Winter Flower

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  His eyes widened and he grinned. “Okay, you got me there. When I was in high school, my parents got it for me for Christmas. So I guess you would say that’s a sign of what, white privilege?”

  “Middle-class privilege maybe. Home computer, what are we talking, two thousand dollars?”

  He nodded. “It’s not like my parents didn’t make sacrifices to make that happen, though. My Dad served in Vietnam, I’m a military brat. And for the record, my roommate at Georgia Tech was black. He got exactly the same education I did.”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said.

  He moved closer to me again. “What’s your name? I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

  “I’m Erin.”

  “I’m Cole. You go to Georgetown, Erin?”

  Two of the girls walked away, disgusted. Cole didn’t notice.

  “Yes. I’m an economics major.”

  A grin appeared on his face, then he leaned back his head with a full-throated laugh. “It figures I’d get into a debate with an economics major from a liberal arts college.”

  I grinned. “Does that intimidate you?”

  He grinned back. “Not in the least. Should it?”

  “Yes. Because I’m clearly a lot smarter than you.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. I won’t lie; I found his confidence insanely attractive. I wasn’t any different than the other girls who’d been surrounding him, fawning. Except they were all gone now, and somehow I was still here.

  “Can I have your number?”

  I laughed, a little disbelievingly. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. I want to take you out to dinner.”

  “We’d better not talk politics.”

  “What fun would that be?” he asked.

  I rolled my eyes. And then I gave him my number.

  A few minutes after that, Angela gave me the signal … the signal we’d worked out when it was time to leave a party together. We walked back to campus, and she talked for thirty minutes straight about her ex and what an asshole he was. Then abruptly, she said, “Who was that guy you were talking to?”

  “His name’s Cole. He thinks too much of himself,” I said.

  She laughed. “There was a crowd of girls around him. But they all left, leaving just you. You were like a dragon slayer.”

  I shrugged and smiled.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “You like him?”

  “A little. I gave him my number.”

  She cheered.

  A week later, Cole and I went out for the first time, to a play at the National Theatre, and then dinner. We did talk politics … debated them all night, in fact. We also talked careers and jobs and about our families. Cole was brilliant and erratic. He’d attended two years at Georgia Tech before dropping out to go to work for a tech startup in Northern Virginia. When he talked about the job, he was excited, his eyes gleaming. He was a believer, going on about how their work was going to revolutionize how people interacted in business. He tended to talk with his hands, waving them around in an animated fashion. It was a wonder he didn’t knock anything off the table.

  Sometimes it was hard to connect those days with now. It’s like we were different people. We’d been so optimistic, so happy. Cole traveled a lot for work, even then, but when he was in town we would go out dancing or to dinner. He took me horseback riding in the Shenandoah Valley, and I took him to lectures on campus and to book signings.

  We laughed all the time and made love all the time.

  I took Cole to meet my parents on my twentieth birthday, right before Christmas that year. It was a five-hour drive from DC to Cary, North Carolina, where I grew up, a town derisively known in the area as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. The weather that Saturday morning as we drove was pleasant, unusually warm, and we rode most of the way with the windows down in Cole’s new Mustang, listening to the audiobook of The Witching Hour Cole had bought me as an early Christmas present. He knew I was a fan of Anne Rice. I’d actually waited in line for hours at Politics and Prose to get a signed copy earlier in the year.

  It was early afternoon when Cole pulled the car to a stop in my parents’ driveway in North Cary. The house was on top of a hill, a two-story, white clapboard home with dark green shutters and a wide wraparound porch. Mom was a professor at NC State, and Dad a doctor on staff at Duke University Medical Center. Cary was almost halfway between the two, a nice, rapidly growing suburb.

  Dad opened the door first, before we were even completely out of the car. He had a big grin on his face and walked toward me, pulling me into a big hug.

  “Erin, I’ve missed you so. Happy Birthday, sweetie. And this must be Cole.”

  Cole approached and put out a hand to shake. “Cole Roberts,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  “Pleasure to meet you. Call me Carl.” He looked around, mystified, then said, “The wife is still inside. I think she’s making some kind of … um … thing … in the kitchen. Come on in.”

  I grinned at Dad. My parents were unusually progressive for the Deep South. They were hippies, throwbacks to the sixties, though that didn’t interfere with their education, and they saw each other as equal partners. But my father had spent my entire life pretending he didn’t understand anything in the kitchen. He’d go in there willingly, burn food, cause things to boil over, and make a disastrous mess. My mother finally gave up and ended up taking a more traditional role in the kitchen.

  As we hung up our coats, I smelled waves of garlic, and, less prominent, butter and spices. I walked into the kitchen and found my mother at the kitchen island chopping garlic.

  She smiled, wiping her hands, then wrapped her arms around me. “Erin. Happy birthday. This is Cole?”

  “Cole, meet my mom.”

  Mom hugged him too, then said, “I hope you like garlic chicken.”

  Cole grinned. “I love it, ma’am.”

  My dad walked in behind us, saying, “She’s putting enough garlic in there to make sure you two don’t so much as kiss while you’re staying here.”

  I blushed horribly, and Cole chuckled and said, “My intentions are completely honorable.”

  That was when I heard the footsteps thundering down the stairs. Lori came flying around the corner and into the kitchen and threw her arms around me. Five foot four, just shy of eighteen, her hair was dyed a deep blue-green that clashed with her bright pink lipstick.

  I squeezed her back, feeling tears prick my eyes. I missed my little sister. Flamboyant where I was conservative, Lori was gregarious and unconventional. “I missed you, sis,” she said. “We’ve got so much to talk about.”

  I introduced her to Cole. Dad grabbed a couple of beers out of the refrigerator—he never had any problem finding those—and passed one to Cole. “Come on outside, Cole. I want to show you the garden.”

  Dad wasn’t exactly subtle.

  Lori and I sat down at the kitchen table, and she started filling me in on her senior year in high school, which sounded like it consisted of nothing but music, art, and boys. So very different from mine. I’d dated, of course, but my focus was academics and career. To be honest, none of the guys at my high school really interested me. Too much football, too much drunken partying, too many drugs. It had never been my scene.

  It didn’t take long for Lori to convince me that the football crowd wasn’t a problem for her. The drugs might be another thing, but I didn’t want to push.

  As Lori and I chatted, I glanced outside periodically. Dad was standing, one foot casually resting on the top of the foot-high fieldstone wall we built together when I was twelve. His face was open and friendly as he spoke with Cole. Cole had his back to me, but I could tell when he was talking, because his arms waved wildly as always.

  Both of them laughed, throwing their heads back.

  Lori followed my eyes and smiled. “You really like him, don’t you?”

  My mother, still standing over the stove, looked over at us when Lori asked that questio
n.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Looking back, Lori at that age was so like the young woman Brenna would become. When my daughter hit her early teens, Lori had been a confidante and friend to her, something I was grateful for, because she’d stopped trusting me, stopped talking to me for a long time. But all that changed when Lori broke her trust to keep her safe.

  Since then, Lori and I had talked about it often enough. We’d torn it apart. We’d second-guessed ourselves and each other. For nearly six months we didn’t even speak, until Mom and Dad brought us back together. And still, I wondered if only we’d done something different, said something different, would Brenna still have trusted us? Would she have been safe? How did Cole and I possibly fail so much as parents that this happened to our daughter?

  My eyes felt hollow as I stared out the window of the plane. The teenage girl next to me was watching the in-flight movie, her headset in her ears, laughing. Relaxed. Happy. Everything Brenna should be.

  Two more hours to this flight, and then I’d be on the ground in Portland.

  I was going to find my daughter. No matter what it took.

  Eleven

  Cole: Now

  I waited to drive away until I saw Erin disappear into the doors of the airport and head for the escalator. I’d wanted to park and walk her in to the security gate, but both of us recognized that we didn’t have the money to pay for airport parking on top of everything else. At this point, every dollar made a huge difference.

  I so badly wanted to be getting on that plane with her. I needed to do something: something for my family, something for Brenna, something for Erin.

  I couldn’t remember the last time she had called and asked for my help for anything. The sound of her voice on the phone, a mix of panic and shock and joy and devastation all at the same time, had left me confused and filled with an urgent sense of need to do something, anything, I could for her.

  The thing is … we hadn’t just lost Brenna. We lost our whole family. I’d spent the past two years watching my wife slowly kill herself, watching my son become isolated and depressed, and I bore the guilt of knowing that much of it was my fault.

  As I pulled out of the airport, I dialed Jeremiah.

  In some ways the two of us had oddly parallel lives. My dad was a Marine Vietnam veteran, his was an Army Vietnam vet. Both of us were military brats and traveled all over the country, and both of us spent our high school years in the Atlanta area … me in Marietta near the Atlanta Naval Air Station, and Jeremiah in East Point near Fort McPherson. Both of us had grown up interested in engineering and had earned scholarships to Georgia Tech.

  But there our similarities ended. He was black; I was white. He was a Democrat; I was a Republican. He listened to hip hop and jazz, and I listened to punk and southern rock. We quickly became best friends.

  One time, I dragged Jeremiah to the site of the former Metroplex in Atlanta. Long since closed down, the club was a shithole in an old warehouse in an area surrounded by other old warehouses and had burned down in the late eighties. But someone had rented a warehouse down the street for Columbus Day weekend for a revival of the old club. A lot of the old bands came, like the Sex Pistols, Rotten Gimmick, and Henry Rollins, and a couple new ones on the scene like Blink 182.

  Before it burned down, the Metroplex had been like an awakening for me. At the end of ninth grade, I’d told Daddy I didn’t want to go spend any of the summer with Lucas. He was my oldest cousin on my father’s side of the family, the younger son of Daddy’s sister.

  “Why the hell not?” he’d demanded.

  I’d squirmed but finally told him. “It’s bad there. Big Bill’s always drunk and he’s real quick with his fists. Ain’t nothing to do there but sit around and get messed up. I hate it.”

  “Quick with his fists?” Daddy asked.

  “With Aunt Donna. And Lucas.”

  A quick flash of anger crossed his face. Donna was Daddy’s sister, and I didn’t think he cared for Big Bill. “You ain’t gonna sit around the house all summer playing video games.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “All right.”

  I did end up working—mostly cutting lawns and yardwork, going door-to-door in our neighborhood most of the summer. A lot of the houses in the area were occupied by current and former military, men who served at Dobbins or Atlanta Naval Air Station, and they were particular about their lawns.

  It afforded me freedom I’d never had. On Saturday nights I’d take the bus into Atlanta then the train downtown. I walked the streets, mouth hanging open like a tourist, staring at the high-rises, drinking up the energy of the city. This was an entirely new world.

  I stumbled across the Metroplex by accident, walking up Marietta Street one Saturday night right before I turned sixteen, passing a shitty-looking warehouse covered with graffiti. From inside, the pulsing of drums made windows rattle in their frames.

  A girl like no one I’d ever seen before sat out front of the building. She had spiked hair, shaved on one side, and wore a jean jacket with tiny metal spikes embedded in the shoulder. Half a dozen earrings shone on her left ear. She was leaning back against the building, smoking a cigarette. She was remarkably pretty.

  “You lost?”

  I looked around. At the corner were two guys who might have been skinheads, black leather with heads nearly shaved, both wearing what looked like combat boots.

  I had short hair, but it was my dad’s preferred high and tight. I was wearing sneakers and blue jeans and a sky blue T-shirt and probably looked right out of the 1950s. So I just shrugged and said, “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  She grinned and stood. “I’m Faith.”

  “Cole.”

  She held out a cigarette to me. I took it, and she lit it, and I coughed and she laughed at me.

  That summer, Faith became my first girlfriend. I ended up, by default, being part of the punk scene for a while. I’d spend my week cutting grass and stacking wood and doing whatever else I could to earn a few bucks, and on weekend nights we’d go see shows at the Metroplex: the Dead Milkmen, Gorilla Biscuits, Flipper, and the Circle Jerks. It was an awakening. I’d never imagined a world like this: colorful and loud, music blasting, the smell of pot smoke, and screams into microphones.

  It didn’t last past summer. Faith had dropped out of school and wasn’t interested in anything other than partying. I already knew that life wasn’t for me. The Metroplex closed then burned down, and that part of my life came to a close. I’d occasionally run into her in other clubs or around town, but the magic was over.

  But freshman year at Georgia Tech—when I saw the flyer for the Metroplex Reunion—I knew I had to check it out. I also knew I had to drag along my best friend and roommate.

  “Nah, man. I’m not into that scene,” was Jeremiah’s first reaction. We were in our room in Cloudman Hall, an early twentieth century red brick edifice decades overdue for renovation. Jeremiah was at his desk, an Introduction to Engineering textbook in front of him. I sat across the room, flyer in one hand and a wine cooler in the other.

  “Come on, dude. I need my wingman! Besides, Henry Rollins is going to be there. You’ll love it.”

  “Why is that? Is this Rollins guy a jazz virtuoso I’ve never heard of?”

  I laughed. “Trust me, you’ll love it. The man’s a poet.”

  He grunted. “You know how much I love poetry.”

  The next evening we caught the bus from campus to Five Points, which ran right down Marietta Street. The reunion was unmistakable as we approached. Three girls in their late teens and early twenties were standing outside an old building wearing tattered clothes. Two of the girls had fluorescent spiked hair, and the third had a spectacular mohawk, its foot-long spikes radiating from the top and back of her head like the rays of the sun.

  After we passed the girls, Jeremiah asked in a falsely innocent tone, “Friends of yours?”

  I chuckled. Secretly, I had hoped we’d run int
o Faith; that she’d gotten her life together maybe just a little; that I could introduce my best friend and the girl who had been my first, and thus far only, girlfriend.

  She was nowhere in sight. We entered the temporary club, got our wrists stamped (“UNDER 21” in bold letters) and wandered toward the mosh pit.

  In retrospect, it occurred to me once again how good a friend Jeremiah had always been. He was correct that this was, in fact, not his scene. Reserved, conservative, studious Jeremiah was far more comfortable in a jazz club or a public library than a mosh pit filled with teenagers slamming their bodies into each other. But he was game to try anything. Both of us were exhausted by midnight when we left the club.

  We walked side by side through the dark downtown streets after leaving the club, headed for Five Points and the train station. We didn’t make it more than a block before three guys stepped out of the darkness.

  Two of them barely registered on my consciousness, smaller and less visibly hostile, but the guy in the center scared me instantly. Tall and strongly built, a pale man wearing a sleeveless vest with spikes embedded in it, he had a swastika tattooed on his shoulder. His head was shaved clean.

  “This the asshole who bumped into you, Ray?” the one in the center asked.

  “Yeah,” said the youngest of the three—a kid really, no older than fifteen. “The nigger.”

  This guy looked punk, but he sounded white trash. “Hey, man, we don’t want any trouble,” I said. “We’re just headed home.”

  “You found trouble,” he replied. “Your nigger friend bumped into my brother in the club.”

  My heart was beating a thousand beats a minute. Back in the day, there’d been a small group of skinheads who hung out across the street from the Metroplex and sometimes caused trouble. I didn’t recognize these three, but I recognized the type. They might not be homicidal, but they’d be willing to hurt us. I scanned the sidewalk quickly, looking for a weapon.

  As the big skinhead unhooked a long chain from his belt, I grabbed a bottle from the gutter and hit it against the curb. The end of the bottle shattered, leaving a jagged nasty weapon. The sound startled all of us. Jeremiah raised his fists.