The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  Now, I had a desk drawer brimming with the application forms she’d collected for me. A few times I’d even seen her add money to an envelope titled “Application Fees” kept beneath the silverware holder.

  “Your senior year of high school is starting in a few days,” my mother said. “Summer’s almost over.”

  “But it’s not over yet.”

  My mother frowned. “Just tell me you’ll look into it.”

  I said, “I’ll look into it.” Then I picked up the Martin and began strumming over the radio.

  I didn’t blame my mother for continuing to seek something better, something steadier and with higher wages, but I was sick of her wanting “better” for me. She just couldn’t see that her definition of the word did not align with my own. To me, “better” meant a shadowy room alive with the sway of close-pressed bodies, the din of a hundred synchronous voices chanting the lyrics to “Don’t Look Back.” Only one more year of high school, I reminded myself, and then freedom. But at that moment, I felt like my life was on hold.

  My mind flashed to Cara, how outgoing she’d become, and the rasp of my name as it rolled from Cody Winters’s tongue. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to become a little more like her, I thought. To just let go of my fears. I could start by going to her party. I wanted to go to her party.

  I knew I probably wouldn’t.

  I turned to the window, watching as children splashed in the futile spray of wind-flung sprinklers. That’s when I saw my father burst out of the garage.

  He marched across the lawn so quickly that he looked supernatural, his skin strikingly pale against the sun-swathed landscape. The sight of him, after all that waiting, was startling.

  “This is it,” he said when he flew through the front door. “This is it, sure as hell. They can’t ignore this one.”

  My father held up a cassette tape and shook it between his fingers. He still recorded analog, everything on eight-track or tape deck, because he thought the sound quality felt more authentic.

  “Can I hear it?” I asked, the guitar mute in my hands.

  “No can do, Susie Q.” He crossed the entryway and plopped down next to me on the couch. “I don’t want to jinx it. I’m putting this bad boy in the mail first thing Monday morning.”

  “On your lunch break, you mean,” my mother said from the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” he said, leveling her gaze. “On my lunch break.”

  My mother did not seem convinced by his response, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she walked to the sink. She filled a glass with water and drank while standing there, staring out into the yard. She said, “Michael needs an answer soon, James.”

  My father leaned into me. “I mean it, Suz,” he said. I could smell the tinge of whiskey on his breath. “This one’s for real. I’ve never written anything like it.”

  Smiling, he plucked a small orange canister out of his pocket and dropped two white tablets into his palm. He swallowed the small pills dry.

  I squinted at the label, but the wording had been scratched off. “What are those for?”

  “Headaches,” he said. “Been getting these awful headaches lately.”

  “For how long?” I looked to my mother, expecting her to share my concern, but her expression was unaffected.

  “You’re not supposed to drink with that,” she said.

  “Do you see a drink in my hand?” he said.

  I repeated: “For how long?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” my father said to me. “Now and then. It’s probably all the loud music. Your mom always said it would be the death of me.”

  He laughed, and I wanted to believe it was over—that my father just needed a break from work, from responsibility, a few days to immerse himself fully in the thing he actually loved. And yet, unease continued creeping through me; I couldn’t help but think that he looked dangerous in his elation, no different from a panhandler at a freeway off-ramp. His face seemed gaunt as he spoke of the studio like a sanctuary, the tape like a time machine—but the fear only lasted for another moment, because then he stood up, put Stevie Wonder on the stereo, yanked my mother out of the kitchen, and began twirling her in his arms.

  “What are you doing? James, stop.” My mother tried to wiggle out of his grip, but it was no use. He only held her closer.

  “C’mon, Diane,” he said. “Just dance with me here for a second. One song.”

  I expected her to start yelling, to fight until free of him. A few seconds later she rested her head on his shoulder.

  Though I still believe she really did love him then, as much as ever, I also think that she was tired of fighting, tired of trying to change someone who didn’t want her help. It was easier just to dance, barefoot on the linoleum floor, and forget he had ever been anything other than what he was in that instant—a father who was trying to do right by his family in the only way he knew how, and a husband who could still make his wife smile when he had one hand on her slender waist, his mouth barely moving as he whispered into her ear: I’ll give you all my love, honey, pull the moon down from above, but I know that it will never be enough.

  Three

  THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN the sun began to droop in the sky, my father decided to hike out to the hills. He said he needed to stretch his legs. Though physical exertion in one-hundred-degree heat sounded torturous, I offered to go with him. I didn’t want to wait until midnight to get him alone.

  The smell of slightly charred hot dogs permeated the air as we crossed through the neighborhood. Then we turned left, followed a private road under the freeway overpass, and made our way up forged paths. At the top of the hill, my father sat on a large boulder that hung over the side of the cliff. He let his legs dangle.

  “Doesn’t everything look so calm from up here?” he said. “It’s much smaller than it seems.”

  To me, the city looked infinite. The winds had thinned out the smog that usually blanketed the horizon and I could see the outline of downtown jutting into a volcanic sunset. To the east, the dark gray plume of a fire spiraled skyward. I sat down next to my father, slightly back, not comfortable so close to the edge. He sang something under his breath and I couldn’t help but think that even when we were alone, he was never fully with me.

  “When you were little, your mom and I used to bring you up here a lot. Whenever we couldn’t get you to stop crying we’d just pack some sandwiches and hike up here and I don’t know what it was, the quiet or the view or something else, but it would soothe you. You’d fall asleep instantly.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said. “Why’d you stop?”

  He shrugged. “Guess you stopped whining. Haven’t said it much, but you’ve been a good kid, Suz.”

  Sometime before we left, he must have stuffed a bottle of beer in the waist of his jeans because he pulled one out and struck the top down on a sharp rock. The cap flew off, bounced across the boulder’s surface, and fell over the edge. I watched until I could not see it anymore.

  “When I was a kid,” he said, and took a long pull from the beer, “I whined about everything, especially guitars. I was five the first time I asked for one. Could barely speak a coherent sentence yet, but man—you should have heard me trying to express how much I wanted that Tele.”

  I could hardly breathe, the air stunned in my lungs. My father never spoke of his life before Los Angeles. For all I knew, he was born of this city, driven into existence on a Greyhound bus headed for the depot in Chinatown. Of course, I wanted to learn about his past, had asked many times. I’d even tried to trick him once by asking about his oldest records. I pulled one of the most tattered spines from the shelf and held it out, imagining its history, a shaggy-haired little boy saving pennies for a year just to purchase that one album: Pet Sounds.

  But when I asked my father where it came from, he just pointed back at the shelves.

  “You see this, Susie Q?” he said. “This is my family, my history. These people may not be related by blood, but we’ve got something stronger. Y
ou want to know where I came from? Listen to this.” And then he put on the record and started singing.

  On the cliff, my father stared at the skyline, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  “They didn’t make little-kid guitars like they do nowadays,” he continued, “at least not where I was from, and my ma said no for a thousand different reasons. I wasn’t big enough. It was too expensive. I’d get sick of it the way I got sick of those plastic toy soldiers she’d bought me. But I kept on whining.” He paused, took another sip of the beer. “Don’t tell your mother about this.”

  I said nothing, my silence complicit. I wanted to believe that this was my father’s way of apologizing—of making amends for his secrecy, for cutting me out of his process and not playing me his tape. Now, though, I sense it was those pills, that they made his tongue far looser than liquor.

  “A year went by, and I didn’t ask for anything I didn’t need to live. That was the only way I could think of trying to show them I was serious. About a month before Christmas, Ma started acting weird every time I mentioned the guitar. Changed the subject. Man, I knew right then. I knew they’d bought it, and I knew where they were keeping it, too.

  “I raced home every day after school, before my parents got there, and snuck into the closet where they hid the guitar so I could mess around with this instructional booklet I stole from the library. I was learning kiddy shit, like ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down,’ because the only beginner books they had were full of nursery rhymes. By the time I unwrapped that Tele Christmas morning, though”—he whistled—“you better believe I knew how to play the damned thing. I just picked it up and started plucking the notes to ‘Joy to the World.’ Everyone thought I was some sort of prodigy.” He laughed out loud. “They were amazed for a whole half second before deciding the guitar was a waste of time.”

  Without turning around, he handed the bottle to me. Though alcohol was not hard to find in my house, my father had never offered to share. I’d never had much interest, either, aside from some sugary wine coolers Cara’s brother had given us sophomore year. But for the first time in my life, my father had willingly told me something that happened before the Vital Spades, and though it wasn’t much, it felt like the key to his entire existence. So I took the bottle and drank.

  Emboldened by the new knowledge, or maybe just the taste of alcohol, I decided to ask for more. I could feel the air straining around me as I sorted through the possibilities.

  When I opened my mouth, an entirely different question emerged. “Are you sick?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said after a moment. “Your mother just likes to make everything seem worse than it actually is.”

  When I didn’t respond he turned around, his expression momentarily inscrutable. “I’m not dying, if that’s what you mean.”

  I nodded. Silence settled between us as the wind kicked up, blowing my long hair around my face like a blindfold. I handed the bottle back to my father. The day continued to darken, and slowly, one pinpoint of light at a time, the city became electric.

  “We should head back down,” he said, casting a shadow over me as he stood. The sun was directly behind him, outlining his body with a tangerine glow. “Don’t want to be up here when the coyotes come looking for dinner.”

  I was not ready to go yet. There was still so much I wanted to ask him, about his childhood, about his tape. But my father started walking and I followed. Later, I thought, in the studio. We’d have all the time in the world.

  We walked home through the lengthening dusk. Beneath the sunset, heat continued shimmering, bending the air in squiggly lines that made our neighborhood look like it was filled with puddles. And when we turned onto Catalina Street and I saw two figures sitting on the curb in front of our house, I hoped, with a growing ache in my gut, that this was another mirage.

  The figures only crystallized as we drew near.

  Lance and Travis.

  “Well, well.” My father grinned, his dour mood evaporating like water. “Look what the coyotes dragged in.”

  It astonished me how casual he acted around them, as if he hadn’t spent the past eighteen years waiting for other people to appreciate him—as if these two fans hadn’t appeared out of nowhere and vanished just as quickly. But then my father sauntered toward them, and I began to wonder if maybe they hadn’t vanished at all.

  He said, “What are you doing down here in the street?”

  “Your wife wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of us hanging around,” Travis said, standing. Though they both had unkempt hair that fell in tangles down to their shoulders and wore the same grungy uniform as so many of the boys at my high school, I knew this one was Travis because he was shorter, with cheeks still vaguely corrugated by acne scars. “She threatened to call the cops if we stepped on the property again.”

  My father chuckled under his breath. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s always been a woman of her word.”

  “We stopped by Joe Thompson’s last night, hoping to catch you,” said Lance, who was tall and lanky. “People there are still talking about us, you know. Had a couple of guys even ask when our next show is.”

  “Is that right?” my father asked, obviously pleased.

  “What show is he talking about?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t really a show,” my father said. “I just brought the Martin over to Joe’s, had these two back me for a bit. We played some old Spades stuff, a couple covers. Nothing major.”

  “Come on, man,” Lance said. “It was more than that. The place was packed.”

  “There were even people out in the parking lot,” Travis added.

  My father laughed. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “I would’ve come.”

  “You know you couldn’t have, Suz. You’re not old enough.”

  This, of course, was true, but that didn’t make it any less painful.

  “We were just playing for a bunch of drunks,” my father said through a smile.

  “Even so,” Lance said, “it was epic. But that’s not why we’re here. We wanted to get your thoughts on something.”

  “Shoot,” my father said.

  “Our band has been talking about this for a while, but we wouldn’t do it without first getting your permission. So . . .” Lance and Travis exchanged a nervous glance. “What would you think about us covering ‘Love Honey’?”

  A wave of panic roiled through me. “Love Honey” was my mother’s song. It was my song, my history, practically part of my genetic makeup. My father sang it to me when I woke up from nightmares as a child. It was the first song he ever taught me to play on guitar.

  My father scratched his chin, considering the possibility. I tightened my arms into a knot and felt my mouth tensing. He couldn’t give our song away like this. He wouldn’t.

  “What do I think?” he said uncertainly. A moment passed before he broke into a grin. “I think it’s a great fucking idea. Of course you should play it. You should play it every goddamn show.” My father clapped his hand on Lance’s shoulder. “Why don’t we go down to Joe’s now and talk some more about this?”

  “Hell yeah,” Lance said.

  “Drinks on us,” Travis said.

  My father turned to me. “Tell her I’m going out for a bit, will you?” He motioned toward the house.

  “But you just got back,” I muttered, startled by how ragged my voice sounded.

  “Come on, Susie. We’ll only be gone a bit. Don’t be like your mother.”

  Though he stood still in front of me, it felt like he was already walking away.

  “Please,” he said, quieter, the hot breeze dragging his words down the street. “Just do this one thing for me.”

  A bitter taste bloomed in my mouth but I must have nodded, because the next thing I knew, he folded his body into the front seat of Travis’s car. The engine sputtered to life and they rumbled down the street. In my balled-up fists, I felt my pulse thro
bbing.

  All summer, I’d wanted to eradicate Lance and Travis from our lives—to prove to my father that I was a valuable band member and not just his daughter. And all summer, I had failed. But now, finally, I knew what I had to do.

  I was going to cover “Love Honey.” And I was going to cover it a hell of a lot better than Lance and Travis.

  The whole process took little more than an hour; I began with the skeleton of my father’s song and translated it to the twangy drawl of open chords on acoustic guitar. I had no interest in performing some bland, basic copy of the original, as Lance and Travis probably would, with the same tempo, the same harmonies, and even the same solo after the bridge. I wanted to reinvent it, break it down, explore the song’s hidden intricacies in a way that only I—as an artist, as James Hayes’s daughter—possibly could.

  So I clamped a capo on the third fret, tweaking the key to match my range. I slowed the song down to better embroider the raw simplicity of acoustic guitar and vocals. While my father’s version was infectiously upbeat, I sought to emphasize the lyrics’ introspection, building my progression into a final crescendo that brimmed, instead, with frustration and longing. And it was easy. God, I was surprised by how easy. Not once did I stop to wonder whether I was making the right decision or whether I was any good, because I knew. This was the sound of my childhood, as coherent as my heartbeat. And without even trying, I’d relinquished my fear.

  But the elation didn’t last long; seven thirty turned into nine, and still my father did not come home. All the triumph I felt funneled into a fresh surge of rage. I was sick of it—always waiting for him, always being the second choice. So I made a decision: I wouldn’t wait anymore.