The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  There was likely a smirk on her face, or some remnant note of pleasant surprise in her voice (because of course, by then, she had already sifted through the envelopes herself and knew exactly what I was receiving), but I wasn’t paying attention anymore. I thanked her, and left the kitchen.

  In my bedroom, I tore through the smallest envelopes first: rejection after rejection from half a dozen universities throughout the state of California. I was not scared of rejection; in fact, the two larger envelopes worried me far more, and with them I took my time. I slid my finger beneath the flaps and gently pried open the seals. My eyes swung across the page, savoring the words as the unimaginable began to gain shape and form: On behalf of the faculty, administration, and staff, I am pleased to inform you . . .

  I leaned back against my headboard, stunned. Both Cal State Long Beach and San Francisco State had accepted me for the fall semester. Despite myself, I laughed out loud, eyes falling again to the letters. I read each one twice more. Even then, I still struggled to believe it.

  I’d been accepted. To college.

  I’d applied without declaring a major, unsure if this would be seen as a fresh breath of honesty (after all, what seventeen-year-old really knows, without any shred of doubt, what she wants to be doing for the rest of her life?), or some subconscious confession of ineptitude. Now, though, I was overwhelmingly thankful for this decision. In a few months, I’d be at college, and I’d have the chance to finally figure out my life. I’d have the chance to figure out myself.

  In a few months, everything would change again.

  But I had to act fast. Because of the delay in delivery of my acceptance letters, I only had a week before my deposit was due.

  Overcome with possibility, I gathered up the two packets and had just jumped from my bed to go tell my mother the news, when I stepped on something bulky—a small manila envelope that must have slipped from the mail pile as I ravaged through the initial lump of rejections. I put down the college letters and bent to the floor. The surface of the envelope was scuffed and frayed, pockmarked with ink. A pale yellow RETURN TO SENDER sticker had been adhered at the bottom, and in the center, an address had been scribbled in the unmistakable scrawl of my father’s hand:

  Capitol Records A&R Dept.

  1750 N. Vine St.

  Hollywood, CA 90028

  It was unclear why the tape was returned. Had they not been accepting unsolicited submissions? Had my father not addressed the package properly, neglecting some delivery specification—a floor or suite or name? Or had it been something even more simple, some unnecessary oversight, like the requirement that all demos now be submitted as CDs, or digitally through email? A deep, prickling sadness welled within me. I could have opened a hundred more college rejections letters—a thousand—and still I would not have felt quite the same despair as I did then, holding in my hands the rejected remains of my father’s final opus.

  As I turned the package over, I felt tears once again springing to my eyes. In many ways, this tape was just another piece of my father’s story that I would never really have access to, exposing a whole slew of new questions. And yet, as I looked closer, one thing became certain. Discernible from the precise mound of crisscrossed tape and the resistance of the glue beneath the envelope’s flap, that same adhesive layer I’d torn through so many times already that afternoon, I knew: the package had never been opened.

  Twenty-Three

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in my bed, winding the tape’s reels back and forth with my pinkie finger while my father’s songs reverberated in my mind. It was only an EP—four tracks that I’d already listened to repeatedly on an old Sony Walkman unearthed from Vivian’s garage. Some of the melodies I recognized, pieces of which we had tinkered with during our various midnight sessions, but most of the progressions were unfamiliar. The final song, in particular, struck me: a wailing rock ballad built around delay, undoubtedly derived from the one we’d played that last night we spent together in the studio. “Before I Go,” he’d titled it. My father strummed slowly but the chords howled, echoing behind elongated, bellowing vocals and an upbeat drum track. The juxtaposition was brilliant, the guitar tone heartbreaking, but the production felt rushed and unfinished, which lent the recording a strange, hollow quality. Something was missing, and I couldn’t stop trying to figure out what. It wasn’t like my father to release a song into the world before it was perfect—especially one that was so good, so close.

  In the end, though, I was forced to admit that the state of his songs didn’t really matter, because I was the only one who was ever going to hear them.

  Unless I wasn’t.

  Gripped by sudden, urgent clarity, I got out of bed and grabbed the house phone. Turning it on, the dial tone droned in my ear. My mind hesitated at first but my fingers still knew the number by heart. The phone rang four times before Nick finally answered.

  “Hello?” he said groggily.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Susannah.”

  For a moment, there was only silence. I wondered if he had fallen back asleep.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  My heart thumped against my ribs. “What?”

  There was a scratching sound, like fabric rustling against the receiver. I imagined Nick in bed, in the dark, nestling his phone between his cheek and the pillow. “Tell me a joke.”

  “Um,” I mumbled, raking my mind. “What’s the difference between a piano and a tuna?”

  He thought for a moment. “I give up.”

  “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.”

  On the other end of the line, I heard a soft, reluctant chuckle.

  “All right, Hayes,” Nick said, and I could almost feel him smiling. He yawned emphatically. Pleasantly. “All right. You have my full attention.”

  Nick’s bedroom looked exactly as I remembered, from the framed poster for The Empire Strikes Back that hung above his desk to the lumpy forest-green comforter tossed crookedly across his mattress. He had attempted to clean for me, I noticed, by shoving a heap of clothing beneath the bed, but the bookshelf remained in happy disarray. A small, thin TV perched atop his dresser, beside which waited the tangled controllers of an old Nintendo console we had played with as kids. But one alarming difference between the room in my memory and the one I found myself in that Saturday afternoon prevailed: though the summer sun raged outside, shriveling lawns and evaporating reservoirs, inside, we were drenched in darkness.

  After my arrival, Nick had barricaded us in the room; he’d drawn the shades, closed the door, wedged a blanket in the narrow crack above the carpet. “It’s to keep the vibrations from kicking around,” he explained. “I’ve spent all morning trying to optimize the tone in here. It’s no Sunset Sound, but for what we’ve got?” He glanced proudly around the dimly lit room. “I think it’s pretty good.”

  “I’m sure it’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you so much for doing this, Nick.”

  “My pleasure,” he said. “You know I live for this stuff. Now, let’s see this tape.”

  I handed over the Walkman, my father’s final cassette still nestled inside. Nick sat down at his desk and plugged a cord into the headphone jack, pulled up a complicated-looking program on his computer. Then, he pressed play.

  For the next hour, with his ears cupped in headphones big as earmuffs, Nick translated my father’s final cassette tape directly from the Walkman to a digital file. Periodically, I glanced over his shoulder at the squiggly sound waves on his monitor, but mostly I just waded through the shadowed room, touching Nick’s belongings, immersed in his smell. I felt jittery and elated. I’d never really recorded before. Against the corner of his bed, the Martin waited.

  “The quality on this,” Nick yelled suddenly, unaware of how quiet the room was. He spun around in his chair and slipped the headphones down to his neck. “It’s incredible. There’s no way you’d be able to tell it was recorded in your garage. The levels will need to be tweaked a tiny bit
, so they’ll match you, but your dad really knew what he was doing.”

  I smiled, though a strange heaviness filled my gut. “How’d you even figure out how to do all this?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The internet.”

  Standing, Nick pulled two mic stands into the center of the room, began checking their plugs, adjusting their height. “You ready?”

  I picked up the Martin and tossed the strap behind my head. I could see the letters TAL SPADES branded in the worn leather near my left shoulder. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  We began recording with “Night Lives,” the catchy, pop-infused folk song that opened my father’s EP, and worked our way to “Before I Go.” Each track had its own personality, and I’d spent every spare moment of the past week practicing and planning, debating how to best emphasize my father’s complicated guitar riffs before ultimately deciding to do what I’d always done best: strum a simple rhythm that swirled through the hollow spaces of his songs. Together, our two guitars created a melody that was sometimes rueful, sometimes bounding with upbeat urgency, and sometimes, somehow, both. At carefully chosen moments, I layered my voice behind my father’s. I sang with my eyes closed, his final lyrics echoing in my ears: We’re all on our own, trying to do right, trying to get by.

  After I’d recorded each track three, four, five times, taken two breaks to temper all the emotions teeming inside of me, and paused to restring the Martin’s high E, I was finally done with my father’s songs. The decision resulted less from my being satisfied with my work, or thinking I had done my father’s album justice, and more from the sudden wave of exhaustion that felled me. But I wasn’t quite finished recording. Not yet. I needed one more take.

  “There’s one more thing I want to do,” I told Nick. “Can you create a new track?”

  “Something of yours?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “A cover.”

  Nick nodded. “All right, give me just a minute.” He clicked around on his screen. “And we’re rolling.”

  I clasped a capo on the third fret, took a deep breath, and started to strum the opening bars of “Love Honey.” I tapped my right foot in a metronomic pattern against Nick’s carpet, trying to quell my tendency to rush as the lyrics streamed from deep in my chest. I gave the take everything I had, because I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. I knew that after this, the song wouldn’t be mine anymore, but that no longer seemed like such a bad thing. More than anything else in that moment, I wanted the song to live.

  When the final chord died out, Nick began clapping. “That’s a wrap,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to say that, you know.”

  I took off the guitar. “And pretty soon you’ll be saying it for your first feature film.”

  “I hope so.” He smiled.

  “I know so. Not everybody can do this.”

  “On the contrary, Hayes. Anybody can hit record. But lucky for me, that’s not where my skill set ends.”

  As I leaned over to rest the Martin on the floor, a dizzying white light swarmed my head. “I think I need to lie down,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  “Just tired.” I kicked off my shoes, tipped backward into the plush comfort of Nick’s bedspread. “I haven’t slept much this week.”

  “Well, it’s going to take me a little while to put together a rough mix of this, so feel free to rest in the meantime.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, smushing my cheek against the clean spring scent of his pillow.

  I woke sometime later, wreathed in the tendrils of a distant memory—or was it just a dream? Though a golden slit of light crept in from the covered window, the room was still dark and musty. I wondered why Nick hadn’t opened the curtains. Maybe he’d thought it would help me rest.

  Nick was right where I’d left him—hunched comically close to his computer, making tiny movements with his mouse. Sidling up behind him, I placed a hand on his shoulder.

  He whirled around and yanked off the headphones. “Hey. How you feeling?”

  “Much better,” I said through an unexpected yawn. “How’s it sound?”

  Nick grinned. “You’ll just have to listen.” He offered the headphones to me, the spiral cord stretching as it extended from his desk to the bed. “I think you’re going to be pretty pleased.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I joked, and put on the headphones. Nick said something I couldn’t decipher but I smiled anyway. A few seconds later, static crackled in my ears.

  The music began.

  I was seized by disappointment.

  Nick, I quickly discovered, hadn’t always picked my best takes, or the ones I thought he would use, where I had nailed the tone on my harmonies and the timing of my strums. Instead, he favored the earlier versions, the ones brimming with uncertainty. Right at the start, I noticed a few muted notes in a barre chord. I heard my voice waver as I grasped for a higher note. It was wrong—not at all the way I had imagined I would sound, and I was about to take off the headphones, to make him start over, but then “Night Lives” surged into the chorus, and I was struck by something else: the mix, I realized, had been carefully split in stereo. All of a sudden spatial relationships existed between our voices, our instruments. As though I were on one side of the room and my father was on the other.

  Closing my eyes, I pushed from my head whatever faults I thought I’d heard in myself, because if my father had taught me anything, it was that the whole of a song was always greater than the sum of its parts. And Nick, I was starting to understand, had chosen the takes that matched the passion in my father’s recordings—the takes that felt the most true to his songs. It was because of this choice that I could see us there, sitting on opposite sides of our studio, my father cradling his maple Telecaster in his hands. Between lines, I could hear the sharp inhales of his breath, could practically smell the whiskey on it. We were living there, inside those songs, in an alternate midnight that went on and on, even when the sun began rising, and when it never would again.

  I took off the headphones.

  “He would have really liked you,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” The mattress squeaked as Nick sat next to me.

  “It just sounds so . . . real.”

  Nick laughed. “It is real.”

  “I mean, like we were really sitting in a room together. My father and I. Recording this.”

  “So you approve?”

  “Nick,” I said. I shook my head, struggling to navigate my thoughts. Next to me, his face softened into a full, gleaming smile, and a jolt seemed to pass between us. The physicality of the feeling was overwhelming; my heart began thrashing and I tried to tether myself to the rhythm of Nick’s breath, certain that I could hear his thoughts creaking into sync with mine as he waited for me to speak. I closed my eyes and let go of my nerves, and the timing, and all the reasons I’d been telling myself to wait, all the excuses I’d invented to keep him at arm’s length.

  I let everything go, and I kissed him.

  For a few exhilarating, extended seconds, there was nothing else. No noise or background or history, just my zipping pulse and our lips pushed together, the taste of Nick’s ChapStick, the salt of his tongue.

  And then Nick pulled back. “Susannah—” he began. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d said my first name and I tried not to think about the strangeness of the sound, or the way he started chewing on his bottom lip as his eyes slanted downward.

  “I got into Cal State Long Beach,” I blurted, fully aware of the frantic note that had wormed into my voice but unable to stop it. “Well, and San Francisco State, but what if I stay here? Long Beach really isn’t that far from USC, and I can come up on days you don’t have classes, or you could come to me, and we can make it work. Just like we imagined.”

  “We can’t,” he said.

  “Of course we can.”

  Nick rubbed his hands over his face. “There was a time when all I wanted—” He paused. “When this—”

&
nbsp; He stood and walked to the window. Parting the curtain slightly, he glanced out into the street. A shard of sunlight invaded the room, sliced right through the darkness, across my chest.

  “I’m going to NYU,” he said. “I leave at the end of July.”

  His words knocked the breath from me.

  “I meant to tell you earlier.”

  My voice sounded thin and far away as I said, “Congratulations. I’m really happy for you.”

  “I care about you a lot,” Nick said. “You know that, right? But this just isn’t the right time to start something. It doesn’t seem fair to either of us, when I’m about to move to the other side of the country. And you’re going to Long Beach? That’s awesome.”

  Tears began burning behind my eyes. “Yeah.”

  “This doesn’t have to change anything,” Nick said. But I think even he knew, as the words left his mouth, that everything had already been altered.

  A rogue tear dripped onto my cheek and I brushed it off with my knuckle, pretending it was an itch, a fly, a speck of dust. “I should go,” I said, and shoved my feet into my shoes. “Thanks for all your help. Really.” I gathered my things, tugged the blanket from beneath the door—and yet, how swiftly I turned around when Nick said, “Wait.”

  “The songs,” he added after a moment. “Let me burn them for you real quick.”

  I was stunned to realize I’d forgotten, and I hovered in the doorway while Nick swiveled around in his chair, fed a blank CD into the disc drive. The next five minutes felt eternal.

  “You’re still one of my best friends,” Nick said as he handed me the CD.

  “You’re one of mine, too,” I told him, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant anymore. I didn’t seem to know anyone as well as I thought I did. But I wonder now if maybe you can’t ever truly know another person. Maybe all you can do is hope that one day, you’ll know yourself.

  I left Nick’s quickly, forcing myself to not look back at his bedroom window as I loaded the Martin into the trunk and sped away from view—yet despite the urgent need I had to leave, I was not actually ready to go home. After turning a few corners, I pulled over and parked, and only then did I notice where I was: Cara’s street. My eyes caught on the familiar sight of her house, and the muscles in my throat began to tighten. But her car was not in the driveway.