Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  But who could be trusted?

  I told no one about any of it: That I returned later that night to find his pickup already parked at the curb. How I monitored the house, noting what time the lights went out—early, too early. And what about his dad, and Sheila? There appeared to be a side door, but I’d have to survey the backyard, too. Or I’d just nail him as he’s coming out of whatever deadbeat bar he drinks at, just turn out his lights and run. These strategies were live wires, sparking through my thoughts. Taking up serious minutes of my days and haunting nights that were already restless. Not that I actually and truly intended anything, but merely gesturing toward harming this stranger made me feel like I was doing at least one goddamn thing to honor my sister’s name.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE MY parents returned from New York, I cruised past his house several more times before heading to Gusoline Alley, a cramped bar in the city of Royal Oak frequented by people I knew, musicians. After a couple of hours on the stool, I ran into Scott, the ex-Wallside guitarist. He’d very recently been playing in an illiterate radio-rock band with Blaine—who’d abandoned his drums in order to strum a guitar and sing songs he’d written about Angela.

  Of course, Warden was doing their record.

  But Scott had just quit, I’d heard, after Blaine slept with his girlfriend.

  “Dude’s a fucking rat,” Scott said.

  He was slender and bearded, dressed sharply in a ruffian style, a plainspoken chain-smoker with the word LIES tattooed inside his lower gums. A genuine nut for music and all that came with it. We’d toured together, traveled the continent, but I’d recently disowned Scott for his Blaine connection. Now we had an enemy in common.

  “He’s got it coming,” I said.

  Blaine was the easy target, a patsy—it didn’t take long to convince Scott to arrange a setup. He might have thought he owed it to me for having stood onstage and played those god-awful love songs about my girlfriend. “Call him right now,” I said. “Tell him you want to meet and talk things over.”

  It was 1:00 A.M., 2:00 A.M. Blaine and his cell phone—the first satellite fiend I ever knew. I was sure he’d answer.

  Scott dialed from a pay phone.

  “There’s a party downriver,” he said as the phone rang. “He’s probably there.”

  If Blaine hadn’t picked up, I’d have let it go that night. Getting my hands on him wasn’t something I looked forward to, but my daily visualizations of doing so were vivid enough that anything short of bloodshed would confirm my lack of spine. Angela had heard him whispering Caitlin’s name, I believed that—though I could barely conceive of anyone so heartless, the prank was undeniably his, carried out in his cheap-shot style.

  Scott talked inaudibly into the phone while I stood on a curb breathing deep and flexing my wrists. “He wants to meet at our practice space,” Scott said, once he’d hung up. “He’s going there now.”

  “Good.”

  We took Scott’s Ford Contour downtown, talking about nothing, headed for a warehouse on Trumble and Holden, an industrial hub where a number of bands rehearsed. One dark, desolate corner of the city where crack merchants huddled across the street, sometimes doubling their wares to include as many bootlegged pornos as could be fit into a trench coat. There’d be no one getting in the way.

  When we pulled into the lot in front of the warehouse, Blaine was sitting on the gravel, leaned back against the grille of his car. The lot was fenced in on all sides. Our headlights washed over him. He was alone, with a beer between his legs. I leaped from the car while it was still moving, and there was an instant when Blaine’s eyes understood what was under way—as I ran toward him, just before I booted him in the face and heard his head wallop against the fender.

  I was weak. I felt the hollowness of my fists as I hammered down.

  But I worked on him for a good minute, slugging at his forearms, which had covered his face once he’d curled into a fetal lump. I told him he was sick—a sick animal. Scott stood between his headlights, pecking his cigarette. When I looked up, his smoking arm was trembling, but his eyes didn’t say one thing or the other.

  They’d claim I’d jumped Blaine. Suckered him. Even in the heat of things, I felt the need to defend myself.

  “He’s a rapist,” I said, because I didn’t think it was below him. “He’s rape waiting to happen.” Scott seemed to understand. Then I kicked Blaine’s forearms and spat these words at him, “You say her name again, I’ll kill you.”

  Though I didn’t say her name, I was the last person who could.

  Blaine was mostly conscious, but he lay balled up and unmoving, playing dead as we drove away. The tires crunched the gravel, and there was a long drive back to Royal Oak, where I’d left Mom’s station wagon. And I didn’t feel well, but I’d done something. One small shift of dirty work no one else was about to get busy with, though it was far from over. The signs blurred on the highway; then came a stretch where I picked the torn skin from my knuckles.

  “He deserves worse,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Scott said, “he’ll learn his lesson.”

  He continued smoking, staring ahead like he was ashamed of what I’d done but agreed that some things—you just don’t let them slide. You can’t live with yourself until you’ve done all that you can.

  The spiritual medium had felt the presence of a girl. It was very hazy, he said—unusually so—but he’d intuited something having to do with gasping for air, a lack of oxygen. A drowning? No, that wasn’t it. Hard to get a sense. She was awake, but not awake.

  “He sat and thought for a long time,” Mom said. “He said it was an odd case.”

  The man had addressed my mother for the entire duration of the appointment, conveying certain images and energies, telling her my sister was sorry. Very sorrowful.

  “Do you want to hear about this?” Mom asked me.

  I was in bad form on the living room couch, a short matter of hours since I’d assaulted Blaine. The night before remained with me in the soreness of my hands, the taste in my throat.

  Dad had carried Mom’s bags to the porch and declined to come inside.

  “He’s upset,” she said. “The man didn’t say anything to him. Not a word. Barely even looked at him.”

  I had to wonder if they were losing touch with the unalterable facts of this life. I’d grown more certain than ever that our souls were merely chemicals swirling inside our craniums. Science. Synaptic combustions—the mental fires that trick us into believing we are who we are. But for the Catholic mass and their belief in the Virgin’s mercy, my parents had been levelheaded skeptics, realists. Unmystical. Unfazed by reports of UFOs, ghosts, psychic encounters.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. “It was good to get away.”

  Ozzy assaulted her with affection, patrolling the room to make desperate swipes at her legs. The poor beast—I’d forgotten about him the night before and he’d vomited on Mom’s fake Chinese rug, refusing to break his housetraining.

  “Why did you turn all my pictures around?”

  “I can’t see that stuff right now,” I said.

  I did nothing to hide my tattered knuckles as I reached for Mom’s luggage because she wouldn’t notice. There were a lot of things we weren’t noticing. We were forgetting to pay bills. We were letting the plants wither. We ran our cars out of gas and walked to filling stations, startled by how quickly the minutes passed. You’re one place and then another, with so little memory of the walk, the drive, the workday.

  What did it say about our minds? How we’d manage to leave our wallets in the refrigerator, the milk carton in the cupboard.

  Driving back to East Lansing, I missed the exit for Okemos Road, realizing it only after the highway veered south toward unfamiliar towns. When I finally made it into the house, Lauren was asleep on the futon. By then I could hardly remember Blaine’s crumpled shape or if I’d truly intended to slay Sheila’s brother. One moment, my anger overran every rational thought; the next, all I longed for was a pillo
w. I slid onto the futon, the frame teetering until I rolled near the center. Lauren wrapped her arms unconsciously around me. Just before I went under I said a silent word or two to my sister, up toward the ceiling, thinking that perhaps she’d arrive in the night-blue air above the bed, twirling in the wind of the box fans. Her spirit. Her ghost. And what was it she’d be trying to say if she were there, whispering down to those of us listening?

  2

  What can be said about that year that is kind and forgiving and proves we were learning to survive? I’ve gone back time and again, trying to remember the hours when the sun shone or a crow was set loose from the attic or a stranger took my hand and walked with me until I’d remembered my name, all of which happened, yet the truth of those days is something else—awesome and strange only in the sense that we are no longer there.

  Will spent the first half of August binging hard before his body collapsed. He was nearly comatose by the time his dad carried him from the upper flat and drove him to Oakwood Hospital. My mom called with the vague details, “He’s in the ICU,” and I hurried off the phone and sped toward Dearborn, where Andrew was in the weird zone of a multiday fast during which he’d been drinking only water. Living in a room just feet away from Will, he’d been too deep into a state of hunger-induced transcendence to notice anything amiss. Since I’d left the apartment, they’d been using my old room for storage.

  Weeks earlier, Will had been jailed in Iowa after an incident of public disruption. He’d returned to Michigan with a copy of his mug shot, which he mailed to me in a heart-shaped envelope days before his hospitalization. Crazy—the currency of our old joy. I couldn’t see it then, but Caitlin’s death had ripped through the lives of my closest friends, driven them a little crazier than before. Andrew and Will didn’t speak about having seen my sister on life support or the fact that she was gone. Not long after her funeral, Andrew told me my dad was the saddest man he’d ever seen, and Will said he’d had a long cry at the rug shop—which was just about the end of us talking about that week in January.

  I cringe to imagine how I’d have handled things had I been in their position, if I might have hijacked their grief for my own musical themes. We were young, too cut off from ourselves to reach for one another. But no one really knows what to do about a mess like that: a young girl dying.

  I’d called Will the day his mug shot arrived in Lauren’s mailbox.

  “You see those stripes?” he said.

  In the booking photo his eye sockets were darkened. He stared upward, holding a placard with his name and arrest number. The Iowa sheriff’s department had him dressed in a black-and-white horizontally striped shirt that looked to have been worn daily for a number of decades.

  “I thought that shit was from the movies,” he’d said. “You get a look at those stripes?”

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT Oakwood, Will was laid up a floor below the unit where Caitlin’s life had ended seven months prior. A psychology course I’d taken that summer had informed me that the average onset for mental illness is between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. Antisocial tendencies, delusions of grandeur, seeking meaning in chaotic patterns, messages divined from rock albums—I’d come to see the potential in nearly everyone I knew.

  “I got diabetes,” Will said as I entered his hospital room. “I brought it on myself. They said another day or so and I’d be dead meat.”

  The space was partitioned by a blue sheet. Whoever lay beyond the curtain had a gnarly cough. Will raised his brows and hissed at every sound the man made. To see him, more conscious than not, relieved by degrees the clenching inside my head, my neck, my lungs.

  “Isn’t diabetes hereditary?” I said.

  “That’s what they say, not what I say.”

  He was thin and greasy. It was in his beady blue eyes, mostly, the illness.

  I clasped his hand. Will wriggled his finger lasciviously in my palm, giving a sleazy tickle so that I flinched away. Now he was grinning, and so was I, shaking my head.

  “You talk to Andy?” he said. He had his headphones beside him. CDs, the great escape. “He saw a shoot-out. In the street, right in front of the apartment. You should go ask him about it.”

  INSIDE THE UPPER FLAT, Andrew sat on the couch, pale and vibrating with unfinished theories. The shades were drawn and a Joseph Campbell videotape played on the television, something about the masks of eternity. Andrew acknowledged me with a nod, as though I’d just returned from taking out the trash. I’d never seen him so docile.

  “Not gonna visit Will?” I asked.

  “I called the hospital,” he said. “They wouldn’t put me through. Tell him I love him if you see him.”

  He was soul deep in a malnourished meditation. His eyes bulged. His face looked thinner. I got the idea that he didn’t plan on leaving the couch until his spirit voyage was complete. Perhaps he dreaded returning to that hospital, where he’d months before seen Caitlin—not quite alive, not yet dead.

  “The mind works so fast when you’re not polluting it with food.” Andrew stared at the television. “It has so much energy,” he said. “I’m learning things.”

  The daylight outside was brilliant. A slab of white sun crashed in as I opened the door to the balcony and peered down at the street.

  I hollered across the living room, “Where was the shoot-out?”

  “Right out there,” he said. “One of those suicide-by-cop things. The cop was real smooth, man. He bent down behind his car door and took the guy out. They’re trained for that. I helped them search for stray bullets after it was over.”

  “What? The guy gets pulled over and started shooting?”

  “I don’t know. I heard shots. Maybe the cop shot first. The cop probably shot first. It’s all part of everything.”

  “You gotta eat.”

  “I need to make it eleven days. Eleven is the number.”

  Andrew pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans. I walked over to have a look: Eleven, the word and numeral, scratched on a receipt.

  “What’s it mean?” I said.

  “Some hooker downtown. I told her I’d been thinking about eleven, and she said she’d been thinking the same thing. She wrote it down.”

  “You didn’t do her, did you?”

  “No, man. It’s not about that. None of this is about that.”

  “Today? How many days is today?”

  “Today,” he said, “is nine.”

  ONCE EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE madness, there’s so much room to wander, to dabble. You’re not nine-to-five. Your family is not nuclear. The earth throbs beneath you, urging you to get busy chasing every arising whim, never mind tomorrow’s cost. I wondered what people did in the days before psych wards and emergency rooms. You got one shot at a meltdown. You saw god as you withered in the desert. You waded into the ocean and let the riptide take you all the way.

  I had nowhere to go. I had my Escort and half a tank of gas. Standing in the street below the upper flat, I was clobbered by a vision of driving to Kalamazoo and showing up at Angela’s. Beside her, with a record playing, was the only place I cared to be. I’d tell her about Will and Andrew. We’d have one last night together, or ten. The rest of our lives. It wasn’t a decision—shifting the car into drive and heading for the highway.

  Twenty miles outside Dearborn, traffic slowed on Interstate 94. A few yards from the Ann Arbor exit it halted entirely. The air had turned thick green, and then the sky hemorrhaged, letting fall a storm of hail. I looked over and through the ice and rain saw a woman in the car next to mine crying into her hands. Hailstones thumped my Escort’s roof dozens at a time. I watched the car’s hood being pelted, while above the highway the August sun remained on the horizon.

  What an unforgettable sight: the sunrays glinting off wet metal as nuggets of ice scattered, popping like marbles onto the road. People I’d yet to meet would talk about that storm years later—the magnificent speed of it—but just then anything could have happened. A twister might have blown through, an
d if I were whipped into the sky, everything would have been as it should.

  Traffic inched forward as the storm subsided, only minutes after it began. A few hellbound drivers sped past on the freeway’s shoulder. The rest of us waited for the jam to push onward and the traffic to thin out, trusting whoever was up ahead. Five miles west, I was once again cruising through sunshine, staring down the cratered hood of my car, strangely grateful for this evidence against my having altogether hallucinated the episode.

  I took it as a sign; good or bad, I couldn’t say.

  Angela wasn’t home when I arrived. One of her housemates let me inside while the others, gathered in front of a communal television, regarded me with the pitying expression I’d seen in Caitlin’s friends at her funeral. What sorrow they endured looking at me seemed to replace whoever I’d been; I felt I was carrying only the single ugly fact that tragedy had touched me. Sad, sad brother of death. Some of Caitlin’s friends had mailed letters I’d not been able to open; others visited my mom with pictures and flowers, relaying messages to me. My sister had known more people than I’d imagined, so many of them strangers I’d never taken the chance to meet.

  I was asleep in Angela’s bed when she opened the door to her room, squealing at the sight of me, turning away and checking again to make certain I was there.

  “My god,” she said.

  “You didn’t see my car?” It was parked behind the house, the hood pocked with hail damage. Even the steel doorframe had a gouge or two.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s all dented up,” I said. “It was crazy. This hailstorm.”

  When I stood, she clutched me, asking, “It’s okay if I hug you?” My hands slid into a familiar niche below her shoulders. I’d buzzed off my hair because I’d been losing it in clumps every time I showered. Angela pulled back to take another a look, fluttering a palm over my coarse scalp.