Songs Only You Know (26 page)

No one could have known how moved I was by the fact my sister was there, myself least of all. But over years that night has become charged with meaning, the way she eyed the black-clothed spectators who loitered, smoking, with records tucked under their arms. The tentative look in her eyes, knowing she was breaching a code I’d worked hard to establish. A collision was in progress, two realms I’d kept apart.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

Caitlin sipped at her beer, one of the only times I’d ever see her with a drink. “Am I not allowed to be here?”

“How did you know we were playing?”

“I was studying in a coffee shop. I heard some guys talking about going to see your band, so I thought, If they can go see my brother, then I can, too.”

And I admit to feeling proud, as if a stranger’s random mention of my music might validate its seriousness in my sister’s eyes. We had fans, believers.

“He’s a star,” said Will. “Don’t you know? Our Boy’s a star.”

I bent to hug my sister, putting something extra into the squeeze, and over the sleek fabric of her jacket my hand slid down the notches of her spine. One of those accidents that remind you the people you love are made of bone. You can reach for them. You can touch their face, if you want—reach out and prove they’re real.

I still see her there, not her disease or whatever they’d try to call it, but the timid uncertainty on her soft, young face as I stood and met her eyes. The unfinished person who hadn’t yet found herself but was flailing messily toward that discovery, just as I was. All these years later, I go back in for another hug. And does everything change in that instant, flowing outward and leading us anywhere but where we were headed? Yes, it does. Because I hold on to her a little longer. I never let her go.

“Happy birthday,” she said.

Angela smiled, and Caitlin smiled back.

We spent a few minutes, talking small, but I felt the earth beneath our feet and the season in the air. I didn’t know where things stood, but I was aware in every sense of where we were. Every few beats someone approached us, asking how much longer until the band went on. “This is my sister,” I told them.

I’d burned calories devising ways to avoid revealing myself to these people—the scene—and they acknowledged her puzzlingly, as if expecting my relatives to resemble hyenas, the mentally deranged.

“Didn’t know you had a sister.”

Someone held up a flask, toasting my twenty-two years. Will walked off in search of another drink, and I took his place beside Caitlin, put my arm around her. “Thing is,” I said, “you gotta stay out here when we play. You don’t wanna see this.”

“What’s the big deal? I’m too straight, like I can’t handle it?”

She spoke quietly. She knew it was our business.

“You just wait outside, you know? We’ll hang out when it’s over.”

The band onstage had finished; it was my turn. Repa, I knew, was off chanting to himself. Ethan was stretching, working out the kinks. Will came marching down the street with a plastic sack full of bottles. “Showtime,” he said, enunciating like a natural, never stuttering once his mind was lubricated.

While heading in to set up my equipment, I took him aside.

“You keep an eye on Caitlin. I don’t want her in there.”

“If that’s,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “what you want.”

T
HERE
’
D BEEN TIMES
I’
D
faked it through a song or two before the ritual took hold. I’d slapped myself, thrown a bottle, worked
my way into the convulsion. That night, I’d given up before the first note. My shoulders were slack; I felt my hands trailing over the frets. Someone from the audience yelled, “What? Aren’t you pussies drunk enough?” But there’d be no freaky stuff, no creepy-crawls, no scaling the rafters. Beyond the glare of the stage lights, the back of the club was vague, all faces obscured by shadow. As the chords rang, there was no telling who was watching.

Repa stole the show. Onstage again, spotlit, he became infused with his old voodoo. He and Ethan locked into the rhythms, oblivious to me posed inanimately beside them. I heard the sound, the odd time signatures, the down-tuned grunt of the chords. Our death rattle. It wasn’t until our last song that I gave in. A long, destructive piece, one of our oldest. Only recently had I realized it was about my family, all of us. Knowing it would be the last time I howled those words, I chewed into them, giving all I could to the verse:
A thirteenth step, by love
.

W
ILL WAS CURBSIDE, HOUNDING
postshow loiterers for a light. A cigar hung from his lips and shreds of tobacco dappled his chin. In the place Caitlin had been, Angela sat alone, fending off various admirers, some of them friends of Blaine. Had they seen it, the underwhelming end?

I clasped Will’s shoulder, holding him in place for a goddamn minute. “Where’s Caitlin?”

“She left, man,” he said. “She was cold.”

“Did she go inside?”

“She stayed out here with me, and then she left.”

So it was, my sister would never experience the band. Never meet Repa and put his unforgettable face to the frenzied baritone she’d laughed at when his messages spewed from the answering machine.

“Was she upset?”

“I don’t think so.” Will pulled an envelope from his jacket. “She said to give this to you.”

I walked up the block to open it: a standard-issue birthday card containing a multipage letter Caitlin had written on sheets of yellow paper. I began reading in the streetlight. After the first line, it was impossible to engage the message sentence by sentence. I couldn’t manage any more than to scan my sister’s tidy cursive: Epithets. The word “Mom.” “Dad.” She’d used the term “idol” to describe her feelings for me. The letter contained no birthday wishes at all but a missive about what had been lost, our closeness as children, and the present gulf between us. There was a line about how she’d parked outside my apartment, staring up at the light in the second-story window, too afraid to walk up the steps and knock on my door.

I folded the letter, pocketed it. A problem that needed fixing—another rising difficulty I’d need to solve one of these days, whenever life revealed to me the flawless, finite answers. I crossed it from my mind: the only important thing that happened that night. The crowd was leaving. I heard Repa laughing above everything. And once I fled this scene, I believed there’d be a short time before my name and the sound of my voice would be forgotten.

But I couldn’t read Caitlin’s words as she’d intended, not just yet.

In fact, I wouldn’t open the letter again. Not until years later, once it was far too late. Then I’d read it from beginning to end for the first and only time, and it would transport me to that scrap of Ann Arbor sidewalk, beneath the November streetlight where the sweat burned my eyes. By then, everything would make perfect sense: How acutely she’d seen our lives. How well she knew me, more than I did myself. I’d see her composing those thoughts inside a coffee shop. I’d know why she’d driven
there, hoping to witness whatever she imagined my music to be, hoping I’d invite her to see for herself my version of what we both felt. By then I’d know that she alone was the one who could have truly understood.

C
aitlin knocked at the upper flat’s door on a Christmastime weeknight—three uncertain raps I might have missed had I not been waiting, more or less staring at the walls. What little I’d read of her letter had convinced me I needed to be near her, whatever that took. Over the past year it had been growing, a slowly churning awareness of how dire it was that we discover a new way to connect, to transform our sibling habits. To grow up, I guess, a task that was mostly mine. We’d been behaving shyly toward each other, but, finally, I’d invited her for dinner.

“Hey,” I said, opening the door to welcome her inside, where she stood idling in the apartment’s front room. She’d done her hair, and I hoped it wasn’t for this. A runty plastic Christmas tree sat in a corner, but there was little else in the way of holiday spirit. Will and Andrew had gone out for the evening.

“Hello,” she said.

I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss, didn’t take her coat or anything formal. She ought to feel she was casually dropping by, that this would become a regular sort of business. Caitlin took a
seat on the couch, and we settled for a movie playing on one of the channels Andrew had hijacked with a satellite dish.
Pretty Woman
—I’d never seen it before. Caitlin eyed Will’s homemaking: The lighthouse scene, plugged in and blinking. The Jesus shrine on the mantel, which she was sure to find heretical.

While the movie played, I took breaks to tend the microwave. I’d become a wizard of the chicken sandwich, zapping the precooked fillets and dashing them with soul-food seasoning that didn’t belong to me.

“How is it?” I said, after serving the entrées on plastic dishes.

“Good,” she said. “Spicy.”

An uneasy feeling, once the romance scenes heated up. Richard Gere unhooking Julia Roberts’s garter. A hooker movie, of all things. An indirect expression of our sister-brother awkwardness—you click the remote, and there it is.

The R-rated images silenced Caitlin and me, looming larger and more lifelike than what we needed to say. One of the stranger confusions I’d felt, an unnecessary embarrassment about being unnecessarily embarrassed that certified just how dislocated she and I were. I asked Caitlin if she wanted to watch something else. She shrugged. The movie trailed on, without the respite of commercials.

The actress had tremendously long legs; the stud a chest that appeared to have been shaved as smooth as his ass, which the camera panned over as he thrust and bucked, but gently.

“You into this?” I said.

“Whatever’s fine,” Caitlin said, because the movie had nothing to do with anything. “Do you wanna turn it off?”

“Only if you do,” I said, and we continued staring at the screen as if a moment we’d been trying to take hold of was being led astray. The hooker and the tycoon plummeted troublesomely
into love, threatened by contrary lifestyles; yet they found their way, in time for the closing theme.

The credits rolled and I took my sister’s plate to the kitchen. As she was leaving, I told her to come back soon. With any luck, I said, the year 2000 would not mark the end of humankind, and we’d be seeing a whole lot more of each other. Then I cracked some
Pretty Woman
joke, at which Caitlin laughed and said, “It’s fine, it’s all good. Sorry if I’m boring.”

O
N THE CORNER OF
Telegraph and Ford hung an ominous banner above the entrance to Harry’s Army Surplus:
GET YOUR Y
2
K SUPPLIES HERE
. Angela said her father had for months been stocking his basement with nonperishables and weaponry for just this occasion. At the upper flat, Andrew had taken precautions by storing gallons of fuel in the garage and making sure there were enough rounds for the rifle he kept hidden from Will in the apartment attic.

“Andy Dandy’s ready,” Will said, and the three of us laughed.

New Year’s Eve 1999. We were huddled on the apartment’s miniature balcony, staring down Michigan Avenue to where Detroit’s skyline was a dusky apparition. A crisp evening, warm for Michigan, the final minutes of December. I eyed the twenty-four-hour Farmer Jack across the street, imagining the windows blacked out and looters shattering glass to ransack the aisles. It must have been nine o’clock, and we’d each swallowed a hit of ecstasy while sipping bottles of piss champagne Andrew had bought for the holidays. Beneath us cars chugged along and streetlights changed on cue, as if to defy whatever catastrophe was about to begin.

The weeklies had been advertising end-of-the-world parties, urging Detroit to let it all hang out, one last time. Around ten, Andrew made his way to some such event. Angela had returned
to Kalamazoo, where I was to meet her the next day, leaving Will and me alone with the agreeable option of blasting off to a private celebration.

He’d wired up a surround-sound system in his bedroom, a speaker in each corner, in the middle of which we sat blitzing ourselves with music. Every so often, we regrouped in the bathroom to swallow another pill, and in this way the year’s change passed without our knowing. We didn’t hear the ovation, the guns going off in the city—bullets shot at the moon. It was well after midnight when we realized we’d lived to see the new millennium. By then we’d gobbled our entire stash but for one tablet, which we cut in half with a razor in honor of the future.

“Happy two thousand,” Will said, tucking his portion between his gums.

“How many have we eaten?”

“Your eye,” he said. “It’s all messed up.”

I glanced in the bathroom mirror to see a contorted visage resembling what I might look like if I’d regressed to some prehuman species. The flesh around my left eye sagged lifelessly. The pupil was dilated and deadened, a fish eye peering through aquarium glass. I poked at my nose and flexed my cheeks. I’d never again reached the high of those first autumn doses, yet this buzz was exhilarating, making it impossible to worry at length.

Will stood behind me, seeing what I saw. “My god,” he said. For a minute, he couldn’t turn away. Then he returned to the music, and I called Angela to wish her a good year. Next, I called my mom. I said the same things to both of them, jabbering while massaging the flesh below my eye—speaking of love and all the great things ahead. And next came a stretch of minutes so spectacularly oblivious I might as well have lived them in a place like heaven, but one thing I’m sure of is that the sun hadn’t yet risen when Caitlin knocked at the door.

By then I’d polished off the champagne. Sweat slicked my lower back, and I’d changed into a white T-shirt because my black one had attracted vicious energies. There was no name for the ride I was on as I danced toward the door, swinging it open with an insane, impersonal friendliness.

“Happy New Year,” I said, before I could really comprehend her.

It seemed impossible to view my sister entirely. I took in square inches: Blonde locks. Deep-red lips with that blotted end-of-the-night smear. For months she’d been holed up studying, but this evening Caitlin had hit the town wearing her finest nightlife clothes. Black pants, a white blouse. Heels. She was wrapped in a peacoat as I hugged her into the room. I might have asked her to dance. From Will’s bedroom music blared down the hallway, and in this late phase we’d reached for the funky sounds: James Brown. Curtis Mayfield. I’d been dancing away the scary ideas that began to creep in each time I stood still. I was afraid to stop.