Lynn would practice for hours a day, composing her own songs after she had mastered the repertoire from her most recent lesson. Her parents did not push her in this direction, nor did they discourage it—it was entirely her own love of the instrument that inspired this level of discipline. They divorced when Lynn was seven, and her father moved to Pittsburgh to work for a sports broadcasting radio network.
By the time Lynn was eight, she had surpassed Amy’s skill level, so she started taking lessons from the woman who played piano for their church’s contemporary praise group. Lynn’s mother had started attending church in the wake of the divorce, and brought Lynn to services every Sunday and Wednesday. Her mother sang way too loudly in services, and raised her hands in worship at times when Lynn did not think it was necessary, or appropriate.
Lynn organized piano recitals for herself and invited The Gunners to her home. Her mother would pour red punch into wax-paper cups and serve store-bought cookies on a plastic silver tray. Lynn would wear the nicest dress she owned. The other five children would seat themselves on folding chairs Lynn had arranged in a semicircle around herself, and they would listen quietly as she played, then applaud when she had finished. Oftentimes, one of the other children would sit at Lynn’s piano bench afterward and paw clumsily at the keys, trying to locate a tune. Lynn would laugh and try to teach them something simple: “Chopsticks,” “Heart and Soul.” At these times, Lynn felt that her friends were the best friends in the whole world. She dreamed that one day she would play on a huge stage, like Carnegie Hall, and be presented with an award and given the opportunity to speak, and she would thank each of The Gunners by name for their friendship and support.
When Lynn was thirteen, the teacher from church recommended her to a teacher at Buff State. She said Lynn was playing at an advanced level and would not find an adequate teacher outside of the university setting, so Lynn started taking weekly lessons with Brent, a tall, slim graduate student from Texas who wore wire-rimmed glasses and his long hair in a single braid down his back. He smelled a little bit like a horse on hot days, and he sucked on butterscotch candies.
When Lynn met Brent, she felt a painful, shivery yearning in her little body.
It wasn’t that Lynn had no interest in her own peers; she was deeply invested in her friendships with The Gunners, but they were like siblings to her—there was nothing even resembling sexual attraction there. And outside of The Gunners, Lynn cared nothing for her classmates or other kids her age. She didn’t need them, she barely even noticed them.
But what she felt instantly for Brent sent her careening after something entirely new, something mega: Lynn wanted sex things. At the age of thirteen, she wasn’t even entirely clear on the logistics, but she knew that’s what she wanted. She felt desire everywhere, most of all in the zoom between her legs, a vibration so fierce it panted and howled against the crotch of her pants.
Life in between her piano lessons became practically unbearable—Lynn could think of nothing else. Inwardly, she hurtled between euphoria and utter despair. She spent long sessions every evening contemplating her outfit for her upcoming lesson. She started to shave her legs. She started to massage her little boobies, having read in Seventeen magazine that this would make them grow faster. She tried to control her wild red curls with pins and a straightening tool and waxy pomade.
The Gunners were routinely swiping liquor from their parents, parents’ guests, older siblings, and occasionally beer from the 7-Eleven when the sweaty, nearsighted guy was the only one working. Lynn took small canteens of her mother’s gin to The Gunner House once or twice a month. More often than this, and more often than she liked to admit, Lynn was sipping from these canteens on her own. Sometimes to make a long day at school less tedious or to make the Christian network that her mother watched in the evenings straight-up hilarious. Sometimes for no reason at all except the simple fact that when she was sneaking sips of booze, she felt, quite frankly, the way a person was supposed to feel. It was like an on button.
Lynn started to sip before her lessons with Brent, too, realizing that it made her more clever and more confident. It made her playing less precise but more colorful.
They were about six months into their lessons when Brent announced to Lynn and her mother that he had been accepted into a PhD program in Cleveland and would be leaving town in May. It was April. Lynn was gutted. She asked her mother how far away Cleveland was.
At the first lesson after learning that Brent would be leaving, Lynn waited for her mother to leave the room. Then, instead of starting in to the passage that she was supposed to play, Lynn wiped her wet palms together and into her thighs. She opened her mouth to reveal herself to Brent. She had meticulously planned out her exact message, and imagined that she would reach the end and Brent would say, Lynn, wondrously, as though she were a mirage, his eyes shining; he would say, Oh, Lynn, yes. But now her message was a collection of words swimming aimlessly in her head, her whole script gone as loose and watery as old Jell-O: too young, but . . . love . . . I know . . . I want . . . Cleveland . . . please . . .
Brent stopped her after she had spoken only a single word, “I—” with a hand in the air between them. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Lynn, stop. I know you think you know what you want, but you don’t.”
“What?” Lynn’s voice sounded to her own ears like a tiny toy. The wild heat between her legs instantly went cool and then dead.
“You think you want me,” Brent said directly but not unkindly. Then he lowered his voice and added, “And I can smell booze on your breath, young lady.”
Young lady! Lynn threw her hands to her cheeks and began to cry immediately, mangled by shame. She shrieked insults at herself inside her head, as though there were two Lynns—one that was completely reasonable and knew all along that she was a child and of course Brent saw her that way, too. And another one that was so stupid it actually thought Brent might share her feelings, the attraction. She couldn’t believe she had let the stupid one edge out the smart one. She couldn’t believe the smart one had let this happen. How could you be so stupid? She screamed at both of them.
Brent retrieved a Kleenex and said, “You’re going to get over this sooner than you think. I promise. But . . . take care of yourself. Okay? You’re an incredible musician already. It’d be a shame if anything got in your way. If you got in your own way.”
He helped Lynn compose herself before her mother returned. But when she did, Brent announced that there had been a change of plans and he would be leaving town earlier than anticipated—that today had been their last lesson.
Several weeks later, Lynn started taking lessons from another graduate student at Buff State, a female Brent had recommended.
Lynn forgot about her feelings for Brent soon after he left—he was right, she recovered from the humiliating incident quicker than she could have imagined—but she did not forget the feelings within herself that had been awakened. She began to explore her own body in private, especially after she’d had a few sips of gin, because alcohol heightened the electrifying sensation that when she touched between her legs she was powerless against her own power.
She began to wonder about the boys who were her friends, Jimmy and Sam and Mikey. She wondered if they had pubic hair yet and what their lips were like and if their penises got hard when they thought about her, or Alice, or Sally. And she even wondered about the girls; she wondered what Sally’s slim body looked like without clothing, if those tiny breasts looked like breasts. She wondered what everyone around her was wondering.
Chapter 7
Issa went to seek out a restroom before the service began, and Mikey observed Lynn as she reached up with her left hand to push red curls back from her face. Her belled sleeve fell loosely from wrist to elbow as she did this, exposing a little knot of waxy white scar tissue on her left inner forearm. Mikey tried to avert his eyes and suppress the pained twinge of deep discomfort, a
vicarious instinct that always, for whatever reason, hailed from his groin.
Lynn had never gone into detail about her personal problems in her emails to the others over the years. Mikey recalled that an injury in Lynn’s early twenties had prevented her from pursuing the piano competitively, and although she never fell completely out of touch, there were a few years when her emails were less frequent and less coherent, often containing some weirdly banal and clichéd message that she presented as deeply profound. Dance like no one is watching. You have to look through rain to see the rainbow. In recent years, Lynn was not bashful about her current role in leadership with AA, but it was clear that she hadn’t wanted to provide the others with so much as a glimpse into her troubles until they had been sorted out.
Fortunately, Lynn’s attention was elsewhere as Mikey’s eyes darted to and from her scarred forearm. She was gazing out over Mikey’s shoulder, and cheerily announced, “Sam-Jam!”
Mikey followed Lynn to greet Sam at the coatrack.
Sam was ginormous. His blond hair had gone wispy at the crown. He wore a dark brown polyester suit, and a seam at his left shoulder had burst. His belly was a barrel. He looked puffy, kind, sad, and distracted. The pores on his nose were cavernous. His pink face cracked into a smile as he hugged his old friends. Sam’s face had always worn emotion oversimplified, as plain as a puppet’s.
Mikey felt tears blistering beneath his eyelids. Seeing the faces of both Lynn and Sam for the first time in over a decade filled him with longing and joy and some type of uncanny despair. It occurred to him, too, in that same moment and with nearly the same measure of despair, that he could not recall the last time he had been touched by another person.
Lynn said to Sam, “Did you drive all this way?”
Sam nodded. “Justine’s sorry to miss it,” he said. “She was gonna come but wasn’t feeling up to it in the end.”
Mikey said, “You drove all that way by yourself? You’re south of Atlanta, aren’t you?”
Sam said, “Got ten hours in yesterday, stayed in Ohio last night, only about five hours on the road this morning.”
“Where’d you stay in Ohio?”
“Heck of a motel,” Sam said. “Just outside Cincinnati. Place was decorated like a boat. The whole motel I mean, just like a big cruise ship from the outside, and the inside, the rooms all done up like a little cabin. Lifesaver things hung on the wall. The shower curtain a, like, what’s the word? A nautical pattern, seashells on everything. Neat. You wouldn’t believe the continental breakfast either. Waffle iron. You make your own.” Sam clapped his hand over Mikey’s shoulder. “How’s life in Lackawannie?”
“It’s good,” Mikey said.
“Your pop still on Ingram?”
Mikey nodded. “Same house and everything.”
Sam said, “You see much of him?”
“Every Sunday,” Mikey said. “Not my favorite part of the week,” he added.
Mikey knew that his childhood friends had always feared and disliked his father, who never raised a hand against any of them but who bristled noticeably at their presence in his home, spoke roughly to them. And there was always that vague smell of blood, blood beneath his father’s fingernails, the suggestion of violence.
“How long are you in town?” Mikey asked Sam.
“I’ll have to hit the road tomorrow morning. Got work Tuesday.” Sam’s lips were the same color of the flesh surrounding them.
Lynn said, “Us, too.”
Sam said, “Awful nice of Jimmy, inviting us to the house for dinner and the night. Shame about his flight.”
Mikey said, “Sounds like if they get him on the next one, he’ll get in at Buffalo-Niagara around seven, out to the house by eight.”
Lynn said, “Anybody know how Sally’s mom is doing?”
Mikey shook his head. “Don’t think I’ve seen her yet today . . . Not a hundred percent sure I’ll know her if I do.”
“What was her name?” Sam said softly. “Karen?”
“Corinne.”
Alice had made a crack about Sally’s mother once when they were young, pointing out to the others that Corinne “looked the way grapefruit juice tastes.” She wasn’t wrong, but Jimmy had jumped all over her for it, even though Sally wasn’t present at the time. He said, “Don’t do that. Sally’s sensitive.” Alice had snorted defiantly, but she hadn’t brought it up again, at least not that Mikey could recall.
Lynn leaned forward. Her voice was a whisper, and it vibrated when she said, “Corinne mentioned depression in the obituary remarks, right?”
Mikey had finished his coffee, and he dug fingernail crescents into the lip of the Styrofoam cup. He said, “Seems that way.”
Sam said, “No note, though.”
Lynn said, “Sam, are you doing okay?”
Sam said, “Still reeling. But . . .”
An organ had begun to play inside the sanctuary, and Issa had rejoined them.
Lynn said, “Should we go in and grab a seat?”
The four of them filed into a pew.
Mikey felt his whole body go languid and loose as a wrung-out rag the moment he sank into a seated position. He had slept poorly the night before, fitfully, waking many times with a dry throat and racing heart and the sensation that he had been panting and running like hell through his dreams, but not sure if he had been running toward something or away from it. Next to him, Sam smelled of a hair too much cologne and stale sweat, presumably from a previous occasion when he had worn this same suit.
Chapter 8
Sam introduced the others to Blackout when he was twelve. He had been taught the game by his weird older cousin, Marcus. Marcus spent several weeks at Sam’s house every summer because he was a freak whose own parents couldn’t stand him, or at least that’s what Sam’s mother always said before Marcus arrived and after he had left.
Marcus had left town that afternoon, and Sam pulled the mattress to the center of the floor in The Gunner House that evening, announcing that he was going to teach them Blackout.
“You make yourself pass out,” Sam explained. “I’ve been doing it all week with my cousin. It’s the biggest high. It’s really scary.”
Jimmy said, “How do you do it?”
“You get on your hands and knees like this . . .” Sam moved to the center of the mattress and crouched on it, his big bottom balanced on his ankles. “Then you hyperventilate a hundred times”—he demonstrated this now, whooshing breath in and out vigorously—“and then you do this—like, you bear down like you’re taking a poo, go really tight in your head . . .” Sam did this for a moment, his face quickly going red. “Then you’re out. You have like a crazy dream, like a super vivid, realistic dream, and wake up in a minute and have no clue where you’re at for a little bit.”
Alice said, “Sounds pretty friggin’ stupid to me.”
Alice was already out of sorts that night. Earlier in the day, Jake had pissed all over her collection of New Mutants comic books, so the pages were soft and smelled like pee and the colors were all bleeding together. She had spread them out all over the floor of The Gunner House in the hopes that they might be salvageable once dry.
Sam said, “Screw you, it’s actually like . . . really cool, Alice. You just don’t want to like it because it’s my thing.”
Mikey said, “It sounds scary. Does it make your brain go bad?”
Sam gave Mikey a condescending look. “Make your brain go bad? No, it doesn’t make your brain go bad.”
Jimmy offered, “Well, it probably kills a bunch of brain cells.”
Alice smirked in Sam’s direction. “That would explain a lot.”
Sam struggled the most of all of them in school, barely passing classes and stuttering like a broken lawn mower when asked to read aloud. He said, “Screw you, Alice,” and glanced around the room to see how others were responding to the
dig.
Lynn said, “I’ll try it.” Although Lynn was usually fairly quiet, it was not uncharacteristic of her to be the first to try something. A year earlier, she had been the one to introduce alcohol to the group, filling a canteen with her mother’s gin while her mother napped one afternoon and delivering it triumphantly to The Gunner House that evening.
Sam instructed Lynn once again, “Try to remember your dream.”
The other children watched as Lynn crouched on the mattress and began to hyperventilate. She was wearing jeans and a tie-dyed tank top. Her forehead was drizzled with a trail of acne beneath the red curls. The sound of her labored breath began to disturb Mikey, and he tried to think of other things. Then Lynn sat upright and closed her eyes, her face and neck went tight, and several seconds later, everything went very soft. She fell back onto the mattress, wearing a blank and peaceful expression.
The others watched in silence.
After a bit, Sally said, “Should we wake her?”
Sam said, “She’ll be up soon.”
Mikey felt afraid. “Is she breathing?” he said.
“Yes, duh,” Sam said, although he didn’t seem entirely certain.
Soon enough, Lynn’s eyes fluttered open. She rose and stared around the room. She blinked. She gave a quick smile and said, “Hm.”
Sam said, “I told you guys so. I told you guys it was cool.”
Alice said, “What was it like?”
Mikey said, “Was it like you were dead?”
The Gunners Page 4