The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  I wasn’t sure why I thought it would be, or why I felt such immense, grating disappointment to discover that she wasn’t miraculously here, waiting for me to show up. My thoughts blurred with the muggy air seeping in through my cracked window. I sat in front of Cara’s house for what felt like a long time before finally turning the ignition back on.

  It was then, driving away from Eagle Rock for the last time, away from Nick and Cara and the place where I’d grown up, that I understood what I needed to do next.

  When I got home, I went straight to the computer in Vivian’s office.

  I opened up the website the Endless West used to stream their music, and, creating a new account, began filling in what few details I could—my band name, a brief description, the title of each track on our EP. The old machine grumbled as the CD uploaded. Eventually, the page refreshed, and it was official. The Midnights EP was live on the internet.

  For a moment, I stared at the screen, stunned and overwhelmed by how long it took me to get here. And sure, it was entirely possible that no one would ever listen to what my father and I had made. Right then, though, that didn’t matter. Our music existed—and not just in the middle of the night, in the privacy of our studio, in the past. This was real, permanent. Available to anybody. Just as my father would have wanted.

  But what I did after surprises me still: I searched the site for Los Funerals. They had a well-trafficked page, replete with photos and videos and tour dates, and three times as many listens as the Endless West. I spent a few minutes scrolling through their content, but didn’t find any recording of “Love Honey.” No mention of it, either. I opened up a new direct message and began typing:

  Lance and Travis,

  I’m sorry about what happened at the Troubadour. I hope you’re still playing “Love Honey.” Play it every goddamn show. You were right—it’s what he would have wanted.

  It’s what I want too.

  Susannah Hayes

  Before I could change my mind, I hit send.

  Though so much of me still felt wounded and scraped raw—still felt the snarl of Lynn’s voice slashing through me, the momentary flutter of Nick’s eyelashes against my cheek—I couldn’t help it. I sat back in my chair and smiled, because in that moment, I also felt free. My future was definitive and simultaneously unwritten, the next step as clear and unknown as the gleaming red suspensions of the Golden Gate Bridge, even through a sheet of fog.

  Yes, I was certain now: I was going to San Francisco.

  But I had one more mistake to fix first.

  The phone rang four times before Cara answered.

  “Hello?”

  She sounded breathless. Happy. Like she’d been laughing.

  “Hi. It’s . . .” It’s me, I wanted to say—what I’ve always said—but I wasn’t me anymore. Not the version of me that Cara once knew.

  I swallowed, traced my fingers over the computer’s keyboard. “It’s Susannah.”

  There was a pause.

  “I thought I recognized your voice,” she said.

  “I finally got a cell phone,” I told her, and laughed awkwardly. “But then I broke it. So I’m back on a house phone for now.” Silence. “And I heard you got into Berkeley. I’m really, really excited for you.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Nick tell you?”

  “Yeah. I . . .” I didn’t know how to explain, how to tell her that I’d sat in my car in front of her house six months too late, uselessly hoping that everything would change. So I said the only thing that felt absolutely, unequivocally true. “Cara, I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. For being a bad friend. For disappearing. For not . . . for not calling you a long time ago.”

  She sighed—a loud, heavy sound—and I knew that dwelling on the past was pointless. I couldn’t fix the mistake at all, couldn’t change how I’d acted. All I could do was try to be better. Start putting rights in the place of wrongs.

  “I’m going to San Francisco State next year,” I swept on, “and I was thinking, you know, you’ll only be across the bay, so if you wanted to, maybe we could meet up sometime. Get coffee or something. I mean, if you’re not too busy. If you even want to.”

  There was another pause, and in the background, I could make out the distinct murmur of voices. Behind that, I detected the splash of the ocean.

  “I’d come to you,” I added.

  For a moment, I feared she’d stopped listening—that she’d left me there, speaking into nothing, as I likely deserved. The wind scraped against the receiver. I closed my eyes, could almost feel it rustling my hair.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  My eyes shot open. “Great! Okay. So, uh—I’ll talk to you later?”

  “Yeah,” Cara said. Then: “Hey, Susannah?”

  “Yeah?”

  A deep breath. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Me too,” I said. Two simple words that I’d never meant more in my life.

  Twenty-Four

  THE DAY I graduated high school, a hot, skin-cracking wind blew down from the San Bernardino Mountains, knocking mortarboards from heads and flipping dresses up at knees. The sun reflected harshly off our football stadium’s bleachers, where the spectators struggled to hang on to their programs. From time to time, a particularly forceful gust swung through the crowd, whipping a slew of unguarded papers into the air, and I watched as the pages twirled higher and higher, finally settling like premature confetti across the AstroTurf.

  After the ceremony, I ushered my mother and Vivian from the stadium, anxious to leave Santiago Hills behind. The summer may have stood before me like an open wound, but soon enough I’d be gone, and I held on to that knowledge as though it were holy. I’d sent in my acceptance to San Francisco State a few weeks earlier and had already started packing in my head—not that I really had much to bring with me. Just clothing, toiletries, my notebooks, and my father’s guitar. His matchbook, with only one head left. I found it both soothing and sad that even though years seemed to have passed since we first left Los Angeles with Vivian, my life could still be reduced to the same small stack of possessions. I told myself I wouldn’t miss anything about Orange. Most of the time, I believed it.

  And then there were the other times, when a mere flicker of memory could dissolve my future oasis into something that seemed as distant and unreachable as a mirage. Walking through the parking lot after graduation, it was the fleeting hint of patchouli trailing a tendril of wind. Instinctively I halted, turned my head toward the scent. There, in the corner of my eye, a familiar glimpse of red flashed between the scintillating metal of parked cars.

  Lynn.

  She was still wearing her graduation gown but had left it gaping open, smoke swirling from the cigarette in her hand. I could tell she’d spent time in the sun lately, her skin that particular shade of gold and her hair ablaze, freshly dyed. Josie and Gabriel were standing next to her, and their laughter pealed into the hot air as they looked toward the field. I wondered if Cameron was here, and what any of them would say if they saw me. I wondered what Gabriel would say. Lynn had probably told them about me. Or, maybe she told them nothing. Maybe, when I never came back, she just let me disappear.

  “A friend of yours?” Vivian asked.

  Her voice startled me; I hadn’t realized she also paused, and was now tracing my gaze to Lynn. “Not really,” I told her, and a stinging, deep-rooted sadness lodged itself in my throat as the truth of that response resonated.

  Later that night, my mother rapped her knuckles against my door, poked her head into my room. “You’re going to be late for Grad Night,” she said.

  “Not interested.” I rolled over on my bed, toward the window. Outside, a slim sickle moon glazed the backyard with a milky shimmer.

  “What about your friends?”

  “What friends?”

  I tried to smile—not in a cruel way or to make my mother feel bad, but in an attempt to show I was fine on m
y own. Or that I would be.

  My mother nodded, as though she’d been expecting my response. “Well, Vivian and I . . .” she began, and stepped into my room. “We wanted to give you a little something. A graduation present.”

  “You already gave me something,” I said, and dangled my new phone from my fingers. I let it drop with a dull thud onto the mattress.

  My mother lowered herself onto my bed and handed me a nondescript white envelope. On the front, she’d written my name in thin, precise cursive. I lifted the flap. Inside was a check.

  Stunned, I sat up. “Vivian already gave me the deposit money,” I said, sliding the check back inside. I held the envelope out to my mother. “I sent it in weeks ago.”

  She cupped her hands around mine, and pushed them back. “We’re really proud of you,” she said. “I’m really proud of you. And we want you to have this. You’re going to be on your own pretty soon.” My mother reached out, touched my hair. “I see so much of him in you. That used to scare me, you know, but now—” She smiled. “Your future will be full of great things, Susannah.”

  In the yard, wind whistled elegiacally through the trees. She said, “I know what it’s like to feel suffocated and stuck and alone. When I was your age, I would have given anything to live in some far-off city.”

  She glanced around my room—her room, actually, with the bed that rested her growing bones and the desk where she wrote her own college applications—and I wondered if that’s what she saw now, the place it had been back then, when she was still a child, still dreaming. I wondered when those dreams had stopped.

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  With a shrug, she said, “I guess I just thought there’d be more time.”

  “There is time,” I urged. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’ll be at college, and you can do whatever you want. You can go too.”

  My mother shook her head. “My place is here now. And that’s okay. It’s good.”

  Of course. She had to stay for Vivian.

  Growing up, I’d been so concerned with my father’s ambitions and sacrifices that I left little time to consider what my mother had given up. Now, I was all too aware of how much I’d overlooked. Though I believed that she’d found solace in the trajectory of her life (or, at least, resigned herself to its present course), this did not make up for what she might have lost because of me.

  “You know,” my mother began, examining me, “that being your mom is the best thing that ever happened to me. Right?”

  She’d said these words many times before but never quite like this, with her eyes burrowing into mine as though she could see straight into my thoughts. As though she knew the exact phrase I longed to hear.

  I said, “I know.”

  For a few seconds we sat there, allowing the words to settle over us.

  “And one more thing.” My mother pulled something else from behind her back. “This is just from me.”

  “You’ve already given me too much,” I said as she offered me some small object wrapped in delicate mulberry paper. Her eyes gleamed with excitement, but her smile was tight and uncertain when I unwrapped the gift: a brand-new leather-bound notebook. The cover was a supple brown, soft and worn. Just like my father’s wallet, I thought. I opened the book, fanned through the blank, ivory pages. I could smell the thick spice of the tanning oil, the sweet must of the paper.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. “I wasn’t sure if you had any preferences, lines or no lines, hardcover, softcover. But I thought that you needed something a little more grown-up than those cheap composition books from the grocery store, so—”

  I pummeled my mother with a hug.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. Gratitude burned through me, and not just for the notebook, or even the money, but for pushing me, insisting that I take those college applications. For knowing I’d want this, even when I didn’t.

  My mother stood. Her eyes were glossy. Out on the hillside, coyotes cackled at the sliver of moon. Maybe, I thought, I would miss this place after all.

  “Thank you,” I said, still clutching the notebook.

  “You’re welcome.”

  My mother smiled and headed for the door, but she’d only made it halfway when I felt the urge to call her back.

  “I have something for you, too,” I said.

  In the instant that followed, I considered giving her the CD Nick had made of my recording over my father’s tape, or maybe even the near-empty matchbook—the few fragments of him that I’d selfishly hidden away for myself. Instead, I angled toward my desk. I rummaged through my stack of old composition books until I found the one with the photograph nestled inside. Then I took one final look at the half-obscured figure of my young mother. I said, “I’ve had this for a long time, but I think maybe now you should have it back.”

  My mother took the photo, confused. Her eyes swung across the image for a few seconds before recognition bloomed. She touched her fingers to her lips, and I wanted to say something more, something important and profound, but a wave of sorrow washed all the words down. I was no longer sure why I had kept the photograph secret for so long, or why my curiosity had always seemed so forbidden. Though I must have had a reason, I couldn’t remember it.

  “I thought I’d lost this,” my mother said after a while, voice knotted with disbelief. “Where did you . . . ?”

  Caught in the nebula of her thoughts, she never finished the sentence. In the end, I don’t think the circumstances really mattered. I watched her face soften, observed the tiny twitching movements of her thumb at the edge of the picture, refusing to shift or speak until the spell broke and she looked up from behind the gauze of whatever memory had grazed her and remembered that I was still beside her, in her childhood bedroom, on a windy, slim-mooned night.

  I couldn’t give my mother much, but I let her have this moment.

  A week later, I left.

  It was a lot easier than I thought it would be; a simple procession of Google searches led me to a site associated with the university, in which students traveling or going home for the summer tried to sublet their rooms. After clicking through a handful of listings, I found the one that stuck: an African Studies major was doing a summer program in Ghana. Her roommate, an artist, was staying in the city to work on her senior show. They wanted someone to move in as soon as possible. I had no reason to spend the summer in Orange.

  The morning was quiet, exploding with sunlight as my mother and Vivian drove me down Chapman Avenue to the small train station in Old Towne Orange, just a few minutes away from where Lynn lived. I’d become so familiar with that drive, the roundabout with the quaint park in the center and the liquor store where we’d stopped one sultry afternoon to buy a case of beer for the boys. Earthquake weather, Lynn had said that day. But it was June now, the air calm. The ground had not quaked since.

  We waited silently in the depot’s small parallelogram of shade until we heard the train’s whistle shrieking in the distance.

  “You’ll call me when you get there,” my mother said. This was not a question.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “And when you’re settled in at the apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “And—”

  “She’ll call you,” Vivian said, wrapping her arm around my mother. She squeezed her shoulders and flashed a sympathetic smile—more, I think, for my own reassurance than my mother’s. They would be fine. They would take care of each other.

  After boarding, I collapsed into a window seat and waved one last time. The train lurched into motion. I kept my nose pressed to the glass, watching their bodies shrink until they finally receded from view.

  Then I took out my new notebook.

  Now, as my train chugs through the last stretch of open land before San Francisco, I can’t help thinking about the strangeness of these in-between moments, these points of intersection amid one thing and the next. People often forget how big California is, how varied its two ends. They
forget that San Francisco is actually as far away from Los Angeles as Phoenix, Northern and Southern like completely different states. It’s funny how perception changes; not so long ago, LA and Orange County seemed like opposite ends of the world.

  And sometimes, it still feels impossible that I moved to Orange less than a year ago, only met Lynn in October, and played with the Endless West for five months. I wonder (more often than I like to admit) if any of them will even remember me five months from now—a year from now. I wonder if Cameron will ever think about our first kiss in the freezing Pacific, or how time seemed to stop inside the walls of his studio. I wonder if Lynn will remember that day we bellowed “Go Your Own Way” out the wide-open windows of her car so emphatically that our throats felt scraped raw—and if these moments, so vibrant and dominant in my mind, matter less if their memories of me cease completely.

  I wonder: Is this moment—this train ride—the in-between, or was my in-between the entire past year?

  My name has never appeared on the Endless West’s websites or in any of their articles or interviews. But I know I was there. However brief my appearance, however unnoticed my mark, I lived for a time in the center of it all. I stood on that stage and felt the glow of the spotlights beaming down like an angry sun. I wrote lyrics that gushed from the mouths of strangers in a wave of sound so massive that my own voice was submerged in the swell. I felt the bass line pump with my blood, stomped my foot against the tape-scuffed floor, slammed the tambourine against my palm until my hand turned blue, and as long as they continue playing “Don’t Look Back,” as long as they sing my words, that piece of me will still exist there. The rest of me, though, has let that piece go.

  It’s when I start thinking about all of this that I’m reminded of something my father once said, not long after my very first midnight in the studio. My amateur fingers were newly healed and my C had transformed from a mangled clang into a clear, precise lull that I struck over and over, awed by my ability to create a sound so beautiful and strong.