When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  “That’s why you want to go? To hang out with the ghost of Hemingway?”

  “It’s not the reason why. More like a second reason why not to not go.”

  “And what’s the first reason?”

  “The girl, of course. Emma.”

  “Okay,” Jayme said. “You want to talk about Morrison’s actions, his motivations, any of that?”

  “I don’t need to. But we can if you want to.” He sliced his beef enchilada in half, lifted up one half with his knife and fork and laid it on Jayme’s plate.

  “None of that matters to you?”

  “None of it makes me feel any less compassion for the girl. Or for her mother, for that matter. The woman is reaching out. In desperation, I think.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

  Okay, she could buy into that. Knowing that you know without knowing how you know. It happened to her all the time. Yet when it came from somebody else, she craved more information. More words.

  She tasted the enchilada. “This is good. You want to try mine?”

  He reached across to her plate, used his fork to cut off a piece of chicken, speared it and stuck it in his mouth. “I prefer the spicy version,” he said.

  “You think she’s so sick that she’s searching for a father for her child before she dies?”

  “She’s fearful of something. Why didn’t she write the letter? Why didn’t she call the judge and the other men and speak to them personally? Why didn’t she send an email? Why encourage a child to send a personal note in a child’s words and a child’s handwriting?”

  “You think she’s being manipulative?”

  He smiled. “Everything a person does is manipulative, isn’t it? Every kiss, every handshake, every kind or harsh word. It’s what we do, who we are. Some of us are better at it or more obvious or more deceitful than others. But we all do it.”

  “Is that supposed to be an answer, Ryan? Do you expect me to read your mind? Are you just playing with me here or what?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe,” he said, and gave her a shove with his shoulder.

  “Babe, please. Let’s figure this out. A smiling Buddha just isn’t going to do it tonight, no matter how sexy you look when your eyes crinkle up like that.”

  “That was the name of India’s first successful nuclear test. Operation Smiling Buddha.”

  “You’re going to make me go nuclear if you keep this up.”

  “Love you madly,” he said.

  “Arrrgh!” She took a drink of water. Dragged a chip through the salsa and popped it into her mouth. Chewed and swallowed. “Okay, practical issue,” she said. “The car will get us to Michigan a lot faster than the RV, and a lot cheaper. Flying will get us there even quicker.”

  “RV, baby,” he said.

  “That’s a whole day of driving. Aren’t you supposed to avoid opportunities to get a pulmonary embolism?”

  “I’ll do laps in the aisle while you drive. We’ll be fine.”

  “What about Hero?”

  “He’ll love it. Our first vacation together. I wonder if dogs are allowed on Mackinac Island. I know cars aren’t.”

  “Ryan,” she said, “Morrison and his friends want us to spy on a little girl and her mother. What are we supposed to do—steal a lock of Emma’s hair while she’s sleeping?”

  “Hair is unreliable.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re okay with all of this discretion, as he calls it?”

  Again he shrugged. “Things happen when they’re supposed to happen.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t an investigation by its nature discreet?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it means, darlin’. Everything means what it means.”

  She still hadn’t gotten used to his all’s right with the world attitude. His docility. His Zen-like koans and cosmic truths. She believed that he believed that he had had an authentic near-death visit to the astral plane, but so much of it had been troubling to her, even frightening. Pain is still pain, loss is still loss, death is still death. She wished she could experience his equanimity for a while, just to see how it felt. But what if it was all a delusion? What if something had been damaged in his brain, and he never recovered from it?

  He chuckled.

  “What?” she said.

  “Your tension is like a feather tickling my nose.”

  “My what is what?”

  “Relax, baby. You have a nice plate of free food in front of you. We have an offer of a free vacation with very little effort involved. And we have each other. All’s right with—”

  “Don’t you say it,” she interrupted.

  Again he chuckled. “Sei bellissima,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “Everything happens for a reason.”

  That was precisely what Lathea, the psychic she had visited prior to her miscarriage, had said. But DeMarco hadn’t heard that conversation, hadn’t been in the room at the time, and Jayme had never repeated it to him. She had been skeptical when Lathea said it, was even more skeptical now. This man beside her—who was he? Where was her DeMarco?

  “Hold on a minute,” she told him. “If everything happens for a reason, and everything is as it’s supposed to be, why should we do anything at all? Why should we even worry about Emma and her mom if everything is as it should be?”

  And for a moment, then, his eyebrows knitted together, his lips pursed, and he looked troubled. But soon his forehead smoothed and a little smile relaxed his mouth. “Everything is as it’s supposed to be at that moment. But change is the rule, the guiding principle. All is flux. All is refinement, correction, rectification. And that, my love, is the reason for everything. Change. And its potential for improvement.”

  She almost groaned out loud. Another cosmic truth. She needed to start writing these things down. They could publish a little book of them, the kind of book full of sappy sentiments that got sold in the Hallmark stores. She regarded him with her head cocked, her mouth a thin line of bemusement.

  God, how she wanted to throttle him. But she also wanted to believe him. Life as a beautifully choreographed dance, but one whose steps we write as we make them? She didn’t know whether he had awakened from his coma as a gentle lunatic or a shaman.

  He smiled as if he knew what she was thinking. Shrugged. Said, “We’re all just photons anyway. All clinging together in an illusion of matter. But that doesn’t make us any less real. These chili rellenos are really good. You want a bite?”

  She shook her head. Pondered the possibilities as he finished his meal. Then something moved to her immediate right and she caught it out of the corner of her eye. But there was a wall to her immediate right, the garishly painted mural static and unchanging. She studied the Hispanic Jesus’s face. That crooked smile, one eyebrow raised—why hadn’t she noticed that oddly taunting expression before?

  Eighteen

  When the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak

  Grandma Loey had showed Emma how to make the filling for graham cracker cookies by stirring canned condensed milk into a quarter cup of powdered sugar, then adding a few drops of artificial vanilla flavoring from the little brown bottle in the cupboard. After you spread the paste over one graham cracker and pressed another one atop it, you had to put the whole plate full of cookies into the refrigerator until the paste hardened a little. That way the paste didn’t drip out between the crackers when you dipped the cookie in milk.

  “We could have used chocolate syrup instead of vanilla if you had any,” Grandma Loey said. “I like chocolate better but this will have to do.”

  Grandma Loey lived somewhere back through the Manistee where Emma had never been, but now she was staying in the trailer with Emma, making sure she got a bowl of cereal in the
morning and got on the bus on time, though these were all things Emma did by herself and always had. But it was Saturday now and Grandma was watching Divorce Court on TV while the paste on the crackers hardened and Emma as usual had one of her library books spread open on her lap. Grandma Loey never wanted to play Tenzi or do a puzzle or anything interesting. Sometimes she would give Emma a nickel and let her do a couple of the scratch-off tickets but Emma never asked to do that anymore because her grandmother seemed to blame her when the ticket wasn’t a winner and they never were.

  “I don’t know how anybody can live without cable,” Grandma said. “Even I get cable. What kind of house don’t have cable in this day and age?”

  Emma sat there on the vinyl-covered banquette and smiled and said nothing and tried to keep reading, but in her mind she could hear her mother answering Grandma Loey’s complaint with, “We can’t afford cable, and besides TV will rot your brain.” It was what her mother always said, especially the we can’t afford it part. It used to make Emma mad to hear it all of the time but now when she thought of her mother she just wanted to cry, and she thought about her nearly all of the time, except for those moments when she could lose herself in one of the books from the school library. She had read all of the Goosebumps and Nightmares! and Holes books plus A Wrinkle in Time and the Narnia books and the first four Harry Potter books and everything else on the fifth-grade reading lists and half of the sixth’s. She was finishing fourth grade this year and planned to start on the seventh-grade reading list by summer. But first she planned to read Little Women again because it was her favorite book ever and one she never had to return to the library. Mrs. Wilkerson had given it to Emma to keep because “nobody but you has checked it out since 1992,” she’d said.

  Emma liked Beth best of the four March sisters and thought it would be nice to have a kitten and a piano someday. She always cried a little when Beth died, and after that part the rest of the novel wasn’t as interesting. She kept the book on her headboard and read several pages every night that the Gray Man came and stood in the corner of her room. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore because he never did anything but stand there and look at her, and by the time she was six she had learned that she could make him disappear just by turning on her ballerina light, which her mom had bought for her for $3 at a yard sale once. Whenever she wanted the Gray Man to go away she would turn on the light and read from Little Women for a while. Sometimes she could feel him there even after he disappeared but she didn’t care. He reminded her a little of James Laurence from the Little Women book, the kind old man who gave Beth March a piano. Emma imagined he would be nice to her too if he could but of course there isn’t much you can do when you are a spirit, her mother had said. There were some who could push things off a table or make a shiny penny appear at your feet, and there was one time, Emma’s mother had said, when the spirit of her grandfather had stepped in front of her as solid as a wall to keep her from getting hit by a car, but in most cases the spirits were limited to hanging around and moving light things like pennies and feathers and maybe now and then a fork. Her mother’s grandfather was one of the rare ones who could control matter, her mother had explained. Because it’s all about the power of intention and how much you really want something. Just like prayer, her mother had said. You have to want something very badly or prayer won’t work.

  Emma had been doing a lot of praying this past week, all of it asking for her mother to get better and come home. It didn’t seem to be working, though, which Emma couldn’t understand since there was nothing more in the whole world that she wanted as badly as she wanted that.

  Today Emma was trying to not think about her mother being sick by reading Eragon but she wasn’t able to concentrate on the book because Grandma kept the TV too loud. “Are we going to go see Mom today?” she asked. She liked sitting on her mother’s high hospital bed and being held close and sharing the dreams they had had since the last visit. Grandma would go down to the cafeteria for coffee or would probably go outside to smoke because Emma could always smell it on her afterward. And that was why she didn’t really care that Grandma Loey had “never been very big on hugging,” as she often said.

  In answer to Emma’s question about going to the hospital that day, Grandma didn’t even look away from the TV, not even for a quick little glance. “I am so tired of that place. It wears me down just being there.”

  It wore Emma down too. Always made her feel heavy and sleepy and sad to see her mother getting tired and weak just from lying there talking. Emma was never allowed to stay in the room very long and sometimes she had to wait a long time before a nurse would let her go into the room at all. Sometimes she could hear her mother screaming at the nurse and sometimes her mother would start talking funny or laughing at nothing at all. Still, Emma had never been away from her mother like this before, the two of them sleeping in different places. And Grandma Loey didn’t like sharing the bed the way Emma’s mom used to. Her mom never said, “Go on back to your own bed. You take up too much room, and I need to get some sleep.” Mom always just made room and tucked Emma in close to her. It made the days lonesome without her and the nights even lonesomer.

  Grandma Loey had come in her own little car eight days ago but she said she couldn’t afford the gas to drive to the hospital every day even though it wasn’t all that far. It was only nineteen miles away. Emma knew because she had watched the odometer during their first trip to the hospital. And at the end of that day, when they returned to the trailer, Emma had said, “Thirty-eight miles, Grandma. That’s how far it is to the hospital and back.”

  “Good lord,” Grandma Loey had said. “That’s two whole gallons of gas every trip we make. We need to cut down on going there too often.”

  Since then they had visited the hospital only twice, the last time four days ago for just a few minutes after school. Emma wished she hadn’t watched the darned odometer at all, hadn’t said a single word about it. She missed her mom so much. She had never before understood what a terrible ache it is to miss somebody. The whole body hurts like it’s coming down with the flu or something, but even worse. All Grandma Loey ever wanted to do was watch TV and complain about not having cable and not having anything decent in the house to eat. “I oughta start going to school with you and getting those free lunches every day,” Grandma said. “You don’t know how lucky you are to get a nice hot meal every day.” One day though when Emma got off the bus and came back home, the trailer smelled like hamburgers and French fries, and when Grandma was in the bathroom Emma looked in the trash can and found the Burger King bag all crumpled up with ketchup stains on it. Another day she smelled something sweet and found the little bag and paper tray the Taco Bell Cinnabon Delights came in. At Emma’s first visit to the hospital, where her mother had been for two days then, Emma’s mom had pulled her close and hugged her and asked Loey, “Is my baby getting enough to eat? Are you feeding her good, Mom?” And Grandma Loey said something like, “I’m doing what I can with what little you give me. You got another twenty in that purse of yours?”

  Emma liked to lie in the hospital bed with her mother while her mother kissed Emma’s head and stroked her hair. “When are you coming home, Mommy? I miss having you there.”

  “I miss you too, baby girl. Mommy’s trying to get better. I really am.”

  But on Emma’s second visit, her mother didn’t look any better. She looked even sicker than Emma remembered her. She was getting thin and her face was gray and on that visit she didn’t like it when Emma leaned against her too hard. “My skin’s just sore right now, baby,” she said. “It’s just sensitive is all.”

  “Why aren’t the doctors making you better?” Emma asked.

  “They’re trying, honey. There’s just not a lot they can do right now.”

  “Then you should come home with me and I’ll take care of you.”

  “I will, baby girl, I promise. I’ll be doing that pretty soon, I think. You
just keep praying and try to be patient for me, okay? I need for you to be patient.”

  There was another woman in a bed in the same room with Emma’s mom, and Emma didn’t like being around sick people she did not know. Maybe the other woman was who was making Emma’s mom sick and keeping her from getting better. If Emma’s mom came home Emma would open a can of chicken noodle soup and heat it in the microwave. She knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches too in the little black skillet.

  To her grandmother now, Emma said, “Can we take some of the graham cracker cookies to Mom today?”

  “I told you I’m spending too much money on gas for that. I’m not made of money, you know. Your mother only gives me so much. I can’t make it out of thin air.”

  Emma was doing her best to pray really hard and to be patient. But being patient wasn’t easy. Doing anything without Mommy in the house wasn’t easy. If she had a piano it might be easier, but where would they put a piano in a mobile home? If she had a kitten she would have somebody to hug anytime she felt like it. But now, on a day when she wasn’t in school, all she had was her grandmother, who didn’t like to hug and sometimes smelled of cigarettes, and who kept reminding her that she wasn’t too big for a good spanking, or that Loey had “took a switch to your mother more than once and I’m not too old to do the same to you.” Emma didn’t know what a switch was, so she’d asked her phone and finally found a definition that fit: “A switch is a thin branch cut from a tree, used for striking, often as corporal punishment.” There were a lot of trees around the trailer. It made Emma tremble just to look out the window and see all of those thin branches just waiting to be pulled down.

  One night when her grandmother seemed especially angry, Emma lay on her bed and prayed to the Gray Man to not let Loey go outside and grab a switch. Later that night the Gray Man showed up, just standing there watching her as he always did. But his face looked especially sad that night, and Emma understood that he was telling her with that face that he was just a spirit and couldn’t do much of anything about anything. She cried then but with her own face pressed to the pillow, because Grandma didn’t like the sound of her crying either.