by Eden Butler
Thirteen years ago, in this hospital, I sat next to Iris’s bed, worried, watching, thinking I might lose my best friend.
“Pneumonia,” I’d heard the principal, Mr. Mellings, tell Mrs. Rogers outside my fifth period Civics class. “Poor Iris is in the hospital, and her mother is beside herself. They’re not sure how long she’ll be there.”
The man had barely gotten the explanation out of his mouth before I ditched the rest of fifth period and walked the two miles to the hospital. It had been snowing then too, but it was Valentine’s Day, not Christmas, and the decorations were all pink hearts and balloons.
Iris had looked nearly as thin and pale as the girl in the room I stood just outside of, but her skin was naturally darker and her thick, dark hair had been in a long braid and fell to her elbow on the mattress.
“Can you hear me?” I’d whispered, my voice cracking because I’d never seen her that silent or that still. “Florecita?”
But Iris hadn’t answered. She lay there still as the grave, and something wild and desperate took hold of my chest clamping like a vice around my heart. No one had ever meant more to me. No one had ever believed in me like Iris had. And in that hospital room, with the IV dripping fluids into her veins and the heart monitor dinging a steady beep telling me she was still with me, fear took hold.
It had a tight grip and didn’t relent its hold of me, sometimes I thought it still had hold of me, but back then, on that cold Valentine’s Day, I understood where that fear came from.
“Iris?”
There was nothing for me to do but lean next to her, just like the boy worrying over his girl. I stroked Iris’s face, frowning when I felt the heat from her fevered skin.
“I hope you can hear me. I hope this reaches you.”
Then I kept my voice low and held her hot cheek in my palm, singing to her, something obscure, but full of meaning even I didn’t understand. Hawthorne, of course.
I am lost without you
Drifting near empty shores
Anchor me, keep me
Lady, take what’s yours
It was a moment I’d never forget: Iris’s skin under my touch and that swell of fear that kept me focused, that made me understand what this meant. What she did.
There was no one in that room but me and my florecita. We existed for that moment in our own space—; a universe of our own, where no one else could touch us.
“Mami, I need you.” I’d held my breath, scared of everything falling apart if I breathed too loud or moved too much. And then, with my eyes burning, blurring, I leaned in and kissed Iris Daine right on the mouth. Because I loved her. Right then I knew, I loved only her.
“Jamie?”
For a second, I’d thought she woke, like some loco fairytale, that my kiss had brought her from the fever and illness that kept her still, but I sat up, hurrying to wipe my eyes and Mrs. Daine walked into the room, looking worn and exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, though I wasn’t. “I just… ay Dios mío …I…”
I moved from the bed, holding up my hands to show Iris’s mother that I was only kissing her, that I wasn’t some pervert.
“I know,” she promised, touching my face to dry my wet cheeks. “I know you worry about her. It’s okay.”
I’d never said more than ten words to Iris’ mother since I’d met her and I’d never seen her look so tired, so weak. Iris loved her mother something fierce. They were close, and sometimes I thought I had to work hard just to keep up with them. Strong women were something I had to get used to, but once I did I’d discovered I’d liked them a lot. But Mrs. Daine looked between me and Iris on the bed, and I thought, for the first time, that she seemed so small and the fear that had crept up inside me the second I’d walked into that room, transformed into something fierce and uncontrollable.
“How can I help?”
She looked at me, easing next to Iris on the bed, but tilted her head, eyes squinting as she watched me. “What?”
“You hungry? Or thirsty? There’s supposed to be a freeze tonight. Did you drain your outside faucet lines and cover the nozzles?”
A small grin twitched her bottom lip before Mrs. Daine nodded. “We’re good on fire wood and the pipes are fine, but I haven’t eaten since last night.”
“Burger? From the cafeteria?” She nodded, that grin stretching into a wide smile. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
I was nearly to the door when Mrs. Daine called me, brought my glance around to her as she watched me. “You know, she needs you too.” It was a brief shift in the attitude Iris’ mother usually had for me. She’d never quite warmed up to me or been very open, but the look she gave me then was enough to thaw the coldness I’d always felt from her. I’d take the small victories when they came.
I’d spent the next half-hour feeding the woman and listening as the doctors updated her on Iris’ prognosis, which had started to improve. Three hours after I’d ditched school to check on Iris, I’d left the hospital, bundling up tight in my thin denim jacket as I headed toward the bus stop. I’d felt good, hopeful that she’d get better, sure that I’d dented a bit of the wall Mrs. Daine kept around herself and I knew that I’d have my friend back soon.
I also knew that I loved her. I knew then that nothing could change how I felt about her and then, just ten feet from the hospital entrance, the loud boom of my mother’s ’78 Pinto backfired, breaking the quiet of the cold night as she slammed on her brakes in front of the hospital.
“Ay, you little shit!” she’d shouted, jumping from the driver’s side of the car, her lips trembling as she stood to glare at me. She wore only a thin sweater, threadbare around the hem and at the elbows, and a pair of knee high black boots over her faded jeans. “Get in this car right now!”
There were two old men smoking near the bus stop, and a girl I recognized from gym was waiting next to the largest man. They all stopped in mid-conversation at my mother’s loud screech and pretended not to notice me as I jogged toward the Pinto, ignoring the death glare my mother gave me.
Her fussing didn’t end when I got into the car, and as we drove away from the hospital, the insults got meaner, and her voice more piercing. “Skipping school…estupido! I swear, te voy a dar una galleta!
“Mama, stop!” I tried, raising an arm to deflect her slap. “I had to check on her. She’s sick.”
“Oh, I know. That gringo teacher told me where you went. Ay bendito, you idiota, how many times do I have to tell you? Leave that chica alone. She’s not for you.”
“What do you know?”
My mother slowed the car to the curb just in front of our house and I curled my fingers around the doorknob, eager to get away from her. She jerked on my elbow, pointing a finger in my face.
“I know she’s smart. Si? I know she’s too smart for this town or for you.” Her features softened then, as though she actually cared. As though everything that left her mouth wasn’t a verbal gut punch. “She will outgrow you and leave you behind. People like that, mijo, they don’t stay with us. They leave. They always leave.”
“You’re wrong, mama. Iris loves me and I…she’s all I have. ”
“Then you don’t have anything.”
I’d left the car, ignoring her as she called after me. It didn’t matter what she thought of me or how I felt. Those predictions hadn’t mattered, but as I pushed off the wall and stared at the end of the hallway, gaze sharp as I glanced at the precise embossed letters on room 214’s door, I realized one of my mother’s promises had come true. Iris had left me behind, but I’d pushed her to do it.
I stared at that door for another full minute before I turned away from it, leaving down the hallway and away from the woman who’d cursed me all those years ago.
Chapter Five
We spent Boxing Day downstairs in Hector’s dirty shop. There were still crates and containers covering nearly the entire surface of the floor, most filled to the brim with old vinyls Hector never got around to organizing and labe
ling for sale. Some he promised were worth money. Those could fill a vault, but Hector never got around to doing much after his first heart attack. I’d left Willow Heights after a year working out my mierda, and Hector got left alone more and more frequently. I’d claimed I was busy writing and recording and touring. I had been, but I could have made time for him. Especially since his daughter stopped visiting as much, mainly because most teenagers are selfish pricks, and that’s what they do. After Maria neglected him, just as I had, Hector got careless. He’d stopped looking after himself. Then he’d stopped caring about the shop.
Maria died years back, and when she did, I got left with the shop and the apartment and the ghosts that haunted both. There wasn’t the normal post-Christmas chaos around the old shop that morning. There was only those old records, piles of paperwork and old posters, and me and Wills Lager playing music.
Well, Wills played and I listened, despite that still-buzzing resentment I felt toward the man. No matter how many times I reminded myself that this pendejo was my father, no matter how often he told me I was a crap son to my mama and a worse man to Iris, he was still the guy I’d always idolized. My musical Yoda, despite this Yoda being a cocky, refusing-to-leave-knocking-on-death’s-door-pendejo. And coño was he bossy.
“You’re not listening.” He’d said that at least twice in the past hour, any time the second progression on the chord I tried to perfect sounded off to him. To be fair, it sounded off to me too, but I damn sure wouldn’t tell him that. “Jaysus, man, I’ve said it over and over. Listen. Like this.” Then my father played the chord again, slower this time, as though I was some thick music student and particularly slow on the uptake. “It’s a blues progression, slow-like, but still gritty…” Then he played it again, and then once more, until I watched closely, focusing on the unreal slip of his fingertips on the frets, and the slow slide of his hand along the neck. Impossible. Magic. This was what Wills Lager did best: make his guitar sing all on its own.
“I can’t do that, mierda.”
He looked at me then, like I’d disappointed him—eyebrows lowering, frown exaggerating the hard lines around his face. I swear, I thought he’d go full Yoda and say something like “shit you can do,” but my father only shook his head, moving his bottom lip between his teeth, seeming thoughtful. Maybe he was trying to figure out how to teach me some secret Old Rock God trick. Maybe he was plotting my death. Either way, Wills went still and quiet for just a handful of seconds before he put a different expression his face, this one neutral and less severe than the frown.
He stretched out his long legs in front of him, holding my borrowed Fender across his small lap. “I didn’t write ‘Heartache in Blue.’”
I sat up, moving my head to hear him better. “That can’t be true.” I nodded toward the back of the shop where I kept Hector’s oldest record player and a personal stash of Hawthorne’s best. It was where I kept the old, small pressing of the song I’d dug out of thrift store in Atlanta when I was a kid. Right here in this shop, Iris and I listened to that track and almost had our first kiss.
“I memorized those liner notes.”
“And no writer was listed, was there now?” It took a minute to go back to the stores of half-forgotten tidbits in my head before I remembered the credits. He was right, and Wills must have taken my open mouth as answer. He at least smiled at the expression and then moved the guitar from his lap and leaned it against a plastic container with a busted latch. “It was on purpose. Crash Nelson wrote that song on the fly, as it were, back in 1976, backstage of The Troubadour.” My mouth dropped open wide enough then that my father laughed. “I was there when he wrote it.”
I crossed my arms, scooting to the edge of my stool to watch him, a little star-struck over the idea that Wills had not only met Crash Nelson, but had seen him write. Nelson had been a pioneer in southern rock and would have changed the world if that asshole fan hadn’t stalked him outside his London flat and left two bullets in his head.
“I’d never seen the like of that moment. Nelson lost to himself, like there wasn’t a shed load of people around him drinking and carrying on. He just found himself a corner, pulled on a set of headphones and sang to himself over and over. I took my time watching him, getting close enough that I could overhear the lyrics and melody, thinking I was some clever lad, all of nineteen and sneaking a listen to one of the greatest songwriters this world’s ever known.”
Wills’ voice went soft then, and he closed his eyes, only for a second, long enough that he let a slow smile twitch around his top lip, like the memory was a sweet one. One he never wanted to lose.
“He spends a good half-hour in that corner, playing, writing, not scribbling a thing down, and when he’s all done and sorted, that arsehole turns to me and says, ‘well, mate, what do you think? Is it complete rubbish?’ I thought I’d piss myself.” I laughed right along with him, caught up in the story, in the amazing notion that this was my father’s life, that his stories were made up of people that had always seemed like characters in one badass fairytale.
“I tell you this, you see, because that was the greatest lesson anyone a’tall could have given me. Watching. Listening. Crash Nelson played that song at least a half a dozen times that night, but only once did I hear the whole thing. I spent the next eight years trying to remember it. He was killed the next winter and never recorded it.”
Wills stood from his seat, running a hand along the back of his neck as he looked out the front window. The snow had begun to melt, and the streets were being swept. They were clear now. When I’d returned home the night before from my almost-visit with my mother, Wills hadn’t said more than a handful of sentences to me, and then it was only to inform me that he wanted to stay a while, though he never mentioned how long ‘a while’ would be. When he found me down here in the shop a few hours before, he’d continued to keep tight-lipped, walking into the shop to sit in front of me, picking up the Fender I’d pulled out of my closet. We spent an hour doing nothing more than playing together, speaking things we couldn’t—likely wouldn’t—ever say to each other. Now though, I supposed it was time for words.
“Why did you tell me that?” I asked him, folding my arms as I glanced in his direction.
“Because,” he started, eyes still on the street. “Listening, practicing, being willing to learn, that shouldn’t ever change. We aren’t plumbers. We don’t learn a trade and think all we must know is jotted off, never to be improved.” Wills returned to his stool and picked up the Fender, but he didn’t play. “We never stop learning, no matter what’s in our bank accounts or how many arseholes feed our egos with gold records and awards that mean shite. We never stop learning. We never stop bloody improving.”
The point was clear then, and for the first time since that night in Indy, I decided to forget how angry at my father I was. I decided to just listen.
“Play it for me, one more time.”
“I learned something new from my…from Wills today.” Wasn’t sure why I whispered. My houseguests crashed a half an hour before, and no one was listening to me. There was a faint echo on the other end of the receiver, likely because I’d come back into the shop while Wills slept. The back office was nearly as empty as the front shop was full, with only a metal desk and poster of Led Zeppelin dulling the sound of my voice. It didn’t matter. Iris would likely never listen to my message.
“He told me that he never wrote “Heartache in Blue.” He told me why he recorded it on that live album, and it had nothing to do with a woman.” I held my breath, remembering the first time I’d heard that song. Remembering how it seeped inside me as much as the girl I’d heard it with had. “Turns out I can still learn. Even at twenty-eight, I can learn.” I leaned back in my chair staring up at the ceiling. The wheels squeaked on against the tile floor, and there were dark, round spots disturbing the popcorn ceiling from a leak that had flooded the upstairs bathroom fifteen years ago.
“After all this time, all the mierda they try to tell
me about my music, all the things I believed about myself for so long, I realized today I’m just a fucking kid. Compared to him, I know nothing. But then, I guess you know that. Isn’t that what you told me on the tour? That night on bus? You were trying to tell me the same thing Wills did. You were trying to remind me to find the magic.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed I was as pathetic as Iris thought I was, but I was beginning to understand that there was room to improve. “I spent the day in Hector’s shop, playing music with the man we idolized. He played Heartache, Iris, and it was better than anything we heard on vinyl. He’s helping me; we’re writing together, and I’m realizing I don’t want to be who they want. I’m tired of the makeup and the persona and all the mierda that keeps me from the magic. I so…I wish…” It probably wasn’t smart, saying the things I did to her. Not after…everything. She didn’t want me, not yet, but that didn’t mean I would stop trying. Inside me, way down deep, Iris was the only woman for me. I had to keep trying.
“I wish you could have been here. I wish you knew how happy that would make me.” And then, like I had every other time I’d messaged her, I spoke the words that were the truest. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I ruined us. I’ll never stop trying to win you back.”
That night when I played the tune that had been haunting me, the same one Wills had tried to get me to play his way, the melody changed, and the lines seemed clearer. There were still words and beats that were missing, things that didn’t quite slip together fluidly, but the progression was stronger, and the tune felt better, and then, just like that, I sang a few lyrics before they slipped from me. Deep inside me/ Deepest part/ Only good I’ve ever known/ Sharpest crack in my wasted heart.
