In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  Midway through the ride home, Papaw put his arm around me and pulled me to him, nudging my hunter-orange ball cap askew. He smelled like cigarettes; clean, body-warmed flannel; and the memory of cold air verging on snow. He held me close until we got home. He called my mama and said I was beat and was going to sleep over at their house.

  At bedtime, he came in to wish me good night. As he was leaving, he paused for a long time in the doorway, burning logs popping in the living room woodstove behind him. I sensed him seeking the right words. Finally: I just love to spend time with you, Mickey Mouse. Ain’t important to me how. He spoke it like a prayer, tapped the doorframe a couple times, and he left.

  Some people can lift your heart up to the light, reading the truth of you written on it.

  I was afraid that being a man meant waging war on what’s beautiful.

  I wanted to love the world without taking anything from it.

  He knew all this. This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

  Mamaw and I sit on the porch. The empty rocker beside us is a void—a black hole drawing all light and joy into it.

  “I don’t have to go back tomorrow,” I say. “I can stay here with you.”

  “That’s not what he would’ve wanted,” Mamaw says.

  “What do you want?”

  “Same as him.”

  “You’ll be alone.”

  “Bets and Mitzi’ll check in.”

  “Still.”

  We rock for a while.

  “He was proud of who you’re becoming there,” Mamaw says.

  “I don’t feel any different.”

  “You are. You carry yourself differently. You’re becoming the man he hoped you would. Go back. I’m fine here.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  As I board the Greyhound behind Delaney, after hugging Mamaw one last time, she hands me two letters.

  “Pep wrote these after he went in the hospital before Thanksgiving. Told me to give them to you and Delaney.”

  “I love you, Mamaw.”

  “I love you, Cash.”

  “I’ll come back home to stay if you need.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just missing him. You focus on your studies.”

  I get on the bus and hand Delaney her letter. Neither of us opens ours yet. Delaney stares out the window. About an hour passes.

  “I gotta know. How’d you get that jar of mold?” I ask.

  She keeps gazing out the window. “Jumped on the first bus back. Took a taxi to one of the outdoor outfitters. Paid a guy a couple hundred bucks to take me to the cave. Just as we were getting close to putting in, I fell in the water. All my clothes dragged me down. I almost drowned. Coughed up river water and shit.”

  “You almost died?”

  “Almost. The dude pulled me out.”

  “I’m real glad I didn’t lose you and Papaw in the same twenty-four hours. You must have spent a fortune.”

  “Everything I still had saved up from DQ.”

  A few minutes pass.

  “You’re gonna leave me and go back home, aren’t you?” Delaney asks, still looking out the window.

  I shake my head. “I’m staying.” I’ve never sounded less convincing.

  And she hears it. She rests the side of her head on the window. She sniffles a couple of times and tears begin flowing down her cheeks.

  “Even if I left, you’d still have Vi and Alex,” I say.

  “Not the same.” She cries for a long time, and when she’s done, she says quietly, “Someday, someone I try to save is going to let me.”

  We ride wordlessly for most of the rest of the journey.

  The cold cast-iron wrecking ball that smashed my life to rubble now hangs in my chest, crowding out my heart, cutting short my breath.

  Dear Cash, also called Mickey Mouse,

  I never had the gift of words like you. But sometimes words is all you get to leave behind, so here goes nothing.

  I wanted you to know how much I loved our talks together and whatever we spent time doing. I loved canoeing the Pigeon and walking the woods with you. You lit up my life every day. Sending you off to school was the hardest thing I ever did. I’m proud as can be that you were brave enough to go. I know you wanted to stay with us, but I’m glad you saw more of the world.

  I wish I could be sure of what happens to us after we’re gone. But if we have a soul that lives on, then my soul will keep loving you, even if I smoked and cussed too much to get to heaven.

  I hope you grow up to be the good man I know you’ll be. I’ll be watching you by your side as much as I can. Sometimes when you weren’t looking I would stare at you and thank God in my heart that I got to be your papaw. Those were the best years of my life. I wish I’d gotten more of them.

  Love,

  Phillip E. Pruitt

  P.S. Take care of your mamaw and see that Tess gets the letter I wrote her. Tess is a special girl. Always treat her good.

  Alex and Vi await us at the bus station, like an honor guard welcoming fallen soldiers home.

  Alex hugs me for a long time and says, “I’m here for you, man. Anything you need. I got you. Been praying for you.”

  Vi follows suit, whispering in my ear, “I’m so sorry, Cash. We love you.” When we pull back from each other, there are tears in her eyes.

  Chris comes over and shakes my hand. “It’s hard, kid. I know. Lost my dad when I was twenty. It gets better, though. I promise.”

  But I already know from losing my mama that it doesn’t get much better. Delaney told me once that when you burn to death, there comes a point when you don’t feel anything anymore because your nerves die. I don’t know who reported that to someone. But I think that’s maybe what happens when people say it gets better—more dying to ease the pain.

  By the time we reach the school, the weight in my chest has tripled.

  I don’t know how I’ll do this. I barely managed when I was only cracked. Now I’m broken wide open.

  I see Dr. Adkins eyeing me during class. She keeps losing her place and sounds distracted. After class ends, we stand in front of each other, my head bowed. I’m reminded of the first time we ever talked alone.

  “I heard about your papaw. I’m so, so deeply sorry,” she says. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” I murmur, trying to keep it together. “I, um. Miss him. A lot.”

  “I know what he meant to you.”

  I nod quickly and my eyes well. I try to laugh it off, but I start crying. I wipe my eyes and turn away.

  Dr. Adkins speaks to my back. “It’s okay to let yourself feel what you feel. Where we’re from, men and boys are told to bury any sign of weakness, and feeling things is sometimes seen as weakness. But I promise you, it’s not.”

  I nod again, still too choked up to speak.

  “Now, more than ever, is the time to turn to poetry. It doesn’t demand that you fix anything or come to any conclusions. It only asks you to observe and sit with what you feel. And with grief, there are no fixes. No conclusions. We can only sit with it.”

  “I feel like I’m never going to be happy again,” I say, turning back to her.

  “You will. While you’re healing, along with writing poetry, please talk to someone. The school has professional mental health resources. Use them. That’s another one of those things that men where we were raised see as a sign of weakness, but shouldn’t. And talk to your friends. They love you.” She rests a ring-bedecked hand on my shoulder. She’s wearing a lotion that smells like clean hay and roses. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s another thing you need to heal.” She walks back behi
nd her desk, picks up a brown grocery bag, and hands it to me. “Good food.”

  I look inside. It’s a perfect golden-brown cornbread.

  “Desiree made it. She sends her sympathies too.”

  “Thank Desiree for me.”

  “I will.”

  I nod, turn quickly, and leave without saying anything else. I feel rude, but I hope she can see I don’t want to cry in front of her anymore.

  Instead of getting better, I’m only finding new and subtle shades of experiencing loss. Turns out it’s like the people you love are riding a teeter-totter across from you. And when they’re gone, you plummet down and have a hard time getting back up. You never reach the heights you used to.

  This is a completely different experience from when my mama died. I guess you don’t get good at mourning. There are no grieving muscles you can train. You start over each time.

  I miss him at the times I’d expect, like when I’m talking to Mamaw. I miss him at the times we would have spoken. I also miss the feeling of knowing he was there, existing, even at the times we wouldn’t have ordinarily spoken.

  And I miss him at the times I wouldn’t expect, like when Vi or Alex mentions their parents. I miss him each time Delaney gets me ice cream using her Dairy Queen skills. I miss him on every occasion I look in the mirror and remember how we’d go get haircuts together.

  I’m realizing that every triumph, large and small, that I have from now until the day I die will be diminished, if only a little, by my inability to share it with him.

  Now that I think a lot on words, I realize how poorly they represent absence. We should have a language of loss that we keep in a black-velvet-lined box and only get out when we most need it. Instead, we have:

  Dead

  Deceased

  Departed

  Disappeared

  Done

  Ended

  Expired

  Finished

  Gone

  Left

  Lost

  Passed

  Not one expresses the completeness of the idea it represents, the way apple represents the completeness of an apple and river represents the completeness of a river. They all leave something unsaid. They all have some phantom limb that reminds you of their lack.

  Don’t they know how much I loved him?

  “You gonna eat your fries?” I ask.

  Delaney pushes them toward me. She’s been quiet tonight.

  “Ain’t much point to these Thursday night dinners if we don’t talk,” I say.

  “I’m thinking about stuff. You haven’t been chatty either.”

  “No. You’re right. What’re you thinking about?”

  “Pep.”

  “Me too. See? We could’ve been talking about that the whole time.”

  We laugh a little.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I say for old times’ sake and to break the silence. It was always a good way to make conversation, to think about something bigger than my life and troubles.

  “I miss Pep saying that,” Delaney says, smiling. Then her smile fades and her face turns contemplative. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Last summer, a little while after all the big news broke, I was having a really shitty day. Like really. I was stressed-out about all the news interviews. Middleford had contacted me. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave without you. My mama was doing really bad. You were off mowing lawns, and I needed someone, so I called Pep. We could easily have just talked on the phone. But he came and picked me up and took me to lunch at McDonald’s. He obviously wasn’t feeling great that day. But we sat there for three hours and talked. I knew how to deal with lots of shitty stuff happening, but I didn’t know how to deal with good stuff happening at the same time. That was new, and most people don’t really wanna hear about that kind of problem. We talked like a papaw and granddaughter. It felt so good. Probably the kind of thing you got to do all the time growing up.

  “I decided to pretend I got to do it all the time too. For that three hours, I felt completely normal. It was maybe the best three hours of my life.”

  “He never mentioned that.”

  “I asked him not to. I wanted the memory all to myself, the way it would be if he were my papaw.”

  “He said once that the more times you tell a story, the more ordinary it becomes.”

  Delaney reaches across the table and grabs one of her fries. She holds it up and looks at it. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Either way, I’m glad you told it to me.”

  “Me too.”

  “I miss him.”

  “Me too.”

  I’m glad I at least have her to mourn with. If I didn’t, I don’t know what I’d do.

  “What do you think happens after we die?” I ask Alex over the churning of our washing machines. I figure if he plans on being a pastor someday, he won’t mind getting a head start on offering spiritual counseling.

  He looks at me for a moment, his eyes soft. “I believe we keep living somehow.”

  “Heaven?”

  “Hopefully.”

  “Isn’t that what the Bible says?”

  “Yeah. But I’m not the biblical literalist a lot of people are. Like, I don’t believe in hell really.”

  “You don’t think my papaw’s in hell because he wasn’t big on church?”

  “Hell? No. See what I did there? Bro. You see what I did?”

  I half smile. “No. Can you explain it to me?”

  “Well, colloquially, sometimes people will respond to a question by saying ‘Hell no,’ and I’m not generally given to use of profanity, but on this occasion—”

  We both laugh. I don’t laugh much these days, but Alex still delivers.

  “You think my papaw’s spirit is still alive out there somewhere?”

  “With all my heart, bro.”

  “Then why can’t I feel his presence?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex says quietly.

  “You think God’s just making me suffer for some reason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You better firm up on these answers before you get your own congregation.”

  “All I can tell you is God has a season for everything. Or that’s what I believe.”

  “A season for feeling like shit all the time, apparently.”

  “See, I’ve been trying reverse psychology on God, where I pray for you to feel bad and I hope my prayer won’t be answered, as seems to mostly be the case for me now.”

  Delaney and I walk slowly back toward the residence halls from the gym. Not that I need extra workouts to stay in shape, with crew during the week, but exercise is one of the only things that takes the edge off the grief for even a few minutes.

  It’s Saturday and freezing, the smell of coming snow on the wind. The air seems to swallow sound. The overcast night sky is a muted charcoal. Cold. Silent. Dark. These are things the New England winter does well. Lucky me to be experiencing the worst grief and depression of my life here.

  “The elliptical always feels too easy,” Delaney says.

  “You gotta set it higher.”

  “But then it gets too hard. I’ve never been able to set it perfect.”

  “Try another machine.”

  “I like the elliptical.”

  “That’s because it’s easy.”

  “Yeah.”

  We smile thinly at each other.

  “Jellyfish are biologically immortal,” Delaney says after a while.

  “As in—”

  “As in they never die of old age. Sickness, yes. Predators, yes. But not old age. They think lobsters might be too.”

  “So every time we get lobster rolls in New Canaan, we’re eating an immortal creature?”

  “Not exactly. They eventuall
y die during molting.”

  “What if they invented a pill tomorrow and if you took it, you’d live forever. Would you?” I ask.

  “You kidding? That’d be horrible.”

  “Okay, then say you live to be two hundred.”

  Delaney thinks for a second. “Still nope.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not sure the human brain is designed to exist for two hundred years. Life expectancy used to be in the thirties or forties. We’ve already more than doubled that. I don’t know if our minds have caught up.”

  “Like Alzheimer’s and stuff?”

  “Not even that. You can live a real long life and have a healthy brain. I’m talking about just getting tired. Seeing people you love die. Watching people be terrible to each other. The world leaving you behind. Stuff ending. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah.”

  We walk slower as we approach Delaney’s residence hall.

  “I coulda done with my papaw living another good thirty years, though,” I say.

  “Me too,” Delaney murmurs.

  “The other day I butt-dialed him. And I had this thought that maybe he’d pick up. I gotta delete his number from my phone. But I can’t.”

  “I get it,” Delaney says.

  We get to the residence hall, and I go to say goodbye. But instead what comes out of me is this: “I haven’t been truly happy even once since he died.”

  Delaney looks at me with sad eyes. “Not even one time?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about hanging out with us? Me and Vi and Alex.”

  “I mean, y’all are great, but.”

  “I’m sorry, Cash.” She steps forward and hugs me. It feels good, but the feeling never lasts long after the embrace is over. “This is worse than when your mama died, huh?”

  “Much.”

  “Anything work then?”

  I shrug. “Just time, I guess.”

  “Time’ll work here too.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How often am I wrong about stuff?” Delaney looks like she’s about to say something else. She covers her mouth with her hand like she’s trying to stop something from coming out. She snorts like she’s holding back a case of the church giggles. Then she lets go and starts laughing.