Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  Cal’s words sunk into my chest like a pickax. “She hates me. Why wouldn’t she? I hate me too.” I picked up my mug and tossed back what was left of the tequila while Cal watched. Just as he was about to speak, I put my hand up and said, “Don’t bother telling me how much I deserve her hate; I know.”

  Cal shook his head. “Don’t underestimate her. October’s above hate. She feels things hard and then channels those feelings into her fucking art. Even after you left, when I hated you, you know what she told me? She told me the most important thing to do when your heart’s been broken is to keep it open.” Cal rolled his eyes. “‘Nurture the tenderness, Chris. Hold on to the love. Turn it into something beautiful.’ Those were her exact words. And when I asked her why she wasn’t furious with you, she said, ‘I understand Joe too well to be angry with him. I’m just sad.’”

  That crushed me. I’d take anger over sadness any day. Moreover, it’s always been hard for me to accept the idea that someone could love me. But for someone to understand me and still love me? Well, that took a level of character and compassion I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  Cal was still shaking his head. “No, she didn’t hate you, Harp. She was just super fucking bummed. You broke her heart. And you left her without an assistant.”

  I rubbed my eyes again. The pain was deeper and duller now. “How is she? Honestly. Is she happy?”

  “I think so. She’s mad excited about this MoMA thing.”

  Against my better judgment, I said, “Is she seeing anybody?”

  Cal shrugged. “Some twenty-four-year-old muralist from L.A. He wears ironic sweaters and makes craft beer in his spare time. It’s nothing. Casual summer fling was the phrase she used.”

  He nodded toward the guitars in the corner, and in what I took to be a deliberate, subject-changing non sequitur, he said, “Remember that time we had the concert in Old Mill Park? Charged a buck for admission and played Who songs until the cops shut us down. And you smashed my Silvertone at the end of the show.”

  I chuckled. “I was very in the moment that day. Didn’t think that move through.”

  “Stalled the electric side of the band for a bit, as I recall.” Cal snapped his finger. “But Bob came through for us that time! He got us a new one, remember?”

  “Wrong.” I shook my head. “You told him the guitar had been stolen.”

  Cal laughed hard at the memory. “Right! Someone broke into his car at the dock, and I lied and told him the guitar had been in the back seat.”

  “He didn’t get us a new one. His insurance did.”

  We both laughed, but then Cal stopped, remembered. “Shit, Harp. I’m sorry about Bob. I thought about calling you after I got your text. I wanted to. I wasn’t ready.”

  “I hadn’t spoken to him in years. Missed his service too. You think I’m a bad friend? I’m an even worse son.”

  Cal shook his head. “Part of that onus was on him.” He exhaled wistfully. “Weird to think we’ll never see that fucker again, huh?”

  He looked up and stared at the ceiling for a while, the way he does when he’s contemplating. Then he said, “Tell me something: If you’d known Bob was going to die, would you have reached out to him?”

  I’d considered that question more than once since Bob’s death. “Yeah,” I said sadly. “I can’t tell you how many letters I wrote to him over the years. I just never sent any of them.”

  “What if it was me?” Cal asked.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I mean it. What if you’d found out yesterday that I had a month to live, what would you have done?”

  “I assure you I would have called. I would have come to see you. Begged for your forgiveness. Sat with you while you took your dying breath. I don’t know. Something.”

  Cal dipped his chin down, and it made the corners of his eyes look sharp and pointy, like little arrows going in opposite directions. “What if I said I came here today to tell you October was dying?” He must have seen the alarm on my face, because he put his hands up and said, “Calm down. She’s fine. But what if she wasn’t? What if you found out she only had a month to live? What would you do?”

  The question stifled me. “I don’t know.”

  There was a hard edge to Cal’s voice when he said, “You don’t know?”

  I huffed. “I would obviously want to see her. I would want to talk to her. And yes, I would be drowning in regrets. That’s what you’re getting at, right? That’s what you want me to say? It’s not that simple.”

  “But it really fucking is,” he said, all riled up. “You make it complicated. You’ve always made everything more complicated than it actually is. Let me spell this out for you: She is dying. I’m dying. You’re dying. We’re all dying. Every single day, each one of us is one step closer to no longer existing. Think about that. Think about how you really want to be spending your days. And with whom.”

  I thought of Santiago and the note he’d written at the end of my assignment. Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.

  “There are no more chances once someone’s gone,” Cal said. “But until then, there’s nothing but chances. Why don’t you get that?”

  “I get it. Believe me. Awareness is not my problem.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Paralysis? Failure to act? Or, well, how did you put it? Generally being the biggest pussy you’ve ever met?”

  Blood and snot had dried on my face, and I could feel it cracking and pulling at my skin. I walked to the kitchen, splashed my face with water and washed it with hand soap and a paper towel. Then I grabbed a clean T-shirt from my bedroom and changed into it. On my way back to the couch, Cal said, “How much more of your life can you waste moping around like this?”

  “Fuck you. I’m fine here.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “This isn’t where you belong, and you know it.” Cal crossed his legs and leaned back. “Earlier you said you’d do anything to make things right with me. Here’s how to do that: Go back and make things right for yourself. Make things right with her. Tell her all the things you want to tell her. At the very least, tell her you’re sorry. Because what’s at stake? Literally nothing. You’ve already lost what you were afraid of losing.”

  “Why do you care if I make things right with her or not?”

  “I don’t care. You care.”

  “Besides, she’d just tell me to go fuck myself.”

  “You’re missing the point. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. There’s got to be a reckoning, Harp. It doesn’t matter if she tells you to go jump off the top of the Salesforce Tower with your fist up your ass. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that you don’t die with all this stuff stuck inside of you, tearing you to pieces, making you less and less until there’s nothing left. And let me be blunt, if you think I wanna be hanging out at my big beach house when I’m eighty, shooting the shit and playing the Tam High setlist with a bitter old fool who’s still brooding over a girl he walked away from forty years earlier, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by Maggie shouting “Dinner!” and knocking on the door until I opened it.

  She shrieked when she saw my face. “Yikes! What the heck happened to you?”

  Maggie was sixteen and looked like a human version of the lanky coast lilies that pop up perennially on the Point Reyes Peninsula in West Marin. Imagine a bright orange flower with little brown dots, its petals curled backward like Maggie’s hair when she pulled it into a ponytail.

  “I happened to him,” Cal announced from behind us.

  I told Maggie to come in while I went to grab the beer and ice cream from the fridge. A second later she shrieked again.

  I looked over my shoulder. Her eyes were wide, facing Cal. “Wait . . . You’re . . .”

  “Chris Callahan,” he said, shaking her hand. �
�And you are?”

  “Margaret Elizabeth Toltz,” she answered formally. “I like your shirt. Where’d you get it?”

  “Saint Laurent,” he told her, ironing the front of it with his hands.

  I liked Maggie a lot. Her favorite pastimes were chopping firewood and driving the snowplow in winter. Over the summer she worked as a camp counselor in Glacier and tipped me off to all the good trails. In return, I was teaching her how to play power chords.

  Maggie looked at me, hand on her hip, hip jutted out to the side. “Joe, why is Chris Callahan in your house? And why did he beat you up?”

  “Long story,” I mumbled.

  I walked back over with the ice cream and beer. Cal tossed his arm playfully around Maggie’s shoulder and said, “But it’s a good story. I’ll tell you about it over dinner.”

  Maggie looked up at him. “You’re staying for dinner?”

  “My flight doesn’t leave until 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. So, yeah, I’m staying.”

  A few days before it came to pass, I dreamed I was having dinner with Cal, Sid, and Maggie on Sid’s porch. I didn’t recall the dream until I was at the table, and then it hit me as hard as Cal’s fist in my face. Specifically, I remembered Cal sitting across from me with a bottle of Big Sky IPA in his hand, leaning back so far in the wrought-iron chair he was on that its two front legs were a foot off the ground, and I worried he was going to tumble backward. I remembered Sid cutting his steak into unusually small pieces like he always did, chewing slowly as he told Cal about the writing workshop, and Cal pointing at me with his beer, saying, “I better be a hot topic in this class, or we’re breaking up for good.” And before it happened, I knew Maggie was going to ask Cal to take a photo with her so that her friends would believe he was really there. But that’s where real life strayed from the dream, because instead of posing for a picture, Cal took Maggie’s phone, switched it from camera to video, and serenaded her with the entire first verse of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” while she giggled and blushed.

  “Congratulations,” he said after he handed the phone back to her. “You just won Instagram for the day.”

  After dinner we had huckleberry ice cream and played a board game called Taboo. The object was to get your teammate to guess a word on a card within a limited amount of time, but there were five other words on the card you couldn’t say to trigger them to guess the main word. Cal and I played against Sid and Maggie, and our ability to finish each other’s sentences, coupled with all the inside jokes we shared, made us unbeatable. For example, during the first round, Cal pulled the word “tofu.” He couldn’t say “meat,” “bean,” “curd,” “Japanese,” or “healthy.” He didn’t have to. Sophomore year there had been a kid in our class who played bass like a boss, and we let him join our band for three days. Everyone in school called him Tofu because his family was vegan, which theoretically wasn’t an issue for me or Cal. But after Tofu lectured us on the hazards of dairy products while I was making mac and cheese for dinner one night, Cal fired him, claiming that the burden of touring the world with a guy who was prejudiced against cheese would be too great to bear.

  When Cal saw the card, all he had to say was “Tommy Preston,” and I immediately said, “tofu.”

  We were playing to fifteen points, and when the score was 14 to 5 in our favor, I pulled a card, rolled my eyes, and said, “This isn’t even fair.” Cal looked at me and I said, “Your mom used to call us this,” and he said, “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.”

  Cal high-fived me and said, “Bam!”

  Maggie said, “You guys suck.”

  Cal and Maggie stayed out on the porch and played with some ephemeral social media app that put animated special-effects filters on their faces and voices while Sid and I went inside to do the dishes.

  Sid and I had developed a system over the years. Sid washed, and I dried and put everything away. He was old-school about it, filling the sink with water and dishwashing liquid, putting on his rubber gloves, and scrubbing everything by hand with a two-sided, yellow-and-green sponge. Something about the slow, meticulous way he worked always felt artful to me and made me think October would have appreciated his ability to be present, patient, and fully committed to the task.

  Sid was elbows-deep in sudsy water, scouring the pan Maggie had used to make the cornbread, when he said, “That’s a good friend you’ve got out there. Came a long way to extend the olive branch.”

  “Interesting you say that, considering what my face looks like,” I joked. “I guess sometimes you have to beat your friends with the olive branch.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I did, and I nodded. “I’m glad you got to meet him.”

  “I like him very much. He’s quite a character.”

  Sid turned on the water, rinsed the soap off the pan, and handed it to me. “Who’s going to help me with the dishes when you leave?” He turned off the water and pulled the drain stop out of the sink. “Certainly not Maggie,” he chuckled.

  I dried the pan and put it back in the drawer under the stove. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”

  Sid pulled off his gloves and folded them neatly over the chrome faucet. Then he glanced at me and said, “Come on. Don’t make me kick you out now.”

  I stacked the plates that I’d already dried in the pine hutch to my right and turned my head slightly to catch Sid’s expression. The rise of his mustache told me he was smiling a little; the way his lower lip quivered told me he was trying not to.

  “And Joe,” he said, “sooner is better than later.”

  It was midnight when Cal and I got back to my cabin, and we didn’t see any reason to sleep, given that we had to be in the car by 4:30 to get Cal to the airport on time. I made a pot of coffee, and we went for the guitars. Naturally, I picked the Martin and Cal grabbed the Silvertone. He told me he’d been struggling for months with a song and wanted me to help him figure it out. Though when we got down to it, it came to light that it wasn’t yet a song. It was a vibe. A feeling. A sonic conversation Cal said he could hear in his head like a foreign language he didn’t understand.

  “I need a translator,” he told me.

  I asked him to give me a few adjectives to describe the sound he was looking for, and I laughed as he paced around the room in that swanky Western shirt, black sparkle guitar hanging like a rifle over his shoulder, Cowgirl Coffee mug in hand.

  He turned to me and rubbed his left thumb and index finger together as if he were crushing the essence of what he was trying to convey. “Romantic homesickness? Nostalgia?” He narrowed his eyes, looked sideways at me. “But not so broad. Not so vague.”

  “Saudade,” I mumbled.

  “Sa-u-what?”

  “A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.”

  His eyes widened as if he’d just watched me do a magic trick. “Yes. That. But. Imagine it . . . evolving . . . a big, swelling bridge. . . . It’s the longing, and then the afterparty of that longing . . . like, if we start out with this feeling of loss, of that word you just said—”

  “Saudade,” I repeated, and was instantly back at October’s kitchen table, so sure of myself as I read her the list of words on my phone, her warm breath causing the hair on my neck to stand up. “It’s Portuguese.”

  “So, we capture that Portuguese feeling . . .” He laughed and then got rightly serious again. “But the song crescendos to the sound of the thing being found. And the realization that it was never lost at all, that it’d been there all along. Make sense?”

  “Absolute and total.”

  Cal smiled with pride. “I knew you’d get it.” He moved his weight from his left to right foot. “Can you play it?”

  I started off doing something bluesy, a lot of minor thirds and sevenths, but that turned out to be nothing, a warm-up for my fingers, a tilli
ng of the emotive soil inside. And then I imagined myself a cryptographer, searching for a code to express something only I could express.

  From there I started a strumming pattern focused on two chords—Asus and Dsus—and I fretted it in a way that left the high E string open throughout, so it rang and rang, and no other chords were necessary.

  Cal said it sounded like my guitar was accompanying itself, and he plugged in and started playing along, singing non-words, trying to come up with a vocal melody that wrapped around what I was doing in a compelling way.

  I threw in a weird key change during the bridge, and Cal practically lost his mind over that, spinning around the room like a whirling dervish, snapping his fingers and howling, “That’s it! That’s it!”

  We slogged over the song for a while, experimenting and refining it, but eventually I was too bleary-eyed to keep going. Cal asked me to play it once more so he could record it on his phone and work on the lyrics when he got home, and I did. After that he took a shower, and I took a ten-minute nap on the couch.

  The woods next to my cabin were alive at night. As we headed out to the truck, I could hear rustling in the bushes, probably a fox or a coyote, or the family of bandit raccoons that ransacked my garbage on a regular basis. A couple of night birds were singing a duet in one of the trees, and the katydids sounded like they were furiously typing on tiny little insect typewriters all around us.

  It wasn’t particularly cold out, but it was chilly inside the truck, and we sat in the cab for a couple of minutes while it warmed up. There, Cal told me he was planning on recording a new album in the spring. He asked me if I would play on it.

  “At the very least you have to play on the Portuguese song.”