Chapter Thirty-One The Past Comes Back
We play Bumbershoot in September, six months after my father died. It’s a largely acclaimed art and music festival in our home state, something we’ve been dreaming of for years. We climb the stage and can only describe the experience as one of the most surreal moments of our lives. Just a few years ago we were bright-eyed and hopeful, standing in the audience and dreaming of the day we’d be on the stage. And now we are. The weather is gracious, the sun pounding down on Seattle in her full majesty. I glance up and eye the scrappy little clouds that dot the sky. There will be no rain today. My mother and sister are in the crowd too, wearing matching red visors. They jump up and down and wave when they see me looking. They’re wearing their Pixies shirts and I know they’re headed to the reunion show after this. It’s from the stage that I see another familiar face. I remember a fight, yelling, Yara throwing a loaf of bread at my head and telling me to choke on it. It sounds comical now but at the time it wasn’t. The anger that spun out of her tornado-like, ripping up what we’d been building together. She said things that night that I’d rather not remember, horrible things about me and the band…my family. It was a painful memory, a gateway to the end. I catch Petra’s eye and she smiles as she sways to the music we’ve already started playing. Her hair is an ashen yellow and she’s dressed in a sheer white dress. I can see her outline underneath the fabric, the dark circles of her nipples. She wants me to recognize her—she wore that dress so she’d have a better chance of it. Women use their bodies like weapons.
After the show Petra waits for me at the back of the stage. There are a lot of people there calling my name, but she stands quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body like she already knows I will stop. If I couldn’t see her goddamn nipples I’d say she looked saintly. I stand in front of her even though security has me by the balls. A big burly guy in a leather vest says, “We need to keep moving.”
“Hello, Dave.” She pushes her hair behind her ear and looks at me shyly.
It’s so intimate, the way she calls me Dave. It triggers something, maybe my deep loneliness, and that’s why I lift the barrier and wait as she ducks under it to join me. She waves to her friends like this was the plan all along and links her arm through mine.
We don’t speak until we’re in the trailer we share with two other bands. Since they’re performing we have it to ourselves for a few hours. The guys pull beers out of the fridge and wipe the backs of their necks with plush white towels, while Petra and I move to the tiny back room where there is a double bed. I sit on the edge and she sits next to me.
“I’m not trying to sleep with you,” I say. Though saying it out loud makes it seem like I am.
She smiles that closed lip smile that she’s mastered and shrugs like she could go either way. I have a thought that I’m ashamed of: what if I should have been with Petra all along and Yara was the mistake? Well, clearly Yara was a mistake, but I’d always blamed Petra for the initial frays in our relationship. Wholly unfair perhaps, but that’s what Yara put in my head: Petra was there to cause trouble, Petra was waiting for us to break up. Petra had been quiet in those days, trailing the band from show to show, showing up so often she became one of our entourage by default. Then the thing had happened with Yara. She came around for a while after that, but one night after I’d had too much to drink, I’d ordered her the fuck out of my condo. According to Brick, in a drunken slur I’d told her that it was her fault Yara and I had broken up. I think of that now as I sip water from a bottle and watch her studying me cautiously. Is she looking for anger?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About what I said. I was hurting and I wanted to fuck everything up.”
“That was a long time ago.” She shrugs. And then she says, “She had this way of making you crazy. It was like she enjoyed torturing you.”
I stare at her. Maybe it was true, but no one had ever said it out loud before. I don’t want to talk about Yara. She must see it on my face because she stands up and grabs my hands, pulling me to my feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” she says. “I’ll buy you dinner.”
I only hesitate for a moment. I haven’t been with a woman in a year. That was after the initial year when I slept with anyone who was game. I like holding her hand, but more than that, I like the way she looks at me.
It’s the first day that I don’t check my trash for Yara’s e-mail.