They are more than you should have. I want you to know that.
But this, this too: I have more than I deserve. You hold what I lost, and I lost what I would not hold. You were a shit and you were innocent, and I’m as appalling as I am mundane. Balance and counterbalance and the universe doesn’t mind which, so long as the whole remains the same.
Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t; your close-mouthed smile gives nothing away.
I delete your photo and pick up the phone. I make the arrangements; I choose the lining and the finish and the words for the service. I pay the man who towed the wreckage and another man for a rental car. I unshroud the photos and put them back on the walls. I don’t cry but I can feel the place where the tears might be. I call my mother.
I’m okay, I say. Let me talk to them.
My children’s voices, small and serious and questioning.
It’s okay, I say. I’m here. It’s time to come home.
THE HEARTBREAKS
“LET’S GO,” MY BROTHER SAID.
He was leaning against the kitchen door, his Levis slung from his hips and his thumbs hooked in his empty belt loops. His white shirt hung open despite the chill in the air. He hadn’t bothered to do it up or maybe he couldn’t; I’d found a button gleaming on the floor like a pearly tooth when I’d cleaned up after. The tree lights blinked on and off behind us, reflecting on tinsel and dappling his skin with yellow red green. You could barely see the bruises along his cheekbone and jaw, and I’d already taped up the worst of his ribs. Looking at my brother standing there grinning at me, you wouldn’t know what had happened. You would not know what we’d done. The Christmas dishes were stacked on the dishrack, the broken glass swept up and the linoleum scrubbed because I’d needed something to do, something to keep my hands busy and my mind from eating itself, something that would put things back together again. After dad started in on Eric.
“Where?” I said.
Eric gave me a slow smile. “We’ll take the van, head south across the line. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. We got family in San Fran.”
The tree lights blinked yellow red green. Wait stop go.
My brother shifted, rubbed his ribs. “Fuck it, Jude. Let’s just get out of here.”
And I went, for I would have followed my brother anywhere in that winter of 1978. Eric grabbed his smokes and was barely stubbing out by the time I’d stuffed his Adidas bag with underwear and socks, a couple of t-shirts — Blondie for me, Led Zep for him, the old Stones shirt both of us wore — and our toothbrushes in the same plastic bag because it didn’t matter much if they touched, not back then. My heart was punching like a piston with the need to get out, to go, but I remembered my cherry cola Lipsmacker and a tube of dried-out mascara I had to spit on to use. I was sixteen. I was sixteen, and there might be boys and how this sent my thoughts reeling, away from the broken glass and blood and dead weight of his body, and onto those California surfer boys, who wouldn’t know I was too small and too smart, who’d never seen me slinking through the halls of high school with gnawed fingernails and my brain buzzing on smokepit weed. But no matter how I tried for the smirking nonchalance Eric did so well, I still aced algebra and got one hundred percent on history tests, those numbers and names and dates still unrolled under my hand like ticker tape. My brother felt sorry for me and let me roadie for his band. They called me ‘Jude’ and ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Don’t make it bad’, and they passed me beer and smokes. You wouldn’t know I wasn’t one of them.
I gnawed at my thumbnail while Eric called Dave from our hall phone. I could hear him whispering with his hand cupped against the receiver. “Tell Rob and Mark to get their stuff together, it’s happening.” My gut twinged; what was happening? “Yeah, you can bring Sheri if there’s room.” Sheri was with Dave now, after the thing with Rob didn’t work out and Mark’s girlfriend found out about the other thing. Sheri called everyone sweetie and I wasn’t sure I liked her.
“Karen,” I mouthed. “Get him to call Karen.”
Karen was my friend or at least she was in Grade 11 like me, and sometimes we shoplifted nail polish and gum from Woodward’s, and once we drank the lemon vodka she’d stolen from her dad’s liquor cabinet, and had ended up laughing and screaming and stumbling across the railway tracks and into the woods. Karen fell over when she tried to pee against a log, and passed out flat on her back with her legs beetled out and her feet hooked up in her jeans. She made me walk behind her on the way home to hide the wet patch on her bum. Karen had done it with three boys already or so she’d said, and I hadn’t told anyone else because I didn’t have anyone to tell, and because I knew what happened after you had sex, what with the pregnancy and heartbreak and insults inked on washroom walls, I didn’t want any of that stuff to happen to Karen. So yeah, I guess you could say we were friends.
We kept the tree lights blinking on and off when we left the house. It wouldn’t have looked right otherwise.
When we picked up Dave, he had a stupid smirk on his face and Sheri clinging to his arm. Both of them piled into the van in a tangle of arms and legs, with Sheri giggling and wafting Love’s Baby Soft perfume over the odour of Dave’s smoke-stained jean jacket. Dave pushed up his shades and told us that Rob was spending Christmas in Vancouver with his girlfriend, and Mark was flat out broke again and working graveyard shifts at the mill. Eric let out the slow whistle that meant yeah, figured as much, and put the van into reverse. Dave had pulled out his gear and started to roll up before we got to the end of the street.
Karen waved us down from the bus stop and Eric gave her the front seat while I shoved in beside Sheri and Dave. Karen got car sick, or so she said. She sat too close to Eric and flipped through our shoebox of cassette tapes, swinging her long ashy hair and wavering between Blondie and Fleetwood Mac. Eric didn’t say anything even though he hated both. He took the tape from Karen and slid it in the player, and when Dreams came on, he sang along in a squeaky falsetto.
Girls liked Eric. They phoned in breathy giggles and showed up at the house looking tear-stained and desperate. They took me aside at school to ask where Eric was playing that weekend and if he had any groupies yet. Sometimes they passed me notes written in strawberry-scented ink, their names in loopy script with heart shapes dotting the ‘i’s. Karen would read each one and laugh.
“Too easy,” she’d say. “Too young, too fat, too dumb. Besides, Eric needs to focus on his music if he’s ever going to make it big.”
Eric had bleached blond hair that flipped out perfectly and a way of looking at you, all sleepy eyes and parted top lip, before he smiled long and slow. The teachers had called him a dope until he dropped out, and our dad had called him a faggot pretty much ever since. The guy who wrote the music reviews for the local paper called him the poor man’s Peter Frampton, a shoo-in for the checkout girls and millworker’s wives. The comparison confused Eric. Goes without saying, he’d said, we’re all poor round here. But my brother could sling a guitar at the end of a song — Wild Thing, Get it On, Satisfaction — with his hair hanging and his foot kicking the last notes away. Sexy, said the girls.
“Hey Captain,” Dave’s voice was pinched and thin with pent-up smoke. “Captain Beefheart? Where you taking us, Captain Beefheart?”
“Bee Fart,” Sheri giggled. “Oh my God.”
Eric ignored them both and addressed me. “I called Larry. You remember Larry?”
I remembered Larry. He was some kind of cousin of ours on our mom’s side, one of our relatives who’d drifted in and out of barbecues and weddings, one of the faces at her funeral. Larry had made and broken bands over the years, and he’d hauled heavy equipment for Eric one summer. Larry was a talented beer drinker and he could flip his bottle cap into any receptacle: a trash can, a Styrofoam cup, and once, even Sheri’s thrust-up cleavage.
“Larry’s stage crewing in San Francisco. At Winterland. Bill Graham’s Winterland, I’m not shitting you, Bill fucking Graham.”
“Oh my God, like the evangeli
st? Larry got born again?” Sheri’s eyes were wide.
“Not Billy, Bill. Bill Graham’s a concert promoter.”
Dave sat up, sobering at the name. “No way. You bring our demos?”
Eric grinned at him in the rearview mirror.
“You’re gonna be so famous!” Karen poked him in the ribs and only I saw the wince.
“Yeah well, we got to get to the man first. Larry doesn’t know if he can swing it, short notice like. But he’s going to get us into a concert. He says he can do that. Through the back door maybe, but still. Winterland. In San Francisco.” Eric drew the syllables out like when he was teaching me to smoke.
“Who we gonna see?”
“Oh my God, tell me it’s Blondie. Or Fleetwood Mac. So bummed I couldn’t see them in Vancouver cuz my mom wouldn’t let me miss school. Like I would miss school.” This was Karen, and it was true; I remembered her sulking through most of last September, hiding out in her bedroom and playing the album over and over, turning up the volume until her mother had stomped upstairs and pulled the plug.
“Depends on what day we get there. We missed Springsteen. But Larry said the Grateful Dead’s playing on New Year’s Eve.”
Dave thrust his joint over the front seat. “Better toke up, Captain. You’re not stoned enough for the Dead.”
“No one’s stoned enough for the Dead.” Sheri giggled.
Eric inhaled and passed the joint to Karen. “Keep it low,” he said to her, “you know how the cops look for any excuse to bust my ass. And no more, Dave, you hear? Van’s stinking of weed and we got the border crossing in a couple of hours.”
“Jesus. You sound like your dad.”
I stiffened. But Eric just grinned and flipped Dave the bird, told Karen to switch the tape to Springsteen. Thunder Road, Tenth Avenue Freeze-out, Born to Run. It didn’t matter that it was the dead of winter and getting dark and beginning to snow; when the chorus came on, we all howled along.
You could have called my brother and me cold-blooded. You could have called the others stupid to ask no more questions about where we were going that cold December day, and why. You could have wondered at that. The cops did, later.
The dark chased us through the canyon and gathered in the mountain shadows, and was creeping into the van by the time we passed through Hope. Eric put on the new Springsteen album and the songs were sadder, slower. Karen curled up in the front seat, her feet stretched towards Eric, and Sheri cuddled into Dave. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes, lulled by the slow fall of snow.
Just before the Sumas border crossing, Eric pulled over into a farmyard drive.
“Get rid of your stash,” he ordered.
Sheri looked at Dave. Dave stared ahead, glassy-eyed.
“Oh man,” he said. “Oh man.”
My brother swung around in his seat and glared. “I mean it, Dave. I’m not going through with a couple of minors and a van full of smoke.”
I slid open the van door and fanned in the cold manure-scented air.
Dave fumbled in his jean jacket pocket and produced a baggie with a few flakes at the bottom. He shook it at Eric with a currish grin. His teeth were flecked with green.
“You swallowed it?”
Sheri giggled. “When we went through Hope. It’s those mountains, they make him nervous.”
Eric slapped the steering wheel, and stared ahead, said nothing for a long moment. “Okay. So here’s how it’s going down. Dave, go back to sleep and Sheri, for the love of Jesus, shut up. Karen, you get in the back seat and Jude, you come up front and look all innocent-like.”
“You don’t think I look innocent?” Karen tucked her chin and widened her eyes.
Eric gave her a slow grin. “No one’s gonna take you for my baby sister. Naw, we’re cousins, and we’re on the way to Grandma’s house for the rest of the holiday.”
“Oh man, Gramma’s house,” said Dave. “Hope she baked cookies.”
Sheri’s laugh was cut short by Eric’s glare.
The border guard waved us through, after a few cursory questions and quick look inside the van, after Eric called him sir and asked him about the weather and the roads and the holiday traffic. His tone was casual yet respectful, the mirror of the voice Dad used when Mom was still alive and we’d haul the trailer across the line to camp at Long Beach. Our parents would spread the picnic blanket over a driftwood tipi and drink cheap jug wine underneath, leaving us to slap around in the waves and poke at the tidal pools, to play pinball on the pier and do pretty much whatever else we wanted. That was when Dad was still okay. Or when Mom was still there to rein him in.
The road seemed longer on the other side. The snow had stopped and the pavement unrolled smoothly under the van’s tires, with the white lines glowing like runway lights. A neat line of fences held back the dark of the forest. I pushed up the window vent. The air smelt different here, soft with the promise of the Pacific, sharp with cedar and the excitement of going somewhere.
Eric put Springsteen back into play, and the songs made more sense somehow.
We stopped at a motel late that night, on the outskirts of some nameless town close to the Oregon line. Sheri and Dave took one bed and Karen and I the other. Eric wrapped himself in a couple of blankets and stretched out on the floor. I could sense him there awake after the others were asleep.
“Are you thinking about it?” I whispered.
“Nope.”
“We shouldn’t have just left him there. Like that. What happens if he wakes up?”
“He sees that we aren’t there. He sobers up. Then he gets drunk again. He looks around for something to kick. It’s not gonna be me and it’s not gonna be you, okay?”
“Still.”
“Go to sleep, Jude.”
And because it was my brother telling me, I did. Because it was my brother lying on the floor next to me, I didn’t ask the other question, the one that had been lodged in my brain all through the trip: what if he doesn’t wake up?
At some point that night I woke up in a sharp panic, sweating, the teeth of a dream pulling at my limbs. A sense of dread, a terrible black guilt. What if, what if? Eric breathed beside me, slow and steady, and eventually I fell back to sleep.
With morning came the madness of three girls sharing a bathroom, and I forgot to worry when Sheri French-braided my hair and Karen smoothed frosted green eyeshadow on my lids with her pinky. Eric looked up from the map he’d found in the motel reception when I came out, but he said nothing and I felt shrunken somehow, like a little girl playing dress up.
Dave was slumped on the edge of the motel bed, bleary-eyed. He stood up, sat down, stood up again and studied his feet.
“Something’s wrong with my shoes,” he announced. “They got bigger. Or my feet got smaller.”
“You’re in the States, sweetie,” said Sheri. “The sizes are different here.”
“Oh,” said Dave, and sat down again.
We were on the road and looking for breakfast before it occurred to me.
“Eric, I don’t have any money. I mean, I have ten dollars in my purse. But they don’t take Canadian here, do they?”
Karen whispered, “You goof. Didn’t you get it changed first?”
Eric looked at her, then at me. “We got enough.”
And when he paid for our hamburgers and shakes, I saw the envelope he’d tucked in his jacket pocket, stuffed with the faded green notes. I wondered for the first time if he’d planned this trip, if escape had been in his mind all along.
Karen started in when we crossed the Interstate Bridge into Portland. Not about the bridge, which looked like a lacy undulating caterpillar, but about how she’d always wanted to see the coast, the long-haired surfer boys and big rolling waves, the brown sugar sand and starfish pools, but she never had because her mother was a bitch and never let her go anywhere.
“Interstate’s a lot faster.” Eric was smiling, but he stared straight ahead.
Karen pouted and snuggled into my brother. �
�Please?”
Eric laughed, and told her to unfold the map to look for an exit.
Sheri raised an incredulous lip at me. Dave was still sleeping it off and she had no one to talk to.
The coast threw its weather at us; stabbing rain, clouds of fog and a wind so strong the van rocked and bucked. Eric inched along, his hands clenched on the wheel. Karen sucked at a hangnail and even Sheri shut up. We stopped just outside Newport to see the view. Dave grumbled something about cookies when Sheri tried to poke him awake, so we left him the back of the van while we followed a sandy path to the edge of a cliff. The ocean roiled and bucked far beneath the clotted clouds, and the setting sun left threads of dirty blood red. My stomach churned.
“Maybe we should stop for the night.” Eric could do that sometimes; catch what I was feeling and say it aloud.
The motel room was cold and clammy, and the foghorn echoed all night long. Karen sighed and jerked next to me, until she announced she couldn’t sleep, and that no one could sleep with that damn thing blaring so she was going out for a smoke. The door slammed behind her. Eric swore softly from his place on the floor, then grabbed a blanket and followed. I could hear their muffled voices outside, back and forth in muted argument.
No one was much in a mood for talking the next day. We stopped for lunch at a rundown beach town, its surf shops and hot dog stands boarded up for the season, and spread our gas station sandwiches on a damp picnic table. Karen refused to eat and cast a forlorn look at my brother, her hair whipping around her face, before she announced that she needed some time alone. Sheri said maybe that would be a good idea. The two of them glared at each other before Dave grabbed at Sheri and pulled her onto his lap. I thought of following Karen, started after her even, but the sand dragged at my feet and the surf crashed from the distance. Sh sh, it said. All things pass.
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