Blowin' My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, page 5
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard Luce and Tracy Cobb,” Juliet’s dad continues, then tells some never-ending story about a summer night in high school dancing under a full moon with the girl of his dreams. “I probably shouldn’t say this in front of our daughters, but girls, lemme just say that if it wasn’t for Luce and Tracy, y’all might not be here right now.”
“Jesus, how corny can you get?” Walden says.
“Now after this incredible show is over, I want you to go out and spread the word far and wide so we pack this place the rest of the week. Would you please give a warm Cascade Family Resort welcome to the one and only, Luce and Tracy Cobb!!”
Dad follows Mom on stage. They plug in their guitars. Mom has her big Gibson Super Jumbo acoustic, Dad his white 57’ Telecaster. Spaced about five feet apart, two stools sit center stage, each bathed in golden spotlight swirling with tiny dust motes. Out there in the darkness, scattered eyes watch them with anticipation.
My mom, radiant in a tight black skirt and a gold sequin top with a deep V-neck, greets the crowd, thanking them for coming, saying how excited they are to be here. The usual. The crowd claps warmly in response, but it’s even emptier out there than we feared, and the applause doesn’t add up to much. Even worse, everyone’s sprinkled around. A half-full crowd doesn’t look so bad if they’re all scrunched together in a big block, at least there’s a sense of unity, but when they’re spread out, it looks more random, like people have wandered in off the street.
In spite of the crowd, though, Mom and Dad start out well. Mom digs deep into her vocal range, singing sweet and soulful the way only she can. Dad’s harmonies blend just right and his guitar playing is smooth. He’s really going for it. And by the time they’re into the fourth song, a cover of “Landslide,” I breathe a sigh of relief because everything is going to be okay.
Dad’s halfway through his guitar solo on “Landslide” when out of nowhere he stops playing, leaving Mom’s orphaned finger picking echoing out into Evergreen Ballroom like a lost bird. Totally naked and alone. At first, I think maybe Dad’s amplifier has cut out or there’s a problem with the sound, but then I see his arms at his side. He’s not playing anymore. Why isn’t he playing?
One of the rules of live music is that you never stop playing in the middle of a song. Ever. You can’t. No matter how bad a mistake you might make, you have to keep going.
Walden and I exchange looks of absolute horror.
“He broke a string,” Walden says, pointing, and he’s right. A little silver coil dangles and dances from my dad’s guitar neck. But a broken string is nothing. It happens all the time. Dad always just plays through it and then grabs a back-up guitar for the next song.
But instead, he stands up from his stool and starts walking off stage. Sweat dripping down his face, he hustles past me and Walden without a word, looking like a ghost, and then pushes out into the hallway. My heart feels like it’s about to leap out of my chest and splat on the floor. This has to be a dream. But it’s not. It’s very real.
My poor mom is out there by herself. She briefly turns toward us, still playing, and though she’s obviously trying to look calm for the audience’s sake—everything’s normal, folks, nothing to see here!!—there’s panic behind her eyes. I give a helpless shrug. She winds into the song’s ending, stretching it out, repeating that last line over and over, way more times than she normally would, singing Yeah, I’m getting older too. I’m getting older too.
I run out into the hallway. Dad’s on the floor in a defeated squat, his back flattened against the wall behind him, his guitar in his lap and his hands hiding his face.
“Dad,” I say, approaching him like I’m walking up to a car accident where I don’t know if anyone’s hurt. “Are you okay?”
He looks up at me. Tears drip down his face and then lose themselves in his shaggy beard. Gazing down, he ponders his right hand, which is lightly shaking, then makes that hand into a fist and slams it into the concrete wall behind him.
“God I’m such a loser,” he says.
Footsteps behind me, and I turn to see Simon and Damon from the St. Regis Horns standing there, looking totally confused and more than a little worried. They’re probably wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into.
“What’s up? What happened?” Simon asks. “He okay? He sick or something?”
I wave them away. “Give us a second.”
I squat down beside my dad. I force the calm into my voice.
“Dad. Dad, you have to go back on. Mom’s out there by herself. You can’t just leave her out there alone.”
“I can’t.”
“Dad you have to.”
“I just—can you go on for me, Rainey?”
When Dad uses my real name instead of Rain Man, something is very wrong.
“Please,” he says. “I’ll fix it for tomorrow night, I promise. Please. Help me. I’m so sorry.”
I’ve never seen anyone look so scared in my life, and the fact that it’s my dad rattles me down into my bones. But there’s no time to make any meaning out of this mess right now.
“Stay with him, okay?” I tell Simon and Damon, then walk back into Evergreen Ballroom. My mom is already into the next song, an original from the early days called “No More Whiskey, No More Tears.”
When she finishes, she jokes to the crowd, “Bet y’all didn’t know how good I sounded by myself, huh?” I suck in the deepest breath possible and walk on stage. Warmth and brightness from the lights washes over me. A few people in the audience clap when they see me, and I wave and force a big smile onto my face, as if this is exactly what we had planned all along. Juliet and her whole family are sitting about halfway back. Seeing me, my mom’s eyes narrow more in confusion than relief.
Leaning down, I whisper “Careless Love” into her ear, naming one of our favorite songs to play together. “Follow me.” She nods in response.
I walk over to the piano, take another breath, and lean into a blues in G, following my fingers, which always know what to do. Mom starts teasing out 7th chords on her Gibson and, before you know it, we’re off to the races.
Ninety minutes later, the show is over and somehow, we’re all still alive to see it. Amazingly, the world didn’t end. The audience is even still there. Mom and I finished the first set as a duo, and then Dad managed to pull it together for the electric set. The audience, which started out a little unsure, rises for a standing ovation as we take our bow, seven across, and walk off stage. As we stand in the wings before the encore, my mom looks dead on her feet, like she just survived a war. The crowd keeps getting louder and louder, like they want us to play all night.
“Should we do ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ like we talked about?” Simon asks.
Mom shakes her head, then says, “Why don’t you go out, Rainey?”
“Me? By myself?”
“You stole the show, girl. They loved you. Seems only right that you take it home.” She turns to the horn players. “You guys mind?”
“Hell no,” Simon says. “She deserves it.”
“Go get ‘em, Rainey,” Chad says.
Damon high fives me.
And then somehow I’m back onstage, only I’m by myself this time, walking toward the piano, with no idea what I’m about to play. I’ve never done an encore by myself before. I’ve hardly ever been on stage by myself. I sit down and adjust the bench. The room has grown whisper quiet. Someone coughs. Someone sneezes. I see Juliet out there in the crowd, and when she smiles and throws up a secret little fingertip wave, that’s when it hits me.
I quickly re-visit the chord sequence in my head, D to F# minor to G, double check the words in my memory bank. Then work my way into a moody, bluesy version of “Lithium,” the song Juliet would take to the moon.
Track Eight
A Big Fat Line Through Number Four
“I think that was the worst fight they’ve ever had,” I say to Juliet.
“Sorry,” she says.
My parents’ raised voices from behind the dressing room door keep echoing in my head, not so much the words themselves, which were hard to make out, but how mad they sounded at each other. Words soured by hatred and disgust.
Juliet and I are sitting on the beach in the exact same spot where we met two days ago. Lake Michigan is whooshing down there in the dark, the black rolling water endlessly coming and going. According to my Timex digital, it’s thirty-seven minutes after midnight.
I’m not supposed to be here, by the way. For the first time in my life, I snuck out. I guess that officially makes me a rebel. Better late than never.
After signing autographs and greeting fans in the lobby, including Juliet, who gave me a huge hug and whispered, “Meet me at the beach in a half hour,” my family walked backstage. There was fire in Mom’s eyes, and I wasn’t surprised when she told me and Walden to wait in the hallway while she ushered Dad into the dressing room and closed the door behind them. They screamed at each other for fifteen minutes, then both emerged, silent and stone-faced.
“Let’s go,” my mom said.
After the short walk back to our rooms—my parents’ room is only two doors down from mine—I asked if I could hang out with Juliet, which my mom immediately shot down. “It’s already after midnight,” she said. “I don’t want you out running around this late. It’s been a long night, and we have to do it all again tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
“Okay,” I said.
But I couldn’t stand the thought of Juliet down there waiting for me. So, after twice swearing Walden to secrecy, I tip toed past my parents’ room, ducking beneath the peep hole just in case, then ran down to the beach where I found Juliet laying in the sand by herself in jean shorts and a gray hooded sweatshirt, smoking, studying the stars. Before she even knew I was there, I looked up at a pulsing blanket of light. How is it that a sky full of stars always takes your breath away no matter how many times you look at it? Makes you want to grab someone and say, “Look!”
I didn’t mean to start talking about my parents’ fight. I didn’t want to be a downer. But the memory just tumbled out. It was all I could think about. Not the standing ovation I got after playing “Lithium.” Not the buzz from the fans. Just my parents screaming at each other behind a closed door and this horrible feeling that my family was going to break apart.
After I get it all out of my system, we’re quiet for a while, then, out of nowhere, Juliet starts crying very softly, which is a strange turn of events indeed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
“Watching you tonight, watching all those people watching you,” Juliet says, “was amazing, but it made me feel like such a loser.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forget it, it’s stupid.” She wipes away tears.
I wait. It’s a trick my dad taught me. If you want someone else to say more, you have to say less.
“Being the youngest one in my family, no one ever notices me. It’s like no matter what I do, or how many trophies I win, they look right through me like I’m not even there.” She talks about feeling outshined by her older sisters, who she believes are all more beautiful and more accomplished than she’ll ever be. “Ardelia is already halfway to being a brain surgeon. Ophelia skipped college to run the resort, so she might as well walk on water. And Cordelia gets straight As and is in all these clubs and stuff. And she’s so pretty it’s stupid.”
“You’re pretty,” I say.
She looks over at me.
“You think so?”
“Well…yeah,” I say. I know I should feel more afraid to say these words, but I don’t. Maybe it’s the stars, or the eternal pulse of the water, or the way her eyes swallow and reflect the moonlight. I don’t add that I gave her an upgrade from pretty to beautiful in my journal, though.
“Thanks,” she says, and knocks her shoulder into mine.
I start to wonder if her relationship with her family is the reason Juliet has a nose ring. Or why she smokes. Or why she gives herself tattoos. Maybe it’s her way of trying to stand out, to get them to notice her.
“Sorry,” she says, wiping away her tears, “I hate people who cry.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “So do I.”
She pushes her mostly burned cigarette into the sand and slides her black hair behind her ear, but the gentle wind pushes it right back out.
“I thought it was pretty cool that I was probably the only one there tonight who knew why you played ‘Lithium,’” she says.
“Um, you were definitely the only one.”
“You changed it so much I hardly recognized it. You made it sound like an old blues song or something.”
“Yeah, this slowed down version popped into my head.”
“Did you go to the mall and buy the CD? You could have borrowed mine, you know.”
“No. I didn’t even know I was going to play it until after I sat down at the piano. I thought we were going to do a full band encore, but then my mom had this idea for me to go out alone, so I did. It was actually seeing you in the crowd that gave me the idea.”
As the words come out, I realize how weird they sound, but I can’t get them back in my mouth. Can’t unsay them. Predictably, Juliet looks at me like I’ve started speaking in Dutch.
“But you must have heard it again after the other day?”
“Um. No. I mean, I don’t think I did.”
“Not even on the radio or something?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
I shrug. She waits, putting the pieces together.
“You mean you only heard it those two times in my room? How did you know all the words? And all the music and stuff?”
I don’t want to explain any of this, but what choice do I have?
“I can just sort of remember things,” I say, trying to sound as casual as possible.
“Like whole songs after hearing them only twice?”
“I guess.”
“Do you have like—a photographic memory?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I hate that expression, and yet, it feels pretty true for how my brain works.
“That’s so cool.”
“It’s really not. I kind of hate it, to be honest. My brain feels so overstuffed sometimes.”
“I’d love to be able to remember stuff like that. I’d never have to study for tests again.”
“It’s not really like that,” I say. “And believe me, it’s not as great as it sounds.”
“Prove it,” she says.
“When I was seven, my parents picked up on it and they used to bring me out at parties to entertain their friends like I was a dog who could do flips. They’d put on records and play me songs I’d never heard, then have me play them back perfectly on the piano while everyone watched. I used to like it because I thought they were all looking at me with all this love. Now I can see they thought I was a freak.”
“Okay, that kind of sucks,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“Guess we’re both freaks, huh?” she says.
“Guess so.”
She turns toward me, and she looks so beautiful in the moonlight it hurts to look at her. My body buzzes and I get that feeling again. That pressure inside. We both lean forward until our faces are almost touching. Our lips hover without coming together, pause, as if trying to decide, and then finally, touch. It’s only for a second, but still, they touch. And when they do it feels like a part of me slips out of my body and starts dancing in the breeze above our heads.
• • •
All the way back to my room, I feel dreamy and light as a feather—until I find my mom sitting in the hallway reading a book. Talk about spoiling the moment.
“Rainey, it’s two-thirty in the morning!” she says, standing up. “Where have you been?”
She’s bleary eyed from lack of sleep and looks scared.
“Just down at the beach. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“I think I’ll be the judge of what’s a big deal or not, young lady. I came to your room to thank you again for tonight, but you weren’t there. Walden said he didn’t know where you’d gone. I seem to remember saying no to you almost two hours ago. What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Hanging out with Juliet.”
“Well, I think I’ll be having a little talk with her mother tomorrow. I can’t imagine she’d approve of this either.”
“No, Mom! Please don’t. Seriously. You don’t have to do that. I’m sorry. Really. It’s just, I’d already told her I would meet her, and I felt bad not going.” Then a little lie slips into my head, and then right out of my mouth. “Her boyfriend broke up with her. She needed someone to talk to.”
The lie works. Mom calms down, and though she looks disappointed, says I should go right to bed, and she’ll see me in the morning. For some reason, I throw my arms around her and tell her I love her.
“I love you too, honey,” she says, then sniffs the air and says I smell like cigarettes.
“Dad,” I say, unable to stop another lie from tumbling out. What’s happening to me?
Mom nods, then says, “Rainey, I mean it, thanks for tonight.”
I slip into my pitch-black room, Walden snoring in the dark, almost in time with the hum and pulse of the air conditioner. Acting fast, I grab my journal and scurry into the bathroom. While I pee, I flip back fifteen or twenty pages until I find what I’m looking for, a list I made earlier this summer entitled Things I’ve Never Done Before. I’d forgotten about it until tonight.
Gone to school
Had friends
Played Nintendo
Kissed someone
Gone to a party
Fallen in love
Gotten my heart broken (see #6)
Stood up to my mom
Done anything rebellious
Felt truly satisfied with my place in the world
