Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  Perhaps it occurred to me for the first time, then: I had no idea how to get from Illinois to California, or where I might stop on my way. I knew I would not return to Romania or Bangladesh or Chicago or Miami, but where exactly was I headed next? Already, I had a pile of letters, an in-box filled with emails, phone calls I had sent straight to voicemail that I could not bear to think of returning. After the local priest had given his lackluster eulogy for Katie, my sister-in-law’s mother had called him personally to chew him out. He said he was sorry that he could not do better. She said she was sorry that he had not tried. I was grateful for such attention. I wanted to be the object of anyone’s advocacy. I did not want to feel loved forever in sympathy. And yet, I wondered. Who would welcome my grief and look also with me beyond it?

  I don’t remember when I heard footsteps on the gravel. Someone was crossing from the clearing in the preserve. He might have stood there a good while watching me. The road ran nearly a half mile to the parking lot. Not a man but two friends turning the corner from the trail. My old friend Don stood on one side of me. Cait stood on the other. We made together a kind of sad lean at the place, into me but also with the slight suggestion, not quite a nudge, that we should step lightly away, catch ourselves, and begin in any direction, if only to catch up a little to the rest of the group. We walked like that very slowly, listening to the cars and the birds in the trees, of which there were so few as to constitute entirely an invention of song, a soundtrack to our unspectacular progress that we lacked a band to strike, until finally we saw them. What was it, maybe fifty people who had come to spread Katie’s ashes? Everyone was there, on the far path to the parking lot, walking in twos and threes, not so far away at all. I thought, I’m a part of that. I can still be a part of that. It was a little more than a mile’s walk. The path itself meandered as the full distance came gradually into view and then grew smaller by half, and half again. Katie’s family was at the front of the group, nearly to the entrance. My family walked at the back, more slowly.

  Three adjacent municipal baseball fields shared the parking lot. Lights on the diamond were warming up for the evening games, mostly dim bulbs still but a few brighter ones shining through the dusk. Simple patterns, the day’s first constellations. It had been so easy, all week, to make small talk, but in my relief to find a group there, in my gratitude to see my two friends, what could my strange ambition to leave Indiana mean to anyone else? I said the first thing that came to mind. California. I tried to smile. I hated imposing like that. I hated needing anyone’s sympathy. Years later, Cait would tell me that Don, so often irreverent, had asked her that night to make sure that I kept my promise. When the time was right, he told her, Cait should get me to California, if only for a quick visit. She agreed she would try to do it.

  *

  I can only describe the beginning, and try to describe it honestly—to narrow down the exact moment that an affection between Cait and me took root, and then name it, even if I’m not sure where that beginning really is. Was it that afternoon in the nature preserve? Was it six months later, when I flew out for Don’s California weekend, corralling old friends for dinners and walks across the city, only talking about Katie, hardly myself, heartsick for Indiana? Was it that same afternoon sixteen years ago that I had met Katie, when she and Cait and Don and I were all new Peace Corps volunteers together, standing in a circle in a hotel ballroom in Seattle, playing icebreakers and scanning the room for some sense of what the next two years might make us into, and with whom we might become it?

  What sticks in my memory now is a different afternoon. Late March. Almost nine months to the date after Katie had died. I have driven from Indiana to O’Hare Airport, on my way to visit my brother for the weekend. I am picking up Cait during her seventeen-hour layover, San Francisco to Chicago to Marrakech. Already, I know that I am moving to San Francisco that fall. Grief doesn’t feel quite so desperate still. On a whim, Cait calls to say that I should show her my beloved adopted city, which becomes instead a long picnic at my favorite spot on the lakefront, followed by a walk across campus. I drop her off at the airport to make her connection. She is flying halfway around the world to hike across Morocco with an ex-boyfriend. And yet I feel so happy for the day. Some incantation I refuse to say out loud. The future? No, that’s not right. I protest, again and again. I will have no interest in Cait, in anyone at all, in fact, until at least one year after Katie’s death. I mean to keep my chaste year with all the vigilance of the cloister. Still, I know, one day, it will only technically be true. However I still feel like Katie’s husband, I want to love again.

  In May I make my second trip to San Francisco. Cait is sort of dating my friend but sort of not. I stay in her apartment. In every way I can think to do so, I mean simply to remain present and hope for the best. Here is the tension I have not anticipated, not between Katie and Cait, or Indiana and California, but between the inevitable present moment of grief, which seems nearly at times to remit, and the uncertain future, into which any feeling might arrive to take its place. That future—however wonderful or awful, charmed or fated or blank—means to come all at once and, if I refuse it, may dissolve just as quickly back into nothing. Or so I believe. Really, I have no idea what it might mean to actually love again. The prospect is terrifying. It is absolutely thrilling.

  “A double-minded man is unstable in all his way.” James said that, about the gap between faith and charity. In California I walk my widower’s walk one last time. I stand at the window in Cait’s kitchen, watching the city. The light behind me makes a darkness. I know that Katie would have shrugged her shoulders and smiled at what I want to do. She would have reminded me that life is short, the world is precious, and wasn’t I the one who was always insisting that things like love and marriage last forever, that the heart is faithful and does not change? It certainly does not follow its whims; no, it distinguishes small affections from the stuff of true devotion. Katie knew that I didn’t know better. I think maybe she loved me for it.

  *

  It happened like this. It was May. I was visiting California, supposedly looking for an apartment to rent that fall. After a long night of drinking and talking about therapy and politics and Chicago music festivals, I made out with Cait’s roommate in the small guest room off her kitchen. We had stayed up late talking with her friends, then alone as we made pancakes, and after everyone else had gone home or to bed, we had danced to a song on the radio that she liked and I had kissed her. A few hours later, it was nearly morning. The whole Bay Area was sleeping through the end of a terrific heat spell. I had left the door to her room open to circulate the air. Cait was an early riser.

  “Won’t this be weird,” the roommate said, “when Cait comes into the kitchen and sees us lying here?”

  Cait and I had spent the day at her family home on the campus of the university where I would work that fall. I had met my new boss. I had bought a t-shirt with the name of the school printed on the front, and also a book of elegies by a famous poet. We had eaten dinner with Cait’s extended family, and when dinner had gone late, we had called her roommate to cancel our plans to all go salsa dancing. The whole drive home, I had stewed. Why hadn’t Cait taken her boyfriend on the all-day family tour that didn’t end in salsa dancing? What did I need with third aunts and fifth cousins if I wasn’t even the boyfriend, Cait’s boyfriend, who probably was salsa dancing with someone—with anyone—at that very moment?

  “Weird,” I said to the roommate, “how?”

  “You two have this history,” she said, “and I think Cait likes you. So, her feelings might get hurt.”

  “Cait likes me?” I said. The room was brighter now. The morning trams were running. “But she’s dating him.”

  “John,” the roommate said, smiling and looking right at me. “I mean, there’s dating, and then there’s dating.”

  I jumped out of bed and raced across the kitchen to Cait’s room. I checked the clock on the oven: 6:37 a.m.

  “Is it
okay if . . .” I said, waving my arms and nodding my head at Cait’s door.

  The roommate laughed.

  “You go get ’em, Tiger,” she said.

  I should go to bed, I told myself as I knocked on her door. I was supposed to leave in a couple of hours for my friend’s graduation from journalism school.

  “Cait,” I said, whispering through the door, “I was just making out with your roommate and I told her that I liked you and she told me that you liked me, too, so I think we need to talk.”

  Cait opened the door, confused, and asked if anyone had drowned. She had been dreaming that we—Cait, the roommate, and me—had all crashed together in a plane into the ocean. Now, she was sitting on the bed. She was wearing pajamas with a full collar that opened across her shoulders, showing high on her pale skin freckles, her long hair pulled to one side as she gathered herself at the edge of the bed, reaching out to hold my hand, fixing me with her blue eyes, a darker blue than Katie’s, her voice even, practical and full of feeling, her hands warm and steady. She liked me too. Of course, she liked me. But didn’t other things matter more right now, like Katie and the death anniversary? What about Katie? she asked. Didn’t I think it would be weird because of Katie? Wasn’t it all too soon? Cait didn’t want to be my consolation prize, and certainly not my rebound. She liked me too much for that. Maybe, she said, that fall, after I was settled, after I had left Indiana and found my own place in the city—maybe then, yes, we could take things slowly. I seemed sad, still, not so fragile but maybe not yet entirely whole. We were old friends, and who knew how these things worked after knowing each other for so long? And what if there was no chemistry? She liked me, yes, but this wasn’t “like” we were talking about, not if we both meant what we seemed to be saying. And was that my moment then, I thought, to lean in and kiss her, whatever she was saying, to whisk away all the doubt and intervening time we agreed was so important and to be bold? I couldn’t do it. It was all such good news, I told myself, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question I wanted to ask, not of myself, and certainly not of Cait, because I wasn’t sure it would be true unless I said it out loud. Even when I was married to Katie? And what did that matter, now, whether it was true or not? What mattered was that I liked Cait now. I liked Cait a great deal, and I wanted to do something about it.

  *

  A few hours later, my friend crossed the dais. The heat spell broke. I borrowed a jacket from a friend of a friend and caught an early ride back to the city, and when I got to the apartment, Cait was already asleep. I went to her door and thought about knocking again. Instead, I took a sleeping pill, pulled the room up over my shoulders, and waited for it to disappear.

  Cait was up first thing. She had already gone out to buy us muffins and coffee. Through the doorway, I could see her, busy in the kitchen. The roommate, Cait said, had left for the weekend. We sat together in the kitchen, making small talk, and all the time I wondered, should I say it again? Had I said something wrong? She gave me a hug good-bye and told me to call her to let her know I’d made it back safe to Indiana. I took the train to the airport. All the good feeling and certainty I had held inside of me since our talk the morning before seemed now uncertain and spent, merely magical, a spell against Indiana whose words I was already forgetting, a feeling too bright and happy and eager to overwhelm the rest of my life. I found my car, loaded my bags, and sat in the front seat, waiting. For a while, there was nothing, though I could feel it coming on all morning and afternoon. I knew all the signs, and when finally the spark seemed more than hysterical, it was still another part of grief: great, heaving sobs so full of fear and feeling that, when they finally stopped, I couldn’t move and my left ear was clogged and I didn’t hear anything out of it for days.

  You fucking idiot, I thought. 341 days.

  A year, I kept telling myself, you couldn’t even wait a full fucking year.

  Already, a migraine was starting. I hadn’t had one in months. I put my jacket over my head to make the space in front of my eyes dark and simple. Flashes of light spun across my vision, in larger and larger circles that slowly dissolved into nausea and pain. Half-blind, fumbling at the phone, I called my therapist and asked if she could schedule a session that afternoon. I took a different pill, tilted my seat all the way back, and waited for the first gap of missed time, then the next, to accumulate into an absence of thinking and feeling. I lost count of the gaps. A few hours later, I snapped out of something that wasn’t quite sleep. I felt a little less manic, more a part of everything, though I knew that that was a haze too. Still, I could at least drive. I paid a fee to leave the airport. I drove across Indianapolis to the therapist’s office and sat in a different parking lot, checking my phone for messages from Cait, or the roommate, or my friend, listening to the radio and counting down the time until my session began.

  *

  East of Gary, Indiana, the sky filled with smog, or industrial steam, or whatever sanctioned waste left the stacks and yellowed the afternoon sky as it rose into the clouds and disappeared over Lake Michigan. The pollution, everyone seemed to agree, wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. The pale, sickly glow had something to do with the relative position of the sun, humidity levels, the width of the lake, the temperature and gravity and science enacting all manner of illusion on my fragile cortexes. Really, Gary was the part of Indiana that Chicago had long ago claimed as its buffer, a place where good things could happen to one city, whatever bad things it did to the people who lived in the other city. What Gary looked like was the beginning of the end of civilization. On either side of Gary, the air was clean and the sky was blue.

  Driving into Gary felt sometimes like discovering a secret history, a past from which there were no clear exits. Businesses were scarce. Exits were marked for landmarks: the independent and unaffiliated minor league baseball team; the historic downtown; a rusted plate tacked under each mile marker, acknowledging again and again Michael Jackson’s birthplace. The plates always gave me a minor thrill. The city’s sense of Michael Jackson seemed to begin with Off The Wall and end with Dangerous: twelve years of iconography, swagger, and pop, all promise and no decline. Gary’s sense of itself was correspondingly narrow and epic. On that stretch of interstate, one sign after the next reminded me, I was passing The Magic City, The City of the Century, The Steel City [Birthplace of Michael Jackson]. Gary had an ivy-covered courthouse, dune beaches, nine parks, and three professional sports franchises, but all that anyone passing through ever saw or seemed to remember were the smokestacks.

  I had received on my phone, all year, daily reminders to send money to political organizations. John McCain was ready to name his vice presidential nominee. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority hated women, minorities, justice, and the planet itself. My five more dollars were all that stood between Rapture and Progress. Here was our new democracy: collecting more money than the old entrenchments, in one- to twenty-dollar increments. Email subject lines addressed me by name. Celebrities thanked me for victories. With each successive message, our good fight felt at least as much like grandstanding as a fair contest. How were we measuring our eventual victory except by what we did not win? Everything was in play: the White House, Congress, a few state houses, our city comptroller, a municipal district special ombudsman. And after that, nature, the world, the idea of America in that world, the future of space. Wouldn’t it send quite a message if the Dakotas turned a rich bipartisan purple; if every congressional district north of the Allegheny and west of Carson City was dark blue, and if we then, for good measure, also passed a referendum protecting a ground rodent?

  All summer, Cait and I had talked about Katie. How could we not? In letters and phone calls, at grocery stores and restaurants, across highways and long hikes, I told stories about places I had traveled—we had traveled. Cait asked questions. She listened to my answers. I was, in those conversations, direct and honest. Cait tried not to offer the usual consolations. I was grateful for that. I knew that I had neve
r been so honest with someone, even Katie; that, if I could have been so honest, under any other circumstances, I would have guarded away at least my shame. With Cait, there was power in disclosure. I could say the things I wanted in a life now. I did not worry about distinctions between widower (reverent, careful, polite) and friend (disclosing, intimate, honest). Cait and I were older and more frank, more clear-minded than our former Peace Corps selves, and more certain of who we were and what we wanted. Always, I tried not to make a defense. Like a spell, or an especially complicated recipe, the thing we revealed together, careful step by step, held an unmistakable shape. Once we recognized it, we took pride in the final stages. It seemed inevitable and nearly complete.

  Crossing the interstate, parallel with the consumptive stacks, I could hardly make out the golden dome in the city’s center. Once, Gary, Indiana, had seemed an idea, a lost ideal, the end of the end of a beginning. And yet, here was Gary, still. I loved the city for its refusal to acknowledge the obvious fact of its decline, for the pride by which it lived in a present moment, celebrating the past, celebrating the future, and never quite explaining what had happened in between. To anyone who bothered to look around or ask, the government was semi-functioning at best. City coffers were empty. The population had more than halved in thirty years. But whoever lived in Gary seemed still to love it. They voted to put sunshine and rainbow piping on the dented city signs, sprucing up the home of a defunct record company, claiming the world’s biggest pop star, whatever the state of his decline. Decades after the King of Pop had left town and headed west, Gary seemed still to exist at the end of one dream, ready for another. However reciprocated, it cheered on whoever was passing through. I was grateful for the acknowledgment. I wouldn’t want to leave the state of Indiana going any other way.