by Len Vlahos
Anyway, I couldn’t tell any of the guys in the band I was pregnant, so I talked to my younger sister Theresa. Or, really, she talked to me.
We were sitting on the beds in our room—Theresa and I shared a room with one of our other sisters, Agnes, but Agnes wasn’t there—and I had my head leaned up against the wall, my hair matted against a movie poster of Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains. It was really hot out, and I felt like I was going to be sick. Theresa took one look at me and knew.
“You’re knocked up, aren’t you?”
I’m guessing my jaw dropped. “Shit. You can tell?”
“You should go to Planned Parenthood.”
“Planned Parenthood?”
“Yes. Get rid of it, Chey.”
For some reason, I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and it made me upset. Which made me feel more sick. I closed my eyes.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why get rid of it?” She sounded like she thought I was crazy for asking.
“Yeah. You tried to keep yours.”
“And look what happened,” she said. “God punished me.”
Theresa had gotten pregnant two summers earlier, when she was fifteen, and lost her baby, at home, in bed. It was pretty messed up. She was, like, seven months, and the baby just started to come out. She tried to hide it, but with all that blood there was no hiding anything.
It had happened in the middle of the night, and somehow all of my sisters except for Agnes managed to sleep through it, even after the ambulance came. My parents, on the other hand, freaked out. My mother stood there in her bathrobe, clutching her rosaries and praying for the soul of the unborn baby. All I could think was Shouldn’t you be praying for Theresa? My father kept mumbling something about killing “the boy who did this to my little girl.”
The two of them went with Theresa to the hospital, but before they left my mother cornered me and Agnes: “Not one word of this to your sisters, do you understand?” She had fire and brimstone in her eyes.
“What are we supposed to tell them?”
“Tell them Theresa has the flu.” Then she spun on her heel and climbed in the ambulance, still silently mouthing her prayers as she did. To this day I don’t think any of my other sisters know.
I guess the conversation about me being pregnant was bringing back some pretty bad memories for Theresa, because she was squeezing the life out of Mr. Giggle Bunny. That’s one of her stuffed animals.
My father’s only emotional connection to his daughters has been to buy us stuffed animals. Lots and lots of stuffed animals. I have twelve and I’m a lightweight. There are one hundred twenty-six between all seven of us, and every one of them has been named. It’s kind of a thing in our family.
“But won’t God punish me more if I get rid of it?” I asked.
Most of the time I tried to be cool and scoff at all the Catholic stuff, but twelve years of religious education and a lifetime of being surrounded by religious paintings, statues, and lectures—well, you can take the girl out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the girl, you know? I started to cry.
Theresa rolled her eyes. “Just get it taken care of, Chey.” It wasn’t exactly mean, but it wasn’t really helpful, either. She put her headphones back on, letting me know that the conversation was over. I guess, on some level, it felt good to get it off my chest, but really, talking to my sister was pretty much useless.
HARBINGER JONES
Once Johnny and I had reconnected, it was like an incredible weight had been lifted. Whatever Johnny’s foibles and whatever my foibles, real friendships, I guess, run deep, and our friendship was real. But it wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever is.
Even though Johnny wasn’t mad at me anymore, I still felt responsible for him getting into the accident. I had driven him away from the band. I had pushed him to leave Georgia and go home to New York. And I was in love with his girlfriend. I may as well have held him down while that car rammed into his leg.
My shrink, Dr. Kenny, and I worked on the guilt, but I’m not sure it helped. The only thing that ever really seems to help me is playing music, so that’s what I did.
CHEYENNE BELLE
Believe it or not, I went to confession.
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school where they force students to go to confession once a week. Most of the girls just made stuff up. “Forgive me, Father, for I had impure thoughts about this boy or that boy.” Never “Forgive me, Father, for I went down on this boy and that boy,” which was true a lot of the time.
Anyway, I hadn’t been since I’d graduated a couple of months before, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to turn.
If you’ve never gone to confession, it’s kind of weird. You sit in this dark little room that’s like two phone booths smushed together; there’s a wall dividing them down the middle and there’s this little hole you talk into. The priest sits on the other side so he can’t see you. I guess the idea is that he isn’t supposed to know who’s giving confession. But don’t you think he peeks when people are coming and going? I know I would.
One time, in the tenth grade, I brought a flashlight with me and shone it through the hole so I could get a good look at the priest. He didn’t appreciate it.
They called my mom down to the school. She didn’t appreciate it either.
Anyway, I told the priest a friend of mine was pregnant. (No way was I going to tell him the truth).
He said exactly what you’d expect a priest to say. “This is very serious. Has your friend told her parents?”
“No,” I answered. “She doesn’t have parents.”
“Everyone has parents, my child.” I never liked that, priests saying things like my child. I can’t possibly be his child because he can’t possibly have children, right? Though I suppose if I really believed that I wouldn’t have been calling him Father, which I was.
“I mean, they’re dead, Father.”
“I see. Does she go to school here?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“I understand that you want to protect your friend, but she needs help. She needs counseling.”
I was quiet for a moment. I knew what I wanted to say but was having trouble working up the nerve. I have to give the man credit because he broke the silence with the question I needed to ask.
“Is this friend of yours considering having an abortion?”
“Yes, Father.” I whispered my answer and wasn’t even sure if he’d heard me.
“Abortion seems like an easy way out,” he said, “but in life there are no easy ways out, my child.”
I was surprised at how gentle he was being. I went in expecting him to shove a photo of a fetus or something through that little hole, but instead he was sort of comforting.
“But isn’t she too young to have children?” I asked.
There was a long pause before he answered. I don’t know if I was lucky or cursed to get the most thoughtful priest in the whole tristate area.
“Yes, yes, she is.”
“Then shouldn’t she end her pregnancy?”
“I think you know that abortion is a sin.”
“Why?”
I could almost hear him wringing his hands. I felt sorry for the guy. He showed up at work expecting to hear the inane gossip of little girls and instead wound up with a real whopper of a problem dumped in his lap.
“It’s murder.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do.”
“But I know girls who’ve had abortions, and they didn’t burst into flames or anything. They seemed happier.”
“A short-term reward in this life is no reward in the next.” Priests were always saying stuff like that, and that’s usually where they lost me.
“So my friend will go to hell, is that what you’re saying?”
“This is not a sin that a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers will simply erase. It will haunt her for the rest of her days.”
I don’t remember the rest
of the conversation, but I know I left pretty soon after his line about being haunted for the rest of my days. I was more confused than ever.
I tried to put it out of my mind, like a homework assignment I knew I was blowing off—I’m pretty good at keeping things in my life separate when I need to—and did the only thing I could think to do. I threw myself back into the band. Back into Johnny.
HARBINGER JONES
Because we were playing music again, all that other crap—my relationship with Johnny, my feelings for Chey—was pushed into the background, like hum, scratches, and static on a record. It’s there, but soft enough that the music drowns it out. You still hear it between tracks, but only for a second.
Have you ever heard of something called signal-to-noise ratio? It’s a term used by audiophiles. The wires that go from your turntable and your stereo to your speakers carry a signal that your speakers convert into sound. But the same wires are also loaded with extra noise generated by all those electrical components working at what they do. Your stereo and speakers filter most of it out. The more noise, the worse the signal and the worse the sound. Your goal in audio electronics is a lot of signal and very little noise.
The signal-to-noise ratio in my life at the end of that summer was really pretty good. The noise was still there, but having made peace with Johnny and having found a way to deal with my own feelings about Cheyenne, it was overwhelmed by signal.
Like I said, we were playing music again, and, really, that was all that mattered.
RICHIE MCGILL
I knew about the whole Harry, Johnny, Cheyenne love-triangle thing. I stayed away from that shit like it was the bubonic plague. I was just glad the band was back together. It was pretty much the only thing I had going for me.
I mean, skateboarding was fun, but it wasn’t the same. The rush I get playing on stage is the reason I’ve never done drugs. From the first time Johnny got us together, way back in the seventh grade, and we played a few holiday parties, I was hooked. Playing music, when it works, is like sex. Just without all the mess. I knew nothing else could ever feel that good, so why bother?
CHEYENNE BELLE
I was able to keep the pregnancy a secret. Other than my nonexistent boobs, which had suddenly started to exist, I wasn’t really showing. I got good at hiding the sickness, too, like I was bulimic or anorexic or something. It’s kind of ironic that I was following in my sister’s footsteps. Hiding a pregnancy, I mean.
Anyway, I thought about the baby all the time when I was alone. And I was so desperate to tell Johnny that I thought my head would explode. I just didn’t know how.
I’d been teaching myself a little guitar—once you know how to play the bass, it’s a lot easier to learn how to the play guitar—so I tried writing a song about it. I thought it would be cool to tell Johnny with a song. Sort of romantic, you know?
It was called “Lullaby.”
Tell me,
What’s that in my belly
Beneath the cat?
I am making us a lullaby.
Tell me,
Can you feel this strange thing in my belly?
Can you feel the change?
I’m too stunned to even cry.
Does it have a name?
Is it a boy or a girl?
Will it be president?
Will it change the world?
Will it be bad
Or will it be good?
Will it be loved
Or misunderstood?
Will it be rich
Or will it be poor?
Whatever it is,
I’m gonna love it forevermore.
Because you’re our little lullaby.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
I wanted so badly to play it for Johnny, but it just never felt like the right time, you know? So the secret stayed with me.
HARBINGER JONES
The other thing going on at the end of that summer was figuring out how to keep my parents at bay. To be fair, they were giving me space, but I knew it wouldn’t last, especially with my dad.
I was already back on Dr. Kenny’s couch at my parents’ insistence—Dr. Kenny had been my shrink ever since I was eight years old, since right after the lightning strike—and it was only a matter of time before they started to push on other things, too. I mean, I was eighteen, I wasn’t enrolled in college, and I didn’t have a job. Johnny’s accident and my reaction to it bought me a little time, but sooner or later they were going to expect something more of me than eating their food, lying on their couch, watching their TV, and using their basement to play music.
But like everything else in my life, I kicked the can down the road. I figured I’d ride it as long as I could.
CHEYENNE BELLE
This was all happening at the same time the band started jamming again.
“Harry,” Johnny said at one of our first rehearsals after Georgia, “you should be singing some of our songs.”
“What? No.”
I had told Johnny about Harry’s incredible night as our front man at the keg party in Athens.
“Seriously, dude, we’re called the Scar Boys, not the Amputee Boys. You and I should share the mic. You sing some of the songs, I’ll sing some of the songs.”
Harry fought it at first, but in the end he agreed. I could tell it made him really happy, too.
I honestly think Johnny figured getting Harry, our original “scar boy,” up front would help the band. But there was something else, too. Johnny was tired. Really tired. He was going to rehab four times a week, and it was taking a toll.
He let me come with him once and I was surprised at how simple it was. I expected to see medieval torture devices clipped to his leg while he learned how to walk. Instead, it was just a plastic leg with a foam foot that he would practice walking on for about an hour. The leg, Johnny said, was temporary.
“They don’t give you your permanent leg until you’re fully healed,” he told me. “They have to wait until the stump is done morphing and changing shape before they can create a mold to fit the prosthesis.”
It’s weird how comfortable I got with words like stump and prosthesis. It’s like they’d always been part of my vocabulary, part of my life.
Johnny had been lucky . . . well, as lucky as you can be when you have your leg chopped off. The break was clean, and his skin was intact. Apparently, what happens to your skin when you lose a limb is really important. Johnny didn’t need any skin grafts, which was good. Plus, because of the way the break happened, the surgery was pretty straightforward. It was really easy for them to fit him for a new leg.
Even in the worst of times, the best things still happened to Johnny McKenna.
The day I went with him to rehab, I saw all sorts of other amputees in much worse shape than Johnny. There was one girl with a leg that was so badly scarred that I wondered what kind of accident she’d been in. It made me think of Harry.
Johnny’s recovery seemed easier than I would’ve guessed. He was a fast learner, and after six weeks his rehab went from four to two times a week, and after three months he was pretty much done. You could barely tell he had a limp.
He’d been all set to go to Syracuse on a track-and-field scholarship before the accident, and it was really important to him to learn how to run with his new leg. Johnny probably had some secret dream that he’d be the first amputee to win a track-and-field medal at the Olympics, and I don’t mean the Special Olympics.
Anyway, even though the rehab was going really well, it was still a strain for him to spend a lot of time on his fake leg. His stump would get blisters if he put pressure on it for too long, so standing in front of a microphone for two hours during rehearsals wasn’t really in the cards. He never actually told me that, but I could tell.
Since he couldn’t stand, do you know what Johnny did instead?
Johnny McKenna decided to play the piano.
HARBINGER JONES
Johnny confided in me that standing up for two hours
—that’s how long our rehearsals usually lasted—was too much for his leg.
“Imagine leaning your elbow on a table for two hours,” he told me. “Even if that elbow is on a nice soft cushion, the weight of your body will eventually wear it down. It’s like that.” The keyboard gave him a chance to sit. It, along with piano lessons, had been a present from his parents. Really, it was a kind of bribe to get him to reengage with the world.
I’d seen that kind of thing before. My parents showered me with gifts after the lightning strike. I was only eight when I spent all that time in the hospital, and I got an endless assortment of books and games and toys. I didn’t get anything as cool as an electric keyboard, though. I mean, the greatest thing about 1976 was the Pet Rock. Enough said.
When we started jamming again with the whole band, Johnny refused to plug the keyboard in, so he would just play along silently. He was something of a perfectionist. Strike that. He didn’t need things to be perfect; he needed them to be as good as they could be. There’s a difference.
But he did plug the piano in when it was just the two of us. That gave him a chance to fool around and learn how to make the keys work with another instrument. Hearing the keyboard and guitar together was like discovering an entire new universe. Like our own, it was filled with planets and stars and people. But in this universe, the laws of physics were expanded to allow for new dimensions. It was unreal.
CHEYENNE BELLE
For most of those first two months of the band jamming again, in August and September, Johnny sat behind his keyboard, trying to find the right notes. We didn’t know if he was any good or not because he wouldn’t plug the damn thing in.
“Not until I get better at this,” he would say.
We all just took it in stride. It didn’t matter. He sat on his stool and sang the songs that Harry didn’t want to sing, and it was like it was in the early days of the band. We just practiced and had fun hanging out together.
