he said. Glancing at the heaps at her feet, he continued, “I like your system. Everything staying?”
“You wish,” she said, knowing her brother was every bit the collector their Dad was.
“Well, then, let’s keep going. Have you looked in that one yet?”
Brandon pointed at a large moving box in the corner. Labeled Box O’ Mike in black Sharpie, it dwarfed the others beside it. “Naw, I needed your help moving it. It looks pretty heavy.”
Her brother stepped over the three piles and grasped the carton on two opposite corners. With a grunt, he pulled it free of the magazines and paperbacks surrounding it. “Jeez, you’re not kidding. What’s he got in here? Rocks?”
Thankful he didn’t have to carry it any farther, Brandon dropped the carton with a thump at Rachel’s feet. He wiped sweat from his forehead and joined his sister on the floor.
Rachel pulled the packaging tape from around the carton’s edges and quickly unwound the string holding the box shut. She flipped the top open and peered inside. “Books.”
“Books?”
“Well,” she said as she pulled out a notebook, “not books, exactly. More like those tablets we used to use in school.”
She began leafing through its contents.
“What’s in it?”
“Oh, this is so cool. These are his stories.”
Brandon looked over her shoulder at pages crawling with childish scribbles. Here and there he saw crudely drawn pictures of spaceships and aliens. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “Dad told us he liked to write.”
Without pulling her eyes from the pages, Rachel answered, “He said he wrote a lot of stories when he was just a kid. This looks like one of his Screaming Eagle stories.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. He said those were like Star Trek with all the characters named after him and his friends. Kind of an ego thing, huh?”
He looked inside the box. “I wondered what happened to them. Wow, there’s a whole bunch in here.”
Rachel retrieved a handful of tattered notebooks. As she scanned their pages, she was impressed by her father’s imagination. In page after page of longhand, Rachel saw tales of spaceships, monsters, dinosaurs, and who-knows-what from who-knows-where.
Digging through the stack, she noticed that, as he got older, Mike Donovan had devoted less time to the fantastic and more to real people and situations. She wondered if it was a coincidence that those stories were typed, rather than written out longhand.
It dawned on her that she was looking at something like a time capsule. While the earlier stories were written by a child, these typed ones were spun by a young man who was developing a growing sophistication in his work.
She turned to see Brandon intensely poring over a story about a werewolf from another planet. Well, not everybody grows up, she grinned.
Towards the bottom, she withdrew a set of pages from underneath half a dozen dog-eared tablets. Looking a little newer than the others, this inch-thick compilation was neatly bound in clear plastic and sported a navy blue binding.
Unlike its companions, it was free of the countless splotches of correction fluid which peppered his other stories; it was apparently done on a computer. Even though Mike wasn’t an especially good typist, even he knew the benefits of a computer’s cut and paste feature.
Still, it was several years old.
“Whatcha got there?” asked Brandon, his fascination with interplanetary werewolves momentarily forgotten.
“Looks like a story Dad wrote when we were just kids,” Rachel answered as she flipped through its pages. Pausing at the bottom, she choked up a little. Oh, Dad, why did you stop writing?
Brandon scooted next to her. “Cool. Whatzit called?”
She looked at the cover and answered, “Shag Carpet Toilet.”
Rachel began to read.