by Ava Dellaira
The back door opened, and in walked Sam Stone, in a blue diner uniform, tying an apron around his narrow hips. Angie felt like her breath had been vacuumed out of her chest. Aside from a few times she’d spotted Sam from a distance outside Mr. Stone’s apartment, she hadn’t seen him since they broke up almost a year ago.
“Angie?” her mom asked. “Are you okay? Where’d you go?”
“I’m fine.” She stared down at the table. Moments later, there was Sam’s hand—the hand that had held her own, the hand that used to sweep across her stomach—right in front of her, setting down a water glass.
“Oh, Sam!” Marilyn said. “Hi! I didn’t know you were working here.” Angie was grateful for her mom’s voice right then, cheerful and kind, because she couldn’t find her own.
“Hi, Marilyn. Hey, Angie.” Angie could see a spike of barely perceptible emotion in his face, like the tiny needle of a Richter scale, but his expression quickly settled into something neutral.
Marilyn continued, “How long have you been—”
“Since winter break,” Sam answered before she could finish the question. “Busing. I’ve been mostly working weekends.”
“I worked here for years,” Marilyn added.
Sam smiled at her mom. “I know, Angie told me. It’s a great place. Though I have to say, their grilled cheese isn’t as good as yours.” Angie remembered the afternoons they’d spent at her house, when Marilyn would make them lunch and Sam would make her laugh by eating three grilled cheeses at once.
Marilyn smiled back at him, but before Angie could think of anything to say, she heard his voice again. “Well, we’re getting busy. Dinner rush. Good to see you guys.”
“Bye,” Angie said, the single word to come out of her mouth.
As Sam walked off, Marilyn looked at her with sympathy, which only made Angie feel worse.
“Was that hard for y—” her mom began to ask, but Angie just shook her head and said, “I’m fine. Can we not talk about Sam right now?” The tiny interaction had been enough to tear something inside of her, and she felt herself splitting open.
When they finished eating, it was Manny himself who came to clear the plates, and then he sat down in the booth beside Marilyn, telling her about his idea to start a pop-up restaurant that would open in various locations around the state. He’d work with local farmers; his grandmother’s mole verde recipe would be their specialty.
Her mom was polite, kind even, but Angie could see she was holding the door shut. Each time Manny saw Marilyn, he pressed, just gently, to see if it would swing open, but it never did. Angie didn’t know why she’d made them come here tonight—or why, after all these years, she still insisted on making them visit him.
* * *
After their first not-a-date to the Town House, there had been a few more weeks of outings with Manny—a movie, the Tramway, bowling at Silva Lanes—and Angie watched her mom begin to open up, laughing, acting silly and giddy—a version of her that Angie had only ever seen when it was just the two of them at home. And then, Marilyn had invited him for dinner. Angie helped her mom grate the cheese for enchiladas, mash the guacamole, mix the batter for her strawberry shortcake in preparation.
He got there twenty minutes early, with a box of brand-new colored pencils for Angie, a bouquet of lilacs—Marilyn’s favorite—and a bottle of red wine. Aside from her old babysitter Gina or occasionally one of Angie’s school friends, they hardly ever had people over. As Marilyn showed Manny around, her body was tense, her voice suddenly formal. When he’d paused in front of the photograph of the ocean that hung in the hallway, her mom seemed eager to move on, tucking her hair the way she did when she was nervous. In the image, the sky was full of clouds with heavy gray bottoms. There was a kid’s swimsuit at the edge of the shore, about to be sucked up by the waves. A bird dove into the water, almost out of frame. The photo had always made Angie think of ghosts. She sometimes stood in front of it for forever, staring at the place where the water met the sky.
“Wow,” Manny said. “This is beautiful.”
“Thank you,” her mom replied.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I took it,” Marilyn said, but her voice sounded like something shutting down.
“I knew you were a lot of things, but I didn’t know you were a great artist too.”
“Well,” her mom said quickly, “not really. It was a lucky shot, anyway, and it was a really long time ago. I don’t take pictures anymore.”
“That’s a shame,” Manny said. He sounded like a doctor who was pressing gently on an old injury to test how deep it went.
“I just keep this one to remind me,” Marilyn said finally.
“Of what?”
She stared at the photograph as if she thought she could step into it. “All the drops that fill an ocean.”
* * *
While her mom went to finish dinner, Angie pulled Manny into her room, showing off her books, her stuffed animals, her set of paints, anxious to make things go right. They ended up on her floor in a stiff Chinese checkers competition until Marilyn called them to the table.
The food was meticulously arranged on the plates. Manny complimented the meal, asked for seconds, poured Marilyn more wine, told them funny stories. Her mom finally started to loosen up.
After dinner, Manny insisted on helping them clean, and when he finished drying the last dish, he pulled a Jerry Maguire DVD from his suit jacket, his eyebrows arched.
“I brought a movie—I know you like this one.”
Marilyn looked momentarily off balance.
“I mean, if you’re in the mood,” he said. “I can always leave it for you, pick it up next time.”
Marilyn glanced uncertainly at the clock. “Well, Angie and I usually read before bed…”
“That’s okay,” Angie said quickly, feigning a yawn. “We don’t have to read tonight, I’m tired anyway.”
Her mom paused a moment. “Alright, then,” she said, a small smile forming on her face. “Why not…”
So Angie got ready for bed and hugged Manny good night. Her mom came into her room, folding the covers over her. “I love you more than the whole universe,” she said.
“I love you more than infinity times infinity,” Angie replied—a bedtime exchange that had been part of their routine for as long as Angie could remember.
Her mom kissed her forehead, and then Angie asked, all at once, “Do you think Manny will be like my dad?”
“Oh, honey. I don’t know.”
Angie sensed her mom rolling backward down a hill, moving away from Angie, from Manny, from the night. Angie couldn’t catch her.
“Your dad was … Manny and I are … just friends. He’s a very nice man, but you’re my family.” Angie felt a sudden, crushing weight on her chest. She nodded and closed her eyes, pretending she’d drifted off to sleep.
But in fact, she stayed awake, listening carefully to the hushed voices coming from the living room, listening for the sound of the movie starting that never came. Instead there was the sound of her mom crying quietly—a noise she’d become attuned to—and eventually, the sound of the door opening and then closing.
In the weeks that followed, Angie asked her mom when they were going to hang out with Manny again, and she’d say vague things like “Not this weekend” or “He’s busy with work, baby.” In an attempt to change the subject, Marilyn would say, “Let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese’s! You and me.” Though her voice was full of forced cheer, the light that Manny turned on in her eyes had gone off. Angie felt if only her mom would let Manny come back, she’d go bright again. But finally, Angie agreed to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and lost herself in the Skee-Ball game and the quest for tickets, trying to forget Manny who knew how to salsa dance, Manny with his movie outfits and big smile.
Angie managed a wave at Sam as she and Marilyn said good night to Manny and walked out of the 66 Diner, to discover the sky lit up in classic New Mexico fashion—brilliant oranges blooming from lavender
blues, the Sandia Mountains glowing the watermelon pink of their namesake. Angie let her mom take her hand and squeeze it like she had when Angie was a child.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Marilyn said.
“Yeah.” Angie sensed her mom saw some deeper meaning in the spectacle of color, something secret that she wanted Angie to see too.
In the minutes it took them to drive back, the sunset slowly extinguished itself, leaving the sky in twilight. Angie bent herself away from the sadness in her stomach and into the safety of their home. Not everyone had what she did, she reminded herself—a loving mom, a house they’d lived in long enough that it had been imprinted with the shapes of her childhood.
As soon as they walked inside, Marilyn began lighting her candles. For as long as Angie could remember, their house had been full of them—the kind you’d see in Catholic churches, the kind you could buy at the 99-cent store. It used to be a regular weekly stop, after Marilyn picked up Angie from school. She’d get toilet paper and paper towels and bags of rice and oranges and cleaning products, and she’d let Angie pick out a treat—flip-flops or a pinwheel or a pack of colorful erasers. And then she’d load up the rest of the cart with votive candles.
The night is good, Marilyn had said to Angie, more than once. It’s a clear dark, a clean dark, but the moment before it’s arrived, when you sense yourself losing the light—that’s when Marilyn would replace the sun with tiny indoor flames.
She would leave them burning in their tall glass jars—it’s bad luck, she said, to blow them out—and since Angie was a little kid, she got used to living with the flickering lights and their ghostly shadows that would accompany her when she’d get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or when she used to come in late from Sam’s house, her mom already asleep. The scent of wax smelled like home.
This evening, while Marilyn lit the candles, Angie made popcorn, with butter and Parmesan cheese the way Marilyn had taught her, and they curled up on the couch together. Angie felt like something familiar and chose Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Halfway through the movie, Angie could hear Marilyn snoring softly. It used to be Angie who would fall asleep during their movie nights, and her mom would carry her to bed. But these days, more often than not, Marilyn was the one who dozed off before the credits rolled. With her head on the armrest of the couch, her eyes fluttering in sleep, she looked, as she did more and more to Angie recently, very young. As if she were a girl, rather than the mother who’d taken care of Angie since she was born, who’d fought to give Angie this very home. Angie pulled their favorite fuzzy pink blanket around her and tiptoed to her room.
She got in bed but felt wide awake. Her iPhone screen was the sole light in the dark room as she began fiddling around, and then, as she found herself scrolling through Sam’s Instagram—his only social media profile and thus her only tie to him. His last post, a week ago, was of an outdoor concert—the Madrid Blues Festival, full of bikers and hipsters alike. The image showed a picture of Sam’s dad holding up a plastic cup of beer. She scrolled through the rest of Sam’s photos—trains tagged with graffiti art, Latin American soccer stars, a still image from the movie Boyhood, and one from Sunset Boulevard, the neon sign for the El Don motel on Central where a cowboy wields a red lasso, his mom making dinner, an image grab of a song on Spotify: “Some Dreamers” by a group called Fly Boys, with the text “gets me every time.”
Angie hadn’t heard of the band before. Sam read all the music blogs, and though he also had a penchant for his dad’s ’60s folk, he was always introducing her to new stuff when they were together. She opened her browser to Google “Some Dreamers” and clicked on the link to the video.
The music was haunting—mostly instrumental, the lyrics sparse: An inch of moonlight, rattled green, quiet, quiet, the night is coming, dream you’re rising, this is your own ragged sky … In the video, there was a boy Angie’s own age. He was brown-skinned, with big, pretty eyes, eyes that looked sad. The camera followed him moving through a pool party—kids stuffed into a sun-blasted backyard, drinking from Solo cups and passing joints, wearing board shorts and bikinis, their bodies perfect in the way that all young bodies are perfect. The boy, our boy, was apart from the crowd. He climbed up to a tall diving board. He looked up and jumped, his arms spread, flying through air. Angie waited for the splash—but as the camera followed him down, there was no water; his body flattened against the concrete bottom of the pool. Angie gasped in horror. A line of blood spread from the back of his perfect head like an inkblot. The world lingered in a long stillness, the other kids now vanished. A lone helicopter circled overhead. Power lines crossed each other. Palm trees shuddered in the breeze.
And then, at once, the boy got up and began to dance. At first he danced as if invisible strings were pulling his limbs, lifting him, moving his body to the rhythm, and then, slowly, he began to break free of them, to move effortlessly, powerfully, joyfully.
Angie watched it three times, in a frozen trance. It was uncannily beautiful, and it felt true, in a way she didn’t have words for.
It wasn’t until she’d watched it for the fourth time that she read the text below. “A short film by director Justin Bell featuring music by Fly Boys.” Justin Bell. Justin Bell. Her dad’s brother’s name. That was the boy in the picture. Of course, it couldn’t have been him. Her mom said he died … and yet, Angie had a feeling, a feeling she couldn’t shake, that it was.
She Googled “Justin Bell, Some Dreamers video,” and found several links. The first article she opened, a blog post by a DJ for KCRW—a Los Angeles public radio station—referred to Justin Bell as an important up-and-coming LA-based music video director with “modest brilliance.” The video had won the audience choice award for best short film at the Los Angeles Film Festival. There were several other articles on music websites. But none of them came with a photo. One article noted that despite his growing relevance, even Google finds Justin Bell elusive. Another article noted that personal questions were returned unanswered. But that same article did note his age—twenty-nine. He’d looked about eleven or twelve in the pictures, so that would be right for her dad’s brother.
She watched the “Some Dreamers” video again, and it felt clear. The name was not a coincidence; it couldn’t be. Justin Bell who lived in LA and had made the music video with its images that cut right to Angie’s center, he was the Justin from the pictures, the round-faced boy on the steps with the melting popsicle. He wasn’t dead like her mother said. He was her father’s brother. Her uncle. He was alive.
So if he wasn’t dead like her mom said, Angie thought, her heart suddenly trying to leap from her chest, what if her dad wasn’t either?
Angie did what she always did when there was too much feeling, when she needed to lose herself. She put on her running shoes and slipped out her window, taking off into the night. She hardly saw the houses in the neighborhood where she’d always lived flying by her, hardly saw the moon or the trees or the windows where lights flicked off, hardly felt the collected heat of the sun rising from the blacktop, hardly heard the crickets with their thrumming songs. Instead, she heard the lyrics of “Some Dreamers,” the chords of the song already etched into her. She saw the video bright in her mind. Her mom lied to her, she thought, and this fact was as stunning as the hope of finding Justin, as the chance her dad was alive. She pushed past the burn in her lungs and her limbs, past the pain, past the limits of her body, until she knew what she had to do.
Angie was high from exertion, sweaty and still breathless, when she stepped onto the porch of apartment 3D with the cracked white paint. She saw the lights were on inside and rang the bell.
Sam opened the door in sweatpants and a hoodie. His eyes looked bloodshot. A moment passed before he seemed to register her on his doorstep.
“Angie?”
“Hi.” She landed halfway back in the world again, realizing the strangeness of her showing up at his house like this, a year after they’d broken up.
“I’m—I—Sorry. To just be here. I need to talk to you. Can I—come in?”
“Okay,” Sam said, his body guarded as he stepped aside to let her pass.
The apartment was almost exactly as it had lived in her memory, shaped like a hallway, long and narrow, with strings of paper lantern lights. A giant arched mirror leaned precariously near the door, reflecting the prints hung on the walls—Miró, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp.
It smelled like weed. It always had, vaguely, because Sam’s dad smoked, with his door closed and bedroom window open, imagining he got away with it. She glanced at the joint in an espresso mug being used as an ashtray, and guessed Sam had taken up his father’s habit, and now neither of them needed to hide it.
Sam settled onto the couch and pulled the blue Mexican throw blanket against him—the same blanket that he and Angie used to lie under together. He picked up a half-finished beer and began peeling at its label.
“Is your dad home?” Angie asked.
“On a date.”
She wasn’t surprised; Mr. Stone had often been on dates, which meant she and Sam had had the house to themselves many nights.
“What’s up?” Sam asked, a sharpness in his voice.
Angie moved toward him and took a seat at the very edge of the couch. She suddenly felt as if she were walking on a frozen pond, unsure how well the ice would hold, unsure if she cared.
“Are you—going to see your cousin in LA this summer?”
“Yeah. Next week. Why?”
“I know that this is a little weird, but I have to ask you for a really big favor. I mean, you’re the only one I can ask, but—I—can I come with you? You’re driving, right?”
Sam squinted at her. He sipped his beer. “We haven’t talked in a year and you show up at my house at midnight asking me to drive you to LA?”
Angie took a deep breath. She wanted to tell Sam everything, wanted to make him understand, but the losses began to fall into each other—Sam, Manny, her mother’s talent for photography, the shape of childhood—leaving Angie with a gaping hole. She turned toward the missing space left by her father, whose absence, at least, had a form.
