The People We Keep(105)
I stop looking for Adam and I just look. Watch the wind scrape dry leaves across the concrete and the way the light comes through the bare tree branches. I watch this guy with a wiry red beard, sitting at a table by the window at Juna’s, reading a battered paperback, chewing on his bottom lip. And then I see Carly, through the window. Her hair is long now, black and past her shoulder blades. She’s wearing a blue dress and she has a big green tattoo winding its way up her arm into her sleeve. I can’t tell what it is. A snake, maybe. A vine. She looks like a mermaid or a superhero or a warrior. She looks beautiful. She pours coffee for the paperback guy. He says something to her. She throws her head back and laughs a real laugh. The kind you can’t fake. And I love that she looks so happy, so different and new. Like maybe she doesn’t hurt the way she used to. Maybe I don’t have to either.
I walk back toward my car. On the way, I stop in Woolworth’s and buy a big envelope, the yellow kind with the metal clip to close it.
When I get in my car, I carefully strip the lining of my guitar case and shove all my letters in the envelope. The thin metal clip scrapes at the calluses on the tips of my fingers as I press it closed.
I scribble Carly in bumpy letters on the top with an old marker so spent I have to lick the felt to get it to write anything. I lock up my car and walk back to The Commons. There’s a crack in the bottom of one of my boots. A click when I step with my right foot. I’m not sure if I can hear it or I’m just feeling it, the way the broken rubber sticks to itself and breaks apart every time my foot flexes.
* * *
I sit on the bench again and watch Carly ring up customers at the register until she walks away and I can’t see her through the window anymore. I get up and walk closer and I still can’t see her. She must be in back. Hopefully it’s a smoke break and I have time. I want to run, make it quick, but I figure it’s better to walk in. Not call attention to myself. I don’t think I can run anyway.
The bell on the door may as well be a siren. Part of me wants her to catch me. The rest of me doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore. I don’t want to impose on the life she has now. I just want her to know that even though I left, I never stopped thinking about her. I just want her to know what happened.
I place the envelope on the counter near the register and walk away before anyone comes out of the kitchen to try to take my order. I walk out the door and the bell rings again. It’s all there. I’ve left it. Everything. The paperback guy watches me, still chewing at his bottom lip as I walk past the window.
— Chapter 68 —
The campground is closed for the season. I park my car off the road down the street and drag a blanket and my guitar around the gate. I can barely walk. It’s more of a waddle and all the muscles in my back ache. But I make it to the right place and build a fire with twigs and left-behind wood. I play Dylan songs to the lake, even though my belly makes me hold the guitar funny and my singing is breathy because my lungs don’t have enough room anymore. One song after another. My fingers throb and my throat is raw. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right bleeds to All Along the Watchtower and runs into Tangled Up in Blue.
I play until I run out of songs I know all the words to, and then I make up my own words and fudge the chords. It’s my funeral for my father. It’s my funeral for all the things I’ve wanted.
I play until what Margo said finally makes sense. It wasn’t about Irene and the boy, or my mom leaving. It wasn’t about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn’t have it in him to do any better.
Just because my father was a coward doesn’t mean I have to be. I won’t leave my child. I will do what it takes to give him a real home and a real bed and a real parent. I will do what it takes to be a person Max can be proud of.
Somehow these things make sense to me as I play, and I can’t stop playing because I want to figure it all out. A song I never finished comes back to me. Where you gonna stay, where you gonna stay, whereyougonnastay, and I sing it again and again, playing with the chords until the rest of the words come out.
Where you gonna stay
When flesh turns into bone
Where you gonna stay
Now that you’re not alone
When the sun shines past the treetops The light’s no longer dim
Where you gonna stay, stay, stay…
Stay with him.
* * *
I wake up on the bare rocks with my guitar still in my hands, not even in my makeshift tent. The fire is only embers and smoke. The sun is just breaking the horizon. My back throbs and my fingers are stiff like claws, but I don’t feel wrong. I feel like that place in me where all the wrong lived doesn’t exist anymore, like how I used to think there were monsters under my bed and there never ever were.
Before I leave, I bury my father’s cracked guitar pick under the rocks by the shore, because it feels like the best way to say goodbye to the person I wanted him to be.
It feels like the best way to start over.
I wad up my blanket. My legs are shaky and the pain in my back is getting so much worse, but I’m ready to go. To call Margo and tell her I need help. Face Little River and figure out what’s next. I might even be ready to sit down and have a talk with Irene.
I reach for my guitar case and all of a sudden there’s a flood of wet and warm and pain like I might break in half. I try to get up, to get to my car, but I trip and fall. I hear the crack of bone against rock. I taste dirt and blood.