What a Mother Knows (7 page)

When she reached the car and looked around, Tyler was ten yards behind her, chatting with a group of athletes in varsity warm-ups. The bell clanged, and the jocks ran to the gymnasium entrance, leaving him with two pompom girls in pleated skirts.

Michelle waved for him to hurry, but he was lapping up the attention of the older girls holding their long hair back from the wind. If he were a puppy, his tail would be wagging.

The ear-splitting squeal of brakes filled the air. Michelle looked up to see a school bus, as long and yellow as caution tape, lumbering toward her. A bus just like the one that had pulled up there on Nikki's birthday.

The
bus
driver
honked
the
horn
for
Michelle
to
move
the
car, but Nikki refused to get out. She complained that her teeth were sore after having her braces removed, but it was more than that. Tyler kicked the front seat in frustration, late for school. Students shouted from the bus windows, and Nikki shoved her birthday cupcakes to the floor. When Michelle pleaded, Nikki stumbled out to the pavement. She melted onto the sidewalk, her tears streaking red rivers down her pale cheeks, her new purple sneakers glued to the cement. The bus lumbered past.

Michelle
called
for
backup. By some miracle, Drew answered his cell. “Let her go home and eat cupcakes, for chrissakes,” he said. “Everyone needs a mental health day now and then.”

Michelle leaned back against the car, waiting for Tyler to finish chatting with the girls. She tried to picture Nikki in one of those pleated skirts. If she had kept up with dance, or done some other activities, maybe she would have felt more like she belonged. Instead Nikki spent her weekends at home, reading poetry and switching between kid shows on the Disney Channel and cult films like
Donnie
Darko.
At the time, Michelle was proud that her daughter was unique. She hadn't minded that Nikki was younger than the other kids in her class. It just meant she got to hold on to her little girl a bit longer. But no wonder Nikki didn't want to go to school on her sweet sixteen—there wasn't much to celebrate.

“Mom!” Tyler called.

“Ready to go?” Michelle asked, then looked back where the girls posed, all shiny and pert, as the athletes from a rival school hopped off the bus behind them.

Tyler stepped closer. “Mom, this is Kelsey and Ashlyn.”

Michelle hid her arm beneath her sweater and smiled. “Hello. Do you girls know Tyler's sister?”

Their mascara-draped eyes darted at each other. “Give me a minute,” Tyler told them. He guided Michelle back toward the Volvo.

“Wait, honey, I need to ask if they've heard anything. Maybe they were friends.”

Tyler stopped at the curb. “Mom, Ashlyn's the one who had to get a nose job. Nikki shut the locker in her face. For real.”

Michelle looked back. Sure enough, Ashlyn's nose was perfect. “She probably didn't know Ashlyn was standing there. It was a misunderstanding between friends.”

“Mom to Earth? Nikki didn't have any friends.” He spread his fingers into an
L
. “She was a loser. If I was her age, I wouldn't have hung with her, either.”

Michelle felt a shooting pain, but this time it was in her heart. “How can you say that about your own sister?”

“Ty, are you coming?” Kelsey called.

He offered Michelle the report. “I'll get a ride home, okay?”

“No, Tyler, I need to talk to you.”

“You want me to like it here, right?”

“I can't drive myself.”

“Please, Mom, you used to drive one-handed all the time, before talking on the phone was against the law.”

“That's beside the point. Why didn't you tell me any of this about Nikki?”

Tyler's face was red with frustration. “Because I wasn't supposed to upset you, duh!”

The girls called out one last time. “Ty, we have to go. See you later?”

Tyler waved at them in defeat, then opened the passenger door for Michelle. Once she was seated, he dropped the report in her lap and kicked the door shut.

Tyler was seething as he sped away from the school. Michelle struggled to buckle the seat belt with her left hand, wishing he would slow down, but she bit her lip to avoid playing the mom card again. The shock of going from no mother to a bossy one was reflected by the speedometer, going from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. Still, all she needed was another accident.

Michelle's stomach dropped. For a blessed few minutes, she had forgotten about the boy who'd died in her car. The thought made her shiver. A police car approached and Tyler slowed, causing the old key chain, a beaded row of their names, to click as it swung back and forth. Nikki had made it for her mother in another lifetime: Before. This was After. Their lives were officially split into two.

Michelle sighed and dumped the contents of the school envelope on her lap as they drove though the suburbs. There was a moldy stick of Teen Spirit Deodorant, a pair of cotton, turtle-print panties from Target, and a crumpled black T-shirt that Michelle didn't recognize. The attendance report would have to wait until her hands stopped shaking.

A motorcycle cop waved them toward a detour past a street packed with white equipment trucks. After recognizing the camera truck and rented star trailers, Michelle searched for familiar faces among the film crew. She wished they were breaking for lunch, but the only ones visible were busy holding up shiny boards and aiming overhead mikes. She pointed toward a man with a walkie-talkie. “That looks like Aziz, the AD from Budweiser. I should call him.”

Tyler drove another block before he finally burst. “Dad's not coming back!”

Michelle looked at him. “I wasn't going to call for your father's sake. But it does prove there are jobs here.” She waited, but Tyler said no more. “What are you not telling me?”

Tyler focused on steering through the busy intersection.

“Come on,” Michelle said. “You knew Nikki had been in trouble, I could tell. I felt like an idiot in there.”

“You have an excuse,” he said.

“Maybe, but you don't.” Michelle picked up the turtle-print panties that Nikki used to love. “Remember the meltdown she had on her birthday?”

“How could I forget? I could have been class treasurer if she hadn't pitched a fit and made me late for elections. She didn't want to go to PE or something.”

Michelle looked at the panties and realized that, at sixteen, Ashlyn and Kelsey were probably wearing lacy thongs. “I'll bet that's what the locker fuss was about. Nikki wouldn't hurt anyone—she was too shy. Those girls must have teased her about the panties until she couldn't take it anymore.”

“Whatever.” Tyler replied. He turned the radio on to a hip-hop station.

“How about something with a melody?”

He switched to a classic rock station, but Michelle's head still hurt. She unlatched the glove box filled with fast-food napkins, hospital parking stubs, and a bent pair of readers. “No Tylenol?”

“Dad took it. Want water? You used to make us drink it for headaches.”

“I didn't want you to get in the habit of using drugs.”

Tyler snorted. “All your classic rock is stoner music: Clapton, Jagger—” The Beatles tune on the radio segued into the Doors. “My English lit teacher said the Doors got their name from the Aldous Huxley book
Doors
of
Perception
. He and Poe and Blake—all those dudes were total druggies.”

“Your school curriculum is impressive,” Michelle said.

“Seriously, Mom. You ever see Jim Morrison live?”

She swatted him. “I'm not that old, Tyler! But my friend, Becca, won a Morrison film scholarship at UCLA. He wasn't much of a filmmaker, evidently, but he was quite the poet.”

“Like Noah. Must be why he was so obsessed with the dude.”

“Noah Butler? The one who was…your pitching coach?”

“Sucks, huh? He was a cool guy,” Tyler said. He pulled the visor down to block the sun and braked to avoid rear-ending a UPS truck. A BMW honked past.

“Hands on the wheel,” Michelle reminded him.

The song on the radio echoed: “hands on the wheel.” They smiled at the coincidence, then Michelle listened more closely. The percussion was off. “Wait—that's not the Doors.”

She reached for the volume, just as Tyler reached to change the channel. He banged into Michelle, throwing her off balance. “Fuck me,” he said.

“Tyler!” Michelle glanced at him. The DJ was announcing a Roadhouse concert at the Wiltern. Michelle recognized the name but couldn't place it.

The DJ continued, “Took their name from the Doors' song, ‘Road House Blues,' about driving to the nightclub in Topanga Canyon called the Cellar, where Neil Young used to—”

Tyler turned it down. “Idiot. Everyone knows it was called the Corral.”

Michelle didn't, nor did she care. But that would explain why she recognized the name of the band—that song was a classic. And the burned-out ruins of the club were still there. Michelle used to notice them every time she drove through the Canyon. Then it hit her. “Roadhouse was Noah Butler's band, wasn't it?”

“Still is. I mean, they still play without him.” He shrugged. “I just wanted a chance to pitch, that's all. Or I wouldn't have begged you to help.”

Michelle's head was pounding now. “Help?”

“You produced the video for him in exchange for pitching lessons.” He adjusted the rearview mirror and swore. “Dad's gonna kill me for telling you.”

“No, he won't. It makes sense,” Michelle said. When her boss used to complain that he wanted to make a movie, she urged him to update his director's reel. He had a few CLIO-winning commercials, but he needed something creative, like a music video. “That's what I do for a living. Did, anyway. And it might explain why he was in my car. But it doesn't make it your fault.”

She looked down at the black T-shirt in her lap. She spread it out as much as she could with one hand, tugging at the safety pins holding the sides together. The front was painted with red triangles forming the letter
R
. “So why was this in Nikki's locker? Was she a fan? Like that guy at the police station yesterday—he wore a shirt like this.” Tyler didn't answer. “Tyler, no more secrets!”

“She was more than a fan, Mom. She was in the video.”

Michelle nearly laughed. She looked to see if he was teasing, but he wouldn't meet her gaze. She took note of his smartphone. “Pull over.”

He slowed past a sushi restaurant and a swimsuit store but found only No Parking signs. “I'll show you when we get home.”

“Now.”

He maneuvered over to the curb, then turned on the next side street and parked in the red zone. Tyler tapped on the screen of his phone a few times, then held it up sideways. He pressed Play.

Michelle watched the title screen cut to a wide shot of four boys standing with their instruments in front of a plain backdrop. The low-budget style was a throwback to early Beatles videos, grainy and soft, so different than the sharp edges of digital images. Victor had taken advantage of the malleability of film. The blacks were saturated, and the shadows were velvety warm.

The musicians looked like any other amateurs, a bunch of scruffy kids in black T-shirts hand-screened with the red
R
. The shots were long, lingering on fingers plucking guitar strings and bouncing along with the drums, catching a laugh between the boys when the bass player slipped on a lick. It was less a performance and more an invitation to join them, to sing along. “Let it roll, baby roll, all night long.” Tyler clicked up the volume of the tiny speaker until they heard laughter in the background, the chuckle of the chubby bass player as the drummer beat an extra roll. There was no reverb, no echo, only a shouted chorus mellowed by the tenor of Noah's voice.

The camera swung to him, the pretty boy at the mike, crooning with the charisma of Frank Sinatra. He glanced behind him where a shadow swayed—a dancer, Michelle guessed. Victor's camera panned the other boys' faces, but they were stealing glances off camera, at Noah.

On screen, Noah held out his arm and drew the girl close. She looked like a typical groupie in ghoulish makeup, a bit on the thin side, with a black Roadhouse T-shirt pinned together at the side. When the camera cut to a close-up, she winked her false eyelashes, raised her black-penciled brows, and stared right into the camera lens. Her eyes were round and deep, like marbles made of Tiger's Eye.

Michelle could hear her heart beat. She held up her hand to make it stop, but searing pain shot up her arm. Wrong hand. She cried out and cradled her arm.

“You okay?” Tyler asked. He hit Pause.

She nodded, pretending the Earth had not just shifted off its axis. She opened the glove compartment, grabbed the bent glasses, and shoved them on quickly. When Tyler hit the Play button, she leaned in for a clearer look.

On-screen, Nikki resumed her swaying dance. The camera pulled back to reveal the entire the band, then panned back to Noah, who strummed the last chord and looked over at Nikki. She was laughing as her hand reached up into the frame. Her bitten nails were painted black, and she spread two fingers apart into her trademark sign. The image froze, then the screen went dark.

Michelle found her voice. “She looks so different. If it weren't for the bunny ears…”

Tyler half-smiled. “Nobody gets that. They think it's a peace sign, like she's so hip.”

Michelle smiled at him. No one knew Nikki like they did. She wasn't a truant or some hippie chick. She was their girl. “You think this had something to do with her running away?”

“I don't know, but after it went viral, she sure got popular all of a sudden. Then, boom, Noah was gone. You both were.”

“Then maybe I was wrong about her being teased.”

“No, she was still teased. But not about underwear.” He avoided her eyes and cranked the key so far the engine screamed.

Michelle put her hand on his leg. “Did you ever get to pitch?”

He shook his head and drove home.