Joan finds me on the studio couch and notices the notepad in my lap. “Are those lyrics?” she asks.
After spending the morning with Paige, I feel lucky to have an outlet for the tornado of emotions spinning inside of me. “Trying,” I say, underwhelmed by the progress I’ve made on the page. “How’s your day been so far?”
She strikes a foreboding bass note on the piano. “Harper’s mom took us to see a movie but I couldn’t concentrate. When it was over Harper wanted to talk about how ridiculous it was when the alien showed up, but I didn’t even know there was an alien. I guess I didn’t see that part.”
“It must not have been a good movie if you couldn’t concentrate.”
“No,” Joan says, staring down at the piano keys. “It’s not that. It happens with every movie. I’ll see something that makes me think of a memory and then I just go somewhere else.”
“It happens to me too.”
She plops down next to me. “Can I see what you wrote so far?”
Now that the song has taken on a clearer shape, I’ve become pickier about what I’m willing to add to it. Most of the words on my notepad are crossed out. “I don’t have much to show. I think I may need some inspiration. Do you think we could do another memory?”
“After this memory, we’ve got only one more left.”
“I know.”
Joan begins to tell me about Sydney’s visit in 2012. She starts on September 9. The following day is when she saw Syd in his Ted Baker suit.
“We’re in the courtyard,” Joan says. “Dad is standing in front of the barbecue. He’s dragged his studio speakers over to the back door so we can listen to music while we’re outside. I don’t know how many people are here but our courtyard is pretty crowded.”
“What is Sydney doing?” I ask, eager to see him again.
“Sydney is sitting next to me at the table. He says he brought me something from California. He reaches into his pocket and then he makes me guess what’s in his fist. I say, ‘Candy,’ and he says, ‘No,’ and I say, ‘Earrings,’ and he says, ‘No. Give up?’ And he opens his hand and it’s a bag of guitar picks and each guitar pick has my name on it. It’s definitely one of the top three presents I’ve ever gotten.”
Syd was a talented gift giver. He’d always get me something I’d never buy for myself, intuiting what I didn’t know I wanted or needed. One time it was a personalized book embosser. Another time a Santoku kitchen knife.
“Everyone’s eating burgers,” Joan says, “but Sydney is eating some type of rice thing. I’m eating watermelon, which Mom hasn’t brought outside yet, but I snuck a piece out of the downstairs fridge when she wasn’t looking.”
“What does he look like?”
She describes him: V-neck, shorts, sandals, eagle bracelet. But it’s all surface. She couldn’t have known that our relationship had progressed drastically since she had previously seen Sydney in 2010. We’d left Syd’s apartment in West Hollywood and bought a house together in Los Feliz. Talk about grown-up. It was the most adult thing I’d ever done and also one of the scariest. As big a commitment, I thought, as getting married. We didn’t have a bed yet, but we were so excited to move into our new house that we slept on blankets on the wood floor. Maybe that’s my favorite memory.
“The music on the speakers changes,” Joan says, “and I realize that Dad is playing a song that we recorded together last week. My face is turning red but I’m also very excited that everyone is hearing it. There’s no singing in our song, so no one knows whose song it is, but Dad gives me a wink and I think Sydney sees the wink because he says, ‘You must really like this song.’ And I say, ‘I do. It’s my song. I wrote it with my dad.’ And then instead of telling me how much he likes my song, Sydney looks at Dad and he says, ‘You have a really good father,’ and I say, ‘I know,’ and Sydney says, ‘I hope one day I’ll be a good father too,’ and I say, ‘I bet you will,’ and then Sydney says, ‘I’d like to keep my name alive,’ and when I hear that I’m really interested because I like when things stay alive and never die and that’s when Sydney tells me that he’s the last Brennett, but I don’t know what that means.”
Joan waits for me to explain. “It means that unless he had a child, he would be the last person to be born in his family. There would be no one else.”
Her eyes cloud with sadness. “That’s horrible.”
For better or worse, I decide to confide in her.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about which is my favorite memory of Sydney. There are so many great ones and I can’t really choose one over the other. But I know which is my least favorite.”
She seems interested, so I go on.
“It was around Christmas last year—I can’t remember the exact date,” I admit, almost by way of apology. “We got into a pretty bad fight and it was all about us having a kid. That was Sydney’s one big wish, to have a kid, and he was excited to move forward. I wasn’t quite sure I was ready, but I went along with it. For a while.”
Joan asks a good and obvious question. “How do two men have a baby?”
“It’s complicated. You need a mother.”
“Who was your mother?”
“That’s sort of what the fight was about. We hired this company to help us through the process and we took all the beginning steps. We even had a mother in place, someone to carry the baby, but in order to get a baby, you need eggs. There was a list of people to choose from, but Syd didn’t like the fact that we couldn’t meet any of these women face to face, and I agreed. It was frustrating, because this was the person who was going to be responsible for what our child would look like and be like.” It seems from Joan’s expression that I’ve completely lost her. “Anyway, Syd had his heart set on someone and I wasn’t sure about it.”
“Who did he want?”
I’ve probably shared enough for one day, but it appears she’s still curious. “My sister.”
Now her brain is really working overtime. “He wanted your sister to be your baby’s mother?”
I don’t know how to explain it, so I just say, “Yes.”
“But you didn’t want your sister?” she asks, although I’m not positive how much of this she actually understands.
“It’s not that I didn’t want her. The whole thing was moving so fast. I just hadn’t gotten around to asking her.”
Using my sister’s eggs was the closest we could ever come to having a baby that included a piece of both of us. I knew Veronica would’ve said yes without hesitation. That’s the very reason I didn’t want to ask her right away. Everything seemed to be moving too quickly. It was as if one night we’d decided to have a kid and the very next day we were cutting a hefty check to an agency and handing over sperm samples and selecting a surrogate. I wasn’t trying to squash Syd’s dreams. I was only trying to apply the brakes for a moment. I just needed more time. On this occasion, time ran out.