The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  She sighed. “Yes. It’s present tense. It will always be present tense. But we can’t let that keep us from moving on.”

  All of a sudden, the conversation shifted, and I knew were talking about something else.

  “How is he?” I asked. “Roger. He hasn’t been around in a while.”

  My mother smiled sadly. “You’d know better than me.”

  I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that I’d reverted to instinct, erecting defenses without knowing entirely why. If only she’d told me about him in the first place—their history, their existence—then maybe the possibilities wouldn’t have seemed so frightening.

  But my mother spoke first.

  “So the Troubadour, huh?” Her eyes brightened. “How was it?”

  “Not like I expected.”

  “Why not?”

  “The way Dad always talked about it . . . I guess I just thought it would be different.” But no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t the truth. “I thought I would be different.” I paused. “I thought, if I ever made it to that stage, he’d be there.”

  “I’m sure he’d have been so proud of you,” she said.

  I shrugged, because I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t want to think any more about last night, what would or would not have made him proud. He was gone.

  We were still here.

  “How do you remember it?” I asked then.

  “Remember what?”

  “The Troubadour. I’ve heard Dad’s stories a hundred times, but not yours.”

  “Oh, geez. That was so long ago.” My mother laughed slightly, looked up at the ceiling. “I guess—I guess I remember the feeling more than anything specific. The music being so loud that it filled you up until it felt like it was part of you. I remember the way it echoed in my chest. And I remember feeling like I never wanted it to stop. The music, the dancing. The song. The moment.”

  She smiled, her eyes misty, and my mind itched with the image of the young woman in the photograph—how desperately I’d always wanted to know her. Yet suddenly here she was, right now, right in front of me. All this time, and it never truly occurred to me that that woman and my mother were still the same person.

  All this time, and I just needed to ask.

  “That’s not really about the Troubadour, though, is it?” my mother said, looking back to me.

  “It’s close enough,” I said. And it was. It was everything I’d ever wanted to know.

  “That was my very first time there, the night I met your father.”

  “He never told me that.”

  She nodded, seemingly pleased to have surprised me. “I didn’t know who he was, who the band was. A friend from school asked me to go with her. Her name was Karen Matthews, I think. God, I haven’t thought about her in years.” My mother put one hand on the side of her face, shook her head. “One innocuous decision, a girl who lived down the hall in my dorm, and my entire life changed course.”

  “Do you . . .” I began. The words congealed in the back of my mouth. “Do you ever wonder about what would have happened if you hadn’t gone?”

  “I wonder about a lot of things,” my mother said, “but I don’t regret any of my decisions. Not for a second.”

  Down the hall, the garage door growled open. My mother turned around, wet a sponge, and began wiping the coffee spills from the counter as the thin echo of heels clicked toward us.

  “I brought bagels,” Vivian announced as she entered the kitchen. She hoisted a plastic bag onto the counter, began unfurling the paper pouch nestled inside. Then she looked at us. “Everything all right in here?”

  “Yes,” my mother said, replacing the sponge on the rim of the sink. Her eyes flashed to me. “Everything’s great.”

  “Well, are you hungry?” Vivian pulled butter, cream cheese, and a beefsteak tomato larger than my fist from the refrigerator.

  “I’ll take half a bagel, if you want to split one,” my mother said.

  “Susannah?” Vivian took out a cutting board.

  “Sure,” I said, looking into my mug of cold coffee. “Thanks.”

  “Need any help?” my mother asked.

  “I’m perfectly capable of chopping produce,” Vivian said tersely, slicing through the slick tomato skin with a thud of knife on wood. “But if you want to scramble some eggs.”

  As they continued talking, chopping, and whisking, I excused myself from the kitchen. I needed a moment alone. I’d been so sure that the conversation with my mother would go terribly, and I was stunned to find that in many ways, I felt better. Last night seemed so far away. I wasn’t going to be that girl anymore. I wasn’t her now.

  And yet, I knew I still had to answer for her mistakes. So I went to my bedroom and pulled up Nick’s number in my phone.

  The thorny wilderness of a blank, fresh text message shone from my hands and I almost turned the phone off, too daunted by the task of finding the exact right thing to say. But I didn’t. I began typing: Is it too late for apologies / to tell you my eyes have blurred behind county lines / and I’m not always sure who I am?

  Minutes ticked by. Nick didn’t respond. I tried again.

  I’m so sorry about last night.

  Another minute passed.

  It’s fine, he wrote back.

  The words echoed in my head, clipped and curt, as I imagined he must have meant them—just two vague, tiny words, practically meaningless when removed from context. They shoved through the bulk of my newfound contentment with a weight so heavy and expansive that when my bagel was finally done toasting and the scrambled eggs were fluffy and firm, I wasn’t even hungry anymore.

  Twenty-Two

  MAY BROUGHT LONG, hot, monotonous days. I threw myself into school. There was just over a month left before graduation, but it was still enough time to salvage my grades, and I was studying for a history test one Saturday when my phone pinged with a text from Gabriel: Constellation Room canceled. Warehouse show instead. Be here by 8, cool?

  I wrote him back right away: See you then!

  This would be our first show since the Troubadour—as far as I was aware, anyway. No one had bothered to tell me about the Constellation Room. I wondered what else they hadn’t told me. I wondered if they’d been recording.

  I texted Lynn. Warehouse party tonight. Want to meet up before?

  Can’t, she replied. See you there.

  A weird, restless feeling stirred in my chest. We always went to parties together, and what kind of plans could she have that excluded me? Something with Josie, I guessed. It was true they’d known each other far longer, but even after our fight and the enduring awkwardness, I still considered Lynn my closest friend.

  For the first time, I began to wonder whether she felt the same.

  When the sun sank behind the hillside and the gloomy, moonless night descended, I got ready alone in my bedroom. I attempted to paint narrow streaks on my eyelids the way Lynn always did, but my hand was not as precise, the lines too wide and uneven. Wiping my face clean, I settled for simple swipes of mascara and red-tinted lip balm. Casual, I thought. I let my hair down and gazed at the mirror. I didn’t look like my father anymore, or like Lynn. Just me.

  At exactly seven fifteen, I marched into the living room and presented the night’s plan to my mother and Vivian. In a spate of full, excruciating details, I explained that four bands would be playing a show, unregulated and unchaperoned, at the Endless West’s practice space. I expected my mother to stop me each time I inhaled or shifted course, but she didn’t. When I finally finished speaking, they both sat quiet. The television grumbled in the background.

  My mother asked, “And when will you be home?”

  “Two?” I tried, awaiting the harsh curl of the word no, or youhavegottobekiddingme. On the adjacent sofa, Vivian noisily flipped the pages of her TV guide, though she was obviously listening. “One?”

  “Twelve thirty,” my mother said, “and not a second later.”

  “Twelve thirty,” I repeated, stunned.
Despite the time I’d spent getting ready, I didn’t fully believe my mother would let me go.

  “Be safe,” she added, veering her attention back to the TV, and I left the family room unable to tell whether the remaining tension in my stomach was relief or disappointment. My mother was, I realized, not going to punish me. Though part of me wonders now if perhaps she actually did.

  By the time I arrived at the warehouse, the place was already packed, dense with the humid scents of spilled beer and sweat, chatter straining to be heard above the stereo. I surveyed the room, checking off in my mind all the people I knew by name or face.

  Then I pulled out my phone.

  Want to come to a party tonight? I asked Nick, jokingly adding, I promise I won’t disappear in the middle of it!

  I stared at the screen, waiting. Maybe he was at a swim meet, I thought uselessly, or working on a project for the video yearbook. I sent him the address anyway, emboldened by a glimmer of hope until I saw Lynn rushing toward me. She approached so suddenly—tripping, perhaps, on one of the duct-taped lumps of cord on the floor—that she fell into me, and my phone shot from my hand.

  “Susie,” she said, laughing. “Where have you been hiding, huh?”

  “Home?” I said, scanning the area around me. “I just got here. Do you see my phone? I dropped it.”

  I crouched down, peering between legs. Lynn squatted next to me, but instead of helping me search, she stared directly at me. Her eyeliner had clumped at the corners, smeared across the crease of her lids. Her skin was splotched and pink. When she leaned into me, I could smell the booze on her breath. “I know what you’ve been doing,” she said.

  “What?” I asked, not sure if I heard right.

  “Oh, here!” Crawling on her knees, she moved a few inches forward, tapping calves out of the way. The crowd parted for her. When she returned she had my phone.

  I smiled, standing, wondering if maybe I’d overanalyzed her earlier text. “Thanks,” I said. The phone was scuffed and screen cracked, but otherwise it seemed fine. Then I tried to turn it on. Nothing. “Shit.”

  Lynn grabbed my hand and started swinging my arm back and forth like a child. “Oh, say that you’ll be true,” she sang, spinning beneath my fingers, “and never leave me blue, my Susie Q.” As she danced, her hips sloshed in sync with whatever was in her cup. Frothy drops plunged over the side. I shoved my phone in my purse.

  “Looks like you’re a few drinks ahead of me, huh?” I joked, though something ominous bristled through me.

  “Dance with me!” Lynn spun again, but this time she lost her balance and knocked into some girl standing next to us, who then shot me a hostile look.

  “I think we should get you some water,” I said.

  “Good idea.” Lynn gulped down whatever remained in her cup. “Let’s go get a drink.”

  “Of water,” I said, but Lynn wasn’t listening; she had already begun dragging me through the crowd, bumping, unconcerned, into more bystanders as we hurried toward the plywood bar in the warehouse’s back corner. “Excuse me, sorry, excuse me,” she called to each person we rammed. I had never seen her act so clumsy, not even when we were drinking. That night, though, it was clear: something inside her had come apart.

  “Let’s do shots,” she said as we sidled up to the bar.

  “I’m driving tonight,” I said.

  “So? Drink now, sober later.”

  That’s when I noticed Cameron behind the haphazard bar, cracking open cans of Natural Ice in exchange for a dollar.

  “Hey,” he said, looking between us. “Beer?”

  “Come on, Cam,” Lynn said, reaching out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind his ear. “There’s no need to be weird.”

  From my vantage, that gesture seemed alarmingly intimate, but he didn’t even twitch. She must have touched him that way a thousand times before, as friends, as more. Even when he and I were together, I’d been too hesitant to imagine such an action.

  “Susie Q’s already over it, anyway,” she continued. “You’ve moved on, she’s moved on, so let’s just all forget it.”

  Laughter crackled somewhere behind me and my breath caught in my throat. I wanted to run, hide, shout that what she said wasn’t true (or maybe it was—I really hadn’t figured that out yet). But the capacity for language had deserted me.

  “Now, I just happen to know,” Lynn continued, lowering her voice, and I couldn’t help noticing the way her tank top draped open when she leaned forward. “Josie has the good stuff back there. I’ll come around and get it myself if I have to. You know how much I hate Natty Ice.”

  “Fine, but I won’t cover for you,” he said. “If she notices, I’m pointing fingers.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Lynn said sweetly.

  He grabbed a bottle from beneath the slab of plywood. “You too?” he asked me.

  My reply came out as a squeak. Clearing my throat, I said, “No thanks. You got any water?”

  As Cameron poured Lynn a shot, her attention shifted to the boy on her right. I recognized him from Surreal Killers, another band scheduled to perform that night, but I couldn’t remember his name. Lynn playfully gripped his forearm, flirting. I turned back to Cameron in time to see his gaze brush away from mine, as though afraid of what might happen if it lingered.

  “The weather,” I blurted, regretting the words the instant they left my mouth. I’d meant to suggest that the sudden influx of thick, arid heat had a way of spiking nerves—but my mouth couldn’t formulate the rest of the thought and those two futile words hung there like a pathetic jab at small talk, spotlighting the strangers we’d become. Or maybe, I thought, we’d always been strangers.

  It struck me then that this was how most things end: seemingly slow and then all at once. As the last trace of him slipped like sand through my fingers, all I could do was smile bleakly, drink my water, and watch him go.

  “To Boulder Girl,” Lynn said, clinking her cup against my bottle. Then she knocked back the drink in one swift sip.

  Shortly after that, the first set began. Surreal Killers followed almost immediately. The bands all used most of the Endless West’s equipment, slipping black braided cables in and out of guitar jacks, so the music rarely stopped. Tall plastic trash cans filled up around me with empty beer cans. Lynn did not leave my side.

  I wondered at first if she and Josie had fought that afternoon, and a remote satisfaction wafted through me. But the sensation was fleeting; when Surreal Killers came to an end and I mounted the stage with the Endless West, Lynn shimmied to the front of the crowd where Josie was standing, rainbow colors streaking her bangs. Lynn said something to her that I couldn’t decipher, and I waited for them to fight or yell but Josie just pushed up her glasses and squinted at me.

  The boys plugged in their instruments. At the corner of the stage I sipped my water, sharply aware of the noises clashing through the crowded room and the way people’s eyes kept flicking to the stage, to me. Cameron, unsurprisingly, kept his attention diverted, but a strong, prickling ache overcame me when I realized that Luke was ignoring me, too. I lingered, awaiting his glance, the tiny offering of his tambourine. But that night, Gabriel had been searching through the suitcase for a spare tuner. When he ultimately handed me the tambourine, smiling in a way that should have brought me comfort, I felt only a deeper pull of despondency.

  We played. Nothing about that night’s set stands out in my mind. The songs had lost their luster, that hypnotic edge I detected when I first heard the boys’ music wafting out from the trees. Even when Alex strummed the first chords to “Don’t Look Back,” as the crowd cheered and chanted and stamped their feet against the stained cement floor, I felt only the routine of the song coursing through me. I still sang, I can’t let go, I can’t let go, I can’t let go—but I was no longer sure of what I was even holding on to.

  When our set ended, Alex announced that Abandoned Nova Brigade would play next and the boys unplugged their instruments. Plunking the tambourine in Luke’s
suitcase, I hurried from the stage, scanning the room for the sunny fluff of Nick’s hair, his blue coral reef eyes. But he wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. It had been useless to think a meager apology would make everything okay between us, or that he’d drive all the way down here on a last-minute invitation. Emerging through the back of the crowd, I made my way to the bar and paid a dollar for the beer—not because I particularly wanted it, but because I wasn’t sure what else to do with myself. I took a sip. A metallic taste lingered in my mouth.

  I turned to the guy next to me. “Hey, you want this?” I asked him. “I only had one sip.”

  “Cool, thanks!” the guy said, and disappeared back into the mob.

  I sighed. All around me were people I recognized, but I didn’t actually know any of them. I couldn’t spot a single person I wanted to talk to, until Gabriel slipped behind the bar. He cracked open a beer for himself, then offered one to me. I shook my head.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that John Lennon and Harry Nilsson got kicked out of the Troubadour?”

  “John Lennon?” I asked. “Nuh-uh.”

  “True story—1974. The Smothers Brothers were playing, doing their comedy thing, and apparently Lennon and Nilsson just started yelling shit at them, as though they were part of the act. Which they obviously weren’t.”

  I laughed. “It’s hard to imagine John Lennon as the heckling type.”

  Gabriel, now playing bartender, did not quite look at me when he said, “Same goes for you.”

  Because no one ever said anything about my outburst that night at the Troubadour, I’d assumed it must have been relatively subdued, massive only amid the scrim of my drunken memory. After all, there were no mosh pits or punches, no broken glass. Apparently, though, I’d been wrong. I wondered if everyone knew—if they saw me now as that girl who screamed and made scenes. And suddenly, I was reminded of Detective Melendez, the nervous way he watched me as my mother and I sat in his office. As if he knew, just by looking at me, the mess I was capable of causing.

  Gabriel grinned and bumped me with his elbow. “Pretty badass of you.”