The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  “No thanks,” I started to say, but Lynn accepted. As Jason popped off the caps I caught Lynn’s eye. Shrugging, she mouthed, What? Free beer.

  “We don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said, sitting on the sofa’s edge.

  Jason plopped down next to me. “I got nothing but time. How is ol’ Jimmy, anyway?”

  “He died,” I said. “A few months ago.”

  “Man, I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

  “A car crash.”

  “Shit.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Bad way to go.”

  I thought about telling him the rest of the story: the circumstances of the crash, the detective’s theory. Instead, I picked at the label on my beer and let the silence swell until it felt almost unbearable.

  “So you still play music?” Lynn asked, breaking the quiet.

  “Never stopped,” Jason said proudly. “Got a band right now called Folly Goes, maybe you’ve heard of us?” When we didn’t respond, he said, “And I also DJ at this bar off the boardwalk called the Black Crab.”

  “Oh cool,” Lynn said. “The Black Crab.”

  I could tell by the upward tilt of her voice that she was faking.

  “Yeah it’s pretty great. I get free drinks, too.” He fished a pack of cigarettes from amid the mess of a side table, then offered them to us. Lynn took one.

  “By any chance had you talked to my father recently?” I managed to ask.

  “Not in at least . . .” Jason thought. “Ten years? I can’t remember.”

  “But you spoke since the breakup?”

  “Sure, yeah. Talked about jamming sometime, but it never happened. Too bad, really. He was one hell of a musician, but he just couldn’t compromise. It was always all or nothing with Jimmy. For a while it was all. Then, it was nothing.”

  “Because of—” The word jammed in my mouth. “Because of drugs?”

  Jason shook his head. “He had his vices, but man, we all did. I’ll be the first to admit that. Vices are what keep life interesting, know what I mean? They’re how you live. Am I right? She knows what I’m talking about.” He nodded to Lynn.

  “No argument here,” she said, dragging casually on her cigarette.

  “See, I just want to have a good time. That’s why I do it. And when it stops being good, I move on to something new.”

  The beer label had become a soggy ball wadded in my hand. “So you don’t fight? You don’t try to hold the good together even when everything else starts falling apart?”

  Jason exhaled, crinkling his eyes against the smoke. “That’s just not my style.”

  Something caught in the back of my throat, like a pill swallowed dry. Before Lynn and I arrived here, I’d assumed Jason would be similar to Kurt—married, well adjusted, with a proper career. Yet while Kurt seemed to welcome the arrival of “middle-aged,” Jason clearly did everything he could to rebel against it. And I didn’t buy the act. I refused to believe that he hadn’t cared about the Vital Spades with the same depth and passion as my father and Kurt, that he didn’t sometimes mourn what could have been—or at the very least miss it. He had to be hiding something, covering up his own wounds.

  But I had not come here to find out the truth about Jason.

  I said, “What do you remember most about my father, when you think of him now?”

  Jason took a deep breath and lounged back, gazing into the hazy air. “When he was on, he was on, you know? You could see it in his eyes, this wild clarity taking over. He heard rhythm in everything, like the whole world was a secret symphony. And then he’d have these fits of inspiration that kept him up for days, tweaking a strumming pattern or a slide or something that no one else really noticed. He’d insist that the almost imperceptible elements mattered most, like some sort of melodic subliminal messaging.” Jason laughed then. “Sometimes, I really thought Jimmy was a genius.”

  And though I knew I should have stopped there, allowing myself to float through a superficial glimmer of goodness and hope, I pressed on. “And the other times?”

  Jason was still smiling, but something about his expression had emptied. “The other times,” he said, “I knew he was just as lost as the rest of us.”

  Throughout most of the drive back to Orange, I remained silent. The time we’d spent inside Jason’s apartment elongated in my mind, stretching and warping until I felt even further away from any one singular truth about my father. Every time I thought I was getting closer to him, a dozen more unknowns emerged, and I was even less sure now of the things I previously felt with absolute certainty. I was even less sure his crash was an accident.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Lynn once we’d reached her house.

  “For what?”

  “For making you drive all the way out there. I thought—” We were walking up the driveway and for a moment, I paused, convinced I felt something, that supernatural flash of wind. But it was only my imagination. “I thought he would be different.”

  “Not like I had anything better to do,” she joked as she slid her key into the front door. “But seriously. If this is what you needed to move forward, then I’m glad we—”

  Abruptly, she stopped.

  “What?” I asked. I stood on my toes, craning to see what had halted her. In the living room, reclining back on the sofa, was a man watching television.

  “What are you doing here?” Lynn said, stepping into the house.

  The man stood and turned off the TV. “What do you think? I wanted to see you.”

  “Wrong answer,” Lynn said, crossing her arms.

  “I don’t know what else you want me to say, kid. That’s the truth.”

  The man had a deep voice, weighted with weariness, as though he were accustomed to fighting off suspicion. I could understand why; though at first glance he seemed well put-together—tall and thin except for a small gut that protruded above his belt buckle—I sensed a roughness escaping in unexpected places: the tug of his tucked-in T-shirt, the faded ink of his tattooed arms.

  “Who’s your friend?” he said after a moment. He must have seen me gawking and my body bristled with tension, though I wasn’t sure why. He reached out to shake my hand. The start of a smile softened his face.

  “Don’t talk to her,” Lynn snapped.

  “Whatever you want,” he said, hand falling. I watched his fist open and close.

  “I want you to leave. I didn’t see your shitty car out there, so I guess you’ll have to walk.”

  “I got a new one,” the man said, brightening. “Used, technically. But new for me.”

  Lynn’s eyes crackled with distrust. “Technically?”

  “If you don’t believe me, check the papers. It’s the Ford right out there.” He dug the keys from his back pocket and offered them to us.

  “Not interested.”

  The man laughed sadly. “Come on, kid. I’m trying here.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lynn said, “but you don’t just get to show up here and expect me to welcome you with a hug.”

  “I didn’t come here for that. I just wanted to talk. So much has changed in the last year. Let me buy you a cup of coffee—both of you.” He looked at me again. I felt my lips parting, the urge to speak.

  “How’d you even get in here?” Lynn asked.

  “This was my house too, Lynn.”

  “Give me the key.”

  “I’m not trying to move in, but I do have rights—”

  “None of this belongs to you,” she said. “We don’t owe you anything.”

  The man scratched his neck. “You can’t keep punishing me forever.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.” Lynn stepped back, exposing the doorway, and put out her hand. “You can either give me the key or we’ll change the locks. Your choice.”

  I took a step backward then, too, not for any particular reason other than to get out of the way, but the man must have taken my action as an emphasis of Lynn’s because he glanced down at his keychain and began twisting
one of the small bronze keys from its ring.

  “I’m not going to leave it like this, kid,” the man said, shaking his head. “You think you’re always right about me, but not this time.”

  Lynn’s lips were taut, her body tightened in a way that reminded me of a toy set on springs. I’d never seen her like that before—wholly affected, and trying so hard not to be. Or maybe that’s not right; maybe it wasn’t really the first time I had encountered her vulnerability, just the first time I’d had no choice but to see.

  The man placed his key in Lynn’s open palm before passing through the door. On the porch he glanced back, just for a moment, and I was surprised to find that the look wasn’t for her. Instead, his eyes found me.

  For the next few moments, until his car rolled out of view, I stood frozen.

  “Let’s go to the thrift store or something,” Lynn said, swiping at her cheek with the back of her hand. “I just—I need to get out of here.”

  “Okay.”

  Without another word, Lynn led us to her car.

  We drove with the radio down low. Lynn stared straight ahead. In profile, without the full coverage of her sunglasses, I could see that her eyes were spiderwebbed with red.

  I still sometimes wonder how it all might have turned out, had I just been able to keep pretending. But I couldn’t. My mind flooded with the image of the man’s final glance, gray and nebulous, saturated with lament for a past he could not change but begging anyway, begging me—knowing in some abstract way that I would want to give him another chance.

  “That was your dad,” I said, voice clouded with disbelief. But something about hearing the words aloud caused my body to react with a throb of recognition, and I had to knot my hands in my lap, fix my eyes on the road ahead of us, just to keep steady. “Your dad is alive.”

  The truth hovered between us, dense and impenetrable—though part of me expected, even wanted, her to deny it.

  She said, “Not to me.”

  “Lynn,” I said, with more force now. “You told me he was dead.”

  “He’s been gone for most of my life. Saying he’s dead is easier than trying to explain. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “This whole time, you’ve been acting like you knew what I was going through. But you don’t. Your dad is here. He wants to be in your life.”

  “So? He’s never going to change, and I’m not still the little kid who waits around for him to come home, to pick me up and take me wherever the fuck he said he would. It’s done.” Lynn secured the steering wheel with her knee and rolled up the sleeve on her right arm before offering it to me, elbow down, fist clenched. Her skin was unblemished except for a tiny series of ripples near the top of the forearm, about an inch below the elbow’s bend. “You see that? Doesn’t look like much now, but it hurt a hell of a lot at the time.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Daddy dearest dozed off with a cigarette in his hand, decided to use me as an ashtray.”

  “But it was an accident, right? He didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Lynn scoffed. “Sure. An accident.”

  As she tugged her sleeve back down, I thought about all the nights I had lain awake in bed waiting for my father, listening to the Santa Anas as they whirled down from the canyons. I thought about the nights he did come home, drenched in the scent of whiskey, someone else’s voice still ringing in his ear. The way his hand slammed against my shoulder that final night. His eyes glistening with tears in the red-hot darkness.

  And I swear I tried to understand why Lynn would refuse any possibility of reconciliation with her dad. I really did. But I would have switched places with her in a heartbeat. I’d have taken a thousand more disappointments if only my own father were still alive.

  She pulled into a parking lot and turned off her ignition. For the first time since we left her house, she looked at me. “Do you want an apology or something? Okay, fine, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan on ever seeing the scumbag again, and definitely didn’t think he’d have the audacity to show up at my house. If I could take it back, I would. All right?”

  It would have been hypocritical of me to not forgive Lynn when chastising her for not forgiving, so I did.

  At least I meant to.

  Twenty

  JUST WHEN I thought my search was over and I had finally exhausted all the roads that might lead back to my father, I received an unexpected text from Cameron. It was simple, totally lacking in congeniality, and yet I felt my heart slip out of rhythm when I read it, because it was the exact message that I had stopped hoping for.

  He wrote: We’re playing the Troubadour on Saturday.

  It was April, and this was the most he had willingly texted me in a month. His brevity, of course, was still upsetting, but I refused to let his waning interest affect me now. The Troubadour was too important.

  The mere possibility of being there, on the same stage that hosted the debut of Buffalo Springfield and enabled the formation of the Byrds—the stage where my parents first glimpsed each other—glittered in my mind with a brilliance so stultifying that I couldn’t focus on anything else, and I nearly convinced myself something had to go wrong. Even as we drove up the 5, the boys, Lynn, Josie, and me all smushed in the van between amps and various pieces of Luke’s drum kit, I was certain the frequent chirping of Cameron’s phone meant bad news. But we kept creeping forward, winnowing through pockets of afternoon traffic. And then, after what felt like hours, we arrived, unloaded our equipment, set up for sound check, and repeated “Check-one-two” into our mics, gazing out into the strange luster of the empty room as we breezed through the opening verse of “Coastal Blues”: Tell me your secrets so that I can tell you the things you already know. . . .

  “All right guys,” the invisible sound engineer said through the monitors, halting us. “You’re good to go.”

  The boys pushed their equipment aside and ambled toward the bar, the same way they would at any other venue. I stayed on the stage. The Troubadour was known for its intimacy, yet the room was so much smaller than I’d imagined, grungy almost, with dark wood-paneled walls and the stench of beer hanging in the air. Near the front entrance, a mess of torn posters advertised upcoming gigs. Bands had been making history here for decades, but instead of feeling exhilarated by all that had been sweated and beaten and bled into this stage, an ache gathered in the center of my chest. I was finally here, at the pinnacle. The literal origin point of my existence. But it felt just like everywhere else.

  Disappointment ricocheted through me, so sharp and unexpected that my eyes welled. I didn’t understand; I’d felt the electric energy of this place just listening to my father’s stories, so why did I feel so disconnected now? I closed my eyes, lifted my face to the warm glow of the overhead lights. I tried to imagine what he’d felt when he stood here, tried to imagine the flutter in his chest when he first glimpsed my mother’s blond hair haloed by that broken spotlight in an otherwise imperceptible crowd. Maybe that was the problem—the doors weren’t open yet, the lights weren’t down. Maybe when the room dimmed and the crowd swelled, when the music was so loud that it drowned out the pounding of my heartbeat . . .

  “Watch out,” someone growled, lugging a guitar case and an Orange amp head up to the stage. Behind me another band was setting up for their sound check.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  At the bar, I ordered a Coke and pulled out my cell phone, opened a message to Nick. I couldn’t think of anything clever or poetic to say, so I wrote, You’ll never believe what is happening. Then, too anxious to wait for his reply, I added, My band is playing the Troubadour tonight!

  A minute passed without response. Sighing, I put my phone away and looked around for Josie and Lynn, only to have my eyes hook on the rough, unmistakable profile of Cody Winters.

  So that was how we got here.

  Cody was talking to Cameron, something about set times. I’d only been watching them a moment when Cody’s eyes flicked to me and I felt the air pull
tight between us. I remembered the heat of his mouth, the way our bodies fit together and the salty taste of his skin. Then I remembered the party in Lemon Heights, and how Cameron had pulled away from me. How I hadn’t been enough.

  Cody smiled at me, an almost indiscernible movement, and I wondered what it would be like to sleep with him again—what it would be like if this time, everyone found out. From our split-second glance, I knew he’d want to, but right then he was talking to Cameron and I felt sick just standing there, watching the two of them, waiting for the sun to recede and the sky to grow black while I drank my complimentary Coke, maybe chased it with swigs from a flask in the bathroom, as Lynn and Josie must have been doing, tumbling now out of the hallway with vociferous laughter.

  “First band doesn’t start for an hour,” I said, approaching them. “Smoke?”

  Together with Luke and Gabriel, we emerged back into sunlight, walked down to the corner where we’d seen a small, triangular slice of a park. Heading toward the fountain in the center, I dug around in my purse for loose change. My father and I used to always do that, offer our spare pennies and nickels to fountains in exchange for a wish. He’d nestle me into his hip and say, “I think we’re getting the better end of the bargain, don’t you?” even though we were broke and neither of our wishes ever came true.

  “Do you know who’s played here?” Gabriel asked, lighting one of Luke’s hand-rolled cigarettes.

  There, at the bottom of my purse, a quarter: the meager tip Cody had given me all those months ago. At one time, I had cherished the bumps and ridges of the coin’s surface. Now, I knew it was just a dirty piece of metal.

  “Bruce Springsteen,” Gabriel continued. “Fleetwood Mac.”

  “Metallica,” Josie said.

  “Metallica?” Luke questioned as he sat in the grass opposite us.

  “So I had a metal phase. Don’t judge me.” She pulled a water bottle filled with brown liquid from her bag and sat on the rim of the fountain.

  “Guns N’ Roses,” Lynn said, snatching the bottle from Josie with a grin.

  “Poco,” Luke countered.