I lose count of the days because I sleep through most of them, staying up all night reading. I start with
Woman on the Edge of Time
, which I devour in a single day, and then move on to
The Complete Love and Rockets
, starting at Book One,
Music for Mechanics
, and not coming up for air until I finish the last line of
Poison River
. God, I love that series like saved people love Jesus. I would totally have a three-way with Maggie and Hopey if they were real, so I guess maybe I am bi after all, but that’s a whole other story. When I finish, I decide to further avoid humanity and spend some time with hobbits and elves and dwarves, diving into
Lord of the Rings
for a complete reread. I finish that in a week but I’m not ready to leave Middle Earth, so I take on
The Silmarillion
, and if you don’t know what that is, congratulations. You probably have an admirably wide range of interests and are capable of carrying on conversations in public with other perfectly normal humans.
It’s late afternoon and I’m still in my pajamas, deep in concentration as I study the map of Beleriand in the back of
The Silmarillion
. I’m tracing the path of Lúthien and Beren to Tol Galen, the Land of the Dead that Live, when I hear Jeff yell from downstairs, “Emmylou! You’ve got company!”
“I’m busy,” I call down to him.
“The hell you are,” I can hear Joey mutter as he climbs the stairs. I go to close the door because I love Joey, but I know he’s here to give me shit for barricading myself in my room with a stack of books instead of interacting with living, breathing humans. I put my hands to my mouth, about to make some rude noises so I can feign a terribly contagious gastrointestinal virus, but when I reach the door there’s a familiar scent—a really good one.
“You brought me Mom’s tomato sauce?” I say as Joey reaches my door.
“We did better than that,” he answers. “So come and see.”
Cole waves from the bottom of the stairs. I’m confused until I see my mother’s worried face as she steps out from behind him and I could kill them both for bringing my mother here. They’re so damn lucky I won’t strangle them in front of her.
“Joseph,” I say in a low voice.
“Desperate times, desperate measures,” he says. “You know the drill.”
He wraps his arms around me, maybe to keep me from strangling him, but when he squeezes me I feel like I might crack. I close my eyes and try to wish this whole situation away because if my mother has made the trip to Highland Park,
you know something is wrong.
“But I’m fine,” I mumble into his T-shirt, probably straight to his nipple as he’s a lumberjack and he’s hugging me really tight. I wrench my neck so I can call downstairs, “Mom, I’m fine. You didn’t have to come all the way out here.”
“Bullshit,” she says. “Jeff and Sonia say you haven’t left the house in over two weeks.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Now that’s real bullshit,” Joey says. “You also look like you dropped ten pounds.”
“Get dressed and come downstairs,” Mom says. “I’ll put the water on for the macaronis.”
***
When I was a kid and used to get sick, Mom would make me pastina with a spoonful of homemade sauce and a pat of butter. Most people get a cold and crave chicken soup, but I crave pasta. I don’t even realize how starving I am until I sit at the table with Mom and Cole, Joey, Sonia, and Jeff, and she puts a plate of penne in front of me, steam rising, and it smells so good I moan a little. Mom laughs and tells me not to wait for her to sit down, to dig in before I drift away in the breeze I’m so skinny. We all eat and Cole is talking about his sister coming to Rutgers in the fall and Joey is talking about working in his father’s warehouse for the summer and Sonia tells me she’s going to hook me up with a job waiting tables at Neubies because they need another server, but nobody, and I mean nobody, is talking about Travis. It’s like picnicking among the remains of a freshly burned-down house and talking about the sunny day.
I don’t want to talk about him, though. I have nothing to say, as I haven’t spoken to him since he quit. He finally stopped calling me sometime last week. He wrote me a letter, mailed it and everything, but it sits in my desk drawer, unread. I don’t know why I’m saving it because I doubt I’ll ever be able to read it. And what could he have to say that I don’t already know? How much of a fucking jerk I am? That being around me when I’m such a temperamental ass isn’t worth it? That he’s sorry, he’s tried but he can’t put up with my shit? I think that’s already obvious. He quit, didn’t he? He even showed up at the house last week, but I hid in the bathroom and made Sonia tell him to leave. Sonia called me an ass (lovingly), and maybe I am one, but nobody seems to understand what he’s done to me.
“Yeah, well what if you’re doing it to yourself?” Sonia said.
“You just don’t get it,” I said. “He quit, Sunny. How am I supposed to ever trust him again?”
“Maybe talk to him?” she said. “For starters?”
But it’s too late now, because Cole said Travis was heading back home to Nebraska. I don’t know what he’s going to do
about grad school because I can’t bring myself to ask. Not sure if he’s coming back here or if he’s decided to go to California instead and maybe I’ll never see him again, but I don’t dwell on that because the thought of it makes me want to vomit.
“Have you guys been playing?” Mom asks us. “Your grandmother keeps asking. I think she’s your new biggest fan.”
Cole looks up at me expectantly. Joey raises his eyebrows.
“No,” I say. “I don’t even have a guitar right now, remember?”
“Well, actually . . .” Joey says and busts a huge smile. Cole gets up and goes into the living room and comes back with my guitar case and places it on the floor next to my chair.
“We emptied the Soft till and took it to Mickey’s luthier in New Hope,” Cole says. “He did a great job on her, Em.”
I’m stunned because I had no idea they even had my guitar, let alone took it in to get repaired. What’s really weird is that I normally play my guitar every day, so the fact that I haven’t even noticed it wasn’t here is crazy. Now I guess I know why everyone was so worried.
I just sit with the case at my feet, unable to find the right words. I look back up at Cole and he puts his hand on my shoulder and gives it a light squeeze. “She’s as pretty as she ever was, you’ll see.”
“Thanks, guys,” I say, my voice all quiet because I’m feeling pretty darn emotional right now.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Joey asks.
“Maybe in a little while.”
I feel bad about the disappointment I see on Joey’s face, and Sonia’s, too. But Cole nods his head and says, “Yeah, good idea. Check her out when you can really give her your full attention. Make sure she’s all that. If not, we’ll take her right back.”
This is why we keep Cole around. He just gets it.
“You know, you really should send a tape to John Erickson,” Mom says.
“Consequence’s old manager?” I say. “Why would we send anything to him?”
“He’s still got all your father’s label contacts. Don’t you want a record deal?” she says.
“No, not anymore,” I say.
“What?” Sonia, Jeff, Joey, and Cole all say at the same time. They stare at me, mouths dropped open.
“What?” I say. “Is it really that shocking that I might want to grow up and be a responsible adult?”
“No, no way is that right,” Sonia says. “Now I’m really worried.”
“Look, I’m twenty-one and I need to get serious about finding a career. Maybe I’ll teach English or something.”
Joey laughs, outright, when I say that.
“What, you think I couldn’t be a teacher?”
“You’d hate being a teacher,” Joey says. “Get serious.”
“Okay, Emmylou, we need to talk,” Mom says, and I’m so confused because really, isn’t this what she’s always wanted? I follow Mom up the stairs, into my room, and she motions for me to take a seat on the bed.
“You’re not giving up your dream over a boy,” she says. “I don’t care if he broke your heart.”
“That’s not what happened. We didn’t break up or anything. He just quit the band.”
“So? You
are
that band. Not Travis. He’s a fine guitarist but he’s replaceable.”
“No, he’s not,” I say. “There will never be another Travis, Mom.”
“Emmy, you’re twenty-one years old, and trust me, there will be plenty of guys . . .”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I explain. “I don’t want to replace him. I never want to be in this position again.”
“What position?”
“The one where I count on someone for so much and then he leaves. Because I can’t . . .” finish the sentence, apparently. But I don’t need to, because it’s Mom and if anybody gets it, she does. I walk to the window and stare out of it, unable to say anything more.
“Emmy, he didn’t leave you,” she says.
“Yes, I know,” I answer. “He left the band, which is actually worse.”
“No, I’m talking about your father.”
I whip my head around, and my mother’s face, oh God. I have no idea what she’s about to drop on me, but I’m pretty sure I’m not prepared to hear it.
“All that time on the road took a toll on him, you know?” she says. “He had a lot of problems with his neck and he was
in constant pain. The doctors had him on a lot of painkillers, and that just opened the door . . .”
“Opened what door?”
“Do you remember when Dad went into the hospital on your tenth birthday?”
“Yeah, of course I remember. He had a really bad case of the flu.”
“He didn’t have the flu. He was so high on heroin that day he almost died.” She pauses as I blink several times in her direction. I shake my head because I must not have heard that right. But then she goes on. “By that point, he’d already been to rehab three times. After that, he said he didn’t want you to ever see him like that. And I agreed.”
My brain must not be working because I’m pretty sure she just said my father was a heroin addict and that is definitely news to me. I know he liked to drink a lot and I’m sure he smoked weed, because who didn’t in the ’70s? But heroin? Seriously?
I drop back down on the bed, and now I’m flashing back through all my memories of my father. I remember these multiple, lengthy stays he had in the hospital, and how I wasn’t allowed to see him and never understood why. I can feel just how tightly he held me when he said good-bye the last time I saw him. Then I see in bright detail the look on his face and his red, teary eyes when he left, and something clicks. As angry as I have always been at him for leaving, I never believed he wanted to leave. It never made any sense. Not until now.
Downstairs, I hear Cole teasing Sonia about something and Sonia laughing. I hear Jeff giving Joey grief for drying a plate with his T-shirt, and it all sounds so normal. I wish I was down there cleaning the kitchen, too, or maybe folding laundry or picking my teeth, or doing anything at all that felt normal, and not sitting here looking back on my whole life and wondering what the hell else was a lie.
“Mom, what do you mean you agreed?” My voice is hoarse as I croak out the words.
She grips the edge of the desk, steadying herself. “I told him if he wasn’t clean, not to come back. Emmy, I kicked him out.”
I can feel the remains of my lunch crawling back out of my stomach. I feel so angry I want to break something. I clamp my jaw, breathe through my nose until I can speak again.
“So Dad picked heroin over us?”
“Well, that’s not really how it works.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Look, if he didn’t have to be on the road all the time and if he wasn’t in constant pain, he might have had a better chance at getting clean. I know he tried. I know how much he hated himself at the end for leaving us.”
“How do you know that?”
Now Mom starts to cry. I go to put my arms around her, but she puts her hand out to stop me, covers her mouth. Gathers herself.
“You have to know how much he loved you, Emmy. You were his everything. He just wanted to protect you, that’s all. And so did I.”
I hear what she’s saying, but I’m not quite there in the room anymore. I’m not in Beleriand, either, though I wish I was. Instead I’m somewhere in the ’80s, listening to this story my father used to tell about riding his horse through the ghost town at the bottom of Round Valley Reservoir. He and his friends used to hang out there when he was a kid, before they filled it in with water. He watched them raze all the deserted buildings, and I’m not sure why I’m thinking about that right now, but as I do, I start to feel a trickle of something in my mind. It gradually grows until I start to feel that hole carved out of me by my father’s death, that endless, empty cavern starting to fill. It fills all the way up with sorrow like I imagine Round Valley filling when the river was turned loose. My mother’s arms are around me and now, years after the fact, I am finally crying. Crying for my dad. I hate crying so much, but I can tell you, this is one of those situations where late truly is better than never.
***
On Sunday morning, I’m staring like a stoned zombie into my coffee. The usual early buzz at Neubies, the clattering pots, the caffeinated chatter, the regretful faces of hungover locals, isn’t loud or distracting enough to get me out of my own head, unfortunately. All kinds of thoughts swirl around as I sit there, most of them dark and surly and full of regret. I didn’t even feel like leaving the house, but if Sonia is getting me a job here, then I need to talk to the manager, and I definitely need a job.
Otherwise, Neubies is the very last place I’d be because of how much it reminds me of Travis. Being here, just thinking of him ordering black coffee and an omelet, is pretty much hell. New Brunswick just isn’t the same without him, and neither am I. I really miss being mad at him, because this relentless longing and self-loathing combination I have going on sucks more than I can say.
From the corner of my eye, I notice someone moving towards me and my heart stops for a second. The shadow of that someone darkens my table and by the high lace-up Doc Martens I know it’s not Travis, but my stomach flips and all the color drains from my face anyway.