Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  After the fun run, I had gone with Ed, Katie’s sister, and our nieces, to fly kites in a nearby park. It wasn’t that Katie loved kites, but rather that we had all flown kites that first year on her birthday, at Katie’s mom’s house, outdoors but not too deep into nature. The point, I guess, was to get out ahead of the birthday, and so, for the day at least, grief. Ed pulled a couple of diamonds down out of the attic. We ran out the line and set the frames into their sleeves, before making tea and crossing the subdivision. The kites hung all afternoon in the sky, moving with the wind as we handed them back and forth. We agreed that we hadn’t had so much luck with kites in a long while, and that evening, looking back on the day, it had felt like we had done well by Katie’s memory: acknowledging the day, making it special, and then, letting it be.

  In San Francisco, I went to the corner store and bought orange juice and Coca-Cola, two of Katie’s favorites. I found the poem Katie liked and printed it on a small piece of cardstock. I woke early and stood a while at the chain-link fence of the urban garden behind my apartment building. The gardeners wouldn’t come out for a couple of hours still. Row after near row was overgrown, abundant. From a field guide I had learned to name California Poppies, Purple Chinese Houses, Common Star Lilies, Blue Flaxes. I thought that if I stared long and hard enough, some miracle would arrive to endorse my spirit and confirm my good intentions so that anyone who didn’t know me or Katie, which was everyone living in California, would see my earnest heart and mark my suffering and know the loss. Of course, that didn’t happen. Still, I tipped both bottles through the metal webbing and said a quick prayer. I read the poem. I stood a while longer, and then I tossed the bottles into the recycling bins, walked up the hill, and ate breakfast by myself at a diner.

  *

  On drives home from dinner with Cait’s parents, or while walking back and forth across the city, we revised our timetables. We might try for a baby that winter. We should enjoy married life for at least a few weeks. Falling in love was fine and good, but we also meant to make a family, and the sooner we started, the bigger our family could be. One afternoon, Cait and I walked up to Coit Tower and watched a spaceman play his drum kit. Two boys pointed cameras and walked in circles. A diagonal walking path was cut into the hill behind him, and we could walk up it to one of the streets where the houses hid behind elegant gardens and empty driveways. The city was all steep hills and narrow corners, but at this high point, I could see everything. The bay sunk in fog. The coast stuck behind hills. It was the middle of the day and no one was home yet—no one would come home for a long while still—but I had the feeling of standing in a place to which the rest of the world gathered. I never wanted to leave that place. What was so great about a cold and rainy city on the edge of a peninsula that would one day fall into the ocean? Everyone who lived there knew. Anyone who visited knew. I felt like William Hurt asking Albert Brooks in Broadcast News what one does when the world exceeds his wildest dreams. “Keep it to yourself.”

  *

  Highway 280 was a steady shot down the peninsula between coastal hills and bay lands. We drove it at least once a week, for work and to see Cait’s family. The later we headed back to San Francisco, the faster Cait fell asleep. At night, the cities between our cities rose to the exits in a cluster of lights, and then fell away beneath the underpasses. I was driving through that darkness and coming out, always, on the other side. I felt lucky and ashamed for liking my life in California so much. I had the habit of getting overwhelmed and doing things I regretted, not magnificent violations of goodwill, but minor offenses I worried would accumulate into some kind of break with Cait, happiness, the city. Surely, I thought, it wasn’t enough to have survived a tragedy and come out the other side. One day, I feared, I would be held to account. Something bad would follow something good. I couldn’t think of another way to balance out the scale.

  And yet, Cait was in the car next to me. She was dozing a little, but every few minutes she would wake up, smile at me, and nod off again. I put “Carolina on My Mind” on the stereo and let the song repeat. I thought about our trip across Montana and how I couldn’t get sick of it. I let the memory of the trip settle in my mind and tried to figure out what would happen to us next. Time was linear. Already, it was running down a life. Sometimes, the Chicago doc would remind me that I had not orchestrated any of this, that I had neither anticipated nor invited the fact of Katie’s death, but rather, I was living after it. In his explanation, it wasn’t fortune I felt, but intense and crippling guilt, a feeling that assigned blame where there was none and made me both benefactor and accomplice to things in which I no longer played a part.

  I refused to believe it. To not choose Cait—to believe she was merely some coincidence of timing and situation—meant accepting something awful about the nature of a world I believed now made us special. The truth was that I had no clue, really, what anyone was going to make of us. And if I had not yet quite figured out how to make my peace with that reality, then I also turned, whenever I could, to look at Cait. I let the feeling wash over me and I enjoyed the music, until we arrived outside the apartment, where I parked the car, opened the windows, and watched the city until she woke up.

  *

  Noise. Signal. I had always felt so superior to the rhetoric of therapy. I was a writer, and writers made their own explanations and contexts. So, it was humbling, week to week, to want so desperately to talk with the Chicago doc and to get so much meaning and help from him, worrying still there was some hokiness to therapy itself, a cookie-cutter philosophy that made the forms of suffering universal and Katie’s death similar to other deaths. It’s all, I sometimes snarked to myself, a rich tapestry. We didn’t do word associations or trust falls or read Iron John. We did make connections everywhere and between everything. Doing so, I felt less alone. I wondered, the more we talked, whether what I wanted really was a benediction, some official permission to say, definitively, that Katie was the past and Cait was the present, or Katie’s was the first marriage and Cait’s was the second marriage. Were the words he used so different from the ones I hoped to discover on my own? I sat at my desk every morning to write. I read books he recommended: Oresteia, The Noonday Demon, The Prophetic Imagination, The Rhetoric of Fiction. I waited at that desk every Friday for his call. Sometimes, with his help, Katie came through as noise: in stories and the static of a continuing life. Other times, she was all signal: the fuzzy memory of a fight, a certain way she held her shoulders when she crossed a room, which I tried to fix in my mind, with his help, before she disappeared again. As soon as we got off the phone, signal and noise seemed to become two forms of forgetting. The signal was the memory. Time, passing, was the noise.

  Sometimes while we talked, I looked at the books on my desk, the corkboard on the wall containing various maps and letters, Grandma’s rosary, a strong poker hand fanned out catty corner from photographs I had pinned up and down one side of the frame. In a shot from our Peace Corps days, Cait and I stand in front of a temple. Her arm is wrapped around my waist. My palm is open and flat on her shoulder. We are young and smiling, earnest and chaste, and there is plenty of space between our hips to see the road behind us, two men holding a map and talking to each other, a grove of trees, flowers. There is seemingly no chemistry in that photo. Still, I believed the story that I was learning to tell about us. We left the temple, South Asia, that life. We put the world between us. Our lives continued. And ten years later, when we crossed the country from opposite directions, arriving in rural Montana, we sought the beginning again, and not so eagerly and simply as we might have when we first met, and certainly no longer the picture of youth. We had only to start walking away from each other to draw the circle. We were already walking.

  Some afternoons, I stopped into drugstores, found the deodorant aisle, and bought a new stick of Katie’s favorite. Baby powder. I could only guess how so many pastes and heavy metals revived our long afternoon walks across the city, the essence of sweat under her collar, t
he coppery smell of her dark hair. They always did. What a rigged game to play, teasing certain memories while hoping not to find others, and knowing all the while that one day the trick wouldn’t work. I would pull off the blue plastic cap and find only a sickly sweetness that smelled like nothing I remembered, and wonder that it had ever revived anything. How was it possible to remember the routines and habits of our life in such detail, but not the sound of her voice or the turn of her body? To see the potential for sorrow and loss in every precedent, and Katie forever her youthful and beautiful self; to live within such complexity and without sentiment, that such vulnerability might come to seem singular, and the rest of the world exceptional to it. What did it matter whether that was signal or noise?

  *

  The day we decided to move into Cait’s family home—where we married; where she was born; where her mother as a young girl had lived with four sisters, and lived still, taking care of Cait’s grandfather—we walked a long loop through the neighborhoods near campus. We tested our new stroller, then sat on the front lawn with her parents, talking through the logistics of how everything might work. We were grateful for the help. We could live in the basement and share the kitchen. Afternoons, Cait’s mom, Gail, said, it would be nice to sit with Cait’s grandfather and talk a bit. He liked the company. We could make dinners together or eat on our own. We’d work it out.

  Our room in the basement was airy and open, with new paint and carpeting, the original furnace, and stapled behind plywood, under ceiling pipes wrapped in white sheets, a panel of high-voltage wiring, by which a house built for no load so demanding as the single-coil toaster, 108 years later shuddered periodically to brownout, never quite failing its distribution to the televisions, computers, Internet routers, space heaters, minor appliances and major, semipermanent machinery of the brood that kept it. The house was warm and reliably accommodating, relied upon easily, and always ready to receive guests. There was space for us in the basement. Plenty of space. No one was prodigal here for too long.

  It was not quite a custom to live in the basement, though most of Cait’s cousins had done so, as had many of her uncles and aunts at the beginning of their own marriages. We were likely to live there at the end of the family’s time in the house. Cait’s grandfather, Sidney “Zait” Raffel, had paid cash for the house in 1955, a little less than ten thousand dollars. He had already once renewed its fifty-year lease on the land: two acres atop one of the campus’s highest hills. Five days before Walt was born, Zait would celebrate his hundredth birthday. It would be his seventy-second year on the faculty. When he died, the family would have two years to sell the house and move out.

  At night, the university did not turn on the streetlights so far from the campus quad, the better to discourage wandering students and insomniac athletes. The hill was a privilege, entirely remote from youth culture, which was how Cait remembered growing up there: among much older faculty members, listening to the parties a few blocks over on fraternity row. Most of the original neighbors were moved out now. The new neighbors were wealthier and younger, retired early to appointments and from startups whose shares they had recently cashed out for astronomical sums. The hill was a place for second, largely avocational careers. The magnificent gardens were tended by strangers: roses and palms; mighty elms, annuals and perennials. So much potential redundancy made Cait nervous. Our moving here could only be my idea. And it was. I wanted the help; to begin our life near the Baby Whisperer, as Gail was known to the legion of children and distant relations that came and went through her daycare in the living room of that Big House. The toys were still there, stacked in neat bins behind the television. Parents stopped in with their children, older now, to say hello. Sheepish teens still loved to dig out their old toys. We would do our best to fill in the deficit of youth and vigor once so predominate it overran an entire floor of the house.

  Our first evening in the Big House, we ate dinner on the back porch. As a girl, Cait had gone bird-watching with her father. Over curry and rice, Bob now pointed to a tree, nearly as tall as the far hill, where two birds shared a nest. It had gone on like this for decades. The summer bird stripped the nest for the season, found its mate, raised its young, and hunted all season. Come winter, it flew south. The second bird built the abandoned nest thicker, kept its perch, and scanned the low brush for red berries and rodents. There was a place in the branches where the tree bent with the weight of the heavier nest, even in spring, but I could only make out, coming and going, the wide black wings of the summer bird, streaked along the back with crimson. I looked for what Roosevelt, arriving in the Badlands, had called the cuneiform of wings. I would look for it anytime I looked into the hills. The birds came and went. They made no clear patterns of their day, all the better to trick the interlopers, that a predator might learn to expect, among so much noise, so clear a signal. I was learning languages here: a family again, the start of my own family, a new family home. The bird built its nest high and away from the houses. A dark shadow was all it ever seemed to disappear into. With time, the shape of its progress came to seem obvious, even predictable. I watched the two birds for more than a difference of plumage, as though their sequence might surrender something of the season to my watching.

  The Big House

  Last night your mother said, “Remember how much Walt liked the goldfish?” and I said, “So much,” and she said, “Where did it go?” and I said, “The tape fell off the edges, so we took it down. Maybe look in the baby book,” but we were both very tired from chasing you and your brother, and anyway, we haven’t done the best job of keeping up the book since Sam came along, so probably the goldfish is gone, having served its purpose, though I remember the day we put it up so clearly. You were a little older than one. The picture was cut from an oversized wall calendar that your mother bought on clearance at the discount store. She had noticed how you liked animals, and we wanted to make a schedule of daycare handoffs, her classes, and my work. There was a big brown bear on the first page. She found online a picture of a dog and glued it in place so I wouldn’t have to look at the bear all month. The next month came the goldfish you so loved: bright orange on a white backdrop, in high relief and magnified to twenty times its size, entirely out of water and happy to draw your attention those mornings we would lay on the big bed considering it together, first thing, while your mother got dressed, you and I talking and tracing its imaginary path across the wall and out the door, into the garden where you liked to hose the plants and dig in your sandbox. Where would the goldfish go when he finally left? Could he make it all the way to the street, the golden hills, the coast, China? You didn’t understand the questions. You pointed at the calendar. I said, “Goldfish.” You smiled and kept pointing.

  Your brother, Sam, is the same age now that you were then. How is he already so big and still so much smaller than I ever remember you? When you were this age, I flung you wildly in the air. I rolled around with you on the floor, and we went together to the burrito shop to eat giant plates of brown rice with black beans. At the bookstore, we looked at fire trucks and birds. We spent all day doing such mindless things together that the boredom seemed like it might kill me, and now you pace him for us, and he and I do the same things with a certain suggestion of nostalgia, and often you in tow. I suppose that’s how it goes with younger siblings. We think he is a little younger than he actually is. Certainly, we take a little more care. Or, perhaps Sam is simply a different child: more sensitive and careful, less reckless. I think we are more relaxed when we parent our new one-year-old, though I might misremember that too. Already, another brother is on his way.

  Just the other day, I got that wrong. I told a parent at your preschool that you were only two years old. I confused your birthday with Sam’s, which is earlier in the year, and then I worked the math in the wrong direction. I don’t think that I confused it, really, more like a mistake floated a moment in my brain, dislodged from its school of likeminded wrong facts, and escaped quickly out of my
mouth. How many times have I done that when talking about you? Switched two simple facts for each other, and not even realized my mistake until much later? More and more, I am afraid I will lose your entire childhood in such blunders of circumstance and time, or lose at least those twenty months that you were our first child, our only boy, our brand new baby with no hair, born so fast your round head came to us perfect and smooth. “Like a baby model,” your aunt joked, “you could really make some money off of that kid.” I thought, No one can think his baby is so beautiful, and instantly I knew I would have to work on my keen insights, my remarkable candor, because of course, everyone feels this way about his baby. And I get to feel it for you.

  You were an early walker, yes, a gorgeous boy. The weekend we brought you home, Gail, your beloved Yu-Yu, went to the mountains for her two weeks at the family cabin, leaving us alone in the house with Linda and Zait as they rattled around upstairs, eating tinned fish and cake for dinner, watching Walker, Texas Ranger. You cried the whole night. We were so scared to be alone with you. We called the phone number on the hospital folder and talked with an advice nurse in Ohio. At three in the morning, she explained that probably you had some essential but treatable developmental delay in your digestive system. For the next year, we would have to spoon-feed you a powerful antacid in small doses, alternating formula and breast milk, and also, we should buy a probiotic to mix with the antifungal to promote the flora of something, and be sure not to give you too much of the antacid because, at adult strength, the medicine would fry your guts for sure, and then you’d really have a stomach problem. For the rest of your life, it would be hard, she said, but after a year or so, we could switch to organic whole milk and titrate the doses, trial and error like, until you either felt better or didn’t. Or, the condition might resolve itself in a few days. Either way, we should definitely check in with our doctor after the weekend.