Songs Only You Know (34 page)

Angela knew the same thing by the look on my face.

By then she’d found letters I’d hidden, birthday cards. She’d found long, light brown hairs on the headrest in my car.

“You should see yourself,” Angela said. “You can’t tell the truth. You don’t know how.”

What wasn’t a lie was that I had no idea how Lauren had gotten hold of our number. Whether I’d given it to her in case of some terrible emergency, or if she’d gone so far as to acquire it elsewhere. I had seen her, secretly, back in Dearborn. Never for scandal, but to steal a moment in which we could pretend we still knew each other. Or to say good-bye a thousand times. Her call threatened the fragility of our connection, told me everything I needed to understand. She’d wanted to hear my voice, no matter the cost.

N
OT LONG BEFORE
I left Kalamazoo for good, I stole three gravestones from the cemetery. I’d come upon a cluster of them that had collapsed onto the grass, rudely neglected. Their surfaces were blasted by sun and worn by decades of rain. I could barely make out a name or the years of the life span they marked but felt the power they held as I laid my hands upon them.

“What if they haunt us?” Angela said, once I’d lugged the tablets from my trunk to arrange them in our backyard.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s no such thing.”

“You’re a crazy man,” she said.

“You know me.”

Eventually an anonymous neighbor called the police, who removed the stones and questioned Angela about the home’s owner or anyone around there who seemed of suspicious
character. She’d never noticed, Angela said, the stones or anything else. “And your housemate? Anything about him that seems off?”

Perhaps it was crazy, despicable; yes, I suppose that’s true. But I believed we’d pay reverence to those forgotten monuments, more than anyone else. If we had visitors, I waited until the end of the night to walk them to the backyard, leading them to the display: all three gravestones leaned against the garage, beside a dried-up garden. Usually, the sun was just beginning to light the yard, the birds cawing. Most people became spooked, turning away the moment they comprehended what they were seeing. When Will finally came to visit, he made it clear that he understood. He kneeled to the scuffed tablets and ran a palm over the stone, whispering, “Dust to dust.”

I
dragged my futon piece by piece from the car, wrangling the metal beams into an alleyway Dumpster. The mattress was tied to the roof of my car, which was packed with boxes. Finally, I lobbed the cushion over the Dumpster’s edge, stuffing it in as deep as it would go. A British album yawned through my car’s windows, a spacey, bittersweet melody. The mattress had been the last thing. The rest I’d gotten over with quickly, ditching much of what I owned at a nearby Salvation Army. Only a bathrobe—as I smothered it into a trash bag—made me cringe, thinking of Angela giving it to me in a wrapped lump for my birthday.

She’d signed a lease on a new apartment a few blocks from the yellow house. I’d planned to rent a place nearby, until one last fight spurred another cross-state migration. Headed for my mother’s basement. Twenty-four years old. To achieve the right mind frame about things, I convinced myself that the musical secrets awaited in Detroit. Sacrifices—material and otherwise—would only draw me closer. Not to mention, I’d be twenty-seven soon
enough, the golden age of the perishable greats: Cobain, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison.

And what did I have? Three years left.

It was May of 2003.

“This is your home,” Mom said, when I arrived. “You’re always welcome here.” Then, in a kind tone, “But you wouldn’t want to stay forever, would you?”

If there was shame in this, I was beyond it. I vowed to be out by autumn and back to school. Truly, I was counting on the band tapping new inspiration. We’d do it like the old days, hop in a van to take the music city to city. Someone in a swank coastal office, catching drift of our passion, would wire us all the money we’d need. After that the true lift would begin, the one I’d never need to come down from.

But musicians these days had steady jobs and girlfriends. They had ganja habits and rent to pay. By July it was clear the band’s schedule wasn’t going to change on account of my freed-up nights. I had a couple thousand socked in a checking account. To stretch that out, I’d cut up my debit card and carried a checkbook everywhere, buying cigarettes and protein bars at grocery stores in order to write the checks for twenty bucks over—thirty when the cashier allowed it. People got a charge out of this. “Hey,” they said. “You got your checkbook?” I was outsmarting ATM fees while duping myself into having too little pocket cash to drink heavily.

At the end of a night, I’d have burned through my twenty spot, finding myself adhered to some barstool blowhard who’d been keeping me in shots. Some of them accepted my scrawled-out payments, written a few bucks over for the hassle.

“You cheapass,” they’d say. “Have one on me.”

In the bar, at a party, in someone’s apartment—there was always music, and I’d started resenting every note. All the more
if the songs were good, flowing with a genius I could not, for the life of me, call my own. New sounds from New York, Montreal, Portland, all of it so many miles ahead.

For the many hours spent trying, I hadn’t learned how to sing, how to distinguish the pitch of one note from the others as they rose from my lungs. I’d yet to hear my voice, whatever true sound it desired to make—I did everything to sound like someone else, a tuneless composite of a hundred singers who were not me. Through pay phones outside random bars, I began calling Will to leave the same harebrained message,
Wanna hear the sound of a man aging ten years in the span of thirty seconds?
before setting loose one of my old howls, pulling it through my chest, holding on to the wail as long as I could. And what if those screams did peel the minutes off your life? Like a cigarette, an X-ray.

L
ATE THAT
J
ULY, ONE
of Dad’s nieces was getting married near Detroit. Angela agreed to accompany me to the wedding. Two hours, one hundred and forty miles—the distance between us had no effect. We’d already begun sweetening each other through the phone. I’d driven to see her, visiting her new apartment until we began feuding over our unsolvable problems. But seeing Angela arrive in a black sleeveless dress, her hair pinned and her green eyes rife with everything she knew and wanted—I had no immunity to that. A swift maneuver into each other’s arms, and we were right back to it.

At the reception, she and I sat in a corner as the DJ spun songs we’d heard all our lives. There was an open bar and Macarena prancing. Dad’s family passed by with the usual
how do you dos
, while Angela kneaded the scruff of my neck. She was aware of my every tic, had phrases to address my many modes of anxiety. “Easy, now,” she said to each whiskey I knocked back.
“Slow and steady wins the race.” Red lipstick; a silver necklace lay just below her throat. With such little flourishes her beauty became dangerously obvious, and the fact I was beside her seemed satisfactory evidence that I had a life to speak of. It felt inevitable that we’d one day exchange vows, alone and in a place where there’d be no further ceremony than the two of us clasping hands.

“It means a lot that you came,” Dad said, every time he made his way to us.

His smile was clumsy. I worried that he’d had a few, but he looked vital as ever, filling out his suit, shuffling in his honky way to the disco pulsing the room. While Angela was using the ladies’ room, he took me aside in a corridor outside the reception. We heard the music, the clatter of glasses. The celebration was really just beginning, but Dad put a tough arm around me, nuzzling me to his chest, knowing my business was done there. A glorious thing: the strength that remained in his arms. I felt he could crush me, Paul Bunyan the whole of me above his head as he had when I was a child. Yet there was something else—as Angela appeared, striding toward us—the slightest change in his eyes that let me know that wherever I was headed, or who I’d become, was all right by him.

I remember clearly the last thing he said to me:

“That’s all that matters. That you were here.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER
I was pacing the living room, stamping over the fake Chinese rug, tracing its patterns with my feet. I reached for Ozzy as he wended past, blindly sniffing for my mother. She’d gone out for the night to a book club or a movie—never anything more. She was soon to return, and I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing. I’d been on the phone so long its earpiece was moist with sweat.

Angela was talking, crying.

We were ending it again, this time through a long-distance call.

“That’s it,” she said. “Write songs about me or whatever you’re gonna do, but don’t call when you get lonely.” The message was nothing new, but her insistence felt more permanent than ever before. “You don’t even want me at your shows.”

“All right,” I said. “There’s no other way.”

“Don’t talk to me like you talk to everyone else. I gave you everything I could.”

It wasn’t a question of love. It’s that it was no way to live—spiraling through our private terror, each of us knowing what levers to pull in order to collapse the other. We’d dedicated so much to our struggle that I had no energy to face the larger problems, which might have been the reason we whipped things into a crisis every week or so. The spinning wheels, a centrifugal avoidance of the larger themes.

“I’m serious,” Angela said. “This time.”

And if I could just avoid her face, I’d slip beyond her weakening, spellbinding charms, and soon enough it would be over.

We hung up. No apologies. None of the open-ended gestures we usually tossed out at the conclusion of our battles; no hesitation in our voices, no softening tone as we said, “Okay, bye.” Staring at the phone, I wanted to talk with someone who could see the future. Thoughts of a bar terrified me in moments like that, when there’d be no telling what I’d do or where I’d wind up. I knew to stay in, put on a record with the hope of slumbering through it.

Outside the windows, the summer sun had gone under.

Through the opened windows came the trickle of my mother’s garden pond.

Some things—maybe they happen the way they’re meant to. Years pass, and you look back at certain instances, wondering if there’s a cosmic order to life’s whirling events. What I did next, of all things, was dial my dad’s condo. It had been years since I’d come to him for anything but the most practical advice about income taxes and torn engine belts. I doubt that I intended to tell him about Angela. I’d only wanted to hear his voice, hoping it would convince me that I’d live a long time, convey some brand of hard-earned wisdom only a father is capable of passing to his son.

The phone rang, and what an awful feeling that brought on. Since Caitlin’s death, waiting out those chiming seconds could induce a speedy, paranoid frenzy. I’d jittered through it many times when I rang anyone dear to me and couldn’t get through. More than once I’d phoned my mom only to be terrified by her answering machine, the gentle clearing of her throat before she spoke,
I’m not home
. I’d call her neighbors, asking them to go, please, check on her house, her car. See if the lights are on. She’d done the same, if only to hear my voice and say, “I had the worst feeling.”

Dad’s line rang once or twice. It was nine or ten o’clock, a weeknight.

My uncle answered, the new husband of my dad’s youngest sister. A friendly electrician I already felt I knew better than any of Dad’s brothers. He’d lost a son to a car accident and had the wounded eyes to match.

It was the thinness of his voice as he spoke my name.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

He said, “Now, where are you? Who’s there with you?”

And I said, “No. No, no, no.” Not because I didn’t believe it but because I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get on with whatever was about to happen.

E
XCEPT FOR THE KITCHEN
, Mom’s house was dark. I sat Buddha-style on the floor with a guitar, my back to the cupboards, strumming open chords I’d pilfered from Nick Drake.

The tones rang over the linoleum. Soon enough, turning around the notes here and there, I was onto a new tune, one of my own.

“What is it?” Mom said, as she came through the back door.

She could tell the instant I looked up at her that something was no damned good.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“What?”

“Let’s go to the living room.”

“What?” she said. “What?”

She took a seat on an ottoman that matched her favorite chair, leaving the chair itself for me. I leaned my guitar against it. The light from the kitchen softened the edges of the room. Mom sat upright, wearing a sundress, her purse in her lap. Her arms were freckled, sunburned, a late-summer tint. Ozzy came right to her, and she stroked his spine with the nervous momentum another woman might have used to light a smoke.

I wanted to be a man, to say it quick, tell it like it was.

“Dad’s dead.”

Her eyes shifted. Then she winced so tightly it appeared as though she were grinning, this brief, puzzling instant being the last she’d ever be free of the undesirable truth I’d spoken into the room. She didn’t want to know, not just yet.

“What do you mean?” she said.

I stood and moved toward her. I put my arms around her. There was no man, now, in our lives. Not anymore. I felt it—not the loss of him but the fact that there was no one to help us.

She said, “What are we gonna do?” She brought her hands to her face, pulling them away to say, “How?” Saying, “No. Don’t
tell me. I don’t want to know … Tim,” she said in a harsh voice, as if calling him from somewhere in that house in which he’d never lived.

There was no way of imagining the flood of memories passing through her. Twenty-two years of marriage; children, homes, anniversaries. The teenage boy across Evangeline Street, thirty years before. As she crumpled onto the ottoman, I couldn’t guess what picture of his face arose in her thoughts. It was she who’d seen him at his best. His finest day—surely he’d spent it with her, with us, in a Dearborn backyard, tossing me a baseball across our trimmed lawn, hamburgers cooking on the grill and Caitlin soaring on the swing set he’d cemented into the ground, next to a garden boxed with railroad ties he’d dug for Mother’s Day … nineteen eighty-something.