Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  *

  The therapist’s office was only a few blocks from Ed’s house, in a lot that some developer must have imagined before the recession would fill with trees and become a park. For now, the low-rise offices in the lot were empty. The parking lot was empty too. There was halting construction across the street, a mess of yellow and rusting hulks that seemed never to move, though they periodically made such a terrific noise during our sessions that we had to stop and close our eyes, wait for the silence and begin again. I didn’t particularly like the room. It was not the quiet bungalow-style nook where we had begun our work a year earlier. No children’s artwork or sagging bookshelves framed the therapist’s various degrees. I could reach nearly across the room from my office chair. My savior, oracle, seen-your-kind-before-and-will-again trauma specialist, whose shrewd sensibility encompassed everything except surprise, was only renting the new space to close out work with her last few patients. She was moving to Florida in July. I should call her any time, and also meet her doctor friend in Chicago on my way out of town to see if I liked the fit. Since she recommended him, I imagined I would like the Chicago doc. But I couldn’t imagine staying in touch with her, much less calling her at home in Florida.

  Right away, she didn’t like the sound of Cait. What was Cait doing, dating my friend if she meant to love me? Was Cait always so dishonest? Dishonest people tended to break hearts. Would Cait break my heart? Had I thought about how well I really knew my old friend? The roommate sounded grounded and reliable. If I should date anyone, then the roommate was a good person to start with. And hadn’t we agreed, the therapist continued, that I would take things very slowly after Katie’s death, and enjoy these last few months in Indiana, the chance to say good-bye not only to Katie’s brother and his family, but also, a way of making a life, that life of grief that would not last forever—that was, already, clearly not lasting?

  Worse than wanting to fall in love with Cait, I realize now, I was committing the cardinal sin of the psychoanalytic devout. I was explaining something I did not particularly want to understand. It was a distinction I was making more and more often in sessions: that life and this one, that place and here, then and now. It was terrifying to think that everything I had pursued in the course of a year’s work in therapy was perhaps now at risk of a faltering attention to the future. “You might even meet someone you’ve never met before,” the therapist said, “and maybe that would be simpler too?”

  The therapist had a habit of rattling the bracelets on her wrist. They were turquoise. There was no turquoise in Florida. Turquoise came from the Southwest, north to California. It was a by-product of copper mining at one end of a mountain range, picked out of the stone pile and shipped to remote places, where it was polished and strung together in jagged shapes, with accents of howlite, blackstone, opal, and jasper to make the blue shine. Oh, I told myself, I know the kind of people who wear turquoise jewelry. Touchy-feely chanters. Fans of harmonics who, in circles, intoned. I hated that the therapist wore turquoise. I hated that she did not like Cait. Of course, it was her job not to like Cait. She didn’t really have an opinion about Cait, one way or the other. She was testing my assumptions. She was treating her patient. She was doing the tail end of work from which she was retiring, and knowing the ethical obligation not to leave a patient in crisis, she felt comfortable enough with our work to let me know it was near its end.

  I wanted our work to continue. I wanted to be in California with Cait right then, as the clock ticked down the end of our session in Indiana, the one I had called my therapist in crisis to arrange, and when it was time to go, what I felt was neither relief nor persecution. I did not gnash my teeth. The prospect of a cure lingered, hopeful as ever, with a next session. For now, like turquoise, grief worked into shape and around other things. Cait. California. Moving. Work. Leaving Indiana. The stuff that came after trauma did not interest the therapist. Certainly, it would not disrupt her life and summer plans. Here was the actual epiphany, and I had missed it entirely. For weeks now, we had begun to work on something far more ordinary and complicated than grief and trauma and loss. I was arguing for a life partner, about suitability and temperament, character and grace and chance. I was imagining bakeries and traffic patterns, courtships, earthquakes, and selves. We were talking about who might help me to best make the transition to living in a new city, where I would do new work and begin to make a new life. In other words, we were no longer talking about Katie. Probably, we hadn’t talked about her for quite some time.

  *

  At the last toll plaza before the Chicago city limits, I bought a coffee and cued up Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. I had listened to the album all year, every trip, the whole way through, until it became a superstition, the thing I had to do before I finally left Indiana. Again, I rolled down the windows and cranked the volume. A friend had burned The Rising for Katie and me to listen to on our drives from Miami to my parents’ home in Central Florida. Then, it had been our somber gem. Every song promised that things were getting better, if only because they couldn’t get any worse. Most of the time, after the first few songs, Katie would change albums or turn off the radio all together. The Rising was meant to exhaust. Katie had little tolerance for purposeful exhaustion, however moving the music or cathartic the occasion. “Life is hard enough,” she would say, “without Bruce Springsteen.” In Indiana The Rising had been my mind-blowing, self-indulgent cathartic. I had yielded to its thrill. I had wanted the feeling to radiate past the limits of my body. I wanted everyone to hear the music.

  I called my sister-in-law to say I might arrive in time to pick up my nephews from their preschool. I thought, I should call Katie’s mom too, and stop by the nature preserve. I knew I wouldn’t do it, not this time. I had any number of excuses. It was at least an hour and a half past Chicago to her house, and a good half hour past that to the nature preserve. Even if I beat the traffic, I would get stuck rubbernecking it back, all the while missing time with the boys, my brother and his wife, my friends, and all the places I meant to go one last time before setting out west. I wanted to see them all before I left. I did not want to spend my first night away from Indiana back in Katie’s hometown.

  Everything I owned was trunked under the hatchback with the seats folded down and the passenger seat pulled up; everything except for my bike, which I had fashioned with bungee cords to a simple frame. It was a trail bike, built for rivers and mountains: everywhere I did not want to go again after Katie’s death. Katie had given me the bike four years earlier, for our first Christmas as a married couple. I had just had it tuned up. I had ridden it across Indianapolis all summer, listening to podcasts and stopping, at my farthest points out, to call Cait and talk about anything, everything, sometimes just to hear her voice. Now, on hills and across potholes, I could hear the thump of the front wheel on the plastic bumper. It rattled there a few seconds, just long enough to call attention to itself, however fast I drove, whatever I was listening to, and then it was silent for the next stretch of miles.

  Badlands

  Chicago came east so fast I drove under as much as toward it, along as quickly as through it. Always it happened this way. At a distance, I admired the skyline. Up close, I followed a maze of exits, tunnels, and bridges to the north side of the city, half a mile from the lake and three miles from the apartment in Uptown where Katie and I had lived before we married. Then, we had gone over to my brother’s townhouse on Fridays to play spades, order Thai food, and at the end, pass my baby nephew back and forth, read him stories, hide behind the sofa with his favorite stuffed animals, and sing his favorite songs. Now, I was arriving at Jeff’s new place. I had grieved for Katie there. I had held out the phone for Jeff’s wife, Sheila, to hear Cait’s voicemails. On his fifth birthday, beneath two large trees, my nephew and I sat together trying to tune a toy guitar. His fingers were too small to make the shapes and the plastic pegs lost their tension quickly, but still, he liked holding the guitar and pretending to make it sing.
Each time we did it, I thought of those evenings when Katie and I had met at the Old Town School of Folk Music, after her guitar classes, to walk to the park and practice barre chords. Like everything in Chicago that brought her to mind, the place was wrong, the time of day too early or late, the feeling a little too present. Still, I missed it: Katie, years alive yet, loving something new.

  That first morning, we watched The Wonder Pets and played Candyland. We made pancakes and walked to the park. As my nephews climbed up and down the jungle gym next to a statue of Dorothy Gale, I called Cait and offered to buy her a plane ticket to meet me in Montana. On short notice, I said, the best I could do was to get her to Billings via Reno and Oakland, first thing on a Friday, three weeks out. We could visit Yellowstone and see the Great Salt Lake. We could even cross all of hot and flat Nevada. She laughed and agreed it sounded fun. She said she’d like to do it. We’re doing it, I thought as I hung up the phone. I did it. The summerlong fantasy was now a plan.

  While the boys napped, I walked to the apartment Katie and I had shared. I had mapped out the route to pass most of Katie’s favorite haunts: the bakery that gave tours and free samples, the travel café with kitchen-sink cookies and a lending library, the model train museum–urban greenhouse next to the fifty-seat theater where we had seen on my birthday an early preview of a play about a music teacher who loved her student and taught him how to play the guitar. Mrs. McKenzie’s Beginner’s Guide to the Blues was amazing. We had never seen anything like it. We had subscribed to the theater company that night, and then to another, and had later signed up for a hip-hop dance class, volunteering at the neighborhood church, and of course, Katie’s guitar classes. That was the year we decided to get out of the apartment more often. We were sick of always driving to Indiana to do it. Now, the bakery was under new ownership: no samples. The theater was closed, though the chain noodle shop across the street was just opening for the day. A man in a white shirt was wiping down tables near the window. It was too early still to eat.

  “You’re making a ritual,” the new therapist said later that afternoon when we met in his Hyde Park office, “and rituals are always messy at first.”

  He had a habit of closing his eyes when neither of us was talking.

  “You left Indiana.”

  I tried closing my eyes too.

  “Now, you’re deciding how to leave Chicago.”

  His office was filled wall to wall with books: shelves of books, stacks of books, books marked with bright stickies and opened to the page, books beneath framed prints from the Art Institute and the National Gallery, books in boxes on a small desk between two sofas where he charged various electronic devices, an electric tea kettle, a clip lamp attached to a hardcover edition of Mark Twain, dark blue along the spine, a little darker than the other books in the series, which were stacked like dominos all the way to the door, where they climbed both sides of the frame.

  “This first time,” he said, “maybe just try to take the best deal you can get. Sixty-five cents on the dollar. Seventy cents.”

  I could feel in the tightness of my own shoulders Katie’s big shrug, equal parts indifference and exhaustion, a little annoyed.

  “Really, John,” she had said one night in Bucharest while we were washing dishes. “What do you think is going to happen if I die before you do?”

  I told the therapist that I liked the dollar-and-change theory. I liked any theory about happiness that let me keep most of it. There I was, finally on my way to California, and I could hardly see my way to the end of a sentence that didn’t name some new calamity between Chicago and Montana that might get in the way of my finding Cait: bears, thunderstorms, desert fever, Lyme-diseased ticks, lost highways that turned deeper and deeper between South Dakota stalactites and arrived to nowhere anyone I knew had ever left. Why couldn’t I simply focus on that happiness and let the rest go by the wayside? It seemed irresponsible not to anticipate danger. I felt alarmist and even self-pitying for mentioning the danger first, before my eagerness to get to Cait.

  The apartment building had been repainted, yellow trim on a light tan, which gave the effect of looking at something restored and made to look too young. I stood on Agatite Avenue for a few minutes, uncertain what more I should find in person that I hadn’t all year imagined. Was the rooftop garden in season? Were the interior apartments three deep on one side still and four across? Katie and I used to sit in our corner windowsill counting families walking back from the lakefront. One night, we had watched a man try to convince a police officer that the prostitute in his car owed him change. They had left in separate cruisers, in a whir of silent lights. His car had sat parked out front all month. Now, the cars on the street were nicer: late-model Toyotas and Subarus and Volkswagens. Children in blue and white uniforms milled the new school park across the street. They climbed impatiently to the top of play structures, whooshing like hungry fish across an aquarium, falling into and around each other, smiling and laughing, frenzying their way back up. A teacher near the fence made eye contact and smiled. I looked away. No one else seemed to notice that I was standing there.

  I took the shorter route back to Jeff’s town house. Clark Street, a few blocks over, was busy and congested. Phalanxes of Cubs fans were making their way to and from the El, emptying and filling the bars near Wrigley, radiating disbelief. They had gone to see the Cubs almost win. The Cubs had nearly done it. Block after block, men in webbed caps hung out the sides of floor-to-ceiling windows, happily sun drunk and blurry, sweaty stalactites of testosterone bellowing Dave Matthews and David Gray at no one in particular, making of loneliness and frustration the same fraternal bond of inevitability that was loving the Cubs when they lost. We all feel like that, they seemed to say, about a lot of things, buddy. I didn’t want to hear it. Katie had given me a Cubs t-shirt as a wedding present. It was our private joke, her gentle way of insisting that I try to enjoy myself, wherever I was, a little more. I had rooted mightily for the Cubs all year. Assholes in Cubs t-shirts, I thought now. What do they know about suffering? It felt small and superior to cross wide of them on the sidewalks. Still, I kept my distance. I plugged in my headphones, sweeping with each quick step mini-avalanches of red plastic cups.

  You’re in the middle of a love story, I told myself, tell it to yourself like it’s a love story. A young widower and his old friend meet cute in a Montana airport. They drive together to California. They fall in love all summer, and when they meet in person, a second life begins for the widower. He is grateful for it. He loves that life all out of proportion to his past, and even to himself.

  I liked that story. I trusted it, even as some part of the telling felt too deliberate, defensive even.

  To whom was I making my account?

  If I loved Chicago so much, why was I working so hard to miss it?

  The therapist walked me to the door at the end of our session. He had parked his bike in the hallway, an old ten-speed with drop bars and a light frame. As we said good-bye, he put on a white helmet with a gray chinstrap. It scrunched his face together and made him look a bit like Lenin.

  “Survival,” he had said at the beginning of our session, “is entirely different from the stuff of daily living.”

  Through the window, I could see the giant Walgreens a few blocks over. Someone had pasted election posters to the side of the building, the Shepard Fairey design that was suddenly everywhere: HOPE repeating across parallel squares set one beside the next, three tall and maybe twenty across, at bright blue and red and white angles to the pale brick wall.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but what if I screw it up?”

  He smiled and closed his eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “then we can talk about that too.”

  *

  The day after I bought Cait’s ticket, Dad called to say that Grandma was hospitalized, in a coma. It was early still but indications were not good. The doctors thought she might die quickly, though it was possible that she could linger for weeks, a few months eve
n. I packed up the car and said a hasty good-bye. I would see my brother and his family again in a few days in St. Joseph, Missouri, I was sure of it. Grandma had said for years that she hoped the Good Lord would send her another big stroke at night and be done with it. Now, it seemed, she had gotten her wish.

  I called Cait from the road to say that she should hold on to the ticket and wait. She was so sorry, I should go, no worries, of course we’d figure it out. Iowa was green and beautiful west of the Mississippi River and south into Missouri. I had made the drive before with my mother a half dozen times, to and from Jeff’s college in Peoria, Illinois, stopping in St. Joe on our way from Kansas City. Eighteen years later, farms and hills still rolled into one long pasture. Gas stations staggered the same few exits. The landmarks were either ironic or charming, I couldn’t always be sure. Iowa was funny in that same way that everyone I knew from the Midwest liked to hold jokes and turn them, at the very last moment, into stories, daring the listener to miss a subtle punch line. “The Corn Palace: The World’s Only Corn Palace.” “The Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk.” It felt good to drive such long stretches of the land at a time. There was no sense of scale to my progress, only periodic acceleration and braking and the low hum of the engine charging the battery to make more speed.

  Grandma and I had talked nearly every week, a practice I had learned from Katie, who was her grandmother’s namesake. When we were first dating, Katie had suggested I keep my chats with Grandma in the steady, middle range of not talking about anything for too long. The key, she had said, was quantity rather than quality. Call every week and say nothing. Mention the weather, work, news, school. It took a little less than an hour to cover the bases—which nurses were honest, whether I liked my work, the side effects of various drugs she worried meant she should stop taking them, the price of corn—and always, in the end, I felt that Grandma and I had caught up. In Indiana, especially, our chats about nothing in particular had accumulated into a short history, the year we had both spent living at a distance to the world. I was careful not to look too closely in those chats for a life after grief. At least as much as Grandma, I think, I was wary to hear a certain tone in my voice. And yet, beyond the small strokes and surgery after one kidney had stopped working, the checking in and out of hospitals for days, then weeks at a time, her slow decline had become, for us, a simple ritual of closeness. I called. More often than not, she picked up the phone.