I just looked at him, turning this thought over in my mind. "I don't know," I said slowly.
"In fact," he continued, "that's worse than lying, when you really think about it. I mean, at the very least you should tell yourself the truth. If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust? You know?"
I would never have been able to tell him so, but Owen inspired me. The little white lies I told on a daily basis, the things I kept in, each time I was not totally honest—I was aware of every one now. I was also cognizant of how good it felt to actually be able to say what I thought to someone. Even if it was just about music. Or not.
One day at lunch, Owen put his backpack on the wall between us, unzipped it, and pulled out a stack of CDs. "Here," he said, pushing them toward me. "For you."
"Me?" I said. "What is this?"
"An overview," he explained. "I planned to do more, but my burner was acting up. So I could only do a few."
To Owen, "a few" CDs meant ten, by my count. Looking at the top few, I saw that each had a title— true hip hop, chants and shanties (various), tolerable jazz, actual singers actually singing—with the tracks listed beneath in a neat block print. It occurred to me that they were probably the result of a pointed discussion about stoner rock we'd had the day before, when Owen decided that maybe my knowledge of music was so "stunted and wanting" (his words) due to a lack of exposure. So here was his remedy, a personal primer, divided into chapters.
"If you really like any of these," he continued, "then I can give you more. When, you know, you're ready to go in depth." I picked up the stack, flipping through the rest of the titles. There was one for country music, the British Invasion, folk songs. When I reached the one at the very bottom, though, I saw that the cover was blank, except for two words:just listen .
Instantly, I was suspicious. "Is this techno?" I asked him.
"I can't believe you'd just assume that," he said, offended. "God."
"Owen," I said.
"It's not techno."
I just looked at him.
"The point is," he said as I shook my head, "that all the others are set lists, set concepts. An education, if you will. You should listen to them first. And then, when you've done that, and you think you're ready, really ready, put that one on. It's a bit more… out there."
"All right," I said. "I'm officially wary now."
"You might totally hate it," he admitted. "Or not. It might be the answer to all life's questions. That's the beauty of it. You know?"
I looked down at it again, studying the cover. "'Just Listen,'" I said.
"Yeah. Don't think, or judge. Just listen."
"And then what?"
"And then," he said, "you can make up your mind. Fair enough, right?"
This did seem fair to me, in fact. Whether it was a song, a person, or a story, there was a lot you couldn't know from just an excerpt, a glance, or part of a chorus. "Yeah," I said, sliding it back to the bottom the stack. "Okay."
"Grace," my father said, glancing at his watch again. "It's time to go."
"Andrew, I know. I'm almost ready." My mother bustled across the kitchen, picking up her purse and putting it over her shoulder. "Now, Annabel, I'm leaving money for pizza tonight, and tomorrow you girls can make whatever you want. I just went shopping, so there's plenty of food. Okay?" I nodded, as my dad shifted in the doorway. "Now," my mom said, "what did I do with my keys?"
"You don't need your keys," my father told her. "I'm driving."
"And I'm going to be in Charleston all day tomorrow and half of Monday while you're in meetings," she replied, putting her purse down again and starting to dig through it. "I might need to get out of the hotel for a while."
My father, who by my count had already been standing in the open door to the garage for a full twenty minutes, leaned against the doorjamb, exhaling loudly. It was Saturday mom-ing, and my parents were supposed to have left for South Carolina for the long weekend, and some big architecture conference, ages ago. "Then you can use mine," he told her, but she ignored him and began taking stuff out of her purse, laying her wallet, a pack of Kleenex, and her cell phone on the counter. "Grace. Come on." She didn't budge.
When my dad had first proposed this trip, he'd pitched it as a great getaway to one of their very favorite cities. When he was in meetings, she could shop and see the sights, and in the evenings, they'd eat at the best restaurants and enjoy some quality time together. It had sounded great to me, but my mother had hesitated, not sure she wanted to leave me and Whitney alone. Especially since Whitney had been in a worse mood than usual since the week before, when she'd started a new therapy group. Against her wishes. With, in her words, a "freak."
"Whitney, please," my mother had said one night at dinner, when the subject first came up. "Dr.
Hammond thinks this group could really help you."
"Dr. Hammond is an idiot," Whitney replied. My father shot her a look, but if she saw this, she ignored it. "I know people who have worked with this woman, Mom. She's a nutcase."
"I find that hard to believe," my dad said.
"Believe it. She's not even a real psychiatrist. A lot of the doctors in my program think she's way out there. Her methods are really unorthodox."
"Unorthodox how?" he asked.
"Dr. Hammond," my mom said, and this time, Whitney rolled her eyes at his name, "says that this woman, Moira Bell, has had great success with many of his patients because she takes a different approach."
"I'm still not getting what's so different about this woman," my dad said.
"She does a lot of hands-on exercises," my mother told him. "It's not just sitting and talking."
"You want an example?" Whitney put down her fork. "Janet, this girl I know from the hospital? When she was in Moira Bell's group, she had to learn how to make fire."
My mother looked confused. "Make fire?"
"Yeah. Moira gave her two sticks, and her assignment was to rub them together until she made fire. Until she could make fire consistently, every time she did it."