The door opened then and there was Rick, the exec we’d been dealing with since the A&R guy handed us over. Today, he had a Cheshire cat smile. The boys stood up, so I did too. It felt a little awkward.
“Are you guys ready to become part of the Capitol family?” he asked. A secretary followed him into the room with a stack of papers.
“Yes, sir,” said Kieran.
“Sure,” I said.
“She’s our star,” Leif said. He tried to put his arm around my shoulder, but I dipped away before he could. “She’s got the voice, the brains, and the look.”
Dan started to sing Roxette’s “She’s Got the Look,” but quietly enough that Rick didn’t seem to notice. Leif didn’t tell him to stop, but you could tell that was what he was thinking.
The week before, we’d all gone out to see Bikini Kill at Wetlands and Leif had come along, even though it was decidedly not his scene.
He’d put his hand on my lower back during “Rebel Girl” and then slid it even lower.
“You’re special,” he said, his lips next to my ear. His voice slurred and softened until I could pretend I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I looked at Kathleen Hanna onstage and thought about how she’d probably kick Leif in the balls and be done with it. Something was stopping me from doing that, but Kathleen saved me anyway.
“Girls to the front!” she yelled from the stage. I looked at Leif and shrugged, then left all four of the guys to push my way closer to her.
I didn’t tell Kieran about it. It was true that Kit hadn’t liked Leif from the beginning. She called him Maple Leaf or Blade, as in Blade of Grass, and sometimes Pine Needle. She thought he was an ass, and she was probably right. But he was just one in a series of skeezy guys I’d had to deal with: bouncers, bookers, bartenders, soundmen, you-name-the-instrument players. At least this skeezy guy was going to make us some money.
Now Rick called Carter’s name.
“You’re going to need a nicer suit,” Rick said, and Carter’s face fell. He looked down at his own jacket. Rick burst into laughter, clapping his hand to Carter’s shoulder.
“I’m just messing with you,” he said. “Though, honestly, I can give you the name of my tailor. He does great work.” His face turned serious. “I’ll have my secretary give you his card.” He said this though the secretary was right there in the room with us, and he could have easily used her name. Unless he was talking about some other secretary. Maybe he had two.
I wondered then if I’d get a secretary.
“All right,” Rick said. “Let’s do this.” He motioned for us to sit down and we did.
Leif put the contract on the table in front of me.
“Let’s have Meg sign first,” he said, like he was giving me a gift. He put a pen down next to the contract. I expected it to be special, somehow, but it was just a normal plastic Bic.
Across the table, Kieran was smiling at me, his dimple showing. I smiled back at him, that boy who’d started this whole thing in the first place. Who’d found me, and helped me make the band.
I picked up the pen.
forty-seven
MY FATHER SMILES WHEN HE sees me, when he pulls the door wide enough to see.
“We meet again,” he says. He’s standing in a small hallway and I’m still on the front stoop. My hand is on the railing, the black metal cool under my hand. I consider pivoting neatly around and leaping off the porch. But instead I make myself smile.
“Sorry,” I say. “I know I should have called.”
“It’s fine.” He takes a step back and motions me in. “That’s why I gave you the address. I hoped you’d stop by.”
I peek over his shoulder, looking for what, I don’t know. Prue, that pretty singer with the pink streaks in her hair? A cat, maybe, curled up on the edge of his couch? But the apartment is empty, as far as I can tell. It’s still and quiet, no music playing on the stereo.
Neither of us knows what to do, so we just stand for a moment in the entryway under a lamp made of amber glass. I wish I had a coat to give him, or maybe a scarf, so he could busy himself hanging it up. It would be weird to hand him my purse, I think.
“Come on in,” he says finally, and gestures toward the living room.
I follow him, trying to notice everything. It’s different today, in his apartment, without the stands full of guitars and the soundboards of the studio. He’s not wearing headphones and there’s not as much to look at. There are a few abstract paintings on the walls of the living room, blurry with rain-soaked, cool shades of blue. There’s only one honey-colored acoustic guitar lying flat across a low glass coffee table, as if he had been playing to his empty apartment when I rang the bell. I hadn’t heard anything out on the street.
“So this is your natural habitat,” I say. I seem to have lost my ability to carry on a conversation like a normal person. But it’s true that I can’t pretend I’m just watching a guy work, like I did in the studio. This is more than that.
“The studio’s probably more natural for me,” he says. “I’m still not sure about this place.”
“I like it,” I say, and I do. The windows are huge and have the vaguely watery look of old glass. I can see the streetlights distort prettily through the panes. Leaded glass windows in geometric shapes splinter the light in jagged patterns on the ceiling, and the walls are the perfect shade of pale gray.
“I’m glad,” he says.
We stand there for another moment, and I’m almost glad to see that my father is as awkward as I am. He seems to have forgotten that it’s customary to ask visitors to sit down. So I walk over to the farthest wall, where he has hung a Shelter tour poster I’ve never seen, framed in thick black wood. The letters are deep blue screen printed on a pearl-gray background, and though the show was played on May twenty-ninth in Austin, there’s no year. I can’t get a sense of what they would have been like just then. Was it at the beginning, when they still thought everything was going to turn out all right for them?
My father supplies the answer without my having to ask.
“That was our first tour,” he says. “Right before Houses came out.”
I look at the letters, the rough, spindly sketch of a boxlike house at the bottom, its yellow windows burning with light. I don’t know what else to say other than “Oh,” so I keep that brilliance to myself. I wait for him to keep talking, to tell me something else.
He stands next to me.
“That was my favorite tour, I think.” I’m surprised to hear him say this. He takes a breath, lets it out slowly. His voice sounds almost shy. “Looking back, anyway. It was easier before everything got started. No one knew us, and no one expected us to know what we were doing.”
His phone rings then from his pocket, a long bell like an old-fashioned rotary phone, and he takes it out to look at the screen.
“Do you mind if I take this, Phoebe?” he asks. “I’m recording this band tomorrow, and they’re really particular about their setup.”
“Go ahead,” I say. Honestly, I’m glad he’s walking away for a minute. I want to keep looking around without feeling as if I’m getting a guided tour of the Museum of Kieran Ferris.
Across the room is a wide metal bookshelf lined with books. It’s possible that some of these were my mother’s, if their books got mixed up when they lived together. I want to find something of hers in this apartment, or something that shows he thinks about Luna and me. I want proof that he didn’t forget about all of us until I showed up on his doorstep a few days ago.
On the edge of the top shelf is a stark white hardcover copy of David Byrne’s How Music Works. I think of Archer, and all the doorsteps I’ve stood on lately.
I can hear my father talking on the phone, not what he’s saying, really, just the cadence of his words, his calm tones. I want him to talk to me like this. There’s a tight feeling in my chest again, and I’m not sure if it’s my lungs or my heart or just my ribs squeezing everything somehow. I take a deep breath and it catches when I
let it out.
There are a couple of rocks on the middle shelf—little more than pebbles, really—gray and worn smooth by a lake or a river. I touch one of them, hold it between my finger and my thumb, and then slip it into my pocket.
As soon as I do it I feel better, fastened more strongly to the floor, the earth. I feel as if this was the right thing to do, to come here.
My father walks back into the room.
“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “Bassists can be so neurotic about their sound. I’m sure you know that.”
I don’t say anything and then he says, “Archer. Your friend. He plays bass, right?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s not really like that.” I clasp my necklace between my fingers. “At least I don’t think so.”
My father shakes his head. “They’re all like that,” he says, smiling.
I turn back toward the bookshelf. Maybe he’s right, and maybe I’ll never know either way.
“Look at this,” my father says. Around the corner in the dining room is a huge record cabinet with four tiers and sliding doors on each made of gray glass. I walk closer and look at some of the titles through the glass. He has a section of Dylan albums and a few sections of sixties soul. He has Nirvana and Weezer and Belly and the Replacements.
“I made it,” he says, “and now I might have to stay here forever, because I don’t think it’ll fit out the door.” He rubs a smudge on one of the glass doors with his thumb. “Or I guess if the new owner didn’t want it, I’d have to—saw it up or something.” He’s almost talking to himself now.
“I’m sure the new owner would want it,” I say.
“You’d be surprised. Most people don’t have so many records.”
“I know,” I say, even though the people in my life, they do. My mother, my sister, James, and Archer, all of them weighted down with vinyl. “So you’ll just have to stay here, then.” I like that idea, somehow, that he’ll stay in this place I know, where I can picture him and his guitar and record cabinet. Even if I don’t talk to him for another three years, or longer.
He nods, smiling. “I think I will.” He leans against the doorway. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Okay,” I say. A flicker of panic crosses his face. So I say, “Do you have anything?”
He glances toward the kitchen. “Probably not.”
I’m a little reluctant to leave since I’m just starting to feel comfortable, but my stomach growls at the thought of food.
“We could go out,” I say.
“Sure,” he says, relieved. “What do you feel like eating?”
A silly thought crosses my mind: this is the father I’ve always wanted. The kind who would ask what I wanted to eat and then just make it happen. So I think about it.
“Pancakes,” I say.
He smiles. “Let’s do it,” he says.
Walking out through the same narrow hallway, my eyes rest on the wooden bookshelf there, which looks like it came from an old high school library, or that it spent decades pushed against the back wall of a classroom before ending up in my father’s living room. Tucked in the corner of the third shelf from the top is a small metal sculpture, a twisting figure made of thick silver wire. It looks like a bird, wings unfolded and neck stretched out. I stop and touch it, and then I turn around to him.
“Did Mom make this?”
He nods, looking at it. “A long time ago. She used to make them in the van sometimes when we were touring. Birds and trees. She’d bring spools of wire and pliers and she’d make one every hour on the long trips.” I look at his face to watch him remember, and he keeps looking at the sculpture and not at me. “She gave them all away,” he says. He picks the bird up and sets it in the palm of his other hand, looking at it for a minute. Then he puts it back. “It’s a little bent, I think,” he says. “I’ve moved with it a couple of times. It always finds its way back on the shelf.” He looks at me. “Are you going to tell her I still have it?”
I tilt my head a little. “Do you want me to?”
“Let me get back to you on that,” he says.
As we walk out the front door, I put my hand in my pocket and touch the stone I stole from my father’s other bookshelf. It’s smooth and cool, and I know then that I’ll put it in my bag later, with the copy of SPIN and the copy of Catcher and my poetry book. I’ll feel its weight in there, just like my father must feel the weight of my mother’s bird every time he moves to a different apartment, or maybe even every time he walks by in the hallway and it catches the lamplight on its outstretched wings. Sometimes the heaviest things are the ones that don’t weigh much at all.
forty-eight
DOWN THE STREET FROM MY father’s building is a diner with wide glass windows and a pink neon sign. It’s mostly empty when we get there, so we sit in a black vinyl booth big enough for six people, pressed up against the windows facing the street. Past the cars parked by the curb I can see the signs for the G train where I got off a while ago, and a Laundromat filled with gleaming white washing machines.
My father leans back in his seat and opens the menu. The waitress—late twenties, blond hair, and a tiny, sparkly nose ring—smiles like she knows him. She lights a tiny candle in a jam jar and sets in the middle of the table. It flickers, then settles and burns strongly.
“I’ll be back when you’re ready,” the waitress says. Her smile is a little wide, but sincere, and I like her for it.
“I know what I want,” I say, without opening the menu. “Blueberry pancakes.”
“And you?” She looks at my father.
He closes his. “Eggs, home fries, and toast, please.”
“Sounds good. Drinks?”
I consider ordering a beer just to see what my father will do, but I’m not brave enough.
“Water’s fine,” I say. My father nods, and the waitress heads back toward the kitchen.
I try to look across the street so I don’t have to look at my father, but since it’s getting dark out, I mostly just see our own reflections. Past that, I can make out a woman with blond braids and a black dress, carrying two pillowcases stuffed with clothes and struggling to open the door to the Laundromat. An older guy walking a small brown mutt hurries to help her. I’m planning to keep watching the scene, or what I can see of it, anyway, but my father decides to speak.
“Is everything okay with Luna?” he asks.
“It’s fine.” I look at him, and then at the saltshaker. “She was tired tonight, and I wasn’t.”
He runs his hand along the edge of the table. “But she doesn’t know you’re here.” I can tell that he’s still looking at me, so I lift my eyes again. I don’t see any reason to lie about this.
“No,” I say. “She’s mad that I came to see you last time.” I smile. “So I did the logical thing and came again.”
He smiles too, and turns his head to look toward the restaurant’s counter. The waitress is coming with our waters. For just a moment, in profile like that, he looks like the tiny photo on the back of Promise, only bigger.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m glad you did.”
My mother hates that phrase, for what it’s worth. “So what you’re telling me,” she always says, “is that you’re already figuring what you have to say isn’t worth much. Then just don’t say it!”
She’s probably right, but I’m willing to let him off the hook tonight. Plus, it is worth something, him telling me that he’s glad I came. I take the copy of SPIN out of my bag and push it across the table to him.
“Wow,” he says, reaching out. “I haven’t seen this in a long time.” He angles it up toward him, and I can’t see the cover for a second, and then he sets it back down. “Look how pretty your mom was.” He looks up at me. “You look so much like her.”
“Me?” I touch my face then, without meaning to, like Jessica on the plane, touching her face because she thought it had changed somehow. “I think it’s Luna who does,” I say.
He nods. “Oh, she does too,
but more than anything Luna sounds like her.”
I pick up a packet of sugar and crinkle it between my fingers. What I really want to do is rip it open and pour it on the table, then draw patterns in the crystals. I don’t know why.
“Mom says Luna’s better,” I say.
He thinks about it for a moment, tilting his head. “Maybe. But sometimes I think there’s no one better than your mom.” He glances toward the window and in the reflection, it looks as if he’s checking his hair. “If she put out an album now, people would go nuts for it.”
I laugh, or maybe it’s more of a scoff. A scoff-laugh.
“She wouldn’t,” I say. “She doesn’t sing much anymore.”
“I can’t imagine that,” he says. He’s smiling, and I can see in his cheek the dimple that mirrors mine. “Or maybe it’s that I don’t believe it. I bet she sings when no one else is around.”
“Our house isn’t that big,” I say. He shrugs, and I don’t know if he means that he doesn’t think that matters or that he doesn’t really remember how big our house is.
The waitress comes back then, and sets my father’s eggs and toast in front of him, then my pancakes in front of me. Steam rises from the food, and suddenly I’m so hungry I feel weak. I take a bite.
My father picks up his fork, but he doesn’t start to eat.
“I heard her voice before I ever met her, you know,” he says.
I’m chewing, and the pancakes are heaven. “Really?” I say, my mouth still full.
“She was in another band. Cassiopeia. Did you know that?”
I shake my head. So not only does my mother refuse to talk about Shelter, it seems that there are entire other bands—maybe whole other constellations of bands, from the sound of it—that she’s also hid from us.
“With Carter and Dan,” he says. “Just the three of them.” He picks up a piece of toast and puts some scrambled egg on it, but he doesn’t take a bite. He just holds it. “I walked into a bar in Buffalo and I heard this voice that was like water. It filled everything. I wanted to listen to it forever.” He shifts his eyes away from mine while he says this, and for some reason, I feel as if I shouldn’t be looking at his face right now. It looks too open, too honest, and I look away too, toward the candle’s flame burning steady and gold. “I asked everyone there if they knew who she was.”
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