The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  “I like some animals,” I told him. “Most animals, I guess.”

  “I love all animals,” he said. “I want a dog, or a kitty cat, but my mama says we can’t have one where we live at.”

  Then he said, “I like flowers too. Do you like flowers, T.J.?”

  “I sure do.”

  “My mama and I have a big rosebush in a big tractor tire right up out next to our trailer. And we water it about every day and it used to have some big red roses on it, but they’re all gone now. But you could still come over and see it sometime. You wanna come over and see it?”

  “Uh-huh … yeah, sure, I sure would, Donny,” I told him. “I’ll come down to where you live sometime, if it’s all right with your mama, and then you can show me your rosebush, OK?”

  Then he motioned for me to come down closer to him so he could whisper in my ear.

  “I might run away,” he whispered.

  “Run away?” I whispered back. “Why?”

  “I think—so I can see more places.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s a good reason then, I guess. It’s good to see more places.”

  “Did you ever run away, T.J.?”

  I thought about that for a minute. I knew I should say no, that he wouldn’t really understand if I said yes, since I’m a grown-up, but he was looking at me so seriously that I just felt at that moment I couldn’t tell him any sort of a lie about anything.

  “Yeah … I ran away once. I mean, actually, I’ve run away a lot of times, I guess.”

  “To see more places?”

  “Yeah … that’s right. To see more places.” And he just studied me with his little blue eyes, and I could see he was taking it all in.

  “Donny Tyndall!” his mother hollered out again. “Didn’t I say not to bother the man?”

  And we shook hands, and I waved good-bye to his mama and to Larry on my way out—I had decided to forget about the Slurpee—and Donny said, “Bye, T.J.” He watched me from the glass doors of the 7-Eleven, and kept on waving good-bye as I got into the Dirt Devil, and I could see his little golden curly head bobbing up and down excitedly as I pulled out of the parking lot.

  To be honest, I hated to leave him there. The whole way home all I could think about was turning the car around and going back to get him and take him away from his mama and her redneck world—I guess you could call that kidnapping, but in this case, I would call it kidsaving. And I thought about how I would read to him all the time, and take him to G-rated movies, and teach him songs and help him make stuff and then teach him to read for himself. All the way home, I thought about those things, about how I could be a good surrogate daddy to Donny and keep him out of the clutches of ignoramuses like Mr. 7-Eleven over there. And I vowed to myself that I would go to see him and be his friend and just help him along as much as I could, as much as his mother would allow me to, and just thinking about all of this made me feel so much better about everything else. Really, it did.

  Two days later, I turned on the TV to see Claudia Davenport Shields talking about a missing child, and then Donny’s mother was on, being held and comforted by a glum-looking Larry. They were standing in front of her trailer, and she was screaming and crying hysterically about “My Donny! My angel Donny!” and I turned off the TV and got up and walked around my little house, and I started to feel dizzy and weak-legged, like I’d been on the Tilt-A-Whirl too long, but I couldn’t do anything, and I couldn’t eat and I wanted to call somebody but I couldn’t do that either and basically all I wanted to do was to go back to bed, and maybe say some prayers, and that’s what I did. But then the next day came and I felt the same way all over again, and then the phone started to ring, but I stayed in bed and refused to answer it. People began to come over, and I sort of saw them, but by then I was taking sleeping pills, so mostly I just stayed in bed, and I stopped even remembering to pray anymore, barely even remembering to get up and eat something, which some days I didn’t. I usually had a beer or two, though.

  Still, I would always set my alarm for the next morning, just in case I felt like coming out of exile when I woke up, but then when I would hear WAVE come on, with their stupid, inane songs and idiot chatter, I would just shut it off and go back to sleep, if I could, but even if I couldn’t, I stayed in the bed anyway … and stayed and stayed and stayed …

  Until this morning.

  And now, I’m sitting here on this tiny little patch of beach, and it’s dark out, and I’m shivering slightly and my face is wet, and I want to scream and yell, but I can’t seem to do it; all the words I want to say stick in my throat. I want to say to the sky and the ocean that I’m sorry, that I should never have told Donny it was OK to run away, I should never have told him that I’d run away myself. Oh, God, why did I have to tell him that? Why did I have to meet him in the first place? Why did I just happen to go to the 7-Eleven that day? I didn’t mean to tell him it was all right to run away, I mean, it isn’t … it never is. Grown-ups don’t tell children it’s OK to run away, only other children say that, to each other. I didn’t know he was listening to me. Not like that. Oh, God … why?

  Why … why … why … why … why …

  I lie back in the sand and wipe my face with my sweatshirt sleeve, which is wet and sandy. Next to me is a flashlight, and I’ve also brought my old copy of The Little Prince, too. I pick it up and look at the cover, with the drawing of the blond little prince standing on the crater-filled planet. How I hoped I could make it into a play for Duck Island Playhouse: The Little Prince starring Donny Tyndall. I swear, even this morning I believed I could make that happen, I believed Donny would be found and be OK, and that we were going to officially become good friends, and I believed I could make this book into a play starring him.

  I flip the pages open to my favorite part, and with my flashlight in one hand I read again what the Little Prince says to the aviator: “You—you alone will have the stars as no one else has them … In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…. You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!”

  I close the book, and turn off the flashlight, then lay both of them on the sand.

  Whywhywhywhywhy …

  Suddenly I am filled with a horrible desire to tear off all my clothes, and so I do, every stitch, and I run down to the water’s edge naked as a dog and then I wade in a little ways and hurl myself into it and fall face first—the shocking, splashy cold of it washes all over my body-and I think how it is just like James Mason at the end of A Star Is Born, except he kept swimming—that’s it—he kept swimming. And here I am—just drifting.

  I pull myself up and stand, trying to find footing on the shifting sand. I look up at the sky, and the stars, and down at the black, white-tipped waves crashing all around me, and now my throat opens and I start to scream and yell and finally, finally, I start to cry, and deep down I know how awful I must look: thirty-four years old and naked, standing in knee-deep ocean water, clutching my chest and shaking with huge, loud pitiful sobs, but I can’t help it. I just hope no one can see me, or hear me. Or … maybe I do hope they can see me and hear me, I just don’t want them to come rushing down to me and ask why I’m naked and screaming. Please don’t ask me that! No! Please don’t! I want them to know why without having to ask.

  But they never will, will they? So what I should do is to just start swimming and allow myself to be carried away out to sea, and all the while I’ll just be saying good-bye to everyone and everything, or not good-bye: I’ll be saying fuck it to everyone and everything—Fuck Island!—as I sink down deep into the Atlantic Ocean, go slow, slow, don’t get too excited.

  But this is not my Norman Maine moment. It’s only knee-deep ocean here.

  I lower myself back down slowly in the water, until I’m crouched on my knees, and I bob my body up and out of waves, and I remember again what I’ve always known about myself, which is that I really am much more like Jud
y Garland than James Mason; it just isn’t in me to swim out into the big black sea and die there. I’d rather be the well-dressed martyr at a press conference … I’m pretty good at that, after all, pretty good at standing up and facing down cruel cameras and distorting microphones, head held high.

  So I stand up in the water and scream out “This … is … Mrs…. Norman … Maine” over the roaring surf, and it’s like a tree falling over in the woods, nobody hears it, because I’m all alone out here, but just doing that makes me laugh and now that I know I’m not going to swim out into the Atlantic, I allow myself to simply float back toward the shore, just calmly taking in the sensations of the seashells and seaweed and the undertow as they knock and pull against me, and wash over my whole shivering, moon-white body. And even though I know the water is dirty, it feels clean and pure, and I say, in a voice that isn’t screaming, “Please God, please make everything turn out all right. Please don’t forget about us down here on this little island. And please don’t forget about me.”

  Lying here, I suddenly realize that nobody I saw today took credit for dedicating the “Theme from Valley of the Dolls” to me this morning. I guess I’ll never know for sure, then. Some things it’s probably good not to know about … I have my suspicions, though … I’ll keep thinking about it, trying to figure it out. Mysterious work.

  And so I’m planning to lie here in the shallow water for a long time, staring up at this big old night sky, looking and looking, and praying some, too; I believe that soon I’ll be able to know which is the one star that was promised to me, the only one that makes any difference to me at all, the one star that can laugh.

  I’m sure I’ll see it, eventually …

  I’ll be here until I do.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to the extraordinary teachers I’ve been fortunate to work with over the years: Max Steele, James Wilcox, Jonathan Dee, Benjamin Taylor, Wesley Gibson, Josh Henkin, Alice Mattison, and Amy Hempel. I am especially thankful to Susan Cheever and Jill McCorkle for their encouragement and support. Thank you always.

  My thanks also to Hilary Bachelder, Amy Boutell, Melanie Cecka, Brendan Costello, Reid Jensen, Amanda McCormick, Susan Rosalsky, and Lan Tran for insightful readings and advice, as well as friendship.

  Much love and appreciation to all my friends and classmates at the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

  Profound thanks to my agent Leigh Feldman and my editor Chuck Adams, not only for their wise and generous counsel but for their friendship as well. Many thanks also to Kristin Lang at Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman, and Cheryl Weinstein at Simon & Schuster.

  And a lifetime of thankfulness, of course, to: Betty Herring, Ginny Ross, Elizabeth and Rob Fitzgerald, Natalie Muldaur, Earl Black, Gary Rzasa, Keith Bulla, Mark Hardy, Paul and Lois Shepherd, Bob Plasse, Jon Imparato, Eric Thal, Nixon Richman, Al Horn-stra, David Bottrell, Wendell Laurent, Richard Storm, Arnold Levine, Christine Butler, Kerby Thompson, Frank Cerbo, Jack and Martha Fleer, Peter Kaiser, and John Avino. Very special thanks also to my aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  And for David and Katherine, Griffin and Anderson, and my mother and father: love and gratitude, always.