by Maddy Wells
I felt my body turn cold. “You didn’t do anything….?”
“You’re kidding, right?!” She looked from me to Tim. “Look, those social workers are so over-worked, they make the rounds like once a year. You’ll be having your own kids before you see her again. She has to visit crack moms and families where the dad locks the kids in a closet, beats his wife, then takes a nap. She thinks you’re all snuggly with your grandma. She has a big check by your name: case closed!”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
We picked up our bikes and walked them. Tim held my free hand. “I’ll miss you so much if you moved to Ohio,” he said.
“I know. We’re just getting good,” I said.
“No,” he said, “I mean I would really miss you.”
We got back on our bikes and we rode home. The lights were on in Jane’s bedroom, so Granny O’Reilly was still awake.
“I guess I’ll go to school tomorrow and take my exams.”
“Good girl!” Captain Kirby said.
“I’m a text message away if you need me,” Tim said, then he leaned in and whispered, “I’m going to ask my father if you can stay with us.” He kissed me and then they pedaled away.
I leaned my bike on the garage door and climbed back through my bedroom window. Granny O’Reilly was sitting on my bed. She had removed her eyebrows and makeup and was wearing a sensible—laughable Jane would say—nightgown. Without the pancake she looked like a sad old lady version of Jane and me.
“You’re just like your mother,” she said. “Thinking only of yourself. Didn’t you think I would be worried about where you’d gone?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“That’s exactly what your mother would say. Having an illegitimate baby with a middle-aged second rate musician. She could at least have picked someone famous like Mike Jagger and gotten a big settlement when he got tired of her.”
“I’m not illegitimate,” I said. “The Griffin and Jane and I are a special and talented family. We’re special. Regular labels don’t apply to us.”
“Is that what she tells you?” Granny O’Reilly stared out into space. “That’s about right. What was she thinking? That she could just come back to Akron where her mother was a TV personality and her father ran a department store? Were we supposed to pretend that that’s how we raised her? That we were that kind of people too? Didn’t she think other people might suffer the consequences for her actions? She never thought of other people. Where did she get that from?”
I had to reluctantly agree with Granny O’Reilly here. Jane always thought of herself first and I always always felt like I was picking up after whatever she cooked up or neglected to do. But until this moment I always thought it was some defect in Jane. That it was how a free-spirited irresponsible person acted. That it was the price people around you paid for your being cool. It never occurred to me that it was something she learned from her own mother who obviously couldn’t think of anything except her stupid washed up career as a fake television judge, who couldn’t be bothered thinking about her daughter and granddaughter. No wonder we never visited Ohio. I started to get angry.
“You’re just like her,” Granny O’Reilly said. “Are you having sexual relations with that boy?”
“That’s none of your business,” I screamed.
“You are, aren’t you? If you come to Akron and you’re pregnant, then what? What are we going to tell people?”
“You can tell them whatever you damn please.”
“I knew it. You’re just like your mother.”
“You know what?” I said. “I’m glad I’m like Jane. And Mick Jagger is ten thousand years older than The Griffin. You don’t know anything!”
“Really? Your mother is in hiding. She hasn’t even tried to contact you, has she? You’re glad to be like her? That’s how you want to turn out?”
All the anger I had felt since prom night came rushing to my brain. Everything was so screwed up I was angry at everyone. Jane. That shithead, Rob. The Griffin. Mrs. Valliere. How about Captain Kirby, always stealing stuff. She stole that bike she was riding. I knew it. We’d all get in trouble along with her if she got caught. How about Mrs. Kirby? She couldn’t manage to get along with living people long enough to earn enough money for her and Captain Kirby so Kirby didn’t have to steal.
“You know what?” I shouted. “I don’t care how I turn out, as long as I don’t turn out like you.”
“Perfect.” Granny O’Reilly stood up. “There’s no chance of that.” She left the room.
I was shaking and crying. I took out my phone to text Tim, but thought better of it. He was probably asleep or studying for exams.
I didn’t know what to do with what I was feeling. It was all too enormous to stuff it into any of my boxes. It would split them wide open. I lay on my bed trying to figure out what to do for hours I guess because morning was suddenly breaking behind the curtains.
Chapter 26
I must have fallen back to sleep because it was seven when I got out of bed. I quickly dressed and went downstairs. Granny O’Reilly’s purse was on the kitchen table. I opened it and took a twenty dollar bill—she thought I was like Jane so no harm done to our family reputation. To my credit I took out a fifty and put it back—there might be hope for me—and left the house before she woke up.
I rode my bike to Mr. Rajeet’s Dunkin Donuts and ordered an iced coffee and a glazed doughnut from a young man. I’d never seen the counter without Mr. Rajeet behind it.
“Where’s Mr. Rajeet?” I asked. I plunked two quarters into the tip cup, feeling flush.
The young man said, “He’s on vacation.”
“Vacation? He never goes on vacation.” I couldn’t imagine Mr. Rajeet on vacation. Not that I knew much about vacations. Our only vacations had been driving around the country in The Griffin’s bus or visiting relatives who clearly didn’t want anything to do with us. But, like Mr. Rajeet at the beach or something? I couldn’t see it.
I was staring at the young man. “Is Mr. Rajeet okay?” I asked.
“You are a friend of Mr. Rajeet’s?”
“Yes, I come here all the time. He told me about his sons in college who are going to be famous doctors.” Another young man who looked amazingly like the guy at the counter came out of the kitchen and slid a tray of doughnuts into the display and I finally got it. They were Mr. Rajeet’s sons.
“He had a heart attack,” the young counter man whispered.
“Oh!” I put my hands over my mouth.
“I think he will be okay, but as you know, it’s in God’s hands,” he said.
“But you aren’t in college,” I said. “What happened to college?”
He shrugged. “School will have to wait. It’s okay, miss. Don’t worry. I will tell Mr. Rajeet that you were here and asked about his health. He will be pleased.”
“Wait! He doesn’t know my name,” I said. How would he distinguish me from the zillions of other ordinary looking fifteen year old girls who’d bought his Munchkins? “I know! Tell him the future rock and roll star was asking about him.”
The young man smiled. “I’ll do that.” He put his hands over mine. “Don’t worry. He’s a very strong man. He may recover.”
“Or….” I blurted.
“Or not. Yes.” He smiled at me.
“And you might not get back to college,” I said as if he hadn’t figured that out for himself.
“Or I will. Two things can be possible at one time, future rock and roll star.”
Mr. Rajeet’s recovery and his sons’ scholastic future were suddenly of great concern to me, probably because they allowed me to think about something besides myself for a minute. What I couldn’t understand was how Mr. Rajeet’s son could feel such uncertainty yet be so calm about it.
I stuffed the rest of my stolen money in the tip cup for his and his brother’s tuition.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Captain Kirby nudged me aside. She took the ten I’d dropped in b
ack out of the tip cup. “Mom gave this to both of us,” she explained to the young Rajeet who nodded that he took her at her word. “I’ll take three Boston Cremes and a large Coffee Coolata with extra sugar,” she said then turned to me. “Do you have a brain tumor or something?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I went to your house to convoy you to school and when you weren’t there I figured you might be here and here you are. Her honor answered the door.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Of course I talked to her. I am a polite person, although granny should try a semester in charm school. No offense. Just saying.”
“I’m hoping that by the time I get home she’ll be gone.”
We went outside and sat down on the curb, drinking our coffee and inhaling the exhaust from the cars in the takeout line. Between my mornings at Dunkin Donuts and Jane’s second hand smoke, my lungs were probably so screwed I probably wouldn’t make it to twenty so why was I worried about anything?
“Hey, hands off,” Captain Kirby said to a boy who was kneeling in front of her bike. He was wearing a baseball cap backwards and his pants were slung low on his hips, gangsta style.
“A CR5, right?” he said.
“Yep.”
“How’d you get it?”
Kirby stood up and wheeled the bike next to me.
“That’s what I thought,” the boy said and laughed.
“Get out of here,” she said. “Before I call the truant officer.” And to me, “Aren’t you going to ask what me and Granny O’Reilly talked about?
“Okay,” I said, “What did you and my grandmother talk about?”
“Your mom is back home.”
Chapter 27
I could hear them fighting before we even got to the front of the house. Jane would scream then Granny O’Reilly would scream. Great.
“You might as well go on to school. I don’t think you want to hear this,” I told Captain Kirby.
“It’s intense,” she said. “They were going at it when I left.”
I dropped my bike on the front lawn—Kirby stashed the Fezzari behind a bush—and we slowly opened the front door. Jane was sitting on the couch smoking, and Granny O’Reilly was smoking too. They were like two angry dragons, blowing smoke and spitting fire and venom.
“Why do you think this has anything to do with you?” Jane asked. “This has absolutely nothing to do with you. You’re such a narcissist.”
“Where did you learn such big words? From your therapist?”
“I stopped seeing a therapist years ago.”
“Well, obviously you stopped too soon.”
“What I don’t see, what I really don’t see, is how any of this is any of your business,” Jane said.
“Really? You know, actually I don’t see how this concerns me either. So then why did the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania call me in the middle of the night in the middle of Ohio to come and take care of your bastard?”
Captain Kirby shot me a look.
“You think I’m an unfit parent?” Jane screamed. “Well if I am, I learned at the feet of the master.”
“You know,” Granny O’Reilly said, “I don’t have to put up with this abuse. I have a career that I am putting in jeopardy just by being away, not to mention that my husband’s prospects for public office are diminishing with every minute I’m here. What do you think would happen if the media caught wind of my involvement in what was happening here? They would crucify me and I don’t blame them. It’s filthy and disgusting.”
They smashed out their cigarettes in the same ash tray, glaring at each other, then Jane saw us.
“Mercedes,” she said, dully. “Captain Kirby.”
“Where were you?” I asked.
She lit another cigarette and exhaled loudly. “Your grandmother asked me to stay away while she was here so the media wouldn’t connect us and it would all get back to Akron, blah, blah, blah. But it’s my house, damn it. And like it or not, she’s my mother and I’m yours and it’s really messed up, isn’t it, that this is how we’re acting instead of helping each other.”
“You keep talking about messes, but what you don’t say is that you caused this mess. It’s your responsibility to own up to it and not drag everyone down with you,” Granny O’Reilly said.
“Okay, I caused the mess. Okay? I’m a defective human being, okay? But we’re family. Shouldn’t we stick together?”
“Coming from you, that’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” Granny O’Reilly said.
Jane looked down at her hand with the cigarette burning in it. She was sitting in the exact same place she was sitting when she was talking to Rob a couple of days ago. Everyone then seemed—if not happy, at least normal and alive. Now everything in the living room seemed dead and completely over. Like the dead lady Captain Kirby’s mom was making up the night I met her. There was no way she was ever going to get up off that slab and sing a song, you know?
“I have to go to school,” I said.
Jane nodded then she looked up at me. “What are they saying?”
“What do you mean?”
“In school, what are they saying about me?”
Hot for student. What a slut.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Really?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You kind of keep to yourself,” Jane said.
“Let’s go,” Captain Kirby said, pulling me by the elbow.
“You wouldn’t know what anyone was saying, I guess,” Jane said.
“Right.”
She looked at Captain Kirby for a second opinion.
“I skipped school all week,” Kirby said and dragged me out the door.
“Jeez, and I thought my mother was bad.”
“She is,” I said.
Chapter 28
I had Trigonometry and Spanish exams in the morning and American Literary Heritage and Plant and Animal Classification in the afternoon. The Plant and Animal Classification exam turned out to be half essay question, “please describe what is meant by evidence of common descent,” and I got stuck on that and I wrote something lame-o about me and The Griffin being really alike and everything because I was trying to distance myself from Granny O’Reilly and Jane; to pretend I was born fully formed right out of The Griffin’s head or something. Anyway, I was pretty sure I flunked all of the exams because I couldn’t focus and couldn’t remember any of the questions when Tim asked me later what they were. Junior teachers were proctoring, so I didn’t have to endure my own teachers’ fake sympathy, although when I turned around to close the door behind me after I finished the Spanish exam, I caught the proctor whispering to a student and looking at me. Or maybe I was turning into a raving paranoid which was very likely on no sleep.
Tim was waiting for me after each session. “You okay?” he asked. “Need something? Anything?”
Which was a funny question to ask because I did need something, but I had no idea what it was. I felt frozen. I certainly didn’t want to go home and face the battleground there. I kept calling The Griffin, but he didn’t pick up. He was traveling on the bus and probably couldn’t even hear it ringing. I knew if I could only see him, talk to him, that he would tell me to come right down. The possibility of that conversation and my escape was the only thing keeping me going.
“I think some music would help,” he said, after our last exam.
“Absolutely.”
I winced when I saw both Jane’s Kia and Granny O’Reilly’s rental SUV parked in front of the house. But at least it was quiet. Unless they killed each other. I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Tim asked.
“I was thinking how that social worker Mrs. Valliere thought it was such a hot idea to bring my grandmother in to supervise me.”
We opened the Trap and turned everything on. If I moved to Ohio I would have to leave my gear behind. I touched it as if I was saying goodbye to a friend.
“You can have all this st
uff,” I told Tim.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“Well, at least keep it safe for me. For when we get back together.” The thought that we might never see each other, never play together again was too depressing to think about. I put it in a box to think about at a later date.
“I talked to Raymond today,” Tim said.
“Raymond? The Griffin’s Raymond?”
“Yeah. We’re kind of like buddies. They’re in Houston now.”
“What do you mean, ‘they’re in Houston’? Like the whole band?”
“Yeah. They’re practicing for the tour. Raymond says your dad is staking everything on this. It’s the first time in ten years they played without Aerosmith.”
“So, the Griffin is there too?”
“Of course he’s there. Hey, listen. I think I have a new song,” Tim said. He ran through some chords. “I have most of the words, too.”
The Griffin was in Houston and couldn’t pick up his freaking phone? “Okay.”
Captain Kirby came running up to the Trap and sat behind the drums, pulling out her sticks.
“What happened to your bike?” Tim asked her.
“Sold it.”
“You said you were test driving it,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I found a chop shop in Harrisburg that does pick-up and delivery I had to get rid of it quick before too many people saw me on it.” Bada boom, bada bing, ya cha cha cha. “What are we on?”
The protocol we developed during the five months Tim and I had been together was to go through all of our old songs before we tried something new. The Griffin had told me, and I verified it on the net, that you have to play a song a hundred times in the woodshed, as musicians call it, before you can take it to the stage. It was our way of getting to a hundred.
We played all ten of them then got to Hole in the Sky.
“We don’t have to,” Tim said.
“Of course we do. I’m all right,” I said.
“You got to stare the griffin in the eye,” Captain Kirby said. “So to speak. It’s the only way to tame it.”
Tim played the intro then raised his finger for us to join him. I picked up the mike and sang, faltering only a little:
