Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  “I thought this was over,” she said.

  She relayed the news as though she’d already spoken it a thousand times: Caitlin had been driven to the hospital by a girl from the dorms, had said she needed help and didn’t know what she’d do if left to herself for another minute.

  “I’ve got to talk to her,” Mom said. “We’ve got to bring her home.”

  Dainty, five foot four, her forearms slender as chair legs, my mother had the ability to quickly galvanize for emergencies: Dad’s fluke 1981 heart attack, puddles of vomit, my childhood hernias and gashed limbs, Ozzy half dead and bloody eyed after being hit by a Cadillac. She’d move swiftly, with sheer focus, dirtying her hands while projecting a certainty that everything was soon to be okay. Ozzy would be stitched like new. I’d be healthy and healed, ready to live again.

  Then came the crack pipes, rehabs, divorce papers, and a new mortgage, all of which she’d managed with a grace I’d spend my life trying to attain.

  Caitlin’s plunges into despair were what left Mom aghast. Her gentle ways had never consoled my sister to the extent they did me, nor could she interpret Caitlin’s wounds with the second-sense accuracy she could mine. My mother’s love for us was so wide ranging that the question of comparison, of whom she loved more, seemed irrelevant. Only years later would she and I agree that the unspoken closeness we shared simply could not, no matter how we tried, expand to include my sister’s whorl of feelings. In this way, my sister spiraled beyond us. Caitlin’s fits bore closer resemblance to my dad’s wild moods, and there was no changing that: the stuff of which we were made.

  “I knew something was wrong,” Mom said. “She couldn’t tell me, but I knew.”

  She dropped the phone to the kitchen floor, coughing until her eyes watered. These hacking spells had begun with the divorce proceedings and were worsening, attacking during the climaxes of made-for-TV movies, as she skimmed the Free Press Metro Section. I’d rarely seen her cry but had watched a hundred times as she coughed herself to tears.

  She retrieved an inhaler from the cupboard, huffing on the mouthpiece as the cartridge hissed. I couldn’t bear to tell Mom the shape Caitlin had been in when I’d seen her weeks before. I stood drawing heavy breaths as if they might soothe her lungs.

  “I just need a month,” she said. “A month of nothing. A simple, boring month.”

  My sister’s sorrow wasn’t a mystery to me because I sensed it vaguely in myself.

  But I feared her pain—the thought of it turned me into a coward.

  “Is she gonna drop out of school?” I said.

  This was no better than my response two years earlier when Caitlin swallowed a bottle of pills and leaped from her bedroom’s second-story window, landing in the shrubs before she returned, scuffed and lazy eyed, through the front door of our Ridgewood Hills house. Mom had rushed her to the ER, where the medics pumped her stomach and fed her charcoal, and if anyone asked, we claimed she’d had an episode with her heart. Much easier to imagine: my sister’s young body on an operating table, her delicate heart repaired like new. What I’d never be able to picture was Caitlin opening that window, the look on her face as she passed over the sill.

  MOM PULLED UP THE driveway with Caitlin in the passenger seat.

  The station wagon was crammed with furnishings from my sister’s dorm room—lamps, radio, a beanbag, garbage bags stuffed with clothes. All of which I carried to her upstairs bedroom and set in places I thought they belonged. Caitlin lay in bed a few days, sulking downstairs in the evening to watch TV in a medicated slump. Someone with a diploma had bandied about the term “manic depression,” about which I knew only what Hendrix had sung in his ’67 single of the same name. Mom tried every solution she could think of—scheduling therapists and buying mood lamps—coming home on lunch breaks to check on my sister. She sat with Caitlin through the evenings, watching television as the sitcoms aired one after the other.

  None of us knew what to say, but we were together again.

  Seeing the light in Caitlin’s bedroom window when I’d return home during the witching hours would assure me she was safe—reading late or having gone to sleep, yet to master her fear of the dark. If I checked on her, the bedroom door would be cracked enough that I’d see her legs, lumped beneath the bedspread. Other nights she’d appear in the kitchen to share a glass of water with me, passing the cup back and forth, always sparing me the last sip.

  “You take it,” she’d say, sleepy in her nightgown. “You finish it.”

  As if the kitchen faucet couldn’t have poured an ocean’s worth if we’d wanted.

  7

  Autumn was ending with an unseasonable chill. On Halloween, the trick-or-treaters arrived white lipped with their costumes tied over winter coats. Frost a week later. In spite of the cold, Caitlin had become a stickler for energy conservation, turning the thermostat down to sixty degrees no matter how often I readjusted it. She’d bury herself under afghans before depleting the world’s resources, and I took it as a sign she was recuperating. Making a stand on this single ideal, another was sure to follow, and before long she’d be taking steps each day toward better things. I didn’t mind if my toes went numb while I slept in the basement. I’d conserve with her. Together, we’d spare what could be spared.

  In the mornings, once Mom left for work, I put on my coat and sat beside Ozzy, massaging his lumps before heading to the record store. The mutt had grown tumored and oily furred, was gassy and anxious and skeptical of everyone but my mother. The minute Caitlin descended the stairs, he sulked away, and I’d watch her check the thermostat before taking her place on the couch.

  The television awakened at the touch of a button.

  Then the sound of her crunching cereal as she flipped though the channels. Her froggy voice, asking, “Why’re you looking at me like that?” if I stared too long.

  I waved good-bye as I left, holding open the front door, pretending to shudder at the first nip of cold. With the breeze coming through the open door, Caitlin sank into her blankets, tapping a finger against the remote, turning to smile or sometimes staring ahead, zapping the pictures as they flashed across the screen.

  THIS WAS THE SEASON Will and our good friend Andrew were moving in together a couple miles east on Michigan Avenue, an event bearing strong implications for me and where I’d spend my evenings. The three of us had recently outgrown a dimwitted phase in which male affection had threatened our sense of dignity. Since returning to Dearborn, I’d been greeting them with hugs and openly calling them my best friends.

  Andrew was a handsome outsider who gave two shits for music but had warmed to Will and me over the years. We admired his genuine loner tendencies because they made us feel inferior, the coolness with which he set about doing whatever the hell he chose. Andrew’s friendship was earned quietly and with time, and to understand its nuances was to keep company with a dude of rare character. Caitlin had always been smitten with Andrew’s mysteriousness, as had Lauren and most other girls around town. His eyes were brown, his hair dark blond and self-cut in a careless style. He was exactly my height but endowed with a warrior gene. I’d seen Andrew manhandle local black belts, psychos of numerous stripes. At twenty, he’d declared himself a Libertarian. Own property, he said. Never trust the stock market. His dad ran an electric-paneling business and bought houses on the side, fixer-uppers. Andrew had been given charge of a two-story duplex: a featureless, box-shaped compound where he’d manage the tenants downstairs and use the three-bedroom upper flat as he pleased.

  Never mind the cold nights, I enjoyed my basement hideaway. I’d taped posters to the walls and arranged recording devices to surround my mattress. The room was dark at any hour, with just a smear of natural light coming through a small block-glass window. I believed I’d altered myself to fill the room, simplified my being. And these changes were for the better. I wrote music at all hours and slept peacefully, waking in darkness each morning to spin a record with no concern for the weather outside.

&
nbsp; But on principle, I begrudged Andrew for having asked his cousin Ralph to join him and Will in his three-bedroom flat. I wondered if it was a demotion in our friendship. Will insisted he’d remedy the details. “One month,” he said while I helped him move his giant stereo into his new quarters, a tight room overlooking a strip mall. “I’ll smoke Ralphy out and get you in here.”

  Will’s devotion touched me, but I refused his offer to hang that afternoon and left, returning home in time to hear the phone ring, which I hoped might be a further attempt to prove his loyalty.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “ ‘Yeah’?” My dad—calling out of the blue, as seemed to be his way. “Since when do you answer ‘Yeah’?” I could tell by his voice that he was in a state.

  “I thought you were someone else.”

  Slack manners peeved him, but he had no wind to pursue it.

  “Your mother fainted,” he said. “We went to court today, you know?”

  I didn’t. But as he narrated the scene, I could picture it: a courthouse, downtown Detroit. Mom stands to state her intentions, termination of her till-death-do-us-part oath, as the judge recites his piece like he’s done a thousand times. And, like that, with her right hand raised, Mom faints on the courtroom tiles.

  “Scared the hell out of me. She was out cold, white as a ghost.”

  He sounded beaten, unable to say the word “divorce” aloud, though it was now official, on file with the state. Yet as he spoke about Mom’s fainting, his voice betrayed the slightest hope, as if their parting was not meant to be. Part of me believed that, too.

  “She’s not hurt?” I said, a question that caused us to linger.

  I hooked the cordless around my jaw, poking around through refrigerator for the sake of not thinking. Dad had been stopping by the house to check on Caitlin, but I’d been ducking him. For a change of subject, he reminded me to keep an eye on things. “You gotta pay rent,” he said. “Help out around there.” Then, softly, “Why don’t you stop by? There’s plenty of room over here.”

  I’d seen his new place once, a barely lived-in condo on a treeless plot of land. Our old furniture helped fill the condo’s emptiness: Our plaid couch, on which I’d spent so many sick days. The oak table we’d eaten at for years, imprinted where Caitlin and I had pressed childish cursive into the lacquer while doing homework.

  “Okay, yeah,” I said.

  “Come on over. I’ll cook dinner.” That meant pizza, a microwaved something or other, steaming in a plastic dish. Then he said, “This is your home, too.” And I said, “Uh-huh,” trying not to express what we both knew: that my home was anywhere but there. A fact that was new to us and stung so badly we’d only begun to feel it.

  I LEFT THE HOUSE in a daze and walked to Telegraph Road and stared at the traffic tearing past the gas stations and barbershop, a hundred cars blurring by and not one other person afoot for as far as I could see. I thought of my mother, that courthouse scene. And I told myself that everything happening was Life, tried convincing myself that this was the harsh, impenitent reality of how it was. Then I switched off. And walked away. And within four hours Andrew and I were on a couch in Ann Arbor smoking bowls with a guy named Randall, this wildcard we’d known in school.

  I’d sort of woken up there, understanding I’d been meant to see Randall.

  One of the band’s songs was about him, something with the words Nobody loves him, Randall is dead. We’d been toking for an hour inside his one-bedroom apartment when I handed him a copy of my twelve-inch record, and with no further ceremony he slipped it onto the turntable.

  “It’s for me?” he said, tuning his ear to the screams. “I can’t understand a word.”

  Randall had dark eyes, black hair parted down the middle. One of those haywire cases who’d been in and out of trouble since his teens. Jails, cops, hard drugs and guns, money buried in coffee cans—once Randall got to talking, you’d believe every word or have a sense that if he was lying, then there was probably a worse true story he was saving for some bender from which you might not return.

  The record revolved beneath the needle. Stolen moments become his life went another line, though only I knew this. Andrew wasn’t much for my music. “Wild shit,” he said, just basically waiting for it to end.

  Then I spoke up and announced, “My dad’s on crack.” I said it studiously, as if reporting some scientific oddity. “He’s been full blown for a while.”

  “Dude,” said Randall. “That’s deep.”

  Andrew had played hockey with me and knew my dad as the wisecracking, good-natured workingman, tie undone after a day at the office, a stiff handshake after a game well played. In certain spheres my dad’s one-of-the-guys swagger had shone favorably on my own total lack thereof. “Goddamn,” Andrew said through the haze, once he realized I was serious. “You’re blowing my mind.” But if there were any weight to our conversation, none of us was about to acknowledge it with our faces. Randall, after all, was blackened around the eyes and looked not to have slept for years.

  “Crack,” he said, touching the flame of his lighter to what resin remained in his blown-glass pipe. “I know about it. Dirty shit.” Then he dropped street lingo, terms I had no idea about: “runners,” “stems.” He said, “There’s all kinds of white boys smoking that stuff. Shit is wack.”

  You couldn’t tell if he was boasting or if the snarled look on his face had to do with an aching flashback, but at least I’d put it out there: Dad’s drugs. Being near Randall consoled me, inspiring a list of interventionist schemes that all seemed to lack some essential component, but still … A row of cabinets stretched above the sink in Randall’s kitchen, on top of which stood a collection of emptied liquor bottles. When I asked how many of those he’d drunk, he pointed his finger as if to count each one. “All of ’em,” he said. “I’d rather drink all them bottles than start smoking rocks.”

  I’d been twenty years old a matter of hours as I peered through the still-undraped windows of Mom’s house to see Will walking toward our doorstep dressed as an angel—a garish, ill-fitting costume he’d scored at a thrift store. Mid-November and the lawn was already ice crusted. Will’s brown hair was greased and furrowed from a violent combing, accentuating his regal, darkly attractive face. A halo of wire and tinsel jaunted above. He’d scissored the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY from a sheet of wallpaper and had taped each of the paisley letters to his chest.

  Ozzy yapped as the doorbell rang.

  “I’m your birthday angel,” Will said, dancing into the living room the instant I cracked the door.

  Despite his musical obsessions, Will had never taken up an instrument. Lately, he’d been referring to himself as an artist without a medium, expressing his creative intensities through improvisations that required neither stage nor set list. For this purpose, he’d been collecting women’s clothing, rubber masks, and penile-enhancement devices, storing these props beneath the seats of his Ford F-150 so he could transform at moment’s notice. Weeks earlier he’d been dressed in drag at a downriver house party, provoking one local roughneck to punch him in the mouth, cracking a molar. “That river rat blindsided me,” he’d said, pulling at his lip to reveal his capped tooth. “But how about if I’d have kicked his ass dressed in a gown?” Once my laughter dwindled, he’d reiterated his latest adage, urging me to give a whirl sometime: “All that’s in the past now, brother.” You could wake up every morning and console yourself with this knowledge. “Last night is the past.”

  In Mom’s living room, he pranced toward Caitlin, shimmying and strutting until she gave his costume its due regard. She liked him, in the way most people did—with some degree of appreciation for his absurdity. Between them, there’d occasionally been an air of mutual taunting. I hoped Caitlin might see the humor in Will’s getup rather than how tightly the fabric clung to his pelvis.

  She sat on the couch enduring the spectacle, uncertain whether he was screwing with her. She’d been sleeping less, walking through the house in her shrou
d of blankets, avoiding the world outside as if it were a barren, treacherous proposition. With the early freeze, her hibernation seemed all the more justifiable. Now that daylight saving time caused darkness to fall by five o’clock, the days must have seemed forgettable: spans of gray light that passed the windows without ever beckoning her outside.

  Will didn’t know about her, why she was there on the couch or anything else. He rubbed his palms together, a fricative sound he augmented with a growl.

  “Is this what you guys do?” said Caitlin.

  When I’d told Will about my dad’s problems, he’d asked questions I couldn’t answer: How long’s he been on it? Where does he get it? How does he keep his job? Questions Caitlin probably wanted to ask me, just to say the words aloud and have someone else hear them. Will inched toward her, making a playful swipe at her ponytail. As if on the outskirts of a joke she had no way of taking part in, Caitlin smiled dutifully, causing him to laugh in a way that somehow accounted for all of us.

  AT WILL’S DEMAND, HE and I took my minivan for a birthday drive. He was fixated on my Ford Aerostar, an earlier, decaying model of the automobile that nearly pummeled me in Ridgewood Hills. The heater was useless. Worse, the cassette deck had malfunctioned. The interior was smeared with an orange funk and crusts when I bought the wreck off a dirt lot that spring. As I drove, Will basked in the grime. He fingered every reachable stain, toying with knobs on the dash to see which worked. I fretted about the transmission, which clanked as though the underbody were being bludgeoned. The cold whistled through. Buttoned to the neck was my Carhartt jacket, a brand of work coat the band had begun wearing as a proletariat, antifashion statement.

  “Freezing in here,” Will said, warming his hands with his breath.

  His halo jittered. His bare shoulders were exposed through tears in the lacy sleeves. The garment had refused to zip in the back, leaving his spine exposed. He was, indubitably, an angel. A birthday seraph. Beside him in the van, I felt his love for me.