Neverworld Wake(78)
I thought of my friends every day. Sometimes when I closed my eyes I could feel them beside me. I imagined where they were now. Because they were somewhere. And together. That I knew. I prayed that they were happy—or whatever lay beyond human happiness.
I think they were.
Mostly I thought of Martha, who she was and what she had done for me. There wasn’t a moment of my life that I didn’t owe to her. Sometimes it rendered me listless and sad, made me say no to the frat party, the Sunday-night pizza feast, the Spring Fling, and I’d hole up alone in my dorm, drawing or writing lyrics, left with the painful truth of it, how the people who change us are the ones we never saw clearly at all, not until they were gone.
I’d remember how Jim had insisted that one day I’d think with wonder: I was friends with Martha Zeigler. That’s how big she’s gonna be.
He had been right.
I shouldn’t have lived. It should have been Martha. I was never the good one. I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It’s so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.
That’s never their only story.
We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.
The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they’re no longer there.
* * *
—
Two years after the accident, I published a dream soundtrack.
It was released by a little publishing house out of Minneapolis called Brace Yourself Books. Not even they knew what to do with it. The market for an album soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist is a pretty small one.
When I received the four printed albums from my publisher, though, I left school and boarded an Amtrak train bound for St. Louis. When I arrived, I took a bus to Winwood Falls, where I hiked a mile past pink brick mansions with shell fountains to a cemetery called Ardenwood. With a map I took the self-guided walking tour past mausoleums of famous writers and captains of industry, peeling off when I found a section for the new graves.
Whitley was up a stone path on a hill. Standing in front of her marble headstone made me cry, because the quote that Linda had chosen was from one of Jim’s best songs, “Immortal She.” The fact that she’d had the insight to comb Whitley’s Instagram and find it meant that maybe I’d been wrong about her too. Maybe she’d understood her daughter all along.
She lives on, fireflies in my head.
I will not forget her when I am dead.
She is my memory, she is my song.
She is the road when the car is long gone.
She is the pillow on my bed.
She is my words, unsaid.
When the sun goes dark and the earth is bereft,
She’ll live in the echo the silence left.
I set the little album by the flowers and walked away.
Next, I boarded another Amtrak, bound for New Orleans, and then a bus with broken air-conditioning to Moss Bluff, a town with Spanish moss giving every street corner the shadowed scruff of a three-day beard. I walked the eight miles to Kipling’s.
To my surprise, the house was just as he’d described it: a rambling white mansion of peeling paint, with a white peacock wandering the yard. I’d always thought he exaggerated his life, but in fact, he left out all sorts of colorful details, like the green Cadillac sitting in the middle of the driveway, weeds growing through the floor like hair overtaking old men’s ears.
I left the album on the porch swing. When I looked back, I saw a bent-over gray-haired woman in a green housedress examining it. She looked after me, puzzled.
Then Los Angeles: two days on the train, barreling past deserts and strip malls and palm trees. I took a bus to Montecito, where I walked to Cannon’s house, a cream-colored Victorian. I slipped the album into the mailbox and jogged down the steps as a car alarm sounded. A man across the street stopped watering his lawn to look at me.
Three days later, I arrived in Providence, Rhode Island. I had read seven mystery novels and twelve magazines, and was out of clean underwear, with a kink in my neck. I walked the final four miles feeling a strange sense of calm, arriving at Ziegler Auto Repair just after dusk.
There was no one in reception. Most of the lights were off. I stuck the album in the window next to a sign, COFFEE 99￠. As I was leaving, the door to the garage opened.
“Can I help you?”
I turned. It was Martha’s dad. Though I had never met him, they had the same chin, the same thick glasses. He was wearing oil-streaked coveralls, wiping his hands on a rag.
I introduced myself, telling him I was an old friend of Martha’s.
“Of course. Beatrice, right? That’s so nice. It’s not often I meet a friend of Martha’s.”
“I’m here because I made an album. Sort of. I wanted her to have it. It’s a soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist about four unlikely superheroes. They all have these hidden powers. Anyway, I wanted you to have a copy.”