Songs Only You Know (31 page)

“Why did you turn all my pictures around?”

“I can’t see that stuff right now,” I said.

I did nothing to hide my tattered knuckles as I reached for Mom’s luggage because she wouldn’t notice. There were a lot of things we weren’t noticing. We were forgetting to pay bills. We were letting the plants wither. We ran our cars out of gas and walked to filling stations, startled by how quickly the minutes passed. You’re one place and then another, with so little memory of the walk, the drive, the workday.

What did it say about our minds? How we’d manage to leave our wallets in the refrigerator, the milk carton in the cupboard.

Driving back to East Lansing, I missed the exit for Okemos Road, realizing it only after the highway veered south toward unfamiliar towns. When I finally made it into the house, Lauren was asleep on the futon. By then I could hardly remember Blaine’s crumpled shape or if I’d truly intended to slay Sheila’s brother. One moment, my anger overran every rational
thought; the next, all I longed for was a pillow. I slid onto the futon, the frame teetering until I rolled near the center. Lauren wrapped her arms unconsciously around me. Just before I went under I said a silent word or two to my sister, up toward the ceiling, thinking that perhaps she’d arrive in the night-blue air above the bed, twirling in the wind of the box fans. Her spirit. Her ghost. And what was it she’d be trying to say if she were there, whispering down to those of us listening?

W
hat can be said about that year that is kind and forgiving and proves we were learning to survive? I’ve gone back time and again, trying to remember the hours when the sun shone or a crow was set loose from the attic or a stranger took my hand and walked with me until I’d remembered my name, all of which happened, yet the truth of those days is something else—awesome and strange only in the sense that we are no longer there.

Will spent the first half of August binging hard before his body collapsed. He was nearly comatose by the time his dad carried him from the upper flat and drove him to Oakwood Hospital. My mom called with the vague details, “He’s in the ICU,” and I hurried off the phone and sped toward Dearborn, where Andrew was in the weird zone of a multiday fast during which he’d been drinking only water. Living in a room just feet away from Will, he’d been too deep into a state of hunger-induced transcendence to notice anything amiss. Since I’d left the apartment, they’d been using my old room for storage.

Weeks earlier, Will had been jailed in Iowa after an incident of public disruption. He’d returned to Michigan with a copy of his mug shot, which he mailed to me in a heart-shaped envelope days before his hospitalization. Crazy—the currency of our old joy. I couldn’t see it then, but Caitlin’s death had ripped through the lives of my closest friends, driven them a little crazier than before. Andrew and Will didn’t speak about having seen my sister on life support or the fact that she was gone. Not long after her funeral, Andrew told me my dad was the saddest man he’d ever seen, and Will said he’d had a long cry at the rug shop—which was just about the end of us talking about that week in January.

I cringe to imagine how I’d have handled things had I been in their position, if I might have hijacked their grief for my own musical themes. We were young, too cut off from ourselves to reach for one another. But no one really knows what to do about a mess like that: a young girl dying.

I’d called Will the day his mug shot arrived in Lauren’s mailbox.

“You see those stripes?” he said.

In the booking photo his eye sockets were darkened. He stared upward, holding a placard with his name and arrest number. The Iowa sheriff’s department had him dressed in a black-and-white horizontally striped shirt that looked to have been worn daily for a number of decades.

“I thought that shit was from the movies,” he’d said. “You get a look at those stripes?”

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED AT
Oakwood, Will was laid up a floor below the unit where Caitlin’s life had ended seven months prior. A psychology course I’d taken that summer had informed me that the average onset for mental illness is between the ages of
twenty-one and twenty-five. Antisocial tendencies, delusions of grandeur, seeking meaning in chaotic patterns, messages divined from rock albums—I’d come to see the potential in nearly everyone I knew.

“I got diabetes,” Will said as I entered his hospital room. “I brought it on myself. They said another day or so and I’d be dead meat.”

The space was partitioned by a blue sheet. Whoever lay beyond the curtain had a gnarly cough. Will raised his brows and hissed at every sound the man made. To see him, more conscious than not, relieved by degrees the clenching inside my head, my neck, my lungs.

“Isn’t diabetes hereditary?” I said.

“That’s what they say, not what I say.”

He was thin and greasy. It was in his beady blue eyes, mostly, the illness.

I clasped his hand. Will wriggled his finger lasciviously in my palm, giving a sleazy tickle so that I flinched away. Now he was grinning, and so was I, shaking my head.

“You talk to Andy?” he said. He had his headphones beside him. CDs, the great escape. “He saw a shoot-out. In the street, right in front of the apartment. You should go ask him about it.”

I
NSIDE THE UPPER FLAT
, Andrew sat on the couch, pale and vibrating with unfinished theories. The shades were drawn and a Joseph Campbell videotape played on the television, something about the masks of eternity. Andrew acknowledged me with a nod, as though I’d just returned from taking out the trash. I’d never seen him so docile.

“Not gonna visit Will?” I asked.

“I called the hospital,” he said. “They wouldn’t put me through. Tell him I love him if you see him.”

He was soul deep in a malnourished meditation. His eyes bulged. His face looked thinner. I got the idea that he didn’t plan on leaving the couch until his spirit voyage was complete. Perhaps he dreaded returning to that hospital, where he’d months before seen Caitlin—not quite alive, not yet dead.

“The mind works so fast when you’re not polluting it with food.” Andrew stared at the television. “It has so much energy,” he said. “I’m learning things.”

The daylight outside was brilliant. A slab of white sun crashed in as I opened the door to the balcony and peered down at the street.

I hollered across the living room, “Where was the shoot-out?”

“Right out there,” he said. “One of those suicide-by-cop things. The cop was real smooth, man. He bent down behind his car door and took the guy out. They’re trained for that. I helped them search for stray bullets after it was over.”

“What? The guy gets pulled over and started shooting?”

“I don’t know. I heard shots. Maybe the cop shot first. The cop probably shot first. It’s all part of everything.”

“You gotta eat.”

“I need to make it eleven days. Eleven is the number.”

Andrew pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans. I walked over to have a look:
Eleven
, the word and numeral, scratched on a receipt.

“What’s it mean?” I said.

“Some hooker downtown. I told her I’d been thinking about eleven, and she said she’d been thinking the same thing. She wrote it down.”

“You didn’t do her, did you?”

“No, man. It’s not about that. None of this is about that.”

“Today? How many days is today?”

“Today,” he said, “is nine.”

O
NCE EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE
madness, there’s so much room to wander, to dabble. You’re not nine-to-five. Your family is not nuclear. The earth throbs beneath you, urging you to get busy chasing every arising whim, never mind tomorrow’s cost. I wondered what people did in the days before psych wards and emergency rooms. You got one shot at a meltdown. You saw god as you withered in the desert. You waded into the ocean and let the riptide take you all the way.

I had nowhere to go. I had my Escort and half a tank of gas. Standing in the street below the upper flat, I was clobbered by a vision of driving to Kalamazoo and showing up at Angela’s. Beside her, with a record playing, was the only place I cared to be. I’d tell her about Will and Andrew. We’d have one last night together, or ten. The rest of our lives. It wasn’t a decision—shifting the car into drive and heading for the highway.

Twenty miles outside Dearborn, traffic slowed on Interstate 94. A few yards from the Ann Arbor exit it halted entirely. The air had turned thick green, and then the sky hemorrhaged, letting fall a storm of hail. I looked over and through the ice and rain saw a woman in the car next to mine crying into her hands. Hailstones thumped my Escort’s roof dozens at a time. I watched the car’s hood being pelted, while above the highway the August sun remained on the horizon.

What an unforgettable sight: the sunrays glinting off wet metal as nuggets of ice scattered, popping like marbles onto the road. People I’d yet to meet would talk about that storm years later—the magnificent speed of it—but just then anything could have happened. A twister might have blown through,
and if I were whipped into the sky, everything would have been as it should.

Traffic inched forward as the storm subsided, only minutes after it began. A few hellbound drivers sped past on the freeway’s shoulder. The rest of us waited for the jam to push onward and the traffic to thin out, trusting whoever was up ahead. Five miles west, I was once again cruising through sunshine, staring down the cratered hood of my car, strangely grateful for this evidence against my having altogether hallucinated the episode.

I took it as a sign; good or bad, I couldn’t say.

Angela wasn’t home when I arrived. One of her housemates let me inside while the others, gathered in front of a communal television, regarded me with the pitying expression I’d seen in Caitlin’s friends at her funeral. What sorrow they endured looking at me seemed to replace whoever I’d been; I felt I was carrying only the single ugly fact that tragedy had touched me. Sad, sad brother of death. Some of Caitlin’s friends had mailed letters I’d not been able to open; others visited my mom with pictures and flowers, relaying messages to me. My sister had known more people than I’d imagined, so many of them strangers I’d never taken the chance to meet.

I was asleep in Angela’s bed when she opened the door to her room, squealing at the sight of me, turning away and checking again to make certain I was there.

“My god,” she said.

“You didn’t see my car?” It was parked behind the house, the hood pocked with hail damage. Even the steel doorframe had a gouge or two.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s all dented up,” I said. “It was crazy. This hailstorm.”

When I stood, she clutched me, asking, “It’s okay if I hug you?” My hands slid into a familiar niche below her shoulders.
I’d buzzed off my hair because I’d been losing it in clumps every time I showered. Angela pulled back to take another a look, fluttering a palm over my coarse scalp.

“Short,” she said.

We fell onto her small mattress. Her body burrowed into mine, a feeling twice as incredible as I’d remembered it. We were suddenly a secret thing—which convinced me we had a love that could not be restrained. We laughed, staring each other in the face. Not a minute later, Angela began to cry at thought of me leaving. When she asked where I was living, I told her I’d rented a room in an East Lansing house of strangers. To gain confidence in this lie, I summoned all the drear I was feeling. “It’s a horrible place,” I said. “I just wound up there.”

“And what about her?”

“Who?”

“Lauren.”

The spell we were in—I wouldn’t have disrupted it for anything. I would have sold out the universe to make it last an hour.

“We’re like family, really, me and her,” I said.

“God,” she said. “I miss you every day.”

L
AUREN AND
I
SHARED
the futon platonically during our final days together. I’d announced that I needed to move on from the past, and she took it to mean that she was an unwelcomed memory, one I intended to shake loose with all the others.

“Please talk to me,” she said. “It’s me. You can talk to me.”

She’d asked if there was someone else, but I couldn’t admit it. I figured that with some finesse and a complete boycott of my feelings I’d be able to avoid hurting anyone. Lauren responded by hugging me tight, attempting to jar loose any trace of emotion; when that didn’t work, she chopped her hair short and
dyed it blood red. She looked beautiful that way, though I didn’t tell her. We spent hours raking over the same ground in hopes of a solution to the mess I’d made. I punctuated every response with “I’m sorry,” pleading insanity with my tone. Her anger was trumped entirely by sadness; her round eyes conveyed only a wish that I’d snap out of it. She never once called me names or told me I was wretched, leaving me in the position of having to do so myself. But even her tears were forgiving. When I couldn’t feel a thing, they seemed to be for both of us.

Before moving back to Dearborn to put her teaching degree to use, Lauren went through the pockets of my jeans and discovered letters Angela had written, which said whatever I hadn’t been man enough to.

“My heart,” Lauren said, on her way out of town, “is breaking.” And it was as though I’d never heard it put quite that way.

I remained in East Lansing, working odd jobs and living alone above a bar off Grand River. Down the hall lived a guy who called himself Vegas, along with a British Indian named Nittin, both consequential only in their enthusiasm for snorting crushed Ritalin. It did about the same work as cheap cocaine. All you had to do to sleep it off was gulp a bottle of cough syrup, which I did one night after putting a chicken breast in the oven. The next morning, I found a blackened goop on the baking sheet. With Lauren gone, this sort of thing began happening often enough to keep me anxious about my health.

My bones felt soft. In coming years, I’d recall those days and worry they’d done irreversible damage, the lonely panic and malnutrition and cheap booze having caused some sickness to fester in the deepest marrows. It would take much longer to realize that what had clamped its jaws on me was a grief I wasn’t yet able to perceive. Only in hindsight would I come to recognize its presence in every word I spoke
that year, in the arrangement of bottles on the windowsill and in the shower, which had no curtain and grew mold about the drain.