Electric Summer

The baseball diamond stretched out before us, emerald grass blurring through the chain-link fence. Marcus hadn't spoken since we left the hospital. Three weeks of radiation treatments and he'd aged a decade in three weeks.

"You want a water?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

He shook his head slowly. "Remember when you pitched that no-hitter?"

"Sophomore year. You were the only one who stayed."

"Everyone else left after the fifth inning. Rain." He managed a weak smile. "Called on account of darkness, eventually."

I'd forgotten until this moment how he'd stood by the backstop, water dripping from his cap, refusing to leave until they officially postponed the game. That was Marcus—loyal to a fault, stubborn as hell, the person who'd held my hair back when I drank too much cheap vodka in college, who'd flown across the country when my mother died, who'd sat beside me through my own divorce.

And now I was watching him die.

A storm had been brewing all afternoon. The first drops of water began to fall as we walked toward the parking lot, fat and heavy, smelling of ozone and impending summer.

"I don't want to do this anymore," he said suddenly, stopping at his car. "The treatments. The sickness. The pretending."

My heart hammered. "Marcus—"

"No, listen." He turned to me, and lightning cracked the sky open, brilliant and sudden, illuminating his face—the fear, the relief, the exhaustion of fighting a war he'd already lost. "I'm tired. I want to go home. Really home."

The rain came harder then, water streaming down both our faces, neither of us moving toward shelter. I saw what he was asking. Not death, exactly, but permission. Permission to stop fighting. Permission to choose comfort over desperate measures. Permission to let go.

I pulled him into a hug, his thin frame alarming against mine. "Okay," I whispered. "Okay."

We stood there in the downpour like we had at that baseball game twenty years ago, neither of us willing to leave first, the distance between us closing and closing until there was nothing left but water and light and the terrible beauty of letting go.