Something huge was about to happen; I could feel it. I was writing songs about it, sensing it at every turn. I took ecstasy nearly half the days of October, not to party but out of a nearly philanthropic desire to plumb spiritual mysteries. Or maybe I took less; maybe it was twice that. Maybe it wasn’t the drugs at all. What I remember most is that I seemed to be living in unending low-grade euphoria that felt holy and dreamed. An exchange at a grocery store could fill me with wonder, as could the sound of my guitar traveling along the apartment’s floorboards. For the first time in my life, I tried to sing instead of scream, and outside the windows the leaves were changing color.
I’d begun devising a two-year plan, the first matter being to end the band in proper fashion with Repa. From there I’d get a degree and start a new group, inspired by the spacey balladeers Angela had softened me to. I’d bought sacks of vegetables and had begun flossing my teeth, had even jogged around the high school track, feeling ecstasy’s residual tingle as I walked a final, cool-down lap. And I’d bought a Chopin record, as well as a vocabulary manual called 1100 Words You Need to Know.
Sometime during this hazy month, Caitlin and I took an evening walk, staged and awkward, but we strolled as though with a little practice we’d soon be experts.
“Think about it,” I said. “People drive everywhere these days, but our bodies were meant for walking.”
“Wayne County is the most obese in the country,” said Caitlin. “I saw it on television.”
Her hair was yanked into a rubber band. Her black eye had healed, and she’d quit the steak house, shutting herself in at night to channel her feelings into long hours of studying. She’d also been forgoing makeup and appeared so much more like herself, uncertain and guileless, a gentleness in every aspect.
Our conversation trailed off, but I knew she was glad to be near me; that she, too, understood a great shift was taking place. I didn’t intend to interrogate her; I wanted her to never look back. We were nearing Ford Road when she asked about my band.
“You think I’ll come see you one of these days?”
My secrecy about the music had moved from the realm of weirdness and into ridiculousness, and now even I sensed its toll on my health and also that secret lives had to do with my own shame as much as they did protecting anyone from anything. I’d orchestrated all this, and now I was living in it. But the cold fact remained that I feared the band’s sicko sound would darken Caitlin’s nights, push her farther away.
“All that,” I said. “I’m getting too old for it. How did we get so old?”
“Don’t you ever wish you were a kid again? When there was nothing to worry about?”
Were I able to return to that walk, I’d let her know exactly where we stood: those years were harsh and confusing, but there were so many ahead of us. At the time her question seemed illogical, hardly worth pondering.
“You can’t,” I said. “You can’t ever go back.”
We’d returned to the house, through the back door.
Caitlin asked, “Do you think we’re normal?”
What I wanted to say was Why would anyone want to be? but I instead bent low to begin untying my shoes.
“You know,” she said. “You think we’ll ever be, like, normal people after all this?” And with that, she lost me. I couldn’t pretend to have the faintest idea.
I NEXT SAW HER on Halloween, when we met at Mom’s house for Dad’s birthday dinner. By then she’d burrowed so deeply into her studies that she seemed bothered to act out this endangered tradition: gift giving and a quick meal, then a candle-spiked pumpkin pie just as the costumed droves crept out in full force. I’d arrived with a paper Dearborn Music shopping bag and was pacing with it through the house, thinking about wrapping paper but not seriously. Caitlin carried on speed-reading, paying no attention to my dad, who sat beside her on the living room couch, not really saying much, just sighing like he’d had a long one—the day, the year.
“Happy birthday,” I said, finally handing him the crumpled bag.
“For me?” Dad upturned the sack so that a Nick Drake CD slid out, a spare acoustic recording Repa touted as the world’s finest hangover album. “Never heard him,” he said, examining the song titles as if they contained a personal message.
His visits here had tapered off, not that it surprised me. Things couldn’t be that way forever—his dropping by Mom’s, taking out the trash, painting the walls of a home she’d made without him. Weeks earlier, there’d been an upheaval over Caitlin’s black eye. From what Mom said, Dad had a full-scale shitfit before he’d sat red faced and panting on the couch. She worried about his heart. In the kitchen, she was working up a spread of salmon and rice, doing away with her tradition of preparing Dad a birthday sirloin. I noticed her making these quiet changes, as if to remind him where things stood.
“Smells great,” Dad called out through the house, staring off and listening for a reply.
It shames me to admit that I’d spent time wondering if he’d given ecstasy a spin—and why not? It seemed to me that, having succumbed to crack, a man would have few scruples left. It also struck me as perfectly logical to think ecstasy’s curative powers might wean someone off the darker substances.
Mom set the food on the kitchen table and called us in. Caitlin took a few bites before pushing aside her plate to replace it with a textbook, in which she began highlighting entire paragraphs.
“Can’t that wait?” Dad said, but she breathed deep and carried on.
Sequestered upstairs, Ozzy was tormented by the unending bustle of trick-or-treaters in the street below. We heard him yipping, his nails clacking against the windowpane. Every few minutes, Mom rose with a bowl of miniature candy bars for the masked children who came onto the front porch to holler through the screen door. Years earlier, Caitlin and I would have been walking Dearborn with pillowcases and painted faces. We’d roamed in different groups, me with Will and whomever else, cutting through the woods, while Caitlin kept to the sidewalks, costumed as a cat, her painted whiskers twitching as she gave thanks for each treasure she received.
This day always scared up something tender and joyous in me, memories of fake blood running from the lips, returning home after the porch lights had snapped off and the jack-o’-lanterns had faded, one year with a pocket full of hood ornaments. Caitlin sitting in the kitchen, organizing her stash. Mom and Dad in front of the television, a made-for-TV thriller playing as they lay entwined on the couch. Dad licking the pumpkin filling off his candles, asking us what good stuff we’d brought home. “Anything with peanuts?”
We’d set the Mr. Goodbars before him, which he’d eat one after the other. Any other night, Mom might have said, Tim, meaning he should go easy; on his birthday, he’d been free to scarf until he was satisfied.
FINISHING HIS LAST BITE of salmon, Dad said, “That hit the spot.”
Which meant he’d soon be leaving.
Headed where? I’d never have asked.
Though Caitlin might have: Where are you going?
Home, he’d say, the strangest word.
After taking his plate to the sink, Dad made for the front door with a fistful of candy bars. I followed him out. As he left, he dropped the candies into the pails of the beggars who’d gathered on the porch. He kept one for himself and tossed another to me. Then he was gone. Forty-nine years old, with the whole night ahead.
THE DEAL:
We wouldn’t perform songs that had been written without him.
We’d demand a seventy-five-dollar guarantee for live performances.
Warden was not to be allowed in the van, studio, or practice space.
These were the conditions of Repa’s return, and I took issue with none of them. Few clubs outside Detroit would guarantee us anything, meaning our new policy would leave weekends free for me to visit Angela and keep an eye on Caitlin. Anyway, it took no more than one early November rehearsal to discover that Repa had jettisoned his skills somewhere in Japan. We bumbled through our oldest m
usic like a reunion act. To mark Repa’s return, we’d booked an Ann Arbor show for November 20, my twenty-second birthday, which I privately decided would be the last time I screamed those songs.
None of this stopped us from practicing long and hard, same as ever. Afterward, we’d cruise Seven Mile in Repa’s Buick Century, pounding the dashboard, re-creating our tunes with grunts and vocalizations: Repa beat-boxing the drums as Ethan motored his lips to approximate the bass. By some trick of the pharynx and windpipe, I’d generate a guitarish burble.
Repa goosed the engine. “Sounds real good,” he’d say. Some nights we stopped in at a bar, one of Seven Mile’s most uninviting facades. “There she is.” Repa would nod, parking outside a paint-peeled dive where a single fluorescent bulb hung above the doorway, the neon sign cracked up like no one cared whether you entered or not. “A place like that—you might never come out again.” But we did, the three of us together, a band, riding out our last days wherever they took us.
“HEY, CAITLIN’S OUT THERE.”
Angela tugged my arm to make certain I’d heard her. She’d just come back from a cigarette, and now the opening act was going full blast, the singer doing the look-no-hands microphone-in-the-mouth thing and not such a bad job of it. We were in Ann Arbor, inside a subterranean venue known as the Halfway Inn—the Halfass, some called it—and I was counting down the minutes. The small room was packed.
Angela nudged me.
“Your sister’s asking where you are.”
It was an all-ages show, alcohol prohibited, but I was drunk enough after swallowing several rounds of birthday shots with Repa at a nearby bar. Angela had wanted to be here on account of my turning twenty-two years old today, and I worried her presence might jinx the band as we took the stage this one last time. Four years, thirty thousand miles, a hundred fifty shows. Repa and Ethan were off priming themselves, having no idea this was it.
“Caitlin?” I said.
“Outside,” Angela said. “With Will.”
Needling through the crowd, I exited the building to find Will with a cigar smoking between his lips and an arm around my sister. They sat on a short wooden bench beside the venue, Caitlin wearing a blue windbreaker, its hood cinched so that her chin and forehead were invisible. Her cheeks shone, saucerlike. She didn’t smile when she saw me but arched her brows so that they vanished underneath her hood. Will had padded his oversize coat with twenty-four-ounce beer cans, the last of which he’d given to my sister. She held the can like some tabernacular thing, both hands cupped around its bottom. Will and Caitlin had known each other for fifteen years, but only then did it occur to me that she was the closest thing he had to a sister.
“Here’s Our Boy,” he said, as I came at them.
I trusted no one with my sister, was only beginning to consider that granting her access to my world at large might not sadden and terrify her. Will grinned, making an embarrassingly true joke at my expense as Caitlin laughed knowingly, which touched me, got me to thinking: Let it be. Let her be here.
Angela had accompanied me outside. Her arm was hooked into mine, and I recall so clearly being worried that my sister might see this as further evidence of the ways I’d excluded her. I knew what she saw: the pretty young woman at my side who’d gotten so close, so easily. Caitlin regarded Angela shyly, easing slowly into the understanding that I’d parted with Lauren for the last time.
No one could have known how moved I was by the fact my sister was there, myself least of all. But over years that night has become charged with meaning, the way she eyed the black-clothed spectators who loitered, smoking, with records tucked under their arms. The tentative look in her eyes, knowing she was breaching a code I’d worked hard to establish. A collision was in progress, two realms I’d kept apart.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
Caitlin sipped at her beer, one of the only times I’d ever see her with a drink. “Am I not allowed to be here?”
“How did you know we were playing?”
“I was studying in a coffee shop. I heard some guys talking about going to see your band, so I thought, If they can go see my brother, then I can, too.”
And I admit to feeling proud, as if a stranger’s random mention of my music might validate its seriousness in my sister’s eyes. We had fans, believers.
“He’s a star,” said Will. “Don’t you know? Our Boy’s a star.”
I bent to hug my sister, putting something extra into the squeeze, and over the sleek fabric of her jacket my hand slid down the notches of her spine. One of those accidents that remind you the people you love are made of bone. You can reach for them. You can touch their face, if you want—reach out and prove they’re real.
I still see her there, not her disease or whatever they’d try to call it, but the timid uncertainty on her soft, young face as I stood and met her eyes. The unfinished person who hadn’t yet found herself but was flailing messily toward that discovery, just as I was. All these years later, I go back in for another hug. And does everything change in that instant, flowing outward and leading us anywhere but where we were headed? Yes, it does. Because I hold on to her a little longer. I never let her go.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
Angela smiled, and Caitlin smiled back.
We spent a few minutes, talking small, but I felt the earth beneath our feet and the season in the air. I didn’t know where things stood, but I was aware in every sense of where we were. Every few beats someone approached us, asking how much longer until the band went on. “This is my sister,” I told them.
I’d burned calories devising ways to avoid revealing myself to these people—the scene—and they acknowledged her puzzlingly, as if expecting my relatives to resemble hyenas, the mentally deranged.
“Didn’t know you had a sister.”
Someone held up a flask, toasting my twenty-two years. Will walked off in search of another drink, and I took his place beside Caitlin, put my arm around her. “Thing is,” I said, “you gotta stay out here when we play. You don’t wanna see this.”
“What’s the big deal? I’m too straight, like I can’t handle it?”
She spoke quietly. She knew it was our business.
“You just wait outside, you know? We’ll hang out when it’s over.”
The band onstage had finished; it was my turn. Repa, I knew, was off chanting to himself. Ethan was stretching, working out the kinks. Will came marching down the street with a plastic sack full of bottles. “Showtime,” he said, enunciating like a natural, never stuttering once his mind was lubricated.
While heading in to set up my equipment, I took him aside.
“You keep an eye on Caitlin. I don’t want her in there.”
“If that’s,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “what you want.”
THERE’D BEEN TIMES I’D faked it through a song or two before the ritual took hold. I’d slapped myself, thrown a bottle, worked my way into the convulsion. That night, I’d given up before the first note. My shoulders were slack; I felt my hands trailing over the frets. Someone from the audience yelled, “What? Aren’t you pussies drunk enough?” But there’d be no freaky stuff, no creepy-crawls, no scaling the rafters. Beyond the glare of the stage lights, the back of the club was vague, all faces obscured by shadow. As the chords rang, there was no telling who was watching.
Repa stole the show. Onstage again, spotlit, he became infused with his old voodoo. He and Ethan locked into the rhythms, oblivious to me posed inanimately beside them. I heard the sound, the odd time signatures, the down-tuned grunt of the chords. Our death rattle. It wasn’t until our last song that I gave in. A long, destructive piece, one of our oldest. Only recently had I realized it was about my family, all of us. Knowing it would be the last time I howled those words, I chewed into them, giving all I could to the verse: A thirteenth step, by love.
WILL WAS CURBSIDE, HOUNDING postshow loiterers for a light. A cigar hung from his lips and shreds of tobacco dappled his chin. In
the place Caitlin had been, Angela sat alone, fending off various admirers, some of them friends of Blaine. Had they seen it, the underwhelming end?
I clasped Will’s shoulder, holding him in place for a goddamn minute. “Where’s Caitlin?”
“She left, man,” he said. “She was cold.”
“Did she go inside?”
“She stayed out here with me, and then she left.”
So it was, my sister would never experience the band. Never meet Repa and put his unforgettable face to the frenzied baritone she’d laughed at when his messages spewed from the answering machine.
“Was she upset?”
“I don’t think so.” Will pulled an envelope from his jacket. “She said to give this to you.”
I walked up the block to open it: a standard-issue birthday card containing a multipage letter Caitlin had written on sheets of yellow paper. I began reading in the streetlight. After the first line, it was impossible to engage the message sentence by sentence. I couldn’t manage any more than to scan my sister’s tidy cursive: Epithets. The word “Mom.” “Dad.” She’d used the term “idol” to describe her feelings for me. The letter contained no birthday wishes at all but a missive about what had been lost, our closeness as children, and the present gulf between us. There was a line about how she’d parked outside my apartment, staring up at the light in the second-story window, too afraid to walk up the steps and knock on my door.
Songs Only You Know Page 19