In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  “Do what?”

  “Middleford. I’m going.” I pause for her ecstatic response.

  She starts weeping into her hands.

  Delaney doesn’t always act the way you’d expect, and this is a surprise. I reach out gingerly to touch her shoulder. “Red. Hey. Hey. Delaney. Hey.” She allows me to put my arm around her, and she flows into my side like two raindrops meeting on a window. I rock her gently back and forth. This has helped before and it helps now.

  “You being serious?” Her voice is frail and tear-sodden.

  “I am.”

  “You’re going to school with me in the fall.” She says it like she’s defying me to deny it.

  “If they’ll have me still.”

  She weeps. “I’m not gonna be alone?”

  “Nope.” I hug her tight to my side. Her tears soak warm into my T-shirt.

  “Why the change?” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “You. Papaw. I had a talk with Aunt Betsy tonight that kinda sealed it.”

  “You scared to go?”

  “Course I am.”

  “I was terrified. But now much less.” She draws a deep, shuddering breath and wipes her eyes again.

  “Shit, hang on.” I jump off the tailgate and walk to the cab. I rummage under the seat and come up with an unopened box of candy canes. They’re her favorite candy—maybe her favorite food. I buy a few extra boxes every Christmas and keep them around in case I ever need to get myself out of hot water. This time, I brought it to celebrate, but tonight it’ll pull double duty. I return and hand it to Delaney.

  She beams and pokes a hole in the cellophane of the box, sliding her finger underneath and tearing it off.

  I stare incredulously. “Now? You just ate a huge container of banana pudding and had who-knows-how-much sugar at work.”

  “You worry about you,” she says, stripping the wrapper off a candy cane and sucking on the end.

  “They’re your teeth and liver.”

  “The pancreas regulates blood sugar.” She offers me the box.

  “Naw, thanks.”

  “You’ve been changing your mind a lot lately. Celebrate with me.”

  I sigh. “Gimme a damn candy cane. Lord.”

  She hands me one. I unwrap it and hold it up, with my pinky out, as if it’s a champagne flute. “To the future.”

  “To the future.” She giggles and raises her candy cane. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Don’t tap it with the end you’ve been sucking on. I don’t need to get sick from the taste and your germs.”

  “Oh please, if we were up here to hook up like any normal high school guy and girl, you wouldn’t care.”

  “No, but that’d be more worth it than getting sick for a candy cane.”

  The funny thing is, I know I’m right on this. Delaney and I did make out once. Well, we kissed. It was almost exactly a year ago. We were intoxicated on moonlight, and I guess we looked pretty good to each other at that moment. For my part, I’d have been perfectly okay with doing it more. A lot more. But I got the vibe it freaked Delaney out. Made sense. Neither of us had much outside of our friendship, and we came to a mostly unspoken agreement that we weren’t going to risk it on a fling. Sawyer was too small for that. Plus, I’d always sort of assumed that Delaney would end up with someone much smarter than me, so why break my heart for nothing?

  Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that kiss sometimes. For someone who’d never, to my knowledge, had a boyfriend, Delaney was a bizarrely good kisser. Somehow her genius extended to that.

  I put the end of a candy cane in my mouth. “Mmmmmmm, hard toothpaste stick.”

  “Eat shit.”

  “Already am. Of the peppermint-flavored variety. Feels weird and gross to be eating a candy cane when it’s so hot and sticky out.”

  Delaney shrugs and nibbles off a small section. “It’s like having an air conditioner blow directly in your mouth.”

  “Oh. That thing people definitely enjoy. Having AC blow right in their mouth.” I manage to suck the end of my candy cane down to a sharp point before I’ve had all I can stand.

  Delaney savors hers like a fine cigar. “Did you know that as of 2020, President John Tyler had two living grandsons?”

  I look at her incredulously. “Wasn’t he like the fourth president or something?”

  “Tenth. From 1841 to 1845. Born in 1790.”

  I shake my head. “There are two people alive today whose papaw was born in 1790? How?”

  “John Tyler had kids when he was super old. That kid had kids when he was super old. Those kids are super old. Think about it. If someone had a kid when they were eighty, and that kid had a kid when they were eighty, and that kid lived to be eighty, you’ve got a span of two hundred forty years. That’s almost the age of the US.”

  “This is blowing my mind. I think Mamaw and Papaw had my mama when they were like twenty-four. My mama had me when she was seventeen. I’m sixteen.”

  “It’s called a human wormhole when this happens. When people live long enough to create what seems like an impossible link to the past. Here’s another. There was a witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on a TV game show in 1956. He was in Ford’s Theatre as a five-year-old.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes shook hands with President John Quincy Adams and President John F. Kennedy.” Delaney grows contemplative. She unwraps another candy cane and gnaws the end pensively. “I’ve started to think about my future for the first time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I never let myself have dreams. Didn’t want to be disappointed.”

  “All those projects you’ve done, all that reading—”

  “It was something to pass time that didn’t involve pulling the fentanyl out of a patch and shooting it up or getting pregnant. Just wanted to die with a full brain.”

  “Now?”

  “I want to go to MIT. I’m gonna become an epidemiologist with the CDC.”

  “Maybe I need to start dreaming a little bigger.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  We sit for a while without speaking, taking in the man-made firefly phosphorescence beneath us.

  “We should visit New York City,” Delaney murmurs. “It’s close to Middleford.”

  “You said you wanted to do that. Go to all of the museums.”

  “Yeah.” She giggles. Then starts full-on laughing. “I can’t believe this is really real. This is happening. To us.” She sighs and hugs me around the middle, from the side.

  I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me. We have a physical intimacy that people usually mistake for romantic if they don’t know I’m the only source where Delaney gets hugs.

  “Who knows where the future will take us,” she says through a deep yawn.

  I shake my head. One of these days, life is going to take us down separate paths. Just not yet.

  Within a few minutes, her breathing slows and she goes limp in sleep. This happens to her sometimes when we’re together. She saves up vigilance for the times she doesn’t feel safe—it’s what I used to do—and it all comes crashing down when she’s in a secure place, a burden she can no longer bear.

  You’re her safe harbor. You’re where she can rest. I knew, on some level, what it would mean to her if I went with her. But it didn’t really sink in until now.

  She sat by me at my mama’s funeral, holding my hand, a faint violet bruise on her cheekbone, where one of her mama’s boyfriends had knocked her around.

  We were always meant to be side by side in this world for as long as we could be. Always.

  * * *

  I let her sleep as long as I can before I need to get home. When the time comes, I gently extricate myself from her
grip—firm even in slumber, like she’s afraid she’ll get swept off by floodwaters if she lets go—and carry her bird-bone weight to the cab of my truck, buckling her in. She slumps against her window for the trip back to my house. I drive with extra caution, to not jostle her. When I arrive, I carry her slowly up the front steps, taking pains not to wake up Papaw and Mamaw. I lay her on my bed, pull off her worn flip-flops, and set them on the floor. I tuck her in, and she curls into a fetal position with a faint mewling noise and the grinding of teeth.

  For a second I consider checking her thumbs to see how torn up they are. They’re a reliable indicator of how she’s doing. But I don’t, because it bugs her when I do that when she’s awake.

  Her mama won’t care or even notice that she didn’t come home. This isn’t the first time Delaney’s spent the night at my house. If people knew, they’d talk. Let them talk. Mamaw and Papaw won’t mind. They know her life.

  As I nest on the couch a few yards from where Delaney sleeps, I ponder, Why me? Why me to be allowed to know this strange and remarkable girl and all that comes with her?

  I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder.

  Live through enough of the one, maybe you’re due some of the other.

  * * *

  We tell Mamaw and Papaw in the morning when we wake up. Papaw coughs for a solid two minutes in excitement. He and Mamaw take turns hugging the breath from Delaney. Mamaw throws together a quick celebration breakfast—I have to mow lawns. While we’re eating, she looks up the school. Turns out I’ll need a new wardrobe. The dress code for boys is navy blazers, button-down shirts, ties, khaki pants, and leather dress shoes.

  “We’ll have to pay a visit to Sawyer Dry Goods when my check comes,” Papaw says. “Get you some new duds.”

  “No,” Mamaw says. “He’s going to a fancy school. He needs nicer clothes. We’re going to Sevierville, to the Old Navy.”

  I pass the rest of the summer working as hard as I can and saving furiously. The scholarship covers tuition, board, and meals, and that’s about it. Any spending money comes from me. On top of mowing lawns, I get a job working a few nights a week stocking shelves at the Tractor Supply Company.

  I don’t see much of Jason Cloud. He must have heard Delaney and I were leaving and lost interest in us. It’s not like his drug-selling business is hurting. And, as Delaney pointed out, who even needs help to find new and exciting opioids to kill people with when you have Chinese and American pharmaceutical companies innovating for you?

  But I run into him once more that summer. We’re stopped on opposite sides of an intersection, and when our eyes meet, mine bore into his. For all the time we’re stopped, I don’t look away. I don’t shrink. His eyes are vacant and dim, those of a starving man whose only thought is his hunger. I guess when you love money like he does, you’re perpetually starving.

  Delaney’s mama worsens. Delaney has to Narcan her back from the brink of death at least once, that I know of. Three hours later, her mama was back out looking for a fix. Their electricity gets cut off. Then their water. They start getting eviction notices. By the end of summer, Delaney is essentially living at our house.

  Papaw’s health deteriorates too. But one shining morning a few weeks before I’m set to leave, he wakes up and he’s having one of his good days. He asks me to take him out on the river. I call my lawn-mowing appointments and tell them I can’t make it and why. They understand.

  He sits in the front of the canoe, like I used to, with his oxygen tank. He doesn’t paddle. He’s not having that good a day. I sit in the back, the way he used to, and paddle for us both.

  We stop at the bank for a while to rest, still sitting in the canoe, the water slapping gently at the sides like the sound of a baby clapping.

  Papaw looks around, lances of sunlight piercing the clouds, insects flitting across the river’s surface. A golden day.

  “This is a beautiful world,” he murmurs.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I’m going to miss it when I’m gone.”

  I start to say, It’ll miss you too. But my voice catches.

  Fortunately, he doesn’t look back. I can’t bear eye contact with him in this moment. He keeps gazing outward. “If I make the cut, I hope heaven is this exactly. To hell with your clouds and harps. Give me a fine day on the water with my grandson. It don’t get no better’n this.”

  My throat aches as it dams up sobs.

  Papaw turns and looks at me. His eyes are ancient and gray as a February sky weighted with snow. “I hope you bring your children and grandchildren here.”

  I nod and try to speak, but the bulwark breaks and tears cascade down my face. I can’t meet his gaze anymore.

  He gives me a slight, sad smile. “Mickey Mouse?” he says softly, and waits until I meet his eyes again. “I love you.” He falters as he says it, but not as if doubting what he is saying. Like someone who believes what they’re saying so much that saying it doesn’t feel like enough. There’s only so much weight words can bear.

  “I love you too.” I hear the same hitch in my voice.

  “We best get home.”

  “Yessir.”

  As we turn into the boat pullout, I’m certain this is the final time I’ll ever be on the river with my papaw.

  But then he turns and asks me quietly if I’ll scatter his ashes on the river when he’s gone, as we did with my mama, and I know that this is the second-to-last time I’ll ever be in this hallowed place with him.

  The week before we leave is a tornado of preparation. We go to the Old Navy in Sevierville to get school outfits. Delaney needs new clothes too. Blouses. Skirts. We buy hers also. What little savings she had squirreled away, she spent to pay up the rent on her mama’s trailer—a parting gift. She sent the money directly to her mama’s creditors so it couldn’t be used for drugs.

  I ask Delaney what’s going to happen to her mama when she’s gone. She doesn’t say anything but gives me a slight shrug, then looks down and back up at me, like I already know. And I do.

  Four days before we go, I drive Delaney to Nashville to get an abscessed tooth pulled. I’d caught her trying to find a YouTube video on how to do it herself. I contacted Dr. Srinavasan, who called in a favor with a Yale classmate who’s an oral surgeon at Vanderbilt.

  Delaney refuses to accept a prescription for Lortab.

  The surgeon says, “You don’t have to fill it. But if the pain gets bad enough, you’ll be grateful for it.”

  “I know. I don’t want to want it,” Delaney says. “Even if the pain is too much. But thanks for pulling that tooth. It hurt like shit.” And that’s that.

  Two days before we go, I take Delaney, still aching, to the Knoxville zoo. We spend all day there, her face alive with wonder in spite of her discomfort. She cries on the drive home and I don’t ask why. I know it’s not tooth pain.

  The day before we go, Mamaw and Aunt Betsy make a huge dinner. Papaw mans the grill until he can’t anymore and Aunt Betsy takes over. We invite Delaney, but she says she wants to be alone. It sounds more like she doesn’t really want to be alone but needs to be.

  I rise with the sun on the morning we’re leaving. I drive to the river. Mist whispers from its surface in the early September dawn. I remove my boots and socks, pull the hems of my jeans up, and wade in. The water feels like the cool side of a pillow on my skin. I stand there for a moment, the current coursing past my bare calves and ankles.

  But I’m still hungry for communion, so I wade farther in, filling my lungs with the dew-scented air, and immersing myself completely in baptism.

  Carry off my fear like it’s sin.

  Fill my reservoir of courage.

  Cleanse me of doubt.

  Make me strong enough to cut myself a path through the world, like you.

 
Remind me that there are things I love that can last.

  Goodbye.

  I rise from the water, letting each drop falling off me rejoin the march to the ocean. “If you can see me, Mama, I hope you’re proud,” I say to the currents that bore away her ashes. Before I go, I fill a glass Dr. Enuf bottle to take with me.

  This must be what it’s like to die. You look around you and see how much of what you love you leave behind.

  After everything, we didn’t have the money for plane tickets to school. Papaw and Mamaw were embarrassed, but I told them I was scared to fly because I’ve never flown before, which isn’t a lie. So we bought Greyhound tickets. Twenty hours on a bus, from Knoxville to Stamford, Connecticut.

  Mamaw and Papaw drive us to the bus station. They told Delaney her mama could come. She said her mama couldn’t make it. I question whether she passed along the invitation. I doubt even more her mama would have accepted.

  Mamaw and Papaw hug Delaney and kiss her on the cheek.

  “We’re going to have a good Longmire party when I come back over Christmas break,” Delaney says to Papaw.

  “I’ll bank on it. You go and figure out how to save the world.”

  Delaney gives Papaw her crooked smile. “I will.” She pauses for a second. “Love you, Pep.” She says it with the unsteady lilt of a question.

  Papaw beams and doesn’t hesitate. “Love you too, Tess. See my grandson don’t trip over his shoelaces up there.”

  She smiles wanly and boards the bus.

  Mamaw gives me a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. “We’re so proud of you,” she says, on the thin edge of losing composure. “You’ll do great things. I know it.”

  “I’ll hug you all right,” Papaw says. “But first I’m gonna shake your hand how I’d shake a man’s hand. You’re a man today.” He looks me in the eye and shakes my hand, his grip strong and callused. He starts to cough but tamps it down. I see him fighting for his old strength, pressing his whole weight against the coughs that would fold him in half in a moment when he’s trying to stand his tallest, trying not to cry. Then, he pulls me into him, his hand on the back of my head, pressing his cheek on the crown. I feel him trembling and then surrendering. He quakes with muffled weeping.