Vivian’s voice emerged then from behind a pile of boxes. “You didn’t think we were going to move it ourselves, did you?” She was so slight that I hadn’t even noticed her in the sea of brown cardboard. “That’s what men are for, dear—to lift things.”
“I put your stuff in your room,” my mother said, releasing me with a nod of her head.
I hurried down the hall. Turning into my bedroom, I saw only five meager boxes slumped below the window. Even before I tore them open, furiously searching for what I already knew was absent, the dread that had sprouted in my stomach began to expand. I flung the contents behind me.
Out of all five boxes, I found only two things that mattered. The first was a dollar bill that had been folded into the shape of a heart. Nick had given it to me when we were in middle school, and I’d kept it pinned to the center of my bulletin board ever since. I breathed in the worn, softened chemical smell. Then I snapped a picture and sent it to Nick with a caption that read, We’re all struggling for a piece of immortality / but sometimes just a memory is enough.
The second item had been wedged halfway beneath one of the box’s bottom flaps, and I almost missed it: a guitar pick. It was not a pick of any special meaning—just a medium weight tortoiseshell Dunlop—but as I held it up between my fingers, the sunlight caught the mottled brown plastic and the swirls of color inside sparkled. Minutes passed while I stared, sitting on the floor among the ruins of a past life. Finally, when my eyes began stinging, I got up.
“Where’s the rest of it?” I called down the hallway.
“The rest of—?” my mother started to ask. “Oh, well we donated all the furniture. Nothing was worth much, old as it was. And because most of our dishes were chipped—”
“Dad’s stuff,” I interrupted. “His guitars and his records. All the recording equipment. Where is it?”
“Susannah,” she said gently, “you couldn’t have thought that we’d bring everything. There was too much.”
“Where is it?” I said again, louder, aware of the tears that swelled in the corners of my eyes, not bothering to wipe them away.
“In storage,” my mother said.
The air around me seemed to sigh with relief. “I want to go get it.”
“Later,” my mother said. “After we sort through all of this and see—”
“I’ll go by myself. Just tell me where it is.”
The tears started falling then, hot and incessant, and even as I acknowledged that it would only be a matter of time before I was reunited with what remained, a part of me must have understood then that something monumental and intangible had been lost.
Muffled by the discord between sorrow and rage, my voice was a whisper when I said, “I can’t believe you didn’t even let me say good-bye. You left me nothing.”
“Now just wait a minute, young lady,” Vivian began, but my mother held up one hand, stopping her. How sad she looked right then—how tired. Her eyelids drooped with a weight I couldn’t fathom.
“Go into the living room,” my mother said evenly.
“Why?” I said, voice burning. “Because you don’t want me to see how you finally got exactly what you wanted?” The words erupted from some dark place inside of me and I couldn’t cage them. I just wanted her to look at me, to scream—anything that would make me stop—but her focus remained on the floor. “This is a new low, even for you. Banishing me to another room just so you don’t have to be held accountable. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”
My mother winced. It was a tiny, almost imperceptible twitch in her eye, at the farthest crease of her lips, but I felt it more forcibly than a hundred slaps.
“Isn’t it?” I repeated. This time, my voice broke.
“Just go,” she said, and turned back to the boxes.
So I went to the living room, my vision blurred behind tears, terrified by how well I already knew those hallways and rooms—scared, most of all, by the way Vivian’s house already felt like home.
When I turned the corner, I stopped. My father’s Martin had been laid carefully on the sofa.
I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. Not long before, that guitar had swallowed me, but it didn’t seem so big now. It was glistening, unscratched. A distorted reflection gloomed up from the varnish and I stared at the smeared image, my tears slick across the glossy body.
“She’s not as cruel as you think,” I heard Vivian say behind me. But after a moment, when I didn’t reply, she walked away.
My mother and I had argued before, many times, but our fight that afternoon was different. In the past, our disagreements were always secondary to the dominating blur of my father’s problems, easily forgotten when more pressing matters were at hand. Now, I feared even running into her in the kitchen, and the fifteen-minute drives to school were excruciating. I knew that I had made horrible accusations; my behavior sickened me, and I was guilt-ridden and sorry, but I didn’t know how to say this to my mother. So instead, I hid from her, tried not to engage in any conversation, and moved forward in the only way I knew how: through distraction.
Once again, I set my sights on finding Kurt Vaughan.
It was a bright morning during the peak of an eighty-eight-degree winter heat wave when Lynn and I made the trek to his Pasadena home. The drive had felt eternal, but it was easy, like she’d said. Light traffic, no accidents. When we arrived, we parked on the opposite side of the street. Though his muddy truck sat in the driveway, the shutters were angled down and the place looked dark. The only motion was the gentle swaying of the American flag over the lawn.
“You do plan on going in, right?” Lynn asked after a while. “At least ringing the doorbell? If he’s not home, then . . .” She shrugged, insinuating that we would turn around and go back to Orange.
But I couldn’t give up. Not this time. I unbuckled my seat belt. “Let’s do this.”
At the front door, I pushed the button. A chime echoed inside the shut-up house. We waited. Nothing.
“Come on,” I mumbled, and pushed the little white button again. And again. The bell rang in harsh, frantic snippets.
“Susie Q,” Lynn said, but her voice was distant. “Susannah, stop.”
She put her hand on mine. The touch of her skin stunned me.
“Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be known. We tried. We really did.” She squinted out at the street, then focused her gray eyes back on me. “Maybe the only thing left to do is to stop at that diner we saw by the freeway and get some coffee, huh?”
A laugh climbed in my chest but it emerged as a cough.
Lynn twisted her arm through mine and smiled. We were halfway down the driveway when the door opened behind us.
“Can I help you girls?” a man said, peeking out from the darkness.
He had a kind voice, but underneath that gentle tone I detected a trace of fear—not for himself, but for us. Or, more specifically, for me: the girl who had rang his doorbell in a panic two dozen times.
“We’re fine,” Lynn said when I didn’t immediately respond. She gripped my arm tighter in assurance.
“Are—are you Kurt Vaughan?” I asked.
“Yes,” the man said, hesitant.
All morning I had thought about this moment, what to say. I’d worried that he would be brusque, displaying immediate disinterest as if we were selling magazine subscriptions, and close the door before I’d even mentioned my father’s name. But Kurt Vaughan was waiting for me to speak. I could see past his feet into the front entryway, where a basketball and dirty sneakers rested.
“I think,” I began, “you knew my father. James Hayes.”
Doubt clouded Kurt’s face for a moment before the name struck, and then his expression alighted. Surprise registered first, tinged perhaps with a shade of joy. Solemnity quickly followed.
“Yes,” he said, shaking his head, looking at the ground. “Yes. Please, come in.”
The white, glaring winter sun cut harsh diagonals through the patio overhang as Lynn a
nd I waited on the back porch while Kurt poured us all glasses of iced tea. Most of his yard was paved in patio stones, but around the perimeter trees and ivies thrived, outshining the teal of the small swimming pool. A bag of fertilizer waited, still open, near the back fence, muddy gloves tossed aside.
“I was very sad to learn what happened,” Kurt said as he distributed our teas.
“Thank you,” I said. “How did you hear?”
“It didn’t happen too far from here. The papers ran the story.”
I nodded, again questioning if my father had known Kurt’s whereabouts—if he’d ever thought about visiting or trying to reconcile what had been broken between them. And I wondered, with sudden hope, if that’s where he was headed on the night that he died. It didn’t make much sense in the grander scheme of that evening, of the summer, but I preferred this new possibility to my only other options: one, that he was leaving us, and two, that he was leaving the world.
“Had you talked to him recently?” I asked.
Kurt shook his head. “Not in many, many years, I’m sorry to say.”
A dull ache gripped my stomach, and I sipped my iced tea. It was bitter, unsweetened.
“How’d you and my father first meet?” I asked next. I knew my father’s story, of course, but it seemed important to start this way, with a safe memory, to see the shades that separated his version of events from Kurt’s.
“Well, let’s see,” Kurt began, leaning back in his chair. “I’d been working in this used record shop in West Hollywood.”
“Half-Life,” I said.
Kurt smiled. “That’s right. Half-Life Records. It was this tiny hole in the wall, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of place that survived entirely on our regulars. Collectors, mostly—guys who’d come in every day looking for first pressings of some obscure jazz ensemble, or rare alternate B-sides. That must sound funny to you, but we didn’t have the internet back then. Most of those albums only had so many pressings, and then they were gone.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” I said. “I grew up with my father’s records. They’re some of my most valued possessions. And Lynn has a pretty great collection too.”
She nodded. “Mostly secondhand stuff, but a lot of it.”
“I guess I should have expected that,” Kurt said through a laugh. “But the whole experience was so different back then. We lived for that hunt. Most weekends, at the crack of dawn, my boss and I would drive around garage sales, estate sales, buying up entire collections for next to nothing. Sometimes, we’d even find albums that were still wrapped in plastic. Can you imagine? Having an entire record collection sitting in your garage, completely untouched?”
Kurt grew more and more animated as he spoke, and even though his memories of Half-Life Records unfurled a different set of details than those already etched in my brain, the dreamy way he spoke of the shop—of that time—made him sound just like my father.
“I’m sorry,” Kurt said, scratching his neck. “I’m way off track. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about any of this.”
“I was actually just remembering all the stories my father told me about Half-Life,” I said. “You wrote your first song there.”
Kurt smiled, the same sweeping smile that carried from one photograph to the next, making his eyes small and pulling creases around his cheeks. Visually, he looked older than my father had, and yet he didn’t seem to carry any of the invisible weight that sagged beneath my father’s eyes.
“We sure did,” he said. “We had some great times there, your father and I.”
He looked past us, watching something out in the yard, and I yearned to know what his life was like now, what his son’s name was, and how many years he’d been married to his wife. Did she know him back then, have any idea what the Vital Spades could have become? The questions rubbed and shifted inside me, but I knew I had to be careful. Kurt wanted to talk; I merely had to wait until he was ready.
“I was twenty-one when your father first came into the shop,” Kurt said a minute later, his smile fading to a rueful glow. “God, that seems like so long ago. But I guess that’s normal. You get older, you move on, and the past fades into white noise.”
“My father wasn’t normal,” I said, fingering a bead of sweat on my glass.
“Don’t I know it. From the second we first spoke, I could tell that together, Jimmy and I had the potential to do something huge.”
“Jimmy?” I repeated.
“That’s what everyone called him back then. Except your mom. She always preferred James.”
“Did you know her well?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “We all did.”
I considered this, anchoring my gaze out in the garden. Though I’d been prepared to ask dozens of questions about my father and the Spades, I suddenly found my interest shifting to what Kurt knew about my mother.
But I hadn’t planned for that. I didn’t know what to ask, or where to start.
“Was she Yoko?”
Lynn’s voice scrambled the careful trail of my thoughts. I shot her an irate glance.
“Well, you weren’t going to ask,” she said flatly.
Opposite us, Kurt frowned. “If you’re wondering whether she broke up the band, then the answer is no. Diane was probably the only reason the Vital Spades stayed together as long as they did.”
I shook my head. “But that doesn’t make sense. I always thought . . .” I stopped, swallowing the second half of the sentence.
“Thought what?” he said. “That she was the bad guy? Far from it. Her leaving was the only reason Jimmy got clean. Without her, he may not have even lasted long enough to see the band break up.” Abruptly, he paused, one hand rising slightly above the table. I thought maybe he wanted to cover his mouth, to will the words back in, but it just perched there above his chest.
“I’m sorry. I’ve said too much.”
“Please,” I urged, my voice strained. “Tell me what happened.”
His eyes darted between Lynn and me, uncomfortable under the weight of what he could not take back.
I said, “I need to know.”
Kurt sighed. “When your mother got pregnant,” he said, “she left him. Jimmy was volatile. The Spades were breaking apart. Everyone knew it, but Jimmy pushed on, doing whatever it took to keep going. Your mother didn’t want either of you to be a part of it. We weren’t sure if he’d still be standing, when everything was said and done. Of course we tried to help but he wouldn’t listen. Not even to her, in the beginning.”
When he turned back to me his expression shifted, darkening like the world when a cloud floats over the sun. “I’m sorry. No kid should ever have to know those things about a parent. But you have to believe me when I tell you that it was his choice. Jimmy chose, of his own free will, to leave the band and go after you. And thank God he did. Thank God for all of us.”
I suppose it should have made me feel better, Kurt’s insistence that my father chose my mother and me over the Spades—that maybe he really did love us more than the thing I always thought he loved most. The truth was, it made me feel worse. If the band’s dissolution was inevitable, then my father merely made the survivalist’s decision. No one would choose to stay in a burning building.
And that’s when I remembered the matchbook. “Have you ever seen this before?” I asked Kurt, fishing the matches out of my purse.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. He flipped the book over in his hands, his face lightening again. “Yeah, I’ve seen this. Jimmy always kept it in his pocket, would fiddle with it if he was nervous before a show.” Kurt thumbed the worn cover. “I can’t believe this thing hasn’t disintegrated.”
“Do you know what it means? Did he ever talk about the Sea Witch, or about Iowa?”
Kurt shook his head. “All I know is he kept it on him. We all had our superstitions.”
“Yours was argyle socks,” I said.
“That’s right,” Kurt said, surprised.
“
And not washing your hands.”
He couldn’t help laughing at that. “He really did tell you everything, didn’t he?”
I forced a smile, but something was pressing at the edges of my chest, rolling in like a fog.
“Are you still in contact with the other Spades?” I asked. “Or do you know how I might find them?”
“Dan and I stayed in touch for a long time after the Vital Spades broke up,” Kurt said, “but he moved to Ohio about seven, eight years back. His father-in-law was ill. We finally lost contact after that.”
“And Jason?” I pressed. “Do you know where he is?”
“Jason,” he started, and then paused.
“Please,” I said. “I need all the pieces. I don’t want to let my father disappear.”
Kurt took a deep breath. “Hang on a moment,” he said. Then he stood, retreated into the core of the house. Lynn and I waited on the patio. For a while we were silent.
“Are you sure you’d want to do this again?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just need to have the choice.”
Lynn frowned, but didn’t argue. “Where do you think the rest of Kurt’s family is?”
“Church?” I suggested, and suddenly my mind flung to Cara, what she’d said the last time I saw her: He’s in a better place now.
Maybe I should just let him rest, I thought. Stop digging up the past. But the truth was that I hadn’t been doing any of this for him. I’d been doing it for me.
The back door opened.
“Last I knew, Jason was living here,” Kurt said. “Not sure if he still is, but it’s all I’ve got.”
He handed a scrap of paper to me. I rubbed my thumb over the address. “Thank you.”
Kurt nodded, a barb of sadness in his voice as he said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
As we waited for to-go coffees at the diner, I worried the edges of the paper into tatters, folding and unfolding until the creases began to tear. The physicality of the thing no longer mattered, anyway; I’d already memorized the address, and had looked it up on my phone. It led to the outskirts of Venice Beach, far west of Pasadena. The opposite direction from Orange.
The Midnights Page 20
