Thank You, Goodnight (19 page)

He pointed at the dashboard radio. “If you’d written songs like this ten years ago, I wouldn’t be teaching music to the tone-deaf way the hell and gone in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t have mattered that you told the Junction to go fuck themselves, that you sent us out on tour on our own, headlining with about a quarter hour’s worth of decent material. But hey, that’s the smoke of a distant fire.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“But . . .” He breathed deeply. “But I’m thirty-five now and . . . Look, it just doesn’t matter how good the songs are. You have to know that. We weren’t an act that absolutely demanded to be heard. We were just a good little rock band that rode the wave of one irritating four-minute jangle that you just know they’re gonna play at your funeral. Come on, man, look at us. We’re well beyond our sell-by date. The industry won’t take us seriously.”

“Why are you so obsessed with age? There’s plenty of music being made by people who look like absolute shit. You tell me when Ric Ocasek was ever cute. Sonic Youth—everybody in that band looks like a Microsoft employee. Nobody really cares about the ages of these people.”

Warren shifted in his seat. “I’m not obsessed with age. If anybody’s obsessed with anything, it’s you—about the past. You know, man, you talk like there’s this place you’ve got to climb back up to. But it isn’t so. Shame on you if you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, especially after all this time.”

I let my hand drop out the window and land with a smack on the side panel. We sat for a languid spell under the dim interior car light, the one sign of life in the whole ink-black parking lot.

“Teddy, when I come home at night, I like what’s waiting for me.”

I said, “I’m not here to sweep you out of your life and away from Lauren and your kid. But come on, Warren, I know you. You love everything about making music. You may say you have no interest in doing a record with me, but whatever you decide, however this ends, we both know that’s not true.”

He let that claim hang unanswered as we continued our silent contemplation of the night. Out past a line of trees, I was just barely able to make out the lonely risers of the football field. Given our condition, it was entirely possible that we’d still be sitting here when dawn broke over those bleachers. And that would be just fine. I’d enjoy watching the window of morning slowly push open the sky.

“You play these songs for anyone else?” came Warren’s low voice. “Other than that dipshit?”

“I played them for Sonny.”

Warren turned. “Sonny Rivers? He still talks to you?”

“Reluctantly.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to go make a record. If you want to get technical about it, he said ‘Go make a record, motherfucker.’ ”

Warren humphed.

“And if you can believe this, he wants to produce and he wants to help shop it around.”

My passenger was shaking his head now, staring out into the darkness as his fingers explored his facial hair. There had to be an
answer to all this out there somewhere—or somewhere deep in that beard.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You get Mackenzie on board and I’ll think about it. That’s not a commitment. You understand me, you annoying pain in the ass?”

“Okay,” I said, containing the edges of my grin.

“Don’t smile, you bane of my existence. You haven’t reeled me in. I am merely agreeing to give it further thought. That’s it. And believe me, I’m not doing anything that takes me away from my family. Get that through that tiny, irritating, narcissistic, desperate, delusional head of yours.”

“Message received,” I said, somehow smug about this now. That was all the mistake I needed him to make. Just one measly error in judgment. From the barest flame abounds the all-consuming blaze.

Warren sighed a deep, defeated breath and reclined into the seat back. His eyes folded closed and he seemed on the verge of sleep. “If you’d mentioned Sonny two hours ago, you could’ve saved us both a bitch of a hangover.”

“Look at it this way. If this all works out, you can resurrect Clark, the brother you never had.” I slapped him on the chest. “I know you loved doing that twins thing.”

He let out a listless grunt. “You do know that to normal guys that means something completely different.”

*       *       *

I regained consciousness under a blanket smelling of cedar. It was like awakening in the woods among the oaks, pines, and Rocky Mountain Douglas firs, the scent of a fire wafting from a nearby cabin. The rustic peace was soon obliterated by the pounding on my skull. I had a vague recollection of Lauren pulling into the school parking lot and glowering at me as her husband and I slumped into the backseat of her car. Someone had left a glass of water and two maroon ibuprofen tablets on the table. Being served painkillers in strange houses was developing into a pastime of mine.

I slipped out before anyone else had stirred, but not before finding a pen and a stray piece of paper. “Thanks—and sorry in advance,” I scribbled.

Squinting into the early-morning light, I took in the Warrens’ row house on this quiet tree-lined street on the outskirts of Lambertville. The neighborhood seemed very aware of itself as a choice for a specific type of living, a town for people who’d gone looking for simplicity in the form of food fairs and antique shops.

Hoping to be reunited with my car, I set out in the direction that I guessed the high school to be. In town, I bought a cup of coffee in a little corner bakery, the kindly graying woman asking if I needed a nice lemon muffin to accompany it. I croaked out a thanks but no thanks, the first words of the day sounding as if they were spoken by me plus fifty years, and shouldered on.

I left Sara a voice mail as I sailed down the highway toward home. She hadn’t responded to the text I sent letting her know I wasn’t going to make it home last night. Nor did I hear from her as I sloped from one room of the condo to the next during the balance of the morning, dragging my headache with me into the afternoon.

Ravi Chatterjee had left another message on our home line, yet again trying to locate Sara without sounding threatening or overly concerned. It hardly comforted me that I wasn’t the only one trying to track her down. She could’ve been up at Josie’s studio, ducking the universe, or she could’ve been with Billy, sifting through the particles of an old universe. Something could have set her off in some other direction. It could’ve been the estranged husband who’d reappeared out of auld lang syne, or the longtime boyfriend who’d dematerialized into a fantasy of his own creation, or something else I didn’t know about. What else, I wondered, did I not know about Sara Rome?

Worry mounted as the afternoon limped by. When evening descended, there was still no trace of her.

To distract myself, I considered the next order of business in my own jigsaw—that being the making contact with and recruitment
of Mackenzie. Mackenzie Highsider. There was nothing about that name that didn’t rattle my nerves.

For years I’d been playing out the scene where we met again, older and wiser. Seasons upon seasons of pondering the abstraction of our reunion had only allowed the fantasy to flower. I pictured her catching sight of me across the street or in a restaurant, and with a double take, her jaw would drop and she’d pause with hands on hips. We’d hug and she’d tell me I looked the same. She’d tell me she’d missed me and that she hated the way things ended between us, that she’d finally let go of her anger.

But the truth was, I was terrified. I could only assume that one inglorious deed of ours in that Phoenix hotel had stayed with her over the years. What I didn’t know was whether she’d spent all this time thinking of me the way she did in the minutes just before we were discovered in that hotel room, or the way she did in the minutes just after.

I switched on the table lamps to illuminate what was feeling like a grippingly empty apartment. For further distraction—one that involved less dread and queasiness—I revisited some unfinished songs. I picked up my guitar and positioned myself on the sofa, pages of quatrains fanned out in front of me on yellow legal paper. But my eyes kept gravitating toward my phone. My ears kept hallucinating the sound of a key in the door.

I recalled a manila folder of abandoned lyrics that still sat buried in a closet. Maybe it would provide inspiration. I had no compunction about stealing outright from my younger, more vital self, so I walked down the hall to the office, opened the closet door, and rifled behind a curtain of Sara’s dresses, outfits only invited out of the house on the rare formal occasion. Also hidden away against the closet wall, behind the veil of hanging clothes, was a collection of Sara’s mosaics. I’d seen some of them before, but only accidentally, when they were being transported from Josie’s studio. Their life cycle was concise and uneventful: they were created, they were carried home, and they were sent directly to storage.

I allowed my eyes to wander over these heavy decorative mirrors of Sara’s creation. The broken glass and colored stones were arranged in impressionistic fashion, elusive and abstract. You weren’t quite sure what you were seeing in the disjointed tiles, but they spooled you into a swirl of motion until you had to turn away. As a mirror of their creator, they were beautiful, absorbing, unsettling.

Then I made another discovery. Urged deep into the back corner of the closet was a globe constructed of a crinkly material that sounded like tissue paper. Gripping a string at one of its poles, I hoisted it out into the light. It was a paper lantern, a purple sphere with green and yellow flowers pasted onto it like continents. I hadn’t known Sara to venture outside the genre of mosaics, and I pondered whether her indulgence in the cabal of paper lanterns was a onetime thing, an outlier, some wild experiment that had erupted in the hot chaos of Josie’s studio, or if it signaled a transition. She’d perhaps entered her paper lantern period. I twirled the string between my thumb and index finger and watched the globe spin smoothly and efficiently, the tight tissue paper making the faint rustle of an April breeze.

A sharp voice behind me pierced the air. “What are you doing?”

I turned. “Sara. Jesus.”

“What are you doing?” She looked horrified, as if snooping through my own closet was a violation of her privacy.

“Where the hell have you been all day?” I demanded.

“What?”

“I’ve been calling you, Ravi’s been calling, everybody’s been trying to track you down.”

She marched at me and snatched the lantern string from my hand, then set about carefully returning the globe to the closet.

I proceeded to lecture the back of her head. “You can’t just fall off the face of the earth, Sara. I didn’t know where you were. I was worried. Look, if you’re going to go hide out at Josie’s, you’ve gotta let somebody know, for chrissakes. And if you were with Billy again, all I can say is—”

It came out of nowhere. She turned abruptly and her open hand
slapped hard against my cheek. Her ring landed on my upper lip, stinging my tooth and snapping my head to the side. Before I could react to the shock of violence delivered by someone who’d never shown the slightest capacity for it, her voice came at me through gritted teeth—low, seething, desolate.

“Where am I every year on my son’s birthday? Sitting in a field of tombstones, you selfish piece of shit.”

She left me there, holding my battered cheek, her words stinging just as harshly as the blow, my face reddening in a rush of shame. I hadn’t budged when she returned a few minutes later with a napkin wrapped around two pieces of ice.

“Come on,” she whispered, and I followed her out of the room.

We sat on the couch for a long while, she holding the ice pack to my face and I too stunned and guilt-ridden even to apologize.

Then she said, “You should probably know that Billy did come with me this year.”

I looked at her.

“He’d never gone out there before,” she added.

“You and Billy went out there together?”

She nodded. “We’ve been talking, with the divorce and all, and it came up. His birthday.” It seemed to require considerable effort for Sara to bring the words out of her mouth. “I told him I go there every year. At first, he said he didn’t think he could do it, but then he said he wanted to, and he thought it might be easier with me there.”

I stared at her sullen profile, her sagged shoulders. “And?”

“There’s just nothing easy about it.”

I sat there and processed the thought of the two of them at the cemetery, standing together side by side. Did they hold each other? Did they hold hands? Did they collapse under the exponential grief of two parents standing over their child’s grave? Grieving because everything had fallen apart? Everything.

Outside, the sun withered behind the skyline, sucking the blue into pink.

“I’m sorry, Sara.”

She turned to me. “Teddy, do you really think that while you’re out there putting together your grand plans, I’m just sitting home waiting to hear about them?”

It wasn’t even an insult; it was a question posed in good faith. She truly wanted to know.

I studied the worn creases of her skirt. The earthy smell of grass still clung to her clothes and hair. Why the hell didn’t I know where she was today? How could I not know how she faced this anniversary after all the years we’d spent together?

And yet, it wasn’t as if Sara had been talking and I hadn’t been listening. Drew was a closed subject. Her accusations of self-centered bastardhood were hard to dispute, but at the same time, there’d been precious little for me to have ignored. I didn’t know how she marked her son’s birthday every year, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t paying attention. It was because in our relationship, we had a litter of sleeping dogs that we simply let lie.

But Sara had slugged me because I’d fallen short of expectations. What had never really dawned on me was that Sara had expectations of me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated in barely a whisper.

She got up to carry the damp napkin into the kitchen.

“Sara.”

She stopped. “What?”

“That lantern. It’s really pretty.”

She cast the final sigh of the day and continued into the kitchen. As the dissolving cubes clanked into the sink, I wondered how long that globe had been lying in the closet. If, at one point, it had been a beacon, a signal to her lost son, her lost husband, or her lost self, then there was no denying that she’d long ago given up and buried it, having surrendered the dream that it could ever help anyone find their way home.