by Amy Reed
Families on bicycles coast by me. Couples walk, hand in hand. Joggers run. They are never going to make it to San Francisco this way. The pedestrian lane stops unceremoniously in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of air, before it even reaches Yerba Buena Island. All we can do is look at the place we cannot go, then turn around and go back where we came from.
It’s so strange that Evie and I never came up here, considering all the time we spent in places so close. But we preferred to go where others didn’t. Dark places. Hidden. Places where we would not be seen. What were we so scared of? What were we trying to hide?
God, I am so sick of hiding.
Nobody cares about the Bay Bridge. It’s not the Golden Gate, not a tourist destination, not the number one place in the world to commit suicide. Is it as deadly? Is it high enough to kill me if I jump? Is the water below as rough and full of sharks? Would my body be broken by the fall? Would it wash up on my beach, on Evie’s and David’s and Mom’s beach, in the same place where I found Evie, almost dead, in the same place where I freed David’s ashes? All three of us, returned to the water. Together.
Here’s a bench to look out at the view. Here’s a pole with an emergency phone. Here I am, climbing onto the railing. It’s too easy. It’s like they want people to die. They want word to spread about how easy it is to climb the fence here; it’s not just the Golden Gate that’s great for jumping.
It’s a beautiful day on the bay. It was a beautiful day when I found David in his apartment with his head blown off. It was a beautiful day when I found Evie, facedown in this water. The day Mom left. The days I cut myself, when I drew my own blood to make the pain stop, those were beautiful days, too. The sun is always shining in Oakland, as if people aren’t dying all over the place, as if people’s lives aren’t falling apart.
No one even sees me standing up here. They are too busy looking at the city in the distance. They are too distracted by beauty to see the ugliness right here in front of them.
But I can’t ignore the ugliness. No matter how hard I shut my eyes, I see horror and heartbreak and the pain of everyone I love. It seeps into me and becomes my pain, their blood my blood, and I can’t tell where I stop and they begin. Love pulls me in every direction; it gets distorted into poison and tears me apart.
I will never be able to save them. It is not in my power to make them stay. They make that choice and there is nothing I can do about it.
This ends now.
I hold on tight to the pole as I grab my backpack from my back, as I pull the zipper open. A gust of wind blows me off balance and makes my heart jump, and I hold on even tighter as I try to keep the world from spinning. I take out Dad’s black box and pull out the gun.
Guns are designed to end things. It is their only job.
The silver metal glistens in the sun. I study every inch of it, turn it over in my hands, again searching for some sign that the small, hard thing is responsible for ending my brother. Strange how he was the one who always hated it, who never wanted to be anywhere near it when we were kids. Strange how it was the last thing that kept him company, probably the last thing he ever saw.
The gun is just a thing, a piece of molded metal. But I look at it and see the people I love; I feel the weight of our stories as I hold it in my hand. I spin the cylinder and it sounds like our voices. I hear Mom crying. I hear Dad yelling. I hear David, I hear Evie, begging God to make their pain go away. All this time, I thought they were talking to me. I thought God’s job was mine.
So many choices. So many ways to live and die. So many ways to give power and to take it. So many ways to begin and end. So many ways to hold on and let go.
So many ways to say good-bye. So many ways for lives to end.
I thought I was saying good-bye to David when I threw his ashes into the sea. But it’s not that simple. This good-bye will last forever. This good-bye will haunt me until the day I die. Only then will I stop missing him.
But that day is not today.
So many lives. So many ways to start over.
I throw the gun over the edge. I watch it fly through the air, catching flashes of sunlight on its way down. I see the small splash but cannot hear it over the cacophony of everything else in the world. It is in darkness now, where it belongs. Sinking, soundless. Turned into just another rock at the bottom of the sea.
Good-bye, David. Good-bye, mother and father of my childhood. Good-bye, Evie of the tunnel, Evie of the beach, Evie of hiding and secrets and shame. I say good-bye and I will keep saying good-bye. I am letting you go. I free you. I free us all.
now.
IT IS EARLY EVENING WHEN I GET HOME, MY BACKPACK empty, the gun and box and bullets deep in the bay. The house smells like food again, as if Dad and Monica have been cooking all day.
I open the door to the kitchen and am shocked to find Mom in there with them. I stand motionless for several moments, trying to understand what I am seeing: Dad, at the counter, chopping vegetables; Mom and Monica, side by side at the stove, stirring things in pots.
What is going on?
Dad looks up from his lettuce. “Marcus!” he says, as if genuinely happy to see me. I’ve never seen him this happy to be chopping vegetables.
“Hey” is the only thing I can think to say to the weird scene in front of me. No one seems worried or anxious. They must not have noticed the dirt and plants and broken pots piled beneath my bedroom window. They know nothing of where I’ve been, what I might have done.
“You’re just in time for dinner,” Mom says, then throws her arms around me. “Oh, it’s so good to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” I say, not rudely. Just confused. This is not the mother I said good-bye to on the bridge. This is not the mother I let go. She is someone new. She is trying to be someone new.
“Your dad called and invited me over for dinner. I knew it had to be Monica’s idea, but I came anyway.” She and Monica wink at each other. “Bill could never come up with something like that on his own.”
“Who’s hungry?” Monica calls cheerfully from the stove. “I can’t eat this whole batch of spaghetti carbonara on my own.”
“I’m starving,” Mom says.
“Bill, how’s that salad coming?” Monica says.
“Uh,” Dad says, looking over at his station of mangled vegetables. “I think I may need some help.”
Mom and Monica laugh and share a knowing look. I feel like I’ve walked on to the set of a sitcom about an alternative Bay Area family.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Stop.” The three of them look at me—Dad, Mom, and apparently her new bestie, Monica. “Am I the only one here who thinks this is really fucking weird?”
They all look at each other, then burst into laughter. “It is what it is,” Mom says as she takes over Dad’s place at the counter to finish the salad. “I think we’re all figuring this out as we go along.”
As we all sit down to eat, I feel strangely optimistic. Maybe I can get used to this new weird family. Slowly. In small doses. At least the food is way better than the garbage Dad and I have been living on for the last two years.
I will tell him about the gun, but not now. Right now, I’m going to enjoy this dinner. There’s been enough drama. But I have a feeling Dad won’t be too upset. I don’t think he’ll mind the gun being lost forever.
“I’d like to make a toast,” Dad says. He and Monica raise their wineglasses. Mom and I raise glasses of lemonade Monica made from scratch.
“Since we’re all here together, I want us to take a moment to remember David,” Dad says. My heart catches in my throat. My blood stops. “He was our beloved son and brother, and we miss him.” Dad chokes on the last words.
“To David,” Mom says. She is smiling, beautiful. “My baby.”
And I am crying. I am shaking with deep, heavy sobs that come from somewhere across time and space, from deep inside the earth where they have been stored for all these years, waiting to be released. But this is not all of them. This
purging will not be the end of pain. There will always be more. There will be new things to hurt about and old things to remember, but maybe I won’t have to store them for so long, maybe I won’t have to wrap them so tight and hide them away inside myself. I won’t have to let them fester and grow and become even more toxic. I can release the pain. I can let it go by feeling it.
Dad reaches across the table and puts his hand on mine. Mom wraps her arm around my shoulders and pulls me into her. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.” Both of us, her babies. One gone, but one very much still here.
I let her hold me until the wave subsides. I don’t have a name for it—sadness, pain, mourning—it is all those things and more. But also gratitude. Also love. The feelings are huge, but there is room for all of them. There is a place where they are safe.
I look up at these three faces, two of which I’ve been looking at my whole life, but all of which I’m only now really starting to know.
I raise my glass. “To David,” I say.
“And to us,” Dad adds. “To family.”
“Here, here,” Monica says.
We say “cheers.” We start eating, all of our faces still wet with tears. It is the best meal I’ve had in a long time.
now.
MOM SAYS IT’S TRAGIC THAT THE BAY AREA DOESN’T HAVE seasons. She says it screws with our circadian rhythms or something. But I’ve never known any different, so it feels like fall to me, even if it is seventy degrees during the day. There are a few trees here and there with leaves changing color. Night has been coming a little sooner each day.
I have a big project due in my Political Science class before Thanksgiving break and I’ve had to work with a partner, which is something I would have usually detested, but it hasn’t actually been that bad. James is pretty cool. I’ve gotten to know him since I stopped sitting at the lunch table with the stoners and started sitting with him and a handful of guys who are all pretty different in mostly interesting ways. They’re not “cool,” but they’re not losers. They’re the kinds of guys who fly under the radar in high school because their focus is elsewhere, on the future, on becoming bigger versions of themselves.
I’m riding in James’s car. We’ve been mostly working at his house in the Berkeley Hills, but today he wanted a change of scenery. He’s probably sick of his mom checking on our progress every half hour.
“Where should we go?” he says. “Somewhere on Piedmont? College?”
“What about Telegraph?”
“Berkeley or Oakland?”
“Oakland, obviously.”
I don’t know what I’m thinking. It’s like there’s a beacon inside my head, blinking, beeping, telling me my destination, opening my mouth and speaking the directions to James. Another part of my brain says Are you crazy? but I can barely hear it.
James parks in front of the yoga studio and we get out of the car. A tilting man with bloodshot eyes stumbles in front of a perky, ponytailed woman pushing a stroller and talking on her cell phone. What a strange place this is, all these worlds bumping into each other and barely even noticing.
As James opens the door to the café, I stop dead in my tracks.
“Dude, are you coming?” James says.
It’s then that I know. I just know. I feel it in my bones. Evie’s here.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m coming.”
There is no feeling of surprise when I see her standing at the counter with Cole. Just a warmth that starts in my feet and moves up into the center of me. But it is heavy and I can’t move. I stand there, staring at her, watching her easy laugh, feeling both like I know her, all of her, but we’ve barely met. It’s been months since we’ve seen each other, months of my trying to let her go. I’m a different person now. She’s different. Everything’s different.
James approaches the counter and orders his drink from Cole, who hasn’t noticed me yet. I count quietly to myself, one, two, three, and then Evie’s eyes meet mine like I knew they would, as if we are driven by the same timing. The dopey grin spreads across my face. Her smile is warm, pure, radiating.
I don’t know how long we stare at each other. I don’t know how long James has been elbowing me in the side, saying, “Dude. Dude. Dude.”
“Oh,” I say. “Hey, James.”
“Are you going to order something or just stand there?”
“James,” I say, “I’d like you to meet my old friend Evie.”
“Hi, Evie,” he says suspiciously.
“Nice to meet you, James.” Her smile is soft. Peaceful.
“Yeah, um,” James says, “I’m going to sit down now.”
“Marcus,” Evie says, “this is my friend Cole.”
Cole smiles warmly. “Hi, Marcus.”
“Hey,” I say. “We already met,” I tell Evie.
“Oh yeah.” She laughs. “I forgot you came here snooping on me a while back.” She says this playfully, with no trace of anger.
“It’s been a while,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “It has.” She smiles, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing I am, that maybe it has been a perfect amount of time that has passed, that maybe now is a perfect time for it to be over.
“It’s good to see you,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “It is.”
Or maybe not. What if we’re still bad for each other? What if we’re still poison? She said before that I inspired her recklessness. I know now that I turned her into an extension of David, that I let her self-destruction define our love. That can’t be what we are to each other. Not anymore. Not ever again.
So what if we start over from the beginning? What if we start by telling each other everything?
We stand there for a long time, staring at each other. There’s so much to say, we are only capable of silence.
“Hey,” Cole says, and it’s only then, when the coffee shop suddenly explodes with movement and noise, that I realize time had paused in those short moments—everyone had stopped moving, the espresso machine stopped steaming, the coffee grinder stopped grinding, and the only thing that existed was the space between me and Evie, the energy passing between us, the question we were asking each other with our eyes: Should we try this again?
“Evie and I were talking about going to a movie later,” Cole says, and his voice calms me. I hardly know him, but something tells me I want to.
We both look at him. I notice a quick glance between him and Evie, a playful glint in Cole’s eyes.
“Want to join us, Marcus?” he says.
I look at Evie, searching her face for apprehension, for a sign that this is not what she wants. I feel a moment of panic. Is this what I want? But it is only a moment, small and fleeting. “Really?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “The more the merrier.”
What could our relationship look like when neither of us need saving?
My heart is beating so fast I think it might fly out of here. I look at Cole, who seems amused by the whole awkward situation. “Will that be weird for you?” I ask him. I think I am sweating.
He throws his head back in a big laugh. “I think I’m probably going be the most comfortable of all of us.”
us.
YOU ARE SITTING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT, YOUR WINDOW half rolled down, your short hair fluttering in the wind like wildflowers. In the forty minutes or so since we got off the freeway, we’ve driven through forest, farmland, and a handful of small towns, the Russian River faithfully on our left, dotted by the occasional kayak or canoe.
“I can smell the sea,” you say, closing your eyes and inhaling deep.
I can, too. One small hill stands in the way of perfect blue sky and our destination. We are only two hours away from the city, but we are in a different world, one without billboards and crowds and traffic and noise. Cows munch grass in front of a picturesque old farmhouse. We crest the hill and the Pacific Ocean swallows the earth in front of us. I forget that I’m driving, and we fly the rest of the way to the edg
e of the continent.
The sand takes our toes. The sun warms our bones. We are on the edge of the world, on earth that was just born. We are new people, falling in love for the first time. Again and again and again.
“I love this emergency nap blanket,” you say. You are in my arms. We are facing the sea. Waves hypnotize us with their rhythm.
I think about the times we have spent on this blanket, all those moments we used it to make ourselves an island, which we tucked away on hidden beaches, on tops of hills, behind bushes and driftwood and gravestones. We are not hiding now, but there is a solitude, still the sense of a world that is only ours. But it is not a dangerous world. It is made out of clean sand and ocean breeze and a safe distance from the waves and riptides.
You sigh. “I wonder how long it’s going to stay wild like this, before humans fuck it up.”
You push yourself into me. We make a more perfect spoon. “Let’s not worry about that right now,” I say.
“Okay.” But after a minute, you say, “Why did God even bother making humans? We must be such huge disappointments.”
“Maybe not.”
“But we ruin everything we touch.”
“Not everything. We make music and art and write books. We love each other.”
“When did you get so optimistic?”
I squeeze you tighter. “You make me feel optimistic.”
A long-beaked bird pecks at the sand in front of us. A wave crashes inches from his little bird feet, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He is at peace with his rough world.
“My brother had this theory that the way a person, or even an entire culture, thinks about God is the way they think about their fathers,” I say. “Like we all want God to be this kind, nurturing dude full of forgiveness and unconditional love, but what most people actually believe is that God’s this hateful, mean guy who we’ll never please no matter what we do. Either that or he’s totally absent or nonexistent.”
“That’s depressing.”