Bright Before Us (32 page)

Maybe you don't remember everything, the way I do. But I keep these memories for the two of us. If you ever want them, you can have them.

Do you remember that time we got drunk and pissed on the church? I don't remember how it came to that—we weren't far from my parents' house. This was high school, so they would have still been married, living in the apartment near San Francisco State. They wouldn't have cared that we were drunk; I doubt they would even have noticed, but there we were: you, squatting outdoors at two in the morning, as I stood hovering above a stream that soaked the church's little rose garden, both of us laughing without sound.

You never wanted me. That's what I've been trying to say.

Without ever having jumped off a bridge, I think I know what it feels like. It's a betrayal of our first contract
with the world: that there will always be ground beneath us. At first it's like when you expect a few more inches of sidewalk before the curb, and then that moment of vertiginous suspension when the next step doesn't materialize. And then nothing for a second, before the piercing wind. They say you have four seconds between the bridge and the bay. Maybe that isn't enough time to make it to fear. Maybe one stays firmly in confusion. Maybe one makes it to panic, but by then it doesn't matter. And so in that fourth second before the water breaks whichever bone it touches first, perhaps there's something like peace. We're all looking for certainty. In those four seconds, certainty is all there is.

I heard you're out of a job,
Buckingham had said, his words half-drowned by a nearby tractor—how ubiquitous that sound was in Nebraska. I asked him for her name, and when he said it, I wanted to feel something. But there was so little left to feel.
Mary,
I said back, inventing the missing details: Mary lived alone in a sunny apartment. She walked along the piers on the weekend, drank with her friends in the North Beach bars. Mary had parents who loved her, and who became alarmed by her sudden absence—why didn't she call on Sunday night? She always called then.

If that was how Mary died—the four-second fall—then she knew that everything I just invented about the sea's calm embrace is bullshit. She knew that as you fall there's only the impulse to climb back up, against time. That in the final moment, you're reduced: you are only your fear.

What I've done can be reduced, too. My students saw something horrible and I did nothing to help them. I hit a child who showed signs of abuse. I left my pregnant wife;
I lied to her, easy as breathing. And all of those events felt like accidents, aberrations—like betrayals of another of our fundamental contracts with the world: that we're free, and that we choose who we become.

Or maybe Mary had a husband. Maybe she came home each night to a man who couldn't give her what she wanted, even if what she wanted was simple: to have her love returned. Maybe Mary had seen the only thing she ever wanted taken from her, the way Greta had. Maybe Mary had destroyed the only thing she ever wanted, the way I had. Maybe Mary fell from the bridge accidentally. Maybe she was a hiker who slipped on a cliff in the headlands. Maybe she was mugged, murdered, and dumped into the bay. I didn't ask. It isn't my story to know.

The story for me to know is the one I made, crafted from the raw materials of failure. I pulled at the tethers of my life, resisting them like a child. I built that story with every word I used to wound, every lie I erected. The story for me to know is the same as the question I'm forced to ask: What did they know?

What did they know—those two kids who you and I used to be. What did they know about love? And what anything meant, and how to live. What did those two people who raised me know, those people whose own stains filtered down into the fabric of me? I want to know what those two dozen students, the ones whose faces adhere to my conscience, were thinking as they watched—as I had, as we all eventually do—an adult drop low enough in their regard that adulthood itself was diminished. Though I think they're the only ones about whose knowledge I'm certain: they knew nothing. I was supposed to teach them.

The pilot came over the intercom a few minutes ago to say that we're about to descend. It's night outside—it's been a long stretch of darkness beneath us, but soon we'll start to see some lights. People are shifting in their seats, antsy for arrival, getting ready to land, stand, and go.

At the airport, I called my wife to tell her I wanted to come home. You know what she said? Not
How dare you
or
You son of a bitch.

She said,
Why?

And I said,
Because I love you.

If she were still alive,
Greta said,
would you be saying this to me?

The announcements had come over the loudspeakers, the terminals abuzz with arrivals and departures. People milled behind me. I considered her question.

No,
I said.

Not more,
I said.
Just differently.

Different how,
she said. I heard the genuine curiosity in her voice.

There are people you can't help but love,
I told her,
and there are people who you choose to love. You wake up every day and you decide to love them.

Yes,
I said.
And the latter counts for more.

She was silent. I thought I had wounded her. And then she spoke.

Thank you, Francis,
she said,
for being honest just this once.

I used to tell myself, in moments when I felt bad about things I had done, that guilt is useless.
It's a dead scene,
I
said to you once. It was a few years before they died, and you were feeling bad about a fight with your mom.
Guilt serves no purpose,
I said.
You have to let it go.
But the only thing I've found to be useless, if you want the truth, is disappointment. Guilt, at least in theory, helps one avoid repeat failures. Disappointment just kills a piece of you. Disappointment tamps down hope. I don't want to be disappointed anymore.

That night we pissed on the church, you cried after. I walked you to the bus stop and saw you wipe tears from your neck. I asked what was the matter and you said,
I can't believe I just did that.

I laughed.
No one could see us.

That's not a reason to do something.
You were hunched beneath the bus stop shelter.
I never do things like that.

I remember speaking before thinking.
Almost everything important that people do,
I said,
is something they think they would never do.

I can feel us beginning to lose altitude haltingly—sink, then tilt. They've asked us to buckle up for the landing. Any minute they'll knock on this door and discover me: my hands gripping the edge of the sink, the mirror fogged from my breath. My glasses folded on the toilet lid. I made myself get up and walk. I've been looking in this mirror, trying to see what you saw. I want to know if what you said is true. I want to know what my purest self looks like.

I suppose when we land I'll call Jess for a ride. Emeryville is just one town over from the airport. I can see the city in my mind: the two bridges, the twinkling hills. The only place I've ever loved. Jess will double-park at the terminal in Dad's old car, leaning over to unlock the passenger door.
She'll drive north to my sad freeway town, pulling up to the little house on the little court, and from the porch I'll wave good night. And maybe Greta will let me inside, and maybe she will refuse. She will say the things she needs to say, and I will listen. I will change. And what remains of who I was, what I felt for you, will get packed up into some out-of-the-way corner of me—some place where it won't get in the way, where I can open it up and thumb through it now and again. It will atrophy quietly in that abandoned place. It will wither and go stale. But it will not die.

You never wanted me, Nora, and cutting the cord to the brief time when you thought you did is something I will never master. I know myself. I will carry this pain as though it has meaning, balancing an unwieldy hope for a future—extending outward, bright before us—that will never arrive. And I will keep on biding the meantime, answering these questions you never asked, telling you this story you already know.

Sincere thanks to the following big-hearted people: Maureen Gallagher, G. V. Cooper, Christine Mayall, Ken MacLennan, Sahar Mozaffar, Diane Berl, Rick Kleine, Maureen Mitchell-Wise, Daniel Anker, Richard Wright, Bruce Wilson, Shennan Hutton, Amanda Davis, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Cornelia Nixon, Mary LaChappelle, Brian Morton, Victoria Redel, Rob Spillman, Michelle Wildgen, Brian DeLeeuw, Nicole Haroutunian, Sara Weiss, Nicki Pombier-Berger, Julie Stevenson, Dan Degnan, Adrian Kinloch, Jessica Winter, Heather M., Nat “Ace” Jacobs, Beth Fitzer, Elizabeth Dunn, Stephanie Palumbo, Erin Kirkham, and Deborah Way.

Heaps of praise and thanks to the brilliant (and aptly named) Meg Storey, and the rest of the good people at Tin House Books; and to Sarah Burnes, the most patient and generous agent anyone could hope for.

Thank you to Amy Hempel, for her keen eye and kind advice. Thank you to Paola Peroni, for her superhuman support and steadfast friendship. Thank you to Alex Banner, for everything.

Warm thanks to the Kimura, Rund, Christie, Fowler, Ratliff, Donahue, and Arnold families—especially my parents, and
especially
especially Cody and Meggie.

Finally, with tremendous admiration and love, thank you to Adam Ratliff (and little Warren), without whom life would be like a broken pencil: pointless.

Copyright © 2011 Katie Arnold-Ratliff

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

 

Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon,
and New York, New York

 

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West,
1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710,
www.pgw.com

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arnold-Ratliff, Katie.
Bright before us : a novel / Katie Arnold-Ratliff.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-935-63908-4

I. Title.
PS3601.R5853B75 2011
813'.6—dc22
2010046252

 

First U.S. edition 2011