Some Place Better Than Here

Chapter 29: Any Old Kind of Day

I noticed a note on the table:

Danny,

I guess you got caught up with your friends last night. That's okay!

I understand!! I'd already arranged to have Tracey Young and her husband from down the street drive me to the airport anyways. I'll call you when I land in California. I love you, Danny! XOX

PS. YOU BETTER PICK UP YOUR PHONE WHEN I CALL, YOU BRAT!

PSS. I did some research and there's an organization by the name Age-Out Angels. They help kids transition out of foster care. I want you and Max to look into it.

I reached for my phone and called Mom. It went straight to her voicemail. I wanted to—no, I needed to talk to someone. Anyone. But as I'd told Mary, I only talk to three—two—people, and one of them wasn't answering. The other couldn't. That was when it hit me. I was alone.

The clouds and the sun took turns sharing the afternoon sky. I sat on the front steps of my house, clutching Mom's letter in my hands, watching the clouds and their corresponding shadows drift by. Looking up, I saw the leaves flutter in the wind; struggling valiantly to hold onto their hue, but summer's green was already giving way to autumn's gold. Somehow I found the strength to move and went back inside.

On my walk up the stairs, I took a moment to stop and stare at Connor's picture on the wall. Looking at him with his big brown eyes and closed-mouth smile, I missed my older brother all over again with a renewed and deepened sadness I didn't know was possible. He couldn't have been any older than nine years old in that photo. And yet, somehow, now I was older than him. It crashed in my head. It didn't make sense. It couldn't make sense. He wouldn't even recognize me anymore. Connor kept his eyes locked with mine. His beautiful, childlike expression of innocence transformed to one of scorn. He was disappointed with me; I'd let him down.

Plagued with regret, I walked up the rest of the stairs.

And then, as I pushed open my bedroom door, I saw it, lying flat on my bed. The photo album Mom had been working on before she left. The plastic cover creaked as I lifted it open. Written in cursive in the center of the first blank page, Mom had penned an inscription.

Nothing Will Take My Sons,

My Sunshines Away.

And here I thought I was the family poet. What family?

Sinking to the floor, I flipped the pages and laughed while I cried. There was a picture of me and Connor in front of the TV as I sat on a training-potty in, yes, a cowboy hat. What was I doing wearing that thing? I laughed, not at my innocence but with it—Goddamn I missed that little kid in the cowboy hat. I missed him so much; I was jealous of him. And then after peeling back a couple more pages, I saw Dad holding me and lost it. I hadn't cried so much since they'd died. I was sick of losing people to photographs.

Once my eyes lightened after losing the weight of all the tears, I lifted my head and looked around my bedroom. So much of my life I kept embodied in the past. The marker etches on the floor, the posters on my walls. Even my record collection only housed the names of the departed:

John Lennon. Michael Jackson. Harry Chapin. George Harrison. Elvis Presley. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Croce. Jim Morrison. David Bowie. Whitney Houston. Johnny Cash. Prince. Glenn Frey. Chuck Berry. Nat King Cole. Clarence Clemons. Bob Marley. Roy Orbison. Marvin Gaye. Miles Davis. Kurt Cobain. John Denver. Frank Sinatra. Joey Ramone. Leonard Cohen. Barry White. Andy, Robin, and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. James Brown. Pete Seeger. Mary Travers. Lou Reed. Freddy Mercury. Ben E. King of The Drifters. Maurice White. George Michael. Jeff Buckley. Tom Petty.

And the uncountable rest whose names and credits were scribed on the sleeves of the albums. Looking over at the Biggie record Mary had never taken home with her, I thought of how even he and Tupac were dead.

Those musicians, those artists, those poets, they were the ones, who, through their music and their words, had taught me how to live and how to feel. They were all outsiders, all a little strange; all had been scoffed at and ridiculed on their way to reaching their dreams. Their stories, through biography or song, gave me hope. Now they were all dead. My record collection was a memorial.

A yellow shaft from the late afternoon sun slanted across my room before my eyes. Spreading the elongated shadow of my torso across my record shelf. What would I do? Sit there—stuck—crippled by nostalgia, waiting for time to claim the names of whoever was left?

I got up from the floor and dropped the needle on my dad's LP, Insight Job, on the record player; still unchanged from that time Mary and I listened to it all those weeks ago. I sat back down on the floor and listened to my dad's music. Then, closing my eyes, I tried to imagine the expression on his face as he sang, "Someday I'll catch myself a southwest breeze and land in paradise."

And couldn't help but wonder, Did it look like mine?