Songs Only You Know (30 page)

“I can barely think,” I told her.

“You don’t love me?”

“I do,” I said, because it was true.

“I told myself in the hospital that I’d be with you no matter what,” she said. “And I need you to know that I would.” When I had nothing useful to say, she told me Blaine had begun harassing her again. He’d gotten her number from a college directory and had been calling at all hours. “I don’t even want to tell you,” she said.

“What?”

“He whispers her name into the phone.”

“Whose name?” I said.

“Caitlin.”

R
ETURNING FROM AN AFTERNOON
at the bookstore, I walked into my new bedroom to see, perched on the dresser, a framed picture of Lauren and my sister. In the photograph it was winter, the snow reflecting sunlight. Their arms hugged each other’s shoulders. They looked to be on the verge of laughter. A stocking cap was pulled down to Caitlin’s eyebrows. She appeared as happy as I’d ever seen her, but I couldn’t tell where they were. I didn’t intend to look any closer.

Lauren lay on the futon, reading, wearing cutoff jeans and a T-shirt. There was absolutely nothing unpleasant about her. She looked at me and smiled huge.

“Could you put that away?” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t see that right now.”

She knew what I meant. She stood to remove the frame from her dresser, moving quickly. Then she held it, not knowing where it belonged.

I left the room to take a shaky walk around the block, and when I returned the picture was nowhere in sight. Lauren stood wiping her face with her wrist. And there it was: how terribly she cared. Enough to make my sister disappear when I asked; enough that she’d tried to keep her here with us in the first place.

T
HAT
J
ULY MY PARENTS
arranged to meet with a world-renowned spiritual medium. After years of communicating with dead souls of every variety, this particular seer had narrowed his specialty to working only with parents who’d lost a child. He’d been interviewed on talk shows and national news stations, though I’d never heard his name.

“I know it sounds hokey,” Mom told me, over the phone. “We’re gonna try it. He helps people in our situation.”

They’d booked flights to New York for their session, which gave me the hope they might get back together. In that way,
things were looking up. That they were divorced, conspiring to share a hotel room—who’d judge them at a time like this?

Mom offered to buy me a plane ticket, but I didn’t consider it. Any mention of my sister could send me into a tailspin, so I smothered my need to believe that she might be reachable somehow, somewhere. Instead, I offered to drive back from East Lansing and keep an eye on Ozzy. After dropping my parents at Metro Airport, I turned around every picture of Caitlin in the house, hardly glimpsing her face as I pointed the frames to the wall.

For months, I’d been investigating Sheila’s brother. The boxer. The male stripper. Into almost every memory of my sister, he’d sooner or later intrude—this vile, faceless presence I wanted to cut down to nothing. I’d jotted his address inside the cover of a
Tropic of Capricorn
paperback. Once I’d memorized the information, I crossed it out and stuck one of my ex-band’s decals there, for fear my notes could be used as evidence. While my parents were in New York, attempting to commune with my sister’s lost soul, I planned to use Mom’s house as a base for surveillance.

It was a Friday morning when I parked Mom’s station wagon a few doors down from the house he lived in with Sheila and their father, a small, unassuming Dearborn Heights bungalow, one thousand or so square feet, on a block with twenty like it. I staked out the scene as the sun was coming around. I’d sipped my way through a cup of coffee and sat deconstructing the Styrofoam rim, wearing an old Tigers hat and a pair of women’s sunglasses I’d found in the glove box. Ridiculousness did not occur to me, only this terrible worry that felt like violence and made it hard to breathe.

At my first glimpse of him, descending his porch, it was difficult to believe he’d existed all that time, so close to home.
Surely we’d crossed paths at a drugstore or a gas station, a bar. He strutted toward the street, an athletic shrug with each step. Can the blood roar and pound so hard that it rises to the tongue? Something tasting of alkaline tickled the back of my throat. My hands felt featherweight, like those dreams where you’re being assaulted and can’t raise a limb in defense. He was tall. Sturdy and tan, with a large, solid jaw. By the way he threw open the door of his pickup, I knew he’d be able to manhandle me in a street fight.

His truck faced me head-on, about thirty feet off, windshield to windshield. He fussed around in the cab and started the engine. We might have been staring at each other as I awaited his approach, but I couldn’t tell. As far as I knew, he’d never seen me before, either, though I believed he’d experience a freezing premonition, some dark recognition of my nearness. But he pulled fast into the driveway of his house, swiftly reversing the truck and revving toward the opposite end of the street without noticing me at all.

E
VERY POSSIBILITY HAD CROSSED
my mind: black-market guns, screw-on silencers. I considered a sword, so there’d be no bullets to trace. I’d concocted a plan of mailing him what would appear to be a free sample of a muscle-building fitness drink—a mix-with-water powder, unidentifiably laced with a deadly poison. This would require chemical research in libraries I’d visit once and never return to and graphic-design techniques for the packaging, tricks I’d learned from putting together album covers. But how to test it to make sure there’d be no chemical tang when he swallowed?

Or maybe just a sword.

But what if he screamed? Maybe a gun—a gun was the sure bet. A pistol, tossed in a Great Lake afterward. I’d drive straight
there once I’d blasted him in the heart. To the Mackinac Bridge, five hours north, then toss the weapon into the Straits of Mackinaw: Lake Michigan flowing into Huron in the gap between the peninsulas. Never to be found. There was a maniac or two I’d met downtown who I imagined might have a beat on stolen firearms.

But who could be trusted?

I told no one about any of it: That I returned later that night to find his pickup already parked at the curb. How I monitored the house, noting what time the lights went out—early, too early. And what about his dad, and Sheila? There appeared to be a side door, but I’d have to survey the backyard, too. Or I’d just nail him as he’s coming out of whatever deadbeat bar he drinks at, just turn out his lights and run. These strategies were live wires, sparking through my thoughts. Taking up serious minutes of my days and haunting nights that were already restless. Not that I actually and truly intended anything, but merely gesturing toward harming this stranger made me feel like I was doing at least one goddamn thing to honor my sister’s name.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE MY
parents returned from New York, I cruised past his house several more times before heading to Gusoline Alley, a cramped bar in the city of Royal Oak frequented by people I knew, musicians. After a couple of hours on the stool, I ran into Scott, the ex-Wallside guitarist. He’d very recently been playing in an illiterate radio-rock band with Blaine—who’d abandoned his drums in order to strum a guitar and sing songs he’d written about Angela.

Of course, Warden was doing their record.

But Scott had just quit, I’d heard, after Blaine slept with his girlfriend.

“Dude’s a fucking rat,” Scott said.

He was slender and bearded, dressed sharply in a ruffian style, a plainspoken chain-smoker with the word
LIES
tattooed inside his lower gums. A genuine nut for music and all that came with it. We’d toured together, traveled the continent, but I’d recently disowned Scott for his Blaine connection. Now we had an enemy in common.

“He’s got it coming,” I said.

Blaine was the easy target, a patsy—it didn’t take long to convince Scott to arrange a setup. He might have thought he owed it to me for having stood onstage and played those god-awful love songs about my girlfriend. “Call him right now,” I said. “Tell him you want to meet and talk things over.”

It was 1:00
A.M.
, 2:00
A.M
. Blaine and his cell phone—the first satellite fiend I ever knew. I was sure he’d answer.

Scott dialed from a pay phone.

“There’s a party downriver,” he said as the phone rang. “He’s probably there.”

If Blaine hadn’t picked up, I’d have let it go that night. Getting my hands on him wasn’t something I looked forward to, but my daily visualizations of doing so were vivid enough that anything short of bloodshed would confirm my lack of spine. Angela had heard him whispering Caitlin’s name, I believed that—though I could barely conceive of anyone so heartless, the prank was undeniably his, carried out in his cheap-shot style.

Scott talked inaudibly into the phone while I stood on a curb breathing deep and flexing my wrists. “He wants to meet at our practice space,” Scott said, once he’d hung up. “He’s going there now.”

“Good.”

We took Scott’s Ford Contour downtown, talking about
nothing, headed for a warehouse on Trumble and Holden, an industrial hub where a number of bands rehearsed. One dark, desolate corner of the city where crack merchants huddled across the street, sometimes doubling their wares to include as many bootlegged pornos as could be fit into a trench coat. There’d be no one getting in the way.

When we pulled into the lot in front of the warehouse, Blaine was sitting on the gravel, leaned back against the grille of his car. The lot was fenced in on all sides. Our headlights washed over him. He was alone, with a beer between his legs. I leaped from the car while it was still moving, and there was an instant when Blaine’s eyes understood what was under way—as I ran toward him, just before I booted him in the face and heard his head wallop against the fender.

I was weak. I felt the hollowness of my fists as I hammered down.

But I worked on him for a good minute, slugging at his forearms, which had covered his face once he’d curled into a fetal lump. I told him he was sick—a sick animal. Scott stood between his headlights, pecking his cigarette. When I looked up, his smoking arm was trembling, but his eyes didn’t say one thing or the other.

They’d claim I’d jumped Blaine. Suckered him. Even in the heat of things, I felt the need to defend myself.

“He’s a rapist,” I said, because I didn’t think it was below him. “He’s rape waiting to happen.” Scott seemed to understand. Then I kicked Blaine’s forearms and spat these words at him, “You say her name again, I’ll kill you.”

Though I didn’t say her name, I was the last person who could.

Blaine was mostly conscious, but he lay balled up and unmoving, playing dead as we drove away. The tires crunched
the gravel, and there was a long drive back to Royal Oak, where I’d left Mom’s station wagon. And I didn’t feel well, but I’d done something. One small shift of dirty work no one else was about to get busy with, though it was far from over. The signs blurred on the highway; then came a stretch where I picked the torn skin from my knuckles.

“He deserves worse,” I said.

“Maybe,” Scott said, “he’ll learn his lesson.”

He continued smoking, staring ahead like he was ashamed of what I’d done but agreed that some things—you just don’t let them slide. You can’t live with yourself until you’ve done all that you can.

The spiritual medium had felt the presence of a girl. It was very hazy, he said—unusually so—but he’d intuited something having to do with gasping for air, a lack of oxygen. A drowning? No, that wasn’t it. Hard to get a sense. She was awake, but not awake.

“He sat and thought for a long time,” Mom said. “He said it was an odd case.”

The man had addressed my mother for the entire duration of the appointment, conveying certain images and energies, telling her my sister was sorry. Very sorrowful.

“Do you want to hear about this?” Mom asked me.

I was in bad form on the living room couch, a short matter of hours since I’d assaulted Blaine. The night before remained with me in the soreness of my hands, the taste in my throat.

Dad had carried Mom’s bags to the porch and declined to come inside.

“He’s upset,” she said. “The man didn’t say anything to him. Not a word. Barely even looked at him.”

I had to wonder if they were losing touch with the unalterable facts of this life. I’d grown more certain than ever that our souls were merely chemicals swirling inside our craniums. Science. Synaptic combustions—the mental fires that trick us into believing we are who we are. But for the Catholic mass and their belief in the Virgin’s mercy, my parents had been levelheaded skeptics, realists. Unmystical. Unfazed by reports of UFOs, ghosts, psychic encounters.

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It was good to get away.”

Ozzy assaulted her with affection, patrolling the room to make desperate swipes at her legs. The poor beast—I’d forgotten about him the night before and he’d vomited on Mom’s fake Chinese rug, refusing to break his housetraining.