Mom had loved that story. “One year we waited in line twice, because you swore you were ready to talk to him. But no dice.”
I drop that photo on the bed and look at the next one. It’s a picture of me onstage at my last spring concert. I haven’t seen this picture before and didn’t know my mother had taken it.
That night was only a month before she died.
I dig deeper into the pile. There are several school pictures—those hideously posed shots against a gray mottled background. And a picture of me and Haze smiling from behind one of my birthday cakes. I count thirteen candles on it. That would have been two years after Haze’s father killed himself.
I study Haze’s smile in the photograph, and decide that it isn’t marked by disaster. Maybe a year or so from now I’ll feel lighter too.
In the bottom of the box is a glossy yellow envelope. I lift it out. It’s sealed with a brittle adhesive that gives way when I put my fingernail under the edge. Inside I find a stack of photographs, all the same size, probably the same batch.
The very first one takes my breath away.
Looking out at me from the photo are young versions of Mom and Frederick. He has his arm around her, his free hand on her knee. My mother looks sideways at him and laughs. They’re wearing shorts and sneakers, and sitting on the porch of a little house somewhere. But it isn’t the smooth faces or the too long hair that surprise me. It’s the look on my mother’s face. She wears a smile so loving, so unguarded that it shocks me.
I’d never seen her look that way at anyone.
In the next photo, Frederick has a beard. He’s seated, shirtless, in a chair with a guitar, and my mother stands behind him, her hands on his shoulders. The casual curve of her fingers on his bare skin gives me a shiver. Here is the very thing I’ve never been able to picture—the two of them together. The uncensored joy on my mother’s face is astonishing to me.
I don’t even know I’m crying until Aurora comes running. “What’s happened?” She sits down on the bed. “Oh! This is your mother.”
Aurora takes the stack from my hands and flips through them slowly. “Where is this?” she holds up a photo. Frederick stands on a pathway, his guitar across his body. There are orange and yellow autumn leaves behind him. In the next picture, Mom is there too.
They’re kissing.
I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen these pictures before. She lied to me.”
Aurora looks startled. “She lied? About the pictures?”
I nod. I’d asked my mother many times whether there were pictures of him. When I got a little older, of course, I stopped asking and started Googling.
“Sweetie, she didn’t want to remember this. It’s not that hard to understand.”
“Yes it is!” I gasp. The next picture is of the two of them, bent over a map. His fingers have swept the hair off her neck. My mother’s hand covers his.
They were so happy.
The true lie, I realize, is not that the pictures exist, but rather what they show. Every time my mother mentioned him, it was as if he’d been inflicted on her, like a disease. But it wasn’t true. My mother had loved him.
It wasn’t all just a shady accident, a tawdry mistake.
“She was just so unlucky.” Aurora sighs, setting a picture down on the bed. It shows Frederick carrying her, piggyback, through a meadow somewhere. “How old was she when she died?”
“Thirty-eight.”
Aurora wipes her eyes. “She could have fallen in love again, no?”
I really don’t know. My idea of her is undergoing a rapid shift. The mom I knew had measured risk and reward with an eyedropper. She believed in delayed gratification. But it obviously hadn’t always been so. And it was me who’d changed her from the happy girl in the photos to the tired woman working double shifts in hospital scrubs.
The next picture makes me squint. But then I let out a little shriek of surprise. “Dios!” Aurora gasps. “Your mother played the drums?”
There she is, onstage, sticks poised over a drum kit. Her hair is pulled up into a knot on top of her head.
The bass drum has a decal on its face: WILD CITY BLUES.
“Wild City,” Aurora says. “Just like the song.”
I am speechless. There’s really no other way to handle my surprise. The photo shows Frederick at the microphone, and a bass guitar is propped against the amp stack.
My whole life I’d been trying to understand my missing father. And the whole time I hadn’t had the first clue about my mom.
“Who took all these pictures?” Aurora asks. “Who is this?” She holds up the final picture, which had three subjects instead of two. Three heads lie together in the grass, and one man’s arm reaches up above them to take their self-portrait.
I hadn’t even thought to wonder who took them. “That’s Ernie,” I say slowly. “When he still had hair.” I pick up the envelope and turn it over. “Hathaway” is scrawled at one end.
“What a blessing that this Ernie took them, and now they are yours.”
I’m not so sure. They make my head spin.
* * *
The next few days are rough.
For most of the year, Claiborne Prep has been my Hogwarts—a separate place in my life where things mostly go well. But now my grief has followed me all the way to New Hampshire. I’m just plain sad. Sorrow hangs over me like a cloud.
I still get out of bed every morning and go to class. But once I get there, I can’t concentrate. I’ve taken to Googling my mother now, instead of my father. Searching for “Wild City” had always led me nowhere. But searching for “Wild City Blues” leads me to an old set list from a Kansas City club.
The song titles on it are unfamiliar, or else covers. But the singer was Fred Richards, the bassist Ernie Hathaway, and the drummer Jenny Kaye.
My mother had a stage name.
Meanwhile, classes go on. I sit in the back of the English lecture hall, reeling. I’m puzzling over my mother’s life instead of the complexities of Middle English.
Two rows up, Jake takes fervent notes. But I’m thinking about the little green house we’d shared in Florida, of doing homework on my bed while Mom bumps around in the kitchen making dinner.
I spent so much time longing for this—the prep-school experience, living on a pretty New England campus. But now the loss of my mother is all I can think about. I want to go backward in time, to slide off the bed in our little house and wander into the kitchen, to watch the planes of my mother’s face as she seasons two chicken breasts and sets them in the oven to bake.
If I could just see her one last time, maybe I could understand everything that happened. But she’s gone. All my chances are used up.
The whiteboard at the front of the lecture hall becomes misty.
There are still ten minutes left of the class, but I swing my bag onto my shoulder and slip out. Usually I have lunch with Aurora after this class, but I don’t feel like talking to anyone.
Walking back to Habernacker, the flagstone pathways are slicked from a spring shower, and the air is cool and moist. But in my mind, I’m back in my mother’s hospital room. For the first time in months, I let those memories come. The first few days in the hospital, she was still mostly conscious. Whenever the doctor came in to talk to us, I would try hard to absorb the things he said about new antibiotics and bringing down her fever. But Mom never seemed to listen. Her eyes never left my face.
I think she knew.
There was nothing to do but wait and hope, and hold Haze’s hand. Every few hours, he would drag me down to the cafeteria and beg me to eat something. His presence was a real comfort. And now even that link to my old life has been shattered by misunderstanding and regret.
I climb the stairs to my room. In my desk, I find a clean sheet of paper and an envelope. Even if my mother and I are never going to have another conversation, there’s one I can have before it’s too late.
It takes me a long time to c
ome up with the right words.
Dear Haze,
I know it’s been months, but I’m still upset about fighting with you. I’ve wanted to say so for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out how. I still can’t. You made me feel so caught. Because I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be.
I loved you as a friend. But you pushed me into more when I wasn’t ready. If there was a better way for me to get that across, I missed it. And for that I’m sorry.
But I won’t ever forget that you helped me survive last year. I love you, Haze. Even if it’s not the way you hoped.
Rachel
It’s a small thing, but I feel better for saying it. I put his name on the envelope, and write out his address from memory. Then I go off to buy a stamp.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A few days later, when the weather decides to take one more crack at being chilly, I watch my father approach the intersection where we’ve agreed to meet.
I’d almost made an excuse to blow him off, because I’m still feeling so blue. He’ll probably be able to read it off my face, and I don’t feel like explaining. But I haven’t seen him in a while, and if I blow him off, he’d probably just call me again tomorrow.
In my back pocket, I’ve stashed one of the photographs I’d found of Frederick and my mother. But I haven’t figured out what question I want to ask yet.
My mother spent seventeen years not talking about what happened. Hopefully it won’t take me the same length of time to ask.
As he reaches the corner, he gives me a little wave. Yet he’s missed the light, and traffic begins to stream between us. I rub my hands together against the cold and wait.
“Hey!”
I turn and smile at the sound of Jake’s voice, the way a flower turns toward the sun. Instinctually.
“I was just missing you,” he says. “Terribly. And you appeared.” He takes my cold hands into his.
I open my mouth to say something, but Jake is quicker. He leans in and kisses me on the lips. It’s been over two weeks since our awful talk, and there’s a whole lot of yearning in that kiss. The only thing keeping me from absolutely melting onto Jake is the fact that my father is probably watching from across the street.
I hear the traffic slow. I take a half step backward, but too late.
“Hands off, buster,” my father’s voice says.
Jake startles and pulls away.
“Dad!” I gasp.
“But isn’t that my line? Did I not deliver it well?”
I feel my face redden. Across from me, Jake looks beaten. Interrupted again.
The timing is awful, but it has to be done. “Well, Frederick, this is Jake. Jake, meet my father.”
Finally.
They shake hands. There’s a silence while I wonder what I should say next.
“So, we walk?” Frederick prompts.
“Where are you headed?” I ask Jake.
“The gym.”
“Walk with us,” Frederick says. He turns toward the main part of campus.
Jake raises his eyebrows at me, and I give him a tiny nod.
“Sure,” he says.
“What do you think, Rachel?” Frederick asks. “The pond? The hill?”
“Your pick.”
“There’s one more option,” Jake says, his eyes on me. “Do you want to climb the bell tower?” He points up at the white spire rising over the library building.
“You can do that?” I ask.
“Only if you happen to have a key,” Jake says. “Which you might, say, if you took it off your asshat brother’s keyring while he was passed out over the holidays.”
Frederick laughs. “Excellent. Let’s go break a few rules. That’s all I ever did in school.”
“During reunion week,” Jake explains as we cross the quad, “there’s a tower tour. But other times it’s off limits.” Jake stops. “Rach, is this okay? I know you don’t like to break rules.”
He’s right, of course. But I think I’ve been looking at the whole good girl thing wrong. I need to trust my gut more and worry less. “Let’s do it.”
They both smile at me, and we head for the library.
Jake leads us through the library stacks, up to level six. We reach a metal door marked “Maintenance Only.”
Jake spins around to flash us a little smile. Then he turns the handle and looks inside for a moment. The coast clear, he walks in.
I follow him into a poorly lit room, containing a few cleaning supplies and a pile of dusty fluorescent lightbulb sleeves. An arrow-shaped sign on the wall reads: To Tower. We follow a passageway until it ends at an old wooden door.
“Well, now we find out if the key works, or if I’ve brought you here for nothing.” Jake takes a set of keys out of his pocket and chooses a big flat brass one. He fits it into the lock and jiggles it. The door clicks open.
“Score,” Frederick says. “Now we climb?”
“That’s right,” Jake says, leading the way.
I follow, my legs beginning to burn after the second flight. It’s cold in the stairwell, but soon I’m sweating. Frederick pokes me on the backside when I stop in front of him for a breather. I whip around to see him wink at me. Somebody’s having fun.
After each set of ten steps, I turn left and see ten more. The stairs are a steep, metal affair, the railing a piece of old pipe. The light gets brighter with each flight, and soon I can see why. The four clock faces on the tower are made of thick, translucent glass. Each one must be eight feet across. I pass first one and then another clock face, their shapely black arms rising toward noon.
The stairs go on in spite of my burning thighs and the stitch in my side. Just when I think I can’t take any more, the steps finally break through a plank ceiling and into a little wooden room. Jake stands, winded, against the wall. He wears a shy, triumphant smile.
“Cool,” I say, and his smile widens. “Coming, old man?”
Frederick emerges, grasping his chest in mock exhaustion. And then he looks up. “Wow.”
Above us hang dozens of giant old bells, all different sizes. Some are as big as me. But at the top, on the end, a few are only the size of a toaster. On one wall in front of us is a set of levers, arranged like the pattern of an organ keyboard. Nearby there’s a music stand and an ancient wooden stool. Frederick bends over the levers for a closer look.
“If you ring a bell, we’re totally busted,” Jake says.
“Gotcha,” my father replies. He counts the levers. “Two and a half octaves. This thing looks old.”
“Some of the bells are from the 1860s. But I think those levers aren’t quite so old. The people who play this are part of the Carillon Guild. They hold auditions every spring. It’s very competitive.”
On the adjacent wall is a single door. Jake slides back the metal bar securing it and swings it inward. An ancient metal hook chained to the wall holds it open for us.
I follow Jake outside, where I’m greeted with a sweeping view of the Connecticut River valley to the west, and the mountains of Vermont beyond. “This is amazing.” The students on the sidewalk below are miniaturized.
“Great view,” my father agrees, stepping outside. “What am I looking at? Are those the Green Mountains?”
“Yeah. And that’s Smarts Mountain up there.” Jake points to the north.
The three of us move slowly around the tower walkway, stopping to take in the different viewpoints. From up here, Claiborne’s brick buildings look like pretty little toys.
It’s breezy, and the cold stings my face. I rub my hands together again, wishing I hadn’t left my gloves at home. “That’s Mount Ascutney,” Jake points toward the south. He reaches around me from behind, taking my hands in his and rubbing my cold fingers. He does this almost absently, as if we’ve never fought, as if everything is still okay. I lean back against him, fighting a lump in my throat.
I catch Frederick watching us, and he winks. The wind whips through again, and Frederick brings the hood of his sweater up over his
head and holds it there.
“I guess we should go in,” Jake says. He walks toward the corner of the tower, and I follow him. But just as we’re about to reach the door, there’s a slam.
Jake scoots over to the door and pushes the handle. It doesn’t move. When he looks at me, the fear in his face is undisguised.
“Oh my God,” I say.
Frederick snorts. “No way.”
Jake stares at the door. “There wasn’t even a lock on it,” he says. “What the hell?” He lets go of the handle and presses on the door itself. “Goddamn it.” He kicks the bottom of the door in frustration.
I don’t even know what to say. But just as I’m beginning to panic, the door opens suddenly from within, and a narrow face peers out. “I was just having a little fun with you,” it says.
Jake pushes the door open and jumps over the threshold. “Did you have to do that?”
Inside, the narrow-faced person is revealed to be a skinny guy with a curly black mop of hair. Whereas Jake styles himself as a nerd, this guy is the real deal. His Adam’s apple bobs nervously as he stares at the three of us. “Sorry,” he says. “You’re not supposed to be up here, anyway.”
Jake takes a deep breath. “True. But I think you took a year off my life just now.”
Frederick laughs. “Good prank, kid. You had us.”
The guy squints at Frederick. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
“I get that a lot,” my father says.
The skinny kid checks his watch. “Whoops, I have one minute.” He opens a folder on the music stand and sits down on the stool.
It’s 11:59. I’d forgotten that the carillon is played every day at noon.
“If we stay to watch, will there be any retribution?” Frederick asks.
The kid shakes his head. “Nah. I’m over it. But the whole concert lasts about five minutes.”
The sheet music reads, “Simple Gifts.” At twelve o’clock, he begins pressing levers, and the folk tune rings out at a deafening volume from the bells overhead. I look up to see the bells tipping one at a time, pulled by metal cords that rise from the backs of the levers. Even when the skinny kid stops pressing levers, the bells’ ringing tone hangs in the air.