She laughed awkwardly and drew something on the ground with the tip of her shoe. I nodded, or tried to. I continued flipping through the handouts.
“Is there anything else I can do to help?” she asked after a minute.
“No,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
“Well then I guess I should . . .” She gestured over her shoulder. “You’ll call if you need anything?”
“Yeah.” I closed the binder.
“Okay,” she said. She waved to my mother and started back across the street.
“Cara?”
She turned around. Behind her, clouds rose up from the mountains like smoke from a fresh fire. I said, “Thanks again.”
A faint smile crossed her face before she got into her car and drove away.
“How nice of Cara to drop by,” my mother said when I walked past her on my way into the house. “You two should go do something this weekend. See a movie. I think there’s some money in my wallet.”
“I’m going to take a nap,” I said, and continued inside.
In the kitchen, I shoved the binder into the recycling.
Seven
WHEN MY TWO-WEEK approved leave of absence from school ended, I didn’t return. My principal must have called, or the guidance counselor, someone—but by then, our answering machine was long past full. All my mother said on the subject was “If you’re not ready to go back yet, I get it. But if you choose to stay home for the time being, you have to help out around here. Deal?”
The compromise seemed fair enough. Besides my willingness to do anything if it meant staying out of school, I’d taken a liking to the slew of simple errands my mother sent me on for her newest obsession: deep-cleaning the house. I followed her whims without hesitation, content to retrieve Drano, sponge rollers, and even a big carpet-washing machine she had reserved from a hardware store way out in Pomona. And when she mentioned one Tuesday that she was not looking forward to the congested drive down to the crematorium where my father’s urn was waiting, I grabbed the keys and told her I’d be back in a few hours.
Returning home, I set the urn down on the kitchen table next to my mother’s visual to-do list—a towering mound of receipts, mail, and miscellaneous clutter. She’d been inspecting a letter when she heard the thud, and she jerked up at the sound.
“Jesus, Susannah,” she said, one hand over her chest. Then her eyes floated down to the urn. “What is that?”
The white ceramic vase looked fake, like a prop in a movie, with little peach flowers frolicking around the rim. If it weren’t so heavy, I might have thought the whole thing was a hoax—that he wasn’t in there, wasn’t even dead.
But there was no mistake; the mortician had his wallet, along with a few of his other belongings. I put them on the table. Most of them, anyway.
“I guess we should’ve answered the phone,” I said.
“You didn’t . . .” She pointed in the urn’s general direction and swirled her finger through the air, unwilling, I suppose, to say anything more specific about the ugly thing. “I mean, this wasn’t your choice, was it?”
“Please,” I said, and sat down next to her. “The guy told me they chose their most popular style when they couldn’t reach us. I guess their entire customer base is made up of old ladies survived only by their cats and doily collections.”
The left corner of my mother’s mouth curled up before drifting back down again. “There’s something so eerie about it. Just knowing he’s in there, beneath those hideous flowers.” She sighed. “Where do you even put something like this?”
“On mantels, I guess.”
“If he saw this . . .” My mother slipped into laughter. She covered her mouth, trying to hold in the sound, and I remember thinking she looked a little bit unhinged right then, yet at the same time, a little bit free.
The next thing I knew, I was cracking up too.
“He would hate it,” I said. Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. “It would seem more personal if we kept him in a coffee canister.”
My mother smacked her hand on the table and a few unopened envelopes slipped to the floor. “Maybe we should transfer him. Can you imagine what he would do if he saw those flowers?”
I shook my head, jaw aching. But the truth was that I could imagine.
“You think this is funny?” he would say, feet planted wide, trying to look menacing. “Yeah, go ahead. Laugh it up. It’s goddamn hilarious, as long as it’s not happening to you. How would you like spending eternity inside this hunk of shit, huh?” And for a second I thought I could actually see him, right over my mother’s left shoulder, fighting the smile that tried to break free of his taut lips.
A shrine did not suit my father any better than a burial, so in the end, we took his ashes up to the ridge. It was my mother’s idea.
“Is this legal?” I asked, cradling the urn like an infant.
“Probably not,” she said. “But it’s all ash up here now, anyway.”
Blackened grass crunched beneath our feet as we climbed, past the signs warning of coyotes, of fire hazards, of the newly restricted area. At the top, I took the urn to my father’s boulder. The summer heat had finally broken and a brisk evening breeze swooped down at us from the marbled sky. Sometime that week, all the remaining smoke clouds had been blown out to sea, and the city was back to normal. I closed my eyes and imagined my father sitting there at the edge, chucking pebbles out into the canyon. When I opened them, there was only the city, the sunset, a two-dimensional image reproduced on a million postcards lining the shop fronts of Hollywood Boulevard. A sprawling city that my father had fought for, that I hardly even knew at all. Right then, Los Angeles just seemed like another piece of him I could not claim.
I walked out to the ledge, lined up the tips of my shoes with the lip of the rock. My body wavered, unbalanced.
“Be careful,” my mother said. “Maybe you should move back a little.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and opened the urn.
I let my fingers glide through my father’s remains before extracting a handful and flinging him into the air. For a second he hung suspended, a beautiful haze of gray dust. Then the wind rose up from beneath and the cloud dispersed. Some particles took flight, out toward the freeway, while others dove down into the valley or gathered around my feet, immediately blending into the charred landscape. I threw a second handful. A third. A fourth. And I thought about how easy it was to vanish.
“He’s part of the city now,” my mother said. “He always wanted this.”
I nodded, but now that it was over, I couldn’t help thinking she was wrong. We both were. I felt a frantic urge to scoop some part of my father back into the jar, to take him elsewhere, do everything over. Maybe he would have wanted to become the ocean instead, one portion lapping at the California shore while other specks floated out to Hawaii, to China, slipping through tributaries into the Amazon or the Black Sea. Looking down at my feet, I couldn’t distinguish between my father’s ashes and the ashes of burned trees. As the silence around us deepened, I realized we hadn’t even given him a soundtrack.
How had I not thought of that before? He’d envisioned a soundtrack for everything else, even joking about the songs I should play when he retired. “At my party, Suz,” he’d said, “I need you to play some Sly and the Family Stone for me. ‘Dance to the Music.’ When I’m finally done with this shit once and for all, I’m going to dance. I’m going to dance all damn night.”
And if his retirement—something I can’t imagine he thought that seriously about—had a soundtrack, why didn’t his funeral?
That’s when I knew. Without a doubt, I knew, as soon as the question formed in my mind: my father had not intended to die.
I turned back to my mother, tears lumping in my throat. “He didn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “I know he didn’t.”
“Oh, honey.” She hugged me—not arguing, but also not agreeing.
When we pulled away, I shoved my hands in my jeans to keep from clawing
at the earth for fragments of my father. And there, in the front right pocket, was the matchbook.
“We found a few things on him,” the guy at the crematorium had said before handing me what little was left of my father—the inadequate urn and his brown cowhide wallet, so worn it felt like velvet. “We tried to reach your mother to verify whether or not these items were supposed to be cremated with him, but when we didn’t hear back, we decided to save them for you.”
Then he placed the matchbook on the counter, a small packet of twenty sticks with red-dipped heads. The card stock may or may not have been white at one time but now appeared a sort of brownish cream, water-stained, with folds on the verge of tearing yet still, surprisingly, intact. On the front, the facade of a building had been drawn in thin black lines. Music notes floated from the second-story windows, out into the soft blue night.
I picked up the matchbook and turned it over in my palm. On the back, in the bold, loopy font of an old magazine ad, were these words: Live music till 2 a.m. The Sea Witch. Ellory Plains, IA.
Walking back to our house, my mother and I were quiet. The daylight had nearly vanished and I couldn’t stop thinking about the Sea Witch. My first idea was that this place, Ellory Plains, in my mind little more than a cornfield with a general store and saloon popping out of the farmland, must be my father’s hometown. Or, I thought, perhaps Ellory Plains was a place he passed through on his way to California, the Sea Witch a bar he felt some sort of lingering connection to. The Joe Thompson’s before Joe Thompson’s.
“Dad ever say anything to you about the Sea Witch?” I asked my mother as we rounded the last corner onto our street.
“The what?”
I didn’t look at her for fear of seeming suspicious. “The Sea Witch.”
“It rings a bell, I guess, but I can’t think of the reason. It sounds like some scary children’s book. Why do you ask?”
“He just mentioned it once. I didn’t know what it meant and thought you might.”
My mother stopped. “What the hell?”
I kicked a pebble with the toe of my sneaker. “I was just asking,” I mumbled. But when she didn’t respond, I glanced up to find that she wasn’t looking at me.
Following her gaze down the street, I saw the candles before anything else—how they hovered in the dark air, only the white flames visible. It wasn’t until after she took off speed-walking toward our house that I noticed the people, each body dressed in black, cradling the candles in their palms. There were a dozen of them sitting in a circle, holding what appeared to be a vigil on our front lawn.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” my mother yelled as she approached our driveway, but the group didn’t seem to hear her, or else they didn’t care. One of them was playing a guitar as another sang the words to “Contradictions,” one of the Spades’ earliest tracks.
My pulse filled my head as I recognized them.
“You.” My mother pointed and wove her way through the small crowd. “I remember you. I let you off with a warning last time, but you better believe that I’m going to call the cops now.”
“We just want to pay our respects, ma’am,” Travis said, an alarmingly sincere edge to his voice. “Mourn the passing of a legend. But since his resting place hasn’t been released, we came here.”
I expected my mother to start screaming then, to tell them about the ashes and the hills, the exact place where we had scattered him and left his urn like a tombstone. Or, I figured she would at least reveal that the powdery residue of his bones had likely fluttered across much of Los Angeles by now, and they could—quite honestly—honor him anywhere. I waited. The wind whimpered through the trees.
“Why tonight?” she finally said.
“We just found out,” Lance said. “It was only posted yesterday.”
“Posted where?” I asked.
“Online.”
My mother turned to me. “Did you do this?”
“No!” I cried. Strangely enough, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Of course I wanted the world to remember and appreciate my father’s music, even if only posthumously, but I hadn’t the foresight to do anything about it.
“Then who?” my mother demanded. “How?”
Lance and Travis glanced at each other, confusion budding between them while the rest of their group remained sprawled out in the dead grass. I wondered who they were, if they’d ever met my father, if they even knew his music, or if they’d just come along for the show.
“I don’t know,” Lance said. “It’s the internet.”
His dark eyes caught mine, as though asking for help, and I thought I saw genuine sadness in him.
“We just want to pay our respects,” Travis said again.
At the end of the street, the moon wrestled with the last dregs of sunlight. I wrapped my arms around my chest. “Maybe we should just let them stay,” I said to my mother.
Her expression was hard. “That’s what you want?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. The last time I’d been certain was when I decided to cover “Love Honey,” but where did that get me? My father never heard it, and these two boys continued appearing in our front yard like drought-resistant weeds. I didn’t know how else to get rid of them.
“They’ll be done in an hour,” I whispered, “and we’ll never hear from them again.”
My mother’s lips tightened, but she nodded. “One hour,” she said to Lance and Travis. “If you’re not gone by then, I’m calling the police.” Then she stormed toward the house.
I hesitated. I thought I saw Lance smile at me. And I thought that maybe, just for now, for this one hour, I could set aside everything I had previously felt toward him and Travis. I wanted to ask them what they knew about my father’s final days. Had they heard his last tape? Had he ever mentioned the Sea Witch? Maybe we could help each other, comfort each other.
Maybe we could be friends.
The air shivered with a sharp gasp of wind, and Lance turned back around. Travis started strumming another Spades song. Their group reanimated, raising their candles as though in salute, and my sentiment slipped away into shadow. A murky, hot aversion began to burn in its place. I followed my mother inside.
That night, after the sounds from the front yard finally receded and the gatherers blew out their candles and went home, loneliness descended. I lay on the sofa with the TV on mute and tried to imagine a time when I wouldn’t feel so sick and isolated. It wasn’t fair that Lance and Travis knew what to do, how to mourn and move forward while my entire life felt upended. Even my mother had her daily activities, and whoever she’d been secretly talking to on the phone. But I had nothing.
With each day that passed, the lack of my father became a little more normal, and any hope I had of unearthing the truth about his past, his death, felt a little further away. If only I could travel back in time, read his mind, discover what that matchbook truly meant to him. If only I could speak to the rest of the Vital Spades.
I sat up, stunned by a solution so obvious that I had never considered it before. While my father was alive, finding the other Spades—the mere suggestion of it—would have felt like a betrayal. Now, it was the only path forward. If Lance and Travis could find my father online, then surely I could find the other Spades.
Too anxious to sit still, I turned off the TV and headed down the hallway to my bedroom. I hadn’t spent much time in there lately, falling asleep instead on the living room sofa, and I was struck by the impression that the room belonged to someone else. The shelves were decorated with childish knickknacks and a handful of dingy stuffed animals my father had won for me years earlier at the county fair. On the walls, old photos had been haphazardly taped. My eyes paused on a photo-booth strip of Cara and me at the Santa Monica pier, thirteen years old, smiling, our tongues out, making eyeglasses with our fingers. We had done it twice: one strip for each of us.
Tomorrow, I thought, when my mother sent me out on the next errand, I would
detour through the public library and begin my search for the Vital Spades. But right then I was still alone, and all I wanted was to find a way to exist—even momentarily—outside of the sadness. So I closed the door and clicked on the house phone.
I listened to the blare of the dial tone for a long time before I finally punched in a number.
For the ten minutes before Nick arrived, I sat on the driveway with my back against the garage, gazing at the wild universe of diffused stars. There was so much I wanted to tell him—about the crash, and Lance and Travis, and my decision to find the other Spades. I wanted to tell him I’d meant to call sooner. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. And I was so consumed by this menagerie of thoughts, my eyes fixed on the shine of a slow-moving satellite, that I didn’t even notice him until he was halfway up the driveway.
“There’s a satellite” was all I managed to say. I pointed into the dark sky.
Nick sat down next to me. For a while, we both watched as the tiny white dot moved, almost imperceptibly, across the night.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I know how to answer that,” I said.
“Fair enough.”
A kink of hair swung across his eyes as he looked down at the cement. I continued staring at the sky. If not for the bulk of our sweaters, our arms would have been touching, and I felt a glow spread up my neck at the thought of his tan skin, his sunburned cheeks, the way he smelled when he held me close. He drew in the dirt with his finger. The satellite snuck forward.
“Tell me something,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like—” I paused. “A joke.”
“A joke?” Grinning, he took a deep breath. I felt his wide shoulders rising and falling. “Okay, okay. I got one.” He shifted, sitting up straighter. “Why did Beethoven kill his chicken?”
I thought for a moment. “Why?”
“Because it kept saying, ‘Bach, Bach, Bach.’”
Scrunching my eyes closed, I laughed—silently at first, and then with a burst of sound. I clasped my hands over my mouth, afraid that my mother might hear me. “That was terrible,” I whispered through my fingers.
The Midnights Page 8