by Jeff Zentner
Jesmyn stealthily maneuvers her hand next to mine. I catch her eye. When Melissa and Pierce are both looking forward, she reaches out with her pinky and taps mine twice. Hey. You good?
I give her two taps back. No. Not really. But I’ll pretend I am until my facade crumbles completely and I’m naked in front of all of you.
Technically Hara and I haven’t broken up. We say we’ll stay in touch after her family moves to Chicago, blah blah blah, but come on. We’re sixteen. We’re not going to be spending weekends together. So, yeah, we’re pretty much broken up the minute I watch her family’s moving truck fading from view.
So I’m lonely. To the point that I don’t even want to text any of Sauce Crew to hang with me because I’m so afraid of being rejected. Georgia’s out with her boyfriend. My parents are at some faculty thing for my dad’s job. I sit in my room and try to get some writing done, but surprise, surprise, I’m not making any headway.
The doorbell rings. It’s Eli.
“Dude, you look like ass.” He walks in before I can invite him.
“Your mom’s ass,” I mumble.
“You look way worse than my mom’s toned ass. So? How you doing?”
“She left a little while ago. So bad.”
“Figured.” With a smirk, he pulls three Netflix DVDs from his hoodie pocket and fans them like he’s holding a winning poker hand.
“What’re those?”
“Horrendous French horror movies. People getting skinned alive and stuff. To cheer you up.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.”
“But no way can we watch these here. If my parents or Georgia come home, we’re boned.”
“I didn’t plan on watching them here. I came to pick you up because I figured your sensitive-poet-ass self would be too heartbroken to drive.”
I smile for the first time that day and flip Eli the bird.
He grins, stuffs the DVDs in his hoodie pocket, and flips me both birds.
“Let me grab my jacket,” I say.
“Grab five bucks too, because you’re not sharing my Roma’s.”
“Don’t you ever consider Roma’s a ripoff even at five bucks?”
“Clearly not, dude. How shitty can pizza be?”
“Roma’s is the laboratory working on the answer to this question.”
Eli spreads his arms wide. “ ’Ey! Why-a you sayin’-a bad things-a ’bout Roma’s, eh? This-a spicy pizza been in my-a family for-a generations, eh?” He makes that Italian kissing motion with his fingers.
“You are the biggest chode.”
“You love this chode. Okay, less talking. More jacket getting. More Roma’s getting. And more French-torture-porn watching.”
For the most part, you don’t hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.
At some point during the drive, without my even noticing (shockingly, my mind was elsewhere), the sky has turned to dreary slate. By the time we reach the Fall Creek Falls parking lot and trailhead, it’s begun to drizzle in that misty way where you’re getting wet but it doesn’t justify using an umbrella. It means the parking lot is empty. And that’s good, because the last thing any normal human needs is to encounter our happy-go-lucky little band of merry travelers scattering Eli’s sand at the falls.
“Well, here we are,” Pierce says to nobody in particular, staring off. He puts up the hood of his parka against the rain. “Have either of you been here before?”
Jesmyn and I shake our heads.
“The first time we brought Eli here was when he was nine,” Melissa says. “He was utterly captivated. He loved that we could hop in our car and drive a couple of hours and see something this majestic.”
Pierce laughs. It’s a hollow, rueful laugh, but it’s clearly not meant to be. “Starting in junior high, he and I used to take father-son weekend trips to western North Carolina. We’d get a hotel in Asheville and spend our days hiking to waterfalls. We used to talk about all kinds of stuff.” He pauses. “But obviously not everything.”
Pierce takes Eli’s jar from Melissa, and we begin picking our way gingerly down the slick, muddy trail. Pierce leads the way. Melissa follows behind a few paces and then Jesmyn and I lag still farther behind.
“Never really seen those two like this,” I whisper to Jesmyn.
She shakes her head. “I’ve seen them fight about stuff, but in a more…loving way, I guess.”
“This must be really hard on them.”
“Can’t blame them.”
“No.”
Jesmyn stumbles on a root and pitches forward a couple of steps. I’m there at her elbow. “Thanks,” she says.
Almost immediately, I slip on a drift of soggy leaves. Jesmyn’s hand snaps to my triceps, steadying me. I glance at her. “Karma.”
The treetops are shrouded in mist, gray lace hanging tattered. Wind moves through branches with a sound like waves breaking on a beach. A beach in November.
I wonder if you ever get to feel the rain in prison.
“This day reminds me of a black-metal album cover,” I say. “Perfect for Eli.”
After a couple of moments, Jesmyn says, “This is how Eli’s voice sounded. Rain on pine trees in October. Dark and green and silvery.”
With a sharp twinge, I remember her joking (at least I hope it was) response when I asked her what color my voice was. I don’t get to wallow in my hurt long before I notice her shivering. Her jacket isn’t made for rain. I pull off my waterproof parka. “Here.” I drape it over her shoulders.
“Dude, no, I’m fine. You’ll be cold.”
“I’m okay. I have my hoodie.”
“You sure?”
I make sure Pierce and Melissa are far ahead. “I don’t need any more friends dying.” It’s a dark joke, sure. But Eli dug dark jokes, so I guess he wouldn’t mind. Jesmyn’s face says she doesn’t.
When we round the bend to the waterfall, the wind has intensified and the mist has thickened.
Pierce and Melissa stand a few feet apart at the edge of the pool, watching the roaring waterfall cascade into it. Jesmyn and I quietly join them. It’s beautiful and terrible standing there. Being close to waterfalls always reminds me of how tiny, fragile, and finite I am.
Melissa clears her throat. “So—I’m not sure how to go about this. I’ll do what feels right to me and I hope it’s okay.”
We nod.
She goes to Pierce, who opens the jar. She pours out a handful of the sand and holds it in her palm for a moment. The mist from the waterfall and drizzle quickly saturate it and it runs down her wrist in rivulets, dripping like rainbow tears. She covers her eyes and nose with her free hand. Her lips tighten and tremble.
She steps toward the pool. “When Eli was four, he used to come into our room on Saturday mornings and climb up on our bed. Then he’d whisper, ‘Banana,’ in my ear really loudly. We finally started leaving a bowl of bananas out where he could help himself. We called him our little monkey. Our little Curious George.” Her voice sounds like it has a sack of stones resting on it. She steps forward again, crouches, and dips her hand into the pool, letting the water carry the sand away in a bloom. “Goodbye,” she whispers.
Pierce pours out a handful of sand from the jar. He holds it for a moment, watching it run and drip as it absorbs the rain and waterfall mist. He starts to say something but stops. He tries again and stops. “All day, every day, I study and teach the history of things. Human lives laid end to end. One generation handing the torch to another generation. Fathers to sons. Unbroken threads running through it all. And—” He stops and clears his throat a couple of times. “Now I’m standing here, writing the final chapter of my son’s portion of the history of my life. I never imagined that my history would include the full history of my son, start to finish. But it does now.”
He walks to the edge of the pool and kneels. He low
ers the sand into the pool as Melissa did. He stands and rejoins us. He talks to us without looking at us. “There’s a water cycle. Water never goes away. It never dies or is destroyed. It just changes from form to form in a continuous cycle, like energy. On a hot summer day, you’ve drunk water that a dinosaur drank. You might have cried tears that Alexander the Great cried. So I’m returning Eli’s energy—his spirit—and all that it contained. His life. His music. His memories. His loves. All the beautiful things in him. I give it to the water so he can live that way now. Form to form. Energy to energy. Maybe I’ll meet my son again in the rain, or in the ocean. Maybe he hasn’t touched my face for the last time.”
Melissa turns to Jesmyn and me with the jar. “If you want.”
Jesmyn and I trade a quick glance. She swallows hard and steps forward. She pours out a handful of sand, staring at it like she’s looking for some part of Eli she recognizes. “I loved his hands. They were strong and gentle and filled with music. I loved when he would hold my hand. I loved making music with him.” Her voice is small against the churning waterfall. She lowers the sand into the pool.
Melissa offers the jar to me. Pierce stares at the ground. My hand shakes as I take a handful of the sand and hold it, staring at it. My heart beats a familiar barrage, bringing a familiar constriction of breath. Not now. Not now. Not now. I breathe it down. The other three stare at me expectantly. I clear my throat. “Um. Once—we were a little sleep deprived—Eli and I started talking about what emotions and memories are, physically. How every emotion and memory is stored as chemicals in our brain. Love, anger…regret—they’re all chemicals. And chemicals can break down and spoil if you don’t store them in the right way. So I’m storing the chemicals that make Eli in the safest part of my brain, locked away where they can’t spoil. But not so locked away that I can’t get to them every single day.” I lower my portion of Eli into the pool, the frigid water biting at my hand.
We take turns, each putting a handful of sand into the pool while reciting something we loved about him.
He was effortlessly funny.
When he was sad, he never used it as an occasion to make anyone else sad.
He smelled like clean, plain soap.
He closed his eyes when he played the guitar.
He played the guitar like he had been entrusted with a sacred fire.
He was ferociously intelligent.
He worked tirelessly to make himself better at what he loved doing.
We do this until Eli’s sand is gone to the water.
Each time it’s my turn, my mouth says one thing while my mind whispers another: I’m sorry.
Although we’re soaked and shivering, we stand, still and silent, around the edge of the pool and watch the waterfall. Melissa holds the empty jar to her breast as if it’s an infant she’s feeding one final time.
Jesmyn pulls her hands into the sleeves of my parka. Her face is soft in the veiled light. She has that look of wonder I saw on her face when she watched the storm, tempered this time by sorrow.
In this guileless raw moment, it’s as though the rain has washed scales from my eyes that kept me from seeing; from understanding clearly.
I thought what I felt for her was ordinary fondness and affection, heightened by her being my only friend. I thought the ache when she talked about Eli was ordinary guilt and grief, heightened by the magnitude of my loss and my culpability. It is none of those things.
I have fallen in love with her quietly. A movement evading my notice. The sun crossing the sky. It crept into my heart like vines overgrowing a stone wall. It caught me like a river rising and swelling.
Maybe love, like water, returns to some unending cycle, only changing form.
There is the space of a heartbeat when I don’t contemplate the consequences of this, and to hold something so verdant and alive amidst the gray and ashen makes me feel right again, as if perhaps sometimes what seems like walking into a sunset is really walking into a dawn.
Just a heartbeat.
A chirping of bright voices coming down the trail snaps us out of our reflection. We head up toward the parking area. Pierce first. Melissa next. Then Jesmyn. Then me. We nod as we pass the effervescent hikers, slipping down the trail, giggling.
But it’s a momentary distraction to what’s now consuming me as I watch Jesmyn ahead. You can’t love her. You can’t love her. You can’t love her. You just dissolved Eli’s creative energy in water like Kool-Aid. You have no right to love her. You can’t love her.
She turns, as if sensing my stare on her back. “I’ll remember a bunch of stuff later I wish I’d said.”
She waits for me to catch up so we can walk together. Pierce and Melissa are waiting at the trailhead.
“I need to use the ladies’ room before we hit the road again,” Melissa says. She and Jesmyn head for the women’s restroom.
“Might as well too,” Pierce says. He and I head to the men’s restroom. We do our business and we’re washing our hands in the sinks, side by side. He catches my eyes in the mirror. His are dim and gray and sunken in his skull.
“I’m glad we have a second or two alone,” he says. “There’re a couple of things I need to get off my chest.”
Naturally I want to shit myself. Good thing I’m near a toilet. I slowly turn off the water. “Um. Yeah.”
Pierce keeps looking at me in the mirror. He rubs his face. “I need to be frank with you, because I understand this to be a day for no bullshit.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not entirely at peace with your role in my son’s death.”
Hey, that makes two of us. And speaking of dying, that doesn’t sound bad right now. But I channel Dr. Mendez and listen, striving for his unruffledness.
Pierce continues. “By no means am I where Adair’s at. It wouldn’t give me any peace to see you prosecuted and suffer legal consequences. But, Carver. Did you have to text Mars when you did? I study historical cause and effect all day. Do you think it’s easy for me to get past this?”
My blood ticks in my chest, and I feel the something-heavy-sliding-off-a-high-shelf, but still, none of the compulsion to confess I felt with Nana Betsy and Dr. Mendez. Instead, I want to tell him about Billy Scruggs. About Hiro Takasagawa. Ridiculous. But I want to defend myself.
I open my mouth to try to speak.
Pierce holds my gaze in the mirror with his dolorous eyes. “Well?”
“I—I don’t—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
I start to edge toward the door.
He turns and looks me in the face, drawing so close I can smell his metallic breath—like he’s been sucking on pennies. His melancholy has melted off to a pale-blue fire. “Another thing I want to say. It’s fairly obvious that you and Jesmyn have grown quite close—more than you ever would have if my son hadn’t been killed. And I don’t have any authority to tell either of you what to do. But I would really love it if I never had to see or hear about you getting together with my dead son’s girlfriend. Because you at least deserve to not actively profit from his death.” His voice strains under some emotion I don’t even recognize. Maybe it has no name.
He doesn’t await a response but turns and leaves.
And the heavy thing slides off the shelf. The buried-alive-fallen-through-river-ice sensation seizes me like a giant, pneumatic steel claw. I sway on unsteady legs and grip the sink for purchase.
Air.
Air.
Air.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Breathe.
My legs are too wobbly. My bones and muscles are gelatin. I sink to the muddy (I really hope that’s mud) floor, leaning against a stall. I’m praying nobody comes in and sees me in this state.
Several minutes pass before I hear someone gingerly push open the door a crack.
“Carver?” It’s Jesmyn.
“Yeah?” I call feebly.
“How…you doing in there? You good?”
“Um…” Yeah
, I’m great; taking in the ambience. There’s a delightful bouquet in here. Earthy, mossy, with top notes of urinal cake and Pine-Sol. I can hear Melissa saying something to Jesmyn.
“For some reason,” Jesmyn says in a loud, deliberate voice, “these bathrooms reminded me of the first day of school.”
I’m not feeling especially quick, but at least I catch her meaning. “Me too.”
I hear Melissa saying something to Pierce. Perhaps: “He was fine before you two went in there together. Go in there and see what’s wrong.” Pierce responds, maybe: “Oh, come on, Melissa. He’s fine; having some privacy to ponder…stuff.”
I try to stand but slump down again.
“You alone in there?” Jesmyn calls.
“Yeah.”
“Are you…decent?”
“Yeah.”
The door opens and Jesmyn walks in. She gives me an oh-bless-your-poor-heart look and hurries to my side.
I manage a wan laugh. “Dignity, huh? Trying to beat my first-day-of-school record.”
“Well,” she murmurs, “you’ve traded smacking your head on the wall for filthy state park restroom floor.”
I’m glad she doesn’t tell me to breathe. In my growing experience with panic attacks, that’s rarely helpful advice since you’re unexcited about not breathing.
She helps me to my feet and stands at my elbow while I hold the sink, my head bowed. I manage to take a good breath or two. I have a sudden vision of Hiro, soaring above the Earth in his winged car. It’s weirdly soothing. My heartbeat is normalizing, and the splotches of black are dissipating from my field of vision.
“Wow. That sucked.”
“Did this happen to you on Blake’s goodbye day?”
“No.”
“What did he say to you in here? Or do you not want to talk about it?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“You wanna try to head out there?”
“Couple more minutes?”
She nods.
“Know any jokes?” I ask.
“I told my mom this scented candle she bought the other day smells like a handsome grandpa. I thought that was pretty funny.”
I smile. “It is.”