Songs Only You Know (29 page)

Over the course of these days, Angela was getting to know these stunned versions of my parents, who were grateful to know she’d be with me through the nights. She held me in a severe new way. She looked me in the eye without hesitation, saying the kindest things, whispering, because the house was otherwise silent. Once Angela returned to Kalamazoo, I spent weeks lying in my sister’s bed, examining the contents of her drawers and staring into her portable television. I caught up on every mind-numbing program I’d missed over the years, and each time I’d think of Caitlin, there’d first be an instant in which I schemed to bring her home—springing her from the hospital, taking her by the arm as we charged out the doors.

Mom kept busy writing thank-you notes and taking phone calls no one else would answer. She mailed a congratulatory card to my uncle Steve. The day Caitlin was pronounced dead, his wife, my aunt Tina, had gone into labor in their bathtub. Beside the tub, clutching her hand, Uncle Steve called 911. Told the operator he wasn’t going to budge, that the medics should break down their front door—which, with the assistance
of the Pittsburgh fire department, they did. By then my newest cousin was already wrapped in a towel, in perfect health. Uncle Steve had once scared Caitlin to tears wearing a Wolfman mask; he’d spent years making it up to her with birthday gifts and kind jokes. He was her godfather, her favorite, had seen her baptized as an infant. Years ago on a day of heavy spring rain, he’d taken us joyriding in his pickup truck, impressing me with his coolness, tearing through puddles as Caitlin clutched my hand.

“Don’t crash us,” she’d said.

She laughed when it was finally over, a beautiful sound.

My aunt and uncle named their newborn daughter Emily and were interviewed on the Pittsburgh nightly news, hundreds of miles away. And I thought about all this every way there was to think about it. And none of it made any sense, except when it did: somewhere, someone was smiling, hearts were beating, and, in spite of predictions, the end of days was nowhere in sight.

T
he purr of their small motors was the most peaceful sound I knew: two box fans running day and night, whenever I was in the bedroom, which was a good deal of the time. Soft, cool static. They helped with the ringing that had begun in my left ear but also with the heat. Summer of 2000 had arrived with one long, humid swipe, giving the overused couch a grimy feel and gumming up the layers of old paint inside the East Lansing house where I was living with three young women.

I’d moved there in May, after Lauren offered to share her bedroom with me. We’d been talking, hugging, spending days together, magnetized by our shared memories of a recent time when living seemed easy. She didn’t mind the box fans or anything else, and it was, I hoped, the end to a scary five months of flamed-out nights and quitting music and breaking things off with Angela. Lauren had graduated with a teaching degree and planned on returning to Dearborn that fall to put it to use. I reckoned that I, too, should be making my way and intended to trick myself into a new lifestyle. I threw away old clothes jinxed
by past mistakes. I sold my albums to record stores, remembering where I’d scored each one as the clerk blew on the vinyl, checked for scratches. Gone, too, were my amplifiers, and on a nervous high I’d enrolled in summer classes at the same school Caitlin had escaped on psychiatric leave two years earlier.

When I’d arrived, Michigan State’s campus was in its vacation-season lull. We lived on a block where many houses were empty, awaiting fall tenants. I’d brought along a couple trash bags full of clothes and the stereo Dad had given Caitlin that Christmas, a nifty, toaster-sized Sony. You inserted a disc into a slot and watched it spin behind a clear plastic guard as music played from miniature speakers. Who needed vinyl? The music cube sat on a coffee table in Lauren’s bedroom, next to a fleet of dwarf cacti. In a corner was a futon that tipped when either of us rolled too close to its edge. A window allowed a slab of light to cut across the walls, which were decorated with tapestries Lauren’s oldest brother had shipped home from the Peace Corps.

The house itself smelled like bananas that had begun to turn black. It had been that way for some time, though the girls had yet to locate the stench’s origin. Lauren and I had to creep through someone’s bedroom in order to use the sole bathroom. Inside was a cramped standing shower with a spigot that drizzled ten minutes of hot water before going cold. The only way the stall contained the two of us was if we entwined. In her early twenties, Lauren had grown more voluptuous. Over the past months, I’d lost ten pounds of good weight—the muscle and girth of my shoulders I believed had made me capable of a hard day’s work.

Lauren wrapped herself around me as the water came down. My face pressed against the slick of her bronze, unfreckled shoulders. Her waist was larger than mine. She was tanned from head to toe.

I avoided comparing her with Angela, whom I’d not seen since May and whom I was trying unsuccessfully to forget. Every move I made was toward forgetting—the past, the present as it happened. The little things were the worst dangers, because in every mundane detail there arose a memory of my sister. She was in the kinked toothpaste tube and the breakfast cereal, in any particular shade of sunlight. In the color of a stranger’s shirt or the scent of cut grass, and in any fleeting instances of happiness because they could not last without her.

The shower was a vortex, one space so misted and confined there seemed only the elements at hand, the inevitability of our bodies. Drizzling shampoo over us, Lauren clenched her eyes as the suds rinsed down. That’s when I’d kiss her, to watch her eyelids twitch as her mouth fumbled for mine, becoming a smile when I pulled away.

Toweling off, we snuck past our housemate, who’d always pull the sheet over her head as we left wet footprints on the worn beige carpet. And if I crawled back onto the futon or drank and slept for days on end, Lauren said nothing about it other than “We need each other right now.”

The box fans rattled loudly enough to conceal the sounds of the housemates and their boyfriends. You could feel the air toiling, lifting the tapestries from the wall. Sometimes, a moment of peace. Lying there in the whir, I’d begin to hear songs, phantom melodies I believed were my own. Now and then a tune playing on the stereo would remind Lauren of Caitlin. She cried giant tears as I held her in the breeze, feeling her arms pulling me in.

L
AUREN SPENT EVERY MOMENT
she could beside me, walking along the Red Cedar River or standing in the backs of bars or taking long drives around the university’s horticulture farms.
She fixed me up with a job at the bookstore where she worked, and we held hands and talked about ideas that would take us far from where we were. My friends had seemed to scatter, all but Will and Andrew—and Warden, who urged me to keep after the music. I hadn’t laughed sanely in half a year, but Lauren didn’t mind. Something new had overtaken her, a need for us to bare ourselves entirely, miseries and all. She began avoiding her many friends, choosing me instead, and I worried that she was following me into the fugue. The sun banged through East Lansing. Her friends tossed Frisbees in the streets and drove to lakefront beaches and threw backyard parties that went all night, but she chose me instead.

A corny old saying: “Everywhere you look, you find yourself.” In a way, it was true; there was death in everything I saw. A game of hangman drawn on a napkin, one table over at Peking Express; a hospital, an ambulance; a blonde stranger as she passed. There was no pause, only variances, the sound of an outdated Seattle band singing through the open windows of a pickup truck
Love like suicide
. I saw my own life: beginning and ending, taking its course. Eighty, ninety years began to seem like a short while, and I believed I’d come to understand the impermanence of life’s gig. Even the sun, the moon—to be one day pulled through a knothole in the universe, just like Andrew always said.

During shifts at the bookstore, this type of thinking caused me to chuckle at inquiring customers, the names of the dead novelists rolling off their tongues. I felt inspired to lie relentlessly, for reasons I’ll never understand. One day, I informed my boss I’d urinated blood, because I’d dreamed it the night before. I told a 7-Eleven clerk I’d witnessed a murder in Tampa, because I’d read about one while touring through. These elaborations flew out of me before I had much chance to consider
them. I could make it all up on the spot. And what did it matter, eternally?

Some days, stripping naked in the street was what made sense. I’d peel off my clothes at the slightest whim as Lauren laughed herself hoarse. Yes, she was still a laugher. She was there with me, picking up my jeans and socks from the concrete. Knowing what I knew. This crazy life—it was happening with or without us.

I hadn’t yet spoken my sister’s name.

Lauren reminded me to call my mother. I thought of her constantly, but getting Mom on the phone was a task. She slept long hours and often turned off the ringer. I’d leave demanding messages, three or four in a row, until she’d return my calls with a small, croaky voice. We’d mention the weather and books. Mom was reading texts about grief and warned that people tended to make foolish mistakes in the wake of a traumatic event. She talked about being in shock. A tricky thing, she said, because you can’t tell it’s happening.

I allowed this to explain what happened when I drove back to Dearborn one weekend to visit with her. No one envied Mom having to live in that house, but she’d kept it in fine order, all but the refrigerator, in which there was barely enough food for lunch. After we ate, she fell asleep, and I found myself cruising Michigan Avenue, overcome by a sublime delusion that it was possible to banish Caitlin from the past. To carry on, as though she’d never existed. It was as though my chemistry had altered, just so. A cog lifting, a paradigm shifted.

And she was gone, the very essence of her.

I could no longer remember her face …

A spell that lasted ten minutes, until I pulled up Mom’s driveway and drove my car into her garage door. I’d hardly recognized it was happening, my foot tapping the gas instead of
the brake. I checked the rearview mirror—no one was watching. The creak of expanding aluminum as the car reversed and yanked its fender from the crumped door. I almost expected Caitlin to storm into the afternoon wagging a finger as I tried to explain everything.

Inside the house, Mom lay asleep on the couch with a book opened across her chest. When I woke her, she couldn’t be bothered to look at the damage I’d done. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “As long as no one’s hurt.”

T
HE BOOKSTORE WAS SO
easy and uneventful it left me anxious. I began filling cardboard boxes with books I figured I should read, stories that might turn me toward one of the many new lives I saw myself living. Using the store’s mail system, I shipped the packages to the upper flat, where Will and Andrew would stow them until I visited. The guilty thrill passed my working hours: browsing cautiously, pulling the spines from the shelves and sneaking them to the mailroom, slapping a label on the cardboard. First class to Dearborn, Michigan.

The books I stole were things Angela had mentioned, sleek novels with austere jackets and poetic titles:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Fire Next Time
. I admired her passions and fine taste; yet when I thought of Angela, I made sure to remind myself me she’d hardly known my sister. I charged this against her, wincing away the memory of how it felt to be near her. Her whip-smart language, her soft hands and knowing face. How certain songs reminded her of colors—
I hear green, blue
.

That February, I’d driven back and forth across Michigan to see Angela and Lauren, believing they each held some fragment I couldn’t be without. I’d told neither of them about the other as I left one college town for the next. They were, both of them, stronger than me, capable of real love. One of my greatest
blessings is to have had them in my life; at the time it seemed another fix I’d put myself in. Eventually, I’d called Angela in haste, telling her straight out that I needed to be with Lauren.

“Why?” she’d asked.

I hadn’t been able to say. Many nights, I’d closed my eyes, hoping to be guided toward the right decision. I’d asked what Caitlin would have wanted. I’d envision the rest of my life, wondering which of these women would remain with me until we were aged and incontinent. Who would carry some piece of Caitlin with them, year after year, on even their happiest days? I’d see the silver watch Lauren had given her—my mom had set it on Caitlin’s nightstand, the place she’d always leave it just before drifting asleep.

Over the phone, I’d mentioned none of this to Angela. I blamed it on circumstances beyond comprehension. “I don’t know how things got this way.”

Angela said she was losing her grip. Flunking classes. The nightmares, she said, were working her over. “Everything we went through, and that’s it?”