Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine Read online

  Julie and my sister came by the Dixie Freeze and I instinctively reached for something heavy, expecting a fight. “We just want to talk,” they said, and I told them to give me five dollars each, and when they did, I pocketed it and told my manager I was taking a fifteen-minute break.

  “I miss him,” Julie said. I nodded and looked at her like, That’s not going to get you your five dollars back. My sister touched my arm and motioned toward the sky or maybe some building in the distance. “This is just some place for you to pass the time,” she said. “We live here and we’ll still be living here when you move on.” I shook my head. I wasn’t allowed to be happy, just because I didn’t have a place of my own to live?

  “That’s not it,” Julie said, “but do you have to make other people miserable in order for you to be happy?” I stood up and walked back to my register. “You were miserable long before I ever showed up,” I said. Julie started to cry and my sister put her arms around her. I made myself a cone of soft-serve and went into the employee bathroom. I smeared the ice cream all over my face and hoped that in a few minutes I would not want to kill someone nearly as much as I did at that moment. When it had passed, I washed my face, and when I walked out of the bathroom, my sister and Julie were gone. I went back to my register and touched the buttons to add up numbers too large to mean anything.

  It wasn’t more than a few days later that Wage decided he was going back to Julie. “I think if we stay together,” he said, “we might end up doing something that would get us in a lot of trouble.” I grabbed his shoes out of the closet and tied the shoelaces together in complicated knots to slow him down. He packed up his computer and some clothes, ashamed to look at me, and I took out an ice tray from the freezer and emptied the cubes into the sink. I threw one of the cubes and it landed flush against the back of Wage’s head. He shrugged from the pain of it but kept on packing. I threw another piece and it missed and cracked the mirror in the bedroom. I threw another piece, and then another, and by the time the sink was emptied of ice, Wage’s nose was bleeding, and I thought it wouldn’t be so bad if I was dead.

  “The rent for the apartment is paid up for the rest of the month,” he said. “You can stay.” I guessed this was what it felt like to love something, wanting to kill it for leaving you, and I kissed him so hard that my mouth was smeared with his blood.

  “I’m already wishing I wasn’t leaving,” he said, and then he left. I ran to the freezer and took two more cubes of ice and held one in each hand, my fist squeezing them into diamonds. I squeezed until the thing that I held had disappeared and then I lay flat on the ground and stared up at the ceiling.

  I thought about that night after the prom, how I’d forced myself on my sister, wanted so badly to be against her. I remembered how she had said, almost crying, “You’re going to hate yourself so much for doing this.” I pulled away from her, stunned, and I whispered, “You think I don’t know that?” I felt the anger become dense inside of my chest and then I walked over to my own bed and crawled under the sheets. I kept my back to my sister’s bed, but my eyes were wide open. I lay there and waited for her to come over to my bed, to place her hands on me, and to make me feel happy. The entire night, I lay there and waited, but she never came, and I wished that I had only tried harder, had made myself so necessary that I could not be refused.

  Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine

  Gina received a call from Adam, her only child, at 3 A.M., more than two months since she’d last heard from him. In the dreamlike moments after she answered the phone, listening to him talk over a gaggle of voices in the background, she struggled to remember what he even looked like. She sketched and resketched her memory of his face, his dark, curly hair that framed his huge brown eyes and his costume-big nose that, even as a child, dominated his face as if he were a Muppet, and his mouth, always held in the slightest suggestion of a frown. There he was, finally, her son, in her mind, and she listened as he informed her that his band, Dead Finches, was breaking up, this very moment, and he needed to stay with her for three months.

  “All of our equipment got stolen, Mom,” he told her. “All three of my guitars, the entire drum kit, even the fucking tambourine. Right out of the goddamn trailer while we ate some dinner. We don’t have the kind of money to get new stuff. We’re just starting the tour, day two of the fucking tour. We’re done.”

  One of the voices in the background, which she recognized as Marty, Adam’s best friend since grade school, said, “We’re not done, man. Don’t say that.”

  “We’re done,” Adam said to his mother, who had not said a single word during this entire phone call. His voice sounded far away for a second as he must have turned to Marty. “Sorry, dude, we’re done. I’m done. And if I’m done, yeah, we’re done.”

  Finally, Gina spoke, her voice scratchy from sleep, sounding bitchier than she had intended. “Adam, why do you need to stay with me?”

  “Because, Jesus, Mom, I’m subletting my apartment to these two European dudes while I was supposed to be on tour, and I can’t go back for another three months. We signed a contract and everything, so I’m kind of stuck.”

  “Can’t you stay with Marty?” she asked, the desperation in her voice so clear that she didn’t even try to excuse it.

  “Mom, I can’t be around these guys right now. It’s over. We’re dead. I wanna be dead by myself, or with you, I guess. Just for three months.”

  “Okay, then,” she said, trying to keep him from the ragged anger that she knew was right on the surface of his entire adult life. “You can come.”

  “I’m in Portland,” he said. “Can you get me a plane ticket to Tennessee?”

  “Oh, God, Adam, that’s going to be expensive.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” he whined, and she heard the drummer, Jody, say, “Get off the fucking phone, Adam. We have to talk about this.”

  “I’ll buy one,” she said. “For tomorrow. I’ll e-mail you the details in the morning.”

  “I love you, Mom,” he said.

  “I love you, too, Peanut,” she replied, but he had maybe already hung up. She called out, “Adam?” and it was clear that he was gone.

  Two hundred and eighty-five dollars later, she e-mailed her son the plane ticket and realized that, in less than a day, he would be in front of her, his shoulders slumped with heavy bags filled with wrinkled clothes, guitarless. She walked into the room that had once been his, which she had turned into her office. She went through the room, collecting any important papers or financial records, and then shuffled them together and walked back to her bedroom. She opened up the gun safe that her husband, three years dead from cancer, had filled with all manner of rifles and handguns, firearms that he had never once, to her knowledge, fired.

  She had taken the guns to the police department the day after the funeral, and she remembered how Adam had yelled at her for doing it. “I didn’t feel safe having those guns in the house without your father keeping watch over them,” she had told him, but he angrily muttered obscenities and then said, “Those were my birthright,” without a hint of self-awareness. Adam, she knew from the earliest age, could not be trusted with anything that had the potential to ruin a life. “At the very least,” he said, finally coming to the truth, “we could have sold them. Split it fifty-fifty.”

  Now, the gun safe was empty save for some jewelry, a thousand dollars in cash, and some photo albums. She placed the papers into the safe, like dropping a rock into a black hole, and closed it.

  Gina took some sheets from the closet and went back into the office. She unfolded the sleeper sofa and made a bed for Adam. Unable to sleep, she sat down at the desk and booted up her computer. She went onto YouTube and typed in “Dead Finches.” And what came back to her, from her simple request, were hundreds of little squares of images, many of them featuring her son’s dark eyes staring back at her.

  Dead Finches had formed when Adam was in high school, and Gina could remember driving the entire band to Nashville for all-ages
shows at Lucy’s Record Shop, waiting in the van until they were done. She remembered the smell of sweat coming off the boys in jagged waves, almost overpowering her, making her swerve the van if she wasn’t careful. She would listen to them excitedly talk about the songs that worked and the ones that didn’t. She watched, in her rearview mirror, her son smiling, his face as open and as happy as she’d ever seen it before or since.

  Adam decided against college, which drove his father absolutely crazy and did not surprise Gina in the slightest, and the band released two albums on their own nonexistent label and toured nonstop, Adam returning from the road looking twenty pounds lighter, his hands shaking, until Sub Pop miraculously signed them. They got more and more popular, as popular as any indie band could get, enough that people her own age had heard of the band. And then one of their songs, “Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine,” was used in a beer commercial that played during the Super Bowl and subsequently made it to number seven on the Top 40, which made Adam and his friends an obscene amount of money. And it made Gina so happy, to see her son, if not happy, at least rewarded for his intense belief that he deserved attention. Adam visited when he had time or the inclination, which was almost never, but she would play his CDs on her stereo while she made dinner and she would hear the weird time capsule that kept his voice perfect and wonderful, as smooth as an R&B singer’s that could instantly turn sharp and punk rock.

  The rest of the story went poorly, and Gina tried not to think of it, her husband constantly asking Adam why he needed to borrow money when the kid had a huge apartment in Portland and wore clothes so thin and plain that they had to cost hundreds of dollars to achieve that kind of simplicity. “Where did those millions go, son?” he would ask, and Adam would shake his head, so angry, and say, “It was never millions. You always think it was millions. It was just hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s gone. It’s all gone.”

  No one bought albums any longer, no one paid for music, and so the only money left was in licensing and touring. So Adam toured, nonstop, putting out albums only as an excuse to get back on the road. And this had been going on for nearly a decade, less and less money, Adam singing songs that sounded like things he would have thrown away when the band first started. Their last album had a song called “Baby, You Are Also Gonna Be Mine,” and Gina always skipped right past it when it was cued up on her iPod, had never once listened to it.

  Now, in her office, she clicked on the music video for “Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine,” and she watched her son strum his guitar and then sing, in that dreamlike, smooth voice, “Baby, you’re gonna be mine / We can leave all this sadness behind / Baby, you’re gonna be mine / Until the end, the end, the end, of time.” He had on a baby-blue T-shirt that had the word Gina in black, block letters printed upside down. “Where’d you get that shirt?” she had asked him the first time she’d seen the video. “I had it made,” he said. “I spent my own money to have it made.”

  “Why?” she asked him.

  “ ’Cause I love you; ’cause it’s a secret just for you,” he said, smiling.

  As she watched the video again, the sun now rising, she stared at her son and slowly turned him upside down in her mind, until her name was in front of her, the message received.

  At the airport, she watched Adam descend the escalator; he was clicking away on his phone, not even bothering to look for her. He took three steps off the escalator, following the traffic, and she called for him, touched his arm. He put his phone away and hugged her, smiling.

  “How was your flight?” she asked.

  “Okay, considering my life is over,” he said. “It’s actually kind of nice to fly without having to deal with carrying on a fucking guitar.”

  “Well, that’s looking on the bright side,” she admitted.

  “It’s what I do best,” he said.

  At baggage claim, they waited for his duffel bag, olive green and stuffed so full that it seemed like his entire apartment would explode from the bag, all four walls included. Adam hefted the bag with some difficulty. “Getting old,” he grunted, and they walked to the parking garage and loaded the bag into Gina’s car.

  They settled into their seats, buckled up, and just before Gina started the engine, she turned to Adam to ask about lunch options and noticed that he was crying. “Adam?” she asked, but now he was shaking, sobbing, unapologetically breaking down. She reached for him. “Peanut?” she said.

  “Could you just get me home?” he asked, turning away from her.

  “Sure, Peanut,” she said, and she pulled out of the garage with some haste. When she paid the attendant, the man looked past her at Adam, still crying so loudly, and then raised his eyebrows, which seemed unprofessional to Gina.

  “His band just broke up,” she said, and the man raised his hands as if he was being mugged but he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  For the entire hour-and-a-half drive home, Adam cried, stuttering sobs; at times it seemed that he had calmed, his moans drying out and normalizing, before he would start up again. It seemed to Gina, from having watched a few movies on the topic, that he was trying to kick a heroin habit, the way he contorted his body, still belted to his seat, into so many different positions. Was it withdrawal or loss that was causing him such unhappiness? She only knew that, if she had lost the one thing that had mattered to her, she might react the same way. But no, she admitted, probably not this extravagant grief. Not her.

  When they finally made it home, idling in the driveway, Gina unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over to Adam. “Peanut,” she said, hugging him, rubbing his back. “We’re home. You’re home, and it’ll all be okay.”

  He looked at her finally, his face so blotchy that it looked like he was deathly allergic to his own sadness. “I think I should sleep,” he said. “I’m really tired is all.”

  “You’re not hungry?” she asked.

  “I’m more tired than I am hungry,” he said. He unbuckled his seat belt, adjusted his neck with several deliberate movements, and then stepped out of the car, already walking to the front door. His gait suggested that he was sleepwalking and could not be disturbed, so Gina awkwardly hopped out of the car, fumbling with her keys, and ran ahead of him to unlock the front door, which she pushed open just in time so that Adam didn’t even have to break stride.

  “I turned your room into my office, Peanut,” she said, calling to him as he ascended the stairs. “But there’s a sofa bed and a closet for your stuff. I made it all up for you.”

  He raised his hand, like he was pledging an oath, his back still to her, still rising to the top floor, and Gina leaned against the frame of the front door. She watched him shuffle into the office, quietly shut the door, and Gina waited for a few minutes to make sure that nothing was going wrong, listened carefully for more crying. Finding only silence, she remembered his bag in the car. She went back to the trunk, struggled with the bag, the awkward, sharp bulges banging against her legs, and finally deposited it at the foot of the steps. She was breathing hard, the tenseness of the situation finally overwhelming her. Though she never napped, she walked to her own bedroom, pulled down the sheets, and climbed, fully clothed, into the bed and fell into a dreamless, deep sleep.

  When she awoke, it was six in the evening, and she listened to the sound of activity downstairs, which startled her. She walked into the kitchen to find Adam moving from the stove back to the kitchen counter, a whirl of activity. The air smelled of rosemary and rendered fat.

  “Mom!” Adam shouted over the sound of sizzling meat. “I’m making dinner. Sit down. It’s almost ready.”

  Still dazed from sleeping the day away, Gina went to the dining room table, where she could watch as Adam took a flank steak, which had been in her freezer that morning, and expertly sliced it into thin strips. He then used a bread knife to cut open several dinner rolls and then slathered them with some kind of mustard sauce before topping it with spinach.

  “When did you learn to cook?” she called out to him.

&
nbsp; “I mostly watch cooking shows,” he said. “It calms me to watch people make food. I pick stuff up now and again. This is flank steak, marinated in olive oil and rosemary, with a mustard-tarragon sauce and arugula on a baguette. But you didn’t have any tarragon or arugula or baguette, so I improvised.”

  “I don’t keep that kind of stuff on hand,” she said.

  “It’s okay. We can stock up tomorrow,” he answered as he plated and served the meal, which apparently was only going to be these steak sandwiches and some potato chips that he had taken out of the freezer, where Gina kept them to make sure they stayed fresh. Adam was watching her, smiling broadly, waiting for her to try it, so she took a bite of the sandwich and was amazed by how good it was. The steak was perfectly cooked and the rosemary made it taste much fancier than anything she would have made.

  “It’s wonderful, Peanut,” she said, and he shrugged, still smiling.

  “It’s that British chef’s recipe,” he said.

  “The mean one?” she asked.

  “No, not him. The young one. He’s real handsome.”

  “I don’t know any handsome British chefs,” she replied, but Adam seemed not to hear her. He was trembling, not touching his sandwich, twisting his head from side to side as if trying to assuage a crick in his neck.

  “Are you okay, Peanut?” she asked, and he again seemed not to hear. She took another bite of her sandwich, which was still delicious, and ate a handful of cold potato chips. Finally, Adam turned to her and said, “Did you say something?”

  “I asked if you were okay.”

  “I am. I’m fine. I’m happy. I . . . never mind.”

  “No, what?” Gina asked.