Songs Only You Know (42 page)

“The paddleboat,” Scott whispered, lurching beside me, and we scampered for it, undocked, and climbed aboard the plastic craft. We chugged alongside the lengthy dock, at the end of which the tattooed figure who’d passed our window was waist deep in the lake, wrenching on a speedboat raised above the tide by a contraption of belts and levers. Its motor was running. His face was smogged behind a wall of fumes.

“Faster,” I said. “Pedal faster.”

We kicked so fiercely that at first the small plastic craft went nowhere as the man turned to us with a wrench in hand. Then we found a rhythm and went sputtering to open waters, watching Warden become little more than a black mange bobbing in the shallows, flailing his arms as if to stop us. We pedaled until the water turned dark beneath, so far from shore the paddleboat shook with each undulation of the gentle tide. For all the lake’s vastness, there wasn’t another undocked boat in the visible distance.

“How deep is this thing?” Scott said.

“Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.”

We sat rocking on the water.

Sometimes I like to think of that as the moment my life changed, or the moment at which I turned away from some alternate future that awaited me. Not that things were any different, once a storm blew over Houghton Lake and we pedaled back to shore, sweating and cursing in the heavy summer rain. It would be a few more years before I could claim any true progress as a human being. In fact, things got worse once I moved to New York and found myself awaking in hospitals or alone in a sleeping bag on the floor of a cruddy Brooklyn sublet, with burns on my arms or broken fingers or empty highball glasses on the nightstand from places I didn’t remember. By then Angela and I would be far beyond repair, blazing to an end no less intensely than we began, so thoroughly ruined that she’d question forever the truth of my love for her; and back home, Will would be dabbling in my father’s drug, and my mom would have a hard time relying on a word I said.

No, it was going to take a whole lot more to right myself, but there on the paddleboat, skidding across the surface of Houghton Lake as Warden trudged through the rain to help pull us
ashore, I’d gone out and turned around, carrying a spirit that began to bloom inside.

Warden hugged me once we’d reached the dank beach.

“That boat ain’t meant for that,” he said. “You could have drowned.”

The rain came down hard, but beneath the motel awning stood the tattooed mechanic, unsmiling, watching us: three freaks, cuddling one another in the downpour. Scott was too expended to speak. We were all breathless, sogged to the bone.

“Man, I’m tired,” Warden said. “I feel like I just screwed.”

W
E WAITED OUT THE
storm inside the motel. When it cleared, we left the room a mess: three pairs of wet trunks hanging off the television and chicken bones on the bedspread. Warden piloted us all the way home. He’d gotten everything he’d come for and took on a perfect mood as the sun set. The rain had ended. There was a shimmering calmness about the wet trees and damp asphalt. You could smell it, coming through the open windows, displacing the stale smoke. From the backseat, Scott strummed the Les Paul that had been doomed for Houghton Lake. None of us said a word about it, though. I dug into the sack of cassettes to split the last pill.

“Just this once,” Scott said, accepting the smaller half. “And never again.”

He also had a long way ahead of him, out of his own trouble; but by the time his first child was born, three years later, he’d be clean shaven and toting around books on self-betterment, calling me on my yearly sober anniversary—so many days without a drop, a slip, or a sip. There are others—Will, especially—I’d like to see healed from the wounds of those days. Scott was the first to show me how to begin, one minute at a time, something like that.

We let Warden play whatever music he wanted, and he bobbed his head to his punk rock favorites, guiding us through a green nowhere. Scott closed his eyes and played along.

Soon enough the hydrocodone softened the edges, and Warden, as if on cue, turned down the music and began speaking about his father, a drunk who’d lived his life in a trailer and had died that year. Who’d known? Warden had been one of a handful at the funeral. He said that when he’d turned seventeen his old man had offered to take him to a hooker, that he’d ditched him at a water park once when he was a kid. He spoke all this as if it were the simplest science there was, nothing to gloom about.

Scott strummed the unamplified Gibson, a gentle scrape of the strings as Warden told it like it was. He didn’t have any particular message; he was talking as he always did, but we waited through the pauses, the way you do when you know you’ll never truly comprehend what it is you’re hearing. The sun was setting as Detroit’s suburbs began sprouting from the land. The billboards and subdivisions gathered, shaping into a tunnel that led the way. We still had miles to go, but Warden was taking it steady, guiding us home.

F
ROM MY BED
, I called everyone in the band and our manager to tell them I was quitting. Ethan said to take a couple days to think about it, and I agreed but said I’d be calling back with the same message. In a matter of weeks, I was on my way to New York, a city I’d never thought about one way or another. I had no business there just yet, other than Angela, but was relieved to sell off the van and my parents’ bed, condensing everything I’d need into a few boxes that could be packed into my station wagon. I turned Samhain over to the care of my mom, who had him declawed. Eventually, she’d claim the cat reminded her of
me—his skittish, nervous way. Or how he always came back, after escaping the house though the back door.

Mom had only seen New York once, for a single day, when she and my dad had sought my sister’s voice with the help of a spiritualist. I hoped I might disentangle from Caitlin once and for all, that I’d slip away from my past amid the crawl of the country’s most incessant place. I never wanted to forget her, only to outrun the memory of who I’d been as her brother.

A couple years later, in the 12-step meetings I’d attend, they’d call moves like this “pulling a geographic.” Getting up and out of Dodge, thinking a change of scenery might allow you to be born anew. I’d spend months sitting in the basements of Brooklyn churches before realizing those survivors were right about a lot of things, so many of them having nothing to do with booze or drugs, exactly, but something they called my spiritual condition. Though once I was able to walk alone down Atlantic Avenue without a second thought for anything but the day—the insane, unknowable possibilities—I felt like someone had died in place of me, that an entire history had happened in order to allow me to save myself. I don’t mean Christ or anyone I’d known or any conscious plan, but some faceless confusion I have no business trying to name.

I was lucky to be anywhere.

I was lonely and exhausted and afraid of everyone I met, but when I awoke each morning, remembering exactly where I was and where I’d been, something as simple as brewing the coffee made me grateful. Made me wonder about the infinite things I was only beginning to enjoy, which somehow added up to the first real triumph of my life. On quiet streets, the flapping of birds’ wings echoed against the brownstone, and from the river the boats could be heard moaning in the night.
Music played everywhere, sometimes bittersweet to hear. Sometimes a gift in that I’d at last learned how to listen, to appreciate the creation of a great tune in a way only someone who’s written hundreds of bad ones can. To find one of my band’s old albums, discarded in the used bin at an East Village record shop, was to hold it for a moment and remember our songs, hoping they’d remain there among the others, growing dusty and silent.

As I was packing my books, about to move away from Dearborn, I found the letter Caitlin had written me, folded inside my twenty-second birthday card. By that time it was nearly five years old. I’d never have said that there weren’t a thousand things I would have done differently or that I didn’t wish she were here in my place. I’d ask myself: If I could tell her one thing, would it be
I’m sorry
or
I love you
? So many things she’d wished for never came to be—that we’d spend a day laughing as we had when we were children. Some pain never vanishes, only subsides. But once I’d read her letter several times, until I lay shaking on the floor of the house I was soon to leave, I discovered something in it that let me know she wanted me to live.

It wasn’t so much her words but a special rhythm within the sentences. I heard her voice, the way everything she’d said was about wanting to know who I was.

The picture of us as children sits on my desk.

A poster she gave me is framed on my wall.

There are days when I’ll think I see her on the subway or at a concert or in line at the movies. Always a lone girl, often someone shaped nothing like her; sometimes she even has black hair. Maybe it’s that I’ll feel her near me before I even look, and when I do it’s what’s in the girl’s eyes that is familiar. Caitlin had lonely eyes—there’s no way around it. So I smile
until she knows it’s her I’m smiling at, until the crowd shifts and she is gone. Once or twice I’ve stopped on the street, believing, if for a millisecond, that my dad was approaching. A stocky man with thin hair combed across his forehead, striding muscularly forward, gazing intensely ahead, searching for what I imagine to be his family. I realize I’m the age he was when I was born—twenty-seven—but soon enough I’m older, finally learning to carry with me the love he was able to give while leaving behind so much that belonged to him and him alone. Only when the man catches me staring do I turn away, allowing myself to pretend it’s my father, both of us on our way to something good.

M
OM AND
I
ARE
in a Brooklyn hotel, lying in separate beds and watching old movies, whatever comes on the television. It’s Mother’s Day 2009, and I’m feeling myself for the first time in a couple of weeks. I’ve lost eight pounds; my hair is matted to my head after days of having sweated myself dry. My hands tremble. My kidneys ache. Mom grasped her chest when she first saw me. She and I drift in and out of awareness, all day long. She sleeps just as much as I do, though she’s not sick. Yet she coughs as she dreams, her nervous tic manifesting itself even when she’s at rest. Sometimes, with a deep, bronchial rasp, she wakes herself to ask, “Are you still there?”

“Right here,” I say, looking over, knowing she’ll remember.

The swine flu scare is still flashing on the news, media pandemonium, but I’ve made my way through the worst of it—an early case I must have contracted from my morning subway ride or the crowded coffee shops where I drain pots and read slowly and carefully the first books I’ve opened in years. When I’m up to it, Mom and I will walk over to an Italian place we like,
where I won’t be able to get much down. Her favorite spot is the Botanical Garden, though we won’t make it there today. She makes do with the restaurant, a changeless Brooklyn establishment that feels passed down from the old country. “These are real Italians,” she says, thrilled to see only this crevice of the giant world I’ve moved to. Our being together is what matters. I’m weak and clammy, just beginning to believe I’ve beaten the virus. But before Mom’s eggplant Parmesan arrives, we’ll get to talking, the same conversation we’ve been having for a while now, an ongoing story no one but us would have the patience for.

We come a little closer to it, and let it go again. We hear their voices, speaking to us in every tone they took over the years. We forget certain angles of their faces and nuances of their moods, only to remember them together—she and I. Finding happiness inside our memories is what’s hardest; but I believe we will. Sometimes we leave them be, and then they’re there in our smiles, with us during the seconds we hold on to each other, just a little longer, as the taxi honks in the street.

“LaGuardia Airport,” I tell the driver.

Mom’s suitcase swings from my arm, a blue floral ribbon tied around its handle so that she knows it’s hers. Soon she, too, will be moving. Far north, to the most beautiful part of Michigan, a quiet place that will seem made for her and that, because she’s there, I will think of as home.

I say, “I’m gonna call to make sure you get back all right.”

“Okay,” she says. “Don’t worry if I don’t answer. You know how I am with the phone.”

The cab door opens, and this is when it hurts to watch her go. But I’m here, feeling this moment, without a song or lyric in mind. I see the lines in her face, the faintest age spots on her neck—so much time in the sun, digging in her garden. The
years have complicated her smile, and she’s beautiful as ever, those great blue eyes somehow larger than before as they take me in. Caitlin’s earrings dangle from her lobes, though Mom hasn’t mentioned them. She doesn’t have to.

“You look great,” I say.

And she says, “I hate to see you so pale, so skinny,” because she knows it won’t be long, this time, before the worst has passed.