Portfolio of Grief (*pending title*)

"If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it." --Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Chapter One

By the time I returned all that was left in the schoolyard playground was a potted plant with the word clementine scotch-taped to it and an upside-down row boat named Lemon Louise. The yellow police tape had been removed, the sandboxes raked through for bullets, ribboned bicycles and tablecloths and basketballs confiscated as evidence and nothing else remained but the chalk-white outlines of four eighth-grade students. Jazzy had wanted to be a cardiologist, Casey a linebacker, Delevingne a singer, Isao a vegetarian.

I went to the beach and smoked a pack of cigarettes. It was California in the summer of 2017. The entire west coast was on fire. An elderly couple had survived the flames by submerging themselves in their neighbor's swimming pool and holding sweatshirts over their heads. I had just been offered a job as a middle school teacher in the suburbs of San Diego. I hated teaching but it paid the rent.

Nothing is all safe, my therapist had said to me the week before I moved to San Diego. But San Diego of all places seemed to be so. The sun warm but not too warm. The surfers surfing and smoking joints and selling hemp bracelets with profits all going toward cleaning the oceans. Whale-watchers and Comic Con and taco shops only the locals could point you toward. It wasn't Los Angeles with the high crime rates and the Hollywood actresses or Silicon Valley with the vast technology and the Buick's.

To my left was a park and at the park falling leaves spun like vinyls. September had just swept August off the doormat. The hottest time of the year is when most crimes take place, a criminologist on the news said. It reminded me of Camus.

My phone rang on the bench I was sitting on and I let it. Everyone important knew I was okay but they all wanted to know if I was okay. I didn't think I was, but at the same time I felt less disturbed than I felt I should have been.

My desire in the days before the shooting was to be obsessed with something. By something, even. I had tried yoga but it bored me and there was nothing in it of the desperation I felt a true obsession warranted. I had tried men too, but they bothered me on account of their being people and their excessive demand for my time. Lastly I had been trying existentialism, and with my two a.m. cigarettes I would dabble in Sartre or Simone. I had bouts of Heidegger and bouts of Ponty, bouts of Camus as well and of Nietzsche, and horrible long bouts of Kierkegaard that left me depressed about the state of the world and ironically concerned whether my students would survive the year. Dostoevsky too, cluttered my table-less apartment, and among all these names he and Camus were those I loved the most.

But I had never fit in with the existentialist crowd, diverse as they were, and anyway I didn't want to fit in, and so I had my apartment and I had my books and my cigarettes and my window facing a red brick wall, and I had my textbooks and my Camry and my parking space on Vaughn St., and up until the spring semester of 2017 I had felt truly okay.

On that particular morning I wore yellow shoes and a burgundy black-patterned scarf, and had I arrived at the schoolyard early so as to not be seen by anyone wanting to talk or to express in any way their consolations. Somewhere a dog was barking. Dogs were always barking. I had been told many times that I should probably get a dog and that owning a dog would be helpful for me and for my situation but I didn't want one that barked and they all seemed to bark.

The wind at the beach was cold and I thought about walking to the nearest gas station to buy another pack of cigarettes but I also was cold and did not want to move from my bench. Instead I kept thinking of the fires and how nice a fire would be right now, red hot and pervasive, how it would creep under my skin and keep me warm. And the other fires that scorched everything in an instant, trees and houses and schoolyard playgrounds and how bullets could be fires just as easily as fires could.

All over the news appeared face of the man who, nearly a month and a half ago now, had done it. He was twenty-one years old and from a family that had been broken not in the way so many families are broken but in a very real way. A mother who was an alcoholic and a cheating father who flew in the navy and one sister and two stillborn brothers with the same name. For this reason the news claimed the jury would vote to put him in an institution to "reconstitute" him. I did not like the word at all and wasn't sure he deserved it.

"Carey, what are you doing?"

I was holding an empty pack of cigarettes in one hand and with the other I plucked at the inside pocket of my oversized coat.

"Oh, nothing, you know."

"Don't think so." And after a while: "Your phone is ringing."

"Oh, right, yeah. Yeah, thought it was."

"What if it's Sam?"

I checked my phone, but the screen showed only a number and no name. "It's not."

"You know I'm seeing a therapist now."

"I didn't."

"We all are."

"That's good, yeah."

The wind seemed only to be getting colder. At the park the swings whistled and more dogs barked. At least in the city it was quiet in all the susurrus uproar, and when a dog barked you couldn't even hear it over the ruckus that made up everything else. I turned my coat up to the wind and the lapels covered half my face and kept me from having to look at Wyatt.

"You could get off my bench, you know."

"Your bench? Look, Carey, I'm just saying it might do you some good. We're all back to school in a couple months and we know it."

"You're all going together then?"

"No, I mean, of course not. We go on our own and talk about how the . . . how it makes us feel."

"How it makes you feel."

"Yes."

"Can't you get off my bench? Well, can't you?"

Wyatt's shoulders heaved and he stood up looking at me with something like sympathy and his hands were in his pockets.

"Get on."

Wyatt got on and I was alone again except for the whistling and the dogs.

It was June and soon the Santa Anas would come sweeping down the mountains from the east, bringing with them hot dry air and smoke and nights sitting up in roadside bars wishing first for a whiskey and second for the dust to subside. The sun would feel hotter than it had felt all year. The fires that were already raging would rage more strongly. More people would submerge themselves in their neighbors swimming pools. More people would not.

I took my car and drove down the coast until I came to La Jolla. I checked my phone for texts from Sam and there was one asking where I was. The closer I got to the ocean the colder it became which was how I liked it. I had moved from Oregon and anything above fifty degrees I considered warm weather. This year, the weathermen had predicted San Diego to be all year round at least five degrees warmer than it had been last year. The biology teacher at our middle school used the information to teach the kids about global warming. I had four missed calls from an unknown number and two from my mum.

The sun set over La Jolla the way it always set over La Jolla: too quickly and with a blinding burst of orange light over the shoreline. A few miles south, on Sunset Cliffs, surfers and tourists would be clapping their hands at the nightly performance. To go from everything to nothing in an instant was frequently blinding.

My phone rang, and this time the number was Sam's. I knew exactly what would happen if I picked it up.

"Hello."

"Hey, you driving?"

"No. Just stopped. I'm in La Jolla."

"Okay." Then, "Are you coming home anytime soon?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll head back now."

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"Okay. Cool. Love you."

"Love you too."

The last thing I wanted was to be home, where I could see in Samantha's eyes a feeling that she had somehow failed me in being unable to help me. But I also wanted more than anything to be there if I could only be there and not anywhere else. If that could not be the case, it felt better to be driving, to be in the middle of things in case anything were to happen and I could say, "look, I'm in the middle of things" and just keep on going.

At the time my girlfriend and I lived in a second-story studio apartment and in the apartment across the hall lived a group of three university students from Mira Costa College's Oceanside campus. They often stumbled half-sober up the stairs and into our apartment thinking it theirs and many times Sam and I had allowed them to sleep overnight on our small sofa, though recently the smells of weed and of alcohol had begun seeping into our cushions and neither of us intended the arrangement to last much longer.

I loved Sam or thought I did. At twenty-six years old I wasn't yet sure of a difference. We had been together for two years and two years sounded long the way love was supposed to be. I had no delusions about love any more than any twenty-six-year-old did, and did not think of it, as Leonard Cohen hadn't, as some sort of victory march, but saw it as an arduous uphill battle very worth the fighting for. The world I saw much differently.

I turned the keys and let my Camry take me slowly back up the coast toward home and Sam. The sun had set. Vermillion lingered in the summer sky. It was California in the summer of 2017 and the entire west coast was on fire in another way. Tragedy had yet to strike the far-off shoreline. I looked to my right out the car window more often than I should have, but sunsets in California were like sunsets nowhere else, especially during fire season. The vermillion turned scarlet. The scarlet turned cerise. The cerise melted violet into a sea surrounded already by a deep orange glow.

I had moved to California from up north because I had been offered a job here and because Sam was here, but it was likely I moved largely because of something not unlike a piece of music that left an aching in my heart. That is, I moved with something in mind I cannot describe but with what is best illustrated in the lyrics and mellow reverence of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California." I had indeed gone to California. Unlike Sam, I had not inherited it.

Our driveway felt longer when I pulled into it since we had recently sold our second car, a yellow Volkswagen Sam had bought in '09. I sat in the dark for a long while before I found the nerve to go inside.

The living room empty. My phone ringing again in my pocket. Home veterinary books open on the kitchen counter and the mail in a heap on one of the chairs we had bought at a Goodwill downtown for only seven dollars. I could hear Sam moving around in our bedroom and I made my way to the coffee pot and poured myself a cup of cold coffee. A study had come out only last year saying that Canadians drink more coffee than do people in every other country in the world. Both my parents hailed from Quebec, and all three of us could corroborate the study.

Sam came into the kitchen after a minute and asked me how I was feeling.

"Alright."

"You're a horrible liar. You have this giveaway where you rub at your left jaw with your right hand."

"Thanks. Alright, I feel pretty bad then."

"That's okay, you know."

"I know."

"Did you hear--"

"I'd rather not."

Sam paid attention to everything, to my smallest movements and ticks, to the weather hour by hour, to the news. She paid particular attention to the case involving the man who had shot up the school. Shot up the school was a phrase the kids used but I usually did better off without.

Sam watched the news after I went to bed like Sam always did. Out the window I could see the tall, strong oak tree growing at the end of our street and imagined it taking bullets one by one until it toppled over onto all the little orange apartment buildings. I fell asleep then and did not wake up until the morning when the light came pale and golden through the oblique slats in my blinds.