Things I'm Seeing Without You

by Peter Bognanni

  I wanted to create one more day like that.

  One more day worth keeping.

  That was what I needed to do somehow in this hollowed-out chamber in Sicily. It was cool inside, but I was still sweating. I cleared my throat and stepped into the light of the doorway. I looked at Grace and at Daniel. And all I could think to say when I opened my mouth was something that had been replaying in my mind for months.

  “This,” I said, “was not how it was supposed to be.”

  The short sentence bounced around the cave, coming back to me word for word.

  “I just want to be honest,” I said. “It seems silly to do anything else at this point. The truth is that we’re not supposed to be here, and we all know that. We’re not supposed to be inside of a church made by old-timey people. We weren’t supposed to bring Jonah here. We weren’t supposed to hide from an Italian park ranger on horseback.”

  I paused and waited for my echoing voice to quiet.

  “Also, maybe this is obvious, but Jonah was not supposed to die. Not yet. None of it was supposed to happen like this.”

  Grace eyed me quizzically.

  “I don’t mean to be bleak,” I continued. “I know it sounds that way. What I mean is that nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to. Everything is messed up. Everything is flawed. And if we didn’t have imperfection, I’m not sure what we would have left.”

  I looked out into the light outside. Its brightness compared to the darkness of the cave washed out what I could see of the landscape. Paul crouched down on one knee and pointed the camera up at me.

  “The way I see it, we have a bunch of imperfect moments all lined up, one after the next, and we feel this strange, imperfect love. Then, before we know it, it’s all over. We give everything we have, but that can never be enough to make things just the way we want them, or to keep someone with us as long as we’d like. But the struggle is worth something. And the love is worth something even though it’s imperfect. And maybe we should try to celebrate this brief, incomplete thing we’ve been given. Maybe that’s all we can do when we find ourselves in the dark.”

  Everyone remained quiet. I couldn’t tell by looking at them how they felt about what I was saying. Still, no one interrupted me, so I kept going.

  “Just because something didn’t last as long as you needed doesn’t mean it wasn’t genuine. Jonah and I had an imperfect love. So what? That doesn’t cancel it. And it’s not gone. It’s still here. And, today, I just want to bring it back. I want to make it tangible again for a little while.”

  I reached out for the ashes and Daniel handed the container to me. I opened the lid and stuck my hand inside. They were powdery and warm from Daniel’s pocket.

  “Jonah,” I said. “This is Tess.”

  My voice was getting a little shaky, but I steadied it.

  “Daniel is here, too. And I guess we came all the way here to say good-bye to you. If it’s true that we knew you the best, I wish you had let us understand the whole of you. And I wish you’d felt more peace with who you were. But we can’t change that. We can only celebrate what we knew. And, personally, I’m still glad I knew you.”

  I looked at Daniel. He nodded.

  “And Daniel is too,” I said.

  I pulled out a handful of ashes.

  “We’re not erasing you,” I said. “And we’re not leaving you behind. But we need to put you somewhere. So you aren’t . . . everywhere. I hope you get that.”

  I let go of the ashes and they drifted down to the floor of the cave church, passing through the light like smoke. I was about to reach my hand back inside, but then I stopped and handed the container to Daniel. His eyes were squinting in the light of the cave. I could tell he was struggling with what to say, but finally, he opened his mouth.

  “I forgive you,” he said, reaching his hand into the Tupperware. “And I forgive myself.”

  He let go of his handful, and the powder sifted through the air. Then Grace took the remainder of the container and stood over the spot I’d chosen.

  “Earth to earth,” she said. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”

  And while Paul kept his camera trained on us, she let the rest of them go. A breeze found its way inside, whistling through the cave. Some of the ashes swirled a bit in the air, but eventually, each grain, each tiny piece of Jonah settled on the ground between us. And then all I could do was walk out of the cave and slowly find my way back to the path.

  Everyone else followed, tentatively at first. The trail was steeper here and I removed my shoes to get a better grip. Paul stayed by the cave, pointing his camera over the edge of the trail to catch the rest of us shrinking into the gorge.

  When I finally got down to the bottom, I walked, without speaking, alongside the river, which eventually dwindled into a rocky stream, and then finally to a bright, calm turquoise pool. I stood by it a moment, my face aimed toward the water.

  Me: The rocks in the pool, blurring in and out of focus. Small weeds billowing.

  I realized I was holding my breath. My heart was hammering in my chest, and I felt light-headed. But this time I was not alone, the way I had been on the dock in Minneapolis. I looked at Grace and Daniel.

  Me: The sunlight on the surface of the pool. The cool rocks on my bare feet.

  I waded in and felt the frigid water instantly numbing my feet and calves. The rocks on the bottom were smooth, and a little slippery from algae, but the water was perfectly clear. I could see my own feet walking as if I were seeing them through glass. I walked until the water deepened.

  And inside my head, finally, there was no monologue to Jonah. Just the passing of my own thoughts. Including one that said: “Do you really want to do this?” And another that said: “Yes. It’s okay.”

  So I stretched out my arms and plunged into the blue-green pool, yelling out from the cold, a muffled howl that barely made a noise underwater. I pushed myself forward with long strokes. And when I came to the surface, taking huge lungfuls of air, I felt the sun warm on my chilled skin.

  Then Grace was floating next to me. She must have gotten in while I was under. Her dress gathered on the surface of the water, and on her face was something like contentment. Daniel jumped in last, and when he came up wet strands of hair stuck to his forehead, and he was shouting like a maniac. There might have been tears in his eyes. It was too wet to tell.

  I swam over to him and held his hand under the cold water. Then we just floated. I don’t know how long. My body was numb after a while, but that was okay. I didn’t need it for the moment. The water held me up and drowned out all sound. I could have bobbed there the rest of the afternoon. But I knew it was risky to stay too long.

  So instead, I tried to fully experience the moment and tell it to myself like a story. I had walked down a valley of jagged cliffs with black windows into ancient graves. I had rested on the surface of a pristine sky-blue pool. And for a minute or two, I found a place to be still. The light glittered on the water and it looked like the sun was beneath us, not above. Somehow I had found a little bit of life in a place of the dead.

  39

  By evening I was on a plane again.

  The contrast was jarring. One moment I was outside my body, the next I was in a cramped cabin full of tourists. They were coming home from Italian vacations where they’d taken pictures in front of old things, eaten at overpriced restaurants, and spent most of the time on their phones. I could have been one of them.

  Nobody knew I had just staged a funeral in a sea cave. Nobody knew that I was a high school dropout, my emergency credit card maxed. Nobody knew that I had absolutely zero clues about what I was going to do when I made it back stateside. And, most importantly, nobody knew that I had to say good-bye to the sleeping boy next to me when this plane touched down.

  Daniel was in a Dramamine coma again. Or at least he appeared to be. His head was slumped dow
n, chin on chest, and a single spot of drool dotting his thick lower lip. On the ride to the airport, we’d both sat shivering under a ratty blanket we found in the back of the van, too dazed to say much to each other.

  We would be together on our first flight, but then we had to part ways. Daniel’s parents hadn’t been too thrilled to learn that their son was suddenly in another country. They were threatening to cut off their share of next year’s tuition if he didn’t come home right away.

  All this came as a surprise to me. Somehow, I had assumed that Daniel would be coming back with me to stay at my dad’s again when our voyage was over. But even as I articulated this thought to myself, I could see it was ridiculous. My father had threatened his life. It was probably safe to say that his couch privileges had been revoked. So we had the length of an international flight to say good-bye.

  Only we didn’t seem to be doing that.

  Instead we were watching bad movies. One after the next, pressing play at the same time on the touchscreens attached to the seats in front of us, and staring forward like lobotomy patients. We were swilling ginger ales and eating bags of “lightly salted” peanuts. We didn’t laugh. We didn’t cry. We stared.

  Then the movies were over and I was left watching Daniel drool. Grace was somewhere at the back of the plane. When we’d found out there were seats together this time, she’d wordlessly given them to Daniel and me. Maybe if she’d been closer, she could have cut the tension.

  “I’ve been thinking . . .” he said suddenly. “. . . about when I go back to school.”

  I had been zoning out. When my vision refocused, I saw he had one eye open.

  “Jesus. Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Just start talking out of a deep sleep. It’s freaky.”

  He opened his other eye.

  “I haven’t been sleeping,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “And we have to talk about this.”

  I took a deep breath. I took my earbuds out and he calmly started to talk.

  “I’ve been pushing this around in my mind, and I keep coming back to two basic options. And, to be perfectly honest, they both seem a little crazy to me. The first one is that we say good-bye at the airport and that’s it. We said our farewell to Jonah, so our reason for . . . being together is gone if you think about it in one way.”

  I watched his face. It betrayed nothing.

  “And the second option is that I go back home, and in a couple months, back to school, and then . . .”

  “Don’t say it,” I said.

  “I have to say it at least once.”

  “No you don’t.”

  He sighed.

  “Long distance,” he said.

  “E-mails?” I said.

  “Among other things. I mean, you have to admit, it’s how we started.”

  “It’s how you started,” I said.

  This stung; I could tell. But he didn’t break eye contact.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I said.

  He rested his hands on his tray table. His fingernails were chewed to nothing.

  “What if there were rules?” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Things to make it more . . .”

  He paused for longer than he needed.

  “Real,” I said.

  “Yes. That.”

  He slumped lower in his seat and looked at the screen in front of him.

  “What if we can only send one message a day, and the rest is by phone or video chat, so that there’s something more to it. And . . .”

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Tess.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be unreasonable. I just can’t do it. It sounds like hell to me. Returning to hell.”

  This quieted him. I hadn’t meant for it to come out so harsh, but there it was. I’d said it. I watched Daniel’s face fall. I took a sip of ginger ale and the bubbles stung my nostrils.

  We both sat there for a moment, until the roar of the engines was the only thing I could hear. Then, eventually, Daniel turned away and I put my earbuds back in, and we sat in excruciating silence for the next hour or so as the plane made its way back to American airspace.

  ■ ■ ■

  We landed at O’Hare. We trudged through customs. And we walked through the cheesy neon light thing on the moving walkway that I loved when I was a kid. Grace kept her distance—probably as much for her well-being as ours. We were almost to the crossroads of our gates when Daniel finally stopped and just stood there, holding his duffel bag in the fluorescent light of the airport.

  He looked completely drained. I’m sure I did, too. Someday I would have to ask myself why the guys I liked were always so sad. But that was a question for another time. I walked up close to him.

  “It’s been nice getting to know you, Daniel Torres,” I said. Then I paused. “Actually, it’s been kind of fucked up and strange. But nice too. Not without its nice moments. Anyway . . . thank you.”

  “For what?” he said.

  He seemed genuinely shocked to hear my words.

  “For making all the stupid decisions that made this possible.”

  He just looked at me.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Without them, I’m not sure where I’d be.”

  His face turned a little red, and I couldn’t tell if he was going to laugh or cry or maybe just tell me to go to hell. Instead he said:

  “I just don’t know yet, Tess.”

  “Know what?”

  He took a step to the side and looked down.

  “Who we are without him.”

  I met his eyes. There was sleep in the corner of one. I had the sudden urge to wipe it away.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  Around us people were dragging their suitcases past us, going around the two-person obstacle in their path without a second thought. Ours was a movie that played occasionally at airports. Everyone had seen it before.

  “We could find out,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We could.”

  But he didn’t sound convinced.

  “Letters,” I said.

  “What?” said Daniel.

  I wasn’t sure I had really said the word until it came out again.

  “Letters,” I repeated. “I would like you to write me letters.”

  His lips parted. I kept talking.

  “I want you to use a pen and write things to me on a piece of paper,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what kind. And then put that paper in an envelope and put a stamp on that envelope. And send it to me. And I’ll do the same thing. For you.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “I haven’t written a letter since I was a kid,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “So you know how.”

  He looked at his phone. He needed to get to his gate. His next flight would be boarding soon.

  “What if they’re terrible?” he said. “What if they’re so terrible, I can’t send them?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Then you can’t,” I said.

  We looked at each other one more time. This was the part in the movie where we were supposed to fall into each other’s arms. But I guess we didn’t get the script because he just turned and walked off toward his gate.

  I watched him join in with the other travelers. Some were walking like the undead. Others were seated at gates nearby, tapping screens, watching real movies, reading books. They were staring wide-eyed at the stories they’d chosen, looking for a way to pass the time, until they arrived at their final destination.

  40

  The morning after I returned from Sicily, I wo
ke before dawn in my father’s empty house thinking about my own funeral. The death of the universe was too big. It would have to wait. Instead, I’d made a new promise to myself to keep my worries in the realm of things I could control. Thus: my funeral. There were so many options, though. That’s what had me thinking in the predawn hours. And my current ideas were too varied to be of any real help.

  I could be incinerated into dust, for example.

  Or made into nutrients in the soil.

  I could be fireworks in the night sky.

  Or particles in a memorial reef on the ocean floor.

  There was even a company pressing people’s ashes into vinyl records, so someone could play a Beatles record made out of me, and sing along to my tiny bits. I could be embalmed and placed on a motorcycle like a man in Michigan. Or be posed in a boxing ring like a guy in Mexico. I could be frozen. I could be shattered and planted beneath a tree. And this was all just the first step in the process. There was so much to consider.

  I walked downstairs and found my father gone, I didn’t know where. He had barely spoken to me since I got home. I’d been waiting for a reaction from him since I first dropped out of school, and now I finally got one. Stony silence. He didn’t say much at the airport. Or at the baggage claim. It was only on the car ride on the way home, where he temporarily opened the floodgates.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m not angry about this, Tess,” he said. “Because I am. I really am.”

  “Really?” I said. “I could hardly tell by your brooding.”

  He gave me a look that told me sarcasm wasn’t going to be a good strategy here.

  “But mostly I’m just hurt,” he said.

  I looked at his tired face. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days and his jaw was shadowed with stubble. He’d told Grace he hadn’t slept while I was gone.