Songs From Vacationland

Chapter 1

Iwouldn’t be surprised if I died any day now.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I died right this instant, standing in the middle of aisle five of Martell’s Family-Owned Pharmacy.

I’m holding a bottle of aspirin in one hand, and a bottle of pepto-bismol in the other, for I have both a killer headache and nasty stomach cramps. Surely, these simultaneous ailments must be a sign of the end.

The enema kits to my right and incontinence pads to my left look more harrowing than usual in the flickering fluorescent light. Although my head spins, I move past them to the pharmacy counter, where Craig, the owner-pharmacist, my knight in shining white lab coat armor, is perpetually stationed.

In the past, I would have been ashamed to leave the house like this. But now, my brain is only set on one thing, and one thing only: making it through the pharmacy line without having a coronary embolism. Or a heart attack. Or an aneurysm, like my husband, Andy, did.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the sunglasses display case. I look both decrepit and childish, in my oversized graphic t-shirt that peeks out from my unzipped black puffer coat. My legs are practically vibrating into another plane of existence.

Except it’s a different man in a white coat than usual.

It’s not Craig. Craig is often my sole comfort in this vast, unending section of space.

He always answers my incessant questions about aneurysms, heart attacks and ulcers with unending patience—and is nowhere to be seen.

I feel a sharp pain creeping up into my shoulder.

I try to shake it off, but it returns just as quickly as it arrived. A surefire sign of a heart attack.

“Oh my god,” I say aloud. This again. This is the end.

“I’m having a heart attack,” I tell the new man behind the counter, pain radiating through my shoulder, my chest growing tighter and tighter.

In an instant, like a flicker of a lightbulb, a flash of a memory, I can’t breathe.

My head spins faster, and I lean onto the counter for balance, both hands flat on the surface. Where is Craig?

Oh, crap. Now I have to wash my hands.

The man behind the counter is someone totally new. His dark hair is styled in one swoop across his forehead. He wears small, square glasses. He’s got a green sweater underneath his white coat, and if my head weren’t spinning, and I weren’t literally dying, I’d think he was good-looking.

There’s a ringing in my ears, and I can’t hear what the new pharmacist is saying, but he’s waving his hands at me from over the counter.

The lights flooding the space are jarring and too bright, and my vision is fading in and out with black splotches around every corner.

I’m a tight, wound up gamma ray, shot into space.

“I’m having a heart attack,” I say, feeling like I might tip over, completely disoriented.

The pharmacist is still stationed at the counter, his eyes tracking me, watching me carefully as I sway like a building in an earthquake in front of the counter.

He grimaces as soon as I open my mouth. “Can you call an ambulance?”

“No.” He replies flatly. “You didn’t have a heart attack.” His name tag reads Dean.

“What?” I ask.

“You didn’t have a heart attack,” He says, not looking up from his computer screen. “Healthy twenty-five year olds don’t get heart attacks.”

“What?” I ask again, my head pounding, shoulder aching. “I’m not twenty-five.” I turned twenty-eight last week.

“You probably just had a panic attack,” He explains.

“Oh…” Yeah. My therapist said it’s normal to get those. That I should expect them, even.

Oh, god, it’s just like last time.

A blush creeps up my cheeks. A panic attack. You have these all the time, Madeline, you idiot. It’s okay. I’m calming down now, my vision has returned and I can breathe like a normal person instead of a distressed French Bulldog.

But what if it wasn’t just a panic attack?

“But—” I start.

“Madeline, just go home.”

I’m caught off guard. “How do you know my name?”

“Craig told me about you. There’s a little post-it note warning the entire staff you come in between 2 and 2:30 every day right here.” He plucks the note from the cash register in front of him and shows it to me.

“Will you walk me home?” I’m genuinely convinced I need an escort or I might fall over and get hit by a car in the middle of the street on the way home and die for real this time. “Craig would walk me home.” And he has walked me home. Several times.

“No. I can’t leave the pharmacy unattended.” Dean shakes his head nope, no way and turns around.

“There’s the other cashier,” I offer. “Where is Craig?”

“Joey is not a pharmacist. Go home. Stop being delusional in my place of business. Go do something else with your life.” Dean goes inside the office, leaving me to the wolves, commodes and multivitamins.

I really don’t know what to make of my behavior. I never know what to do after a panic attack, and it usually ends with me bawling in the shower. I never know I’m having one until after it’s over. Brushing off my coat sleeves, and trying to keep it together, I walk out of the store.

Staring across the street at my house, I zip up my coat.

It’s probably only 100 feet away, but with the way my head feels so heavy, it may as well be a thousand.

I look to the sky, a ghastly overcast gray.

It’s frigid even though it’s still early December.

My feet are glued to the sidewalk. I can’t move from where I am, even though I’m desperate to douse myself in near boiling hot water in my own shower.

A panic attack. Not a heart attack.

I used to be able to keep it together. Old me wouldn’t think twice about walking across the street.

I know for a fact I can make it home in five minutes or less.

My house is the third largest Victorian, the one with the chipping yellow shutters and the dirty, old wrap-around porch, on the main drag in town.

Biting the bullet, I race across the street as fast as my legs will carry me.

I go so fast that the wind blows curly strands of hair into my face, catching on my chapped lips.

I blow the hair off and bound up the stairs to pick up today’s paper—even though I swear I canceled the subscription long ago, they still deliver it to me.

Since Andy died, there’s always something to clean up or throw out.

A tattered t-shirt in the back of a drawer, the last of the men’s razors in the linen closet, the pair of hiking boots caked in mud by the back door.

I’m always finding pieces of Andy, no matter how hard I try not to find him.

It’s not like I’m trying to get rid of him anymore.

I unzip my coat, the only thing that makes these Maine winters bearable, and don’t bother to hang it up, tossing it on the entryway bench. Early afternoon light is streaming through the stained glass window above the sink.

Turning towards the fridge, the article pinned by a cracked, magnetic palm tree catches my eye.

Rather, it’s the picture of Andy plastered next to the blocky headline that gets my attention.

I picked out that photo myself. It was taken at our wedding.

I know the article by heart even though it was published just a few days ago.

Remembering local musician Andy McKinney 5 years after his death.

I flip up the newspaper clipping to reveal the other newspaper clipping behind it, the very same photo of Andy peeking through. I read the headline for old time’s sake.

Andy McKinney, award-winning local musician,

Dead at 27.

My breath catches in my chest like it does every time I read the article. It’s short—less than a paragraph. I clipped it the morning after, and it’s hung on my refrigerator ever since.

Andy McKinney, York Falls resident and musician, and 2022 GRAMMY winner for Best Folk Album, has died at the age of 27 following an accident mid-performance at The Belladonna in St. Agatha. Arrangements to be announced.

The arrangements were barely made, and never announced. Andy’s funeral had been cold, rainy and short. His parents were dead, mine were overseas, and I didn’t want any fans around. Only his bandmates and my college roommate were in attendance.

I had been managing the aftermath of his death well until I planned a road trip to visit every dive bar, inn and tavern Andy played on his Hometown Roots tour.

It wasn’t until the night I left, and I couldn’t shake the thought that pain in my head was a stroke waiting to happen, and I crashed Andy’s truck into a telephone poll.

I never got around to working up the courage to go again.

Since becoming a diagnosed hypochondriac, and trial and error with three different anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications, I’ve stayed in town.

I hardly leave the house or deviate from my routine, but I check the mail in the morning, visit the cafe around the corner for a late breakfast, and go to the pharmacy in the afternoon.

I make a humble living as a virtual assistant and I mostly live off of my nest egg from Andy’s life insurance and album revenue.

I look at the paper from the porch that I’m still holding, and flip to the arts and entertainment section.

Sure enough, in the corner of page E4, in a tiny black and white box, is the schedule of performances dedicated to Andy’s memory.

At least one is held every year at The Belladonna and crowds go.

I’m always specifically invited, but I’ve never felt ready to attend.

Go do something with your life, Madeline.

What would happen if I did go?

They’d say, “Oh, Madeline, we’re so sorry” and “We miss Andy so much” and “He had so much potential” and “We can’t believe he’s been gone for five years!”

Well, me freaking too.

Then they’d make me go on stage and say something, and I’d start crying, and nobody wants to hear that. I see the name of a jazz trio I almost recognize in the deepest section of my memory.

Before I know it, I’m fumbling with papers and letters and pictures in a box in the basement to compare this article to.

It takes me a minute and several near paper cuts, but I find it in a scrapbook from Andy’s tour.

On the back of a postcard with a drawing of a lighthouse.

A scrawled recommendation by Andy of The Bloom Jazz Trio.

A band he first listened to in 2016, that he apparently felt so moved by their performance one night, he wrote a postcard the next morning to recommend them to me.

According to the newspaper in my hand, they are performing in Andy’s memory at The Waverly Inn in Kennebunkport.

This Sunday. Tonight. And the next band is on Tuesday in Camden.

And on Thursday in Caribou all the way through Friday in St. Agatha.

I peel off the corresponding postcards Andy sent me from each venue from the scrapbook.

I know I don’t have the truck anymore. I haven’t driven a car in four years. I’m pretty sure my license is expired. But am I going to hoof it to the Enterprise Rental on the outskirts of town and try to get a car? Just for the hell of it?

I hear Dean’s voice echoing in the back of my head. Go do something, Madeline, go do something! In a panic induced stupor, I drag the single suitcase I own up the basement steps. I haul it into my wreck of a bedroom and start throwing clothes, socks and underwear into it before I lose my momentum.

I grab an armful of over the counter medication—my new bottles of pepto-bismol and aspirin included, and toss it like the cherry on top. I make sure to grab the stack of postcards from Andy, and put them in my tote bag with extra care.

I pause for a breath in front of the entryway door. What in the fresh hell am I doing?

A road trip? Because the new pharmacist was mean to me once? I can’t upend the next week of my life for this man. I’m not the kind of person to have a big plan like this.

I collapse onto the floor in front of the door, and I pull my tote bag into my lap, and bring the postcards out.

The card on top is the one Andy sent me just before his death.

Postmarked in St. Agatha, with a photo of a green and lush Long Lake on the front, there’s a short message scrawled in his handwriting.

Dear Madeline,

We’re almost finished with the tour. We have one more show at The Belladonna here in St. Agatha.

The weather is great. The music is fantastic.

And the fans are incredible. I hope you get to experience something like this someday.

There’s nothing quite like the excitement of a crowd on their feet, screaming your name, singing your song.

But none of it compares to you. I ‘ll be home with you soon.

Love,

Andy

My heart is pounding. Andy wanted this for me. I’m going to make it in time for tonight’s concert even if it kills me.