In January I started going over. Just for an hour. Just while he napped.
I had worked it out, the way you work out how to do a thing you know you shouldn't. My mother had bought a nursery monitor at the Kmart in October, after my grandfather fell out of the hospital bed one night trying to get up by himself and lay on the floor in the dark for an hour before she heard him. It was meant for babies. There was a picture of a baby on the box, a fat blond baby asleep on its stomach. The monitor came in two parts. There was a transmitter, a cream-colored plastic box about the size of a paperback book with a little grille on the front and a cord that plugged into the wall, and you put it near the baby, or near the grandfather. And there was a receiver, the same color, the same size, with a volume wheel on the side and a red light on top that flickered when the sound came through, and a telescoping antenna like a transistor radio. You could plug the receiver into the wall or you could put a nine-volt battery in it and carry it around. At night the receiver sat on my mother's nightstand, and she said she could hear my grandfather turn over in his sleep, she could hear him breathe. The box said the range was up to three hundred feet.
From our back door to the side door of Station 4 was about a hundred and twenty steps. I counted them. In the first week of January, on a Saturday when my mother was at the store, I put a battery in the receiver and turned the transmitter on next to my grandfather's recliner, where he was asleep, and walked across the alley with the receiver held up to my ear, and stood in the parking lot of the firehouse in the cold. The light on top flickered. Through the hiss I heard my grandfather snore, the long ragged snore he had then, like somebody sawing a log very slowly. I heard the clock on our kitchen wall. I heard the furnace click on. I stood there in the wind with my eyes stinging and listened to my own house from across the alley, and it was like magic, it was like having a long invisible ear, and I thought: this is how. This is how I can do it and still keep the promise. Mostly keep it.
So every day after that, every day B shift was on and some days it wasn't, I gave him his four o'clock pills and got him settled in the recliner with the afghan over his knees and the television on low, and I waited until his breathing went long and even, and I turned on the transmitter and set it on the table beside him. Then I put the receiver in the front pocket of my red backpack, switched on, the antenna pulled out a few inches through the gap in the zipper, the volume turned down to two so nobody else would hear it, and I went out the back door and across the alley. I told the firemen my mother was home. They had no reason not to believe me. I hung my backpack on the hook by the kitchen door, right beside the chair where I sat to do my homework, and every few minutes I'd lean my head back against the wall as if I was thinking about a math problem, and put my ear near the front pocket, and listen. Snore. Clock. Furnace. Snore. If anything changed, I told myself, I'd be home in sixty seconds. I'd timed it. Forty-four seconds running, gate to gate. At a quarter past five, before he woke up, I put my backpack on and went home.
It worked. That was the terrible thing. For a month it worked perfectly.
The monitor did odd things. I knew that. Twice I picked up somebody's cordless telephone, a woman's voice in the middle of my grandfather's snoring, very clear and close, saying, "I don't care what he told you, the payment was due on the fifth," and then gone. Once, for a few seconds, I got a radio station playing "Down Under." Chuy had told me cordless phones and walkie-talkies and the monitors all used the same kinds of frequencies and that they bled into each other, that a guy on A shift had once heard a man ordering a pizza on the station's portable radio. So I didn't worry about it. There was a little switch on the back of the receiver, A and B, two channels, and I kept it on A, and mostly what I heard was home.
But starting on a Thursday in the middle of February, I heard other things too. Not much. Just at the edges, every so often, when my grandfather's snoring went quiet. A woman's voice saying something soft I couldn't make out. A television. And sometimes, under the hiss, a high thin yapping, yap yap yap, yap yap, very small and very far away, like a toy.