All We Are Trying To Do

The old pick up truck sparkles with midnight frost as it passes under the few street lights dotting the desolate farmland road. Marty, in the passenger seat, feels like a popcorn kernel, bouncing on the pleather bench seat. The washboarded road combined with the lack of shocks makes for an unpleasant ride, no matter how slow his grandpa drives. 

But even if this ride were in a smooth toasty limousine, it would still be unpleasant.

Grandpa Jack, his cheeks whiskery with the day’s stubble, guides the truck away from the dirt road and into a field that rises gently toward the sky. Cresting the hill, they come to a rest and Jack snaps the engine off.

They sit in silence for a moment and then, seat and bones creaking, Jack begins to climb out.

“Cmon, Marty.” He pauses with the truck door open. 

“It’s cloudy,” Marty replies. 

“It’ll clear.”

“I’ll wait in here until it does.”

Jack shrugs. He sits back, shuts the door, reaches behind his seat and pulls out his Thermos. It’s a creamy dinged plastic with peeling red plaid. He pours hot black black tea into the lid and hands it to Marty who accepts, mainly for the warmth it will provide.

Steam rises in front of Marty’s face as he holds it and feels the familiar sag of depression increase its weight on his twelve-year-old body. Mom had always brought hot chocolate. 

Marty sniffs.

“What’s that?” Grandpa glances over at him.

“Hot chocolate,” Marty mumbles.

“Hmm?”

“Mom,” Marty raises his voice slightly. “Mom always brought hot chocolate.”

Jack sags a little now. He rubs his palms on the worn knees of his work pants. 

He looks away. “I thought maybe,” he shrugs, “chocolate in the middle of the night … might give you a tummy ache, that’s all.”

Marty nods. His stomach hurts all the time now anyways so what difference does it make? Grandpa doesn’t know this though. Because Marty never told him. Marty never tells Grandpa anything.

Jack reaches behind the seat again and pulls out a horse blanket.

“Here,” he sets it on Marty’s lap clumsily. “Stay warm.”

Marty wants to say his bed had been warm, but he doesn’t. If Marty said all he was thinking all the time, he would be considered a very unpleasant child. So he stays silent. 

Jack clears his throat. “It should start in about an hour.”

Marty nods again and then the cab is silent. The steam from the tea dissipates into the air and creates a gentle warm moisture around Marty’s face. He can hear Grandpa’s watch tick, the seconds passing slowly.

Marty squeezes his eyes shut, trying not to remember but it’s impossible. His desire for the way things were surges and images come pouring in: Sitting in the bed of the truck, Mom making a nest of quilted blankets that smelled of dryer sheets. They would huddle together for warmth, Mom with her arm around him, refilling his hot chocolate. While they waited for the first meteor to fall, they would sing at the top of their lungs because no one on earth could hear them up here in the middle of the night. Mom, with her nasally off-key voice and Marty hardly knowing any of the words. He takes a sip of the bitter black tea to chase the memories away. The silence is unbearable.

“You probably didn’t want to come,” Jack says finally, “because you will remember.”

Jack scratches his cheek. “I know because I worked to shut out the memories too. Before.”

Marty doesn’t want to do this. “Do we have to talk?” He knows that Jack doesn’t want to and is only doing this for him. They may as well skip the whole thing.

“It’s been a year, son,” Jack says gently. “Now, I’m no good at talking and neither are you.”

Marty glances up.

“But if we don’t, we will never be whole people again.”

Marty sighs. “Okay.” 

Jack waits and then Marty asks, “What did you mean, before?”

“Before?”

“You said you tried to shut out your memories of her before.”

“Your mother— she ran away. From me.”

This is news to Marty.

“Why? She loved you.”

“Because I — I tried to chase her boyfriend off. Your father.”

Marty says nothing.

“There are some people, Marty, that just don’t have integrity. Your father, he—” Jack shakes his head. “There was nothing redeeming about that young man. He was handsome and he knew it and he used it.”

Marty knows this is true. He found a folded up photo in his Mom’s wallet after she died. It had to be his father. He was so handsome Marty was almost embarrassed to look at the grainy face with cheekbones sharp as an axe. He’d started to throw it away but then tucked it inside his math book.

“I’ve never seen a man more disinclined to settle down. Man.” Jack almost spits out the word. “He was a boy. A selfish boy.”

“That’s why you chased him away?”

Jack rubs his palms on his knees again. “Yes and no. I knew he would hurt her. He already had. I just wanted to protect her but — I don’t know if that was the right way.”

Marty ponders this. He understands on a certain level.

“One time,” he says, “I hid something from mom, so it wouldn’t hurt her.”

He waits for a question but Jack just looks calmly through the windshield.

It was a bottle of gin. Marty doesn’t volunteer in the information.

“The clouds are breaking up,” Jack says.

Marty peers through the frosted glass at the sky as Jack opens the door and then eases himself into the brittle cold grass. Marty stays in the truck for a moment and then reluctantly follows, keeping the horse blanket tight around his shoulders. It smells like dusty hay. He might sneeze.

Leaning against the hood, Jack looks up at the break in the clouds, his stubble glowing in the faint moonlight with gentle sparkles like the frosty grass. Marty avoids looking at the sky. If he sees one meteor he just knows he will cry until there are no tears left.

“I used to bring your mom up here when she was little. Your grandmother, she’d never brace the cold, not even for us.”

Marty peeks at the sky. The crack is widening and he sees a few stars shining through.

“Mom loved the winter constellations. Orion was her favorite.”

His voice is shaky but he gets it out. Maybe that’s enough.

“Yes indeed. That was the first one she learned to recognize.”

“And she said the night sky was special because you didn’t see it as much. Too cold to spend time with it.”

Marty lifts his face to the sky then. It’s not as hard to look at Orion without Mom as he thought it would be. “Unless you were doing something special. Like this.”

“She used to make up stories about them,” Jack says. “That’s what we’d do while we waited.”

“She did that with me too.” How could he have forgotten that part, he wonders.

“They were silly,” Jack says. “But they were hers. That was the important thing.”

They were silly. Marty starts remembering all sorts of things then. How mom would wake him every morning by sitting on the edge of his bed eating cereal. He hated the sound of it but he’d give anything to hear it now. He remembers how her belches could rattle the windowpanes and how much that made him laugh. He remembers the times she was disappointed in him, how quietly angry she could become. He remembers how much she loved puttering in the yard and how very much she hated spiders. He remembers how happy she always was, unless she was drinking. Then she would sit for hours talking to him about her mistakes, who she had wanted to be, and how much better he deserved. She would put her head in her hands and wonder tearily if his father left because she truly was unlovable or if he was the unlovable one. She could never decide. Marty would gently tuck her in those nights and they would never speak of it the next day.

Marty shakes his head. These aren’t the memories he wants. But they are coming anyways and he is saying them all out loud. He feels like he is no longer in control and it scares him but every memory leads to another and they come faster and faster until Marty stops, and breathes hard. He feels like he just ran a marathon.

Jack ever so gently sets his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This is good,” is all he says.

“I don’t want to remember like this though,” Marty says between shaky breaths. “I want to remember only the good but that’s not how it works. It’s all tangled together. So I’d rather not remember.”

Jack lets the seconds tick by and then he clears his throat. “There’s something your grandma used to tell me. She said all we are doing every day is trying to say ‘I love you’ in the best ways we know how.” Jack pauses, then continues slowly. “These memories — the ones you want and the ones you don’t — that’s all you are remembering. Your mother trying to say she loved you.”

Marty shivers. He ponders this. He thinks about the things he hid from his mother, the things he gave her, the things she gave him, the every days they spent together and he begins to have a dim understanding of what his grandfather is saying.

Then he feels the scratch of the horse blanket on his cheek. He sees the cold on the tip of his grandfather’s nose. He smells the tea, no longer steaming, still cupped in his hands. All we are doing is trying to say ‘I love you’ in the best ways we know how.

And then the first meteor passes over head.

“Look,” Marty breathes. In another second another falls and then another and another until the sky is littered with streaks of light like rain on a speeding windshield.

Marty looks at them, head back and mouth open and Jack looks at Marty, seeing the lights reflected in his shining, dry eyes.

The meteors keep coming — bits of debris burning to a crisp as they enter the atmosphere, meeting their death with a blaze of glory and giving a gift as they flame out into oblivion. 

Side by side in silence they watch — each with their own memories, each creating a new one — as the seconds pass by. Marty no longer feels the cold. And he no longer feels that pressure inside of him to hold back a dam. He breathes slower and deeper. He knows that in this moment, on this night, he has begun something important. 

“You’re going to be alright,” Jack says softly and then turns his eyes back towards the brilliant sky.