Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  The silence that follows is more than uncomfortable; it is intolerable. I can’t break it. What do I have to say to him.

  “I reckon you’re clearing your mind. Or at least trying to. That’s the hardest part about not being able to run, let loose, clean out the ol’ carburetor. I’ve yet to find a substitute for it. But I am finding that humility helps. So, Shelby…”

  He does know my name. I assumed he thought it was “that girl.”

  “…let me just say that I’m sorry. For the way I’ve acted, treated you, talked to you and about you. There’s no excuse for it—my insecurities.”

  “How could you have known that I wouldn’t be the one to leave him or the one to take him away from you,” I say, enjoying the turnabout a little too much, lacking the same humility.

  “Guess I can only be thankful he didn’t let me push him away. I reckon you’re as good a kid as he is. One I’d like to get to know, if you ever could entertain the notion.”

  Oh, don’t put it on me. Can’t he just stay mean and miserable. Instead of complicating it with his convenient kindness. I don’t buy it for a minute. Ace is leaving. So, what? He needs a kid—any kid—to boss around, to control.

  “I thought you should know, I went to the police about the last conversation I had with your father, where he implicated Miss Patterson. It’s long overdue, I know. But maybe it’ll help them in investigating her case and his murder. If the two are connected in any way.”

  If—that’s more like him, skeptical.

  “If I hadn’t let envy get the best of me, Mason and I could’ve been friends. And if I could’ve admitted it then, the thing I admired about him most was how he was with you.” He takes a few puffs from his inhaler, the incline steepening. “The baby stage, I never was any good at it. Hell, maybe I didn’t make the time or the effort to be good at it. But he did.”

  “He was the best,” I say. Better than any biological father I might have. Even if it took me a while to rediscover that, to listen to what was in my heart and not to the opinions this hollow echoes.

  “I never meant him any harm. It’s tragic what happened. It’s a testament to him and you, how you’ve turned out.”

  I liked him better ornery and aloof. “You don’t have to say all of this because of some results.”

  “What results.” He looks me square in the eye.

  And for the first time I see myself in him. The eyes—his and Wren’s together gave mine their color. But mine are the shape of his, hooded, lid obscured by lash.

  A magazine in the library at school said hooded eyes are symbolic of one who is “cheerful, open-minded, the kind of person a stranger tells their secrets to. Cheerful on the outside, something is always troubling them on the inside.” Like my horoscope, the description is half accurate.

  I always thought my eyes made me look how I feel—hard to get to know. Guarded, feline-esque, predatory maybe, like I’m up to something.

  He is definitely up to something.

  I push off my toes, shoes spinning up gravel, and run.

  “Maybe I’ll see ya next time!” He calls after me.

  I sit at our spot. Not on the hood of the Jeep as usual but inside—a temperature in the low twenties is too cold even for my hot blood—waiting on her to stand me up, apparently.

  The Meatloaf album she gave me for Christmas that I converted to mp3 in order to play through my Jeep stereo system is two songs in to playing again. An hour, basically, she’s not coming.

  I reach for the first can of a six-pack, brought precisely for this reason. I pop it open, guzzle it, recline the seat, and consider downing another.

  We haven’t been together, like “together,” since Christmas Eve. A lot of crap has come out over the past few weeks, but a lot of good has come of it too. Must it all be bad in order for us to be good together.

  The rumble of the Shelby is heard before seen, even over Meatloaf. I forget about seconds, crush the first empty can, chuck it on the floorboard in the back, return to my upright position, and turn the music down to an ambient purr.

  She pulls in and sits there with the Shelby still running. I half expect her to back out and drive away. She shuts it down, gets out, and gets in with me.

  Did the past five months never happen? The air between us feels like the first time she ever rode with me, the night after the circle. Like we were never more than friends perplexed by ever being more than friends.

  “It’s weird, right,” her voice breaks the tension. But her body language can’t get around it, stiff and staring out the windshield, more mesmerized with the light snowfall than with me.

  “They make it weird,” I say of the adults around us, stepping all over themselves in blending new biological and old familiar roles.

  “Tell me about it. Your dad actually ran…well, walked…with me the other day.”

  “I know.” He couldn’t wait to tell me. “I think it may have been the highlight of his day.”

  “So weird.”

  I shrug. “Maybe it’s just normal.” What it could’ve been.

  She snickers at that. Strangers to normal, how could we recognize it. “Have you seen our other mother?” She’d like to laugh again, but it’s no laughing matter.

  More than weird, it’s unnatural to share parents with your girlfriend. In no way biologically related, we’re fine but we’re not. It’s too close. I mean, how will I ever again share my feelings about Shelby with Mom and expect her to be objective. How do either one of us take the other home to “meet the parents.” The only parent we don’t share in some capacity is Johnny. He gets all my future conversations and questions about Shelby? That’s messed up. Given his track record, he probably gives shitty relationship advice anyway.

  A sharing that Mom treasured. A sharing that brought a new intimacy to our relationship, that brought us closer than ever. But how am I ever again to share with Mom my thoughts and feelings about Shelby without her processing them through a mother/biological mother lens—obligated to consider what’s best for both of us, all of us. I can’t tell Mom that “tonight’s the night” with her biological daughter. That’s really messed up!

  “Not yet.” I cringe. I met Maisy once. Shelby was there. “Something tells me biology isn’t going to sway her one iota.”

  “You might be surprised. She’s going through a lot of changes at rehab. And given that she didn’t know what we all didn’t know, surely her curiosity will be as sparked as the rest of us.”

  Try as we might, Shelby and I can’t even shake the curiosity. How might our lives have been different if we weren’t separated from our biological parents at birth? The question impossible to answer makes it no less desirable to ask, forever haunting us.

  “Johnny said something about going to see her. The two of us together. I don’t know. It’s all just so…”

  “…weird,” she says once more, still fixated on the windshield.

  “Johnny also said…you can go with us…on tour,” my voice nears a whisper, any certainty sucked from it. Fearful that she will reject the proposition before even considering it.

  That draws her defiant eyes from the windshield to mine. “Last I heard, you think I should stay with your mom.”

  “What do you want to do?” I thought city life, college, was what she was after. She can have the best of both at Mom’s.

  “I don’t know.” She pulls tighter the turquoise bandanna at the nape of her neck. The same one she drenched in beer and blotted my eye with before she kissed it. Can’t we go back to that. “I thought I knew. I did! Before all of this.”

  “It’s too easy, isn’t it.” We came out fighting as preemies. I continued, literally fighting for nothing, while she fought for everything. Sitting in this Jeep, we fight for breath and heartbeat.

  I reach across the console and take her hand. The connection, just like in that oven, delivers. Bodies—souls—find equilibrium. Calm. Alive.

  “Can I live without you?” she whispers, fist over her heart, min
e leading its rhythm.

  “Come with me.” And we don’t have to test it.

  “As intriguing as it sounds…it’s not my path.” She pulls her hand from mine. “Even if it had turned out that Johnny was my biological father, I wouldn’t go on tour with him.”

  “I don’t have to go either. I don’t know how to tell you. It’s not fair. You should have that scholarship already. But I won’t ever keep anything from you again. I can go to UK. We can be together there.”

  “You got in?”

  “I didn’t get in. van den Berg’s name got me in. It must’ve been set up. All they needed was my application.” I’m surprised Pop hadn’t thought of that when he mailed it in. Just one more way that spite bit him in the ass. “van den Berg would get you in, too. But it won’t come to that. You will get in on your own.”

  “What would you do with more school?” She ignores the notion of van den Berg “donating” her way in. “You hate school.”

  “I could love it for you.”

  “Oh no you don’t.” She cuts off at the pass any future resentment.

  “It wouldn’t be that bad. I can keep playing, locally, when I’m not in…school.” I shudder involuntarily with the thought.

  “And you can regret that you didn’t go with Johnny when you had the chance.”

  “There’ll be other chances.”

  “If I were you, I would go,” she admits. But I can see it in her eyes. She is thinking what I have been thinking ever since Johnny offered up the tour. She was supposed to leave the hollow first. “You were born to do this, Ace. You have to go. And I have to let you go.”

  I lean across the console, grasping and keeping her hand from opening the door. The night adds the same softness to her pale, cool complexion that it did the first time I ever saw her by the dashboard light of this Jeep. In the background and on cue, Meat Loaf sings about how the setting is paradise. These dashboard lights, far from paradise, only accentuate the saltwater diamonds forming in her turquoise eyes.

  “What does it matter who leaves first. None of it changes the way I feel about you. I loved you then,” I say of our premature forms connected in that oven. Before I even knew what love was, I felt it with her.

  “I love you now,” she says, beating me to the punch. Finally saying it!

  “Here or anywhere. Mining or music. That’s never going to change. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”

  “Your life is going to change,” she quotes me from that night in the hospital parking garage in Pop’s truck.

  “Oh, so, you’re me, now.” Worried that I will outgrow her. “Taking us right back to where we started, letting fear and doubt win?”

  “Maybe I’m just not prepared to do what I asked you to do. I’m so sorry. You were right. I should’ve listened to you.” She pushes through my hand, releasing the door latch.

  I let her go, letting me go!

  Ace and Johnny ensnare me in their plan to visit my mother in rehab. Mostly, Johnny does. The only reason I agreed to meet them is because I won’t be alone with Ace.

  I don’t want to be a part of it. But I don’t want them screwing it up either.

  “You can’t solve everything by taking the entire hollow on your tour. Money, music, ‘opportunity,’” I throw Johnny’s teaser back at him, “isn’t going to make her recover any faster. It’s a process…a mandatory process. She has to see it through for herself.”

  “I know a thing or two about rehab,” Johnny says, defensively. “I just thought maybe the promise of touring with us, playing bass for us…eventually, might give her something to look forward to, a goal, you know. You work hard at getting clean, you stay clean, and then you get this.”

  “Did you ever know my mother at all?” He walked out on her then. He expects her to accept him now?

  “She’s got a point, bro,” Johnny says, looking over his shoulder at Ace. “Hell hath no fury like a female bassist. Some of the toughest chicks I know.”

  “And that’s why you’re here,” Ace says, looking at me sitting across from him in Johnny’s chauffeur’s oversized SUV outside the rehab center. “I trust you.” His gray eyes pierce into me, steely and challenging.

  See! If we were alone, I would challenge back. Then he would. Then I would. Until we ended up making out! Making it harder to let go.

  “Even money’s a bad idea? I’ve had none, and I’ve had more than my fair share,” Johnny admits. “It might not solve everything, but it sure as hell helps. Pay for rehab. A place to live once she’s out. She earned it…Bootleg royalties. It took me eighteen years and staring down the tunnel of death to realize it, but I wouldn’t have any of this without that band.”

  Fine time to think about that now. Where were you when my father needed a leg up. I can’t help myself from thinking it, even though he is making an attempt.

  “I don’t know.” Instinct knows, shaking my head. “That might muddle the whole ‘accountability’ thing. If only Grayson were here.” He would know.

  Ace’s neck turns visibly red, his hands turning to fists on his thighs.

  So I indulge once more. “Grayson would say no. Not yet. Let her do it herself. She’ll find more empowerment that way. Once she’s completed all the steps, stabilized in her recovery, then payback would be between the two of you.” Financial reward or revenge…

  “Okay…” Ace tweaks his vein-popping neck from side to side. “Since you trust Grayson so much, what would he say is permissible?”

  I chuckle. Grayson would say permissible. Biting my tongue from asking my own contemptuous question—more than permissible, groupies are encouraged on tour, aren’t they?

  “Johnny’s just trying to do the right thing, Shelby.”

  The right thing. I chuckle again. Of course it wouldn’t bother Ace that he is technically the one Johnny ran out on. Ace still has his father.

  “Since there seems to be more to this conversation than meets the eye,” Johnny sidesteps our spat. “Let me put it to you this way, Shelby: If you were me, what would you do? What would you say to Maisy?”

  Given the phase of recovery she’s in right now—truth and amends—other than I’m sorry I hurt you, I wouldn’t necessarily say anything. I would listen. Something tells me that if she doesn’t run Johnny off, he’s going to get an earful.

  A part of me wants her to run him off, tail tucked between his legs. It wouldn’t be anything he hasn’t already done. And it would be her choice this time.

  “Say whatever is in your heart, Johnny,” I deadpan and get out of the SUV.

  I hear him start to laugh before his recovering ribs turn it into a dry wheeze. “I don’t care what the results say, she is Maisy’s.”

  My mother sits in a meeting room. The same room we met in last time. Reclined in a love seat, the guitar she holds swallows her frame. But her limbs, like the neck of it, are long. Legs stretched out, one crossed over the other, her feet are bare.

  As with most pants that fit her waist, the inseam is a bit short, exposing the tiny Bewick’s wren on her interior ankle. Dainty, it is obvious if one knows what they are looking for. How did Miss Patterson overlook it all these years.

  “Their song is loud and melodious,” Enisi said when I chose the feather for Ace’s smudging ceremony.

  Surely a musical reference when my mother chose it for her tattoo, the song she plays now is not loud. Even melodious is questionable. Mellow, maybe. It is somber, broken up, reflective as her pensive stare.

  It takes her a moment to realize I stand in the doorway.

  “You came,” she says, setting aside the guitar and standing from the love seat. “I mean, I’m glad you did. Thank you. I just…well, I wasn’t sure I would ever see you again.”

  She read the results. And assumed what? That I would run out on her too. The uncertainty of college, her recovery, life in general cleared up with one decision. I move in with Wren. I have the life I’ve always dreamed of. Like my old one never existed?

  “You still lo
ok like my Shelby,” she says, walking to me and pulling my braid over my shoulder. “They haven’t changed you yet.” As if they—Wren and van den Berg, their lifestyle—will eventually.

  “The results don’t change anything.” If we don’t let them.

  “You didn’t open them…” she says, surprised but satisfied. Making me think that maybe I should have. “I wasn’t going to. But since I’m dealing with truth these days, I figured I might as well face all of it.”

  “And how is all of it going?” I parlay the urge to immediately tell her about Johnny and Ace lying in wait in the parking lot.

  “Full speed ahead.” She pulls me to the table and into the chair beside her. “I move to outpatient in a few weeks. They already have a job lined up for me. The first thing I’m gonna do is pay you back. I can’t believe I did that. Stole from my own flesh and blood.” She pauses—not the best choice of words. So weird. “I can’t believe I let him into our home. I can’t believe that was my life. I am so sorry, Shelby, for everything.”

  “What kind of job?” I steer clear of stolen tips, still a sore spot.

  “At a music store.” In her voice irony rings like the triangle I once played in an elementary school Christmas concert. The only music I ever played. “It’s okay. I found music again. Or it found me. Either way, they’ve helped me turn it around, from a trigger to a tool, you know. I’ll sell instruments, give lessons. It beats the hell out of the meat department!” She aw ah aw’s.

  I laugh with her. She is happy. “That’s really cool, Mom.” I say it as much for myself as for her. Biology be damned, she is my mom.

  She cups my face and kisses me on my short, upturned nose. “I don’t care who you got it from, I’ve always loved it on you. She’ll love you too, if she doesn’t already.” Her voice shakes with emotion, working to repair a bond with me while Wren works to establish one. It must be a heart-rending and heart-warming feeling all at once—a mother sharing her child with another mother. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”