Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  “I like it,” I told her. What I meant was I liked who I was in her eyes.

  My coffee had gone cold, I went to get a refill, and when I returned to the table a young man who said his name was Finster had taken the seat beside October. Finster had no food or beverages in front of him and claimed he had been a lobster in a previous life.

  “I had a beautiful lobster wife and a lobster daughter,” he explained.

  Finster had broad shoulders like a swimmer, a square forehead, a square jaw, and wild, crystal-meth eyes.

  “We lived peacefully in the ocean for years,” he said. “Then one day my family got scooped up in a net and ended up in a tank in a seafood restaurant near the wharf.”

  I tried not to laugh. October listened politely, her chin in her palm, elbow on the table.

  “I watched my family get picked from the tank and cooked alive.”

  “I’m sorry . . .” October said.

  “I prayed for death,” Finster told her. “I wanted to end up on a plate too. I wanted to get chewed up and turned to shit like them. Instead I got rescued by a militant vegan who drove me back to the ocean and set me free.”

  That time I laughed out loud; October shot me a look.

  “A few days later I got snagged by a fisherman’s hook.” Finster curved his index finger into the shape of a “J” and hung it from his mouth to demonstrate. “Mort.”

  With obvious trepidation, October touched the man’s hand, and I saw her flinch when her fingers made contact, like whatever she felt was not good.

  “We should go,” I mumbled.

  October said she needed to wash her hands and wandered off to the bathroom. While I waited, Finster stared at me with deranged scrutiny, and I imagined he could see in me what I saw in him—blackness.

  “You miss her,” Finster said.

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s coming back.”

  “I know she’s coming back. She just went to the bathroom.”

  October’s sketchbook was still open on the table. Finster looked at the drawing and said, “It’s you. Without the rage.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where’s your rage come from? Daddy? Mommy?” He sniffed the air like a dog. “I can smell it.”

  I shut the sketchbook, stood up, and began to bus our table. Before I took the dishes away, Finster grabbed what was left of October’s egg sandwich and shoved it into his mouth.

  As we were leaving, Finster pulled on October’s sleeve and said, “Your sweatshirt is nice.”

  She was wearing her oversized gray hoodie. There was nothing especially nice about it, and October took it off and gave it to the guy.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “What if it gets cold later?”

  “I have a sweater in the car.”

  “He’s not a lobster,” Finster said to October, pointing at me as we were walking out the door. “You can’t catch him.”

  The redwoods along the highway start to get noticeably bigger after Willits, and October kept leaning her head out the window, trying to see their crowns. “Look at that one,” she would say, and I’d remind her that these were still the small trees.

  As we approached Avenue of the Giants, she asked to see the mushrooms. I reached behind my seat, grabbed them from my backpack, and handed them to her.

  “Wait,” she said. “I was literally expecting a bag of dirty mushrooms. These look like candy bars.”

  “My buddy Len isn’t kidding around. This is his art. He melts down high-quality chocolate, chops up the mushrooms, mixes it all together, and makes those by hand.”

  Each bar was a two-inch square, individually wrapped in metallic foil, with pretty paper labels on top. The labels had images of Hindu goddesses printed on the front and a Hunter S. Thomson quote on the underside that read: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

  “The one in the pink wrapper is dark chocolate with dried cherries. The gold wrapper is milk chocolate with honey. And Len wanted me to mention that he uses all organic ingredients.”

  October looked sideways at me, playful and flirty. “There’s two. One for you and one for me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see,” she repeated, mocking my deep, humorless tone.

  She smelled the bars and said, “I call the milk chocolate.”

  The “Welcome” sign near the entrance to Humboldt Redwoods State Park has a John Steinbeck quote on it, something about how the trees are ambassadors of another time, but October said it felt more like a prehistoric place where time stood still.

  “If a triceratops walked past me right now, it wouldn’t seem weird,” she said.

  The air smelled of dirt, bark, and moss, and inside that miasma I could taste the ocean. It was in the wind that blew over the hill from the Pacific and kept the earth soft and damp under our feet.

  We had decided we would hike around for a couple of hours, visit the specific trees we’d been talking about, and then find a motel where one or both of us would eat the chocolates. If all went well after they started to kick in, we’d go back out into the woods, let the magic unfold for a while, and at some point October would draw me again.

  We started down the trail, and as soon as October saw the wooden platform that led to Giant Tree, she ran toward it. When she got to the tree, she stretched her arms out and said, “Nice to meet you, sir. I’ve heard so much about you from my friend over there.” Then she looked back at me and said, “Joe, he’s magnificent.”

  “You look like a child next to that behemoth.”

  We walked deeper into the forest, October and I both petting random, unnamed redwoods as we went along.

  “Wow, look at this one,” she would say. Then we’d walk a few more feet. “And this one.”

  Near Drive-Thru Tree, I asked her to turn around so I could take her picture. She stepped back into the naturally carved out tunnel that ran through the middle of the tree’s trunk, raised her arms into the air, and smiled.

  That was one of only two photos I took of October back then. I must have looked at it a thousand times after I left California, and every time I did, I saw so much more than her face and body in it. I saw her spirit, the way she had seen mine. As if she were lit from within. Other times I looked at that photo and saw the future. I saw how careless I was with her. How stupid.

  She said we needed a pic of the two of us together and motioned for me to stand next to her. Then she gave her phone to an older man hiking nearby, and he snapped a shot of us side by side, October’s arm thrown around my shoulder, my hands deep in my pockets.

  We lost track of time in the forest, and the last tree we visited was the albino redwood. On our drive up that morning, I had predicted that Albino Tree would be October’s favorite.

  “You were right,” she said as we stood beside it.

  “Naturally. It’s the weird one.”

  “You’re calling me weird?”

  “I’m calling the tree weird. Then again, you once had me film you standing on your head reciting the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Touché,” she laughed.

  Albino Tree was tiny compared to the others—only about sixty feet tall—but it was exquisite, with white, frosty leaves due to its inability to make chlorophyll. Sometimes called the forest ghost, Albino Tree appears to glow when the light hits it just right.

  October said Albino was her spirit tree and contemplated filming it to use in a selfie. “Cool or dumb? I can’t decide.”

  “Cool,” I assured her.

  She nodded and proceeded to record a long, static shot of the tree, though why she trusted my estimation of cool is one of my life’s great mysteries.

  By the time we got back to the car it was after four, and we
still needed to find a place to stay and get some food before we were ready for the mushrooms. I drove us back toward the highway while October used her phone to look for nearby motels. She found a place in Miranda, right on Avenue of the Giants, promising quaint cottages in the middle of a forest. She called the number on the website and booked us a two-bedroom bungalow with a fireplace and a kitchen and told them we’d be there soon. After she hung up, she said, “Judging from the price of a two-bedroom cottage, I suggest we don’t get our hopes up for luxury.”

  I shrugged. I’d sleep in a muddy trench if it was surrounded by redwoods.

  We stopped at a dodgy convenience store down the street from the motel and picked up some snacks. It was slim pickings in there, and we made do with what seemed edible, which was limited to a bag of tortilla chips, a small lemon pie in a box, and two bottles of water. October suggested we get beer too, but I told her we weren’t going to want to mix alcohol with the mushrooms.

  As we were turning into the motel, October looked over at me and said, “Time for you to decide if you’re going to buy the ticket and take the ride.”

  I didn’t say anything as I pulled into a parking space next to the small office, where a “Vacancy” sign blinked in the window. I could see all the little cottages behind the main building, and a grove of redwoods behind that. October was right. It wasn’t luxurious. It was old and shabby and mundane. But there was something nostalgic about it. Something woefully charming.

  She was waiting for my answer, and I thought of what Cal used to say when I tried to convince him to get high with me.

  “Fine, fine,” I said, my bones tingling with both excitement and doom. “I’ll do it.”

  SIXTEEN.

  The old lady who checked us in called the place a resort and told us it had been built in 1929 for city folks looking for a quiet retreat in the forest. She had a spiky gray buzz cut and saggy triceps that hung like raw crescent rolls as she walked us around the grounds. First she showed us the pool, littered with leaves and sticks that had rained down from the trees, and then she pointed out a gate at the back of the property. The gate, she said, led to a trail that meandered through a small redwood grove. She gave us our key, which dangled from a keychain shaped like Giant Tree, and told us our cottage was the only one that still had the original wainscoting.

  Our cottage reminded me of the apartment where Cal and Terry had lived in Marin City, with its pine-green carpet and Walmart furniture. There was a double bed pushed up against the far wall in the living room, a smaller bedroom on the other side of the house, and a shared bathroom in between. Two pleather recliners sat across from the living room bed; a hexagonal dining table of wood veneer sat to the left of those. There were dark water stains on the ceiling tiles. The fluorescent lights were way too bright, even before we ate the mushrooms. The venetian blinds were covered in webs and dust. And they’d lied about the fireplace. There was no fireplace.

  “I told you it wasn’t going to be fancy,” October laughed.

  I went and got our stuff from the car and set it all on the table. We didn’t have much. I’d brought a backpack with my toothbrush and a change of clothes. October had a small duffle bag, her sketchbook and pencil case. And we had the food and water from the market.

  The cottage had a damp, musty odor, and the first thing October did was light an incense stick that instantly transformed the smell of the room from “dingy motor inn” to “woodsy bohemian den.”

  We hadn’t eaten since breakfast and contemplated snacking before we ate the mushrooms, but from what I recalled they were more potent on empty stomachs.

  October sat on the bed in the living room, smiled apprehensively and said, “OK. Let’s do this.”

  I got the chocolates from my backpack and sat down across from her. I handed her the milk chocolate square and kept the dark one for myself. It was hard to get the foil off because some of the chocolate had gotten a little gooey in the afternoon heat of the car, but we managed to scrape it all out.

  I snapped my piece in two, put both halves in my mouth and ate them at the same time. October held hers in her hand and made a face.

  “Oh, no. You can’t paper-belly the mushrooms.”

  She laughed and said, “I’m scared.”

  I loved October’s vulnerable side. It made me feel useful. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Her expression softened as soon as I said that. She took one bite, chewed and swallowed, and then wriggled her nose and ate the rest.

  “Ticket bought,” she said.

  “Now, we wait for the ride.”

  “Let’s wait in the forest.”

  We made our way to the trail behind the resort. The hike down into the grove only took a few minutes and wasn’t as picturesque as we’d hoped. There were old tires and the blackened chassis of a car from the 1930s at the bottom of the hill, and huge stumps of old-growth trees that had been cut down among the new ones.

  “These are babies,” I said, touching random redwoods. “Less than a hundred years old, I bet.”

  It had been only about twenty minutes since we’d eaten the mushrooms, and I didn’t feel anything yet, but October’s were starting to kick in; I could tell because her pupils were beginning to take over her irises. Black and shiny, they looked like little vinyl records spinning in her eyeballs. And there were sharp, weather-bleached branches all over the ground that she thought were animal bones.

  We walked a little farther and came upon a creek. That’s when I noticed something starting to happen in me because I knew it was water I was looking at, but it didn’t look like water. It looked like Jell-O. I touched it and swore it felt rubbery and gelatinous like Jell-O too.

  Regrettably, I couldn’t think of Jell-O without thinking of the day Sam died, and I tried to push “Eject” on that memory before I got sucked down into it. The last thing I wanted to do on this trip was to take a wrong turn. Or worse, to bring October down with me.

  I tried to walk away from her because I didn’t want her to feel my darkening thoughts, but she was following too close behind, holding onto my arm, imploring me not to leave her alone and whispering that everything looked weird.

  I turned around, leaned against a downed tree, and asked October to stay where she was. She stood in place like I’d requested, but in this case she didn’t have to touch me to know something was wrong.

  “What?” she said, her face changing from amazed to concerned in an instant.

  I’d never spoken to her about Sam, but I was on the ride now, and the walls of impassivity I usually hid behind were crumbling.

  “The Jell-O,” I said, rubbing my face.

  “Jell-O?”

  “It was my fault.”

  She tilted her head to the side, and after a good twenty seconds of squinting at my face, she said, “What was your fault?”

  “My brother.” I started rambling, beginning with how Ingrid and I had been at Tam High to watch Sam’s swim meet. “He swam freestyle and butterfly and was good enough that his coach thought he’d be able to get a scholarship if he wanted one.”

  October’s eyebrows rose as if they’d been animated, and the air around her face started to look pink and hazy, like there was a summery filter over it.

  “Sam had this prerace ritual of eating raw strawberry Jell-O. He would rip open the packet, lick his finger, dip it in the powder and then lick it off, over and over, until his tongue and teeth were red and he was, as Ingrid used to say, bouncing off the walls.”

  October reached out for my hand, but I shook my head, pressed my palms hard into my temples.

  “Joe—”

  “No, just let me talk. Before we left the house that day, Ingrid handed me a packet of Jell-O and asked me to bring it to the meet. I was on the couch playing Mario Kart and set the Jell-O to the side. And then I forgot about it.”

 
I moved my palms to my eye sockets, pressed harder, and saw thick swirls of dark green and purple, like paint being splattered on a black canvas. When I lowered my hands, I was sure October had taken a step forward. She seemed too close.

  “About thirty minutes before Sam’s first event, he rushed over and asked for his Jell-O, but I didn’t have it. And he was so pissed at me. He huffed and cursed and stomped his feet. And you know what Ingrid said to him? She said, ‘Calm down, sweetheart. It’s not the end of the world.’ But it was. For him, it was.”

  October’s face was melting into so much waxy softness I had to look above her head to get away from it, and the same dark swirls that had been behind my eyes were now in the sky.

  “Joe, what happened?”

  “Ingrid gave Sam ten dollars and told him to run to the Safeway across the street to get his Jell-O. Naturally, I begged her to let me go too, because I was twelve and Sam was sixteen, and I wanted to do everything my big brother did. Ingrid told Sam to take me with him, and to get me a snack. I remember I had to stop to tie my shoe and Sam huffed and said, ‘Come on, Joey. You’re such a frickin’ turtle.’”

  October was still wide-eyed. Her body was twirling side to side as her hands went to her hair, and she began twisting her locks in circles around her fingers.

  “I followed after Sam fast as I could, yelling about how I wanted him to get me a Dr Pepper and some Doritos, but he was sprinting by then, not paying any attention. And he was a considerable distance ahead of me when he darted into the street without looking to his left or right.” I could feel the tears starting to roll down my face, and they felt automatic, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on my sorrow. “The driver of the Porsche didn’t see Sam until it was too late, but I saw the whole thing unfold from the top of the steps, and watching it was like watching a premonition come to life. What I mean is my point of view was wide enough that I knew the car was going to hit Sam before it did. I even shouted for Sam to look out, but by then the outcome was unchangeable. Sometimes the future gets locked into place and there’s nothing we can do about it except feel a powerless sense of regret, you know?”