Tempo Change (11 page)

The church was lit entirely by candles and the organ music filled it, somber and beautiful, and the incantations that all the people said together had an effect on me. I stood in the pew next to my mother and Ed the Guitar Guy, and I looked at all the people around us and the priest in his robe and the altar boys holding candles on long sticks and all the haunting, scary but strangely beautiful statues around and something stirred in me. I won’t tell you that I became a believer. But in that moment, I was thinking,
What if it’s true?
What if the thing they are talking about isn’t entirely invisible but just circulating and moving and pulsating in a place our eyes simply aren’t trained to see? What if it’s like sound waves, the things that came out of my guitar and Gigi’s bass and Ella’s drums and Viv’s voice, these great vibrations that didn’t exist and suddenly did, and then they floated away and kept on living somewhere, if only in the memories of the people who heard them?

What if it was all part of the invisible system Jeff talked about?

Synergy, he called it. A silver network of threads holding it together, creating meaning and purpose. X’s and O’s.

I felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. These kinds of thoughts were not like me at all.

Another thing that happened was that I looked at Mom
and Ed and they seemed kind of right together, as if they’d known each other a very long time, like in another life. And they had finally found each other. I saw a different quality in my mother’s face and her body language. There was a peacefulness to her, a settling, or a calm, like when the ocean glasses over.

Ed had put his arm across her shoulders and she leaned her head against him.

It wasn’t sexual. It was friendly and united.

What was I supposed to do with that?

The thing about Santa Claus came into my brain and I told myself that this was no different. This was just a beautiful myth for adults to believe in but it was all the same thing. It was not a reality. Standing there, listening to the organ and feeling all the belief around me, I just wanted it to be true. Then I was ashamed of wanting it to be true because I couldn’t imagine what my father would say about that. I couldn’t imagine where he was this Christmas, how he dealt with the whole holiday. Did he spend it alone and ignore it completely? Or did he go out to Christmas luaus in Hawaii? Did he ever think of us?

I watched the people going up to take Communion. I was moved by it. It made me smile and at the same time it made tears well up. Tears that I fought back with everything I had because there was no way I was going to cry about people standing in a long line to participate in a ritual that shouldn’t make any sense at all. If Jesus had been the son of God and he’d been born to spare everybody their sins, why did everyone still suffer and why did pretending to eat him in a cracker ease their suffering? Now it was a conversation
I wanted to have but I had no idea who to have it with. I stared at the serious face of the priest and couldn’t imagine having it with him. I looked at my mother and I knew I’d never bring up anything so difficult with her. I looked at Ed and was shocked when I realized I could have that conversation with him.

I watched as he walked up to take Communion. When he came back to the seat he was chewing the cracker. He winked at me before lowering the prayer bench and getting on his knees. My mother didn’t kneel but stood very tall and straight beside him. And that impressed me. She didn’t need to do what he was doing. She was her own person—not buying in to his Catholic tradition but not rejecting it, either.

I thought we might have a conversation when we got home but I didn’t know how to bring it up. We sat in the living room and Mom made hot chocolate. We sipped and they talked about how well Biscuit was doing and how well Ed the Guitar Guy’s shop was doing and that meant we might actually be able to go skiing or something in January and then Mom said, Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have some music?—Ed could borrow my guitar, and I said yes. He started playing some old songs that I happened to know so I provided harmony and Mom just sat there watching as if everything were turning out the way she’d always dreamed but never planned. It annoyed me and pleased me at the same time and I was resisting, with everything in me, the way I resisted the tears in church, feeling that this was all a good thing. Then Ed gave me presents and I opened them. He gave me some picks and some songbooks—collections of the eighties and nineties, and we looked at the chords and
talked about the ones I knew and the ones I’d have to learn. I thanked him and didn’t know if I should show how much I actually liked it all. Because secretly I did.

Finally Ed left. My mother and I watched the end of
A Christmas Carol
before going to bed and that was the last normal moment I had for a really long time.

My overhead light popped on around two a.m. and I said, “Mom, come on, Christmas can wait.” She often got excited about things like that and couldn’t resist waking me up early. “The presents will be just as much fun in two hours.”

She didn’t say anything. She moved into the room and said, “Come into the living room.”

I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t talking about opening presents.

I followed her into the living room and my heart was working very hard. There was a breaking news story on. I could barely make myself say it:

“Is it Dad?”

All my life I knew that if something bad happened to my father, we’d probably hear it on the news before we got a call. That’s how it went with famous people.

“No,” she said.

By then I was staring at the screen and before I heard the words I saw the crawl on the TV screen.

“Local girl lost in Angeles Forest.”

“Who?” I asked my mother. “Someone we know?”

Then the reporter was talking: “The sixteen-year-old girl from West Los Angeles, a student at Laurel Hall Academy, was separated from her parents during a hiking trip
late on Christmas Eve. Her parents, Drs. Hugh and Evelyn Wyler, are well-known scientists who do research in the areas of physics and biology. Their youngest daughter, Vivien, was last seen by them yesterday when she fell behind the family during their hike. So far, the search has revealed no sign of her, and we’ve been told that the temperatures did dip into the twenties here last night.”

I looked at my mother.

“They’ll find her, right? They always find people, don’t they?”

“I think they do. Usually.”

“But the twenties, that’s not so cold. She probably found a cave.”

“Probably,” Mom said.

We stood staring at the screen, pictures of rescue workers and dogs and helicopters moving past, and I couldn’t believe this was all going on right before my eyes, all over my friend Viv, who had stood next to me on a stage, singing my songs, just a few days before.

“What should we do?” I asked.

She didn’t know the answer to that, either.

I heard my cell phone ring and grabbed it. It was Gigi.

“Oh, my God, have you turned on the TV?”

“Yes,” I said. “We’re watching it now.”

“What can we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming over. I’m gonna call Ella and we’ll come over. We should all be together.”

Mom called Ed the Guitar Guy and he came over. He had a friend who had a friend who was a cop in that area of
the country so he called and talked to him. But the cop had no news. It was just the same as what we were hearing on the TV. The cop did say that the majority of the time they found people within twenty-four hours but there was bad weather, clouds moving in, and if it started to snow it could really set things back.

Ed and Mom and I ate eggs while we waited for my friends. We were quiet.

After a moment Mom put her face in her hands and sat there.

“Are you crying?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I was praying.”

“Oh, Mom, don’t.”

“I didn’t ask you to join me.”

“It’s superstition. It’s ridiculous. We need to do something real.”

“Hey,” Ed said, precisely in the tone of a father.

“Hey, what?”

“I know you’re scared,” he said. “But I can’t let you take it out on your mother.”

I thought about taking him on and telling him he wasn’t an authority figure, he was just some guy who sold guitars, but I realized this was far from the time to do that. So I backed off.

Gigi and Ella arrived and Mom made them some food and we went over all the details again. Gigi’s father had talked to Viv’s father and they had been walking for half an hour before they realized she wasn’t with them. She was dressed
well but she didn’t have any food or water with her. She had a cell phone but it had died because she had mentioned that on the walk. He said the rescue workers were pretty optimistic but the weather was a real threat.

“Should we go up there?” I asked my mother.

“No, sweetie. There’s nothing we can do. It would just create more stress.”

We sat there looking at the news for another hour or so and then my mother said, “We have to do something. Let’s go.”

Ed drove us up to the Angeles Forest, which was about an hour away, and we couldn’t get very close to where they were searching. They made us sit and wait in the restaurant of a lodge. We drank tea and stared out the windows at the clouds lying close to the ground. It looked and smelled like snow. I thought about how odd it was that we lived in a desert but we were just an hour away from snow. An hour away from a forest so vast that you could get lost in it and stay lost for a long time.

After a couple of hours the Wylers came in with one of their other daughters, Claire. She was a freshman at Pomona, and the only thing I knew about her was that she, like the other sister, Jasmine, was smarter than Viv Viv said both her sisters were smart and she was the sporty one. Her parents didn’t get her, she said, and worried about her all the time. I remembered telling her that nobody’s parents got them; she was probably just being sensitive. But she said that wasn’t the case, she really was the black sheep, but she wasn’t all that bothered by it. She meant, it, too. Viv didn’t get emotional. Just as she didn’t take it all that seriously that
she had a voice most girls would kill for. Viv was centered and strong and I realized how much I had come to like her and rely on her. She would be okay. She had to be. If anyone could figure out how to survive, it had to be Viv because she wouldn’t panic. She was an athlete. She understood her body and what it could do. Which was probably how she had gotten into trouble. Feeling overconfident, getting separated from the others.

The Wylers didn’t say much but they were glad to see us. I realized it was helpful for us to be there. Ed talked in low tones to Viv’s father. My mother just had her hand on Evelyn’s shoulder. I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn’t sure I could do that when it was my turn.

Gigi started to cry and Ella glared at her and said, “Cut it out, I mean it. They don’t need that right now.”

“You’re right,” Gigi said, and sucked it up. “But she’s gonna be okay, right? We can’t know someone who could disappear and …”

She didn’t say “die.”

Ella shook her head and stared at her Converse shoes. Her foot was swinging back and forth, fast and hard.

“It sure would be great to believe in God right now,” I couldn’t help saying.

Ella raised her eyes to me. “It’s Christmas.”

“Right. I forgot.”

“How does that matter?” Gigi asked. “And who doesn’t believe in God? Everybody does, even if they’re not religious.”

I didn’t say anything more about it, about how my father had taken God out the door along with famous.

We stayed at the lodge with Viv’s family. I was lying on the couch in front of the fire when my mother woke me up.

“They found her?” I asked, my heart pounding.

“No,” she said. “But we have to go home. It’s starting to snow.”

That was the first time I felt panicked and I couldn’t stop the tears that had started to well up the night before at Mass and seemed somehow related.

I didn’t even fight it when Ed the Guitar guy put an arm around my shoulders and I let him lead me out to the car. Ella and Gigi followed and there was nothing to say.

W
HEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN, THE HARDEST THING TO BELIEVE
is that the machinery of life just keeps going. Everything I did made me feel guilty and strange, from brushing my teeth to watching television. It bothered me enough to say some version of it out loud to my mother.

“It was like that when your father left,” she said. “I couldn’t understand the whole idea of the sun rising and setting, let alone going to the grocery store or washing the dishes.”

“How did it change?”

“It just does, slowly, over time.”

I looked at her because she was sort of saying what everyone was afraid to say. That Viv might very well be dead. That with every day that passed, she was more likely to be dead. The rescue workers, when interviewed on TV,
said they were still optimistic and that it was entirely possible for a young person to still be alive and well. She could be eating vegetation and drinking snow and there were lots of places for shelter.

We were still on winter break. Ella and Gigi and I got together the first two days but that made things worse because it just reminded us of who was missing. Then I just stayed in the house and watched the news and ate junk. Ed the Guitar Guy tried to coax me out of my worry with some music, showing me new guitar licks, and I allowed myself to get sucked in because it did give me some relief, a reasonable distraction.

But then things would happen, like getting e-mail and letters from Coachella, telling us the rules and guidelines and asking us to submit our set list for our upcoming show. They were pleased to have the Fringers join them and could we please submit the full names and addresses of all the band members and what instruments they played so they could post it on their Web site.

I went ahead with the plans because not doing it felt like saying she wouldn’t be around for it. But it was hard to handle all the feelings that came up. Because I did feel disappointed that we might not make it. And then I felt horrible about that.