With him gone, the apartment was desperately quiet. It felt empty rather than crammed. Each time I walked into the living room, I expected to see his boots lined neatly against the wall and his jacket on the folding chair next to the door. Every time that I found them once again not there, it was like missing a step as you walk downstairs, that slight lurch in your stomach, that teetering before you regain your balance.
Last year, Roger knew I was in San Francisco, but he never contacted me. And I never saw him at the mobile clinic. Once a week, I go out with the van and we do the rounds—Church and Market, the Tenderloin, the Panhandle, a few stops in Golden Gate Park. I was in his territory. I saw and treated countless men like him, men like Weasel. By then, he may have been so far gone that he wouldn’t have taken any help. I think about it though. If he’d stepped up into the van, could have we saved him? It would have meant another round of rehab and finding the right cocktail. It would have meant another long road.
Despite myself, there are times when I think I see him in a crowd. Walking down Mission on my way to get a burrito. A flash of his face through the window of a BART train pulling out of the station. I see him as a lost, charming young man. Or as he would be now, heavier, darkened by the world, but still striving for something beyond the measure allotted him.
Sometimes, this happens with patients too. The ones I thought could make it to old age, or at least to their next check up. The ones whose deaths I was least prepared for. That’s why at the end of every appointment I say good-bye and hug them. They get used to it and sometimes it’s a side hug, so quick they barely notice. These are habits, gestures, as much as they are small, urgent blessings.
These are the things we do. The way, out here, we have built an entire city atop the San Andreas Fault, as if it really could sustain all this weight, all this life.
Emily’s gone and pregnant. Peter’s getting married. Keisha still hasn’t been sent to Iraq. Weasel’s back from the dead and grinning. I saw Roger’s body.
I know he’s dead. I get it.
But there are still moments when he’s right here with me, when it’s like we’re back in those woods again and I’m racing to keep up. In a second, he’ll slow down long enough to turn around and flash that damned grin of his. Then he’s off again, running a slant pattern, brushing past trees as if they were linebackers, arms outstretched, eyes locked on the ball.
These aren’t the kind of things we speak of often. But the dead, I have found, are strangely loyal companions. They leave, but they also come back, the way, I know, Emily will not. It’s as if they cannot stay away, as if—even more than us—they cannot bear the grief.
DIFFERENT PATHS, SAME WOODS
For six months, the invitation to her son’s wedding sat in Ruth’s underwear drawer like a love letter, tucked behind a mound of folded pastel cottons and the one lace thong she owned. The sleek gray envelope was addressed only to her. Ruth Fearrington it read in black calligraphy, as if Ronny didn’t even exist. She hadn’t told Ronny about it, and she wouldn’t. If anything was going to convince him to reconcile with their son, it was not Peter’s wedding to another man.
Now that the day had arrived, she knew she’d made the right choice. Aside from the obvious, she had finished another round of chemo and was coming off four days with her face in the toilet, grateful for the tiniest things—the symmetrical, gleaming tiles under her knees, the soft, cool washcloth Ronny placed on her neck, a thirty-minute reprieve between retching.
But this morning, she’d held down a cup of hot tea and a piece of unbuttered toast. She was sitting on the rear deck in jeans and a t-shirt and the morning sun was shining on her face and her bald head, slathered with 70 sunscreen. At home, she didn’t bother with the wig unless she and Ronny were entertaining or making love.
He had finished the laundry and paid the bills, so she had nothing to do today except soak up the sun and go to brunch and a matinee with her best friend, Janet. Their sweet, dopey hound, Buster, was asleep at her feet, too old and arthritic now to join Ronny on his Saturday hunting trips.
It was the first week of deer season and by now, he would be deep in the woods of southern Orange County. He’d retired from his job as a US History teacher a year earlier and worked part-time time in kitchens and plumbing at the new Home Depot near SouthPointe Mall. The moon had still been shining when he’d gotten up that morning, extracting himself from her arms and dressing in the dark, packing his truck with a cooler, a pair of camo coveralls, and the ridiculous orange vest he wore so he didn’t get his head shot off. But it could be worse, she knew. Janet’s sister’s husband had recently announced that he was in love with his thirty-two year old trainer at their gym.
The deck was a birthday gift from Ronny. Like all of his projects, it was beautifully executed, the cherry stain gleaming, the nails evenly sunk, a discreet nook for his gas grill. They’d lived in the three-bedroom ranch since 1974, the year that Peter was born and that Ronny returned home to Durham from his final tour. After Peter went to college, they’d added the den. Later, when it became clear he wouldn’t be visiting, they’d turned Peter’s room into a craft studio where she made ornaments for their church’s annual Christmas fundraiser.
More recently, Ronny had redone the kitchen and both bathrooms. Nothing could be done about the house’s boxy, brick exterior, but with each addition, its interior more closely resembled the home Ruth wished they could afford. She was proud of what they’d done with it. The neighborhood kept changing, though. A tienda had opened up a block from them, its front windows plastered with ads for phone cards that she couldn’t read and the bright jerseys of Mexican soccer teams. There was now a halfway house for ex-cons a few streets over, and Ronny taught weekly Bible Study there with a friend from his North Baptist’s Men’s Group. Their new neighbor on the right was an artist who refused to mow her law or to let Ronny do it for her. To be polite, they had gone to an opening of hers at a downtown gallery a few months ago, but all her paintings had been nude self-portraits. Ronny could barely make eye contact with her after that. The paintings weren’t even that good; her face looked flat and she’d clearly been blindfolded when she’d done her boobs and hips.
Thinking of all this made Ruth laugh. Cancer did that, at least: helped sift the essential from the mundane. The sun was warm on her skin and that was real, as was the smooth half-acre of grass that stretched out behind the house. She loved walking barefoot through the grass to pick corn, tomatoes and berries from Ronny’s garden. And they were just a few miles away from Duke Forest where for decades she’d hiked the trails. Those woods were one of the great joys of her life. In them, she felt most like the girl she’d once been, the one who’d collected bugs and who’d wanted, until she’d barely passed chemistry junior year, to be a scientist.
Her cell phone rang. Buster barked once and then fell back into his nap. She answered, expecting to hear Janet’s voice.
“Mrs. Davis?” a man asked.
“Speaking,” Ruth said, slipping into the smooth, vacant tone she used to take calls at the pediatrician’s office where she worked as a receptionist.
“This is Felix Rivera.”
She hesitated, unable to place his name.
“Peter’s Felix.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I know this is unexpected, so let me get right to the point. There’s a ticket waiting for you on a 12:05 non-stop flight today out of Raleigh-Durham. It arrives four hours before the ceremony and a driver will take you directly to the hotel. I booked a room for you and a return flight for Monday.” His voice was smooth and deep, unlike Peter’s, which bore a lilt that sometimes made her cringe.
Ruth didn’t know what to say, so she went with good manners. “That’s certainly generous,” she began. “But I don’t see how it would be possible.” When she’d asked Dr. Patel about flying, he’d frowned and pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose. He’d gotten