The Disenchantments (19 page)

“Oh my God,” Bev says. “You’re bleeding.”

I take my hand away from my face, and yeah, I’m bleeding. Around the bus, the other passengers appear unharmed.

But Bev has a red cut on her lip. Her bottom lip, just right of the middle.

I squeeze shut my eyes. Tears come anyway.

More time passes, and it becomes too much—the not knowing.

I get out my phone because I know that
something
will be okay. You don’t lose everything at once. When I think hard I can see my mom’s face as she watches Dad strumming his guitar. I can see the love in it. Adoration, even. The rightness of it washes over me. My dad will be
at the table in the kitchen, and it will be the same time of night for him as it is for me now, and there will be no delay when he answers me, none of the fogginess of sound moving across continents and ocean, nothing foreign or unfamiliar when he laughs and tells me that of course they are fine.

Now the phone is ringing and I feel almost relieved already. His voice sounds hopeful when he answers and I say, “Hey, Dad,” and he is glad it’s me.

“I know this is going to sound strange but I have a question for you.”

Bev looks over at me, brow furrowed, and there may be worry in Dad’s tone when he says, “Sure, son, what is it?” But I am probably imagining things.

“Is there anything going on with you and Ma? She’s really just away studying French, right?”

I am ready for his laugh, for the worry to lift away.

Instead there is silence.

The clearing of his throat.

The weight of something terrible settling in my stomach.

There are a couple minutes worth of stammered partial explanations and promises to talk about it in depth soon and assurances that they still love one another.

When I don’t say anything in response, he says, “Son, the thing is this: I just don’t know.”

A beep comes and I move the phone away from my ear to see that Jasper’s calling.

I manage as many words as I can: “Okay, Dad. I’ll call you later. I have to go.”

I click over.

“We found them,” Jasper says.

At first I don’t even register what he’s talking about, as if my world has shifted and words that once made sense are now cryptic and strange.

Found who?
I almost ask, but he keeps talking.

“They’re about to leave for some trip or something so you have to go tonight. They said you could crash there if you want.”

He says this so loudly that Bev, sitting next to me, can hear him, even over the rumble of the bus and the loud breathing of all the sleeping passengers. I turn to her.

“You decide,” she says.

And yeah, every part of me feels broken and I am exhausted, but it’s not the kind of exhaustion that sleep would be able to fix. No matter where we end up tonight it isn’t going to be home.

So I tell Jasper that we’ll go.

“I have directions,” he says. “They aren’t simple. So bust out that Sharpie and prepare to take notes.”

Bev pulls a torn half sheet of paper from her bag and hands me a pen.

“All right,” I say. And Jasper tells us what to do when we get off the Greyhound in Medford. We have to catch another bus to Jacksonville and then walk a mile to get to their house.

“They said they’ll leave their porch light on. And they’ll wait up for you.”

When I hang up Bev doesn’t even need to ask what my dad said. I guess it shows on my face.

“Colby,” she says.

But I say, “Let’s not talk about it,” and she doesn’t put up a fight.

Bev texts Meg to fill her in as we walk down a gravel and dirt road. We pass a dark house: it isn’t theirs. I start to wonder why we’re doing this. I know I really wanted to, I know I pushed for it, that it’s something that mattered to me as recently as a day ago, but now I can’t think of why.

Then there is the shape of a house against the sky in the distance, and as we get closer we see it—the porch light is on.

Before we can knock, the door swings open and a man and woman stand in the doorway. They look around my parents’ age, maybe a few years younger.

“I’m Drew,” the man says.

“I’m Melanie,” says the woman. “Come in.”

In their living room, Drew, silver-haired in a Hawaiian shirt, surveys our injuries with an expression that is part concern, part enthusiasm.

“First aid is a hobby of mine,” he says. “Come with me.”

“I’ll make tea.” Melanie smiles warmly at us and rounds the corner to the kitchen.

We follow Drew down a narrow hallway lined with photographs that Bev and I don’t pause to look at. He flips on the light to the bathroom. It’s small and clean and everything in it is covered in shells—shell jars and shell drawer pulls and a shell-lined mirror, all of them pink and white and shining.

“Melanie’s hobby,” Drew explains, opening a shell-adorned medicine cabinet and pulling out a first-aid kit.

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to the edge of the bathtub, and Bev and I sit side by side. Our hands touch. Neither of us has the energy to pull away.

He wets washcloths with warm water and soap, unscrews a jar of iodine, lays out medical tape and gauze.

“This might sting,” he tells me, dabbing my face, and I feel myself wincing but the burn feels good, like the iodine could heal me.

When Drew is finished disinfecting and bandaging, we walk back down the hallway and into the living room again, where Melanie is waiting for us. She has made us herbal tea in jars.

“Be careful where you hold this,” she says, handing me mine. “It’s hot.”

Steam rises: lemon, ginger, honey.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Thank you,” Bev says.

When I sip I feel the heat travel from my throat through my chest. I sip again.

“We like your shells,” Bev tells Melanie.

“Oh.” Melanie laughs. “Well, it’s meditative. It helps clear my mind. And somehow Drew puts up with it.”

“I love them,” he says. “You know that. They’re pieces from our other home.”

“Where is that?” I ask.

“Kauai,” he says. “It’s where we met and where we married. We go at least twice a year.”

“That’s where we’re going tomorrow morning.”

They turn to one another and smile. So much good passes between them in that single look.

“Are you going to show them what they came for?” Melanie asks. “They traveled a long way to see it.”

“Of course,” Drew says. “It was a huge surprise to hear from Danielle—it had been years—and an even stranger surprise to hear the reason she called, that you kids wanted to see this old, faded tattoo of mine.”

He stands up and turns around. Pulls up his shirt. And there it is, on his back: the bluebird, the telephone wire, the roses, the rain cloud.

“Do you mind if I take a picture?” I ask.

“Not at all,” he says, but I’m asking Bev as much as I’m asking him, which feels awful. Normally I would’ve just reached into her bag and taken out her camera.

Bev nods.

Melanie turns a reading light on and angles the beam toward Drew as Bev hands me the turquoise camera. The
photo will turn out a little dark, but hopefully not too dark to see what it is.

“One more?” I pull out my phone and take another picture. It turns out fine.

“So which one is your dad?” Drew asks me, sitting back down. “I remember one of them was a kind of young Jerry Garcia type, scraggly and long haired.”

Bev and I both smile.

“That’s my uncle Pete.”

“So your dad is the more clean-cut one. I didn’t know they were brothers.”

“Brothers-in-law,” I say. “My mom is Pete’s sister.”

“Colby’s mom painted that bird,” Bev says.

“Wow.” Drew shakes his head in wonder. “Look how it all comes together.”

“Tell them the story,” Melanie says.

“There isn’t much of a story to tell. Danielle said that you were trying to solve a mystery, but I’m afraid it’s less of a mystery than a coincidence.”

Drew leans back on the sofa.

“So let’s see. I was at a café in San Francisco, visiting some friends. That’s where they were from, right?”

Bev and I nod. “We still live there,” I say.

“Great city,” he says. “What a place to grow up. So I was with my friends, and your dad and uncle started setting up. We thought about leaving because we hadn’t been
planning on seeing any music; we were just looking for a place to talk. One of my friends, he was going through a hard time.”

“This was James?” Melanie asks.

Drew nods.

“We decided to stay. I don’t know why. One of us must have suggested that we give them a song or two’s worth of our attention. See what they were like. We ended up staying through the first set.”

Drew pauses, and I can see him figuring out how to say what comes next.

“They weren’t the most visionary musicians, but it wasn’t about that.” He looks at me, making sure that what he’s saying doesn’t offend me.

“Everything was earnest, you know?” he continues. “Their songs were melodic, sincere. You could tell they felt it. After the set was over, we got up to go, and I thought about buying a cassette but my friends were walking ahead of me and I didn’t want to hold them up. But then we got outside and it was raining, so we stopped under the awning to open umbrellas, and I thought:
I want that tape.
So I told them to hold on and I went back in to buy one. I think it was your dad who sold it to me.”

He takes a sip of his tea. Melanie rests her head on his shoulder and he puts an arm around her. He does it in this effortless, instinctual way. Bev shifts in her chair, tucks her
legs beneath her, and I wonder if anything between us will ever feel natural and easy again.

“So it became a tape that I listened to often. I kept it in my car and it just kind of stayed in the tape deck.”

Drew stops and thinks for a moment.

“Meanwhile,” he says, “I had met this woman. Here’s where you come in, Mel.”

Melanie sits up; his arm stays around her.

“I loved her. Trouble is, I didn’t know if she loved me.”

“I was crazy about you,” Melanie says. “You knew that. You just didn’t know if I could settle down.”

“True,” he nods. “I amend that. I was in love with this wild girl, this traveler.”

“I was a journalist for a surf magazine,” Melanie says. “I was living a few months in California, a few months in Baja, off to Kauai for the winter . . .”

“I wanted her to live a life with me, and she didn’t know if she was ready to do that. Long story short, I thought I was going to lose her, and then she changed her mind.”

“Best decision of my life,” she tells us.

“I took her on a trip to Mendocino. You been there?”

“We drove by it,” I say.

“You should have stopped.”

“On the way home, maybe,” Bev says.

“Everything on the trip was perfect. She told me she would marry me. I felt so goddamn lucky. We got in the car on the morning after she said yes, and I opened the console
for something, and I saw the cover of your dad’s tape. I felt just like that bird, like the rain clouds were parting just above my head. And I thought, I have to do something to capture this moment, so I can always remember how this feels. I knew that an old friend of mine, Danielle, had a tattoo artist boyfriend who ran a shop right there in Fort Bragg. So we called her up and made an appointment for that day.”

“I held his hand all the way through it,” Melanie says.

“True,” he says. “I didn’t want to let you go.”

We sit in silence for a little while, sipping our tea.

“That’s the story,” Drew says. “That’s all. Hope it didn’t disappoint.”

“Not at all,” I say, and I try to smile, but there’s something so painful about it, that someone’s walking around with a tattoo made before my parents were in love. When the future was still wide open.

Melanie sighs pleasantly, stands up.

“It’s getting late,” she says.

“It’s
been
late,” Drew adds. “It was past midnight when you got here, and I’ve been boring you with my first aid and my anecdotes.”

“It was so nice of you guys to let us come,” Bev says, and I nod, feeling grateful that she’s able to speak and say the right things.

“Let me put washcloths out for you,” Melanie says.

Drew collects our empty jars.

“Be right back,” he tells us.

They both disappear, leaving Bev and me alone in the living room.

I look at the medical tape on her lip, touch the bandage on my cheekbone.

“How’s it feeling?” she asks.

“Okay,” I say. “A little sore.”

“Yeah.” She moves to the couch and peers down the hall. Then she says, “That question in the car yesterday, the one about love? That was yours, right?”

I nod.

“I kept thinking about that the whole time we were sitting here.”

I picture the way Drew and Melanie looked at one another, the way she rested her head on his shoulder.

“It could be just an act,” Bev says.

“Yeah,” I say. “But I don’t think so.”

A long time passes.

Then Bev says, “I don’t think so, either.”

Bev gets ready first, and by the time I walk back out into the living room, she is already fast asleep on the couch.

“Should we just let her stay there?” Melanie asks.

I nod, and Melanie takes a blanket and drapes it over Bev’s feet.

“Come,” she whispers. “I’ve fixed a bed in the study.”

The room is cabinlike, unpainted wood walls and hanging
plants and a desk cluttered with papers and books. Melanie has made the futon. Soft sheets, a pillow, a green comforter. I climb in.

“Do you need anything?”

I shake my head, no.

She stands above me for a little longer.

“Everything will be okay,” she tells me.

She leans over, tucks the blankets around me. I don’t mind, because even though it’s too intimate an action for a stranger, we both know it suits the moment.

It isn’t until later, after she’s walked out and shut the door, that I realize I never told her that anything was wrong. Everything about me, it must be obvious to everyone. Like what Sophie said:
You feel it so much.

I reach for my phone to check the time—2:38—and there’s a new voice mail from Dad. I consider letting it wait until tomorrow, but instead I press play: