Suddenly Light, page 13
The teenagers left cans and bottles around the creek. That bothered her. After a few months of watching them, she decided to go down herself, waiting until they were not around. She brought a garbage bag.
She walked through the dim path carefully and came into the clearing, a circle of sunlight resting on the ground. She looked around. There were cans and bottles at the edge of the trees, some of them filled with cigarette butts. She sat on the branch instead, still holding the bag in her hand. The creek was near-silent, clear water moving gently across the brown mud and rocks below—it was a nice place to spend time, she thought. Hang out. She thought of her husband.
She had met him late in life when his youth was well behind him, a fossilized echo of the young man he had been. She didn’t know anything of his younger self, if he hung out with girls in the woods, if he ever got anywhere or only went home with longing. He had been a quiet, reserved man after a long shyness in childhood. He had been a good deal older than she was.
She stood up and started putting cans and bottles into the bag. She gathered what she thought was enough and brought it back to the building, emptying it into the recycling chute, the bottles clattering hard, the cans making thinner sounds. She put the butts in the garbage.
A month later she went again, picking up the loose ends of a restless afternoon. Weeks’ worth of restless afternoons. This time she found two empty condom wrappers—different brands. At first she was horrified in that reflexive way she felt about almost anything teenagers did. But she calmed down; at least they were using condoms. When she was young, they would be parents. And then a true horror story would begin. At least they were only wrappers; the used condoms themselves were not around—cast into the river? A big finish, a final salute? Bravo, she thought. And after she thought it, she laughed out loud. Bravo!
It had been almost thirty years, and still the late-term miscarriage stayed with her as fresh and reliable as morning. Leaving that hospital with her only child left behind, cold. She thought of the teenagers like the creek, fresh water moving across an old riverbed of mud and rocks—they were always new; the path was always old. And in a way, a tender way, all of them were her children. She saw them as belonging to her somehow. But she saw them from far away.
There was a boy she saw often by the water, and she realized he was popular—tall and lean and shoulders jutting like wings. A specimen, she thought. It was easy to recognize him because of the white t-shirts he wore, tightly. His hair was dark, his skin slightly less so—the white shirt was bright as a flag.
She started to recognize some of the girls too. Occasionally there would be another boy here or there, but it was mostly him. Sometimes he was with one girl; sometimes he hung out with a couple of them. He would be talking and they would be laughing, handing a small joint around. She felt another reflex—she didn’t like him.
It was a weekend morning—Saturday or Sunday, she didn’t remember. She was entering the clearing with a bag and caught her breath with surprise. A girl was there.
The girl was sitting on the branch facing away and had not seen her approach.
There was a moment to back away quietly, but she hesitated behind the girl, holding the garbage bag, looking at her back. The girl was wearing a light purple tank top and black cut-offs; she was tall and lanky, her shoulders dark from the summer sun. Her left forearm had a large tattoo—how old was she?—and she saw the tattoo as the girl lifted her arm up to her face and then back down, smoking a cigarette.
“Smoking with your left hand; that’s unusual,” she said to the girl. From decades working as a nurse, she knew how to disarm strangers—friendly but something unexpected and personal, something about themselves.
The girl turned around, twisting her upper body, startled. Her face was long with a thin, upturned nose. Her eyes were guarded, her mouth pulled small. There was something of a startled bird in how she looked, a lanky, long-necked bird.
“You must be left-handed then,” she continued, and smiled for encouragement.
“Yeah,” the girl said.
“Not many left-handed girls; it’s rare.”
The girl said nothing, nodding—self-conscious and uncomfortable around a stranger, even one as old as a grandmother.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just picking up some trash and recycling. I live in the building; I’m retired and have nothing better to do.”
The girl said nothing. She turned back around again and after a drag on the cigarette, took out her phone.
She felt a strong motherly pull toward the girl. It was an ache, both a pleasure and a pain in her body. She felt protective and fearful of the girl, with her large tattoo—how could she choose that permanence when she was so young? She would regret it. There were so many decades, so many selves, left in her life. More than anything she wanted to keep talking, but the girl would be scared off; she had to keep her here somehow.
She walked around the clearing picking up the bottles and cans and butts. The girl finished the cigarette and threw it on the ground, rubbing it out with her shoe. Then she stood up and put her phone in her pocket—she was leaving.
“That’s a popular guy that comes here, eh?” Taking her eyes from the girl, she bent for two tall cans and slid them into the bag. “I see him a lot.”
The girl stopped and looked her full in the face, startled again, but her guarded eyes flashed bright.
Aha, she thought.
“So you know him? Tall guy, lanky like you.”
“I know him,” the girl said.
She didn’t know what to say next; she had struck something, and now the girl, who had been leaving, seemed to pause—unsure.
“Yeah, popular guy.” She kept moving around the edge of the clearing, stooping and picking up. “He comes around here a lot with girls, sometimes in a group but sometimes one on one. Different girls.”
She didn’t look up but could see the girl was facing and looking at her, silent.
She kept picking up the cans and bottles. It had rushed out of her in a heedless moment; she wouldn’t say anything more about it. They were both silent for a few moments.
Then the girl spoke. “I know,” she said. And then, after a pause, “Sorry about the cigarette butts.”
She straightened up, and they looked each other in the face. The girl’s eyes were hardened; her kindly nurse authority took over. “Don’t worry about it, please,” she said firmly. “I’m bored; I like cleaning it up. I like the creek. I like having something to do here.”
The girl seemed to smile a little, an attempt, and then left, picking her way through the narrow path and disappearing behind the branches, the tattooed arm hanging loose at her side.
There was something pure about them, like elements. Life was long with so much sameness and repetition; life had a way of tempering you out, smoothing and polishing you down. Teenagers were pure like animals, elemental, hot and bright or dark and cold, sparking off each other, reactive and explosive. But sloppy and blind and foolish, with bravado so charming and pathetic; they were mere children who had grown too big, still smashing into things.
She remembered earlier years when she did not like teenagers, saw something cynical in that bravado. But her only child had died before birth, and it had left her so fatally humbled and longing. She saw so much wounded innocence and longing in them. And pride and vanity and struggling to pull themselves out of the bewildering madness of youth—the struggle to become someone, even only just themselves.
She still saw the boy by the creek, recognizing his height and lanky walk; they were wearing light coats now, and his white t-shirt was gone. Sometimes the groups were a mix of boys and girls; sometimes he was alone with one. She went down every month or so, gathering up what was left behind, sitting on the branch and looking at the water. Leaves were being shed and covering the ground with bright yellow and orange. She went in the morning when it was unlikely the kids would be around.
But she saw the girl one more time. This time the girl entered the clearing and she was the one sitting on the branch. She heard the crunching of leaves on the ground and turned around; they were both startled, looking at each other. She smiled at the girl with genuine warmth and relief—until, in a sharp shock, she saw the bruises on the girl’s face.
The shock was brief, flickering through her, because of course she’d seen trauma before. The rage took over next. She was sick with it.
“Did a boy do that to you?” She was standing suddenly, facing the girl, when she blurted it out. She almost hissed it.
The bruises were fading already, starting to heal. The girl sensed the fear, and a vague warmth moved across her face. “No,” she said. And after a moment: “It was a girl.”
The two women looked at each other. The creek murmured behind them.
“Why?”
The lanky girl did something very interesting then. Instead of answering she pulled out a cigarette and lit it, lopsided, and through the soft grey smoke she grinned.
Wolfish.
“Well, then,” she said, picking up her garbage bag, still empty. “I will get out of your way.” The rage was gone from her, understanding. She was falling into thought, and her movements became automatic.
The girl did not say anything as she stepped aside.
She went home, bag empty. Still understanding.
She had a glass of red wine on the balcony, remembering the bitter first bite and the slow mellowing after. She missed strange things about her husband now that he was gone; details surfaced and circled down again. She even missed things she didn’t know about him and never thought to ask—about himself, as a young man, as a teenager in a purer form. Before work and repetition and time had cast him. Moments were always falling into the next one; moments stumbled over each other until whole weeks and years were gone. He died, his body gave up, and she had missed it. She was working and then she cared for him and then it was over.
But she knew about his heartbreak. He had described it once only as a point on a timeline—married early, she ran off with another man, he didn’t marry again until they met decades later. And she already knew that was it. Inside of him there wasn’t room for more. She accepted it the way she had accepted her miscarriage, with almost no peace, only the willingness to get through another day to see if it was less tomorrow. And a distant awareness it would never be less.
And they never spoke of it.
Love: the end of a heartbreaking fight for some kind of understanding between strangers. Strangers with an abnormal capacity for hurting each other, all of the unspoken fear around it. Young lovers were so careless and terrified of each other, always, and perhaps that made it exhilarating—but love was the ceasefire.
The girl. Those bruises on her face, they were like her tattoos. The girl wanted them done early; she wanted to learn fast and conquer. Love and sex, jealousy and violence and war, winning and losing. She knew the girl; she knew the young warrior females—even in awkward youth, they were all fire. She herself had been one. She never married until late because she had fire well into her forties. And she suspected her husband had liked women like that—the first wife.
But the girl just didn’t know how much life was left, and she wasn’t pacing herself. She was rushing, as children do, brave and blind. Into early pain.
Runners
She lengthened her stride in slow sweeps, and suddenly a smile moved sideways along her face. She glanced over at me, the smile still on her face but not going to last, then she faced ahead again. It was short but I saw it.
I knew what it was; I loved the moment when running became easy again. It started easy, light on my feet, limbs stretching, weightless on my toes, and thin electric lines starting to move down my legs. But then it would start creeping in eventually—layers of labour and strain. It was ignorable for a while, until my body stopped listening to how I was asking it to move. Heels coming down, heavy, then heavier. Chest turning into a block of wood. But we were all running for the same reason, tied up in everything else: the moment it broke and became easy again. It was such an easy metaphor for everything.
Our group met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; weekends we had off, although many of us would still run, but alone. I ran alone, and I found that I liked that as well—changing routes as the mood took me, taking breaks when I saw something more interesting than cars and houses. Sometimes I stopped in parks and sat under a tree, resting but looking around at the people and children, and then considering other things. The two-hundred-year-old oaks along the edges of the park. Trees were reliable; they reminded you that you weren’t going to matter very much. They were calming in that way. Many years before me—or many years after—I could see a kid sitting under those trees, picking up a small fallen branch and breaking off the twigs, one by one, like I would do.
I wasn’t a lifelong runner; I ran sometimes for a stretch in my twenties, and then I didn’t for a period. Those periods got longer until eventually it just seemed as if I had stopped, and it was final. But Alison died three years ago this past spring, and last year I started up again. I joined the group in May. I didn’t know what to expect, socially, but it was an unselfconscious group—no one tried for each other. Pleasantries were brisk and somewhat formal, unenjoyed. I found myself frequently running alongside Sofi, a young woman who preferred running at the back of the pack. It was my preference too, and I studied her sometimes, curious about why she was here. Most of us were decades older.
Sofi must have been in her late twenties or early thirties, white, thin, building up some tough, wiry muscles on her legs now. She put her blonde hair in low ponytails. She had brown roots showing sometimes. Pretty in a standard way, in the way a lot of women were around that age. Richard was probably in his late fifties, stocky, greying but not much, Korean background, some faded acne scars on his cheeks, a younger widower like me. Angela was probably in her fifties like Richard, divorced, sturdy looking, dark-haired, olive-skinned, the mother to four adult children. Angela was probably someone I might have looked at a second time if circumstances were different. Sebastian and Eleanor—you could not have improved the names—were an active, older white couple, freshly retired, freshly tanned, both horse-faced and remarkably fit, as if their entire marriage was based on a variety of fitness activities and strenuous vacations. Climbing things, cycling across something, a boat race where you pedal with your hands. I learned all of this in only one conversation; they did not engage with the rest of us very much—content and whole in their unit. Edward was also retired; formerly an accountant, a Black guy in his sixties, he had a paunch, and his doctor told him to lose it, then his family strongly backed that up. He was losing weight steadily, and I wondered if he would leave the group soon. Katherine may have been the oldest. She was skinny and nearing seventy. She was a widow without children, pale as birch with long white hair she twisted into a bun. And then the inconstant group that sometimes showed up and sometimes didn’t: Alex, Jeffrey, Amina, another Katherine who went by Kathy, Winn, and Tony.
I didn’t know what to make of Sofi. There was no explanation for why she was with us—she found us online and showed up. Many of us were broken down by one thing or another, illness or grief or aging, loneliness, feeling forgotten by the high buzz of the city belonging to much younger people, caring but also not caring. There was always this thin tension between casual bitterness and not caring. But mostly I saw grief, and bereavement. In brief exchanges you would find out that someone was widowed or freshly divorced—once, a dead child. I didn’t want to think about that. Adrienne. She ran down until she must have been barely a hundred pounds, and then she quit. Later I saw her and some weight was back—I thought, it’s okay. I thought, she’s out. The grief has played out.
My wife was never a runner. It was not how she acquired adrenalin—she loved heights. Her excitement was so complete that she did not even sympathize with people that were afraid of them. “They are afraid because they are asking what if. What if I fall. What if the railing breaks. What if I slipped. How can you live like that?” She had very little patience for something perceived as overthinking, an excess of consideration.
In the end it was cancer that took her life. Thirty-two months of pure hell, and then it was over. It took me almost two years to not hate everyone I came across with a violent disgust that twisted my mouth and eyes. And I knew what I looked like—I saw myself once, by accident, in a pane of dark glass. A disgusted old white man staring down a group of teenagers, or couples, or someone with their kids. But they would never know why—and frankly I could not care. For a long time, they didn’t even exist.
It seems almost unbelievable to me now, but we met on a cruise ship. We were both working there. I went because I had received a pamphlet that listed the four-month seasonal income. She went because she was bored living in a medium-sized town, surrounded by very small towns, anointed with a medium-sized city an hour away. To her, a cruise ship was the moon. It was an entire world away and several spheres beyond.
When you got there, you saw how much the crew was hooking up. Everybody looked you over a few times, men and women. It was a young but haggard working population, serving rotating groups of people who were on their once-in-a-lifetime trip—everybody going nuts—leaving the set-up and clean-up staff with a profound alienation that you could not manufacture anywhere else. Can you imagine—prom for fifty-somethings. For sixty-somethings. Every single night. Something desperate about that bared sunburnt skin, the ecstatic din, the mania and exhaustion, unblinking, the body oils in sharp and synthetic coconut scents, the lineups, the low ceilings. The young staff were unblinking too, faraway and blind to the guests, seeing only each other as fixed points—but those rotated too. Everything was short-term, but time felt long.
