Songs Only You Know (11 page)

Standing in the doorway, Caitlin was a wreck. Her eyes had the drear of someone who’d stared too long at the sun. Her blonde hair was tangled and streaked with red dye. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans.

“Will you talk to me?” she said. “Lauren told me you were here.”

Beneath a shaft of light, standing in the institution-green hallway, my sister came suddenly and fully into focus—clearer than ever before. Funny how, glimpsing someone I’d known my entire life, I saw afresh the sunspots fading into the angles of her nose, the graceful bend of her wrist as she pressed the butt of her palm to her forehead. The first etchings of crow’s-feet as she clenched her eyes. Cafeteria food had added weight to her face, rounding her soft cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “It’s okay.”

I followed her outside, where we set out beneath the towering grids of dormitory windows. So many people, stacked atop one another—groping and studying and dabbling in expendable lifestyles. Music was blaring, bad stuff. I’d never have admitted it, but places like that terrified me. After we’d walked far enough that I became lost, Caitlin said, “Can I have your keys? Just go for a drive?”

“I’ll drive you,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t be able to massage my minivan’s temperamental ignition. “Where you wanna go?”

We didn’t look each other in the eye, a kind of avoidance we’d perfected in churches while shaking the hands of strangers—
Peace be with you … And also with you
—before proclaiming the mystery of faith and accepting Christ’s Body on our tongues.

“I can’t stop thinking about driving a car into a wall,” Caitlin said, “so that no one would know I meant to do it.”

I gripped her wrist, yanked her until we were standing still. Then she snatched back her arm and avoided me by examining a silver watch Lauren had given her as a birthday present, precious to her, I could tell, like some anti-evil talisman. The sidewalks were littered with scraps of leaves. I felt the thick, prickling lethargy of having sat motionless for one day too many. Chatter sounded in every direction as students reeled by with backpacks. I’d endure it each time I was there, a longing for whatever I was missing out on: the collegiate verve, the mid-American coming of age. Then I’d think of the band and be satisfied that I was where I belonged.

“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “It screws with your mind.”

Caitlin huddled into me, crying slowly. Like my mom, a two-pronged vein rose in her forehead when she was upset. She could seem so childlike, not in her gestures or words but in how completely her face gave away her feelings. This, I knew, was something she regretted about herself.

“I just want to leave,” she said.

I held her tightly. Small crowds passed us thoughtlessly—we were typical, indistinct, a couple who’d had a spat or flunked our chemistry exams.

“How long have you been here?” Caitlin said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

There was no excuse. Over two days, I’d accomplished little more than the alphabetization of Lauren’s CD collection, recordings from a couple years earlier that already rang nostalgic—aside from a copy of my band’s CD, which I’d confiscated on sight. One more attempt to cleave my life in two: music and all else. I’d also read from her diary, the better half of it about me, and none of those bits were entirely flattering. Between classes, Lauren smuggled me fish sticks from the cafeteria, asking what my problem were as I scarfed the items, wounded by her secret theories about my life.
Distant
is what she’d written.
Unreachable
.

“I was going to call you,” I told Caitlin, though I’d already compartmentalized this visit to East Lansing as a private misadventure, a semiclandestine bender.

Visiting my sister should be an official event, a rose-in-hand occasion.

“I hate it here,” she said. “These people are nasty.”

“What about your roommate?”

“She and her friends stare at me when I walk in. She lets these guys sleep in our room. I came home the other night, and some ass was in my bed. She sucks. She has pictures of herself in swimsuits all over the place.”

“Man,” I said. “That’s sick.”

Caitlin said, “I want to die sometimes.”

“Hey, now.” I gave her a gentle shake.

Having indulged so often in dark fantasy, I felt a glib ownership of her idea, as though I’d braved the trenches of depression and had gleaned profound insight. “It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “Smart people get that way sometimes.”

Caitlin tugged at her sweatshirt sleeves, pulling the ends over her hands, staring off with a look that said,
No, I wasn’t hearing a damn word
.

After that we walked aimlessly, saying nothing.

Months earlier, while driving home from the Atlanta rehab, my dad had told me about an acoustic chamber he’d stood inside while studying automotive sound cancellation—his attempt to establish a bond, seeking common ground through auditory science. The chamber, he’d said, was a room-sized vacuum where audio waves were rendered inaudible by the balanced vibrations of carefully tuned, opposing frequencies. Sound pitted against sound, equaling silence; a void where even the most deafening decibels existed unheard, quiet as air, yet occurring nonetheless like mute explosions. This was the silence between Caitlin and me: both of us waiting for some unknowable frequency to lower in pitch, so that whatever was there would begin to wail and prove it existed.

We reached her dorm, where she stood at the door, asking if I’d come by again.

“I’ll come back real soon. You just have to take it easy.”

“Can’t I just take your car?”

Tears had glossed the skin beneath her eyes, and in them was a look as though another night in the hormonal wilderness of Michigan State University would be unbearable. Whatever she meant to tell me, I wasn’t ready to understand.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

I hugged her, holding on a little longer than usual. Up close, I noticed the puncture in her earlobe where an earring was supposed to be.

“I love you,” I said. “Don’t let these fucks get to you.”

“But they’re everywhere,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Trim that nasty-ass hair before you come back.”

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

“Or else I’ll do it.” Finally, she smiled. “Nice and neat.”
Reaching for my bangs, pretending to snip them clean with her fingers.

L
ATER THAT EVENING
, G
RAND
River Avenue filled with students protesting a campus-wide ban on the football-season tailgate parties for which the school was infamous. Through Lauren’s window, we heard the commotion stirring through the courtyard. I’d decided it was my last night there.

“Want to check it out?” she said.

“They’re rioting over tailgating? Aren’t student riots supposed to be about wars?”

“Some people,” Lauren said, “think this is fascist.”

When we made it to the street, there was fire and a mob of hundreds chanting
Bullshit! Bullshit!
gathered around the blaze. A young man in a mesh jersey was lifted above the crowd, reaching for a traffic-signal box that hung from a cable above the avenue. They lifted him until the steel box was cuddled in his arms; he dangled from it, piñata-like, as those with bottles in their hands raised them to the light.

Lauren took my arm as we watched from a distance too far to tell what, exactly, was on fire. East Lansing had brought about no drastic changes in her, not that I could tell. Her brown hair was crimped at the bangs. We were wearing flannel. She leaned into me.

“My sister’s okay here?” I said.

“I think so.”

Lauren kept her eyes on the crowd. Behind us a police squad in riot gear arrived, their face masks drawn, some with leashed dogs, charging toward the conflagration. When, at the periphery, a boy in a backward ball cap dug into a box of beer and the first bottle was thrown aimlessly into the crowd, Lauren and I retreated to her dorm. As we passed Caitlin’s building, I
counted the windows, unsure which was hers yet convinced it was one that was unlit, and that inside all was quiet.

A late-October morning, trees bare up and down the street, a season’s worth of fallen leaves swept to piles at the curb; half the kitchen painted white, the other half still yellowed from years of stovetop fumes; the gas heater getting its first chance to prove it worked and doing a fine job, warming even my lair in the basement. Our new home: shaping up and in working order. Mom and I: housemates, grateful exiles. Everything seemed to be coming together slowly but coming together nonetheless, and this was the state of things in general when the psych ward called.

The band had just returned from a two-day jaunt through Canada. I was coming around after a heavy sleep in the basement and could tell from Mom’s voice—monochromatic and blunt in the kitchen upstairs—that everything was not at all in its right place.

“And she’s safe? She’s okay?”

Usually I rose from the mattress in a doltish, uncaffeinated trance, but I tore off the sheets and dressed frantically, calling up the stairwell to my mom, who wasn’t answering. When I entered the kitchen, she stood clutching the phone.

“I thought this was over,” she said.

She relayed the news as though she’d already spoken it a thousand times: Caitlin had been driven to the hospital by a girl from the dorms, had said she needed help and didn’t know what she’d do if left to herself for another minute.

“I’ve got to talk to her,” Mom said. “We’ve got to bring her home.”

Dainty, five foot four, her forearms slender as chair legs, my mother had the ability to quickly galvanize for emergencies: Dad’s fluke 1981 heart attack, puddles of vomit, my childhood hernias and gashed limbs, Ozzy half dead and bloody eyed after being hit by a Cadillac. She’d move swiftly, with sheer focus, dirtying her hands while projecting a certainty that everything was soon to be okay. Ozzy would be stitched like new. I’d be healthy and healed, ready to live again.

Then came the crack pipes, rehabs, divorce papers, and a new mortgage, all of which she’d managed with a grace I’d spend my life trying to attain.

Caitlin’s plunges into despair were what left Mom aghast. Her gentle ways had never consoled my sister to the extent they did me, nor could she interpret Caitlin’s wounds with the second-sense accuracy she could mine. My mother’s love for us was so wide ranging that the question of comparison, of whom she loved more, seemed irrelevant. Only years later would she and I agree that the unspoken closeness we shared simply could not, no matter how we tried, expand to include my sister’s whorl of feelings. In this way, my sister spiraled beyond us. Caitlin’s fits bore closer resemblance to my dad’s wild moods, and there was no changing that: the stuff of which we were made.

“I knew something was wrong,” Mom said. “She couldn’t tell me, but I knew.”

She dropped the phone to the kitchen floor, coughing until her eyes watered. These hacking spells had begun with the divorce proceedings and were worsening, attacking during the climaxes of made-for-TV movies, as she skimmed the
Free Press
Metro Section. I’d rarely seen her cry but had watched a hundred times as she coughed herself to tears.

She retrieved an inhaler from the cupboard, huffing on the mouthpiece as the cartridge hissed. I couldn’t bear to tell Mom
the shape Caitlin had been in when I’d seen her weeks before. I stood drawing heavy breaths as if they might soothe her lungs.

“I just need a month,” she said. “A month of nothing. A simple, boring month.”

My sister’s sorrow wasn’t a mystery to me because I sensed it vaguely in myself.

But I feared her pain—the thought of it turned me into a coward.

“Is she gonna drop out of school?” I said.

This was no better than my response two years earlier when Caitlin swallowed a bottle of pills and leaped from her bedroom’s second-story window, landing in the shrubs before she returned, scuffed and lazy eyed, through the front door of our Ridgewood Hills house. Mom had rushed her to the ER, where the medics pumped her stomach and fed her charcoal, and if anyone asked, we claimed she’d had an episode with her heart. Much easier to imagine: my sister’s young body on an operating table, her delicate heart repaired like new. What I’d never be able to picture was Caitlin opening that window, the look on her face as she passed over the sill.

M
OM PULLED UP THE
driveway with Caitlin in the passenger seat.

The station wagon was crammed with furnishings from my sister’s dorm room—lamps, radio, a beanbag, garbage bags stuffed with clothes. All of which I carried to her upstairs bedroom and set in places I thought they belonged. Caitlin lay in bed a few days, sulking downstairs in the evening to watch TV in a medicated slump. Someone with a diploma had bandied about the term “manic depression,” about which I knew only what Hendrix had sung in his ’67 single of the same name. Mom tried every solution she could think of—scheduling therapists
and buying mood lamps—coming home on lunch breaks to check on my sister. She sat with Caitlin through the evenings, watching television as the sitcoms aired one after the other.