by Maddy Wells
“We have bitchy neighbors, too,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Tudesco and her yapping Pomeranians. “One of them’s always calling the cops on us.”
“They wouldn’t call the cops. They would throw us out,” Isak said.
“They can throw you out of your own house?”
“Technically they can. It’s like a condo association, but Mom would never let it get to that. She would be mortified. ‘I am so mortified.’” He made his voice go soprano.
I laughed, but if that’s what Marjewel was like I was in big trouble. Jane practically made a habit of mortifying people. It’s what we did.
We both put on our headphones. Isak switched on a microphone in front of him and gestured for me to do the same.
“Hey,” he said through the mike, “You might know this one.”
He ran through the head, a stanza, and the bridge of Hole in the Sky.
I felt my face get white. “Hey. That’s my song. Our song.”
“Don’t have a fit,” Isak said. “I’m just fooling with you. Dad was singing your boyfriend’s praises. No one’s going to rip you off. It’s your boyfriend’s song, isn’t it? What’s his name?”
I strummed the bridge. “Tim.”
“Well, how about this?” Isak started playing. “It’s one of mine.” It was like he was meandering through a field of wildflowers, going nowhere in particular but enjoying the trip. He started singing. I joined in on the bass. It was a love song to the desert. To water holes and poppies and sage and naked mountains. It wasn’t anything like any relationship song I’d ever heard. It was like a revelation. Captain Kirby had said “Mom is not a people person,” when I met her at Kulick’s. Maybe you didn’t have to just write about people. It was so cool to think about having a brother I could explore with. I had been defined against just Jane and The Griffin for my whole life and it had never occurred to me that that wasn’t the only way to know myself. I could define myself, like right now, against a brother to whom I didn’t have anything to prove. I could see what having a real home had made of Isak. He wasn’t in awe of The Griffin. He didn’t have anything to prove like Jane did—saying she’d show The Griffin by doing something so unbelievably stupid that didn’t even make her happy. Isak was at home with himself.
When he finished his song I smiled at him and started the head to the new song that Tim and I had been working on at Sunny Vale.
I close my eyes when I play and I did now too. When I got to the end of where we’d gotten so far I looked at Isak. He nodded. “How about this,” he said and played a new bridge between the stanzas and kicked in with a stanza of his own.
We toodled around with his bridge and more words came shooting out of his mouth just like they did out of Tim’s and I could see that he was even better than Tim. But how could he not be? Tim had gotten more confident just jamming with Raymond and Bang in the Trap. Isak lived full time with The Griffin for Pete’s sake. That’s why I wanted to be here. That’s why I was here.
Isak segued into a Latin riff, made it rock and finished with some lyrics in Spanish that I didn’t understand.
“That’s for my mom,” he said. “That’s the part of me that’s a Latino rocker.”
“What do you mean you’re a Latino rocker?”
“My mother is Mexican,” he said.
And before I could ask him more about his mother and his Mexican heritage, Marjewel was knocking on the glass wall and smiling at Isak, her smile turning to disbelief, then anger when she saw me.
Chapter 53
If Isak inhabited real space in my mind, Marjewel had been like an incomplete drawing, a menacing figure without a face who kept The Griffin from being with me and Jane.
Isak pulled off his headphones and opened the door, then went back to the music stand and plugged back in.
“Turn it off,” Marjewel commanded. She was staring at me. “Who’s your friend?”
“Mom, this is…’
“I know who it is,” she screamed.
Isak scratched a couple of high Cs that mimicked a screech.
“Stop it and plug in your the headphones,” Marjewel said. “You know you’re not supposed to do that.”
Marjewel had Isak’s face and jet hair. She was neat and polished like a car that had just gotten detailed: glossy highlighted hair, buffed skin, fingernail and toenails that shone with new paint. She obviously was returning from a “day of beauty,” one of those things Jane and I were always saving up for but never quite got to because her car or some appliance broke down just as we were on the verge.
“Why are you here,” she asked.
“I’m waiting for The Griffin.”
“What do you want to see him for?”
“Do I need a reason to see my father?”
“My husband is preparing for a tour. We don’t need the media crawling all over us because you’ve shown up. Wouldn’t they just love this.” The look on her face changed from rage to derision. “So tell me,” she said, “how is your mother enjoying jail?”
Isak pulled off his headphones. “Mom, cut it out. Chill out, will you. Mercy is my guest. Okay? We’re just jamming.”
“How did she get in my house?”
“I let her in.”
“Querido,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.” She ran out of the room. Isak put his head down and picked on his guitar, adjusting the strings, ignoring his mother’s exit, ignoring me.
I was breathing really fast. I could hardly hold the pick in my fingers I was shaking so hard.
“Thank you, Isak,” I said into the microphone. I knew he heard me because he nodded his head, even though his eyes were closed.
I closed mine too. All I had to do was hang in long enough for The Griffin to get home. I pictured him flying into the room, picking me up with his lion’s claws and carrying me away to a place where we could be father and daughter together. If only I could wait that long.
Chapter 54
Isak and I jammed for another hour—I knew he was doing it to soothe me—then he told me he had to go to The Griffin’s studio downtown and did I want to come?
“I’m playing with them,” Isak said. “You know Dad broke off with Aerosmith, don’t you? This concert is all his. Righteous Anger.”
“Righteous Anger?”
“The name of the tour. Dad wants me to join him on the tour. I’ve been thinking more and more about Latin rock, I want to develop a sound of my own, but I’ll just do this tour and see how it goes. Can’t hurt to see what it’s like on the road. Last chance. Wanna come with me?”
“I think I’ll wait here,” I said. I knew if I left the house Marjewel would change the locks or alert security to not let me back in. It was really lucky that Isak was home by himself when I arrived.
“I have a tune that I want to work on,” I lied.
“You’re more than welcome to it, but Mom is going to come down as soon as I leave. She’s a badger when she’s angry. Dad and I are used to it. I don’t know if you can take it.”
“I’ll be alright,” I said. If Isak knew what I had been through lately he would have known I could take care of myself, that I couldn’t be bullied by Marjewel or anyone.
“Show me this,” I said, pointing to the sound board. “Then I won’t bother you anymore.”
Isak walked me through how to record a CD and edit it on the software program on his Apple. “You can’t break it,” he said. “Believe me. I did all kinds of dumb shit on it when I started and it’s still here. At your service. Indestructible. So don’t be afraid to experiment. Just keep this backup tape in the tape player so you don’t lose your work in case you screw up.” He slipped a small thick cassette in the tape player. “That’s the big mistake I always make, not backing my shit up. I’m leaving it on. You’re ready to go.” He cased his guitar and pointed to the glass door and smiled. “I’m not going upstairs,” he said. “Have fun.”
“Hey, Isak?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for that message when Ja
ne got in trouble.”
He nodded.
“Does it feel weird to have me here?” I asked. “I mean, to find out you have a sister?”
“Dad always talked about you. So not really. I feel like I’ve always known you.”
“He did? The Griffin talked about me?”
“Sure. He doesn’t say anything to mom after he visits you and your mother, but he tells me. I think he feels really bad about how things are.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. He said how you were this funny little kid who was always showing him charts and graphs to explain things that were going on in your life. He thinks that’s hilarious.”
I felt my face get hot. I thought it had made me seem rational and grown-up, like Mr. Dow. It never occurred to me that I was being ridiculous. “Well, it’s not so funny when you get to talk to your father like five minutes a year.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“He never talked about you,” I said.
“We’re tight,” Isak said, ignoring my dig.
“Did he ever say anything about…” I closed my eyes and made a wish. “Anything about my music?”
“Just that you wanted a guitar. So I said you could have my Fender.”
Chapter 55
The sound board was amazingly simple to work and I engrossed myself in figuring out the different channels and sound levels because I wasn’t feeling so hot about myself, and I was thinking whether I should call Tim to come down immediately, that he could do a demo right here, when I saw Marjewel standing on the other side of the glass wall of the studio staring in at me. She must have heard Isak leaving. She pushed on the door and when it didn’t open she gestured at me to let her in.
“I thought I’d wait here for The Griffin,” I said, talking really fast. “Isak said it was okay. I was just playing around on the board. Isak said it was unbreakable. I’ve been keeping my head phones on.”
Part of me didn’t think I owed her any explanation, but part of me knew that I was basically a trespasser.
“He might not be home for a long time,” Marjewel said. She pulled up a stool and sat down, tugging down her skirt. “I find musicians to be unreliable,” she said, talking in a quiet tone that was scarier than the anger I expected. “They tell time by a different clock. They are always, always late when they show up at all. They are narcissists and live without any thought of consequences of their actions and leave messes for other people to clean up. Don’t you find that to be true?”
I knew she was laying a trap for me. “I only know the members of my band and they’re always on time,” I said. “They’re more on time than I am. And responsible? Ha! Tim? Captain Kirby? I wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for them.”
“Oh really? You have a band? You’re a musician too?” she asked.
I knew that any answer I gave was the wrong answer. “I’m trying to be a musician.”
“But they are charming, don’t you think? Your mother thought so. She was so charmed by my husband she thought she would take him away from me.”
“My mother didn’t take anybody,” I said. “Jane and The Griffin were in love.”
“She said that?” Marjewel asked.
Of course they were in love. I knew they just tried to act casual when it was time for The Griffin to leave to spare my feelings, so I wouldn’t be so sad when he left. Because he always left. It was the most reliable thing The Griffin did: leave.
“Well, they had me,” I said and laughed nervously.
“The Griffin is my husband,” Marjewel said. “Isak was already here when you were born and your mother was riding in the bus, pretending that my son and I didn’t matter. I knew he was with other women when he was on the road. But my husband having a child with someone else? How do you think that made me feel?”
“It was special with Jane,” I said. “The Griffin and Jane and me, we’re a special and talented family. We have our own rules.”
“Is that what your mother tells you?” Marjewel laughed sadly. “You insist on waiting here till The Griffin comes? When The Griffin comes home to his house, my house, our house, you can ask him if he thinks you are part of a special and talented family or if you are just the daughter of a groupie who was too dumb to use birth control.”
I was stunned. “He’ll tell you who we are,” I said, but even as I said it, I thought of Evelyn, the groupie The Griffin took into the bus that night in Milltown and Evelyn was no different from other groupies over the years. Was it possible that the only difference between Evelyn and Jane was that Jane was unlucky—stupid?—and got pregnant? Was I just some accident caused by two careless people who never considered that what they were doing would have consequences for others, like, for me? That thought got caught in my head and I couldn’t dislodge it and it was crowding out everything else in there and my head was getting all misshapen, and it was knocking over the piles of boxes I had so neatly stored in perfect rows and they were splitting wide open, messy contents spilling everywhere. Jane’s stuff was mixing with stuff from Isak’s box which was mixing with stuff from Tim’s and Clarisse was in Tim’s, how did she get in there? Everything was out of control because my giant head was beginning to shake like an earthquake, smashing boxes open, and Captain Kirby burst out of her box riding the Fezzari, and Mrs. Tudesco looked at me knowingly, shielding her Pomeranians eyes, and all the neat little divisions I had positioned so diligently to keep the boxes segregated in their own quadrants were suddenly growing legs and marching around on their own.
I was breathing so fast I thought I was going to pass out.
“It’s so not true,” I said in a raspy voice that sounded like I’d been yelling. “What you’re saying…Jane and The Griffin….”
But there it was. Something deep inside of me must have always known the truth because why else could I never bring myself to call my parents Mom and Dad like every other kid on the planet?
Marjewel smiled slightly. “So maybe, being a narcissistic musician yourself, is the reason you can’t see how your presence here, in my home, would have the consequence of enormous pain for me.”
“I have a right to see The Griffin,” I said. “He’s my father.”
“He has a responsibility to you, of course, and I make sure he does what’s right—yes, I make sure of it—but I wouldn’t call someone who sees you twice a year a father, actually, would you?”
Every pronouncement she made she turned into a question she acted like I should answer.
“How do I know how many times a year you have to see a person to call him your father?” I
screamed. “See, I want to fix that. I want to see him more than twice a year.”
“Are you saying that you think you’re going to stay here? In my house?” Marjewel asked.
“It’s not your house, it’s The Griffin’s.”
Marjewel burst out laughing and kept laughing so long I thought she was going crazy.
“Why don’t you ask The Griffin about that, too, as long as you’re going to have a big heart-to-heart conversation with him?”
For some reason I can’t explain, I thought of the frog Krista Kulick and I dissected in biology class to analyze what was inside it, but I was the frog being cut apart—with Marjewel making sure The Griffin did the bare minimum and me with my charts and graphs and PowerPoint presentations that The Griffin couldn’t wait to tell Isak about as soon as he got home so they could have a good laugh about how ridiculous I was. Hahahaha. And I gave him copies of some of those charts. How could I ever look at him again? And this house where I always imagined I really belonged was what? I was always able to bear that Jane was a substandard mother because I was certain my supersized father with eagle wings and lion’s haunches would one day pluck me up and take me to his castle where we would truly be a special and extraordinary family. How could I be so dumb? My whole life had been such a ridiculous lie that I couldn’t believe I was still breathing. I was alone in the world. My mother was in jail for having sex wit
h an underage student and my father, my father wasn’t a superhero. The only reason he even came to see me was because Marjewel made him. He was nothing but a bunch of feathers and crepe paper, a giant gimmick held together by a glue gun and staples.
I felt cold and I slumped to the floor and curled up in a little ball, sobbing, gagging. I felt Marjewel stroke my hair, saying “There, there, niña. You are almost a grown woman,” she said. “Maybe it’s a good thing you came here, so you can see the truth for yourself.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “It’s not my fault.”
“No,” Marjewel said. “But that doesn’t change anything. And that is part of knowing the truth.”
Chapter 56
I guess I fell asleep because it was dark outside when I got up off the floor. Low wattage emergency lights illuminated the studio. I had no idea if I was alone or not because the studio was sound-proof so I knew I couldn’t hear if anyone was upstairs in the house. The Griffin might not be home for hours, maybe days. Based on my own experiences with him he showed up whenever he pleased and left when things got real. And honestly, I didn’t know what I had to say to him anymore.
I counted my money. I could get to the airport and throw myself at the mercy of the airlines and hope they would just stick me on a flight home to get rid of me as some kind of pathetic charity case—isn’t that what I was? Or I could ask Isak for a ride to the airport and fly as far as four hundred bucks would get me.
I picked up my guitar and plugged it in, turned on the sound board and put a blank CD in the player, and when I did the lights came on. I thought I would record something to show Tim—if I ever saw him again—how easy it was to do it.
I did my usual warm-up with some scales, then struck a chord, an E flat—my key—and was astounded at the violence that came out as I played every note in the chord: E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat, C and D. Then I turned on the microphone, prepared to sing my usual la-la-la-la-la-di-da but instead a wordless sound came rolling up through my body and exploded out of my mouth—louder than anything I ever sang, truer than any sound I ever made—a scream. It was bigger than my body seemed able to produce and I didn’t recognize it as me, and it went on and on louder and louder and I couldn’t stop it and it felt like my eardrums would burst in the headphones. It was crystal clear and if I had been a soprano I would’ve broken the studio’s glass walls. When I finally ran out of breath, I inhaled, thinking that whatever had happened was over, but it wasn’t and words started pouring out of me. Like the scream, the words were coming from inside my body but I had no control over them.
