“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.” She was quiet for a moment. “I think about what it would be like to grow up somewhere else. Who would I be if the ex-hippies never took me out of Guatemala?”
“You probably wouldn’t know the Electric Warts.”
She laughed a small, soft laugh. It had been too damn hot earlier, so I’d left my denim jacket in the Blue Bomber, but now that the sun had gone down the desert air was much cooler. Corrina was cold too. She shivered. I wished I had my jacket so I could have thrown it over her shoulders.
“You’d be a totally different person,” I said.
“Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wouldn’t know you. You wouldn’t be you. And that would suck for me.”
She shrugged.
“But it’s not what you’re asking.”
“No.” She paused and then continued. “I feel like my whole life I hear people telling me who I am not. I feel all the things I’m not, or not totally a part of. I just want to feel a part of something. I just want to be something I am. Fully.”
I thought she might say more, but she didn’t. Instead, we were quiet for a while, and we looked out over the neighborhood of dark or barely lit rectangles. But I knew Corrina was watching me, too. “I come from a weird home,” I eventually said. “I mean, I always guessed Dead Dad was screwing around behind Mom’s back, but she’s a little fucked up to not tell me more about it. For knowing, and not saying anything to me. All that silence is just as bad as a lie.”
“I get that,” Corrina said, leaning back. “I really get that.”
I was feeling strange, because having been electrocuted will do that, but also because I was still thinking about Dead Dad and the woman in St. Louis, and Mom and what she knew or didn’t, and why Gpa couldn’t talk about it either, and why this kind of stuff that really is the most important is always the stuff no one wants to talk about.
“We both have weird families,” I finally said, just to say something, to try at least.
“Yeah, kind of.” She sniffed. “We both don’t know a lot about our parents.”
“Your parents don’t have any mysteries, though,” I said.
“I’m not talking about the ex-hippies,” she said. “My biological parents. Even that word hides them. Biological: like they’re lost and locked away in some book or encyclopedia. Where are they? Who are they? You know. Those kinds of mysteries.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Yeah.”
“And then . . .” She looked at me and then away, out toward the mountains. “That all leads to other mysteries. Mysteries—more like black holes of understanding. Like I’m just stuck between two different worlds all the time, but I don’t really understand either of the two worlds I’m stuck between. I sometimes feel like people want me to choose one of the worlds, but I can’t. I’m right in the middle, and nobody can figure that out. Why do I have to figure it all out?”
I nodded. “That feels lonely.”
“Fuck yeah it does.” Corrina shook her head. “So I’ve got these parents who love me, yeah yeah yeah, but they don’t know me. I mean, my dad can tell you a concert, name the date, the year, who was onstage, the set list. But he doesn’t play an instrument. So what does he really know? I always think about that. Did my parents in Guatemala play an instrument?”
“You wonder if that’s why you play? Genetics and all that?”
“Yes and no,” Corrina said. She put both hands to her head as if she was keeping it from splitting open. “It’s not that simple. It’s from the ex-hippies to some extent. They’re the ones who let me sign up for Girls Rock Camp. I went for years. That’s where I starting learning the songs they love. It’s so weird. They were skeptical, but once they heard me playing the stuff they love, they were okay with it.”
She got up and walked across the roof and stood by the other edge with her hands in her pockets, staring toward the glow of the Vegas skyline, the single spire of gray light rising from the pyramid and the candy-colored haze of buildings around it. It might have looked like LA, except that it was nothing but hotels.
Corrina kept her back to me as she continued. “Sometimes I wonder if I play because it was the only time they listened to me. I mean really looked at me and really listened to me. The only time they were really proud, or at least the only time I could see it on their faces. But I was playing their music, you know? And I am their world. I am. But I’m also not, and they never talk about that.”
I was about to say, “Yeah, I know,” but then I didn’t. I stayed silent and just listened. Because I didn’t really know, and it would have been stupid of me to think I did.
“My dad makes these lists of my behavior patterns, but never says, Hey, how does it feel to be a brown girl raised by white parents? And my mom? Honey, we don’t see race, she says. We only see family.” Corrina turned to me, and even in the dimness I could see her eyes glisten with a few tears. “That’s fucked up, Hendrix. It just is. Like, if you don’t see race, you don’t see me, Mom.” She gestured to the space between us. “If I’m across the room from them at a party, no one looks at my parents and just assumes they’re my parents. They look around for brown folks.”
I thought about the photo Corrina had found back at the Great Empty Blue, the photo of Gpa, the old war hero with the Solo cup. She’d teased me, but beneath it, she was saying, This is your history, Hendrix. It was right there, looking me in the eyes. It reminded me of Mrs. Keene’s first assignment in poetry class: the “Where I’m From” poems. She’d asked us all to read our poems out loud, and Corrina’s was about a swirling ball of fire, something like the sun, with sunspots leaping out and diving back into the smoldering center.
“Now, Corrina,” Mrs. Keene had said to her in front of the whole class. “What I asked you to do was write specifics, not abstractions. Talk about where you’re from, the food, the culture, the smells of your grandmother’s cooking, and all that, the sounds of the neighborhood.”
Corrina stood back up. “Fine,” she said. “ ‘Where I’m From.’ Whiskey and mashed potatoes. My parents are fucking Irish.”
Corrina had been booted from class for her language.
But how could I blame her for her frustration? Words like home and family didn’t need to fit in a tidy little box with a label on the front so it could conveniently fit on someone else’s shelf. What if Corrina started her own family book? The CFB. What would that look like? What did family mean, exactly? And what was home, for that matter? It sure as hell didn’t have to be my abyss of the Great Empty Blue.
On the roof, Corrina’s voice had gone hoarse. “Why am I even telling you all this? I must sound insane. Maybe my dad’s right?”
“Hey,” I said moving a little closer to her. “You’re not crazy.”
“Yeah, right. You don’t know me, white boy.”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I’m listening and you don’t sound crazy to me.” I took a deep breath. “For real. I remember your poem from class about the swirling ball of fire. It made sense to me. It was awesome. Vivid, just like a frigging ball of fire should be! It all made sense to me.”
“It did?”
“Like it was something alive and fluid—something on the move, maybe.” I paused. “I should have said something to you then.”
Corrina sniffed.
I walked over to her and looked out toward the skyline. “I should have. And I should have said something to Mrs. Keene, too.”
Corrina took a deep breath through her nose. “Not going to lie, Hendrix, would have been nice if someone else had told her that.”
I nodded and we stood there, side by side, staring at the gaudy skyline, for a while. “Okay,” I eventually said. I pointed to the city. “So that’s Vegas. But we’re going elsewhere.” I steered us around to the other side of the roof so we were looking toward the blue-shadowed mountains in the distance. “I don’t know what’s out there,” I said,
pointing to the invisibleness behind the peaks.
“But we’re going anyway,” Corrina said. “Story of my life. Every day I feel like I get up and jump off a cliff, hoping there’s water below.”
“Or fire,” I said. “A solar flare leaping off the surface of the sun, hoping to fall back into the fire, not fizzle out—it was something like that, right?”
Corrina nodded. “Something like that. Man, I can’t believe you remember all that.”
“I remember all kinds of lines from poems. It’s like . . . my thing.”
“Like what else?”
I paused, because I realized that my hand was only inches from hers, and, to me at least, there was this crazy invisible fire leaping back and forth between us, like it was rising off our skin and fusing in the soft breath of space between her fingers and mine, and one voice inside me told me to grab her hand and another told me to cool it, because she’d just poured her guts out to me, and what I would have given for a frigging instruction manual to follow, but I had nothing, so instead I stammered and twitched as I just tried to say the first thing that came to mind.
“Do you know E. E. Cummings?” I said.
“I’m sorry about his name.”
“Ha. And ha. The thing is, he has this poem and it reminds me of you: (the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) / nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
She looked at me and smiled. “Voice of your eyes, I like that.”
“I like your hands,” I said, and then I took one of hers and pressed it to mine, palm to palm, heat to heat, my giant, trembling fingers standing up over hers. “They’re so much smaller. But I think they’re stronger.”
“From playing guitar.”
“Yeah, but also just from you. You’re strong.”
“So are you.”
She leaned into me, face into my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her gently. I felt her breath through my shirt. “Just look at us,” she mumbled. “Who’d have ever guessed we’d be standing on a roof in Vegas together.”
We stayed like that for a while, wrapped up in each other’s arms, wrapped up in each other’s silence, letting it hold us until it became a kind of cocoon of warmth that kept the cool air away.
Eventually we sat down and looked at the mountains and I smiled as she began to sing with a voice as beautiful as the desert light, the colors of twilight sinking into night, the color of that bottom-drop feeling that fell through my gut when she sat on the edge of the roof, leaned against my shoulder, and sang.
She said it was one Gpa might like, called “Bell Bottom Blues,” but I thought it meant something very different to her, something private, something that resonated deep within her, and the great thing about music, as I had begun to learn, was that it moves like a spirit or a spell, powerful and independent, within each of us, and as she sang, my mind drifted and I wondered if Gpa had heard the song back in his old war hero days and liked it, and if he sang those words to himself, “I don’t want to fade away,” when he was on the other side of the world in Vietnam, and if Gma had heard to it too while she waited and waited and waited for him to come home.
“Sing one of yours,” I said when she finished. “Those are my favorites.”
Corrina nodded. She didn’t look at me. She sat quiet for a moment and I could hear her, feel her, catching her breath. “Okay,” she said.
CHAPTER 12
WHERE WE’RE GOING
Corrina and I both slept in the living room with Gpa, her on the couch, me on the floor, in case Gpa got up and was confused, but he wasn’t the first one up. The Raconteur woke up before all of us and made his way into the kitchen to make coffee. Old Humper followed him, and being Old Humper, must have gone after the water cooler by the bathroom door, because I woke to a crash in the kitchen and the Raconteur shouting, and before I could get up and really collect my thoughts, I heard the back door in the kitchen slam.
There was more moaning and groaning from the kitchen, but I rubbed my face and turned to Gpa, who was looking around skeptically. “Gpa,” I said. “It’s me, Teddy. We fell asleep in the living room.” He squinted at me and rolled his stiff shoulders. He stood uneasily and inspected the room.
“That fucking dog!” the Raconteur yelled from the kitchen. “Get in here and clean up his mess!”
Gpa glanced from me, to the kitchen, to Corrina on the couch, and back to the kitchen, deep lines of worry wrinkling his face. I got up and hugged him and reminded him that we were on a road trip together and that we were heading back to Ithaca and that we’d fallen asleep at the Raconteur’s. I told him all of this as slowly and simply as I could while the Raconteur continued to shout behind me.
“Everybody heard you the first time,” Corrina told the Raconteur as she rolled off the couch. She pulled a dish towel from the fridge handle and wiped up the spilled water.
We cleaned ourselves up after that, ate a few bowls of cereal, fed Old Humper, and thanked the Raconteur for his hospitality.
The Raconteur wheeled onto his small stoop and cut the current from the fence so I didn’t go round two of stupidly electrocuting myself, and when Gpa got to the sidewalk, the Raconteur called out to him. “Charlie, everybody respects the road trip, man.” He held his hand in the air to Gpa and flashed him peace.
Gpa let out a little sniff of a laugh and smiled. “Keep on trucking, Lou,” he said, and they nodded to each other with miles in their eyes.
Then Gpa turned back around and we all piled into the Blue Bomber.
Corrina was the only one who’d changed clothes. I was in my usual blue jeans and T-shirt, and Gpa was still half hidden beneath his veterans’ cap, and Corrina had gotten back into her black jeans, but with a different T-shirt, one with the sleeves ripped off and rolled into a tank top. Some band I’d never heard of was silkscreened in black and white on the front. They all looked skinny and close to death.
Corrina got the car rolling out of the Raconteur’s neighborhood, put the skyline of the Strip behind us, and the dusty RV parks and faded fast-food joints and Big Lots and other discount stores all ticked by along the flat, colorless highway like the slow blades of an enormous fan.
We fought through traffic on the backside of Paradise, but once we passed the last cluster of cookie-cutter, prefab, white-box homes in Henderson, we were back out on the open road with the pale blue sky an infinite expanse all around us. We could have been on the moon and I wouldn’t have cared, because I was with everyone I wanted to be with. I glanced at Corrina—who was hidden behind her round, gold-rimmed sunglasses, and who sang along with the pulsing power chord song on her playlist—and smiled at her.
We put miles of highway behind us and wound our way toward the Hoover Dam as Corrina kept the Blue Bomber heading east to Arizona. We found ourselves on a bridge with a few hills in front of us and the vast gray sweep of desert beyond, but then the road dipped down and down and kept winding down, and what I thought were hills were the rocks piled highest on the gigantic mounds of earth that became steep cliff faces of the largest gorge I had ever seen, and the reddish-gray rock of Nevada was behind us and the reddish-maroon rock of Arizona was ahead of us and the green snake of the Colorado River divided it all, far below. High above, the clouds stretched like flamboyant quills.
We were on our way. Gpa was quiet and calm and mostly staring out the window, listening to contemporary musicians Corrina kept steady-flowing through the speakers, and for a stony, butte-strewn, mountainous stretch of miles, a strange peace came over me, a sense that this ridiculous plan might actually come together after all, just like the seamlessness of miles and miles of music from Corrina’s own playlist: Sarah Jaffe, Hindi Zahra, the Heavy, Pimps of Joytime, Gary Clark, Jr., Little Hurricane, We Are Trees, the Districts.
But somewhere just after we merged onto the 40 near Kingman and passed the surreal green golf courses surrounded by the desert brown, beige, and gray, Corrina’s phone started buzzing and rattling in the dashboard dock. We both glanced at the i
mage of her father’s pinched and ruddy face staring at us from the screen. He looked so much older than I thought he was, balding, some thin, feathery hair still clinging to his head, eyes that looked yellow with exhaustion. In the photo, he wasn’t wearing glasses, but they’d left red indents on the bridge of his nose.
Corrina ignored the call. “Go away,” she said to the phone.
He rang again, and a third time, and Corrina growled in frustration. “Just make him go away,” she said. Thinking I was being helpful, I reached for the phone and was going to hit the switch to flick off the screen, but the car lurched and my hand swayed and my finger stabbed the answer button.
The buzzing stopped, the music paused, and Corrina’s father’s tinny voice tore into the car. “Corrina? Corrina? Where are you?” It wasn’t on speakerphone, so he sounded mousy and distant, but he repeated himself and pleaded with her to respond.
Corrina whacked the steering wheel and turned to look at me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but I knew she was glaring at me. I was too embarrassed to move, too scared to say anything. I sat rigid and quiet as if the seat belt had tied my arms back and roped itself around my mouth. The Blue Bomber picked up speed.
“Corrina, please,” her father continued. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
“Well, answer him,” Gpa said from the backseat. He leaned forward and pointed at the phone. “Is that your father? Talk to the man.”
“Corrina?”
But before Gpa or her father could say anything else, Corrina hung up. Her father’s face disappeared and she didn’t look at me. “Hendrix, you idiot,” she said to the road ahead of us.
“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
We ripped at a speed that made the car feel like it was rocking on the wheels, and I was about to ask her to slow down, but she floored it, cut off a car in the middle lane when she swooped in front of it, and then swerved across the exit lane and steered onto the wide rocky lip along the side of the highway, braking in the gravel, skidding, and almost losing control.
The Last True Love Story Page 9