Isn't the World Dark Enough?

On stifling days and rising steam and checking on her one more time

Stifling July has a smug look and we’re driving all the way up Queen Street ten minutes after the thunderstorm, steam leaking up out of the asphalt, the trees weighed down by the heaviness of it all. An old black man has stopped walking in a small patch of shade and holds his gnarled baseball cap in one hand, mops his forehead with a cloth, and contemplates the long stretch of shadeless, glaring sidewalk ahead. Then, wearily and with resignation, he sits in the small patch of dirt around the tree and waits in that shade, and we drive past.

Everyone moves slowly through the city after these storms, standing with eyes glazed over even after the signal has changed to walk, thinking who knows what, and then walking, and the cars, too, pause a moment and then drive through the rising steam. It’s like the street itself is on fire, just below the surface. Like the world is burning.

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The nights of my life are long now, and late, with so many teenagers. I meander through the house even after it’s quiet, waiting for that last child to get home, waiting for everyone to be gathered under this roof. A child who will eventually come home that night but is still gone is like a shard of something in the bed.

Last week our middle daughter drove all the way to the Jersey shore for the first time, her and two friends, and on the way home they hit thunderstorms so strong she had to pull her car under an overpass. She called, and the loud, pounding sound of the rain was like every worry I’ve ever had about what might happen drumming through my skull. I could barely hear her voice.

I couldn’t sleep until I saw her car in the driveway, the neighbor’s motion light glancing off the glass of her windshield. I heard the downstairs door close quietly—she never closes doors quietly—and I sighed and went back upstairs and fell asleep immediately.

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In the midst of this stormy summer, my obsession with Irish novels is deepening. Niall Williams’ This is Happiness, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and now Donal Ryan. I’m currently reading his book, Heart Be At Peace, and came across this:

“She told me there not too long ago that she practices mindfulness, that she lives in the present moment. Well for you, I said, and she started to get a bit sniffy and so I said no more.”

“I know she thought I was making little of what she was saying but I was actually envious of her. I’d love to be able to do that. Imagine being able to shuck off the weight of the past, the burden of all your sorrows, and walk the earth free, light-footed, sure of your step, not worried that you might buckle and fall at any moment, lose the breath from your body in a moment of remembrance, of realization, of sudden stabbing grief.”

Imagine.

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We have a new artist showing work in the book shop, as we do every other month or so, and all of her watercolors are beautiful but it’s the one of the man in the rowboat that draws my eye, a lonely image, the water all around him as white as can be. Him, floating. Pausing between rows, the oar still dipped under the surface.

Nowhere really to go, just an expanse of nothing around him, and I wonder how he got there and why he’s there and I imagine he’s sitting in the quiet, listening to the tiny waves lap against the side of the boat, and maybe he’s old and the end of his days is near but everything about life is right there in the boat. Just the sound of the water. And nowhere to go.

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Daddy, will you come check on me again, she asks, and I am only ten paces away down a short hall but would I really deny her one last goodnight in this world, this world of floods and bombs and agents sweeping people off the street and vanishing parents, disappearing parents? Recently I can’t stop thinking of those rising waters, those rising muddy waters and the sound of it against the inside of playful, summer camp cabins.

I crawl out of bed and walk to her room and she has preceded me there, grinning up at me, and a shaft of light flat and straight stretches from the doorway to where she rolls over, her back towards me, snuggled under covers.

From where I am in her room, there beside her small bed, I can hear the older kids downstairs in the kitchen, laughing about something, and I can picture Maile on her side of the bed, the bed I just left, reading herself to sleep, reading about a security guard who worked in an art museum, and I wonder about what quiet nights were like for him, there among the paintings. The motionless sculptures. And I wonder which pieces spoke to him, and what they said.

Soon enough, she’s asleep, and I stand gingerly and tiptoe through the doorway and leave the light on in the hall because isn’t the world dark enough?