Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  October zoned out for a moment. Then she said, “The truth is, there’s a part of me that knows I shouldn’t be having this conversation with you. And another part of me that feels, I don’t know, compelled. Like it’s essential. An inevitability. Or maybe I’m just crazy. All I know is that the day you walked into my studio, I almost burned my hand off with that blowtorch when I saw you.”

  “Why?” I asked, baffled.

  “Sometimes I meet people and I just know things about them.”

  “What did you know about me that day?”

  She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling. Then she looked at me again and said, “That you belong here.”

  I swallowed hard and felt the hair on my arms stand up.

  She picked a blackberry out of the pie pan with her fingers and ate it. Then she wrinkled her nose like she knew it wasn’t her best work. “Joe, I don’t know how you ended up seeing that post and calling about the job and walking in that day, but you did, and here we are, and I refuse to believe there’s not a reason for it.”

  I thought of Sam then, because if I believed in reasons and signs, then I had to believe they were from him. I had to consider the possibility that my brother had a hand in whatever this was.

  I stood feebly in place, trying to figure out what to do. I wanted to be the kind of guy who could saunter around to the other side of the counter and kiss October right then and there, but I wasn’t.

  Two minutes or an hour went by with both of us standing there, the kitchen counter between us, sipping at our brown recluses.

  October took her phone out again and said, “I want to play you a song.”

  I heard Sam’s voice whisper: Here’s your stupid sign, you shithead.

  “I don’t know why,” October said, “but this song reminds me of you.”

  The song started out with this sprinkly high hat/kick drum combo that was fast but slowly brooding at the same time. Then the first two lines come in, and they aren’t sung so much as they’re murmured with an aloofness that felt too close to home.

  Sorrow found me when I was young.

  Sorrow waited, sorrow won.

  A few seconds later the baritone singer starts repeating the line I don’t wanna get over you in a way that seemed more like foreshadowing than a sign.

  Listening to the song made me feel like October understood something crucial about me, something that lived deep inside my core, something she couldn’t possibly know. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. The fact that she played the song, and I understood why she played it, and perhaps she understood why she played it.

  Still, it all seemed too fantastic. Too risky. And I didn’t take risks.

  Because where could this possibly go? And if I blew it, then what? I’d be out of a job and an apartment, not to mention potentially brokenhearted to the point of no return.

  I don’t wanna get over you.

  I should have established boundaries right then. Refused to engage with her beyond our professional relationship. That’s what I’d sworn to do before she came over. Nothing is going to happen between us, I told myself. I’m her employee. She has a boyfriend. She’s successful and extraordinary and I hate myself. This could never work.

  I don’t wanna get over you.

  She put her hand on top of mine, stared hard at me, and sighed. “This won’t affect our work, I promise. I just had to get it off my chest. You can forget we had this conversation if that feels like what you need to do.”

  She came around to the other side of the counter and hugged me. It was a deliberate hug: sincere, innocent, full of heart. Then she put her hood back up and walked to the door.

  The dialogue in my head went like this: Don’t say another word. Let her go.

  Then I remembered I was supposed to be a new and improved Joe Harper, and I tried to imagine what Cal would say if he were there to give me advice.

  “Go for it, Harp.”

  Maybe it was the tequila. Maybe it was something else. A tiny burst of courage? My authentic self taking over? My truth? My destiny?

  Even if I wanted to forget the conversation, I knew I never would.

  “Hey,” I said.

  October turned around, one foot already out the door.

  “Do you want to hang out tomorrow night?” I mumbled. “Maybe we could go for dinner or something?”

  I could see a subtle smile like the crest of a wave trying to break across her face. She bit her lip to hold it back and nodded.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Cool.”

  SIX.

  When I was a kid, I thought trees were gods. It’s hard not to when the forests that surround your town are full of ancient redwoods that stretch like divine monuments so far into the sky you can’t tell where the canopies of the trees end and the heavens begin.

  The day I met Cal I was on one of my favorite trails near Muir Woods, having a conversation with a redwood I’d named Poseidon.

  If you’ve never stood beside a redwood, this might not make sense, but trust me when I say they’re immense, awe-inspiring, and majestic. Arboreal skyscrapers, they put you in your place and remind you how small and insignificant you are. They’re living testaments to resilience, and proof that there is poetry in nature.

  I’d named this particular tree Poseidon because its trunk was hollowed out at the base, so huge I could stand inside of it, and when I did I swore I could hear the ocean, even though the beach was another five miles away.

  Given that I’ve already admitted to having conversations with my dead brother, and now I’m admitting that my closest living confidantes were trees, I feel the need to state, for the record, that I wasn’t crazy. I just spent a lot of time alone. And trees, like music, have always been good at keeping me company.

  If I’m trying to make a case for my sanity, I probably shouldn’t admit this next part either, but on the particular day in question, I was discussing with Poseidon how I could kill Bob Harper and make it look like an accident.

  Listen, my father issues are a long story, and I don’t feel like getting too deep into them—there are enough sons in the world who blame their emotionally or physically unavailable dads for their problems. But I’m in my late thirties now, and that means I’m old enough to know I can only blame myself for where I am. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting a few significant details that include Bob and Ingrid and their shortcomings as parents.

  First, after my brother died, I stopped talking for two years. I can’t explain why, except to say that it seemed too exhausting to use words after I lost Sam. It felt even more exhausting to use words that expressed what I was feeling. I tried, but nothing came out. And the longer I didn’t talk, the easier it became to remain silent.

  My silence was hard on Bob and Ingrid, and in the beginning they were sympathetic. I guess they figured that once I came to terms with what had happened to Sam, I would go back to being a normal kid. But months went by and I stayed mute and weird, and Bob’s patience ran out.

  He dragged me to a bunch of therapists, but none of them helped. After the therapists came a slew of medical doctors who assured Bob there was no physical reason I couldn’t speak. That’s when what was left of his sympathy turned to anger. I’m sure it was me he was mad at, but he took a lot of it out on Ingrid, and the following year they split up.

  Ingrid and I stayed in the Mill Valley house, and Bob moved to a dark, three-story houseboat in Sausalito. He lived less than ten miles from us, and he and I were supposed to spend every other weekend together, but by the end of June I hadn’t seen him once since school let out over a month earlier.

  I don’t think he liked being around me, and I couldn’t blame him. Who wants to be around a sullen kid who doesn’t talk? Bob would ask me questions and I would just stare at him. Then he would blow his top, grab me by the shoulders, and try to shake the words
out of me, shaking so hard I could hear cracks and pops in my neck and back like I was being adjusted by some kind of lunatic chiropractor.

  When that didn’t get me to open up, Bob would shout about how hard he worked and ask me why I didn’t understand that all of it was for me and Sam, and now that Sam was gone, I was all he had. “Why can’t you appreciate all I do for you, Joseph? I’m building you a business. Setting you up for life. And this is the thanks I get?”

  Bob owned and operated a successful construction company called Harper & Sons. He built McMansions all over the Bay Area and made shitloads of money, and because that was all he cared about, he assumed it was all the rest of us cared about too.

  Even when Sam was alive, Bob wasn’t an especially pleasant guy to be around. One of Bob’s most prominent traits was that he didn’t think he was ever wrong. Domineering and brusque, he was that guy at the table who would say a thing was black even if he knew it was white, just to start an argument.

  I didn’t have the nerve to challenge Bob, but Sam would spout off and call bullshit on him all the time, which you would think would piss Bob off, but it had the reverse effect. Bob believed it meant Sam knew how to be a leader. He used to tell his friends how Sam was a bull and was going to take over the business one day.

  I was what a nice person might call a sensitive kid: shy, awkward, and generally nonconfrontational. Bob often referred to me as a pussy.

  Taking all of these factors into consideration, I didn’t care that Bob was avoiding me because I didn’t want to be around him any more than he wanted to be around me. Except that I did. That’s the rub for all kids with shitty parents, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. You only hate them because you love them and you want them to love you back. And never was that truer than the Saturday in question, because it wasn’t any old Saturday, it was my birthday, and Bob had promised to hike from Mill Valley to Muir Woods with me to celebrate.

  When Bob was in college, before he started working in construction, he’d been obsessed with trees too. He’d moved to California from Spokane to study Forestry at UC Berkeley and could identify every tree and plant he saw, no matter where we were. Ingrid maintains it’s the greatest gift my dad ever gave me: my love of trees. And it’s why I loved hiking with him. When we were still a family, he and Sam and I would spend hours on the trails every weekend, exploring, foraging, and investigating the forest. Bob was a different person when he was in the woods. He was funny and patient, and all the good memories I have of him are from those times.

  Bob and I hadn’t hiked together once since Sam’s death, and I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

  Twenty minutes before he was supposed to pick me up, the phone rang. The answering machine clicked on and I stood beside it, listening to Bob leave a message about how there was a running race happening on Bridgeway and a bunch of streets were blocked off and it was going to be a nightmare for him to make it over to Mill Valley and yadda yadda yadda, he was sorry but he wasn’t coming.

  “We’ll go before the summer’s over,” he said. “I promise.”

  I picked up the receiver and slammed it down as hard as I could. The asshole never even wished me a happy birthday.

  And he wasn’t fooling me. He lived one measly town south of Mill Valley, and sitting in a little traffic in order to spend time with your kid on his birthday didn’t seem like too much to ask.

  Over the years, being lonely has become the standard for me. It feels normal now, like a bad leg wound that turned into a permanent limp, and I accept it. But back then loneliness was a new, excruciating state of being, and there were only two things that made me feel less alone. One was playing guitar and the other was being in the woods, and that day I opted to spend my time doing both. I was going to hike as planned, and I was going to take my guitar with me, Bob Harper be damned.

  I had filled my backpack with what Bob told me to pack when he thought he would be coming: two turkey sandwiches, a couple cans of Dr Pepper, iced oatmeal cookies, and a canteen full of water.

  When I realized Bob wouldn’t be accompanying me, I added my portable CD player, a couple CDs, and a small notepad and pen, in case I got lost and had to ask for directions. Then I grabbed my guitar and headed out.

  The beginning of the trail was a ten-minute walk from my house, and from there it was another mile to where I wanted to eat. When I finally got to the spot, my arm was sore and tired from lugging the guitar all the way there. I sat at an empty picnic table near Poseidon, took everything out of my pack, and set it up like I was having a party.

  I was trying to pretend that it was fine for a kid to celebrate his birthday by himself, but my heart hurt like someone had hammered nails into it, and when I inhaled it felt like my breath had nowhere to go, like I could suffocate from all that solitude. That’s when I started fantasizing about killing Bob. I figured if he died I could forgive him for ditching me on my birthday.

  The best idea I could come up with—and by “best” I mean the idea that seemed least likely to look like foul play—was pushing Bob off the deck of his houseboat. It was built right over the water and had a simple wooden railing that was designed to let the view of the bay and city in but, if tampered with, would not be good at keeping an asshole father from falling out. And if he fell at low tide in only a couple inches of water, it would be like hitting cement.

  The problem with my plan was that when I pictured what Bob’s body would look like after they pulled it out of the water, it didn’t satisfy my desire for revenge at all. Instead it made me think of Sam, and I forced myself to get off that train of thought before I felt even worse.

  I drank some Dr Pepper to settle my stomach, took off my shoes and socks, and got out my guitar—I always play guitar barefoot, no matter where I am or what the temperature. I feel more connected to the earth when my feet are touching the ground. More deeply rooted. Like a redwood.

  I started strumming an old Tom Petty tune that I’d just learned, and when I got to the chorus I heard a voice behind me singing the words.

  I looked back and saw Cal on the trail down below. He was standing maybe ten yards away, his head raised toward the sky, and from where I sat it appeared as though he was staring directly into the sun.

  I recognized Cal right away. Well, not by name, but I had seen him twice before, both times at the record store in Mill Valley.

  It was hard not to notice Cal. He was extra tall for his age, reed thin and willowy, with fine, wispy yellow hair that made him look like a stalk of wheat blowing in the wind. He had a narrow face and these little round, crafty eyes that reminded me of the great gray owls Bob and I went looking for once in Yosemite. And that day he was wearing the only thing he wore the whole summer—a navy blue sweatshirt and a pair of cutoff denim shorts that his hipbones could barely hold up, with two drumsticks sticking out of his back pocket.

  I quit strumming and he said, “That sounded rad.” He slid onto the bench across from me. “I dig that song.”

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out the CD.

  “You have the whole album?”

  I nodded, though it actually belonged to my mom’s boyfriend, Chuck, who was twenty-seven, had a perpetual tan, and worked as a trainer at the gym where she took exercise classes. Chuck was basically living at our house, and he called me Mutant Joe when my mom wasn’t within earshot. I was pretty sure he was trying to make a joke about how I was mute, but he was too stupid to know that the word “mutant” wasn’t some adjectival version of “mute,” and if I hadn’t actually been mute, not to mention timid beyond reason, I would have called him stupid to his face. Instead I wrote the word “rebound” on the notepad in the kitchen every morning, which made my mom laugh; back then, not much made Ingrid laugh, so I kept doing it.

  I remember wanting to invite Cal to eat lunch with me, but I figured he was too cool to say yes. Even back then I had a sense that certain people
were out of my league.

  Luckily, Cal was sure of himself in a way kids that age rarely are, and he didn’t need an invitation. He looked at all the food on the table and said, “What’s with the spread?” Then he noticed the Dr Pepper and said, “Can I have one of those?”

  He grabbed the can, opened it, and waited for the foam to fizz out over his hand. Then he drank the whole thing in seconds, an achievement that culminated in a long, loud burp, for which he took a bow.

  I watched him, and that’s when he began looking at me suspiciously, as if he were waiting for something—probably words—to come out of my mouth. The longer the quiet lingered between us, the more puzzled he seemed.

  I swallowed hard and looked down at the table, embarrassed and now wishing he would go away.

  But instead of laughing or calling me a freak or threatening to beat me up like most of the kids at school did, he leaned over and said, “You all right?”

  That was a hard question to answer.

  “Say something,” he prodded.

  I stared at him.

  “Can you say something?”

  I shrugged. That was an even harder question to answer.

  Cal reached over and picked up my guitar, watching me carefully, as if I were a stray dog that might bite him.

  After examining the guitar, he handed it back to me and said, “Play something else.”

  I looked down at the neck and started playing “Big Love” by Fleetwood Mac. It was a hard song and the one I often used to warm up because it required a lot of finger picking, plus some flamenco and classical stuff.

  When I was done, I set the guitar on my lap and looked at Cal. His jaw was agape. “What are you, like, twelve? How is it possible you can play like that?”

  I was small for my age, and people always thought I was younger than I was. I took out my notepad and wrote I’m 14.

  “Me too,” Cal said.

  Wow woulda guessed 17, I wrote. Thought u were older.