Tarrying with Yesterdays

Hutch contemplates anniversaries and losses thirty years after Starsky was shot.

Written for the thirtieth anniversary of Sweet Revenge.

Thirty years gone like thirty minutes. In between, though, each year seemed like a year was supposed to seem. All the big and little events that made up a day, a week, a year. The highs after a good arrest, the lows when nothing panned out right.

Every year, as much as he tried not to, around the middle of April Hutch would begin to gear up, bracing himself for the crash the way he’d always braced himself against the Torino’s dashboard. Most of the time the crash didn’t happen . . . until it finally did. And once it had, it never stopped, year after year.

Every May he thought: Enough already, it’s been five years. Ten. Twenty-five.

This year he’d decided not to remember it anymore, not to leave it with its power intact. This year he would promise Starsky he’d let it go, let it be just another day. So far he hadn’t been able to do it.

Back home the first flowers would be blooming. He never could go home in spring anymore—and even if he wanted to, now there was no one there to visit.

He could almost smell the lilacs as he sat there in the sun. He looked to his left, smiling, to share with his mother the memory of the banks of them in front of their house, of how she smiled when he gathered them for her on Mother’s Day. How she put them in the same vase every year. “Every year on this day,” she would always say, “I remember the best day of my life, the day you were born.” He could feel her hand on the top of his head.

He wished he could still bring her flowers. He wanted to tell Starsky about how she looked in the sunlight, how it felt when she kissed his face. And later, how lilacs made him think of funerals, of his father still tall—but broken—by her side, his hand on the lace pillow by her cheek. Her anniversary, for Hutch, would always be Mother’s Day, not the day she’d died.

When it was his father’s turn to make an anniversary, Hutch gave him lilacs, too, and asked him to carry them to his mother, to touch her cheek, to tell her . . . something. Anything.

And anyway, lilacs didn’t grow well in the Bay City smog, in a climate that never really froze their roots. Eventually he’d given up trying to cultivate them where they so obviously didn’t want to live, and had let them go. He wished he could do that with memories. With anniversaries.

And hadn’t he just decided there’d be no more looking back, only forward? He’d managed Mother’s Day this year without much of a ripple. Why not, finally, let this anniversary be just a day like any other in the year, like any day was supposed to be, full of ping pong, of promise.

He looked down at his hands, turning them, and seeing his father’s hands instead of his own. He heard his father’s voice inside his head, like his own thoughts, his own voice. For a moment he felt as if he were behind his father’s face, in his father’s body. Disturbed and comforted at the same time, he closed his eyes, wishing for the day to be over.

Anniversaries marked the passing years, his father had always said, that’s what they were for. Like holidays. Maybe you weren’t supposed to forget them. Maybe they were meant to keep you connected to what you’d lost, to remind you that loss didn’t kill you. Or not all of you, anyway.

Maybe they were the stepping stones through the year, and without them, you’d just fall into the river and be swept away.

Starsky knew how to cope with it all. He still lit the yahrzeit candle, though he’d picked a day at random for all his loved ones’ souls, and remembered them every year on that day with pepperoni and extra cheese. He’d recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, and say “V’eemru: Amein” and when Hutch said, “Amein” he’d clink his beer bottle to Hutch’s and ask what he had in mind for the weekend, and that anniversary would be that.

“It’s thirty years, Hutch,” he said now. “Why aren’t you remembering that I didn’t die, instead of acting every year like I did?”

Hutch hadn’t heard him come outside. He moved over on the garden bench and Starsky sat down with a small grunt and a hand to his knee.

“I was just thinking about that. I don’t know why. Maybe because I lost something that I never got back.”

“What did you lose?” Starsky looked down at himself, and then at the garden, and at their bare legs gently touching all along their length.

Hutch still thought he didn’t know, couldn’t name the loss of his belief in immortality. Then he said without thinking, “Faith.” That was it. “When I knew you could die, I lost my faith that you never would.”

“Hmm.” Starsky nodded. Maybe he understood that better than Hutch realized. “I got you something this morning. It ain’t a lilac, but it’s for your garden.” He got up with the same little grunt. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

Hutch waited, watching the birds at the feeder, trying to remember the day Starsky woke up, not the day he went down. That was the anniversary he should be obsessed with. Why had he never thought of that before?

Starsky said, “Close your eyes.”

Hutch closed his eyes and put his hands up to accept whatever it was, but Starsky was moving across the grass. Hutch could hear him a few yards away.

“Keep your eyes closed.”

“I am.”

He was planting something. Maybe it was the oleander Hutch had mentioned, or that hybrid tea rose.

He heard footsteps returning, and then Starsky grabbed his hand.

“Don’t open ’em!”

Starsky might be sixty-something now, but he was still just a kid. Hutch let him lead him down the path, let himself be turned, placed, planted.

“Okay. Open up.”

Hutch looked down. It was a large stone, granite maybe, flat on the bottom and rounded on the top, but not smooth. It looked like it had always been there, belonged there, was part of the garden, part of his life.

The front had been polished flat, though, and into its surface was carved a word: Faith.

“How did you—?”

“I didn’t. I just saw it, and I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I just bought it.”

Hutch reached sideways and found Starsky’s hand.

“That’s . . . amazing.”

“Maybe I kinda knew all along. All these years. I couldn’t name it either, until I saw that stone.”

Hutch sat down on the grass in front of the new stone, without letting go of Starsky, pulling him down alongside him.

“You’ve never lost your faith.”

“Sure I have. Sometimes.” Starsky pulled up some grass and shredded it. He still never just sat quietly without fiddling with something. “Nature of the beast. You have to lose it sometimes so you can find it again.”

“When did you become a philosopher, Gordo?”

Starsky let go of his hand, and patted himself on the belly. Hutch chuckled.

“So, what’s this year’s resolution, then?” Starsky said, then turned a little to face him. “Wait. I just had a philosophical revelation.”

“Uh oh.”

“Shaddup. I think I know what’s been wrong all these years.”

Hutch lifted an eyebrow.

“I’ve never let you talk about it, have I? Every time you tried, I always said you gotta let it go, move on. How could you, if you had to carry it around all locked up all this time.” Starsky looked at the carved stone for a long moment. “It’s a heavy rock, ain’t it?”

Hutch started to shake his head no, but Starsky shoved him with his shoulder, and almost tipped him over sideways.

“Okay, then, yeah, sometimes I’ve wanted to talk about it—what happened to you, and what it was like for me. No one ever asked me how I was, and I was dying, too.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “And later, when we didn’t know if you’d be able to work, the thought of being on my own—all those rookies I had to cope with, Dobey watching me all the time. And me watching you . . . suffering.” One of Starsky’s hands covered one of his, and he felt the warmth of it relaxing his tense muscles. He looked up and blinked a few times. “Sometimes I remember how that felt, sometimes I still feel how it felt, and I want to tell you . . . but then I think you’re right, that I have to stop. But I just never seem to be able to. All these years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. That’s not what this is about. It’s just that everyone thought it was something that happened to you, but I always thought it was something that happened to us. No one understood that except . . .”

“Your mother.”

“No, actually.” Hutch smiled. “Yours.”

Starsky turned a little to face him. “Really? I thought—”

“She called yesterday. Said she was wondering how I was doing this year, now that Dad’s gone, too.” Starsky looked either pleased or annoyed, it was hard to tell. “She wanted to say hi to you, but she had mahjong or something. Had to get to the lounge before all the good partners were taken.”

Starsky shook his head in admiration. “I hope I still got that kind of energy when I’m in my eighties.”

“You don’t have it now.”

“I got enough to keep you sniffin’ around. That’s all I need.”

Hutch laughed, and squeezed Starsky’s hand. “I’m glad we still have her with us.”

“I’m glad you’ve had her to talk to. All these years. Shoulda been me, though. I’m sorry for that.”

“We just do things differently. It’s okay, Starsk. It’s all in the past.”

Maybe it finally was.

“Yeah.” Starsky laid himself carefully down onto his back in the grass, and put his hands behind his head. “‘We should look forward,'” he said slowly, “‘for life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.’ I forget who wrote that. I always liked it, but now I think it’s wrong. Life is all about yesterday. And tomorrow. You can’t separate ’em out. They go together.”

Hutch turned around so he could look down at Starsky’s body lying there in the grass. “They aren’t the only things that go together.” He put his mouth onto Starsky’s to demonstrate.

Starsky put his arms around Hutch’s back, and when Hutch finally pulled away and started to move down the side of his neck, Starsky said, “Think you still got enough energy to take me?” He pulled at Hutch’s belt buckle, then at his own. “After all these years?”

“I got enough energy to make us a whole new anniversary. Something to remember on this day for years to come.” Hutch laughed at his own wit. “Years. To come.”

Starsky rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe you. You’re gonna to have to prove it to me.”

Hutch lifted himself up to give Starsky better access to his zipper. “Sometimes,” he broke off for a moment, distracted by Starsky’s hands, “sometimes you just have to have faith.”

“Oh, believe me, I got plenty of that,” Starsky said, and proceeded to prove it.

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“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday” is from “On Children” in The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran