Writing Our Song (4 page)

We stood and went into a huddle, our arms over each other’s shoulders in silent support as we each tried to loosen up in our own ways to be able to give the best performances we could.  It was a short moment that seemed to last for much longer, a huddle that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.

Blair led the way out of the door, his guitar slung over his shoulder like the axe he sometimes referred to it as, followed by Darrin, spinning one of his drumsticks around his fingers and Drew, protectively cradling the bass guitar he had barely managed to scrape enough money together for.

Something held me back for a moment, a compulsion to check my phone for any messages.  My dad was going to be out in the crowd for this one, not there on the stairs to give me a pep talk, so I wondered if he had any last minute words of encouragement he might have texted to me.

I’d put my phone on to silent when we arrived, not expecting anything important to come through and wanting to concentrate on the task at hand.  That being the case I was beyond surprised when I pressed a button, the screen lit up, and I saw I’d had twenty seven missed calls from my mom.

When I cleared that message, I saw that she’d left three voicemails too and felt a hot flush of panic bring a lump to my throat.  My mom wouldn’t call that many times to ask me to pick up some milk on the way home.  Something had happened, I was sure of it.

My hands were shaking as I dialed into my voicemail and let out a strangled growl at the automated voice that slowly droned out the number and time the first message had been received.  After the beep I heard my mom’s frantic voice over the back drop of slamming doors, howling wind and the engine of some car.

“Bea!  Call me back, quick!  Your dad’s been in an accident!  I’m getting a lift to the hospital with our neighbors.  Call me back!”

Accident?  What the hell kind of accident?  Had he fallen off a ladder?  Electrocuted himself somehow?  I gulped as I listened to the semi-robot voice announce the number and time of the next voicemail message, followed by the clop-clop of my mom’s footsteps as she pounded pavement and yelled into her phone.

“Beatrice!  Why aren’t you answering?  Call me back!  I’ve just arrived at the Northwest Hospital, I think it’s pretty close to where you are.  Call me!”

I went down to my knees as the drone announced the last voicemail and raised my hand to my mouth, covering my quivering lips as if that would do any good to stifle the whimpering I felt fighting to get out of me.  The final message was the most frantic of all.

“Fucking hell, Bea!  Oh my God… they won’t let me see him!  Somebody just said that if there’s any other close family for him they need to come quick.  He’s… just… they just said come quick.”

My hands dropped to my sides and I sat there like somebody had just pulled my plug, I wasn’t even sure how long for but I supposed it must have been only a minute or two.  I didn’t even notice at first when somebody came back to the room and started saying my name until they shook my shoulder and I looked up to see my three bandmates staring down at me in confusion.

“Bea? Bea?”  Blair said.

“Hospital,” I croaked. “Can somebody take me to the hospital?”

“What’s wrong, you eat something that’s on its way back up?” Darrin asked.

“My dad’s been in some kind of accident… I’ve gotta go.”

“Now?”

“But what about the…” started Drew.

“Screw the show, look at her, this is serious,” Blair said.

Drew took another look at me and quickly had an about-face.  “I’ll get my mom to take you,” he said.

*****

I must have called my mom at least as many times as my phone said she had called me on the short journey to the hospital, every time it ended up going to her voicemail.  Drew’s mom drove right at the speed limit and it was all I could do to stop myself from screaming at her to floor it as I redialed over and over again.

After what seemed like the millionth time listening to my mom’s cheerful voicemail greeting I suddenly felt dizzy and looked out of the window with a grimace of confusion and shock trying to fix on something stable like a horizon.  All there was to look at was the blur of buildings and the glare of streetlights, headlights and brake-lights, all of which were soon swirling nauseatingly in my vision.

I didn’t even feel it coming when I vomited down the side of the seat, my dinner giving me an unexpected encore.  With my head resting against the window I mumbled a barely audible apology even as my stomach gave another massive squeeze and raw bile burned my throat, adding a horrible garnish to the meal I had eaten earlier.

“Don’t worry about it, don’t you even think about it,” said Drew’s mom, a parent of five boys who had no doubt seen a lot worse in her time on the frontlines of motherhood.

We pulled into the hospital car park and drove right to the front doors, where we came to a halt.  I fumbled at the handle for a moment, my inability to make the simple mechanism work almost bringing my panic boiling over into a full meltdown.  Thankfully, if there was anything to be thankful about, I got the door open and the cold rain hit me full in the face, bringing a shock of clarity.

“Do you need me to wait for you?”

“No.”

I was gone.  I had no time to explain my mom was here with the neighbors and/or the neighbors’ car.  I slammed the door behind me and raced towards the bright light spilling out of the glass doors, barely squeezing between the panes as they slid to either side and pushing my way to the reception desk past some man and woman who moved aside without argument when they saw my face.

“Hampton!  Henry Hampton!  Where is he?”

“And you are?” the receptionist asked.

“Beatrice… I’m his daughter.  Please!”

“One moment.”

I could feel the eyes of everybody in the room on me, looking at the lunatic girl with traces of vomit on her leg, bright red face and screechy old-cat-lady voice.  I could feel them and I didn’t care, I’d bask in their condescending gaze forever if it would just mean that my dad was OK.  Anything to feel his arm around me and have him tell a stupid joke.

The receptionist tapped away at her computer for a few seconds and the glow on her face changed color as the screen she was looking at brought up some information in a new window.  An indecipherable look passed between her and the older receptionist, who was peering over her shoulder.

This older woman, who was wearing a name badge bearing the moniker ‘Millie’, called over a young man who was pushing a trolley of something around and asked him to take me to ‘GR three’ right away.

I followed him to the elevator, up a few floors and then through a maze of lefts and rights until I was completely disorientated.  Finally he knocked on and opened a door, letting me through with such a look of pity on his face that I wanted to punch it right off him and scream about how I didn’t need that look, my dad was fine, he looked worse than he really was.  That’s it.

The room was small and clinical, like so many rooms in a hospital I supposed.  About six orange plastic-looking chairs lined two walls around a small coffee table.  A rack of pamphlets stood against another wall next to a water-cooler like an unpopular office worker that nobody wanted to gossip with.

Sitting in one of the chairs was my mom, and sitting in the closest chair against the other wall was a tired-looking youngish doctor who looked up in my direction as the door clicked shut behind me.  My mom continued looking straight ahead, focusing on some point much farther than the confines of the room allowed in reality.

The doctor pursed his lips and gestured at the seat next to my mom, who hadn’t so much as batted an eyelid since I’d entered.  The room seemed to be rocking from side to side like a boat in a gentle swell and I stumbled almost drunkenly towards the chair with my footsteps echoing in my ears.

“Beatrice?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Reception called and said you’d be coming up.  I’m Doctor Wilkins, I’m a surgeon here.  Henry... uh… your dad, was brought in this evening with serious trauma from a motor vehicle accident.  I’ve got some of the most talented doctors and nurses I’ve ever worked with here at Northwest… but, I’m sorry, Beatrice, there’s no easy way to say this.  We couldn’t save him.  I’m so sorry.”

The doctor kept on speaking but a ringing far worse than anything loud concerts had ever inflicted on me drowned out all other sounds, and my empty stomach clenched up and slowly doubled me over until I literally slid off the chair on to my knees.  With one hand grasping at my stomach as if I could somehow force my muscles to release and the other holding on to the coffee table for support, I knelt there on the ground as if I was at some altar dedicated to a god of pain.

Something inside of me felt like it was going to explode and I was robbed of my ability to speak.  I tried to deny what I’d just been told.  I tried to yell for my dad to call off the shittiest, yet most elaborate, joke he’d ever pulled.  Instead, all I could get out was the first syllable of the word that had only ever brought comfort before.  Over and over again.

“D…d…d…d…”

Chapter 4

I had no memory of how I made it back home from the hospital.  It was like my mind reached some kind of limit, said ‘Nope’ and then just switched the lights out.  Waking up in my own bed was a mystifying straw that I grasped at with both hands.

A nightmare!  Of course it was a nightmare, things like that can’t happen, not to my dad.  From my perspective everything in my room looked normal, all the sounds outside my window were normal.  I breathed a sigh of relief and sat up, only to feel the wind knocked out of when my eyes spotted the outfit I had been wearing the previous night strewn across the floor.

Reality hit me like a physical thing and knocked me flat on my bed again, my hands reaching up to rub away tears welling up from my eyes, which I found to be already raw from so many similar gestures that I must have already performed.

Eventually I had to get up.  I swung my feet out on to ground that had never felt so unsteady and changeable before.  When I peeked out into the hallway, all was silent.  Everything in the house looked superficially the same, but fundamentally different as if some crew of humorless pranksters had come through in the middle of the night and swapped everything for nearly identical items.

The couch was still the same color, the same model and brand as it had always been but somehow it wasn’t the same one where I had bounced for hours straight while watching cartoons on a Saturday morning.  If I flipped that cushion over I wouldn’t see the stain that had resulted from the time my dad spilled his drink on it while mom was in the kitchen preparing popcorn for our movie night.  It would be gone.  I couldn’t force myself to check.

I considered making myself some breakfast but my stomach turned at the thought, so I went back upstairs and heard the first sound inside the house not caused by myself.  Behind my parents’ closed bedroom door I could hear crying.

The hitching sobs fuelled the embers of panic in my own stomach and I felt it bubbling up all over again as I reached for the door handle.  Locked.  I knocked on the door and my mom’s crying stopped, leaving me alone in the silence again until I spoke.

“Mom?”

In my whole life I couldn’t remember a time when my mom or dad had locked their door and shut me out.  My panic was in full control now and I knocked more urgently, my grief and crying making me slur my words when I called for her again.

“Mom?  Please!  I… Mom?  I need to talk to you… I need… Mom?”

My legs slowly gave way and I sunk down to the floor with my head resting against the door and my knocks eventually trailing off.  From inside the bedroom I heard nothing.  Nothing at all.

*****

“It’s time, Beatrice,” said ‘Uncle’ Albert, some distant relative on my mom’s side.

I was the only child of an only child on my dad’s side, his parents had toppled over like dominoes one after the other not too long after I was born.  I was his only close family in the whole world.  It was that thought alone that picked me up off my bed and got me moving that morning.

I had to be there for him.  If not me, then who else was there?  People he worked with and some old friends were the only people there purely for him and their number was dwarfed by the amount of people my mom had invited.  Relatives, friends and neighbors that had played little, if any, role in the life of Henry Hampton filled a disproportionately large amount of fold out seats.

My mom and I sat next to each other, front and center.  If this was an event that anybody wanted to go to, they would have been the best seats in the house.

As I listened to the man who had never even met my father speak about what a fine man he was, surrounded by people who were mostly not even close to him, my tears flowed like they had no intention of stopping between now and the end of time.  I hung my head, letting my hair fall around my face like a veil.

To my right I could feel
cold
radiating off of my mom as if she was some kind of air conditioner.  We’d hardly said a word to each other since before I left for the gig at the community college and, ever since that first morning afterwards, I hadn’t seen or heard her crying.

I didn’t know if she
did
cry again or if she’d found some kind of a switch inside to turn it off.  I tried to hide my grief, my guilt, as much as possible too, keeping out of sight in my room whenever I felt the sobs, the big unstoppable ones, coming.  I guessed, aside from right now, she hadn’t seen me cry much more than I had seen her.

Now though.  Now, it was too much to stop, my room was too far to run to and I wished she would tell me where that switch was as I glanced up at the box that held my dad before casting my eyes back down to my lap.

It felt wrong to look at the coffin directly.  It was too bright, it hurt my eyes, and I was sure it was more than just reflected sunlight off the polished handles.  It was as if it was shining a spotlight of blame towards me, a blamelight.

My fault.  I thought back to how hard I’d had to convince my parents that the community college gig was an essential step for our band’s career.  It was a Sunday night, a school night, and their gut reaction was to say no.  But I had got my own way in the end and then my dad had died coming to see me perform.

He never would have been there, the wrong place at the wrong time, if it wasn’t for me.  My hands bunched up into little impotent fists as I thought about the delirium I’d been walking through for the past several days.

Only a few minutes away from where I had been happily talking music with the rest of Apollo Gone, my dad had been hit on the driver’s side by some kid in an old muscle car his rich parents had bought for his nineteenth birthday.

Sporting a classic racing-red paint job and an engine that had been heavily modified for more power, the car was too unwieldy for the inexperienced driver.  He had lost control in the wet conditions while pushing the car as hard as he could, trying to impress his friends.  The old fashioned brakes and suspension were no match for the updated engine and high speeds.  So I had been told.

My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands as I squeezed even harder, channeling all the blame emanating from that coffin away from myself, adding my own anger to it and sending it full-force in the direction of that bastard rich kid and his stupid parents.  More money than sense.

My dad had always said that a kid’s first car should be an underpowered piece of crap, they’d get into less trouble that way.  He’d said my first car would probably not even have an engine.  What were they thinking giving the boy a monster of a machine like that?  Did they think that the rules didn’t apply to them because of all their money?

I let myself seethe with hatred for them.  Anything was better than feeling that blame completely on my own shoulders.  The rest of the service passed in a blur, I barely even heard any words that were spoken until the casket started lowering into the ground and I almost jumped up screaming ‘Don’t put him in there!’ but instead all that came out was a whimper.

A funeral is supposed to be about letting go, about some kind of closure, but when they started putting dirt on top of him not even my newfound hatred could stop the guilt from resurfacing.  I was sorry for so many things.  Sorry for asking him to come watch me sing, sorry for all the times I said ‘I love you’ out of habit rather than taking just a second to really appreciate what the words meant.

I was sorry I’d never listened to his song, the one he had just been working on.  For some reason that thought more than all the others gave new strength to my tears.  Now nobody would ever hear his song.

*****

Throughout the entire ordeal I’d been avoiding all of my friends, even Blair.  I couldn’t face them, I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what they’d ask.  Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks, I had to go back to school and as soon as they spotted me in the hallway they all rushed over.

“Bea!  Are you OK?  I haven’t been able to get through to you!”

“I’m so sorry, Beatrice!”

“Did you make it to the hospital in time?”

“You don’t look so good, are you alright?”

Their hands seemed to be all over me, arms over my shoulders, what they must have thought were supportive grips on my elbows.  I looked from one to the other, barely able to get a the first word of a reply out before the next question hit and all of a sudden I felt surrounded, trapped, and felt my heart begin to thump heavily in my chest as a hot flush rose up my neck and over my face.

I looked upwards, trying to get my face into the fresh air above the swarm around me, and ended up looking right at a fluorescent tube light that was flickering away with an annoying buzz that I could somehow hear despite the noise of everything else.  Every flash was like another blast from the blamelight and as my breaths became shorter and faster, their questions got all twisted in my mind until they were almost accusations.

“Are you glad he’s gone?”

“You getting a big pay out for the crash?”

“What did he look like after the accident?”

“How does it feel to kill your dad?”

I stumbled backwards and fell on my ass against some lockers, screaming and holding my hands over my ears.  My heels scrabbled on the floor, trying to push me backwards through the lockers away from them, their questions, that blamelight, but there was no escape.

That’s how I earned my first visit to the school’s counsellor, a middle aged man named Elias Rothenberg (‘call me Eli’) with a stereotypical psychiatrist’s beard, who was full of infuriatingly open-ended questions.  The principal had been so proud when he first announced this addition to the faculty, he apparently had a lot of qualifications.

For myself, I thought he was almost useless.  All the calmly delivered open-ended questions in the world wouldn’t bring my dad back but it did at least get me another week off school before I had to return and face regular meetings with him.

When I returned for the second time the same group of friends spotted me in the same hallway but stayed back as if I was either made of delicate china or plastic explosives.  I didn’t mind, the last thing I wanted to do was answer any questions or talk.

Even when Blair sat with me at lunchtime I couldn’t bring myself to open up or say anything more than the most basic of single word responses.  It was awful.

In class and walking between classes I hunkered down, trying to make myself as small as possible.  I wanted to be invisible, to be anywhere I wouldn’t feel so closely scrutinized.

The groups of friends that tried to talk to me got smaller and smaller, the text messages I received and never responded to became more and more infrequent.  Somehow, impossible though it seemed, time just kept marching on.

At home my mom was as concise with me as I was with everybody at school.  It was a quiet and lonely existence.

One night I was sitting at my desk staring at homework I had no idea how to complete because I hadn’t been paying much attention in class and my phone announced a text message.  It was the first message I’d had in about a week and it was from Blair.

‘
Come 2 my place for band practice?  Do u good to get out of the house
’

Of course I hadn’t been to a practice session since the accident.  I didn’t even know if I could still do it anymore.  I thought back to that night at the Seattle Days festival, how all our practice and hard work had come together to make something that bordered on the magical for me.

That was a lifetime ago, a different world.  Was it even OK to do anything that made me happy in this new age and this new world?  Would that trivialize what had happened to my dad?  Could I… maybe… let the music take me flying again?

I bit my lip and kept on pressing buttons on my phone to keep the screen lit up as I stared at it.  To say I wasn’t coping well in public situations would have been an understatement.  Could I handle the noise of band practice?  The expectations?

From the hallway I heard the creak of a floorboard as my mom walked past and, with a squeak of wheels, my chair rolled back from the desk as I stood up.  I had to try, even if I just sat there with my eyes closed while the others rehearsed around me.  Maybe recovering my place in the world could start with recovering my place in the music.

My life was falling through my fingers like fine sand and if I didn’t figure out how to hold on to it I was afraid there’d be nothing left.  Band practice might be a disaster, maybe even to the point of another panic attack, but I was on the verge of losing myself.  That little spark inside, what my dad had sometimes referred to as ‘pure-Bea’, didn’t have much time left.

“Mom?”

I walked to my doorway and looked out to see my mom descending the stairs as if she hadn’t heard me.  When I called again she stopped, eyes fixed towards the ground floor and gave me the kind of terse response that had become the norm.

“What.”

“Um… would… could you please give me a lift to Blair’s house?  There’s a band practice and I…”

My teeth snapped shut with a clack as my mom turned her head to look at me and I saw for the first time what she’d been barely keeping in check for the past several weeks.  Under her cold surface was hot rage and I’d just opened the floodgates.

“Are… you…
fucking
… kidding me?”