Songs Only You Know (3 page)

“I’m gonna wait for him,” I said.

“Get some sleep,” she said. “Letting this control us won’t do any good.”

Outside the windows, the street was empty. The gunman must have been peeling off his shirt, sliding into the sheets next to his sleeping wife. Down the hallway, his kids dreamed openmouthed in the air-conditioned twilight. As I lay awake in a bed my father had built by hand, I wondered if the man kept his firearm near as he slept, if it had even been loaded. Possibly he’d relive the scene with each coming day as his minivan rolled through that same quiet intersection. He’d remember why he carried a pistol. Staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, he might figure he’d done the right thing.

Through my bedroom’s open window the highway was a distant white noise. Caitlin lay just beyond the wall—resting soundly, I hoped. She’d always be the one I worried most about, tucked away as she often was, and just out of reach.

There was still a chance Dad would drift home to spend the night on the couch. The worst would be over. Tomorrow morning we’d piece everything together. Or does a person sleep at all once he’s toked from that pipe? The worst pipe packed with the worst drug. Does he actually come back? I reached for the box fan on my windowsill to crank it on high, and through the whirring of the blades the music returned, deep chords ringing slow and heavy. Will’s Easton lay beside me on the mattress, and already I knew what I’d tell him about the man and the showdown and how, when he’d ask me to repeat the story again and again, I’d describe the flash of the gun.

C
aitlin’s four-cylinder Escort was a dinky, white, egglike sedan she’d been driving the past eleven months, since she’d turned sixteen. Stacked in the glove box was an unlikely assortment of cassettes. Mozart, Carole King, the Smashing Pumpkins, mixtapes I’d made showcasing punk rock’s somber moments: the Replacements’ “Go,” “Long Division” by Fugazi. A rosary dangled from the rearview and fortune-cookie scripts were held with a paper clip beneath the emergency brake; all of which, I hoped, would remind my dad of Caitlin as he pulled into a dealer’s driveway or alleyway or whatever it was.

Come morning, though, I was thinking most about a cassette I’d left in the Escort’s tape deck: my band’s first demo, our song titles—“Blamesday” and five others—printed on the shell. My family had been expected at Brighton Treatment Center the previous afternoon for Dad’s exit evaluation, and I’d been running late enough that Mom and Caitlin had left without me in the station wagon. Though Caitlin trusted no one with her car, she’d made the mistake of leaving behind her keys, which
I’d snatched, intending to analyze the band’s new recording on a different stereo. I’d blared the tape the entire twenty-five-minute drive into rural Michigan, where Dad awaited us in a farmhouse-turned-rehab. They might have heard me coming if not for those puny Escort speakers just sort of rattling as I maxed the volume.

The band was onto some genuinely ugly sounds, our mission being to corrupt all traces of harmony. When notes felt too “right,” we augmented with wrongness. Lyrics were pulled unexamined from some part of myself that I couldn’t otherwise locate:
A rite of passage, bought and sold / See how we’ve grown to fill our cage
. More than tough or hard, we wanted to sound painful. Crazy. We wanted to take it all the way, whatever that meant, and had just enough skill to set ourselves on course.

Our twenty-minute demo tape—now at my dad’s fingertips, awaiting his turn of the dial—held the proof.

He suspected my guitar and secret life of cultish gatherings to be the cause of my lackluster grades, so I hid all evidence of the music for both our sakes. Things between us had begun turning a few years earlier, when I gave up my baseball mitt for an imitation Stratocaster I’d funded by delivering the
Dearborn Press and Guide
. He’d threatened to snap the instrument in two. The sound of it, even unplugged, goaded him. We’d have fared better had I, even failingly, striven for honor and experience through fierce, competitive sport. Teamwork. High fives that become hugs. We’d shared such moments when I was eleven. Now I understood he’d prefer to cancel large parts of who I’d become with age. Recently he’d uttered the words “Fuck you” to me for the first time and meant it so completely that I’d lowered my head to silently agree. Music—my drive toward it—upset a brute fear in him because songs reached me in ways he never could. Who’d guess that in the seventies he’d grown
his hair and attempted the classical guitar? He’d owned the first four Zeppelin albums. Now Dad called Robert Plant a “whiner,” Mick Jagger a “fruitcake.” I dreaded what he’d make of my band’s down-tuned noise, punk and hardcore and Mahavishnu jazz, impulsively fused. My asylum wails rising from the Escort stereo. I could only hope he wouldn’t listen carefully enough to decipher whose screams they were.

T
HIS FOCUS CHANGED THE
instant I came downstairs to find Mom in her robe, sitting with a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. She hadn’t opened the newspaper or switched on WQRS, Detroit’s sole classical station. No matter how often I passed through this room—countrified wallpaper and unscarred countertops—it reminded me of something assembled by Allen wrench and wood glue. Caitlin remained in her bedroom, though I doubted either of them had slept. The lights were off. The sun was rising on Saturday morning.

“Are you okay?” Mom said.

“You heard from him?” I asked, and her eyes said she hadn’t.

In the day’s early light the creases on her forehead and the sunspots on her sternum were plain to see. Her capillaries erupted when she was flustered, leaving her cheeks a blotchy pink. “How could he do that?” she said. “Right after we met with those doctors and everything.”

Brighton’s clinicians had counseled my mom, sister, and me separately, encouraging us to “talk openly” before ordering us to reconvene in the rehab’s central office. That’s when Dad had entered, husky and guilty eyed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his ash-blond hair disheveled like he’d just risen from a two-week flu.

The whole scene already looked black and white in my mind.

“Those morons don’t know what they’re doing,” I told my
mom. When Dad wasn’t around, I liked to act as though I had an edge on things. “What a joke.”

“They’re specialists,” she said. “They’ve seen this before.”

The experts—I felt suckered. No sooner had Dad taken his seat than the head doctor began quoting shorthand transcripts of what we’d said, interpreting our testimonies aloud, his curt restatement of our words rendering them truer than when we’d spoken.
Your wife feels you’re emotionally unavailable; your daughter doesn’t trust you
 … Were these trained professionals? The woman interviewing me asked if I loved my father. For an answer I’d told her about my band, how we planned to ravage the country one city at a time.

“Did you sleep?” Mom said. I gave her a one-armed hug, not wanting to admit I had. “This is all so unreal,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

I refilled her coffee and took a seat beside her.

“It’s my fault,” I admitted, which felt true. Dad had asked me for the Escort’s keys once the four of us stood unobserved in the rehab parking lot. He’d worked up a plot about his support group’s plans for a going-away party, affecting a penitent tone—“They’ve been good to me here”—while looking my mother and sister in their teary eyes with an earnestness that made me believe. Caitlin protested, but I hadn’t thought twice. My father had never missed a mortgage payment. Whatever he’d promised—vacations or corporal punishments—he’d always come through, so let him reassure us of his manic love when we needed him most. I’d handed over my sister’s key ring, dangling pink rabbit foot and all, the minute he’d reached out his hand.

“You dad’s very sick.” Mom took the tone people use when categorizing addiction as disease, the drug fiend as unwitting victim. I could tell, suddenly, that she’d spent one too many nights trying to wrap her mind around this problem and how
crushed she was to know that I’d now joined her, both of us staring ahead into the terrifyingly unknowable near future. What happens tomorrow? An hour from now? She kneaded her temples. “But, you know, people get through this kind of thing. We have to stick together.”

She touched my arm.

Moments later, Caitlin entered the kitchen with her blonde hair raked into a headband and a dry, practical expression. In the ragamuffin style of 1996, she wore baggy jeans and a thrift-store T-shirt, a dark, almost-mulberry shade of lipstick. Five foot six. Slightly round in the cheeks. Her eyebrows were darker than mine, lending a gravitas to her scowl.

“So, where’s he taking my car?” she said, as though the vehicle were at risk of contamination. “What kind of places?”

My sister tried to talk tough, but she was a softy through and through, more so than any of us. Beyond the family, she was timid, the quietest in any room. At home only she had the nerve to snarl back at my dad, deflecting his anger so quickly it stunted him. A funny thing: to watch them go around. Caitlin turning his phrases inside out with a boldness I’d never manage. This morning her lady-finger wick had been lit, sizzling. She was ready to detonate, if only he’d show his face.

“I’ve gotta go to work,” she said. “He ever think of that?”

Mom suggested taking Dad’s Ford Contour and Caitlin shook her head, showing signs of a long, hard cry that was about to break. Yet, as if in protest, she remained stoically against missing a day’s work, the weekend tip jar. It was her way of rallying to get us all up and moving. Mom took the cue and chauffeured my sister to the coffee shop in the station wagon, Ozzy riding along.

Alone at the kitchen table I drummed my fingers on a place mat. There was a song to be mined from any crisis, if you had the knack. Close your eyes, and the chords silently arrive, the
closest approximation of what you feel then and there. Everything else was numb. The only evidence on me of last night’s trouble was a skinned elbow and grass stains on the blue jeans I’d slept in.

I decided to call in sick to work—a relieving idea because I was, literally, the shitheel of the golf-course maintenance crew. My uniform was caked with green dung and stored, at Caitlin’s request, in the garage. Management had sussed me out as someone who’d never actually swung a club, and therefore I spent entire days scooping Canada-geese droppings from the fairways, breaking only to comb disrupted sand traps. Twice, I’d been struck by an errant drive; another had whistled past my ear.

Not today.

I got the manager on the line to tell him there was “family business.”

“You ain’t the only one” was what he had to say about that.

W
HEN
M
OM RETURNED, WE
sat with another round of coffee. One of those times you dread turning on the television or busying yourself with errands because who knows what panic might be triggered.
Tell your family about your triggers
was how Brighton’s staff had put it. What were ours? Better to remain still.

“We’ll just take it easy,” Mom said.

She sat beneath a framed watercolor of our old Dearborn house, powder blue, each of our names written in calligraphy above a bedroom window. Ozzy was a black lump on the porch.

“That stuff,” I said. “One hit and you’re addicted.”

I was only beginning to comprehend that the ordeal might be more than a fluke, what my dad called freak things: a baseball knocked from the sky by a soaring pigeon; my uncle zapped by lightning on his prom night; a cougar escaped from the Detroit Zoo. One in a million. As for crack, I’d seen programs
in school warning of its warp-speed annihilation, the way its fumes turned people hollow faced and destitute in what seemed a matter of days.

“What if they come here looking for him?” I said. “Dealers?” Friends of mine had been hunted around town for owing their pot suppliers; how the crack world did its business, I imagined, was a whole other bag. Fear shot straight through me. “We’re talking about killers. The scum of the earth.”

“No one is coming here.”

Mom hadn’t changed out of her robe. Saturday’s business—groceries, weeding her garden, dusting the banister—could wait. Her grief was visible in her lowering face, her small twitching chin. She’d once had a way of neutralizing my childhood worries, consoling me with smiles. Before moving to Ridgewood Hills I’d never seen her unravel, even when she’d been my fifth-grade English teacher, standing before a classroom in which I’d worked stridently to be chief clown. Until recently, she’d explained Dad’s absences as business trips to Mexican Ford plants and last-minute sporting excursions, but I’d heard her shouting from their bedroom, into the phone, her voice darkening over the months. Then came a night he’d called after work claiming to be headed to a Red Wings preseason game. Mom had rifled through the
Free Press
, thrashing pages as she read that the Ice Capades were the only thing happening that week at Joe Louis Arena.

Dad’s compulsions—marijuana in the basement and his haywire temper—Mom had known about their entire marriage. The hard drugs she’d kept secret for a couple of years, attending Al-Anon and couples’ therapy, offering goodness the chance to intervene before she yanked the alarm. How to reconcile the sense that, as mind-shattering as all this was, it provided an instant dimension for things I’d already known? Trouble
I’d sensed on some level beneath thought and language, in my crackling nerves and an inalienable, primal fear I’d mistake for a weakness of character. However deeply buried, the truth had its influence, altering me, screaming from the bottommost source of all things.

“Maybe I should have told you sooner,” she said, swirling her coffee.

We liked ours the same, heavy with milk, easy on our stomachs.

“No,” I said, “it’s okay.”

I understood the urge to protect someone from troubles they didn’t need. I’d never tell her about the man with the gun or the time I’d been jumped at a gas station. It would be years before I’d reveal the name of my band—long after we’d called it quits—or the locations of the dank Detroit basements and clubs where I first stood before an audience. And I can’t honestly say I’m not grateful for those teenage days I lived unaware of my father’s disgrace, when the only problems on earth seemed to be mine.