Everything the Light Touches

The morning smells like rain that he hasn't felt in ages.

Gerald knows this smell the way he knows the creak of the third porch step, the way he knows the sound of his own breathing in a house that no longer seems to breathe itself. It’s a smell like anticipation, like something the world is holding just behind its teeth.

He sits in the white rocker that Margaret bought at an estate sale in 1987. She'd driven forty minutes to a farmhouse outside of Pueblo and paid sixty dollars for it, which was sixty dollars they didn't exactly have, and she'd come home with the chair strapped to the roof of the Buick, laughing the whole way through the front door.

It's a classic, she'd said. You'll thank me.

He'd pretended to be annoyed, but found himself thanking her every day since, though he'd never said so out loud. And now saying it out loud was no longer possible.

He’s eighty-one years old. This is a fact that still surprises him. Not because he expected to die young (he hadn't, particularly) but because the number sits so strangely on his chest, like a heavy coat that belongs to a stranger. Inside he is still someone younger and less certain about life. Inside he is still the man who drove to Pueblo with Margaret and pretended the chair was a bad idea.

The street below the porch is quiet. It's early, not yet seven o’clock, and the neighborhood hasn't started its routine. A robin picks at something in the grass across the road. Two houses down, the Delgado family's sprinklers click on, arcing across the lawn in that slow mechanical sweep. It brings about the smell of wet earth which blends faintly with the scent of the coming rain.

Gerald watches all of this without moving.

His coffee has gone cold. He noticed this ten minutes ago and decided he didn't care. There’s something he likes about cold coffee now, something humble about it. Hot coffee makes demands and has needs. Cold coffee just sits with you, never in a hurry.

His daughter called last night. Rachel lives in Portland with her husband and their two boys, and she calls every Tuesday and Thursday with a cheerful, effortful tone. She sounds like a caregiver who’s performing a wellness check without wanting it to seem like a wellness check.

He loves her, and he knows that she loves him. Between those two facts is a wide, navigable distance that neither of them has ever quite figured out how to cross, and at eighty-one he has mostly made peace with this.

Dad, she'd said, Marcus wants to know if you'd come out for the summer.

Marcus is her youngest boy, twelve now. He’s a serious child who once spent an entire visit asking Gerald about the Korean War, which Gerald had not been in, and about the Vietnam War, which Gerald had not been in, and finally about what wars Gerald had been in, which was none.

I was a pharmacist, Gerald had said.

Marcus had looked at him with a careful, recalibrating expression, one of a child managing his disappointment. Gerald had found this hilarious. He still does.

He'd told Rachel he would think about Portland.

But he will not go to Portland. Not because he doesn't want to see her or the boys, but because travel has become a thing that costs him something he can't quite afford to spend anymore. Not physically. He’s in reasonable health for a man his age, his doctor says, though he isn’t comforted by the notion. But emotionally. The preparation, the airports, compressing himself into the practiced shape of visiting grandfather, having to pretend that everything is fine at all the right moments.

Here, on this porch, he doesn’t have to be fine in any particular way.

The robin flies off. Gerald watches it go.

He thinks about Margaret. This is not unusual. He thinks about Margaret as often as he breathes, without deciding to, without being able to stop. She has been gone three years now, and he has been told by people who mean well that grief softens slowly over time.

This is true. What they don't mention is that the softening of grief brings its own kind of grief, one that you mourn a little because your initial grief was proof of something.

He remembers the last ordinary day they had together, before the diagnosis, before the long tribulations of illness began. It was a Tuesday in October. She'd made eggs. They'd argued briefly about whether to repaint the kitchen. She wanted blue, he thought the existing yellow was fine, and they'd gone on about it for twenty minutes, just like people who have been married long enough that arguing is just another form of dialogue.

She'd won, as she often did. The kitchen is blue now. He loves the blue kitchen more than he will ever be able to explain. Or tell her.

That Tuesday in October had not felt significant at that moment. That is the thing about last ordinary days: they don't announce themselves. They just happen, quiet and unremarkable, and then you turn around and they're the thing you'd give almost anything to have back.

A car rolls slowly down the street. Gerald watches it without interest. It parks in front of the Delgados' and a young woman gets out. Mid-twenties, dark ponytail, and wearing scrubs. One of the home care workers for Mr. Delgado, who is ninety-three and apparently discovered the cure for death. Gerald raises a hand. She doesn't see him.

He doesn't mind.

He picks up his cold coffee and takes a sip.

There’s a quality to April mornings in Colorado Springs that he has never heard anyone describe adequately, including himself. The light comes in sideways and young, not yet introduced to the day. The mountains—he can see the long pale suggestion of them from the porch, Pikes Peak shouldering up above the lower ridges—hold the last gray of night in their crevices.

Everything exists in a state of mild becoming. He has lived here for fifty-three years and this still gets him, this particular light at this particular hour, and he thinks this is maybe the closest he comes to something like perfection anymore. Not the perfection promised once someone reaches heaven or the perfection most people fake to the outside world. Just this… Noticing the light and knowing it’s all he needs.

He’s thinking about getting a second cup of coffee when the gate at the side of the house opens and his grandson appears.

Danny, seventeen years old, Rachel's older boy, who has been staying with Gerald for the past three weeks while his parents manage some kind of renovation chaos in Portland. He’s tall but lanky, like a boy whose growth spurt took him by surprise and left him slightly awkward with his own height. His dark hair is uncombed, and he’s wearing a sweatshirt that Gerald suspects he slept in.

"You're up early," Gerald says.

Danny shrugs, comes up the two porch steps, and clears the creaky one without thinking. He has already learned the house's old bones. He drops into the other chair, the metal one that has been out here since Gerald can remember and is possibly a tetanus risk.

"Couldn't sleep," Danny says.

"You want coffee?"

"I'm seventeen."

"I drank coffee at seventeen."

Danny considers this like he considers most things, with a slow, interior seriousness that Gerald has come to appreciate. He’s not an easy boy to know, Danny. He’s layered, just as the people who feel things at a volume the world hasn't quite adjusted for yet. Gerald recognizes this. He was something like it, once.

"I’m not sure I’d like it," Danny says.

Gerald nods, doesn't move, and they sit together in the easy silence that has developed between them over three weeks of mornings. Rachel had worried, Gerald knew, about the arrangement. About whether her father would be too much, or whether Danny would be too much for him, about the logistics of a seventeen-year-old and an eighty-one-year-old navigating a house and a schedule and the weight of each other's company.

But it had been fine. It had been better than fine. The boy had a quietness about him that Gerald respected, and Gerald apparently had something (he wasn't sure what) that Danny kept showing up to receive.

"Grandpa," Danny says.

"Mm."

"What do you do when you don't know what you want to do? Like, with your life and stuff."

Gerald turns to look at him. Danny is staring out at the street where the sprinklers have stopped and the sunlight is starting to warm the edges of things.

"How do you mean?" Gerald asks.

"Everyone keeps asking." Danny's voice has a controlled flatness, as though he’s managing his feelings. "What college, what major, what career. And I don't—I just don't know yet. And it feels like not knowing will get me stuck."

Gerald is quiet for a moment. He thinks about being seventeen, which he can still do, surprisingly. He thinks about the pharmacy program he chose because his uncle was a pharmacist and it seemed realistic and familiar. He thinks about how he'd been content with that choice, mostly, but also how many things he hadn't known at seventeen that the world was in a great hurry for him to have decided.

"Not knowing isn't the wrong answer," Gerald says. "It's just the unpopular one."

Danny glances at him.

"The people asking those questions," Gerald continues, "they're not asking because they want to know. They're asking because they want reassurance. They want to hear that things are proceeding in an orderly way like they’ve been taught." He pauses. "They're afraid of being uncomfortable. Afraid of the mess it brings."

"Aren't you afraid of the mess?"

"I'm eighty-one," Gerald says. "I am the mess."

Danny laughs a genuine, surprised laugh, and Gerald feels the satisfaction of this, the small bright joy of it.

The rain smell intensifies. To the west, above the mountains, a low bank of cloud has moved in without Gerald noticing, and the light has shifted into that pewter-and-gold register that means late morning storms. The robin is back on the grass across the street, or a different robin, Gerald can't tell.

"I might want to write," Danny says, his voice quiet, as if testing the sentence.

"Then write," Gerald says.

"Mom thinks—"

"I know what your mom thinks," Gerald says without judgment. "She just wants you to be okay. There are worse things to want for someone." He takes a sip of his cold coffee. "But okay takes a lot of forms. Don't let anyone tell you different."

Danny nods slowly. He pulls his knees up to his chest, settles deeper into the uncomfortable metal chair, and looks out at the street. Gerald looks out at the street too.

The sunlight is doing its thing.

The mountains are there, patient and enormous, holding the gray.

Gerald rocks the white chair—Margaret's chair, now his chair, and somehow both of those things at once—and listens as the morning proceeds. The rocking brings something up in him the way deep water brings things to the surface.

He thinks about the last time he sat here with her. Late September, two months before her diagnosis. She’d been reading something (he couldn’t remember what) and he’d been watching the mountains the way he always did, and it had been so ordinary, so perfectly unremarkable, that he hadn’t thought to look at her for long stretches at a time. Hadn’t thought to say anything. To him, there had always been another evening to come, another visit to the porch, another ordinary September.

He had loved her the way someone loves breathing. Without noticing, without gratitude, without ever once thinking to acknowledge it aloud. And then one morning the breathing changed, and the doctors spoke words that rearranged every aspect of their life, and he'd looked at her across the blue kitchen and thought: I should tell her. He thought that every day for fourteen months. He thought it on a Tuesday in March when she was sleeping and her hand was in his and the room was so still. He thought it on that Tuesday in October when their ordinary life would come undone. He thought it right up until the moment he no longer could.

His grief isn’t sharp today. It’s the other kind, wide and weather-like. The kind you stop trying to get out of and simply stand in. He has been standing in it for three years now. He has learned the shape of it the way he has learned the shape of her white chair.

He speaks finally, feeling something calling out from deep within his chest. "I spent forty years being a pharmacist. It was fine work. Good work." He pauses. "But I never once told your grandmother what her chair meant to me. I figured she knew. Figured there was time." He looks at the white rocker. "Don't be in a hurry to decide. But don't wait so long to do things that you run out of days to do them."

The silence that follows is different from earlier. It has weight to it.

Danny unfolds slightly from his knees, feet finding the porch boards. He looks at his grandfather with an expression Gerald hasn't seen on him before. Not his careful and managed seriousness, but something more open and vulnerable. Younger, somehow.

"Did she ever know?" Danny asks quietly. "About the chair. Do you think she knew anyway?"

Gerald is still for a long moment.

"I think she did," he says. "Margaret knew most things." He pauses. "But that's not really the point."

Danny looks back at the street. He blinks slowly as he understands his grandfather. "The point is that you knew but didn't say it."

"The point," Gerald says, "is that saying it would have been for both of us."

Danny takes this in with that interior slowness of his. Expression isn’t just for others. It’s also for yourself, to feel a sense of completion.

The clouds have thickened to the west, the pewter-and-gold light pressing closer now, and the rain smell has deepened into something certain rather than something promised.

"I want to write because—" Danny starts, then stops. He tries again. "I think if I don't, I'll spend my whole life with all of it just piling up in my head. Driving me crazy." He glances at the coffee mug in Gerald's hand, almost involuntarily, and Gerald sees the boy make the connection himself.

Gerald nods. He doesn't explain it further, and neither does Danny, because some things don't need to be closed, only opened.

After a while, he stands.

"I'm going to get more coffee," he says. "Hot, this time. You want some?"

Danny is quiet for a moment. Then: "Yeah. Okay."

Gerald goes inside. The blue kitchen is waiting for him. He fills two mugs, and when he comes back out the first thin drops of rain are beginning to fall, and Danny is still in the chair, watching it come.

The morning smells exactly like Gerald always knew it would.