Tears spilled down my face, but I kept my eyes locked on his and refused to bless him with a response.
“Tell me you’re sorry. And admit it, your mother screwed you up and that’s why we aren’t together anymore. Admit—” But then Johnny sucked in air and lost his grip on my finger as Ian punched him in the gut. Johnny stumbled backward, and Ian, ignoring the broken glass beneath his feet, punched him once more in the stomach and then in the jaw.
Johnny head-butted Ian in the chest, knocked him to the floor, and fell on top of him. “Stop it!” I screamed, but they just pummeled each other harder.
It seemed to happen in slow motion, me jumping on top of both of them, one arm pinning Johnny’s flailing arms, the other pressing against Ian’s torso. As I held Ian back, Johnny scuttled out from under him, blood dripping from his lip, the left side of his face swelling. I couldn’t hear anything except my heart pounding in my ears, but he seemed to be mouthing “Thank you.”
“Thank you?” I roared. “Get the hell out of here before I …” I stomped on the palm of his left hand with my bare foot, certain not to break it but to make it throb like he had my finger.
He howled, pulling his hand away, clenching and unclenching it to make sure it was okay before scrambling to his feet and running for the door.
“I’m sorry about all that,” Ian said moments later, as the sound of Johnny’s tires crunching over gravel filtered inside. He moved to embrace me.
“Don’t!” I jerked away. “You should have just left. I can take care of myself. I don’t need a goddamn prince on a white horse to save me.”
And with that, I gathered my shoes and my guitar and ran out. I left Ian standing openmouthed among the beer bottles and the broken glass. I decided that as much as I liked him, I wouldn’t be seeing him again because humiliation was not my cup of tea.
Blasting my car stereo as I sped out of Wisconsin, I told myself it didn’t matter. You don’t need a boyfriend, it was never part of the plan.
INDISCRETIONS
September 1996 through June 1998
Louisa left L.A. before Nadia got out of the hospital. When Colette came home in the morning to retrieve some of Nadia’s things because the doctors wanted her to stay one more night for observation, she found Louisa slumped on the couch flanked by two suitcases. “I need you to take me to the bus station. You can keep my car. You guys need it here,” Louisa stated numbly before Colette could even speak.
Colette blinked at her with wide, bloodshot eyes. “What?” finally scraped out of her throat. “You’re leaving?”
Louisa nodded mechanically.
Colette’s nostrils flared. “I almost lost my kid and now I’m gonna lose my best friend?”
“I told you that I couldn’t stay in one place for very long or bad things would happen. Bad things happened.”
“Louisa, it had nothing to do with you! It’s my fault. I was irresponsible. I already talked to some people at the hospital about me and Nadia seeing a therapist together. I’m gonna be a better mom and I need you to help me do that.”
Louisa couldn’t help but laugh, a dark, drained cackle. “You want me to help you be a good mother. Me? I left my kid because I was no good for her. I can’t help you be a mother. I can’t be around your daughter anymore. I’m a bad person, Colette. A bad, broken person. Nadia doesn’t need that. Besides, it’s not fair to—” Louisa stopped herself before she said Emily’s name and rose from the couch. “If you won’t take me, I’ll call a cab.”
Colette trembled, but she pressed her lips together and nodded. “I understand, but won’t you at least say good-bye to Nadia?”
“I can’t.” Louisa’s head dropped into her hands. She bit her left palm before she looked up, tears glistening. “It’s hard enough saying good-bye to you.”
Colette wrapped her arms tightly around herself, head bobbing slowly. She still wore the same clothes she’d had on when they ran to the motel. They’d gotten soaked and dried wrinkled. Her hair stuck up in an unruly way, and all her makeup had washed away so that the deep circles under her eyes and worried creases in her forehead were painfully obvious. Louisa hadn’t seen someone so hurt since the night she’d left Michael. She spoke to Colette in the same empty tone she’d used on him. “I’ve gotta go. I should’ve left a long time ago.”
Still nodding involuntarily, Colette reached for Louisa’s car keys. “I know,” she whispered.
When they got to the Greyhound station, Colette hugged Louisa. “Go see your daughter,” she said, her breath warm in Louisa’s long, golden hair. “Because you still can and you never know when that chance might slip away.” She pulled back to meet Louisa’s gaze. “I’ll tell Nadia good-bye for you, tell her you went to see your own daughter. She’ll feel good about that, ’cause it’s gonna break her heart that you’re leaving. You should write us, okay?”
Louisa didn’t respond, so Colette urged, “Please go find Emily. Do it for me. Do it for no more regrets.”
“No more regrets,” Louisa echoed listlessly, staring out at the line of cold, metallic buses, one of which would bring her to her next life. She made no promises. Finding her daughter would only lead to remorse for everyone involved. But she’d let Colette think that was the plan if it would bring her and Nadia peace, not to mention keep them from following her again.
Louisa went inside the station and bought a bus ticket to Portland. It was the only thing she could think of, picking up where she’d left off before L.A. sidetracked her.
In Portland the routine began again. Late-night cocktail waitress. Dreary, lonely apartment. Louisa wondered if this was how it had always been when she wandered alone. On a night off, she ventured into a punk club. She’d stopped doing that in L.A., focused more on partying. Follow the music, she remembered. The music wouldn’t be powerful enough to absolve her of her guilt as she’d once hoped—with Nadia’s near death added to the rest, she had enough to run from for several lifetimes. But as she stood there, holding a watery beer, watching a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen ferociously whale on the drums so that her chestnut curls flew in every direction, Louisa knew that the energy of the music could keep her going.
She spent every night off at some hole-in-the-wall listening to local bands. She craved more, like a junkie on a binge after years of sobriety. Ready to search out the next big wave, but no longer in tune with where it would hit, Louisa went to its last known location, Seattle—though, by the end of 1997, it was the center of the dot-com universe, not the rock ’n’ roll galaxy.
The day after moving to her apartment on the outskirts of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, Louisa scouted for a job. At two thirty on a Thursday afternoon, she walked to the bar down the block. Since she was still without a car, working close to home would be ideal. There were only two customers inside, guys in their forties. Judging from their tired smiles and dusty boots, probably contractors, who started their workdays and nightly drinking before everyone else. They slouched at the bar, keeping the bartender company with their off-color stories. Louisa sat three stools down from them, and when the bartender, who was about the same age as his customers, loped over to ask her what she’d like to drink, she said, “Actually, I’m wondering if you’re hiring servers. I just moved from Portland. I was a cocktail waitress there.”
He smiled at her, took off his baseball cap, and smoothed the ginger hair beneath it. “Sorry, this place don’t get enough business to pay for servers, just bartenders.”
“You were looking for a bartender, though, weren’t you, Ben? You tend bar, too?” one of the customers asked, swiveling on his stool to face Ben and Louisa. His skin crinkled around bright cobalt eyes when he smiled, and he wore his hair in a gray-streaked, dirty-blond ponytail.
“You tryin’ to do my hiring for me, Finn?” Ben joked.
Finn shrugged. One shoulder seemed stiff, hardly able to go along with the movement. “She just seems nice.”
“I’ve tended bar, too. Lots of different places
, different cities,” Louisa offered.
Ben scratched his pudgy cheek. “This is a shot-and-a-beer kind of place …”
She smiled. “My kind of place.”
Ben glanced at Finn, who gave the thumbs-up. “Well, I guess if you got the Finn Leahy seal of approval, you’re hired.”
Louisa became fond of Finn because, like her, he had failed. Louisa had failed to escape Eric without resorting to the worst kind of violence, and because of that she failed at being a good wife and mother. She’d even failed at running away to seclude herself from everyone and everything but the music. Finn was a failed musician, so she liked him even more because their failures seemed connected. Finn was forty, just a year younger than Louisa. His first garage band had bombed in the late seventies—not quite punk enough. He’d had his last big chance in 1992 when his latest band—like many others from Seattle—garnered major-label attention. He was thirty-five, still young enough, he felt, to live the rock-star dream if destined.
“But it wasn’t,” he told her on her second shift. He was the only one in the bar, a pattern that would begin most of her days. “’Cause unlike those other guys, kids really, who, sure, came from nothing, and worked a few shit jobs but gave ’em up to be struggling musicians, I’d struggled for too long, so I had a day job. Construction. And just days away from the gig that probably would have landed us the big deal … boom! Total freak accident. This stack of wood tumbled down behind me, a rain of boards and me caught beneath.” He paused to rub his shoulder. “I got hit in the back, and now the weight of the guitar is too much. I can do a show every now and then when my back’s feeling good, but when it’s bad …” When it was bad, Louisa wouldn’t see Finn for a few days. He didn’t get out of bed, lying there in a haze of pain pills. “And it took years for me to be able to play that often. By the time I wasn’t hurtin’ too much or too drugged up to function, I had no band, and, well”—Finn smirked—“grunge was dead.”
Finn kept going the way Louisa did. Not that Louisa felt their situations quite comparable, but she admired his outlook.
“It could’ve been worse,” he said. “I could’ve been crushed. My dad was a logger. I went to work with him a few times as a kid and saw a guy crushed to death, smashed flat, no bones left in him, just a puddle of skin and blood. That’s why I didn’t end up a logger.” Finn laughed, a smoky, deep laugh through which Louisa could almost hear his singing voice. “I’ve never gotten that image out of my head, and it’s good. Whenever them pain pills drag me to the lowest of lows, instead of putting a gun in my mouth, I think, Finn, maybe you lost your dream of playing music, but somebody liked you enough to keep you around so you could still listen to it.”
It had been years since Louisa had met a person with a passion for music that mirrored her own, so she found herself saying, “That’s what I’m looking for, music. That’s why I move so much, trying to pick up new sounds, new bands. Maybe you could tell me some places to check out here? If the music’s still good.”
“Of course the music’s still good.” Finn grinned. “That’s what MTV and Time magazine didn’t get. The music in Seattle has always been good and always will be. They just caught onto our secret for a little while. My back feels pretty good today, so how about when you get off, I take you to a place or two? You’ll never want to move again because Seattle’s got the best scene.”
Louisa winced slightly. She knew she’d left the best music behind in Carlisle. “Well, okay. I was in L.A. for a few years, and everything seemed so fake and empty to me, I decided to keep going north till I found something. If the music here is that great, it’ll stop me from going to Alaska.”
“Alaska? They got something up there I don’t know about?” Finn chuckled. He always laughed despite his pain, another reason Louisa came to like him so quickly.
“No, but I always told myself that’s where I’d go if I felt like the music was completely gone.”
“Hmm.” Finn thought about that for a moment. She could tell by the look in his eyes that the idea of being surrounded by snow, being so cold he couldn’t feel anything, appealed to the failed being within him. But he took a swig of beer and said, “If I were in L.A. for any length of time, I’d think music was dead, too. Nah, I’ll revitalize your ears tonight.”
Louisa soon found herself out with Finn at some club or bar every night that he wasn’t in too much pain. She grew attached to him like she had to Colette. She thought about running, really going to Alaska, but she realized there was a part of her original plan she just couldn’t force herself to follow anymore. She couldn’t be alone. Thoughts of Colette and Nadia surfaced far too often for her liking, and she couldn’t be with them any more than she could be with Michael and Emily. But being with Finn was a safe substitute. Being with Finn was okay because he was already damaged. And at first sleeping with Finn made her feel as guilty as any of the one-night stands she’d had through the years, but eventually she realized he was different. He’d been a friend before he became a lover. Still, Louisa knew she couldn’t tell him any of her secrets, much as it hurt to keep them inside. They would poison everything she and Finn had.
After six months together, Louisa had all but officially moved in with Finn. They spent many a night both silently staring into the darkness, neither of them able to sleep because of the pain. Louisa gave Finn a reason to keep his head clear, but resisting taking the pain pills meant lying awake aching. Sometimes he would break down in the wee hours of the morning. Louisa would hear him turn over with a groan, then hear the pills rattle into his hand from the plastic bottle he kept beside the bed. He would sleep late into the following day. But Louisa couldn’t take anything to ease the discomfort in her chest, where all her heartbreaking memories lived.
One night, Finn spoke her name into the black, knowing that she couldn’t sleep either. “Louisa, nothing in this world scares me more than being alone.”
“Yeah?” she whispered.
“I used to think that if I couldn’t play music, it would kill me, but it hasn’t. I thought nothing could be worse. But you know what’s worse? Being stuck flat on your back in bed for two days, in too much pain to get up for food or water, and thinking that you could die there and no one would even miss you.”
Louisa’s face contorted, his despondent words sending a pang of worry through her. “I’d miss you.”
“Yeah, but before I met you, I was goddamn lonely, you know? Of course you know, you were as lonely as I was. I saw it in your eyes that first day. That’s why I made Ben hire you. I thought we might be able to help each other. And you really have helped me. Have I helped you, though?”
Louisa wanted to say that no one could help her, but even Finn would question that. And she appreciated the fact that he didn’t usually ask questions, just accepted that she would tell him what she was able. She sighed. “Yeah. I’m not too good at being alone anymore, either.”
That was enough for Finn. He fell silent momentarily. Then she heard him roll onto his side, but not in the usual way toward his nightstand; instead, he turned toward her. He didn’t groan in pain, just hissed a little bit of air through his teeth. “You know I’m lucid, right? I didn’t take them pills.”
“I know.” Louisa’s head lolled in his direction. She let her eyes drift over the shadowy outline of his nose, his chin.
“Let’s get married, Louisa. So we don’t have to worry about being alone.”
Louisa wanted to tell him that her last marriage had resulted in her being more alone than ever. She parted her lips to say so, then closed them. It was time, she concluded, to bury her memories where she could never dig them up. Emily and Michael deserved to be set free, not locked up in her head next to the corpse of Eric and images of Colette and Nadia, her makeshift family. Her life with Michael had been a fantasy that kept her alive on the cold cement floor while Eric forced himself into her. She’d kept breathing like Finn had beneath the boards. Like him, she survived, but old dreams were unattainable. Mother, wife, it
couldn’t happen. It hadn’t happened. She had crawled out of that basement blood-spattered and bruised, staggered barefoot down the driveway, through the fields, her torn clothing catching on the rough vegetation. She kept walking, shedding fabric, then stained and tainted skin. As she wandered all the way across the country to the tune in her head, her body regenerated. She wound up in Finn’s arms as an entirely new person. There was no reason not to start over. “Yeah,” she told Finn, “that sounds good.”
Finn’s hand found its way to Louisa’s. He interwove his fingers with hers. She rocked onto her side to face him, pressing her body closer to his. Her lips found his neck, then his chin, and finally his lips. For the first time, she wasn’t haunted by Michael while she kissed another man. It had been almost twenty-two years since she’d left him. Certainly he had given up on her, moved on, remarried. As he should have. As she was about to.
ROCK ’N’ RUIN
Don’t give your drummer a microphone even if she sings great harmonies. I learned that lesson at Reading Festival in England when Regan decided to embarrass me in front of fifty thousand people. To be fair, she warned me of her scheme; I just didn’t think she’d go through with it.
I’d moped through our entire European summer tour over my fight with Johnny and, more so, because I couldn’t be with Ian due to my wounded pride. Taking matters into her own hands, Regan confronted me in our dressing room, staring me down in the mirror as I applied eyeliner until I got irritated and shouted, “What?”
“You know who’s here, don’t you?” she teased.
But I misjudged her tone and responded nastily, “Yeah, I know Johnny’s here. Do you think he’ll try to fight me because we’re second from the top of the bill and he’s second from the bottom? Unfortunately, him having to stay fifty feet away from me doesn’t apply in England, huh?”
Regan’s face fell. “Oh. Yeah. Him.”
“Yeah. Him. Who were you talking about?” I glanced over my shoulder at her.
She couldn’t help but smile. “Your favorite Rolling Stone photographer.”
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone Page 25