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Jahed Stetter
Such activities fit this newly elastic time. Hours balloon only to constrict into suffocating rubber necks. Like a lump of salt dough, time, once a pinched pot, now shapeshifts into a heavy-winged dragon, a sad cat, a leaf etched with veins. Plenty to do, nowhere to go. Also, an actual mound of salt dough molders in the fridge, until I force my children to sculpt something so we can take photos to upload, attach to their e-learning pages, and send to the art teacher (all of which takes an extraordinary amount of time). My daughter, in five seconds, forms that simplest shape, a ring.
We long to go anywhere. We stay home. We kick around the yard. We paint. We scour the shower curtain liner. We scrub the masks with dishwashing detergent and hang them on the clothesline, where they flap; tiny, wrinkled flags of surrender. What this year is has replaced our idea of what this year will be. Afternoons, we sit on the porch and drink tea with milk and cloves.
The children have favorite spots in the woods. On a near-vertical hill, someone has tied a dirty climbing rope to a tree near the top. They belay down for an hour if we let them. A log has fallen at just enough of an angle to be a challenge. They tightrope up and down it, arms out. What did we use to do? It feels as if we could stay here forever, in this year of looking, of waiting. Time loosens its grip on us; the empty hours deliver us back to ourselves.
Other days triggered the urge to flee. Gropings on the street. The headmaster handing over a stick and instructing you to beat a disobedient pupil. The women who stirred, sifted, and scrubbed every waking hour, while so many of their husbands and sons lounged on pallets, smoked, or played carom. We all knew the desire to escape.
This year, eventually not even our projects amuse us. Ice storms come, and then the ice falls like hardware from the trees: hinges and clamps loosed from the branches that shaped them. If you look straight out the window, not up, it appears that the sky is being demolished, torn down for some new project. This seems too obvious a metaphor for February.
My feelings for Martin happen fast, and I have no impulse to stop them. I am in an altered state, needy for reasons to live. If my heart were an eye, it would be fully dilated. My world is so dark that I am hypersensitive to light. The smallest pinprick of hope feels like God's own rays shining through. Martin is a twinkly thing, a beacon, and I move toward it, with grandiose thoughts of destiny. There are those that might measure a love by the loyalty shown afterwards, but this is not my logic. For twenty-three years, I have proven my love for Evan. The only thing to prove now is that I'm not wrong to be alive.
The first inkling. Martin outside the hospital room. Evan in a coma, rocked by a giant mechanical mother, strapped to it facedown. It surrounds him so that all you see are hints: an ear, a lock of hair. I hold his hand, both of us tied to the rhythm of his automatically pumped breath. It counts what is left of his time in motorized beats. The room is small; the machine overfills the space. Martin leans against the wall of the hallway, his eyes lit by the light of his phone. He is relaying updates to our friends and family, people he also knows.
I may have never seen him wearing glasses, because the times we have spent together have been social. He would be in his kitchen serving drinks, his stance wide, and eyes festive. Quick to smile and laugh, he was otherwise quiet, arms often folded, fitting the role of observer. Now his eyes are on my life; he scrolls through its most painful details. The thought flits in -- partner. It comes in a flash, an impression of us, this idea that we are in this together. Before this, I had seen him from the surface, noted his looks, humor, and the love that Evan had for him.
My second inkling is at the play when I find that I am thinking about Martin's neck. Third, we end up together on Valentine's Day at the movies. Within two weeks, he's my plus one, right when the minus one hurts most. Invites pour in, two free tickets to each event, and Martin chaperones. He picks me up, pays if there is a cost, and brings me home. The inklings, if like drops of rain, now shower down. When we go to hear the jazz, I hold Martin's hand and cry as I listen as the drums drive the bass and horns into the same shared rhythm. It's grief-like, how the music swells in waves and becomes louder until it's almost all noise; then, slowly, it ebbs into an exhausted quiet. The question now is not if I'm going to kiss him, but how. It's a physics problem, how to position our faces so that our lips will touch. When he drops me off, his VW idling in my driveway, I think this could be the moment. We sit in the cover of dark, under the massive pine tree. But the bucket seats are badly angled, and the goodbye is too short to allow for my delays.
Now, I have asked him if I can come over, I have said I need to talk to him, I'm about to drive to his house. It's after seven; I've fed the kids; I leave hidden in the shadows of the douglas firs; the streetlamps subdued by the thick dark of their heavy branches. The two stands of golden bamboo watch like sentinels on either side of the walkway. They rub their leaves in the wind, a sound like rain. The cool air feels alive, it rushes forward as though to greet me. I know every inch of these narrow roads, how they bend and dip. I know the madrona around the corner, how the neon colors emerge, mirage-like as I come to the lights of Lake City Way. That terrible night they called me back to the hospital, it was at this stoplight when I realized for the first time that this might be the end. It was after midnight and waiting there, I screamed to Evan that I was sorry; sorry for his loss of his life, because all at once I grasped the truth that his life didn't belong to me. At that moment, any sense of us being bound together fell away as though it had never been real.
I head up the hill, passing all the places I often took the kids: the mall, driving classes, the burrito place, ice cream, past the place I went for yoga, the movie theatre where I took the kids with their friends, landmarks of my old life. I think of the phrase crossing enemy lines, but I know that's not it exactly; I am going against pledges of allegiance, against promises that seemed permanent but now are broken. This is the Death Do Us Part of my marriage. I drive under I-5, the thick dividing line that bisects Seattle, separating east from west. The cars race across the bridge, their headlights a bouncing frenzy overhead.
At the intersection at Meridian, I think again of the hospital, how it continues to exist. It's a few blocks away; I am thankful not to see it. The idea of it haunts me, as if a gateway there has been left open. I picture that Evan was beamed up in a channel of light leaving behind dangerously charged dust. My tires screech when the traffic moves, and the road twists through a small patch of woods before it straightens to meet 99. Like I-5, it slices through the city, but it's the old highway, slow, punctuated with roads in and out. Strange figures on the corners linger, hunched and unhinged.
In daytime this is a stretch of road where the mountains in the west appear, giant and craggy, and the sun blinds, erasing everything, but it's night, and the sun shows no interest, makes no cross-examination. A call comes in from Evan's sister. She asks what I'm doing as if she senses betrayal, and perhaps she does, because now, as I turn onto Holman, the arrow points right at what I'm about to do; I'm on the road that ends at his house.
I have already confessed to her about my feelings for him, believing in the strength of my renewed sisterhood; we have been made closer by the loss of Evan. Every day she texts with poetic accounts of her grief for the loss of her brother, and I respond with my usual muddled hope. She begs me not to act on my feelings, even though she says she understands the appeal. She has known Martin nearly all her life and has long ignored her own soft love for him, her own small crush. But she is in Chicago and married, has never pursued him. She says, if you do this you will be ruining something, and I say but isn't everything already ruined?
Now I am on his street. It has no sidewalks and a ramshackle feel. The cars are piled haphazardly on either side like resting beasts. Over there, a chain link fence. Next to that a tree. It's a hodgepodge of multistory and squat houses. His place is behind a hedge; it's tall and dark green with white trim. I'm at his house, I say, and I tell her not to worry, that it isn't a bad thing. Don't do it, she says one more time. I feel I am being defiant, but at the same time, I know this is just me, continuing to live.
When she says goodbye through the car's speaker, I am already half-out; already I have one foot on ground. The car beeps as it locks, kindly obedient, and I climb up the steps, these steps I know. I hear the echo of all the shoes I've worn over the years on these stairs. The air smells of the brine of the sea and rolls in like waves. Prickles of wet land in my eyelashes. Martin comes to the glass door with a crooked smile looking as if woken from a nap and says hello in a jovial way. He is in slippers, a plaid long sleeved shirt, and jeans, and I cross the threshold, remove my shoes and slide across the shiny maple floors. All around Evan is historical. I remember him in every part of the room.
The room is quiet and shiny like crystal. The white Christmas lights up year-round give a diffuse and festive light. I sit on the burgundy couch, and he sits next to me, close enough to touch but not touching. We use the polite formality of diplomats; neither of us will make any sudden moves.
I look at the clock on the wall. It's big, round, and demands that I interpret Roman numerals. For years I have looked at it, thinking I should get home. Evan and I would be at one of Martin's parties. The kids would be with us and need to go home to bed or they would be home and we'd need to get back to them. Even now they are home and waiting. Every time I leave the house, they worry, the emptiness more ravenous the longer I am gone. How easily they imagine losing me, as if I'm next to disappear. The clock says get on with it; I hear it tick.
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