My heart stopped and then raced.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She handed me a beer. “I saw the light on. Thought I’d come over and listen to you play for a while.”
She curled up on the couch, across from the chair where I was, and drew her knees into her chest. Diego settled on the cool concrete floor by the door and could have been mistaken for a shag rug.
I opened the beer and took a couple of long drinks. October sipped at hers. I was staring at her, and she was looking around the room at everything but me. We didn’t speak, and it was uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in a way that borders on exciting, like when two people feel too much when they’re alone together, and for one reason or another can’t show it or tell it.
Then I realized I could tell her a lot; I just had to start strumming.
“Any requests?”
“Sad songs,” she said. “Only sad songs.”
I took another drink of my beer and then played “Slip Slidin’ Away” because that song is about missed chances, regret, and fear, and because the closer I got to October, the more I felt like I was sliding in the opposite direction. Moreover, whether I’m listening to that song or playing it, I find myself wondering how any of us make it through the peaks and valleys of our lives with any grace and hope at all.
In the middle of the song, October set her beer on the floor, stretched out on the couch, stuffed a pillow under her head, and lay down. Then she closed her eyes and hummed along to the music.
I played a couple of Leonard Cohen songs, one of which I could’ve written about October if I were as cool and poetic as Leonard. And then I noodled around, making stuff up as I went along, and she fell asleep.
She was on her side, hands together in front of her chest as if she were holding a baby bird in her palms. I watched her as I strummed soft chords and plucked at sweet lullaby notes with my fingers, and when I finally got tired and put the guitar away, I thought she’d wake up, but she didn’t. Then I remembered she’d once slept through a Bruce Springsteen concert.
She looked comfortable, and I saw no reason to rouse her. I pulled up the blanket to cover her shoulders, shut off all the lights except for the small one near the door, stepped carefully around Diego, and walked out.
When I got back upstairs, I felt electric. Knowing October and I would be sleeping under the same roof filled me with an odd combination of peace and desire that wrestled with my body and calmed me down all at once.
This is the good kind of loneliness, I thought. The kind that’s really a longing for something your imagination can hold onto until morning.
My sheets were glacial when I got in bed, and I swore I could feel October’s closeness in the shivers on my skin. Then I thought of Cal and wondered how I was going to hold this all together.
Right before I fell asleep, I realized I’d forgotten to tell October about the mushrooms.
FIFTEEN.
I was sitting at the table in October’s studio, eating a bowl of muesli and paging through a book on redwoods, one Ingrid had recently sent me, when October and Diego got there the next morning.
October seemed lighter in spirit than she had all week. Her movements were smooth and floaty, like she was on roller skates, and she glided over to where I was, sat down across from me with one of her legs tucked underneath her, leaned halfway across the table and said, “Whatcha readin’?”
I had a mouthful of cereal and showed her the cover. She spun the book around and opened it to the inside flap, where Ingrid had written:
Dear Joey—
Thought of you when I saw this in the bookstore.
Love you,
Mom
“Ha-ha,” October giggled. “Joey.”
“Just so you know, Ingrid is the only person on the planet who is allowed to call me that.”
She began paging through the book. I watched her eyes moving right to left, widening as they skimmed the words and looked at the pictures. Every so often she would shake her head and mumble, “Holy cow.”
As soon as I finished my breakfast, I said, “I forgot to tell you last night. I got your mushrooms.”
At first she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Then she did. She leaned in and began to ramble nervously. “You have them? Wow. OK. You can’t just give them to me, though. You know that, right? I can’t do them alone. That doesn’t seem safe. Are mushrooms safe? Maybe we should film it. No. Probably not a good idea. No filming. Private is better, right?”
“Private is definitely better.” I saw Rae pull in and said, “Can we discuss this later? I don’t need Rae accusing me of being a drug pusher.”
October laughed and made a zipping motion across her mouth, and I quickly took my bowl to the sink in the back. All week long I’d been making sure I was nowhere near October when Rae arrived in the morning.
Rae came straight into the studio, presented October with a handful of bills, and asked her to sign some checks.
October set my book on the table with the page she was reading splayed face down. She scribbled her signature on the checks and then picked up the book again. Looking at Rae, she said, “The tallest tree in the entire world lives in a park in Northern California.”
Rae feigned interest, but I could tell she didn’t really comprehend what October was trying to tell her. I walked over to join the conversation and noticed Rae didn’t have any nuts and raisins with her. This meant she wasn’t staying long.
“Hyperion,” I said. Rae and October both looked at me. “That’s the name of the tree. It’s about 380 feet tall.”
“Three hundred and eighty feet?” October exclaimed. “That’s as tall as the Empire State Building!” She seemed to find this awe-inspiring. Rae acted like it was ordinary, but probably only because I said it.
“I camped in that park after Hyperion was discovered,” I told them. “It’s phenomenal.”
I turned to a photo of Hyperion and pointed it out to Rae. In the photo, a man was standing beside the tree. He was listed as being six feet eight inches tall, and that really showed the scale, because he looked like a tiny toy soldier that had been placed beside an upright bass.
Rae’s eyes finally widened, and she said, “Wow. That is big, yeah?”
I flipped back a few pages and pointed to Giant Tree. “This one’s my favorite. He’s not the biggest or the prettiest, but in person he really moves me.”
“He moves you?” Rae said, with a slightly comic tone.
“Where does he live?” October asked.
“Avenue of the Giants. In Humboldt. I once drove all the way there, had lunch with him, and drove home.”
Rae said, “Did you sing ‘Kumbaya’ to him too?”
I chuckled. “That’s actually funny, Rae.”
“You know, I can be funny, Joe.”
October said, “Let me see.”
I pointed. “Look at the way the sunlight reaches down through his crown. Incredible, right?”
October said, “I can’t believe I’ve lived here for as long as I have and didn’t know about these trees. I thought the trees in Muir Woods were giants.”
I could tell Rae was paying close attention to the way October and I were bonding over the trees. Or maybe she was just surprised by my passion and enthusiasm, which was rarely on display in front of her, or anyone for that matter.
I handed the book back to October and said, “I could talk about trees all day, but I have a birdcage to finish.”
I went back to my corner—I was about two full workdays away from being done. Meanwhile, Rae went into the office and printed something on the computer and then left to run errands.
October was still at the table, still engrossed in the book. Usually she had music playing during the day, but that morning I worked in silence while she read about the redwoods.
Around lunchtime she came back to see me with the book still in her hands.
I wiped my face on the bottom of my T-shirt and gave her my attention.
“Do you have plans tomorrow?” she said.
“No.”
She stepped closer and pointed to the cover of the book. “Will you take me here? To see the trees?”
“Tomorrow?” I laughed. “We can’t go all the way up there tomorrow.”
“You just said you didn’t have anything to do.”
I cracked my knuckles and stared at her, which caused her to point more vigorously at the cover.
“This is where I want to do the mushrooms.”
My body tensed and shook as though it were feeling the approaching future and all it held. October’s phrase “can of worms” popped into my head, and I mumbled something that was unintelligible, even to my own ears.
“Come on,” she purred. “Doesn’t this seem like the perfect place to do mushrooms?”
Fucking hell, I wasn’t going to lie to her.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it does.”
Initially, October wanted to see Hyperion, but he’s pretty far north, almost to the Oregon border, in a fairly remote area of Redwood National Park. It would have taken us a good five hours to drive there, and another couple to hike to the tree. Avenue of the Giants was only three hours away, in Humboldt County, and the state park there was filled with tons of notable redwoods worth visiting, including my favorite, Giant Tree, as well as the Flatiron Tree, and the Albino Redwood—a tree not many people knew how to find, but I did.
I suggested we leave early so we had the whole day to explore. I also wanted to make sure October was coming down off her trip before we drove home.
As we were making our plans, October pulled out her phone and said, “Before I get too excited, let me text Rae to see if she can spend the night with Diego.”
She began typing, and I let her words sink in.
“Wha . . . huh?” I stuttered, my brow furrowing against my will. “You want to spend the night there? Together?”
She paused, biting at her thumbnail while she pondered my question, as if the trouble with the idea had only just occurred to her. “Well, I thought . . . I mean . . . We certainly can’t drive home on drugs, right?”
“I’m not planning on doing the drugs. I’m planning on supervising.”
“Joe, no. You can’t let me do them alone.”
My stomach felt like it had been tossed off the top of a tall building.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s a long way to go for just a few hours. If we find somewhere to crash for the night, we can spend a lot more time with the trees.”
I didn’t want to be responsible for making a decision like this. On the one hand it seemed like a horrible idea for us to go away together overnight; on the other hand there was nothing I wanted more than to spend the night in the middle of an ancient redwood forest with her.
She touched my arm and said, “It’ll be fine. We’re friends, remember? Friends do this kind of stuff. Don’t worry.”
I wasn’t worried. I was terrified. And weak.
“We can get separate rooms if that makes you feel better. However, if I’m still tripping when I go to sleep, I’m going to need you to sit by my bed and make sure I don’t die.”
I laughed. “You’re not going to die.”
She laughed too. But then she got serious. “Really though, if you don’t feel comfortable with this, I understand. I can ask Rae to go with me.”
I scoffed. “You cannot do mushrooms with Rae.”
Her megawatt smile returned. “OK. What I’m hearing you say is that it’s cool and you’ll take me?” She raised her phone. “Blink once for no and twice for text Rae about the dog.”
My conscience wrestled with all the other parts of me and lost, because as much as I believed no was the correct answer, I blinked twice, and the words that came out of my mouth were “It’s cool. Text away.”
“Thank you! I promise it will be fun!”
Fun was not what concerned me.
She pushed “Send,” and we waited for a response. Less than two minutes later, Rae wrote back and told October she would be at Casa Diez by seven.
The next morning I walked down to Equator before Rae got to the house—I didn’t want her to see me leave with October.
October picked me up at the cafe a little after seven, asked if I minded driving, and then climbed over the middle console to the passenger’s side of the car.
As we headed north on US 101, she propped her feet up on the dashboard and reclined her seat as if she were relaxing on a beach lounger. She had my redwoods book in her lap and was reading facts aloud—facts I already knew—but I let her go on because her reverence for the trees made me feel closer to her.
“Redwoods have been around for 240 million years!” she gasped. “That’s before humans.”
“Yup. Before birds and spiders, even.”
“They can live to be two thousand years old? Jesus. It doesn’t seem fair that a tree gets to live for centuries and all we get is a handful of measly decades.”
“You’d really want to live for a thousand years?”
“You wouldn’t?”
“I’ve barely made it this far.” It was warm in the car, and I asked October to hold the wheel while I took off my fleece jacket. “Anyway, trees are so much smarter, stronger, and more reliable than humans. If we could actually live that long, imagine how much more fucked up the Earth would be.” I tossed my jacket into the back seat. “Who am I kidding? We would have destroyed the Earth by now. We’d be long gone.”
“That’s very pessimistic, Joey.” A minute later she said, “Wait. The coast redwood is actually a cypress tree, not a sequoia?”
“Coast redwoods and sequoias are both part of the cypress family.”
“And the coast redwood is the tallest?”
“Yup.”
“And that’s what Hyperion is? A coast redwood?”
“Correct. All the trees we’re going to see today, those are coast redwoods too. The giant sequoias grow in the Sierra Nevada.”
“Sequoia sempervirens.”
“Always alive. Forever green.”
“Redwoods are nature’s art installations,” she decided firmly.
A quote came back to me, one I’d memorized when I was doing research with Sid for my college thesis. “Aristotle once said: ‘There is more both of beauty and of raison d’être in the works of nature than in those of art.’”
She nodded with so much enthusiasm she had to sit up to do it. “That’s why I love these trees. They’re universal symbols of strength, perseverance, and survival. They’re living poems to time.”
I’ll admit it: I wanted to fuck her when she said that. And as I drove on, an image popped into my head. I saw myself as the pith inside one of those colossal trees, living in darkness, buried deep inside the trunk, hidden under centuries of growth, a heartbeat muffled and faint. And then I imagined October coming along and scraping off long pieces of bark, peeling away layer after ancient layer, trying to reach me. And still it would take years to get deep enough to set me free.
She said, “Redwood trees are poetic, don’t you think?”
Her voice brought me back into the car, back into my body.
“Yup,” I told her. “Always have.”
We made it to the little town of Willits, known as the gateway to the redwoods, in two hours and stopped at a coffee shop on Main Street for breakfast. There were few patrons inside—couple of burly loggers and some old hippies. We drank strong coffee and ate runny egg sandwiches, and after we finished, October got out her sketchbook and asked if she could do a portrait of me.
The plan, she said, was to do one now and then another later, after the mushrooms kicked in.
“No talking, no moving,” she directed.
I sat still and stayed quiet while she focused on my face. The entire time she was drawing, I had a strong, somatic, dare I say synesthetic response to her attention. What I mean is I felt as if she were touching me with her pencil. Her hand made broad, sweeping strokes and small, intricate marks on the paper, each one like a gentle caress on my face. And as she tilted her head and squinted at my features, I had the sense she was examining my interior as much as my exterior.
“You have a beautiful mouth,” she told me matter-of-factly. “And your eyes are almost symmetrical.”
She used her hand for a bit, shading and smudging until her fingers were gray from the graphite.
“This is fun,” she mumbled, as if she were talking to herself. “There’s so much going on behind your eyes, and that makes for a very nuanced portrait. On the surface you’re all still water. But man, that water runs deep.”
“Swampy,” I mumbled.
“No talking.” She shook her head. “Besides, you’re wrong. I can see people’s spirits when I draw them, and yours isn’t swampy. It’s a little marine flare blinking at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.”
She put her pencil down, examined her work, made a couple of additional adjustments, and then flipped the pad around for me to see.
“Well?”
She’d drawn me with a cup of coffee in my hands, looking a little off to the right, the cafe’s one big window behind me and to the left.
I studied the portrait for a while before I said anything. It looked exactly like me, and yet it looked like a stranger. She’d drawn a fiery light in my eyes that I didn’t think was really there.
“That’s how I see you,” she said.
Then I understood. She’d drawn the potential Joe Harper, not the actual one. Because that’s what a spirit is, right? Our best, brightest, purest self?
Sorrow Page 16
