“Did they?”
“Of course. She grew up there. I had just come for college, and then I dropped out anyway. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in a band, but it wasn’t going anywhere. But then I saw her.” Something changes in his face when he says this.
“Did you talk to her?” I ask.
“I waited at the end of the bar while she put her guitar away, and when she came down there I offered to buy her a drink.” I can hear him start to smile, and I look at him. “She told me her drinks were free already, but she’d sit next to me while she drank. One drink.” He raises his pointer finger. “I asked her that night, but it took me a month to convince her to start Shelter with me.” He smiles. “She wouldn’t leave Carter and Dan, so I guess I was basically asking to join their band.”
“So then what happened?” I ask. My voice is quiet. I’m not talking about what happened next. I’m time-traveling. I’m asking about what happened after all that.
“What do you mean?”
I raise my voice just a little. “Between you. Why did you break up?”
He doesn’t look surprised at the question, but he’s not in a hurry to answer, either. He takes a bite of his toast and egg and then chews and swallows. I wait.
“It’s not a math problem,” he says. “You can’t find the one and only answer.” He exhales slowly. “There were a lot of reasons.”
His voice softens a little when he says this, and it makes me think about when I was younger and he’d call from Berlin or Edinburgh when he was on tour. His voice on the phone would sound tinny and watery at the same time, and while he talked about the shows and the food and this one hotel where the rooms were so small he had to sleep with his guitar in the bed, I’d imagine the telephone wires strung underneath the oceans, running next to the coral, over the sand. When he fell silent I’d think about some lonely sea turtle out off the coast of Ireland, say, chewing on the wires and chewing on his words. There always seemed to be holes in our conversations. It was better to have a reason besides the obvious: most of the time, my father didn’t know what to say to me.
“I don’t mean to turn this into a whole thing,” I say, “but I’ve always wanted to ask you . . . why you left.” I’m looking right at him, now, and he doesn’t look away.
“I was really young,” he says.
“You were twenty-six,” I say. I’ve done the math. It doesn’t sound that young to me.
“Yes,” he says.
“I turned seventeen three weeks ago,” I say, “and I don’t think I’d leave.”
He glances at the ceiling and then back down. “You wouldn’t,” he says. “Your mother wouldn’t. She didn’t, I mean.” He smiles then, a smile so big and wide I think for a second that he’s lost his mind. “She was so freaking tough. I mean, beautiful, you know, with that voice that could just knock people on the floor. More than that, she was fierce.” He’s in some kind of reverie, remembering.
“There was this band called Salt Sky that we played with a few times, right in the beginning.” He shakes his head. “The singer had a crush on her. I think he actually would have tried to poach her if he thought she was willing.” My father puts his fork down. “He drove her nuts. Anyway, he got really drunk one night and tried to kiss her. It was late, after the show. We were loading our gear out the back door.” My father stops for a second, runs his hand through his hair. “I didn’t see what he did, but I saw what happened afterward. She socked him right in the mouth.”
I smile. I can see my mother doing that.
“He landed on his back in the alley,” my father says. “I was frozen, just standing there watching her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.” He laughs a little. “We’d only been dating for three months. I would have done anything to protect her. It just . . . didn’t seem like she needed help.” He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
I’m riveted, leaning forward, my hands on the edge of the table in front of me.
“Anyway, she let him lie there a second, and then she put out her hand and helped him up. He stood there, wide-eyed, rubbing his mouth, and she just said one thing to him. No.” My father seems sort of amazed. “Then she took my hand and we just got in the van. I think I knew I was going to marry her, right there in that alley.”
This may be the most I’ve ever heard my father talk at one time. He looks almost embarrassed, and glances out the window. I look out there too, but it’s so dark now that I can’t see much more than the Laundromat sign glowing white. Besides that, I only see us: my father and me.
He takes a breath. “She was always strong. So it makes sense that she would make such a nice life for you and Luna. I admired her for that.”
I feel a sudden fury spread like a flame in my belly. It’s great that he admired her while she was working her ass off raising two girls by herself. “Did you ever tell her that?”
He shakes his head. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he says. “I’m kind of an ass. I’m sure your mom has told you.”
He’s wrong there. Even when Luna would go on her tirades about our father in the last couple of years, my mother would say very little.
“She actually . . . She doesn’t say much about you at all.” As I say it I wonder if that’s better or worse.
My father is looking at his plate, studying his eggs as if he’s trying to memorize them, their lacy edges, their yellow-and-white swirl.
“Luna thinks you’re an ass, though.” I offer this detail as if it’s a consolation.
My father’s exhale comes out as a soft laugh, nervous around its edges.
“I don’t blame her,” he says. “I wasn’t any good at it.”
“At what?”
“At being a dad.” He puts his hand on his cheek. “There were too many other things I wanted to do.”
I pour syrup on the last few bites of my pancakes, then set the pitcher down a little too hard. The candle and the sugar jar rattle.
“You could have still done them,” I say.
He nods. “You’re probably right. I just couldn’t figure out how.” He lowers his voice and leans toward me. “Meg found out she was pregnant and she just wanted to stop. I guess I didn’t. I convinced her, and we went out for a few more tours. Your aunt Kit came with us.”
I know this, of course, but I don’t tell him that I’ve seen some of the pictures. In one in particular, I remember Aunt Kit with her pixie cut, looking like a tinier, more birdlike version of my mother, smiling wide, wearing six-month-old Luna in a front carrier and clamping her hands over Luna’s ears. Did they really take Luna and me to the shows? Or was this just a practice? I’ve always wondered, but I don’t want to get distracted now.
“Why did you stop calling us?” I ask.
He looks at me as if he’s trying to figure something out. As if I’m one of those 3-D pictures that you have to stare at for a long time, trying to unfocus your eyes, until the picture appears.
So I keep talking. “I mean, you say you wanted us in your life. But you’ve been gone. Totally gone. Until this week, I hadn’t seen you in almost three years.” I’m speaking faster now, my words tripping over one another.
My father puts his two hands on the edge of the table, then looks up at me. “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” he says.
I blink. “Why would you think that?”
“I’m beginning to see that I might have been wrong,” he says. “Phoebe, Luna told me not to call.”
My heart drops out then, and that feeling gives me a flash of a memory from when we were small: Luna and I dropping Barbie dolls two stories down our grandmother’s laundry chute. I feel anger bubble up again.
“What?” I say. “When?”
“A few summers ago.” He looks down, twists a silver ring on his right middle finger. “She said that you were almost in high school and things were going to be different. She said it was okay when you were younger, the fact that I wasn’t around very much, but now you two had decided that it would be easier
if I weren’t around at all.”
The waitress appears then and sets our check down on the table. Under the total she’s drawn a smiley face and written Thanks! in blue-inked, loopy scrawl. I want to crumple it in my hand. I want to tear it into tiny pieces.
I take a breath without looking at my father. I’m waiting for him to say something else, but he doesn’t, and I don’t even know what his face looks like now, whether he feels embarrassed or just sad. But what I do know, right away, is that when Luna told my father not to call three years ago, she wasn’t talking about things changing for me, not really. Or not only me, anyway. She was talking about herself. And looking back on her anger these past few years, she didn’t want him to believe her at all. But he did. He didn’t fight for us. He didn’t argue, so I lost out on having a dad.
I look at my father. “It wasn’t Luna’s choice to make,” I say. “It was mine.” I try to keep my voice steady. “And I can’t believe you fell for it. She wanted you to choose to be our dad. She wanted you to call.”
He sighs. He picks up a sugar packet from the bowl at the center of the table and crinkles it between his fingers. “I think you’re right,” he says. “I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. Teenage girls . . .” He says this as if it’s an explanation. “I thought I’d give her a little time and she’d come around.”
“Why didn’t you just talk to Mom?” I asked. “That would be the normal, parental thing to do.”
I say this though obviously he’s never been a normal parent.
I wait, and he stays quiet. Across the restaurant, our waitress nearly drops her tray and bursts out laughing. I look at my father and he looks at me. Finally he starts to talk again.
“I did. She told me that I should listen to Luna.” He looks to the side and I can see his jaw clench. “She said to give her time. And I figured Meg had the right to say that. But then the months passed, and the years, even, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. How to fix it, I mean. I waited too long, and then it seemed like it was out of my hands.” He tosses his hands up as he says this, then rests them on the table in front of him.
I slide my plate toward the end of the table. “It wasn’t.”
He drops the sugar packet back into the bowl and looks straight at me. “This is why I’m so happy you came to see me. Honestly, Phoebe, seeing you at the door of my studio, after the show, even tonight . . .” He shakes his head. “It’s the greatest thing.”
I want to shake my own head, or scream, or get up and walk out of here, but I don’t. I finger the silver bangle bracelet my mother gave me before I left. I breathe in and out. I try to calm down, but it doesn’t really work.
“Do you come here a lot?” I ask. I’m biting the inside of my cheek.
“Sometimes,” he says.
“‘The light will trap you, the light will catch you, but summer’s not long. Summerlong.’” I actually sing the song, and as I hear the words come out of my mouth, I have a thought: I’m a better lyricist than my father.
He looks at me. “I haven’t heard that song in a while.”
“I heard it at the grocery store last month,” I say. “I think that’s the standard place it’s played now.”
“Ouch,” he says, pretending to flinch. The ends of his mouth curve up into a small smile.
“They play it on the radio, too. 92.9 FM Hot Mixx Radio,” I say.
“Christ,” my father says, shaking his head, and I realize he must not listen to the radio much.
I shrug. “It’s okay. Your new record is actually pretty great.”
“Thanks.”
“But what the hell does that song mean?”
“You know,” he says, “I really can’t remember.”
He puts a twenty down over the check and then adjusts it, lining it up so the edges are even. I’ve imagined this before: What would it be like if eating pancakes with my father were completely normal? It could be just a thing I did sometimes, if I didn’t have to go all the way to Brooklyn to do it. I look at him now and realize that I’m trying to memorize him because, really, who knows when I’ll see him again? It is crazy to think that he’ll be back in our lives now. Right? I’m not sure what that would even mean.
I can picture my father on the sofa in my parents’ old apartment in the West Village, his guitar in his lap. I don’t know if it’s a real memory or one my mind has created, cobbled together from photographs I’ve seen over the years. I know the sofa was green and the walls were blue, but I was only two years old when they’d moved out, so is it possible I really remember?
My father looks up. “I’m glad you stopped by,” he says. “Don’t be mad at Luna. She was trying to protect you.”
“She was trying to protect herself,” I say. “Luna thinks about Luna first.”
“Okay.” He looks at me. “She’s like me, maybe. So I have to forgive her.”
I gather my purse and stand up, and he follows me, out of the booth and out of the restaurant and onto the sidewalk. As I walk with him behind me I try to think of the things I’ve learned about my father so far. He reads. He sings Beatles songs to pretty girls if the opportunity presents itself. He makes furniture too big to fit out the door. He screws up, but eventually admits it. That’s not like Luna at all. Maybe it’s like me.
“I’m just going to get on the train here,” I said, pointing to the stop on the next corner.
“Are you sure?” my father asks, but he seems a little relieved.
“I’m sure.” I want to be able to walk away from this, and now. I need to figure out what to do next.
“Well, come back again,” he says. “Bring Luna.”
“Sure,” I say. I don’t tell him that I’m leaving tomorrow, and that I know that if Luna didn’t ring his doorbell the last time we were there, she might never do it.
“Go see her again,” I say. “They play in Red Hook before they leave for the tour. Next week.” I try to smile but it only goes halfway. “Maybe she’ll talk to you this time.”
My father nods. He puts his hand in his pocket then, and I can hear change rattling around. He pulls out a yellow MetroCard.
“I have a MetroCard,” I say. “A weekly pass.”
“This one has twenty dollars on it, I think.” He hands it to me. “You can use it when yours runs out.” I take it, even though I don’t have any use for it, because I know my father just wants to give me something. I don’t tell him that I already have his rock in my pocket, not to mention his dimple in my cheek.
“See you soon,” he says, and stands there looking like he’s not sure what to do. So I let him off the hook again. I step forward, and I hug him, or maybe it’s that I let him hug me. And then I step back and smile and turn around.
When I get to the subway entrance, I know he’s still watching. He’s standing there, his back to the diner windows, waiting for me to look at him. But I don’t look. I just walk down the subway stairs, trailing my right hand lightly on the railing, avoiding the sticky spots of stuck-on gum. I don’t turn around to see him watch me leave.
forty-nine
MEG
MARCH 1993
I’M THE LAST ONE OFFSTAGE, and I feel so light-blind that I can barely see anything when I step into the hallway. I reach out and somehow Kieran’s hand is there, pulling me forward, toward him. He folds me into his arms.
“Amazing,” he says. “You were amazing.” Some kind of energy crackles like electricity in the air. I can almost see it over Kieran’s shoulder, blue as sparks at night. It’s a spectacular feeling, beautiful and a little scary, and I can’t tell if the sound I hear is the crowd or my blood rushing in my ears.
In front of us, Carter turns around. There’s a huge smile on his face.
“What the hell was that?” he says.
“That was ‘Sea of Tranquility,’” Kieran says.
“Yeah,” Dan says to me. “You killed it out there. We killed it.”
I’m smiling, but I feel dizzy. I lean hard on Kieran.
> “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m just”—I take a breath—“overwhelmed.” I’ve always liked being onstage, but this was something else. This was fervor. The crowd was crazy for us. It was a little scary, honestly.
Kieran must see the look on my face, so he reaches out to touch my cheek.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” he says. “And it was for you, babe. They went nuts over your lyrics. And that fucking beautiful voice.” He kisses me then, leans me backward for a long moment and pulls me back up.
I can still hear the crowd screaming and clapping, hoping we’ll come back for a second encore, I think.
“Should we?” I say. I take a deep breath, trying to steady my pulse. My blood feels carbonated.
I look at Kieran. He smiles and takes my hand.
“Let’s do it,” he says.
fifty
WHEN I FINALLY GET BACK to Luna’s street, I sit down on the scratchy sandstone steps of the building next door, propping my bag against my feet. From this spot, if I lean against the railing I can just see Luna’s living room window up near the roof. It’s dark, so I think she must be sleeping, either still on the couch or in her own bed. Either way, I don’t want to go inside and I don’t want to talk to her. I take my phone out of my bag and scroll through my music.
I’m looking for “Sea of Tranquility,” the title track from Shelter’s biggest record. The one that came out before my mom got pregnant with Luna. The one about an empty sea on the moon. I have listened to this song approximately five thousand times in my life, partly because this one is a duet. My parents sing it together.
I find it. I press play.
The guitar lines at the beginning are both my mother’s and my father’s, but her voice comes in first. In fact, it takes kind of a while for him to start singing too, but once he comes in he’s there for the rest of the song. Right now, I’m trying to figure out if they sound younger here, twenty years ago, but to me, they just sound like themselves.
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