He shrugged. “You didn’t ask for a good joke.”
Finally, I turned to look at him. Even in the murky gleam of a streetlight, his eyes were luminous, gentle and wide. This was not the first night we had sat with our backs against my garage, laughing at silly jokes. Years ago, when Cara and most of the other boys our age were called home early for dinner or unfinished homework, Nick and I would ride our bikes back to my house and eat sour candy we bought at the liquor store as we waited for our own curfews to expire. Both of our fathers worked late (at least that’s what I told him, because it felt close enough to the truth). We never really talked about them, though. Somehow, we just knew.
“We spread his ashes today,” I said.
Nick opened and closed his mouth. I waited for him to apologize, to offer some artificial sentiment. Crickets sang from one of the neighbor’s bougainvillea bushes.
“Up on the ridge past your house. And when we got back there was a group of people holding a vigil on our lawn, led by these guys who’ve been following my father around all summer, acting like they’re his spiritual children or something. My mother was livid.”
“And you?” Nick asked.
A breeze twirled down the street. I pulled my sweater tighter around my chest. “Lately I keep thinking about this time he came to Career Day at our elementary school and played ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ for the class, and all the parents, even the lawyers, were singing along, completely transformed from whatever they had been moments earlier. It was like he allowed them to remember something about themselves that they’d forgotten. It sounds ridiculous, I know.”
“Not at all,” Nick said. “I remember that, actually. Fourth grade with Ms. Hopkins.”
“You were there?” My eyebrows knotted as I tried to remember the room that day. I saw Ms. Hopkins in her Thanksgiving-themed attire, and the sticky desks lined up in rows five deep. But despite the lucidity of these other memories and the fact that Nick had always been vibrant and gregarious, appearing to me a shade brighter than everyone else, I could not find him anywhere in that classroom.
“That’s how I first heard of the Beatles,” he said. “I was so mad at my own dad for not being there and I just kept talking about yours, and how he totally changed the dynamic in the room. Anyone can pick up a guitar and play a song, but it was like he was speaking to both the kids and their parents, and not separating them the way most adults did.” Nick paused, glancing up. The satellite was gone. “Anyway, my dad eventually figured out I was talking about the Beatles. We reconnected over The White Album, and he introduced me to all these old bands he liked.” He smiled then, looking out at the empty street.
“That’s a good album,” I said.
We fell silent for a moment. I leaned my head back and watched Nick from the corner of my eye. His expression softened, drifting somewhere between me and a memory that I could imagine easily enough: the jolt of that connection he had once felt, that he built up and relied on and savored all those other nights when his father wasn’t around.
“It sucks,” Nick said, rubbing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. It was a school night; he must have been tired. “It really fucking sucks.”
Though I wasn’t entirely sure what he was referring to, I nodded. It did suck. All of it. I said, “I wish I could just have a new life and start over.”
“In less than a year, we’ll be at college,” he said. “I just keep thinking that. Less than a year, and everything will be different.”
“College,” I repeated, somewhat bewildered by the word. I had forgotten about it, all my possible futures scattered across the Golden State, currently shoved and wrinkled in the bottom drawer of my desk. My mother hadn’t mentioned the applications since that summer afternoon when I heard the soft lilt of her singing along to Carole King, and my father finally emerged from the garage. How long ago that day felt.
“People always say that you don’t really know who you are or what you want before college,” Nick said. “That it’s one of the most important times in your life.”
“You believe that?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He swam his fingers through his hair, guiding the thick blond strands back from his forehead. “Maybe it’s less that you find your true self, and more that you feel okay allowing others to see it. But I do think there’s some truth to the idea that you can’t fully be you until you leave home and have to deal with the world. I’ve heard from many reliable sources that the process of doing your own laundry can be very enlightening. I’ve already started saving quarters.”
I laughed and scooted in closer, rested my head on his shoulder. A strange confidence inhabited me in the dark, knowing that Nick wouldn’t be able to see me blush. Down by our hips, the backs of his fingertips brushed against mine. I felt his hand twitch, unsure, before settling. His pinkie finger slipped just slightly under my palm.
“Will you still visit me when you’re in college?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “We’re obviously going to the same school.”
“Is that right?” I smiled.
“Yup. We’ll live in adjacent buildings. And your roommate will be in some sorority, so she’ll never be around, and I’ll come to your room with Sour Patch Kids and we’ll watch the entire Hitchock filmography, in chronological order, on your tiny dorm bed.”
“Why Hitchcock?” I asked.
“Dunno, really,” Nick said, the warmth of his breath tickling my forehead. “I’ll be studying film, so it seems sort of appropriate.”
I wanted to kiss him. I knew that all I had to do was lift my head and I would find him there, waiting. And yet I couldn’t help feeling that the timing was wrong. It wasn’t right that night in Cara’s guest bedroom and it wasn’t right now, while so much of my world still seemed irreparably broken. So instead I kissed him in my head, on the tiny dorm bed in my tiny dorm room, our mouths sour and sugar-laced. In college, I thought. That would be the right time for us.
For a while longer, we sat in the driveway, the far-off stars flickering overhead. Nick never asked why I suddenly called, or why I hadn’t for so long, or why I’d asked him over in the middle of the night to sit in near silence, but I felt some understanding pass between us. And after he was gone I went back into my bedroom, pulled all the applications from my desk, and began to fill them out, one at a time, starting with the easiest questions: my name, my birthday. The only things I knew for sure.
Eight
UPON FIRST ENTERING my local branch of the Los Angeles Public Library—an uninspiring room bathed in browns and steeped in the scents of stubborn dust and old paper—this was what I thought: I could have been, quite literally, almost anywhere else. Depending on the direction, an hour’s drive from the center of LA could put you at the majestic, white-capped mountains, the ocean, the barren expanse of desert. Any of these places would have been preferable. But if I wanted answers, I didn’t have a choice.
So I parked myself at the computer farthest from the noisy kids’ section and made my peace with the incessant buzz of the low-hung lights. I logged on, and began to search.
I assumed the process would be simple; I didn’t expect to find much information about the band online, but I hadn’t thought it would be that hard to track the other members down, find their phone numbers and addresses. And yet, after four separate afternoons of clicking, I was no closer to any answers. There were hundreds of Jason Millers and Dan Lees—dozens of each in LA County alone. Fewer men were named Kurt Vaughan, but even then the handful of candidates seemed impossible to sort through.
The problem was, I’d always felt like I grew up with the Spades, the swell of their instruments so often trilling me to sleep. Plus, I knew all the stories. My father had told me in great detail about the time Jason, the bass player, fell off the stage at a festival in San Francisco and broke his wrist in two places. And I knew that when Dan’s drum set was stolen from a dive bar in Murrieta, he dragged in metal trash cans from the street as a repl
acement. I could practically hear the awful clamor made when Dan struck them, because my father’s stories had been painted with such vibrancy into my childhood that his memories began to feel like my own.
But as I scrolled through the search results, I understood: They weren’t mine. I didn’t actually know these people at all. Though the internet could reveal many things, it could not tell me which men were the costars in my father’s life, or which men would give me the truth.
“I only need to find one of them,” I said to myself. “And at least there’s air-conditioning in here, right?” I shook out my arms and legs and cracked my fingers, trying to rejuvenate my resolve. Then I smacked my forehead against my palms and let out a long, frustrated groan.
The woman who’d been sitting at the next desk over shot me an annoyed look before scooting two chairs down.
My luck was no better with the Sea Witch. A search for this phrase resulted in a thousand images of fantastical undersea creatures, including Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Apparently, there was a Sea Witch Tavern in New York, but no other results came close. I tried searching for the Sea Witch Ellory Plains, though this yielded nothing. I even tried just Ellory Plains, Iowa, and then finally James Hayes Ellory Plains. All that came up then was the city’s outdated welcome website, and links to articles from their local paper. They were having a rainstorm. An elderly man also named James was lost, presumed dead.
And then, finally, on a hot cloudless afternoon, I found him: Kurt Vaughan, resident of Pasadena, California, and part owner of Vaughan Construction. I had clicked on his company’s website, unsure of what exactly I thought I would find among the before-and-after photos and testimonials from satisfied clients until I saw, on the “About” page, a photograph of two men smiling. Richard and Kurt, the caption read, the father/son duo behind Vaughan Construction.
The photo must have been at least a few years old, but maybe that’s why I knew. This was the Kurt who, according to my father, refused to wash his hands before a gig so that his pick wouldn’t slip out of his fingers, and who always wore the same pair of argyle socks onstage, cleaning them afterward by hand so as not to wear them out. In the picture, he had on a heavy canvas coat and blue jeans, his arm slung across the shoulder of his father. The same loose smile that I recognized from the band’s promo photos stretched across his face.
It took another hour of searching before I found what appeared to be a home address. I scribbled the directions onto the back of a research request form, and rushed out into the bright parking lot.
The drive east to Kurt’s house took less than twenty minutes. He lived in a nice neighborhood, upscale but unassuming, on a quiet street shaded by the lush stretch of deep-rooted trees. Warm air sifted in through my open window as I counted down the addresses. Just a few more to go—two, one.
My stomach whirled when I spotted it, a simple two-story home with an American flag swishing over the porch, a mud-splattered truck parked at the curb. I wondered if my father had known that Kurt was here all this time, only a few freeway exits past us. Had they been in contact since the breakup? Did Kurt know about my father’s death? Would he welcome me like distant family, admit he wished we’d already met?
My car inched closer, and the rest of the house lurched into focus: a young boy shooting basketball hoops in the driveway. A dark-haired woman unloading groceries in the garage.
The next thing I knew, the house was behind me. I had kept going.
Bad timing. That’s what I told myself after. I’m not sure what I expected to find when I arrived at Kurt Vaughan’s house, but I did not anticipate seeing his wife, his son, his well-adjusted, normal life. In fact, I hadn’t even realized he would have these things, or that he wasn’t still, in the most fundamental ways, the same person who’d shared a stage with my father. I hadn’t considered that he might actually be happy with the course his life had turned.
Besides, they’d just gotten home from the store. His wife probably planned on starting dinner. I’d try again later.
But later took more time to come than I expected.
It was an overcast Tuesday morning when I finally felt like I’d rallied the courage to return. My mother had not yet bestowed a task upon me, so I sat on the sofa watching a rerun of The Price Is Right, thinking about what I would say when I introduced myself to Kurt. You don’t know me, but I think you knew my father. . . . Why yes, I am Susannah. And how interesting that you mention “Love Honey,” because I actually just wrote an acoustic version. . . .
Yes, today felt promising. Today, I was going to meet another member of the Vital Spades.
At the corner of the kitchen table, my mother sipped her coffee and stared out into the street. Every few minutes she scribbled something on the yellow legal pad in her lap, but between notes she didn’t shift, shoulders rigid, eyes alert. The crowd on TV yelled out answers. I wondered where she’d send me today. I wondered what Nick was doing.
“Susannah,” my mother said. The sound of my name in the still room startled me. “There’s something I want to—”
Someone knocked at our door before she could finish.
“I’ll get it,” I sighed.
At the door, I put my eye to the peephole. I had expected a man—the UPS guy in his brown uniform, or a debt collector in a wrinkled suit. I even considered that Doug, my high school’s guidance counselor, might be making a house call and would appear at our door in his familiar thrift store tweed and belted blue jeans, a few bagel crumbs still stuck in his beard from breakfast. I did not expect to see an older woman.
She had platinum hair—not the wispy, shriveled gray of TV grandmothers but a styled white-blond that glistened, crisp and light, beneath the bright shimmer of sky. Pearls adorned her ears and a bright floral scarf had been tied loosely around her neck. She looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure why; she certainly didn’t work at the school. She put one honey-colored eye right up to the glass, as if she knew I was standing there on the opposite side, watching her. I stepped back and opened the door.
“I was beginning to think no one was home,” she said.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
She laughed. “No, dear. I’m here to help you.”
Of course, I thought. She must be selling something. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound polite. “We don’t have any money.”
I began closing the door, but the woman had already slipped into our living room. She eyed our old furniture, the empty walls, the heap of mail on the kitchen table. “Cozy, isn’t it?”
“Mom,” I said, unsure of what to do.
“You look good,” the woman said to my mother. “Considering.” She waved her hand through the air. Now, standing in front of me, I could see that her black slacks were pressed. Shiny red leather flats peeked out from beneath the hems. She looked so foreign in our home, surrounded by our things.
“You know each other?” I asked.
“Well . . .” my mother said.
“Oh, Diane, for God’s sake. You didn’t tell her?”
My heart began stomping in my chest. “Tell me what?”
The woman rubbed her temples. “What a nightmare this day has turned out to be.” Her head fell to one side, thin lips turned down in a look of expected disappointment that reminded me of my mother.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Ever since your father . . .” my mother began, and then stopped. She looked around as though for help—for something to tell her the right combination of words that would make whatever was happening okay.
The woman sighed and said, “I’m your grandmother, dear.”
I looked between them, trying to understand. “You’ve known where his family was all along?”
“No,” my mother said. She pressed her palms together, held her fingers in front of her mouth. “My mother.”
Cheering erupted from the television, but the sound seemed far away, as if the air in the room had thickened. I shook my head in what felt like slow motion.
“But,” I said, my thoughts spinning together. “You told me your parents were dead.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” The woman opened her purse and began digging around inside. “Thought you could wipe your hands of us, is that it?”
“Jesus, Mother. Must we start with this already? And for the record, I never actually said that. Susannah just assumed.”
So this is my fault? I wanted to say, but words had deserted me.
“I couldn’t have predicted how this all would end up,” my mother said, though I wasn’t sure to whom.
The woman pulled a tube of lipstick and a gold compact mirror from her purse. “Well, there’s no point beating around the bush now.” She began reapplying the color to her lips. “Or were you hoping to spin some new tall tale about me before I showed up? Claim that I’ve risen from the grave?”
“I was only trying to make it easier for Susannah—”
“Been reincarnated?” She rubbed her lips together. “Hare Krishna, or whatever else they’re singing about these days?”
Their voices overlapped, colliding discordantly in the air as the room warped around me. I felt dizzy. I’m not sure how much time passed while I stood, speechless, but when I finally found my voice again, I shouted, “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”
They both grew silent, and turned to me.
“Susannah.” My mother said my name slowly, delicately, as if improper pronunciation might break me. Then she put her hands over her face and inhaled through the cracks in her fingers. “Your grandmother and I weren’t in contact for a long time. Until recently, I honestly didn’t know if we’d ever talk again.”
“Well, I’m here now, so let’s not dwell. Dwelling gives me a headache.” The woman—my grandmother—lowered her petite frame down onto the couch. She frowned as her body sank into the cushions. After a moment of trying to adjust her position, she stood up again. “I suppose you can call me Grandma if that makes you feel better about the whole thing, but I’m perfectly content with Vivian.”
The Midnights Page 9
