Goode Vibrations

by Jasinda Wilder

Unable to breathe, because she was here.

  After a day spent searching, she’d found me. Or…fate had brought her to me.

  She shut the phone off and shoved it into her backpack and let out a breath.

  That’s when I knocked on the window.

  She bolted upright, jumping in fright.

  Spun, hand to her chest, gasping.

  When she saw me sitting there, she just blinked. Disbelieving.

  Errol? she mouthed.

  I just smiled.

  Patted the seat beside me.

  Another moment, and then she headed for the door, and my table.

  Poppy

  My heart was hammering as I sat down in the booth across from Errol. The shock of the fright had passed; now, it was a complex amalgam of emotions clashing my heart like a medieval battlefield, chemical reactions in my body combusting, a starburst of conflicting thoughts in my brain.

  A momentary, incendiary silence.

  “Hungry?” he asked, voice pitched low as if confiding a secret.

  I could only nod. “Famished.”

  He twisted on the bench, half rising, flagging the waitress; she came over, chomping gum, pad and pen ready. “She’ll have a double cheeseburger with fries,” he said, glancing at me for confirmation; I nodded.

  “And a chocolate milkshake,” I added.

  She left to ring in the order, came back in a matter of minutes with my shake, and then we were alone.

  “You’re here,” I said. “North. Way north.”

  He swallowed hard, swirled coffee dregs at the bottom of his mug. “Yeah. I, uh, I got about two hours away and realized I’d fucked things up.”

  My heart clenched, hope and fear competing. “How so?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Took a sip of his coffee but grimaced and set the mug down. “Ugh, it’s gone cold.” He was restless, shifting in the booth, tracing rapid swirling patterns on the chipped Formica tabletop. “With you.”

  “How—” my voice broke; I cleared my throat. “How did you fuck things up with me, Errol?”

  “I should’ve gone north.” A significant pause, his eyes meeting mine. “With you.”

  “Errol—” I started, broke off when the waitress dropped off my food.

  “Eat first.” He sat back, arm slung across the booth back.

  But when I was done eating, we still hadn’t started talking. I was loathe to open up this Pandora’s box. Why had he come back? Fucked what up? We’d agreed to go our separate ways, mutually.

  He paid for both our meals, and then we just sat in the booth, staring at each other. “Poppy, I…” he blew out a breath, scrubbed his face, pawed his hair backward. “You want to get out of here? With me, I mean. Drive a bit further together. We’ll go north.”

  “Sure.” I hesitated, though. “But I’m confused as hell.”

  “Me too.”

  “You came back. Sort of.” I blinked at him. “Wait…how the hell did you know where I’d be stopping?”

  He barked a laugh. “I didn’t. Spent the whole fuckin’ day looking for you, Pop. All up and down the area—Twenty-seven, Thirty-five, One-fifty-one, Sixty-one…all over. Dirt roads and side roads and two tracks and deer paths. Gave up, and here you are.”

  “But did you come back…for me?”

  He nodded. “I came back for you.”

  “Why?”

  He looked like he was wrestling with deep emotions, which was odd for him, to let me see the turmoil. “Let’s drive a bit first. I need a minute to figure out where to start.”

  “You’ve been looking for me all day, but now that we’re back together, now you have to figure out where to start?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, well…I’ve started the conversation in my head about a million different ways, but now I’m sat across from you, it’s all gone out of my head.”

  It had only been part of a day. Twelve hours, even less. But it had felt like a lifetime without him.

  I was pitifully glad to see him.

  So glad it terrified me.

  The hope I was feeling terrified me. Because…hope for what?

  What did I hope was happening here?

  We went to his van, and I made for the passenger seat.

  “Actually,” Errol said, stopping me between the headlights. “Would you mind driving?”

  “No,” I murmured. “Not at all.”

  Behind the wheel, I pointed our headlights north, and he turned to stare out the window, lost in thought. I didn’t rush him. I had my window cracked, and the radio was off. The only sound was the wind through the window and the hum of our tires.

  The small analog clock in the dashboard read well past two, almost three in the morning, and I found myself yawning.

  “Need to stop soon, Errol. Been a hell of a long day.” I glanced at him.

  Asleep? I laughed. Fine. I’d figure it out myself.

  I saw a sign for Lake Eau Claire County Park; a few turns, a dead end, some slow crunching rolling down remote back roads and bumping over rutted two-tracks, and I found a spot on the lake where it was highly unlikely we’d be discovered. I wasn’t sure if it was illegal or whatever, since we weren’t technically an RV and we weren’t camping, just parking to sleep.

  I pulled around so the passenger side sliding door was facing the lake, and shut off the engine. Sat with the silence sudden and thick, except Errol’s soft breathing. I wasn’t tired, suddenly. Or, rather, exhausted to a degree that simply falling asleep wouldn’t be possible.

  Unbuckled. Pivoted to put my feet between the seats and unlaced my boots, kicked them off, laid my socks over them.

  Errol snorted, stirred, woke up. “Poppy?” Disoriented. “Where’re we?”

  “Parked on the shores of Lake Eau Claire, Wisconsin.”

  He sat up, looked around. “Nice spot.”

  “Glad you approve.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “An hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to nod off. I had, like, a pot of coffee, so I’m not sure how I even managed it, honestly.”

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. But now I’m wired and tired at the same time.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I know the feeling. Let’s get out and stretch our legs.”

  A quick look around the area revealed that this was a spot that saw fairly regular use—cigarette butts, a fire ring near the shoreline, a garbage bin with a metal lid chained to it, a picnic table. Errol pointed at the fire ring. “You fancy a fire?”

  “Sure. Will we get in trouble?”

  He shrugged. “Nah. Keep it small, I doubt anyone will notice.”

  I lifted my palms up, slapped them against my thighs. “I hope you know how to make one, because I don’t.”

  His laugh was somewhere between derisive and sarcastic. “Yeah, Pop, I can make a fire.”

  And he did, quickly, efficiently. He gathered an armload of sticks and branches of varying sizes, used a stick to dig a small hole in the ashes within the ring and set a bunch of the smallest sticks in a pyramid shape, points steepled together. Shredded some bark and broke up other sticks even smaller, piling it all under the steeple of sticks, and then tossed a lit match onto the whole. Some gentle blowing, and the flames caught. After another few minutes, the flames were bigger and yellow and bright, and he gradually built it up to a merry little blaze that gave off decent heat in the cool of the summer night.

  We sat side by side, watching the fire flicker.

  He glanced at me, long and slow and meaningful, thinking, letting me see the emotions in him. “Poppy, I…” he trailed off. “You know, I think I know a better place to start than talking.”

  I laughed. “Well color me intrigued, Errol.”

  He pounced up onto his feet, went to the back of the van, returned with the fiddle case. Sat down with it on his lap. Turned the tag to face me. Pointed at the bottom name, E. Sylvain. “Me, Errol Sylvain.” The one above it, B. Sylvain. “My dad, Bastien Sylvain.” He withdrew the
card, gently, flipped it over and showed me the other side—there were another four names, in increasingly smudged and faded ink, going from the most recent on top to the oldest on bottom; he pointed to each in turn as he named them. “My grandfather, Jean-Paul; great-grandfather, Marc; great-great-grandfather, Emil; and my three-times great-grandfather, Henri Sylvain.”

  “So when you say this is a family heirloom…” I said, somewhat awestruck.

  “I mean exactly that.” He traced the middle curve of the instrument with a reverent finger. “It’s not worth much, like, it’s not a Stradivarius or anything of the sort, but it’s priceless because it’s old as hell. Henri Sylvain was born in the mid-seventeen hundreds.”

  “Wow.” I watched him touch the strings, the bow. “So cool that you have it.”

  He eyed me, then his attention returned to the instrument. He sighed. “Yes, it is cool to own such an old thing, something that ties me to my ancestors.” He lifted the fiddle out of the red velvet case with exquisite care. Held it by the neck with familiarity, resting the other end on his knee as he deftly removed the bow. Let out a slow, sad breath. Rose to his feet. Turned away to face the lake, campfire at his back, the orange glow sending his shadow dancing in long twisting flat gyrations on the placid surface. Fiddle held at his side, bow pointing to the earth.

  He…played?

  If he could play the fiddle as well, I was going to be mightily annoyed that any one person could contain so much talent.

  Moving slowly, as if drawing on something only half remembered, he lifted the fiddle to his shoulder, tucked his chin against it, adjusted the position of fiddle and chin, bow still held slack against his thigh. Spine straight, shoulders back. I couldn’t see his face, but I had a feeling his eyes were closed. Seeing some past memory.

  The bow seemed to float up, up, as if under its own power. Rested on the strings with a soft zzzzhringgggg. He drew the bow along the largest string, twisted the tuning knob; the next, and the next and the next, and back to the first, sawing a couple short notes each time as he tuned, and then all went silent again.

  I just watched, silent.

  This was a different Errol I was seeing, and this one spoke to my heart, not just my loins.

  A deep breath, broad hard shoulders lifting, settling as he sighed. And then the bow lifted once more and this time, he struck the strings with sudden force, a jarring clangor of double notes that he somehow drew out into a long, plaintive wail, the bow sawing smoothly back and forth. A three-count, a four-count, and then, without missing a beat, he tilted the bow across the strings and his fingers began to dance across the strings at the neck, near the headstock.

  A jig, a reel—I didn’t know the difference. A quick, lively, merry tune.

  In fact…

  It was the tune that I’d heard a few snatches of when I’d started that mysterious playlist of “just some old stuff.” I also recognized the tune as the song they dance to in the lower decks in the film Titanic.

  My jaw dropped as he played, because he was…it was magical. The notes flew from his fingers, from the bow, from the fiddle, radiating across the lake in echoing waves, and there was nothing but him and the moon and the stars and this little campfire and me and the music, and he just played and played, tune after tune, as if he’d broken open a wellspring somewhere deep inside and the music just had to flow, flow, flow.

  His toes tapped, and then his shoulders began to move, and then his knees began to dip with the notes and the rise and the fall of the melodies, and then, impossibly, this tall aloof laid-back surfer photographer was dancing in the sand, barefoot, sawing at a three-hundred-year-old fiddle with a virtuosic talent I’d had no clue he possessed.

  It was seared into my very soul, the sight of Errol wheeling and spinning with his feet in the sand and splashing in the rippling moon silver-lit lake, fiddling a jig that would make the stars themselves dance.

  How long did he play? I didn’t know, didn’t care. But after a timeless time of dancing and playing, he came to rest once more, near me, facing me, eyes on me. The jig slowed and became a ballad, a slow sad song; mournful, as hesitant as he’d begun.

  Then, with a sigh, the fiddle dropped from his shoulder and the bow drooped to point at the dirt once more.

  Silence reigned.

  He sat, nestled the fiddle back into the case, the bow as well, and left the lid open, firelight glinting off the aged red wood.

  “What…the…fuck, Errol?”

  He smiled at me. “I haven’t played in a long, long time.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t know.”

  He snorted. “I messed up several times.”

  “Errol.”

  He sighed. “My dad was gone a lot when I was a kid. Gone more than he was home. But when he was home, he taught me to play. Insisted on it, said the Sylvain men had played the fiddle for three hundred years and I was no exception. Mom made sure I kept up practicing. The best days of my childhood were when Dad came home from a tour in Europe and would want to know what I’d been playing. It was the first thing, always. ‘Play for me, Errol,’ he’d say. ‘Let me hear what you have learned.’” He said it in a French accent, echoing his father’s voice. “And I’d play for him. I was always so desperate for him to approve, you know? So I’d…I’d practice my ass off all year for the moment he’d come home and ask me that question.”

  He breathed out, slow, harsh.

  “Of course, then, this was his fiddle. I had a cheap one mom had bought thirdhand. Always out of tune, a real piece of shit. But I played my heart out for Dad, year after year.” Another pause. “I was alone a lot as a kid. Mom was an artist; I think I told you that. She had been a photographer, but when she had me she’d retired from photography and focused on painting. Abstracts and still lifes, mostly. She had this studio out back of our little house, and she’d be in there for hours…sometimes for days at a time. Lost in the art, she called it. She sold them at this gallery owned by a friend of hers, and later, sometimes, online. Enough to keep us afloat, with a bit of cash Dad would send every month.”

  He twiddled a finger in the dirt, not looking at me.

  “I learned to be self-sufficient by the time I was, what, six? Seven? Mom would make a bunch of food all at once and put it in the fridge and freezer, but other than that, she’d be in her studio. And, it’s not that I wasn’t allowed in—I was. She just…wouldn’t even notice me. Didn’t see me, or hear me, even if I stood beside her and shouted. Just…lost. I’d sit in there with her until I got bored, just watching her paint. Then I’d go play. I’d get myself ready for school in the morning, make my own lunch, do my homework, play, watch the telly. Put myself to bed.

  “Once she’d finished a piece, though…she was all mine, for at least a week, sometimes two. She’d keep me out of school and we’d take drives all over New Zealand, sleep in the car, or on the ground watching the stars. Swim on the beach and go on hikes, and she’d tease me and tickle me and tell me stories, and it almost, almost made up for days and weeks of pure neglect. More than made up for it, I felt, in the moments I had her to myself, and nowhere near made up for it when she was painting. Then, randomly, Dad would appear and he’d stay for a month, and I’d have this…this little taste of what it was to be part of a normal family.” Sad, his voice. So sad, bitter, lost to me, lost in the memory. “We’d go for ice cream together, or go round the dairy together and shop for dinner, and we’d all cook together, and Mum and Dad would sing and dance in the kitchen and kiss each other right in front of me.”

  Long hard pause.

  “And then he’d leave again. Kiss me on the head, tell me to keep my chin up and take care of Mum, and keep practicing on the fiddle. He’d promise to call and write, but he never did. And Mum would do his washing and she’d find things in his pockets. Notes, and phone numbers, and addresses, and leftovers from smoking dope and packets of coke. Frenchie wrappers.” He shrugged. “Never said shit to him about it, and I never knew her to see anyone else. They never
argued. He never raised his voice, and he was always kind to me, always my dad, playing and wrestling about. And Mum was…just Mum. She’d stop painting when he came home, and that always steamed me off, that. She’d never stop for me, not for nothing. But Dad came home and she’d quit her painting for a solid month. I loved those times as much as I hated them, because they always ended.”

  “Fucking hell, Errol. What a childhood.”

  His laugh was a bitter bark. “Just getting warmed up, Pop.” He stood, paced away; I snapped a stick into pieces and fed them to the fire. “That was life, until I was twelve.”

  “What—” I didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to know—it was a weight I didn’t want. The intimate knowledge of his pain was a burden I’d been avoiding. “What happened when you were twelve?”

  “Mum got sick.”

  My throat closed, my heart skipped a beat, dropped out of my chest. “Oh, Errol.”

  He stood with his hands in his hair, elbows facing out, head tipped back to watch the stars in their slow wheeling dance. “I found her in her studio one afternoon, after school. On the floor, paint all over the place, in a pool of vomit. She’d been going to chemo while I was at school. For fuckin’ months. She’d been dying for fucking months, Poppy. And she never fucking told me. Until it got too bad, until the chemo was killing her as fast as the cancer was.”

  Hot lump in my throat, burning eyes. “God.”

  “He wasn’t in it,” he muttered in response to my epithet. Bitter. Furious. Aching with old pain. “She hadn’t told Dad either. Made me promise not to tell him.”

  “Why?”

  A shrug. “Fuck if I know. Some weird thing they had, I guess. Same reason she ignored the…finer details…of his life on the road. She loved him, he loved her, and they both loved me. But it was…just fucked up, I guess.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, summoning the courage to tell more. “I took care of her. She’d lost weight and I’d got bigger, so I could and did carry her around. Couch to bed. Bed to bathroom. Helped her bathe. Helped her onto the toilet. Fed her. I used to brush her hair. She loved that. She’d make me brush her hair till my arm hurt.