forty-four
I’D LEFT THE DOOR UNLOCKED when I went out and it’s still open when I get back. In fact, Luna hasn’t moved at all. She’s not asleep, just lying with her head on the armrest again, staring at the ceiling.
I shut the door with my hip and walk over to the couch, then dump the bag out on the table. Luna ignores the tests and picks up the strawberry lip gloss first. She uses her silver-painted fingernail to peel the plastic away from the cardboard, and then she breaks the seal on the tube.
I flop down on the couch.
“You can have that,” I say, “but the candy’s mine. Except the M&M’s. Those are yours. But I think you should remember that the lip products and the candy are not the important purchases here.”
She sits back down on the couch and opens the lip gloss anyway, running the tube over her lips. Then she turns and tips backward again, lying flat. I look around, but there’s no sign of James in the apartment.
“I’ll take them in a minute,” Luna says.
“I think you should take them now.”
She closes her eyes. “Just let me lie here a second.”
“You have been lying there for hours.” I take a breath. “I got three of them,” I say, leaning forward to line them up on the table. My mother’s robot flower looks down on them. “All different brands. I figured that way we’d make sure the results were accurate.” Since this is apparently a science experiment we’re running here.
Luna smiles in a lopsided way, but she gets up. She takes the three boxes, stacked one on top of the other, and goes into the bathroom. When she closes the door I can hear the rustling of cellophane and the tearing of cardboard. I’m listening so hard I swear I can hear her unfold the directions and lay them on the sink. Then her voice, echoing off the ceramic tiles.
“Oh, give me a home,” she starts to sing, “where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play.”
For a split second, I smile without meaning to, as if this is any old day and Luna is the silly version of herself that I like best. But then I feel anger bubble up like spilled soda, and my lungs tighten so much it’s hard to breathe.
“Enough with the songs,” I say.
“I don’t want you to hear me pee,” she says, her voice coming through the door muffled.
“That’s good,” I say, “because I don’t want to hear you pee either.”
I free my own lip gloss from its packaging and run the tube over my lips. It’s the exact taste of being ten years old, and for a split second, this almost makes me cry.
Luna opens the door, and I try to read her face before she says anything. She looks flushed, not pale, and her eyes are wide.
“The first one is negative,” she says. “Should I take the others?”
I don’t have to think about it. I bought them, didn’t I?
“Yes,” I say.
A few minutes later she comes back with all three sticks. She fans them out between her fingers, holding them up high, and I can see that each has a single pink line.
“All negative,” she says, and the relief makes the anaconda-tight feeling around my heart go away. But then in its place is just exhaustion, and I sink down on the couch.
“I don’t need the visual aids,” I say. “Keep the pee sticks in the bathroom, please.”
“Or I could frame them,” she says. She’s flushed and smiling but her eyes are still sad, shiny like my mother’s when she knows something is shitty but she doesn’t want to admit it. She takes the sticks and the boxes and puts them back into the Duane Reade bag. Then she goes into the kitchen and throws it into the garbage under the sink, pushing it down deep in the can. She washes her hands and then comes back into the living room.
“Do you want me to pick up some food?” I ask. “I could go to the Thai place again. Red curry and spring rolls, maybe. Coconut soup?” I just got back a half hour ago and I already feel claustrophobic, though I’d like to chalk it up to a New York/small apartment thing. “Or Indian. Garlic naan and malai kofta.”
“I’m not hungry,” Luna says. She leans back to lie down on the couch again. She puts her bare feet high up on the back of the couch and holds the package of M&M’s by its edge, crinkling the paper package.
“There was this one time,” she says, “in June, outside Madison. Somewhere in Wisconsin, anyway. It was late and we couldn’t find the motel, so we decided just to sleep in the van. But I couldn’t fall asleep.” She shakes her head. “It was too stuffy; I felt like I couldn’t breathe. So I went outside. I climbed out the window without opening the door so I wouldn’t wake anyone, and I lay down right there in the grass by the edge of the parking lot.” She stops, remembering. “I couldn’t sleep out there either but at least I could breathe. I counted the stars for two hours. James freaked when he woke up and I wasn’t in the passenger seat.” I can hear her smiling.
“That’s what I felt like, before,” she says. “And now I feel like I can see the stars.”
Outside on the street, a car honks three times, sharp and quick. I hear its door slam, and the engine rev as whoever it is drives away.
“How long have you known?” I say. “I mean, how long have you been worrying?”
“Two weeks.” Luna pushes her hair away from her face. “Maybe. My periods have never really been regular, but I forgot to take my pill a couple of times.” She looks at me. “I know it was stupid. Please don’t ever be that stupid.”
I think about my going-nowhere almost-relationship with Ben, or the fact that Archer walked out of the practice space hours ago and still hasn’t called.
“I’m not really there yet,” I say.
“That’s fine,” she says. “That’s good.” She tears open the package and pours a few M&M’s into her palm. “I wouldn’t have had it,” she says without looking at me. I know she means the baby.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m not Mom,” she says, for the second time this week. This time she sounds less sure, her voice wavering and small.
I nod, but she still isn’t looking at me anyway.
“I wonder what it was like for her,” I say.
“What?”
“When Mom found out she was pregnant with you. I mean, it must have been just after they’d done the cover of SPIN, Sea of Tranquility was selling so well, and then . . .” I trail off.
Luna sits up. “And then she took a pregnancy test in a hotel room in Seattle and I entered stage left. Or womb left, I guess.” She flutters her fingers in the air. “Vagina left.”
“I get it,” I say, holding up a stop-sign hand. “You were born. But how do you know where she was when she found out?”
Luna pulls her feet under her. “She told me once. She played the show that night anyway, even though she was throwing up in the back ten minutes before they went onstage.” She makes a face. “She told me she was happy when she found out. But I don’t know if I believe her. How could she have been?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She gave everything up so easily. I don’t think Mom ever really cared if she was famous or not. Maybe she was ready to let it go.”
Luna sits still, considering this. “Maybe,” she says.
“Anyway, I was the biggest mistake, right?”
“What?” Luna turns her head and looks at me, the first time she has looked directly at me since she sat down.
“That’s what you told me when I was a kid. You said you were an accident, but I was a mistake.”
Luna’s eyes widen. “What? Shit, Fee, I’m sorry about that.” She sighs. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t even remember saying it.”
“It’s okay,” I say, even though maybe it isn’t.
“But you know, Phoebe, I thought if anyone was going to understand about Dad,” Luna says, “it would be you.” She looks at me, narrowing her eyes. “You know how it feels.”
“I do understand,” I say. “But it doesn’t mean that I’m not curious about him.” I bend down to open my purse. The magazine is still in the
inside pocket, waiting. It feels like the right time to show her. I hold it out in my hand.
“Look.”
She does. She looks. She holds the magazine in both hands and studies it as if the headlines were written in some other language, one she knew a long time ago but has forgotten in the time since.
“I’ve never seen this,” she says. “Not in real life, anyway. Where did you get it?”
“On eBay,” I say. “I know it’s dumb. I just thought if I could hold it, it would help me figure everything out. But it didn’t really help anything.” I place my fingers flat on each of my cheeks. They feel hot.
Luna touches the First Girl on the Moon headline with her pointer finger. “It helps me,” she says.
“How?”
“I don’t know. It’s just comforting.” With her left hand, she starts to smooth the creases in the cover, the same way I always do. “Seeing them like that. It makes me think everything will be okay.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Things weren’t okay for them.”
She lifts it closer and squints at the photograph of our parents. “Well,” she says, “they didn’t stay together, but we’re here, and we’re okay. Right?”
“Sure,” I say. I almost mean it.
She looks up at me then, her brow furrowed. “You couldn’t have just told me that you went to see him?” She doesn’t sound accusing, exactly, just curious, and for once, I don’t feel as if I have to defend myself. I just try to explain.
“I thought about it. But I didn’t think you wanted to know,” I say. “And anyway, it wasn’t like it was some big deal. I was curious, that was all.”
“You talked to him?” Luna asks.
“A little. Mostly he just showed Archer around. He was recording this girl with pink streaks in her hair. She was nice, though.”
“How old was she?”
“Older than you. Twenty-eight, maybe? Her name was Prue, I think.” I close my eyes for a second and think of the smell of my father’s studio, records and amps and the rubbery, burnt scent of cables and cords. “Anyway, you never told me before this week that he came to your show.”
“I know,” Luna says, her voice soft. “I’m sorry.”
“You said you hadn’t seen him since you came to New York.”
Luna shakes her head. “I said I hadn’t talked to him. I didn’t. After our set, I stayed in the back until he left.” She opens the magazine and starts paging through. “Prue played that show with us.”
“Page seventy-seven,” I say, and it reminds me of being on the airplane days ago, pretending to Jessica that I was someone I’m not. But this is who I am: the daughter of two people who could make a band work for a while, but couldn’t make their family work for more than a few years. I am secretive. I am devoted. I am focused and confused. I am lost and found and a little bit spiteful. I am a lot . . . a lot patient. I’m figuring it out, what I am. And that’s enough for now.
“Prue is nice enough,” Luna says. “Though she came up to me after he left and told me how great it must be to have a dad like him.” She scoffs. “This was after she talked to him for fifteen minutes, maybe. I guess he told her he liked her set. I thought maybe he was just hitting on her, but I guess he was serious, if they’ve been working together.” Luna stops, and I wonder if she’s thinking about what it would be like to work with my father on the Moons’ next record. I wonder if she’s even considering it.
Luna slides down to lie on the couch again. “What was his show like?” she asks.
“It was nice, I guess. Packed. It was strange seeing him play for all these people who obviously adore him.” I can feel my lips begin to tremble, and I press them together. “He’s my father and I don’t even know him.”
“But he wants to know you.”
“I think so.” I shrug. “You too.”
“I don’t want to,” she says, and I don’t say anything. We sit there, not talking, until a few minutes later, when a motorcycle roars down the street so fast the windows rattle. In the quiet space left after the sound of it fades away, I take a breath. Just then, I remember what James said earlier. It floats up like a bubble in my memory.
“What did James mean, Luna?” I ask. “When he said you should tell the truth?”
“I have no idea.” She brings one hand up to cover her eyes and rubs her temples with her fingers and thumb. “I don’t have any idea at all.”
I sit there and look at the record sitting still on the turntable, and think about what to say next. But then Luna’s breathing becomes softer, as regular as the recording of ocean waves my mother uses sometimes, and I know she’s asleep. And since she’s sleeping where I’m supposed to sleep, since I’m tired but jittery, I decide to leave.
forty-five
MY FATHER CAME TO SCHOOL with me once. I was in third grade and it was show-and-tell, which, when I was eight, sometimes involved bringing a person, not just a seashell from a beach vacation or a favorite stuffed rabbit. One of my classmates had brought his uncle who was a policeman and he passed his badge around the room so we could all hold the heavy piece of metal in our hands. That was the moment I decided I wanted to bring my father, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because he was around so rarely it seemed like something special, something worthy of show-and-tell. I didn’t understand that for most of the other kids, having a father wasn’t a big deal.
He followed me into the classroom and then sat down in my teacher’s chair. He played a song on his guitar, the title track from Slight Chance, I think, and the sound of his chords was both familiar and strange there in the room with our desks and lunch bags and boxes of crayons. I can still see it in my mind, the letters of the alphabet strung on a garland over his head, the green chalkboard behind him smudgy with dust. Teachers I didn’t even know clustered in the doorway and watched him play, nodding along, and Abby, who I couldn’t stand, mouthed the words along with him. Later Abby told me that her mother was a big fan of my father, as if that made Abby special, not me.
By the time he was finished with his third and last song, I knew that I had done the wrong thing, because now I had to share my father, who I hardly ever saw. Here in the classroom, he didn’t belong only to me.
And really, I guess, he never did.
The street is quiet when I get outside of Luna’s building, the last bit of silvery light fading from the sky. I head up to Court Street, past the Barnes & Noble on the corner, still open, cross the street and keep going. Farther down Court, the Indian place where Luna and I ate on my first night is lit up and golden, the saffron-yellow silk curtains in the window shining like fire. I think about going in for naan bread and cucumber raita, maybe some chai tea in their small, cream-colored cups. I haven’t eaten since lunch, unless you count that candy bar. But I don’t head that way. I keep walking.
I haven’t yet used the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, but thanks to the map on my phone (and the fact that it’s technically on the same street where Luna lives, if much farther down), I’m reasonably certain I’ll be okay. I know where I’m going now, and I like it, that I’m starting to own the city, or at least some small part of it. Half my family lives here, and I was born here, so I guess it belongs to me already. Or maybe I belong to it. Without even trying I’m walking in that New York way, like I know where I’m going and I’m confident that my feet and the sidewalks (plus the subway, I guess) will take me there.
In the train station, my footsteps echo against the tiled walls. It’s so bright down here it feels like daytime again. Water drips from the ceiling onto the tracks, pooling in slick puddles laced with garbage. It isn’t pretty, except where it is: the bright squeal of the train as it slides to a stop, the decades-old letters spelling out Hoyt-Schermerhorn.
I have to take the G train to get to my father’s apartment, and when it arrives at the Broadway station, I get out. It’s a different Brooklyn up on the street, grittier and uglier, with fewer trees and no brownstones as far as I can see. Graffiti tags in bubbly letters cove
r the roll-down grates of a dry cleaner and a falafel place, and I see a few vaguely hipsterish guys maybe five years older than me coming out of a grocery on the corner. It seems like they’ve been sent by central casting, or by Luna, in order to prove her thesis about Williamsburg and my dad.
I memorized the number on the train, but I still take the paper out of my pocket. My father’s handwriting is slanted to the right as if it were in a hurry, one half of his letters trying to get somewhere before the other half.
When I find it, three blocks away, it’s a two-story, sand-colored building with black painted doors, two at a time, and big windows looking out onto the street. The door to his apartment opens out on the street, it seems, because there is only one buzzer and only one name. K. Ferris, it says, in the same green label-maker tape I’ve seen before.
I stand on the doorstep for a moment, like I did at my father’s studio with Luna last year, and again with Archer just a few days ago. But this time, when I get the courage to let my finger press the bell, it doesn’t surprise me one bit.
forty-six
MEG
APRIL 1993
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT it was the biggest table I’d ever seen, and my second was that I wanted to tap-dance on it. Kit and I had taken lessons when we were kids, and though I hadn’t really thought about tapping in years, something about that long, smooth expanse of wood made me want to do it.
We were here in the Capitol Records offices to sign our contract, the boys dressed in suits and me in a knockoff Chanel jacket and skirt. Kit had found them in a vintage shop in the East Village and insisted I wear them today. The seam was ripped under one arm, but as long as I didn’t take the jacket off, no one could tell. And I couldn’t imagine why I’d have to take the jacket off. Unless I got really enthusiastic with the tap dancing, or the air-conditioning broke. The windows were all sealed up there.
Our manager, Leif, was here, his blond hair more carefully messed than normal. We were all sitting silently, looking at each other. There was no clock in here: it was a Land Without Time.
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