http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/building-water-moss/

She was still elegant even with the cracked paint and frayed boards. Her bow was still tall and proud, and it sliced effortlessly through the calm water. Irregular piles of fog, ever-present on the Vague Sea, swished silently around the old ship’s worn hull.

“How do they navigate?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When it’s cloudy. Don’t they normally navigate by the stars?”

“They have electronic compasses.”

Leo Waronka and Old Charlie stood on the main deck wrapped in thick, dark coats. Each held a steaming mug, their hot toddies fighting the good fight against a persistent chill in the fog.

Leo shook his head. “I’m not entirely comfortable with these guys using unproven devices when we’re navigating rock-strewn waters.”

Charlie looked over the edge and nodded. “You want to get off here then?”

Leo laughed and sipped the warming whiskey elixir. For the tenth time since coming aboard The Real Doll he questioned his decision. His brother and sister hadn’t thought twice about making the trip. They fought him tooth and nail, in fact. Citing his mother’s wishes and decades of evidence, they’d made their point very clear. None of them owed their grandfather a damn thing.

“I always wondered how he got it out here,” Leo said. “Did he hook up a team of giant turtles like a seaborne carriage? Did he enlist Poseidon? Or Godzilla?”

“With him, nothing would surprise me.”

“When’s the last time you went?” Leo asked. “To the factory.”

It took some time for Charlie to work out the answer. He was an old man, pushing 80, and his memory wasn’t what it used to be. Plus, it had been ages. It would have been ages for everyone, of course.

“Well let’s see,” Charlie said, hoping that talking it out would coax the information from his brain’s recesses. “He vanished with the factory, what, 21 years ago?”

“21 years, 3 months and a couple of days,” Leo confirmed. He’d done his homework. Both to prove his siblings wrong and, if he was being honest with himself, to battle the guilt he’d felt at drifting so far from his mother’s oddball father.

“And no one had been allowed in for about 7 years before that,” Charlie said. “Since your brother and sister cashed out their options.” He paused, wondering if Leo would comment here. When the younger man kept quiet, Charlie finished his deduction. “I’d gone with your sister a few months before that to tour his new idea for candy cereal. So 28 years ago, give or take.”

That wasn’t true. Charlie had been to the factory a dozen times since that trip with Dahlia. But those trips were to help Leo’s grandfather prepare for the factory’s last great surprise – vanishing.

Leo nodded. “I was there a few days before he stole it.”

“He owned it, Leo,” Charlie corrected. “Can’t steal what you own.”

“Not all of it.” Leo sounded sad as he spoke. Charlie rarely saw Leo, had forgotten how much different the youngest son was from the rest of his family. “My brother and sister cashed out. I did not.”

“I know.”

“They said I was projecting. We didn’t have a father, and they thought I’d wanted one so badly I tried to foist our grandfather into the role.” Leo looked down to the small duffel bag at their feet. “That I clung to some quixotic notion of what a family ought to be and ignored the reality of having a grandfather who was probably insane.”

Silence fell. Fog swallowed sound, and silence in the mist was heavier than silence elsewhere. It had physical weight, like sacks of guilt hung around the necks of those wrapped in its ethereal embrace.

“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “You were closer to him than anyone. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Charlie nodded his appreciation. “I was closer to him than anyone, that’s true. But let’s not confuse that with knowing him well. Your grandfather was as eccentric as they come. He always kept his own counsel.”

A few shouts of concern drifted down from the crow’s nest. Beneath their feet, the two passengers felt the engines rev. The Real Doll arced to the left to avoid a shallow patch. Mossy rocks peeked up from the glassy surface of the sea, green sentinels guarding who-knows-what.

“21 years. You knew him best, and in 21 years he never contacted you?” Leo asked. There was a tendril of hope in his voice. Maybe Charlie had been holding out on him, had kept quiet at the behest of his strange and vanished friend. His grandfather was long dead now. What point would there be in keeping his secrets?

“Not once,” Charlie answered. Leo would have questioned that, but he heard the hurt in Charlie’s voice. He knew the old man was telling the truth.

“You ever wonder what life would have been like without him?” Leo asked. “The town, the contest, the chocolate wars. The money. What we all would have been if he’d sold insurance instead?”

“Yes,” Charlie answered gravely. “For you, your brother and sister, I cannot say. Your grandfather was many things, Leo, not all of them complimentary. But he was, like a Newtonian muse, a ball of potential energy. He was relentlessly happy, cocooned like that in the factory of his life’s work. All rampaging, joyful id. Without him, I would have grown out of imagination, out of wonder. These days, as I run inexorably out of time, I think about him a lot and what my life would have been without him.

“For you, he must seem like the strange old man in a fairy tale. An apparition in the foggy sea of your memory, not unlike our current, trusty conveyance. For me, he was my ticket to a better life. My strange, effervescent, unknowable, golden ticket. Everything I had, my whole life, I owe to him.”

In the years that followed, Leo developed the notion that Charlie had timed his speech. That Charlie knew something no one else aboard The Real Doll knew about the factory. Because as he made his point, a form materialized in the distance. The shouts from the crow’s nest came only after Charlie had stopped speaking.

A dark, oblong shape slowly coalesced into the remains of a grand factory. Beneath it, a barge kept the building afloat on the always-calm waters of the Vague Sea. As the ship drew closer, Leo could see the letters wrought in the rusty iron gates: WW.

“We worked so hard to separate ourselves from him,” Leo confessed. “Left town. Changed our last name. We abandoned everything except the money.”

“That was your mother,” Charlie said in gentle accusation.

“Yeah.”

Leo leaned down and unzipped the duffel bag. From within, he extracted a long, tattered purple jacket. He patted it idly as the ship drew ever closer.

“It’s strange that after a lifetime of living rich off his hard work, the only thing of real value I have is his old jacket,” Leo said.

“Put it on,” Charlie urged. With a nod, Leo did. His hair danced in the wind, the coat flitted around his ankles, and for a moment Charlie thought he was looking back in time at another man entirely.

“You have something else of his, I think,” Charlie said.

“What’s that?”

Charlie dug into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. It was the same length and width as a chocolate bar and it was once, many years ago, a glittering gold. Charlie handed it to Leo without a second thought.

“Imagination.”

Leo felt a welling of something in his chest. He’d never actually seen one of the tickets. After all this time, he’d thought it might have been just a myth, a fun extrapolation of the old tale. He lifted the dulled paper to his nose and breathed deep the scent of chocolate. And nuts. And sugar. And bubblegum. And the infinite possibility of imagining something new.

Maybe he knew more of his grandfather than he’d realized.