Songs Only You Know (18 page)

Following my Christmas night chair-smashing inside his condo, he and I had gone half a year without really speaking. We’d finally reconnected over the past summer while his father was dying of heart failure and decades of unacknowledged alcoholism. Everything about my grandfather seemed wounding, a darkness behind closed doors, a source of lifelong damage resting heavily upon my dad. The night the old man finally died, I drove to Dad’s condo and listened to him crying hard, saying, “You know, he never threw a baseball with me, not once.”

We never mentioned the chair and picture frame that had gone missing from his place. We took a long drive and found ourselves outside of the rusted batting cages on Van Born Road, where Dad led the way to the experts-only section, a smiling-and-crying look on his face, saying, “Whoever whiffs the most buys dinner,” as he chose a bat and dropped quarters into the slot.

I’d been there many times, in that very cage, but not for years and never with such a desire to impress. I swung desperately at the fastballs, redeeming myself with a crooked line drive as the machine coughed up the last of its pitches.

“You still got it,” Dad said, stepping inside, stretching in a professional way before crushing most of the balls to the far end of the chain-link dome. “Looks like you’re buying,” he’d said, slugging my arm.

Afterward, I’d sat across from him at a diner, thinking of his heart as the greasy plates arrived but saying nothing about hardened arteries or my grandfather. Dad snatched the bill when it came, looking ahead toward a harsh night and somehow telling me with his eyes that he wanted badly to discover who I was before time had its way with him, too. Ever since, we’d been meeting Tuesdays at the diner, which was where we were, eating hamburgers one February evening seven months later, when I told him I was moving out of my mom’s place.

“Andrew’s gonna cut me a deal,” I said, my essential concern being that he, or anyone, would see it as a failure on my part to be the man of the house now that he wasn’t around. “I’ve got the new job sewing rugs, you know?” I said. “I’ll come back and do the lawn, shovel the snow.”

But he didn’t seem to think much about it, pulling out his wallet and passing me some folded-up bills.

“Nah, nah,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just remember to take your old man to dinner when you’re rich.”

A
DAY LATER
C
AITLIN
accosted me in the kitchen. I walked through the back door to find her brooding and waiting, a look on her face that meant business.

“So,” she said. “You tell Dad before us, huh?” She opened the
refrigerator and began pushing around milk cartons, leering as if everything inside had spoiled. “That’s what I hear.”

Her hair was dyed extra blonde, hyperblonde, the color of sunlit hay bales. She’d plucked her eyebrows into fierce, angular crescents, the skin beneath the tweezed hair a shade paler than the rest of her tanned face. Throughout our first year in Mom’s house, she’d remained unnaturally bronze. The slight baby fat she’d carried for years had vanished, and when she spoke, it could appear she was trying to settle into her new face. My sister was changing. Tanning booths, hours at the gym, an ill-advised attempt at modeling—it didn’t seem like her, not so much. Not to me.

“Moving out,” Caitlin said. “Just like that.”

She huffed into the refrigerator, mumbling about a block of cheese I’d neglected to wrap. “It’s a good deal,” I said. “One fifty a month.”

“Are you and Willy Wonka gonna get stupid?”

When Mom returned from work, she said, “Well, you’ve been living in that basement awhile.”

She was taking everything in stride, joining book clubs, enrolling in Irish-dancing lessons. Like me, she worried after Caitlin and was cautious about probing too sharply, not to jar loose any old miseries. Any perceived analysis of her emotions wounded my sister. She refused to talk about her weekly therapy. She hid her medication in a makeup case. Though I’m not sure any of us believed in depression, that it was the mysterious beast some people claimed. Mom spent workdays helping students with true disabilities, paraplegia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger’s, fetal alcohol syndrome. She’d become a specialist in assisting autistic teenagers who on bad days could barely speak a comprehensible word, but she listened, and they invited her to birthday parties and spelling bees. They mailed her letters long after graduating.

She’d also begun helping Will with his stutter, giving him private lessons and cooking him dinners. I’d come home to find him at the kitchen table, picking at chicken bones, both of them laughing as though I’d narrowly missed a joke told at my expense. Over the summer, Mom had tamed the backyard into a fertile garden. The snapdragons and lilies reaching for the scant sunrays that leaked over the garage. All the flowers seemed to lean eastward. You’d have thought they’d been there all along, but it was Mom who’d planted them, who spent all winter looking forward to the thaw, the slow-blooming life.

Having announced my upcoming move, I sat down to dinner with Caitlin and my mom, wondering why we hadn’t done so more often. If I was abandoning them, no one accused me, and I convinced myself I’d come by often to put myself at their disposal. Once we’d finished eating, I gathered our dishes to wash them.

“That’s a first,” Mom said. “What a nice surprise.”

“You’re never gonna come by here anymore, are you?” Caitlin said.

“It’s a mile away.”

“Yeah, but I know you,” she said. “I know you.”

W
ITH HER NEW LOOK
, Caitlin seemed to gain a new confidence. Some days she was chipper, jamming the booty-bang dance music her coworkers had hipped her to. At any volume, those were sounds that injured my faith in humans, but when I’d barge into my sister’s bedroom intending to cast insults, I’d see her midtwirl, arms raised, clumsily regaining her footing before she’d stick out her tongue and slam shut the door. Working at the steak house, she’d made friends with the kinds of people Will and I had long ago sworn oaths against, clubsters and thugs, left-behind Dearborn roughnecks and barroom shrews
who’d done a semester at Henry Ford Community College before joining the local workforce.

“Morons,” I’d tell her, though I knew none of them personally.

But my suspicions were strong, and she knew it.

“Can’t you be happy I have friends?” she said.

Days before I moved out, I answered a knock at the door to find a guy in a sleeveless T-shirt looming on the porch. It was a sunny early March afternoon, yet hardly warm enough for the beach-party garb he wore. His arms were gargantuan oars, and I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses.

“Is Cait home?” he said. It was as though he were requesting someone I didn’t know, until my sister nudged me aside, muttering, “Bye,” as she passed through the doorway.

All I knew of this stud was that he was nicknamed Turbo and grilled rib eyes at the steak house while on leave from the Marines. Caitlin jumped in his pickup, and I assumed she’d taken pity on him, had agreed to counsel him on some other girl, a randy vixen who’d temporarily wrecked his ego.

She’d been spending hours on the phone, listening as her new friends poured out their troubles. If Lauren called the house, it was usually for Caitlin, and their talks were long and hushed and of matters they both referred to as deep. These depths, I wanted to presume, gushed with touchy-feely whispers and pseudo-poetic analyses of love and life; many years later, though, I’d be forwarded several letters they’d exchanged during this time and would meet a side of my nineteen-year old sister I’d only imagined. A girl who wrote artfully about her own suicide attempts, oscillating between images of having her stomach pumped and lucid observations of the snow falling outside whatever window she’d sat before while penning those messages:
It’s so beautiful how every flake falls down to earth and
is then just kind of absorbed … Lauren, I grazed death physically but inside I felt truly dead. When the ambulance brought me to the hospital they parked me next to a man bleeding all over from being shot, and I don’t remember any of it
. Her handwritten tone that of someone desperate to confess her burdens but fearful of the implications:
Don’t think I’m psychotic, though; it was a part of my growth and a part of who I am
.

And the part that hurt most:

I feel like I know more about you than I do my brother. We were close once but it’s like he’s become like a stranger
—a claim Lauren wouldn’t have argued against. She and I had agreed, by then, to break up once and for all. Which didn’t end my hope that she’d be the one to guide my sister away from the many horrible choices available to attractive, confused young women. Choices like Turbo, about whom the only further insight I was able to offer was a useless but universal, “Fuck him.”

Not that I didn’t try to imagine the young man who might have suited Caitlin. I liked to think he existed, perhaps in some nearby town: a steady boy whose head was screwed on in a way mine wasn’t. Desirable strangers did exist, I knew, because I’d recently had a few dates with unusual girls from acculturated suburbs: kind, pretty girls who made mixtapes and talked about vegetarianism. Perfect on paper. That I preferred being alone made me worry there was a problem with my soul, as though my constant thoughts of Blaine’s distant girlfriend were my way of avoiding women altogether.

W
ORKING AT THE RUG
shop, I had plenty of time to mull things over. Day after day, I wore a surgical mask and pulled ancient, dusty threads from the carpets. I opened wounds and stitched them with new yarn, losing myself in the patterns. Cat urine, decades of shed skin, dander, and dirt—they were all there in
each piece of unthreaded string. The fibers clouded my face, moting in the sun that came through the showroom window. Certain rugs caused my forearms to swell with hives. Will sat in a corner, sipping coffee and reading the paper until the appearance of a customer required him to flip through the stacks of carpets.

At the record store, I’d spun whatever albums I liked. That Frank Sinatra was the only music the Armenians permitted made the job feel like a type of penance. I might have quit, had Caitlin not been so vigilant about waking me each morning, making sure I’d be on time, regardless of how little I’d slept.

“Time to get up, lazy.” She’d be fully dressed, standing at the foot of my mattress while stressing over a midterm or preparing for the gym. She’d grown by thrusting herself headfirst into change. And if the manic nature of this left me on edge, she seemed happier than she’d been in years.

She was sitting on my mattress in Mom’s basement the day I packed up my room. A prophecy was being fulfilled: that Will and I would work and live and conspire together at all times. As kids we’d talked of co-owning a mansion, with a junglelike atrium housing endangered creatures and a private rock club, a racetrack circling the premises. The upper flat was as close as we’d come.

“It smells down here,” Caitlin said, gazing around the basement. “Probably will for years.”

I peeled posters from my walls and loaded my records into crates. I cleaned up anything my mom wouldn’t want to discover. Caitlin was curious about what I’d take with me and what I’d leave behind. I made sure she was looking as I slipped the trinkets and sweaters she’d given me into the boxes.

“Who’s gonna wake you up for work every morning?” she asked.

“I’m perfectly capable,” I said, as if the wake-up calls had simply been my strategy for seeing her first thing each day, but that wasn’t true. And, really, life never would be so easy to manage without her.

S
he tilted her head. She raised her eyebrows and smiled and waved me over.

I shuffled toward her until I was close enough to hear her say, “I’ve wanted to talk to you all weekend,” to which I replied several ways in my thoughts before realizing I wasn’t yet able to speak. We were in a parking lot outside a veterans’ hall, where the band had just finished our set as part of a Detroit music festival. I was catching my breath, but I’d rehearsed this moment: what the two of us might say if we wound up face-to-face. Now that it was happening, the script I’d prepared seemed pitifully out of reach, a wordless flickering. She wore a green sweater. The sun had fallen, and in the light from the streetlamps her eyes were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Are you busy?” she said.

I’d screamed my throat hoarse, lending my voice a manly rasp it didn’t possess otherwise. “Let’s take a walk,” I said, knowing Blaine would be watching.

She nodded, and we started off.

It was late-March, the last night of a three-day extravaganza: bands for days, forty or so in all, packed into a Knights of Columbus hall. I’d known she’d be there, as well as the usual culprits: Will, gussied up like a pilgrim—his latest costume—and the jackass fan who’d set knives on our amps in hopes we’d gash ourselves. And hundreds more who came from god knows where, as far as California. Warden had arrived with his hair gelled into a preposterous afro. Inside the hall he’d fastened a banner that read:
CTW- BOYCOTT THIS MOTHERFUCKERS
, which he’d stood defiantly beneath, peddling records no one intended to buy.

She and I stepped through the crowds. Musicians gathered around vans. People stood huddled and smoking, showing off the latest albums they’d scored. Some called out, “Good set, man.” They slapped hands with me.

“You know everyone,” she said.

I’d come to feel lonesome at those shows. Now that we’d gored our way into the scene, I felt no reason to be there. The bands and seven-inch singles and T-shirts, the anarchist pamphlets. Loudmouths dressed in safety-pinned shreds of clothes, spouting half-cooked politics. Caitlin had wanted to attend that night, but I’d forbidden it. Soon enough, I’d regret not introducing her to that world of fringe ideals and tube-powered distortion. There were good people to be found there, dreamers looking for answers, but I didn’t want my sister witnessing the person I’d become away from home, the way I badgered the audiences, blaspheming the punkish ceremony even as we were at its center.