I didn’t even bother trying to climb out of my worn armchair when the phone rang.
I was cozied up in a blue sherpa throw my father had gifted me for Christmas a while back. There was a freshly brewed mug of chamomile tea sitting upon the coffee table in front of me and a copy of the Sunday newspaper nestled in my lap that I rifled through while I patiently waited for the tea to cool off.
The cool Pacific breeze gently blew through the opened windows of my living room and caused the olive green curtains to flutter like Spanish flamenco skirts. For the first time in a few months to my pleasant surprise, the usually foggy weather allowed the sun’s rays to peek through the clouds, and for the first time in a few years, I was alone in the house and away from my rambunctious kids.
If my boss was on the other line– which he probably was– I didn’t plan on picking up. My boss had the nastiest habit of giving me calls on the weekends, vacation days, and even on Thanksgiving. I told him several times to not call me while I had my wife’s family over, but nevertheless he did. My father in law was not pleased when I went to pick up my Boss's call right before our dinner prayer began.
Earlier this week I told my boss that my family and I would be out on a fishing trip up in coastal Washington today. In reality, my father in law was the one taking my wife and kids up to Washington. He initially extended the invitation towards me, which I almost took up excitedly, but the look he had on his face seemed to suggest that I should stay at home. So, out of a bit of fear, I told my wife I wouldn’t be able to make it because of a business trip to Portland.
I picked up my mug of tea and cupped my hands around the top to feel the steam. I thought about that fishing trip the rest of my family was on without me. Hopefully my son hadn’t caught his first fish yet. That was for me to teach him. Not his grandpa.
Trying to soak in my peaceful Sunday afternoon was difficult when the constant brrring, brrring, of the telephone obnoxiously rang in the background. It was like reality was calling– Hello, is this Will Levern? Yeah, stop daydreaming, you old bum. Get back to work. Jesus Christ, I resisted the telephone’s doomsday pull as much as I could, but it drew me in faster than teenage me to a new Superman comic.
But as soon as I began to mentally prepare myself for my eviction from my cozy haven, the telephone stopped ringing. Good, I hummed to myself, pleased. He’s not gonna call me again. But right as I completed that thought, the phone started ringing again. Jeez, I thought. He never called me twice unless there was some last-minute paperwork I had to do. But despite knowing that something urgent was probably on the other line, I still made absolutely no effort to get up across the living room to pick the receiver up. I was stubborn on letting my boss hear nothing but complete silence from me. God, I could envision his face right now, bright red with repressed anger while he paced around his office. It was oddly satisfying to know that I was in a position of power above him.
I stared at the phone and willed it to shut up, but it didn’t. The ringing droned on longer than it should have, which was strange, considering at this point any normal person would’ve hung up and dialed again. But there was no long pause in between the rings and worry began to flood my stomach. The same rhythmic brrring, brrring continued to disrupt my peace, so sadly, I willed myself to put down my mug of tea, clamber out of my armchair, shuffle my feet across the living room, and at last, pick up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Jesus. I thought you were dead,” Mack said. “Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I thought you were my boss,” I muttered, fidgeting with the telephone cord. “What do you want?”
My friend of forty years huffed through the phone. “Do you remember how to get to that cliff?”
I paused, a bit confused. “The one by the river that we used to jump off of?”
“Yeah. That one.”
I almost forgot about the river we spent days in, swimming with turtles, fish, and tadpoles. We used to jump off this one cliff above the river, far, far away from all the proper hiking trails the town had marked out. Shrouded by several impressively large Alder trees, shrubs of flowering snowberries that bees buzzed around, and a rocky edge perfectly sculpted by Mother Nature herself to jump off of, the cliff looked untouched by any human life. Its location from the sun made it perfect for soaking up rays on rare sunny afternoons, so little nine year old me knew I had struck gold.
I knew I had to run back to Mack so I could eagerly show him my new findings, so after retracing my steps back to Mack and being violently tagged by him with a scream of “GOTCHA,” we re-retraced my steps back through the woods and to the cliff. We marked the path using pieces of our shoelaces we sliced using my dad’s pocket knife (which Mack suggested to me to steal, “just in case a bear attacks us or somethin”) and drew a not-so-detailed map on a crumpled napkin using a stubby restaurant crayon– all to ensure that when we returned back tomorrow, we would be able to find our private hangout spot.
God, the river seemed like a lifetime ago. All those days of jumping and swimming in that river and sunbathing on the rocks to dry ourselves off… Those memories were like fantasies now.
Adulthood was funny like that. Snap of fingers, and bam: suddenly you’re balding and your limbs creak everywhere you go. There's no time for anything, besides working in a room with no windows and blankly staring at an empty Word document. Every morning had the same unenjoyable cup of dirt-tasting coffee, the same commute to work, and if I was lucky, maybe a car crash to entertain me while I was stuck in traffic for three hours.
I let out a slow exhale. “It’s been decades, Mack. Why?”
There was a pause. I heard Mack weakly chuckle through the phone, like he was nervous about something. “Will, you know what I was thinking about last night?”
“Just drop the bomb, Mack,” I muttered.
He nervously chuckled again. “I was… lying on my bed last night… thinking about the old things, y’know? How I could’ve done this better, studied better, worked harder and ended up in a better place…”
I could barely hear his voice over the din of three kids screaming in the background– something about a dinosaur.
“And I sort of… dug through my brain and there it was– the river where we had all met. And I thought to myself, you know… why not go back? See if things are different.”
I stopped fidgeting with the telephone cord and froze. A bead of perspiration threatened to form on my receding hairline. I stood there like a statue, unsure of what to say, unsure of what to do. Mack’s son began crying earnestly in the background. I could hear his wife trying to pacify the seven year old, the quiet shushes filling the empty silence over the phone between us.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. My glasses started fogging up.
“Mack, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. I could feel my throat closing up, and I struggled to get the last few words out of my head. I tried to sound as stern as possible while resisting the urge to slam down the phone and sprint, far, far away from this confrontation. Mack should’ve given me a warning, or– or just something, something so that I would be at least a tiny bit prepared for this conversation. “Mack. If there’s one place I’m not going, it’s there.”
There was a long pause. I listened to Mack whisper something to his wife, go to another room, open the door, and walk into what I assumed was a separate room. “Will, that was almost thirty years ago,” Mack said quietly with a dangerous edge to his voice. I heard him shut the door behind him and click the lock shut. The crying muffled, and the two of us were alone, temporarily away from our domestic life. “You’ve had thirty years to grieve, and you still haven’t moved on?
Thirty years ago I was still considered a young man. I had never attended a funeral before, nor knew anybody particularly close to me who had passed away. Inexperience with death made me unfamiliar with grief– so when Ron passed, all the logs in my lifelong emotional dam had been wrecked by insufferable waves of pain. My body procrastinated tears and for the first time in my memory, I cried. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I would wake up late in the afternoon to splotches of dried tears on my pillow and my bedroom curtains shut like I was some sort of vampire, and I would feel… empty. Worthless. I had a sickening hole in my body which made me feel like one of those colonial era corpses that had a cannonball blown through the ribs.
The day of the funeral, I remembered staring at myself in the mirror before leaving the house. Gelled back brown hair, violent, bloodshot brown eyes, crooked black-framed reading glasses with a blank expression on his face, the boy who stared back at me radiated ruined confidence. Rather than standing up arrogant and tall like a normal young man should’ve, the boy’s back was hunched over cowardly as if he were the new intern for Atlas. The truth of the world had burdened his back and afflicted his soul, and I felt a horrendous amount of pity for him.
Up until then, I had seen Death as somebody who whisked away strangers and drug-addict rock stars, people who couldn’t force the tears out of me even if I were held at gunpoint. I was soon turning eighteen. I was practically considered a man! But the old black suit my mom picked out for me hung wearily on my shoulders and the wrinkled olive green tie that was paired with it was practically begging to be ironed. Even the slightly-too-small brown oxfords I wore were originally part of my old school uniform. With each step I took I felt my cotton socks rubbing uncomfortably against my toes.
My reflection was a foreigner to my bedroom, an intruder, and I remembered disliking the way he looked back at me. So right before I left, I shut off the lights so he couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see him.
For the first time in days, I went outside. I went down the steps, strode towards the family car, flung open the door, and launched myself into the back seat where I sat, alone. Even though I still had an hour and a half before we had to leave, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to prepare myself for what would come next. Dread settled in my stomach and my heart pounded in my ears. Dear God, I wanted to barf. I tried to forget all the strange and unfamiliar feelings that bubbled and threatened to spill over, but I couldn’t. Every time I told myself to forget, forget, forget goddammit, my mind turned back to the same memory of Ron, eyes wide with fear before he slipped underneath the water and disappeared.
All Ron left for us that day were bubbles of oxygen on the river’s surface, but even those were swept away.
It was my fault. It was my fault that Ron drowned. I thought he was pretending when he called for help. I thought he was fooling with us, like he usually did, but he wasn’t. And he died.
The car shook violently as I slammed the seat in front of me, let out a noise that was a mix between a sob and a roar, and used the best of my abilities to try and beat up the front seat viciously. My boxing match with the car was just supposed to be a cathartic release. I didn’t really think it would work. I thought that I would be done after a few punches, but by the time my parents stepped into the car my hands were bruised. I pretended that I felt nothing while I sat with my hands underneath my butt and blankly stared off into the space in front of me.
Unfortunately, my hard-worked minutes of trying to hold back the tears in my eyes were in vain. Tears silently streamed down my face as my parents weaved the car through the dense and foggy Oregon forest. I was completely aware of every whisper they exchanged with each other. They talked about me, about Ron, about Mack. They talked about everything I didn't want to hear and looked at me with forlorn eyes, watching me while I squirmed in my seat.
About halfway through our drive, my mother passed me a tiny plastic package of tissues. I took them gratefully and dabbed my cheeks with the soft and purse-wrinkled cotton, but I saw my father staring at me through the rearview mirror while his hands clenched around the steering wheel, so I immediately stopped wiping away my sadness.
By the time we reached our destination I summoned enough courage to stop my tears. I managed to sit through the ceremony with a few ruptured blood vessels and a bobbing Adam’s apple. I concentrated on the grass patch underneath the chair in front of me while my palms gripped my knees tightly. There are forty strangers around you, I repeated to myself. There are forty strangers around you.
My gaze was torn away from the grass patch when I heard ugly, strangled sobs arising from somewhere in the rows in front of me. I wasn’t the only one who seemed shaken out of their griefed daze, because Mack had perked the ears of everybody who attended the funeral. Sitting in the front row with the rest of his family, Mack’s shoulders shook erratically while his blotched face was buried in his hands. His nice-looking suit had been ruined by the stream of salt tears and disgusting snot.
My palms twitched against my knees. I resisted the urge to slap him and tell him to shut up and get it together, but my job was quickly taken by his dad, who grabbed his son by the back of his collar after whispers began to snake through the rows of chairs. Mack’s dad forcefully pulled his son up from his slumped position and revealed his son’s shocked and wide-red eyes to the public. Suddenly all the whispers stopped. But before Mack could give his dad a well-aimed punch to the nose, his dad bent his head towards Mack’s ear and quietly whispered something to him.
I never knew what Mack’s dad said, but whatever it was, it made Mack’s shoulders tense and stare defiantly at his dad. Mack’s jaw constantly clenched and unclenched as if he were chewing on the bubble-gum words he was preparing to pitch at his dad, but after a few strained seconds, Mack lost the unofficial staring contest. He slowly turned away from the harsh gaze of his father and faced front towards the pastor, all while hastily pushing his black hair out of his face and roughly wiping his eyes with the back of his palms. He was rewarded with silent praise from his father, who gave him an approving, curt nod.
Although everyone’s attention had now been drawn away from Mack and to the pastor who had called for everybody to stand up, my eyes were still glued to the back of his head. I watched him as he suppressed the tremor in his shoulders and tilted his head up to the sky to whisper some sort of silent prayer or reassurance to himself.
“Close your eyes and think,” The pastor said, snapping me out of my daze. I closed my eyes, just like everybody else around me who keenly listened to what the pastor had to say. “Think about Ronald. Now– remember him. Remember his face, but more importantly, remember what he has done for you. For the world.”
My cotton socks rubbed uncomfortably against my shoes. I squeezed my eyes tighter.
“God won’t forget him,” the pastor said confidently while raising his voice. “Even if me, you, all of us forget him, God won’t. God won’t.”
Mack started crying again that day, but I managed to go home without a single teardrop leaking out of my eye. All I had to do was just forget about Ron.
~
“Will,” Mack repeated again through the telephone while I avoided the gaze of nobody and stared at the hardwood floor in between my feet. “Will, why can’t we just remember the good times?” He quietly pleaded with me while my stomach sank with a familiar dread. “What’s preventing you from going back there, man? Listen, we can even take our kids. We can show them the exact places where we used to play. You can show your son how to skip rocks. You ca–”
“Mack,” I said, cutting him off before he could say another word. He obediently shut up. “Mack, I don’t wanna go back there.”
Mack didn’t respond. I assumed that he was waiting for me to add on something else, so I awkwardly continued. “Mack– th– there are just some things I’d rather be left in the past,” I half-lied while I fidgeted with the telephone cord again, still keeping my eyes on the floor.
“And this is one of them?” He said, deadly quiet with a tinge of venom. I froze, a deer in headlights. “Will, you can’t run away from the past forever. Why can’t you grow up?”
“I have grown up,” I said with only a hint of frustration. “I have grown up, Mack, and I’ve stopped running away. I’ve– I’ve accepted the fact that Ron died, and– and I don’t know why you keep assuming that I’m still hung up over it, but I’m not. I’m over it. I stopped crying a long time ago.”
I waited for Mack to respond again. I half-expected him to yell at me and threaten to drive over to my house and punch me in the face so he could release all the built up annoyance he had towards me from all these years. But to my surprise and relief, he never did.
Instead, he sighed deeply.
“You know what? Forget it,” Mack said, resigned, all of his venom gone. Rather than sounding angry, he sounded pitiful. “I was planning on going back there next week with or without you anyways. But hey,” he said, taking a jab at positivity. “If you change your mind– feel free to drop by.”
Mack hung up before I could even open my mouth to say goodbye.
I gently put the receiver back down into its telephone cradle and shuffled back across the living room. I nestled back into the armchair I had left five minutes ago and picked up my mug of tea into my hands. All the enjoyment I had before I picked up the phone disappeared. Mack had gone as quickly as he came and left me to deal with the reformed pit in my stomach alone.
Again.