Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Two suitcases sat agape on the floor in front of her. These were no weekend travel bags; they were true pieces of luggage, made from some sort of coated polyester, hardy things with latches and locks, and they were stuffed high with neatly folded clothes.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked. “Does this have something to do with your medication?”

“Strangely queasy,” she said. “Not once in that brick oven of a studio the entire summer, and yet the second Sonny sets us free, I go back to being me.”

“I could check my glove compartment for more of Jumbo’s ganja.”

Mack laughed, then swept the hair off her forehead with both hands. “You really didn’t need to come over here. I can get these into the car myself.”

“If you were just pale, maybe I’d let you. But since you’re also wan . . .”

“In that case, I’m going to do something for you that I haven’t done for a man in a long time.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m going to take you to the store across the street and buy you a grape soda.”

“A grape soda.”

“Fanta, my friend. When’s the last time you had a Fanta grape soda?”

I squinted fondly at a stain up on the ceiling. “It was, I believe, the summer of ’eighty-four.”

Insisting she was up to it, we walked over to a tiny, unnamed convenience store wedged between a women’s clothing shop and a place that sold candles and stationery. A metal-toothed fan beat down on the Hispanic gentleman sloped over the counter. His graying mustache smiled lifelessly at us as we entered.

The dim and dusty establishment exhibited an air of indifference toward inventory, as there was gum in the front, a refrigerator in the back, and a wasteland in between featuring lonely bottles of mouthwash and aged boxes of cherry Jell-O. Mack found two cans of Fanta in the fridge next to a plastic container of cheesecake, and we drank them outside on a bench beside an ancient church. The color had returned to her cheeks.

“This is such a nice city,” she observed. “I really like Philadelphia.”

I nodded in agreement, realizing I’d never really lived anywhere else.

“I might have stayed after college if the band hadn’t happened,” Mack said.

I remembered those days of feeling as though you could live anywhere, that you would live anywhere. As a kid, I accepted it as inevitable that there’d be a chapter in my life where I lived in a small town, some place with a Main Street and a family-run hardware store. There would also be a suburban chapter, a life lived on driveways and garages and lawns, and a European chapter with Vespas and an unaccountable fluency in some other language. I never viewed these episodes as connected to each other or to any kind of ordered path, as in a board game where your piece makes its gradual, inexorable way to an end. These chapters would simply happen. Somehow I’d live in Prague for a while. The world would just carry me there.

“Do you think you’re here for good?” Mack asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

For good sounded so final. But you reached a point in life where you needed a good reason to move, where your wandering blood settled into something that craved familiarity. Mack’s question somehow led me to Sara. I would move for her, I supposed, and she for me. At least I thought so. We would follow each other, wouldn’t we?

As Mack and I continued to slurp our grape soda and engage in meaningless, comfortable small talk, my thoughts kept returning to Sara. Not so long ago, Sara and I had opened up our high school yearbook for no other purpose than to cringe at the devastation that time had wreaked. I howled in grim amusement at my feathered hair, at the full cheeks that the years had hollowed, at the immaculate cluelessness in my sneer. But for Sara, seeing the brimming optimism of her teenage self, the hope in a young girl’s eyes flowing over—it did not strike her as funny, not even ruefully so. There’d been too much road between there and here.

Here I was, deliberately trying to tunnel back into my past with the implied threat of leaving everything behind in my vapor trail of freedom. Meanwhile, Sara struggled daily just to come to grips with her past. Freedom was something Sara would never know—freedom from her memories, freedom from all those cries and whispers that pierced the universe circling around her. They were everywhere. Look, Sara, look at the family playing Uno in a restaurant booth. Look at Josie and Wynne and their new baby. Isn’t that wonderful? Everyone could change, move on, escape. Everyone except her.

When Sara looked at that yearbook, her mind saw pictures her eyes would never see. Her son with a girlfriend by the Grand Canyon, with a wife by the Eiffel Tower, in line at Space Mountain with his own peach-faced children. What would he look like in those photographs, standing by the world, gradually growing older? How many times must Sara have found herself walking down a busy street, on her way to some appointment, and been leveled once again by the realization that life really does go on? It had gone on. Here I am, living the ordinary moments of my life, but something awful has happened and there’s no one to take my grievance to! Every day those familiar fears sprang up again. The fear of open spaces, the fear of being buried alive, of being swallowed alive, of stray bullets, of everyone being able to read her mind. The fear that every thing and every person in the world exists for no other reason than to certify the darkness. In the end, that’s what it all came down to. No matter how many sleepless nights or endless winter Sundays, they all added up to an absence, an unmistakable echo. That echo was the sound of her son telling her that where he’d gone she could not follow.

I found myself wondering why Sara had bailed on me this afternoon, how an unmissable meeting could materialize out of nowhere from one hour to the next. Was this a meeting with Billy? I was letting my suspicions get the better of me. All these thoughts sounded like jealousy, like possessiveness. Sara and Billy were divorced now, at liberty to be with whomever they chose—even each other. The idea of Sara being officially unchained had terrified me before, as I knew it could bear a fresh set of expectations for me at a critical time, a time when I had fresh expectations of myself. But all that changed when I realized that those expectations had been there all along. No one had twisted my arm to move in with Sara or to stay with her all these years. These were expectations I’d willingly submitted to, had had a hand in creating. I must have wanted them there all along. They’d inhabited me, propped me up, defined me when music no longer did—precisely what Sara had been doing for me all this time.

Who was I kidding? We were already married.

When Mack and I had drunk our soda cans clean, I lugged the suitcases down the steps while she pulled her Beetle around and edged it onto the sidewalk. She popped the trunk, then, with the driver-side door open, she kissed me on the cheek and said, “This was fun. Really.”

“You know, even if it turns out that we’ve made a terrible album that nobody wants to release, I’m glad we got to spend all this time together. I hope you have no regrets if that’s the way this ends.”

She patted me twice on the chest and smiled. “It’s a fantastic album,” she said, and slid behind the wheel.

I watched the Beetle zip up Second Street. Then I went to hunt down my ever-untraceable girlfriend.

The hostess looked as though she were spitting up on her onesie the last time Tremble rollicked through an evening here, but younger faces aside, the Mirabelle Plum seemed to have been preserved in tree sap since the days of our prime. Jumbo had insisted that this meeting be held here. As he would have it, success was simply a matter of replicating the past, finding our way back to our old selves.