The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  Lance and Travis.

  Lance said, “This one’s for you, man,” and around him, the band launched into the song. The crowd cheered and whistled. On my left, Nick might have said something, or maybe he just cleared his throat. All I could hear were my father’s lyrics coming out of Lance’s mouth:

  I’ll give you all my love, honey,

  pull the moon down from above,

  but I know that it will never be enough

  to make you see you are everything—

  you are everything to me.

  My lips moved involuntarily, unable to deny my father’s words, but I was shocked to find I wasn’t the only one singing. Smashed up against the front of the stage, with hands thrusting wildly in the air, a whole group of people shouted the lyrics. The clamor of their voices sawed through me; I thought about my mother, the unidentified muse, my pulse darting as her lyrics flung around the room. Behind my eyelids, I saw the girl in the photograph: a twenty-year-old ghost who had no idea that loving my father meant she would be forever frozen in the shadows of his stage.

  Although my mouth continued moving through the entire song, the rest of me had stiffened with an anger so pronounced it felt physical. Only after Lance said, “Stick around, Fire Society is up next!” and the crowd started loosening did I regain my motion.

  After that, everything happened quickly.

  I shoved my way through the horde, toward the stage where Travis was lacing a cord through the hook of his thumb and down around his elbow.

  “Hey!” I yelled. Despite the punk music raging once again from the speakers and the contending buzz of conversations in the crowd, he heard me, turned around. A glint of recognition crossed his face.

  “Oh, hey,” he said. “Cool set earlier. You guys have a good style.”

  “You can’t play that,” I snapped.

  “Play what?”

  “‘Love Honey.’ It’s not yours.”

  “We’re not trying to steal credit,” he said through an unsettled smile before tugging another cord from his pedal board. “Bands cover songs all the time, and most of them don’t even have permission.”

  “Neither do you!”

  “Whoa,” Lance said, crossing the stage. He glanced, confused, between Travis and me. “What’s going on?”

  “We were there,” Travis said to me. “Just days before he died. He told us to keep the song alive, like he knew something was going to happen.”

  “You don’t know anything about him!” I shouted. They didn’t know anything at all—not the way my mother looked beneath that spotlight, or when my father pulled her into his arms, twirled her around the kitchen, and whispered in her ear. They didn’t know how he used to pick me up and sing “Love Honey” to me when I couldn’t fall asleep, the sway of his arms how I imagined waves would feel out in the middle of the ocean. And they didn’t know I’d covered “Love Honey” myself, that I was actually proud of it, and that I abandoned it before ever even showing anyone. But most of all, they didn’t know what I felt right then with devastating certainty: that my father would have been more proud of them than me.

  In some very real, very visceral way, I understood I had no right to hate them. I couldn’t blame Lance and Travis for anything that happened, for stealing a song they hadn’t actually stolen, for doing exactly what my father had asked. But I did anyway. I blamed them for all of it, because in that moment, it was easier than blaming myself.

  “You have no fucking clue what was going through his head,” I continued, “or what he wanted. He probably only kept you around to feel better about himself.”

  Lance laughed—a harsh sound, crisp with hostility. “And what the hell do you know about it?”

  That’s when it hit me: they had absolutely no idea who I really was, only recognizing me from the Endless West’s set an hour earlier. Last summer, Lance and Travis had been such a prominent presence in my life, lingering like a giant thorn in the flesh of my relationship with my father. But to them, I was nothing.

  My anger boiled over, drumming in my ears. I said, “I’m his daughter, you asshole.”

  I felt a hot pull of gratification when both their faces blanched.

  “Come on, kid,” said the security guard who had appeared, suddenly, next to me. “I think you need some air.”

  He gripped my upper arm—a gentle grip, admittedly, there to guide more than force, but I wrenched myself free of him. “Get off me!”

  “Watch it,” he warned, seizing me again with greater strength. He steered me away from the stage.

  “You didn’t know him,” I yelled over my shoulder. “He didn’t leave you anything.”

  As the security guard escorted me from the room, I noticed that a few people nearby had halted their conversations in order to stare. I tried to twist loose, but my effort was futile; we reached the front and the security guard waited with stiff, knotted arms until I huffed through the door.

  Emerging, bleary-eyed, out into the night, my shoulder knocked into someone. “Hey!” he yelled, but I didn’t stop. Traffic zoomed down Santa Monica, smearing taillights through the dark as I veered west. Above me, smog smothered the stars. Not sure what else to do, I turned the corner and swung into the alley behind the venue where our van was parked.

  “Susannah,” a voice called, and I thought instantly: Nick. He must have followed me. Relief fluttered in my chest as my head swarmed with images of the next few seconds (collapsing in his arms), the next few months (entwined on a tiny dorm bed). I scanned the darkness for his blond flop of hair. My eyes caught on the sparkling orange tip of a cigarette.

  “You all right?”

  Shadows danced across the ridges of Luke’s face and I stared at him, mute. A flicker of worry clouded his expression—something I’d never before glimpsed.

  “It’s okay,” he said, reaching toward me. The rough pad of his thumb slipped across my cheek, clearing the tears. I closed my eyes.

  So much was already clashing inside of me, and I didn’t have the strength to question his touch or the rapid swell beneath my rib cage. When he asked what had happened, I shook my head. What could I say? The harder I fought for something—anything—to hold on to, the further away stability always seemed. I’d been searching for my father all over Los Angeles, in the creases of record sleeves and the patterns of songs on the radio. I’d been certain that some clue would rise up from the bottom of the emptying whiskey bottle each time I took a swig. But he was really gone. No matter what I did, or how hard I looked, or how many fragments of his past I found and wound together, there would always be a wilderness of what I didn’t know.

  I cupped my palm around Luke’s hand and pressed it harder against my face. The heat of his skin felt electrifying.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, words floating almost inaudibly on the cusp of his breath. The scent of embers wafted from his tongue.

  I leaned forward.

  In a way, what happened next was as unimaginable as a room full of people singing a song my father had written about my mother as though they, too, could hear his voice jangling through every facet of their memory. And yet, I wasn’t really all that surprised when Luke met me there.

  Twenty-One

  THE CAR RIDE home was quiet. I sat in the back row of seats with Gabriel, exactly where, not quite two hours earlier, Luke and I had tumbled into each other. We hadn’t even fully undressed then, our limbs too clumsy, too impatient as we’d clambered into the backseat. Already, the whole night felt a lifetime away—or maybe that was a mere effect of the pot, which Luke had dug out of the glove compartment once we’d finished, sprinkling the green pebbles atop crispy wisps of tobacco before rolling it all into a tight cigarette that tasted not like the aftermath of a fire but like the spark had just started. Other than the secondhand highs I’d experienced in Lynn’s living room, I’d never actually been stoned before, and I let my body sink fully into the sweet weight of lethargy. My mind slipped through a state of half sleep, allowing only simple sensation
s to reach me: the strange tinge coating my teeth and the incomprehensible heaviness of my limbs. The remote tendrils of Cody Winters’s voice wending out of the venue and down the alleyway toward me, like the edge of a dream.

  But now Luke was driving, and I was so exhausted that I felt brutally awake. In front of me, Josie snored shamelessly. Because of construction, the 5 Freeway had tapered down to two lanes and I stared at the directional flares as we rolled forward, each slow bump of road pitching my stomach into my throat. Though I’d planned to stay at Lynn’s house, as I often did when I knew we would be out far later than curfew, I did not think I could bear anything now other than my own room. My own bed.

  “I don’t feel great,” I announced to no one in particular. “Do you mind dropping me off at home?”

  I’d expected grumbles, or perhaps even disappointment. No one responded—not Cameron, who was bobbing his head to the Los Funerals CD that seeped from the stereo, or even Lynn, who rested her cheek against the cool glass of her window, feigning sleep.

  “Luke,” I said, a flush rising in my cheeks as though his name in my mouth would reveal everything. “Is that all right?”

  For an instant, our eyes met in the rearview mirror. Then he shrugged. “Fine with me.”

  I tilted my head back, anxious for sleep. Though I tried to think of nothing, tried to aim my focus on a universe of blank, white, untouched space, guilt gnawed at my periphery. My mind sprang for the hundredth time to Nick. I opened my phone, reread the hail of text messages he’d sent, which I saw only after we were back on the road—the appropriate time for rectification having long since passed:

  Come back soon, Hayes—I’m wandering lonely as a cloud out here.

  Where are you?

  Are you okay? I’m kind of worried. Lynn said she’d also look for you, so if she finds you first, I’m still by the stairs.

  Look, I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to come tonight. Maybe I just misinterpreted everything, but I really thought you wanted to see me, so if that’s not the case, then please, just tell me.

  I’m going to leave. See you around, I guess.

  Even after the construction zone finally ended, after Luke dropped me at the corner of my street, after I stumbled up the driveway and began hoisting open my unlocked bedroom window, Nick’s texts still tormented me. I tried to conjure excuses and explanations, the magic combination of words that could fix what I’d done, but part of me also thought that I deserved this. I’d hurt the one person I could always count on. My mind lurched with the single, agonizing, pointless wish that Nick had been in that alley instead.

  The thought was only severed when my foot caught the bedroom’s windowsill, and I toppled, clamorous, into my room.

  I had just stood up again when the door sailed open. The lights leapt on. Instinctively, my face dipped down, an arm rising to shield my eyes from the cruel exposure of the lamps.

  “Mom,” I gasped. “I can explain.”

  But the voice that thundered back was not my mother’s: “I should damn well hope so.”

  “Vivian?” I put my arm down, eyes fluttering to thwart the brightness.

  “How many times must we discuss this?” Vivian asked. She appeared frail in her white silk nightgown, hair matted on the left side from her pillow. “I don’t care what you say to your friends, but when you are in my presence, you will not refer to me by my first name. It’s disrespectful.”

  “I’m sorry,” I stuttered, too bewildered to remind her that she’d basically told me not to call her Grandma on the first day we met. I was about to try “Mrs. Crane,” the most reverent choice I could think of, but Vivian spoke again: “What in God’s name are you wearing?”

  She was staring at the runs that climbed up my tights from my knees to the hem of my dress. My fingers instinctively touched my thigh.

  “They’re just tights,” I said.

  “You look like a two-bit hooker.”

  A smile caught the corner of my mouth. Admittedly, there was a certain sexuality to the tears in my tights, the visible slivers of skin—but little seemed more horrifying than discussing my sexuality with Vivian, so I simply said, “I guess we just have different concepts of fashion.”

  She sat down on the edge of my bed, shaking her head. “Where did I go wrong with you?”

  “I don’t really think you have anything to do with what’s wrong with me,” I told her.

  “I know you were with that boy again.”

  My heart plunged. “Boy?”

  “I’m not completely oblivious.”

  My eyes roved helplessly around the room in search of an explanation. It was still, all things considered, a guest bedroom, blank and impersonal. I had no secret boxes of notes under the bed, no private diary or incriminating mementos shoved to the bottom of my underwear drawer. Briefly, I thought of my lyric journals, which were accessible in a messy stack at the corner of the desk, but those wouldn’t have given away any concrete evidence. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to anchor myself. The weed was still lapping through my blood. “It’s not what you think.”

  “All those boys are after one thing,” she said, “and this Roger is no different.”

  “Rog—?” The name snagged in my throat. “Did you just say Roger?”

  “Don’t tell me there’s already another.”

  My mouth dropped open. “You think,” I said carefully, “that I was out with Roger.”

  “Colleen Johnson saw you kissing in the hallways.”

  “Colleen Johnson,” I repeated.

  “Mrs. Johnson, the administrative secretary.” She brought her fingers to her temples and began rubbing in a circular motion. “Eleanor Johnson’s mother.”

  The names still meant nothing to me, but as I scrambled to find some frayed strand of logic in the net of an otherwise stymieing conversation, Vivian spoke again, exasperated. “You know Eleanor. Her father gave you your first horseback riding lesson.”

  A flurry of conflicting emotions tore through me. “I’m not—” I began, but then some instinct that I couldn’t quite identify, or maybe just the deep trill of disquiet that was expanding inside my stomach, stopped me from continuing. I shook my head, felt the irrepressible urge to start over. “Of course,” I said, barely able to control the quaking in my voice. “Eleanor Johnson’s mother. I’d forgotten for a moment.”

  “You’re too young,” she said.

  “Too young for what?”

  “How can you possibly know whether or not he’ll be good for you?”

  I paused, trying to radiate calm. Trying to act like my mother. “I know he’s a good man,” I said.

  Vivian scoffed. “He’s hardly a man.”

  “He will be a good man,” I amended, this time with more certainty, “and he’s going to make someone very happy one day. I’m sure of that.”

  “He’s not good enough,” Vivian said, and despite myself—despite the night and the conversation and the position I’d unwittingly found myself in—I smiled. She may have had valid reasons for being suspicious of my father, but it was obvious now that she had set the bar unreasonably high. If Roger Tipton could not have passed her test back then, no one could.

  I sat down next to her on the bed. “You’d say that about anyone.”

  “What are his plans?” she demanded, turning her head just enough to look at me.

  “He wants to be a teacher. He’s really smart, and he’s compassionate—”

  “He should come to the door,” she interrupted. “Not make you sneak out in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll invite him over, then. I know he would love to meet you.”

  “He hasn’t made a very good first impression.”

  “Give him another chance,” I said. “Please.”

  Vivian brought a bony hand back up to her forehead where a parabola of sweat glistened. “Only if you promise to start obeying the rules of this house,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I let you screw up your life while you’re living under
my roof, understand?”

  I nodded, aware of a loosening in my limbs, the physical relief.

  “No more lies,” Vivian said.

  “No more lies,” I echoed, and wished, achingly, that I could mean it.

  Vivian sighed. “Let’s not concern your father over this,” she said then, standing. A brief, tight smile crossed her face. “The poor man is working himself to the bone. He’s always so tired these days.”

  As she spoke, a new swell of fear dazed me. The night had me so twisted around that I nearly forgot who we were, when we were, had to physically repress the urge to shout, He’s not tired, he’s sick—please take him to the hospital! For an instant, I actually thought that if I acknowledged the signs and took the precautions, maybe I could save him.

  Then, without warning, all the worry and the sadness fell away, replaced by a soft, blanketing equilibrium. In the morning, I knew, everything would change—but right now, wherever we were in Vivian’s memory, David Crane, my grandfather, was still alive, and I wanted her to keep him for as long as possible.

  “No,” I agreed. “Let’s not worry him tonight.”

  My eyelids pulled apart to a white morning, bright and fresh as stretched canvas. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sleeping but it felt early, the sun-dusted air hushed with the quiet of dawn. After flopping uselessly around my bed for a while, I got up and washed my face, brushed my teeth, attempting to scrub the tissue-paper taste from my tongue. The previous night swirled around me in fragments but I was locked inside the dominating fog of a hangover. I could hardly think. I needed food, and ten thousand glasses of water.

  In the kitchen, the sun had already broken through the wide windows, fanning ivory light across the tile. My mother sat in her usual chair at the table, the Sunday Register propped in one hand. I shuffled toward the sink.

  “Good morning,” my mother said, surprised. “When did you get home?”