Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  Wyatt shook his head. “You can’t be sloppy on a Martin.”

  “Oh, sure you can. Have you seen Mr. Callahan play one?” I laughed. “That’s his intent though. His is the warmest slop there is.”

  The crowd was chanting Cal’s name, and he walked back onto the stage with a bottle of water in his hand. He set the water down on the drum riser, went to the mic, and said, “I’ll keep playing as long as you guys don’t mind hanging out in the rain.”

  Another eruption of applause. Behind Cal, two crewmembers were setting up stools and guitar stands. Justin the guitar tech ran over to Wyatt, they spoke briefly, and Justin ran off again.

  Cal wiped his face with the bottom of his T-shirt and extended his arm out to the side, in the direction of where October, Wyatt, and I were standing. “Got a special treat for you tonight. That is, if I can convince my buddy to come out and play with me.”

  Cal started waving me over, and I felt myself retreating backward, shaking my head.

  Wyatt said, “Don’t be shy,” and dragged me toward Cal, and before I knew it I was standing in the middle of the stage.

  Justin came over with Cal’s stunning 1964 Gibson Dove and a beautifully battered 1949 Martin D-13 I’d never seen. He placed them on the stands beside the stools.

  “Say hello to my brother from another mother,” Cal shouted. “Joe Harper, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Eighty-five hundred people cheered, and I didn’t dare look over to see if October was one of them.

  While Justin adjusted the mic stands in front of the stools, I turned to Cal and said, “I can’t do this.”

  Cal put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Harp, you could do this upside down in a tub full of molasses, and you know it.”

  He grabbed the Gibson, sat down, and motioned for me to sit. And God knows what the expression on my face was, because Cal looked at me and burst out laughing. That made me laugh too, because when Cal gut-laughed he looked like the kid in the photo he’d shown me earlier, and for a brief moment it was as though I’d stepped back in time, to 1996, to open mic night at The Sweetwater.

  Before I sat down I took out my phone and snapped a couple photos for Ingrid—one of the crowd, and a quick selfie of me and Cal, because I knew it would mean something to her to see me up there beside him, for what I guessed was going to be the first and last time.

  I thought of my brother then. I searched for his presence in the sky, in the rain, in the roar of the crowd, and I really and truly felt it. Then I wondered what Bob would have made of me up on that stage, and I knew in my bones that I had something to prove. To my father or to myself, I wasn’t sure.

  “Let’s do this,” I said to Cal.

  I pulled off my shoes and socks and took a moment to feel the cool, damp softness of the rug beneath my feet. Then I sat down and picked up the Martin. And I felt Sam there too. Inside the guitar. In the strings. In my hands. In my fingertips. In my heart.

  I looked at Cal and said, “The usual?”

  He nodded, grinning.

  I counted to four and we both hit our D chords in unison.

  The rest of the performance is a blur. I have no recollection of whether it sounded good or bad. I only know it felt like magic. And repatriation. And when we put down our guitars and stood up, the clapping and cheering surged through my bloodstream like a drug.

  Cal took my hand and held it up in the air as if I’d just won a boxing match. “One more time, give it up for Joe Harper.”

  I glanced at October then. Her palms were pressed together underneath her chin, frozen in mid-clap, and her face was blank, as if she was unable to find an existing expression for what she’d just witnessed.

  Behind us, Wyatt was ushering the choir onto the stage for the last song. Another crewmember dashed over and picked up the acoustic guitars. Justin walked out and handed Cal his 1966 Olympic white Jazzmaster.

  I remember Cal smiling at me, lofty, proud, and emotional, like he thought we’d just accomplished something momentous together. Justin nodded for me to follow him off the stage, and I bent down to grab my shoes and socks. As I stood back up, I saw something shifting in Cal. He was focused on the ground, and the joy was draining from his face, his features seeming to absorb it like butter melting into a piece of warm bread.

  At first Cal only seemed confused. Then I saw something click.

  I looked back down at the ground, trying to identify what had triggered him. That’s when I realized he wasn’t looking at the ground. He was staring at my feet. My toes. The little animals October had painted on them.

  The rest of the band had returned, and Justin was now pulling me by the arm, trying to get me out of the way before the last song began.

  Cal’s hands began to shake. His jaw pulsed, and his eyes darted back and forth from my feet to my face, searching for something that might suggest he’d come to the wrong conclusion.

  A long line of lights went on above us, so bright they illuminated the rain. I swore I could make out every drop, and I remember having a strange, momentary insight that raindrops weren’t drops at all, they were sharp, vertical lines, like little knives of water falling from the sky.

  Cal’s hawk eyes locked on mine. His face was like a piece of petrified wood.

  “You,” he said, with a disappointment violent enough to feel like a punch.

  And then the blue robes of the choir overtook me like a flight of western scrub jays. Justin had me by the shoulders now, and he dragged me and didn’t let me go until we’d made it to the outdoor lounge, where the afterparty was already in full swing.

  I didn’t know where October was, but I suspected she was still standing where I’d left her, oblivious to what had just happened.

  My body was cold and numb, my mind empty, void of feeling, void of language except for one word: Run.

  But I didn’t run. I put my head down, pulled my collar up, and walked slowly but deliberately toward the nearest exit while behind me a chorus of voices chanted “Turn the Lights Out” in three-part harmony.

  I bumped into Rae as I was heading up the stairs. She was coming out of the restroom and asked me where I was going.

  “The party’s that way, yeah?” she said, pointing back toward the stage.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I can’t.”

  “Huh?”

  I met Rae’s eyes and held her shoulders to make sure she was listening. “Tell October this: Tell her I said I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  TWENTY-THREE.

  There was a guy in Sid’s writing workshop, an ex-Marine named Santiago, who was working on a novel about a soldier from the future who returns to America in 2017 to assassinate the president and save the human race. It sounds worse than it was. Santiago was a solid writer with a strong voice. He was also an expert marksman and had served two tours in Afghanistan before his twenty-fifth birthday. He said that when he came back, his head was on backwards, and he’d been trying to turn it around for the better part of a decade. Writing helped. Booze didn’t.

  Santiago was built like a gorilla: wide as a doorframe, hirsute, with long arms and a rounded posture that made him look like he was knuckle-walking when he moved. He and I were workshop partners for a session. That meant we had to read each other’s assignments and offer feedback, and every Wednesday night for eight weeks we met at the IHOP out on Highway 93 because Santiago was in AA and said it wasn’t healthy for him to be around anything stronger than coffee.

  During ABANDONMENT week, I wrote a poem about how I’d left October without saying goodbye. Almost all of my assignments focused on Cal or October, with the occasional bit about Sam or Bob thrown in for good measure. At any rate, Santiago knew a good portion of the backstory from conversations we’d had over pancakes, and at the end of the poem he’d scribbled two notes. The first one said: Loving a woman who can break you is the bravest thing a man
can do. The second note said: Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.

  It wasn’t like I’d intended to stay in Montana forever. My original plan had been to head back to California after the dust settled. The night I left, I’d only grabbed what I could load up in a hurry, which amounted to a duffle bag full of clothes, a couple of books, some camping gear, my guitar, and my laptop. I’d fed Diego the leftovers in my fridge, hopped in my truck, and headed north, assuming I would drive around for a week or so, talk to some trees, and end up back where I started, ready to face the consequences. But the longer I was gone, the more distance I created between myself and the mess I’d made. And the more distance I created, the more it seemed like a good idea to stay away.

  For a while I was peripatetic, pulling off in parks whenever I got tired of driving. I stopped near Yreka the first day and car camped in the Klamath National Forest surrounded by white firs and incense cedars. From there I went to Crater Lake, Bend, and then up toward Hood River.

  What I’m about to admit might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever copped to, and that’s saying a lot, but as I was hiking through an old-growth forest near Indian Mountain in Oregon, thinking about Cal and October—they were all I could think about back then—I found myself wondering why they hadn’t tried to contact me.

  I guess I’d assumed they would have a lot to say, and I wanted them to say it. And I decided that as soon as one of them reached out—to curse me, call me a liar, a promise-breaker, a coward, the biggest fucking fuckhead on the planet—I would go back.

  Neither of them did.

  I wandered around in the woods for a couple more weeks, staying in cheap, dreary motels when I couldn’t find a decent campsite. I drank a lot of coffee, alternated between reading Trees of the Pacific Northwest and Shantaram—the two books I had with me—and played a lot of guitar. And I suppose it would have been something of a romantic existence had I not been so empty inside.

  I made my way to Spokane and considered staying there for a bit, to get a feel for where Bob had come from, to see if it provided me with any clues about who he was. But while the outskirts of Spokane were green and beautiful, the city itself was a lot of strip malls and fast-food restaurants, and that kind of banal homogenization only intensified my despair.

  The loneliness I felt in those first few weeks was like a famine inside of me. Every day a vicious, gnawing hunger ate away at my flesh and made me feel like a carcass the coyotes were picking clean. It got so bad I started to contemplate hurting myself. Driving off a cliff. Buying a gun. Pills. I knew I needed a friend, but the two friends I needed the most were the ones I didn’t have the courage to call. Then I remembered Sid was less than a day’s drive away. I rang him up, told him I was in a bad way, and asked him if I could stop in for a visit. He has a ten-acre spread not far from downtown Whitefish, right in the middle of a ponderosa pine forest.

  “Come,” he said. “There’s an empty caretaker’s cabin on the property. It’s not fancy, but it’s yours if you want it.”

  My intention was to stay a month or two, but winter hit northwestern Montana like an invading army, and I decided to wait it out. I got a job giving guitar lessons at a small music store in Kalispell and then supplemented that income by picking up construction work here and there. By summer I’d joined the writing workshop, and Sid’s house desperately needed a new roof, a project I gladly took on as a thank-you to him for putting me up. Before I knew it a year had passed; there had been no word from Cal or October, and Mill Valley got farther and farther from the end of my telescope.

  Cal and October had managed to stay together for a couple of months after I left. Or maybe that was just how long it took the internet to find out about their breakup. I browsed the web regularly to check on them. When they officially called it quits, Cal moved back to Brooklyn. About a year later he started dating a woman that, according to an online celebrity gossip site, he met through mutual friends. Her name is Nicole and she makes documentaries on animals facing extinction.

  I had a harder time gleaning information about October’s private life, but it was probably better that way. I had her work to keep me company, and I knew that was more intimate and telling than anything else the internet had to offer.

  Once the entire catalog of 365 Selfies was available on the website, I went through phases where I visited it obsessively, watching different clips like they were episodes of my favorite TV show. Then I would swear it off like a drug habit I was trying to kick, vowing never to look at it again, avoiding it for days, sometimes weeks.

  Those were the times I convinced myself I was over October. But then I would cave and start watching again. There was one particular clip that always set me back and made me wonder about things I knew it was unhealthy for me to wonder about. Number 361 of 365. One of the last selfies posted. In it, October is sitting on the same bed in the same cottage where we’d stayed in Miranda. Her eyes are wide and wild like they were the night we’d spent there, and it’s obvious to me that she’s eaten mushrooms again, though she doesn’t mention it. She has her big sketchbook on her lap, a pencil between her fingers, and she’s talking in a hyper-focused ramble as she draws.

  The selfie, titled Portrait #2, is the only one in which she speaks directly to someone. And knowing all I know, I don’t think it’s presumptuous to assume she’s talking to me.

  We didn’t do the second portrait that night, remember? It was the reason we’d come, and we fell asleep before we could finish what we’d started. Tonight I’m going to finish what I started. And then I’m going to put this in my rearview mirror where it belongs.

  Here’s what I don’t understand though. Here’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time. How do you let go of something that lives inside of you? How do you remove something that feels attached to your ribcage and wrapped around your heart? How do you cut that out without losing a piece of yourself in the process?

  Art?

  Maybe.

  That’s how our story began.

  With art.

  Mine, not yours.

  Or was it?

  The first thing I asked you was how you felt about art, and do you remember what you said? You said it was a way to tell the truth. And right away I knew. Not because I liked your face—though I did. Not because I was looking for a lover—I was not. But because something about you felt like home.

  You inspired me.

  And isn’t that where all great art starts?

  Isn’t inspiration born in those imaginary moments that incite riots and recognition in our spirits?

  Most people think of inspiration as a kind of mystical influence that stirs the mind or the soul, but the verb “to inspire” also means “to draw in.” Specifically, it’s the drawing of air into the lungs. Think about that. Inspiration is how we breathe. It’s how we stay alive.

  I told you this once before. We were watching a bird outside the window, and I told you there was something about your energy, in its almost comical melancholy, that inspired me in ways I still don’t know how to explain. But the words coming to me now are these: You reminded me of who and what I am. That is, an artist. Oh, I know, I was an artist long before you strolled into my studio, and I am an artist without you now. But you know as well as I do that artists often feel like hacks. We exist in vacuums for long periods of time and need someone or something that reflects our work back to us in a way that allows us to see it in a different light. To see ourselves in a different light.

  You did that for me. You got me out of my head and back into my heart. And that meant something to me. It meant something to you too. I know it did.

  At this point in the clip, October puts her sketchbook and pencil down and paces around the room. The camera follows her to the painting above the recliner, the one of the wave crashing onto the beach. She reaches out and touches it, and she laughs, and I know with complete certa
inty that she’s remembering the night we were there together, and how we thought the water was going to spill out over the chair.

  She’s still looking at the painting when she says: After you left, Chris asked me if perhaps I thought I could save you, if that had been the appeal. But I never saw you as someone who needed saving. I saw you as someone who needed to be understood.

  She goes back to the bed, picks up the pad, and studies what she’s drawn for forty-seven seconds. Then she says: You know what I missed after you left? I missed your forearms. (She laughs again.) I missed the way we would curl up on the couch at night, drink a little wine, and play each other songs on my computer, and you’d let me trace constellations in the freckles on your forearms. Remember the night I drew them with a Sharpie? You had Lyra and Orion inked on your skin for days.

  For a while after you left, I would go outside at night and look for Lyra and Orion in the sky, and if I couldn’t find them, I would tell myself it was because you were holding them ransom in the little connect-the-dots galaxy on your arm.

  She uses her fingers to shade a bit and then resumes drawing.

  I’m not going to lie. I’ve considered the possibility that I had been wrong about you. I’ve wondered if my intuition had been off. If my senses had completely failed me. (She purses her lips as if she’s still pondering the likelihood of this and then shakes her head.) Whenever I try to convince myself of that, one specific memory comes back to me. That time we went to Inverness for dinner. I was driving up Highway 1 and all of a sudden you started pointing to the left, out my window, saying, “Look over there. Do you see that? It’s a Swainson’s hawk. Up in that eucalyptus.” Then you went on about how rare they are in Marin and how they’re sometimes called grasshopper hawks because that’s their favorite food and blah blah blah; I can’t remember the rest. I hadn’t actually gotten a look at the bird, and when we got to the restaurant I asked you to pull up a photo on your phone so I could see what I’d missed. After some hemming and hawing you admitted that you’d made the whole thing up. (She imitates my voice by dropping hers an octave and mumbling.) “There was no hawk.” That’s what you said. I asked you why you’d lied, and you got all bashful and said there’d been a dead dog lying on the other side of the road, that it looked like it had been hit by a car. (Her eyes get teary and she looks up at the ceiling then back down into the camera.) You didn’t want me to see it. (She wipes her eyes, tilts her head to the side.) You knew it would hurt me and you didn’t want— (She exhales.) Ironic, I know.