Songs Only You Know (33 page)

Maybe he’d have liked me to remember him in his prime—when he was fit and self-assured—but working beside him in that house was the best I’d know of him. We passed tools and cursed bent nails. I’d never felt so lucid in his presence, not that we talked much. He focused intensely on the work, speaking only to say, “This is the best time I’ve had in a long while.”

I’d stopped wondering what he might be up to, if he was sober and for how long. Neither of us had much moral ground to stand on; we met on a level field and found we liked each other there. Dad thought Angela was the most delightful woman: this petite, dark-haired student who spoke to him, charmed him, as if he were another of my pals. She teased us about picking up the pace and made him laugh by referring to our basement as “smelling like ass.” “She’s a keeper,” Dad would say, once Angela had gone to bed, as he and I glued the last tiles to the floor. He always stayed up late, until the work was done. In the morning, I’d find a twenty-dollar bill on the kitchen counter and know he’d risen long before.

T
HERE WAS EERINESS TUCKED
inside Kalamazoo’s every nook. Old neon signage and rusted cigarette machines, water pollution,
PCBs in the Kalamazoo River. Unsolved murders. Abandoned paper mills. Lagunas and Skylarks parked on the streets. On the outskirts, certain neighborhoods had the look of salvage yards while another was haunted by youths who prowled the night on bicycles, mugging random loners on their way home from nearby bars—unsettling news that blended a wild, almost delicious fear into the late night walks Andrea and I took. Years before, a mental hospital had closed, and former residents still loitered in the town square, riding unicycles or dressed like Dr. Seuss characters. Angela and I set out to befriend as many of them as we could. One local hero wore an Uncle Sam costume and, when asked how it went, said, “You know me.” A phrase Angela and I put to use whenever it applied, and often when it shouldn’t have: when I was hungover or during the ferocious battles we’d begun staging.

On any given day, we were either at each other’s throats or clinging tightly, laughing, pretending we were the only two alive. The magnitude of what I was coping with intensified our every need, gave our partnership a gravitas far beyond its age. The truth became slippery when I spoke of certain things, wild nights I’d had on the town or, more essentially, any contact I’d had with Lauren. Having been raised on lies, Angela loathed deception with a force that made unspoken truths roil deep within a liar’s soul. She sixth-sensed fakery, impure motives. Once I’d raised her suspicions, my elusiveness began to dominate my character, but we both had a way of surviving on the good times, holding each other as the fallout rained down.

“Sometimes I feel like it’s my art,” she’d say. “Loving you, ya freak.”

“You know me.”

Angela cooked pasta and I took out the trash. There was no one else I could have awoken beside morning after morning,
believing we’d return to the serenity we’d felt together not so long ago. And though our worst behavior would remain secret to everyone but us two, though I brought upon us a kind of hurt that would not easily be healed, I hoped some resonance of my very real love for her might outlast our sorrows. She was family to me, just as she was severing all contact with her parents, a decision I supported woefully and only because she had no other choice.

We lit candles and listened as thunderstorms shook the thin walls.

We hung framed pictures and plants, and on some days our house was nearly a home, yet the place that truly characterized our life together was Mountain Home Cemetery, just west of downtown Kalamazoo. Angela had been first to spot it: a majestic, rolling expanse with fields of crooked headstones rising from the sloped landscape. She and I picnicked there countless afternoons. Out on an errand, whichever of us was driving would turn the wheel to pull between the black iron gates, saying, “It’s our place.”

We always chose a different grave to lie upon feeling passions that arose only when we were among the dead. We stared at the sky as the ants tickled our arms. The cemetery was no place for arguments. It was a reprieve from the yellow house, our marathon feuds, nights of standing red faced, inches from each other, shouting, dressed in nothing but our underwear. My lies tripling in attempt to avoid the pain of earlier lies, to bandage the growing wounds, followed by bouts of heavy drukenness to obliterate all sensation, entirely. Mention of Lauren’s name ruined days on end, but we rarely spoke of my sister. When I felt at the brink of losing control, I’d lock myself in one of the unused bedrooms until Angela would slide an apology beneath the door.

One of us was always saying, “We’re crazy, aren’t we?”

“You know me,” the other would say.

In the cemetery, all that was irrelevant. Here were the graves of unnamed infants, of persons who’d lived twenty years and some who’d made it to ninety. Their stones reminded us what a short time it really was; they seemed to be there for that very purpose.

Other days I drove alone to the cemetery with my guitar to strum chords as I wandered over the graves. I wrote hundreds of tunes with titles like “One Dream or Another” and “You Could Be the Knife.” I’d come around to thinking music was the sole force that could redeem me and soon began heading for Detroit each weekend in an attempt to start a new band. This brought a storm of worry over my relationship, but Angela never once slighted my talents; she believed I had what it takes. The trouble was that the sad, simple music I wanted to make was beyond my range. It might have been the delicate new sounds I was trying to conjure, or the fact I was drinking too much—nothing was coming out right. But once it did, I trusted the songs would aim me in the right direction. They’d speak the truth, even when I couldn’t.

T
HE NEW BAND PRACTICED
on Saturday afternoons and relocated to a bar once night fell. Afterward, I’d arrive late to my mom’s house, where I slept in the basement. In the mornings I’d find her sipping coffee with the newspaper in her lap, Ozzy sprawled on the couch. The workweek exhausted her, but she was glad to have me around, especially when I strummed my guitar.

“Play me something,” she’d say. “Whatever you feel like.”

She’d stowed away her classical music tapes because the concertos reminded her of so many things. Her house was often so quiet you’d hear the clocks ticking and the ice trays contracting
in the freezer. For the first time, I played for her, only for her, the nicest melodies I could find.

Those years wore hard on Mom, but she’d sooner nap through the afternoon than complain. “I’ll just rest my eyes,” she’d say, drifting off on the living room couch. She wrote Angela, talked to her on the phone. They’d begun communicating on a womanly plane far beyond my reach, sharing feelings that had little to do with me. Mom never closed off. Her heartache showed in unusual ways. The U.S. Treasury had issued a series of centennial quarters, and I noticed she’d been depositing these tokens into a coffee cup. She wanted to collect the entire set—all fifty states—in case they’d one day be worth something. The woman who’d hoarded only photos and flowers—I knew she was thinking of the future, of supporting herself over the long haul. Imagining her carrying home those coins, sorting through them alone, brought me closer to tears than anything. I’ll never know the worst of what she felt, only that she never failed to smile the instant she saw me.

Sunday afternoons, we ate lunch on the living room couch. Though Mom wasn’t much for leaving the house, on what would have been Caitlin’s twenty-second birthday she and I drove a mile up Telegraph Road to St. Hedwig’s cemetery, where I saw my sister’s grave for the first time. Mom trimmed the stray grasses around the headstone and removed shriveled flowers people had left there, replacing them with a bouquet of pink roses.

“That’s nice that her friends come to remember,” she said.

I considered returning alone to lie atop the grass. If I were capable of praying, I would have that day, but the only epiphany I had was a piercing new sense of Caitlin’s erasure from my past. Seeing her grave, I felt the severance of our shared memories, felt each memory of her being altered forever by a
gradual understanding that she was never coming back. My blonde-haired partner with whom I’d long ago shared the couch as we scratched each other’s chicken-pox scabs and sang along with
The Monkees
as their harmonized voices dripped from the television—she no longer knew me. She was no longer there to remind me of who I might be.

Mom removed the leaves that had fallen onto Caitlin’s grave. She’d bought the plot next to it, where she intended to lie one day.

“Are you ever mad at her?” Mom said.

It was an invitation to acknowledge our confusion, to say anything at all. She had to ask, because only I might understand.

“I’m never mad,” I said. Though if I felt anything, it was anger. Not at my sister, but at myself, and the rest of us who’d hurt her.

“I am,” Mom said. “Sometimes.”

A
FTER MONTHS OF WEEKENDING
in Detroit, I’d formed a number of bands. Really, I’d put together several versions of the same group, playing with more than fifteen people in the span of a year. Repa came and went, as did Ethan. None of us knew how to play softly, with restraint, which left us muddled in an embarrassing, overaffected style. We had a go at several recording sessions, pestered by botched notes and the dramatic warble of my voice.

An alto, a baritone? I’d yet to decide.

Onstage, our keyboards malfunctioned. The rhythm section rolled out the songs fast and sloppy, maiming the intended earnestness of my latest tunes. Fans from the old days might listen to a song before walking off; at a festival some raised their middle fingers in protest. I received an email sent from a cryptic address, suggesting: “How about you remove your
Tampon and get some balls again.” It was a bust—anyone could see that. But these were the battle stories musicians told, years later, once they’d made their mark. When someone was finally listening.

The night of our second Halloween in Kalamazoo, Angela and I pulled into the driveway to see my parents sitting together on the porch swing outside the yellow house. The street glowed with an October sunset. Nearby, jack-o’-lanterns had already been lit. My dad raised a hand to his forehead and saluted as I put the car in park.

Angela said, “They look so cute like that.”

They could have been schoolmates, rocking gently, the rusted chain creaking as they swayed. Beside each other, they seemed themselves once again. A night like this was as good as it got. My dad’s fifty-second birthday.

“Nice pumpkin,” he said as Angela and I ascended the wooden porch.

I’d carved a pentagram into the orange gourd that sat on the steps—a bit of heavy-metal humor—but an unknown force had caved it in nights earlier. Just then, I was glad someone had booted the thing.

“Trick or treat,” I said.

My parents held hands, smiling, and I didn’t scrutinize it. No one could know our bizarre condition, that when the three of us were together we could nearly grasp some shred of the happiness Caitlin brought us. Her silly, smiling face, or words she’d mispronounced—
ambliance
. We weren’t people who went around feeling wronged by death. We knew it was on us,
whatever happened next, and I hoped my parents would go on holding hands for a long time, keeping alive what they could.

“A porch swing,” Mom said. “I’ve always wanted one.”

I carried a pumpkin pie, concealed in a shopping bag, that I intended to present after we’d gone for dinner downtown and returned to the house. We laughed at our waiter, who was dressed in drag, platinum blonde and diva-like but for his mustache. The entire staff wore unidentifiable costumes, and Mom hadn’t been able to rest until she’d speculated about each of them. “Is he supposed to be Vanna White?” Back at the house, Angela lit candles as the trick-or-treaters arrived, many of them fully grown, bearded, wearing tattered coats and holding open plastic shopping bags.

“You’re kidding me,” Dad said, dropping miniature Snickers into their sacks. “What are you supposed to be, little boy?” He couldn’t get enough of it.

“Tim,” Mom said, in her half-amused way.

As for the few costumed children who made their way up the porch, Dad told them to dig deep into the bucket, to take as much as they could grab.

O
VER THE TWO YEARS
Over the two years we lived together, Angela and I were in such perpetual conflict that I sometimes awoke having no idea where we’d left off the day before. I’d look over at her, breathing softly, such a peaceful sleeper. Sometimes cuddling her awake would be enough to temporarily dissolve all anger, but never our fears. The real tragedy was to be so incapable of closeness, so confused and weak in spirit, I couldn’t embrace what she offered so completely to me—the thing I needed most.

A turning point was the night Lauren called, awakening us in the late hours. Upon answering, I tried to pretend it was
a wrong number, though I’d known who it was from the first word.
Hello?