Accidental Notes: A Novel
Chapter 25
The Last Blockbuster
Not sure what this story is? The synopsis is available here.
Catch up on chapter 24 here.
Snow blankets the truck outside, and Dad brushes it off the front windshield without hesitating. It almost falls faster than we can keep it up, and I miss the stars, but I’m getting used to being in this dizzying snow globe, where the scenery is annoyingly perfect. Nothing inside is perfect at all.
Once the truck is ready and the seat warmers are on, Dad backs down the driveway. His ease feels like a mockery of how poorly I drove. Christmas music still plays on the radio, even though Christmas is over, and I let it fill the background. Twenty-four hours ago, I would have said music doesn’t get between us anymore, but that changed yesterday afternoon. Brennan’s music is a mountain I don’t know how to scale.
“You found the photo albums,” Dad says. It’s not a question. I guess I didn’t do a good job putting things back how I found them. However, Dad basically just told me what he was doing when he disappeared with all the boxes yesterday.
I raise one finger to trace the paths that snowflakes take down my window. But they swirl together and tangle and I can’t keep them straight. “There are more pictures of him than you ever took of me. And you had to get his developed, didn’t you?”
My question isn’t the one he answers, but then again it wasn’t a question. We both know. Instead he answers a question I’ve been asking for years. “We’d always say we focused on our careers and traveled together before you were born.”
“And I could never find any proof because it never happened.”
“Your mom and I had just graduated college when she found out she was pregnant. We got married. Neither of us had a job lined up. We still lived in California, but of all the places I applied to, only an engineering company by my mom’s house in Bend hired me.”
The trees lining the road are heavy with the burden of snow now. Boughs closest to the ground kneel like the wise men, but it doesn’t look like worship. “I don’t want to know about you and Mom. I want to know about Brennan.”
Dad’s hands are tight on the steering wheel now, like mine were. Knuckles pale, blood drained. “I’m getting there. His story starts with us.”
Like mine starts with Brennan, I think. But I’m not brave enough to say it.
“We moved in with my mom. The two of us stayed in the bedroom you’re in now, Brennan too, after he arrived.” The bed I’m sleeping in is a twin, and uncomfortable, and I don’t know how they made it work. It’s not important, though. “Your mom hated staying with Grandma Nancy. We moved out as soon as we could pretend we could afford it, and she threw herself into taking care of Brennan. Those first few years… he was our world. He wasn’t part of the plan your mom had, but he was the best detour she could have imagined. That’s what she kept saying.”
I wonder when things changed for Brennan. When he let go. Why he had to. Why it was Dad he apologized to. “Mom’s a career woman. Nothing is more important to her than her job.”
“She didn’t work at all until Brennan was in kindergarten. He was her world until then. It was only after he was in school she started studying for her LSAT. Anyway, we’re here.”
I want to argue, because we hardly got to when Brennan was a person — he only told me about him and Mom, overdue but not what I asked for. Then I realize where we are. “Why — ”
“This was one of Brennan’s favorite places.”
Dad pulls in to one of the most ironically famous buildings in Bend. Of course this would be a place my brother liked. I wonder if he knew, in the early 2000s, that it was doomed. I wonder if he knew that he was.
The last operating Blockbuster in the world is here, and it’s internet-famous, but it’s more like visiting Williamsburg in Virginia than a place people use the way they did when it actually mattered. Instead of being transported to colonial America, this Blockbuster takes people back to the ’90s. All my cousins talk about that decade like it was this sacred Before and nothing was ever wrong then.
I wonder how long this store will last, when it’s held together by a group of people who cling to the past. Then again, if Brennan were a building Dad could visit, it would still be here, lights on, candles lit in memorial.
We walk through the steady snow and a growing wind. Then I’m in a time machine with my dad and we’re both taken back into a world my brother would have recognized. Nothing has changed in thirty years, from the uniforms to the displays to the bright purple that coats everything in shiny plastic fabricated happiness.
The films, though, span from classics to new releases. There’s something off-putting about seeing the latest Pixar movie on a shelf here. It’s an anachronism, a glitch in our time travel. Proof that what I’m looking for — answers about Brennan — don’t hide in this version of his past. He isn’t here. He isn’t even a ghost.
“We’d go here every week. Pick out a movie to watch on Friday nights, when your mom would go out with friends. We were closer than he was with your mom, by then. I thought he told me everything.”
I follow Dad along the rows of movies, which he scans with a nostalgia so deep it cuts me. The music already proved it to me, but this is another theorem for which I need as many proofs as I can get. “What’s your last memory with him?”
“We’d had such a wonderful Christmas that year. Brennan spent almost all his time on Mom’s piano.” The rest of the story I work out in the changes in his expression. Distant eyes. Confusion in tight cheeks, then frustration in wrinkled forehead. It’s over in milliseconds. His gaze returns and leaves the story inside him. “I don’t need to talk about it. Let’s do something happy.”
But it feels forced and I don’t think he wants happy, not really. He wants easy. “Follow me,” I say, and wind through the maze of movies to a back corner, then sit down against the wall of the horror section.
“I’m too old to sit like that.”
“I’ll help you up again, Dad. But we need to talk about Brennan. It’s been eating at me, and I’ve only known for a week. It’s bothered you for seventeen years.”
Dad reaches behind him and grabs a movie without looking at it. “He wanted to work here when he turned sixteen. He wanted sharing movies with people to be his first job. Talked about the future and everything. I had no idea — it was all so sudden.”
“He didn’t — you didn’t see anything about him change? He didn’t ever bring it up?”
“Not once.” Dad’s eyes look watery, his jaw tight. He stares straight ahead, unblinking. “He didn’t even leave a note.”
No. No. I’m glad we’re sitting, because if we were standing I’m sure my knees would have buckled. Words take detours from my brain to my tongue. I can’t find any of them. My hands shake and I dig my fingernails into my thighs to mask it. Deep breath. Five things I see. An empty, ghostless store. How wrong Dad was. This bright purple shade of denial. Snowstorms that bury everything. Flowers that will push through anyway.
“You said he spent Christmas at the piano? Was he — was he writing?”
Dad chuckles, but his jaw is still tight. It’s throaty, unnaturally high-pitched. “You figured it out, huh? That Brennan wrote that music?”
I can’t tell him. I have to tell him.
Four things I feel. Dad slipping away from me even as he sits here. Misunderstood. Certain Dad should have known about Brennan’s note. Helpless. “Yeah. I figured it out.”
“He was so talented. What a beautiful song. It was hard to listen to you at first, but I’m glad I’ve gotten to hear it again.”
Three things I hear. That haunting music. Alarm bells firing across my mind. Mom’s voice in my head, telling me to leave it all alone.
I stand up and turn around to offer Dad a hand. He takes it, but it’s harder to lift him than I thought it would be. Hunched over, gray hair matted in too many directions, hands on his thighs, he seems old.
He doesn’t say anything else. Strolls over to a shelf and picks up a movie without even looking. Pulls out his Blockbuster card, laminated paper. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Finley,” the older man working the register says. “It’s been a while.”
Dad nods, grunts something like a thank you, but it’s half-unintelligible. He puts the movie under his arm and leads me back to the car. The snow is falling even harder now, and a wind has picked up. The snowflakes are smaller but more intense. They’re dusty, and these ones sting like a slap across the face. Every single one.
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