The Frequency of Living Things, page 4
Ara’s inbox was unhelpful. Three library hold-notifications (Herbal Healing for Addiction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, The Dispossessed), an offer to join a clinical trial, a bunch of social media notifications, and a message from the Survivors’ Resource Center: Ara had missed her intake session. They wanted to reschedule but couldn’t get ahold of her.
Join the club, Emma thought. And then her phone rang.
She slipped on the soil of the aloe plant, banging her shin on a crate of XLR cables as she scrambled for her phone. A number she didn’t recognize. She swiped.
“Ara?”
“Um, this is Ian.”
“Who?” She knew a thousand Ians. “Are you with Ara?”
“Is this Emma?”
“Listen, who—I’m kind of extremely busy right now.”
“This is Ian, from the Fountain? You gave me your number this morning?”
She rubbed her knee. She’d never been so disappointed to hear from such a good-looking man. “Right. Sorry. I’m waiting to hear from my sister.”
“Oh. Want company while you wait?”
* * *
Ian from the Fountain. He’d moved from Connecticut two years ago, he said. Jamaica Plain was way less manicured back then. Condos were ruining everything. When he finished college he’d played a season of American football in Italy. He’d hopped freight trains with buddies. He had a memoir in him, he believed, but worried people wouldn’t take it seriously, because of his age.
“How old are you?” Emma asked.
“Twenty-three. How old are you?”
Emma laughed. She got him off her mattress with a playful kick to his butt and said she’d tell him if he made her a cup of tea. She watched him tiptoe naked through the debris field of her apartment, and calculated that he’d been in elementary school when she and Ara had led the first Mosh for Women’s Lives.
“So you’re in a band.” He set the kettle on the hot plate with a clatter. “What kind of music do you play?”
She pulled on his T-shirt, walked across the room, and plugged her phone into her workstation. She was showing off, but whatever—she’d earned the right, and it worked, every time. She hit play. “American Mosh” boomed through the apartment. Ian spun.
“Shut up! This is you?”
“Me and my sister.”
“I know this song!”
Emma laughed. Ian’s excitement was so genuine that she briefly considered breaking her no-boys-sleepover rule. Not since Ara was last in rehab had Emma spent more than one night by herself. The apartment was too quiet. She had to fill the void with something.
She turned down the music when Ian brought her a cup of tea. This was his first time to Mattapan, and he couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t live over here, he said. Did Emma realize what people would pay for this much space? He shared a two-bedroom unit on Centre Street with three college buddies; it was the only way they could afford rent. To him, Emma’s apartment did not reek of squalor. He found it great they had room for their amps, mixers, looping pedals, guitars, keyboards. Their costumes, shoes, drumsticks, capos, picks. Their tuners, Fast Fret, harmonicas, and backstage lanyards from defunct music festivals. He thought the high ceilings were great. The molding. It was all really, really great.
He explored, picking and pawing through her belongings with the delicacy of a toddler archeologist. It felt invasive, but as long as he wasn’t wearing clothes, Emma wasn’t complaining. Not until he flipped open the record player and lifted Smiley Smile from the turntable.
“Put that down!” she yelled, jumping off the bed, spilling tea on the floor.
He flinched, almost dropping the record.
“Careful!” she said, taking it from him. Not only did Smiley Smile have the unique power to soothe Emma’s nerves, it also happened to be the last remaining record from their father’s collection. She couldn’t relax until it was safe in its cardboard sleeve and propped up behind her workstation monitor.
“That’s off limits,” she said. “You can play with literally anything else.”
“Like this?”
Presented to Emma and Araminta Tayloe to commemorate RIAA Certified Gold Sales and Streams of more than 500,000 copies of the GhostTrain single “American Mosh.”
Ian had picked up their gold record. It was framed, and still in the original bubble tape packaging. “Why isn’t this on your wall? I didn’t even know these things were real.”
Emma shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t care that much about the past. I’m all about the future, you know?”
“I do,” Ian nodded. His sincerity, in conjunction with the way he was holding her record, at dick height, produced a jarring image that felt emblematic of Emma’s career in a way that she did not wish to put her finger on.
“What else have you recorded?” He leaned the gold record back against the wall.
Emma closed her eyes. There was no question that she’d answered, and hated, more.
“Not every musician is Dylan,” she said. “We don’t just release every shitty thing that we make. Music is like sex. You can rush it, sure, but why not take your time?”
The truth was that after the success of American Mosh, their sophomore album had to be as good, if not better. And with each year that passed, the expectations had grown greater and greater.
The truth was that Ara was the beating, creative heart of the band, yet she had not been her beating, creative self for a very long time.
The truth was that although Emma had every right to make music without Ara, her one solo project—Tigress—had proven that she should never try anything like that ever again.
The truth was that Jojo and the Twins were en route to becoming one-hit wonders.
But Emma refused to accept this label. It would mean they’d made their best music as teenagers, which was too depressing. Worse, a one-hit wonder could only become a one-hit wonder retroactively, and if their career was over, that meant Ara was broken and Emma would never be able to put her back together.
“Anyway,” she said, “we’re about quality, not quantity. Look at Lauryn Hill. She only made one record, and it was perfect.”
“Lauryn who?”
Emma laughed. She shook her head as she flipped through her crate of vinyl, looking for Miseducation so she could blow his young dumb mind. Just then, however, her phone lit up. Since it was still plugged into her workstation speakers, her ringtone chimed through the apartment.
Another unknown number, this one from Bogastow. She couldn’t swipe fast enough.
“Hello?! Ara?”
This is a collect call from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections…
A beat of silence—no more than a sixteenth-note, but enough for Emma’s blood to rush to her head and her hand to glance against the mug on her workstation desk and the mug to shatter on the floor and the tea to slosh and mix with the dry soil of the aloe plant—and then Ara’s shaky voice, at full volume, through the speakers.
“Hey Sis. It’s me…”
“Ara! Are you okay? Where—”
Do you accept the charges? said an automated voice.
“Yes!” Emma cried. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Chapter 4 Josie
Their third day at Acadia, Dean declared that he couldn’t take another ocean cliff view, another mossy hike, another goddamn warm breeze across another drop-dead-gorgeous lake. He needed civilization, or he was going to lose his mind. By civilization, Josie knew, he meant a cocktail, and likely plural.
“I’ll go with you.” She put down a winter issue of Nature that she was finally catching up on. “Nobody should drink alone on vacation.”
They climbed into Dean’s 4Runner, the backseat still jammed with musical equipment. Hardcases rattled as they rolled out of the campground. When Josie had insisted they haul the gear back to Boston, Ara hadn’t complained. They’d hugged goodbye in the parking lot of the Mad Mountain Tavern, after which Josie and Dean had driven three straight hours to Acadia in a rush of adrenaline, sugar-free Red Bulls, and worry. She’d felt it when she hugged Ara goodbye. She felt it when they pulled into the campsite, her ears still ringing from the show. She’d felt it when she shook awake Dean so he could blow up the air mattress while she found somewhere to pee. Something was wrong.
“Of course something’s wrong,” Dean had said with a yawn. “Something’s always wrong. That’s what vacation is for, to pretend life’s fine for a few days.”
And pretend they had. They stashed their phones back in the glovebox with the dead Kern Primrose and set out. They hiked mountains and made fires. They dunked in waves and gaped at stars. They napped on slabs of sun-warmed granite. Elemental stuff. They’d even made friends, Meghan and Sylvie, a couple on their honeymoon who they’d met in line at the campground bathroom, bonding over the fact that they appeared to be the only four adults in the entire park without children. They’d grilled together on their second night, when one of those inevitable questions came up about kids, leading to Josie punching Dean playfully on the shoulder and saying, “We’re just old friends,” at the same time as Dean reached for her hand and said, “We haven’t ruled it out,” which led to Meghan and Sylvie graciously changing the subject to boardgames, of which they had brought an astonishing quantity. The four of them played Settlers of Catan, then brushed their teeth, put out the fire, and said goodnight.
Only Josie couldn’t sleep. She blinked in the dark of their tent, trying to assess whether Dean was also awake. Their air mattress held all the firmness of a carnival bouncy house, but Dean was suspiciously still. Josie couldn’t even hear him breathing. Had they been a couple in the traditional sense, this would’ve been the time for one of them to roll over and say something like, “Are we cool?” But, as they had made awkwardly clear to Meghan and Sylvie by the grill, they were not a couple in the traditional sense. They were a couple in the shared-history sense. The family-catastrophe sense. When Dean’s mother, a fugitive darling of the countercultural left, had turned herself in to the authorities almost twenty-five years ago, Josie’s mother was the lawyer who’d negotiated the terms of surrender. Dean stayed with the Tayloes for the summer so he could visit his mom, and he’d returned every summer through middle and high school. He and Josie had spent their most formative, most unstructured, adolescent months together. Naturally, bonds had formed.
Decades later, they were living together under the same roof once again. They had separate bedrooms in the top floor of an outer-Boston triplex, walking distance from Jamaica Pond. They shared rent, chores, library books, a PlayStation 4. Sometimes they slept together. Sometimes they slept with other people. They went as partners to author readings at the local bookstore, Al-Anon meetings at the Congregational church, excruciating toddler birthday parties of mutual acquaintances. They vented to each other about politics, traffic, weather, family. They could’ve been parents when Josie was seventeen, but she’d decided against it. Dean had gone with her to the clinic. He’d moved with her to California when she started at Stanford. He’d come with her back east when Ara first needed rehab. Josie never once asked him to pull up stakes and follow her around, but she was glad he did.
She was so, so glad.
Dean understood her demented family like nobody else. And vice versa. Theirs was a co-evolved, symbiotic relationship.
But symbiotic did not mean perfect. Like this third day in Acadia, when Josie had made excellent spinach and goat cheese omelets on the camp stove. She’d brewed strong coffee. She’d led an invigorating hike around Jordan Pond where she spotted a milk snake, a great crested flycatcher, three tiger swallowtails, and a peregrine falcon making grocery runs to her nest on the cliffs. They ended at the Jordan Pond House restaurant. She’d wanted to surprise Dean with the popovers that everyone wouldn’t shut up about, but she only got laughed at by the teenage server who explained no, they could not walk in and expect a table, and no they could not sit at the bar, and no, they did not sell drinks to go.
Dean was quiet on the shuttle bus back to their campsite. Josie chose not to remind him that this vacation was his idea. This week was supposed to be relaxing. Why then, as they left the Loop Road and crossed into the cool shadow of Cadillac Mountain, did Josie feel a pit of dread?
Because she knew what was coming: Dean wanted his mom to move in with them. Her twenty-five-year prison sentence was up this winter. Dean hadn’t formally proposed the idea, but where else does a senior jailbird go? This was the serious news that Josie knew was about to drop. Yet they had been in Acadia for seventy-two hours, and Dean had not once mentioned his mother. So what was wrong?
Maybe nothing was wrong?
Ha. Haha. Hahaha.
Josie thought of her phone in the glovebox of the 4Runner. If they got back to the campsite before five, she could call the Survivors’ Resource Center to reschedule Ara’s appointment. She took a breath. She was unaccustomed to doing nothing. How did people do it? Vacation was hard.
And so, later that afternoon, when Dean said he needed some civilization, Josie acted as though she was doing him a favor, keeping him company, when truthfully, she could’ve killed for a drink herself.
* * *
“Martinis. Two. Gin. Please. Olives. Please. Two. No, three. As many as you can fit in the glass?”
They’d followed the signs into Bar Harbor and pulled over at the first option, a breezy outdoor place with white rocking chairs on a deck overlooking the harbor. They ordered. They rocked. They made obligatory comments about the setting sun, the pink-hewed clouds, the metallic ocean waves. When the martinis arrived, Dean downed his in a few big gulps, chewed the olives, then turned to face Josie. He put his hands flat on the little white table between them.
“Yes?” She braced herself. Here it came.
“I can’t believe you told them we’re just friends.”
Josie needed a moment to register what he was talking about.
“But we are,” she said. “You are literally my best friend.”
“Best friend is different from just friends.”
“Well what should I have told them?”
He rocked his chair aggressively. He was smiling, but it wasn’t his friendliest.
“Honestly, Jo? At this point, I don’t know.”
The summer Dean had initially stayed with the Tayloes, he’d given off an unhinged first impression. Josie knew teenage boys—she’d been forced to go to middle school with a great number of the species—but rarely had she observed one in its natural habitat. One vivid memory included a branch, the oak tree in the front yard, and Dean, red-faced and swinging until the branch splintered. Josie watched, aghast, with Ara and Emma from the kitchen as their mother sorted prisoner mail at the counter and told them to stop gawking. He’s angry, she said. Imagine what he’s going through.
Josie had kept her distance. Only when she’d run into Dean wandering the woods—her woods—did she dare approach with confidence. She’d shown him her favorite spots: the salamander homes she’d built under rocks, the ancient maple where the snowy owl lived, the edge of the marsh where you could almost always catch something, just watch—she’d kicked off her shoes, sloshed around, and come up with a painted turtle that she thrust into Dean’s hands. The turtle stuck out its head. Dean smiled and softened. Josie relaxed. She’d recruited her first field research assistant, and he’d stayed by her side for over twenty years.
“Is that what you tell people?” Dean said. “That we’re just friends?”
Josie waved down the server to order another round of martinis that couldn’t come fast enough.“We’re more than just friends. Okay? Can we talk about something else? We came here to unwind. I don’t want to talk about serious things. Not tonight.”
“Then when?”
“I don’t know, Dean. Later. My mom is basically homeless. Your mom is about to get out. My sisters are one royalty check away from total poverty. We have a lot going on. So please forgive me if this doesn’t feel like the best time to focus on us.”
She dunked her fingers and popped an olive into her mouth.
Dean snatched her wrist and brought her hand to his face. He licked her fingers. He smiled. It was like that moment with the painted turtle at the marsh—everything would be alright. Josie laughed. She pulled back her hand.
“We’re more than friends,” she said.
“I knew it!”
Josie laughed again as the server arrived with fresh drinks. One sip of martini number two and she was voluminously drunk. But it wasn’t just the alcohol. The last sun rays glittered off the waves. Flecks of mica sparkled in granite. The ocean lapped the shore. She put a hand on Dean’s hand. Vacation was hard, but life was harder. She felt almost weak with gratitude, to have him as a partner.
“I want you,” she said.
Dean chuckled, then saw she was serious. He stopped rocking.
“Like, now?”
“Do you have a condom?”
He nodded. He fumbled for his wallet. He checked. He nodded again.
She hopped off the deck toward the water. “Well come on then. Let’s go.”
* * *
Their chairs had hardly stopped rocking before their pants were already zipped back up and buttoned. They’d found a crevice between two granite slabs. Rockweed and barnacles underfoot. Waves sloshing their ankles. They were quick. No time for romance. Not a remote chance that Josie would come, but orgasm wasn’t the goal. The goal was being as close as possible as two human beings who were more than just friends. They’d washed off with ocean, then run back giddy and flush. They settled back into their rocking chairs. Josie caught the server’s eye and ordered another round.
The semi-public sex, combined with martini three made for a fun effervescence that lasted until they paid their tab and climbed into the 4Runner. Dean said he was good to drive, and Josie believed him, but neither could remember the way to the campground. He nodded at the glovebox.
