Page 96 of Goodbye Days

Pierce and Melissa stand a few feet apart at the edge of the pool, watching the roaring waterfall cascade into it. Jesmyn and I quietly join them. It’s beautiful and terrible standing there. Being close to waterfalls always reminds me of how tiny, fragile, and finite I am.

Melissa clears her throat. “So—I’m not sure how to go about this. I’ll do what feels right to me and I hope it’s okay.”

We nod.

She goes to Pierce, who opens the jar. She pours out a handful of the sand and holds it in her palm for a moment. The mist from the waterfall and drizzle quickly saturate it and it runs down her wrist in rivulets, dripping like rainbow tears. She covers her eyes and nose with her free hand. Her lips tighten and tremble.

She steps toward the pool. “When Eli was four, he used to come into our room on Saturday mornings and climb up on our bed. Then he’d whisper, ‘Banana,’ in my ear really loudly. We finally started leaving a bowl of bananas out where he could help himself. We called him our little monkey. Our little Curious George.” Her voice sounds like it has a sack of stones resting on it. She steps forward again, crouches, and dips her hand into the pool, letting the water carry the sand away in a bloom. “Goodbye,” she whispers.

Pierce pours out a handful of sand from the jar. He holds it for a moment, watching it run and drip as it absorbs the rain and waterfall mist. He starts to say something but stops. He tries again and stops. “All day, every day, I study and teach the history of things. Human lives laid end to end. One generation handing the torch to another generation. Fathers to sons. Unbroken threads running through it all. And—” He stops and clears his throat a couple of times. “Now I’m standing here, writing the final chapter of my son’s portion of the history of my life. I never imagined that my history would include the full history of my son, start to finish. But it does now.”

He walks to the edge of the pool and kneels. He lowers the sand into the pool as Melissa did. He stands and rejoins us. He talks to us without looking at us. “There’s a water cycle. Water never goes away. It never dies or is destroyed. It just changes from form to form in a continuous cycle, like energy. On a hot summer day, you’ve drunk water that a dinosaur drank. You might have cried tears that Alexander the Great cried. So I’m returning Eli’s energy—his spirit—and all that it contained. His life. His music. His memories. His loves. All the beautiful things in him. I give it to the water so he can live that way now. Form to form. Energy to energy. Maybe I’ll meet my son again in the rain, or in the ocean. Maybe he hasn’t touched my face for the last time.”

Melissa turns to Jesmyn and me with the jar. “If you want.”

Jesmyn and I trade a quick glance. She swallows hard and steps forward. She pours out a handful of sand, staring at it like she’s looking for some part of Eli she recognizes. “I loved his hands. They were strong and gentle and filled with music. I loved when he would hold my hand. I loved making music with him.” Her voice is small against the churning waterfall. She lowers the sand into the pool.

Melissa offers the jar to me. Pierce stares at the ground. My hand shakes as I take a handful of the sand and hold it, staring at it. My heart beats a familiar barrage, bringing a familiar constriction of breath. Not now. Not now. Not now. I breathe it down. The other three stare at me expectantly. I clear my throat. “Um. Once—we were a little sleep deprived—Eli and I started talking about what emotions and memories are, physically. How every emotion and memory is stored as chemicals in our brain. Love, anger…regret—they’re all chemicals. And chemicals can break down and spoil if you don’t store them in the right way. So I’m storing the chemicals that make Eli in the safest part of my brain, locked away where they can’t spoil. But not so locked away that I can’t get to them every single day.” I lower my portion of Eli into the pool, the frigid water biting at my hand.

We take turns, each putting a handful of sand into the pool while reciting something we loved about him.

He was effortlessly funny.

When he was sad, he never used it as an occasion to make anyone else sad.

He smelled like clean, plain soap.

He closed his eyes when he played the guitar.

He played the guitar like he had been entrusted with a sacred fire.

He was ferociously intelligent.

He worked tirelessly to make himself better at what he loved doing.

We do this until Eli’s sand is gone to the water.

Each time it’s my turn, my mouth says one thing while my mind whispers another: I’m sorry.

Although we’re soaked and shivering, we stand, still and silent, around the edge of the pool and watch the waterfall. Melissa holds the empty jar to her breast as if it’s an infant she’s feeding one final time.

Jesmyn pulls her hands into the sleeves of my parka. Her face is soft in the veiled light. She has that look of wonder I saw on her face when she watched the storm, tempered this time by sorrow.

In this guileless raw moment, it’s as though the rain has washed scales from my eyes that kept me from seeing; from understanding clearly.

I thought what I felt for her was ordinary fondness and affection, heightened by her being my only friend. I thought the ache when she talked about Eli was ordinary guilt and grief, heightened by the magnitude of my loss and my culpability. It is none of those things.

I have fallen in love with her quietly. A movement evading my notice. The sun crossing the sky. It crept into my heart like vines overgrowing a stone wall. It caught me like a river rising and swelling.

Maybe love, like water, returns to some unending cycle, only changing form.

There is the space of a heartbeat when I don’t contemplate the consequences of this, and to hold something so verdant and alive amidst the gray and ashen makes me feel right again, as if perhaps sometimes what seems like walking into a sunset is really walking into a dawn.

Just a heartbeat.

A chirping of bright voices coming down the trail snaps us out of our reflection. We head up toward the parking area. Pierce first. Melissa next. Then Jesmyn. Then me. We nod as we pass the effervescent hikers, slipping down the trail, giggling.

But it’s a momentary distraction to what’s now consuming me as I watch Jesmyn ahead. You can’t love her. You can’t love her. You can’t love her. You just dissolved Eli’s creative energy in water like Kool-Aid. You have no right to love her. You can’t love her.