Songs Only You Know (32 page)

B
Y AUTUMN
, I
COULD
drink half a fifth of the cheap stuff and still awake the next day for work. Mostly, it was beer. I shut myself inside my room, doing push-ups on the hardwood floor and strumming my dad’s acoustic guitar. I’d given up on studying psychology, spooked by the possibilities of all that could go awry with the brain. The guitar kept me busy. I played for hours, recording songs onto a cassette deck and erasing them the instant they were finished. Back home, Will was administering insulin shots alongside slugs of malt liquor, and Andrew had driven across the country in search of a woman whose name he’d decoded from the Bible. He believed she had the answers, if only he could find her.

And Mom had joined a bereavement group.

And my dad had begun planning a road trip out West. The two of us, through the mountains, where we might even do some skiing.

“I can still keep up with you,” he said, but I had to wonder.

Each morning pigeons flocked to the roof outside my window. That winter, snow packed against the panes and the sunrise glared into the room. On the windowsill, next to a box fan, sat a single photograph inside a stained-glass oval frame I’d given Caitlin for her twentieth birthday. She’d rigged it with Popsicle sticks so it would stand upright. Behind the small pane was a faded print: The two of us toddling in early eighties clothes. Our summer-bleached hair, hers pulled back, my bangs cropped at eye level. I was squinting. Caitlin’s deep blues were wide open as I sat behind her on the lawn of our Dearborn bungalow. My arms were wrapped around her,
though you could hardly make out the image until you pressed your face near it.

That was the version of her I allowed myself to miss—the child, the earliest, flickering memory. Who she actually was had no consistent focus, a person it hurt too much to acknowledge. She wasn’t yet finished becoming whatever she was supposed to be, which made all that might have been the cruelest mystery I knew.

Mom had mailed the photo to me, knowing Caitlin would want me to have it.

She fretted over what to do with my sister’s clothes, her books, and keepsakes. She offered me things Caitlin bought not long before. A juicer and vitamin D lamps, home-exercise kits—evidence of times when she’d been on an upswing. The picture and her stereo were enough for now.

My mom had only one question.

She’d ask it softly: “Are you okay?”

As far as I knew, I was. I had the idea I could carry on this way a long while—the rest of my life—if only to outlive her, so that she’d never lose another child. Thinking about her was what kept multivitamins in the cupboard; sometimes it poured the last sip of booze down the drain. Mom mailed me twenties and handwritten notes, along with letters that showed up for me at her house. Some were from fans of the band, wondering if we’d ever make our way to California, and why we hadn’t already.

D
ad had been clenching the wheel since Denver. The windows were open, and the sun was beating down in a way it never could in Michigan, yet around every other switchback the mountainsides remained buried in snow. It was March. The small Toyota we’d rented at the Denver International Airport hiccupped as it ascended the Rocky Mountain inclines, revving loudly when Dad gunned the engine. Even when the roads leveled out through a valley, he squeezed the wheel as if his next move might be to yank it from the steering column. I saw the tendons in his hands, raised beneath the skin.

Dad used to drive for miles using only his knee to guide our car around the bends; it was the first trick I’d learned upon getting my license. Neither of us had that kind of cocksure attitude anymore. On the flight to Denver, I’d studied my dad as he slept beside me, twitching and murmuring and digging his nails into his arms, which he’d wrapped around himself.

Now that we were on the road, he smiled, taking in the sun and the view and the fact that we were together. With the car chugging up the next ascent, he floored the pedal and shook his head as the car struggled to keep pace with traffic. “Damn rice burner,” he said. “I should have asked for a Ford.”

It was an old joke of his, but Dad took pride in his twenty-some years with Ford Motor—the one thing that had remained constant as everything else went to pieces. As he settled into the drive, he began talking about new endeavors, wistful predictions for retirement. Woodworking was one idea, projects he’d design from top to bottom, something to keep his hands busy.

We were cruising through the mountains for the hell of it, on an impractical journey to the Air Force Academy, which Dad hadn’t returned to since he’d dropped out thirty years earlier. After that, we planned to choose whatever ski resort beckoned us from the road and hit the slopes. It was the most time we’d spent together in years. We were both thinking of Caitlin; I could feel it. Our family had taken a wintertime trip to Colorado, and I remembered my sister skiing behind us in a pink jacket, making no use of her poles, fanning her arms like a runaway snow angel. She must have been eleven. My dad, skiing in blue jeans, yelling, “You gotta turn,” slaloming wide to keep an eye on her as she barreled recklessly down the mountain. “Use your edges.”

The nearer we came to the Academy, the more yarns Dad spun about our surroundings. We passed a mountain town where cadets had once gone drinking on weekends. He pointed at the entrance to a closed-off road that had been rendered unnecessary by the interstate. “There was a bar up there,” he said. “Way at the top. One night some of us got
into it with some bikers and they chased us down the mountain.” He said that as one of his classmates sped the car back to the Academy, he’d looked through the back windshield to see one of the motorcycles lose control and veer over the side of the mountain.

“You think he lived?” I said.

He stared awhile at the road. We were circling back to the flatlands of Colorado Springs, which we’d already passed. I didn’t know if he was giving it some thought or trying to remember if it had happened at all, but I was no stranger to the far-off look that had clouded over his eyes.

“It’s one of those things you just never know,” he said.

T
HE
A
CADEMY WAS AN
official-looking arrangement of austere, geometric buildings. Everything silver tinged, a governmental compound more than a school. In the distance the Rocky Mountains appeared like isosceles hunks of metal. We parked and walked toward the football stadium. Dad wore jeans, an old polo and a disastrous pair of futuristic-looking sneakers. He nodded toward the barracks where he’d lived.

“You had to be up at five
A.M
. to get into formation,” he said. “They’d come by and inspect your room, bounce coins off your bed to see if you’d made it properly. If anything wasn’t done to specs, you’d have to do marching drills instead of lunch. You’d have some prick ordering you to stand on one foot for an hour.”

I was dressed in black. The only thing about me that might have been relevant to the surroundings was my steel-cap boots, scuffed at the toe. How differently, I imagined, my father’s life might have unfolded had he stuck it out here. A military career. He’d have never married my mom, which would have
spared her something. Caitlin and I would have been other people, both of whom might still be alive. The monochrome of the campus and the strictness in the air—it all confirmed how lazy I’d grown over the past several months.

“Man,” I said. “I can’t imagine that.”

I meant waking up to a commanding officer and dressing in uniform and learning to fly, but I could have been talking about anything. Though I wondered if that brand of discipline might be what I needed—a by-the-book blowhard screaming at me each morning to put one foot in front of the other.

Dad took in the view panoramically as we walked toward the stadium.

“It wasn’t bad,” he said. “The first year’s the worst, when you have to spit shine upperclassmen’s shoes. They’d piss their sheets and make you do their laundry. I made it through the worst before I left.”

Inside the stadium’s vestibule were photos of sports teams and pilots and dead heroes. We found my dad’s young face—his blond hair trimmed to the bone—in a group of football players. A few paces down the hallway hung a series of placards titled “Fitness Test Wall of Fame.” Etched into bronze plates were names of cadets who in the span of five minutes had done one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred pull-ups, and leaped a certain number of inches from a standing long jump. We found the placard listing the years Dad had been there. He scanned the names as if expecting to see his.

“It was the long jump,” he said. “I could have done the rest, no problem.”

W
ALKING ONTO THE STADIUM
’
S
mezzanine, we stared down at the green turf of the football field. Dad noted various aspects
of the stadium: the press box, and the benches he’d sat on. Then we stood silently, each of us counting the decades that had passed since he’d been there, all promise, his future so totally unknowable. After a while, Dad made for a restroom and told me to have a look around. He needed a moment to be alone with all that the place conjured in him. I wandered through the stadium corridors, mostly empty, except for several uniformed boys walking with lifted chins, shoulders squared, passing me as if I were some custodial element. At the far end I came across a gift shop and quickly bought a blue baseball cap stitched with the air force insignia, sticking it into my coat pocket.

When I found Dad, he was again meditating on the football field’s hugeness. I joined him at a rail, where the bleachers seemed ready to swallow us—an aluminum gorge so vast and empty I couldn’t imagine it filled, all at once, with people.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s make like a tree.”

We walked out into the sun and started up the Toyota. Puttering off like tourists, we drove a few miles into town in search of a restaurant that was no longer there. Very little Dad remembered of Colorado Springs seemed to remain. We settled on burgers at a sports bar, where I counted every fry he ate, thinking of his heart and what the doctors had advised after his surgery. But—let him enjoy each bite, because, for a moment, we’d escaped. Not from home, which no longer existed, but from all that had come between us.

“I love you,” he said.

He’d been saying that every time I saw him, not before we parted or when he was supposed to, but at unpredictable moments like this one as I wiped ketchup from my mouth and finished chewing. He looked squarely at me, amazed that I was in front of him, with traces of his face in mine.
On the plane, I’d caught his blue eyes glinting in the sunrays that streaked across a cloud, through the oval window, and I’d seen my sister in there. We knew where things stood. I was black-clad and aimless, but I still had a chance to live a better life than he had. No matter where we were, it felt as though we were standing together at the edge of the world. For that, we had no better company than each other.

Before the waiter brought our check, “Kokomo” began playing on the restaurant speakers. To some it was a glaring wound in the Beach Boys’ catalog, a money-grubbing insult to the Wilson brothers’ genius. Dad bit his fist and began sighing violently. He stared into the lamps that hung from the ceiling, then at the air force pennants and memorabilia on the walls.

“Here,” he said, laying too many bills on the table. “I’m gonna step outside.”

At the strum of its first chord, the song had reminded us of the same thing: Caitlin in a pink Hawaiian-print ice-skating costume, scooting across a Dearborn ice rink, twirling clumsily to the beachside melody. She must have performed in four or five of those shows, but it was the year she skated to “Kokomo” that I’d always remember because she fell in love with the song and played it for months on end. She was smiling as she skated, and as she watched the VHS tape of the show again and again, well into the summer.

Outside the restaurant Dad slung his arm around me, and we headed for the car like two people walking away after a gruesome competition our very best efforts had been useless toward winning. He asked me to drive, which was a rare thing. Once we’d seated ourselves inside the car I handed him the baseball cap, and he nearly wept all over again before pulling it onto his head, without thinking to remove
the price tag that dangled by his ear. The sun was still shining above as I turned the key, and we were about to luck into some good radio. I was ready to drive as long as it took. Dad socked me playfully in the thigh, which meant as much as anything we could have said. Then we were moving again, headed back to the mountains.

O
nce I opened my eyes to it, Kalamazoo consoled me like no other place. Life there moved at an alleviating pace, this slacker’s utopia where three-bedroom houses rented for five hundred bucks a month. The one Angela found for us was a dusty-yellow residence at the bottom of a sloped brick-cobbled street. Inside was a wood-burning stove and a piano with splintered keys. On the porch, a two-person swing hung from rusty chains. Angela had taken over the lease from some friends, and I was to sign as soon as I arrived.

Dad offered to haul my belongings in a truck borrowed from Ford. Before he arrived, I scrubbed clean my East Lansing apartment, wiped the ashes from the sills and the tar from the stovetop, hoping he’d see I wasn’t a man to leave behind a mess. Night had fallen by the time we carried my boxes into the yellow house, where Angela stood holding open the door.

“Look at this place.” Dad shoved at the walls to test their fortitude. “Prewar. Nineteen tens, probably.”

He slept on a ratty pink couch that had come with the joint, and it was good to feel as though I had a finger on his pulse for the night. He’d sleep there a few more times, when he returned to repair the kitchen floor or seal the windows with caulk. Our handiwork gave him such enjoyment that he soon began talking about investing in Kalamazoo. Decent houses went for as low as thirty thousand, and with a little work we might turn it into a rental. It sounded lucrative, a sure thing if my dad was willing to take the risk. I vowed to keep an eye out for the perfect bit of real estate.