Take What You Can Carry

know they left. They were long gone.”
The boy with the tomato seed on his chin. Feet that didn’t touch the ground. She tries to conjure his face, to picture him somewhere safe, but now can’t remember what he looked like—which only solidifies the grief inside her. And the other boy. There was a second one, and yet she can’t even remember the color of his shirt. Why hadn’t she noticed him? Why hadn’t she paid him any attention? The thought of a boy, a child whose life was about to end, not even being noticed—she draws in a breath, trying to hold everything back, but it doesn’t work. The tears are silent, but she turns her head so no one sees. “They were right next to us.” As if the proximity should not have allowed for such different outcomes.
“That family,” Delan says, “they left. I promise. Olivia, look at me. They left.”
He holds her eye until at last, she nods. In her mind, she adds minutes together, the time it would take for them to finish, to pay the bill, to maybe stop in the bathroom before leaving. Kids always take longer, playing with the door, eyeing someone’s dessert. Did they make it? It’s futile, she knows, because even if they did, there was an entire restaurant of people who did not.
After a moment, Delan lies back on the ground, his arms folded beneath his head as he stares at the sky. She watches him, then goes to lie beside him. Without pause, he moves one arm down, placing it around her, then turns his head toward her, his mouth against her hair. His words are quiet, the heat of his breath a comfort. “I’ve never thought you weak,” he whispers. “You don’t have to prove yourself to me.”
Above them, the clouds seem to buckle, curling in the night.
Inconsolable hours. The hours you’re alone in bed and can’t be talked away from thoughts. Can’t be distracted enough to stop seeing a boy’s shoe under the table, swaying back and forth, back and forth. Can’t stop remembering the restaurant’s glass window, filled with the reflection of people who were not long for this earth.
Olivia goes from outrage at anonymous death, the very concept that someone can be next to you and then gone and you’d never even known their name, to wishing that on her way out, she’d simply pulled one person with them. One person. One life could’ve continued, and with that so much more because that one person could then have children, and their children could have children, and eventually an entire family tree would emerge from the place in the ground where there was almost nothing. That little boy. His brother. A waiter. Anyone. What one person could’ve gone on to do. The lives they’d impact, the love they’d give. Caught on a spiral of regret, her thoughts shoot out possibilities that were never there, options that work only in hindsight.
And she never took a photo. All that happened will slip beneath the radar, will remain unknown, and she realizes that here, that is life. The reality of this world is that tragedy occurs undocumented and daily, and what happened this evening was a mere flash within a greater explosion and is one most people will never know took place. Whereas before, Olivia would’ve spun this toward inspiration, toward a need to fix things, now she feels only futility. Who is she to make things better? In a world in which tonight happens and not even a ripple is felt, who is she to cause an impact?
Cold, she pulls the blanket around her shoulders. A trick to fall asleep: think of words in nonsensical arrangements. A reenactment of what actually happens when you drift off, her father used to say, as if the mind could be fooled into thinking it’s already on that chaotic ledge. Words plucked at random: Linguine. Window. Fog. Tomatoes. Forests. Table. Shelf. Fall. Broken. The words mistakenly lead into each other, and suddenly there’s her mother’s leg at the wrong angle on the black pavement and she jerks fully awake. Heart pounding.
All she’d seen was her mother’s leg, her body not completely shielded by the policeman’s coat. Those toes her mom had painted pink while Olivia watched Huckleberry Hound sing “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” Those brown sandals she kept by the front door in a basket. Olivia stared only at that leg in the street until someone grabbed her hand and pulled her back into the store where they’d been, books lining shelves and lamps lit in corners. Her mother had just gone back to the car to get her checkbook to buy a book for Olivia. Little House in the Big Woods, the first of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. That night, they’d planned on making marshmallow Rice Krispies treats from a Kellogg’s ad in a magazine and reading the book. Her mother had forgotten her checkbook, so she’d crossed the street and was, essentially, no more. A family went to eat and was no more. Countless people took a breath and were no more.
The burning car and child, her former daydream of heroics. She thinks of it now and laughs and then cries because all those fantasies in which she’d reach within herself to find some unexplored magnificence were just that—fantasies. She is not brave. She helped no one. And those daydreams—she used to think they were about the powerless finding power, about a world in which the unjust could be stopped and she could do something to help, to maybe even save the mother about to cross the street. But now she sees they were about more than that, because they never occurred on an empty street, and the stories never went untold. They were about being seen, being at last acknowledged by those who would never think her capable of importance. They were more about recognition than about doing something good. And they were wrong.
The next day, it rains. A