by Will Walton
I went into the kitchen to brown the meatless crumbles. Pal was in bed. I wished Luca had come over, and then wondered if all of this was too adult, if Gia had told him not to come. While the meatless crumbles browned, I heard Gia ask Mom if Mom had heard from Babs, and Mom said that no, she hadn’t and that she hadn’t tried.
Gia left and we woke Pal for dinner. The three of us ate sitting on his bed, watching A Walk in the Woods. Pal owned it. He had bought it not too long ago. I think the last movie he bought. He loved Robert Redford, and I liked the movie. I was already seeing the story as some kind of future for Pal once we got through this. A little rougher for the wear, maybe, but still moving.
(there’s this place called The Healing Garden)
(in our neighborhood, behind the hospital)
(the labyrinth isn’t much)
(takes minutes only)
(little memorials)
(stones)
(angels)
We have to do something like this for him.
We’ll talk about it.
I like this one.
(a birdbath with an etching)
(In memory of Billy Stern, please feed the birds)
He’d probably like something more to do with water.
(Mom laughs)
A buoy on the lake with his name on it.
Exactly. All his fishing buddies will sail by and be like …
They’ll say, “There he is.”
(we sit a while)
(Mom points)
That one is nice.
(an angel with hands clasped)
(some bird shit on it)
(a placard)
(There are healing angels that walk with us)
It’s good to have this place here for people.
“Okay, he drove off!”
“Did you look away?”
“I had to go to the bathroom!”
Mom didn’t get angry with me. She just grabbed the keys off the hook. “You coming?” she asked. “He can’t be driving if he’s drunk.”
I didn’t know what we’d do if we found him. I didn’t ask. “I’m driving carefully,” she told me, “so I need you to keep your eyes peeled. Let me know if you see him.”
“Where first?” I asked.
We tried Jay’s first, since Jay’s was the closest. But he liked that ABC Package Store because of the drive-through.
“Right,” I said. I acted like I knew. We turned by the hospital and rolled up toward Jay’s. New parking on the side. I could barely see. My hands were shaking. “I don’t see him,” I said, but knowing it was possible that I’d missed him.
It didn’t feel real enough, though. None of it did. We didn’t want him to lose control over his own life, so even though we’d gotten rid of all the alcohol in the house, we hadn’t asked for his truck keys.
We found him at ABC Package, where there was a line at the drive-through. We pulled into the gas station across the street and parked up against the edge of the lot. We spied.
“This is what he does,” Mom said. “Look.” He had done this before; she had witnessed. She had followed him once before, and then followed him right back home. It had made him angry.
He was one car back, and then he was at the window. I made a video in my head. “Vodka,” he went, wrongly. The way he spoke. Drawling, tugging on vowels. “Vodka,” with its two short syllables and hard consonants, didn’t work.
But that’s what he ordered. I saw the clear bottle appear in the window, just long enough for me to imagine it dry, and place a ship inside. And then the clear bottle disappeared. Then I saw a bright green bottle appear and then disappear. “What was—”
“Mountain Dew.”
The truck went forward a short distance. Pal tipped the Mountain Dew bottle out the driver’s-side window. The bright drink fell in a stream, and splashed against the asphalt. “Then he pours the vodka into the bottle,” Mom said, when the Mountain Dew retracted, “and mixes it.”
There was this woman at High Tides, and she, I’m not supposed to share really, but she was a mom. Is a mom. She had tried to commit suicide, and
I mean, it was so sad, sitting there listening to her. She had bipolar disorder—has bipolar disorder—but she hadn’t been diagnosed at that point, and she said that she had the thought:
Okay, so if I just do this, if I just get it over with.
She loved her kids, but she was saying sometimes how like her body couldn’t, you know, let her love them.
So it was like if she could just get rid of the body, then all the love she felt would finally be free to just
(Mom waves her hand)
be, you know? Exist in its own right. Free of selfishness and sickness and … human stuff.
She was convinced her kids, her babies, would still be able to feel that love without her there, and a better version of it too, that love. And I was just sitting there, listening, thinking about how badly I wanted to come home to you, how I missed you, how I am just so grateful to
be alive, to have you.
There was one night when he called Red Lobster. He placed an order for over $80. He asked Mom to go pick it up.
Mom paid. When we got to the house, I arranged plates on the card table on the porch. We all sat. He’d ordered three lobster dinners, each with a baked potato, side salad, cheddar biscuit, and little plastic cup of melted butter.
“Y’all eat up,” he instructed. He forgot we didn’t eat lobster. But we ate our baked potatoes and cheddar biscuits and side salads. When she was done, Mom leaned back. The sun seemed to be warming her face through the screen of the porch, and she seemed okay.
Pal ate slowly, wiping his hands with a napkin between each bite. He only spoke once to say, “Good to have a little treat every once in a while, huh?” He never lifted the napkin to his mouth, so some food collected there.
Even though I know I’ll like to keep the good days in my memory, I know I’ll like to remember him like this too. Having ordered too much from a chain seafood restaurant, with butter on his whiskers, and grunting as he chews. In the grip of his heartbreak, still trying to make us happy.
He wasn’t himself after she left. After the Mountain Dew trip, we took his truck keys. He didn’t want to come stay with us, and we couldn’t stay there. It was almost like a horror movie, walking in. He kept the lights off.
He’d be sitting in his chair. “Partner,” he’d go. And I would sit with him, and if he’d made a mess of something, I would clean it up. We brought him each meal and sat at each meal with him. Mom had tried to convince him, but he wouldn’t go to therapy. We didn’t think he was drinking during this time. We don’t think he was.
An old friend would stop in and pay visits sometimes, but really only just one friend. She walked with a cane. Didn’t come to the funeral. But she did send a card. It said she was heartbroken. Mom spoke to her a few times. Mostly, she and Pal would just catch up.
She sent a card to us this week too, so it’s been a year.
It says she is still heartbroken, that she thinks of him every day. I don’t know much about her and Pal’s relationship, even now. It got murky for me. The depth of the past, of relationships, of sickness. His days. It did get too adult. I couldn’t fathom it. Just the depth of it all.
If I started to try, it started to hurt me. I had to stop. I just worked on what I’d learned. Two feet on the floor. To be present, be. Listen when he was talking to me. To go along with him thinking that I didn’t know a thing about what was going on. To let him believe I was still protected from it.
(From what? How bad life gets?)
Some advice from Pal:
“Why make a plastic jig silver? Well, I’ll tell you. Silver is one of the most successful colors for specifically the bad days, and by bad days, I mean the dreary days. The gray days. Days when the fishing ain’t going to be any good, and you’re out there trying anyway because that’s just how it worked out, you know?
“I realize it might seem
contrary to make a gray jig for a gray day. But truth is, the darker the color you use on a gray day, the better.”
Luca said one day, “I guess life doesn’t level out the way you think it will, ever.” Because the thing is, you always have a body. And with it, you have need, you have desire, and you have love, and it all changes.
As we live. Changes.
The matter we’re made of, that connects us to stars, in constant motion.
And all of that, even after the body quits, still changing. Disappears here, reappears there. Some nights I can’t sit still. He had that too.
He had one really good weekend left. We went fishing. He was lucid.
One night he fell.
“Susannah, if you please,
What are the messages?”
“The messages are: There
Are no messages.”
“But the light is blinking. I can see
the light—” “Oh wait, yes. The messages are,
Wait here, okay, wait right here, just while
I’m at the bottom now, please
Hold,
I have to dig for just one minute longer—
Would you like to choose your hold music?”
“I’d like a Beatles song: specifically
‘A Day in the Life,’ like when it goes super
Metro—crescendo—and then halt!”
“We’re in it now.” “Okay, thanks, Susannah.”
“You are welcome, dear Avery.”
“First un-left message
—”
“Hello, Avery, it’s Babs.
I just want to say first, that my note from you made me cry, and I wanted to say too, that, even though
I know
You knew,
I mean,
How could you not sense it? Things were off,
Between Pal and me, and so of
Course you knew, and shouldn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t
Ask me rightly to apologize
(Which you didn’t, and I appreciate) or cast blame
(You didn’t), but I
Do wish we had more time to talk—
I’d been preparing some things to say, and so
Now to just say them to you,
Just to be happy, and to know that you’re valuable.
I spent so much of my adult life unhappy, and
With Pal, it was always hard to get a word in edgewise.
Him with that radio going,
‘—always!’ ‘—always!’
‘—always!’ and always speaking to
Everyone we ran into. Never a moment’s peace,
Oh, and I know those things got to you too,
Got on your nerves too, but, Avery, oh,
You are younger!
And my life is … well, you
Understand. I couldn’t spend any more of it
Un—” (doot)
“Are you sure you would like to delete this message?”
“Yes, please. Thanks, Susannah.”
“Next un-left message:
—”
“Hi, Avery, it’s Mom,
Oh don’t mind me, I’m just calling you from
Ha-wa-ii … No, kidding. Well, not really
I’m not ‘kidding,’ because I am in
Fact, calling you from Hawaii, though it might as well be
The Arctic here, Avery. I miss you so badly,
I mean, it might as well be stone-cold winter—” (doot)
“Are you sure you would like to delete this message?”
“Yes, please.
Thanks, Susannah.”
“No more messages:
—”
“Thanks, Susannah.” (She’s really not supposed to play me those, so it means a lot.) “No problem, dear Avery.” (It’s a risk she runs because she cares.)
Night is close, but no closer to nothing, so
Are you speaking my language yet?
To go outside: it’s funny about the streetlamp lights,
And the moths, they don’t, like, get hot?
Burn, even? What is worse than burning,
can you imagine? Being young is like being a moth, or alive I
bet—possibly:
I am burning, if I am learning anything these days, it is that
The flames you keep touching when you’re young, you keep right ahead on touching when you’re older
Look at that one, he goes and tee—
Just a slight little tap on the wings on the warm, off the warm on the wings, and then—
alights suddenly,
Back on again. Everything in nature
as cyclical as this. Everything in nature
such addiction,
like today, you know how
we sleep with the window
in the bathroom down
& the screen still up;
& you know, sometimes an insect
will get behind the screen & through
somehow:
This morning, a wasp
Yellow striped & brown orange—
& some red—
so much brighter when you really look
clawed in
combs antennae behind the mirror
That is prayer:
that is mental,
overtaking
the body.
That’s distress for you: externa-
mental, at its base
a physical, a coping
mechanism,
an “everything is fine”-
anism.
Animism—
so sad,
makes me sadder than anything.
To think how I left it there
all morning.
I get a drinking glass and an old slip of paper—
A scrap on which I wrote the make and model of the toilet seat—
oblong oyster—
when we needed to know.
I slip it beneath the wasp.
I carry it out.
I set it on the grass. It clings to the inside
of the glass, it encircles
the rim, doesn’t go anywhere—
“a watched pot doesn’t boil,” I think, “a cliché”
“is a coping”
“mechanism”
“animism”
“mechanism-animism”
“is belief in the soul of the process”
“mechananimism”
“is belief that a machine”
“has a soul”
—”
When you’re old you die, and no other consolation.
It is true too of the young sometimes—we die. But I’ve been watching too many shows lately where the kids just go out and party
and listen to how I say “kids” as though I’m not one
anymore, like this summer totally rent me of “kids,” like I don’t want to party:
I’m partying now for crying out loud: this orange in my cup in my hand, is light orange, if you
catch my drift. And there are no cars. It is
too late, already, for cars: At 16,
I don’t have to think much about family, at least not
in terms of starting one;
Though, to be fair, my mom was hardly
out of high school when she had me
(in her belly, under graduation robes).
I wonder about how one, say, “gets there”
“from here”—okay, so, for instance
