What Remains

“I can’t believe you are going to be happy sitting on your ass all day in some professor’s office,” Tyler said. Jonathan Hart was driving Tyler’s van across the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun rose higher over the East Bay. “Even if it is your own office.”

The two men had risen before dawn and harvested specialty melons, heirloom tomatoes, and other vegetables and flowers from Tyler’s rented two acres in Winters, sixty miles northeast. Tyler was asking Jon again when he would make their partnership official.

Jon laughed and shook his head. October is harvest month for walnuts. He should be in the orchard.

“You know the money is damn good,” Tyler added, texting one final message from his BlackBerry. This was not true. The gross margins were high—price minus seeds, water, gas, and rent--so it could seem that way if he ignored how much time he devoted. His clients were Sacramento and Bay Area chefs; he was the only farmer who guaranteed same-day harvest and delivery. He also sold community supported agriculture shares locally.

“You need money?” Jon asked. “I don’t have to take wages this week.”

He paid the six dollar toll and headed toward the Marina. They had already delivered in Marin. Most of their San Francisco stops would be downtown, in the Embarcadero, and south of Market Street, plus one Noe Valley customer.

“No. Are you listening to me?” Tyler answered. “I have the cash flow. I just think this would work out well. You can still do your research. We’ll find a way to work it in.”

Jon waited to answer. Tyler, who had an undergraduate degree in soil science and had studied Backyard Market Gardening, You Can Farm, and the rest of the genre, rented his acres between the walnut orchards on the same farm that housed the land institute that had hired Jon in 2003. After work one day Jon had offered to help Tyler who was just breaking ground on his new plots. Jon got involved in everything--planting, weeding, harvesting—all by hand. They made it fun, competing and cracking jokes. Plus it did not hurt that Tyler always managed to have women around who drove out for volunteer shifts.

Jon fondly recalled last winter when Tyler added fruit trees to a small area behind the vegetable rows. With crusty shovels in a bitter north wind they had dug planting holes two-foot diameter, one-foot deep, racing each other and the fading afternoon light down the rows Tyler had laid out in a north-south direction.

“You know I love you, baby,” Jon joked finally, pulling up to their first stop near the Bay. “But I just can’t buy that ring right now.”

Tyler laughed then Jon said, “No seriously, let me get through the harvest—and by the way, you know I can’t do next week, I told Neil I’d be there for the shakers. Anyway, I’ve got harvest then we can talk about this more when we are slow. I am not honestly clear where I go after my thesis. I haven’t worked it out yet.”

Jon had gotten to know Neil Murphy, the land institute’s founder, who had donated a portion of his walnut farm to the nonprofit, and his neighbor Terry Thelan, who also grew organic walnuts on his farm down the road. Both men were in their fifties, while Jon at twenty-eight was one year older than Tyler. Jon read Neil and Terry’s ancient extension paper on organic walnut production and witnessed their lively discussions on topics such as how long to leave cover crops in the orchard. Neil liked tidier rows; Terry believed the messy, dried vetch and clover provided habitat for beneficial organisms.

Each farmer strove to operate efficiently and sustainably—seeking ways to save water, reuse walnut shells, and solve pest problems without resorting to “a nuclear bomb” as Neil liked to say.

Terry had found a way to power his farm using the gas produced by burning walnut husks. In partnership with a professor at the University of California at Davis, Terry was testing whether using the char ash from the combustion process could fertilize the orchard and result in a net negative carbon impact overall. Both farmers understood that cultivation acted against nature, but they strove to succeed nonetheless. Their thoughtful, scientific approach led Jon to enroll at UC Davis. Now in the fall 2007 he was in his third year of coursework for a master’s in horticulture and agronomy. In addition to working with Tyler, he was an intern at the Market Garden on campus. He planned to develop a master’s thesis using research from the orchards.

***

On an errand with Tyler in Sacramento later in the month Jon drove to the third story of a parking structure and stopped his pickup in the last covered space before the rooftop level next to a thick, gray concrete column. It was a warm afternoon, sunlight angled through orange, red, gold, and brown leaves, the sky a cloudless light blue. The parking spot was on an incline and the truck tilted with the driver’s side leaning uphill. When Jon swung out his legs collapsed, and he sat down hard across the white line on the black pavement. Unaccustomed to helplessness, he remained there stunned.

Tyler called from the other side of the truck, “Man, what the hell are you up to now?”

When he came around Jon looked up and Tyler’s face showed that he saw immediately there was no joke this time. “Hey guy,” he said more softly, “What’s going on?”

Tyler wanted to take Jon to the ER right away, but once he was in the passenger’s seat, Jon said, “No, it’s nothing. Just take me back to student health.”

By the time they drove the twelve miles back to Davis and parked on campus, Jon walked into the clinic with no assistance to make an appointment for the following week. For months there were no other symptoms.

Jon completed neurology’s obstacle course as he harvested the Market Garden’s peppers, Japanese eggplants, and carrots, arranging them in wicker delivery baskets. He lifted boxes full of Chandler walnuts, separating the darkened husk fly-infested hulls from the non-infested and calculating their respective edible yields. Whenever he could he ended a full day of class and fieldwork under the night lights on the grass behind the Recreation Center in a fast, ultimate Frisbee game. He turned the soil to prepare new garden beds and proposed his thesis until he heard “relapse remitting multiple sclerosis” in November. His body felt fine.

Two months later in January it had been foggy, dark, and chill for weeks, the air, the cold, gray like the streets and sky, the sky heavy and low. Jon caught a flu that confined him to bed for three and a half days. When the fever and aches waned it was as if his weight, his essence had departed too, leaving him a diminished man. On Wednesday, the fifth day, he attended classes disoriented with a sense of loss and unease that he shrugged off, assuming it was the low, heavy sky that depressed him.

Thursday morning he awoke more alert. He bicycled to the Market Garden, four open acres on the west side of campus behind the Recreation Pool. Its rows stretched both east-west and north-south directions next to green and yellow stucco student housing and behind extension classrooms in multi-colored portable buildings. The sky was dirty gray, the air still frigid and damp.

Jon and another intern planned to move sprinkler irrigation pipe to newly transplanted broccoli and cabbage beds, and remove drip lines from already harvested, decaying tomato bed areas at eight; he had arrived more than an hour early. He decided to harvest the broccoli scheduled for pick up in the afternoon while he waited. Around him the garden rows ranged from fallow, with dried fig leaves and hay tufts in the mud; to dead, the sagging, blackened tomato and pepper plant bodies hanging limply, muddy red fruit lying occasionally between them; to robust, with greens varying from purple-black to nearly yellow, and red chard stalks topped with hearty green leaves. Stumpy fig trees marked the garden’s center where lavender, rosemary, oregano, mustard, and sage flourished along a wire fence. Next to them a few bright yellow leaves and several fruit hung on a pomegranate that in size could only qualify as a bush. To the west two olive tree rows obscured distant purple mountains.

There was no smell, just the cold. Jon heard traffic rushing on Highway 113, distant construction trucks beeping, hammers slamming on plywood. The garden itself was silent, visited by a few brief bird songs. The broccoli stalks clicked when his harvest knife cut through them and they clunked into the cardboard box that sat in the cold mud alongside the row.

Jon worked peacefully, content, until his left eye clouded, like a winter sky bringing in a storm: first a white fog at the outer corner, spreading across to the middle, while darkness began at the left. A frigid breeze from the northwest penetrated his wool sweater and quilted shirt with wet chill. He kept going, pulling the broccoli box with him. He could believe the blurring would pass in minutes.

At seven forty-five Jon’s left eye saw only black. Panic waited in the recesses of his body, in his upper left chest below the collarbone and low near his hip; he denied it access to his midline. He paused his work, walking back along the wide muddy corridor through the cattle gate and the packing shed full with delivery baskets, leaving the half-filled broccoli box behind. He picked up a hula hoe someone had left out in the shed, and he sat at the picnic table in the clearing outside, leaning back into the table, his arm outstretched to hold the hoe alongside him like a tall walking stick as the fog encroached the left most corner of his right eye.

By the end of the morning half his right eye blackened too, and by three that afternoon his body shut down into a dense, impenetrable fatigue that was like his recent flu without the viral symptoms. Someone from the garden drove him home.

During the next eight weeks he swallowed prednisone and learned to inject interferon into the subcutaneous tissue on his belly, thighs, and backside until his sight returned as magically as it had vanished. Fellow students brought him food—casseroles of macaroni and cheese, paper bags containing super-burritos and mountains of chips, and of course, fresh produce that they washed and made into salads or stir-fries. Tyler brought take-out from his San Francisco restaurants. They drove him to doctor’s appointments in Sacramento and to the pharmacy.

After that, though Jon could see, erratic pains, weakness, and tingling attacked frequently, and fatigue crushed him. Meanwhile the interferon brought aches, fever, and chills every other day. Unable to perform his duties during planting season or even to keep up with course work, Jon elected incompletes for winter and a planned educational leave for spring.

He wrote emails to his department chair, other students, and the Market Garden Coordinator with the same false cheer he delivered in person when someone stopped by:

Hey—

Just wanted to let you know I’ll be off campus this quarter. Taking some time to chill, you know.

To people in the know he reassured:

I’m doing fine. Yeah, it’s a lot to swallow but I’m doing really great. My docs—and my meds, ha ha,--are all terrific. No worries here.

He knew he was being deceptive; he told himself it was temporary. Until I get my act together, he said to himself often. Until I get my act together, get back to normal, get a grip on things. All phrases that meant, when I go back to before this ever happened. Even then he recognized this lie, but the panic he had pushed to the side at first had taken him over now and this was the best he could do.

He had not told his parents or siblings about his diagnosis when he went home to Ohio for Christmas. At the time he told himself there was no reason to—he was fine. And the opportunity never came up, he rationalized, everyone was always busy, always doing something fun, it was just not the time or place. But he had not called and told them now even with the blindness, even with the drug injections. His unexamined thought was, “I don’t have to tell about this because it is only temporary; I’m only going to be like this a short time, then I’ll be back to normal. Why upset everyone? Yeah, it’s dishonest, kind of. When this blows over I’ll be back to my usual straight-forward self; this isn’t a pattern.”

For the first time in his life he wanted to get away from people. It exhausted him to the point of pain to be in another’s presence and maintain his facade. Tyler offered a room in his house when Jon said he planned to move to reduce expenses. Jon was unable to lean on a friend that much. He was used to give and take in friendships, but this felt so overwhelming to him that it seemed all take, so unbalanced it could topple a relationship, to bring to it that which was so huge and unpredictable. It was neither who he was nor who he had been, and he refused to become that person.

Tyler would not back away easily the way more casual friends had, yet he seemed to understand Jon’s need for space, and so he agreed to help him find a Woodland rental.

Some time in that period Jon instant-messaged his college roommate who was programming in the Bay Area, “Dude, what was that band you used to play when we’d trash the room?”

“Dude, Radiohead. Anthem. On Kid A. You going to own some music? You should check out their new shit online, they’re not even charging for it.”

Jon had not been much of a music guy before this. In his life he had owed four albums. Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna, and Fleetwood Mac’s, Fleetwood Mac, his older brother and sister let him have from a cardboard box of cassettes a cousin donated. The older kids never let him listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd when he wanted to, so when he left for Grinnell he bought a collection album--more for “Sweet Home” than “Free Bird.” It got a lot of use at the end of late night dorm parties despite the ribbing he took for only having that one.

When he packed his truck for the drive to California his sister Gretchen gave him a Dixie Chicks album that covered Landslide, laughing, “It’s a long drive, little bro.” That made four, and you know the Chicks were pretty good.

After he downloaded the Radiohead, Jon trashed his room in the Davis rental he shared with other graduate students. He yelled and broke a chair without even putting on the music. He felt foolish, and he wondered why they did it as undergrads, demolished their room repeatedly. What were they angry about? Because he remembered that he was angry; it had not been just rugby steam. He remembered the murky room filled with battered wooden chairs and stoned or drunken young men, open to the brightly lit, tiled hallway in the middle of the night. They lived in the ugliest dorm on the campus. Had someone known about that group in advance?

Violent action felt sufficient then, maybe precisely because the anger was vague. And it satisfied to express the power and the right to destroy. Alone and sober that anger, that power eluded him. Or was it that the anger he felt now was so soaked in grief he feared releasing it?

Later when he played his new CD in his truck the song’s relentless bass guitar and the horns shrieking wildness filled the cabin. He played it loud, the music full, pulsing with unwavering intensity that illustrated his frustration as if the musicians had studied him. Then in the next song, “How to Disappear Completely,” rage washed away leaving only loss, longing, emptiness, swirling confusion, again, as if he had been studied down to his bones; the song broke him and he pulled over to sob.

Rebecca met Jon briefly at a party in Village Homes when he first came to Davis. He looked like the suburban Ohio senior class president and homecoming king he was: tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged, and witty, the type who waited for women to come to him and who carefully chose those he preferred. Later in the evening she observed him talking and joking, surrounded by his agronomy classmates in the large orchard yard lit with small white solar lights. Rebecca conversed inside with people from Viticulture, including the professor hosting the party and his new wife.

Three years later when Jon visited about her attic room and bath for rent he was a different man. His charm radiated before. Now he was quiet, fifteen pounds thinner, his handsome face pinched. Tyler had explained Jon’s situation to her and assured her that Jon was an upstanding citizen. Since Tyler’s appraisal matched her gut feel she went ahead with the arrangement; she just needed a renter.

***

Rebecca’s home in central Woodland was side-gabled with a large open porch; Jon’s dormer faced the giant western sycamore in the front yard. Rebecca and her daughter Michaela, age ten, lived downstairs and shared the living and kitchen areas with him. Spanish-eclectic, stucco homes with red tile roofs stood next to freshly refurbished Queen Anne Victorians and craftsman bungalows in the neighborhood, one of the first residential areas of the city incorporated in 1871. In 2008 mature sycamore, redwood, palm, birch, pine, and black walnut trees kept the streets in the enclave cooler than the summer heat outside and gave it a sleepy, slow-paced feel.

Jon noticed immediately that Woodland smelled differently than Davis in a way that was familiar; it hinted at Midwestern. He caught that scent in Davis too, out past the veterinary center where the sheep pens were on the road to Putah Creek. Asphalt, stucco, and lawn suppressed it in downtown Davis or on campus; in Woodland he felt it still in the air, touching his skin, even within the city.

Davis residents deride Woodland as a grittier, dumpier, more Republican place with higher crime and lower aesthetic standards; it also offers lower housing costs. Less expensive rent brought Jon to Woodland yet he felt at home there, appreciating the prominent industrial structures, the stately older architecture, and the corn fields on the town’s northern edge. When he later read that Woodland’s agriculture made it the richest town in America in 1900, it made sense. Jon felt that richness still here in the city, standing underneath what came afterwards-- retail malls, large distribution centers, and residential areas that sprawled from 1970s’ ranch home tracts to late 1990s’ stucco McMansions.

In the summer months after he moved in, Jon avoided the house’s common areas when Rebecca or Michaela were home. His bright room allowed space for his bookshelves, desk, and a sitting chair. His quilt–-draped on the chair during the heat-–and the rag rug on the wood paneled floor gave the room cozy.

On weekdays Rebecca sold ads for the local paper and Michaela attended the fifth grade at the neighborhood school. When they were gone Jon went downstairs to eat breakfast. On a good day he might clean the baseboards or dust the ceiling fan, chores that needed to be done that Rebecca would not notice; or he tried to read plant physiology, soils, or physics books. These were for coursework he missed as an undergraduate math and economics major despite his environmental studies concentration.

When pain stabbed his left temple or when his vision blurred or when tiredness was pain itself, he flipped through Rebecca’s books and newspapers, or listened to Radiohead – in order from Pablo Honey to In Rainbows – and read the lyrics. Thom Yorke’s voice and the instrumentals, articulating misery in a way that made him feel understood through the headphones stabilized him, soothing him enough to get though the hours.

***

On a late September night it was so damn hot Rebecca turned on the central air. Usually no matter how hot it was she resisted. Instead she would peel off her slacks after work, wear nothing but a dress to cook in, and retreat to a bedroom as soon as she could since they all had window units; it kept the bills down. Tonight she cranked the thermostat down and poured a glass of wine.

Michaela and a girlfriend practiced a dance, giggling and hip-hopping. Rebecca fed them a margherita pizza and set out her nut-filled party tray. When Jon brought in his plates she said, “Some people are coming over later, why don’t you stay down?” It seemed rude to have a party in the house and not make some effort to include him.

He mumbled an excuse as he went back upstairs then around ten when the girls had left for their slumber party, and the neighbors still mingled on the stoop and around the fireplace, he returned to sit on a cushioned porch chair. The music shifted to Spanish guitars. When everyone had gone it left them together in the cooling night air.

It wasn’t the wine so much as the high-end chocolate that someone brought. After she savored its creamy, satisfying smoothness she wanted more of that kind of pleasure. Thin and depressed, he was still a good looking man after all and indeed thinner, he looked more like her usual type. The first night they met his confident, impeccable politeness had made it clear that she was not his without him being consciously aware he had made a choice; his possible availability now was due to his weakened state. That was good. It meant she could go ahead with this and it would stay contained. The few affairs she had since Danny, Michaela’s father, she had kept brief and outside the house; she intended to continue her discretion.

When Rebecca had hugged the last guest goodbye, laughing and promising to do this more often, she turned back to the porch where Jon sat quietly. He wore a nice buttoned-down shirt, long-sleeved blue, with khaki shorts. She moved closer, perching on the cushion on the chair beside him, sitting cross-legged such that her body filled the chair’s width, facing him fully. She smiled and said, “So Mr. Jonathan, what did you think of our party tonight?”

He raised an eyebrow then smiled. Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy. She leaned back in her chair. “They are a nice group,” she added. “I like to get to know my neighbors. Did you talk to anyone?”

“It was nice of you to include me,” he said. “I’ve gotten a little cut off from people these days.”

That was an understatement. The guy stayed in his room all day from what she could tell. She knew about his condition, of course. Tyler had told her when he reintroduced him. She did not want get into that now. “What did you think of Leyla? Isn’t she wild?”

She continued with small talk, about her guests, about the heat, about nothing really. Gradually she stretched out her legs so they rested closer to his; she found an excuse to pick up his hand and hold it then give it back. When they went inside she playfully asked for a dance. She could tell he hesitated to accept these advances in the way a person too long in the dark winces and squints in the sun, but he acquiesced. When the music stopped she said, “Now I know you belong in your attic tree-house, but since Michaela is gone tonight, why don’t we make an exception?”

She took his hand again and led him to her lightly perfumed room. Later she remembered how strong and warm his hands felt on her back.

***

As Rebecca slept next to him Jon admired her dark hair and pale thin shoulder. She was vivacious and pretty, tall, so very funny, and her brown eyes sparkled in the porch light. She had drawn him in and he had allowed it, pleased to receive her attention and simple, human welcome.

He laughed to himself that he had been like a woman who thought she was too fat: afraid when nakedness was expected. Fortunately his synapses fired all right and she did not seem to notice his injection site bruises. All the same he felt more despair than before because this happy surprise did not free him; his physical pain and worry accompanied even the most intense moments. He climbed to the attic to lay atop his bedcovers, tears sliding down into his ears.

He fell asleep. At four a.m. pain in his left middle fingertip woke him. It lasted ten, maybe fifteen minutes in the finger before a break. Then it bore through his left thumb from the top like a twenty-five gauge needle, thin but sharp, before a thicker, piercing sensation compressed his left foot, rotating a cramp through the foot, forcing it to curl and his calf to spasm. At five-eleven his right hand was numb past the wrist. His outer forearms felt like they were swollen and puffy even though they were not.

Jon was used to this; for months he had experienced similar symptoms. Even though they were a minor annoyance, much less debilitating than the fatigue that had him strapped down, he hated them. He hated them because they were insistent; they insisted that he acknowledge his disease. And he hated them because he knew that they could turn ugly and terrifying at any time.

Lying in bed with these stabbing pains and sensory distortions his early morning companions, Jon thought about the past year’s events. He saw that even in the spring when he had self-consciously torn his room apart he had more hope than he did now when fight like that seemed futile as he faced the long, uncertain road ahead.

“Coffee?” Rebecca asked the next morning without looking at him. She routinely offered hospitality without meaning it. He had not understood this until now. She cleaned the living room, washed the wine glasses and thick ceramic dishes piled in the sink. She left the house briskly with an air that said, “This never happened.”

She had used him like a blanket that she now folded neatly and put away. He could do casual, but her unseeing gaze was like nothing he had experienced before.

The following January Jon’s sister Gretchen and her family came to California; Gretchen’s husband conducted business in San Francisco. Gretchen and the boys rented a house at Stinson Beach for a week, then with the Hyatt as a base, they visited the city’s museums while Jeff worked. Jon avoided them with vague excuses. Finally when they headed south he met them at Costanoa, a small resort on Highway 1 near Pescadero.

He walked the morning three-mile elephant seal tour with no problem, even with the mile long sand dune section. After lunch when they tide-pooled at Bean Hollow though, fatigue crashed into him accompanied by nausea and pain flashed deep into his left temple.

At first he was defiant. He stood at the edge, the water violent against black, jagged rocks slimy with red sea vegetation, and he thought, “Who cares if I collapse and pitch into it, I am going to enjoy this time with the boys.”

After a while it was too much and he backed away from the ocean to sit near a small pool that only exchanged water at high tide. When he next tried to stand his head throbbed and he thought he would vomit. Finally he retreated to a sand hill where it was dry and he could still see them.

Jon sat for more than an hour on the rough, orange-colored hill, watching. He watched his sister and the boys climb and crouch and exclaim; he watched the waves bursting a high spray on the rocks; he watched his pounding exhaustion and the sharp pains in his head.

Gretchen’s sons were tall like she was, with her strong, lanky legs, fair skin, and square features. Both had their father’s dark hair while she kept the blond ponytail she wore as a girl. Two years ago at Cape Cod Jon led football on the beach, campaigned for bonfire s’mores, was active every minute with the boys. He wanted it to be the same now, for himself and for them. He tried to be interested when they came to show him a rock, a shell, some sea glass. He declined when they asked him to go back with them to the edge. Instead he sat separate, wishing for escape like a sick animal. The question of what kind of father he would be when as an uncle he was a disappointment lurked in his mind; he pushed it away. Where is the line between self-pity and honest grief? It was not a question he had considered before.

He put his head down, not wanting to cry. An electrical charge surged down his neck and spine, then out through his upper arms. For the next half hour he sought compassion within himself but found only contempt, frustration, and anger.

“You look bad,” Gretchen said, flopping down beside him. The boys were still collecting. This was classic Gretchen. She was a chemist who now wrote research grants for Cornell to keep her work hours fewer than what her lab work had required. Jon said nothing.

“You going to tell me what’s going on?”

“What’s going on?”

“J—do I have to…”

So she noticed his slumping posture, gaunt body, and evasiveness.

“No. I know. You don’t have to.

The sky was overcast with fog, the ocean air cool, wet, and energetic. Waves hit the craggy rock formations at the shore, splashing high then sizzling and frothing in retreat. Gretchen waited while Jon still said nothing. “It’s not good, is it,” she asked.

“No. No, it’s not good.”

Jon looked straight at her face now, into her light green eyes. His had always been darker. Gretchen did not flinch or look away. He knew he could relieve her--even though she refused to look or act worried--if he told her he was not dying, that it was not cancer. Ha, he could tell her what his doctor always said, “It’s a great time to have MS!”

Or the doc’s other favorite: “Seventy-five percent of MS patients never need a wheelchair.”

He could not do it.

Jon thought about their older brother, whose body always appeared cramped and stunted compared to Jon and Gretchen’s long, athletic ones. Jon could never forget Doug’s tantrums, how he howled almost to himself, his face contorted and red, on the soccer fields as kids, at the junior and then senior high schools. Even in college and afterwards Doug was permanently cranky, inflexible, and easily angered. He never had a diagnosis; he was bright, did academically well in normal schools, and was accepted at Grinnell. But his emotional problems strained and diminished their mother, and Jon lost respect for his father for the way he would not see this.

“Why can’t he just act normal? Why does he have to be like that?” Jon used to ask before he came to realize that this was normal for Doug and learned to conceal his own frustration.

“He can’t help it,” Mom always replied. “It’s his nature.”

She said it serenely, but Jon knew she was pretending. He knew she felt as humiliated and ashamed as he and Gretchen did.

In contrast it was his and Gretchen’s nature to be easy. “Never any trouble,” his grandmother said. They both were even-tempered and they brought home friends and athletic achievements as easily as math and science awards.

Jon imagined his family receiving the news of his illness as if it were a heavy, lead slab crashing down right in the center of their modest suburban home. The image filled him with anguish. He did not want to relinquish the golden position, the weightless, cherished position he had always held within the family as a pleasant, healthy child; he was not ready, not yet.

“Gretch, I’ll be straight with you. I can’t get into it right now. I’m trying to get my head around it myself. I have to fill you in more when I can.”

***

Back home alone in her station wagon Gretchen heard Jonathan’s favorite Stevie Nicks song on the radio:

Even when you feel like your life is fading,

I know that you’ll go on forever, you’re that good.

It brought back Jon at nine, coloring with crayons on his stomach on the rug in his room, the tape player repeating the cassette over and over. While their older brother Doug used to tease Jon about “Ooo baby, ooo baby, ooo,” and the doves, Gretchen knew the one he really liked best.

“Oh, baby brother,” she murmured.

She bought an Ipod and the album for him, and she listened before she wrapped it. “After the Glitter Fades” made her smile remembering that their homecoming crowns, won two years apart, were now still together on the mantle in their parents’ Ohio home

Through the spring 2009 Jon felt less ill after his weekly shots; he switched to weekly injections midyear after the doctor coaxed him to admit how badly he suffered every other day. He tried the amantadine he rejected before and it reduced his fatigue. He took a shift at the Tractor Supply on East Main, familiar with their products since he worked a high school summer at the Macedonia store. When Tyler called again and invited him to a young farmer’s social event he agreed to go, teasing, “Aren’t you worried I’ll steal all your women?”

He found the strength to tell first Gretchen, then his parents about his diagnosis and his current condition. The phone call with Gretchen was not at all what he feared; he felt comforted and encouraged. He laughed afterwards about it: what had he expected from Gretchen anyway? Dramatic screaming and falling to the floor? The call to his parents was more difficult; he had to ask to speak briefly at first then call back a week later to talk again. Still when he was able to listen to and answer their anxious questions, he knew he had grown tremendously since the year before.

In May Jon visited the brand new county offices on Cottonwood Street. He waited his turn to speak to the modestly tattooed benefits coordinator with a Yolo County Indigent Health Care Program application and a bright yellow MyHealthResource.org bookmark in his hand, finally ready to confront what might be if he failed to reenroll at UC or take a job with benefits before his student health insurance extension ended. He resolved to swim at the Woodland Community Swim Center.

Jon always hated swimming as a sport, dull and lonely as it was; he preferred to be out in the air with a team. He played baseball, football, soccer, and basketball in high school, rugby and intramural Frisbee in college. On his first day at the Woodland pool he slid into the cool water watched by a young lifeguard in her high chair at the west end and by a huge American flag raised high at the east. He started freestyle across the pool as a mallard duck skidded into the water several lanes to his right. His body felt so empty, so feeble, he wanted to yell; there was a pathetic trickle where his life force had once surged.

He kept swimming, determined to complete ten laps even if it took all day. He reached his goal slowly, with more stops at the side than he would have preferred. He came back the next week, then twice the next until he increased to nearly every day. Gradually he created a routine, biking north on College Avenue under the quiet sycamore row on the eastern curb, relaxing into a rhythm in the water for a quarter, then half a mile. Usually he simply enjoyed the exercise and the air, but one day in June as he swam he found himself musing about his life path.

After college graduation he worked at his father’s accounting firm in Cleveland. The summer was fun; that year the firm bought top-dollar seats at Jacobs Field, the games sold out the whole season, and the Indians were All-Central champs. It bothered him to see what he had suspected: that his father, while smart, was too plodding and introverted to be made partner; he did not sell or build relationships. More importantly, Jon realized as he turned and glided away from the pool’s edge, he himself was restless in an office job despite liking and being well regarded by his peers and superiors. When a conservation corps in Colorado accepted his application, he quit accounting to become a trail crew leader. A year later he took the land institute job in Winters.

Jon knew suddenly as he kicked north across the pool that his craving, his need for physical work had directed his career. He saw now the subtle way he had remained detached from his peers and mentors, even though he became curious about urban youth education and empowerment, curious about farming and the American and international food supply, and even though he ultimately agreed with his more radical colleagues in his work and school environments.

The African women and the sons of American farmers in his master’s program had a direct relationship to the farm, to the earth, to their families’ economic well-being. American-born students in the international agricultural development program had a passion for service and justice. And Terry and Neil. By the way they employed their ingenuity in environmental stewardship Jon recognized their fierce commitment, though he was unable to describe its source.

Jon shared and admired these people’s values but he lacked their motivation. He understood now that his drive came from his simple need to be fully engaged in his work, engaged with his entire being, but most significantly with his body. Tyler was right: Jon could never be happy sitting on his ass all day, and that was what had driven his choices so far.

He stopped and pulled himself from the pool. It was almost one o’clock. The sky was pure blue, nearly the same blue as the pool, with the sun beaming almost directly overhead. He had swum over half a mile, more than he used to do, but not as much as he had planned. He was done.

***

A month later on a July night when it was hot again Rebecca sat in her armchair in the living room reading Barron’s Guide to Law Schools with all the windows open. She had taken the June LSAT, planning to apply to UC Davis in October and other schools next year. She had sold ads for Woodland’s Daily Democrat since Michaela was little; now she intended to achieve the goals she had set for herself before motherhood. Her sheer curtains billowed with the Delta breeze.

The back kitchen door opened, signaling Jon’s return from the pool. In summer he swam later because the pool offered early evening hours every day.

In the last few months with his new job and exercise routine Jon was not in the house as often as he used to be yet Rebecca noticed him more. She heard him tramping down the stairs, and opening or closing the back door. She smelled his Ragu sauce and garlic bread, which he made on sweet French bread, rather than sourdough. He left his Disneyland mug in the dish drainer instead of taking it back upstairs, and his dog-eared Arguments of Agriculture and Post-Harvest Technology of Horticulture Crops lay on the small cherry end table next to her chair.

“Hey,” he said, setting his bag on the living room floor.

“Hey,” she replied, looking back to her book.

“How was your night?” he asked, still standing in front of her. He had nearly regained his weight and his skin was tanned.

“Good. How was yours?” she answered. Why was he looking at her like that?

“Really good,” he said, his inviting smile highlighting Michaela’s absence.

Rebecca had regretted their liaison last September only because it made things awkward around the house immediately afterwards. The experience itself had been very nice. And he got the message right away that it was a one-time exception—he was a smart boy--so it had not been a problem at all.

Would she do it again? Maybe.

“You look like you’ve got something on your mind, cowboy,” she said. “Do you want to let me in on the secret?”

“Maybe,” he said.

Soon he took her hand and pulled her from the chair. They embraced then headed towards her room again, laughing with sudden familiarity.

His body felt warm, generously muscular; he held her gaze, his hazel eyes commanding her attention. This is nice, she thought.

When he entered her she was startled by how she felt. Their bodies fit perfectly together, chest to chest, and with him inside her, his arms around her, she felt securely protected and opened in a way she had not been before; it was soaring freedom along with a delicious security.

While they moved together these feelings intensified. Her abdomen seemed to widen, expand, and fill with pleasure; she experienced a brilliance overtaking her entire being. “Oh my God!” she thought, “Oh my God, oh my God!”

She didn’t want to say that.

She said instead, “Ah, ah, ah.”

He held her curled in his arms when they both calmed. They lay entwined for a time, neither speaking. After more than a polite interval Jon rose and looked her in the eyes again. “I’ll go to my room now,” he said. He seemed deflated, more like the way he had been the last time.

Rebecca wanted to say “No, don’t go,” but it was out of context. She let him go. No kiss. No smile. She found him different, fantastic. It was like a dream, a dream which bore no relation to their life.

She draped herself in comforting clothes so as to stay enveloped. She rummaged under her dresser for a pack of long-hidden clove cigarettes and went outside to the porch. She heard the toilet flush upstairs and then the shower running. When it stopped, Jon went into his room and shut the door.

In the morning, after Jon and Michaela left, Rebecca called her best friend. Eileen lived three hours away, married with a three year old and a new baby. Rebecca waited while Eileen arranged the kids then she blurted, “Remember I told you I slept with my renter last year and we never talked about it?”

Eileen laughed and the baby sucked and smacked as Rebecca confessed the night before, concluding, “It’s hard to put into words, and don’t think I am a bad person, but I haven’t really noticed him before. Doesn’t that sound terrible? I’ve slept with him twice; I live with him for Chrissake. But now I feel all screwed up, do you know what I am saying?”

“It sounds like you feel something for this man that you didn’t expect to feel.”

“Yeah, but it makes no sense. I barely know him; he’s what, five, ten years younger than I am? And I am trying to go to law school.”

Eileen laughed again. “I doubt he’s more than five, Bec. I wouldn’t stress. Does he seem stressed?”

Eileen’s first response, that she felt something for Jon that she did not expect to feel, stayed with Rebecca. How had she become a person who expected to feel nothing when she had sex, a person who did not expect or intend to make love?

***

That day Jon worked the early shift at the Tractor Supply, shelving inventory before open hours and then manning the front register as a cashier. He noticed again that he liked people who bought their blue jeans at the same place they bought cattle rubs, fencing, and tractor parts. He came home at noon for lunch and since he would not swim until evening he decided to ride his bike out Road 99 toward Davis.

It was over ninety degrees outside and it would get hotter as the afternoon continued. This could bring symptoms, so he tied a cold pack around his neck, wore a cold Camelback, and planned to ride only a few miles. He pedaled through his quiet old neighborhood, turned west on Cross then south at the cemetery, continuing by a single story tract built in the 1970s, and past the fire station until the city street became a county road.

Outside town he rode by the U-Pick; past a fenced yard where peacocks, emus, and goats grazed; and past the tractor lot filled with yellow and green John Deeres before he came to a large field bordered with olive trees. He pulled the bike to the east roadside, lifting it and climbing across hard, rutted dirt through the trees to sit down at the field’s edge. Sunflowers stood to the east as far as he could see. The air in the olives’ shade smelled like dust and sunflower stalks. The highway murmured eastward two miles away but here a still silence dominated, spreading over the flower rows, expanding into the gigantic azure sky.

Jon sat. Something felt displaced in him that he could not identify so he sat in the warmth and quiet letting it settle. Intermittently a bird called or an insect buzzed and less frequently a car or truck sped behind him. Unrelated images arose in his mind. Repeating were his college rugby scrum; his childhood home; Gretchen staring at him on the beach; he and Tyler racing to dig planting holes in a cold, open field at dusk; a forested Colorado trail; the walnut orchards in Winters; last night in Rebecca’s room.

He was not entirely sure why he had seduced her. There was no clear thought; he had been feeling good, happy for once, and he wanted to share it. He knew she did not want to get involved, was worried a relationship would derail her plans. He knew she did not want just any random guy around her daughter. But he wasn’t just any random guy; she’d see that if she would ever actually look at him. More than once a year.

See now that was what was giving him an unsettled feeling: he was lying. Sure he had mostly approached Rebecca last night because he felt joy and health, say ninety, ninety-five percent was that. The other five was his need to command her attention so as to amend the year before when he had skulked away after she pretended he did not exist. If she had not discarded him like that he probably would not have approached her in a romantic or sexual way again. This was lame and vindictive, and it showed just how low he sunk last year and in truth, how low he still was now.

It wasn’t even fair to blame Rebecca for not looking at him. He had been trying to be invisible. He told people he had moved to Woodland to save rent money. He also had wanted to get away. Until he got his act together, he had kept telling himself, meaning, when he got back to normal, something that he could admit now, now in this moment, was never going to happen.

So they had been perfect for each other: she didn’t want to look; he didn’t want to be seen.

Jon continued to sit under the olive trees. The same memories filled his mind and he saw vividly the tranquil grounds around Neil’s office at the orchard, planted with golden native grasses that swayed in the breeze, mulched with chipped walnut shells; the sunny fields where his rugby or Frisbee teams played; and the wild ocean along the rocks where he sat watching Gretchen’s boys.

His life had turned around after his conversation with Gretchen. She made him remember who he had been, an adored youngest child in a loving family home, and who he had become, a strong, popular young man, an athlete, an accomplished student. Gretchen had helped him find the strength to face others, including her, and begin accepting his new reality.

Jon thought about Rebecca again. The memory of last night was thinner than all the other memories gathered here and he felt that difference revealed something important.

As he sat longer he understood the connection between the other scenes. He colored contentedly in his room with his siblings nearby; his muddy rugby team shouted with their arms around each other; his trail crew snickered at a joke; he worked beside a man who dedicated his orchard farm to his community and the next generation; he helped Tyler create a farm where there had been empty ground. Each recollection brimmed with warmth, energy, spirit, love, and in each Jon was at the center, in that warmth and part of it, radiating from himself what he received in return.

He had been wrong that day at the pool. The pure physical fed him and it informed the choices he made, but it was not all. There was a deeper meaning beneath, he realized with profound relief, which would remain no matter how his illness ravaged him. He had received physical gifts, but in him was a basic good nature, a spirited glow that guided him towards the same spirit in the world. This could never be taken from him, and it was valuable and precious to others. Although not particularly to Rebecca, he admitted, amused.

I can pretend last night never happened in front of Michaela, no problem, but this hiding is over; I am not going to fade into the shadows again like last time. She is going to have to face me, he thought. I have got to start showing up, crippled or not, and treat myself with dignity. And she can grant me that courtesy this time too.

He decided to start over with her, thinking, I’ll simply act the way I would have acted as a roommate if I didn’t have this hideous disease.

He rested near the field for nearly an hour, the elegant olive trees, the regal sunflowers, the sky, the light, the rough, solid earth surrounding him.

On the way back he stopped at the U-Pick. He poured cool water down his back before taking a bucket from the shade hut and walking out into the long, straight rows to crouch and reach for the fragrant, deep-red strawberries.

When Rebecca arrived home, Jon sat at the kitchen table with Michaela. Michaela drank a pink smoothie from one of Rebecca’s Pilsner glasses. Jon and Michaela were laughing, and an enormous pile of strawberries glistened in a colander between them. The kitchen was a comfortable temperature, the blazing sun tamed into gentle golden rays that filtered through the sycamore boughs into the window behind Jon.

Rebecca greeted them and Jon held her gaze, recognizing her discomfort. When Michaela went to her room he whispered loudly with a smile that brought out his dimples, “Don’t panic.”

Rebecca frowned awkwardly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jon laughed undeterred, sitting in her kitchen chair like he owned it. He was filled with the exuberance she saw when she first met him; his eyes were twinkling.

“Hey, I saw your look when you came in. You don’t need to worry about me. I know you are going to law school, and I realized today that my next move should bring me closer to family. But I was thinking, how about you and I try to become friends?”