Steven repaired instruments for a living, mostly tuning pianos. Joan taught music at various high schools throughout the Portland district. After hours or on weekends, they gave private lessons. Each of them called those things their jobs, what they did to keep the roof over their heads from leaking. Their jobs, not their work.
Music, that was their work.
They did it together, and I blame them both equally.
June, and school had ended, though I was scheduled for summer school in just a few weeks, a desperate attempt to bring me back in line with my classmates. I’d been with Steven and Joan just shy of two months, and the time hadn’t been easy, because as much as I liked the room they’d made for me, I sure as hell didn’t trust them. The longest conversation we’d had so far had concerned how I could get a letter to my brother, and if I could go and visit him soon. The answers were yes and no; I could write him all I wanted, but Mikel wasn’t allowed visitors for the time being.
So for two months, I’d been quiet and self-absorbed, testing their boundaries, stealing their cigarettes, and getting more chores heaped on me as punishment. I wasn’t as bad as I’d been with the Quicks, but I was getting ready to escalate.
They’d done their best to weather it. They’d seen me poking at the various instruments around the house, fiddling the keys on a trumpet, striking notes on the Steinway. Both of them had asked me if I had any interest in playing any of the instruments they had around. The flute, for instance, or the violin, or the clarinet, or the piano.
“No,” I’d said.
A lie. But the last time I’d played an instrument had been when I was ten, and though I could still remember the thrill of it, I remembered the rest, too. The weakness of my hands and the failing of the guitar; Tommy’s impatience with my inept fingers; my mother’s annoyance, her telling me that I shouldn’t play so loudly until I could at least play, you know, well.
It is impossible to practice an instrument quietly. Music, by its very definition, must be heard.
Dinner was finished, and I had cleared the table, doing my appointed chores. I finished drying the last of the dishes just as Joan was pouring coffee for herself and Steven. They both looked at me, the kind of look that always made me nervous. They looked pleased, and that had to mean that I’d done something wrong.
“Go to your room,” Steven told me. He was smiling.
So was Joan.
“Why?”
“Go to your room and see.”
Stupid games, I thought. Stupid people. Don’t know anything about me. Don’t know who I am or what I want and don’t even care.
Making it as clear as possible with body language that I was doing them a big favor, I went to my room.
The guitar was on the bed, resting in an open case.
“Yours,” Joan said. “Do whatever you want with it.”
Steven added, “We’ll be downstairs.”
They left us alone.
It was a used Taylor acoustic, scratches on its body, gouges in the wood around the pick guard. The steel strings seemed to float just above the mahogany neck.
I sat down beside it on the bed and just stared at it, trying to figure out if I wanted to be bought this easily. It wasn’t as sophisticated a thought as that, of course, but that’s the only way I can think of it now.
The Taylor won out in the end.
I picked it up, held it the way I had seen Steven holding his guitar. I put my index finger on a string, it was the sixth string, the low E, and I struck the note.
I went downstairs with the guitar held in both hands, by the neck, and found Joan and Steven in the piano room, sitting side by side on the bench. Steven was smoking a cigarette and singing softly along to what his wife was playing, and then she saw me and let the notes trail off, and his voice followed.
I pushed the guitar out in front of me, toward them, and said, “Show me how.”
Joan laughed, and Steven got up and went to get his acoustic, and we settled on the couch, and he started to teach. It was just after nine when he began, and he knew what I was after; he didn’t talk about chords or sevenths or octaves or diatonic scales. He explained only the barest facts that I needed, just enough to get me playing notes that combined to make music that I could recognize. He showed me everything he was doing on his guitar, never touching me or mine, letting me mimic him. I was clumsy and awkward and my fingers kept slipping. My back ached from this strange new posture, the muscles in my neck throbbed because of the way I was craning my head, trying to watch both of my hands at once. The steel strings dug channels into my fingertips. My left hand, my fretting hand, cramped up.
“Stop,” Steven said. “Take a break.”
So for five minutes I stopped, massaging my hand, amazed at the blood on my fingertips, blood on the strings.
“It hurts,” I told Steven.
“Your fingers’ll get used to it,” he said.
I picked up the Taylor again, and he made me review everything I’d learned so far, and it still didn’t seem like I was learning anything at all. It just seemed like we were playing with the guitars, having fun with each other.
Joan came back and announced that it was past one, and that she was going to go to bed.
“You go on up, hon,” he said. “Mim and I are going to work at this a little longer.”
“Don’t stay up too much later,” she told us.
“We won’t,” I said.
We were up until dawn.
CHAPTER 11
After Tommy left, I spent the day getting my life, and myself, back in order. Just checking through the now over a hundred voice mails took most of an hour, and almost every message was like the first had been, reporters wanting a story, demanding a comment. Near the end there were separate calls from Click and Graham, each wanting to confirm that I’d made it home safely. It bought them some grace, but not much.
There were two messages from Mikel, each left Wednesday, one in the morning and one that evening, check-in calls, much like Click’s and Graham’s. He left his mobile and asked me to call him back, and I didn’t. It was clear to me that he’d told Tommy where I was, maybe even had told him it was safe to visit, and I was pretty fucking angry at my big brother.
I rewarded myself with a late lunch of cold Chinese food, another beer, and a trip down to my music room. The nice thing about playing in the basement was that I could play volume. I fed the Gibson through the VOX AC-30 and wailed on that for a while. It’s a great unit, classic tube design, and it plays soft pretty well, but when you crank it up you get a lovely, shimmery sustain on the notes, as if the amp is breathing. I wasn’t playing anything in particular, just noodling. I switched to one of my Strats after a while, trying to emulate some of the Knopfler I’d heard the night before, but my left just doesn’t have the strength his does, and I can never get the same pop from the strings.
The cut on my palm opened again, and I shut everything down and went upstairs to change the bandage, and that’s when I saw it had grown dark.
I also saw that my front door was wide open.
It wasn’t like I went straight to panic, but I sure as hell accelerated to nervous. The alarm was off, had been throughout the day, ever since Tommy’s visit, and I gave myself a mental kick for not having reset it.