Streetlights Like Fireworks

by Pandolfe, David

  Again, a pause. “Who have you been talking to?”

  It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve managed to trip him up that easily. My father is an impressive trial lawyer who wins nearly all of his cases. He prides himself on always being completely prepared. He spends weeks, months if need be, poring over every detail, analyzing each possibility. But preparation is the key and this time he’s been taken off guard. In saying as little as he has, he’s already tipped his hand. He could still say any number of things and recover. For example, “Do you mean which hospital?” Or, “Obviously, right here in Edmonds. We’ve never lived anywhere else.” Or even, “For a moment, I thought you asked when you were born.” But he doesn’t say any of those things.

  Now, it’s not a feeling. Somehow, I know. I clasp my phone and my heart keeps beating faster, the light beyond the window blurring as my eyes start to fill. I try to keep my voice steady. “I don’t see why it matters at this point who I was talking to. I just want to know if I was adopted.”

  Again, seconds pass. I know the tables have turned but it isn’t like I feel good about it. I’m not winning anything. My entire universe is about to shift and I have no idea what to do with that. I feel cold and numb, even as I stand in the sunlight. I’ve brought the past back to the present. Now it’s time to carry the weight.

  “Listen, Jack,” my father says, “we were going to tell you. We thought probably when you turned sixteen. But we decided to wait until you were eighteen. All things considered, it seemed like you had enough going on already.”

  I hear the words and struggle to process the information. It feels like I’ve suddenly been plunged underwater. All things considered. In other words, we never knew how to deal with you. So, we kept our distance.

  “Jack? Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Are you okay?”

  It takes me a few seconds. “I think so. Yeah, I’m okay.”

  My father takes a deep breath and, again, I can see it. He’s preparing, collecting himself to state his case. “Jack, I never once imagined having this conversation on the phone. I just thought…well, our plan was to tell you when we thought you were ready.”

  I experience two opposite reactions at the same time. First, that this can’t be happening. That I must be dreaming. But my second reaction—the one that rings true—is that I finally understand why I’ve always felt like an unwanted guest in a house belonging to strangers.

  “Jack?”

  “I’m still here,” I say.

  But what matters is, I really am here, where I now stand. Not there. I’m very far away from there, thousands of miles away, and outside the sun continues to cast light on rippling water. Seagulls ride currents of air, trailing a ferry as it drifts across the bay.

  “Was it possible that you were never going to tell me?”

  “We weren’t entirely sure,” my father says. “We just wanted what was best for you. We were still trying to work it out.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I understand.”

  But all I really understand is that I’ve been raised by two people who lied to me the entire time. Maybe, at first, they had my best interests in mind. I get that. And possibly it wouldn’t bother me if they hadn’t constantly backed away from me and acted like I wasn’t truly part of the family. In that case, I would have been able to forgive the lie. But it hadn’t gone that way at all.

  “I should go,” I say. “Besides, don’t you have a meeting or something?”

  “In fact, I do,” my father says, and I can totally picture him straightening his tie. “But that’s not important right now. What matters is that you’re okay.”

  “Sure, I’m fine. Seriously, you should go to your meeting.” It’s so easy to imagine him checking his watch.

  “How about I call you later? Maybe a few hours from now. Wait, that’s probably not going to work. How about I call you this evening? Are you sure you’re okay?”

  The sun is still rising and the light has just hit the top of those mountains. “I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t worry about me.”

  ~~~

  Then it’s just me alone, listening to the silent house around me, wondering which room Lauren is in and whether I can nudge her shoulder and wait for her to open her eyes. I want to crawl into bed beside her and make things as they’ve been until now—just the two of us on a journey with a mystery pulling us forward and no knowledge of what waits at the other end.

  Somehow, Lauren knew there was meaning on the other side of all this and she made it happen. Maybe now she can tell me what to expect next. I really need her to tell me how it’s possible that Jessica just happens to get feelings about things too, why she told me to call my parents and ask where I was born. How could she possibly get a feeling about something like that? Maybe Lauren can help me understand these things. But when I open my door, I hear nothing and it’s just an unfamiliar hallway full of unfamiliar doors.

  I walk softly down the hall and then down the stairs. I go into the kitchen, thinking I’ll still be alone when get there. Jessica sits at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, gazing out the window. She turns to look at me, her eyes rimmed red as if she hasn’t slept much. She offers a smile.

  “Did you sleep okay?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer before adding, “I’m guessing probably not if you’re already up.”

  “I slept a little.”

  Jessica nods. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “I think so,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Jessica gets up from the table and takes a mug from the cabinet. She fills it and adds milk and sugar, then comes back and sits across from me. She looks into my eyes and it’s nothing like all the photos I’ve seen of her over the years. Her eyes are still vividly green but there’s a sadness there I haven’t perceived before or that maybe wasn’t there yesterday. Either way, I never once imagined sitting across from Jessica Malcom at her kitchen table while she wore a faded blue bathrobe, her hair disheveled and streaked with gray.

  After a few moments, she says, “You talked to your parents, didn’t you.”

  I wrap my hands around my mug. Part of me still feels cold and numb. “I talked to my father. It would appear I was adopted.” Saying it out loud doesn’t exactly make it real. I guess it’s going to take me some time getting used to the truth. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” Jessica says. “It didn’t seem remotely possible. But I have to admit, I got a feeling about it. Listen, I think there’s something we should both take a look at together.”

  19

  The Moth Spectrum

  We leave the kitchen together and I follow Jessica into the living room, that space full of easels and canvases. She lifts the guitar case from the sofa where she left it resting the night before and sets it on top of an old steamer trunk—plastered with ancient, faded stickers—that must serve as a coffee table. The only other things on top of the trunk are two small screwdrivers, one a Phillips and the other flat.

  Jessica takes a seat on the sofa and pats the cushion beside hers. “Let’s find out,” she says.

  I have no idea what she’s talking about but I sit next to her. She looks at me, lifting her eyebrows momentarily, then turns her attention to the guitar case. She frees the clasps and raises the lid.

  “So,” she says, “a long time ago, I put something inside this guitar. Something I never expected to see again. Since, after all, I never expected to see this guitar again.” She lifts the Telecaster from its case and rests it face up, flat across her knees. “I guess you might call it a message in a bottle. Would you mind handing me that screwdriver—the small flathead?”

  I pick up the screwdriver and pass it to her.

  “The thing about these old Telecaster pickguards,” she says, “is that people hardly ever remove them because they run beneath the strings. There are also a ton of screws and you have to remove the tone and volume knobs as well. It’s just too inconvenient to bother with unless you really nee
d to take it off.”

  I watch as Jessica loosens the tiny screws on the sides of the old knobs, which hold them tight against their posts. She lifts the knobs from the guitar and places them on top of the steamer trunk.

  “The string part is kind of an illusion,” she says. “It looks like you’d have to take off the strings but once you remove the screws, you can slide out the pickguard. Do you mind handing me the other one?”

  Jessica passes me the tiny flathead and I pass her the Phillips. She starts removing the small screws that hold the pickguard in place. One by one, she hands them to me.

  “So, theoretically, this is a great place to hide something. As I said, theoretically.”

  I wait as Jessica continues to remove the screws. I hold my hand out, palm open to keep receiving them.

  “There,” she finally says. “That’s the last one. Now, all I have to do is slide this out from beneath the strings.”

  Jessica carefully lifts the worn, scratched plastic plate from the front of the guitar. She raises it above the pickups and slides it out from beneath the strings. She takes a sudden, deep breath. “It’s still there,” she says. “Do you see it?”

  I see it too, of course, and I feel sure she’s asking me to be sure she isn’t imagining it herself. Within the now exposed cavity in the wood, tucked into the topmost recess, pinned beneath wires running to the pickups, sits a folded square of paper.

  “I see it,” I say.

  Her hand trembling, Jessica removes the paper. She holds it against her lap, her eyes meeting mine for just a moment, within her gaze a shared message I don’t yet understand. Then, she unfolds the paper, carefully, seam by seam. She spreads it open for both of us to read.

  ~~~

  At first, it seems like a strange thing for Jessica to have done, placing a birth certificate inside a guitar before sending it out into the world. But it starts to make sense as she tells her story—how both the guitar and document symbolized a past she felt forced to part with, how she tied both together in an act of saying goodbye.

  At the time, no one knew about her relationship with John Gavuzzi. They did everything possible to keep things quiet since they weren’t sure how it would affect the band. So, of course, no one else knew either when Jessica found out she was pregnant. Other than John, of course.

  Their last moments together didn’t go well, a memory that’s haunted Jessica since. She didn’t blame him, not anymore. Those were different times and they’d both been young. Still, John didn’t react well to the news, his feeling being that she should have an abortion. Purge was rising fast, gaining a huge following, and had just started to headline tours. Jessica didn’t feel the same way at all. The fact was—something I never would have guessed before—she’d always been a private person. She’d never imagined, when she and Michelle Carter formed a garage band during high school, that anything would happen with the music they made together. She hadn’t been going for fame and, years later, still wasn’t interested. She was tired of the constant touring, sleeping on the bus or in motel rooms night after night, the drugs and alcohol, all of it. She was ready to move on.

  But the timing for the news also couldn’t have been worse for John. On the same day that Jessica discovered she was pregnant, John was booked on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Having successfully managed Purge for the past two years, he’d been offered an A&R position with Interscope records, the opportunity of a lifetime for him personally and one that might also lift Purge from indie to major label status. There was just no way he was going to miss that flight. So, he left things unresolved and caught a cab to Logan Airport. He made his flight but that plane never reached its destination. No one ever determined whether the crash had been due to mechanical failure, the severity of the storm the plane passed through, or possibly both. Not that it mattered for most onboard. Very few survived the crash into a rocky stretch of Arizona desert.

  “We’d planned to talk about things more once John got to LA,” Jessica says. “He said he’d call. I don’t know if we ever would have been able to agree on what to do, but I never found out. I’ve always liked to think that maybe he would have changed his mind.”

  Jessica sets the birth certificate next to the guitar case on the steamer trunk. She slides the pickguard back beneath the strings. She reaches over, takes one of the screws out of my hand and places it back.

  “After what happened, I could barely think. I loved John, I really did. And I also thought it would be great for us to go in that direction. Together. Alone, everything suddenly became different. It’s hard to explain but nothing seemed to make sense. On top of that, I wasn’t anywhere near ready. I just wasn’t sure I would make all that great of a single mother—if I could be a mother at all. I just didn’t know what to do.” Jessica takes a moment to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand, then says, “In the end, I decided to have the baby but give it up for adoption. So, that’s what I did. After that, I thought about going back to the band but things had changed too much for me. I couldn’t do it. I just knew all of it was over.”

  Jessica wipes her eyes again. Then, she tightens another screw into place.

  “I went to live with my father for a while, outside Boston. He lived in a small town called Marshfield. I don’t imagine you ever would have heard of it.”

  I shake my head and Jessica nods, not surprised.

  “My parents divorced way before that. At some point, my mother moved back to where she grew up. A place really far away from where they’d lived together. A place really far away from almost everything.”

  Jessica waits but it doesn’t take me long to put it together. “Here?”

  “Exactly,” she says. “It seems weird that two people from so far away could end up together, but that’s how it went. They both went to school in Boston back in the sixties and met each other there. Anyway, obviously it didn’t work out. So, this is where I decided to hide for a while.” Jessica tightens down another screw. “It wasn’t exactly my plan to stay this long but it wasn’t like I had any plan at all. I just needed to get away. The strange thing was, back then not too many people around here had even heard of Purge. In those days this place was incredibly remote. There were maybe five or six hundred people living out here total. No one was all that worried about some band from the east coast.”

  Jessica takes one of the few remaining screws from my palm. “But life always has a way of bringing something else you didn’t expect. A few years after I moved out here, my mother got sick. She died not too long after that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I feel bad about having nothing more to offer but it doesn’t seem to bother Jessica. Her eyes meet mine.

  “Thank you. She was a wonderful person and I still miss her. But that’s how I ended up owning this house and property and it made as much sense as anything to stay on after that. Eventually, I bought the shop in town, to have some sort of income as well as something to do. Not too long after, I met Peter and we got married.”

  While Jessica describes how she managed to create a new life, my eyes keep drifting to that birth certificate spread out on the steamer trunk. The baby’s name at birth, before adoption, had been John Malcom. And while my family and friends all call me Jack, my actual name is John Atkinson. Was it possible?

  Maybe Jessica notices as I keep glancing at that piece of paper, or maybe she reads my mind. But after she takes the last screw out of my hand and finishes securing the pickguard, she settles the guitar back into its case again. Then she turns to me.

  “So, what do you think?” She could mean any number of things but I understand.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “It doesn’t seem possible. I mean, that I was the one to find the guitar.”

  Jessica glances at the battered, old Telecaster resting in its case. “Well, over the years, I’m guessing lots of people found it.”

  Upstairs, I hear footsteps. I can’t be sure if it’s Peter or Lauren. But the footsteps are light, the floorboards just barel
y creaking. Then I hear a door close and running water.

  “True,” I say. “It must have passed through a lot of hands.” No one knows better than me, and Lauren, about that.

  Jessica closes the guitar case and clicks the clasps back into place. “But it seems like you noticed it in a different way. I’m guessing that has to be true, given that you’re sitting here next to me.”

  I think back to that afternoon when I first noticed the Telecaster hanging on the wall in Gary’s shop. The way the light hit it, how I felt compelled to cross the room and take it down. The way finding that guitar changed everything so far and the way things continue to change.

  “I just got a feeling about it,” I say.

  Jessica smiles. “Yes, you did.”

  Upstairs, the water stops running and a door opens. Footsteps travel in our direction.

  “This is what I know,” Jessica says, her voice soft. “My child was born seventeen years ago. The adopting parents were from Virginia but I never met them. I made only one request, that they name him John. Then my baby was gone and I never saw him again.”

  The footsteps reach the top of the stairs. Feet appear as they take the steps, followed by legs and hips. A moment later, Lauren stands on the landing wearing a black skirt, a purple t-shirt and a gray hoodie. Her moth spectrum. She looks at us sitting there on the sofa.

  “So, how far did you two get?” she says.

  And that’s just one of the things I love about Lauren. She always knows that more mysteries remain and she’s was just fine with it.

  ~~~

  After breakfast, we pack our things back into the VW bus. Not the Telecaster, of course. That old guitar, with all of its stories, has been delivered home at last. Hopefully, to collect more stories. Jessica and Peter stand by watching us. Peter has his arm around her while she rests her head against his shoulder.

  When we finish packing the van, I walk over to Peter first and shake his hand. I’m not sure what else to say, other than, “Thanks for having us.”