CHAPTER 11
By the time Flynn and Cameron arrive, the guardhouse is closed. The blonde guard offered us a ride again before she left, but we told her our friends were on their way. I did, however, give her a letter with my name and phone number and asked her to deliver it to Teresa Johnson.
“So, what are you doing in Reedley?” the woman asked us. “That’s an inconvenient place to stay, if you came to visit the prison.”
“We’re in a band,” Daniel said. “We’re playing a show there tonight.”
I cringed, thinking about how disappointed he’d be when he realized that our “show” would be us standing outside a fast-food restaurant with a tip jar. But I couldn’t worry about that yet. The blonde guard hovered a little longer than was comfortable, but eventually she left, waving at us as she pulled away in an old gray sedan. Daniel attempted to start conversations with me several times, but I just sat there, staring at the ants, trying to make their trek a little more straightforward. At one point, he placed the warm palm of his hand against the center of my back, but when I didn’t react, he slowly removed it.
When Flynn pulls his van up and opens the door, the first words out of his mouth are, “Nora, are you insane?”
I shrug, then pick up a pebble and toss it at a tree behind me.
He jumps out of his van and stands over me. “You hitchhiked to a prison? Do you have any idea what could have happened?”
“Dude, you’re not her dad,” Daniel says. “Just chill.”
“And you,” Flynn says. “You helped her hitchhike to a prison?”
“Seemed better than letting her go by herself,” Daniel says.
I throw another rock, this time aiming for the orchard across the street. “I know, Flynn,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me how stupid this was. Because trust me, I’m fully aware.”
“I didn’t say it was stupid, I just—” Flynn squats down in front of me and puts his hands on my knees. “What are you doing, Nora? Why are we at a women’s prison?”
I look to the side, trying to hold back the vast pool of tears that’s growing behind my eyes. “Dan didn’t tell you?”
“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to,” he says.
A large shadow looms over me, and then Cameron sits by my side. He puts one of his long, heavy arms around my shoulders and pulls me in. His shirt smells like laundry detergent and coconut. I bury my nose in it while he pats my back.
“I thought my birth mother might be here,” I say, though I know my voice is muffled through the fabric.
“Say what?” Flynn asks.
Cameron rests his chin on the top of my head. “She thought her birth mother might be here,” he repeats. His low voice resonates in his chest; it feels like something’s purring between his ribs.
I hear Flynn plop down in the dust in front of me, then feel his hand on my exposed shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” I choke out.
Cameron smooths hair away from my face as he says, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
Daniel crouches down in front of me and places a tentative hand on my knee. The four of us rest there for a moment, intertwined on the dusty and rapidly darkening edge of the Central California Women’s Facility. I close my eyes and just soak in the sense of security that fills me. Even if I never find my biological parents, at least I have this.
“I hate to be the one to say it,” Flynn says eventually. “But we’re already late for our gig.”
I peel my face away from Cameron’s shirt and fold my hands over my knees. “Actually, I doubt anyone would notice if we didn’t show up.”
Now all the guys lean away from me.
“Nora, you want to bring us all up to speed?” Flynn says. “Because I think I’m still missing a few details.”
I take a deep breath and finally tell them almost everything, starting with finding out my original name was Summer and ending with the guard this afternoon telling Daniel and me that we’d have to wait weeks before we could get in to see Teresa Johnson. I don’t tell them about my internship this summer. There’s only so much grief I can handle at once.
“So, you’re saying we’re not going to be paid for playing at this restaurant tonight?” Flynn says. I shouldn’t be surprised that’s the detail that sticks with him.
I shake my head. “I don’t know if you could even really call it a restaurant.”
“And we don’t have any gig booked in Watsonville, whatsoever?”
I shake my head again, then hold my breath and wait.
Finally, Flynn says, “Why didn’t you tell us?” His voice is soft, almost drowned out by the sound of the breeze in the orchard across the street.
“About my birth parents?”
“About all of it. If we’d known that you wanted to go looking for them, then we didn’t need the ruse about the tour and the gigs.”
“You would have taken the time off school?” I say. “You would have spent the money on hotels and gas and all that, just because I wanted to find my birth parents?”
“Point taken.” We all sit in silence for a moment before he reiterates, “So we don’t actually have a gig tonight?”
I pick up another pebble and roll it around between my palms. “There’s a guy named Juan at the burger place who said we could play on the patio for tips, but that’s it.”
After a long pause, during which I expect them to tell me off for wasting their time and money, not to mention for deceiving them both directly (lies) and indirectly (omissions), Cameron leans back on his hands and says, “Is there a reason why you’re looking for Teresa instead of Martin?”
I look at him. My honest answer is that Martin’s the one who ultimately gave me up, so I’ve always been less interested in him. Based on my understanding of the story, Teresa seems like the one who would be happiest to see me. But I hate talking about the circumstances of my adoption. It always makes people look at me like an abused puppy. So I say, “Not really.”
“Then we should probably look for the Martins in these scenarios, not the Teresas.”
There’s a collective pause before Daniel says, “Explain yourself.”
Cameron flicks an ant off the back of his hand and then stands, pacing along the side of the van. “You’ve been basing this off people born in your birth year named Summer, then looked for women with matching surnames, but what are the odds that your Teresa never married again, or changed her name—”
“Whereas Martin’s surname would stay the same,” Flynn says, nodding along.
“It’s so weird that name changing is still a thing,” Daniel says. We all look at him. “I mean, when you think about it.”
“Did you find an address for Teresa Croft?” Cameron asks me.
“No,” I say. “Though, I did find a defunct address for a business called Croft’s Confections in Watsonville, and my birth mother was supposedly a baker.”
“So, someone with the surname Croft probably owned a bakery in Watsonville. Maybe the owner’s name was Teresa, maybe not. But even if the owner was your birth mother, you should still search for a Martin Croft. He’s probably the one you’re more likely to find.”
Daniel’s eyebrows go up. “You may have a future as a detective, Cam.”
He shrugs. “I mean, it just makes sense.”
I look at the prison behind me. “But what if I’ve already found my birth mother, and she lives in here?”
“Then you’ll find out when she calls you,” Cameron says. “But in the meantime, we might as well keep looking.”
My heart swells with gratitude. Daniel stands now, too, and I’m left sitting on the twilit dirt with Flynn, who pats my knee and says, “We’ll find them, Nora.”
I look at each of them. “What did I do to deserve you guys?”
Flynn stands, then extends his hand to help me up. “You’re the best bass player in our school.”
That makes me think of Irene sitting on the floor in my bedroom, telling me she thought I might be the best bassist in the state. I wonder what she’d say if she knew about my detour to this prison. I know she’d disapprove, but I’m not positive which reason she’d focus on. There would be so many.
“Plus, we like you,” Cameron says, squeezing my shoulders.
But right now, I can’t imagine why they would. All week I selfishly ignored everyone else’s problems while plowing forward with my own insane agenda. If Teresa Johnson is my biological mother, then maybe it’s hereditary. This thought feels like a fermata played on an out-of-tune instrument—not a temporary dissonance waiting to be resolved, but a suggestion of continuing discomfort.
We load back into the van, and then Flynn U-turns on the narrow road, heading in the direction of the highway. As the prison disappears behind us, I try to picture what the women behind those walls are doing right now. Eating dinner? Reading? Working? Are some of them writing letters to the people they’re missing on the outside? Is my birth mother in there somewhere, wondering what happened to the girl she named Summer and then abandoned? Is she deciding, even this minute, to get her life back on track, to find me as soon as she has the chance? And what will I say to her if she calls me tomorrow and says, Summer? It’s me. It’s your mother. What will I do then?
As the fields between Fresno and Reedley rush past me, I think about a song I used to listen to over and over—“Little Green” by Joni Mitchell. It’s the song she wrote about giving up a baby girl when she was too young and poor to take care of her. I used to lie on my floor and close my eyes as I listened to it, imagining that it was really my birth mother singing about me.
The van has gone quiet. Cameron’s sitting shotgun, and Daniel’s staring out his window. I don’t have my earbuds with me, but I scroll through my music library anyway, find that song, and play it as softly as I can, holding my phone’s speaker against my right ear while I rest my forehead on the window.
During the second verse, Flynn asks me what I’m listening to, so I lean forward and hold my phone up to his left ear. I see him glance back at me in the rearview mirror. He knows what the song means; everyone does.
Cameron asks to listen next, so I turn up the volume and start the song over. Joni Mitchell’s voice fills the van.
Once the song is over, Daniel says, “I have a good feeling about Watsonville.”
That makes one of us.
As Flynn pulls the van into the lot behind our motel, he says, “So what do we want to do tonight?”
Cameron looks at him. “Aren’t we playing at that burger place?”
“But we’re not getting paid.”
Daniel leans forward between their seats. “Since when are we such a hot commodity that we’ll only play for money? A gig’s a gig. It’s all good practice.”
Flynn glances at the time on his phone. “But we’re over two hours late.”
“Well, they can’t complain, can they?” Daniel argues. “Like you said, we’re volunteers.”
“Besides, it’d be funny,” Cameron says. “A full rock band playing on the patio of a fast-food restaurant. We should document this for our future Behind the Music.”
I’m the one sitting right behind Flynn, so maybe I’m the only one who can see how his shoulders tense, how his neck and jaw become a little more rigid before he sighs and says, “Okay. Sure. Why not?”
Daniel and Cameron hop out of the car and head to the room, but Flynn waits for me to get out. We walk across the cracked asphalt together, falling further behind the other two. Finally, Flynn stops. I don’t look at him, but I wait, because I know I deserve whatever he’s about to say to me.
“Nora—”
The sky here is gorgeous. The thickest part of the Milky Way seems to pulse and quiver, like there are strings running through it and they were recently plucked. I wonder, if I sat here quietly and listened for a very long time, whether I’d be able to hear the music being played up there, if all the trembling vibrations would eventually coalesce into a melody.
“—why didn’t you tell me?”
I wish we could just stand here in silence, listening to the stars, because I think I’m beginning to hear something unexpected but beautiful, a low, rumbling hum. No wonder heaven is often imagined as populated by harpists and a choir.
“I didn’t want my parents to find out what I was doing. And I knew it was a lot to ask—coming this far out of the way, spending all this time and money.”
“But you should have known I’d understand,” Flynn says. “I mean, we’re not just bandmates. We’re friends.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“And you know I care about you.” When I don’t respond immediately, he goes on, “I mean, yes, it’s a lot to ask—coming here, when we all have finals to study for. But if you’d told me how much it mattered to you, I would have understood.” His voice sounds tight. “I just—” He gestures broadly. “I feel bad, Nora. I think I’ve let you down.”
I look at him. “What? No. Not at all.”
“Yeah, I have.” He steps forward. “I know I’m not as fun, or probably as likable, as Dan and Cameron”—he tries to laugh, but it comes out as more of a sigh—“but that doesn’t mean I care about you less.”
“I know that.”
There’s something strange about the tone of his voice right now. It’s like these words are coming from somewhere deeper inside of him, and that’s lowered his register.
“Nora?”
He says my name as if he’s asking me to say something, anything, in response. He’s not as tall as Cameron, but he’s taller than Daniel. I have to angle my face up to meet his eyes. I reach forward and pat his arm. I don’t know what he’s going to say next, but I have a premonition that I don’t want to hear it, so I say, “We should get ready,” and then step toward the room. “We have a lame, free gig to play.”
“Nora—” I think I see something new behind his eyes, something that makes my heart beat double time. Above us, the galaxy sighs a melody that’s very nearly audible, but not quite. But then the expression is gone. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.”
He digs his hands into his pockets, then steps forward and nudges me with his shoulder. The gesture is friendly, nothing more, but I can’t help thinking about the way he froze when he found Daniel and me behind the Rowdy, the way he’s mostly kept a safe distance between us. It’s what I always did with Daniel, until last night.