The Wonder of All Things

by Jason Mott

  “What situation with Wash?”

  “His cancer,” Eldrich said flatly. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  * * *

  “Does Wash know?’ Macon asked. He stood in the doorway of Brenda’s house. He didn’t bother to come inside or say hello before the question spilled from his mouth.

  Brenda fidgeted, as though she had been expecting the question, and yet she was unable to escape the sting of it. She wore an old white-and-yellow flowered dress and an apron. Both were worn and tattered—she wore nothing for fashion, only for practicality or out of habit. Macon had seen her in this particular dress and apron more times than he could remember. But, today, they seemed more tired from use than before. There was a white stain on the bottom corner of her dress. The woman smelled of bleach and sweat.

  “No,” Brenda said flatly. “He doesn’t. And I’d thank you to keep it that way.” She turned and walked into the house.

  “Dammit, Brenda,” Macon said. Finally he crossed the threshold and came inside. The smell of bleach was overpowering. It stung his nostrils. “How long have you known?” he asked. There was little hospitality in his voice.

  “A week now,” Brenda said flatly, “more or less.”

  There was a scrub bucket filled with water on the floor next to the couch. The smell of bleach poured out of it. Brenda walked over to the bucket, drew a sponge from the tepid water, got down onto her hands and knees and began scrubbing the floor. “Mind that you don’t track all that mud in here,” she said to Macon over her shoulder. Then she added, “They told me over the phone. What kind of a thing is that to tell a person over the phone? You’d think they’d call us into the hospital for something like that, wouldn’t you? Or maybe even come out here. But I don’t suppose people do house calls anymore, do they? Not even for telling a woman her grandson has cancer.”

  “Jesus,” Macon said. He stepped forward across her newly cleaned floor, tracking in dirt from outside and not noticing. “How did this happen? Were you going to tell us about it?”

  “I asked you to mind my floor,” Brenda said evenly.

  Macon looked down at his feet, then at Brenda. “To hell with the floor, Brenda! Dammit. How could you keep something like this to yourself? How could you not tell us? Hell, never mind that, how could you not tell Wash? How serious is it?” Macon paced. His hands gesticulated with each new question. His mind shifted from thoughts of Wash to thoughts of Ava to thoughts of the both of them at once.

  Since they were five years old they’d been inseparable. They were in every class together at school since kindergarten, and when school was over they spent the afternoons together. During summer break you couldn’t find one without finding the other within arm’s length. It was a bond that’s hard to come across in the world these days, Macon had always mused. Nowadays, nothing lasted forever. People relocate. They move away. They die. The world comes and takes people from your life, year by year. But he had hoped for something different for Wash and Ava. He saw a childhood friendship that would eventually blossom into a young romance—if it hadn’t already. Then maybe they’d marry, and on and on. It was a dream that he had never realized he believed in. And now it was all in question.

  Wash was like a son to Macon. The sheriff had already lost a wife, his daughter’s health was precarious, his new wife was struggling with a pregnancy that, as much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, was not guaranteed...and now Wash had cancer.

  “Jesus, Brenda,” he said finally. He spoke slowly and with exhaustion. His anger at the old woman was replaced by exasperation as the truth of the situation filled his head. Still ignoring her newly cleaned floor, he walked across the room and sat on the couch. “Let’s talk this out, Brenda. How serious is it?” he asked again.

  “How serious?” Brenda said, almost laughing. “Can you name a case when cancer in a child wasn’t deadly serious?” She stopped scrubbing the floor and heaved a heavy, fatigued sigh. She stood and, after rubbing the soreness from her knees, walked over and sat on the other end of the couch. Her face was flushed and sweat beaded upon her brow. Her long red hair was pulled in a ponytail that had been coming undone from the exertion of her work. She rested her hands in her lap and began massaging them.

  It was then that Macon noticed how red they were. Her hands looked as though she’d touched scalding water. They were raw. “You think I’m cruel, don’t you?” Brenda asked. She straightened her back and faced him. “You ask yourself, ‘What type of a person doesn’t tell a child that they’re sick?’ You want me to make it make sense for you?” Her mouth tightened. “I’ve got my reasons. And it’s not your child. You’re not responsible for him. You don’t have to look into his eyes when the time comes to tell him that he might be dying.”

  “He needs to know,” Macon said softly.

  “And he will know,” Brenda replied. “I’m just not ready yet.” She looked over at the scrub bucket waiting by the end of the couch. Then she looked at the dirt that had ridden in on Macon’s shoes.

  “But how long can he wait?” Macon asked. “How long can you let him go untreated? This is his life we’re talking about here, Brenda.”

  Without a word, Brenda stood and crossed the room and retrieved a broom from the kitchen. She came back into the living room and began sweeping the dirt from the floor. “I’m going to have to scrub this again,” she said.

  “Brenda, stop,” Macon said.

  But she did not stop. She swept the dirt from his shoes over the threshold of the door and out into the world. Then she returned the broom to the kitchen and kneeled on the floor next to the bucket of bleach water. She dunked the sponge and returned to scrubbing the floor.

  Macon watched. He had never seen the woman like this. Not even when her daughter died in the car crash with Tom, not even then had she behaved this way. She stood tall at her daughter’s funeral, like a statue. She didn’t even cry—at least, not that Macon saw. She only sat with her arm around her grandson as he wept. In the pew next to them both was Tom, blubbering and moaning, with both hands over his eyes, as if not looking at the body of his wife could make her death any less real than it was.

  Macon had come over today expecting to find that same version of Brenda. But, instead, he found a woman hanging by a thread. Even stone crumbles after being hit enough times, he thought.

  “I’m sorry,” Macon said softly. He walked over and took Brenda’s hands and helped her up from the floor. “Just stop that,” he said. “I’m sorry for showing up here like this. I just...it just all caught me off guard.” He led her back to the couch and sat beside her, still holding her hands.

  “You want to know why I don’t tell him?” Brenda began. “You want to know how I can let him walk around not knowing what’s going on inside him?” She squeezed Macon’s hands. “You want to know what the greatest thing in a lifetime is, Macon? What’s better than climbing some damned mountain, better than falling in love, better than having a child, better than all of that?”

  Macon watched the woman carefully. The fire that she had been missing was slowly returning to her. “Okay,” he said. “What?”

  “Believing that the world can’t hurt you,” Brenda said. And, at last, she looked at the blood flowing from her hand. She dabbed her knuckle with the cloth, and did not flinch when the antiseptic came in contact with the wound. “That’s the most amazing thing a person can ever feel, can ever believe. And it only ever happens once in a lifetime, and it never lasts. The world always tells you the truth of things. People around you start dying, you get hurt—whatever happens—and eventually you start to understand that you’re not invincible, that you’re not special. That, just like everybody else in this world, your days are numbered.” She shook her head. “Hell of a thing to lose,” she said. Then she stood and continued trying to staunch the bleeding of her hand. “There’s a word for that feeling, Macon,” she said. “It’s called childhood. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. And that sense that the world is this large magical thing
gets taken away with it. In that moment, you become an adult, and you lose your ability to see the wonder of all things. All you see from that point forward is how broken everything will one day be.”

  “But he needs to know,” Macon said softly. “Wash needs to know what’s happening to him.”

  “He will,” Brenda said. Finally, the tears flowed down her cheeks. “But is it so wrong of me to want to give him a couple more days? A few more moments of his childhood? Does it make me a bad person, Macon? Have I wronged the boy?” Her voice was filled with pleading and fear and the sadness of a grandmother who is afraid of outliving her grandson. Macon kneeled beside her and wrapped his arms around the woman. “I’ve already lost a daughter,” she continued. “Parents don’t bury children. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. And, every day, I wonder if it was my fault. I don’t blame Tom. I don’t even blame God. I blame myself, because that’s just what you do when your child dies, regardless of how it happens. Every single day she’s not here and every single day I wonder what part I played in that. And now there’s a chance I might lose Wash, too, and I just want to let him have a little bit more of his childhood. Tell me,” she said, “am I so wrong for that? Am I?”

  The sound of her crying filled the house. And it was a terrible sound, not unlike the sad, lonely trill of a single harp string being plucked.

  “No,” Macon said, holding the woman. “You didn’t do anything wrong. We’ll find a way to make this better.”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Brenda said. Then she looked into Macon’s eyes. “Don’t tell Ava. Promise me that.”

  The thought had been in Macon’s mind before Brenda said it.

  “Everything that’s going on with her,” Brenda continued. “It’s enough. She’s already done the impossible for Wash once. And she’s still not fixed, not really. I know you see it as well as I do.” Finally, she let go of Macon’s hands. “Wash will be okay,” she said. “The doctors will do what they do and they’ll make him better. Your daughter can’t save the whole world. Promise me you won’t make her try.”

  “It’ll be okay,” was all that Macon said. He made no promises and he asked no more about Brenda’s motivations. He only sat with her as the day rolled on and, somewhere in the time they were together, he tried to imagine if she could live without Wash. He wondered if Ava could.

  They spent the afternoon in the mountains with a bucket and a small square of steel. They dug through rocks and rubble and Ava’s mother would not tell them what they were looking for. “It’ll be something you’ve never found before,” was all that Heather would say, and Ava liked the hint of mystery it added to their expedition.

  These were the mountains, after all, and even though she was young, Ava had heard stories of gold and diamonds and all manner of valuable things being found in mountains—even in these familiar mountains around Stone Temple. So she worked through the first half of the afternoon without complaint, finding excitement and strangeness in everything that she came across.

  In just a few short hours she found an old bottle cap, a pocket knife, a stone shaped like a tooth, an actual tooth, a piece of wood shaped like the state of Texas—a state which she liked very much on account of the movies that came on television sometimes about the Wild West—a piece of rubber whose origin she could not explain and more.

  For her part, Ava’s mother focused on one specific area. Now and again she would take the small square of metal from her pocket and run it back and forth over the rocks as though it might show her something that she could not otherwise see.

  “What is that?” Ava asked, pointing to the square of metal. It was late in the afternoon and Ava had not found anything particularly interesting in several hours and so the excitement of the day was beginning to wear off.

  “It’s a piece of steel.”

  “Why do you have it?”

  “Because I need it.”

  “Why do you need it?”

  “To find what I’m looking for.”

  Ava was tired and her attention was beginning to wane. She thought of Wash and the television back at home and her father who had not come with them and a dozen other things that had nothing to do with whatever it was that she and her mother had come to the mountain for that day.

  There is a world beyond this, she thought.

  “There it is,” Heather said, a glimmer of excitement in her voice. She kneeled over a large, smooth stone with the pane of steel placed above it. When she lifted the steel, the rock rose with it.

  “What’s that?” Ava asked.

  “It’s a lodestone,” Heather said. She pulled it away from the iron rod and placed it in her daughter’s hand. The child responded by moving the stone back toward the metal. When it was close enough, it leaped from her hand and attached to the iron.

  Ava smiled.

  “It’s yours,” Heather said.

  “I can have it?”

  “Of course you can. It’s been waiting here for you for all these years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was young,” Heather began, “I used to come up to these mountains all the time. And one day I came up here and I found a stone just like this, in this exact place. And I took it home and I kept it for many, many years. And then, one day, I lost it. But I never forgot this place. And I promised that, one day, when I had a child, I would bring them up here and let them find one of these stones.”

  Ava held the small stone in her hand. She squeezed it tightly, as if trying to understand it better by feeling the weight and heft of it in her hand.

  “And now, years later, you’ve got it. It’s been waiting for you for longer than I’ve been alive. Maybe longer than anyone has been alive. It’s almost impossible to tell how long something like that, something that’s destined for you, can sit and wait, counting days, holding on, waiting for you.”

  “Is that true?” Ava asked. She opened her palm and looked at the stone and tried to imagine all of the years that it had been waiting for her. She imagined rain and wind and clouds and the earth rolling on its axis and animals passing by and people coming and going and, all the while, the stone sat and waited in silence, knowing her name.

  “It’s all true,” Heather said. “Everything that you can believe in this life can be true.”

  SIX

  “HOW DO YOU FEEL?” Wash asked in a loud voice.

  It was the second time Ava had woken to his voice in the hospital. Over the past few days her vision had been slowly returning to her. Wash, along with everyone else in Ava’s life, had come by and sat with her and talked to her and been excited when, each day, she could make out shapes and images a little more. All of them could feel their own fear lessening.

  “What?” Ava answered in a groggy voice. Her head hurt a bit—she imagined a large bell being struck in the front part of her brain and, usually, it got worse when she opened her eyes. But, overall, she felt that Wash was worth the headache. She opened her eyes slowly, blinking and looking around the room. “Wash,” she said. “Is that you?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, hearing something different in her voice than he had heard in the previous days. There was a sliver of fear in it. He got up from the chair at the foot of her bed and came and stood beside her. When he looked into her eyes, they were clear, but she seemed to be looking past him. “Can you see me?” he asked nervously. “Those clouds that were there before are gone.” He waved his hand back and forth. “You should be better,” he said, and the thought trenches sprung up on his forehead. “Ava, can you see?”

  Ava reached up from the bed and took his earlobe between her fingers and tugged it—not enough to hurt, but enough to get his attention. “Does that answer your question?” she asked, giggling. The sudden motion made her head hurt more, but it felt good to make Wash smile.

  “You jerk!” he said, laughing. “That was mean.”

  “It was funny,” Ava said. She sat up on her elbows, excited by the fact that, for the first time in many days, s
he could see clearly, as though nothing had ever been wrong. She coughed and the pain that came with it reminded her that she was very sick. She was still cold and there was an ache in her bones that persisted. The coughing continued and there was the coppery taste of blood in her mouth. Wash sat on the edge of the bed and filled a cup with water from a pitcher sitting beside the bed. He watched the girl endure the coughing, and he waited to help her. He looked to the door, about to call for help.

  “No,” Ava managed.

  Wash held the breath that was in his throat. When the coughing finally ended she sipped the water and rolled onto her side, wheezing slightly, while Wash patted her back. He picked up a small cloth that was lying beside her bed and wiped the blood from her mouth.

  “Thanks,” Ava said when the pain was lessened and she could speak again.

  “Why won’t you tell anyone how badly it hurts?” Wash asked.

  “It wouldn’t stop anything,” Ava replied. She shivered and Wash adjusted the blankets atop her, making sure that she had as many quilts upon her as he could find. When she was covered and the warmth was finally beginning to kindle within her, she reached up and pulled Wash’s earlobe again. “You’re not singing,” she said. “I thought that was your secret weapon for annoying me until I got better.”

  The boy smiled. “I’m taking a break from it,” he said. “Maybe I should try something else. I brought Moby Dick. I could read that for you.”

  “I’d rather hear you butcher a song right now,” Ava said gently. “And when you’re in the hospital people are supposed to do what you want them to. Anything but ‘Banks of the Ohio.’ No more songs about people killing their boyfriends.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t really sing anymore,” Wash said. “My dad said I should stop.”

  “Wash...”

  “Maybe he thinks I don’t have the voice for it, you know?” He rubbed the top of his head. His shaggy brown hair fell into his eyes. “We both know my voice is kind of weird. He knows a lot about music. Maybe I should listen to him.”