“I have no idea where she is. The last time I saw her, we had a huge fight over the tree. I’d forgotten to bring it upstairs, and she wanted me to go down and get it. I was in my pajamas and ready for bed, so I refused. Well, I refused until Auden got up to do it. So I did go down for it, but it was like something inside me had snapped. Like I could see the Matrix all of a sudden, you know? She was never going to give us any of the stuffa mother is supposed to give her kids. And I’m not just talking about food and shelter and all that.”
“So you left after that?”
“No, she did. My reckoning was more internal. I wouldn’t have left until Auden was done with high school, but at that moment, I understood that there was no point in trying to please my mom. Or trying to get her to be decent to us. Or… whatever it was I was doing; I’m not even sure. The point is, I gave up. Maybe she could sense it; maybe she somehow knew she didn’t have any hold over me anymore. Regardless, she left that night—she said she was going out, but she never came back. Looking back, it was one of thoseYou can’t fire me; I quitscenarios.”
“What! Did you try to find her?”
“Initially we assumed she’d turn up eventually. She sometimes disappeared, but usually only for a few days at a time, max. That time, though, a couple of weeks went by with no word from her, and one day we came home from school to find the tree gone. So we knew she’d been back to get it, and that she was really gone—for good.”
“What?” This was all so egregious, I was having trouble wrapping my mind around it. “What did you do? How old were you?”
“We didn’t do anything. We stayed in the apartment. She already wasn’t paying rent. It was May, so the heat wasn’t an issue. It was spring of my senior year, so I finished school and we stayed through the summer. Without my mom rallying everyone against the landlord—I guess she was good at something—the eviction notices eventually came with police. So Auden and I got a shitty studio apartment in Brownsville.I was working full-time days to pay the rent and trying to make the band work at night. She was only a year behind me in school, so she kept going—and she got a part-time job, too. She was smarter than I was, so she got into NYU with a bunch of scholarships, and she figured out legally how to demonstrate that our mom had abandoned us, so that made her eligible for financial aid.”
“And then the band took off, and she became an actuary, and now it’s all fine.”
“Maybe.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Perhaps that things were fine financially—which was the sense I’d meant—but not fine in other ways.
“I literally hadn’t thought about that song for years. But then on my first night here I was standing in the dark in my cabin looking at that keyboard, and it just… rose up inside me. I think remembering it is what sparked the sixties-protest-music renaissance I seem to be experiencing. And I say ‘seem to be experiencing’ because it really does feel like something that’s happeningtome rather than something that I’m consciously doing. But even though I’m a regular Arlo Guthrie these days, I can’t get through that particular song without… well, without feeling ill. I play the first few measures, and then I have to stop. So that’s a very long answer to what I meant when I said I was ‘trying’ to play it.”
“You’re playing around it, or playing your way up to it.”
“Maybe so.” He shook his head and lifted an arm out of the water. “So yeah, that’s the story of the ink.” He was signaling that we were done with this conversation.
I took the cue and said, teasingly, “You and all your deep tattoos. And here I thought rock stars had tattoos of, like, badassdragons and shit. Or Chinese characters they think mean ‘fierce’ but actually mean ‘rainbows.’”
He laughed, which was gratifying. And also my chance to take my leave. “I gotta get out.” I held up my pruney fingers. “I have a FaceTime with my contractor tonight. He’s doing a walk-through of my new building.” I made a face. “So I have to turn my phone on.”
He made a sympathetic face.
“Yeah, I’m about to spend a shockingly large sum of borrowed money on a risky new venture—I close on the purchase next month—and I haven’t figured out a way to do that without a cell phone.” I popped off my kickboard.
“Reality rears its ugly head.”
Didn’t I know it, Teddy Knight. Didn’t I know it.
I thought about what Teddy had said as I showered and dressed. I thought about what he’d said as I grabbed dinner from the dining hall, and as I ate it in my cabin. I thought about it as I unearthed the planner that held my notes on the new building—skimming them made me feel like I was an archeologist discovering records of a past civilization.
Well, no, really I thought abouthim. Kid Teddy hauling that lemon tree up and down five stories. But also adult Teddy floating in the lake and just… opening himself. Telling me about his tattoos as if I were a person worthy of his confidences.
Not going to lie, I was also thinking about those tattoos in a purely aesthetic sense.
Also in the I-want-to-put-my-mouth-on-them sense.
But we’d had our last hurrah.
And it was good to remember that while we’d had fun, this was what was real. The studio. Studios, plural. This was my life.
I had to plug my very dead phone in and wait for it to come back to life. I was tempted to read the 207 emails and thirty-two texts I had notifications for, but I resisted. I had autoreplies on everything. This was only a quick dip back into reality.
“She lives!” Rory exclaimed when FaceTime connected. “Are you really not using your phone at all?”
“Not at all!” I confirmed. “It was completely dead, and I’m having to talk to you with it charging.”
“Hey, Gretchen,” Justin said. “Are you having a good summer?”
“I am, but I’m on pins and needles here. How does it look?”
