Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  “Can you just,” I said, trying to find the words. “I mean, would you—would it be okay—can you, you know, maybe hold me?”

  So maybe she was thinking it too—what was on my mind that we had so quickly stopped—that I had stopped talking. She smiled and reached out her arms, pulling me in sideways. She filled in the silence with whatever came to mind, and even after a few moments, when I said I was okay, as we walked back to the car, she said there might be bears at this altitude, but probably not so close to a highway, not in the middle of the day. Bears near people learned their routines and kept a distance. They were shot when they didn’t. And I wanted to agree with her and say also that they would be black bears instead of grizzlies, across the rest of the state, at least until we got to Yellowstone, that I was grateful for her reassurance because she knew these places well and I did not. But still, I wondered: Did snakes cross the tree line at altitude? Mountain lions? Cougars? Did hunters at this altitude wear orange vests? Should tourists? Did the rain bring thunder, lightning, fire? If a semi lost control on the downhill, what were the odds that the driver would make it to the runaway truck ramp before he rolled the tank across all four lanes, sparking the metal on the edge of the divider, clearing us off the edges of the map, into an echo of fire and dust?

  *

  We drove the last stretch all day to arrive at her family’s cabin. Past Salt Lake City, we set out with the sun behind us until it crossed overhead and bore down against our progress. The desert was hot and bright. The last news we heard, leaving the city, was that John McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. “Who is Sarah Palin?” Cait asked. I knew all about Sarah Palin from my podcasts. Sarah Palin, I explained, was the governor of Alaska, a choice-friendly and modest centrist who worked well with big business and urban liberals and who had a reputation for being a small-town politico on the make. Such went the conventional wisdom, and our fears that drive, and for many days following, that McCain might turn the country bright red with his moderate genius.

  Coming down the hill past Tahoe, the mountains gave way to terrific bends and plunges. West was our time to make up, our certain destination, and now, our deadline. Cait’s family was gathering at the cabin for the holiday weekend. If we got there by sunset, we could have dinner and meet everyone. As we drove, Cait talked about her good friend who had married after her boyfriend made a terrific PowerPoint presentation. There were slides and graphs, bulleted arguments and calculations, expressed in complicated equations, by which he had meticulously predicted their future. Two to four kids. A home in the hills near Portland. Trips each summer to see her family and, if they were lucky, a trip every spring by themselves to the beachside timeshare he said they’d be nuts not to buy into. It was all hypothetical, but the numbers had a certain magic to them. He had worked out his arguments in advance. He reassured like a lawyer, finessing rougher points, bullying through easier ones, wearing her down until there was only one response. They married that fall, in the farmhouse he knew she’d like, with the guest list and seating chart he had anticipated within three seats of who actually showed up. Cait admired his determination and commitment, she said, even as there was something sterile about his method, a reckoning of sides of equations that meant things should equal out to perfect sums, with no remainders or carryovers and nothing left to chance. It wasn’t romantic, Cait said. I oriented myself instantly to this assessment. Was I romantic? In all my caution about leaving Indiana and racing to California, and planning for the future, had I left enough to the heart?

  Then, we were arrived. I pulled up slowly along what seemed, in the darkness, a stone drawbridge. The tires dug into the gravel, inching us forward. I pulled the emergency break and took out the electronic key. It was the end of our trip. We had arrived in good time. Outside the car, we would walk into a world of family I had only the faintest notion could be so epic. Aunts and cousins who were best friends. Grandparents who held court at the heads of long tables. An entire clan of family traveled every Labor Day to that cabin in order to watch Cait’s father lead cardboard boat races at the dock of the nearby lake. Of course, there were cardboard boat races. The children were smiling and building their cardboard boats out back. Uncles watched with pursed lips, nodding their heads. There was a hierarchy to the gathering, a continuity that took everything in and said that all the pieces fit. For everything I knew of family, this was both corollary and radical opposite. Surely, people who loved everyone simultaneously could not possibly be related. I had no idea how to situate myself within such extremes. I wasn’t sure that I needed to. It seemed that I would soon marry near the heart of something special where Cait was beloved, without condition, admired and kept dear. I would notice it in the way she organized our introductions, and the knowing looks that followed the fast once-overs. People who were too busy to care too much about arrivals made a general exception for Cait.

  Opening the car door, I noticed first the pine trees and ravines in the surrounding darkness. A porch light cast down the trail a faint circle that showed the way and made shadows. We were only a few dozen yards out, but the distance seemed immense. The porch looked so exposed. Cait turned me in another direction. We weren’t going that way, not yet. Her mother had left a note to say they would all be down the hill at the neighbor’s cabin. Cait knew the way by heart. We cut across the rocks and over what seemed like a giant river, though the next day, I would see the pathetic stream and the high, flat rocks across it. On the cabin porch, her father was playing the saxophone with a quartet of close friends. As we walked up the stairs, the procession began. As though in a chorus line, family members peeled away to say hello, hug Cait, hug me, and ask questions. How had our trip gone? Had we just arrived? Was I really from Indiana? Someone handed us glasses of wine. Someone else passed plates of pasta with salad, bread, sausages, and garden vegetables.

  So many of the details I remembered were right. The aunt who lived in Northern California frequently came over to the house. She drove a red car. We talked like that a while. She was impressed by my memory. It was only the next day, saying hello on the beach, that I realized I had never met this woman. Rather, that spring, I had talked with her sister, a different aunt, nearly a twin. It was a family resemblance impossible to miss in the evening light and swirl of voices, drinks, meals, and conversations. Even after we had stumbled back finally to the family cabin and climbed into the tiny double bed, before we woke up all night with altitude dreams and the sound of pine combs, in the wind, falling onto the roof, I had to ask and ask again for Cait to help with the distinctions. There were five aunts, in total, eleven cousins, fifty-odd nephews and nieces and uncles and extended others. All afternoon, I had continued the conversation with the aunt I met the night before. Neither of us missed a beat. Only the next afternoon did I finally run out some part of my luck.

  “What,” Cait’s mom asked, as we sat on the beach, “does your mother think of those tattoos?”

  I rubbed the skin over my shoulder.

  “She hates them.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, walking into the water to swim. “We’ll have something in common.”

  *

  We hiked to a sulfur spring near a swimming hole and had a picnic. We drove the next day to an alpine lake with a lemonade stand and jumping rocks. Every time I tried to name a tree, I guessed redwood and got it wrong. There weren’t redwoods this high up at elevation, not near the water. A family friend took us on a boat trip around the lake. We stopped to swim where, for decades, a recluse had prowled the beach with a shotgun, threatening trespassers. He was dead now. His land was cleared and filled with campers. The last night, we sat on the sofas, listening to her nephews coming and going in the kitchen. On the wall were two framed newspaper clippings related to a great-uncle’s business and an acrostic poem extolling the virtues of a grandmother’s career in journalism. I had been playing the acrostic game in my mind, ironically I guess, a little absent-minded. Can’t take my eyes off of you. Clearly, we were me
ant for each other. Could I compare you to a summer’s day? C for Compassionate, Caring, Consistent, Clever, Curvaceous, Cute, Charismatic. Corinthians, Cauliflower, Carpentry, Cumulus, Chard. California. From the Ben Folds Five song I had been singing all morning: “I wanna be Cait! Cait! Cait!”

  “When we get back to the city,” Cait said, “this is going to be exclusive, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “that that’s a very good idea,” but I didn’t really catch her. I was already laughing. I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t stop laughing, not even when my stomach seized up and I finally caught my breath, the tears on my face streaming down, and Christ, it felt good. I must have looked so odd, and I couldn’t even explain the joke, not in any way that I thought would make sense, but yes, exclusive was just fine. Exclusive worked for me.

  *

  Our last morning, I made a cup of coffee, said good-bye to everyone, and climbed back into the tiny green car. The family cabin and the nearby lake rolled into highway, so much silent exhaust coasting downhill, the engine charging the battery all the way, the battery icon on the dashboard one bar greener, nearly to full. I watched the steady decline of the mountains becoming fast relief, and the heavy trucks, loaded with goods and chemicals, toys and compounds, wheeling no clutch, awkward and confident on the breakaways, buoyant and joyless as teenagers on dirt bikes. It was an illusion. In a mile or so, the highway would incline back up. The trucks would fall away into profile, staggered as evenly as the hash marks separating traffic. At that speed, a single wreck would careen any vehicle down the mountain right into what I imagined was a valley, with trees blocking the high Sierra busk of all-day sun baking the pine silt, where ancient docks jutted over deep glacial lakes. I tried to imagine the prehistoric block of ice inching its way between the mountains, rimmed at the peaks. The external temperature on the dash ticked up a degree or so every few minutes. There was a computer somewhere in the car running calculations, firing one semiconductor alongside the next, spitting out a new set of data that made my progress into a kind of video game. Every five minutes, a yellow bar appeared on a timeline, measuring the efficiency of my driving habits. The far relief of one set of mountains and the near, jagged profile of the next meant, eventually, Central Valley. No romantic backdrop that. The highway was packed. The AC kicked in. The fruit crops in harvest sold at two and three dollars a pound.

  Crossing Sacramento, I called my friend Dave in Chicago. He picked up on the first ring. He was so happy for me. Cait sounded wonderful. The trip must have been amazing. He had good news too. Meghan was thirteen weeks pregnant. She felt great, a little tired still. They were looking for a bigger place. I can do this, I thought to myself. I can talk about someone else’s happiness too. There was enough happiness to go around. Out my window, the coastal hills of California were alive with matted, yellow grass. Between giant white windmills catching the ocean as it skipped over the hills, I pointed my tiny car at the end of a peninsula, through millions of invisible waves carrying my voice into the middle of the country. The waves found Dave’s voice and carried it back with news of a life continuing, a new life in the instant that everything was changing, filling my world with infinite hopefulness, whichever parts bounced off the windshield or burned right through me, changing me as memory changes one life and connects it to the next, sometimes imagining the connections, renewing itself in order to find a way through.

  3.

  The bear followed me back across the lake. It swam beside us in the rowboat, climbed onto the roof of the cabin, and swatted at the trees until pinecones shook loose in twos and threes all night. It pissed under our window so that the whole room smelled of bear, and when I went out with the flashlight to say aha!, it disappeared just far enough back into the woods that I could see only the branches shaking with fear, and the pine needles scattering in both directions on the ground, and over my little beam of light, the sky filling in again with stars.

  There was no bear near the stream, and few bears anywhere close to the cabins. That time of year, in that part of the woods, they tended to get shot by the forest service, tagged by the fire patrol, or snapped into traps set on both sides of the lake. I could only panic there precisely because I knew I was safe. Only there, in my imagination, was the bear not quite afield. Only then could it stride forth to reveal itself, wet-furred, in foot-by-foot-wide prints, full and lumbering, graceful on its striped ball, squeezed into its tiny car just long enough to circle the circus, wave at the crowd, and then drive out of the tent and back deep into my subconscious.

  For a while, this is how I thought about bears. The herd for an eye. A species for Katie. Destroy the world around them and see where they go next.

  I see, in my rigid distinctions of species and place—brown and black, dead and alive, young widower and young dad, new husband and second wife—the suggestion of habit, an ending that brings me around again to what I only tell myself is a new beginning. But there is hopefulness, too, in such distinctions. I can’t help looking for Katie where I do not miss her. It is easier, perhaps, than finding her where I am scared again to look.

  I, too, lumber toward a beginning. From a remote and dark place, I come back every summer to the cabin so that I might revive the feeling, add another step to the ritual, and somehow, continue the rite. I want to say that nine months—one for each death anniversary—are missing from my life, but that isn’t right. The time is there. I have lived through it. Every June, I hear my voice run out like a wire, charged and careless, eager to make a connection that closes the loop and returns me to this world. It is my voice, and my circling back and forth; my routine and my habit that I think might draw out all manner of calamity to begin the reckoning. I practice each to perfection. Once, I could imagine no life after Katie, much less one that meant me well; a life that leaves me now to see what I might do with so much fear and happiness.

  From two ridges a surrounding life gathers near the cabin. Between them runs a river, high in the spring season, come down the mountain from the last snowpack, making a thin stream that always, eventually, runs dry. I have walked with Cait and our boys to the riverbank and back. Along the bed are stones set loose, rolling constantly this way and that. They make the path. Their edges are smooth. Their undersides, in the cold mud, are dry. The summer peaks round, in that high weather, to ice. Without ice, the river would hedge the land and stop its progress. The cabins would shutter. No one would return.

  Each summer, I hike a short distance up and downriver, circling the cabin, trying to will a familiarity that, with time, will resemble the safety that everyone around me takes for granted. I carry pepper spray in my pocket. I rent a satellite phone. I check the bear safety books. I keep these tools, these charms against unreason, in a box near the stove. And if I only make it a few yards by myself before I return to the cabin, still I tell myself I am making progress. I am learning to live in a place I do not have to love, one that for the rest of my life, I can irrationally fear. For some passersby, the method and manner of my walking must certainly seem strange and incidental, even circuitous. But the vantage point changes with time. I see a little clearer in both directions, a distance that never quite moves with or against me. I watch it for all signs of calamity. Whatever responds to my changing scent, or the mud of my footprints, or the sound of my breathing, my voice in that place is strange and thin. Wherever I call from, it marks the place.

  Yes

  I proposed to Cait and she said Yes. I walked along the Chicago River from the Michigan Avenue overpass, past the Loop, and down the rickety circular stairs under the balustrade, crossing stone planters glazed in slush and filled with cigarette butts, in Chicago’s late December early dusk wondering already whether this was the best way to do it, the best place to spot her before she spotted me, some place I could sit and wait for her in the shadows, flowers in hand, a full smile and feeling dapper in my new wool slacks with the blue wool sweater I bought at the department store on my walk from the El because Chicago in
December was colder than I remembered, the wind unforgiving and unimaginatively dull, my jacket and scarf and hat nothing against it, my cufflinks and watch nearly marble on my skin. And, yes, Cait was already making her way out of the museum and through the park, along the path where my sister had ferried her. She was walking in one direction at Yes, toward the place I knew, already, she would surely say Yes. Yes, this must be the place. The benches were metal and bolted into the pavement. The water was dark and lit on all sides by holiday lights, a great pitch-black at the end of the channel where the harbor became the Lake, hushing, at a distance, ice: yes, yes, yes. There was music up on the avenue, someone singing loudly over a prerecorded track. “God—Yes! Thank you! God Bless!—Ye Merry Gentlemen.” No boats out that hour patrolling the river to watch the tottering edge of Yes. No sea monsters rising from the toxic and microbacterial sludge of Lake Michigan to phosphorate a spectacular Yes. Would Cait find the spot romantic? Would the stone wear through the fabric over my knee as I bent down to look up? Would that one Yes become a beautiful and definitive and lifelong Yes?