Page 15 of The Strawberry Field
I shook my head. “I have a brother. But he doesn’t care what I do.”
“Lucky you,” Tommy said. But that was where I had to disagree with him. I didn’t think it made me lucky at all.
*
AFTER THAT NIGHT, Sawyer started showing up at the dock when Tommy and I were working, riding a family Sea-Doo over. At first, she had some reason for being there. She’d come by to get some food from the snack bar, fill up the Sea-Doo with gas, and then when she seemed to run out of new excuses, she started hanging out and watching while we filled boats with gas, sipping on a Dr. Pepper from the snack bar fountain.
Tommy was usually busy talking to whichever girl happened to be hitting on him at the moment, and so Sawyer began talking to me. At some point, it started to become obvious that she was coming to see me and not Tommy. I’d been flattered by this even though Sawyer was two years younger. She was pretty. Really pretty. And I had the impression that this was something she hadn’t been aware of until recently. I didn’t know whether she had reached this conclusion on her own or if she’d picked up on my reluctant attraction. And it was that. Reluctant. Very.
I clearly understood the age difference between us, as well as the value of my friendship with Tommy, and there was no way I was going to do anything to cross either one of those lines, but Sawyer was just easy to talk to. She seemed to be interested in my answers to the questions she asked of me: What did I want to do when I got out of high school? What was the best book I’d ever read? Did I think it was a bad thing for football players to get concussions on a regular basis? Did I think people needed to eat meat in order to be healthy?
That was the question she’d asked me one hot July afternoon when Tommy was again flirting with a girl from North Carolina there for the week with her family. Sawyer was sitting on the edge of the dock, just down from the gas pump I was in charge of manning. She dangled her feet in the water, tossing bits of bread from her peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the ducks hovering a few feet away.
“Because,” she said, “you see, I don’t think so. I keep looking for books in the library that talk about how much protein people need and what kind, and I haven’t read anything yet that convinces me we have to get it from eating animals. What do you think?”
“I guess I never thought about it,” I said, feeling her passion.
“I don’t think most people ever have,” she said without any criticism in her voice. Her tone was considering, as if she were wading through the logic right then and there with me. “For example, we’ve given names to foods that don’t say what it is we’re eating, like a hamburger is not called ‘cow shoulder’. Do you think people would eat it if it was called that?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“And bacon. I mean, what does bacon have to do with what you’re eating?”
“I guess that’s the whole idea,” I said. “So people can deceive themselves.”
Things were slow, so I closed the gap between us and sat down next to her on the dock.
“Don’t you think a lot of things in life are like that?” she said. “We don’t want to look at the truth, so we call it something else or put a label on it that hides what it is.”
“Maybe,” I said. “What’s got you thinking about all this?”
She lifted her shoulders and shrugged. “When I was a girl, and we would drive down here to visit, we used to pass all these pastures full of cows grazing. They’d have babies by their sides, and the babies would be running around playing in the grass. I used to think it was such an amazing sight, that maybe that’s what heaven would be like. It was something I looked forward to about the drive down here.But then one weekend we drove by this farm, and there was a tractor-trailer backed up in the middle of the field. They had this section of gates that made a big square around it. They were chasing the cows into the enclosure and onto the back of the truck. Some of the older babies weren’t being allowed to get on the truck, just the mamas and I asked Daddy where they were taking them and why they wouldn’t let all of them get on. I remember it took him a moment to answer me, but he’s always tried to tell me the truth even when he didn’t want to. When he told me where they were taking them, I started screaming and rolled down the window and stuck my head out and yelled at the people to stop. Daddy drove on faster because I guess he didn’t want the people to think I’d lost it, but then I started begging him to go back and buy all the cows so they wouldn’t have to go there. He told me that he couldn’t do that and it wouldn’t matter anyway because if people want to buy hamburgers and steaks, that’s what’s going to happen to cows. I didn’t speak to him for a week, I was so angry at him. It took me that long to admit he was right. It made me angry at the whole world. I still am. Angry.”
I stared at her, noting the way she wouldn’t look up at me, her shoulders stiff and rigid as she stared down at her feet in the water. I could tell she was waiting for my answer and that what I said would make or break her. I didn’t want to answer her because I didn’t want that kind of power. I just knew that she cared what I thought. And so I considered my answer before saying, “I think, Sawyer, that’s one of the most awful things about growing up and not being a kid anymore. The realization that there are some things in this world that we don’t see the way other people see them. That some of those things we’re never going to change. That maybe all we can do is live our version of truth and what we believe is right to the best of our ability. And even that won’t be perfect. But what if everyone did their part in making the world a compassionate place? Wouldn’t that add up to things being drastically different?”
She did look at me then, our eyes meeting and holding before she said, “Yeah. I think it would.”
And it was in that moment on that hot, summer afternoon that I think we both realized we saw in each other some reflection of ourselves that maybe no one else had ever seen. Or maybe we’d never let anyone else see for fear of being judged or ridiculed. And even though there was still a shimmer of tears in her eyes, Sawyer had smiled at me. The thing I could compare it to was the sun rising in the sky after days and days of rain. I felt the connection between us click into place, life-changing and permanent.
When I think of that day now, it’s the stillness that haunts me, the way the fog on the lake never lifted, just hovered there, blurring the edges of everything. Maybe that’s how grief works. It hides what’s too painful to look at until you’re ready to see it again. I wonder if that’s what Sawyer’s been trying to do all these years—see her brother’s face through the fog and not the loss.
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke,Letters to a Young Poet
Chapter Six
Sawyer
I WAKE TO the sun again, squinting at my phone screen on the nightstand next to the bed. This time it’s morning. Nine o’clock. I’d gone to bed around six, sleeping another fifteen hours without waking a single time, my body fatigued to the bone. I drop back onto the pillow, listening for my own feelings of energy this morning. The dead weight of the fatigue I’ve felt for weeks now seems to have lifted a bit, the breath in my chest a little lighter.Not enough to feel like myself, just enough to notice the difference.
I try to think of what I should do today, focus my thoughts on the possibility of walking through the house and making a to-do list of everything that needs to be done to prepare it for sale. Just the thought, though, settles another boulder of anxiety on my chest. I focus instead on the prospect of coffee, sitting up. I slip on the pair of bedroom slippers I had brought with me and pad down the stairs to the kitchen.
Within a few minutes, the room smells of coffee, and I pour a cup, taking a tentative sip without adding the cream and sugar I normally prefer. Surprisingly, the taste is delicious, and I decide to forge ahead with the black coffee. Something about denying myself the simple comfort of cream and sugar feels fitting, though it does nothing to change the fact that I’ve walked away from my life’s work.Still, standing here with a warm cup in my hands feels… tolerable. More tolerable than anything has in a long while.
I open the refrigerator and pull out the loaf of whole wheat bread I bought at Carl’s yesterday, dropping two pieces into the toaster on the kitchen counter. I go back for the butter, and then wait for the toast to brown, sipping at my coffee. Jake pops into my mind. And I realize the reason I had gone to bed so early the night before was to stop myself from thinking about him. Yet, here I am again, his face as clear in my mind as if he were standing right before me. It had taken me years to stop thinking about him.The thought doesn’t hurt the way everything else does. Not today.
Not so surprising, given that I had, early on in our friendship, decided that he was the one for me, despite the two years separating us that first summer we met. I found in Jake a simpatico I had never known with anyone else in my life, other than my brother. And that was different. That was different.
