Under the Dusty Moon

by Suzanne Sutherland

  “Jesus, Mom!” I tried to put my knife down, but accidentally threw it at my plate from the shock.

  “And Europe.”

  “Whoa, that’s … those’re …” I fumbled with my cutlery, moving the knife off my plate, embarrassed at the noise I’d made. I lowered my voice, “That’s huge.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. That’s like Dusty Moon big. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She finally raised her head to look me in the eyes again.

  “So how long’re you gonna be gone for?” I asked.

  “Sounds like it’ll be two and a half weeks in Japan.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “And Europe?”

  “Six weeks.”

  It hit me like a punch in the gut. Eight and a half weeks without Mom. Eight and a half weeks with Gran. But I could see how guilty Mom felt about the whole thing already, so I played nice.

  “Cool. Wow. That’s, uh, that’s a long time.”

  “I know, sweets, I’m sorry.”

  “So when is this all happening?”

  “Japan in August.”

  “That’s so soon! How can you even get ready in time?”

  “I know, right? But they had some band cancel on them or something, apparently. There are a few folks touring together and I guess they had a spot to fill. I knew there was a chance it might come through, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. So now we’ve got three weeks to get ready!”

  “Whoa. That’s … you knew about this?”

  “I mean, yeah,” she said, “I knew the tour was happening, I just didn’t think I’d get the spot. So I didn’t want to get your hopes up. Or worry you. You know.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess that makes sense. But what about Europe?”

  “Europe’s news to me,” she said, “but I’ve been wanting to get back there to play for a while now. I’ll be gone September and October.”

  “Wow. Oh. Okay.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “it’s pretty wild stuff.”

  “But wait,” I said, “when do you leave for Japan? When in August?”

  “I’m not sure yet. We still have to firm up the dates.”

  “But it might be …?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. “It might be over our birthdays.”

  Her hand was back over mine, but I shook it off.

  “Oh?” I said. “Okay. Whatever. It’s fine.”

  It only adds to the joke that Mom thinks of us as twins because our birthdays are so close together. I’m August fourteenth and she’s August seventh. We’re Leos, and we always celebrate our birthdays together. The parties are ridiculous, and they’ve gotten even rowdier as I’ve gotten old enough to enjoy them. Mom books a bar that one of her friends owns and it feels like everyone she’s ever met comes out to wish her a happy birthday. And when they find out it’s my birthday too, they go nuts. We wind up dancing ’til four in the morning and we’re all just trying to hold each other up. It’s amazing. Sticky and sweaty and perfect.

  But Mom’ll be in Japan this year, without me.

  And I knew it would happen eventually, I guess, that we’d miss a year.

  That our birthdays aren’t actually worldwide holidays, even if it feels like they should be.

  I knew it wasn’t always going to stay the same.

  But still.

  Three

  So part of the reason why Mom’s music is so popular is that people really used to love her old band. Like, obsessively.

  People will just come up to us while we’re out to talk to her. They want to shake her hand or high-five her, or ask her a million questions about a band that broke up more than ten years ago. Twelve, actually.

  It happens all the time. A couple of weeks ago this young guy came up to Mom and me on the street. We were hauling flimsy plastic bags stuffed with actual groceries from an actual grocery store for once. Mom was even wearing a dress, though it didn’t exactly fit her right, it was too loose in the chest — that was one thing I had over her: boobs. We looked almost like a normal suburban family that day, except for the fact that we were carrying our grocery bags on foot and not loading them into an SUV.

  Anyway, as this guy walked toward us, Mom nudged me with her elbow and said, “He go to your school, hon? Looks like someone’s got a crush on you.” Because his eyes were practically bugging out of his head staring at us, and for a second I almost thought Mom was right.

  He was pretty cute. He was wearing these tight black jeans with beat-up Converse and a super-faded band T-shirt that you could practically see his ribs through. No way a skinny guy like that would ever go for me. Plus he was like half a foot shorter than I am, but Mom was right, it did look like he was staring at me.

  He wasn’t, of course.

  When he got a bit closer you could see that he was trying to make up his mind about whether or not to say something. He was clenching and unclenching his hands and couldn’t seem to look away from us, which was totally creepy.

  “Are you … you’re Micky Wayne, right?” he finally said as he approached us.

  “Oh,” said Mom, nodding, “yeah, that’s me.” She put down the two giant grocery bags she’d been struggling with and waved hello.

  “Wow,” he said, “wow. I’m such a huge Dusty Moon fan. Seriously. I even have a … can I show you my tattoo?”

  “Sure.” Then she turned to me as this kinda creepy but pretty cute stalker-boy started lifting up his pants leg to show us whatever dumb scrawl he had permanently marked on his leg. “You know you’re not getting a tattoo until you’re eighteen, right, Vic?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, “just like you never gave yourself one when you were sixteen,” I said, pointing to her left hand where she sported three tiny homemade tattoos — X’s on the knuckles of her index and middle fingers, and a heart at the base of her thumb.

  “I told you to drop it about the stick-and-pokes,” she said. “Stick-and-pokes” being how a sixteen-year-old in Halifax is able to give herself a tattoo. And probably hepatitis. I Googled it — you dip a sewing needle wrapped in thread into some India ink, and off you go. Real sanitary.

  “But I thought you were going to give me one for my birthday!” I said.

  “Absolutely. I’m going to give you the Children’s Aid logo so that they’ll be able to recognize you when they come to take you away from me the next morning.”

  And by that time this weird kid had finally rolled up the leg of his too-tight pants and turned around to show us his tattoo of the Dusty Moon logo — the phases of the moon that Dennis, Mom’s guitar player, drew for the cover of their first album — forever branded on the back of his left calf.

  “Cool,” Mom said. “Yeah, that looks great. I haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

  He stood there, beaming at the attention, but made no attempt to roll his pants back down and be on his way.

  “Look,” Mom said finally when it was clear he wasn’t taking the hint, “it was nice to meet you, but my daughter Vic and I really need to get our groceries home. All right?”

  “Oh,” he said, covering the tattoo back up, clearly disappointed, “yeah, totally. I’m sorry to bug you, it’s just so great to meet you. Your music, it means a lot to me.”

  “I appreciate that,” Mom said, giving him one of her smiles. “Take care.” And we picked up our groceries and trudged the rest of the way home.

  Not that it isn’t cool to see people lose their minds like that over someone who I know deep down is a total weirdo and a slob, but it would be nice if once in a while the cute guys who stare at us on the street actually were looking at me.

  Dusty Moon got their start when my mom was only just over a year older than I am now. She’d just turned eighteen when they had their first band practice. She was the singer, and her friend Dennis from school played guitar. Their bassist, Jason, and their drummer, Jana, were kids they’d met at parties, and they met up one day to see if maybe they could make some half-decent noise together. They hung out in Ja
na’s parents’ basement in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and together they banged out some tunes.

  That was in 1996. Mom says that there was pretty well nothing happening that year. Musically, anyway. That Kurt Cobain had been dead for two years already, and that grunge music had become so mainstream that the corporate soul-suckage that all of those bands were railing against was, by that point, nothing but empty posturing.

  So Mom, Dennis, Jason, and Jana started off playing stuff that sounded sort of grungy, but their sound started changing pretty quickly, and soon people started to take notice. They were recording a lot in Jana’s basement with some really ancient audio equipment and somehow this cool label in the states heard their demos and signed them — I don’t know how, this was basically pre-Internet — and then Dusty Moon started touring all around the world.

  It’s so unbelievable to me that she did all of that before she even turned twenty. There were shows that the band was booked to play where they weren’t even allowed to hang out inside the club before they went on because they were too young to drink, which is hilarious.

  When she was my age, Mom was off having adventures and giving herself tattoos, and pretty soon she was going to start a band that would make her famous and send her all around the world doing what she loved most.

  And I spend my time trying to get one stupid drawing right.

  I remember a few years ago when Mom was invited to play at some big music festival in Austin, Texas. There was a whole week of shows all over the city, with thousands of bands performing. Mom even took me out of school for a couple of days so that I could drive down with her and the rest of Dusty Moon. It was a reunion show, so it was kind of a big deal. Like I said, they used to be pretty popular.

  The drive down to the fest was intense, but I got to sit shotgun in Bigfoot, Dusty Moon’s old van. It’s like a rule that you have to give your band’s vehicle a name. I think it’s good luck or something.

  Anyway, Mom had just quit smoking for the seventeenth time, so she was pretty seriously grouchy. Jason and Jana were wedged in the back with all their gear and they all wanted to make the drive without stopping, so I pitched a fit when they wouldn’t let me sit down at the fast-food place where we stopped for lunch. We all ate our burgers in the van instead, with me feeding French fries dipped in barbeque sauce to Mom as she drove.

  It had been so long since I’d seen Jason and Jana that it was almost like a family reunion. They’d been like surrogate parents to me when I was little and on the road with the band, but on that trip we were definitely a dysfunctional family.

  Everyone was in a bad mood. Jason’s divorce had just been finalized and Jana had been fired from her new job as a server the day before we left because she’d asked for time off work. Mom insisted that this was illegal and made me promise I’d never take crap like that from a boss, which only pissed Jana off more.

  Dusty Moon hadn’t played together in years by then. And all four members hadn’t even been in one place together since their last big show — the one where their guitarist, Dennis Mahler, announced that he was done with the whole thing, and that he didn’t want to be in the band anymore. He said that the stress of touring, and recording, and trying to meet everyone’s demands was too much, and he quit.

  And they knew that Dusty Moon couldn’t go on without him, but it was impossible for Mom and Jason and Jana to even imagine doing anything other than playing music. Dennis had been the heart of the band, but he had been acting so strangely in the year or so leading up to that night that they wondered if maybe they were better off without him. Maybe they could start a new band.

  But then things got a whole lot worse.

  I know a lot about Dennis, and a lot about what happened afterwards.

  I know a lot about it because Dennis is my dad.

  Or he was, anyway.

  Or maybe he still is.

  No. I don’t mean that.

  I know, I know that Dennis is gone.

  That Dennis is dead and not coming back.

  That Dennis is no one’s dad, and never really was to begin with.

  Dennis is — was just Dennis.

  When Dennis was alive, he had icy blue eyes and shaggy reddish-blond hair. He loved the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. He was tall, six and a half feet, which is why I’m so gigantic. He was never a surfer, but sometimes he’d pretend that he was. He’d talk about going down to Mexico to live with a bunch of yoga-loving gringos on the beach. Dennis had a dog named Charley, a mutt, who he’d named after John Steinbeck’s dog. John Steinbeck was his favourite writer. Dennis played guitar, and he and Mom fell in love when they were teenagers. It happened fast. Dennis didn’t finish school, he dropped out, but he was smart in other ways. He read a lot and kept a sketchbook, and he wrote most of Dusty Moon’s lyrics himself.

  Mom and Dennis were together off and on for a long time. They were dating even before they started Dusty Moon, but they didn’t always get along so well. But for whatever reason people absolutely loved their band, so they were stuck together for a long time, even though they knew that the two of them never really worked as a couple.

  Dennis had some troubles. He had some difficulties, like, mental health-wise. Mom says that his troubles were just whispers in the beginning, but that they got louder and more demanding as time went on. He didn’t always have both of his feet in the world that most people can see. I think that’s what Mom liked so much about him. Dennis took his medications most of the time, but the pills stopped him from being himself, he said, so sometimes he wouldn’t take them for a while and that’s when things would get more intense.

  And then, so the band bio goes, the night before they were supposed to head out on their first American tour, something pretty major happened. The band was going to drive through the States, playing as many shows as they could before they ran out of money, when my Mom found out that she was pregnant with me. She told Dennis that he was the dad and that she was going to keep me, and Dennis said that he’d do the best he could. They even gave me his last name at the hospital. They wouldn’t let just Mom put her name on the birth certificate, so from day one I’ve been a Mahler.

  They found out pretty soon after I was born, though, that it wasn’t going to work between them. Dennis had too much of his own stuff to deal with before he could worry about anyone else. He got into drugs, too — heroin — on top of everything else, and Mom didn’t want that stuff in my life. So they played together and they toured together, and they knew each other better than most people ever get to know another person — again, Mom’s words — but she knew that he’d never be a good dad to me. And it was hard for her, I guess.

  So anyway, after years of playing shows and recording and touring for months on end — Mom tried to bring me with her as much as she could, but she would leave me behind a lot, to stay with Gran and Grampa — Dennis finally announced that he was quitting. And nobody knew what to do. They knew that the band wouldn’t be the same without him. So they went back to their crappy little hotel room that night and talked about what they were going to do next. Dennis wasn’t there with them, they didn’t know where he’d gone. They stayed up all night trying to figure out what to do, and eventually they decided that Dusty Moon would have to break up. Maybe, they said, they’d start a new band without Dennis.

  Mom tried calling his apartment a few days later just to make sure that he was all right, but he didn’t answer the phone.

  Another week passed and she still hadn’t heard from him. Nobody had.

  And a week after that his parents took out an ad in the Globe and Mail that said DENNIS, PLEASE CALL US. WE MISS YOU. WE JUST WANT TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE SAFE. I know because Mom cut it out and saved it. It’s in her Dennis album. The newsprint’s yellowed and brittle now, but the message is still clear.

  But he never called my mom or his parents or anyone. And they never found his body.

  It’s been more than ten years since it happened. But no one knows for sure what it was.

&
nbsp; A few die-hard Dusty Moon fans still believe he’s alive, which is so seriously freaky. The going theory is that he just packed up, changed his name, and left everything behind him. These fans, though, they’re just desperate for an easy answer. They’re like those people who still think Tupac’s alive. That it’s all some conspiracy. But we all know what really happened, and even Dennis’s parents finally agreed that he was probably dead two years ago. They’d been holding out hope for a long time that he might come back, but I guess even they had their limits. They don’t really talk to Mom and me anymore, but they send a Christmas card every year. Mom says she thinks it was just too hard for them to stay in touch, to see me. It’s a pretty awful excuse, but I get that it’s complicated. I think maybe Dennis’s parents blamed Mom for what happened, but she doesn’t like to talk about it.

  They had to make it all official, though. To make him legally presumed dead. Mom got asked for a lot of interviews after that. The whole band did. They wouldn’t talk about it, though. They said it wasn’t respectful to Dennis.

  Privately, Mom was glad that they’d finally done it. That they’d closed the book on him for good. She’d thought of Dennis as being dead a long time before that, and that’s how she always talked about him to me. Dennis was a great musician. Dennis was so talented. Dennis loved your smile and your chubby little knees. The Dennis I knew was always dead. That’s all there is. I’m not some lost girl searching for the father she never knew. I’m not. I’m searching for a boyfriend, maybe, or sex on the beach. Or maybe just to find something I’m actually good at for once instead of hanging out in Mom’s or Lucy’s shadow while they do what they love.

  So we ignore the message-board threads, blog posts, and conspiracy-theory Facebook groups. Dennis was a complicated guy, Mom says, so why shouldn’t his legacy be complicated, too? She’s full of all kinds of pseudo-philosophical nuggets of wisdom like that to deal with the weirdness of our lives. When she’s not just plain full of it.

  Some journalist is writing a book about it all. About Mom and Dusty Moon. And about Dennis. He’s been trying to get Mom to talk to him for a while now, and she finally agreed to it after she read a bunch of his stuff and decided that if anyone was going to be able to tell the story respectfully it would be him. He’s a talented writer, she says, even if he is a bit nosy. And Mom’s never been what you’d call a private person. So she and Jason and Jana will finally tell the story of what happened to Dennis — or what they think happened, anyway — and some creepy journalist is going to make a bunch of money on a sad-sack story about my family. It feels like we’re being used. Like this guy is stringing out our skeletons for everyone to see. There’ll probably be a fresh wave of Dusty Moon conspiracy theorists, too. Thousands of people who’ll think they know more about my family than I do just because they read some book. Great.