The Disenchantments

  “True,” he says. “I didn’t want to let you go.”

  We sit in silence for a little while, sipping our tea.

  “That’s the story,” Drew says. “That’s all. Hope it didn’t disappoint.”

  “Not at all,” I say, and I try to smile, but there’s something so painful about it, that someone’s walking around with a tattoo made before my parents were in love. When the future was still wide open.

  Melanie sighs pleasantly, stands up.

  “It’s getting late,” she says.

  “It’s been late,” Drew adds. “It was past midnight when you got here, and I’ve been boring you with my first aid and my anecdotes.”

  “It was so nice of you guys to let us come,” Bev says, and I nod, feeling grateful that she’s able to speak and say the right things.

  “Let me put washcloths out for you,” Melanie says.

  Drew collects our empty jars.

  “Be right back,” he tells us.

  They both disappear, leaving Bev and me alone in the living room.

  I look at the medical tape on her lip, touch the bandage on my cheekbone.

  “How’s it feeling?” she asks.

  “Okay,” I say. “A little sore.”

  “Yeah.” She moves to the couch and peers down the hall. Then she says, “That question in the car yesterday, the one about love? That was yours, right?”

  I nod.

  “I kept thinking about that the whole time we were sitting here.”

  I picture the way Drew and Melanie looked at one another, the way she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “It could be just an act,” Bev says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But I don’t think so.”

  A long time passes.

  Then Bev says, “I don’t think so, either.”

  Bev gets ready first, and by the time I walk back out into the living room, she is already fast asleep on the couch.

  “Should we just let her stay there?” Melanie asks.

  I nod, and Melanie takes a blanket and drapes it over Bev’s feet.

  “Come,” she whispers. “I’ve fixed a bed in the study.”

  The room is cabinlike, unpainted wood walls and hanging plants and a desk cluttered with papers and books. Melanie has made the futon. Soft sheets, a pillow, a green comforter. I climb in.

  “Do you need anything?”

  I shake my head, no.

  She stands above me for a little longer.

  “Everything will be okay,” she tells me.

  She leans over, tucks the blankets around me. I don’t mind, because even though it’s too intimate an action for a stranger, we both know it suits the moment.

  It isn’t until later, after she’s walked out and shut the door, that I realize I never told her that anything was wrong. Everything about me, it must be obvious to everyone. Like what Sophie said: You feel it so much.

  I reach for my phone to check the time—2:38—and there’s a new voice mail from Dad. I consider letting it wait until tomorrow, but instead I press play:

  “Colby, I wasn’t finished. I don’t want you making something more out of this than it is. This thing between your mom and me isn’t something new—it’s just that you never asked before. Your mother loves me. She’s just a difficult woman to pin down. She always has been. Life . . .” he says. “Life is an extraordinary thing. It has mountains and canyons. I know I’m sounding like a folk song. Actually, I think that might be my folk song. Mountains and canyons . . .” He does this kind of half-singing, half-humming thing. “Anyway. Here’s the thing: if you had asked me last year, around springtime, if anything was going on between us I would have told you the same thing I told you tonight. And if you had asked when you were, say, between the ages of three and five, I would have said, ‘It’s not looking so hot, kid.’ Your mother is a complex creature. She means well, but she’s never had any problem with keeping me guessing. So that’s it. We’re in a state of something—confusion? suspension?—but who isn’t. Pete says, ‘Tell Melinda hello. Don’t forget to check her oil.’ I say, Good night, son. Be safe.”

  Thursday

  For the first time in my life, I wake up to the sound of a rooster.

  I push the curtains back and look out into the morning. What I find is a grassy field that stretches forever, and on the field are three horses. I’ve never seen horses like this—so close, just grazing. A white one with brown spots nibbles on grass. An acorn-brown one stands still in one place, then walks slowly to the third, black and white, and rubs his nose against the other’s.

  I need to draw them. I get out my sketchbook and turn to a blank page and I draw until I hear a knock at the door. It’s Bev, telling me that we should get ready; Drew and Melanie can drive us back to the Greyhound station before they catch their plane.

  She crosses the room to me, looks at my drawing. I see surprise flash across her face. She looks out the window, and I can tell she’s seeing the horses for the first time.

  For a few minutes she stays by me, watching the horses, while I work on my drawing.

  “They look so powerful,” she says, and I nod yes and assume she’s talking about the actual horses but really she isn’t looking at them; she’s looking at my sketchbook. I keep working. I draw the curves of their backs and their hooves and their manes, the patches of grass beneath them. And then my drawing is finished and I close my sketchbook and for a little while longer we look out of the window together, captivated by a life that is nothing like our own.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says, and disappears. Moments later she’s in the room again, holding an acoustic guitar.

  “It’s Drew’s,” she tells me.

  She sits at the foot of my bed.

  “I’ve been working on a song about my parents. I can’t really play it for anyone, so I was hoping I could play it for you.”

  Her hair is damp and she smells like some good, unfamiliar soap. The cut on her face isn’t bandaged anymore; it’s already starting to heal. She’s watching me, waiting for an answer. I nod, okay.

  I know that what she’s saying is intentional, a reference to our conversation in the river by the apple farm, and the one later at the Starlight, when I told her that I didn’t want to be anyone. And though I don’t want to be this person that she has to take care of, that she worries about, at the same time I’m glad that she’s playing this for me now, even if it’s only to make me know that I mean something to her.

  She opens up her gold notebook and thumbs through for the right page. She finds it: messy, lines crossed out, words inserted over those little editing symbols that mean that a new word goes in a too-small space, letters to remind herself of the notes.

  She strums one chord and then another one, higher and fuller than the first. Her playing sounds almost folksy coming from an acoustic guitar. She starts to sing, and the melody is more Marvelettes than it is Sleater-Kinney—more slow and solemn than spunky and irreverent. It isn’t the angry punk song I would have expected. Instead, it sounds like a song about lost love, which, I guess, it is.

  She reaches the chorus and repeats these two lines,

  Boots by the door/Not Dad’s, not yours, which is simple and great like “Modern Girl,” like how the best song lyrics always are. When she switches chords to play the next verse, she messes up.

  “Oops, sorry,” she says, and I realize that she’s nervous. She positions her fingertips on the right fret and continues. Her voice sounds softer than usual, with none of her trademark breathiness, no yelps or shrieks, just simple notes and a pretty melody. She sings about being a kid, being a part of a family. It could sound corny but it isn’t corny—it’s just right. She sings the chorus once more.

  Then she tells me, “This is the last verse,” and sings this:

  Our photo album smiles/Faded to a blur

  She does this great fingerpicking thing that I’ve never heard her do before.

  Maybe we were never/Who I thought we were

  The
last chord lingers, then stops, and Bev sets the guitar down. She waits.

  “It’s really good,” I say.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s so sad.”

  We sit together for a little bit longer. It feels like it could be the moment. It could be now that Bev tells me what happened to us, and why.

  But soon Melanie is calling to us from the kitchen, and on the table she’s set out orange juice and coffee and scrambled eggs and toast, and Bev and I are both embarrassed, saying that she shouldn’t have cooked for us, but she says she needed to use the food before they left and is glad to have people to make it for. We eat. We thank her. We help them carry their bags outside and I try to push away the sadness that comes when they lock their door and I realize that I will never see them again or step foot in their house, and then, as the sadness is threatening to overtake me, I see the most beautiful thing.

  It’s Melinda, coming toward us. Turquoise and shining and driven by Meg. If we’d left a few minutes earlier they would have missed us.

  Meg pulls over across the street, and I tell Melanie and Drew, “Those are our friends,” and before I can say anything else, Meg has stepped out of the van onto the dirt road. Her dress of the day is yellow, short enough to show off her tanned legs and brown cowboy boots.

  “Hey,” she says to Drew. “Are you a weatherman?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m a geologist,” and Meg makes an exaggerated snap—another theory, proven false.

  “You smell like breakfast,” Meg tells us as we drive away.

  “Um, thanks?” I say.

  “It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It just makes me hungry. We drove past a restaurant on our way here. We should stop and eat.”

  “How did you find us?” Bev asks.

  “I called the tattoo place last night and talked to Jasper. He went on and on about how bad Saran Wrap is for tattoos, and I told him that I wasn’t using Saran Wrap so he had nothing to worry about, and he was like, ‘You promise you aren’t using Saran Wrap?’ and I was like, ‘Jasper, listen to me: I am not using Saran Wrap,’ and then he told me where to find you.”

  “We thought about calling you,” Alexa says. “But we decided it would be a good surprise. You know, to just show up.”

  “It was,” I tell her.

  “The best surprise,” Bev says.

  Meg pulls into the parking lot of a restaurant named Rooster’s and we file inside. The waitresses are all middle-aged women who seem like they’ve been working there forever. The place is dark for the time of day, with brown booths and unpainted wood walls. It feels worn-in and comfortable, and we stand out for several reasons. Among them, we’re the only people under forty, and we’re the only people with pink hair.

  We slide into a booth. Meg and Alexa on one side, Bev and me on the other.

  “I’m going to decide what to order,” Meg says. “And then you are going to tell us the story.”

  While Meg and Alexa study the menu I check out the reading material at the table, of which there happens to be plenty. I read Bev a few practically nonsensical riddles off of a pamphlet titled “Kids Jokes,” until she rolls her eyes and says, “What’s the point? These are impossible to solve.”

  The waitress comes. Meg and Alexa order breakfast, Bev and I order coffee.

  Meg says, “Okay. So he’s not a weatherman. What’s the deal, then?”

  Bev and I tell her Drew’s story, about seeing Dad and Pete’s show, and falling in love, and being first denied and then accepted.

  “That’s it?” Meg says, not attempting to hide her disappointment.

  “No,” Bev says. “I mean, kind of, but it’s not everything.”

  So we elaborate. We tell them about arriving at their house so late at night, and Melanie’s seashells and Drew’s love of first aid. About Hawaii and the tea and the horses. The way they looked at one another.

  When we’re finished, Meg says, “These are like magical people. They’re your fairy godparents or something. This is not how real people are.”

  “No.” Alexa shakes her head. “Meg, you’re wrong. They’re each other’s soul mates. Someone’s going to love me like that one day.” Then, more to herself, she says, “Maybe my play should be about them.”

  “Still,” Meg says, “that’s the mystery? Some dude asked some woman to marry her and she said yes so he got an impulse tattoo? I mean, they sound like nice people, but man. You can’t blame me for expecting a better payoff than that.”

  As if on cue, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and check the screen: Jasper.

  “Bro, you’ll never believe this,” he tells me.

  “Yeah?”

  “So my brother’s been out of town at a convention this whole week. Left on, what, Thursday? I don’t know for sure. But anyway. He got back last night and I told him the story—you guys, the tattoo, your mom, Spider and that lady he dated, Drew and Melanie. But my brother was like, ‘No man, I know that tattoo,’ and flipped through another book and found a variation that he did on this guy he knew who ended up living in Seattle for a while.”

  “Whoa,” I say. “Another one?”

  “Yeah. He’s a graffiti artist,” Jasper says. “I forgot his name, but my brother says he’s kind of a big deal. He’s gonna get a hold of him and see if he’s still in Seattle.”

  “Seattle?” I say, and all the girls stop talking and look at me. Alexa’s nervous, I can tell. Seattle is not in the plan.

  “The tattoo is different but I’m telling you—it’s dope. I’m not even kidding, if he’s in Washington, it’s worth the drive.”

  I doubt that we could make it to Seattle, but I have to admit I’m interested. Just when I thought we’d figured everything out, here it is: something else.

  I say, “Let me know what you find out.”

  “Yeah,” Jasper says. “I’m on it.”

  Crossing the parking lot, Alexa says, “I know we don’t have a show tonight, but I just don’t think we have time for Seattle.”

  “Jasper doesn’t even know if the guy is in Seattle anymore,” I say. “And even if he is, if he’s really this big artist why would he want to meet me anyway? Because my mother painted a bird like the one on his tattoo?”

  Meg runs ahead of me and jumps into the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t think we have to worry about it,” I say. I open my calendar. In today’s square I’ve written, Portland: dorm. In tomorrow’s, 8pm show. It’s all happened so fast.

  “Meg,” I say. “This is it.”

  Only a couple days ago I was standing in a river, wanting to turn back, and now we’re almost to our destination, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I get home.

  “This is what?” she asks.

  “This is the day we get to Portland. We’re moving you into your dorm room in, like, five hours.”

  Meg doesn’t say anything, and then Bev, carving next to me, says, “And tomorrow night is our last show.”

  “So what happens after tomorrow?” I ask. “The band breaks up?”

  “I guess so,” Alexa says. “Meg’s in Portland, Bev will be in Rhode Island. I’m the only one who will still be in San Francisco. Except maybe you, Colby,” she adds. “But you aren’t technically in the band.”

  “We could start a new one,” I joke. “Just you and me.”

  Alexa smiles. “I like boy-girl bands,” she says. “What will you play?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe your sandy harmonica, if you’ll let me use it.”

  “Harmonica and drums,” Bev says. “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “It’ll be rad.”

  “We’ll be back over the summers, right?” Meg says. “So maybe we can book a couple shows for next year.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Bev says.

  “Did you see that there were cabins at that apple farm?” Meg asks. “I loved it there. We should all go in on a cabin and live there one summer. We could practice all the time.”
br />   “I hope so,” Alexa says. “We’ve worked so hard.”

  For a couple of hours Meg drives and Alexa navigates and Bev carves and I lean against the window with my feet near her lap, looking through the pictures on my phone.

  Bev is listening to her Walkman. She keeps stopping and rewinding, stopping and rewinding.

  “What are you listening to?” Meg asks when Bev has stopped the tape for the seventh or eighth time.

  “Nothing you’ve heard of,” she says.

  “Try me,” Meg snaps.

  “It’s nothing,” Bev says, and turns up the volume. I hear tinny voices, but not clearly enough to make out what it is.

  Time passes. No one says anything.

  In the photo I took last night, Drew stands with his back to the camera, his shirt pulled up, the bird spotlighted by the table lamp in Melanie’s hands. I had meant to get a closer shot, but I actually like it this way. It shows more of them. In the background I can make out a table and some plants and books.

  I press send.

  A moment later, my dad texts back: YOU FOUND THE TATTOO!?

  I type, YEAH. GUY NAMED DREW. GEOLOGIST. LIVES OUTSIDE MEDFORD.

  DID YOU GET THE STORY?

  I think for a while, for the best way to put it.

  Finally, I write: HE WAS IN LOVE.

  WITH ME? Dad shoots back.

  HA.

  PETE, THEN. NO TASTE.

  This is my dad’s usual humor. I can’t tell if he’s laughing as he’s writing this, or if he’s just forcing it. Maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe if we all force ourselves to act like we’re okay even if we’re not, eventually things will get better.

  Halfway between Medford and Portland we decide to stop for lunch.

  “We should get it to go and eat in the bus,” Alexa says. “We’re on schedule, but we should give ourselves enough time to move Meg in while it’s still light out.”

  She is back to herself now, the tour-manager, organized and in control. But Meg says that no, we should eat in Eugene.

  “I’ve heard it’s a cute city,” she says.

  “But don’t you want to unpack a little when we get there?” Alexa asks. “We can hang things on the walls. We can make it really feel like your space. I think that’s important.”