Wait for Me, page 25
It hurt, the hopelessness of it, the effort. The love.
“Where—” Elle tried to keep her hands from shaking. “Where is he now?”
“He lives on my property, and that’s where you’re going to leave him.” Ash fluttered from the end of Arlo’s Marlboro. “It took him too long to stop looking for you.”
“And no one ever knew to look for Marijohn.”
“Who?”
Other cars filled the parking lot. People gave Arlo alarmed glances, as if he might need to be rescued from a ghost. He stared straight ahead.
“Marijohn was the baby,” Elle said, “whose whole life you left up to fate.”
“Fate?” Arlo laughed. “Fate is for motherfuckers, Elle. Not people like us. If we left it to fate I’d be working in a mill somewhere trying not to lose a hand, and you’d be married with six kids.” He swiped at his mustache. Forgot about his cigarette. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The Marlboro fell from his fingers onto the asphalt. “A year before that Opry performance, Josie came to me in a panic, saying she was pregnant with a baby she didn’t want.”
“So you fixed it?”
Arlo looked proud, almost. “Faked a European tour, Josie had the baby in a private medical facility, and you know the rest.”
Elle lifted up Josie’s signed letter. “Josie signed over the rights to my music, Arlo.”
She wanted him to know how it felt to have a future toyed with, a legacy flushed down the drain.
Arlo took a cursory look at the note, and then he laughed. Laughed so hard he made the whole car shake.
“Shit, Elle. You really are an idiot, still. This will never hold up in court. Josie doesn’t own that music. I do.”
Elle had found herself in this position with Arlo too many times to count. She felt helpless, felt the need to claw at anything that might turn him vulnerable and weak. “You know Weston would never forgive you for this.”
Arlo closed his eyes. “There’s already a lot he hasn’t forgiven me for.” He sniffed. “I don’t like surprises, Elle. And after twenty years, that’s still all you’re giving me. Now there’s none left.”
“So Marijohn is just collateral damage,” she said. “And so am I.”
He opened his eyes. “Just the opposite. You’re free now. You want to guide your career so bad? Think you can do better? Have at it.” Arlo looked at himself in the sideview mirror. “But Weston Studios still owns the rights to Josie’s album, all your music, and your next record. So let it go, Elle. Live your life, do what you want. I’ll make money off you still.”
Arlo undid his seat belt and cranked open the door.
“Arlo,” Elle said before he stepped out.
He looked at her one last time.
“I will bury you.”
He shook his head, almost laughed—because he had no more use for her. And then he walked away, back inside Weston Studios, returning to the safety of the kingdom he had built.
Both Ways
Two months after Marijohn played her mandolin with Elle Harlow on her porch, that night turned into a ghost. Marijohn hadn’t heard from Elle, and no word of her reappearance had made its way into the nightly broadcast news, but Marijohn still felt her just beyond reach. An apparition, a lack.
She didn’t know what else to do with a ghost but sing for it. Wait for it to sing back.
Rumors hit the tabloids—Elle Harlow had been spotted behind the windshield of a car in Kentucky, at a municipal building in Tennessee, onstage at a dive bar in Pennsylvania—but no one paid attention. These headlines were no different from the ones that first ran in 1973. The idea of disappearance still had a romantic violence to it—as if an imagined kidnapping, a brutal and untimely end, turned Elle more beautiful. More urgent. More prophetic. As if it were better than letting her age. Letting her live.
Marijohn knew better now.
Singing with Elle that night was the most moving, confusing, tectonic act Marijohn had ever been part of. Before it, she’d been a motherless daughter—a shape she knew well. After it, she’d turned into a mound of loose clay where Elle had left an imprint of her bootheel. Absent but present. Marijohn had told herself for a long time that she’d survive just fine never knowing her mother. Now, she felt such a restless ache for her she couldn’t sleep at night. Couldn’t even play her mandolin.
Marijohn wanted to tell Lazarus all about it. She wanted to tell him all the things she understood now—that her constant state of unknowing had been an addiction. That getting sober from it felt like death. That maybe she’d confused death with destruction, and they were not the same.
She’d never been lonelier.
In early November, Laz released his new single. He’d been gone for almost ten weeks. Marijohn heard his voice on the radio one night while washing the dishes after dinner.
It’s the last night of the world
For you and me, for you and me, girl
Marijohn threw her wet sponge across the counter. The song was so—happy. Jaunty. Gross. She’d always thought of their music as twin headlights coming at her in the dark. Not menacing, but bold. This song was a dead engine, and Marijohn hated it. It didn’t sound like Laz at all.
She hadn’t heard from him, and she wasn’t sure she would. Neither of them had known that August night the meteor hit would be their last time in the woods. He’d have to return to Lenora sometime, but Marijohn didn’t want to be right where he’d left her when he came back, like a wartime wife waiting to see if he’d come home.
She could tell Lazarus hadn’t written that song himself. “Namesake” hadn’t been a ballad the record company wanted—and they hadn’t wanted his love songs, either. It was what Marijohn had hoped for, that her music would remain her own. And yet she wanted it both ways—for “Namesake” to stay in her private sanctuary, and for it to be beloved by many, for it to curl around a stranger and hold fast. She still felt herself standing at the edge of the ravine at summer’s end—staring up into the smoke, not sure what she was looking for or whether she’d already missed it.
So she wrote a song about it. A good one, too. But she figured “Both Ways” would never get played on the radio because she was too afraid to send it out into the world. She had no idea how to, anyway. Laz had said she was the bravest person he’d ever met, but Marijohn didn’t believe him. Courage required movement, and she was stuck.
I want you to say you’re mine
You’re waiting on miracles divine
But I’ve always wanted it
Both ways, both ways
It was a ballad about wanting too many things. She wanted her songs on the radio. She wanted to know her mother, and she wanted her best friend to call.
“I can’t do this without you,” he’d said to her the last time they spoke.
And he was right. He couldn’t. Laz was quiet and thoughtful and private and cautious. Performing over and over again would skin him alive.
Marijohn could see the outline of his future, and it gave her no joy. His album would live just like the meteor that preceded it. It would burn bright, and then it would be gone. Lazarus, the real one only she knew, would disappear—no new lyrics, no nights spent back-to-back in the woods. No Jolly Ranchers, no corner of his mouth digging into his dimple while they dissected death and everything that came before and after. No one—except for Marijohn—to know he was missing.
Then he sent her a letter.
Just before Thanksgiving, it arrived as a curious and clean rectangle written in his careful hand. Her father left the envelope on the counter at the gas station, the same spot she used to leave faux Elle Harlow memorabilia for her father to revel in. How swiftly the roles between them had switched since the meteor struck.
“Read it if you’re ready,” Abe had said. “Or I can put it away until you are.”
Marijohn could not wait. She clawed at it the same way her father had opened that package from Kentucky with the rhinestone cat barrette inside. It had only been a few months since then, but she was someone else now. Someone who understood that sometimes a dream was a person, and sometimes you had to let that dream go.
The letter from Lazarus contained guitar tabs for a chorus he’d written:
I never told you I loved you
Girl with the old mandolin
Its broken neck you loved true
I want you now just like I did then
Lazarus had always been a master at writing down what he couldn’t say plainly with his mouth. He also wrote a note, five words in handwriting she’d recognize anywhere—
I want to come home.
What else was there to say? Marijohn had stopped believing love could heal her wounds. She took every single feeling, every longing, every speck of love, and clamped it. Laz had said he wanted to come home because he wasn’t going to. Marijohn threw the letter away.
She didn’t want to be someone who waited anymore.
* * *
After Thanksgiving passed, Marijohn showed up late to work on Monday morning. She’d been coming in later and later, leaving earlier and earlier. Mercifully, Abe’s business had picked up. Suddenly the world was ripe for his kind of care—soft and genuine, thorough and slow.
Abe Shaw had a way of bringing about miracles for humans and vehicles alike.
When Marijohn arrived at the station, there was Elle Harlow—as if she’d never left—standing over Abe’s glass case of artifacts. She inspected them as Abe stood beside her.
“I definitely wore that earring,” she said, pointing at the turquoise stud plated in gold. “I left it in a drawer in my room at the boardinghouse.”
Abe’s face lit. “I knew it!” he cried.
She pointed to a linen napkin with Jaclyn, in her iris fields scrawled on it, stained with dark red. “The napkin isn’t mine,” she said softly. “Neither is the blood.”
A thick quiet filled the shop until Elle spotted a tube of red lipstick.
“Rose pearl,” she called it. “My mother’s favorite shade.”
The door clanged as Marijohn shut it, and Elle glanced up. She looked bright and peachy. Marijohn was haggard and petulant. She promptly turned around, flew out the door she’d just entered, and started to head for the woods.
Elle followed her.
“I’m not giving you the mandolin,” Marijohn called over her shoulder, pulling her jacket close. “So don’t even ask.”
“I won’t,” Elle said, and Marijohn slowed her pace.
They walked together in silence until they reached the edge of the farmer’s meadows. The meteor’s wide stripe in the field had turned brown, and the cows grazed around it like an altar.
Suddenly, Marijohn stopped in the roadside dust. Then she tipped her chin to the sky and screamed. Yelled her guts out for a full minute, throaty and needy and nude.
When she’d finished, a cow flicked its tail. Another stamped its hoof, then settled into the grass.
“Feel better?” Elle asked.
“I feel like shit.”
“You’re getting close, then,” Elle said.
“To what?”
“To what matters. Leaning into the heart of something will always hurt.”
Marijohn pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it with the band around her wrist. She felt unkempt and wild, as if she couldn’t keep all the pieces of herself in one place.
“Can I ask you something?” she hedged as she took an old stalk of wheat and held it in her grip. “Was it everything you dreamed it would be, making it as a musician?”
They started walking toward the trees as a scarlet leaf from a maple tree floated to the ground.
“It was everything I dreamed of, and nothing I expected,” Elle said. “It made me not want to live in the world I had created.”
It was a cryptic answer, and on any other day with any other woman, Marijohn wouldn’t have minded. She liked loose ends and mysteries and complicated truths—except when it came to her mother.
“Did you ever think,” she asked, “that the world you made still needed you?”
Elle’s hair looked coppery in the light. “No.”
Marijohn marveled at it—the ability, the guts, the ambition to build a world of your own and then abandon it.
“Since I was young,” Marijohn said, “I’ve had two memories. This voice in the darkness, singing to me, and that broken mandolin. I tangled them up so much in my mind because I thought my mother must have wanted me to have that instrument. I’ve been playing it since I could hold it up, trying to make those two memories into one. Trying to form a true version of myself out of it. And I failed.”
She meant the open mic, the video half the country had seen, even her attempt to convince Elle to tell her the truth.
“You didn’t fail onstage at the bar,” Elle said. “You just needed a little company.”
Marijohn pinched the grain between her fingers. “You never needed any company.”
“You’d be surprised.” Elle tilted her head to the sky. “Is that really what you wanted to ask me?”
Marijohn twisted the wheat, then dropped it to the ground. “You’re really not going to tell me who my mother is?”
Elle shut her eyes for a moment. Somewhere, a bird sang. “I’ve been thinking on it, and the secret isn’t mine.”
Marijohn wanted to tear every tree by its roots from the ground. She wanted to scream again, to curse, to find a way to force someone who could not be forced. Perhaps this was her first measure of adulthood—to look at the living face of her own disappointment, to thrust all her power against it and witness how unyielding it was.
“I thought it might be you, you know,” Marijohn said. Her voice was dry. “I hoped it was you.”
If Elle had been her mother, every part of this sad story would have made sense. The meteor wouldn’t have just been a random rock falling through the sky. Abe’s Elle Harlow collection wouldn’t have been the hoarding of a fairy tale. Marijohn’s life would have been a folk song with a beginning and an end.
“Oh, honey,” Elle said, touching Marijohn’s shoulder. “I wish it was, too.”
They stood in a place halfway between here and there, halfway between resolve and regret—the gas station where Elle had left Marijohn, and the river where Elle’s Studebaker had sunk.
“The more I thought about it, though,” Elle went on, “the more I realized that even if it’s not my secret, it certainly is yours.”
She unhooked her satchel from her shoulder and pulled out a folder she’d brought. Elle handed it to Marijohn, and she opened it. Inside was a sheet of paper with a name and date.
Marijohn Jaclyn Starling, born July 2, 1973.
It was a copy of her birth certificate.
“How did you get this?” Marijohn asked. It was the first tangible piece of her past she’d ever held, other than the mandolin.
“It took some doing, but let’s just say there’s someone at the records department in Nashville who is a huge Elle Harlow fan,” Elle replied. “And she’s happy I’m not dead.”
Marijohn felt a flash of verve. Of mercy. Relief.
“As happy as my dad is, though?”
Elle grinned. “No one is as happy as your dad.”
“My mother.” Marijohn’s eyes scanned the document. “She’s Josie Starling.”
Elle didn’t confirm or deny. “Your mother never meant for you to be abandoned. She only wanted you to be cared for in the best way, that’s all.”
Marijohn had been given a little, and she was ready for more. She was so ready for her life to begin.
“Do you think she wants to meet me?” she asked.
“She ain’t ready, honey.” Elle looped her arm tightly through Marijohn’s. “I’m not sure she ever will be.”
Marijohn looked at the earth under her feet. Steady, unbending. “I see.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to want it. Only that she might not be able to give it to you.”
Marijohn’s green eyes settled onto Elle’s. “You saw her?”
“I did.”
“So she also knows you’re alive.” Marijohn watched her. “Didn’t you want to stay gone?”
“Some things are worth coming back from the dead for.” Elle looked toward the tree line. “I’m sorry I abandoned you, too.”
“You gave me to my dad,” Marijohn offered quietly. “I was so well cared for, Elle. Always.”
She’d never realized until then that her love for music didn’t rest only with her mother. It had come to life because of Abe.
Elle made to head back the way they’d come, but Marijohn stopped her.
“Elle,” she said, solemn, “I don’t know how I can ever repay you for this.”
“I’m in your debt,” Elle said. “Hearing you play that mandolin gave me something I thought I’d never get back.”
That seemed to be the miracle of this meteor, now buried beneath a river. It hadn’t brought things back from the dead; it revealed what still lived.
“I know what you mean,” Marijohn said.
They continued walking the road in silence until they reached Marijohn’s porch, where her mandolin perched on the swing.
“Thing is, Marijohn,” Elle began, “there is something you can help me with.”
Marijohn cast Elle a wary glance.
“What’s wrong?” Elle asked.
“I don’t want your pity.”
Elle couldn’t stop herself—she laughed. “Well, shit,” she said. “You might not be my child, but I feel like I’m about to have a fight with my younger self.”
“Pity isn’t funny,” Marijohn countered.
“‘Believe me, honey.’” Elle quoted her own song title. “‘Pity is the last thing I feel for you.’”
Something deeper grew there between them, half hidden, for which neither of them yet had a name. It wasn’t a mirror, or a family tree, or a resolution of any kind. It was a joining of hands, a fire in the night. A harmony born in the well of a throat.
Elle spoke her next words with care. “You remember the Merry album we sang through a few months ago?”
