48. Call Your Mom – Riggins
Ashford will forever be a double-sided coin to me. I love this place; it’s where I found myself, my best friends, and my band. It’s where I grew up, where I met Stella, and where I wrote music that changed lives—my life, the band”s life, and fans” lives if what they tell me is true.
But it will also always be the place where my mother died and where my father essentially killed himself. When I drive from the airport to here, through the Pine Barrens this time of the year, it’s nothing but sticks, depressing and empty.
Every time, I’m reminded of the times Stella and I lay beneath those trees, staring at the sky, promising we’d be forever. I can look at the stars from anywhere in the world, but when I do it with my feet planted in Ashford, it’s like I’m still here with Stella, and that hurts more than anything ever could.
Even more so in the house I grew up with. It was left to me when Dad passed, with no siblings or other family to take it on, and since then, it’s been my sole remaining tether to Ashford. A tether I’ve avoided like the plague to the best of my ability. It’s not that I haven’t been in this house since my dad died. I have, just not for any stretch of real-time.
I haven’t lived in this house.
I surely haven’t explored it.
This house is so still, so quiet, a time capsule of my childhood and my father”s pain and the life my mother lived that ended too quickly. When I walk through the door, boots hitting on the same carpet my mother hated but my father never replaced, it’s like I’m seventeen again.
I feel a strange mix of anxiety that creeps up my chest and makes me want to turn around like I’ve done every other time I tried to clear this place out but fight it back. I didn’t learn how to control or conquer until it was too late, and I have an unending hope that I still have a huge, full life in front of me, a life where I can make dreams and hopes come true.
Hopes that would have undeniably included Stella.
I think I’ve put off cleaning and selling this place for so long because it felt like the one remaining strand of hope for her, the last of the invisible strings tying me to Stella that I haven’t severed.
But it’s time. Time to leave this behind, to finally sever this part of my life.
To finally try and move on.
Maybe if I cut this tie to Ashford, I’ll cut the part of my soul that always aches for Stella.
Wishful thinking, maybe, but I’m a desperate man.
Rubbing my hand over my forehead, I stare around the time capsule that is my childhood home and grab a hair tie to pull up my hair, only the top half making it into the small bun Reed would absolutely make fun of me for.
I start with the bathroom, seemingly the easiest spot that would hold the least memories, but when I see the cabinet above the sink holding every product my mother used, half full like the day she left it when she passed, the knife turns.
I hated my dad for the longest time.
My mother passed, and I was just a kid, a kid without a mother. Then, he took my father away from me, drowning his emotions and sorrows until he died.
But I get it. I might have been deep in the rockstar life when Stella was with me, but as soon as she left, I fell off that cliff, drowning my sadness, filling that hole she left with whatever would numb the pain.
The shoes she left when she ran are still on the top shelf of my closet, and I built an entire fucking shrine for her in Maine. I get how he couldn’t bear the idea of clearing out Mom’s things, even if it would have made his life easier, his grief less suffocating.
I get it now.
It’s an uncomfortable realization that despite my best intentions, I became the man who angered me so much as a kid. And that now, I feel a bit of guilt knowing I got so mad at him for being human and not having the tools or ability to cope.
I push it back and begin the heartbreaking and harrowing work of packing up my past.
Hours and hours later, uncovering more frozen memories of my mother and even more uncomfortable realizations about my father, I head into the living room to run out and grab lunch for myself. Before I leave, my eyes catch the black box on the side table next to the couch. The family phone we never used, but never got rid of because the answering machine had my mother’s voice.
I get it, not wanting to hear that, the way it would tear open wounds that have barely healed. God, do I get it.
Every fucking day I’m on stage where I sing and play the songs we wrote together; it’s her voice that I hear.
It’s why I fell so far off the cliff when she left. Even when I wanted to get over it and her, to run away from it and forget her altogether, every fucking day, I was reminded of what I lost.
I’m old enough, wise enough, to know now that’s what it was: me losing her. She’d talked to me so many times about the spiral I was on, and not only did I ignore her, but I started to hide things, and worse.
She left without a word and ignored the call when I needed her most, but I ignored her for months and months before that. My bitterness about it all is gone now, washed away with time, age, and clarity.
I wonder what my father saw with time and clarity and how that gutted him.
I don’t blame him anymore. I had Stella as mine for barely over a year, and it destroyed me. My dad was married to my mother for fifteen years.
But now I’m looking at the old phone, the cord spiraling down the table, and see the red blinking light of a message. It could be years old, for all I know. It’s probably just telemarketers, but before I head out to get food, I sit and tap in the password—my mother’s birthday—and listen to the message.
“Hi! You’ve reached the Greene’s. We’re unable to make it to the phone right now, but please leave a message with your name and number, and we’ll call you right back.”
God, it still hits me, hearing the voice I forgot all these years later.
Somewhere buried in this house are home videos my mom made, her voice saved forever, but I don’t even think I would have the ability to play the old VHS tapes. And even if I did, would I want to risk finding footage of Stella and I, of watching our once sure history being written?
But the world shifts on its axis a moment later, breaking me out of my thoughts about home videos and how to play them when the first message plays.
“Hey, Jeanette,” the voice says, and instantly, I know it’s her.
Stella.
I haven’t heard her voice in five years, but I could hear it whispered on the wind and know it was her. It instantly takes me back to late nights under the stars, writing songs, watching her gorgeous face pull out similes and analogies that still can bring me to my knees, and doing it with ease like she was born to do it.
Sometimes I wish I had recorded those sessions, that I had her voice saved somewhere so when the memories start to fade, I can replay them, resharpen the memories, since they’re all I have of her anymore.
It’s actually cruel that our mind saves memories, the more painful, the more crystal clear ones, but doesn’t save sounds the same way, doesn’t capture the way the end of a sentence dips lower, the way one single word can contain three emotions at once.
“It’s me. I know no one listens to these, and I feel so fucking lost right now, so I thought… I don’t know. You were always so smart. I can’t talk to my mom about it, and Evie’s at school… He’s been drinking a lot. Riggs, I mean. And it’s probably because I’m young and overreacting, but… Well, you know. I don’t know. I just wish you were here. You always knew what to say. Miss you.”
The machine beeps, and I hit back, wanting to listen once more and commit it to memory, and this time I catch the date.
She left this in November after our first tour, those days when we were happy to be together when I started to drink and party. But she was doing it too, I remember. I remember her smiling at me, watching me with those eyes that never left me.
But I also remember the panic in her face when I would grab yet another beer, the way she’d pick at her nails or bite her lips with nerves.
I think I knew then.
The machine beeps and goes to the next message, and I hear her voice again.
“Hey, Jeanette. It’s me. I finally got the nerve to talk to Riggs about his drinking. It’s getting out of hand, and it makes me nervous because some days, he drinks more beer than water. I think it helped. I hope it did, at least. And we just found out the guys have been nominated for Song of the Year! I’m so proud of him. He’s… he’s doing everything he said he would. You’d be so proud, too. I know it.”
The hope in her voice kills something in me, knowing how this story ends. The next message is months later, a few months into our first headlining tour and a week or two before we got Gracie.
“Hey Jeanette,” she says and this time, there’s tears, painting her voice. She’s been crying, the words strained. “I’m so lost, and I don’t know who to talk to. But you always knew how to handle Riggs and… I wish you were here. He’s falling apart, and I don’t know how to help him. He’s drinking so much, and I’m so scared I’m going to lose him. I just… I wish you were here. You’d know what to say.”
I don’t hit back to relisten to this one, hating it more than anything else. The next beep comes, and her voice comes again, this time filled with joy and excitement.
“Hey Jeanette, it’s me. I think… I think I got through to him. We talked and it went so much better than I feared. And we got a dog!” Her voice sounds so happy, so ecstatic and I remember that day.
I remember feeling heavy, soul-breaking guilt at the look of disappointment and hurt in her eyes when she asked me to stop drinking.
That was the day I started hiding the full extent of my drinking.
In the years following her leaving, I thought it was her fault she didn’t see it, that she didn’t notice the signs that I was drinking much more than she thought.
And then I’m reminded how fucking young we were and how fucking in love with me she was.
“Her name’s Gracie. After you, of course. Jeanette Grace. Wish you were here. Thanks for keeping an eye on us still. Gracie, no!” The sound rumbles, like her phone falling and there’s a giggle before the message ends.
I collapse to the floor as the tears start, the memories jagged as they rip through me, causing me true, physical pain at everything I’ve lost.
At whom I lost.
Another beep and another message, this time staring with laughter.
“No! I’m calling your mom!” Stella’s voice says, and in the background, there’s my voice laughing, “What!?” Before she laughs again. “I do this! Leave me be, Riggins Greene. Sorry, hey Jeanette! It’s me! Guess what!? I’m officially your daughter! Well, in law. We got married! It was very last minute, and no one knows yet, but… god. I’m so damn happy. Wish you were here.”
It cuts off abruptly, but I don’t even care.
Because all I can hear is, We got married!
We got married…
We got married?
We. Got. Married.
I hit back, listening again and, this time, paying attention to the date.
I look back, try and think of where the band was that date, to figure out what happened and why I don’t remember, but I know.
It’s Vegas, the day before she left me.
I let the machine play the next and final message.
“Hey, Jeanette.” It slices through me, the sadness, the hoarseness of her voice. She’s destroyed. The contrast between this and the previous message is actually painful. “Uhm, I, uh… god. I don’t know. I won’t be calling you again. He lied. He lied, and I don’t even know what to do anymore. I’m so sorry. I thought I... I don’t know. I thought we’d be okay. But I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t let him do it to me either. I love you, Jeanette. And I love him. But I can’t do this.”
The message cuts off on a sob.
Suddenly, without warning, the morning I had torn apart a million times before comes back to me in a new light.
Waking up in the fancy hotel room with Stella, wondering why the fuck we paid so much for the lover’s suite. The headache I had, the urge to find a drink as soon as I woke. The wide smile on her face.
“Good morning, husband,” she had said, her eyes soft as she brushed my hair back from my face, looking at me like I was her entire fucking world.
And I threw her away.