Composed (16 page)

In June the record was finished. Julian called, and it was clear that he was again trying to tell me something that was difficult for him to get out. He finally said, “If there’s anything else you have to say on this record, you have six weeks.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, mystified. “We’ve already mixed it. Hell, we’ve already
mastered
it, Julian.”

“I’ll pay to remaster it,” he insisted. “If there’s anything else you have to say. You have six weeks.”

I hung up and within the week wrote “Like Fugitives”—about my mother’s death; about the public insanity surrounding my father’s death; about the forthcoming film
Walk the Line
, which had recently been previewed for me, and which I found to be an egregious oversimplification of our family’s private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style; and about the torment my sisters and I were suffering from losing so many people in two years. I ended the album with a track that was seventy-one seconds of silence. To me, it was the only direct tribute track to my mother and my father, both of whom had died at the age of seventy-one.

My mother had made her exit six months before the release of the movie about our family
,
the idea and anticipation of which she found to be emotionally untenable. When the film was released in America, I went to Paris to avoid the hoopla. I wandered the flea markets and the churches, went to the opera and the Grand Palais, the bistros and the shops, ate well, bought antique fabrics and topiaries, and put it completely out of my mind that there was a new version of my father’s drug addiction and the collapse of my nuclear family, the two central catastrophic events of my childhood, which have cast their long shadows over my life since.

On my return to New York I steeled myself for the press I knew I would have to do to promote the record, and the inevitable and relentless obsession with the backstory. I refused to allow myself to become a poster girl for grief. I refused to let any journalist goad me into crying, which some of them certainly tried to do. I refused to discuss my last private moments with my parents, or my “feelings” about their loss. I had to develop a bit of armor to protect myself against the dozens and dozens of people who wanted me to help them process their own grief over losing my dad, some of which was genuine and some of it expressed in so many commercial ventures, whether plays, songs, books, screenplays, or concerts. I resisted, sometimes vehemently, being drawn into the experience of those who came to my concerts as if they were attending a memorial service, wearing Johnny Cash T-shirts and clutching tissues. I refused to participate in any of it, except for a single tribute concert on Country Music Television, filmed at the old Ryman Auditorium in Nashville the November after my father’s death. I sang “I Still Miss Someone,” with John playing guitar, and “Tennessee Flat-Top Box,” with John and Randy Scruggs, reprising his original part, both of them standing next to me like sentinels of protection. The powerful aura of love and community made that night an unforgettably beautiful experience.

By the end of that oppressive six-year period, from May 2003 to June 2009, I wanted out, I wanted change, I wanted to make a record of covers that had no prescient qualities at all.
Black Cadillac
had been released in January 2006, and in the eighteen months following the release of the record, I played twenty-five concerts of a show with three narratives I had written—“Mariners and Musicians,” “The Unbearable Blue,” and “What Did You Dream This Time?”—and films that went with the narratives. The show was set up like a theater piece, highly structured. Danny, my manager, had a great vision for that show. It was elegiac and somewhat dark, but beautiful. Then a moody documentary film was made about me by Steven Lippman called
Mariners and Musicians
using the songs from
Black Cadillac
. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. As well as the theatrical “
Black Cadillac
in Concert,” I played probably fifty more shows with just John. Then I was done with it.

The tour was exhausting, and I couldn’t bear to hear one more story of loss from a fan or friend, but even then, the deaths weren’t over. In the three years following my mother’s passing, we lost several more aunts and uncles; my sister Cindy’s husband, Eddie, died in a tragic accident; and I lost two dear friends, Eric Wishnie and my songwriting mentor, John Stewart.

Three years and a couple of months after my dad died, I dreamed I was visiting one of the world’s great museums, set in a lush forest at the edge of a pristine lake. Outside the museum, in a little cottage filled with light pouring through big windows, with a view of the trees and water, was a hospital bed, where my dad lay. A kind, gentle, sandy-haired doctor with spectacles was attending him. I walked in and went around the curtain shielding his bed. My dad and I acknowledged each other, and I saw that the doctor was busy with him, so I left. Dad looked ill, but still much healthier than he had been in life. When I woke up I felt relief: It was no longer my job to take care of him, as he was being taken care of, wherever he was. The legacy of his work was intact, in my dream preserved as carefully and conscientiously as if it had been in a museum. Something settled in my gut. I could let him move on now.

When I was eleven years old, we were at a lake in the mountains of Southern California—my mom, dad, sisters, my dad’s sister, Aunt Reba, and her family, and a friend of my dad’s, a slow-moving, laconic, tall, skinny fellow with a drawl. My mother and aunt went off on some mission, and we kids were left with the men to fish. I was walking barefoot by the picnic table when I stepped on something sharp. I didn’t feel any pain, just a sudden wetness. I looked down and saw that blood was gushing from my foot into the dirt, creating a circle of dark mud around my toes. I called to my dad, who came over and bent down to look at my foot. I watched as his face went white. He quickly took off his shirt, wrapped it around my foot, and put me in the truck. My uncle stayed with the rest of the kids, and my dad’s tall, skinny friend drove. As Dad explained that he was taking me to the hospital, I kept pleading, “Promise me they won’t use scissors. Promise me, Daddy!” I said it over and over, and he promised each time that no scissors would be involved. Dad and I were in the ER with a doctor examining my foot when my mother walked in crying. I was still almost inconsolable before she arrived, but when I saw her tears, I understood that both of us could not be upset at the same time—it would unbalance the entire universe, with black holes materializing in hospital hallways and vortices of doom appearing at bedsides everywhere. I stopped crying.

Apparently, I had stepped on the sharp edge of an open sardine can and sliced off the end of the second toe on my right foot. The doctor was talking to my parents about skin grafts, perhaps from my thigh, when my dad’s lanky friend drawled, “Well, you know, I set that sardine can up on the picnic table after I saw she stepped on it. I think that toe is still in there.” Everyone stared at him, awestruck. The doctor roused himself. “Go get it, man!”

When my mother told the story in later years, she always finished by saying, her eyes glistening, “And the toe
lived
!” It was a miracle. My toe was cleaned up of sardine oil and sewn back on (scissors were involved; I was furious at my dad), and it did, indeed, live. But, sadly, it has become my least favorite toe.

In Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb” is a line that haunts me, that hums in the background of my thoughts about my parents as they are now, in whatever place they reside: “Time has transfigured them into untruth.”

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, the untruth. Perhaps we don’t get the whole truth until we can stand it, and perhaps no one can ever really stand it in the density of this physical existence. I have settled quietly on the untruth, and even found its equanimity in my daily life. In the untruth of my parents, there is still so much for me, so many acts of service, so much real impulse for goodness, no matter how thwarted or strained. I see them clearly now, flawed as they are, self-centered and driven, with incomprehensible missions and agendas, diving headlong into parenthood when they were barely out of adolescence, unsuited to the task but devoted and hopeful, and, ultimately, not even on this earth for me as much as for themselves, which is the hardest thing for a child to accept. But
how
we remember is as important as
what
we remember.

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

S
eptember 11, 2001, was the second day of seventh grade for my youngest daughter. That day I took her to school—St. Luke’s in Greenwich Village—in a taxi, as I had to attend a parents meeting in the cafeteria, which was scheduled to begin at eight thirty. As we traveled south down Seventh Avenue, I looked up and remarked to myself that I should remember a blue as fierce and dedicated as the sky was that morning, on a day that combined the best of summer and fall. It was peculiar how intense the color was above our heads, and how much I wanted to hold on to it.

Carrie went into school, and I made my way to the parents meeting, which started promptly at eight thirty. By eight forty-five I was growing a little bored and was staring dreamily at the big school clock at the front of the room when the sound of a plane suddenly filled the cafeteria, heading south, very low and very loud. Whoever was speaking at the time kept talking as the building rumbled, and I exchanged glances with some of the other mothers in the room. One woman near me said quietly, to no one in particular, “That plane is going to crash.” Seconds later I heard a faint boom, like a distant construction blast. I didn’t connect the two; it just seemed too far-fetched. The meeting went on, and after a few minutes passed someone came into the room and whispered to Ann Mellow, the head of the school, who was then addressing us. She listened gravely and then announced to the ten or twelve mothers and handful of teachers scattered around the tables, “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.” I remarked to Clint, the development director, who was sitting at my table, “I bet it was that plane that went over a few minutes ago.” He replied that he hadn’t noticed. No one was very alarmed, as we all assumed it was a small commuter plane that had lost its way.

The meeting continued until a few moments later, when someone appeared at the door, crying, “It was a passenger jet!” We all got up and rushed out to try to find out what was happening. At the front entrance of the school I met another mother I knew, Michelle, whose husband, John Dolan, had taken the photographs of my wedding. “I just saw a second plane hit the other tower,” she told me, her face alarmingly pale. I was confused.
A second plane?
I walked around the corner to the intersection of Greenwich and Christopher streets, just at the back of St. Luke’s, where I had a clear view all the way downtown to the towers. I caught my breath; both were on fire. Huge, gaping black holes had been torn down the sides of both buildings. It was unnaturally quiet in the street as a small group of us stood and looked at the smoke silently billowing from the towers, almost elegant in their ruin, as if they had resigned themselves to their fate with grace. I thought to myself that without the filter, and distancing effect, of the histrionic ruminations of a newscaster, this was just too much to take in. Today, when I think about that moment and the scene I witnessed, the most unsettling part of all was the depth of the injured silence. I started crying. Robin Rue, a literary agent friend and mother of one of Carrie’s classmates, came and stood next to me, and we put our arms around each other. “All this in the name of God,” she said somberly. I was startled and looked at her through my tears.
Of course,
I thought.
She’s absolutely right. Religion. For what other reason do people ever act with such absolute inhumanity?

My cell phone rang, for the last time over the next three days. When I heard my mother’s voice, I became a little unglued, shouting to her, “It’s a terrorist attack!” I went back into the school and waited for Carrie, who was being herded with her class into the cafeteria. I took her by the arm and led her around the corner to look at the towers, and then we began walking toward our home, fifteen blocks north. I wonder now why I wanted her to see them. It felt so important to me in that moment; I was uneasy that her imagination might torture her if she didn’t have the stark reality to reference. Now I’m not so sure I did the right thing. The pictures of her imagination might have been easier for her to assimilate.

The first tower fell while we were en route, and though I saw people standing on corners, staring and becoming increasingly agitated, I would not let Carrie turn around to see that, and I would not turn around to look myself. There were no available taxis. I kept trying my cell phone, with no luck, and by now the lines at pay phones were half a block long. I started to pull Carrie to hurry her along while I kept determinedly punching my home phone number into my cell phone, desperately trying to reach John, in case he had not heard the news. I wanted to warn him not to leave the house, and ask him to wait with Jake for Carrie and me to get home. A man walked by us heading south, holding a radio up on his shoulder playing very loud. “What’s happening?” I asked him. “A plane hit the White House,” he said, and kept walking. Though nearly paralyzed with panic, I kept dragging Carrie, and we finally got on a bus at Sixteenth Street. The other passengers were nervous, talkative, and trying their cell phones. Nothing made sense, nothing worked.

We left the bus and hurried up our block, and when I finally pulled Carrie up the stoop of our brownstone, I saw John opening the door, beside himself with worry.

“Where have you been?” he asked anxiously, pulling us into the house.

The smell of burnt plastic and toxic ash drifted up from the site and lasted well into December. Over the next several weeks the police precinct house on West Tenth Street, which was near the school, housed many extra police officers from around the country who had come and volunteered their services, and I joined a group of mothers from St. Luke’s who donated food and shaving cream, shampoo, razors, and soap to them. The school received teddy bears from children all over the country who wanted to show their sympathy to the children who had witnessed such horror. The children became used to that horrible, pungent smell that hung over downtown. One day I picked Carrie up at school, and a little girl walking out next to her lifted her face to the air and exclaimed, exasperated, “It smells like the World Trade Center!” I was shocked—and comforted—by how quickly children adapt. But day after day, it continued to feel like a dream, a new life, torn from a page of the old life, with scrambled sounds and smells.

My son’s first day of preschool was delayed. When Jake finally did start class, he began building towers with the blocks in his classroom and crashing a toy airplane into them to knock them down. He did this several days in a row before his teacher told me about it. I was stunned, as we had been diligent about keeping the television turned off and our emotions about it kept in check around him. Every day when I picked him up, I whispered to the teacher, “Did he do it again today?” Every day she would nod and point to the wreckage of some Legos and wooden blocks. A couple weeks went by and I finally went to the head of the school and told her that I was concerned about his behavior.

“Is he eating and sleeping all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Then don’t worry about it,” she said consolingly. “He’s working it out.”

After a few weeks, Jake stopped building and destroying the Lego twin towers. A few months later, early in 2002, we were heading across West Twenty-third Street in a taxi when Jake, who had been quietly looking out the window, suddenly said to me as he pointed at the view down Fifth Avenue, “Someday, all these buildings will fall down.”

I resisted the impulse to believe him.

“No, honey,” I assured him. “Just the two. Just the two that already fell. No more.”

It took me another year before I stopped waking in the night to the sound of a jet airplane reverberating in my ears, and to the sound of my own pounding heart.

Now we New Yorkers don’t talk about it. Newcomers here say they are surprised that we don’t all spill our September 11 stories at the first available opportunity, but we don’t. There seems to be an unacknowledged code of silence about what we each experienced that day and in the weeks that followed. We barely talk about it among ourselves. Robin Rue and I, who stood next to each other in the street and together watched the towers burn, have never discussed it since. My daughter will not allow anyone to bring up the subject. My husband and I don’t speak of it. My son, now in middle school, asked about it not long ago, as if it were a made-up story he may have once heard and now wished to verify as the truth. He wanted to know why it had happened. He has no recollection of his block towers and toy airplane.

In 2007, three and a half years after my dad’s death, his house burned to the ground. We had sold it to Barry Gibb and his wife, Linda, and they were in the process of an extensive renovation. A sealant being used on the wood was accidentally ignited, and the old timbers went up like newspaper. My sister-in-law Laura called me while it was happening, and I screamed as if someone had just dropped dead. My sister Kathy called me as I was talking to Laura, and gave me the cell phone number of the fire chief. (Kathy has an uncanny ability to come up with the phone number of anyone on the planet.) I called him while the house was still burning, and he was still on the site.

“This is a total loss, ma’am,” he said solemnly. “I’m sorry. There will be a complete investigation, however.”

The following week I went down to Nashville to present an award on television to Kris Kristofferson, my dear friend and the closest link I have to my dad now, in many ways. Country Music Television was giving him something called the Johnny Cash Visionary Award. Kris and his wife, Lisa, who were perhaps closer to Dad and June than anyone else outside the family, hired a car and driver to take me and Chelsea out to look at the damage. Each of us had our own memories of the house, and our own particular sadness about its loss. As we walked around the ruins and blackened wood, I mapped out in my head each room, each fireplace, each staircase, each light fixture, window, and door. None of what I was seeing made sense; I might have been looking at a hologram or a film set. The damage was staggering, but there was no silent rebuke in the ash and charred ruins. What I experienced was, in fact, the opposite of a rebuke—what I felt was, I realized, a benediction. I became oddly liberated, as though something difficult was finally at an end. All those fires of my youth, the mountainside my dad had set on fire with a spark from his tractor, the forest fire he had accidentally set while camping in the wilderness in California (through which he became the first individual ever sued by the state of California), the periodic wildfires that scorched the hills of Ventura and those of Malibu Canyon while I was growing up and then as a young wife and mother—all of them coalesced in this singular ruined house. I walked around the debris and fallen timbers—the single frame of a window still standing, the new view of the lake where before had been a wall—and my tears stopped. I looked at the result of this fire, and suddenly I was looking at the end of all fires. There was no reproach, no portent of further disasters, only the conclusion of something long and sad, and whatever that something was would reveal itself to me on its own, without my having to search or to struggle to understand.