“And now?”
I look at her, and the warmth and tenderness in her eyes melts me, turns me into the child who still trusted her. I feel the heat of tears in my eyes.
“And now she’s gone,” I say, choking a little on my words. “She got hooked on pills and wouldn’t let me help her. She almost died.” And now I’m crying, really crying, as if I’ve saved up my tears from all the years I never did this, never talked to my mom about what’s going on, never gave her my pain because she was so busy carrying David’s, so busy carrying her own. Her arm is around me and I let her pull me against her. “But she’s alive,” I say. I wipe my nose and sit up. “She’s alive and sober and refuses to see me. Like I’m some kind of poison. Like she thinks I’m going to hurt her. I would never hurt her. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy.”
“Maybe this has nothing to do with you, Marcus,” Mom says gently. “Maybe there are things she needs to do on her own.”
“But she still loves me. I know she does. If she didn’t, I think I could accept it. I could let her go. But I can’t.”
“Maybe,” Mom says, and a small part of me thinks I should be angry at her calmness, at her defending Evie without even knowing her or our situation. But a greater part of me is so grateful to be speaking. “She needs to go through what she needs to go through,” Mom says. “She needs to figure out her own way to heal.”
“I know,” I whimper, sniffling on my tears. I feel like a child, but it’s not an entirely bad feeling.
“I think if you really love her, you need to let her do that, even if it means being away from you. She needs to do it on her own terms.”
“Fuck her own terms,” I say pathetically.
“I know,” she says. “Fuck people whose needs don’t match ours. Fuck people who need space.”
“Like you did.”
“Like I did,” she says. After a moment, she adds, “But I did it all wrong, Marcus. I fucked up. You have every right to be mad at me.”
“Fuck you, Mom,” I say, but I’m almost smiling.
“Fuck everybody,” she says.
“God, what’s wrong with me?” I say as I stand up. I offer my hand and she takes it. “Why do I keep getting mixed up with women like you two?”
“Maybe we have something to teach you.”
We start walking, out of the shade and back into the sunlight. “Like what?” I say. “Stay away from crazy blond chicks?”
“Yeah,” Mom says, and I can hear the smile in her voice. “That’s probably it.”
We start walking, this time side by side, at the same pace.
After a few minutes, Mom speaks: “How are you, Marcus? How are you really?”
“Fine,” I say, but I already know she’s not going to accept that answer.
“Come on. Talk to me. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
You could leave. You could stay.
“What are you doing these days?” she says. “School’s over, you don’t have a job. What do you do with your time?”
“I’m going to do that internship with Dad.”
“You know what I mean.”
I try to think of something to say that will satisfy her, but I can think of nothing.
Nothing. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what my life is made out of.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Not much.”
“Is she really worth it?”
I say nothing. She doesn’t even know Evie. She barely knows me. What makes her think she’s figured me out?
“Is this girl worth throwing your whole summer away? Is she worth torturing yourself and putting your life on hold while you wait for her to come back?”
I shrug. I feel like I should be angry, but I’m not. I’m strangely calm. I’m interested in what Mom has to say.
“It’s like you’re making yourself miserable to get back at her,” she says. “But who exactly are you punishing? Certainly not her.”
“Are you, like, practicing to become a motivational speaker or something?” I say.
“I just don’t like seeing you give up on life because of some girl.”
“She’s not just some girl.”
“Does that really change anything?”
I shrug because I don’t want to admit out loud that she’s right. My mother—this woman who left her husband and two sons when things got too hard—is giving me advice. But I guess she does know something about putting life on hold for other people. She knows about losing herself. She knows about loneliness.
“Your dad’s new girlfriend seems nice,” she says.
“Can we just not talk for a while? Please?”
“Sure, honey. Of course.”
I listen to the pebbles crunch beneath our feet. This is how sand is made—hundreds and thousands and millions of footsteps, years and decades and centuries of wind and rain and ice and earthquakes. Life rubbing up against something hard, wearing it down, turning it into tiny versions of itself.
In a couple of hours, I will be back down at sea level, back in my house, surrounded by the same things, with the same empty summer spread out before me.
I can’t go back to that. I can’t.
here.
THE FIRST DAY OF MY INTERNSHIP AT DAD’S OFFICE WENT as good as it could have, I guess. I blended in with the other glassy-eyed morning commuters in button-up shirts and slacks, swaying with the motion of the BART train to San Francisco. At eight thirty a.m., it was already in the upper eighties as I filed out of the Civic Center station, walked through the gauntlet of panhandlers and hustlers without making eye contact with anyone, passed through the metal detectors to get into the courthouse, and listened to the echo of my footsteps join others as I found my way to Dad’s office through the marble halls. His assistant, Fletcher, showed me around and then parked me in front of a computer with a pile of files to scan and upload. Dad made a three-minute appearance between meetings, time enough to say hi and pat me on the back.
Now, nine hours later, I am on the BART train again, my eyes aching from looking at the computer screen, my hands dry from handling so much paper, my white shirt stained with sweat. This is my first taste of a respectable adult life: a commute, a desk, a few hours of mostly mind-numbing tasks, small talk by the coffeemaker. The most exciting thing that happens all day is walking through a cloud of crack smoke and barely avoiding stepping in a pile of human shit on the sidewalk. I’m on the train with a bunch of grumpy, overheated strangers forced to stand after a long day of work. We crush each other, slam wet armpits into faces. The men sitting in the seats by the door pretend not to see either the pregnant woman standing right in front of them or the sign that tells them to give up their seat to her.
I thought I saw Evie on the street, but it was one of the half-clothed and zombie-eyed prostitutes wandering down the hill from the Tenderloin district. I thought I saw her in the courthouse, a beautiful attorney in a pencil skirt and high heels. I thought I saw her on the train, a young summer intern like me, trying to start a life, trying to become someone who matters. No matter what I do or where I go, she follows me.
So now what? How do I outrun the ghost of someone who’s still living?
I decide to get off at the MacArthur station and walk the three miles home because I have nothing else I want to do. My job covered the day, but there is still the night to fill.
The area outside the station has a familiar smell of cheap incense. That guy with the haggard dreads and Rasta shirt has been sitting in that same spot for as long as I can remember. I bet it’s a front for drugs. The old me might ask him what he’s holding. The old me might see a solution in getting high, in running away. It is tempting. But after all this time trying, I know it accomplishes nothing. It certainly won’t bring Evie back.
It is too hot for incense. The air is already stifling. I overheard someone on the train saying Oakland was supposed to get up to ninety-five today. The news says to stay indoors because of the dangerously bad air quality. The sky is hazy
and stings the eyes because of forest fires burning up north. There’s a water shortage. Alameda and surrounding counties have forbidden the watering of lawns. Even rich Piedmont grass is turning yellow. Down here, everyone is sweating, miserable, and cranky. Young black men, shirtless, ride bikes around in lazy circles, trying to create their own wind.
This is the kind of heat that kills people. This is the kind of weather that can make people crazy.
Crazy.
I must be going crazy.
Because standing on the sidewalk across the street, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, is Evie. In broad daylight during rush hour, on a hot day of car exhaust and baking concrete. On a day of sweating into long-sleeved shirts with tight-buttoned cuffs. On a day of filing papers and pressing buttons, marble hallways, mahogany furniture.
What a strange place for a ghost to appear, in a crowd of mismatched people outside a church, smoking cigarettes and holding Styrofoam cups. An old biker in a frayed leather vest looks at his watch and speaks words I cannot hear. People throw their cigarettes into the street and file down a set of stairs into a basement. Evie says something to a blue-haired woman old enough to be her grandmother.
“Evie!” I yell across the street. “Wait!” But the speeding cars steal my words.
Cars honk and tires screech as I run across the street. I don’t check to see if anyone’s coming. There is only my destination. There is only the line of my path there. Two dimensions. The cars can wait.
I run down the stairs and find myself in an empty, half-lit hallway, at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. A fluorescent light flickers on stained gray walls. I’m underground. This could be a tunnel, a cave, a catacomb. But it is only a church basement. It smells like linoleum, bleach, and burned coffee. There were so many people on the street, but now they’re gone, just like that, disappeared into thin air. Ghosts, all of them.
I open the door in front of me, but it is just a dusty supply closet. The next door is an empty bathroom. The next door is locked. I turn the corner and there are two staircases, more doors, more corners. A big kitchen, a huge dining room, the smell of old gravy. Empty, all of it. So much space for nothing. The people from the sidewalk, gone. Lost. Evie, swept away with them.
Or maybe they were never there at all. Maybe the sun is getting to me. Maybe this is what heatstroke feels like, hallucinations and a heart thumping out of my chest. I walk up a set of stairs to the back of a dark and empty chapel, the pews lined up straight and perfect, the creepy stained glass of a bloody, heartbroken Jesus on the cross glaring down at me, the glass illuminated Technicolor by the hot Oakland sun. Everything else is dark and shadowed except him up there, tortured and untouchable, reminding everyone who sees him how much they break his heart.
I haven’t been in a church since David’s funeral.
So many ghosts. So many fucking ghosts.
I turn around and stumble down the stairs, dizzy. There are too many doors, too many twists and turns. This door is locked. That room is empty. Where do people go when they disappear?
Something in the corner of my eye. Movement in the hall. Someone walking by, in a direction I haven’t been yet. Something human shaped. I go. I run.
The back of someone slipping through a door. Muted voices escape before the door closes, a group recitation, a monotone chant. Some sort of ritual. Ghosts rising from the dead.
I open the door and look inside. Folding chairs in rows, people facing a podium, someone reading from a battered old blue book. Big posters with lists on the walls. A framed picture of an old white guy with a long face. I scan the crowd for Evie. Old people, young people, white and black and brown, upscale and haggard and everything in between. But no Evie. These are the people she was with on the sidewalk, I’m sure of it.
An old hippie-looking guy sitting by the door sees me and smiles a creepy cult smile. “Welcome,” he whispers. “Glad you’re here.” Then he motions for me to sit in the empty seat next to him. I turn around and run. Through the labyrinth of cool, empty halls. Up the stairs and back into the heat.
I’m going crazy. This isn’t about love anymore. This is obsession. This is nuts. Sane people don’t run across traffic to follow groups of weird strangers. They don’t go chasing hallucinations around church basements or go bursting into cult meetings.
Do normal people know when they’re going crazy? Is this what the beginning of madness feels like?
My room is dark. I have one candle burning. I lie on my couch watching the flame. My shirt is off and the light of the candle flickers on my rib cage. I can almost feel Evie’s soft lips brushing my skin.
My phone buzzes with a new text, but I don’t bother to look at it. I know it’s Mom. She’s the only one who ever texts me anymore. I don’t know what happened to me on our hike the other day, but I was weak; I let down my guard. Maybe it was the sun and fresh air and being away from the city, maybe the trees did something to me. Maybe I was desperate.
All I can motivate myself to do is water David’s plants. I trim the dead leaves. There seem to be more than usual, shriveled and yellow. A few pots have developed a white mold in the soil. No matter what I do, the plants keep dying.
I’m well acquainted with sadness. I know it’s what I’ve been trying to fight all this time with cutting, with drugs. But now my drugs are gone and the fresh cuts on my shoulder have scabbed over. I’m growing new skin. I’ve thrown my pipes and rolling papers and lighters away; I’ve thrown away my razor blades. And now there’s a new feeling surfacing, something sharper breaking through, not the sadness I’m used to.
Depression is like fog, like a heavy smoke that permeates everything, that sneaks into all the cracks of me and weighs me down. Everything pales and darkens. Everything moves slower. But this other feeling is like something cutting through all that. Like lightning. Like fire. Like claws scraping. Fangs biting. Sharp and hot and fast. It comes from the same place, but it takes a detour.
I am angry. I am furious. And even though the feeling is new, it seems to already know me, like I have been carrying it for years, like it has been watching me all this time, planning its attack, gaining strength, curating its collection of resentments until the point of saturation, until there’s no room for any more deception and desertion and disappointment, until I’m full, until I am holding all the pain I can handle, until all the different pains fuse together and become one huge evil pulsing inside me.
I look at my left shoulder, at the old scars crisscrossed with new ones, and I am disgusted.
I don’t know who I miss more, David or Evie. The loss of them mixes together and envelops me. I cannot tell the pains apart. They turn into concrete, and I am stuck inside it, immobile, my arms caught midstretch, my mouth wide, screaming. And then it all shatters, rock flying, and my heart breaks in a million different ways.
I am done. I am done being deceived. I am done believing in people. I am done with the foolishness of having hope. I look at my scars and renew my vow to never let anyone in again, like I promised a year ago when David died. But love made me weak. It made me break my promise. It let the pain back in.
I pick up my phone, send a text to my mom: Stop texting. Stop calling. I don’t want to see you again. I throw my phone across the room.
I look back at the flame. I breathe. My world is only as big as this weak light.
there.
THE FIRST TEXT READS: I DID IT AL WRONGH I LET HIM WNN
Five minutes later: yr good marcus dont frget yr good
One minute later: i wasnt good enohg
Seven minutes later: its goin to hurt im sory brothr
I keep redialing David’s number as I drive to his house, but he never answers. He has sent me plenty of weird texts before, probably written while he’s out of his mind high, but this feels different.
His ex-girlfriend has been calling me for a week, leaving increasingly angry messages on my voice mail demanding I get David out of the apartment. The lease is in her name and she’s fina
lly moving out. She hasn’t stayed there in more than two months. Her last message threatened to call the cops if he wasn’t gone by that weekend.
It’s the middle of the day, in the middle of summer. It’s hot and windy, and I’m hungover. Even the wind is hot. I slept with a girl I met at a Templeton party whose name I don’t remember. I had an empty, sour feeling in my stomach when I woke up that told me nothing good was going to come out of this day.
The hallway of the run-down apartment building smells like cooking grease and cigarette smoke. Half of the lights are out, and the dark-red carpet is stained in too many places to count. I walk slowly down the hall at first, then something tells me to start running.
I don’t knock. Somehow I already knew there would be no answer. Somehow I knew the door would be unlocked.
But I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the door. I didn’t know I’d find the apartment completely empty of furniture, with several windows open, trash and papers piled into corners by the wind. A small whirlwind of dust bunnies dances in the center of the kitchen floor, and I stand there transfixed for nearly a minute, watching them move. But then the world shudders open, and I notice the smell of rotting food, the mold-covered dishes piled in the swampy sink, the empty food cans and other garbage piled on the counter. I flip a light switch, but nothing happens. I try another. Nothing.
“David,” I say, because it is what you do when you’re looking for someone, even though I already know he will not answer.
It is two days after I let David into the house to steal stuff, two days of trying to convince myself he was only looking for money and things to sell.
Everything is quiet when I open the bathroom door. It’s an odd feeling to see the worst thing imaginable and not be surprised. Someone pressed the pause button on the world, and everything is strangely still and peaceful. The small bathroom window lets in a weak orange light. Everything is soft.