Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Johanna’s greatest preoccupation, her fear, was that she was weird—not charming, manic pixie weird, but weird in a way that separated her, permanently, from a body she didn’t belong in, from people who surrounded her without being able to comprehend her.

  Sometimes, in the middle of shows, she’d stop playing and singing, and just stand there, stare out at the crowd—and the crowd would cheer louder and louder, imploring, demanding, impatient, smitten, until finally she’d lift her guitar and resume the song. At first, Adam figured this was a trick to get the show going, or maybe the same stage fright that afflicted him. But eventually she admitted she needed that pause to convince herself that they were cheering for her, and not some chimerical Johanna Mayfield that they could see, but she couldn’t.

  Johanna didn’t trust the people she met. She’d get quiet, mean. Or she’d overcompensate, and throw herself at them, take from them whatever physical or emotional affirmation she could get. She cheated on Adam in all kinds of ways. He’d lied to Marissa, it began right from the start. Why wasn’t Adam enough for her? He tried to be: singing her to sleep at night when her mind raced with fearful insomnia, playing to her from his classical repertoire, Bach, Schubert, all the shit he’d promised himself he never, never, never had to play again—and never would’ve except sometimes she’d sit there contented at the end of the piano like Lucy in Peanuts. He forgave her her cheating, her days-long silences, her inexplicable furies or spasms of laughter; he swore to her that he understood all of it, that even if there were parts of her he couldn’t peer into—that she couldn’t peer into—he at least knew they were there, and it didn’t change his love any more than hers would’ve changed for him if he woke up fingerless. They were good together, he could tell Marissa. They made each other happy. But he started drinking more. And she got sick.

  Four minutes from the bus station now.

  He’d have to make Marissa understand that Johanna wasn’t to blame for his drinking, any more than she was to blame for her sickness. After all, it wasn’t like he’d only started drinking when he met Johanna Mayfield! Adam had always loved drinking—since junior high, when it felt like capital-A anarchist rebellion, when it felt like you were really doing something for once. And then later, in college, and even among the Deployers, he was always the one who wanted to keep going: another shot, another bar. He didn’t get depressed when he drank, he got bigger, brighter—happier, for fuck’s sake. What was wrong with feeling happier? And if he drank more and more in the face of the gathering unhappiness—it wasn’t Johanna’s fault. As they taught at Stone Manor, some people can recognize and take action when their life begins to fall apart. And other people run screaming for whatever makes them feel better fastest. Adam did a lot of the latter.

  When they’d played songs off the first album so many times it just felt like work, and then they’d get offstage and find themselves tense and quiet around one another; when the same thing started to happen with the way they fucked; when she’d seem distracted and withdrawn, making him annoyed and suspicious, which made him clingy and resentful, which made her withdraw further; when they’d try to write new songs and got nowhere and so they’d avoid trying again later; when he returned to their apartment to find her sitting on the end of the bed, pages and pages of scrawl-covered paper scattered at her feet, and she finally looked up to tell him she was transcribing the bangs and hisses of the radiator; when they missed meetings with the label; when she let all three guys in another band fuck her one night; when she’d spend hours in the tub, filling, draining, filling, draining; when he tripped down the steps of a fire escape, splitting his face open and breaking his wrist, and couldn’t play for a month; when the label sent them down to Miami to the mansion of some producer who could “jump-start” the second album, and ten minutes after they walked in the door Johanna disappeared, and Adam finally found her outside on the lawn, face down in the grass and ear pressed to a gurgling garden hose—Adam’s response to all these moments, and the thousand others like them, was always the same: He’d have another drink. When the record company finally canceled their contract, it was like a mercy.

  Spend enough time in bars, you realize that endings are always less remarkable than people think. It was nobody’s fault. Every band breaks up; every relationship either explodes or cools like a dying star. And if it seems extraordinary, that’s probably because it happened to you.

  The red brick façade of the Brattleboro bus station rose in the windshield.

  He tried to help her. Even after they’d broken up, he tried. He tried talking to her, he tried talking to her parents, to her friends, to doctors, to psychiatrists. But Johanna didn’t want help, then. And his drinking blunted all his efforts. He needed help he didn’t want then, too. “Alcohol dependence is a clinical disorder,” his individual therapist at Stone Manor, Wendy, would tell him, day after day. “Just like schizophrenia.” Adam didn’t argue with her, but she’d inevitably repeat the words again the next time, like she thought he hadn’t been listening.

  Marissa turned off the engine, left him in the car, went into the bus station to buy him a ticket to Ann Arbor, where he’d told her Johanna’s parents lived (which was true). She’d taken the keys with her, which he had to admit was pretty shrewd. He probably wouldn’t have stolen the Sonata to escape from this, but it was possible.

  The last time he saw Johanna—autumn, years ago already. He’d come up for air, so to speak: six weeks sober following his first go-round in rehab, just detox and two weeks of groups at a city hospital. His family had staged an intervention. They hadn’t even needed to say anything: finding himself ambushed in his apartment by his parents, Kristen, Jack, and a dead-faced, skeletal stranger, he couldn’t say yes fast enough—anything to keep them from reading the handwritten letters they had clutched in their hands. (He’d squandered so much goodwill and forgiveness. How much more could he expect?) Johanna by then was living in an inpatient facility on Lake Huron. Nobody thought it was a good idea for him to visit, but he went anyway. He’d imagined, as he made the drive from Austin, a whole song cycle that he could write about the trip. But he quit playing before he got around to writing it.

  He parked in the visitors lot of Great Lakes Psychiatric Care, a campus of brick buildings with wide wings and modest landscaping on top of a hill overlooking Lake Huron. He’d never been to the Great Lakes; he remembered as he walked from the car being stunned he couldn’t see to the opposite shore, like it had to be an optical illusion. They met in an empty cafeteria: mopped orange floors, an odor of lemon-scented disinfectant and steamed vegetables. The windows were barred, but there was no big-chested male nurse keeping an eye on them, as Adam had imagined there’d be. Johanna walked in unaccompanied, her hair cut to just below her chin, her face vague, swollen, dark folds crowding her eyes. She wore baggy jeans and a Michigan State hoodie—an outfit so humdrum-suburban he thought she must be wearing it as a joke. “Hi, Adam,” she said as she sat down, her voice quiet, throaty, like she needed tea. She gave him a subdued, vaguely suspicious look, then turned her head toward the window.

  Silence piled on top of silence. He felt like he was chasing what to say down a long corridor, falling farther and farther behind. Her body looked so small in the sweatshirt; he imagined if she raised the hood, she’d just disappear among its folds. At intervals, something like a mocking half smile would start to spread on one side of her mouth, then sag to nothing; otherwise, she didn’t appear to have any reaction to his presence at all.

  He remembered touching every part of the table where they sat—legs, gum-caked underside, metal torsion bars, like his hands might finally land on the words he needed. Anyone who believed there was anything romantic about madness, or drinking, or recovery, or love just snapping in two, should’ve been made to endure that silence. As he sat in the car waiting for Marissa, he wondered if he’d ever escaped it.

  Finally, desperately, he got to the ostensible reason he’d given himself for visiting. He pulled a small di
gital recorder from his pocket, played Johanna some songs he’d been working on: just him singing, accompanying himself on the piano in a Y gymnasium. Midway through the second song, she picked up the device, pressed stop. “What are you doing, Adam?”

  He felt she’d wounded him in a way she never had before—because even at their worst, she always listened to his music. “I thought, I don’t know, when you got out of here, we could start working on some new stuff.”

  “I can barely read a magazine,” she said bitterly. “You think I’m going to write songs again?” She scratched a small zit tucked behind her nostril. “I’m sick, Adam,” she told him, with a brief smirk. “I have to adjust to a new normal. Anyway, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  He frowned. “For what?”

  “I know you did your best. You just fell in love with the wrong person.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “And I’m sorry I cheated on you all those times. I just got lonely.” She smirked again.

  “You got lonely?” He was shouting now.

  The corner of her mouth edged up toward her cheek. She noticed him notice, and rubbed her face in annoyance. “It’s the meds. It won’t stop.”

  His anger seeped away, and with it the last of his hopes; it wouldn’t have made a difference if he’d never come at all. “It’s okay,” he reassured her. “You look good, Johanna.”

  She sighed, like the little burst of conversation had worn her out. “I gotta go take a nap. I get so tired. It’s because they make me take so many pills.”

  She stood up, started toward a set of double doors beneath a Residents Only sign. She stopped, turned, and her smile bloomed out of nowhere, and all that time and injury collapsed into nothing, they were right back on the piano bench. “Do you remember that one show we played?”

  “Which show?” he asked desperately.

  “The really good show. You know.”

  “When—you mean, in Seattle when we—or no, at Fire and Water, in Northampton?”

  “The really good one.” She was getting impatient. “You remember.”

  All his weight was on his hands pressing the edge of the table, like he might leap over it and grab her. He sat back. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “We were really good that night. We really connected. That’s what it’s all about, right?”

  He’d have a drink as soon as he got out of there. He promised himself. “Sure. That’s what it’s all about.”

  She nodded a little, and turned back to the doors, his mental jukebox cruelly playing every Genesis ballad at once. There was no sense to it, there was no soundtrack for this. Every note that’d ever been played was no match for the double doors swinging shut and his last glimpse of her back. And five months later, she was dead.

  Marissa got into the car, handed him an envelope with a bus ticket. “Lotta stops,” she warned him. “Gimme your cell phone.” She took it, and he watched her save their respective numbers on the two phones by calling her phone with his. “By the time you get there, I’ll be on the ground in Seattle. Give me a call once you talk to her, okay?”

  “Yup, you got it,” he said brightly, taking back his phone.

  She eyed him. “I paid eighty bucks for that ticket, Adam. You’re going to go to Ann Arbor and call her, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the plan!” he answered. “Where are you headed?”

  She reached up toward the dark gash above her eyebrow, thought better of it.

  “My mom lives in Athol now.”

  “Wow. Good luck,” he said.

  She leaned across the stick and wrapped one arm around his neck, letting go before he could hug her back. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right?”

  “Absolutely!” He got out of the car and pushed the door closed.

  Could it have been different? What if he’d said something more—something better? Wendy said no, everyone in the group sessions said no. Marissa probably would say no, too: No, of course not, you can’t think that way. Johanna had a clinical disorder, and in the end, she didn’t get better. That was the inevitability; that was the explanation.

  But even so.

  How could he not wonder if it might’ve turned out another way—if he’d said the right thing, or simply “I love you,” pitched at just the right tone, or if the songs on the recorder had been a little better. Might it have been enough to deliver her from the nightmare of all her fears come true, an inmate in an insane asylum, enough to deliver them both to some other, circumscribed life? Him measuring out her pills, her driving him to AA meetings, television, taco night—not what they’d ever expected, but in it together.

  Marissa waved through the window, and he gave a broad, happy wave back. She put the car in gear and drove to the end of the block. The car paused at the intersection, signaled, turned, was out of sight. The wind twisted around him on the sidewalk; big, scattered snowflakes drifted in the air, like ash.

  So that was the explanation—the best he could do. And if there were gaps, evasions, mistakes obvious to anyone, well, that was him: Adam being Adam. And if the whole story sounded like a lie, hey, if you had to know, that’s why he stopped playing, too. Because the chords started to sound like lies—like laughter.

  Anyway, whatever happened, you had to find a way to cope, like Wendy said.

  He followed a couple other people through the revolving door into the station.

  [ 2 ]

  The Lotus Field Apartment Homes

  Marissa waited at the last stoplight before her mother’s apartment complex as a man spoke on the radio in a calming, indoor voice about drowned refugees. She didn’t usually listen to the news, but it was the first station she’d found, and it’d gotten very quiet in the car.

  The light changed, she crossed the intersection and continued down the street. Momentarily, she glanced into the mirror on the driver’s side—and as she did, the face of the driver in the car behind slid into view, framed perfectly in the rectangular mirror: a white man with a square auburn goatee, a shadow slashing his forehead. Her mouth went dry, she considered slamming the brakes, but then he made a turn, the face slid away. There was no one following her anymore, she told herself: They’d already gotten what they wanted. And right now, she had better reasons for feeling tense.

  The street ascended gradually, passing converted duplexes and squat apartment buildings set close to the empty sidewalk. It was a nice little neighborhood, all in all, the signs of wear nothing a crew of painters and an upswing in the economy couldn’t fix. It was certainly nicer than most of the places she’d lived growing up.

  “You have arrived at your destination,” her phone announced. A brown wooden sign etched with yellow letters stood in an oval of cleared snow:

  The Lotus Field Apartment Homes

  Apartment Living

  A/C & Cable

  She turned off the street onto the drive to the apartments, stopped beside the sign, put the car in park, turned off the engine. Ahead, the strip of blacktop ended in a square of parking lot, bounded by three identical buildings: two-story, horseshoe-shaped, beige siding with white trim, long and flat like shipping containers. Marissa leaned her head back on the headrest. God in Heaven, what the fuck was she doing here?

  It had to be almost five years since she’d seen or spoken to her mother. Hadn’t she been better off? Even going this far had stirred the old familiar bitterness that sat at the bottom of any thoughts of Mona—because what the fuck was her mother doing here? What was the point of all the T rides from one far-flung, end-of-the-line corner of Boston to the other, their worldly possessions reduced to what could be stuffed into shopping bags, if her mother one day would just up and move to Athol? Marissa would’ve liked to have spent her childhood in the Lotus Field apartments—safe, stolid, so profoundly ordinary it was its own form of grace. Why the seediest nooks and crannies of Dorchester or Hyde Park while she was growing up, and now, when it didn’t matter anymore, a place with cable? It was like Mona did it all on purp
ose, just to—

  The cut above her eye throbbed, like it was reminding her she knew better. To assume Mona had lived in Boston for decades then left for Athol to spite Marissa was to assume Mona did anything for any discernible reason at all. Why was a question you had to let go of when dealing with Mona Cavano: She was impervious to why. And Marissa realized, too, the anger throbbing in her temples to make the cut ache and now her back and ribs start up again, as well (it had all been feeling better after the gas station ibuprofen), had less to do with Mona than it did with Leo, with herself, with the whole fucking ruin she’d made of her life today. Maybe that, then, was what she was doing here. After everything, this was the only place she belonged: with her mother. More concretely, the thought of spending the next three hours sitting in a hotel room at the Sheraton, staring at the ceiling or at the television or at the dark behind her eyes, hoping Robbie would call while certain he wouldn’t, struck her as simply unbearable. So, here she was.

  Already, the cold was working its way into the car, diluting the leftover warmth. She turned on the engine, drove up to the parking lot, and pulled in beside a battered Crown Vic, its backseat piled past the windows with cardboard boxes, trash bags, bundles of newspapers. She tucked her purse under the seat, then changed her mind and brought it with her as she got out of the car. She locked the Sonata, double-checked the address Caitlyn had texted (“bldg C, apt 2”) she double-checked her face in the driver’s-side mirror. She’d washed off everything in the gas station bathroom: dirt, snot, blood, makeup. For that sliver of an instant before she could filter her own mental portrait, she looked worse than a mess in the mirror: She looked old. But at least the Band-Aid over her eye looked clean. It was a day to count your blessings.