Perfect Tunes

by Emily Gould

  “I’m just going to play an old song to warm up,” she told the engineer, who nodded at her wordlessly. He was probably counting down the minutes, too, looking forward to getting a sandwich or something, or to greeting whoever had booked the day’s next session, someone who would likely be competent, or at least play music.

  Fuck! She had to get it together and transmute the self-hatred and impotence she felt into something resembling creativity. She played the opening of her old song about Dylan, the plaintive one about wondering whether someone was your boyfriend, and without thinking too hard, began to make up new words to it, nonsense words at first. She sang angrily, loudly, the way she’d sung in the shower as a teenager, when she’d mistakenly thought that the noise of the water drowned her voice out. Gradually the song became a new song, though it had something in common with the old one. She repeated a chorus over and over again, some nonsense about someone not loving you the way you loved them.

  She couldn’t get any further than that. Still, it was something. She tried it again in a different key, and spent some time thinking about an arrangement with other instruments. At the end of her session, she sent a file of the song to Callie in an email titled “possible song in progress?” and then felt grateful that the rest of her day would keep her busy enough that she wouldn’t be able to check email again for hours, waiting for Callie’s response.

  * * *

  It occurred to Marie, as her bus pulled up out of the ugly warren of tunnels under Port Authority and began to make its lumbering way out of the city, that she had never left New York on her own before. She hadn’t realized how easy it would be to just buy a ticket, wait in line, and escape. She would be in another city in just a few hours, a place she’d never even visited before. No one had stopped her to ask where her parents were. No one had even looked at her twice, or asked her for ID. She had the backpack she’d left home with that morning, full of useless schoolbooks. She wished she’d thought to pack a change of clothes, but she had her phone and charger and her ATM card. She could wear her underwear inside out tomorrow. She was filled with the sense of power and well-being that comes from deciding to do something on a whim and actually having the nerve to follow through.

  The bus ride passed quickly, the blur of 1-95 interrupted only by a bad chicken sandwich at a rest stop in Connecticut. She had a window seat, and the bus didn’t smell overwhelmingly of piss and disinfectant. The girl sitting next to her cleared her throat with an ominous crackling gargle every so often and blew her nose a lot, but she was at least apologetic about it, and with her headphones on, Marie barely noticed.

  Figuring out where Daisy lived had been easy. The town was mentioned in Dylan’s Wikipedia entry, and from there she’d just googled Daisy’s full name and the name of the town and gotten both her workplace and home address. She also found an obit for Dylan’s dad, who’d died of a fast-moving random cancer just a few years earlier. Her grandfather. It would have been nice to have met him, she supposed. She tried to feel angry at her mother for a moment, but instead just felt guilty. If Laura knew where Marie was, and where she was going, she would be so upset, even more upset than she’d been last night. Marie wasn’t sure exactly what she’d said to hurt Laura so badly, but she sensed that something had fractured between them, maybe irreparably. If only she hadn’t been so wasted, and if only she could just communicate effortlessly with her mother and make her understand how she felt—just to be able to share it with her, without alarming her or upsetting her. But that had always been impossible, and maybe always would be. She would text later to say that she was spending the night at a friend’s house.

  The car ride from the bus station to Daisy’s house was longer and more expensive than she’d counted on; she hadn’t factored in rush-hour surge pricing, but she still figured she would be able to afford the return trip and her bus ticket home. The driver didn’t ask why she was taking a $100 ride to a random suburb, or try to talk to her at all. Somehow getting into a stranger’s car seemed more fraught with peril in Boston than it did in New York. She had a moment on the highway when she’d realized that if the driver decided to kidnap and rape or murder her, there wasn’t anything she would be able to do about it. But then she looked at the blue dot on Google Maps and saw that it was headed in the exact right direction. There was a small photo of a baby stuck on the guy’s dashboard; he wasn’t a murderer. And soon they were pulling into the driveway.

  The house itself was beautiful, red like a barn-house toy she’d had as a child. She got out of the car and breathed crisp, piney fall air, a huge relief after the sanitized stuffiness of the vehicles she’d spent all day trapped in. The driver gave her a dispassionate wave and was gone before she had even made her way halfway up the stone path toward the front door.

  Now she was stuck here. There was nothing to do but knock.

  The sun was beginning to dip behind the tree line of the pine forest that surrounded the house, and there didn’t seem to be many lights on inside. Briefly, Marie freaked herself out by imagining that maybe no one was home, and no one was coming home, but she did it in the same way that you purposely scare yourself when you’re fumbling for keys that you know are definitely somewhere in your bag. Someone was in the house, she was almost certain, but that someone might be hoping she would go away. After a few minutes, this theory was proved correct: as Marie moved to knock again, a muffled voice came from the other side of the door.

  “I’m not interested in discussing Dylan with his young fans, and since this is private property, you could be arrested for trespassing,” the voice said calmly.

  “Okay, that’s fine. I’ll leave. I’d just like to come in for a second and charge my phone,” Marie said.

  There was a long pause, and the sound of a dog scratching to be let out. Finally Daisy heaved a sigh and opened the door. The dog, a yellow Lab, bounded joyfully past Marie and into the yard, where she turned in circles a few times before relieving herself.

  Marie couldn’t help but compare Daisy to her other grandmother, who wore a lot of makeup and sweaters with ribbons and bells on them. Daisy was much more austere. She had white hair, cut in a bob, and was wearing loose jeans and leather L.L.Bean slippers. Marie tried to make out any family resemblance between her own face and Daisy’s; if there was any, it was in her large eyes and furrowed forehead. Daisy didn’t look like a happy person.

  She was looking past Marie at the dog, whom she beckoned back inside with a commanding wave. Then she turned and gestured to Marie in a very similar way. “You can charge your phone, but then you’re going right back to wherever it is you came from. I’m not running a tourist operation here. It’s ghoulish and it doesn’t do me any good.”

  “I’m sorry that you have to deal with people coming here,” Marie said.

  “You’re sorry!”

  “I’m different,” she said, not knowing quite how to phrase it. She’d come up with a few different alternatives on the bus, but now that she was here, they all seemed melodramatic.

  “Oh, everyone thinks they’re different,” said Daisy.

  13

  “You’re not the first person to come here and try to convince me they’re his child.”

  Daisy had poured herself and Marie both glasses of white wine from a large bottle, filling them both to the very top. It was flattering to be presumed to be an adult, and she wanted the wine, but something made Marie feel like she had to be honest with Daisy about everything in order to be believed about the crucial thing. “I’m only fourteen,” she said, gesturing to the glass. It had gone through the dishwasher, she could tell, but still wasn’t quite clean. The whole house was like that: a veneer of tidiness, but dust on everything, piles of unsorted mail, a musty dog-smell that was almost but not quite canceled out by the woodstove and the general freshness of the air outside.

  “I’m sure you can handle a glass of wine if you’re related to me,” Daisy said with a grimace.

  “I do have a high tolerance,” Marie said, an
d took a sip. “So you believe me?”

  Daisy scowled as she scrutinized Marie’s face. “You’re more plausible than the rest. And I met your mother once, I think. She was one of the ones who was seeing him around the time of his death. The one who was also in a band, with that beautiful friend of hers.”

  “Callie. Yeah. My mom’s beautiful, too.”

  “She was pretty, but I didn’t understand what he saw in her. She was a pushover. Too shy to be a singer. Not a match for him. They wouldn’t have lasted.”

  “Well, probably no one’s relationships that they have in their early twenties are meant to last, right?” Marie took a sip of her wine and pretended that this was hard-won knowledge, not something she’d assimilated from TV shows.

  “I met Dylan’s father when I was twenty-four. We were together for three decades. He stood by me through everything.” Daisy’s tone was deadened, not sentimental or wistful. “Now he’s gone, too.” Her glass was empty already, and she poured herself another; the bottle was still on the table. It wasn’t the kind of wine Marie’s parents drank; it tasted sugary, almost like a spoiled soda, but she gulped it down almost as fast as Daisy did. She was hungry, and the sugar in the wine was almost like eating food. She felt exhilarated. This was her grandmother! Marie felt like she was unraveling a mystery, though it wasn’t clear what she was trying to solve. She’d known that Daisy existed, and that she was her father’s mother. Was there something more to know? She struggled momentarily to remember why she’d come.

  She’d thought her dead father, or what remained of his family, could be an alternative to her living mother. She knew her mother loved her but also wanted her to be a happy child still, and to stay that way forever, and it was already too late for that. She could tell that her sadness made Laura uncomfortable—it wasn’t transient like Laura’s own sadness, it was something bigger that she couldn’t handle. It made Laura feel like she’d failed, and that was too horrible a thought to cope with. That after all the effort she’d put in, and everything she’d sacrificed, there was something wrong with Marie that she couldn’t fix. And Marie, in turn, felt like she’d failed Laura, which made her feel even worse. It was impossible to talk about any of this, of course, so instead they fought about rules.

  Whereas with Daisy she could start fresh. She might understand what it was like to be defective, brain-wise, in a way that couldn’t be cured by a good night’s sleep or a walk around the block.

  “Tell me about our family,” Marie said. “I want to know where I come from.”

  “I will, but first you should call your mother and tell her where you are, so that she doesn’t worry about you,” said Daisy. “Well, she’ll still worry. But at least she’ll know where you are.”

  14

  After Laura got off the phone, she didn’t tell Matt right away that Marie had run away from home. She cleared the table where he and Kayla had just finished eating dinner and put the dishes in the sink, then started washing them even though technically it was Kayla’s turn to do this. Kayla did not point this out. She went into the living room where she spread out her notebooks on the coffee table and put on her giant pink headphones. Matt came up behind Laura and embraced her as she scrubbed a hardened ridge of dried-up lasagna noodle off a Pyrex pan, and she stiffened and nudged him away with her one raised shoulder. He took a step backward.

  “I’ve told you a million times that I hate it when you do that,” she hissed.

  “Jesus, sorry that I wanted to hug you. What’s going on?”

  She turned off the water and wrung out the sponge, wiping the lip of the sink before resting it on the edge, where it balanced above the remainder of the dishes still floating there in a puddle of greasy, sudsy water. Looking at what remained to be done, Laura felt a wave of exhaustion. The dishes would dry, she would put them away, and then tomorrow her family would get them out and dirty them again, and on and on. Sometimes someone else would help, but most of the time Laura would be the one who moved the dishes from cabinet to table to sink and back. She sat down at the kitchen table and swept up a pile of crumbs with the edge of one hand, then just left them in a pile there, too defeated to stand up again and ferry them to the trash can.

  “Marie took a bus to Boston this morning. She tracked down her biological father’s mom, who I haven’t talked to since Dylan’s memorial service and who I’m pretty sure is not a stable person. I know she must not be a huge fan of mine. Anyway, she’s there now, getting to know her ‘dad’s side of the family,’ as she put it.”

  She caught the look of hurt in Matt’s eyes before he quickly looked away. Even though Marie called him “Matt,” it was understood that he was, for all practical purposes, Marie’s father. Matt was what “dad” had meant to Marie since she’d been able to form memories. It was ridiculous that she could bring herself to use that word to refer to anyone else.

  “I guess it’s to be expected, right? You remember what being her age was like—I would have done anything to annoy my parents. She’s just doing what she’s supposed to be doing. And at least we know where she is, and that she’s safe.”

  “We don’t know that!” Laura exploded. “I have no idea what this woman is like!”

  They both reflexively glanced over at Kayla, but she still had her head bent, bopping in time to whatever was playing through her headphones.

  “Did she say when she was coming back?”

  “I told her to come back tomorrow, that we’d pay for the train—I gave her my credit card info. She told me she’d think about it. I was so upset that I hung up on her. She’ll think about it? What does she think, that she’s going to go live there?”

  “She can spend a couple of days, if she wants to. Let her get bored and miss her friends. She’ll come around if you don’t freak out and try to force the situation.” He took a step toward her as though to hug her again, but she moved away, still unwilling to let him comfort her in any way.

  “We’re supposed to reward her for running away from home by being nice about it?”

  Matt shrugged. “I’m just saying, every time you crack down on her, it pushes her further away. You know that it does.”

  Laura shook her head at Matt, past trying to communicate with him if he kept refusing to get as enraged as she was, or at least to meet her halfway. He was probably right about not pressuring Marie to come home, but who was he to tell her how to discipline her own child? Just because Kayla would never pull something like this didn’t mean that Matt had some kind of parenting expertise that Laura didn’t. It just meant that Kayla was a self-sustaining little jade plant of a teenager. Kayla’s hardiness had as much to do with Matt as Marie’s sadness and rebelliousness had to do with Laura. She wanted Matt to understand all this, but she was too tired to explain it all, and besides, what was the point? She felt a deep need for oblivion: a glass of wine, a cooking show, something to dull the terror that she felt every time she thought about Marie, miles away, sleeping in a strange bed in the home of a stranger who probably wanted to teach her how to hate Laura even more than she did already.

  15

  Daisy and Marie ate a sad limp stir-fry that Daisy dumped out of a frozen bag into a skillet, and drank more wine. Marie slowed down to focus on eating—though the food wasn’t tasty, she was starving—and soon found her equilibrium returning. Daisy, though, got drunker and drunker, continuing to refill her own glass long after Marie had cleared the table and politely started washing the dishes. Daisy talked the whole time. She asked Marie a few questions about herself but used them mostly to springboard to complaints about her own family and life. Dylan’s childhood seemed to have been her happiest time, and she looked past Marie with a dreamy expression as she told a story for almost half an hour about the first time a school music teacher had singled him out for a solo in the school band.

  Marie tried to think of questions for Daisy, but she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to know about Dylan, or why she wanted to know it.

  “Do you think Dyla
n would have liked me?” she finally asked, as Daisy seemed to be running out of steam. There was only about an inch of wine left in the big bottle.

  Daisy squinted at Marie and almost smiled. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t know you well enough. I don’t think he would have liked being a father—he wasn’t ready to be one. Not at all.”

  “My mother wasn’t ready to be a mother, but she did it anyway.”

  “Yes, and I think that’s quite odd. I don’t understand her decision. Didn’t she also have a band? She probably thought she’d get some money out of it because Dylan was doing so well with his band.”

  “I really don’t think so. That’s not what she’s like.”

  “So then why did she do it? Was she just disorganized and waited too long? That’s been known to happen. I don’t imagine she’d have told you that, though. She probably told you something about having been so in love, and feeling an obligation to honor his life in some way.”

  Marie shrugged. That was what her mother had told her, of course. She had never questioned it; it had seemed like the truth. Daisy was an asshole for trying to make her question Laura’s motives. On the other hand, just because she was an asshole didn’t mean that she was wrong. Maybe Marie’s life—the baseline fact of her existence—was nothing but a long-con cash grab. It was the darkest thing she’d ever imagined about herself, but her odd day had left her in a mood where anything seemed possible. She thought of Laura’s voice on the phone—resigned, tightly controlled, obviously trying not to yell. What if all her overprotectiveness, which had seemed like a form of love, had just been about protecting an investment?

  No, there was no way. Marie hated her mother but she also loved her, and knew that Laura loved her, too. Their life together before Matt and Kayla, which she barely remembered, had been hard. Laura talked to her sometimes about their tiny first Brooklyn apartment, her fights with the landlord over rent and heat and bugs. No one made those kinds of sacrifices or feigned that kind of affection, long term, in the hopes of getting a cut of some royalties.