The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.

I keep that memory somewhere inside me—​where it’s safe. I take it out and look at it when I need to. As if it were a photograph.

Sam, she was smart as hell. And she knew stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. She also felt stuff. Oh, man, could Sam feel. Sometimes I thought she was doing all the thinking, all the feeling, and all the living for both of us.

So what if sometimes Sam was an emotional exhibitionist, going up and down all the time? She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room. So what if she made me a little crazy? All of it—​all her emotional stuff, her ever-changing moods and tones of voice—​it made her seem so incredibly alive.

Something happened inside me. A huge and uncontrollable wave ran through me and crashed on the shore that was my heart.

face. It all happened in an instant, like a flash of lightning, only the lightning wasn’t coming from the sky, it was coming from somewhere inside of me.

“I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.”

Maybe Sam was right about things hiding inside of us. How many more things were hiding there?

“Yeah,” I said. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.

But my father, the man who was in my room and had turned on the light, he’d raised me. He’d tamed me with all the love that lived inside him.

We were in the middle of a drought, and it hadn’t rained for months and months and months. And that’s when I knew that your father was like the rain. He was a miracle.”

But maybe there isn’t a logic behind the word family. The truth is, it isn’t always such a good word.

She had all this love in her eyes, and I swear I could drown in that love.

I let him be. Sometimes you have to let people have their own space—​even when you are in the same room with them. He taught me that, my dad. He taught me almost everything I know.

When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science.

“I want to live in the calmness of the morning light.”

And like everybody else in the known universe, she didn’t always let herself in on the truth.

She looked like a summer garden.

“But you know we’re always going to have to rely on the goodwill of those of you who are straight for our survival. And that’s the damned truth.”

I wanted to tell him that all the awful things that happened in the old world were dead. And the new world, the world we lived in now, the world we were creating, that world would be better. But I didn’t say it, because I wasn’t sure it was true.

She had a lot of empathy. Maybe that’s why she liked all those bad boys. They were outcasts. It was like she was picking up strays and taking them in. It’s like she could see past their rough exteriors and see the parts of them that hurt. Maybe she thought she could take away the hurt. She was wrong, of course. But I found it hard to fault her for her good heart.

She put her hand on my chin and gently raised my head and looked straight into my eyes. “Whatever it is that’s going through that pretty little head of yours, well, you can’t hide it from me.” I didn’t say a word. She kissed me on the cheek—​and then she said, “I’ll love you till the day I die, Sally.” I cried all the way home.

What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky.

“If we’d never met, then there would be only three seasons.” “Hmm,” I said. “Am I supposed to guess which season?” “Yup.” I thought a moment—​then I smiled. “Spring. Then there would be no spring.” “Spring,” she said.

That’s how she loved people—​by feeding them.

I wondered if happiness would go away when she died.

I realized that Sam wasn’t angry at all. She was hurt. At that moment I heard all the hurt she’d ever held. And it seemed to me that the whole house had quieted down to listen to her pain.

She wrapped her hands around my face and looked into my eyes. Her hands were old, but they were the softest, kindest hands that had ever touched me. She didn’t say anything. She just smiled.

Dad read the sports page. My theory was that he kept up with the sports world in order to be able to have a decent conversation with his brothers—​that was the way he loved them.

“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”

Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart? I wondered if there was a way to keep her in this world forever.

I didn’t feel like a man just then. I felt like a five-year-old boy who didn’t want to do anything except play in a pile of leaves. A five-year-old boy with a greedy heart who wanted his grandmother to live forever.

It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.

Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—​that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?

It was as if all the scenes of my life were running through my brain like a pack of dogs running through the streets, dogs running and running, unable to stop even though they were tired.

“You’re like your dad, you know that? I mean, I know he’s not your real—” “Yes, he is.” She nodded. “Yeah, he is.” And right then I wished with all my crooked heart that my dad had been the man who’d fathered me.

The storm was fierce. But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my father’s love was fiercer than any storm.

I thought of what my father had told me one summer day. I’d fallen down, and my knee was all scraped up and bleeding. We sat on the back porch, and he cleaned my wound and put a Band-Aid on it. The sky had cleared after a summer storm. I’d been crying, and he tried to get me to smile. “Your eyes are the color of sky. Did you know that?” I don’t know why I remembered this. Maybe it was because I knew he was telling me he loved me.

And why the hell was I thinking this crap while Sam was in the other room with a heart that would never be unwounded again? Maybe her heart would never heal. Maybe the hurt would live in her forever. So why in hell was I thinking such stupid and shallow things?

I watched her and her Aunt Lina stare at each other for what seemed a long time. Something was being said. Something important. Something that had to be said without words.

The world had changed. And this new world was quiet and sad.

WE SAT ON Sam’s bed, looking around the room. I’m not sure what we were looking for. She texted me. We did that sometimes, texted each other even though we were in the same room: I can’t live here. Me: U don’t have to Sam: where is home? Me: I’ll be ur home She leaned into me. “Get me out of here, Sally.” Before we left Sam’s house, I used my phone to take pictures of Sylvia’s last note to her daughter. I wanted Sam to have a copy. So she’d never forget. As if she ever would.

My mother’s voice is extinct

The Sam I knew was never in control of her emotions. But on that day she was wearing dignity. So much more beautiful than pearls.

I wanted to tell her that I thought she had a beautiful heart.

Maggie was scratching at the door. I let her in. And then I thought that maybe life was like that—​there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.

We lay there in the dark listening to Emili Sande’s voice. And when the song ended, it seemed that the world had gone completely silent. Then I heard Sam’s voice in the dark. “So you’ll be my river, Sally?” She was crying again. “Yeah,” I said. “‘I would do all the running for you.’” I would have sung her the whole song, but I have a not-so-great singing voice. “And you’ll move the mountains just for me?” “Yeah,” I whispered. And then I was crying too. Not out-of-control crying, but crying. Soft, like it was coming from a place inside me that was quiet and soft too, and that was better than the hard place inside me when I made a fist, or wanted to make one. Maybe the river was made of our tears. Mine and Sam’s. Maybe the river was made of everybody’s tears. Everybody who had ever lost anybody. All those tears.

It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.

Her eyes were as sad as they were fierce.

What I wanted to tell her was that I didn’t care about sin or about God. I wanted to tell her that God was just a beautiful idea and I didn’t care about beautiful ideas and that He was just a word I hadn’t run into yet, hadn’t met yet, and so He was still a stranger. I wanted to tell her that she was real, and she was so much more beautiful than an idea.