“I’ll come back,” I say. But then, seeing her face and doubting my own promise, I add, “Okay, a little bit longer.”
While my mother brews coffee, I take an extended tour of the house. It’s no longer the mournfully quiet place I remember. I find life’s commotion in every room—in my old bedroom, where I thrash-danced to Nirvana blasting from my distorted boom-box speakers; in the basement, where I threw the keg party that led to a visit from the police, who seemed unconcerned about the noise because there was the more pressing matter of the Chevy Beretta that someone had parked on my neighbor’s lawn; in the garage, where my high-school band rehearsed its unironic Bush covers; in the bathroom, where I read my gaming magazines on the tiled floor while Veronica’s four-year-old fingers became wrinkled in the lukewarm tub.
And then, after sipping from our mugs in front of the evening news, my mother and I are back on the porch where we started this morning. She wants to give me a lift to the station, even though it’s only a few blocks away. She says she has to pick up pies for the nursing home tomorrow. Why she has to pick up the pies right now, I don’t know, nor do I ask. She’s been living on her own for decades and doing just fine.
But that doesn’t mean she never gets lonely. “You can always sleep here, you know,” she says.
“I’ll come back. We’ll have a sleepover.”
It brightens her. “You should drop in for a viewing party,” she says on our way to the car. “My friends would absolutely die if you walked through the door.”
“Hmm, yeah, I’ll have to check my schedule. You know, I’m kind of a big deal now, so…”
“Hey,” she says, pointing a stern finger at me. “I was the one who changed your diapers. Don’t you ever forget that.”
21
Dad wants to take a break so he can pick up dinner. I put on the TV but nothing excites me. I write in my journal but it only makes me think more. I ask Mom what else Gavin said before he left the house this morning, but she doesn’t remember him saying anything. When the front door finally opens it’s just Dad with dinner.
I’m not hungry but Dad says we can’t finish recording until I eat something. He and Mom eat pizza while I force noodles into my mouth.
“I tried pizza,” I announce.
“You did?” Dad says. “When?”
“In the city with Gavin. It was the same day he took me around to all those John Lennon places.”
Dad nods and he takes a drink and now I’m feeling bad that I didn’t want to try pizza all those times with Dad but I tried it with Gavin.
It feels strange without Gavin here because for two weeks now he’s been eating dinner with us and he cleans up the dishes and takes out the trash and fixes the Internet when it stops working. I don’t like what Dad said about Gavin being flaky and not showing up when it seems like Dad is the one being flaky because he’s the one who hasn’t been here lately.
I hurry up and clear my plate, but Dad needs coffee.
“How’s it going?” Mom says.
“So far, so good,” Dad says. “Just waiting on our singer.”
I know Dad was only trying to help when he offered to ask Christina to sing our song, but I don’t want someone else to sing it. Gavin isn’t just my singer, he’s my McCartney and he’s the blackbird and he can’t let me down. If he doesn’t get here soon I might have to ask Dad to bring me to Home Depot for some important supplies so I can slam my head against the concrete and get rid of my special memory forever, because I don’t think I’ll want to remember this day.
Mom puts the leftover pizza slices in the fridge. “What time do you think you’ll be done?”
“Hard to say,” Dad says, watching the coffeepot turn black. “You know how this stuff goes.”
She stands there with her arms crossed and she rubs her big toe along the gritty line between tiles. After doing her toe thing she takes two wineglasses out of the cabinet and puts them on the counter. She looks down at the two wineglasses and touches her chin and puts one glass back in the cabinet and fills the other glass halfway.
Dad’s equipment looks like the controls for a spaceship. Right now he’s putting a sound like a low siren in the background. “That’s so sad,” I say.
“Should I take it out?”
“No. Sad is good, right?”
He doesn’t answer but I already know that Dad thinks sad is good. He leans back in his chair and lets the song play and when it ends he plays it again. “The bridge could be better.”
I nod like I agree, but actually I want to bury my head between the couch cushions.
“Do you have any other ideas?” Dad says.
I play him the other bridge I wrote. It’s much simpler.
“We can work with that,” Dad says and then he sings it, “We can work with that,” to the tune of the Beatles song “We Can Work It Out,” which was written by Paul. I was pretty sure John wrote the bridge to that song but after talking to Gavin I’m not sure who wrote what anymore.
“Is it true that Paul wrote the bridge for ‘A Day in the Life’?” I ask.
“Yes. It’s amazing, right?”
“I never knew that.”
Together Dad and I play through the bridge a few times and we try out different chords until the section feels right. It’s hard to impress Dad, but when he finally gets excited, you feel like you’ve done something really special. “Okay,” he says, “let’s record that.”
He leaves me in the Quiet Room and I practice playing the new bridge a few times and then I say, “I’m ready.”
I wait for Dad’s voice in my headphones but he doesn’t answer. Maybe he went to the bathroom. I look around the Quiet Room.
Saturday, July 18, 2009: Uncle Nick and Grandpa are finished building the walls for the Quiet Room and now I’m helping Dad paint them. Dad has to go over my areas a second time because I moved my brush in every direction instead of up and down like he asked. Dad lets me sign my initials in silver Sharpie near the socket.
I slide off the stool and find my initials. Seeing those letters makes me smile but my smiling can’t last because I start to think about what’s going to happen to my initials when Dad shuts the studio down. What if the new people paint over my initials? What if they turn this downstairs apartment into a hardware store like they did to John Lennon’s favorite café? I hate hardware stores.
I hear Dad’s voice in my headphones. “Okay, honey. Go for it.”
I climb back into place. I play the part until Dad is happy and he tells me to come into the studio. When I get there, I see someone on the couch. “Hello, Joan Lennon.”
He says it with a British accent and it’s hard not to smile. But I’m also pretty annoyed. “Where have you been?”
“I took a train ride,” Gavin says.
He sounds like Bob Dylan and I don’t like that at all because Bob Dylan is the worst singer in the world, besides Tom Waits, and we’re never going to win the contest with a voice like that. But at least he made it here in time. That’s all that matters. Well, almost. “Did you finish the lyrics?”