In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  We meander. The High Line is well lit and meticulously landscaped. We have it mostly to ourselves, but we pass the occasional person or couple.

  We gawk at the views and speculate on what buildings house. We watch people walking on the streets below. We come around a bend, and there’s a stunning vista and a bench to take it in. This is the place. My breath quickens.

  “Wanna sit?” I ask, hoping she’ll interpret the unsteadiness of my voice as a shiver from the frigid bluster.

  “Sure.”

  My blood pounds in my temples. I had a plan for what I was going to say, but it left me the minute I sat.

  “I almost forgot,” Vi says, rummaging in her pocket. “I have a job for you.” She pulls out another tangled necklace.

  My body sings relief. This might smooth my path. I remove my glove and hold out my palm. She drops the necklace on it.

  “Now you’re testing my skills,” I say. “The cold reduces dexterity, and the light isn’t great.”

  “We can wait.”

  “I like the challenge.”

  I hold the necklace in my palm, moving it around slightly, waiting for it to reveal how it’ll give up its tangle. I get an idea. “We’re going to teach you.”

  She edges toward me. The wind blows a strand of her hair across my lips. I make no attempt to move it.

  “Okay.” I start to pull out one of the tangles, but my hand is trembling and I can’t get ahold of it.

  “I’ll try,” Vi says. She removes her glove and delicately takes up a small length of chain.

  Both of our hands are right there, together. My finger brushes hers.

  And then, somehow, my fingers are interlacing with hers. Her hand is smooth and soft and cold. She drops the chain back into my palm.

  And now I’m holding hands with Vi Xavier.

  Every cell in me sparkles.

  I lower my palm with the necklace and turn to face her.

  She looks away with a thin, nervous laugh.

  “I…don’t know how to say this. I have to tell you something.” I’m a trembling mess. “I’ve…liked you for a really, really long time. As more than a friend. I guess that’s the thing I needed to say. I couldn’t keep it inside anymore. But. Yeah.”

  Quite the poet. Dr. Adkins would be so proud.

  Vi takes a deep breath, as though gathering herself. She looks at me and then at her feet.

  “Cash,” she says softly. She pulls her hand from mine so gently it makes me wish she had yanked it.

  My pulse starts a drumroll at the base of my head, and even the wind seems to hush to hear what she’ll say.

  “I can’t.”

  I feel like I’ve been running in the pitch dark, and suddenly, there’s no ground under my feet, and the only question as I fall is how badly I’ll be broken when I hit the bottom of whatever chasm I’ve stumbled into. And still I cling to the tiniest scrap of hope, as if I’ll land on a giant feather mattress. Maybe this is her idea of humor.

  But she looks at me with great sadness—no, pity.

  “Oh,” I say weakly. “Oh.”

  “I think you’re really amazing. I love being your friend. We have so much fun together.”

  “What’s…wrong with me?” I hate the pleading in my voice.

  “Nothing is wrong with you. It’s why I love being your friend. But—” She catches herself.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head.

  Maybe this is the one doubt I can resolve that will make everything work. “Vi. Please tell me what you were about to say.”

  She looks at her feet and doesn’t speak.

  “Please.” My voice is brittle.

  She raises her head to meet my eyes. “Cash,” she says softly. “You’re in love with Delaney.”

  I give a small disbelieving laugh. “Wait. What? No. No. Vi. I am not in love with Delaney. I mean, yes, we’re best friends. But we’re not together. We’ve never been.”

  “I know you’re not together,” Vi murmurs. “But it’s obvious.”

  The warmth inside me that was protecting me against the cold has been extinguished as surely as pissing on the embers of a campfire. I start shivering violently. The awful prickly chill of impending sickness cascades down my back like a legion of centipedes. “Is there anything I can tell you to convince you I’m not in love with Delaney?”

  Vi takes my hand in hers, but with a you’ll-get-through-this energy. “You’re very important to me. I hope we stay friends. I never wanted to hurt you.”

  Now I pull away. I clasp my hands in front of me and rest my knees on my elbows. I suddenly feel so tiny and crude and ridiculous. In my cheap clothes with my belly full of cheap Brazilian food. Having met Vi on a scholarship I didn’t earn. With my family dying all around me. Where did I ever get the idea I was in her league? My broken life is no place for her. I wonder if all my days will be spent pressing vainly against doors forever shut to me.

  “Cash?” she says quietly.

  “You never asked for this. I know,” I say. “I’ll be okay.” Maybe.

  “I don’t want things to be weird between us.”

  “I just need time is all.” I stand. “We should start heading back.”

  She stands too and we begin walking.

  If only heartbreak were truly what it claims to be, it might not be so bad. But here’s the thing—your heart never gets broken quite enough to stop wanting who broke it.

  We return to the Strand, which is still bustling with shoppers. We haven’t been waiting long (but it feels like forever) when Alex, Malik, and Desiree roll up, chatting merrily.

  “Bro,” Alex says. “This New York City place? It’s got some food options.”

  They regale us with their culinary odyssey. They’re so exuberant, it eases Vi’s and my efforts to act like everything’s fine.

  Delaney, TaKisha, and Dr. Adkins arrive. They also radiate the aura of having had the time of their lives.

  “Well,” Dr. Adkins says, “that was my first experience going to the museum with someone smarter than the museum.”

  “We had more fun than you did,” Delaney says, coming over to where I’m standing, slightly apart from the group.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shouldn’t have ditched me. After all that talk about hanging out together here someday.”

  “I know,” I say quietly, looking away. I expect Delaney to keep twisting the knife, but she spares me.

  She sits beside me on the ride back to Brooklyn to retrieve the car. What a stark difference between this ride and the ride to Manhattan. I imagined making this journey in triumph, Vi by my side, our eyes sparkling, everyone giving us congratulatory smiles. Instead, Delaney and Alex sit between me and Vi. I try to hold my head high, but the burden is too much and I slump into myself.

  We get to the car, and I immediately call the far back. “Man, this day was tiring. I’m gonna crash on the trip home.”

  “Same. I’ll sit with Cash. Give Vi and Alex room to spread out.”

  Thank the Lord for Delaney Doyle.

  As I’m getting in, Dr. Adkins asks, “Have fun today?”

  She knows. So I offer as much of the truth as I can. “Seeing TaKisha was amazing. I’ll never forget it.”

  “That was really something special, wasn’t it?”

  I rest the side of my forehead against the icy window as the city lights dissolve into the blackness behind us like sugar melting into coffee. I squint at them and remember simpler times—going with Delaney to overlook Sawyer, the equivalent of a few blocks of Manhattan.

  “They look like phosphenes,” Delaney murmurs, seeing my fixation on the skyline.

  “Do what?”

  “That’s what you call the little lights you see when you close your eyes.”

  I squeeze m
y eyes shut and stare at the slow dance of phosphenes on the backs of my eyelids.

  Everyone is tired from the day, so the drive is mostly quiet. But after a while Delaney murmurs, “There could have been other intelligent life on Earth before humans. And we might not ever know.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “Hundreds of millions of years ago.”

  “Yeah, but there’d be pyramids and fossils and stuff.”

  “Only a tiny fraction of life gets fossilized. Human structures can’t last millions of years. Almost everything from millions of years ago is just dust. If there was a civilization of advanced beings that existed for one hundred thousand years sixty million years ago, we’d probably never know.”

  I look back at the glow in the distance. “All this will be forgotten?”

  “Someday.”

  I think on our passing through the night over the pulverized bones of long-buried loves and memories, and it’s an oddly soothing idea—that the world forgets all of our wounds and aches so completely you eventually can’t distinguish them from dust.

  Delaney slumps into my shoulder. She reaches over and takes my hand. The way she did at my mama’s funeral. I feel the roughness of her distressed thumb. This is the third time you’ve held hands with a girl tonight, zero of which were how you hoped for.

  She doesn’t let my hand go the rest of the drive. This won’t help my case that I’m not in love with Delaney, but I don’t mind, because without her to hold on to, I would drown in the current of my sadness.

  * * *

  Back on campus, we say our good-nights. Vi and I don’t hug like we normally do. I play it as a joke, like I’m afraid of knocking off her hat. But I don’t know who I’m performing for anymore.

  Alex and I walk slowly back to Koch Hall.

  He puts his arm around my shoulders, and we walk for a while without speaking. Finally he says, “You took the plunge.”

  “From a hundred-foot cliff into four inches of water.”

  “Man,” Alex says.

  “Got the old ‘I just want to be friends.’ ” I don’t feel like telling Alex about the other part.

  “Aw, man. I’m sorry, bro.”

  “It’s all good. I mean, it’s not really, but.”

  “For what it’s worth, man, I think she’s sincere about that. I can tell you mean a lot to her.”

  I sigh.

  We get on the elevator. Alex drops his arm to hit the button for his floor. As he’s about to get off, he turns to me and motions me in. “Come on, bro. Hug it out.”

  I smile against my will and we hug. It feels good. Alex smells like restaurants—smoke and sizzling oil and spice.

  And then I’m alone again. I trudge to my room. I sit in the silence. Tripp is gone for Thanksgiving. I almost wish he were here to provide some distraction. Even anger or annoyance would feel better than what I’m experiencing.

  I text Delaney.

  Me: Sorry again for ditching you in NYC. I regret it.

  A few seconds pass.

  Delaney: You okay?

  Me: I guess you figured out.

  Delaney: Yeah.

  Me: Did Vi tell you?

  Delaney: Your face did. She hasn’t said anything. I’m sorry, Cash. I hate to see you hurting.

  Me: I feel like an idiot.

  Delaney: You don’t seem like more of an idiot than normal, if that’s a comfort.

  Me: Surprisingly it is.

  Delaney: You’ve survived worse. You’ll pick yourself back up.

  Me: I hope.

  Delaney: You still owe me a trip to NYC. Us hanging out like we planned.

  Me: Damn right I do.

  I try to sleep, and exhausted as I am, it should be easy. But each time I drift off, my brain replays my conversation with Vi and it snaps me back awake, like I’m trying to sleep on a narrow catwalk over a freezing lake, and every time I’m near sleep, my hand falls in the icy water.

  * * *

  It’s two a.m. I look at my phone, as though there’ll be a text from Vi saying, Hey, now that I’ve had some time to think, I wanna be your girlfriend after all. Of course there’s nothing.

  I spiral. Why are you choosing to be so far from everyone who loves you? At a place where you’re only going to fail and let everyone down? You could quit school tomorrow and leave all this hurt behind.

  I want to talk with Papaw so bad it makes my teeth ache. I honestly consider, for a second or two, calling him. But I would be pulling him from sleep and I couldn’t.

  Then I remember Dr. Adkins’s book. I haven’t even cracked it open to see her dedication to me. I open it and, still under my blanket (I can’t bear leaving the warmth to turn on the light), read by the glow of my phone:

  To my fellow poet Cash,

  There is beauty in every wound.

  Find it.

  Your friend,

  Bree Rae Adkins

  Fellow poet. I feel about ten percent better immediately. I start thumbing through, reading. It’s a garden of aching wonder. She writes about the things, landscapes, and people I know. Her poems massage the hurt from my heart—not by asking me to avoid it, but by asking me to sit with it and to speak with it—to know it.

  And I know how to do that. I have a pen on my nightstand. I grab it. I don’t even get up to find my notebook. I write in the back of Dr. Adkins’s book, the way she once told me she used to do in her favorite poetry books.

  It pours from me, unbroken. Seeing my words spilling onto the page dulls the keen edge of my misery. Beauty in every wound. Dignity in heartbreak. This is what your mama was looking for—just to stop hurting for a while—and it killed her.

  As cures for pain go, poetry is better than most.

  A Feast of Apples

  You told me apples were your favorite

  fruit and you taught me

  the secret way of eating

  them so their rough

  parts vanished.

  You told me apples were your favorite

  fruit because we desire

  most what we can’t have.

  Did you know you can starve

  at a feast of apples?

  The more you eat of them

  the more they leave you wanting.

  You were beautiful

  in the dwindling October light.

  All around us was the sweet perfume

  of apples’ sun-flushed skin,

  heavy in the burning

  season’s breath.

  I wanted to kiss your lips clean

  of the nectar

  that anointed them,

  I was delirious with want;

  there was no amount of you

  that would not leave me hungry.

  “This is the longest we’ve talked since Thanksgiving,” Delaney says, staring out the Greyhound’s window. She had no desire to go home for Christmas break, but I told her she could stay with us, so she acquiesced.

  “You’re not blaming me, are you?” I ask.

  “I’m not not blaming you.”

  “As if you didn’t spend ninety percent of December studying for finals,” I say. “Same with Alex and Vi.”

  “As if you didn’t spend every free minute you had alone by the lake with your notebook, skipping meals with us. At least when I was doing it, I had the excuse of being mad at you.”

  My attempts at escape hadn’t worked. Every time I’d tried to turn down the volume on my thoughts, they only reverberated louder. “You know why.”

  “Alex said you promised you wouldn’t ditch us if Vi rejected you.”

  “Why is Alex telling you that?”

  “Because we were discussing how much we missed you, piece of shit.”

  I stare
at my hands. “I needed a break from seeing her every day.”

  “She snores and leaves out used tissues.”

  “I bet they’re beautiful snores. And used tissues.”

  Delaney rolls her eyes. “Gross. Don’t be pathetic.”

  We don’t talk for a while. Then Delaney says, “I mean it, dickhead, I miss you.”

  “I heard you. I’m working out my shit.”

  “If we’re gonna stay friends at Middleford, we gotta work on it. It’s not like in Sawyer, where it was easy because there was no one else. This is like a plant you have to water.”

  I turn to Delaney. “When we get back, every Friday night we hang out. Just you and me. No Alex, no Vi. Deal?”

  “You think I’m committing my Friday nights to you and you alone? Flatter yourself much?”

  “What could you possibly have going on Friday nights at Middleford?”

  “That’s my self-care night.”

  “We both know the only self-care you believe in is tormenting me.”

  She smiles a little.

  “Thursday dinners,” I say. “Just you and me.”

  “Deal.”

  “You know this bus ride home was almost the first little bit of peace and happiness I’ve felt since Thanksgiving?”

  Delaney shrugs and cozies against my shoulder, draping her hoodie over herself like a blanket. Soon she’s fast asleep. At one point, she stirs and murmurs, “Someday, when you’re moping about Vi down by the lake, you should write a poem about how awesome I am to take your mind off your pain.”

  “I promise you I will,” I say. I’m not lying.

  Being home again mends some of the rifts in me.

  My first night back, Papaw and I brave the cold to sit on the porch and talk. I’d already told him about crashing and burning with Vi. But I tell him again.

  “Sometimes you get your heart broke, Mickey Mouse. Ain’t no avoiding it,” he says, wheezing.

  “What now?”

  “You said she wants to be your friend.”

  “She says.”