I take my headphones off and leave the Quiet Room and I hear my acoustic guitar playing through the speakers. “You got really good at fingerpicking,” Dad says.
It feels like I’m floating. Now I know what Mom means when she says Dad is in a cloud when he records his music.
“Do you want to add some bass?” I ask.
“Sure,” Dad says. “You take the controls.”
I take Dad’s place in his roller chair and start recording for him. I see a large red bar move across the screen and black waves start to form as Dad’s bass guitar follows along with my acoustic. He plays through the song a few times and then he asks me which parts I like. I like everything he does.
When Dad finishes recording the bass, he takes out a special little organ that he knows is my favorite because of the way it sounds and also because it doesn’t have a plug or batteries. It works by someone blowing into a tube. Dad does the blowing while I hold down the organ keys that match my guitar chords. Then Dad plays the snare drum and hi-hat and after that I shake the shaker and tap the tambourine and then Dad tells me to hit the cymbal each time the chorus plays. The song keeps getting bigger and bigger. I feel like I’m getting bigger too, stretching out, like my body is too small to hold all the feeling inside me. I think I’d be happy just staying down here with Dad forever.
While he listens back to all the instruments and makes everything sound right, I sit on the couch with my journal. On the coffee table in front of me is the thickest book you could imagine. It’s so thick because it tells all the secrets about how the Beatles recorded their music. Dad calls it his bible. Inside there are drawings of where each Beatle was standing in the Abbey Road studio when they recorded their famous songs because that’s how important the Beatles were: people want to know exactly where they were standing when they made their magic.
If the song we’re recording now does what I hope it will do, then people in the future will want to see a sketch of how we recorded too and they’ll want to know what Dad’s studio looked like before it got shut down. I slide a piece of notebook paper over the book and trace the outline of one of the rooms at Abbey Road, and then I turn my outline into a sketch of Dad’s studio:
I’ve got all the important stuff: the Quiet Room, Dad’s roller chair, the guitar rack, and the arrow leading down the hall to Gavin’s room. I’ve even got Dad and me in there. The only thing missing is Gavin.
“He’s supposed to be here,” I say.
Dad spins his chair around. “Listen, honey, I just want to warn you. Gavin is going through a really rough time right now, and even at his best, he can be a little flaky.”
“What’s flaky?”
“He goes off the map sometimes.”
“Which one is it? He’s flaky or he goes off the map?”
“Never mind. I just want you to know that if he doesn’t show up, it’s nothing personal.”
But if he doesn’t show up, my whole plan will be ruined. “Dad, what are we going to do?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. I can always call another singer. Didn’t you originally want Christina to sing your song? I can give her a call. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind laying down some vocals.”
Dad wouldn’t be smiling like that if I had sung the lyrics to our song instead of just humming the melody. He’d realize that his idea of having someone else sing it is the worst idea ever, because the only person in the world who should be singing those lyrics is Gavin. He’s the only one who can put the true meaning into the words.
20
“Gavin.”
“Hi, Mom.”
She steps onto the porch, smothers me. I know instantly, standing here, holding my mother, that I was right to come today and wrong to have waited this long. I assumed she’d always be here waiting for my arrival. Given all I’ve been through, I realize it was never a guarantee. I’m lucky to be holding her right now.
But of course, this kind of grab-hold-of-life perspective never lasts long. Especially when your mother touches your cheek with no attempt at concealing her disapproval. “You have a beard,” she says.
“So?”
“On the show you’re so clean-cut.”
“You’ve been watching.”
“Of course I’ve been watching,” she says. “I host a viewing party here every week.”
I’ve purposely pushed the show out of my mind. I’m proud of the work we did this year, but thinking about my second life on TV invariably reminds me of the video my neighbor leaked and the subsequent media storm, which, thankfully, I’ve caught only a glimpse of. I’m thrilled the show is finally getting the attention it deserves but I wish I could maintain my respectability in the process. My mother, however, would surely be tuning in regardless.
She welcomes me into the same three-bedroom ranch I grew up in but haven’t stepped foot inside in the last ten years. I expect some bone-chilling melancholy to grip me as I enter, but the only overwhelming part of the experience is how surprisingly normal it feels. Even the nostalgia seems faint.
My mother wanders into the kitchen while I linger in the living room. The furnishings have changed, as has the layout, but the photos are all the same. The whole family is here on the wall, all the Deifendorfs, including our missing patriarch. Seeing him in these old photos, I feel a thousand competing things at once. I see a stranger and I also see a mirror. I am a heartless adult and a heartbroken child.
He was, like many fathers, quiet. If he wasn’t leaning over a book, he was staring into space, always turning something over in his head. It was a shock to hear his students remark at his funeral how passionate an orator he was in his classroom. He seldom opened his mouth at home and yet he managed to take so much sound with him when he died; he was the only thing on our minds and none of us knew how to talk about him. I never quite learned how.
My mother appears at my side and stares up at the same wall of pictures. The difference between her and me is that she’s smiling. She points to a black-and-white photo of me as a young kid, maybe five years old.
“Your first head shot,” she says, handing me a cold drink.
I catch a distinct scent and notice the green leaves scattered throughout the glass. “Is this mint?”
“Yes, straight from my garden. One hundred percent organic.”
I didn’t realize mint was such a thing for Sydney until Joan pointed it out. It seemed from Joan’s stories that even Sydney was unaware of how much he gravitated toward it.
We take a seat on the couch. She seems to have recovered from the sight of my beard. Her scorn has been replaced with an irrepressible smile. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
“I’m sorry it took so long.”
She waves the notion away with her hand. “Don’t worry about that. I know how busy you are.”