Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  She does too, her face bunting against mine like a cat claiming ownership of its keeper. “A song about what?” she purrs.

  “Love,” I murmur back.

  “There are words to express it?”

  “We’re gonna find out.”

  If I have to pull it out of her. I can’t go any longer without knowing how she feels.

  Love makes me feel hungry, like I haven’t eaten in days. I couldn’t eat if I wanted to anyways. Because love is like a nerve on the end of my skin, sensing and feeling, taking it all in. Consuming, it wants to matter more than anything else. Confusing, love gets me ahead of myself. Out on a limb, up on a wire, love isn’t happy until it’s on fire.

  All true, but awful, she says so herself: “What a cruel irony. My parents were songwriters. I write decent papers. I love words! How can I suck so badly at stringing them together.”

  “It’s the verse form,” I empathize, having struggled with it myself. You’re starting from scratch, no texts, no sources, no given material to regurgitate. Songwriting is the art of expressing one’s self, concepts that are notoriously hard to express.

  “Is there a formula?” The achiever in her could master that.

  “If you figure it out, let me know.” I close the notebook. The song is cute. It’s from her. I’m keeping it. Then turning to devour her kiss, “Love makes me feel hungry too,” I wisecrack. God, it does.

  It’s a new year. The first year my mother will start sober since before her addiction began. Is it a forecast of years to come?

  Grayson said now should be a good time to visit, having allowed her a few months to acclimate to the environment, the routine, the surrender that recovery requires. None of it happens overnight, he said.

  Awaiting clearance, I fidget with the necklace Ace gave to me for Christmas—two halves of a black crystal heart encircling a diamond.

  The diamond makes sense. It is our birthstone. The saleslady told Ace that a diamond represents new beginnings, love, and open nature—trust—with which one comes into the physical realm. The love and trust that we, as newborns coming into physical existence, thrived upon in those ovens.

  “A black heart?” I questioned, leery of putting it around my neck. What if it choked the life from me. Even haloing the luminous symbolic diamond, isn’t a black heart completely opposite of love, open nature, new beginnings? Sorrow, lack of emotion, death? Or is it a little dark humor, the sentimentality of it all a bit too much.

  “Dark, shrouded, shadowing the sun—a total eclipse of the heart,” he said with a smile.

  The way his beat for mine when we were newborns. There is love even in darkness. A black heart is the most romantic gift I’ve ever received.

  “I’ll never take it off,” I whispered, turning my back to him and holding up my hair as he clasped the necklace on.

  It is as melodramatic as the vinyl album I gifted him—Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell. Forty years old and one of the “best-selling albums of all time,” it was the most unforgettable of the tens I sampled. Beethoven meets rock meets Broadway, the salesman said it had been turned into a musical.

  “What about it caught your ear?” Ace asked, after opening it.

  My ear? “It made my heart race,” I said. “It made me smile, it made me yearn, parts of it even made me laugh.” It’s that moving and that exaggerated. “All of it reminded me of you. Especially You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth and Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” I pointed out the tracks on the back of the album.

  And by the dashboard light of the Jeep, his kiss took the words—I love you—right out of my mouth.

  “Shelby, you’re all set,” a counselor calls me back from the heart-racing recollection. “This is where we have breakfast and early meetings. This area is for lunch and daily therapy. This space is reserved for exercise, dance, art, and music therapy.” She starts with a tour of the facility.

  I only half hear her, attention seized by my mother in a central communal area surrounded with glass. She hasn’t seen me yet. But I am seeing her for the first time.

  She laughs and talks with others in recovery. Aw ah aw’ing and smiling—she is happy. A woman sits across from her, a guitar in her hands. Casually, my mother tutors her through fingering and strumming. Music is no longer a trigger, but now a therapy? When the woman gets it right, my mother is as proud as she is.

  I should be happy for her, but jealousy taunts joy. For all the times I’ve wanted her laughter, her conversation, her mentoring, her pride. For all the times I’ve wanted her to be happy with me.

  “We also offer family therapy,” the counselor says, maybe picking up on my resentment. “The recovery process is as important for you as it is for her.”

  Moments later, in a designated space and after an awkward greeting, there is no aw ah aw’ing. The atmosphere is as sober as everyone here.

  “Maybe I should go,” I offer, standing in the doorway.

  “No,” she kind of questions before repeating definitively, “No. Stay. Sit, please.”

  “But I saw you through the window. You were happy. I want you to be happy.”

  “It’s easy to be ‘happy’ with them. I haven’t made a life of disappointing them.” She looks me dead in the eye, shame but sincerity in hers.

  This is new—eye contact, no glancing around the truth.

  “I disappointed you, too. Having me wasn’t all you thought it would be, was it.” I sit down across from her, attempting to employ Grayson’s advice in posing statements and asking questions rather than blaming, while cutting to the heart of what I believe has been the elephant in the room.

  “I thought it could be more. I wanted it to be more. I had it all worked out in my mind. Getting pregnant didn’t mean that I—we—Bootleg couldn’t make it in music. It was a minor setback,” she says, as though she still believes it. As though adolescent naivety had nothing to do with it. Having a child changes everything, obviously. “But not everyone saw it that way.”

  “Everyone?” My father had to have seen it that way. He never gave up on music.

  “Johnny went out on his own.”

  So Johnny vouched for Ace, for me, out of guilt? It was his leaving that was the end of Bootleg. “Couldn’t you have found someone else?” Replaced Johnny. If she wanted music that badly.

  “You sound like your daddy,” she says with fond exasperation. “It was never the same. I wasn’t the same. All the music I had in me, Johnny took it when he left. When he chose it over us.”

  Us—as in Bootleg. Or us—as in us. I don’t care to know.

  “After things didn’t work out as planned, I didn’t think further than having you. My mother—your grandpa’s wife Rebecca—died having me.”

  “Rebecca,” I repeat, the first I’ve ever heard her name. They never talked about her.

  “I guess I thought the same would happen to me. When it didn’t, and when I took that first pill in the hospital, there was relief. Finally numb, it was the only way to escape the reality of my decision, the reality of a future I would never have.”

  She thought she would die? “But you had me anyway?” I ask, trying to receive the weight of that sacrifice.

  She nods. “I don’t know, maybe I wanted to.”

  She wanted to have me or she wanted to die?

  “It wasn’t the first time I thought about death. I mean, if I died, would I be with my mother.” She shrugs. “It’s ironic, right? I lived, here in the physical. But I was as gone from you most of your life as my mother was from me. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t deserve it. I—my addiction, my choices, my actions—caused it. I failed you. I hurt you. I’m sorry. You deserved so much more, Shelby.”

  Grayson on one occasion told me don’t speak from anger, speak from love. Even then, I fully intended on being angry. But hearing her point of view, hearing her acknowledge the hurt her addiction caused—it is the furthest thing from maddening. It is the beginning of healing, I guess.

  “So did you,” I say.r />
  “They call it ‘amends.’ That’s a thing around here. I made a list…a long and specific one…of the people I’ve hurt and how I’ve hurt them. Like your grandpa. I manipulated him into enabling me. I used his need for approval, his need to be there for me because she died having me, as a means to secure my addiction. If he didn’t support my habit, he didn’t support me.” She shakes her head at the twisted psychology. “I have so much to tell you, baby. So much to apologize for, so much to make right. I just hope you’ll give me the chance.”

  “I was there through the bad. You think I’m going anywhere through the good.”

  “Well…you haven’t heard the worst of it yet. I haven’t even told them,” her voice lowers, surveying for passersby. “I will. But you have to know first.”

  The doting wife. She did it? My heart catches in my throat.

  “Happy New Year, Pop!” I call, rushing through the front door.

  I killed it at my gigs. I can’t wait to tell him, whether to win his favor or to rub it in his face.

  I’m booked every weekend for the next two months. With the “momager” negotiating, between pay and tips, I made more per hour than I did at the mine. I just don’t have as many hours…yet.

  “Pop? Pop!” Is something burning?

  “Oh, no. No. No. God, no!” Tell me that isn’t the Bootleg guitar, jagged pieces of its waterfall pattern scattered from my bedroom to the living room and into the fireplace.

  I didn’t take it to my gigs. Stowed away under my bed, I didn’t want anything to happen to it, loading in and out of venues. I didn’t want anyone to recognize it as Johnny Allman’s. I want to make my own name.

  “Why? Who the fuck does this!” I shout, apparently to myself. There is no sign of Pop, other than the destruction he left.

  The empty guitar case sits beside my bed. I pull my jacket off, wet it quickly in the bathroom sink, and run to the fireplace. Water and weight suffocate the embers. Recently lit and poorly so, nothing is burned clear through, but irreparable still.

  “Johnny. Shit! I’m sorry, so so sorry.” I guess he’ll never know that I found the secret note square behind the label. But the work, the love, the songs written and years played on that guitar—how will I ever make it up to him. Not only irreparable, it is irreplaceable. “Pop!” I could wring his neck. Jealousy is not a natural emotion. It is a disease. As crippling as black lung, he has it!

  Like a hot potato, I retrieve the neck of the guitar—in one piece but burned at the tuning end—from the middle of the pile. The next few pieces, I cannot make heads or tails of where they belong. Front? Back? Sides?

  What kind of a monster does this.

  My eyes burn from tears and smoke, from torment and madness. The fragments of charred curly maple rescued, a shoe box full of pictures remains beneath the rubble. Some rolled up from heat, some halfway turned to ash, Mom—her face, her silhouette, her back—is the subject of the images.

  Candid shots—Mom and friends, Mom and Stephan in social settings that I’m certain my father was neither invited to nor would willingly attend. Like he was trying to prove something, catch her in the act.

  In his defense, I always wondered if she met Stephan before she divorced him. It was as if she moved out of our house and into his.

  The man in this picture with her looks familiar. They stand at a profile in front of a small building, a storefront maybe. They are pointing and smiling. Not at the camera, but at the building.

  A SOLD real estate sign hangs from an iron arm in front of the building. A long white sign hangs across the front of it—a plant insignia and COMING SOON! 3rd Generation Extracts.

  Extracts. Tinctures. Mullein. Shelby. Enisi. That’s Mason! That’s how my father knew. “Didn’t think I knew about that, did ya,” he said to Mom that night in the hospital.

  Do I know him at all? What kind of man spies on his ex-wife.

  These have to be from high school. A class picture of Mom. A class picture of…me? With a late ’90s haircut.

  I turn the wallet-sized photo over. It’s signed. Back when they signed class pictures. Back when they had actual class photos, not digital pics plastered all over social media. The uniquely familiar writing, a mix of cursive and print, reads Wren, It’s been fun. Stay fly! Peace, Johnny.

  “Peace” not “love”—friends?

  That’s him. With his dreamboat flattop and smooth shave from the Bootleg cover, must be before he started growing it out. “Jesus Christ, it’s like I’m looking in a mirror, kid,” he said that night backstage at his concert.

  I leaf through a few more until I see myself again. Teenage Johnny stands next to teenage Mom. His arm lobbed casually but exclusively around and over her shoulder, she hides her smile from the camera, her face pressed into his chest.

  More than friends.

  These can’t be from a spy. These have to be hers. Something she kept but left behind. The significance of them more weighty to Pop than to her, or else she would’ve taken them.

  Mom and Johnny were a thing? How much of a thing?

  I share more of his features than Shelby. Is that why Pop’s so jealous? Why he smashed and set fire to the Bootleg guitar. Should there have been a secret note square for me too?

  That would make Shelby and I…

  I run for the bathroom, the greasy McMuffin and hash browns inhaled on the ride home not sitting well at all.

  My mother slides a piece of paper folded into a square across the table to me. She took up origami in rehab?

  “Just tell me,” I say, pushing the square back to her.

  “I can’t. I don’t know how to say it. Just read it.”

  My name, in a mixture of cursive and print, is written across the flat side opposite the four folds. It is not my mother’s handwriting.

  When I have fears that I may cease to be

  “A Keats fan,” I say.

  “Who?” my mother says.

  “A poet. A romantic one, even though he wrote about death. It was like he knew he was going to die young.” My father died young. Is this his handwriting? I can’t recall.

  Before my guitar has played for the world

  Before the music that cries within me

  Hold like full heart your fingers round it curled

  I’m not crying yet, but it hurts like hell to swallow. I can recall his hands, how safe I felt in them or holding them.

  When I behold, upon your precious smile

  Huge cloudy symbols of a higher calling

  And think that I may never be worthwhile

  Their shadows, with the ego, come falling

  And when I feel, dear mine of creation

  That I shall never have you, music, and her

  “But he had us both. Didn’t he?” I ask. And he was making plans for music. That’s what Wren said.

  Now my mother gulps, the simple act of swallowing catches up with her too. “Just finish it. Then we’ll talk.”

  Never relish in the adulation

  Of love, fame, happiness—more than we were

  Of the wide abyss, I sink and wonder

  ’Til it swallows me whole, pulls me under

  “‘Pulls me under’?” Water. The river. He knew he was going to die. My mother wasn’t the only one who thought about death. And if Grandpa isn’t covering for my mother, then he’s covering up my father’s suicide?

  “It’s not totally what you think, baby. Just breathe and listen.” She holds my hands and eyes across the table.

  Breathe? What’s worse, being murdered or taking your own life! This is not healing at all.

  “I hurt your father, I did,” she begins. “The day he gave me an ultimatum about moving to the city to start his new venture—some medicine shop—and revive his music career. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to give up my habit. He said he had given me enough time. He was going…with you, with or without me.”

  “You should’ve let him take me,” I seethe. I knew I couldn’t leave here without being angr
y.

  “I know that now. But then, all I had was addiction…and oddly enough the truth. I told him you weren’t his to take.”

  Between my tears and hers, we can barely see each other.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This poem…” she shakes the tan, unlined paper “…is from your biological father. Your biological father who is still alive.”

  “I don’t care!” I jerk the paper from her hand and tear it into quarters. “My father is dead. Because of you!” Just like Enisi said.

  “He didn’t take his own life, Shelby. They ruled out suicide. He would never do that to you.”

  “Unlike you,” I cry. My birth may not have been the first time she thought about death, and it wasn’t the last. Does she think I am ignorant to the several near overdoses!

  “Is everyone okay in here?” the gently irritating voice of a counselor chimes, opening the door and peeking in.

  “We’re fine!” my mother and I bark in unison.

  “Making amends is not always easily received,” my mother follows up, as if she is quoting a counselor.

  “No, it is not, Maisy. Good work. Carry on. Sorry for the intrusion.” The counselor pulls the shade on the door before closing it.

  “A part of him…Mason…knew long before I admitted it,” my mother continues to argue her anti-suicide angle. “Hell, the whole town speculated. We were young. We were in a band. Relationships as explosive as the amps we played into. I thought I loved Johnny. Mason loved me…you…more.”

  He’s not your uncle or you godfather, Ace said that night on the front porch steps. He was trying to tell me. “Johnny Allman…” is my biological father. No. If everything was so tumultuous, “Exactly how did you know who the father was?” My father!

  “I just knew, Shelby. The same way I know that Mason never would’ve left you, unless someone else took him away from you.”

  “Well, then, who was it?” Miss Omniscient! “Why would Grandpa take the rap?”