“It’s fine. Just wasn’t meant to be.”
That overused phrase echoes in my brain as Veronica maneuvers out of the lot and merges onto a main road. With the windows down, her hair whips wildly, but it doesn’t bother her one bit. Meanwhile, over in the passenger seat, I’m so lightheaded with possibilities I feel I might just blow away.
In less than ten minutes we’ve conquered the island, from New Town to Old. Veronica parks along the water. “It’s about to rain,” she says and then wanders into a building to return the keys to the car’s owner. It belongs to someone named Larry, a man who Veronica swears is just a friend.
I walk to the edge of the pier and look across the Atlantic. Somewhere out there is Cuba. Closer than Miami, according to Veronica.
I feel a raindrop on my nose, then another. In mere seconds, it comes down in clumps. I take cover under an awning and drop my luggage on dry ground.
A family rushes into the building behind me. I’m standing in front of an aquarium. My parents took me to zoos and aquariums as a kid. This was before Veronica was born. I always forget these neutral memories. I tend to remember only the great highs and deep lows.
I press my face to the window and watch the family at the ticket counter. It’s a man and woman with two boys. The smaller boy reaches for his brother’s hand, but the brother wriggles away. The smaller boy then grabs for his mother’s hand and she takes it blindly.
My breath is fogging up the window. The storm has already passed. The sun is shining. Veronica returns. “You’re soaked,” she says, laughing. “I tried to warn you.”
“It happened so fast.”
“Yeah. It’s the season.”
We walk down Whitehead Street, a semi-busy thoroughfare with pedicabs, tourists, and street stands. Quaint homes slumber behind short white walls and tropical cover. Birds sing out from tree limbs as if paid by the town to set the mood. I wonder what it means that my sister has chosen to live in a place that feels like a permanent vacation. Then again, some people say the same thing about Los Angeles.
“What would you like to do?” Veronica says, playing with the charm at the end of her long necklace. “You hungry? You feel like going to the beach? Whatever you want.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Let’s drop your stuff off. I’ll show you my place and we’ll take it from there.”
Suddenly she’s on my back. With my heavy bag in hand, I almost topple over. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she says, her legs dangling off me.
“Me too,” I say, trying to stay on my feet.
I’m hunched over, but I’ve got her good enough. We don’t have much farther to go.
Veronica shows me around her small apartment. The furniture seems like it came with the place, wicker chairs and matching glass end tables. She’s always been a no-frills girl, a bit tomboyish, more about practicality than appearance.
But she’s added a few personal touches. A potted snake plant by the window. A sign on the wall that reads IT’S ONLY YOUR LIFE. Photos of people I know and don’t know. In one photo, my father is holding Veronica in the crook of his arm, barely feeling the weight of her.
“The couch folds out,” Veronica says. “I don’t mind sleeping there if you’d rather have the bed.”
“No, this is perfect.”
I can’t look away from my father, Alex Deifendorf, with the newborn baby pressed against him. He was about the same age I am now.
“Let me show you upstairs,” Veronica says, guiding me up a tight spiral staircase to a loft. I immediately recognize the print on her bedroom wall.
“Thanks for sending that, by the way,” she says. “I love her.”
It’s Mara’s surfer girl. When I bought the print from Mara at the fair and sent it here to my sister, I didn’t realize that it was going from one mother candidate to another. Sydney would recognize the magic in that. I think, for once, I have to do the same.
35
A whole week passes without Gavin, and just when I think I can’t get any more depressed, which is something that Dad says all artists get, the weekend comes and Dad starts clearing out the studio.
First he takes all the posters and pictures and postcards off the walls and the corkboard. Then he takes all the mini-keyboards off the shelves and unplugs all the cords from his equipment and wraps the cords into neat loops. Then he takes his guitars off the rack and gathers all his microphones and puts everything into big boxes and tapes them all up. Pretty soon he’ll carry everything out the door to the Sully and Sons van parked outside.
I look inside one box that hasn’t been closed up yet and I find cassette tapes, CDs, ticket stubs, lyric sheets, set lists, backstage passes, and the spare key for Dad’s old van. I pull out a broken drumstick and wave it in the air. Little pieces of wood fall to the ground. I wonder why Dad would keep a broken stick, but then I realize it’s not a drumstick anymore, it’s a reminder that leads back to a memory.
I love that Dad keeps all his old stuff, just like I keep my important art projects in the box under my bed. But Dad’s things aren’t staying in our house. Dad is going to bring them to his storage unit and once they’re there, he won’t be able to take his music stuff out whenever he wants.
At the bottom of the open box, I find magazines and newspapers. I flip through them and find a picture of Dad and Gavin in a black-and-white magazine called Hub City. Dad has long hair that he tucks behind his ears and his face doesn’t have one hair on it. Gavin has jeans with big holes in the knees, and his eyes are like a raccoon’s with dark shadows around them.
“That was a long time ago.”
Dad is standing behind me and now we’re both looking at the photo. “Is Gavin wearing makeup?” I ask.
He looks more closely. “Looks like it.” He takes the magazine from me and starts to read the article. “This is the same day I met Mom. She came to the show that night.”
I try to imagine being my mother in college and seeing my father play drums and then I remember that I don’t have to imagine because I can go ask Mom to tell me about it right now.
I find her in the spare bedroom. The Awake Asleep poster is off the wall, and the blankets and sheets have been pulled from the bed. I fall face-first onto the naked mattress and press my nose against the pillowy top. I can barely smell Gavin anymore.
I turn over. “When you watched Dad’s band play in college, did you think he was special right away?”
My memory movies load up quickly, but Mom has to wait for hers. She finds what she’s looking for and her mouth makes a slanty smile. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had so much passion, like he was going to explode. I wanted to know what he was so worked up about.”