Chapter 39
– Chapter 39 —
It’s almost dark by the time I call Jam. I should have called earlier. I meant to check on him, but the day got away from me.
He doesn’t pick up. I give it five minutes and he doesn’t pick up again. I could call Aubrey to see if she’s heard from him, but I don’t want to worry her.
The sun is fading, temperature dropping. The roads will freeze over again, and I trust my feet more than my tires, so I bundle up and climb the hill. As I walk past the neighbors’ houses, there are tarps on roofs and branches down everywhere. It makes me feel a little less like the rain cloud exists directly over my head.
I look for signs that I might still know the people who live in these houses—a familiar car, or flag, or statue of Mary—and I realize that we never actually had much contact with our neighbors. I knew the kids on my school bus by sight and name. I played Marco Polo with some of them at the pond. But I’ve never been inside most of these houses. My parents didn’t have friends. We never had barbecues with other families. Steena’s social life existed away from our house. Maybe there was a neighborhood happening around us that I never noticed. Or maybe people moved out here for the solitude and we were just part of the culture.
The lights are off at Jam’s house, but when I walk up to his bedroom window, I can hear piano music. I slide the window open and climb in, kicking my shoes off before they make a mess. The lights work when I find the switch, so I think he’s been playing since before dark.
I stand by the door to the basement and listen. The song is one of Jam’s own pieces, I think. It feels like him. The plink plunk of high keys, played slightly off rhythm, creates a sense of unease while he builds the bass notes, bringing their stability in like a wash of relief. He loops back, plays the same bar again and again, then crashes the keys, which I don’t think is part of the song. It sounds likes he’s writing and frustrated. I take the pause to open the door.
“Hey, Jam! It’s me!”
“I’m down here,” he shouts, as if I wouldn’t know otherwise.
His purple and green lights are reflecting strangely off the floor. As I walk down the stairs, I realize there’s standing water in the basement, all the way up to the bottom step.
Jam is seated on the piano bench, feet submerged to reach the pedals. The water is over the metal wheels, lapping at the legs that Vili may have carved.
“Jam! We have to get the water out!”
He shrugs and goes back to playing the bars he’d been repeating; the music echoes across the water.
“This will ruin your piano!” My mind is scrambling for a solution.
He keeps playing.
“Why would you let it be ruined?” I yell.
He looks over his shoulder at me. “I’m ruined,” he says, as if it’s a cool, calm fact.
I feel like my heart might slip through my ribs. I want to tell Jam he is not ruined, but I’m afraid he might be.
He finally plays something he’s happy with and takes that riff, repeating it, changing the last few notes each time until he lets the first ones tumble. I sit on the steps to listen. He is caught in the trance of his own music, waves of emotion twisting his face, swaying his body.
When he’s done, we just sit there. He rests his head against the music stand.
“We have to get the water out,” I say, breaking the quiet.
Jam sits up, bangs the keys ferociously. A knocking sound follows the notes. “Do you hear it? The death rattle? There’s a crack in the soundboard. It’s been chasing me for years.”
“Where’s your sump pump?” I ask.
He turns to look at me. Even in the weird purple light I can tell his pupils are large. He smiles, long and lazy like the Cheshire Cat. “Sump. Pump,” he says, making popping sounds of the P s. He raises his arm, flips his hand toward the corner as if he’s conducting.
I take my socks off, roll the cuffs of my jeans as high as they’ll go, and step off the stairs into the flood. The water is bracing. My toes ache instantly. I worry Jam could have frostbite. There are pages of music and pencils floating on the surface. I walk slow, sliding my feet forward, one at a time to avoid stepping on anything that could cut or trip me.
When I get to the sump pump, it’s tipped out of the drain hole, floating on its side, so there’s no way for the buoy to trigger the on switch. The motor hasn’t drowned. As soon as I get it upright, the pump kicks into gear, but it will take hours to drain the basement.
“Oh, sumptuous pump,” Jam says. “Do your bidding.”
My anger hits the boiling point. “Damnit, Jam!” I shout. “You can’t let your piano rot. That was an easy fix!” But Jam is unmoved, and it feels like yelling at a brick wall.
“A crumb to a human is a boulder to an ant,” he says, plunking out a marching rhythm on the high keys.
“Jam! Stop! This is pathetic!”
“Being a musician means you’re always at least a little pathetic, right?” His voice is dispassionate. “You’re either struggling to get somewhere, or you got there and you’re living off the praise, terrified it’ll end. You’re striving. Starving. Striving.” He bangs chords on the low keys that sound like a chorus of his words. “Everyone’s life is like that. Security is always an illusion, but in art, we know security doesn’t exist.” He breaks the chords into solitary notes that climb upward like an anthem. “Pathetic. Pathetic. The only way to be an artist and not be pathetic is to keep the art close.” He changes key, turns a rumble into a melody. “But I—I don’t know how to do that. Do you? I don’t. Music isn’t mine. It’s a tribute. I’m a tribute band,” he says, like he’s just finally made sense of something.
And then I realize he’s playing Free Bird .
It takes me ages to convince Jam to get his feet out of the water. Eventually, whatever he took starts to fade, leaving him exhausted and pliable. I lure him upstairs with the promise of hot cocoa, hoping there’s some in the cupboard. It doesn’t matter when there isn’t. At that point, he’s sad, shivering, grateful for any care. I fill the bathtub with a few inches of cold water and make him stand in it, adding heat slowly so it doesn’t hurt as his feet thaw. He’s quiet mostly. I feel like he’s not really with me. My mother exploded when she drank. But Jam gathers his pain, drawing it inside, turning himself into a bomb blanket. He doesn’t realize the loss of him would hurt me so much more than the shrapnel.
Eventually, I drain the water and draw a real bath for him. I help him lift his sweater over his head. Steady him while he takes off his pants. When he gets in the tub, I sit on the side and scrub his back with a washcloth, running my hand along the knobs of his spine.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I don’t know how to be me in the world.”
Once the tub is too full to keep adding hot water as it cools, Jam kicks the drain with his foot. I wrap him in a towel when he stands. He walks back to his room in a dreamy haze and curls up in his bed.
There’s a message on my phone from Aubrey. She’s spending the night at Shray’s. So I take off my pants and climb into bed with Jam, feeling the warmth radiate from his body.
In the morning, I hear Jam get up. I mean to follow but drift off again, my brain collecting the sounds of kitchen clatter and footsteps without being sure what’s real and what’s dream. When I do open my eyes, Jam is standing next to the bed, holding a plate with a huge stack of pancakes swimming in syrup.
“I’ll spill this on you if you don’t wake up,” he says, a grin in his voice. He sits beside me, hands me a fork, digs in with another. He’s dressed, bright-eyed, hair combed. “I figured out the song I was writing. You want to hear it?”
And, of course, I do.
“Bring that,” he says, pointing to the plate.
“Don’t you want to eat more while they’re hot?”
He shakes his head. “You can have the rest. I ate like six while I was cooking.”
I follow him to the basement, which is mostly drained now. There’s sediment collected at the water line, puddles on the floor, sheet music stuck to the concrete like papier-maché. Jam has dragged the shop vac down the stairs.
“I didn’t want to run the vacuum while you were sleeping. But I’m going to clean today.” He says it like he’s trying to prove something to me, and I really want him to.
I sit next to him on the bench. The cushion is cold, and maybe a little damp from all the moisture in the room.
“Okay,” he says, making fists with his hands, rolling his wrists. “I haven’t plunked it out yet. I just heard it in my head. But I think I got it. So, we’ll see.”
He starts playing a discordant twinkling that makes me picture stars in my mind. When it turns into a melody, there are whole constellations and I swear I can see them glow. So brightly.