THAT BOX OF RECORDS IN THE ATTIC HAD BEEN ON LUCIA’S mind for over a week. Finally, she couldn’t stand it. It was a Tuesday after school. Beatriz was working on a house in Southeast and her mom had called to say she had to stay an hour late at school for a meeting. Normally Lucia would have taken advantage of this by fixing herself a bowl of ice cream, three scoops, sprinkling it with anything that looked good—dry breakfast cereal, chocolate powder, maple syrup, cinnamon—and kicking back with an uninterrupted stretch of afternoon cartoons. But today she took the step stool from the closet and unfolded it in the hallway beneath the trapdoor.
The attic was strictly off-limits without adult supervision of the cantankerous ladder. But Lucia had watched her mother do this enough times that she had figured it out. With a toothy metal spaghetti ladle, she reached up and snagged the loop of rope that served as a handle. She tugged. Nothing happened. The door was heavier than she’d expected. She pulled harder and sank all her weight into it.
The door swung down with an indignant pop. Lucia fell back off the step stool and wiped out on the floor. Her right elbow burned and her ankle sent shooting pains through her leg when she stood, but she ignored it, righted the stool, and stepped back up to pull down the extendable ladder. She climbed into the cool dimness, heart thumping, and retrieved the top record from the box. Then she closed it up and pushed the box back to the deep corner it came from. The attic had to appear completely undisturbed.
Once she was back on the ground floor, though, Lucia realized there was no way she could push the ladder back into place, much less the entire dangling door. “I had to go back and find—no—I thought I forgot something up there,” she murmured, practicing. “I thought I left my notebook with my lyrics in it. No, my notebook for school.” All the way to her bedroom she rehearsed the line until it sounded forlorn and sincere. She shut the door behind her and pulled out her guitar.
Hers was unmistakably the same guitar as the broken-necked one on the album cover. It gave Lucia the most unsettling feeling. Most things in their home had come secondhand, and plenty of her clothes and books too, and she never knew the story of where they came from, they just showed up and settled in. Lucia had never thought about their history. But her guitar had known another life—another death, even.
Out to the living room she went, to listen for clues on the stereo.
The record’s first song, “Stethoscope,” was the best one. Lucia listened patiently to the other two on side one, and then played the first song again twice. She flipped the record and listened to side two. The fifth song was a slow one, she liked that, though she wished it were longer. The last one went on too long, like they didn’t want to let go. A draggy jam. Lucia and Sydney hated jams. Except their own, which were awesome.
She picked up her guitar, checked the tuning, and turned the record back to side one, song one. Her fingers found the first chord. “You remember this one?” she asked the guitar. The strings hummed against her fingers. Learning a song was like climbing rocks, finding foothold after foothold until the path was easy to follow.
At first Lucia had thought she wanted to play the drums. It felt good to hit something. But when she tried an electric guitar for the first time, she was hooked. She hit a single note and it rang out, crunchy and soaring at the same time. She pressed her fingers against the strings, which pressed back sharply, and strummed, and a wall of sound poured out. You could do anything with a guitar. You could make it sound watery and dark, or filigreed and delicate, or, with a quick stomp on the pedal, like a roar of dissatisfaction. You could make whole songs of your own. You could re-create almost all the songs on the radio or in your mom’s record collection on a guitar, and most were surprisingly simple to break down into their parts. The mystery was not what they were made of, but what made them good. Lucia loved how her fingers tingled after playing, how her fingertips thickened, self-armoring.
When Beatriz pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Lucia jumped up to grab the record and slipped it back into its sleeve. She slid it under her bed as the back door creaked open and shut.
“E aí, chuchuzinha? Estou em casa!”
“Olá!” Lucia came into the kitchen, where Bullet was already wagging her tail and bumping her head against Beatriz’s hand. She was getting better at Portuguese, even though sometimes she forgot and responded in Spanish. Portuguese sounded cushier, Spanish more percussive.
Beatriz gave Lucia a high five and both of them a quick affectionate scratch behind the neck. The guitar was slung across the couch, where Lucia had ditched it in a hurry. “You’ve been practicing,” Beatriz said with approval. “New song?”
“Not really,” Lucia said. “Just messing around.”
“Good kid.” Beatriz hung her messenger bag and jacket by the door and headed toward her room to change out of her work clothes. In the doorway to the hall, she took a startled step back. “Merda. Did the attic door fall down?”
Lucia wanted to say yes, but Beatriz sounded so concerned she couldn’t. “I had to get something up there.”
“You can’t do that, Luz, that thing is heavy. You could get hurt.”
What was her line? Lucia blanked. “I thought I left something up there.” What was it? She added quickly, “It was a present for you.”
Beatriz softened. “A present? Why would it be in the attic?”
“I didn’t want you to find it.”
“Was it up there? When do I get it?”
Lucia shook her head. “I didn’t find it. I might have left it at Sydney’s.”
“You hid it too well.” Beatriz laughed. “You’re sweet, chuchu.”
“Are you mad?”
“I should be, but . . . no.” Beatriz gave her a sidelong look. “Are you worried your mom’s gonna be?” Lucia strategically widened her eyes and nodded. “I’ll take care of the door,” Beatriz said. “Don’t worry.”
The question seemed so simple—Mom, where did my guitar come from?—but her mother looked stricken. She stopped chewing her spaghetti. “I’m not sure exactly,” she said, but in a way that signaled she did know something and was stalling.
“What’s up? Is that like asking where babies come from?” Lucia joked. She looked to Beatriz for a laugh and Beatriz obliged, but kept her eyes on Andrea.
“I think I got it at The 12th Fret,” she said. “Yeah, it was from The 12th Fret.”
“Did it cost a lot? Beatriz said it’s a good guitar.”
“Not too much. I did an art trade with them. I traded some design work.”
“But you don’t play guitar.”
“I thought I might learn.”
“Oh. Where did The 12th Fret get it?”
“Who knows where that guitar has been? It’s older than all of us,” her mother said. “Beatriz, do you want some wine? I think we need to finish that bottle on the counter.”
Lucia understood she was not to ask any more questions about the guitar tonight. Which only made her curiosity leap from spark to blaze.
After dinner, she put on her pajamas as instructed, but she couldn’t resist picking up the guitar, sitting down on her bed, and playing through the song again. When a song got in her head, it was all she wanted to do, work it out and play it over and over until she could close her eyes or look up from the frets and feel it move through and out of her body, part of her. Already this song was working its way in.
Andrea paused. Lucia’s bedroom door was ajar, and through the gap she could see her sitting on the edge of her bed, head down, stretching her small fingers to form the chords on her guitar. The song she was playing—what was it? Something from a long time ago. From the radio? An old mixtape?
Luz shifted to the chorus and began to murmur under her breath, in that still-sweet small voice, With you I need a stethoscope.
A watery feeling rippled down Andrea’s ribs. The Cold Shoulder. What was Lucia doing playing a Cold Shoulder song? After asking about her guitar?
It was all she could do not to push into the room and demand to know. Instead she closed the bathroom door behind her and sat down on the tile floor.
Luz’s brown hair falling over her face like that, the blue Telecaster in her lap, the specter of Ryan inhabiting her small body.
Andrea tried not to ascribe too many of Lucia’s talents and habits to anything other than the kid’s own particular nature. After all, look how differently she had turned out from each of her parents. And to constantly seek evidence of herself in Lucia, though irresistible, seemed narcissistic. But whether by inheritance or coincidence, traces of Ryan sometimes surfaced. Maybe Andrea had only imagined that Lucia’s early pots-and-pans banging was weirdly rhythmic. But there was also the time they were at the river with a few other parents and kids, and Andrea watched as Lucia picked up all their discarded towels and T-shirts and tried to fold them neatly. Lucia wasn’t interested in hanging on to things either—not only did she easily let go of outgrown T-shirts and toys, sometimes she outright brought them to Andrea and said she didn’t want them anymore. She liked everything to be put away in her room. She loved Sydney and had a few other friends, and other kids liked her, but Lucia wasn’t interested in having large birthday parties or joining sleepovers. She just wanted to be with Andrea, Beatriz, and a couple of her rock camp buddies. Unlike Andrea, who loved being around people but hated standing in front of them, Lucia was an introvert yet an effortless performer.
And there was the model horse incident, at age seven. Andrea told Lucia that after she tucked her in for the night, Flynn and his girlfriend were coming to hang out at the house so she and Lawrence could see Quasi play at the Doug Fir. Lucia said she wanted to go to the Quasi show too. This was obviously out of the question—it was a twenty-one-plus show, and the headliner played at eleven. But Lucia’s soft little face hardened right up. It wasn’t a babyish tantrum—throwing a spoon, overturning a bowl, stomping, howling, going limp. There was no performance in it. No, Lucia went quiet, and then she went to her room. A minute later, there was a thud and two cracks.
Andrea found her on the floor, trying to gather the pieces of her favorite model horse, Bandit, a pinto yearling. Broken legs, a snapped tail.
She knelt beside Lucia. “Honey, what did you do?”
“I was mad.” Luz looked down at the hooves in her hand and began to cry. “I was so mad, Mom. I’m sorry. I ruined Bandit.”
It was better to hurt things than to hurt people or animals, Andrea told her. But better yet, if you were mad, you should let it out with your words. Or your music. “Breaking something might feel good in the moment,” she said, “but as often as not, you end up with something you can never fix.”
She and Lucia put the yearling back together with superglue and clothespins, but it never stood steady again. Thin scars of glue ringed every mend.
It was a warning flare: coincidence or inheritance? How much could she raise Lucia, and how much of Lucia’s becoming was not only cultural but cellular? Andrea had done everything she could to keep Lucia steady and safe, even as she parented against the wind. To be a single parent and a lesbian parent, with a Spanish last name no less, she felt she had to work three times as hard to be credible in the straight world. Among their chosen family and friends, they were deeply at home; after hours and on weekends, they had a luxurious, abundant, supportive community. But then there was school and work and the doctor and the dentist and the Internet. There she was not a parent but a mom, a species held in somber, near-spiritual regard while being for all practical purposes steadily crushed by the forces of public policy, like the American bison.
At least family court always favors the mother, Andrea reminded herself now. She pressed her hand to her chest. But what if I’ve been a bad one? What if I’ve fucked up? What if she turns into Ryan and takes off one day, never to return?
The music stopped.
Lucia’s voice came through the door. “Mom? Are you crying?”
Andrea pulled herself up from the floor and wiped her eyes on the hand towel. “Oh, no, Luz, I’m just having allergies.” She sniffed loudly for good measure. “Finish your song and then let’s go to bed.”
“Already?”
Andrea opened the door and there stood Lucia in her flannel polar bear pajamas and pink socks. Andrea fought the urge to scoop her into her arms like a little kid, which suddenly she wasn’t anymore. “How about this, cub. You can leave the light on and read as long as you want.”
Lucia looked surprised. “Is this because I’m almost ten?”
Andrea said, “Yes. Yes, it’s because you’re almost ten.”