Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  “At first, I just had all this crap at school. Sam and Amber, all that. Then I had all the stuff at home. My mom not telling me about my dad and trying to find out more about him without her knowing. Now, though, I have to make a decision—what do I want my relationship with him to be? Now, it’s on me. And that’s harder.”

  “Yeah,” Cass agrees, looking back out at the swirling world. “That’s way harder. So, what do you want it to be?”

  “I don’t know.” I stare into the mist, willing it to have answers that I know aren’t there.

  ***

  After Cass drops me off downtown, I stand in the rain and look at the road leading to Sam’s house. I think about the dance last week, about his breath in my face, about how hard he shoved Eli. I walk the mile up the hill to his house. At least I can fix one messed-up thing in my life.

  As I ring the doorbell, I feel ridiculous. And wet. My hair is plastered to my head, and my thin jacket is soaked clear to my sweatshirt. I wait, the haunted doorbell echoing through halls I have never seen. I am just about to turn away when the door is pulled violently open.

  Sam stands there, breathing heavily. “Oh,” he says. On his head, a cut drips red blood; there are splotches of it on his pale-green shirt. Behind him, something shatters.

  “They won’t take me there!” a banshee voice cries from somewhere in the depths of the house. “Nooooooooo!” More glass breaking. Sam looks fearfully over his shoulder.

  “Calle, this is a bad time,” he says. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What’s going on?” I try to peer over his shoulder. A beige wall with the picture of a sailboat. A mahogany table with a vase of white roses. Withered white roses. All thoughts of the dance drain out of me. His life, at least right now, seems more messed up than mine. The house itself seems to tremble with heartache. “What happened to your head?”

  He touches the cut, as if for the first time. “It’s nothing. You should go.”

  Footsteps sound in the hallway. In seconds, a woman is at the door. She is unmistakably his mother. Her coppery curls are loose on her shoulders, matted and sticking out in various directions. Her feet are bare, and she wears a black-velour sweat suit. The top is unzipped to her waist, exposing a pale-pink lace bra and white belly. I take a step backward.

  “Who are you?” she demands, tears spilling from her large eyes. “I’m not going.”

  “I’ll just see you at school,” I say to Sam, starting to back away. “Sorry.”

  I see her collapse into the doorframe, spilling down it like water thrown against a wall. Sam struggles to pull her inside, his frightened gaze trying to be on me and her at the same time. Then, she turns to dead weight in his arms.

  I don’t try to help. I don’t say anything. I don’t know why but I can’t. It’s too much. Instead, I race away down the driveway.

  ***

  “Calle! Calle!”

  I try to ignore the voice and keep running, but a cramp seizes my side, and I can’t run anymore. Hands on my knees, I bend over and try to take in air.

  “Hey,” Sam is panting beside me. “Wait up, will you?”

  It has stopped raining, but the misty air has turned his cut into a watery, drippy mess and expanded the bloodstains on his shirt.

  I slowly catch my breath and watch him catch his.

  “I’m really sorry,” I start. “I don’t know why I ran.”

  “Look,” he says. “You can’t say anything about what you saw, okay?” He grabs both my wrists and stares down at me.

  “I don’t know what I saw,” I say, wrenching my hands from his grasp. “What’s going on? I mean, the Valentine’s dance…that,” I point up to his house.

  “I want to tell you,” he says. “I just can’t. I have to get back to her. She can be…she can hurt herself when she gets like this.” I notice that he’s in sock feet, and that they are soaked through and muddy. He shivers.

  “You always say you can’t talk about it. It’s ridiculous. Why can’t you just talk to me?” I am shivering too. The words stumble out.

  “Calle.” He holds both my shoulders. “Right now I need you to promise that you won’t say anything to anyone about this. Promise me.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “At the store.” His eyes darken. “He’s not very involved right now. It’s just me.” He exhales and then says again, “Please promise.” His voice is choked with desperation. “Please. It’s a small town.”

  “I promise,” I whisper.

  “Can you meet me at the bar later? I know it’s a school night, but I really want to talk to you about this.”

  “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll be there by eight at the latest,” I say with more certainty than I feel.

  Nodding, he gives my shoulders a brief squeeze, then turns and runs back up the hill toward his house, his wet sock feet slapping the asphalt, leaving muddy prints that soon fade into the wet ground.

  ***

  I know it’s my father inside, not by his voice but by my mom’s. It has an edge, like the low roil of near-boiling water. The front door hangs open a crack, and I stay right near it in the shadows and listen.

  She is saying, “I don’t want your life. I don’t want that life for Calle.”

  “We can put it behind us, Alyson. All behind. We can be a family.”

  “I can’t. You haven’t changed.”

  My father’s voice is all butter and soft syllables. “I’ve changed. You don’t know. You never gave me a chance. I wanted her in my life, and you never gave me a chance.”

  My insides swim with his words. I am still digesting the scene I witnessed at Sam’s, still processing it after the hour I spent walking alone downtown, and now my father is here. Talking with my mom. And he wanted me all along. All this time. I strain to hear my mother’s response.

  “You gave up that chance when you made your choice.” Roiling water, churning and churning.

  What choice? When he went to jail? I hold my breath, frustrated. It’s like listening to only one side of a phone conversation; the other side is an unspoken history.

  “I was trying to keep food on the table. Someone had to work, and you didn’t want to.” His voice loses a soft fold. I hear anger beneath it.

  “I had a baby!”

  “And I had to work!”

  The water of Mom’s voice hits boiling. “Selling drugs?” Her voice is up an octave. “Some career for a father to have. How could I keep our daughter there? How, Jake?”

  My eyes widen. Drugs? He’s a musician. He has a band. I lean closer, trying to look through the narrow slat of the open door, but I can’t see them.

  “My music was about to hit. You remember the manager from Philadelphia. We were so close. If you’d been more supportive. Who knows? I might have gone somewhere if I hadn’t had to deal with you.”

  “It’s my fault? You didn’t make it because of me?” My mother sounds like she’s in the kitchenette now. A drawer opens and shuts. “Maybe if you’d spent more time playing music than shooting up, the guy from Philadelphia might have had something to listen to.”

  “Don’t act so superior. You had no problem with my career,” his voice drips sarcasm, “when you were using it, did you?”

  I flinch. My mom won’t even eat refined sugar; there is no way she used drugs.

  “I want you to get out, Jake. I want you to stop following us, stop harassing us. I’ll call the police.” My mother’s voice is shaking.

  “Call them. Tell them you kidnapped our daughter, that I’ve spent the last fourteen years trying to find her. Tell them that.” I can hear his heavy footsteps pacing the living room. “Call them!”

  “You’ve spent most of those last fourteen years in jail,” my mother shouts back.

  “You never gave her my letters, never gave me a chance. Or gave her a chance to know me. You stole her from me.”

  “She was a little girl. Ouch, Jake, let go…”

  I push open the door. My father holds
my mother’s arm tight, wrenching it toward him.

  “Let go,” she shouts again, her hair in her face, before they both see me and freeze. A twisted tableau. It doesn’t seem real. Like the game we play in drama rehearsal warm-ups where two people act a scene until an audience member shouts “Freeze!” and then steps in and changes it, using the same position to create a totally different scene.

  I wish I could change this freeze. Make it a happy family. Maybe the mom and dad would be dancing. They could be ice skating or helping one another into a boat. Not hurting each other. Not shouting about drugs and kidnapping.

  I find a voice I don’t recognize and use it. “Let her go.”

  My father lets go and takes a step back. My mom pushes her hair out of her eyes.

  None of us says anything for a very long time. My head throbs, and I am aware of the hum of the heater, the tick of the clock on the wall. My parents stand at strange angles before me, as if they don’t know what to do with their body parts, so they just let them hang there.

  Suddenly, I am filled with the song—“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man…”echoes through my head. But even as it comes to me, it fades. I look at the man frozen in the middle of our small, dim living room. My Tambourine Man. My whole life, I’ve wanted this father. But I can’t have the scene before me, not this fractured portrait. So I will write my own role. Change the freeze. I know what to do, what I have to say.

  “You should leave,” I tell my father.

  “Calle, I…” he tries, can’t finish, and runs his hand through his mop of hair. It looks unwashed. I study him. Slumpy shoulders. Rumpled clothes. Inked bruises under his hollowed eyes. My father. Not handsome like his picture. Not the polished-on-his-best-behavior handsome from the pizza place. This handsome has grown tired. A shadow. Used up.

  “We should talk,” he says, finally.

  “I don’t think we need to talk. Not now,” I say, making sure my eyes don’t give me away—it’s always the eyes. I open the door wider. “Go.”

  His eyes flit from me to my mother and back to me, and I see something dark cover them. “Don’t do this.” His syllables are ragged now, broken.

  “Go, Jake,” my mother says, and I hear the sameness of our voices. “Or I’ll call the police.”

  His eyes lock with hers a last time, haunted, and I see the loss in them. This isn’t drama—this is my life. I’m not playing games. There is no end of scene, no curtain. I just need him to go. I turn away as he pushes past me and out into the night.

  I close the door and look at my mother, still feeling the brush of his raincoat on my arm.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been talking to him.”

  She comes to me and wraps me in her jasmine smell. “I know, sweetheart. He told me. But it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. He always finds us.”

  “He’s been here for awhile,” I tell her, my face buried in her hair.

  “I know. It’s why Rob left.”

  “What?” I look up at her.

  She brushes at my tears and holds my shoulders tight. “A few weeks before Rob left, he started getting weird calls at work. Threatening calls. That’s always my cue. To leave. Your father was always jealous. He was like that with all of them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Ted, Dan, all of them. He threatened them. I guess I wasn’t worth sticking around for to find out if he was serious or not.” Her smile is watery and sad. She continues, “He’d get out of jail, track us down, start bugging the guy I was with. I just made sure we stayed one step ahead.”

  “But we didn’t leave this time.” I look around the apartment, noticing the prints on the wall, Alexa’s picture. A blender. My mom bought a blender for her smoothies. The only appliance that moves with us is the TV, but she bought a blender.

  “I like it here,” she says, sighing and combing at her tangled hair with her fingers. “And you liked it here so much. Had all your friends. I thought maybe I could handle it. Handle him.”

  “But now…” I don’t want to finish.

  She shakes her head. “It’s too hard. He’s too unpredictable. With the drugs. He gets violent. I can’t take that risk.”

  She sees my face crumble. I sit on the couch, holding my face in my hands.

  My mother sits beside me, her arm warm across my shoulders. “I’m sorry, Cal. Damn it, I wanted this to be different. I really did. But that’s why I didn’t want to tell you. No kid needs to know she’s got such a screwed-up dad. It was easier to just let you think he left us.”

  “That wasn’t easy at all,” I say, my words muffled.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “He said you did drugs.” I pause, looking at her. “Is that true?” I wipe the tears away, willing my eyes to dry up. She looks at her hands, and I know the answer.

  She sighs again. “It was a long time ago. Before you were born. But that’s over. It was over as soon as I knew I was having you.” She takes both my hands. “I promise. But with your father…it can never be over with him.”

  I look toward the door, thinking about him out there somewhere. “Should we call the police?”

  “I’ll call them,” she says, standing. “Have them do a drive-by. It will be enough to chase him off for a while, in case he’s watching the house. He’s not real brave, your father, despite all his threats.” She starts toward the phone and then turns to look at me. “We have to pack, Calle. Then we have to leave.”

  I shake my head, tears resurfacing.

  She tries to look sympathetic, but I can see her already moving on, boxes packed. “We have to,” she says. “Honey, I know you like it here, but we can’t wait for him to do something stupid. We have to leave.”

  My world is ending again.

  “No,” I say, not meeting her eyes.

  A brief flicker of annoyance moves across her face. “What?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Of course, you’re going.” She moves to the kitchen and begins to pull things from shelves.

  “No, Mom,” I say, louder now, more forceful. “You can go, but I’m staying. You can’t keep doing this to me.”

  She turns from where she has been winding the blender’s cord around its base. “You can’t stay.”

  “I’ll stay with Alexa. She would totally let me.” The plan is already formulating itself. I could actually stay. I could do it.

  She sets down the blender and looks hard at me. “No way. I won’t let you. Besides, you couldn’t afford to stay.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “It costs a lot to live. You don’t know.” She dismisses me with a wave and walks toward the bedroom.

  “I can make eight bucks an hour as well as you can,” I say. “It’s not hard.”

  I can see the hurt in her face as she turns to me. “Pack your things, Calle Lynn.”

  “Everything’s about you!” I scream at her. “You never think of me.”

  “I’ve spent my life thinking about you. Always about you!” she yells back. “You were the reason this all started in the first place.”

  I take a step back, as if slapped. “You’re blaming me?”

  “You’re the reason I’m running. He’s not coming after me—he’s coming after you.” Her voice echoes off the walls.

  “And you hate that. You hate that he wants me and not you.”

  “You have no idea what I’ve given up for you. To protect you. I didn’t ask for this life!” Tears race down her face. We have never, never fought like this, and my world whirls with it.

  “I’m not going!” I tell her, yanking open the door. “You can leave. You should have left me anyway, when you left him!”

  Without waiting for a response, I run through the open door and into the night. My feet pounding the street, I hear her calling after me. I keep running. I race down streets, no sense of where I’m going, not caring. Soon her voice fades, and I can only hear my heart pounding in my ears.

  CHAPTER 25

  LAST DANCE

>   My mother and I pack everything into the brown boxes we found behind the Safeway, listening to Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing album, the way we always do, always replaying the last song, no lyrics, just Sarah playing that sad, lonely piano because that’s how we always feel at the end…like there are no words…

  I call Cass from the phone at the Gas and Save. The guy in the Clash T-shirt working behind the counter plays his Game Boy and pretends he’s not slipping glances in my direction. When I hand him the phone, he gives me a free pack of gum and goes back to his game.

  Minutes later, Cass pulls her truck out front and honks the horn.

  I thank the guy for the gum and go outside. Pulling open the truck’s heavy door, I crawl inside. “Hi,” I say, my voice unsteady, ragged.

  “Sam’s at the bar,” she says, pulling out onto the street.

  “Thanks.”

  She looks sideways at me. “You okay? You sounded weird on the phone. And you look like crap.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, watching the night out the window.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  Maroon Five’s “She Will Be Loved” begins to play on her radio, and I burst into tears.

  “What happened?” she asks after a minute passes. Outside, the dark world slips by, lit windows from town, spatters of trees. We pass the school, quiet and full of shadow. Another place I’ve lived. Another place I’ll say good-bye to.

  Cass clicks off the radio. “Come on,” she says. “Out with it.”

  I tell her everything.

  ***

  Inside, Lucky’s is almost empty: a man at the bar, two in a corner booth with half-drained beers. The country music is low enough to hear the floorboards creak when we walk in. Cass’s uncle is behind the bar, talking in low whispers with the bar guy, Harper from Burger Mania. They both wave to us, quick identical salutes.

  “He’s back there,” her uncle says, pointing to a booth where Sam sits, staring down at the empty table.

  “Go ahead,” Cass says. “I’ll get you something to drink.” She stops and clutches my sleeve. “And you’re soaking wet. I’m getting you a sweatshirt.”

  I slide into the booth across from him. He starts, clearly unaware that we’d come in. “Hey,” he says. “Thanks for coming.”