CHAPTER 12
Juan, the manager of JT’s Burgers, tells us he’s a musician, too, and he’s been looking forward to us playing at his restaurant ever since I called. He’s short and pudgy, probably in his thirties.
“You know Van Morrison?” he asks us as we set up. “‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a good song.” He strums an imaginary guitar and bobs his head.
“Yeah, we know it,” Daniel says.
Juan points at Daniel, covers his mouth with his hand. “That’s the first song I learned, man. It’s a pretty good song. No?”
“Yeah,” Flynn says flatly. It’s clear he wishes Juan would let us set up in peace. “It’s a classic.”
But I like Juan. I turn to him and say, “Do you want to play that song with us? We cover it all the time.”
Juan holds his hands up in front of his shoulders and shakes his head. “Oh, no. I couldn’t.” But then he lifts his air guitar again and strums a few chords.
Cameron gestures to Daniel’s guitar and says, “You should definitely play it with us.”
“No, I’m not a real musician like you guys,” he says. But he’s already stepped over to Daniel’s guitar. “This is a nice instrument.” He drags a finger across the strings. “What kind?”
“Gibson Les Paul,” Daniel says. The usual lightness is gone from his voice. The one thing he never jokes about is his guitar.
Juan nods. “I’ve got a pretty good one, too. Fender Squier. You know it?”
“Yeah, I know it,” Daniel says. The Squier is Fender’s starter guitar; the strings don’t hold their tuning for more than a couple songs. But Daniel sounds fairly convincing as he adds, “It’s a good one.”
Cameron stifles a laugh as he says, “Hey, Juan, you should play Dan’s guitar tonight, when you play ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’”
“No, no, man,” Juan says. But he immediately follows that up with, “Maybe I’ll come play one song with you. Yeah? A little Van Morrison?”
“Great,” Cameron says, pointing to him. “We’re going to hold you to that.”
Juan smiles broadly, then sings the Sha-la-la chorus of “Brown Eyed Girl” as he disappears inside the restaurant.
Cameron’s thick eyebrows rise almost to his hairline as he says, “He actually has a good singing voice.”
“Great.” Daniel glares at him. “But he’s playing your guitar.”
“Fine,” Cameron says. “Then I’m playing yours.”
Juan squeezed the four plastic outdoor tables into one corner of the patio to make room for us, but there still isn’t space for Flynn’s whole drum kit. He sets up a few pieces, and I place my bass amp next to him. I can’t stand without risking knocking over one of Flynn’s cymbals, so I sit cross-legged on top of my amp and pull my bass into my lap. While Daniel and Cameron look through our gig book and discuss song order, Flynn starts drumming a simple beat. I feel the rhythm for a couple measures, then come in on a funky bass line—nothing too fancy, just a D-minor riff with plenty of space and groove.
As the progression evolves, I close my eyes and let my chin hang toward my chest. After the past few days, this is exactly what I need—to disappear into the music. I need a break from me.
I don’t notice when Daniel and Cameron stop talking, but I do notice when they come in on the progression I’m inventing. Daniel’s just keeping time on his guitar, but then Cameron takes a solo. As far as I know, no one is out here listening to us. We’re just playing.
When Cameron finishes his solo, we bring it back to the groove. Flynn starts messing with the rhythm, and we’re all listening and responding to each other. I’m reminded of the aspen trees I saw in southern Utah when my parents took Irene and me on a road trip to Yellowstone a few years ago. When they told me that the entire grove was a single organism, I didn’t get what they meant. But that’s what we’re like now: four people circulating a single life force, only, instead of an interconnected root system, we have music.
I don’t know how long we jam, but eventually the progression becomes steady and recognizable. When Daniel starts singing one of our cover songs, I open my eyes, letting the outside world flood back in.
We’re in the middle of our second set when Flynn leans forward and says, “Hey, we forgot to come up with a word.”
“Oh, shit,” Daniel says.
“Shit,” I say quickly. “I think that fits.”
Cameron nods, as if seriously considering the word’s merits. “I’m good with that. Shit.”
Flynn plays a drum fill. “Shit!” he says, a little too loudly. The only couple sitting out on the patio glares at us.
“Sorry,” Daniel says to them. “Our drummer has issues.”
Cameron wisely starts strumming the opening progression for our next song. I meet his eyes as I come in on my bass line, and our word is there between us. Daniel can hardly sing through his laughter.
Juan isn’t a terrible guitar player, and what he lacks in skill he makes up for in enthusiasm. When we finish “Brown Eyed Girl,” he says, “You know the band Creedence Clearwater Revival?”
Cameron nods. “Yes, we do.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty good, too.” His fingers find the places for a C-major chord, then a G-major. I come in on the bass line for “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” by CCR, and Juan smiles at me so big I think his face might split in half.
Juan refused to sing on “Brown Eyed Girl,” but as we play the intro to the song, Daniel points to Juan, then gestures to the mic. Juan shakes his head, but Daniel is already on the other side of the patio, leaning against the rusty metal fence.
“Go on,” I say. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Juan looks at me. “I die,” he says, and he looks like he means it.
“But that’s true of driving to work in the morning, right?” Cameron says. “So, you might as well go for it.”
Juan thinks for a second, then steps toward the microphone. He looks like he might be about to puke, but he opens his mouth and the words come out just fine. At the sound of a new voice, the people sitting on the patio—there are only six of them; one couple and another group of four—look up in surprise. When they see who’s singing, they clap and cheer. Pudgy Juan does a little hip wiggle, tilts his face to the sky, and sings his heart out, sometimes hitting the notes, sometimes not, but it doesn’t really matter. The worst doesn’t happen.
As we’re playing through the final chorus, two middle-aged white women step out onto the patio. They’re about the same height, but one is broad shouldered and narrow hipped, wearing her gray hair short and gelled into erect and vaguely threatening spikes, while the other is soft and blonde, with smooth skin and small blue eyes. It could be my fatigue or the disorienting emotional stress of the past forty-eight hours, but I’m overwhelmed by déjà vu. I think I’ve seen them before.
Daniel’s still leaning against the fence, but when he sees the women, he stands straighter and looks at me. He nods at them significantly, then mouths two words, but I just shrug to indicate that I haven’t caught his meaning. He walks around the edge of the patio, moving carefully past the table of four, then squeezing past our instrument cases. He reaches me just as we play the final note of the song.
“That’s the prison guard,” he says. “The blonde one.”
I see it now. She’s changed out of her uniform, but her hair is pulled up into the same wispy bouffant.
Juan is basking in the applause from the now-eight members of his audience, alternately waving them down, as if he wasn’t all that good, and bowing deeply, with a surprising flourish of his hands.
“You want to play another one with us?” Flynn says, but Juan is already lifting Cameron’s guitar off his shoulder and handing it back. Even from here, I can see that his hands are shaking.
“No, no. Two good songs.” He waves at his audience. “I’ll stop while I’m ahead, right?” He presses his palms together in front of his chest, and I think he’s about to thank us or something, but then there’s a shine in his eyes, and he just steps toward the door. “I’ll bring dinner. Burgers, fries, milkshakes—whatever you want.” But without asking us what we actually want, he steps inside the restaurant. Through the window, I see him move quickly across the dining room, disappearing into the kitchen.
“I like Juan,” Cameron says.
“Why not move somewhere else, though?” Daniel says, lifting his guitar strap back over his shoulder. “If he wants to do music, he should move to L.A.”
“It’s possible to play music without pursuing it,” Flynn says, almost to himself. He’s still looking through the window into the brightly lit dining room. “Not every musician wants to make a living off it.”
“This is where his life is,” Cameron says. “I get that.”
Daniel looks over his shoulder. Beyond the decrepit fence, there’s the cracked asphalt of a mostly empty parking lot, and, beyond that, the other half of this strip mall—a hair salon, an auto center, a liquor store.
“I don’t,” he says. “I don’t get it at all.”
“Now who’s the snob?” Flynn says.
Daniel answers, but I’m only half listening to what they’re saying, because the blonde guard hasn’t taken her eyes off me since she stepped out onto the patio. The woman with the spiky gray hair has her arm around the back of the guard’s chair. She’s leaning toward the blonde’s ear, having what appears to be a very one-sided conversation.
I’ve been trying not to look at the women straight-on, but my eyes drift that way. The blonde notices and waves at me.
Right then, Juan reappears carrying a tray full of food. The guys are already removing their instruments, so apparently we’re on a break. Cameron and Flynn join Juan; Daniel takes a detour to the table of four that got here shortly after we started playing. The blonde woman keeps beckoning me over, so I approach and stand awkwardly in front of them, expecting her to speak first. When she doesn’t, I say, “Long time, no see,” which is maybe the stupidest collection of words that’s ever come out of my mouth. Still she doesn’t speak. “I didn’t realize you were also driving down to Reedley,” I say. “Do you live here?”
The gray-haired woman finally peels her gaze away from the blonde woman’s face and says, “I’m Harriet.”
All I can think to say is, “Oh.”
The gray-haired woman looks back at the blonde and says, “Well, she does have your gift for gab, Mel.” She stands and offers me her chair. “You sit. Mel’s got something she’d like to say to you.” She looks inside the restaurant and then adds, “I’m gonna hit the little girls’ room. Take all the time you need.”
Without looking away from my face, the blonde woman nods and says, “Thanks, sweetie.”
Harriet crosses the patio in three long strides, then disappears inside the restaurant. Daniel’s sitting with the guys now, unwrapping his burger. I hear them laughing at some story Juan is telling about a time he played guitar at his nephew’s seventh birthday party. “I thought, he’s a pretty smart kid, you know? I’ll play him some Bob Dylan,” Juan says. “But ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is a long song, man. I didn’t realize.”
The blonde woman gestures to the chair vacated by Harriet. “Please, sit,” she says. I hear a faint southern twang in her voice that I hadn’t noticed before.
As I sit on the empty chair, I catch Juan saying, “. . . face-first in his cake, man. Fell asleep right in the middle of the last verse. Was exhausted, I guess.”
“I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” the woman says.
I expect her to continue, but when she doesn’t I say, “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Well, I didn’t have—” She looks at the dark sky. “I heard what you said to Beatrice at the guardhouse this afternoon, about thinking Terry Johnson might be your birth mother. And, well . . .” She looks at her hands. Before I came over here, she couldn’t stop staring at me, but now that I’m here, she seems to want to look anywhere else. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but there’s no way that woman is your biological mother.”
“Oh.”
There isn’t any music being piped out to the patio from the restaurant. In fact, there might not be any music in the restaurant either. The table of four has finally left, as have the few other people that drifted out here to listen to our last set. The only people on the patio now are me, my band, Juan, and this woman. Around and through the sound of Juan’s voice and my bandmates’ laughter, I think I can hear my own blood whooshing through my ears.
“But I think . . .” The woman (did Harriet call her Mel?) is staring at her upturned palms, which are resting on top of either thigh. She’s studying them, as if they might be where she wrote the script for whatever she came here to say. “I think I might be your mother.”
The whooshing in my ears seems to stop. Everything seems to stop.
“What?”
She presses one of her palms against her chest and says, “My name is Melanie Teresa Klassen. Sixteen years ago, I gave up a baby girl for adoption. I was living in Morro Bay at the time.”
I feel belief begin to seep into my bloodstream. The feeling reminds me of the night we ate pot brownies at Cameron’s house; once the drug is in your bloodstream, it colors everything.
“But my adoption papers say my birth mother’s name is Teresa,” I say.
“Back then, I used my middle name a lot,” Mel says. “I grew up in Georgia, but I’d run away from home, was working as a maid with a cleaning service. I was only seventeen, but I lied about my age, my name, everything.”
“When was your baby born?” I say.
Mel says a date that is the year I was born, but the wrong day and month.
I shake my head. “That’s not my birthday.”
“But how do you know?” Mel says. “The papers?”
“What was your baby’s name?” I ask.
“I didn’t name her, at least not officially,” Mel says. “For most of my pregnancy, I knew I’d be giving her up. I signed the papers in the hospital.” Her eyes are dewy, but I’m not sure if that’s because she’s about to cry or because she hasn’t blinked in a while.
Behind us, I hear Juan say, “Reedley is a small place, you know? Who would want to start a band with me? I’m not so good, anyways. I just like the good music. It’s fun for me to play sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But there’s no way that I’m the girl you gave up.”
Mel wipes away a tear that I didn’t see fall and says, “How can you be sure?”
“You have the wrong name. I’m the wrong age. I was given up for adoption at eighteen months, not at birth. And my birth mother named me Summer.” I study the squareness of her jaw, the thin sharpness of her nose. “Besides, we look nothing alike.”
She looks at me, her blue eyes sparkling in the dim light. “I should have known it was unlikely I’d find you so easily,” she says. I resist the urge to correct you to her. “It’s just, I’ve been looking for so long. The circumstances of the adoption were so—” She shudders. “How was I supposed to know what I’d want a year later?” She wipes away her tears again. “I’m so embarrassed to be crying in front of you, but it’s just—I thought I’d have another chance, and it never came. I know there’s no use regretting these things, but—” She stops herself, takes a deep breath. “Could you just tell me one thing?”
I nod.
“Have you been happy with your adoptive family?”
“Yes,” I say, but that doesn’t feel like the whole truth, so I add, “I’ve been happy. But I always knew I was adopted.”
“Was that a bad thing?”
I close my eyes and try to think about how I can put this into words. “I think it made me always feel like I needed to be—”
I pause so long that Mel tries to help me by saying, “—different?”
“No. Careful.” I can see that Mel doesn’t understand, so I try to explain: “I just—it’s hard to get over the idea that the people who were biologically most inclined to love me still were willing to give me up. If they could abandon me so easily, then what’s to stop anyone from doing the same thing?”
This is something I’ve thought about a lot, but have never said out loud. It feels weird to put this deepest fear of mine into words for a stranger.
Mel’s eyes are dry now, but her eyebrows are lifted and pinched in the center. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve given up children,” she says. “I belonged to a support group before I moved up here, and I’m still active on the message boards.” She wraps her hands around mine and squeezes. “And I want you to know that no one makes the decision to give up a child lightly. We’re not all equipped for deep thinking and future planning, so some people just follow the feeling of what they ought to do, but it’s never easy. Someone wanted more for you than they had to offer. You weren’t abandoned, sweetheart. You were set free.”
Her words feel like cool water on a feverish forehead, but they don’t solve the problem of the combustion inside me. I ask, “How do you know Teresa Johnson isn’t my birth mother?”
“Because her daughter was adopted by a big family in Colorado—a pastor and his wife. There was an article about it in the paper a few years ago.” She wipes away another tear. “When Terry Johnson was inside last time, the girl visited her.”
Harriet steps back outside. Mel looks at her and shakes her head, and Harriet’s weathered features soften into sadness. Mel stands and apologizes for taking up my time, or something like that. I’m not really listening. Instead, I’m watching Harriet watch Mel. The love between them is palpable, like there’s an actual ribbon of it cycling physically on an infinite loop, from one body to the other. As they disappear into the restaurant together, I think, At least she’s not alone.
“Nora, what was that about?” Daniel says, looking across the now-empty patio.
“Nothing.” I join them at their table, sitting in the empty chair between Cameron and Flynn. “A misunderstanding.”
“Why was she crying?” Flynn says.
“She thought she was my birth mother.”
“What?” They all say it at once, so I have no choice but to explain the whole conversation. As I finish summarizing what I know, I look at the boys at this table, and I remind myself that I’m not alone, either. I know this. I’ve always known it. But it’s easy enough to forget when the people who were supposed to love me first may not have loved me at all. Because no matter what Mel says, it’s hard to believe that love wouldn’t have been enough reason for them to keep me.
When we get back to the motel, I call my parents. I tell them that the drive into Reedley was easy, and that our gig was smaller than we expected, but it was actually a lot of fun. I tell them about Juan and his cover songs. It feels good to say something true.
Daniel’s the last one to get ready for bed. After some debate, we all agreed that Cameron and Flynn would share the bed on the far side of the room, and Daniel and I would share the one by the bathroom. Flynn didn’t seem overly pleased with this arrangement, but he went with it.
While I wait for Daniel to get out of the bathroom, I think about something I learned in history last year about René Descartes and John Locke, philosophers of different ages. One believed in the primacy of nature and the other believed in the importance of nurture, but I can’t remember which was which.
I imagine my parents lying in their bed, my mom’s blonde hair spread across her pillow, my dad already kicking off the covers, rolling closer to her side of the bed. How can two people feel so intrinsic to my life and yet so foreign? If I do find my biological mother, will I feel differently about her, or will it be the same? With her, I’ll have the blood ties I’m missing from my parents, but I won’t have all this history.
Then I remember, René Descartes believed a person is born with innate knowledge, while John Locke, who came later, believed each person is born tabula rasa, a blank slate, upon which character is written by experience. I wonder what Descartes and Locke would say about my quest to discover my origins, to find the people who made me, in the most literal sense, me. If I’ve understood them correctly, then Descartes would approve, while Locke would tell me to get on with my life.
The door to the bathroom opens, and Daniel switches off the light. I hear more than see him cross the room and climb into the bed beside me. I lie still, hoping he’ll believe I’m asleep, but when he whispers, “Nora?” I can’t help responding, “Yeah?”
“I just wondered if you were awake.”
When I swallow, it sounds enormous. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room as quiet as this one.
Neither of us moves for a long time, but his breathing doesn’t change, so I know he isn’t asleep yet. Finally, he whispers, “I’m sorry we didn’t find her today.”
“Yeah.” I roll onto my back. “Me, too.”
When his fingers brush against my skin, I’m so startled I almost jump. But then his warm palm presses into mine, and our fingers weave together. He repeats what he said earlier. “I have a good feeling about Watsonville.”
I have a good feeling, too, but I think that’s just because his hand is holding mine.