Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  *

  In the dream, Katie is standing on the beach. She is wrapping her hair in a towel and leaning over to shake the water out of her ear, with that little half shake I can’t quite mimic. She pulls a chair out from under the trees and sits in the sun, half watching me, nodding off. Katie could sleep anywhere.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asks. I sit down next to her. “Why can’t you take your happy life and leave me alone already?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You do,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “You were sick. For a while. Sort of. You’re not sick now.”

  “I was sick.”

  “But you were never really sick. Not sick-sick. Just, you know, sick enough to worry a little.”

  The scar on Katie’s forehead, that little half-moon she dug out that time with her brother—how could I have forgotten it?

  “But the marriage itself, our life—”

  “John,” she says, interrupting me as she folds her towel over her shoes and walks toward the water. “You do this every year.”

  “A widower should not feel this way,” I say, “about his dead wife.”

  “You like marriage,” she says, swimming toward the dock. “Everyone knew you’d get married again.”

  “A widower should not feel this way about his dead wife.”

  “I know,” she says. She is laughing, a little out of breath. “You already said that.”

  *

  After supper, we wash the wine glasses and coffee mugs by hand. We load the dishes and pack the chicken into plastic tubs with the last of the salad. We will leave in the morning first thing. Outside, where there is no light from a city, the twilight deepens. The sky positively glows. Beneath it, a broken wall, a road, the houses and the river and the freighters, the hills and mountains, the beaches further to the ocean, all of it shades to a single darkness. The longest evening of the year finally begins. This is the exact moment when Katie died, and in another hour or so, when that moment passes, I will feel again a relief greater than I feel any right to expect. The weight will lift for a while, and with it, my reverent and neurotic attention to it, and all of the ways that Katie’s death makes me feel terrified, lonely, uncertain, and worst of all, special.

  We are returning tomorrow to the world: California, our home. The first day of another year since Katie died will begin with the simplest forms of persuasion and distraction, those that should only work on small children. Katie’s death will seem again at a distance. I may not dream of her for months.

  The boys will sleep in the room next to us. When they awaken, as they usually do, Cait and I will fumble through the darkness to the table with pacifiers and juice cups and sugary medicines, in the narrow sliver of the night-light, and do our best to offer them some proper consolation. We will sit with them and rub their backs, telling them stories or singing them songs until they fall back asleep. And if there is no noise when we walk into their room, if they have fallen back to sleep mid-cry, or soothed themselves enough to forget the distraction without our help, then all the better that we leave in silence. They will wake with the first light or just before it, and our day will continue.

  I know what the light was that made the noise in my dream stop. It is clear to me now. A piece of metal sparks on the machine. The gleam of a mirror wobbles across my blanket. The Seine shakes out its still and deep waters, west of here, as the white sky over France grows bright with the first of the day’s light in California. The light traps its cities in the heat, making the brimming white radiance grow broader and broader until all dissolves in it, all vanishes, all passes and either disappears forever or becomes something else. I should still be standing on the dock, shaking with cold, searching the water for something I have missed. Sleep, that brief stretch of blank hours that consciousness does not track, that grateful silence broken by light, makes its own edge with the day and draws two worlds across it, cleaves them with sharp teeth and makes them fall into darkness. At the bright edge of memory, both sides fall together and away. Between them is a narrowing no wider than the space between the door and the floor. The door swings easily. It makes no noise. Our boys can come into the room to find us. I know Cait is sleeping next to me. The real world I imagine returns like memory to fill in the gap. The garden grows in patches of green and white, dirt and shade, field and flower, the whole way around the house, across the gap, wherever it finds the light.

  Mountain Rain

  Our third son is born on a Wednesday morning, Cait’s shortest labor yet. There is some bleeding afterward, and a surgery, but Cait comes through, exhausted and more than a little tired of boys, of pregnancy, of a body that loses and finds again its shape, so perhaps this too is an ending—a family of five, no more babies?—or perhaps it is merely another beginning, the start of our family life in full and earnest, a time I think at best can last a decade before our tiny men race toward their adult lives, across the country and world to places I hope we’ll visit, where we’ll wish them well and from which I’ll hope at least for letters, news, sweethearts: a continuity, the continuing of a life we’ve started, as it finds several new beginnings. Like the other boys, Monty sleeps next to the bed, in a co-sleeper I’ve again adjusted to match the height of our mattress. The co-sleeper is held in place with two long straps across the box spring, the better for Cait to half-wake and nurse before setting him down another few hours. Under our overcautious watch, it took Walt forever to settle, so we’ve left Sam and Monty to fuss and work it out, and they are better sleepers for it. Before morning, footfalls, bowls of cereal, and shows, before the routine sets us off to preschool and teaching and long weeks on little sleep that pass in the blink of an eye, even those short days we get the boys early from Gail and take a picnic for lunch, or drive out to the bay lands to feed the ducks and name the Star Wars characters, imagining among tankers and bridges a perfect Lego spaceship burning across the sky, disappearing into a tiny moon of light, Cait and I get a few minutes together every couple of mornings. We thrill at such waking. We wake disoriented and confused—where are our boys? we have children, right?—and only after we tick through the shortlist do we relish such silence.

  *

  I give a talk at Cait’s school. The theme is “spread the word,” and someone has heard me speak elsewhere about grief and guilt, fear and hope. Before an auditorium of tenth and eleventh grade English classes, I start with Aeschylus—“It is against our wills that we become wise”—and continue with poetry, William Henry Wright, John Lennon, the Peace Corps, the beginnings of lives that begin again and again. Even the therapist in Indiana with the turquoise jewelry makes an appearance. I add in photos of stuffed animals, Horcruxes, Cait, koans, and grief. As always, I apologize for mentioning the two things I know that my audience already knows. Katie is dead. She was killed by a bear. I memorize the whole thing and deliver it in twenty minutes. All of my eight years fit into a single talk I practice until it sounds unrehearsed. It is the Chicago doc who suggests Aeschylus. I refer to him in the talk as “a wise friend.”

  Mom calls and asks again when I will write the happy book, the one about the wife and kids after the incomprehensible loss, and California, with the happy ending and all the silence of beautiful things happening outside of a need to chronicle, analyze, and share them with anyone. I want to say that I’m writing that book—I’m always trying to write that book, Mom—but what I say instead is that that book may never exist. I may never write that book. So, we change the subject and talk about Walt’s glasses, Sam’s vocabulary, Monty’s smile and short naps, and how excited we are to see her and Dad when they come to visit in a few weeks. As we say good-bye, I ask her for a cookie recipe that I remember from childhood. A few weeks later, she sends a box of them, freshly baked, with a book about dragons for the boys and some candy hearts and a card for Valentine’s Day. The boys shake the card in front of Monty’s face. They coo and practice their bab
y talk, and sometimes, at night, they get wild and scrap with each other, bellow and wail and caterwaul, and the Chicago doc says it’s probably because Cait is spending so much time with the baby and we’re all getting back to work, and a behaviorist reminds us we cannot change our children, we can only change their environment, routines, and schedules, but in the end, their punches look pulled and they end up building Star Wars ships out of Legos and demanding more juice. We buy a pop-up trampoline. We build a reading nook in the corner of the room. A week later, we move the sofa into the garage and sit together at the kitchen table, holding hands and talking about our days.

  At night, when the boys can’t sleep, I prop my phone in a cup on the bookshelf and play a seventeen-minute nature sounds loop. “Mountain Rain.” It’s as much white noise as any mountain or rain I’ve ever witnessed, and it never stops restarting. I’ve played it 1,257 times, over and over again, a blank static that fills the space between their two beds with the facsimile of a natural world that still terrifies me. All this time I’ve spent entering it, under Cait’s watch, in a part of the world absent those terrors that kept me from it, that beautiful world I cannot bear to remember, and still I am afraid. I imagine sometimes that when Walt is older, after his brothers have left the house too, I will walk into the woods by myself and spend days there, relieved of the obligation to protect anyone besides myself. There, I will know what it means to be vulnerable and selfish together, in a way that risks no danger for my boys. Perhaps Cait will wait for me there so that the end of my long walk will be my arrival to her, a fantastic story we will tell the boys later about a place I feel finally I have earned the right to live with and past, a place that is entirely my own, where they can come as grown men, able and sure of the woods, which is to say, like their mother at the very beginning: expert and wise, ready to care for me and make me feel safe.

  *

  Every couple of weeks, I take down Katie’s chess set and line the pieces in front of Walt. We tick in sequence through their strengths and weaknesses. Walt likes the queen the best. He can’t stop counting the spaces on the board. When we move our pieces, I am careful to correct the sloughing diagonals of the bishops, the meandering rooks, the ridiculous el of the knights, which we call horses, as my father taught me. I move my son’s hand again and again in simple shapes that elude him. The process is maddening—such simple mistakes. I want to correct it. I want him to learn the right way to play. He is five years old. Every time Sam slams a taken pawn onto the kitchen table, announcing that he has destroyed yet another stormtrooper, Walt corrects him. Not stormtroopers. Horses. He marches his pawns down the lane and asks for a second queen, a third, fifth, and tenth. We switch out buttons, salt and pepper shakers, Lego men with lightsabers and silly hats who move freely in every direction and capture a move at a time every other piece. Left to his own devices, Walt would trade out all of the pawns for knickknacks.

  Shouldn’t he believe this about the world, that nothing in a life is ever lost, it only changes into something better, or is turned in a different direction, as the people we love, in turn, are loved by someone else?

  When I put the board back up on the bookcase, I tidy the pieces of my shrine. It has not changed in years. I don’t think my son even sees the shrine, only the place where the chessboard is stored: high on a shelf, just out of reach. If one day he reaches for it, or if he is curious at all about what else he sees there, I will try to make some sense of the life it marks. For now, we only look together inside the box. We play along its top. We use its pieces, and when we are finished, I assemble the shrine again. I follow my son out of the room.

  *

  Hiking back down the trail from the lake, Cait and I make plans for the coming year. Walt will start kindergarten. Sam will go full-time to preschool. Gail will watch Monty, but probably we should arrange some daycare too. Cait will ask Nadia if there is space. She liked Walt and Sam, so perhaps it will work. And what about a regular babysitter? Couldn’t we offer to keep one on a kind of retainer, four hours every Friday whether she comes or not? Cait will teach every day. I will teach my schedule and try still to write. A woman in a black swimsuit is stopped on the path in front of us. She is talking quietly to her friend, who is standing off the trail, up the hill. “Down by the trash cans,” she says, nodding to us. “The cub is just behind it.” Seven years we have come to this place and finally it is happening. I grab two giant stones from the trail, and we all stop to watch. “Is it a black bear or a brown bear?” I ask. I know the answer. “A black bear,” the woman says, a brown-faced black bear. “They must have come up from the dumpsters. I called out to the Turner cabin, but there’s no one there.” It would be foolish to throw my rocks and attract the bear’s attention. I can do nothing in this moment except watch, and after we watch a while, Cait and I start walking again down the trail. Our cabin is maybe four hundred yards away, up the hill and across the river. I clench the rocks in both hands and walk into the cabin holding them at my side. I walk back out to the car and drive into town, and when I get there, I turn around and drive back to the cabin. Who will keep my family safe? The adrenaline makes me nuts. I can’t sit still, and Cait knows better than to say anything to anyone about it. So we don’t. Or, I don’t. I disappear into the bedroom, take a pill, and watch a baseball documentary on my laptop. The woman in the black swimsuit kept watching, long after we walked away. I weep hysterically when the documentary is happy and again when it is sad. What is the difference? And when I feel nothing, I hear again her voice, and feel ashamed that there is nothing to say or to tell anyone that they do not already know or will believe, even if I say it, and in this way I keep my secret from everyone else in the cabin, because I am blessed and fortunate to live, and to feel alive, and to come here every summer and feel exempt from the things that I know surround us. Bears, but also a way of living, a pattern of days circling lakes and trails around which whole cities develop, from which the bears retreat until we are so numerous they must return, scavenge our waste, and become still another possible side of fortune, that we see them whether or not they mean to reveal themselves to us, that they suggest a different kind of abundance, an overwhelming beauty indistinguishable from terror. “Ahh,” the woman said, whispering to us, “isn’t it cute?”

  *

  Already, Monty has slept the longest in the co-sleeper. We’d move him into the boys’ room except Cait is worried about all the pillows Sam likes to lay on the baby’s face—to make his bed soft, to love him more than he needs to or can stand to be loved—and the noise of three small boys in one room. The potential for chaos, and barring that, mere calamity, stuns us into another quiet night. He’ll leave our family bed soon enough. A few more weeks, a month maybe, and we’ll pop the crib up again down the hall. We’ll close the door at night and greet him with bright, cheerful sounds in the morning, and he’ll learn to sleep through the night and expect us as the room brightens, right after the first light. He’ll learn to call for us.

  For now, he locks onto me first thing. He is smiling—all smiles. He leans and lists, slumps and drools, and the smile looks like it will never stop crossing his gorgeous face. I want that moment of total attention, simple and undivided, to last forever. Of course, it can’t. Already, I am crossing the room. The bigger boys are turning over juice cups and smashing the wall with brooms. Cait is sitting at the table to nurse Monty before she leaves for work, when I will take him over to Gail’s apartment down the street and head off to work myself. Always, after they watch their morning shows, the boys are restless. Monty is hungry. I can only look to the future a few moments at a time; when I am lucky, a whole afternoon. The world is changing too fast ever to really begin or end, but when I try to slow it down enough to hold the moment in my affection, always, it seems, I am looking at the next beginning.

  About John W. Evans

  John W. Evans is a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Young Widower: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2014), winner of
the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize; The Consolations, winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book; and two poetry chapbooks.

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