A Silver Chalice

“Alright kids, let’s give Mr. Bell a big round of applause!”

Mr. Bell smiled in thanks as the classroom burst into uneven applause, most of which tapered off after thirty seconds, but he noticed two boys who were battling back and forth, one singular clap at a time, to be the last applauder. He smiled slightly wider.

“Now, we have Mr. Bell for a few more minutes, so why don’t we ask him some questions about his books?” Ms. Renwick continued. Hands shot up into the air.

“Okay, how about… Ryan. What’s your question for Mr. Bell? Loud, so we can all hear you.”

The dark-eyed little boy opened his mouth excitedly, but nothing came out except a couple of vague sounds for the first few seconds, as he’d not thought how exactly to phrase his question before he’d been called on. “Is there a– Do you have a favorite ending in the book?”

Mr. Bell looked down at the hardcover in his hands. The Silver Chalice. The seventh and most recent choose your own adventure book to be graced with the name Leslie Bell. There were upwards of thirty potential endings, from death by dragon fire to a portal to a new land where you have to start your life anew to a crown and endless riches.

He glanced back up at the rapt classroom. “It’s not the most exciting ending, but there’s one where the hero escapes from the dragon without the magical chalice, but with one pocketful of jewels. The hero is singed and battered, but they manage to make it home to their family, where they sell the jewels for enough money to save their farm with the perfect amount left over for a meal fit for a king.”

In the pause after he finished, five more hands shot up into the air.

“Is the hero a boy or a girl?”

“It’s whoever’s reading it! It’s your adventure.”

“How long does it take to write one of your books?”

“It changes for each one, but the biggest amount of time for getting my book out there is on the publishing end. It takes a lot of time to pick art and get it edited and even make all of these heavy things.” He knocked on the hard, colorful waxy cover with his bony knuckles, and the children laughed.

Eventually, there was only time left for one more question.

“Sophie, what’s your question?” Ms. Renwick asked her student.

Sophie lowered her hand and tilted her head to the side as she asked, “How do you write your books? Like how, do you come up with the ideas and how do you organize it all?”

Mr. Bell took a deep breath. “Well, I actually wrote all of these stories years and years ago, and I didn’t even realize it. I have six kids, and they’re all grown up now, but when they were little, getting them to bed was just crazy crazy crazy. But eventually, I found a way to get them all to settle down: stories. Every night, after everyone had gotten their teeth brushed, pajamas on, clothes laid out for school the next day, their mother and I would squish them onto our big couch in the family room. And with all of us together there, I’d make up stories for them, off the top of my head, just trying to keep them entertained. But they were still a restless, rowdy bunch, so I decided I wanted to get them involved in the story. So as I was telling it, I’d make up options for the hero on the spot, left or right down the path, pack the rope or the knife, run towards the commotion or away. I had no idea where either option was going, and once the kids picked, I figured it out from there. But eventually they got a little older and their memories got a little better, and they remembered that there had been other options for what the hero could have done, and they wanted to go back and explore that path — especially when they’d fought over what to do the first time around,” Mr. Bell joked. The kids all giggled and poked each other, remembering all their own fights over what game to play or who deserved which lollipop flavor.

“So when I finished a story in one world, they wanted to stay in it, figure out everything that could have happened after one different choice. But after we followed that new choice, there were even more choices to make up, and the world and its thousands of plot lines began to unfold. In order for us to finally get to a new world, I had to make sure some of the choices doubled back to familiar paths or that different journeys would ultimately lead to the same ending. And when we’d exhausted every possible version of one world, I would make up a new one, and the whole process started all over again. My kids eventually grew up and got too old for bedtime stories, and even longer after that they all moved out of our house to start their own families, tell their own kids stories. But I was still a dad, and even if they didn’t need my stories anymore, I still had them somewhere in the back of my head. I figured I should do something with them. And it turns out, kids like you still like these stories! So I’ve kept on going even as I get older and older and older!”

         The kids all laughed again, including Sophie, though hers ended quicker than the others and her mouth opened again to say something more. But she could not get whatever it was out, because Ms. Renwick’s voice cut through the just-dying laughter.

         “Alright, kids, let’s say thank you to Mr. Bell.”

         “Thaaaank yooou, Misterrr Beeeeeellll,” the kids chanted in unison, the small sentence stretched out to twice its length as it always was when he visited elementary classrooms.

         “Thank you all for having me. And remember to always go adventure!”

         The kids gave another round of applause for Mr. Bell’s crisp signoff — it was always a hit — and Ms. Renwick ushered him past the small desks and brightly colored cubbies out the door, both her hands on his arm like she was afraid he’d stumble on the small decline from carpet to linoleum. Mr. Bell didn’t think he was that old, but perhaps he was. Maybe spending all of his time back in the thick of his 30s and 40s and the stories of children only made him forget he was to be considered elderly, and it did not actually make him any younger in body.

         But he could still walk. He loved to walk. Sweet Jennifer, his eldest girl, had gotten him an iPhone after his wife died. Yes, so he was reachable, traceable through something called “Find My Friends,” able to call for help if he ever needed it in his now-empty house, but also so he could listen to music on his walks. “You don’t have Mom to chat with anymore, so I thought it might be nice for you to be able to listen to music so you don’t get bored.”

         Mr. Bell hadn’t cared for the phone in general, so he never charged it, didn’t want to spend money to rebuy songs he already had on records and CDs, left it sitting in the places that soon became the dustiest parts of his house, only to be rediscovered whenever one of his kids came to visit and asked where he kept his phone. So then Jennifer got him a portable CD player, “It can clip right onto your waistband, Daddy, you don’t even have to hold it,” but even that went unused. He did not want to fill the empty space where his wife had been with noise. He’d much rather listen to the sounds of their neighborhood loop, the rustle of the leaves and the morning song of birds and the rush of the wind and, yes, even the summer-hot screams of cicadas when they emerged. They hadn’t spoken much on their walks through the winding streets of their neighborhood anyway, so all this music was the same as it had been when she was by his side.

         So he walked home from the elementary school, the midday streets quite empty, the crossing guard who guided the children during dropoff and pickup hours long gone. The school wasn’t too far from his house, and what rush was he in to get home? What more important than the sun and the sounds of nature was waiting for him there?

         Mr. Bell’s hands were empty as he walked home. He’d left the copy of The Silver Chalice he’d been reading from in the classroom, with a wobbly Leslie Bell signature, a small treasure the kids could enjoy and potentially even remember fondly one day. It wasn’t like meeting him was a life-changing event; choose your own adventure books, no matter what official name and copyright they fell under, weren’t the sensation they used to be or even much of a moneymaker, but they were still fun for a little while. That was enough for him — Jennifer, sweet Jennifer, she visited the most, always scolded him when she came to the old house and found his small publisher’s checks still in their unopened envelopes, scattered around the house like little surprises everywhere you turned.

         As he walked, he thought. There was nothing much else to do. Step after step, he replayed the visit, enjoying the children’s palpable excitement as they fell into the adventure. He smiled as he remembered the kids’ questions, almost always the same asked, almost always the same answered.

         Sophie’s question was different, and he knew why she’d wanted to follow up after he’d answered it. It was because he hadn’t answered all of it and that was on purpose. He had almost but not really answered how he organized his stories, only how they’d been first told.

         As he arrived home, he pulled open the door of the mailbox that looked like a birdhouse. It was a rather shoddy thing made by Timmy in his shop class, especially after years of wear, but Mrs. Bell had loved it. To her neighbors, she was a rather shy, soft-spoken woman, who did not like to draw too much attention to herself, but she’d cried when Timmy had proudly brought it home as a gift for her and immediately had her husband set it up in the front yard. It was the one piece of ostentation she allowed herself. He had no plans to ever change it.

         The envelopes looked thick in Mr. Bell’s growingly translucent hands — to call them paper thin seemed like an insult to paper at this point. He always felt that his hands had aged faster than the rest of him. He could still climb stairs without help, he could still drive if he chose, he could (poorly, but that had always been true) do the Sunday crossword, he could still lift his arms to comb his hair which had luckily never really receded, though it had paled. He could still walk. His body was creaky and soft but it still worked well enough, yet you’d never be able to tell by his hands.

         He flipped through them at his desk when he entered the house. It was mostly bills and junk mail, Richard Bell, Richard Bell, Richard Bell, Mrs. Richard Bell. He paused at that one, a card mailer from one of the large department stores that hadn’t yet made the full switch to email promotions. He still got his wife’s mail occasionally. It usually felt like his heart had gotten ice water dumped over it.

         But sometimes it was nice. It was nice to see her name in print, to think that some people, or even inhuman machines, did not yet know that she no longer existed in this world, that her legacy, even just on a department store’s mailing list, still lived on. But he hated when it read Mrs. Richard Bell, because she had. His wife, to the world, had been a demure, unassuming, traditional and stereotypical homemaker, and she had been content with that image. But among their family her volume was turned all the way up. She was the first to laugh and laugh loudly, she was smart as a whip, she kept their six kids in line without ever being a tyrant or forcing him to be one either thanks to an overflowing, fierce, unquenchable love she had for all of them. She’d died with her husband and children surrounding her, telling them that they were the great and only project of her life and that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. But despite her love of being a wife and mother, she’d always said she was a person first, and despised when she was reduced to only a wife, Mrs. Richard Bell.

         “I took your last name,” she’d told him whenever she’d get worked up, “but not your first! I’m still me, that me just happens to be your wife, not the other way around.”

         Richard had always laughed. Not in a way that misunderstood his wife’s anger, but rather commiserated in it yet still had to laugh at the futility of being angry at the mail. And he’d pull her close, kiss the top of her head, and say, “Well, I’ll always know your name, Leslie Bell, and mark my words, one day I’ll make sure even the mail knows it, too!” And she’d laugh and hold him tight right back.

         So no, he hadn’t answered Sophie’s question of how he organized all of his stories, because it would change everything. The very, very short answer was the desk he was sitting at now.

         He was not an organized man. He’d provided for his family, switching from one type of salesman to the next over the years, but he was just the engine. Leslie was the conductor, the engineer, the tracks themselves. As he told the kids the stories, she’d sat next to him, folding laundry or balancing the checkbook. He was never entirely sure how much she actually listened, or if she just wanted time with her family in a shared space. And once the stories were done, he would make sure each child actually got under the covers and retrieve cups of water and check that there were no monsters anywhere in the house. Leslie had always sat at the desk, working on some paperwork — there was always another piece of paper to be dealt with — until they were both ready to go to bed.

         When she’d died, he hadn’t just been emotionally adrift. Richard realized that he knew nothing of how his house really functioned, how things got done, where anything was. And he hadn’t wanted to touch Leslie’s desk. It was sacred — he could not mar her shrine. But he was left with no choice. Bills had to be paid. He’d been searching for the checkbook when he’d found it. All the old stories, every world he’d built, entirely organized, laying out plot after plot in logical harmony.

         He’d gone through page after meticulously tracked page. There were blank spaces, of course, where one option had never been remembered or notes where the paths inevitably clashed, but it was all ordered, all logical, all indexed, an endlessly complex and perfectly woven together maze in the same way it must be to run a home. And it had been done with no pretense or expectations, no grand plan. They’d been sitting in that drawer for years, seemingly untouched after the kids had all gone. She had just wanted to remember, or to give it as a gift to the kids, or maybe to pass on to the grandchildren someday. He would never really know for sure.

         Richard had carefully gone through each manuscript — there was no other word for what Leslie had done to his spontaneous, winding stories — and filled in the empty spots, corrected the mistakes, but there was little more for him to do. When the first one was re-finished, he’d sat in her chair at her desk and looked at their work, though it was truly her work more than anything. And he decided that he’d try. He got his kids to help him figure out Google and even then they still had to help him correspond with potential book agents and publishing firms. He  signed his deal for a small amount of money which he really did not need, approved the final jacket cover, and the first of the books, Wild Child Out West by Leslie Bell, was published.

         From then on, whenever those small publisher’s checks came in or invitations to read in classrooms arrived, the mail always knew the name Leslie Bell.