16. Shane
Shane
The hospital should have been the one that did it.
Or the livestream, or the parking lot. It was her hands going up.
Twenty seconds of a kid in a crib deciding the man at the end of it was somebody she’d like to be picked up by.
I’ve played to eighty thousand people in a field in Belgium and nothing in it did to me what that did.
I call Rob from the parking garage and tell him to kill the international leg.
Rob argues until his voice turns hoarse. He says I will not get those rooms back, which is true, then explains what happens when an international run is pulled apart, which I already know. Finally he tells me I am making a permanent decision in a temporary state of mind.
“She’s eight months old.”
“Right, and in three years she’s four and you’re a guy who used to play Europe.”
“Kill it.”
I rent a place off Manor. Two bedrooms, a carport, popcorn ceilings, and a lemon tree somebody has been aggressively neglecting.
My business manager asks twice whether I’d like him to look at something in West Lake instead, and the second time I have to say the reason out loud and hear how small it sounds.
It is close to her house. When Tess brings Sadie over, she does not have to walk past a guard.
The label sends a letter. Lawyers, not people.
It uses the word momentum three times, which is how a company tells you it’s finished spending money on you.
I start seeing a woman named Dr. Alvarez in an office building near the university with a fish tank in the waiting room, which is a sentence I’d have chewed my own arm off before saying out loud two years ago.
For weeks the sessions are useless. I turn on the charm and Dr. Alvarez waits me out. Then one afternoon she asks what happened when I was fifteen and my mother’s face was on the front of a magazine at the grocery store. I hadn’t thought about it in twenty years.
My folks came apart in public. Dad was a session player on records everybody knows, and when it went bad it went bad in print, and there was a stretch of about eight months where you could stand in a checkout line in Murfreesboro and read what my mother had allegedly done in a hotel in Muscle Shoals.
She stopped going to the store. Not the crying, that’s not what stayed with me. A grown woman stopped going to the grocery store and sent her fifteen-year-old instead, and I’d go, and I’d stand in the line and turn the magazine over so it faced the back.
“What did you take from that?”
“That it’s a stupid business.”
“Try again.”
“That people are vultures.”
“Try again.”
It takes the rest of the hour. What I took from it is that if you love somebody where people can see you do it, they’ll eventually get to read about it in a line at a store, and there is not one thing you can do to stop it.
So you love people in rooms with the door shut.
And then when the door gets opened anyway, you go on television and say the person on the other side of it made you up.
I tell Tess on a Sunday, on her back steps, while Sadie destroys a plastic cup on the concrete between us. I make a point of doing it badly. Nothing builds to anything. The facts come out in the flattest voice I’ve got, and then I say the part I worked on in the truck.
“That’s not why I did it.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. It’s where it comes from, it isn’t a reason.
Plenty of people had that and didn’t do what I did to you.
” I turn the cup upright for the kid and she immediately turns it back over.
“I’m telling you because you’re the one deciding whether I’m a safe person to have around, and you can’t do that on half the information. ”
She’s quiet a while.
“Your mom still doesn’t go out much. I noticed that, when I met her.”
“No.”
“I liked her.”
“She asks about you.” I have to stop and start again. “She does this thing where she asks about you without asking about you. She’ll go, how’s everybody.”
Tess laughs. One short surprised note, and she cuts it off fast like she’s caught herself being unprofessional. I don’t say anything about it. If I say anything about it she’ll never do it again. By late summer, the song finds us. Not publicly. It is never coming out.
I bring the old Gibson over because Sadie has decided that the sound of a guitar is the greatest thing that has ever happened to anybody, and I sit on the floor and let her slap the body of it while I play nothing in particular.
Then Tess says, “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“The thing you just did twice.”
“Nothing. It’s an old thing.”
“Play the old thing.”
So I do, and four bars in I understand that I’ve made an enormous mistake, and by then stopping would be an event.
I wrote it in her apartment. On her couch, in January, while she was in the shower, and I never played it for her because I knew what it was and I couldn’t stand to be looked at while it was in the room.
I sat on it. I told the label it wasn’t finished. It went on a drive.
It’s about a man with a door in his house he keeps shut, and about the room behind it being the only room he can breathe in, and about how he’d rather suffocate everywhere else than let anybody find out it’s there.
There’s a line in the second verse about how she’d be safer if he were braver.
When I finish, the room has nothing in it. Even the kid has stopped.
Tess is at the counter with a dish towel in her hand and she hasn’t moved through any of it.
“When?”
“January.”
“January.” I watch her do the arithmetic. “That’s five weeks before you came to my door and asked me to keep hiding.”
“Yes.”
The towel goes down on the counter. Her hand isn’t steady.
“So you knew,” she says. “The whole time. You knew exactly what you were doing to me and you sat down on my couch and worked it out with a rhyme scheme.”