You'd Be Home Now (94)

“We’ll just be a little bit. To say hello. To say goodbye,” he answers. “I come here quite often to see my mother. She’s over here.” He points where we should walk.

    He bends down, groaning a little, and brushes leaves from her gravestone. He sighs.

“My mother was a pained woman,” he says. “My father was an alcoholic. A charming one, like something you’d see in some old black-and-white movie. Always jolly, laughing, a joke when you needed it. But a terrible sadness inside that he tried to drown out. But we loved him. We cleaned up after him, we put him to bed. We called his work when he wouldn’t wake up and said he wasn’t feeling well. And then he died. One day, he just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

“Oh,” I say. It kind of sounds like what I’ve been doing for Joey for years, except for the dying part, but after what I saw in the woods, maybe that’s not far off. I breathe in deeply, trying to stuff down the hurt that thought brings me.

Simon Stanley blows on his hands in the cold air.

“My mother was never quite the same. A suicide, especially, does that to you. It was a long, long time ago, and back then, when that happened, people liked to shame you. Said she should have been a better wife, a better woman. This town didn’t treat her very well and she changed. Closed herself off from everything. From me. I couldn’t wait to get out of here, to tell you the truth. The day after I turned eighteen, I took the first bus to New York City, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket and a suitcase full of dreams, as they say. That’s the beauty of youth. You don’t need much if you just have a dream.”

“I’m getting really cold,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. “And I feel like you’re about to break out into song.” It’s also a little scary, what he’s saying about his mom and dad. I like to think of Simon Stanley as permanently cheerful, even though he told us that thing about people being full of layers, like onions, and that you have to peel them back to truly get to know them.

    He laughs. “Well, I do teach theater, so that might happen. But shut up and listen anyway.

“I wanted to find my people,” he goes on. “Bright lights, big city, dreamers like me. Gay, like me, because that was not a thing in Mill Haven back then, at least not openly. And I had the time of my life, to tell you the truth. I fell in love, I was in plays, I lived in a disgusting walk-up with four other people and we lived on bags of rice and bottles of wine and grew our hair long and fell in and out of love and were broken and alive all at the same time and it was glorious. But then my mother got sick and I came home. To take care of her. She was difficult to the very end, but that’s what you do. You get up every day and try to love your people, even if they make it hard. Because what else do you have, in the end.”

He tugs on the sleeve of my coat. “Come, let’s walk.”

We make our way up the path, surrounded by gray stones and marble crypts. Tiny little plaques in the ground, flat, for babies. The air is sharp and cold and part of me wishes I’d brought a scarf. I pull up the collar and hood on my coat.

“Here,” Simon says.

I look down.

    Candace Pauline MontClair

2002–2020

Our beloved angel, taken too soon

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”



There’s a lump in my throat. I wish we hadn’t come now. I haven’t dreamed of Candy in a while and I don’t want to start again. That’s part of why I took the Vicodin after seeing Joey at Wolf Creek. Being back there, I felt her in a way I haven’t in a while, and I just wanted to make sure that that night, of all nights, I did not have to see her.

    “It’s from Hamilton,” Simon tells me. “A song Eliza sings at the end. Candy had a lovely voice.”

Simon points across the cemetery. “Shannon Roe is over there, and Wilder Wicks, he’s down that little incline. I have a lot of students here. Too many. But I try to visit them often because even though they’re gone, they remind me.”

“Of what?” I ask.

“To appreciate what I have, in the here and now. To not miss it. Because it might be gone, at any moment. And we can’t control that, no matter how hard we try. Whatever the universe is, it’s always got the upper hand and we only have this one chance.”

He pauses. “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“What?”

“It’s a line from a poem by Mary Oliver. One of my favorites. I chose New York and shiny lights and rice and heartbreak and then I chose here, and teaching. I made those choices for myself. The thing about adults is, we’re always trying to keep kids safe. That’s our job. We want you to have a good life and get a good education and be a good person and do good things and sometimes, frankly, we fuck it up. Your childhood is like one long rehearsal, performing a script we wrote for you in the middle of the night that makes no sense to you but seems perfectly coherent to us.”

Simon turns to me. “I’m sorry, I get very long-winded sometimes. I just want to say, Emory, that you can’t give up. This is life. It’s basic. It’s struggle and joy. Sometimes you have one and not the other. My life here was awful. I went away and had joy. And then I came back and had struggle, but I also had some joy from the past to sustain me.”