The Leavers(92)

He pulled over to the shoulder. Either his phone’s battery had died, or the cable needed to be replugged. He rolled down the windows and heard layers of chirping crickets, opened the door and walked out to the street. There were houses in the distance, the occasional light, and a swath of tall grass on the corner he pushed around with his feet. He and Roland used to practice wheelies on their dirt bikes near here. He stood still, absorbing the night.

For so long, he had thought that music was the one thing he could believe in: harmony and angular submelody and rolling drums, a world neither present nor past, a space inhabited by the length of a song. For a song had a heart of its own, a song could jumpstart or provide solace; only music could numb him more thoroughly than weed or alcohol. With Roland, he had wanted to fill other people’s silences, drown out their thoughts and replace them with sound. It was less about communication, more about assault and plunder. That was how he’d preferred it. But standing on the dark street, a pressure released inside him, the crickets a consolation for his remorse over leaving the city, that he had pushed his mother away before she could tell him the truth.

Most nights Daniel began to stay in. He did homework, wrote music, used an old condenser mic to record several tracks onto Peter’s computer, which ran a pirated version of Pro Tools faster than his laptop. The songs he was writing weren’t anything like the ones he and Roland played. They lacked structure, didn’t cohere in a predictable way. They were too bare, too vulnerable, they cared too much to be cool. He no longer wanted to make music that forced itself on you, or tried to be something it wasn’t. The challenge was not to overstate, but to be honest, unguarded. In class, he worked on lyrics as Professor Nichols droned on about X and Y variables; it felt like he was defrosting a windshield, that the fog would eventually reveal clear glass.

In the back of his closet, he found a stack of cassettes. One of them had a label drawn in marker: NECROMANIA: BRAINS ON A SPIKE!!!! He remembered recording it on Roland’s mom’s old tape player one afternoon, his first year in Ridgeborough, the two of them wailing along to a three-chord backing track they had downloaded online. He put the tape in a padded envelope along with a note that said, “Remember when we used to jam?” and mailed it to Roland’s apartment.

HE WAS AT CODY’S on a Friday night in August, in the Campbells’ basement, watching an MMA fight. Cody was the only person he talked to these days, besides Peter and Kay. Amber wasn’t taking classes for the rest of the summer and had gone to visit family in Connecticut.

The match ended, the guy in the red shorts standing over the prone body of the guy in the black shorts. Blood ran down both their faces.

Daniel had transferred the tracks he’d mastered from Peter’s computer to his phone. “You want to hear something I’m working on?”

Cody looked over.

“Will you turn the volume down for a second?”

“Hold on.” Cody waited to see if the announcer was saying anything important. When the match switched to a commercial, he hit mute.

Daniel took out his phone. He heard the familiar first notes, the guitar, his own voice, tinny and monotone on the microspeaker. The sound was too poor to make out most of the words.

“That you?” Cody said.

“Yup.” The song didn’t need any more changes or rewrites. It didn’t matter if he’d ever perform. It was exactly what he wanted it to be.

“You’ve changed, Wilkinson,” Cody said, after the song ended.

“How so?”

“In high school, you were all like—” Cody hunched over, curling his shoulders in and looking down at the carpet. “Reave me arone,” he said. “You barely spoke English! Now you’re all American.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I spoke English.”

“You called that English?”

“Fuck off, Cody. Fuck you.”

“You need a drummer,” Cody said, as Daniel headed toward the door. “Like those guys at the Black Cat Open Mic. They rocked.”

HE COULDN’T SLEEP; HE decided to sit on the porch. Looking for his phone, he spotted the manila envelope from Kay, grabbed it and then went outside. Beneath the porch light, he examined the printout of the permanency hearing report. Foster parents plan to petition for termination of mother’s parental rights on grounds of abandonment. He held the envelope upside down and shook it hard, until the rest of the contents fell into his lap.

There was the surrender form, with Vivian’s signature. Placement: Indefinite. Another form she signed, authorizing his foster placement. There was a smaller envelope, too, tucked into the papers, which contained a transcript of his grades from P.S. 33. He’d gotten straight C’s and D’s in fifth grade. A note from his teacher, a Ms. Torelli, that said he should take remedial classes. Another note that said he had been in detention on February 15. He had forged his mother’s signature on the required line and must have neglected to return it to school after she disappeared.

There was a black-and-white photograph of him and his mother paper-clipped to one of the forms, the bottom half of the picture a printed illustration of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and a yellow cab driven by a googly-eyed giraffe, along with a caption for the South Street Seaport. He was a baby, fat cheeks and a swirl of dark hair, and his mother looked like a child herself, younger than he remembered her. It was the only baby picture of himself he had ever seen, the only picture of her he had. Why hadn’t Peter and Kay given it to him before?